((25 FEBRUARY 2022 VERSION -- STILL INCOMPLETE

Note to readers:  This document is *under construction*, which is
why it remains in plain text format -- HTML is very pretty but
makes any major editing and/or reconstruction work harder than it 
really needs to be.  

Any text found in

      (( double parentheses ))

or

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are suggestions and submissions made to me which have not yet
been evaluated, edited and incorporated into the main text.  They
may hold opinions or suggestions that I do not agree with, and
may contain their own errors of grammar, spelling or style.
Double parentheses may also surround my own notes to myself for
future material.

If you care to offer your own comments or suggestions on the
contents of this guide, *please ignore these sections*.

Thank you.

-- The Mgm't.))

This document is copyright (C) 2006-2022, Robert M. Schroeck,
and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike-
Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.



               A Fanfic Writer's Guide To Writing

                or, How To Be In The Ten Percent

                     by Robert M. Schroeck
                 (guide.j.bgcloon@neverbox.com)



                 "90% of *everything* is crud."
                     -- Theodore Sturgeon

For approaching thirty years (as of 2022), I've been part of the 
online fanfic community, starting in anime fanfiction with a 
brief foray into Trekfic, but as of the 2000s branching out to 
"Harry Potter", "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and a few other 
fandoms.  In that time, I've read a godawful lot of fics.  And 
among that godawful lot of fics were a *lot* of godawful fics.

This document is an ambitious attempt to help reduce the number
of putrid fics by some small but noticeable amount.  It started
off as a series of threads in the "Other People's Fanfiction"
area of my discussion forums on my website, and on Yuku.com and 
ezBoard before it.  I've extracted the useful information from 
those threads and expanded upon it, supplementing it with 
practical advice and guidelines garnered during my three years in 
(and degree from) the Creative Writing program at Princeton 
University, 2 years as a newspaper stringer, nearly thirty years 
as a professional freelance writer and twenty-some years as a 
member of SFWA, not to mention those twenty-five years of writing 
fanfiction.  (And yes, that *does* mean I started fan writing 
long *after* I was officially a pro.  I'm not the only one, 
although the other way 'round *is* the more usual route.)

I've broken down this document into three main sections:

   I.  General Guidelines -- Broad rules that can help improve
      your writing overall.
   II.  Stupid Writer Tricks -- Dumb and dumber mistakes to
      avoid.
   III.  Crafting Fiction -- Advice on how to construct a story
      so that your audience is engaged and entertained.

Let me note before we go further that a lot of my advice herein
is, arguably, opinion -- albeit opinion based on many years of
training and experience.  I'll try to make it clear when I'm
espousing a personal view as opposed to an objective truth, but
regardless, feel free to disagree with me on anything and go your
own route.  Part of developing a personal style as a writer is
working out your own way of doing things, and assembling your own
collection of tools and techniques.  Not everything in here will
be right for every writer, but I'm confident in stating that most
of it will be of great value to anyone who wants to write at all
well.

Also, please note that many of the examples below are informed by
and/or selected from my personal fandoms.  That *doesn't* make
them any less apt or useful if you don't share those fandoms with
me.  Don't discount an example lifted from a "Ranma 1/2" fic, for
example, if your only interest is writing "Halo" or NASCAR
stories -- a mistake is a mistake regardless of its context, and
the same will be true of the fix.

I hope this document and the advice it contains prove useful to
you.  Good luck, and good writing.

-- Robert M. Schroeck


I.  GENERAL GUIDELINES

1.  Learn, and write in, reasonably proper English.

   (Or whatever your language of choice may be.)

   This means spelling and grammar (about both of which more
   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 Dan Brown, 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 and *enjoy* 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 proficiency 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
   *your* fun doesn't trump *mine*.  If trying to puzzle out what
   you're saying takes too much effort, it gets deleted.  
   Quickly.  Do you want that to be the fate of your story?
   What's the point of writing something if no one wants to read
   it?  Don't you have any pride in your work?

   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 furniture makers -- who will build
   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.

   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.

   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" if you can.  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 and
   just as fun, and also has a website supplementing it
   (http://www.lynnetruss.com/funnies.asp).  (It's specific to
   punctuation, though, so you'll still need a good guide to
   grammar to go with it.)

   Finally, consider purchasing a style guide.  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.

   (For many years I recommended Strunk and White's "The Elements
   of Style", but by 2011 comments by readers of this guide as
   well as articles I've come across both online and in paper
   publications (all pointing out the weaknesses, faults and
   occasional inanities of this work) have led me to re-evaluate
   that recommendation.  I still feel that a style guide is of
   immense use, especially to a beginning writer, but as of this
   writing I have yet to find a satisfactory alternative to
   Strunk & White.  Until then I must leave it to you to
   investigate the guides that are out there and pick the one
   that best matches your needs and purposes.)

   If you are hesitant to shell out US$50 or more for reference
   books just to write fanfiction, you do have alternatives.
   Since reference works aren't huge sellers and are updated on a
   regular basis, 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.
   (Although do try to get the most recent dictionary possible --
   words and their meanings mutate and evolve faster than other
   parts of the language.  Then again, if you're writing a period
   piece, you might want to go out of your way to find period
   references so you get the right flavor.)

   If you're so strapped that even buying at a discount is out of
   the question, you can check all 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 dictionary, grammar and style
   sites, although you need to be careful about your choice of
   which ones to use -- if you can, get an independent opinion on
   how good a site is before you start to rely on it.  As with
   any other web resource, be careful; there are "gag" references
   out there, and malware hosts masquerading as useful sites.

   Some (older) reference works are also available for free
   through Project Gutenberg -- while the style guides may be too
   old for modern writing, their copy of Roget's Thesaurus is
   still quite useful.

   If for some reason even *that* isn't possible, Google can
   serve as both thesaurus and dictionary in a pinch.  Wolfram
   Alpha does well as a dictionary, too, although I've had less
   success at using it to find synonyms and antonyms than I've
   had with Google.

   If you're really *serious* about writing, fan or otherwise,
   though, 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.  Read as much as you can.

   If your fandom is literary, or serial art, or other printed
   media, read it and reread it for as long as you can stand it.
   If your fandom isn't print-based but has tie-in novels, read
   *them*.

   Beyond that, read anything and everything else you can.  Don't
   limit yourself to just your fandom, or just fanfiction.  Read
   *everything* that catches your eye, or appeals to your
   taste... and at least a few things that *don't*.  Strive to be
   a voracious reader -- *especially* if your fandom is primarily
   from a non-print medium.

   And read not just for the enjoyment, but with an eye open for
   *why* you are enjoying.  Or, equally importantly, why you
   might *not* be enjoying.

   Just as in most other modern fields of endeavor, writers build
   on the work of those who came before them -- somewhat more
   directly in the case of fanfiction, but regardless of what you
   write, reading other people's work will expose you to new
   styles, new techniques, and new approaches.  And every one of
   these that you notice, understand, and absorb expands *your*
   skills and toolkit as a writer.  You may never have a need to
   write an entire story in the dream-language of "Finnegans
   Wake", but then again you might someday want to craft a scene
   which evokes the same fluid unreality -- and knowing how Joyce
   did it will help you come up with your own answer to the same
   challenge.

   On the other front, understanding why you *don't* like a
   particular piece of writing is often a good tool for
   identifying mistakes and missteps in writing that you will
   want to avoid.  The better you are at spotting exactly why a
   story turns you off, the better you will be at crafting your
   own work without those and related weaknesses.

4.  Get into the *habit* of writing.

   Make it a point to write every day.  Set yourself a goal
   (however small) and make that goal every time.  A case in
   point:  science fiction author David Gerrold has, since he
   started writing professionally in the 1960s, required of
   himself that he complete one "motivational unit" -- a scene,
   in other words -- in the morning and one in the afternoon,
   every day.  You needn't be quite so demanding of yourself --
   Gerrold was, and is, writing to put food on his table, after
   all -- but you should be making the same *kind* of effort.

   Yes, it's hard at first.  And it can be heartbreaking to sit
   there for hours and look at a blank sheet of paper or an
   empty document file, and have *nothing* happen.  (Believe me,
   I *know*.  Ask me about The Book From Hell some time.)  But
   once writing becomes a *habit*, it can be an amazing relief to
   know that you can just sit down and *create* when you need to.
   Yes, it is oh-so-good to have the muse inspire you, but
   sometimes the fickle bitch heads to Patagonia for a month or
   three; you have to learn to write without her.  And once you
   do, you will never be held hostage by a lack of "inspiration"
   *ever again*.

5.  It's not the writing, but the rewriting, that is great.

   Don't expect to get it perfect on the first draft.  As Ernest 
   Hemingway said, "The first draft of anything is shit."  It is 
   the rare writer indeed -- even among professionals! -- who can 
   produce ideal-quality work in one pass.  Unless you are one of 
   these prodigies, you are going to need to review and rewrite a 
   lot of your work.  This *doesn't* mean you're a bad writer! 
   It means you're a *good* writer, because you'll be catching 
   and fixing the kinds of mistakes and problems that a bad 
   writer ignores or doesn't even *see*.

   Consequently:

6.  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 won't catch a correctly-spelled word 
   that is used in the wrong place ("they're" for "their", for 
   instance), either.  If you're not paying attention, you can 
   accidentally miscorrect a badly-spelled word into a completely 
   wrong correctly-spelled word.  (A story I once read where
   someone was looking for a "steel sewer girl" comes to mind
   here.  Then there was the one where a misspelling of "et
   cetera" had been "corrected" to "excreta"...)

   Spellcheckers 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. (This has been 
   amusingly named "The Cupertino Effect" for one infamous 
   example -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupertino_effect)  
   A case in point:  at the time I wrote this passage, the built-
   in spellcheckers for a number of popular word processors
   apparently did not know the word "genteel" (meaning "refined,
   well-bred, ladylike, gentlemanly") and would 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.

   (Just to hammer this home, at least one author whose works
   I've read has noted that MS Word's automatic spellchecking 
   makes it *more* likely that he will misspell setting-specific 
   words (in his case, for "Harry Potter") -- he    knows they're 
   going to be red-underlined already, so he never looks to see 
   if they're *really* misspelled.)

   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.  If
   you have any choice in the matter, disable your spellchecker.
   If you can't disable it, see if it will let you create a 
   custom dictionary into which you can put all the vocabulary
   you use in your writing which it otherwise wouldn't recognize.
   Regardless, never *ever* click the "Correct All" button.

   For exactly the same reasons, if your word processor has an
   autocorrect feature that "fixes" things as you type them, 
   *turn it off*.  *Permanently.*

   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
   a river of false positives.

   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 exact
   contents, you can manage by yourself.

7.  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.  While good for the ego, 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 a team of 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.

8.  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 "why does this happen?" has an answer that would
   spoil a future development (see "Chekhov's Gun" and "Asspulls",
   below).  If your prereaders complain about these passages,
   note their complaints and act on them if possible, but leave
   the important information where it belongs in the story.

   Sometimes a fix will have to be drastic:

9.  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.

10.  But don't throw away your deletions.

   Nothing says you can't save those scraps and recycle them,
   though.  For each of my active writing projects, I have a
   "discards" file.  Anything at least a sentence long that gets
   cut goes in that file for potential reuse elsewhere -- and I
   *have* found ways to reuse things.  This is a great 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 those drastic cuts when they're
   needed.

   To take this to the next level, consider using version control
   software.  If you don't know what that is, it's a type of 
   program that will maintain a complete history of your work 
   from initial empty file all the way to finished product, and 
   let you undo even the kind of accidental changes and deletions 
   (even of files and entire directories!) that might otherwise 
   break your heart and sink a project.  Since 2011 I have been 
   using Apache Subversion (AKA "svn") to save my work; svn is 
   not only free but available on just about every computing 
   platform out there including Android; there's even a Windows 
   shell extension for it called Tortoise which makes everything 
   point-and-click.  Even better, there are outfits on the web 
   like Slik Subversion (http://www.sliksvn.com/) which will not 
   just provide you with the software, but give you a free cloud-
   based host for your repository -- which means that even if 
   your PC and your thumb drive and your optical backup all get 
   destroyed, your writing will still survive -- and you can 
   retrieve it from *anywhere*.  That kind of persistence makes 
   it so much easier to make those dramatic changes that you 
   might otherwise hesitate over.

11.  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
   fandom in the middle 1990s and earlier.  Web-based language
   dictionaries (and translators like Google Translate) 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.

   (However, even when you're in a hurry, never rely on a single
   online reference.  Always try to get at least one other
   independent verification.  Websites are created by people
   like you and me, people who can be confused, fumble-fingered,
   mistaken or outright malicious.  *Always* double-check -- and
   triple-check if you need a tie-breaker.)

   Expanding on this:

12.  Know your source material.

   This one may seem painfully obvious, but a distressingly large
   number of fan writers ignore it:  If you're into a particular 
   game, 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 -- *almost*.
   Trying to work with names in one of the languages most foreign
   to English speakers can be daunting at first.  But almost
   everything is on DVD these days, and the subtitles are just a
   button-press away on your remote.  And if you're too lazy for
   *that*, then the least you can do is read the freaking credits
   at the end of an episode.  This is very much an example of
   "When in doubt, look it up".

   Beyond that, there is no excuse *at all* for native speakers
   to misspell names in *English*, especially in fics based on a
   printed property.  I swear I will hunt down and kill the next
   person I find misspelling "Dolores Umbridge" as "Dolorous" or
   "Delores" in a "Harry Potter" fic.  And the less said about 
   "Blaize Zamboni" and "Cho Change", the better.

   In any case, this is a *major* red flag for me as a reader --
   my automatic reaction is that if the author can't take the
   time to make sure that basic, fundamental details about the
   property are right, he's probably not able or willing to write
   a decent story.  If that's the case, 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 become 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 property if you've
   never actually seen/read/played 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 maybe even fans
   among others who have had 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:

13.  Don't arbitrarily violate canon for your convenience.

   Unless you have a damned good story reason for not doing so,
   you should hew as closely 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 2011 (or 2001, or 2021) because I want to."  Or 
   "Ranma" fics where Nabiki has Internet access on her laptop.  
   Or, for that matter, "Ranma" fics where Nabiki has a computer 
   *at all*.  (See "The Eternal Now", below.)  One of the worst 
   cases I've encountered was someone who couldn't be bothered -- 
   and actually said so in an embedded author's note (about which 
   I have much to say elsewhere) -- to remember or look up 
   Hermione Granger's middle name, so he made one up on the spot.  
   (For added irony, writing the note probably took longer than 
   Googling for the information would have.)

   This is nothing more than lazy, sloppy writing.  It dilutes
   the core setting, whose unique attributes and flavor are
   presumably why you're choosing 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 Google, reread or rewatch as
   needed to get a key bit of information right.

   Related to this point and its predecessor is the next:

14.  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 what was then the Anime Fan Fiction Mailing
   List gradually standardized on "Kimiko".  More recently, 
   "Harry Potter" fandom mostly decided that Hermione's unnamed 
   parents were "Dan and Emma".  (Which has the added "bonus" of 
   being annoyingly meta as well as fanon.)

   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
   misconceptions 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.

15.  Don't disguise original fiction as fanfiction.

   Some 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 completely that it's
   unrecognizable?  Conversely, if you have a good and compelling
   story idea that is so utterly 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" (http://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 all so radically different that it's hard to
   justify it 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 crippled, intellectual scientist.
   Huh?)

   Another good example would be "Rendezvous With Fate" by iCe
   (found at http://www.fanfiction.net/s/67364/1/), also a
   "Ranma" fic.  Here Akane is the twenty-something widow of
   Ryoga; her mind/soul is sent back in time to Edo-period Japan,
   where she finds herself occupying the body of Kodachi,
   estranged wife of Ranma Saotome, a high-ranking warrior in the
   service of Happosai and twin brother of Nabiki...  It's an
   extraordinary story, well-written and engrossing, but once
   again, the characters and settings are so vastly divorced from
   "Ranma 1/2" canon that there is no real reason for it to be a
   "Ranma" fanfic.

   If you're writing something so thoroughly altered, you might
   as well take that last step, use new names, and call it
   original fiction.

   Who knows?  Maybe you'll find an editor who'll buy it.  It's
   happened before -- as "50 Shades of Grey" (originally a
   "Twilight" fic, if you didn't know) amply demonstrated.

16.  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.

17.  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 his work, and want
   to see more than just chapter 135 of "L33TWr1T3R Conquerz Teh
   W0rld"!

18.  Don't let reviewers write the story for you.

   What I mean is, don't radically change your plot just to make
   reviewers happy, especially because they are being loud and 
   obnoxious about your choices.

   There are always people out there who are going to have some
   objection to something that you're doing in your story.  The
   worst ones will tell you about it, loudly and frequently, in
   the hopes that you will then write the story *they* want you
   to tell instead of the one *you* want to tell.  At the very
   minimum, this is horrendously rude, and more than a little
   bit lazy.

   There is a huge difference between "your handling of the
   Shinobu-Ichiro relationship is a little weak" and "Shinobu-
   Ichiro is boring -- you should make it Ichiro and Drusilla!"
   The former is good, if vague, feedback, but the latter is an
   attempt to take control of your story and redirect it the way
   the reviewer wants.  *Don't let them railroad you!*  You have
   a plan (or should; see below) -- stick with it unless someone
   definitively *shows* you why it's not working.

