Are there genres or scenarios you like watching in film, but don't have the courage to write?

The Chatters
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So, you mean the kind of stories you prefer writing are those which are heavy sci-fi?

Well, I think that goes for anyone :stuck_out_tongue: If you don’t enjoy it in general, how can you even write it?

That would be complicated. Similar to you, I want to write a detective story, but it just sounds too complicated XD No will :stuck_out_tongue:

I just looked him up. I didn’t see the movie, but I remember Kaiji. All the little games have to lead up to some epic twist or something. The author has to figure it all out like some genius twisted mastermind :stuck_out_tongue:

Sounds like you and I are slightly opposite. When I write comedy, it’s apparently only funny to me :stuck_out_tongue: I don’t write horror, but I have written a story with lots of horrific things like, well, death in various, gruesome ways.

Idk about English, but I’ve read some terrifying Japanese novels. Most of it is not that the scary thing is actually scary. Usually it’s the suspense and something unsettling that continuously happens.

Have you read Mexican Gothic? Personally I didn’t find it as scary as the hype made it sound, but some people were scared.

Also, what are some horror novels you have read?

This is why I don’t do sci-fi XD Not to say I don’t do research for fantasy and not look into science at all. I do, sometimes, but I’ve done this: when it looks like the science gets too complicated, I stop researching and say to myself “It’s because of magick. No more. Moving on. Too complicated.” :stuck_out_tongue:

I used to think I couldn’t take on a mystery because you have to be as smart and cunning as the villain. Then I wrote a mystery/satire/magic realism/lit fic story. I think the problem for me, idk about you, is that I don’t have the idea yet. I felt like I could write a mystery because I got an idea for it. And it was an idea that I felt like I could write. Before, I was trying to force the genre on myself and it wasn’t working.

Maybe one day I’ll have figured out a good idea for sci-fi.

How do you think the day you write sci-fi could come for you?

Hey, haven’t seen you around in a while. How are you? :wink:

I’ve been drawing for a while now, and I think animation is a totally different skill :sweat_smile:

Drawing and making them move. Two different magicks :wink:

That’s also a thing, you know, do people want to read about problems today like they did when the Hunger Games came out? Hmm :thinking: As a library person, have you seen how trends are going?

You could do what I did. Do a loophole. Do historical fantasy.

I like the 1800s, so I take that and look up a country around that time and use it as inspiration for my fantasy world. I call it the (other) world because it is still our world, but kind of other. Historical events do happen as they do in our world, but some things are altered. Like, for instance, the Ottoman Empire never happened.

But technology is the same as it would be at the time.

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He strikes me as the type of person who watches Fear Factor and thinks “Why didn’t I come up with people eating leeches alive off of their teammates? It’s genius!”

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That sounds like something he might say XD

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It’s true that you need the idea for it! And personally, I also need the right frame of mind. I wrote a historical fic novella out of an idea I’ve had for nearly 10 years. Now, after previously writing a full-fledged novel and using Open Novella motivation, I managed to push through. So I guess I need the right combination of idea and circumstances, haha.

Also, writing sci fi would definitely be time-consuming, so I would need really strong motivation to muster the patience lol.

Because I’m sure a big part of sci fi coul be…

“It’s because of this specific technology/chemical compound/alien science that I made up. No more. Moving on.” :joy:

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This has nothing to do with this conversation: Do you ever read something and come up with a joke in your head based on one of the fantasy worlds you created? So, telling the joke wouldn’t mean anything to anyone, but you would be hysterical about it?

I just had this with that sentence and I could tell you, but you wouldn’t know what it’s from and why it’s funny XD

I just remembered, in Perdido Street Station, there was this whole long explanation of some kind of scientific thing. Idk if the author made it all up or if it’s half real, but it sounded pretty solid. Like it could be a real theory. There were parts that sounded more magical, but it was all so subtle. I would read back a few paragraphs and think “Wait, that actually sounds impossible in our world, so this is probably the magic part? But wait, it also makes sense in this part…I don’t get it.”

So, maybe, on top of saying “I just made this up and it works”, another way to pull off science is to make it too complicated-sounding for anyone to begin deciphering it :stuck_out_tongue:

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Nope, I’ve never read Mexican Gothic, although it keeps coming up as a Kindle Daily Deal. The book blurb just didn’t sound that interesting to me. So far I’ve only read the early classics like Frankenstein, Dracula, The Vampyre, Jekyll and Hyde, The Invisible Man, etc. and Stephen King books like The Stand, The Langoliers, and The Green Mile. I was told some other books were horror novels, like Our Wives Under the Sea, We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Last Ghost series, but none of those books were scary. I mean, they were good books, don’t get me wrong, but they just weren’t scary. So now I’m thinking it’s impossible to actually write a scary book, because you just can’t do things with words that you can do with music and images.

