Recent content by Simulacrum

You did not read my post in its entirety, or you did not read it carefully. I did not say there are any rules here, I noted that going out of your way to come up with substitutes for “said” can pull a reader out of the narrative and flag a writer as a beginner. I pointed out that if something...

That’s what it boils down to. If it doesn’t improve the story, the creative energy is best spent on things that do. There are a lot of posts here about inconsequential things and not much about things like narrative. Most of the stylistic stuff can be answered by reading. I don’t know if it’s...

Think about stories in newspapers and magazines. They almost never deviate from “said,” and it doesn’t detract from the narrative even if it’s a 5,000-word investigative story. The thing is, worrying about attribution means expending energy on something that doesn’t really have any payoff. In...

Funny that you mention that because I recently took a look at something I wrote in 2002 and it’s much different from what I’d produce now. Back then I was obsessed with trying to imitate my favorite novelist. Nowadays I don’t try to imitate anyone. I’ve noticed some of my favorite writers have...

You have to go back to the classics. Read Herodotus, Plutarch and Xenophon. Penguin publishes paperback versions of their works. Then there are the modern heavy-hitters like Wil Durant, whose “Life Of Greece” is one of the definitive works. Wikipedia is good for getting your bearings and...

Lots of good advice in this thread. Read authors whose prose you admire. Pay special attention to the way they use language. But as pmmg noted, it all springs from your own voice.

This. Nothing screams “amateur” quite like a writer who is obsessed with finding replacements for “said.” Often that compunction results in really weird forms of attribution and/or using words in ways they’re not supposed to be used. Worrying about phrasing attribution should be way down on the...

Thankfully we don’t have to worry about AI wiping us out because AI doesn’t exist. Everything we call “AI” these days is algorithmic, not actual AI, and no one has a path forward on conscious AI, called “strong AI” in the industry, because we don’t understand consciousness. Hell, we can’t even...

In Larry Niven’s Ringworld humanity is an interstellar civilization and has conquered mortality, but they still use tapes to store data. That pulled me completely out of the narrative for a moment. Another good example is 1998’s Event Horizon, which did a fantastic job with visuals and making...

This. The Nostromo in Alien is a straight up piece of shit. It’s an old, creaking ship with mechanical problems. Its terminals are grubby and worn from use. There are dirty ashtrays everywhere. Every part of the ship shows significant wear and tear. When you see that ship, you think “This...

Regarding outside interference from nations with an interest in sparking a war, that was exactly what the Persians did to the Spartans during the age of Spartan hegemony following the Peloponnesian War. Sparta had defeated Athens and became the de facto leader of the Greek world. Then the...

If a planet has two moons and one is destroyed, it will impact the planet’s orbit. How much the orbit is impacted depends on how large the moon is, the position of the planet’s orbit around its home star and other factors. You’d have to do the math and figure out if the planet could still be...