   The only possible exception here is if you're working on an
   improv or round-robin fic, where you need to coordinate with a
   larger pool of writers; in this case, feedback along these
   lines, while still rude (in my opinion), may well be
   necessary.

   A corollary to this point:  You don't need to slavishly react
   to *every* comment and suggestion, even those from your
   prereaders.  All responses are not equal, and you need to
   learn (if you don't know already) how to filter the noise from
   the useful stuff.  And that sometimes the distinction is very
   subjective and personal.

19.  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 (for
   example) has already lost a number of fair-to-good writers 
   (who had the potential to be truly great) because they let 
   negative comments get too deeply under their skins.  The same
   is true of many other fandoms.

   Too many talented, creative individuals have thrown in the
   towel because of jerks like these.  We don't need to lose
   more.

   On the flip side of this:

20.  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.  They might call your
   bluff.  If you do it repeatedly, then *many* people will take
   you up on your offer to stop writing, and some will complain
   when you don't keep your promise.  Nobody likes an
   extortionist.

   More seriously:  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, and work at being a better writer as you 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.

21.  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 seasoning 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 entire 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.

   On the other hand, 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 judgment comes from experience, and
   experience comes from bad judgment.  Don't be afraid to
   exercise bad judgment when writing; if you don't release the
   experiments, the only people who'll suffer because of them are
   you and your prereaders.


II.  STUPID WRITER TRICKS

This section attempts to delineate some of the more common (or
more dramatic) errors, blunders and missteps a writer can make.
These are by no means limited to beginning writers -- established
authors with a long history of work (like me! Oh, boy, like me)
can and do make many of these mistakes (like me! Oh, boy, like
me).  So there's no shame in doing any of these -- as long as you
catch and fix them.

Learning from them would be a good side-benefit, too.


1.  Vocabulary, Vocabulary, Vocabulary

   "The difference between the almost right word & the right word
   is really a large matter -- it's the difference between the
   lightning bug and the lightning."  -- Mark Twain, in a letter
   to George Bainton, 15 October 1888

Know your language, and you won't do something like this:

   There rising up out of the darkness, was a castle Hera had
   only thought could exist in fairy tales. There were huge walls
   made of stone cinder blocks, spinnerets climbing into the sky,
   and the windows were each burning with torch light. It was
   gorgeous.

(from Chapter Three of "Harry Potter and The Unlikely Gryffindor"
by "Hera Malfoy", at "Sink Into Your Eyes" and fanfiction.net,
among many other sites.  This is one of the most unrepentantly
*bad* self-insert Mary-Sue fics I have ever encountered.)

In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, "I do not think it means
what you think it means."  This passage attempts to evoke the
awestruck enchantment the main character feels upon first seeing
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry from the "Harry
Potter" books, and fails utterly.  It fails because the author
apparently plucked random words and phrases out of thin air and
did not check to see that they actually meant what she intended.

There are no such things as "stone cinder blocks".  The term is
an oxymoron, as stone plays little or no role in the manufacture
of cinder block.  And even if there were such things, they would
certainly not be an elegant, ethereal building material -- a
castle obviously built from cinder blocks of any variety would
would have more in common with a crude, cheap garage than with an
enchanting fairy-tale structure.

The real howler, though, is yet to come:  spinnerets are *not*
towers, but the organs on the end of a spider's abdomen through
which it excretes its webs.  (My best guess is that she somehow
conflated the words "spire" and "minaret", both of which *are*
varieties of tower, although "minaret" is *so* precisely wrong
for Hogwarts it's not funny.)  The combined image is not of a
mystical medieval fortress, but rather of a pile of cheap modern
building materials out of which protrude the rear ends of
humongous spiders.  (Acromantulas, perhaps...)

The lesson here is very simple.  To avoid looking like an utter
idiot, check both a dictionary and a thesaurus to make sure that
the words you use are the words you *want*.

Corollary (and a bit of a counter to that):  You don't have to
use flowery vocabulary to write well -- just look at Hemingway.
Don't live and die by the thesaurus, and don't use ten fancy,
imprecise words where five simpler, precise ones will do.  You
can grow into a larger, more expressive vocabulary as you
continue to write; if you try to force it, though, it will come
out *sounding* forced.  And that's just as bad as spider butts
among the bricks.


xx.  Neologisms

English is one of the more modular languages on the planet.  It's
very easy to mix and match prefixes, suffixes and roots and come
up with an entirely new word whose meaning will be understood by
the reader.  But that doesn't mean you should *do* it.  The
result is often clumsy, and it almost always duplicates an
existing word which is frequently shorter and far more familiar.

Here's a good example, from an otherwise fine story I've recently
been reading:

   Millicent felt her eyes burning at the thought of her
   mother's accusatorial words.

"Accusatorial" is a neologism.  While it is perfectly good purely
in terms of the rules by which English words are assembled from
their component parts, it does nothing that "accusing" or
"accusatory" wouldn't do in less space and fewer syllables.

The best solution I can offer is be aware of what you're doing
and stop yourself when you find you're about to snap together,
Lego-like, a bunch of word parts to come up with a way to say
what you want.  Go to a thesaurus instead.

Another kind of neologism:  Anime fan writers have come up with a
variety of terms to describe the rainbow hues possessed by many
characters' hair -- for example, "bluenette" and "pinkette".  And 
yes, if these hair colors were "real" within the context of the 
story world (as opposed to being mostly a visual metaphor for 
various character traits), there would be terms for those colors 
equivalent to "blonde", "brunette" and "redhead".  However, I 
find these neologisms distracting and often cutesy to the point 
of twee.  (Even worse are those created in the place of words 
that already exist -- like "crimsonette" for "redhead", a genuine 
example that I came across in a "RWBY" fic in late 2016.)  I'd 
recommend avoiding such terms completely.  They add nothing that 
can't be handled by a bit of pure description, and just encourage 
instances of the "Burly Detective Syndrome" (see below).



xx.  Eye Dialect

The transcription of any less-than-perfectly spoken language is
called "eye dialect".  This covers any non-standard spellings and
slurrings such as "gonna" for "going to" and "sumbitch" for "son
of a bitch".  It is, as one of my references puts it, "locutions
deliberately misspelled to suggest the way our speech sometimes
sounds."

I will be the first to admit that eye dialect has its place in
the writer's toolbox.  It's a great device for building a
"character voice" (more about which can be found elsewhere in
this document); it helps you give a sense of a person through his
speech -- usually someone with an extreme dialect (such as an
American from the Deep South with the stereotyped "Dixie" accent)
or with so poor an education and upbringing that he cannot speak
properly.  (I've certainly used it for a variety of characters,
even on occasion my well-educated and well-spoken character
Douglas Sangnoir, where it's intended to suggest his casual and
relaxed attitude in most situations.)

However, do not mistake this device as any kind of proper usage.
In particular, it should not appear in the narrative voice if
you're using any kind of third-person narrator, the traditional
"I'm not a person, I've the voice of the book itself" narrator.
Only if the narrative voice of your story belongs to an actual
person should you ever employ eye dialect in it.  (And in such
cases it can be very effective, as works like "The Sound and the
Fury", and "Charly"/"Flowers for Algernon" can testify.)

Regardless of where you use it, though, one particular variety of 
eye dialect is *always* wrong.  I refer to "would of", "should 
of", "could of", "might of" and similar constructions.  These
are, as "The Columbia Guide to Standard American English" puts
it, "aberrant spellings" -- in these cases, of "would have",
"should have", "could have" and "might have".  There are others,
but these are the most common and ought to suffice as examples.

This error, which is often systematic throughout a writer's work
when it appears, is caused by what I can only consider to be an
ultimately illiterate confusion between the preposition "of" and 
the contraction "'ve".  I say "illiterate" because it does not 
take a potential writer very much reading at all to learn that 
this is not proper usage, even when writing accents and dialects.  
Someone making this error either has not read enough to know 
better, or worse, *has* but hasn't noticed... or doesn't care.

Because of this, I personally consider the presence of any of the
"* of" errors a red flag that puts me on my guard for other
fundamental problems when I read a story.  Sadly, I'm not usually
wrong.


xx.  Eggcorns and Mondegreens

Just because it *sounds* right, doesn't mean it *is* right.  This
is a case of "Eye Dialect" (see above) striking with a vengeance.

"Eggcorns" are words or phrases that a person has only ever heard
and never seen (or identified) when written, which when that
person needs to write them down himself get written the way they
*sound* to him.  The term comes from the transcription someone
once made of the word "acorn", which they had somehow gotten
through their life without once seeing (or at least *recognizing*) 
in print.

"Mondegreens" are eggcorns as expressed in the transcription or
interpretation of song lyrics.  The term comes from a famous
essay in which the author admitted long mistaking a line in an
English folk song -- "And they laid him on the green" -- for
something rather different -- "And the Lady Mondegreen".

I bring these up because there are a number of eggcorns and
mondegreens that show up with distressing regularity in amateur
writing.  I can't cover all the possible cases, but I can cite a
few prominent examples in the hopes that they will prompt you as
a writer to keep an alert ear out for phrases that are familiar
but don't look quite right when written down.  Get in the habit
of checking these in a dictionary or other reference, and you
should be able to keep them from ending up in your writing.

I'll start with what is arguably the Number One Offender, both in
fanfiction and much other modern writing:

   * "For all intensive purposes"

     For those of you going, "well, what's wrong with that?", the
     phrase actually is "for all intents and purposes".  It
     means, basically, "for any possible reason", not "for those
     reasons which are particularly strong or sharply felt".

The Number Two Offender is:

   * "Phase" -- as in, "The strange behavior did not phase him."

     The correct word for this usage is "faze".  "Phase" is a
     part of a cycle or sequence, usually one that repeats on a
     regular basis.  A derivative meaning covers things that come
     into sync with each other, or which make a transition (say,
     from intangibility to tangibility).  "Faze", on the other
     hand, means to evoke a stunned, surprised or shocked
     reaction in someone.

     Weirdly enough, I have come across one (and only one)
     instance of the *opposite* error -- Ozzallos' "Heir To The
     Empire" has several scenes in which "faze" is used in place
     of "phase".

A few more examples, all of them taken from fanfics I've read:

   * The Latin phrase "per se" -- which means, literally, "by
     itself" -- spawns a lot of eggcorns.  It's not "per say",
     "persay", "percy" (!) or anything else like that.

   * "-esk" as a suffix.  An eggcorn of "-esque", meaning
     "similar to" or "suggesting the appearance or manner of".
     Examples would include "Romanesque", "Rubenesque" and
     "arabesque".

   * "Once and a while" for "once in a while".

   * "Prodigy" for "protege".  While a protege may be a prodigy,
     or vice versa, they are not synonymous.  A protege is
     someone whom a mentor has taken under his wing.  A prodigy
     is a person with an extraordinary talent.  Chiyo-chan from
     "Azumanga Daioh" is a prodigy, but is no one's protege.

   * "Draw" when what is meant is "drawer" (sliding box with a
     handle in a cabinet, dresser or chest).  This is a perfect
     example of "eye dialect" -- in many American dialects people
     swallow the sound of the final "r" in the word, pronouncing
     it as "draw-ah", which eventually gets worn down to, and
     written as, "draw".

   * Very similarly, "murder" when what is meant is "murderer".
     If you are a "murder", you are the *victim* (i.e., a corpse)
     and not the one who did the killing.

   * "Low and behold" for "lo and behold".  A simple case of
     not knowing or remembering the homophone "lo", which is a
     simple, if archaic, interjection roughly equivalent to "hey"
     or the British "oi!"  "Lo and behold" literally means
     nothing more than, "Hey!  Look at that!"  It just sounds
     more formal.

   * For the anime fic writer:  "facevault" for "facefault".
     "Facevault" doesn't mean anything, but if it did, it would
     mean leaping over your own face with the aid of a pole.

In amateur writing in the electronic environment, blame for these
can sometimes be laid at the feet of a spellchecker.  (See above
for my rant on this topic.)  But it's equally likely to be
unfamiliarity or ignorance.  Either way, don't let it trip you
up.  A little thought spent on a doubtful phrase ought to at
least give you a clue about whether it makes sense or not.  No
matter what, if you've never seen the word or phrase in print,
look it up, just to make sure.  Google can be surprisingly adept
and figuring out what you're looking for even if you mangle it
badly.

A good reference you can consult online is to get some help
with possible malapropisms along these lines is
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/ .








Much like "to," "two," and "too." These words, while correctly
spelled, are probably not the words that the author intended.






xx.  Words That Don't Exist

Even with the ability to create neologisms in English (see above), 
some words just *don't* exist.  Consequently, you shouldn't use 
them.

*  The past tense of "to drag" is "dragged", not "drug".

*  The past tense of "to lend" is "lent" or "loaned", not
   "leant".


xx.  Overusing Favorite Words

> *Overusing certain synonyms.  There was once an EVA 'fic that decided
> Rei's eyes were "alizarin".  Every time she showed up in a scene and her
> eyes needed describing for some reason, they were alizarin.  Did they read
> that off of a paint tube? Argh! Ditto using "azure" or "cerulean" when
> "blue" would have worked just fine.  Ditto "shimmering hair".  Nobody's
> hair shimmers unless they haven't washed it in a week.

((Which author always used "sandalwood" for Ukyou's eye color?
Dreiser, among others.  Need to doublecheck.  Gregg Sharp?

Also cite Amelia Peabody books -- Emerson's eyes are always
"sapphirine" -- although that may well be a deliberately aware
usage as a kind of parody.))

((Eyrie Productions Unlimited and "sardonic".))




> And a couple of bad writing tricks (sorry in advance if the tone is harsh,
> I hate these with a passion):
>
> *Using ellipses to denote blanks in dialogue.  This is not a comic book.
> If the character is silent, let them remain silent.  If they leave off the
> end of their sentence, use dashes, or add a description like, "but then
> her voice dropped to a whisper" or whatever.
>
> *Overusing "-ly" adverbs.  They don't add anything to the narrative.  Less
> is more.
>
>         "Leave me alone!" she hissed.
>
> is more powerful than
>
>         "Leave me alone!" she hissed harshly.
>
> Or, to be even more descriptive,
>
>         She rose to her feet in one motion.  "Leave me alone!"
>
>         And then she was gone, stomping down the hallway, and slammed the
> door behind her.
>
> Or whatever.  Be more creative.  "-ly" adverbs should be used sparingly
> (ha!) or not at all.




xx.  Plagiarism

Don't do it.  It's not worth it if you get caught -- and you
*will* get caught.  There is nothing -- I repeat, *nothing* -- so
obscure that you will be the only person who has ever read it.
No one has tastes so unique that no one else shares them, and yet
can find fiction that suits those tastes.  There will *always* be
someone out there with tastes similar to yours whose reading
overlaps yours -- and because your tastes will drive not only
what you plagiarize from (who would steal from a story they
*didn't* like?), but what you steal it *for* (not to mention the 
audience who will read it), it is inevitable that someone who 
read the original will read yours, and nail you.  It doesn't 
matter if you steal three paragraphs or a two-megabyte epic.

I should also point out that plagiarism makes you look like a
fool and a nimrod -- especially if you are stupid enough to steal
a *big* story and claim it as your own.  I can't imagine why
someone would do that, but they do, and they somehow think that
a) no one will notice, b) no one will care, and c) they will be
lavished with praise for their mad fic skillz.

Wrong on all three counts.

Oh, and if you ignore this advice, and you're caught at it, at
least have the good graces to admit what you were doing and take
it down.  Don't be like the bozo back in early 2008 who reposted
the first chapter of Bobmin's epic "Sunset Over Britain" to
fanfiction.net under a new title and his own byline, and then
claimed he was really trying to "promote" the original fic when
he was caught and called on it within hours.  There's looking
like a fool and a nimrod, and then there's looking like an
especially *stupid* fool and nimrod.



xx.  Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe

A lot of people think doing archaic English is easy -- just throw
in "thee" and "thou" and put "-eth" on the end of all the verbs
and "-e" on the end of everything else.

A lot of people are very, very wrong.

I won't go into great detail here -- there are some very good
webpages for those who really care -- but here are several quick
hints to keep you from looking like a complete idiot if you have
to write something that sounds like Elizabethan English.  That's
it, no further back.  Middle and Old English are more like German
than Modern English, and you can't make either look or sound
right without making it unintelligible.  (And honestly, even
Elizabethan English, correctly pronounced, doesn't sound a whole
hell of a lot like Modern English, as a few academic videos on 
YouTube go to some effort to demonstrate.)  If you're going even
*further* back, say to the so-called Dark Ages or historically
Arthurian times -- the Fifth Century or so -- there isn't any
English of any variety *at all* -- they'll be speaking one of any
number of Celtic tongues generally referred to as "Briton" which
are unrelated to English -- so making them sound archaic is just
pointless.

That said, some guidelines to help you with Elizabethan (16th-
century or so) English:


"Y"/"y" (as seen in "ye olde") is not the modern letter with its 
associated sound, but "þ" -- a now-forgotten letter called 
"thorn" that had the same sound as the modern digraph "th".  "þ" 
gradually changed in shape to something like "Ƿ" before it
disappeared entirely from the English alphabet around the 
sixteenth century, and typesetters ended up using "y" to 
represent it until they just gave up and went with "th".  Thus 
"ye olde" is just "the old".


"Thee/Thou/Thine/Thy" follows the same pattern as 
"Me/You/Mine/My".

