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Okay, A New Version...
Okay, A New Version...
#1
...of the first section of my fic writer's guide. I haven't really implemented everyone's suggestions yet -- mainly because I haven't actually sat down and gone through them point by point -- but I think I hit most of the important ones.
Anyway, let me know what you all think.
Thanks!
I. GENERAL GUIDELINES1. Learn, and write in, reasonably proper English. This means spelling and grammar (more about both later), and on a larger scale, writing proper sentences, paragraphs and chapters. Understand -- I'm not talking about being able to write like a professional before you start. No. Some fan writers can and have done it, but it's not something one should expect of all fan writers, and certainly not in their first works. There's no shame in not being Hemingway, or even Tom Clancy, when you start. Not even Hemingway was Hemingway, at least in terms of his writing, when he first put pen to paper. *BUT* -- if you expect someone to read what you wrote, try to have at least a high school-level grasp of the language you're writing in. Some may accuse me of snobbery when I say this, but if you want your work to be widely enjoyed, and maybe even acclaimed someday, you *have* to have a minimum profciency in using your language of choice. I've seen authors claim that they don't need even that much 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. Do you want that to be the fate of your story? 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? You don't need to be Chippendale, but you do need to know how to make something that's attractive and will bear the weight put on it. Just as an example, I know that many fanfiction authors are writing in a second language when they work in English. But you know something? Unless they say so, I often can't tell. That's because they frequently 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. Acquire writers' references, and consult them as needed. If you're planning on doing any reasonably large amount of writing -- be it for pleasure or profit -- it's a good idea to build up a set of reference books to help you with your craft. At the very least, you should have a good thesaurus and dictionary. Fortunately you can find inexpensive paperback editions just about everywhere, and even some hardcovers aren't too exorbitant. 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). You don't need to adhere slavishly to its suggestions -- in fact, you probably shouldn't -- but when you're having trouble getting something to come out just the way you want it, a style guide can be an invaluable aid. 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. If you're weak on English usage and grammar, supplement these 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. And there's a book called "Eats Shoots and Leaves" by Lynne Truss which is also very good. If you are hesitant to shell out $30 or more for reference books just to write fanfiction, you do have alternatives. Since reference works aren't big sellers and are frequently updated, you can often find them on the "severely discounted" tables in bookstores. Used book stores are also good places to look for copies at cut-rate prices, along with public library sell-offs. Don't worry about getting older editions; while the language is always evolving, the core elements are sufficiently constant that you'd have to buy a *really* old edition -- half a century or more -- to stumble onto something that's no longer relevant in modern usage. If you're so strapped that even buying at discount is out of the question, you can check these books out from (or just *at*) your local library. Or, if you're still a student, your English teacher/professor. You can also consult the Net; there are a number of good grammar/style sites, although you need to be careful about your choice of site -- if you can, get an independent opinion on how good it is before you start to rely on it. However, if you're really *serious* about writing, fan or otherwise, there's no excuse for not (eventually) getting your hands on your own set of references. It's like trying to be a mechanic without owning a set of good tools.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 for a few days (or weeks) 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 will make a good prereader. Likewise anyone who's spent the time to tell you how your writing made them *feel* or react -- prereaders like this can be especially invaluable. And 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. Encourage them to find weaknesses in your story, like plot holes and places where your characters are acting like idiots for no good reason except that the plot demands that they do. 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. Sometimes that fix will have to be drastic: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, and you'll end up with a much better story, one that gives *you* more satisfaction during the writing.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 work 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 (for instance) the Dark Ages of anime 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. Expanding on this: 9. Know your source material This one may seem painfully obvious, but a distressingly large number of writers ignore it: If you're into a particular book, movie or TV show enough to want to write your own stories about it, then for god's sake care enough to make sure you get the established details right. And I'm not talking just about knowing that Character A's house is exactly 2.5 blocks from Character B's, and I don't mean the kind of things that change when you create an alternate universe -- I'm talking about stuff as basic as *names*. I cannot tell you how many fics I've seen over the years where a writer simply didn't care enough to make sure he had the names of a show or book's *main characters* spelled right. I can almost excuse this for anime fanfiction -- trying to work with names in one of the languages most foreign to English speakers can be daunting at first. But there is no excuse for misspelling names in *English*. I swear I will hunt