...some of the more complete parts of the rest of the file. This is more so you see what kind of stuff I'm handling where than for real commentary at this point, but I'll accept commentary.
II. STUPID WRITER TRICKSChekhov's Gun!!!Asspulls (part of Chekhov's Gun)Harry Potter suddenly reveals that he's studied his genealogy and has learned he's the heir of one or maybe all the Founders of Hogwarts, even though he's never even been in the library in the whole story so far. Buffy Summers tells her sister Dawn that because Dawn was made from her, *Buffy's* blood will substitute for Dawn's own mystic nature in a magical ritual. (more examples here)These are called "asspulls". Because the author needed a certain something -- a detail, a secret, a prop -- and just pulled it out of his ass at the moment he needed it, regardless of what it did to how believable the story was. This is one of the most common, and *biggest*, mistakes a beginning writer makes. Even pro writers make them -- the "Buffy" example above comes not from a fanfic, but from an actual broadcast episode. Asspulls are bad because they make the reader stop and say something along the lines of, "now hold on just a freakin' minute!" Even a *small* asspull can knock your reader so far out of the story that they don't want to go back into it. A *big*one will make them throw the story away and tell their friendsnot to read it -- ever. You don't want that.Asspulls stem from a failure to properly anticipate your story's direction and needs. A good writer will know (at least in general terms) where he's going and what he requires when he gets there -- and will lay out all his details and tools along the way so that when they are used, no one will go, "hey, wait a second, where did *that* come from?" This is "Chekhov's Gun" worked backwards -- if you know you need a gun to go off in the third act, make sure you hang one on the wall in the first act. If you know that Harry Potter needs to prove he's the descendant of a Founder, you'd best show him finding that out at some point *before* he needs it. You don't have to actually say what he finds -- you can hide it from the reader, as long as you provide enough surrounding detail that when he pulls the the information out, your reader can say, "Oh! So *that's* what he learned back in chapter 6!" and not feel like they were somehow cheated by the author.If you avoid an asspull with sufficient skill, your reader willprobably say something along the lines of "that's very cool".Strive for that reaction.To this goal, try to be aware of how your story is going to end, and make sure that all the pieces needed for that ending are visible in the story along the way. They don't have to be *obvious* -- in fact, it makes for a far better story if they're *not* -- but they *must* be there.In all fairness, it *is* possible to write a story without longterm planning. Charles Dickens did it almost all the time. He wrote his novels as serials, sold to newspapers one chapter at a time, and he had only the vaguest idea where they were going. But those chapters were *so* dense in detail that he had literally hundreds of things he could pick from when looking for something to turn into a plot point later, if/when he needed it. If you are skilled enough and write densely enough, you can pull it off. But a beginning writer probably shouldn't try it.In-Line Author's NotesSelf-referentiality, author asides and talking directly to the reader: Don't do it at all, unless you're *really* good. Exception: First person narrators who are explicitly telling a story to someone, either directly or indirectly, can address that someone, even if only in the form of "my presumed reader". Butyou need to justify that at some point, if only with a singlethrowaway sentence about "so now I write this account", or "andso I'm telling you all this".Never interrupt the narrative to insert a parenthetical "author's note", though -- and for the love of god if you actually have to do it for some reason, don't preface such a thing with the phrase "author's note". If you *must* speak directly to the reader, that's what prefaces and postscripts are for. If you have to explain something, make it part of the earlier story. You as the narrator are as much a character in the story as anyone you're writing about, even if you're not writing in the voice of a physical person involved in the action somehow. DON'T BREAK CHARACTER to chat with the reader. It destroys the flow of the story and the Willing Suspension of Disbelief.Example of talking to the reader which works: Eric Hallstrom's"Ranma and Akane: A Love Story", Kenko's "Girl Days". Example that doesn't work -- the following passage from "Different War, Same Army" by TechnocraticSithLord, a fic on "Twisting The Hellmouth" (which is, in fact a good example of many bad things): Dawn left the room, and came back about two minutes later holding the six books of the Harry Potter series, and Buffy's suitcase. Her copies of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone(A/N: I live in Canada, where we call it by its British name, Philosopher's Stone), the Chamber of Secrets, The Prisoner of Azkaban, The Goblet of Fire, The Order of the Phoenix, and The Half-Blood Prince were all well torn and ripped from the trip on the bus, and from all the abuse they'd gotten over the years. Buffy took the books and her suitcase from Dawn, despite the looks she got from almost everyone present. She opened the first book to page 41,(not sure, just guessing, haven't got a copy on hand) and read to her suitcase "a girl with bushy brown hair."