"Thee" is direct object, "thou" is subject.  If you can't
remember which is which, the modern word and its antique
counterpart usually *rhyme* (or would if we had rationalized 
systematic spelling).  Use "thee" the same way you would use 
"me"; "thy" the same way you'd use "my"; and so on. It's 
uncanny; you'd almost think there was some kind of underlying 
system there. <grin>

The only time you can use "thine" in place of "thy" is if the 
next word starts with a vowel.  (This also used to be a rule for 
"my" and "mine" as well, but that's one of the things that 
English has lost over the centuries.)

A note on proper usage, though:  "Thou" and its brothers are the
informal, intimate "you".  English used to have a formal, plural
"you" and a singular, informal "thou" much like the Romance
languages do.  The latter was used for conversations between
friends or intimates.  However over the centuries it all got
collapsed into "you".  (Puts quite a different spin on the use of
"Thee/Thou/Thine/Thy" by folks talking to God and vice versa in
the King James Bible, doesn't it?  Rather than being excessively
formal, as so many people think nowadays, it's actually talking
with God like he's your best friend -- or your lover.)


-eth = -s verb ending.  Don't say "I runneth" because it's the
same as "I runs".  If it helps, imagine you're speaking with a
lisp.

I run
you/thou runnest
he/she/it/my cup runneth

"To do" is slightly irregular:

I doth
you/thou dost
he/she/it doth

(( from http://www.idir.net/~ipsifend/grammar.html :

I            walk        am         run         think          do
Thou         walkest     art        runnest     thinkest       dost
He/she/it    walketh     is         runneth     thinketh       doth
We           walk        are        run         think          do
Ye           walk        are        run         think          do
They         walk        are        run         think          do
))


Don't mix a period conjugation of "to do" with a period
conjugation of another verb.  "He doth runneth" is equal to "he
does runs" and it neither makes good grammatical sense nor gives
you anything "he runneth" wouldn't.  "He doth run" works, too
(but may sound wrong to some ears).

For more detail or information, you may wish to explore these
websites (active as of October 2011):

((note to self, confirm these are still live in Oct 2021))

http://www.renfaire.com/Language/
http://www.elizabethan-era.org.uk/elizabethan-online-dictionary.htm
http://www.ehow.com/how_4474444_learn-speak-write-elizabethan-english.html
http://www.netplaces.com/shakespeare/how-to-understand-elizabethan-english/elizabethan-english.htm

However, it's best to remember that no matter when or where they
lived, people always spoke in their own vernacular language.
Unless you're actually writing about Elizabethan England, don't
put Elizabethan English in their mouths -- especially if they're
not actually speaking English.  Just write them as if they were
speaking Modern English (leaving out, of course, any references,
vocabulary, usage or slang specific to the Modern era).  How we
sound to each other now is exactly how people speaking in other 
languages and eras sounded to each other then, regardless of 
where and when they were, or what language they used.  It's as 
simple as that.



xx.  I/He/She vs. Me/Him/Her

Compound subjects and objects built wholly or partly out of
pronouns seem to confuse a lot of people.  I can't count the
number of times I've read (or heard) something like

        Me and him ran all the way from Azabu-Juuban.
                or
        Do you want to sit with her and I for dinner?

Most people do seem to know that there is one set of pronouns
used in sentence subjects and another for objects.  If there's
only *one* of either (or each) they don't usually have a problem,
but mix it up with two or more (and/or throw in a name or two)
and some writers choose the wrong one every time.

There's a very simple way to figure out the right pronouns to
use in most cases, assuming you have no problems with simpler
structures.  Just take a moment to think of the sentence as two
(or more) separate sentences, and note what pronoun you use when
it's all by its lonesome.  For instance, with our first example
above, you would break it out into:

        Me ran all the way from Azabu-Juuban.
                and
        Him ran all the way from Azabu-Juuban.

If when you do that one or both of the sentences sounds like
Tarzan or Tonto, well then, you have the wrong pronoun.  (Unless
you're writing dialogue for Tarzan or Tonto, of course, in which
case why the hell are you worrying about this *now*?)  Change it
or them:

        I ran all the way from Azabu-Juuban.
                and
        He ran all the way from Azabu-Juuban.

And then merge them back together.  Guaranteed, it will be right:

        He and I ran all the way from Azabu-Juuban.

This example points out one other rule:  When you include a first
person pronoun ("I" or "me") in a series of subjects or objects,
it always goes *last*.

(Just for the sticklers:  "subject" pronouns are technically
called the "nominative case", and "object" pronouns are the
"accusative case".  Not that that will help you figure out which
to use when.)


xx.  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* of 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.  Priss Asagiri
of "Bubblegum Crisis" wishes she could survive the fight she's
in, and suddenly a combat robot that hasn't been seen or
mentioned before (or since) shows up to fight alongside her.
(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" and "Bubblegum Crisis" examples
above come not from fanfics, but from actual episodes.

Asspulls are bad because they make the reader stop and say
something along the lines of, "Now hold on just a freakin'
minute!  Where the hell did *that* come from?"  Even a *small*
asspull can knock your reader so far out of the story that they
won't want to go back into it.  A *big* one will make them throw
the story away and tell their friends not 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 backward -- 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.  You can even hide it
from the character who needs it by giving it to him in a form
that requires interpretation, decoding or unlocking, which can
then be done at the appropriate key moment. ("Harry, where did
you get that ring?")

If you avoid an asspull with sufficient skill, your reader will
probably say something along the lines of "that's very cool".
Strive for that reaction.

Toward 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 all have to be
*obvious* -- in fact, it makes for a far better story if they're
*not* -- but they *must* be there, in one form or another, or
your readers will rebel.

This is especially true when the fan author -- as is common -- is
writing a long-format story in installments.  You will usually
not have the luxury of being able to change chapter 1 to include
a gun when you realize that you need one while writing chapter
12.  You must either plan out what you'll need so you can account
for it ahead of time, or you must make do with the details you're
stuck with when you get to that point.

In all fairness, it *is* possible to write a large story without
long-term planning.  Charles Dickens did it almost all the time.
He created his novels as serials, written and sold to newspapers
one chapter at a time, and he had only the vaguest idea where
they were going, if *that* much, when he started them.  But those
chapters were *so* dense in detail that he had literally hundreds
of choices 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.



xx.  Sauce for the Goose

This is a useful rule of thumb for plotting and characterization,
especially when you're tempted to take shortcuts or make use of
certain tired cliches:

If your plot point seems arbitrary, awful, lazy and/or just plain
dumb as hell when applied to a *male* character, you can safely
assume it'll be the same with a *female* one.



Many thanks to John Kovalic, who first espoused this rule in the
June 15, 2012 installment of his webcomic, Dork Tower
(http://www.dorktower.com/2012/06/15/croftwork-dork-tower-15-06-12/).



xx.  Bobble-heads

((Overuse of grinning and nodding as "stage directions" in
narrative.  I'm guilty of this -- quite a bit so, to the point that
I scan my work to purge it of excess grins and nods.

from

"Don't Be a Bobble-Head, and Other Bits of Guidance" in
Fantastical Visions II. [October 2003] Reprinted in updated form
in Many Genres, One Craft, Michael Arnzen & Heidi Ruby Miller,
eds., Headline Press, [May 2011] by Timons Esaias ))




xx.  Postmodern Fun and Games

Self-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".  But
you need to justify that at some point, even if it's only with
something as cliched as a single throwaway sentence about "so now
I write this account", or "and so I'm telling you all this".





xx.  In-Line Author's Notes

You may be writing the story, but even if you have a first-person
narrator, *you* are not *in* the story.  And you should stay the
hell out of it!  Never interrupt the narrative to insert a
parenthetical "author's note" -- and for the love of god if you
actually *must* do it for some unbelievable reason, don't preface
such a thing with the actual phrase "author's note".

If you have to explain something, make it part of the earlier
story.  Your narrative voice is 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.

Similarly, inserting justifications for something you've done
within the story.  As I write this, I've just read a chapter of a
"Harry Potter" fic where the author breaks in and spends a whole
paragraph justifying letting Harry order books early for his
second year, before the formal letter specifying them is sent.

Blech.

Why not turn something like that into part of the story, with
Harry wondering if he could do such a thing, and then exploring
his options, and finally finding success?  You don't see
Hemingway breaking into his story to explain why the Old Man has
access to certain fishing equipment, or Stephen King to justify
the psychic powers of the little blind girl in "The
Tommyknockers".

Let me make this clear -- this is one of the things that slaps a
huge neon-orange "Dumb N00b" label on what you write while at the
same time sucking quality and professionalism from it.  DON'T DO
THIS.  Decisions you make as a writer, choices of style or
mechanics, deviations from canon in fanfic -- all of these should
be transparent to the reader or expressed as a natural outgrowth
of the plot and action of your story.

As an illustration of what I mean, imagine you are watching a
serious dramatic movie.  The action gets intense, the peril is
ramping up, the hero is in major trouble -- and suddenly it all
comes screeching to a halt when the director abruptly steps in
front of the camera to justify his choice of angle and lens for
this scene -- and takes five minutes to do so.  *This* is what an
in-line author's note does to a written story.

If you *must* speak directly to the reader, that's what prefaces
and postscripts are for.

If you *must* editorialize, either turn it into part of the
narrative or dialogue proper, or put it somewhere else, like a
separate note at the end of the chapter.  Even better would be to
put it in a completely different document entirely.  (See
"Ranting," below.)

The only thing that could make this practice this worse is to put
the in-line comments *inside dialogue*.  Which I have seen one
author actually do.  Thank you, no.

Please note that in-line author's notes are different from the
kind of narrator who is aware that he is telling a story, and
will address the reader and comment on the action.  Two good
examples of the latter from fanfiction would be Eric Hallstrom's
"Ranma and Akane:  A Love Story", and Rob "Kenko" Haynie's "Girl 
Days", and the narrator of the Lemony Snickett books is a classic 
published example.  Terry Pratchett's infamous footnotes in the 
Discworld novels can be viewed in this light as well, but are 
much less intrusive because they *are*, after all, footnotes.

This kind of narrator, regardless of the way he might address the
reader directly and offer his opinions on the plot and the other
characters, is still *not* the author, and should not (except,
perhaps, satirically) discuss the technical issues of writing.
Even if he is not an embodied person taking part in the story
directly, he is a *character*, and as such should know nothing of
and say nothing about the plans and decisions of the author.

This is a story-telling device that can frequently add an extra
level of interest or humor to your work.  The only things in-line
author's notes add are annoyance and distraction.


xx.  Trigger Warnings


((oh dear god.  amateur hour plus self-righteousness.))

"Trigger Warning:  The following material is written for grown-
ups.  Bad things happen to good people.  Good things happen for 
bad people.  An effort is made to ensure the story feels like 
real life.  If you can't cope with any of these things without 
anti-anxiety medication or excessive hand-holding, go read 
'Winnie the Pooh Contemplates His Navel' or something else with 
absolutely no drama or excitement.  We would feel *terrible* if 
you were distressed by something blatantly imaginary that is 
clearly written as entertainment."




xx.  Narrative Voice vs. Character Voice

Understand the difference between a narrative voice and a
character voice.

Unless the narrator is one of the characters in the story, the
narrative voice should be as impersonal, precise and formal as
possible.  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.
(This is also good advice for an in-story narrator, unless for
characterization reasons it's something he can't or won't do.)

Note, by the way, that you are not required to put a speaking
verb on *every* little thing someone utters.  If the context
makes it clear who's saying what, it's perfectly okay -- and
often preferable -- to omit it.  And there are a dozen ways to
indicate a speaker without using "said" or a synonym.  For
instance, here's a brief passage from chapter 3 of "Drunkard's
Walk V", on which Chris Angel and I were working when this advice
was originally written:

   "I'm sorry," she said softly, "I'm prying."

   Well, I felt instantly lousy.  "No, no, not at all!" I
   protested with genuine contrition.  "I was just reminded of
   something and was following the thought."

   "If you're sure..."

   I nodded.  "I am."

   A slow, tentative smile worked its way back onto Belldandy's
   face as she served herself a small plate of seaweed salad.
   "In that case, what abilities do you have?"

Although there are five lines of spoken dialogue here, there are
only *two* instances of a "said"-type verb.  Context serves to
identify the speaker in the rest.

In conversations between two characters, you can even get away
with *no* context clues, at least for a little while, relying
solely on dialogue and voice to identify the speakers.  Unless
you're attempting something special, though -- as I did with
"Aquarius" and "Sagittarius" in several scenes in the final
chapter of "Drunkard's Walk II" -- don't overdo it.  You can lose
the reader after four or five exchanges unless you're careful.
And trying to make it work for three or more speakers is *very*
difficult unless they all have *very* distinctive patterns of
speech.

The best plan is a mix of all three approaches.  This keeps your
dialogue from sounding repetitious, and at the same time keeps
your readers on their toes.




((It's the 'Rabbit Season', "Duck Season" cartoons... without the
clear voices or visual characters 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.))




xx.  What Not To Do With Your Narrative Voice

Unless your narrative voice is that of an actual character, be he 
an onlooker or the hero, you should not write it in a colloquial 
or informal manner.  In particular, you should never use phrases 
or words like

* Goofy
* Stuff (in the sense of "unspecified items")
* Wacky
* Y'know
* Yoink
* Great big (as in "a great big monster")
* The same old X
* Or something (used to mean "or something similar")
* real (as a synonym for "very", as in "he was real experienced")

xref "Bathos"

Unless your entire narrative style is based on being overblown,
do not indulge in hyperbole in your descriptions.  Hyperbole in
metaphors is fine, and even traditional at times.  Similes can be
hard to judge, but when in doubt, tone it down.

Similarly, unless your narrator is an actual character, the
narrative voice should be as formal and educated as possible.
That does not mean to make it dry or boring, but it *does* mean
to eschew slang and chattiness.

However, do not in turn make your narrative voice *so* formal 
that it comes across like a paper submitted to a scientific 
journal.

Unless the narrator is a character with his own part to play in
the story, the narrative voice should never offer opinions about
the characters or action.  For example, a third-person narrator
should never simply *say* that a woman is sexy, but rather
describe what she *does* that makes others perceive her as sexy.
"Sexy" by itself tells us nothing except that the disembodied
voice which is recounting the story to us finds her sexually 
attractive.  But describing her alluring perfume, her understated 
but effective makeup, the silken clothing that clings to her 
curves, and the predatory hip-swinging strut she uses to approach 
the hero not only tells the reader she's sexy, it lets, even 
makes, the reader *see* that she's sexy, in a very real and 
visceral way.  And if you must have an opinion about or emotional 
response to her, give it to the character she wants one from, not 
from the narrator, whom she (presumably) doesn't know exists.

A "Love Hina" fic I have been reading at the time I write this
suffers greatly from this -- the narrative voice frequently (read
"excessively to the point of monotony") calls Kitsune "the foxy
lady", and blandly announces that Su and Sarah are wacky.  Over
and over, ad nauseum.  Sorry, but if they're properly written, I
think I can work out that they're wacky by myself.  I certainly
don't need to be reminded of it every time they appear.

The narrative voice also should not *explain* things -- any
revelations, large or small, should come as a result of the
action of the story, not because the narration decided the reader
needed to know it.  This applies as much to ephemeral details as
it does to major plot points.  If a character is, for example, 
trying to remember the name of a TV series but cannot, the 
narration should *not* helpfully tell the reader what show he's 
thinking of.  If it's important enough, add enough clues that the 
reader can figure it out for themselves.  If it's *not* 
important, don't worry about it, or skip it entirely.  *Don't* 
spoon-feed your reader -- they'll get tired of and/or insulted by 
it.

I've just encountered something even worse than spoon-feeding,
though.  I've been reading a "Tenchi Muyo!" fanfic where the
third person omniscient narrative voice has (late in the story)
started to break out in bullet points.  Oh, please, no.  Yes,
your narrative voice should be more formal than the characters.
But there is such a thing as *too* formal.  If you've got so much
information to get across that you're tempted to just *list* it
like that, by all that's holy *don't*.  Write a scene where it
becomes necessary for someone to give that information to someone
else and then let them do it.


xx.  Narrative Time vs. Narrator Time

If you think to use "ago"/"tomorrow"/"yesterday"/etc. (and by
extension, the present tense in most cases) 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 usually
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, in
describing your actions at that time, "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.  The
narrator, either implicitly or explicitly, is telling the reader
about something that *already happened* from his/its point of 
view, and the tenses and relative terms you use in writing the
narrator's voice should reflect that.

As always, there are exceptions.  Perhaps the best example is the
work of Damon Runyon (author of the stories that were adapted 
into the musical "Guys and Dolls").  His characters and narrators
spoke almost entirely in the present progressive tense (see 
Tenses, below).  When they didn't, it was in the future 
progressive tense.  This was a stylistic choice to which Runyon
adhered with an almost religious dedication.  Combined with the 
argot used by many of the criminal characters he wrote about it
gave his work a unique and unmistakable style -- so much so that
trying to use the same device today will get you accused of 
mimicking Runyon, whether you intended to or not.  

Trying to use the simple or perfect present tense will appear far 
less derivative, but is difficult to pull off.  I've seen many
authors try it, usually in conjunction with a *second-person*
narrator (where the reader is put in the place of the central
character and told what they, the reader, are doing as they read
it).  It usually doesn't come off well, unless the writer is 
experienced, gifted, or both, which is why I discourage it.  (In 
general, it's my personal opinion that the only place it really
works is in "choose your own adventure" books and stories.  It 
just comes across stilted in almost any other situation.)

