07-18-2006, 06:58 PM
During the past few weeks I've been thinking about all the "pet peeves" and "stupid author tricks" threads we've had in here over the years, and I finally decided to try to consolidate them and turn them into some kind of guide document for fic authors. I'm far from finished, but I've got a big chunk of the first section done, and I thought I might post it here for commentary and suggestions. So please take a look at this and let me know what you think. Thanks!
-- Bob
Over the decade or more that I've been part of the fanfic community -- initially anime fanfiction with a brief sideline into Trekfic, but of late branching out to Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a few other fandoms -- I've read a godawful lot of fics. And among that godawful lot of fics were a lot of godawful fics.This document is an ambitious attempt to help reduce the number of putrid fics by some small but noticeable amount. It started off as a series of threads in the "Other People's Fanfiction" area of my discussion forums on ezBoard. I've extracted the useful information from those threads and expanded upon it, supplementing it with practical advice and guidelines garnered during my three years in the Creative Writing program at Princeton University, 2 years as a newspaper stringer, and seventeen years as a professional freelance writer and member of SFWA, not to mention my eight years of writing fanfiction. (Yes, that *does* mean I started fan writing *after* I was a pro.) I've broken down this document into three main sections:I. General guidelines -- Broad rules that can help improve yourwriting overall.II. Stupid Writer Tricks -- Dumb and dumber mistakes to avoid.III. Crafting Fiction -- Advice on how to construct a story sothat your audience is engaged and entertained.I hope this proves useful to you. Good luck, and good writing.-- Robert M. SchroeckI. GENERAL GUIDELINES1. Learn, and write in, proper English. This means spelling and grammar (more about both later), and on a larger scale, writing proper sentences, paragraphs and chapters. I've seen authors claim that they don't need to do any of this because they're writing "for fun". Well, bunky, let me tell you that I'm *reading* for fun, and if trying to puzzle out what you're saying is too much work, it gets deleted. Quickly. Look at it this way: words are your tools. You *must* learn to use them properly if you are ever going to craft something worthwhile. Imagine two furnituremakers -- who will make the better chair? The one who chips away at the wood with a dull screwdriver and bangs nails in with a pair of pliers? Or the one with a router, lathe and woodcarver's blades, and the knowledge of how to use them properly? Mind you, I know that some of the FFML's authors are writing in a second language when they work in English. But you know something? Unless they say so, I usually can't tell. That's because they often write English better than native speakers do. It's a rare case that one of them makes an error. I only wish the native speakers were as well-educated. Related to this rule is the next:2. Buy a style guide, and consult it regularly. I recommend Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style", which you can get at any bookstore (and, of course, on Amazon.com). There are others, like the Associated Press stylebook, but they tend to be primarily for journalists, while Strunk and White's is focused on more general use. A style guide will help you avoid some of the more common but harder-to-detect errors a writer can make. (And you *will* make them, and continue to make them, no matter how good you get.) It will also guide you in crafting sentences that mean exactly what you want them to mean, instead of just coming close (or worse, looking like they do while missing the mark entirely). If you're weak on English usage and grammar, supplement the style guide with a good guide to structure and writing. I can't recommend Karen Elizabeth Gordon's books highly enough -- get "The Deluxe Transitive Vampire" and "The New Well- Tempered Sentence" (again, available just about everywhere). Not only are they spot-on guides to grammar and punctuation, respectively, they're a whole hell of a lot of fun to read.3. Proofread and preread. Do it yourself, or recruit a friend. If you're lucky or determined, you might assemble a small circle of prereaders. For god's sake, don't trust spellchecker programs. They are notoriously *stupid*. Unlike a human reader, they have no sense of context, and will blithely miscorrect a bad spelling into the wrong word if you carelessly tell them "fix all" or the equivalent. They also *never* have every English word in them, and lacking them, can end up flagging and "fixing" a perfectly good and proper word that they don't recognize. A case in point: the built-in spellcheckers in a number of popular word-processors do not know the word "genteel" (meaning "refined, well-bred, ladylike, gentlemanly") and will insist on turning it into either "gentle" ("delicate of touch") or "gentile" ("not Jewish"). Not exactly the kind of thing which helps the meaning of a well-crafted sentence, that. Make no mistake -- most spellcheckers are designed for *business* writing, and the words they know are biased in that direction. Don't let them get their hands on your work. Similarly, grammar checkers are not the be-all and end-all. They *are* somewhat better tools for the fiction writer than the spellchecker, but again, they tend to be business-oriented. Worse, they have no real way to allow for the less-stringent structure and flow that is necessary for fiction. Use a grammar checker if you want, but be prepared to wade through more false positives than you'd like. The only real solution for both is to manually eyeball your work. This is something that's problematic for most