down and kill the next person I find misspelling "Delores Umbridge" as "Dolorous". (Even though, to be fair, that particular misspelling does show a creative combination of scholarship and laziness...) In any case, this is a *major* red flag for me as a reader -- if I see that misspelling names is endemic, the story goes into the circular file. To a limited degree, over-Americanizing Japanese settings comes under this heading. This is sometimes unavoidable, especially with anime that has been heavily "adapted" for Western audiences. But if you have a clearly Asian setting, it behooves you as a writer to be at least passingly familiar with those Asian customs, mores and behaviors relevant to the story you want to tell. By extension, don't write fanfic about a show or setting if you've never actually seen/read it. I can't express just how bad the results will be in the eyes of people who know the source material. You may get readers and even fans among others who have no exposure to the original, but you will earn no points with those familiar with it. Just don't do it. If you like the idea of a series, movie or book enough that you want to write fic for it, you owe it to yourself to actually experience the original. Related to this is:10. Don't Arbitrarily Violate Canon For Your Convenience. Unless you have a damned good story reason for not doing so, you should adhere as close to a setting's canon as possible. "Canon" here means any and all details -- including time, place and characterization -- firmly established by the creator of a setting, either within the primary source, or by way of a secondary one (interview, commentary, etc.). Except in the case of the "Unicorn In The Garden" rule (see below), do not blatantly violate canon -- especially not just to satisfy a whim, or to save yourself effort or time in research. I can't count how many Harry Potter fics I've read with an author's note that had words to the effect of "I don't care if Rowling says the stories start in 1991 -- I'm putting it in 2006 because I want to." Or "Ranma" fics where Nabiki has internet access on her laptop. (See "The Eternal Now", below.) This is lazy, sloppy writing. It dilutes the core setting, whose unique attributes and flavor are presumably why you're chosing to write fanfic there in the first place. If the setting has that much appeal for you, why in hell would you want to make random changes to it that don't have anything to do with the needs of your story? Surely it wouldn't be a terrible chore to reread or rewatch as needed to get a key bit of information right. Related to this point and its predecessor is the next:11. Avoid fanon. Fanon, for those who are unfamiliar with the term, is the accumulated body of fan-created detail that fills holes left by the creator(s) in a series or setting. It contrasts with (but tries to complement) canon. For example, the name of the late Mrs. Tendo in "Ranma 1/2" is never given in any official source, but somewhere around 1998, many writers on the FFML gradually standardized on "Kimiko". The problem with fanon is that for a newcomer to a fandom, it can be almost impossible to distinguish from canon at first. It can take years to shake off all the accumulated "details" that fanon can saddle a newcomer with. It also saddles you as a writer with a horde of details that were created by other fan writers for *their* creations, and which may not be right for *your* story. 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.12. Don't disguise original fiction as fanfiction. Some observers/readers might phrase this as "don't make the characters so unlike themselves that they're different people with the same names". Either way you look at it, it's a complete puzzle to me. If you're writing fanfiction, you're celebrating the source material. Why choose to change it so radically that it's unrecognizable? Conversely, if you have a good and compelling story idea that is so radically different from the original setting, why feel constrained to turn it into fanfiction? A good example of this would be the acclaimed "Ranma 1/2" fic "Ten", by "Richard E" (ten.waxwolf.com/). This is an amazing story demonstrating outstanding literary skill ... but it has absolutely no reason to be a Ranma fic. None of the Ranma characters really act like him or herself here, their backgrounds are so radically different that it's hard to justify even as an "elseworld", and there's really nothing here that anchors the story to the "canon" Ranma world. (Just as one example: Ryoga as a lame, intellectual scientist. Huh???) If you're writing something so radically altered, you might as well take that last step, use new names, and call it original fiction.13. 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.14. 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"!15. 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.16. 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. The anime fanfiction community has already lost a couple fair-to-good writers (who both 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.17. Know when to break the rules. Remember that the guidelines here and below are simply that -- *guidelines*. Sufficiently skilled writers can ignore them and make it work. But even the best violate only one or two at a time: like an unexpected dash of spice in a familiar dish, breaking a rule can add a powerful twist or impact to a story. But breaking too many is like dumping the contents of the spice cabinet into a meal in the hopes that it will improve. It won't. A skilled writer will choose his broken rules carefully and for special reasons, if he chooses to break any at all. And until you understand almost instinctively what you can achieve by ignoring these guidelines, it's better if you adhere to them closely.
-- Bob
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...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...
Reply
Re: Okay, A New Version...
#2
Much better. Now the only thing I can think of (besides stuff covered in the other sections, that will exist later) is an addition to 15. Don't let the reviewers write the story for you... unless your writing as a improv style thing for a challenge.
