Comments?

[telophase]

I've got a couple of paragraphs of here and want to know if this is a decent description of a (fictional) place. Mind reading them, commenting on what it brings to your mind, and then taking a look at a couple minutes of a video and letting me know if what you got was ANYTHING like it? If not, what made you confused or was missing that would have made it better?

The text below is basically pseudocode for writing--it's not even at first draft stage yet, but I've been wrestling in my head with how to describe this city for ages.

No comment on grammar, tense, or or whatnot plz, and the eventual passages these will get expanded into will contain a bit more description (like that the walls are stone).

Time period: sort of Renaissance-ish.

Heads down the wide stairs from the university quarter towards the merchant quarter, then takes a series of twisty stair passages between buildings, some so narrow he had to turn sideways when he met someone coming the other way. Once you left the upper city, if you weren’t on the central stairs near the cataracts, the mid-city area was not interested in devoting space that could be used for living in, selling things, or working to moving around. Aristos of the upper city loved them some broad, decorated stairways you could almost march a company down, but the mid-city people roofed over stairways into arcades to build housing and workshops on top of them, and sometimes even blocked them off, forcing passers-by into complicated detours to avoid dead ends. Doorways opened directly off of stairs, sometimes directly into houses and shops, occasionally into tiny courtyards.

He paused at a shrine built into the wall of a tiny landing where the flight he was on stopped and continued down to the left, and made a gesture of hopeful thanks for getting the job. Couldn’t afford to leave a coin at the moment, but [deity name] understood that sort of thing.

This video starts at 37:26. Paragraph 2 occurs at something similar to what you see at 39:32.



(hopefully spoiler-disguised so you don't read it before doing the above...)
YES THIS IS MAGICAL RENAISSANCE FANTASY AMALFI COAST ONLY IN A SECONDARY WORLD

Comments

[jenett]

Oooh, I've been there (ages ago...) And that's a fascinating use for walking videos, and I am totally here for this premise.

I got pretty much that from the text, with a few notes:
- Cararacts threw me, for work-related reasons.

- Something about the text implies more steeply winding stairs than is the reality there - a phrase or two about 'long sloping steps' or something like that might help. But the twistiness was just fine in my head, and the way you get random doorways/windows/etc.

- More colour would be a big help - talking about whitewash, or fading whitewash, or moss, or terracotta for a roof tile, or ... whatever.

- The shrine was very clear in my head, but I am both familiar with this historical thing, and in current practice. Some idea of the size and shape could help.

[yhlee]

I am reminded of my school in Korea, which had a sky bridge connecting the middle school building on the 2nd floor to the high school building’s secondary library on its 2nd floor. So I am imagining something like that but on steroids, an overgrown forest of buildings linked by stairways, with possible plot hooks regarding structural stability or firefighting, especially if any of this stuff is made of wood. I also expect this to be setup for some kind of chase scene at some point.

Now to view the video...

[yhlee]

Okay, the one thing I had not really gotten was how terrifyingly claustrophobic those passages are, which you do imply in talking about their narrowness; this is probably due to my being aphantasic and not a fault in your description! And for something like that I’d lean on POV emotional reactions anyway, which wasn’t the stated point of your passage.

[loligo]

Like Jenett, something about the description made it feel even steeper and more vertical to me than it actually turned out to be, but I'm not sure what did that. I was trying to figure out if we were talking about a normal hillside, a steep hillside, or an actual cliff-face. But I'm guessing that if I'd gotten the overall lay of the land in an earlier paragraph, this would have worked just fine to convey the basic architecture of the city, because that part matched pretty well with the video for me.

[telophase]

XD I found the walking videos first, right after we got our treadmill and mounted a TV in front of it. ProWalks only had a few up then, just up to the Path of the Gods videos. And after I watched those, the location kind of combined with something I'd been noodling around with in my head, and it coalesced into a Thing.

And then I promptly failed to do much other than poke at it and attempt to outline, until I stepped back a little in time from the Thing and now I am much farther along on a Thing that occurs a few months previously, and basically sets up the characters.

I'm going to have to think about "cataracts"--in a fuller context it may make more sense, and I kind of want to imply something a little bit different than a plain waterfall. It'll be mentioned at least once before this passage as a location rather than an object ("meet at the top of the cataract (cataracts?)" for example) so hopefully the reader will be primed.

I'm not going to talk too much more about the city since I'll probably need to post bits again to see if people figure out what it looks like from my prose. :) (Aaaand as the first POV that encounters the city is someone who does not actually give a damn about the city and what it looks like.....I may have made it harder on myself than warrented. XD)

[telophase]

But it's probably something I should think about, though! Thank you! :D

(And given the number of people on Reddit who go "Wait...you mean people actually see pictures in their heads? I thougth that was a metaphor!" every time the subject comes up, there's a large chunk of potential audience that's aphantasic.)

My goal with what I'm doing right now is pseudocode, with some passages of actual prose and other passages of "Okay they're standing in a study and B is twiddling with his hat and C is riffling papers on her desk as they're talking." After I get this done and the plot seems to make sense, then I'll go to first draft, which is to turn all the pseudocode into actual prose. And then my plan is to start doing the FUN stuff I like, which is layering in emotional reactions and trying to distinguish voices and suchlike.

Reading something where the first stuff hammered out was referred to as pseudocode seems to have knocked something loose in me. If it's pseudocode it's crap, and it's meant to be crap, and it's not actually the thing I am failing to do, it's instructions on how to do the thing I am currently failing to do.

Hopefully this works!

[telophase]

Thank you! I don't want to talk too much about the actual layout of this city in my brain because I may need to post passages like this again, but I think it actually is a bit more steep than the video, so that works out JUST FINE. XD

[yhlee]

That's a really cool way of structuring your process--I look forward to hearing about how it works out for you! :D My rough draft of Phoenix Extravagant was like that in some regards (although not as, uh, organized), as I'd stop and [write up paragraphs about what the hell was I doing and what I needed to establish and I need to add a flashback here], those kinds of things in [brackets]. XD

[sartorias]

Evocative description! It came off in my head twister and narrower than the actual vid, but still the idea came across. Once you get in the occasional elaborate door, the patches of grass clinging to the walls, the rough and smooth stone, the light,(and imagine the smells) it's gonna br awesome.

[telophase]

Thank you! :D The passages as I envision them are often twistier (and steeper) than the ones in the video, so I think I'm on the right path here.

[genarti]

Yes, that's basically similar to what I was picturing! I was picturing bare stone rather than the whitewash/plaster/whatever, and I think I was picturing more frequent doorways and decorations, and generally an aesthetic that's more Middle Eastern souq crossed with Edinburgh, but all that's superficial decoration really. The general feel of the steps etc was about what I was thinking of. (Although the cataract thing made me expect an open waterfall, but also probably not in the bit of the city the narrator was walking through, so there's that.)

[telophase]

Awesome, thanks! :D

(And yes there's an open waterfall/set of falls that cascade through the city without eroding the stone because magic.)