Monsters Ch2

[farla]

Monsters Ch2 is up. No chapter titles for whatever reason.

It actually is an interesting challenge to write. The thing about high school is that although it's certainly something most people have experience with, this never translates into being able to write about it well. I think it's the burning need to give your thoughts on yaoi the failures inherent in the schooling system. Because you're there a lot. And bored. And thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking, and all those thoughts are along the lines of "I'm bored" and "This is so stupid". And at the same time, you've thought those same thoughts ten billion times to the point you have no idea where the starting point is, and barely even notice your surroundings.

So I'm going to try to describe the setting a bit, while keeping the ramblings on school in general more under control. None of it's really relevant yet - I'm just kind of going to throw stuff up and see what sticks.

Some stuff I have ideas for after writing it, and others I don't. So, the heating thing is going to kind of tie into the story at some point, but it's included because my dominant school experience was that it's fucking cold and who the hell designed this?

I have the feeling people are going to misunderstand the author's note, since it's a pile of nested qualifiers and negations.

Comments

[purplekitte.livejournal.com]

Well that was boring but no more than was inherently inevitable and that characters seem like nice normal people.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I'm writing a daily life story that takes place in college and I'm at a complete loss as to what people do between saving the world other than repetitive and boring homework, work, and drinking. Classes get a whole line of "I went to class" except for the occasional recounting of something stupid the teacher said.

The last time I wrote a high school AU fic it was only like ten pages and two days, but not a single class was shown, just club rooms, the detention room, the cafeteria, and the football field. That's all I remember of high school.

[farla.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's kind of a multilayered problem.

It's a type of story that really cries out for a rough draft and then vicious edit - you throw everything in, then cut out the parts you turned out not to use. Which is really not a forgiving format when you're posting that first draft chapter by chapter. There's got to be some way of eliminating the "I went to class" altogether, as it's just taking up time, and yet, without that, it's not really set in a school. I think heavy use of timeskipping would help, jumping over days at a time and then stuffing any day that needs to happen full of other interesting things. But it's easier said than done.

And this one's also kind of mimicking published style books, where there's often very little story and the draw on the reader is just to keep reading to find out the solution to the puzzle raised, so there's an extra layer of fail. And that's absolutely not a good format to combine with a chapter by chapter way of doing it, where you're supposed to make each chapter enjoyable. Plus, in terms of soliciting advice, it means it reads completely differently to a random reader and anyone who knows the central reveal.

Presumably I could get tips by reading actual published books with the setting, but most of them suck.

[charizamdc.livejournal.com]

I swear you've posted this before somewhere.

[farla.livejournal.com]

Yes, actually. I posted what I'd written up initially a while back over here. (http://farla.livejournal.com/147309.html)