I don't think I've ever seen a story successfully written in any 
of the future tenses.  There may not be any, and for good reason.  
(That will probably be taken as a challenge by someone reading 
this.  Future editions of this guide will no doubt lack this
paragraph, which will have been replaced by one or more examples 
with the same "don't try this unless you're very good" warning.)

Regardless of the exceptions, though, don't do this.  Stay with
the past tenses unless you're really intending to do something
experimental.




((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.))




((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 without warning.))




xx.  Character Voice

For many writers, character voices are the most difficult part of
creating an original story -- making original characters sound
distinct from each other can be an imposing task, especially if
you're new at the game.  When a writer of fanfiction has this
problem, though, I find it terribly ironic -- because there is
almost always a huge sampling of "genuine" voice to copy from for
practically every character.  It should be *harder* for a fanfic
author to err on a voice than not, if he's the least bit
attentive to his source(s).

Sadly, this is not always the case.  I have, at the time I write
this passage, been reading a pair of rather large "Harry Potter"
stories by an author on fanfiction.net who calls himself
Bellerophon30.  Although he is deft enough at plotting to keep me
reading, he has *many* other failures, and chief among them is a
complete inability to handle voices.  To give an idea:  he makes
Dobby the house-elf sound like a Victorian gentleman's valet, and
Dumbledore like a laid-back high school teacher from California.

Similarly, while "Heirs of the Founders" by animekitty has many
things in its favor, the author has made some strange decisions
when it comes to character voices -- almost every character is 
given toward slurred and slangy eye dialect (q.v.) like "hadda 
bin" and "gonna" regardless of whether they are eleven-year-old 
students or septuagenarian professors.  Given that her narrative
voice shows none of these peculiarities indicates that it's not a
matter of the author's ignorance but a deliberate choice on her
part.

"Voice" is one of the most important parts of keeping a character
from going *out* of character.  It is all about choice of words
and choice of syntax.  A dignified, elderly gentleman like Albus
Dumbledore will *always* say "children" instead of "kids", for
example, and his sentences are going to be formal in structure
and tone.  By contrast, Dobby is hyperactive, worshipful, can be
somewhat motormouthed, and is given to referring to himself in 
the third person.  He wouldn't respond with a sharp "Yes, sir!" 
to a request from Harry (except perhaps after a great deal of
character development).  Instead, he'd say something like, "Dobby 
is overjoyed to be able to serve the great and kind Harry Potter 
sir!" -- if not five or six sentences *more* of similar gushing 
excitement.  And even *if* he is staying in America, Harry should 
not be picking up gangsta slang.  Not in a serious story, at 
least.

To switch to a different property, Willow Rosenberg should not
sound like Mr. Spock.  Which I've also seen.

In a way, it's like writing in a code:  when you write, *who* a
person is defines -- is coded into -- *how* they speak.  And when
your work is read, the reader decodes *how* a person speaks into
*who* they are.  If you don't "encode" the personality correctly
with their word choice and sentence structure, then the reader is
going to "decode" a different person than the one you intend them
to read.

It is absolutely necessary for a fanfic author to study the way
characters speak in his source material, so that he can reproduce
it in his work.  Look at what kind of words they use and what
kind they don't.  Look at the structure of their sentences.  Do
they use profanity, and if so what kind?  (Long ago I read an
observation that at one time Catholics tended to use religious
oaths while Protestants swore by bodily functions.  Does the
character make such a distinction?)  Do they have an accent or
dialect?  Do they have a "verbal tic"?  (That's a word or sound
that they start or end sentences with, like an anime catgirl's
"-nyaa", a teenager's "like" and "y'know", or a stereotypical
Canadian "eh?")  Do they have a catchphrase that they frequently
utter?

At the same time, original characters also need the same kind of
"encoding".  You need to pick speech patterns that match the way
the character is perceived by both the reader and the other
characters in the story.   If, for instance, someone is perceived
by other characters as a "valley girl", they should *talk* like a 
valley girl.  Likewise, someone perceived as an intellectual 
should talk like an intellectual.  They may well be far more
complicated than that initial impression, but their voices must
match -- or at least not conflict with -- the image that other
characters have of them (and that you want to give to the 
reader), because those voices are *part* of that image, and 
helped (or will help, in the case of the reader) form that image.

Some voice "tricks" are simple.  An intellectual, possibly cold-
blooded, character can be portrayed by the simple expedient of
using no contractions and no slang in his speech at all.  A goofy
dreamer will begin sentences but often leave them unfinished,
sometimes in the middle of words, sometimes to switch to a
different train of thought.  A person unconcerned with 
interpersonal niceties may never use "please", "thank you" and 
other "social lubrication" words/phrases.  Addressing other 
characters by their full names (or at least first-and-last) at 
all times can be used to help indicate several different kinds of 
characterization, as does ignoring nicknames or diminutives in
preference to full names.  And the distinction between addressing 
all others that way, or just a few (or one) other persons, can
imply volumes about the character.

Playing *against* expectations (for instance, a Southern belle
with a British accent; a cheerleading captain who is studious and
formal) is an excellent characterization tool, but it is not 
something you should do with every original character.  If you
overdo it, you will come across as not understanding voice at 
all.  Again, a hint of spice, not the whole cabinet.





xx.  ExpoSpeak

One 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
classic example from "Lost Potter", a "Harry Potter"/"Buffy the 
Vampire Slayer" crossover I 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 Dog Latin, the sentence fragments, and the lack 
of proper punctuation for now, this piece of dialogue fails the 
reality check because no one talks that way!  Especially 
considering that this is Remus Lupin talking to *Albus 
Dumbledore*:  if *Dumbledore* needs to be told what a "Portal
Reviewus" spell is -- a spell apparently so common that every
Wizarding home is warded against it -- he shouldn't be leading
the Order of the Phoenix or running Hogwarts.

It's exactly the same as you turning to your mother and saying,
"I am taking our 'automobile', which is an internal combustion 
vehicle powered by petroleum distillates, down to the 
'supermarket', which is a place of business that makes an
extraordinary selection of foodstuffs from around the world
available to the average citizen for reasonable prices.  Is it
not wonderful that we live in a world of high-speed transport and
instantaneous communication?"

You don't talk this way.  Neither should your characters.

"But how do I tell the reader what he needs to know?" I hear you
wail.

There are several far more satisfactory ways to do this.

The easiest -- though frequently the clumsiest and most
transparent -- is to have a handy outsider in the cast who needs
these things 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 (and, sadly, some aspects of *Muggle* 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 is all but certain to be new and strange 
to Harry, requiring someone to explain it to *him*, and thus 
neatly serving two purposes at once.  Similarly, in Buffy fics, 
either Buffy or Xander can neatly serve in the outsider role, at 
least as far as the arcane is concerned.  And crossovers by their 
very nature will usually be filled with people who need things
explained to them from every direction.

The problem with this method is that if not handled properly 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 easier in concept, but harder for a beginning writer to
do, is *don't*.  Let the context inform the reader.  For example,
with the passage I quoted above, you would eliminate the second, 
explanatory sentence.  The reader should be clever enough to 
figure out that the "Portal Reviewus" does from Lupin's report of 
what he learned and Dumbledore's reaction -- not to mention from 
the Dog Latin spell name itself.

(Properly executed, you can stretch out an "unexplanation" 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 discussing 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
"But Don't Reveal Everything Right Away", elsewhere in this
document.)

A third method is to insert, usually at scene or chapter breaks,
quotations from books and other works from within the setting of 
the story.  A good published example would be all the quotes from 
the works of Princess Irulan in the "Dune" novels by Frank 
Herbert.  This one is a bit harder to pull off, because it 
doesn't always work with every story, and lends itself better to 
longer works.  If you do use it, though, it's an excellent tool 
not only for doling out the odd informative detail here and 
there, but also for providing flavor and a sense of time and 
place.  Plus, if your quotes come from future works that look 
back on the events of the story as a matter of history, you can 
also use them to deliver foreshadowing as well.

...

If you ever find one of your characters speaking a line of
dialogue that includes the phrase "as you know", stop!  You are 
probably about to commit expospeak.  If the person he's speaking 
to knows this already, why does he have to say it?  Find another 
way to get it across to the reader.



xx.  Ranting

Don't.  Not even through your characters.  If you have something
that you feel that strongly about, don't filter it through your
fiction.  Write an essay and post/publish it separately.  Yes,
authors have written (and successfully published) entire novels
which are merely carriers for some specific political/religious/
whatever viewpoint they wanted to evangelize about or against.
It can even be said to be a bit of a tradition.  But you know,
when *I* read a novel or a fanfic, I want a *story*.  If I wanted
a political or theological treatise, I'd've gone somewhere else.
And to be quite honest, it's almost always the case that the
story suffers when it becomes nothing more than the vehicle for
the author's politics, or religion, or philosophy, or whatever.
That's one reason why I stopped reading the "Sword of Truth"
books by Terry Goodkind.

Sometimes characterization requires that your *characters* rant 
about things that upset them.  That's okay.  People -- including
fictional people if you're doing your job as a writer properly -- 
are complex and different from each other.  And some of them are 
going have deeply-held, strongly-felt beliefs that they will want 
to express.  So let *them* rant if it's necessary to the story.  
But at least make it short and believable for the situation 
they're in, and keep their rants distinct from *your* rants.

Ranting in the narrative voice, though... that's another flag
that tells me a story's bound for the recycle bin.





xx.  Misused Words and Phrases

Here are a few of most frequently misused words and phrases that
I see in fanfics.

"Akimbo"
For some reason, I see *so* many authors misuse this word.  It
does *not* mean "spread wide", and you cannot have one's legs
akimbo.  It is physically impossible.  "Akimbo" applies only to
*arms* -- it is what it's called when you have your hands on your
hips and your elbows out to the sides.  Every good dictionary
I've ever seen it in actually has an illustration.  You can no
more have your legs akimbo than you can give someone the finger
with your ear.

"Ancestor" vs. "descendant"
This one is in here because I saw it misused in a *newspaper
article*.  And J.K. Rowling famously made this error (which her
editor did *not* catch and fix) in "Harry Potter and the 
Philosopher's Stone", prompting both a fix in the second printing
and a *whole* lot of speculation from readers.  Too many people 
get these mixed up for no good reason.  The simplest case of 
these two terms is that of a parent and a child -- the parent is 
the ancestor, the child is the descendant.  The ancestor 
ultimately produces the descendant.  Without actual time travel, 
you cannot be the ancestor of someone in the 16th century -- as 
that newspaper article ridiculously reported -- but you *can* be 
his descendant.  If you absolutely must have a mnemonic image to 
help you remember this, imagine that you're sitting at the top 
of your family tree -- the branches are the ancestors, and as 
you climb down the tree, as you *descend*, you come to 
descendants.

"Beside" vs. "Besides"
"Beside" means "next to", a physical location.  "Besides" means
"in addition to", or "furthermore".

"Deign"
It means "allow, as if doing a favor", not "refuse".  If someone 
deigns to talk to you, it means they *are* talking to you, 
they're just doing it as though it were a chore or an imposition 
for them.  If someone does *not* deign to talk to you, it's 
because they consider it a waste of their time.

"Discreet" vs. "Discrete"
This is perhaps the number one word confusion that I see in fics,
outside of simple typos and eggcorns.  Even some of the very best
fan writers that I have read get this wrong with distressing
regularity.  "Discreet" means "circumspect" or "able to keep a
secret".  "Discrete" means "individual" or "separate".

"Gibbous"
"Gibbous" is not the same as "crescent".  Gibbous is the
*opposite* of crescent.  A gibbous moon fitted together with a
crescent moon form a full moon.  Even very good writers make
this mistake.  You'll earn many points if you don't.

"Itch" vs. "Scratch"
This is a grade-school error that I see all too often, one that
nobody over the age of 10 ought to make.  An "itch" is an
unpleasant sensation; "scratch" is what you do to alleviate it.
You do not itch yourself.  No, no, no, never.

"Imply" vs. "Infer"
Far too many people who ought to know better confuse these two.
"Imply" means to hint or suggest.  "Infer" means to deduce or
draw a conclusion based on hints and clues.

"Just deserts" vs. "Just desserts"  
This one really doesn't belong here, as both are considered 
correct; or rather, that the wrong one is considered such a 
minor error that it really doesn't matter to all but the most
persnickety reader.  The one-S "deserts" is the correct form, but 
it depends on an archaic meaning of "desert" that most speakers 
of English no longer realize exists, in which it is related to
"deserve".  Its mutation into "dessert" is perhaps a bit 
counterintuitive (given the perception that dessert is a kind of
reward, but a just dessert is a punishment inflicted by a fair
universe), but it's borderline acceptable in modern usage.

"Less" vs. "Fewer"
Fewer (smaller in number) and Less[er] (smaller in mass or
substance) are often confused.  To remove two of twelve cake
slices is to leave the cake with *fewer* slices.  To make the
entire cake (and its slices) smaller is to leave it with *less*
slices (or, technically, lesser slices).

"Millennium" vs. "Millennia"
"Millennium" is the singular.  "Millennia" is the plural.  I'm
tired of seeing references to things that happened "a millennia
ago" or spanning "two millenniums".

"Passed" vs. "Past"
"Passed" is the past participle of the verb "to pass".  It is 
only used to refer to the act of moving alongside and then beyond 
something, either physically or in the sense of time.  "Past" 
(when not the noun meaning "the time before right this moment") 
is a preposition, used to indicate a relative position in time or 
space, roughly synonymous to "beyond" or "distant".  They have 
very similar meanings, true, but they are used in very different 
ways.

   Wrong:  He is passed the age of retirement.
   Right:  He is past the age of retirement.
   Wrong:  She told tales of times passed.
   Right:  She told tales of times past.
   Right:  I was going 90 MPH when I passed the Corvette.


Believe me, this is far from a complete list of commonly confused
or misused words.  At one time I had included in this document a 
much more comprehensive tally of all the cases I'd come across in 
my years of reading, but after a while, it got so large it 
threatened to overwhelm everything else in this file.  So I moved 
it to its own document, which you may find at 

   http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/guide/fwg-misused-words.txt
   
Venture therein at your own risk!



xx.  Repetitious/Redundant Word Choice

One thing that irritates me as reader is the irritating
repetition of a word or phrase several times within a short time.
The irritation it causes drags me up out of the story level to
the technical level of a story, and that irritates me.

Hopefully that paragraph, while admittedly a bit forced, will
illustrate the point I'm trying to make.  Using the same word (or
variations thereof) several times within close proximity can be
jarring enough to make the reader change their focus from the
story to how you're telling that story -- which you don't want to
do.  Your writing should be "transparent", by which I mean the
reader should forget that he is involved in the process of
reading because he is engaged in the story.  Repeating a word too
often in too short a time (except, of course, for the little
"mechanical" words like "and", "the" and so on, which are almost
invisible because of their ubiquity) draws attention away from
the story and to the *writing*.

It's like having a patch of dirt on a TV screen:  you stop paying
attention to what's on the TV, and start paying attention to the
dirty spot, and soon you're no longer involved in the story.

(This is one reason why overdoing "he said-she said-they said" in
narrative is bad.  In addition to the monotonous tone it can
produce, it can also, conversely, draw too much attention to
itself.)

Note that this can be easy to do by accident, especially if you
go back and revise sentences without rereading their context.  I
myself do it more often than I'd like.  (Even in this document!
A passage near the top at one point had four instances of the
word "radically" within five sentences.  Bad Bob, no biscuit.)

The solution is simple:  pay attention to what you're writing (or
rewriting) and its context -- and if you find yourself about to
repeat a word, see if you have a good synonym instead.

To be honest, though, this is often something that is more likely
(and perhaps better) found and fixed in an edit/proofread pass.
So don't get too worked up about it *during* the writing.

Just... be aware.


xx.  Adjectival Phrases

Sometimes using short descriptive phrases as adjectives is okay:
things like "freshly-baked bread" and "early morning sunshine".
However, it's very easy to overdo this kind of thing, turning a
sentence into a twisting maze that can leave the reader wondering
just what is modifying what.

Here's a typical example, from "Another Better Father Than Genma
Story" by Gregg "Metroanime" Sharp:

   Nabiki stays honest because group marriage or not, she has her
   best chance of a comfortable beyond her wildest dreams life
   that route.

The offending phrase here, if it's not obvious, is "comfortable
beyond her wildest dreams".  It's long and complicated enough
that in its current location it completely derails the sentence,
leaving the ending confusing and ambiguous.  (It also happens to
be a relatively *simple* example; really *bad* cases of this can 
be long, impenetrable messes.)

Although I've been calling them phrases here, strictly speaking
this is a misuse of what is properly termed a relative (or
adjectival) clause, a variety of dependent clause.  A dependent
clause should have a subject and a verb even though it cannot
stand as a full sentence by itself.  Some writers (including me,
still, if I'm not careful), try to force the descriptive part of 
a relative clause to act as through it were a single word, which 
does nothing but muddle up the sentence they are writing.  (It 
also makes the afflicted sentence almost impossible to read out 
loud in any way that sounds good and/or makes sense.  This may 
not matter to some writers, but I read fanfics to my wife, and 
it's incredibly frustrating for both of us when I have to stop 
and figure out just what a sentence is trying to convey because 
it's become bogged down in misplaced clauses.)

The solution is to accept that these are dependent clauses and
use them properly -- which is to say, with the necessary subjects
and verbs and positioned properly in the sentence.  One possible
way of fixing the example above would be to recast it thusly:

   Nabiki stays honest because, group marriage or not, that way
   she has her best chance at a life which is comfortable beyond
   her wildest dreams.