(once again, just guessing)The comments from the author are intrusive and disrupt what littlenarrative flow he'd managed to create.Narrative Voice vs. Character VoiceUnless the narrator is one of the characters in the story,the narrative voice should be as precise and formal as possible.Do not use slang, jargon or informal terms -- there should bevirtually no personality to a third-person narrator.ExpoSpeakOne of the worse sins against characterization is expospeak --"expository speech", which is the practice of making a character say something that everyone inside the story would already know intimately, solely to make sure the reader knows it. Here's a good example, from a Harry Potter/Buffy The Vampire Slayer crossover found on the "Twisting The Hellmouth" fic site: "Albus I don't think they ran away. I used a /Portal Reviewus/ to see what happened at their front door. A spell that wizarding world doors are proofed against but muggle doors wouldn't be. ..."Leaving aside the hideous grammar for now, this piece of dialogue fails the reality check because no one talks that way! This is Remus Lupin talking to Albus Dumbledore -- if Dumbledore doesn't know what a "Portal Reviewus" spell -- a spell apparently so common that every house is warded against it -- is, he shouldn't be leading the Order of the Phoenix or running Hogwart's. This is exactly the same as turning to your mother and saying, "I'm taking our automobile, which as you know is an internal combustion vehicle powered by petroleum distallates, down to the supermarket, which is a place of business that makes an extraordinary selection of foodstuffs available to the average citizen for reasonable prices."You don't talk this way. Neither should your characters."But how do I tell the reader what he needs to know?" I hear youwail.There are several far more satisfactory ways to do this. The easiest -- though frequently the clumsiest -- is to have an handy outsider in the cast who needs this stuff explained to him. He serves as the reader's surrogate, asking all the necessary questions and getting all the necessary answers. Sometimes this need is already addressed for you in the source material. If you're writing Harry Potter fic, for example, Harry is the built-in outsider who needs briefing on every aspect of wizarding life. Since almost all we know about the Wizarding World comes through his perceptions, virtually *anything* that the author might want to explain to the reader may well be new and strange to Harry, requiring someone to explain it to *him*, and thus neatly serving two purposes at once.The problem with this method is that it can turn into a long lecture or series of lectures which could bore the reader. It works best if you interleave it with action of some sort.Almost as easy in concept, but harder for a beginning writer to do, is *don't*. Let the context inform the reader. For example, with the quote above, you would eliminate the second, explanatory sentence. The reader will be clever enough to figure out that the "Portal Reviewus" does from Lupin's report of what he learned and Dumbledore's reaction. (Properly executed, you can stretch out an explanation for a *long* time, turning it into a hook that keeps your readers interested. For instance, look at the first few chapters of my story "Drunkard's Walk II". Doug shows up in Megatokyo, and during his turns as the narrator starts discusing songs, being a Warrior and a host of other things as though the reader already knows what he's talking about. It's not until chapter six that the readers have the answers to every question he raises just in his first ten or fifteen paragraphs. This was deliberate. See "Don't Tell Everything Right Away", elsewhere in this document.)NARRATIVE TIME VS. NARRATOR TIMEIf you think to use "ago"/"tomorrow"/"yestrday"/etc. (and by extension, the present tense) in the narrative voice, don't, unless you're writing something very experimental where the story is supposed to be taking place at the *very* moment the reader is reading it. These are time references that are relative to the speaker's position in time. The narrator -- even if he's one of the characters in the story -- is telling the story at a *different* time than the one when it "happened", and should use "the day before", "the next day", "five days earlier" and similar constructions that take their cue from the action in the story, not the narrator's point in time. If you have trouble understanding why this matters, imagine you're telling a story to someone in person, something that happened to you a year or more