The anti-boasting thread

[ElectricBlue]

Have you ever encountered Katarzyna Groniec's "Millhaven"? One of the few Nick Cave covers I've heard that stands up well, partly because it doesn't just try to imitate the original.

Brilliant! Thank you. Not only her voice, but the superb animation!

 

[mildlyaroused]

Have you ever encountered Katarzyna Groniec's "Millhaven"? One of the few Nick Cave covers I've heard that stands up well, partly because it doesn't just try to imitate the original.

I can't say I have. Thanks for the pointer, I'll look into it!

There are indeed scarce few Nick Cave covers. I've always liked Johnny Cash's rendition of "The Mercy Seat", though it is changed into a fundamentally different song.

 

[gunhilltrain]

It's a bullshit question but I'm not sure that's the reason people ask it. I've done a bit of hiring in my time, and it does require culling the candidates heavily - we might get 200 applicants and only have the budget to hire ten of them. But every candidate I interview is at least an hour out of my day, so I want to do most of that culling before interview stage; going to the trouble of an interview and then looking for arbitrary reasons to eliminate people would be self-defeating.

IMHO, most of the reason people ask those questions is that they just don't know how to run an interview. If we're interviewing for a widget designer, most of the panel are going to be other widget designers who understand the job but have little/no experience in hiring. They know interviewers are supposed to ask questions, and they remember that "what's your biggest weakness" is a question that interviewers often ask, so they ask it, without thinking very much about what the purpose is for that question or what useful info they're going to glean from it.

Not to drift too far into job interviews, but it was different in the pre-Internet era. We'd get maybe twenty applications based on some ad in a local New Jersey paper like the Bergen Record. People had to take the trouble to mail them. With online ads, applicants can spray out an almost unlimited number from anywhere in the world. It gets difficult to make sense out of hundreds of such things.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Not to drift too far into job interviews, but it was different in the pre-Internet era. We'd get maybe twenty applications based on some ad in a local New Jersey paper like the Bergen Record. People had to take the trouble to mail them. With online ads, applicants can spray out an almost unlimited number from anywhere in the world. It gets difficult to make sense out of hundreds of such things.

Sure does. Last time I ended up digging through something like 150 applications, and there were several from overseas from people with no obvious connection to Australia (and no indication that they would've been eligible to work here).

 

[MyBareTorso]

I can't say I have. Thanks for the pointer, I'll look into it!

There are indeed scarce few Nick Cave covers. I've always liked Johnny Cash's rendition of "The Mercy Seat", though it is changed into a fundamentally different song.

Evan Dando's Cave cover is... interesting.

 

[MyBareTorso]

Some would likely say my stories are a bit one-note, but I write what turns me on, and my tastes are a little... singular.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I can write fine about people, evoke their characters, give them dialogue, and eventually they'll co-operate and fuck.

How this sometimes turns into a story, with a beginning, middle, end, pacing and that, I have no idea. The rest of my stories stay as what a nice commenter called 'slice of life tales', where you get a look at someone's life. I'm mostly content with that - many a published author has stuck with that genre - but it would be good to feel I was doing it on purpose rather than out of inadequacy.

 

[Trionyx]

Anti-boast: I'm over-fond of stuff like "softly" and "I think" in my writing, and too often I get hung up on perfecting something that probably nobody else is ever going to notice.

Same here, but since I am writing primarily for myself, I want my toughest critic (aka: me) to be happy.

 

[Not2Pervy]

Missed this thread earlier. My writing has many flaws, but among the most persistent is my tendency to explain rather than simply depict. Too often, I don’t trust the reader to “get it” unless I club them over the head.

I also write too many two-dimensional characters, which is why I get bored with them quickly and have no desire to extend a series into the multiple chapters readers occasionally request.

 

[Devinter]

Verbose writing, far too many adverbs, and making common foreigner mistake such as mixing up "its and it's" or "to and too". Furthermore, I mix British English and American English all the time, but I don't even notice that.

... Also, too many characters I write end up sounding like posh pricks. Wonder where they get that from..

 

[AllenWoody]

Although I'm just certain that my vocabulary is strong, Grammarly begs to differ. Do you folks get the weekly digest from them saying how productive you are, how accurate, and how many unique words you use? Even when I rank high in terms of productivity and accuracy compared to others using the service, I rarely break into the top ten percent for vocabulary. Not good for the ego.

 

[AllenWoody]

I'm not entirely conscious of it. "Bit" is one I use too often. "Seems" is another one, especially in first-person writing. Either the character perceives something or they don't. Why would they doubt what should be obvious?

Yes! I have to carefully monitor myself to reduce the number of what I think of as diminishing words. Seems, seemingly, basically, half, nearly, almost, practically... I *think* I'm getting better at catching them, but it takes discipline.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Yes! I have to carefully monitor myself to reduce the number of what I think of as diminishing words. Seems, seemingly, basically, half, nearly, almost, practically... I *think* I'm getting better at catching them, but it takes discipline.