I should note that you can use a misplaced relative clause for
comedy purposes, taking humor from the very fact that it is too
long and in the wrong place.  In cases like this, though, you
should draw attention to the clause by hyphenating the entire
thing, as though you're pretending it's all one overly-complex
word:

   I suppose you think this whole too-long-and-complicated-for-
   us-to-wade-through thing is funny.

As always, though, when playing grammar/syntax games for humor
value, don't overdo it.



xx.  Grammatical Oddities

"X, let alone Y", "X, much less Y":  These are useful turns of
phrase that are just unusual enough that many people are unclear
on exactly how to use them.  They appear in comparisons of
results or effects, where what happened is far less severe or
impressive than what was expected:

   After that accident, Voldemort was surprised that his Humvee's
   fender didn't have so much as a scratch, let alone a dent.

This is actually an implicit three-way comparison, which is
always in the order:

   what actually is (This is implied, or the sentence subject.)
   small alternative
   big alternative

Neither comparison actually is the case, and are sequenced to
rank them in an ascending order.  This actually has the effect of
making the actual result seem at least as "big" as the larger
alternative.


"Try and do X".  This is a common error -- so widespread that
it'll probably enter established usage in a couple of decades
when the authorities finally throw up their hands and declare it
a lost cause.  Until then, though, you should employ the correct
usage:  "try to do X".  One way to remember this is that "try and
verb" literally means doing two different things -- trying and
verbing, and they are separate from each other.  On the other
hand, "try to verb" means you are making an attempt at verbing 
but uncertain of your success at doing so.

I should note that I'm inclined to allow this confusion in 
dialogue -- and dialogue *only* -- as part of "eye dialect" 
(q.v.).  However, it should never appear in the narrative voice.


"inasmuch"/"insofar" (right) vs "inasfar" (wrong) and using them.


"Moreso".  Should be "more so".  In addition to its frequent 
misspelling as a single word, this phrase is prone to misuse and 
overuse.  Most of the time "more" will suffice.  I should note 
that the one-word form has gained credence as a proper usage in 
the United States over the past few decades, and the OED -- the 
platinum-iridium standard for dictionaries -- actually lists it 
as an American variant.

*However!*  It also appears that the one-word and two-word forms
are starting to diverge grammatically -- basically, they are
beginning to have slightly different meanings and functions.  If
it's really a concern for you, you might want to check out this
article:  http://grammarist.com/usage/moreso/


"None is" vs. "None are".  There is a persistent myth that "none"
is always singular.  It is not.  It can be used as either "not 
one" or "not any"; the former is singular, the latter is plural.
You really need to be guided by the context and your intent, but
it's probably safe to say that most of the time if you think it
should take the plural, you're likely right.


xx.  Then/Than

This is a distressingly common confusion.  I am constantly coming 
across the first misused for the second.  For the record:

   "Then" (with an "E") is an adverb designating a time relative 
   to the speaker or the concepts he's discussing.

   "Than" (with an "A") is a word indicating a comparison or a
   contrast between two objects or concepts. 

An example of their proper use:

"Better dead than Red" is a sentiment from the 1950s and 1960s 
indicating a political preference, the one instead of the other.
 
"Better dead then Red" indicates the order in which you'd like to 
be *both*.






xx.  That/Which/Who

(( "A person that visited" <- wrong
   "A person who visited" <- right

With people, only "who" is used in this role, and "who" is only
ever used for people; don't use "that" or "which", which are
solely for non-sapient entities -- anything from rocks to
animals.))



xx.  Its/It's and Whose/Who's

The difference between "its" and "it's" is the source of a lot of
confusion, and judging by how often the wrong usage shows up even
in professional publications these days, that confusion is
growing.  The distinction is very simple:

     "Its" is the possessive.  It is the only possessive which
     does *not* use an apostrophe.  The punning mnemonic "its -- 
     the exception" may help in remembering when to use it.

     "It's" is a contraction, and *only* a contraction.  It
     stands for "it is", "it has", "it was" or other similar
     conjugations.

And just for the record, there is no such word as "its'".

There doesn't seem to be as much confusion about "whose" and
"who's", but these words are also not used quite as much.  The
distinction is much the same:

     "Whose" is a possessive:  "Whose poison lollipop is this?"
     It asks a question of ownership.

     "Who's" is a contraction, standing for "who is", "who has",
     and "who was".  It's a pronoun plus a verb.  "Who's in 
     charge here?"



xx.  Verb Tenses

Too many fan writers have only a primitive grasp of verb tenses.
Although some have a vague idea of what auxiliary verbs can do,
many seem to be stuck with three basic tenses -- a kind of
generic past, present and future -- that they use for
*everything* regardless of the shades of meaning they are trying
to convey.

Quite frankly, even though people can and do speak that way and
still make themselves understood, it just doesn't work for good
writing.  This is one of those language mechanics that as an 
author you *must* master, because the use of verb tenses can make 
or break your narrative.  The difference between, say, the simple 
past tense and the past perfect can completely change the meaning 
of a sentence -- and the entire direction of your plot, if you 
are careless.

Depending on whom you consult, English has at a minimum some
*thirty-two* different verb tenses, each one denoting a
different -- often subtly so -- relationship between the action
taken, when it happened and for how long.  (I didn't believe it
either when I learned that while researching for this section,
but trust me on this.)

Now don't panic.  You don't need to know all thirty-two-plus verb
tenses.  *I* certainly don't.  For almost all purposes, you
really only need a basic set of nine tenses:

   Simple Present: They talk
   Present Perfect: They have talked
   Present Progressive:  They are talking
   Simple Past: They talked
   Past Perfect: They had talked
   Past Progressive: They were talking
   Future: They will talk
   Future Perfect: They will have talked
   Future Progressive: They will be talking

Here's a quick summary of their usage.  I should note that there
are a few mentions of the "past participle" and "present 
participle" below.  That's just formal grammar-speak.  The past
participle is the form of the verb that ends with "-ed" 
("walked", "interrogated", etc.) or an irregular equivalent 
("ran", "flew", "ate/eaten", etc.).  The present participle is 
the "-ing" form ("walking", "eating", "skateboarding").

   Simple Present:  Describes an action or situation which is
   happening right now ("I exist").  It is also used for
   unchanging conditions ("Space is big"), recurring or cyclic
   actions ("Every four years we elect a president") or to
   express a widespread truth ("'Au' is the chemical symbol for
   gold").

   Present Perfect:  Describes an action which began in the past
   but which is either still going on ("It has rained since this
   morning"), or has an effect which itself is still happening
   even if the action which caused it has stopped ("The ground
   has been wet ever since it rained last night.").  It's formed 
   with a Simple Present tense form of "to have" plus the past 
   participle of the verb. 
   
   Present Progressive:  Describes an ongoing action that is
   happening at the same time the statement is written or spoken
   ("The chef is making me a pizza").  It's formed by using "am",
   "is" or "are" with the verb's present participle (the form
   ending in "-ing").  A lot of people use this tense thinking
   it's the same as the Simple Present; it's not, although the 
   distinction can sometimes be subtle.  

   Simple Past:  Describes an action that began and ended in the
   past, and has no effects that continue ("I ate lunch").

   Past Perfect:  Describes a completed action in the past, which
   took place before another completed action in the past ("I had
   eaten a big snack before I ate lunch, so I wasn't that
   hungry").  Similar to the Present Perfect, it's formed with
   the Simple Past tense of "to have" plus the verb's past 
   participle.

   Past Progressive:  Describes a past action which was happening
   when another action occurred ("I was eating my lunch when I
   had to answer my cell phone").  It's formed by using "was" or
   "were" with the present participle.

   Future:  Describes an action which will take place in the
   future, but hasn't started yet ("I will watch TV tonight").

   Future Perfect:  Describes an action which will have been been
   completed by a specific point in the future ("By the time I
   die, I will have watched thousands of hours of TV").  And yes,
   as you've probably guessed, you form it with a Future tense
   form of "to have" with the verb's past participle.  

   Future Progressive:  Describes an ongoing or continuous action
   that will take place in the future ("I will be staying at my
   aunt's place next month").  It's formed by combining "will be"
   or "shall be" with the present participle.

If you think about it, you'll probably realize that while you may
not have known their *names*, you already use all these tenses 
(and several more!) in your everyday speech.  The challenge is 
*recognizing* that you're using them and why, using them 
*correctly*, and transferring that knowledge into your written 
work -- rather than limiting yourself to just a few overused and
over-simplified tenses.

For more information, you may want to check out these and other
web pages (active as of September 2013):

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/601/01/
http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/grammar/tenses.html
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/sequence.htm




xx.  The Subjunctive Mood and How To Use It

This is another of those specialized bits of grammar that seem to
be vanishing from the English language, mostly because I don't
think it's being taught any more -- at least not before the
college level -- and so few people even know to use it that it's
not learned by example like so much of the rest of the language
is.

First off, a definition:  a "mood" is a form of a verb that lets
you indicate an attitude toward the subject on which you are
speaking.  It's both less than a tense, and more -- mood can
modify any tense, but it doesn't change the tense itself.
Different languages have different numbers of moods, with a wide
variety of purposes; English, depending on the authority you
cite, has either two, three or four:

   * Indicative (Which is just the usual way of using verbs.)
   * Infinitive (According to some sources.  This is the basic
     "unconjugated" form of the verb, usually prefaced by "to":
     "to be", "to run", "to live".  The past and present
     participles -- verbs ending in "-ed" and "-ing", or their
     irregular equivalents -- are also infinitives.  These are
     not "fully-functioning" verbs, and in fact can be used as
     nouns or adjectives.  Note that many English texts,
     particularly in elementary school, list the infinitive as a 
     tense, or at least *with* the tenses.)
   * Imperative (Which is the "command mode" of a verb:  "Be
     here", "Don't smoke", "Run away!"  Just as with the
     infinitive, many texts list the imperative as a tense and
     not a mood.)

and finally,

   * Subjunctive (which this section is about)

The subjunctive mood is used when you are expressing a wish or a 
conditional based on something that is contrary to fact.  Its
purpose is to flag the false thing as false by the use of a
different form of the verb in the part of the sentence that
describes it.

Basically, you use the subjunctive if you're writing an "if/then"
kind of sentence where the "if" part is something that didn't or
won't happen, and the "then" part includes the words "would" or
"could".  In such a case, the "if" clause uses the subjunctive
mood for its verb:

   If you were someone else, you would have had a different
      career.
   I could have gone to Europe if I had won the lottery.

The verb "were" used in the place of "was" often indicates the 
use of the subjunctive:

   I would not say such things if I were you.
   If she were asleep, then she would be snoring.

There's one other use of the subjunctive -- when you're expressing 
a wish, the verb "may" is used to form the subjunctive:

   May tidings of joy and good cheer come to you all year 'round.
   May you have a happy birthday.

(If you think about it, it's kind of sad that the subjunctive is
used for this type of thing, because it implicitly acknowledges
that the wish almost certainly won't come true.)

As always, there's also an exception:  Don't use the subjunctive
after "ask if" or "wonder if".

   Wrong:  He wondered if he were strange.
   Right:  He wondered if he was strange.

The reason for this is that the subjunctive marks the use of a
known false premise as though it were true, in order to explore
a consequence that would have occurred as a result of it being
true.  In this exception, the premise is not *known* to be false;
its truth is being questioned or pondered, and no consequence is
usually explored.

As I noted above, this is one of those things which are starting
to disappear from the language; speakers of Modern English,
particularly Americans, tend to stay in the indicative mood 
almost all of the time, using a kind of "false subjunctive" built 
with auxiliary verbs when they absolutely have to:

    If we should meet them, we shall fight.
    If we meet them, we will fight.  (Very American.)
    Have a happy birthday!

Now, this "false subjunctive" is just fine for "Eye Dialect" (see 
above) and other informal speech from your characters.  But you 
should keep it out of your narrative voice and other more formal 
writing.  Help keep the subjunctive mood alive by making sure 
your narrative voice uses it, and uses it properly.





xx.  Antecedents

((antecedent disagreement))











xx.  Scene Breaks


((Illuminatus-itis: The tendency to scene break without any clue to
the reader, so the poor reader can be 6-10 lines into a new scene
without noticing it. Named for the work which foisted this style on
us first.))

Fanfiction.net can accidentally make this happen for too many
authors with the way it deletes just about anything a writer
might use to separate scenes -- which unfortunately forces
people into actually writing things like "//scene break//" where
they should be able to get by with a horizontal rule or a few
asterisks centered on the line.  But outside of ff.net's bizarre
restrictions, no author should do such a thing.


((Telegraphing flashbacks, and other unorthodox scene boundaries))


It's common in post-modernism, comedies and postmodern comedies 
to draw attention to such devices as a fade to black or a wavy
transition to a flashback scene.  That doesn't mean you should do
it, too.  Unless one of the points of your story is to draw
attention to such devices for some reason, you should handle 
things like flashbacks subtly.  Set them off in some way -- 
italics are common in professionally-typeset works, and whatever
convention you might use to denote major scene transitions would
also work  -- and as in so many other things let the context 
inform your reader.  Ending a scene with a line like "Darby 
closed his eyes and thought back to the day he met Wanda" then 
making the next scene visually different from its predecessor is 
far more effective and professional than actually putting the 
word "Flashback" at the top of the next scene.

Although a header simply stating something like "Eighteen months
earlier..." can work as well.

...

While it's not uncommon for scene boundaries to have date/time
and location headers, do not render times in terms relative to
the structure of the story itself.  What I mean is, don't say 
something like, "Ten minutes after the last scene".  Reminding 
your reader that they're reading something by drawing attention
to a structural element like a scene is a good way to damage 
their Willing Suspension of Disbelief.  Instead, just say, "Ten 
minutes later".


((Linebreak-ism: The tendency to inflict new lines at seemingly
random moments.}}


xx.  Sentences

To look at some people's stories, you would think they've never 
*read* anything before in their lives; or if they have, they've 
never noticed that there's a difference between the way one 
speaks and the way one writes.

In speech, you can get away with a lot -- broken and fragmentary
sentences, bad grammar, and rambling, to name a few things -- 
that you simply cannot do while writing.  


((run-ons.  hanging clauses.  Fragments.))






xx.  Paragraphs

Some writers never seem to grasp the need for paragraphs.  I have
seen stories of *all* sizes that were written as single massive
blocks of text -- and not because of an accident of or bug in 
formatting.  It should come as no surprise that such stories are 
immediately subject to the "too long; didn't read" effect; walls 
of text are hard on the eyes and tend to discourage readers from 
even making an effort to read them.  So, the first rule of
paragraphs is, you need more than one.

Paragraph breaks should happen pretty much organically.  In
conversations, every time the speaker changes, you should have a
new paragraph.  If someone does something nonverbal, and then a
second person begins talking, start a new paragraph for the new
person.  (The reverse is also true -- if someone is talking and
another person replies nonverbally, or starts a verbal reply with
a nonverbal action, begin a new paragraph for the second person.)  
If you are writing straight prose (such as exposition or 
descriptions), every time your focus or topic shifts, start a new
paragraph.  In writing dialogue or first-person narration, you 
will probably also want a new paragraph any time the speaker 
would pause longer than he would need to take a breath.

Remember those elementary school composition classes:  each
paragraph should be about its own topic, and ideally should have
a subject sentence which the rest of the sentences in the
paragraph support.  Now that rule was more for writing term 
papers and reports, but even if the rules are more lax for 
fiction, they still apply.  Just understand that a "topic" here 
is a very broad concept, and the subject of the narrative doesn't 
have to change very much at all to merit the start of a new 
paragraph.

Now admittedly, there is a lot of room for personal judgment and
style here, but a good rule of thumb -- the first-and-a-half
rule of paragraphs, if you like -- is that it's far, far better
to have too *many* paragraphs than too *few*.

The second rule of paragraphs is, variety in size is good.  Two
dozen five-sentence paragraphs in a row is boring.  A hundred is
inviting eyestrain and "tl;dr" again.  For both visual appeal and
to keep your reader interested, vary the number (and length!) of
sentences in each paragraph.

Now, this should happen more or less naturally as a result of
making paragraph breaks to begin with -- some things you'll want
to say more about than others, and if you've got a good ear for
it dialogue should work itself out -- but it's still something to
be aware of as you're writing.  If you find your paragraphs are
all coming out about the same size, you may want to step back and
take a look at what you're doing -- and see if there's something
you should be doing differently.

In regards specifically to dialogue, unless a character is
literally giving a speech, it will be rare for them to ever speak
in long paragraphs.  Most "realistic" dialogue tends to be made
up of exchanges of short, brisk sentences; few people say more
than a couple sentences at a time unless they are answering 
questions (like at a press conference) or explaining something.

(When you do happen to write realistic dialogue that spans two or
more paragraphs, there is a special punctuation rule to remember:
*Do not* put a quotation mark on the end of the first paragraph,
but *do* put one on the beginning of the second.  Leaving the
end quote off the previous paragraph indicates that the next
paragraph is a continuation and not the start of another
speaker's dialogue.)

It's also very easy to write sentences too long or convoluted
for anyone to ever actually *say*.  It's a good idea to read your 
dialogue out loud to see if it actually sounds like a real person 
said it -- or *could* say it.  This will frequently help with the 
paragraph size issue as well.