earlier. You wouldn't say, "I did X, and then tomorrow, I'll do Y", would you? You'd say, "I did X, and then the next day, I did Y". It's the same principle in a written story when the narrator is describing time relationships.III. CRAFTING FICTIONBut Don't Reveal Everything Right AwayIt is a common mistake for a beginning writer to start a storylike this: Jim Andiheerou was a geeky tenth-grade student at Gaittin High. At five-two with messy blond hair and a bad complexion, he had problems getting dates. He had often tried to ask the prom queen, Maryjo Largenboost, to the movies, only to be rejected with derisive laughter.Besides violating both the "Show, Don't Tell" and "First LineHook" rules, it comes across as stiltedOverloading your readers with *important* details doesn't help yourstory. First Line HookThe first sentence of a story should "hook" the reader in some way,to make him want to read the second sentence. Try to give it animplicit or explicit question that the reader will echo in his head;"why?" or "how?" are usually the best, although "who?" works pretty well too.For instance, here're the first two sentences -- one physical lineon the screen or page -- of my story "Drunkard's Walk II" (after youget through all the titles and whatnot): I am a killer and a clown. I am a hero and a fool.What this is supposed to do is make the reader say to himself, if only subsconsciously, "What kind of person would describe himself this way? Who is he?" Of course I don't answer these questions right away -- in fact, I raise several more questions about this narrator, and then abandon him for several kilobytes -- leaving a dramatic tension behind that is intended to drag the reader through the setup for the "Bubblegum Crisis" part of the story. (See "Don't Tell Everything At Once," above.)Here's the first line of a story I'm currently working on. It's a bit of a cliche, but it still works: I don't *think* I'm crazy.The tension set up is (hopefully) the reader's desire to find outwhether or not the narrator is really crazy, and why they mightthink so either way.The first sentence doesn't need to be quite as in-your-face as these, though. Take, for instance, the first line of the "Tenchi Muyo!" fic "In Vino Veritas" by Sinom Bre: The stone steps were eternal, in any practical sense of the word, and for as long as he could remember, there was an almost ritualistic quality to climbing the long stairwell to his house, or the even longer trek to the shrine, suitably higher on the hill.This sets a very specific mood, while at the same time forcing the reader to ask, "who is the 'he' this sentence refers to?"A different kind of example, from Barry Cadwgan's Shadowrun/BGC crossover, "A Wolf In Crisis, Part I": Most plays and stories begin the moment something goes wrong... this is no exception. The reader is led to ask himself, "what goes wrong, and for whom?" The desire to answer these questions will hopefully draw the reader deeper into the story. One of the most spectacular, though, has to be Eric Hallstrom's "Ranma and Akane: A Love Story", which begins the story with a prologue that is engaging discussion on how to open a story interleaved with tantalizing images of characters. Then the prologue *starts over again* with an evocative sound effect which leads into an opening that with casual self-awareness contrasts itself with the "usual" opening for a "Ranma 1/2" fanfic. It breaks several rules and defies easy description, and has to be read to understood. It's a piece of art. And that's all before we get to the first paragraph of the first chapter, which with one gordian knot firmly fastens the reader to the story: This is the story of a boy who was a girl, and a girl, and a boy, and a girl, and a boy, and a girl, and a girl who acts like a boy, and a boy who acts like a girl, and a woman, and a man, and another couple girls, and a cast of thousands. And a Panda, though not until much later. And butterflies, lots and lots of butterflies. One way you can do this is the classic device of "In Media Res" --loosely translated, "starting right in the middle of things".Make your first scene something that happens, chronologically, half-way through the plotEditorializingAuthor's editorial comments embedded in otherwise third-person viewpoint stories. Especially when the content of the comments could just as easily be handled as proper narrative. And especially when they're set off and marked as "Author's Note". Bleargh.Chapter SizeDespite what Dan Brown did in "The Da Vinci Code", ten paragraphs do not a chapter make. Ten paragraphis is barely enough for a *scene*, and a chapter should have several scenes, at least one of which should advance the central plot of the story. A chapter is a self-contained unit that should function *almost* as a ministory in its own right.A ten-paragraph chapter that breaks in the middle of the scene just to create an artificial cliffhanger is *right out*. That's not writing a chapter. That's running out of steam in the middle of the first scene and pretending you're done."Unicorn In The Garden" RuleThis rule