authors, as they have a tendency to read what they know they meant, and not what they actually wrote. Other eyes without preconceived notions about the content are the best way to go about this, although if you have the luxury to let a written piece lie fallow until you forget its contents, you can manage by yourself.4. Pick prereaders carefully. Once you have a chapter or a story out, it's easy to get (more) prereaders. If you're any good, almost everybody who liked your work will clamor to preread simply to get an advance look at your newest stuff. Be aware that these folks do not always make the best prereaders. While this is not a hard and fast rule, self- nominated prereaders run the risk of being (or turning into) "yes men" who always respond "it's great!" to any new material. This can make it hard for an author to grow in his skills, or to evaluate his growth. No pool of prereaders should be made up entirely of self- nominees. When assembling prereaders, *always* make sure you ask some folks who have given you more than just praise. Anyone who's ever told you something was broken (and better, how to fix it) will make a good prereader. If you can actually recruit someone who is uninterested in your subject matter, story, or fandom entirely, even better -- they won't be biased by their own enthusiasm when trying to evaluate your writing. Finally, when selecting prereaders make sure they know that you want more feedback from them than just spelling and grammar errors. You'll profit from it in the long run. 5. Pay attention to what your prereaders say. Especially if they say things like, "why does this happen?" or "this doesn't make sense". Ideally, your prereaders are representative of your greater audience, and if they're more frustrated or confused by a story than entertained and intrigued, that's indicative of problems with your approach. Listen to them, and fix as needed.6. Don't be wedded to your text. Nothing you've written is graven in stone. Nothing is so perfect that it can't be revised or even thrown out. Do not get so attached to a passage that you cannot ruthlessly cut it out of the story if needed. And be prepared to rip your entire story down to the foundations and start it over if that's what the prereaders suggest. It'll be painful, and you won't want to do it, but nine times out of ten, it'll be the right thing to do.7. But don't throw away your deletions. Nothing says you can't save those scraps and recycle them, though. For each of my writing projects, I have a "discards" file. Anything more than a sentence long that gets cut goes in that file for potential reuse elsewhere -- and I *have* found ways to reuse things. This is the best way to preserve that turn of phrase or clever scene that you're so proud of, but which just didn't fit in the place where you first wrote it. Plus, if you know the material won't be lost forever, it's easier to make drastic cuts when they're needed. 8. When in doubt, look it up. In the era of the Internet, there is no reason to make a dumb mistake of fact. Between Google and Wikipedia alone, there is absolutely no excuse for errors born out of ignorance. Series canon for virtually everything is thoroughly documented online these days, unlike the Dark Ages in the middle 1990s and earlier. Web-based language dictionaries are reasonably good and mostly easy to use. It will take maybe five minutes to confirm or correct most details about which you are unsure. Take that time. Newbie readers will thank you, and old hands will respect you. And every once in a while you'll find something utterly cool that no one has ever used before.9. Avoid fanon. As a corollary, resist the urge to fall back on fanon, even (or especially!) when it fills a known hole in your fictional setting of choice. Fanon is never unavoidable -- and making up your own detail from scratch will sometimes lead you into profitable new areas of exploration.10. Write for yourself as well as your readers. Or, to put it differently, you are one of your readers -- don't forget you're writing for your own enjoyment.11. Write for your readers as well as yourself. However, don't get so wrapped up in writing for yourself that you forget you have other people in your audience. This is what causes the worst Self Insertion fics -- when the author gets so caught up in his self-indulgent ego trip that he forgets that other people are going to read this, and want to see more than chapter 135 of "L33TWr1T3R Conquerz Teh Wurld"!12. Don't blackmail your readers. Don't *demand* reviews, or C&C, or whatever your outlet of choice calls reader response, and by the gods do not threaten to stop writing if you don't get any. If you're not getting reviews, or not getting *positive* reviews, there's a *reason*, and a puerile threat to stop writing won't do much good. It might even *reward* some of the people who give you bad reviews. Just write. Yes, you want people to enjoy your work, but nothing is enjoyed by *everybody*. Besides, the work itself should be as much reward as the response. If it's not, you're doing something wrong.13. Grow a thick skin. Related to the above point is how you respond to criticism. Every writer gets bad reviews. I've had them, Stephen King gets them, Hemingway got them, hell, even Shakespeare got heckled in print and in person. There's always somebody who's going to hate your work, no matter how good it is. DON'T LET HIM CHASE YOU AWAY FROM WRITING, BECAUSE THAT WAY HE WINS. Remember that you are writing as much to please yourself as your readers, so don't let someone's abuse make you stop doing something you enjoy. We've already lost a couple fair-to-good writers who had the potential to be truly great because they let negative comments get too deeply under their skins; we don't need to lose more.
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...