What I mean is that don't radically change the story just to make some the reviewers happy. Things like making the main couple in the story with other people based on the idea that the canon main couple is 'boring' and that these others being a couple is 'exciting'. That example is covered by fanon comments, but changing the story to make random loud people happy, and expand their target story features is just make a target group happy.
Next is have a clue where you are going. Have a basic idea where the story will end up. Don't just start writing and keep going and going and going. Unless you have no intention of ending the story. A continuing series of story arcs are better that a story that takes forever to go nowhere.
Some of this is probably next section material... however don't ignore the reviewers should be followed by don't let a group of them railroad the story so they like it. THere are people out there who review story (sometimes with a single sentence) then try to make the story a mirror of their favorite subgenre.
Reply
Re: Okay, A New Version...
#3
Quote:
Much better. Now the only thing I can think of (besides stuff covered in the other sections, that will exist later) is an addition to 15. Don't let the reviewers write the story for you... unless your writing as a improv style thing for a challenge.
I'll throw that in. As for the stuff in other sections, some of it already exists, at least partially. Hmm. Let me toss that up in a moment...
Quote:
Next is have a clue where you are going.
I've got that in another section.
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...
Reply
As Promised Above...
#4
...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
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...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...
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Re: Okay, A New Version...
#5
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If you think to use "ago"/"tomorrow"/"yesterday"/etc in the narrative voice, don't.
In ultratight third, when the POV character's thoughts are not marked out from the narrative proper, this rule isn't applicable. Much of the apparent narration is then actually very lightly paraphrased thought, for which yesterday/tomorrow etc is appropriate.
However, when you're that deep inside the character's mind, it's more usual to use first person, unless there's good reason not to, such as maintaining uncertainty about the characters survival.
Which names to use goes by the same criterion. Normally, characters are referred to by the names a polite stranger would call them, but in ultratight third the name the POV character thinks of them by is used, even if it's a relationship term. Eddings, for example, refers to one character as 'Aunt Pol' over several books, because the narration is so deeply inside her courtesy nephew's head. If the POV were any less tight, she'd be Polgara throughout.
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Re: Eternal Now
#6
Good Point about the Eternal Now and unnecessary anachronisms, but Harry Potter and Ranma 1/2 may not have been the best examples for it.
Rowling plays rather fast and loose with the dating of her story herself. Is the Prime Minister in HBP Tony Blair or John Major? The start of term is always the same date and weekday and any attempt to make a coherent timeline is doomed from the start. So anybody who has something like easy internet access and widespread cellphone usage or 2 Pound coins or the Millennium Wheel for their HP story has an excuse even if it should not have been around in the early nineties.
Ranma on the other hand is almost timeless. The manga especially could easily be moved back or forwards for decades without any major conflicts with canon. There is almost no mention made of technology thoughout the series that would require it to be dated at a certain point. What little there is of fixed dates is really minor and irrelevant to the plot at large. If a writer wants to give Nabiki an I-Pod that really would not count as major violation of canon.
But there are other fandoms who take much greater care with their timelines and their chronolgical setting where any sort of anachronism will have a much greater and far more jarring impact. If for example the ubiquitous presence of cell phones would have made several canon plots about people trying to contact each other or somebody searching for a pay-phone unlikely it gets harder to simply set a fanfic in the 'present'. If the coming of the millenium was a major plot point you can't really have people walking around today without having aged a few years.
It should also be noted that many fandoms are set canoical in a sort of "Eternal Now" especially the more succesful ones that go on and on without having the charcters age too much, but still keep involving current elements. Others have a built in alternative history because the creators could not easily adapt their stories to major real live events that occured during production.
The most problematic are fandoms that are set in a timeline that must have diverged from our own at some point. They usually occur when you start out with a sci-fi series set in a distant future like the year 2000 and then reality catches up with them. Some handle that better than others compare for example the UN War from Macross and the Eugenic Wars from Star Trek that should have happened a while ago.
In those divergent timelines you in theory should pay attention to avoid anachronisms too. Don't write an Evangelion fic that has characters do things like referring to 9/11 or use technology that never got invented. Shinji owns an S-DAT player with a magnetic tape and not an MP3 player with memory sticks for a reason.
But while it is bad thing to make such 'mistakes' for no reason at all, there is no reason to hold back if there is a good reason to introduce any anarchonisms. Crossovers almost always require some 'adjusting' of timelines to work if the different series you are crossing are supposed to be set in the same reality. And if your 'one unicorn' that you add to canon requires the story to be set in a differnt time than canon indicates then that is certainly a good excuse and not an unnecessary anachronism.