is intimately connected to the principle of "Willing Suspension of Disbelief". Given that suspension of disbelief is often far more critical to the fanfic author than to the professional author, it behooves you to pay strict attention to it.The rule is, quite simply, make one fantastic assumption in your story and only one. Do not add more as the story goes on. I've given it the name above because the first time I ever heard the rule explicated was in a 1980 set of writers' guidelines from Analog Magazine, which used the example of James Thurber's classic short story "The Unicorn In The Garden". Quite simply, Thruber's story is about an ordinary suburban couple who wake up one morning to find that there is a unicorn in their garden. The guidelines pointed out, quite correctly, that the story worked because the *only* fantastic element was the unicorn. If ten pages later an alien spaceship landed in the garden next to the unicorn, it would not have been as strong or good a story.Once you have your one assumption, all further fantasic elements must derive from *it*, not any new assumptions.Now, in fanfiction, what constitutes "one fantastic assumption" is little harder to determine than in mainstream pro fiction, but I'm going to give it the old college try. A single crossover element, whether it is a shared world, or a visitor, consitutes the "one assumption". In the case of a mega-crossover like Biles' "Dance of Shiva", the fundamental changes necessary to enable such a combination of settings is the "one assumption" -- although, to be scrupulously fair, once you have a megacrossover in motion, you can usually add most anything to it without seriously damaging suspension.The Eternal NowMedieval artists did it. Elizabethan playwrights did it. Fanfic authors still do it today.What is it?They approach everything as though it were happening right now.Medieval artists had a tendency to dress Biblical personages inclothing styles that were contemporary to the artists. Shakespeare wrote ancient Rome as if it were modern Italy, withchiming clocks and all manner of other anachronisms.And fanfic writers do things like put Harry Potter in 2001 or"Ranma 1/2" in 2006.No.These stories are *period* pieces, even if the period is only a couple of years ago. JK Rowling, for instance, has made it expressly clear that Harry Potter's first year at Hogwart's was 1991-1992. Manga "Ranma" takes place around 1989. Anime "Ranma" dates itself with a shot of a calendar as 1992.
There's more, but it's very very fragmentary. Notes for stuff to wri
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...
II. STUPID WRITER TRICKSChekhov's Gun!!!Asspulls (part of Chekhov's Gun)Harry Potter suddenly reveals that he's studied his genealogy and has learned he's the heir of one or maybe all the Founders of Hogwarts, even though he's never even been in the library in the whole story so far. Buffy Summers tells her sister Dawn that because Dawn was made from her, *Buffy's* blood will substitute for Dawn's own mystic nature in a magical ritual. (more examples here)These are called "asspulls". Because the author needed a certain something -- a detail, a secret, a prop -- and just pulled it out of his ass at the moment he needed it, regardless of what it did to how believable the story was. This is one of the most common, and *biggest*, mistakes a beginning writer makes. Even pro writers make them -- the "Buffy" example above comes not from a fanfic, but from an actual broadcast episode. Asspulls are bad because they make the reader stop and say something along the lines of, "now hold on just a freakin' minute!" Even a *small* asspull can knock your reader so far out of the story that they don't want to go back into it. A *big*one will make them throw the story away and tell their friendsnot to read it -- ever. You don't want that.Asspulls stem from a failure to properly anticipate your story's direction and needs. A good writer will know (at least in general terms) where he's going and what he requires when he gets there -- and will lay out all his details and tools along the way so that when they are used, no one will go, "hey, wait a second, where did *that* come from?" This is "Chekhov's Gun" worked backwards -- if you know you need a gun to go off in the third act, make sure you hang one on the wall in the first act. If you know that Harry Potter needs to prove he's the descendant of a Founder, you'd best show him finding that out at some point *before* he needs it. You don't have to actually say what he finds -- you can hide it from the reader, as long as you provide enough surrounding detail that when he pulls the the information out, your reader can say, "Oh! So *that's* what he learned back in chapter 6!" and not feel like they were somehow cheated by the author.If you avoid an asspull with sufficient skill, your reader willprobably say something along the lines of "that's very cool".Strive for that reaction.To this goal, try to be aware of how your story is going to end, and make sure that all the pieces needed for that ending are visible in the story