To be honest, this is an easy lesson; once you've gotten a feel
for how and when to start new paragraphs, it will become second
nature to you with very little time and practice.  And if you got
through high school English with a decent grade, you probably
know this already.  But some writers definitely need to learn (or 
re-learn) the lesson.


xx.  Chapter Size

Despite what Dan Brown does in "The Da Vinci Code" and his other
works, ten paragraphs do *not* a chapter make.  Ten paragraphs
are barely enough for a *scene*, and under most circumstances 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.

The single worst case of this I have ever seen was in "Broken
Families" by Zira, a "Buffy"/"Harry Potter" crossover to be found 
on Twisting The Hellmouth.  Not only does she spread what should 
be the contents of a reasonably-sized prologue over *four* 
separate "chapters", one of those so-called "chapters" is *two 
paragraphs totaling less than 75 words*!  That's not writing, 
that's jotting down a note!

Naturally, this advice does not apply to short stories, only to
multi-installment epics.  As the existence of the drabble, the
Feghoot, and other short and short-short formats testify, a one-
shot can be any size that suits the needs of the story it's
telling.  But if you're writing something that's going to have
more than one chapter, you'd damned well better make sure those
chapters have some substance to them.



xx.  The Eternal Now

Medieval 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 in
clothing styles that were contemporary to the artists.
Shakespeare wrote ancient Rome as if it were Elizabethan-era
Italy, with chiming clocks and all manner of other anachronisms.

And fanfic writers do things like starting Harry Potter's story
in 2015 or setting "Ranma 1/2" in 2006.

No.

These stories are *period* pieces, even if the period is only a
few years ago.  JK Rowling, for instance, has made it expressly 
clear that Harry Potter's first year at Hogwarts -- despite some 
bizarre irregularities in how she handles the calendar -- was 
1991-1992.  Manga "Ranma" takes place around 1989, although it 
seems to go through that year at least twice.  Anime "Ranma" 
dates itself with a shot of a calendar as 1992, although like the 
manga it seems to loop through that year at least a couple of 
times.  "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" very explicitly takes place 
between 1996 and 2002, the years it was broadcast.

Trying to write them as if they were taking place right now
(relative to the writer) can actually spoil the atmosphere and
flavor of some properties.


((case in point:  the cell phone era makes it almost impossible
to put characters in serious jeopardy -- unless the author goes
through hoops to take their cell phones away or strand them far
away from a cell tower.  Otherwise, the solution to almost any
problem is to call a friend or 911, or use your GPS, or consult
Google.  And satellite phones are even worse, because unless you
go underground you can't get out of the coverage zone.  Moving
some older properties into the Now removes some or many of their
threats -- or forces the writer to mutate them, possibly
unrecognizably.  You couldn't do Indiana Jones-style stories set
today, for instance.))


This extends more generally to any kind of fiction writing, I
might note.  If a person didn't live through the period in which
he's writing, and it's not one whose historical details are well
known to him, he's likely to make the unconscious assumption that
it was just like right now, only with the calendar dates set to
thirty years ago or so.  A common example:  I've read a few
stories set in the 1970s written by people born in or after that
decade, in which the character(s) routinely use cell phones,
personal computers and VCRs, and go to video stores to rent
movies.

Nope.

The very concept of a personal computer -- that is, a computer
that didn't occupy an entire room and serve the needs of a good-
sized organization -- had barely manifested in 1977 with the
Altair III, which had to be hand-built by its owner (partly out
of plywood!), was programmed with front-panel switches, and gave
its results with blinking lights.  It wasn't until 1980 that IBM
slapped together a bunch of off-the-shelf parts and called it
"the IBM Personal Computer", creating what we know now as the
"standard" PC architecture.

VCRs only made their appearance at the end of the 1970s, and then
they were huge, expensive machines, costing the equivalent of
*tens of thousands* of dollars in today's economy.  And while by
1984 video stores had appeared, they were few and far between,
and they were all mom-and-pop affairs; it wouldn't be until the
end of the 1980s that the first national chains started
appearing.  And they started *disappearing* in the 2010s, put out 
of business by video streaming over the Net.

The lesson here is don't assume the past was just like the
present, only in sepia-tone with funny clothes.

(("What Do You Want?" by Polenicus, written starting in 2017, is a 
"Ranma" story but gives Nabiki a smart phone.  "Ranma" takes place 
in 1989 (or '92, for anime), just at the beginning of the digital 
cell phone age.  Smart phones weren't even around in *2009*, let 
alone 1992.))

(( It should also be noted that many fandoms are set canonically
in a sort of "Eternal Now", especially the more successful ones
that go on and on without having the characters 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-life events that occurred 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
both 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 anachronisms. 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 different time than canon indicates then that is
certainly a good excuse and not an unnecessary anachronism. ))


(( 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 one year ahead of him and both still in high school and so
on. It is notable in the manga that New Year's 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 experiencing 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 (early 2000
or so) and the follow-up TV series takes place a specific number
of years later.  Harry Potter, as you said, takes place over the
course of seven years starting 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 contemporary times because the existence of GPS and
hypersonic jets makes a lot of the "exotic travel to unexplored
lands" aspect suspect. ))





xx.  The "Burly Detective" Syndrome

> And a couple of bad writing tricks (sorry in advance if the tone is harsh,
> I hate these with a passion):
>
> *Using a character description, instead of the character name.  It just
> makes the narrative sound like a police blotter.  Using "the red-haired
> girl" when it should be obvious to the reader that the person speaking is
> girl-type Ranma is so very annoying.


((The burly detective syndrome gone wrong: Seen a *lot* in BtVS
fiction. Instead of just leaving it at 'the red-headed witch',
writers go further and use silly descriptors like 'the former
president of the We-Hate-Cordelia Club'. ))


xx.  Tomato Surprise

The device of artificially imposing mystery or suspense upon a
reader by deliberately hiding a detail -- usually one obvious to 
anyone *inside* the story, the knowledge of which would 
completely obviate the entire plot -- until its unveiling at the
end of the story.  So named by George Scithers, the editor-in-
chief at the time of "Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine", in his 
1980-vintage notes for new writers, when he gave as an example 
hiding the fact that the narrator was in fact a giant tomato.

This is not always a bad device -- a couple of classic "Twilight
Zone" episodes are built around the Tomato Surprise, and execute
it masterfully.  But it's very easy for an inexperienced writer 
to bungle it and turn the reveal into a disappointment that 
leaves the reader feeling cheated.



xx.  Parentheses

   "If sometimes you can't hear me, it's because I'm speaking in
   parentheses."  -- comedian Stephen Wright

Don't use them.

At all.

They should never appear in dialogue.  Ever.  Do you ever think
of anything you say as appearing in parentheses?  Neither should
your characters, and you should respect their wishes.  If you
need to set off a parenthetical phrase, use long dashes ("--" in
pure ASCII, or the more appropriate "m dash") instead.

Parentheses should appear rarely, if at all, in narration.  Never
is better, but there is that rare, rare instance where it might
be necessary.  Even so, try to avoid it.


xx.  Exclamation Points

   Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.
   -- Terry Pratchett, in "Reaper Man"

   Cut out all those exclamation marks.  An exclamation mark
   is like laughing at your own joke.  -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

I am of the opinion that there's a Law of Conservation of
Excitement when it comes to exclamation points:

   (The number of exclamation points in a story) times
   (how much impact each one has) equals a constant.

In other words, the more exclamation points you use, the less
each one means to the reader.  Use too many, and they all mean
*nothing*.  Your reader will then ignore any excitement or
tension you want the points to convey.

As a result, use them sparingly, and then only in dialogue.
*One*, and only *one*, exclamation point should end any excited
speech -- more than one looks amateurish.  (Similarly, try to
avoid compound punctuation like "?!", aka the "interrobang".  
It's nonstandard and isn't used in proper writing, the title of 
the second "Negima" anime notwithstanding.)

Don't use exclamation points in the narrative voice.  Exception:
if the narrator's a character in the story who's telling the
story to the reader, you can violate this rule, but again, do so
sparingly.

Don't end every sentence in an exclamation point -- not only will
you dilute the impact of *all* the exclamation points in your
story, nobody's *ever* that excited, and your dialogue will end
up looking like it came out of a Silver Age comic book.  (Of
course, if you have a character whose shtick is to sound like 
he's from a Silver Age comic book, then go for it.)


xx.  Question Marks

Use question marks only to terminate actual questions.  Sentences
which just *describe* or *imply* a question being asked do *not*
take a question mark on the end, unless the actual question is
part of them, and actually *ends* the sentence.

   Wrong:  Terry gave Wiggins a questioning look?
   Right:  Terry gave Wiggins a questioning look.

If you're ever in doubt, remember that a question mark indicates
a rising tone at the end of a sentence when it is read out loud.
Do just that -- and if the sentence sounds wrong read that way,
then it shouldn't get a question mark.

Exception:  It's not uncommon in spoken English -- *especially*
where there's a strong Jewish/Yiddish influence in the local
patterns of speech, like in New York City -- to make a question
out of a statement just by adding a rising inflection to the end
of the sentence (something called "uptalk").  So in dialogue --
and only in dialogue -- you can get away with this.  Still, do
it sparingly, or your characters might all end up sounding like
yentas or alterkockers.


xx.  Hyphens and Hyphenated Phrases

When identifying animate objects by their age, hyphenate the
phrase; when specifying an age, do not:

   Our two-year-olds were running about the house.
   Our children are two years old.

pluralizing hyphenated phrases
Not always consistent, but basically, find the noun in the
phrase, pluralize that rather than the entire phrase:

   passers-by
   brothers-in-law

Exceptions:  where the phrase as a whole has due to age or 
erosion been reduced to effectively a single "word".  
"Jack-in-the-boxes", for instance, instead of "jacks-in-the-box".



xx.  Plurals

No apostrophes.  Never.  Never never never.  Apostrophes are for
contractions and possessives.  Never for plurals.  Ever.

Never.

And don't do it, either.

Are we clear?


xx.  Story Killers

((Over-large casts. Harems that deserve their own zip code.
- Which is either a special case of "over-large casts", or a
specimen of "Negima!" fanfiction.  Jumping the shark.  ))





xx.  The Eight Deadly Words

"I don't care what happens to these people."

https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Eight_Deadly_Words






xx.  Gratuitous Japanese

When writing anime fanfic, fan authors who've spent the time
necessary to master even a few words of Japanese often feel
compelled to share what they know with their readers.  Sometimes
this works.  Adding honorific suffixes to names is fine (and the
most common ones are actually well-known these days, if the
scripting of licensed anime dubs is any indication).  The
occasional exclamation like "Gomen" or "Itai!" is less fine but
still understandable.  Somewhat larger amounts of Japanese whose
meaning can be derived from context, or which are accompanied by
a glossary, are marginally acceptable, although in my opinion
they make a story annoyingly difficult to read enjoyably.

What *definitely* doesn't work are those fics which use a *lot*
of Japanese and don't have a glossary.  A particularly egregious
example of this would be the classic and otherwise very amusing
"Narrabundah 1/2" by Urac "Ratbat" Sigma, where you not only have
to struggle through vast amounts of unfootnoted Japanese, you
also have to deal with transcribed Scots and Welsh accents,
obscure Anzac slang, and some just outright bizarre character
speech patterns, all of it in obsolete script format.

My advice?  A very little Japanese is good for flavor, especially
that which is known to your audience already, or which can be
grokked from context.  But when deciding what to put into a fic,
err on the side of caution and ignorance, even if you plan on
appending a glossary.  If you keep forcing your reader to stop
reading to look up a word, you're not going to maintain the flow
of the story, and you may even drive him away from the story
entirely.  Sometimes it's unavoidable, because the equivalent
term just doesn't exist in English, or at least not as compactly
(e.g. "genki").  Even in these cases it should be used sparingly.
Japanese vocabulary is like salt in a stew.  A little makes it
tasty, but a lot will make it inedible.

While I have you, some specific issues with fan-usage of
Japanese:

* Japanese sibling terminology.  This is one bit of gratuitous
  Japanese I don't normally mind, as I find it far more
  euphonious than the English equivalents.  But every once in a
  while I come across an author who doesn't know that "-nee-" (as
  in "oneesan") means "elder sister" *only*, and uses it
  indiscriminately for older and younger alike.  That really
  messes up my willing suspension of disbelief.  I've also seen
  "-nii-" for "elder brother" get similarly misused, but not
  nearly as often, for some reason.

  For the record, for those who don't know, the proper words are:

     younger sister: imouto
     younger brother: ototo

  (Strictly speaking, if I'm to be consistent in my choice of
  Romanization schemes "ototo" should be "otouto".  But I find
  the former more pleasing to the eye than the latter.  Sue me.)

  I should also note that these words are not actually used the
  way "-nee-" and "-nii-" are.  Older siblings tend to call
  younger siblings by name rather than "title", which is probably
  why they are so unfamiliar; any place where "younger sister/
  brother" is used in Japanese is almost always going to be a
  place where direct translation into English is the best choice.

* Confusing "yatta" and "yatai".  "Yatta" means "hooray!" and
  "yatai" means "food vendor's cart".  I've also seen the
  confused mixed form "yattai", but the online Japanese-English
  dictionary that I use actually seemed to recognize that as a
  form of "yatai", so it may just be a variant transliteration.
  I doubt the author who used it had intentionally chosen it on
  those grounds, though.

* Saki vs. sake.  "Saki" is either a Steel Angel with an
  attraction to pink-haired androids named Kurumi, or the pen
  name of early 20th-Century British humorist and author H.H.
  Munro. "Sake" is an alcoholic beverage made from rice.

  Guess which one is sold in bottles in Japan.

  Guess which one some fan writers try to have people drink.

  Perhaps knowing the proper pronunciations might act as a
  mnemonic aid -- "saki" ("sockee") vs. "sake" ("sahkay").

* "Senshi".  This word does *not* mean "teen-aged girl in a 
  miniskirt who is a magical defender of love and justice".  It 
  means "soldier" or "warrior", along with a host of similar 
  concepts.  Referring to the core cast of "Sailor Moon" as "The 
  Senshi" is thus borderline incorrect -- it's calling them "The 
  Soldiers".  This is why they're explicitly called "The Sailor 
  Senshi" in the source material -- to distinguish them from 
  *other* soldiers and warriors.

     "I agree with Haruka-papa," Hotaru added quietly. "She isn't
     a threat, but she isn't 'normal' either." She frowned. "Her
     aura feels like Michiru-mama and Haruka-papa's auras."

     Minako lifted her head. "Like Senshi?" she asked.

     Hotaru shook her head. "No. Like - I don't know how to
     describe it. Like someone prepared to - no, who /expects/ to
     endure pain. Someone who works for the best but expects to
     pay for it, and the payment is going to hurt forever. I
     think that's what I mean. I don't know the word I'm looking
     for -"

     "It's 'warrior', Hotaru-chan."

     (from Raye Johnson's excellent, if incomplete, story "A
     Different Path")

     "Ukyou sum up very nicely." Shampoo nodded. "But Shampoo not
     really Senshi. Shampoo is Amazon warrior and Champion, but
     is no really Senshi."

     (from Gregg "Metroanime" Sharp's incomplete "Featherbrite's
     Tale")

   Sadly, that means passages like these, which draw some kind of
   distinction between the two, are utter nonsense even if the
   characters *aren't* speaking Japanese.  And if they *are*, it
   just gets ridiculous:  "She's not a soldier, she's a soldier."

* "Pocky" is a trademark.  It is *not* a generic, like "gum" or
  "chocolate", and should always be capitalized, just like "Ford"
  or "Cheerios".

* The Japanese School Year.  People tend to think that their
  local customs are universal -- and Americans, deserved or not,
  have a particularly bad reputation for this habit.  It is no
  surprise, then, that American fanfic writers have a tendency,
  based on equal parts assumption and ignorance, to apply
  American/Western details to Japanese settings.  Because so much
  anime revolves around high school-aged characters, the most
  common of these is the Western school year.

  The Western school year was designed to facilitate the needs of
  a largely agricultural society which required the family's
  extra help -- i.e., children -- in the fields during the summer
  and the harvest afterward.  (Thus the summer break, which only
  became summer *vacation* in the 20th Century.)

  This was never the case in Japan, which applied a school
  schedule that was arranged according to different needs.
  Consequently, the Japanese school year starts and ends in the
  Spring, and has no single season-long block of break time;
  instead, smaller breaks are scattered throughout the year.

  It goes something like this:

     5 April (approx.):  Start of the academic year
     29 April-5 May:  Golden Week (A set of national holidays
        all near each other, celebrated as a big block)
     May:  Midterms, plus a school trip of 3-4 days for some
        grades
     July:  First term finals
     19 July (approx.):  First term ends
     August:  Summer holiday
     1 September (approx.):  Start of second term
     October:  Midterms, culture festival
     December:  Second term finals
     23 December (approx.):  Second term ends
     8 January (approx.):  Start of third term
     February:  End of year tests, university entrance exams
     March:  Graduation ceremonies
     25 March (approx.):  End of year ceremony

  There's quite a bit more to the typical academic year than
  this, and some schools hold their trips and festivals at other
  times, but it's good enough for a basic overview.  If you need
  more detail for your story, well, Google is your friend.

* The Japanese School Day usually consists of six periods with 
  the teachers moving from classroom to classroom, while the 
  students stay put.




xx.  English Honorifics For Royalty

   "I'm not your Grace, I'm your Elsie!"  -- Monty Python

Normally, this would be too esoteric a topic to include in a
general writers' guide, but even the most cursory perusal of the
properties inspiring fan writing out there will turn up a
disproportionate number of kings, queens, princes, princesses
and other aristocratic types.  Just in case you're writing
something that includes one of these, here's the way to address
them.