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Re: Eternal Now
#7
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Ranma on the other hand is almost timeless.
Ranma (and a number of other series) take place in Riverdale Time.
That is, it is ALWAYS Ranma's first year of high school. He is always in the same class as Akane and Ukyou. Nabiki and Kuno are always on year ahead of him and both still in high school and so on. It is noteable in the manga that new years passes... TWICE and yet no one ages or graduates. This despite the fact that the Japanese school year ends in winter. The seasons change to reflect the season that Rumiko was epxerincing when she wrote it, not when it should. Ranma goes through summer vacation at least three or four times.
Other series are more definitive. We can pretty much place the Read or Die OAV series at a specific moment in time (around 2000 or so) and the follow up TV series follows up on it a specific number of years later. Harry Potter, as you said, takes place over the course of seven years staring when the first book was published and working their way up from there. Buffy the Vampire Slayer starts the year it started and ends the year it ended.
That being said, adjusting timelines is not really a big issue unless it would ruin the story to have a major technological or political advancement which would render the story moot. For instance, you could not reasonably set The Hunt For Red October in 2006, because the political situation that existed when the story was set no longer exists. Similarly, Indiana Jones can not be set in contempary times because the existence of GPS and hypersonic jets makes a lot of the "exotic travel to unexplored lands" aspect suspect.
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Epsilon
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Re: Okay, A New Version...
#8
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It works best if you interleave it with action of some sort.
I think you mean 'interweave' here.
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If you think to use "ago"/"tomorrow"/"yestrday"/etc.
Missspelled 'Yesterday'.
"Unicorn in the Garden" seems a bit clunky... like your trying to say too much at once. While the one change thing is good for a simple story, as you said, in multicrossovers things get handled differently... rather looks like your giving people an out by tossing in the idea that they can get away with pretty much anything if they include enough series. Not your intention, but an out that I can focus on in at this stage.
Best to mention that things work differently at some point later. After getting through the rules of a single change story move on to other categories. The first catagories that come to mind are:
-Crossovers (with only two stories/series involved)
-Original charicters (added them in without having them eat the quality of the story)
-Fusions (how to fuse elements of two stories together in a way that can't be described as Train Wreck Theatre)
-Multicrossovers (how to blend without using the puree setting)
-Self Inserts (the fun section on how to get personally (more or less) involved without destroying peoples intrest)
-How to avoid your honest effort from becoming an unintentional farce.
-How not to smother your crossover (like how some people insist that Tenchi can't work in any way unless the universe has only 3 deities... things like this can choke getting any useful reviews, as your review section ends up a warground)
Basically, do the guidelines for one change in the story. Sometimes the 'Unicorn in the Garden' is Kuno or Ryoga getting a new magic toy to screw things up with. Good for a one change deal. A good starting point... gets all the basic rules down. Changes little in the lond run for the cast, one more bizzarre event in a series of things. After the basics of making the story readable (boiling water, make toast with a toaster), you want to then integrate the elements one by one(teach them to boil eggs and pasta) and then slowly advance as they get things down... rather than having them get the idea that a 40 series crossover will be a good idea after they can spell (12 course meal for a hundred.)
It doesn't matter if the jump in the deep end to start.. your giving them a guide to what to do and not to do.
Section one was all about basic writing and feedback processing (general to all writing). Section 2 should be about how to change one thing and make it work. Make the 'Unicorn in the Garden' piece lead into examples of changes (Section 2 1/2 or 3). Original charicters, a new magic toy plot device messing with people, a secondary charicter is actually a robot or kitsune or a were-typewriter... Relatively minor changes that effect the whole only a bit. Often temporarily.
Then you can work on bigger changes... a main or secondary charicter dies or moves away changing the basic dynamics of things. A new sibling comes to town and attempts to integrate themself into the cast. Then discovering that the cast aren't the only kind of over powered freaks in the world. Be it a crossover with another series or discovering that a new race is living in the sewers.
Once basic changes have occured you can get on to the mind warpingly complex stuff. Self Inserts in the middle as that is often what people are wanting to write. Having the basic pitfalls and trip wires pointed out is rather useful for curbing the writer away from seriously writing 'My Immortal' with good grammar.
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Unicorn In the Garden
#9
A better version and phrasing of the Unicorn in The Garden rule is that you can do anything you want that is fantastic and strange... as long as you don't change the basic groundrules you established early in the story.
Fanfiction that takes place in fantastic settings or science fiction settings is just like regular sci-fi and fantasy. You have to establish the ground rules, and you have to establish them SOON, rather than later. And once you've set your ground rules you must NEVER break them. Ever. Even if you want to.