along the way. They don't have to be *obvious* -- in fact, it makes for a far better story if they're *not* -- but they *must* be there.In all fairness, it *is* possible to write a story without longterm planning. Charles Dickens did it almost all the time. He wrote his novels as serials, sold to newspapers one chapter at a time, and he had only the vaguest idea where they were going. But those chapters were *so* dense in detail that he had literally hundreds of things he could pick from when looking for something to turn into a plot point later, if/when he needed it. If you are skilled enough and write densely enough, you can pull it off. But a beginning writer probably shouldn't try it.In-Line Author's NotesSelf-referentiality, author asides and talking directly to the reader: Don't do it at all, unless you're *really* good. Exception: First person narrators who are explicitly telling a story to someone, either directly or indirectly, can address that someone, even if only in the form of "my presumed reader". Butyou need to justify that at some point, if only with a singlethrowaway sentence about "so now I write this account", or "andso I'm telling you all this".Never interrupt the narrative to insert a parenthetical "author's note", though -- and for the love of god if you actually have to do it for some reason, don't preface such a thing with the phrase "author's note". If you *must* speak directly to the reader, that's what prefaces and postscripts are for. If you have to explain something, make it part of the earlier story. You as the narrator are as much a character in the story as anyone you're writing about, even if you're not writing in the voice of a physical person involved in the action somehow. DON'T BREAK CHARACTER to chat with the reader. It destroys the flow of the story and the Willing Suspension of Disbelief.Example of talking to the reader which works: Eric Hallstrom's"Ranma and Akane: A Love Story", Kenko's "Girl Days". Example that doesn't work -- the following passage from "Different War, Same Army" by TechnocraticSithLord, a fic on "Twisting The Hellmouth" (which is, in fact a good example of many bad things): Dawn left the room, and came back about two minutes later holding the six books of the Harry Potter series, and Buffy's suitcase. Her copies of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone(A/N: I live in Canada, where we call it by its British name, Philosopher's Stone), the Chamber of Secrets, The Prisoner of Azkaban, The Goblet of Fire, The Order of the Phoenix, and The Half-Blood Prince were all well torn and ripped from the trip on the bus, and from all the abuse they'd gotten over the years. Buffy took the books and her suitcase from Dawn, despite the looks she got from almost everyone present. She opened the first book to page 41,(not sure, just guessing, haven't got a copy on hand) and read to her suitcase "a girl with bushy brown hair."(once again, just guessing)The comments from the author are intrusive and disrupt what littlenarrative flow he'd managed to create.Narrative Voice vs. Character VoiceUnless the narrator is one of the characters in the story,the narrative voice should be as precise and formal as possible.Do not use slang, jargon or informal terms -- there should bevirtually no personality to a third-person narrator.ExpoSpeakOne of the worse sins against characterization is expospeak --"expository speech", which is the practice of making a character say something that everyone inside the story would already know intimately, solely to make sure the reader knows it. Here's a good example, from a Harry Potter/Buffy The Vampire Slayer crossover found on the "Twisting The Hellmouth" fic site: "Albus I don't think they ran away. I used a /Portal Reviewus/ to see what happened at their front door. A spell that wizarding world doors are proofed against but muggle doors wouldn't be. ..."Leaving aside the hideous grammar for now, this piece of dialogue fails the reality check because no one talks that way! This is Remus Lupin talking to Albus Dumbledore -- if Dumbledore doesn't know what a "Portal Reviewus" spell -- a spell apparently so common that every house is warded against it -- is, he shouldn't be leading the Order of the Phoenix or running Hogwart's. This is exactly the same as turning to your mother and saying, "I'm taking our automobile, which as you know is an internal combustion vehicle powered by petroleum distallates, down to the supermarket, which is a place of business that makes an extraordinary selection of foodstuffs available to the average citizen for reasonable prices."You don't talk this way. Neither should your characters."But how do I tell the reader what he needs to know?" I hear youwail.There are several far more satisfactory ways to do this. The easiest -- though frequently the clumsiest -- is to have an handy outsider in the cast who needs this stuff explained to him. He serves as the reader's surrogate, asking all the necessary questions and getting all the necessary answers. Sometimes this need is already addressed for you in the source