   Emperor/ess - Imperial Majesty
   King/Queen - Highness/Royal Highness (England pre-1519),
                Grace (pre-1519), Majesty (1519 and after)
   Prince/ess - Royal Highness
   Grand Duke/Duchess - Highness
   Duke/Duchess - Highness, Grace

   Pope - Holiness
   Cardinal - Eminence
   Archbishop, Bishop - Grace

Note that this is a generalization/simplification of the British
system, which is probably appropriate since most fairy tale-
flavored works are likely inspired by British usage and wouldn't
necessarily be point-for-point accurate themselves.  Likewise,
the ecclesiastical honorifics mostly reflect Anglican/Catholic 
usage.

If you need absolute real-world accuracy, or a lot more shades of
usage, Wikipedia has a rather involved cluster of pages on the
various titles and honorifics that go into excruciating detail.



xx.  Special Advice for "Harry Potter" fiction:

Several bits of vocabulary specific to the "Harry Potter" books
apparently give both fan authors and their spellcheckers fits.
Allow me to provide the following ever-so-brief guide:

* The word for Wizarding teleportation is "apparition", with an
  "I" as the third vowel, not "apparation" with an "A".  This is
  particularly confusing to many fans and fan writers because
  the verb form is "apparate" with an "A".  Why Rowling chose to
  make this distinction, the world may never know.

* The terms for the Wizarding mental arts are "occlumency" and
  "legilimency", not "occlumancy" and "legilimancy".

  "-mancy" is a suffix meaning a kind of divination or augury,
  such as in "oneiromancy" (dream interpretation), "cartomancy"
  (Tarot-reading), and the original meaning of "necromancy",
  which was the practice of interrogating spirits of the dead for
  information not available to the living.

  The suffix "-mency" comes from the Latin word "mens", meaning
  "mind", which we can see in its original form in the spell
  incantation "legilimens".  It may help to know that "occlu-"
  comes from the same Latin root as the English word "occlude",
  meaning "to hide, to obscure", just as "legili-" comes from the
  same root as the English "legible", meaning "readable."  Thus 
  "legilimens" literally means "read the mind" and "occlumency" 
  means "the art of hiding the mind".

* Grimwald/Grimauld/Grimmald/Grimmauld Place.  This one trips up
  just about everybody, I've noticed.  The proper spelling is
  "Grimmauld".  (And as for the pronunciation, well, it's a grim
  old place, after all.)

* "Quidditch" has a "T" in it.  I'll let you figure out where.
  (Hint:  It's not at either end.)  If you absolutely must have a
  mnemonic, think "quidditch witch".  And after recently reading
  another fic, I suppose I should note that it has two "D"s in it,
  not two "T"s.

* "Acromantula," oddly enough, doesn't get misspelled as often as
  the others, possibly because it's unfamiliar enough that people
  go and check it.  If it helps, Rowling probably came up with it
  by putting the Latin root "acro-" (meaning "big" or "tall", as
  in "acrophobia" [fear of heights] or "acromegaly" [a genetic
  disorder similar in some ways to gigantism]) on the back end of
  "tarantula".

* "Parselmouth" is the ability to speak with snakes.
  "Parcelmouth" is the ability to speak with UPS shipments.
  Note that Harry has never encountered a UPS truck in canon.

* It's "The Department of Mysteries", not "The Department of
  Mysterious".

* It's the "Room of Requirement", singular, not "Requirements",
  plural.

* Mind control is accomplished by use of the "Imperius", not
  "Imperious"; the latter is an English adjective meaning "to act
  high-and-mighty".  You know, like Lucius Malfoy.
  
* Similarly, it's "obliviate", not "obliterate".  The latter 
  *will* remove memories, but does so by removing the head 
  they're in...  

* It's "horcrux", not "horocrux".

* Memories are viewed with a "pensieve", not a "pensive"; the
  latter just means "thoughtful".  This is, however, one of
  Rowling's puns that can trip up the unwary, and thus a pretty
  good candidate for a spellchecker barf.

* The thing in the closet is a "boggart", not a "bogart".  Unless
  your greatest fear is 1940s-era tough-guy Hollywood actors with
  a slight lisp.  Or a classmate hoarding a joint.  It's not a
  "bogard", either, unless you're frightened by street fighters.

* It's only if it's done incorrectly that it becomes a "Wrongski
  feint".  Otherwise it's "Wronski".

* As handsome as Draco's father may be, he's not Luscious.  He
  is, however, Lucius.

* And while we're on the topic of names, Hermione's middle name
  is "Jean", not "Jane".  "Jane" was a typo made in a published
  interview with J.K. Rowling, and since proliferated as false
  canon.

* Oh, and it's "Lockhart", not "Lockheart".  Despite the effects
  he had on girls.

* While JK Rowling has confirmed that James Potter and his
  friends did indeed call themselves "The Marauders", their map
  is "The Marauder's Map" -- *singular* "Marauder", not plural.
  
* Watch your spell-checker.  I've seen too many stories where 
  "auror" had been blindly auto-corrected into "aurora".

* For an appallingly complete guide to the unique language of the
  "Harry Potter" books that goes far beyond this little list, see
  "Potterwords" at the "Harry Potter Lexicon" website:
  http://www.hp-lexicon.org/help/potterwords.html

A few more general comments for "Harry Potter":

Rowling has confirmed that the Wizarding World never went metric.
Which I'm sure is a relief for American fic writers.

Note that at least in *Muggle* England, having red hair can get
you bullied, harassed or even beat up; for reasons that are
unfathomable to Americans, being a "ginger" in Great Britain will
subject you to much the same kind of prejudice that Jews used to
experience in the United States before World War II.  Given that
despite all the other things said about the Weasleys by pureblood
fanatics "ginger" never enters the picture until the final volume
of the series, it's entirely possible that this prejudice doesn't
exist in the Wizarding World, and would probably be just as
incomprehensible to most wizards as it is to Americans.  Even so,
it's still an interesting detail to remember if a Weasley ever
has to spend significant time in the Muggle world.  (Or even
*in*significant time -- the few minutes the trio were on the
street after fleeing the wedding in "Deathly Hallows" was long
enough for one Muggle to call Ron "ginger".)

If Professor McGonagall has an accent at all -- something that's
not at all supported by the novels, although it's present in the
films -- she would have a "burr", not a "brogue".  A "brogue" is
an *Irish* accent, while a "burr" is a Scots accent.

Azkaban is *not* located near the arctic circle, nor in the
Orkney Islands.  According to "Prisoner of Azkaban" chapter 19,
it is actually several days' quick-paced foot travel *south* of
Hogwarts, which most likely puts it on a latitude below Hadrian's
Wall and thus off the coast of some part of England proper.
According to Cornelius Fudge in "Half-Blood Prince", Azkaban's in
the North Sea, so it's probably somewhere not far from Newcastle-
upon-Tyne.

Dumbledore's obsession with "the Greater Good" (and his use of
the concept to justify any action or atrocity) is almost
completely fanon.  The phrase appears only once in the entire
series, and that's during Dumbledore's youthful infatuation with
Grindlewald and his philosophy.  If anything, Dumbledore's adult
career is an explicit *repudiation* of the idea that serving "the
Greater Good" excuses all excesses committed in its name.

Although Harry is small and skinny as a boy, he is (as unlikely
as it seems) *not* stunted in his growth by a poor diet or other
mistreatment by the Dursleys.  It is shown in "Order of the
Phoenix" that Harry is within an inch or so of his father's
height at the same age, if pensieve images are to be trusted.
(And Rowling's language is just vague enough that Harry might
actually be slightly *taller* than his fathser at that age.)
By "Half-Blood Prince" he's actually had enough of a growth spurt
that the narration makes a point of describing him as "tall".
(Though not as tall as Ron, who apparently could take a part-time
job as a telephone pole.)

Marietta Edgecombe did not have "SNEAK" marked on her forehead,
as so many fic writers think, but across her cheeks and nose.
The pustules forming the word aren't red, but *purple*.  She also
does not remember much of her betrayal, despite fics to the
contrary -- she was subtly and quietly obliviated by Kingsley
Shacklebolt in Dumbledore's office to protect Harry after the DA
was caught.  (I'm sure there's a seed for an interesting story
in there, with her wondering *why* she's marked and treated as a
pariah...)

Finally, try to avoid Dog Latin (putting Latin-like suffixes on
English words) when creating new spells.  Yes, Rowling got away
with things like "Riddikulus" and "Peskipiksi Nopestermi", but
that doesn't give *you* an excuse to use something like "Summonus
horsus".  (Unless you're intending to be silly or satirical, of
course...)  You don't have to get every declension or conjugation
perfect, but it's not that hard to find English-Latin
dictionaries on the Web.  Use them.  (Or English-Greek.  Or
Sanskrit.  Or Aramaic...  Not all of Rowling's spells use Latin,
why should yours?)  At the very least, give Google Translate a
go.



xx.  Special Advice for "Ranma" fiction:

Not many people are writing "Ranma 1/2" fanfiction these days --
not compared to the halcyon years from the middle 1990s to the 
early 2000s, when *everyone* did "Ranma" and vast new landscapes 
of story ideas were still there for the taking.  But just because 
those days are gone doesn't mean no one's still walking those 
landscapes, looking for a choice nugget (or lump of mud) that 
everyone else has overlooked.

For those few who are still writing "Ranma" fics, here's some
kibitzing just for you.

* The Tendo Dojo vs. the Tendo Home.  Far too many authors seem
  to have thought that "dojo" = "the house", or perhaps that the
  entire Tendo complex was the dojo.  No.  The dojo is very
  strictly defined -- it's the training hall, and only the
  training hall, a separate building off to one side, connected
  to the house only by a covered walkway, at least in the anime.
  Using "dojo" to mean *anything* inside the boundary wall other
  than the koi pond or the dirt underfoot is just *wrong*.  And
  when anime Ranma retreats to the roof, it is almost *always*
  the roof of the *house*, not the dojo, the Christmas party OVA
  notwithstanding.  (In the manga, he retreats to *trees* away
  from the Tendo home.)

  For an excellent and exhaustive resource to the layout and
  structure of the Tendo home and yard, check out the Tendo Home
  Project (http://andysearls.tripod.com/vhome/), where you can
  find a CGI "walk-thru" of the compound, as well as maps and
  illustrations.

* "Okonomiyaki".  You cannot imagine how many different times
  and ways that I've seen this word mangled.  And I don't care
  what Viz says.  It's not Japanese pizza.  It's Japanese
  *crepes*.  I *know*, as I've made both; they're practically the 
  same recipe at their cores.  All that really differs are the 
  fillings and when you add them.  And just as a reference,
  Japanese pizza is simply Western pizza with really ... *odd*
  stuff on it, like mayonnaise and corn (maize, for my British
  readers).

* Ranma's preferred style of shirt is called a "tang" -- yes,
  just like the instant orange-flavored beverage much beloved of
  astronauts, only with a lower-case "T".  It is not a "tong",
  which is a type of Chinese criminal organization, nor is it
  ever plural unless he's wearing more than one at once.

* "Nekohanten", not "Nekohatten".

* The colorful mace-like weapons that Shampoo uses are not
  "bonbori" -- that's the Japanese word for a kind of traditional
  paper lantern.  They're actually called "chui" or "sui" -- and
  I have no idea how the confusion first arose.  If you ever want
  to see what they look like in live action, check out the bar
  fight in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" -- one of the big
  guys is swinging an unpainted pair of them around.

* While Kuno hates his father, Kodachi does not, at least in the
  anime.  A late-season episode shows that she respects and even
  adores him, and he's perfectly willing to act "normally" (or as
  much as he can with that palm tree on his head) for her.

* On the subject of Kuno, he does *not* summon lightning when he
  invokes his self-given nickname of "Blue Thunder".  The only
  time this happened in either the manga or the anime was during
  his first meeting with Ranma, which took place *in a thunder-
  storm.*  The bolt that struck as he introduced himself was a
  dramatic one-time coincidence.

* "Nerima".  Not "Nermia".  It is not the land of the Nerms.
  Admittedly, this is probably a simple typo most of the time --
  it's an easy one to make.  Still, keep an eye out for it.

* And while we're on the topic:  Despite nearly a generation of 
  fanon, Nerima is *not* a haven of weirdness, known throughout 
  Tokyo as an open-air lunatic asylum, a mere visit to which is 
  tantamount to a legal declaration of suicidal intent.  Nerima 
  is in fact a very sedate middle-class area, which Takahashi 
  (and other mangaka) use as a *contrasting* background for all 
  the bizarre happenings in their stories.  Yes, eventually some 
  of the neighbors get used to the weirdness, but at first 
  people's eyes pop and they panic.

An interesting thought for those considering writing Ranma fic
still:  Taking the few dates we see in the manga/anime literally,
Ranma and his contemporaries would be in their forties today -- 
the same age Genma is supposed to be in the series.  What might 
they be up to?  And with whom?




III.  CRAFTING FICTION


1.  Planning

   Endings are hard.  Any chapped-ass monkey with a keyboard can
   poop out a beginning, but endings are impossible.  You try to
   tie up every loose end, but you never can.  The fans are 
   always gonna bitch.  There's always gonna be holes.  And 
   since it's the ending, it's all supposed to add up to 
   something. I'm telling you, they're a raging pain in the ass.
   -- "Chuck", in "Supernatural", Season 5 Episode 22: "Swan 
   Song" 

I won't ask how many times you've read a fic that *started*
great, but then petered out long before it looked like it was
going anywhere -- or worse, got halfway through and died just as
the "good stuff" was starting.  We've all seen *way* too many of
them.  For my part, it's one of the single most frustrating
experiences I have had in reading fanfiction.

Now sometimes this is because real life overtook the writer, and
despite their best intentions they simply cannot get back to the
project to finish it, or have lost the spark that drove it.
Other times a collaboration fell apart, or an experimental fic
failed to pan out.  And in a few heartbreaking instances, it was
because the author passed away.  (RIP Bobmin, Durandall, and so
many others...)

But in many other cases, possibly most other cases, it's because 
of a critical failure on the part of the writer:  the failure to 
actually *plan* their story.  They start with a cool idea, be it 
an unusual crossover or a weird "what if", and start writing.  
But that's all they have, and once they get that cool idea down 
onto paper or electrons, they flounder and lose direction, and 
the story stalls out.

There's a way to prevent this.

When you get that great inspiration, hold off a moment and
*think* before you write.  If you were reading a story that used
your idea, how would you like to see it *end*?  What kind of
climactic scene would make the best use of your idea?

Decide *that*, and you suddenly have a direction to write in.
Even if you don't plot anything else *at all* in between the
start and the end of the story, you now know your destination,
and whenever you get stuck, you've got that knowledge to help you
find a way out.

This can be a *substantial* aid in sustaining a story -- for
instance, author Stephen Donaldson has noted that the entirety of
his first trilogy of books, the infamous "Chronicles of Thomas
Covenant The Unbeliever", was driven by his vision of the final
confrontation between Covenant and Lord Foul.  That vision
carried Donaldson through literally thousands of pages -- nearly
*half* of a typical John Biles story! <grin>

In my own case, "Drunkard's Walk II" was driven by the face-off
between Doug and Quincy, which I had outlined and partially
written as far back as 1998.  Similarly, "Drunkard's Walk V" was
driven by *its* climactic sequence, which I had come up with
years before I began collaborating with Chris Angel on the story.

More thinking can provide even more help.  For crossovers, spend
time considering the way the casts will interact.  Who will like
each other?  Who will *dislike* whom, and why?  Will the villains
team up, and if so, will they ally sincerely, or try to backstab
each other?  Or will they consider each other an enemy, a
pretender, or an usurper?  Is one villain so bad he will convince
the other(s) to ally with the good guys?  Answering each one of
those questions, and the others that a moment's thought should
give you, will provide you with that much more material to write
and that much more help to carry you forward to your ending.


2.  Cohesion and Coherence (AKA More Planning)

When you set out to write a story, you should also decide
beforehand what *sort* of story it is.  By this I mean basically
genre (is it romance, SF/F, historical, espionage, film noir,
superhero, etc., or a blend of two or more?) and tone (is it
slapstick, humorous, serious, dark, or something else entirely?).
Of course, these elements may well be inherent in many ideas, but 
where they aren't, taking the time to think on them will prove
helpful.

Like having your ending in mind before you start helps you
direct your plot before you can lose your way, defining your
genre and tone will help you keep your story focused and coherent
as you get there.  Different genres have different conventions
and tropes which you can employ either as inspiration or directly
in your story; knowing *what* your chosen genre usually does in
certain situations will help you decide on what happens next in
*your* story.  For example, compare and contrast the different
typical outcomes of a girl being caught up in a sudden,
unexpected kiss in a Harlequin romance vs. an anime romantic
comedy vs. a tense psychological thriller.

Crossing and blending genres can often spur wildly innovative
storytelling.  Just look at things like "Bladerunner" (science
fiction + film noir), "Cast a Deadly Spell" (film noir + Cthulhu-
style cosmic horror), and "Firefly" (SF + Westerns).

(Once you've settled on your genre or genres, just be careful not
to *overuse* or rely entirely on those conventions -- that way
lies the unoriginal, cookie-cutter story that is exactly the same
as a million others.  Always try to do something a *little*
different even while writing within a strictly-defined genre such
as film noir.)