A great example of this is Full Metal Alchemist. The author quickly establishes the basic rule of the universe, "equivalent exchange" is the basis of all the 'magic' of the setting, and nothing in the setting is allowed to contradict equivalent exchange. In fact, the entire story revolves around the protagonist's examination of exactly what this means and his attempts to circumvent it.
In fact, you can have setting full of strange, fantastic elements as long as you establish their possibility early on. It is fully possible that you could have a setting which includes both magical unicorns, UFOs and all sorts of stangeness. Take at look at the X-Files, for example. It has everything from mutants to prehistoric lost species to aliens to vampires to ghosts and on and on and on. But they don't break the basic "rules" of the setting (which are, explicitly "strange shit happens and no one knows/can prove why").
This rule, like all other, is double-edged. Once you establish the rules you must follow them to their logical conclusion. If you say that, to steal an example, a sci-fi setting involves putting people into cryogenic suspension for intersteallr flight you have established that such a thing exists. Then you must allow it to be used for other purposes. A severely wounded character, for example, could be put in suspension until appropriate medical attention is available. If they don't, there had better be a good reason (for example, the suspension chambers are destroyed or unavailable).
But yes, the basic point of this rambling is this: When writing any sort of speculative fiction (including fanfiction based off the same) you have to establish the ground rules early on and never break them. Thankfully when it comes to fanfiction in many cases the ground rules have alreayd been laid out for us. For instance, we know how supernatural powers work in Naruto, and we know what the technology in Star Wars is capable of.
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Epsilon
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Re: Unicorn In the Garden
#10
As a small exapansion to Epsilon's point, the characters will most likely also know the rules, or think they do, and if something is not the way they would expect, they will react to that, not accept it without note. With the cryogenic chambers, for example, I'd expect someone to complain - if only to themselves, and only for an instant before moving on to deal with the problem - that if only one were still functional they could jsut put the injured person in and not ahve to worry.
Somewhat disconnected from that, and less articulate than I'd prefer - When wizards and witches have been doing everything with their wands and suddenly Dumbledore just waves his hand and the tea set floats over, it's a rare and powerful magical effect that impresses the other characters, because it means he's powerful enough to bend the rules, or at least bring a special case into effect - the exception that proves the rule, so to speak, and as we see the students struggle in HBP to cast with their wands but without speaking, it only reinforces how well he must have known the rules and how much effort was put into breaking them to do it.
For the section on managing crossovers and fusions, I'm thinking of a BtVS/Stargate general example - one or more characters from one team is drawn to the others' stomping grounds and takes part in the latest adventure, fine and good - but what;s keeping the rest of the other group away? Both the Scoobies and SG1 are "hero" characters, they don't (as a general rule) just let one of their freinds hang in a dnagerous situation (especially with the wider consequences for the world at large often found in SG1 and BtVS) so there has to be some reason why they aren't there, whether it's a second hot spot that they're tied up with or a lack of communication or just being unable to get there - but the importnat point is that they have a reason, and that reason is in keeping with their established characters. Not "Daniel had a few days of vacation so no one worried when he vanished for a while," not "Giles said he was meeting some science guy he knew form the Brtish Museum's archeology department, so no one bothered him when a new bunch of wierdness showed up," more like "Stepping out into the parched afternoon air, Giles and Daniel were relieved to see the signal indicators on their cell phones come on - it appeared that they had finally made it back to the present day, or at least close enough to have modern communications."
I suppose what I'm saying with all of these is that mainting internal continuity is paramount, even if the canon of the original setting has been folded spindled and mutilated. It doesn't matter if Ranma 1/2 took place in 1972 so he and one or more of the girls can be parents for your 2006 characters, only that you don't have Ryoga show up at 18 to continue his rivalry with the next generation of Saotome - not unless you provide a reson why he's gone over thirty years without aging.

Somethign about how to gracefully show character growth and change might also be good, rather than "With a gasp, it all became clear to him - he'd fought and insulted her, hexed her and jeered at her, but all along, all he'd really wanted was her attention. Well, no more! 'Hermione,' Draco murmurred, his silver-blue eyes sparkling with intensity, 'Let's not fight any more. I know I've been an arse, but... would you go with me to Hogsmeade next Saturday?'"
- CDSERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
A kung-fu nun in a leather thong was no less extreme than anything else he had seen that day. - Rev. Dark's IST: Holy Sea World
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
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Re: Unicorn In the Garden
#11
A possible suggestion for the general guidelines: "Pick a tense to use for your narration and stick to it." This is something I have trouble with myself, so I know how jarring it can be. I'll write down a scene at work one day and do it in present tense, I'll write another scene somewhere else later and use past tense, and when I finally get both typed in and read them together... gah! (Not that I'm sure how I end up writing scenes in present tense, since I don't think it works well, but it happens.)
The "have a clue where you are going" might also help in the resist-overzealous-reviewers department. If making a change a review suggests breaks your long-term vision, then either there's something wrong with the vision or with the review. And I'd recommend to anyone to go with their vision in such a case, since they're more likely to enjoy what writing it, which tends to make for more enjoyable reading to me.
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Do it yourself, or recruit a friend.
Or better yet, do both. Like I said before, I think there's things that outside proofreaders won't catch.
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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".
I'm not bothered so much by marking something as an author's note, but good lord, at least don't interrupt a sentence for a note. Like the second paragraph in the example, it still isn't really good, but it doesn't totally disrupt the flow either.
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ExpoSpeak
A technique I've become rather fond of for this sort of thing is from Stephen R. Donaldson's "Gap" novels. Sometimes between chapters there'd be a couple pages describing some interesting bit of technology or politics in the setting, a bit like what an encyclopedia article or report written by someone in that world would look like. I've tried doing this a few times in my own writing; sometimes there are things that would either be interesting or helpful that there's no good way to explain in narrative. (Often because I'd like the audience to know something long before the characters who know it are willing to tell anyone else.)
Of course, the trick to making this work is that the "supplemental information" has to be *interesting*.
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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 plot
Personally, I *hate* this one, just from seeing it screwed up too often in otherwise good stories. Not only do they have to keep things interesting without directly showing what happened before, but then they eventually have to go back and show it. It seems to be very hard to manage flashbacks of any length well.
I have to join in and say that Ranma doesn't seem like a good example of a series really fixed to one time, but then I admit it's another thing I'm pretty relaxed about. The only time it'd really bother me is if a change in the timeframe caused an unusual change in a character. Really, I'd say about the same things apply to HP. The setting basically works as about any reasonably contemporary period of time; I'm not sure it would ever even make any difference unless there were some external political events poking their noses into the story. (Which probably isn't a good idea anyway.)
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Shinji owns an S-DAT player with a magnetic tape and not an MP3 player with memory sticks for a reason.
Seems like kind of a weird example. Shinji doesn't need to not be using an mp3 player for any other reason than he just hasn't bought one. (See: NXE?) (I was upset when the car I got recently had a cd player and not a tape deck... the longer audio tapes can hold more music than a cd can.)
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This rule, like all other, is double-edged. Once you establish the rules you must follow them to their logical conclusion. If you say that, to steal an example, a sci-fi setting involves putting people into cryogenic suspension for intersteallr flight you have established that such a thing exists. Then you must allow it to be used for other purposes. A severely wounded character, for example, could be put in suspension until appropriate medical attention is available. If they don't, there had better be a good reason (for example, the suspension chambers are destroyed or unavailable).
Sometimes there's no good way to set things up for specific cases like that though. In some settings, for instance, if a person was seriously injured, then putting them into suspension (or maybe the thawing out process) wouldn't accomplish anything but to finish them off. There wouldn't really be any in-character reason for someone to explain that if everyone there should already know it.
-Morgan has run out of things to say..."I have no interest in ordinary humans. If there are any aliens, time travelers, or espers here, come sleep with me."
---From "The Ecchi of Haruhi Suzumiya"
-----(Not really)
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Re: Unicorn In the Garden
#12
"If Hideo's wounds were just a bit less serious, they could have just put him back into cryosleep and let the medical section back at starbase deal with it when - if - they returned. As it was..."
- CDSERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
A kung-fu nun in a leather thong was no less extreme than anything else he had seen that day. - Rev. Dark's IST: Holy Sea World
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
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Re: Unicorn In the Garden
#13
Point. Still, I'm sure there would be examples where the possibility in question is too stupid for it to make sense to bring up - say, if anyone in good enough condition to survive cryosleep wouldn't be in bad enough condition to need it.
-Morgan."I have no interest in ordinary humans. If there are any aliens, time travelers, or espers here, come sleep with me."
---From "The Ecchi of Haruhi Suzumiya"
-----(Not really)
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Re: Unicorn In the Garden
#14
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Point. Still, I'm sure there would be examples where the possibility in question is too stupid for it to make sense to bring up - say, if anyone in good enough condition to survive cryosleep wouldn't be in bad enough condition to need it.