material. If you're writing Harry Potter fic, for example, Harry is the built-in outsider who needs briefing on every aspect of wizarding life. Since almost all we know about the Wizarding World comes through his perceptions, virtually *anything* that the author might want to explain to the reader may well be new and strange to Harry, requiring someone to explain it to *him*, and thus neatly serving two purposes at once.The problem with this method is that it can turn into a long lecture or series of lectures which could bore the reader. It works best if you interleave it with action of some sort.Almost as easy in concept, but harder for a beginning writer to do, is *don't*. Let the context inform the reader. For example, with the quote above, you would eliminate the second, explanatory sentence. The reader will be clever enough to figure out that the "Portal Reviewus" does from Lupin's report of what he learned and Dumbledore's reaction. (Properly executed, you can stretch out an explanation for a *long* time, turning it into a hook that keeps your readers interested. For instance, look at the first few chapters of my story "Drunkard's Walk II". Doug shows up in Megatokyo, and during his turns as the narrator starts discusing songs, being a Warrior and a host of other things as though the reader already knows what he's talking about. It's not until chapter six that the readers have the answers to every question he raises just in his first ten or fifteen paragraphs. This was deliberate. See "Don't Tell Everything Right Away", elsewhere in this document.)NARRATIVE TIME VS. NARRATOR TIMEIf you think to use "ago"/"tomorrow"/"yestrday"/etc. (and by extension, the present tense) in the narrative voice, don't, unless you're writing something very experimental where the story is supposed to be taking place at the *very* moment the reader is reading it. These are time references that are relative to the speaker's position in time. The narrator -- even if he's one of the characters in the story -- is telling the story at a *different* time than the one when it "happened", and should use "the day before", "the next day", "five days earlier" and similar constructions that take their cue from the action in the story, not the narrator's point in time. If you have trouble understanding why this matters, imagine you're telling a story to someone in person, something that happened to you a year or more earlier. You wouldn't say, "I did X, and then tomorrow, I'll do Y", would you? You'd say, "I did X, and then the next day, I did Y". It's the same principle in a written story when the narrator is describing time relationships.III. CRAFTING FICTIONBut Don't Reveal Everything Right AwayIt is a common mistake for a beginning writer to start a storylike this: Jim Andiheerou was a geeky tenth-grade student at Gaittin High. At five-two with messy blond hair and a bad complexion, he had problems getting dates. He had often tried to ask the prom queen, Maryjo Largenboost, to the movies, only to be rejected with derisive laughter.Besides violating both the "Show, Don't Tell" and "First LineHook" rules, it comes across as stiltedOverloading your readers with *important* details doesn't help yourstory. First Line HookThe first sentence of a story should "hook" the reader in some way,to make him want to read the second sentence. Try to give it animplicit or explicit question that the reader will echo in his head;"why?" or "how?" are usually the best, although "who?" works pretty well too.For instance, here're the first two sentences -- one physical lineon the screen or page -- of my story "Drunkard's Walk II" (after youget through all the titles and whatnot): I am a killer and a clown. I am a hero and a fool.What this is supposed to do is make the reader say to himself, if only subsconsciously, "What kind of person would describe himself this way? Who is he?" Of course I don't answer these questions right away -- in fact, I raise several more questions about this narrator, and then abandon him for several kilobytes -- leaving a dramatic tension behind that is intended to drag the reader through the setup for the "Bubblegum Crisis" part of the story. (See "Don't Tell Everything At Once," above.)Here's the first line of a story I'm currently working on. It's a bit of a cliche, but it still works: I don't *think* I'm crazy.The tension set up is (hopefully) the reader's desire to find outwhether or not the narrator is really crazy, and why they mightthink so either way.The first sentence doesn't need to be quite as in-your-face as these, though. Take, for instance, the first line of the "Tenchi Muyo!" fic "In Vino Veritas" by Sinom Bre: The stone steps were eternal, in any practical sense of the word, and for as long as he could remember, there was an almost ritualistic quality to climbing the long stairwell to his house, or the even longer trek to the shrine, suitably higher on the hill.This sets a very specific mood, while at the same time forcing the reader to ask, "who is the 'he' this sentence refers to?"A different kind of example, from Barry