I’ve never read any Japanese horror novels, though, so maybe I’ll try those next! Got any recommendations? I’ll have to see whether there are English translations of them.

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Courage? That’s not the word for it.

But most often hard core science fiction (Intersteller), murder mysteries (Bones, NCIS, Law and Order), and real life stories (The Blind Side) are at the bottom of the list for aomething Im going to attempt.

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Is it power?

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It’s WORK. SCIFI would be the easiet to wing out of that, but its areas that you “have to get right”.

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:wave: Long time no see! I’m good. Just got back from a big trip lol. And yourself?

I’d love to be able to draw in the first place lol, but it just comes with good practice I guess haha

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I don’t think so, no. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how they don’t reach for political things or books that are like versions of our world-like problems, but it could also be a niche audience. I mean, lots of popular books have political meanings behind them and show a dystopian-like world or an unjust government that could pique the interest of others. :woman_shrugging:

The main trends I’ve seen don’t really include dystopian topics, but do have unjust systems or there is a monarchy with a horrid king/queen or something of the sort, so it’s similar, but not quite.

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I thought that the key to writing dysutopian novels was listening to KMFDM’s backlog.

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Is this considered a horror? I found it to be tragic rather than frightening.

Maybe we need to figure out what we mean by “scary”. What are we looking for in books that would make them scary? For me it’s the unsettling and suspense parts. What about you? What would be in a book to make it scary for you?

So, my favorite horror author is Tatsuya Yoshimura. He passed away from cancer in 2012. Doesn’t look like any of his books have been translated. He wasn’t super famous :sweat_smile: though he did have fans.

Another author is the one of the Ring and Sadako, Kouji Suzuki. He wrote a book called Edge (2008) (Japanese title) and that’s the only book of his that I’ve read. It’s science horror. I always recommend it to people interested in horror. Idk of there’s an English translation or not. He seems to have won an award in the states (Shirley Jackson Award) for best novel in 2012.

Since I was reading only Yoshimura’s horror books, I didn’t look at the other ones. Then after a while I tried to get into other ones, but I couldn’t :sweat_smile: I just liked the way he wrote horror and there wasn’t anyone else who could replace the for me. Eventually, I got into horror comics, so I stopped reading horror novels.

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Welcome back :grin: I’m good, too. I’ve been ferociously editing.

Yep. Good, fun practice.

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I attempted to write a sci-fi when I was a teen… I abandoned it halfway through chapter 1. I literally only even tried because I knew I wasn’t into sci-fi and it’d be a challenge I wanted to attempt.

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Lol yes not quite like that but I do find myself hilarious on account of stuff I’ve written but can’t really share outside my head because it wouldn’t make sense :rofl:

I don’t think that’s something I can do, haha. I work with ppl and explaining stuff to them all day, and one reason why I’m good at my job is because I make sure I understand everything first. By extension, I would need to understand what I write about before I write about it, and then I write it out as clearly as I can. Idk. This is all speculation, who knows what kind of ideas will strike me if I ever get there, heh.

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You were a ballsy teen :rofl::rofl::rofl:

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All I remember was giving the characters strange alien names by literally running my hands over a computer keyboard to mash together letters that didn’t make sense and that there was a space princess and an alien who was her bodyguard (and also like a rare alien species that was immortal, so he was old as dust in reality but didn’t look over 17 or something :rofl:). And they were on a spaceship. Literally, that’s as far as I got before I just stuffed it back in my writing binder - this was way back in the day when I hand wrote stories… I know exactly where it is and recently went looking for it to see how far I got. It was about 4-8 pages I think :rofl:.

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:rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:

Omggggggg you just reminded me that when I was a kid, in middle school or something, I wrote a story about people living inside the Moon! So I guess I did write sci fi lol. Earth was being attacked by Martian creatures who kidnapped Earth’s prince and his girlfriend goes to rescue him but turns out she’s some sort of moon goddess??? It was wild and pretty much a rip-off of all the anime I’d been watching at the time (Sailor Moon included :rofl:).

This memory was triggered by what you said about the names – I was very adamant to look up Latin or other weird names to make them :sparkles:unique :sparkles: and :sparkles:alien-y :sparkles: :rofl::rofl::rofl:

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Omg sailor moon def inspired me :rofl:. That was probably the most Sci-fi thing I remember that I could actually watch… And it’s more fantasy lol.

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