This is best dealt with in exposition early in your story.
For example: Say you have this cyrogenic system. A throwaway reference early in the fanfic for somebody "passing the physical otherwise you won't be allowed to go into Cyrosleep" will solve your problem handily!
The point being: Either have a good reason why people can't do obvious application of bizarre magical power/scifi gadget or let them do it.
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Epsilon
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Re: Unicorn In the Garden
#15
I guess the idea I'm trying to get at is that sometimes there are going to be things that you won't be able to explain in advance, and that I feel in that case it's better to leave things a bit uncertain than to have your characters say something blatantly stupid.
-Morgan."I have no interest in ordinary humans. If there are any aliens, time travelers, or espers here, come sleep with me."
---From "The Ecchi of Haruhi Suzumiya"
-----(Not really)
Reply
Re: Unicorn In the Garden
#16
I'd question tht in the case of diseases... the disease gets frozen also, so it can't get worse. If we freeze a large group of people some will live and some die... which helps with the problem of 'charicter bloat'. This being the condition where the cast is so large it squishes the story till it can't move at a good clip and either you reduce the cast through removing or ignoring the charicters or lose a large portion of the audience to confususion or them not wanting to put the effort into keeping up with the series.
Which brings me to another separate section... story killers. Over large casts. Harems that diserve their own zip code. Jumping the shark. Adding in bards with names able to be shortened to 'TB', rather like a disease.
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Re: Okay, A New Version...
#17
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Anyway, let me know what you all think.
Okay...
General Guidelines; Acquire writers' references,...
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And there's a book called "Eats Shoots and Leaves" by Lynne Truss which is also very good.
That should be "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves". As is appropriate for a book on punctuation, the punctuation in the title is important... (It's the punchline of a joke where a panda uses a badly-punctuated nature guidebook to justify eating a restaurant meal, killing the waiter, and walking away.)
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Don't worry about getting older editions; while the language is always evolving, the core elements are sufficiently constant that you'd have to buy a *really* old edition -- half a century or more -- to stumble onto something that's no longer relevant in modern usage.
If you're writing a period piece, you might want an older edition. For example, a story looks more "Victorian" if compound nouns are hyphenated (e.g., motor-cycle), but a modern style guide won't tell you that.
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You can also consult the Net; there are a number of good grammar/style sites, although you need to be careful about your choice of site -- if you can, get an independent opinion on how good it is before you start to rely on it.
Some (older) reference works are available through Project Gutenberg - while the style guides may be too old for modern writing, their copy of Roget's Thesarus is still quite useful.
General Guidelines; Proofread and preread
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spellchecker programs ... 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.
I don't recall whether I mentioned this earlier: spellchecker programs will also not pick up a correctly-spelled incorrect word (e.g. "cold" instead of "called").
General Guidelines; Pay attention to what your prereaders say
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Especially if they say things like, "why does this happen?"
Sometimes "why does this happen?" has an answer that would spoil a future chapter (see "Checkov's Gun" in section II). If your prereaders complain about these passages, note their complaints and act on them if possible, but leave the important information in the story.
General Guidelines; Know your source material
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I can almost excuse (misspelling names) for anime fanfiction -- trying to work with names in one of the languages most foreign to English speakers can be daunting at first.
Most North American DVDs (and a few Japanese DVDs) have English subtitle tracks where the characters' names are spelled out, although this doesn't help with unlicenced anime.
General Guidelines; Don't Arbitrarily Violate Canon For Your Convenience
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Or "Ranma" fics where Nabiki has internet access on her laptop.
Or, for that matter, "Ranma" fics where Nabiki has a computer.
General Guidelines; Know when to break the rules
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And until you understand almost instinctively what you can achieve by ignoring these guidelines, it's better if you adhere to them closely.
On the flip side, sometimes the only way to know what happens when you break the rules is to break the rules -- that is, to experiment. But don't expect most of those experiments to come out well. (See "Don't be wedded to your text", above.) There's a cliche: good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement. Don't be afraid to exercise bad judgement when writing; if you don't release the experiemnts, the only people who'll suffer because of them are you and your pre-readers.

Stupid Writer Tricks; Chekhov's Gun
Despite the old SCTV sketch to the contrary, this is presumably not a Star Trek reference...

Stupid Writer Tricks; Narrative Voice vs. Character Voice
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Do not use slang, jargon or informal terms -- there should be virtually no personality to a third-person narrator.