Cadwgan's Shadowrun/BGC crossover, "A Wolf In Crisis, Part I": Most plays and stories begin the moment something goes wrong... this is no exception. The reader is led to ask himself, "what goes wrong, and for whom?" The desire to answer these questions will hopefully draw the reader deeper into the story. One of the most spectacular, though, has to be Eric Hallstrom's "Ranma and Akane: A Love Story", which begins the story with a prologue that is engaging discussion on how to open a story interleaved with tantalizing images of characters. Then the prologue *starts over again* with an evocative sound effect which leads into an opening that with casual self-awareness contrasts itself with the "usual" opening for a "Ranma 1/2" fanfic. It breaks several rules and defies easy description, and has to be read to understood. It's a piece of art. And that's all before we get to the first paragraph of the first chapter, which with one gordian knot firmly fastens the reader to the story: This is the story of a boy who was a girl, and a girl, and a boy, and a girl, and a boy, and a girl, and a girl who acts like a boy, and a boy who acts like a girl, and a woman, and a man, and another couple girls, and a cast of thousands. And a Panda, though not until much later. And butterflies, lots and lots of butterflies. One way you can do this is the classic device of "In Media Res" --loosely translated, "starting right in the middle of things".Make your first scene something that happens, chronologically, half-way through the plotEditorializingAuthor's editorial comments embedded in otherwise third-person viewpoint stories. Especially when the content of the comments could just as easily be handled as proper narrative. And especially when they're set off and marked as "Author's Note". Bleargh.Chapter SizeDespite what Dan Brown did in "The Da Vinci Code", ten paragraphs do not a chapter make. Ten paragraphis is barely enough for a *scene*, and a chapter should have several scenes, at least one of which should advance the central plot of the story. A chapter is a self-contained unit that should function *almost* as a ministory in its own right.A ten-paragraph chapter that breaks in the middle of the scene just to create an artificial cliffhanger is *right out*. That's not writing a chapter. That's running out of steam in the middle of the first scene and pretending you're done."Unicorn In The Garden" RuleThis rule is intimately connected to the principle of "Willing Suspension of Disbelief". Given that suspension of disbelief is often far more critical to the fanfic author than to the professional author, it behooves you to pay strict attention to it.The rule is, quite simply, make one fantastic assumption in your story and only one. Do not add more as the story goes on. I've given it the name above because the first time I ever heard the rule explicated was in a 1980 set of writers' guidelines from Analog Magazine, which used the example of James Thurber's classic short story "The Unicorn In The Garden". Quite simply, Thruber's story is about an ordinary suburban couple who wake up one morning to find that there is a unicorn in their garden. The guidelines pointed out, quite correctly, that the story worked because the *only* fantastic element was the unicorn. If ten pages later an alien spaceship landed in the garden next to the unicorn, it would not have been as strong or good a story.Once you have your one assumption, all further fantasic elements must derive from *it*, not any new assumptions.Now, in fanfiction, what constitutes "one fantastic assumption" is little harder to determine than in mainstream pro fiction, but I'm going to give it the old college try. A single crossover element, whether it is a shared world, or a visitor, consitutes the "one assumption". In the case of a mega-crossover like Biles' "Dance of Shiva", the fundamental changes necessary to enable such a combination of settings is the "one assumption" -- although, to be scrupulously fair, once you have a megacrossover in motion, you can usually add most anything to it without seriously damaging suspension.The Eternal NowMedieval artists did it. Elizabethan playwrights did it. Fanfic authors still do it today.What is it?They approach everything as though it were happening right now.Medieval artists had a tendency to dress Biblical personages inclothing styles that were contemporary to the artists. Shakespeare wrote ancient Rome as if it were modern Italy, withchiming clocks and all manner of other anachronisms.And fanfic writers do things like put Harry Potter in 2001 or"Ranma 1/2" in 2006.No.These stories are *period* pieces, even if the period is only a couple of years ago. JK Rowling, for instance, has made it expressly clear that Harry Potter's first year at Hogwart's was 1991-1992. Manga "Ranma" takes place around 1989. Anime "Ranma" dates itself with a shot of a calendar as 1992.
There's more, but it's very very fragmentary. Notes for stuff to wri
-- Bob
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...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...