As imperfect as Garmmarly is - and we've discussed its quirks - it will often suggest cutting unnecessary words like the ones mentioned above. It at least gives the option of noticing them and letting you decide whether to cut or not.

 

[Mogrem]

For me, it's plotting. I suppose after half a lifetime editing other people's texts I've become used to them doing the heavy lifting for me. All my attention goes into writing the best possible words, sentences and paragraphs. In most of my stories, the plot tends to be little more than a single scene. With longer works, I just lurch from scene to scene until it looks something like a story - or I get tired of writing.

The same but worse. My sentences are pretty good. My characters can have their own voices, if I concentrate. But the plots just crumble. But hey, the standard here is about 3k a story. I can manage that. Just. Sometimes.

 

[AllenWoody]

As imperfect as Garmmarly is - and we've discussed its quirks - it will often suggest cutting unnecessary words like the ones mentioned above. It at least gives the option of noticing them and letting you decide whether to cut or not.

Yes, it routinely chides me for 'very' and 'definitely'. Sometimes I want them but as often as not I appreciate the advice and cut them. 95% of editing is cutting.* I do leave those words in dialog, as I believe it reflects natural speech.

*I had to stop myself from writing "95% of editing seems to be cutting."

 

[gunhilltrain]

Yes, it routinely chides me for 'very' and 'definitely'. Sometimes I want them but as often as not I appreciate the advice and cut them. 95% of editing is cutting.* I do leave those words in dialog, as I believe it reflects natural speech.

*I had to stop myself from writing "95% of editing seems to be cutting."

At least you didn't write, "In fact, it appears to me that 95% of editing seems to be cutting." I could have made that worse.

On a slightly different topic, I sometimes add text during editing.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Rather like Texans’ confusion - do they have the world’s biggest midgets or the world's smallest?

Nobody writes as badly as I do! My stuff is six layers of crap coated with limp characterization, pointless plots and juvenile grammar. I’m the WORST!

 

[HordHolm]

I'm shit, and I know I am,
I'm shit, and I know I am...

 

[lovecraft68]

Back a few years ago I wrote in some other categories. The last few it has been all mature or taboo-my mom, my friend's mom. all about the mom- I do this because its what sells in the market and everything I've posted here in the last few years was for sale first.

I tried to break out a bit, posted a group story a couple years ago for Halloween, an LW story (went as poorly as one would expect considering my fondness for male humiliation) and a story in NC/R that flopped and I ended up having to remove it anyway over a publishing conflict.

I just don't feel the need to stretch myself anymore, which is probably a bad thing, but I have time constraints so why waste it?

 

[NoTalentHack]

Back a few years ago I wrote in some other categories. The last few it has been all mature or taboo-my mom, my friend's mom. all about the mom- I do this because its what sells in the market and everything I've posted here in the last few years was for sale first.

I tried to break out a bit, posted a group story a couple years ago for Halloween, an LW story (went as poorly as one would expect considering my fondness for male humiliation) and a story in NC/R that flopped and I ended up having to remove it anyway over a publishing conflict.

I just don't feel the need to stretch myself anymore, which is probably a bad thing, but I have time constraints so why waste it?

I don't think that's a bad thing, necessarily. I want to hit almost every category here eventually, but I also don't want to force it just to say I did. As long as you're writing stuff that you like inside the categories you want to, and people are still picking up what you're putting down, you do you. I'll go one further: if you (or me, or anyone else) decide one day "no, I'm done," I don't think it's right to view that as a bad thing, either. Just because someone's good at a thing doesn't mean them stopping it is failure; it just means that they're choosing to use what little precious time they have on this earth on the things that they enjoy, and that's changed.

 

[NoMoreMisterNiceSpy]

I have always struggled with setting descriptions. Many times I'll write something and realize that I've written my character actions up to a point that it feels like they're just standing in a white room. There's no description of where they are, or if they moved from one room of the house to another, there's no additional information on the new room, etc. I've been dinged on it a few times by my professors in my creative writing classes. I think the problem is that I can imagine exactly where my characters are and while writing I just skip that part because it's in my own mind. It's a problem I'm trying to work on.

 

[Erozetta]

I have always struggled with setting descriptions. Many times I'll write something and realize that I've written my character actions up to a point that it feels like they're just standing in a white room. There's no description of where they are, or if they moved from one room of the house to another, there's no additional information on the new room, etc. I've been dinged on it a few times by my professors in my creative writing classes. I think the problem is that I can imagine exactly where my characters are and while writing I just skip that part because it's in my own mind. It's a problem I'm trying to work on.

I do this, too. It takes some effort to break the habit, but it's doable.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

Yes, it routinely chides me for 'very' and 'definitely'.

Writing here, I learned that I use "actually" about every other paragraph. That's actually too much.

 

[TheLobster]

Writing here, I learned that I use "actually" about every other paragraph. That's actually too much.

It's definitely very often.

 

[StillStunned]

I tend to start things, but then never get round to