-- Bob
Over the decade or more that I've been part of the fanfic community -- initially anime fanfiction with a brief sideline into Trekfic, but of late branching out to Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a few other fandoms -- I've read a godawful lot of fics. And among that godawful lot of fics were a lot of godawful fics.This document is an ambitious attempt to help reduce the number of putrid fics by some small but noticeable amount. It started off as a series of threads in the "Other People's Fanfiction" area of my discussion forums on ezBoard. I've extracted the useful information from those threads and expanded upon it, supplementing it with practical advice and guidelines garnered during my three years in the Creative Writing program at Princeton University, 2 years as a newspaper stringer, and seventeen years as a professional freelance writer and member of SFWA, not to mention my eight years of writing fanfiction. (Yes, that *does* mean I started fan writing *after* I was a pro.) I've broken down this document into three main sections:I. General guidelines -- Broad rules that can help improve yourwriting overall.II. Stupid Writer Tricks -- Dumb and dumber mistakes to avoid.III. Crafting Fiction -- Advice on how to construct a story sothat your audience is engaged and entertained.I hope this proves useful to you. Good luck, and good writing.-- Robert M. SchroeckI. GENERAL GUIDELINES1. Learn, and write in, proper English. This means spelling and grammar (more about both later), and on a larger scale, writing proper sentences, paragraphs and chapters. I've seen authors claim that they don't need to do any of this because they're writing "for fun". Well, bunky, let me tell you that I'm *reading* for fun, and if trying to puzzle out what you're saying is too much work, it gets deleted. Quickly. Look at it this way: words are your tools. You *must* learn to use them properly if you are ever going to craft something worthwhile. Imagine two furnituremakers -- who will make the better chair? The one who chips away at the wood with a dull screwdriver and bangs nails in with a pair of pliers? Or the one with a router, lathe and woodcarver's blades, and the knowledge of how to use them properly? Mind you, I know that some of the FFML's authors are writing in a second language when they work in English. But you know something? Unless they say so, I usually can't tell. That's because they often write English better than native speakers do. It's a rare case that one of them makes an error. I only wish the native speakers were as well-educated. Related to this rule is the next:2. Buy a style guide, and consult it regularly. I recommend Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style", which you can get at any bookstore (and, of course, on Amazon.com). There are others, like the Associated Press stylebook, but they tend to be primarily for journalists, while Strunk and White's is focused on more general use. A style guide will help you avoid some of the more common but harder-to-detect errors a writer can make. (And you *will* make them, and continue to make them, no matter how good you get.) It will also guide you in crafting sentences that mean exactly what you want them to mean, instead of just coming close (or worse, looking like they do while missing the mark entirely). If you're weak on English usage and grammar, supplement the style guide with a good guide to structure and writing. I can't recommend Karen Elizabeth Gordon's books highly enough -- get "The Deluxe Transitive Vampire" and "The New Well- Tempered Sentence" (again, available just about everywhere). Not only are they spot-on guides to grammar and punctuation, respectively, they're a whole hell of a lot of fun to read.3. Proofread and preread. Do it yourself, or recruit a friend. If you're lucky or determined, you might assemble a small circle of prereaders. For god's sake, don't trust spellchecker programs. They are notoriously *stupid*. Unlike a human reader, they have no sense of context, and will blithely miscorrect a bad spelling into the wrong word if you carelessly tell them "fix all" or the equivalent. They also *never* have every English word in them, and lacking them, can end up flagging and "fixing" a perfectly good and proper word that they don't recognize. A case in point: the built-in spellcheckers in a number of popular word-processors do not know the word "genteel" (meaning "refined, well-bred, ladylike, gentlemanly") and will insist on turning it into either "gentle" ("delicate of touch") or "gentile" ("not Jewish"). Not exactly the kind of thing which helps the meaning of a well-crafted sentence, that. Make no mistake -- most spellcheckers are designed for *business* writing, and the words they know are biased in that direction. Don't let them get their hands on your work. Similarly, grammar checkers are not the be-all and end-all. They *are* somewhat better tools for the fiction writer than the spellchecker, but again, they tend to be business-oriented. Worse, they have no real way to allow for the less-stringent structure and flow that is necessary for fiction. Use a grammar checker if you want, but be prepared to wade through more false positives than you'd like. The only real solution for both is to manually eyeball your work. This is something that's problematic for most authors, as they have a tendency to read what they know they meant, and not what they actually wrote. Other eyes without preconceived notions about the content are the best way to go about this, although if you have the luxury to let a written piece lie fallow until you forget its contents, you can manage by yourself.4. Pick prereaders carefully. Once you have a chapter or a story out, it's easy to get (more) prereaders. If you're any good, almost everybody who liked your work will clamor to preread simply to get an advance look at your newest stuff. Be aware that these