I have to forcibly stop myself from doing this, especially if I've read Stephen King right before writing something.
I don't mind thoughts in italics, in fact I prefer them, but OMG do I hate thought/narration echoes. Or thoughts that sound like the character is narrating their own book, when in reality the thought process of a real person in that situation would likely be "profanity profanity profanity OH GOD PROFANITY". Unless you're writing Darkwing Duck, don't have your character narrate himself.
Dammit! I’ve been looking for MONTHS to find a legit source for Darkwing Duck streaming, and finally gave up and forgot about it like two weeks ago. WAY TO MAKE ME WANT TO WATCH IT AGAIN, JERK.
That doesn’t look like a legit site to me. When I say legit, I don’t mean “virus free”. I mean legitimate, as in they own the rights to the content they’re streaming.
I mentioned one facet of this in the death penalty thread, but it goes beyond just its effects on that: Commercially released full dive MMOs that are no fun to play for obvious reasons. Like, perma-death or 5+ minute lockouts on death (or even hours long lockouts, which is basically the game telling you to f**k off and come back tomorrow, and why would a game ever do that?). No fast travel system, requiring people to just walk down a road for an hour or more, even to get to places they've already been, sometimes with little to no chance of encountering any mobs on the way. If travel isn't even dangerous, what could possibly be the justification for making it so time-consuming? At least, if being ambushed and killed along the way happened off enough to be a significant factor in the decision to go from one town to another, it would make sense as part of an MMO designed for a hardcore niche, but if ambushes are once-in-a-blue-moon events, then why not just have fast travel? How is requiring an hour of your time to accomplish what otherwise could've taken thirty seconds a feature? When people play four-hour raids, it's not because they can't think of anything else to do with those four hours, it's because that is the amount of time needed to complete a raid that big. Raiding is fun, so big, epic raids make sense. But why would you want to spend an hour just walking to a place? You can do that in real life and get health benefits out of the deal, why buy a game to do the same thing? Lots of MMO-esque trappings in the leveling and inventory systems, but there's no dungeons, raids, or quest structure to be seen in the actual gameplay. I don't want everyone to just flat-out clone the standard WoW quest structure of talking to people with exclamation points over their heads handing out the exact same quest no matter how many times they get completed, but no one ever does anything like Guild Wars 2's event system or even Skyrim radiant quests. What's the point of using the conceit of an actual, commercial MMO if the author's just gonna write portal fantasy? They could've written an actual LitRPG portal fantasy (or the reverse portal fantasy thing that Randidly Ghosthound did) and none of this would've been an issue.
Sorry this might be a bit off-topic, but I think there's a very interesting discussion here: I agree that the third one is horrible. Personally, I like either: He knew this was his chance. John aimed his gun. Or even: Now was his chance. John aimed his gun. Or: Now's my chance. John aimed his gun. I guess the problem with thoughts in italics is that there needs to be a balance. Going for a long passage where it's Some thoughts in italics, followed by something non-italics action stuff. Then some thought in italics again is kinda rough on the eyes, and constantly jumping back and forth between 'he/she' to 'I' is kinda dizzying. I think the best example of italics I've ever seen is Joe Abercrombie's Glokta chapters, since he always has something biting to say, and it meshes together well with everything else. Instead of direct thoughts in italics, most of the time I prefer the narration to do that work and be a bit biased toward whatever POV we're coming from, like describing how "the stupid goblin couldn't find its way out of the trap". The word 'stupid' hints at value-judgment, and it helps color the whole passage and gives you insight into how the character's attitude and mental state. Since I just mentioned Joe Abercrombie, I'll continue with another example. I remember enjoying his 'set phrases' that form part of the narration. Like the recurring 'Say one thing for Logen Ninefingers...'. I love how this only appears in Logen's chapters, and it gives a wonderful cultural flavor, since you can sort of guess it's a real saying in the culture he's from. One thing I have to say about the author is that his different POVs feel (very slightly but) organically different from one another, which is what I can't say about A Song of Ice and Fire, despite it trying very hard to do that. But sorry for going off-topic again. All this is great stuff, too. I wonder if there should be a separate thread just to discuss 'writing styles' in general, so people can state their preferences and talk about what they look for in the writing itself, not just story or plot?