But don't limit the narrator's vocabulary, either. "He said... she said... he said... she said... he said... she said..." gets boring fast. "He mentioned... she muttered... he demanded... she asked... he answered... she cried..." maintains the lack of personality, but is less likely to induce sleep in the readers.

-Rob Kelk
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
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Re: Okay, A New Version...
#18
I dunno, the Trek version of Chekhov's Gun is relevant as well - that being "Which button fires the phasers?" "It doesn't matter, as long as the camera sees his hand move." The message being that dtail is good, but going into extensive detail about some unimportant item will only bog down the narrative flow. I myself am often bad about this, getting sidetracked into all kinds of little back alleys and sidelines when I shouol dbe writing the story.
- CDSERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
A kung-fu nun in a leather thong was no less extreme than anything else he had seen that day. - Rev. Dark's IST: Holy Sea World
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
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Re: Okay, A New Version...
#19
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That should be "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves".
I cut'n'pasted from another source which obviously had it wrong. Doublecheck things!

Lots of good stuff in this, Rob... I'll be adding it and a credit for you to the final document. Thanks!
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...
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Re: Okay, A New Version...
#20
Thanks! I'm flattered, and happy to have been of help.
Oh, yes...
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spellchecker programs will also not pick up a correctly-spelled incorrect word (e.g. "cold" instead of "called"
i remembered a better example for this: the infamous "Rouge Boomer". (That should almost always be "Rogue Boomer", but the thought of a Boomer storming down a MegaTokyo street and applying makeup to everyone is priceless...)
(Edit: Helps if I get the example right... )

-Rob Kelk
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
Reply
Re: Okay, A New Version...
#21
Oh, trust me, that'll be in there.
Oh, and everyone else who offered comments, I'm sorry if I seemed to have snubbed you. I didn't mean to. I am using many of your suggestions, and in some cases your actual wordings. (I will be giving credit where credit is due.)
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...
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Re: Okay, A New Version...
#22
Something that just occurred to me, due to the fic I'm reading being very bad about it.
If you are writing a first person story that switches perspective between several different characters, make it obvious as quickly as possible whose perspective a new section is from. And be very very careful about changing perspectives rapidly.
-Morgan, "... who the heck am I?""I have no interest in ordinary humans. If there are any aliens, time travelers, or espers here, come sleep with me."
---From "The Ecchi of Haruhi Suzumiya"
-----(Not really)
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Re: Okay, A New Version...
#23
With that goes... explain who is talking. Its okay when two charicters are bickering or commenting back and forth to have a few lines that are just back and forth comment that stop with the lables for a bit.. but I've seen back and forths that stop making sense after a while, far to often. I've seen 3 or more charicter converse rabid fire and none of them are labled lines... there just isn't any useful indication of ownership of that spoken phrase.
Its the 'Rabbit Season', "Duck Season" cartoons... without the clear voices or visual charicters to tell who said what. In these this type of 'Stupid Writer's Tricks' the reader ends up as confused as Elmer Fudd, only we can't shoot the target we want to shoot. The writer.
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Re: Okay, A New Version...
#24
I have read one thing where not labelling seems to work - in the book I'm reading right now, there are parts that are the internal discussions of a sort of multiple-personality. (Actually four people combining into one entity.) It's still hard to tell exactly who is "speaking", but it works for this case.
(One of the things that gives me fits in my writing is coming up with enough different ways to tag my dialogue...)
And another thing...
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the thought of a Boomer storming down a MegaTokyo street and applying makeup to everyone is priceless...
Now I want to go see Bubblegum Crisis just so I can write a fic where this happens. '.'
-Morgan."I have no interest in ordinary humans. If there are any aliens, time travelers, or espers here, come sleep with me."
---From "The Ecchi of Haruhi Suzumiya"
-----(Not really)
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Re: Okay, A New Version...
#25
1) Again, remove all FFML references. This is turning out to be a fantastic essay/paper, removing the FFML refs will make it more accessible.
2) You've made some caveat notes here and there, for example bringing up Dickens when referring to Chekov's Gun and planning-as-you-go writing. At some point you need to mention that *any* rule in your guide can be freely violated...
*IF* you know what you're doing and are *AWARE IN ADVANCE* you're doing it. This is not an act for the rank novice.
3) In a moment of shameless self-promotion, I'd like to mention OMB as an example of talking to the reader. It's chock-full of "narrator's notes" and may be a useful example.
4) I'd recommend a 'know your audience' section. --
Christopher Angel, aka JPublic
The Works of Christopher Angel
[Image: Con.gif]
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