folks do not always make the best prereaders. While this is not a hard and fast rule, self- nominated prereaders run the risk of being (or turning into) "yes men" who always respond "it's great!" to any new material. This can make it hard for an author to grow in his skills, or to evaluate his growth. No pool of prereaders should be made up entirely of self- nominees. When assembling prereaders, *always* make sure you ask some folks who have given you more than just praise. Anyone who's ever told you something was broken (and better, how to fix it) will make a good prereader. If you can actually recruit someone who is uninterested in your subject matter, story, or fandom entirely, even better -- they won't be biased by their own enthusiasm when trying to evaluate your writing. Finally, when selecting prereaders make sure they know that you want more feedback from them than just spelling and grammar errors. You'll profit from it in the long run. 5. Pay attention to what your prereaders say. Especially if they say things like, "why does this happen?" or "this doesn't make sense". Ideally, your prereaders are representative of your greater audience, and if they're more frustrated or confused by a story than entertained and intrigued, that's indicative of problems with your approach. Listen to them, and fix as needed.6. Don't be wedded to your text. Nothing you've written is graven in stone. Nothing is so perfect that it can't be revised or even thrown out. Do not get so attached to a passage that you cannot ruthlessly cut it out of the story if needed. And be prepared to rip your entire story down to the foundations and start it over if that's what the prereaders suggest. It'll be painful, and you won't want to do it, but nine times out of ten, it'll be the right thing to do.7. But don't throw away your deletions. Nothing says you can't save those scraps and recycle them, though. For each of my writing projects, I have a "discards" file. Anything more than a sentence long that gets cut goes in that file for potential reuse elsewhere -- and I *have* found ways to reuse things. This is the best way to preserve that turn of phrase or clever scene that you're so proud of, but which just didn't fit in the place where you first wrote it. Plus, if you know the material won't be lost forever, it's easier to make drastic cuts when they're needed. 8. When in doubt, look it up. In the era of the Internet, there is no reason to make a dumb mistake of fact. Between Google and Wikipedia alone, there is absolutely no excuse for errors born out of ignorance. Series canon for virtually everything is thoroughly documented online these days, unlike the Dark Ages in the middle 1990s and earlier. Web-based language dictionaries are reasonably good and mostly easy to use. It will take maybe five minutes to confirm or correct most details about which you are unsure. Take that time. Newbie readers will thank you, and old hands will respect you. And every once in a while you'll find something utterly cool that no one has ever used before.9. Avoid fanon. As a corollary, resist the urge to fall back on fanon, even (or especially!) when it fills a known hole in your fictional setting of choice. Fanon is never unavoidable -- and making up your own detail from scratch will sometimes lead you into profitable new areas of exploration.10. Write for yourself as well as your readers. Or, to put it differently, you are one of your readers -- don't forget you're writing for your own enjoyment.11. Write for your readers as well as yourself. However, don't get so wrapped up in writing for yourself that you forget you have other people in your audience. This is what causes the worst Self Insertion fics -- when the author gets so caught up in his self-indulgent ego trip that he forgets that other people are going to read this, and want to see more than chapter 135 of "L33TWr1T3R Conquerz Teh Wurld"!12. Don't blackmail your readers. Don't *demand* reviews, or C&C, or whatever your outlet of choice calls reader response, and by the gods do not threaten to stop writing if you don't get any. If you're not getting reviews, or not getting *positive* reviews, there's a *reason*, and a puerile threat to stop writing won't do much good. It might even *reward* some of the people who give you bad reviews. Just write. Yes, you want people to enjoy your work, but nothing is enjoyed by *everybody*. Besides, the work itself should be as much reward as the response. If it's not, you're doing something wrong.13. Grow a thick skin. Related to the above point is how you respond to criticism. Every writer gets bad reviews. I've had them, Stephen King gets them, Hemingway got them, hell, even Shakespeare got heckled in print and in person. There's always somebody who's going to hate your work, no matter how good it is. DON'T LET HIM CHASE YOU AWAY FROM WRITING, BECAUSE THAT WAY HE WINS. Remember that you are writing as much to please yourself as your readers, so don't let someone's abuse make you stop doing something you enjoy. We've already lost a couple fair-to-good writers who had the potential to be truly great because they let negative comments get too deeply under their skins; we don't need to lose more.
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...
![[Image: happy.gif]](http://www.ezboard.com/intl/aenglish/images/emoticons/happy.gif)
![[Image: Con.gif]](http://www.yggdrasil.org/misc/Con.gif)
![[Image: glasses.gif]](http://www.ezboard.com/intl/aenglish/images/emoticons/glasses.gif)
its good to check source/reference materials... also add in that suggestions above remembering that not everything on the net/in the media/in all books is correct. While new things are cool and spiffy... if you make an error that thick skin will help a lot (reinforcing this necessary skill). If you make a mistake (or someone else is mistaken/deluded about the item in question) having a source to point them to helps.