Similarly, tone will help you shape the depiction and
consequences of events in your plot.  The example comparison I
gave above is as much a function of tone -- in this case, serious
vs. humorous vs. tense -- as it is about genre.  A humorous
romance would have a different outcome from a Harlequin romance,
depending on the lead-up to the moment; and a darkly-themed anime
*won't* have its heroine pull out a mallet and smash the guy for
being a pervert. (Except, maybe, to have him end up laying in a
puddle of blood with a shattered skull...)  And a sudden kiss in
a thriller can be anything but romantic -- it could even be the
herald of terrible things to come...

Tone doesn't simply define light-vs-serious, though.  It operates
on more axes than that.  You can mix and match tones until you
come up with the right one for your story.  Perhaps you need to
work in a dark slapstick mode for your Regency-era political
thriller to work the way you envision it -- but once you make
that determination, *stick with it*!  Don't hop between genres
without any rhyme or reason, and without anything resembling an
actual point, and don't change your tone.  You'll end up
disorienting your readers.  A perfect example that actually got
published is John Ringo's "Ghost" -- which in the words of one of
my contributors can't decide if it's a military adventure novel, 
a political rant, or just plain smut (and not even very *good* 
smut), and hasn't got much of a plot, not to mention plot 
*points*.  Ugh.


3.  Evil Always Triumphs In The Middle

While we're on the topic of planning and plotting, this is an
important point:  your hero should *never* be guaranteed of 
winning until the final confrontation -- and only during the 
final moments of *that*.  Up until that point, the opposition 
should be *winning*.  Big time.  Because if the opposition 
*isn't* winning, why does your hero even *care*?


((cite "You Can't Thwart Phase One"
Intermediate small or large successes for hero, but nothing
so good it defeats the enemy.  Make the hero work for his
victory.))



4.  Keep Your Hero Off Balance

Still on the topic of plotting and planning:  your hero should
never have a complete picture of what's going on.  In fact, it's
better if he's critically *wrong* about something -- what the 
villain's plan is, what the villain's goals are, even *who* the 
villain really is -- all the way to the end.  A story is more
satisfying if the hero has to somehow figure out how to win when
all his plans are invalidated by what he discovers at the end
than it would be if the hero found out everything he needed to
know, made a plan, executed that plan, and won.  

Remember, the key dynamic to a good story is *struggle* on the 
part of your protagonists.  The villain should *always* be about
to win, and keeping the hero(es) in the dark about what, how, why
and *who* is one of the classic ways to arrange that.  Think of 
the 2017 "Wonder Woman" movie -- Mars was in plain sight all 
along, advancing his plans, but Diana had no idea he was even
*alive*, let alone puppetmastering things -- until the very end,
of course.



XX.  Willing Suspension of Disbelief

   In this idea originated the plan of the 'Lyrical Ballads'; in
   which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to
   persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet
   so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and
   a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows
   of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the
   moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
   -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Biographia Literaria, or
   Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions" (1817)

"Willing Suspension of Disbelief" (WSD) is the idea that the
audience of a story chooses to put aside their knowledge that the 
story *is* fiction and invest a certain amount of temporary 
"belief" in its events -- however unlikely they might be in the 
real world -- in order to enjoy it as much as possible.

It is a reciprocal arrangement, though -- implicit in the
audience's willingness to engage the story on its own terms is
the expectation that the creator of the story will "play fair"
with them -- that once he establishes the "ground rules" of the
story (including things like style, tone, and genre, as well as
setting and flavor) he will not change them without warning and
without a *very* good reason, nor will he do anything to remind
us we are in a story that does not actually serve the purposes of
the story.

Note also that WSD is not a bargain struck at the start of a
story and from then treated as permanent.  It is a constant state
of negotiation between the creator and the audience.  Every new
element the creator adds to the story is evaluated by the
audience in terms of everything that has come before, whether
they do so consciously or not.  If it looks like the new element
conflicts with or contradicts the "ground rules" of the story
as they have evolved up to this point, they *will* react
negatively.

Think of it this way:  the beginning of a story is like a half-
built jigsaw puzzle.  As the story goes on, the writer hands new
pieces to the audience, who test each one for how well if fits
into the puzzle.  If the creator is doing his job right, each
piece he gives the audience will fit in right away, or at least
look like it will fit somewhere soon.  However, if it's too hard
to fit a piece in, the audience may set it aside and ignore it.
Too many of those, and they may give up on the puzzle.  And if it
looks like the piece is from another puzzle entirely, they may
get frustrated or even angry, *then* give up on the puzzle.  They
may even throw the puzzle to the ground, convinced that the
creator is jerking them around instead of helping them to enjoy
it.

I'll give a more concrete, if somewhat extreme, example.  Imagine
you're watching "The Bourne Identity", or any other similar
spy/techno thriller movie.  It's tense, it's exciting, it's
filled with classic spy gadgets and gambits and head-games, with
car chases and briefcase bombs.  Then when you get to the climax,
the big bad pulls out a wand and stuns the hero with a spell.  Up
to this point there's been no suggestion that this is a world
with magic, no subtle hints or clues that there is anything going
on in the movie besides high-tech cloak-and-dagger skullduggery.
You say, "...the *hell?*"

The bad guy with the wand is the puzzle piece that does not fit,
no matter how you try to jam it in.  It breaks all the rules the
movie has convinced you to accept in order to enjoy the story.
You've just had your willing suspension of disbelief violated.

The usual response of a reader to a violation of WSD depends on
the degree of the violation.  Minor ones may not draw much
attention to themselves but still evoke a feeling of "wrongness"
in the reader.  If there aren't many of these, the reader may
keep reading, but finish the story with the feeling that is
"bad" without being able to precisely put a finger on what made
it so.  Mid-level violations will be obvious to the reader, who
may or may not forgive them while reading (but will likely say
"that's stupid!" regardless); when done he will have no doubt
that the story was disappointing.  If there are large violations,
or lots of smaller ones, the reader may abandon the story
completely, and tell people not to read it.

So what qualifies as a violation of WSD?  To start with, just
about anything in "Stupid Writer Tricks".  But in my personal
opinion, the top contenders would be, in no particular order:

   * Internal consistency errors, either in terms of "history"
     (what did or didn't happen) or in the "rules" (saying
     something is impossible, then permitting it without a good
     explanation).
   * Characterization errors, particularly in the areas of
     character voice and behavior for canon characters used in
     fanfic.  Original characters who suddenly change how they
     speak or act, especially if the changes facilitate the plot,
     again without a good explanation.
   * Asspulls.
   * The author using the narrative voice to chat with the
     reader -- or to rant at them.
   * Blatant errors of fact that do not reflect differences in
     the "ground rules" of the story's setting.
   * Inability to stick to a consistent genre or tone.  This
     includes breaking the "Unicorn In The Garden" rule, below.

Note that "playing fair" with your audience doesn't mean you have
to lay everything out for them right from the start.  You just
have to give them enough to build a base that they understand and
agree to, on which you can then add more as the story goes along.

And you don't have to make the implications of a story element
immediately apparent -- it's a good trick of the trade to get the
reader to accept an apparently innocuous detail without making a
fuss about it, and then when they least expect it, drop an 
unexpected plot point on them that is an eminently logical 
consequence of that detail.




XX.  The "Unicorn In The Garden" Rule

This 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:  if it's required by your plot, make
*one* fantastic assumption in your story and *only one* -- and do
it in or before the first chapter (or first page or two, for
shorter works).  Do not add more as the story goes on.  And once
you have your one assumption, all further fantastic elements must
derive from *it*, not any new assumptions.  And just to be fair,
it must be either obvious to the reader, or something that can be
deduced from evidence present in your story.

(And yes, having the whole point of a story being the process by
which the reader finds or figures out the divergence which
changed the entire landscape is perfectly valid, although if
badly handled it can become little more than a Tomato Surprise.)

I've given it the name above because the first time I ever heard
the rule explicated was in a set of writers' guidelines from
"Asimov's Science Fiction" magazine I saw in 1980, which used the
example of James Thurber's classic short story "The Unicorn In
The Garden".  Put simply, Thurber's story is about an ordinary
suburban couple who wake up one morning to find that there is a
unicorn in their garden.  The guide pointed out, quite correctly,
that the story worked because the *only* fantastic element was
the unicorn.  If on the second page a flying saucer had landed in
the garden next to the unicorn, it would not have been as strong
or as good a story.

Now, in fanfiction, what constitutes "one fantastic assumption" 
is a 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, constitutes "one assumption".  In the case of a mega-
crossover like John Biles' "Dance of Shiva" or "Undocumented 
Features", the fundamental changes necessary to enable the fusion 
of 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.  (Just ask the good folks over at 
Eyrie Productions Unlimited.)

A divergence which causes an alternate universe can also be your
"one assumption" -- things like "Ranma was born a girl", "Neville
Longbottom is the Boy-Who-Lived" or "John Crichton's trajectory
through the wormhole took him someplace else entirely".  So can
the death of an established character.  A canon character "wising
up" and behaving differently is also a valid difference, although
the *real* change is going to be whatever made it possible for
him/her to be clued in.

I can't repeat this strongly enough:  *One and only one* such
change should be in play in a story.  If you have two or more,
you have a case where you need to find a more general "fantastic
assumption" that allows for all -- or you have several different
stories demanding to be written and colliding inside your head.

A classic example of a story that violates this rule to its
detriment would be "Shampoo's Revenge" by Jared "Skysaber"
Ornstead (available on Fanfiction.net under "Skysaber").  It
starts with the "fantastic assumption" that a "Ranma 1/2"
character -- in this case Shampoo -- can learn from her mistakes
and formulate a plan making use of her canon resources which
actually succeeds.  It's a great idea, well executed, and carries
the story along nicely for several chapters, until suddenly we
are handed a new "fantastic assumption":  that Nabiki has been so
focused on enriching herself with petty con games, blackmail and
betting pools for the last few years, she has completely missed a
few details about her own home and family -- like Kasumi being an
Olympic figure-skating champion; that their mother is only
divorced from Soun, not dead; and that she has half-siblings she
never knew about.  Now *either* of these concepts would make a
good story by themselves, but when they both appear in the *same*
story, they compete with each other and eventually derail the
whole plot -- literally, as "Shampoo's Revenge" has been a dead
fic since 2007.


xx.  First Line Hook

The first sentence (or two) of a story should try to "hook" the
reader in some way, to make him want to keep reading.  Try to
give it an implicit 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 are the first two sentences -- one physical
line on the screen or page -- of my story "Drunkard's Walk II"
(after you get 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 subconsciously, "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 a few more questions about this
narrator, and then abandon him for several kilobytes of text -- 
leaving a dramatic tension behind that is intended to drag the 
reader through the setup for the "Bubblegum Crisis" part of the 
story.  (See "But Don't Reveal Everything Right Away", below.)

One of my favorite examples comes from "The Stoker and the 
Stars", an obscure Golden Age science fiction story by Algis
Budrys:

   "Know him?  Yes, I know him -- knew him.  That was twenty
   years ago.

   "Everybody knows him now...."

Of course you as the reader *don't*, and what this opening does 
is make you want to know:  who, and why.  It's very successful at
that, embracing "Don't Tell Everything Right Away" with a
vengeance and leaving you hanging on a key detail even after the
end of the story -- but it's that initial question that you ask 
on reading the opening that pulls you through like a towline 
behind a motorboat.

Now 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 out
whether or not the narrator is really crazy, and why they might
think 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"/
"Bubblegum Crisis" crossover, "A Wolf In Crisis, Part I":

   Most plays and stories begin the moment something goes
   wrong... this is no exception.

Despite the dubious truth of this assertion, the opening still
works.  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 an engaging discussion on how to begin 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 be 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 Medias Res" --
loosely translated, "starting right in the middle of things".
Make your first scene something that happens, chronologically,
half-way through the plot

((This device can be good - many fics I enjoy use it - but it
should be noted that if the characters are acting significantly
different than canon, don't take too long to jump back to the
beginning to start explaining why they've changed. Depending on
how different they've become, "too long" could easily be "more
than two or three paragraphs".))




xx.  Chekhov's Gun

   "If there is a gun on the wall in act one, scene one, you must
   fire the gun by act three, scene two.  If a gun is fired in
   act three, scene two, you must see the gun on the wall in act
   one, scene one."  -- Anton Chekhov's First Rule of Playwriting
   (aka The Law of Conservation of Detail)

Despite the old SCTV sketch to the contrary, this is *not* a Star
Trek reference.  What it is, is one of the best tools a writer
has for both directing his plot and at the same time playing fair
with his audience.

!!!



xx.  Show, Don't Tell

The first rule every writing course gives its students, and for
good reason.  The difference between telling and showing is the
difference between a dull story and an engaging one.

Let's look at a classic example:  It is *very* common for a 
beginning writer to start a story like 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 Larjenboost, to the
   movies, only to be rejected with derisive laughter.

Besides violating the "First Line Hook" rule, it comes across as 
stilted and dull.  We are flatly told a couple of details about 
Jim -- some basic identity information, what he looks like, a
little personal history -- but it's dry and stale.  This is 
almost like reading a government dossier or an executive summary 
instead of a story, except it's not quite as well-written.

In general, the narrative voice should limit itself to describing
the action and, to a lesser degree, the setting.  Let character
background flow naturally out of the action in the story.  For
instance, let us take the first sentence in the "example" above.
Rather than force the narrative voice to announce blandly that
Jim is a tenth-grader at Gaittin High, build a scene where that
information surfaces organically:

   "Mornin', Mrs. Tripe!" Jim said as he picked up an apple from
   the old woman's cart and dropped two quarters on the newspaper
   before her.

   "Good morning, Jim," she replied, her eyes twinkling.  "On
   your way to school?"

   He nodded.   "Yup.  Finals today."

   "Then be off with you!  Don't want you failing and being left
   behind to retake the tenth grade!"  Her hoarse, raspy voice
   pretended to sound harsh, but Jim could hear the laughter
   hidden in it.  "Gaittin isn't so good a school that I'd
   expect you'd like another year there!"

   "No, ma'am!" Jim grinned.  "Thanks for the apple!" he added,
   walking backwards for a few steps as he waved.

Do you see the difference?  Not only have we given the reader the
information, we've also provided a sense of who Jim is, by virtue
of his speaking voice, how he interacts with the old woman who
sells fruit, and his attitudes toward school.  With just a few
more words, we've started to show who Jim is as a person -- the
reader should already be identifying and empathizing with him.
The only detail from the "bad" sample that we've left out is his
last name -- and that's something that can be provided once he
reaches school with a roll call or other interaction with an
authority figure.  His appearance and his failure rate with
Maryjo can later be demonstrated with an attempt to ask her out,
followed by a friend asking something along the lines of "why do
you keep trying?"

If you really can't figure out how or why this is better, think
about the way a movie is structured.  You don't (usually) plunge
right into the action in the first shot.  Instead, a movie will
often spend fifteen minutes to a half hour building up the core
character(s).  You get to know them in their everyday lives, get
a sense of how they deal with people, get a sense of who they
are.  It's only after you acquire a baseline picture of them in 
their normal lives that you can really care about them when they 
get thrust into something extraordinary (i.e., the story the 
movie is going to tell).  Imagine if "Star Wars" had simply put 
up a card that read "Luke Skywalker is a farmboy on Tattooine, a 
planet with two suns.  One day his Uncle Owen bought two droids.  
The next morning, one was missing" and then jumped right in to
chasing down a runaway R2D2.  Wouldn't you feel cheated, like
something was lacking?  Would you even care about Luke and the
droids?

(Those films and stories that don't do this are usually employing 
In Medias Res, by throwing you into the deep end first -- but 
then they back up and give you that buildup, while you're 
wondering how you got to Point B all the way from Point A.  Or at 
least they should, if they're trying to tell a good story.)




xx.  But Don't Reveal Everything Right Away

   One of the great skills in using any language is knowing what
   not to use, what not to say.  -- Ron Jeffries


Overloading your readers with *important* details doesn't always
help your story.





xx.  Infodump, Dulldump


((the text below is actually two different points.  find a
natural place to split it apart...))


...

This is frequently a problem because beginning (and not-so-
beginning) authors -- and believe me, I include myself in this --
very often start to write with a key image or scene from deep in
the story in mind, and want to get to it *as fast as possible*.
They want to jump right into the "good stuff", into the action
and adventure, into the moment that inspires them to write the
story.

The problem is, the good stuff needs a foundation to sit on -- it
needs a proper build-up.  Before you put your hero into jeopardy,
you need to make the reader care about the hero so that the
jeopardy *means* something to the reader.  As a mental exercise,
think of a television show that you *don't* watch.  Do you care
that its hero(es) will be in some kind of danger 45 minutes into
the next episode?  No?  I'm not surprised.

This is how a reader will feel if you don't take the time to lay
down the groundwork for your story.  Before you take your
characters to a place of danger and excitement, you must show
what they are like in normal circumstances.  At the very least
this establishes their personalities and behaviors so that their
reactions to the unusual will be understood.  It gives you a
chance to make them into people before you shove them headlong
into danger.  (That it also gives you a chance to contrast normal
with abnormal, and to set up foreshadowing and other narrative
devices, is just gravy.)

Note that even sequels do this!  After the life-changing events
of a prior story, the (surviving) cast settle down into new
routines and new lives, which we are normally shown as the
opening scenes of the sequel, be it film or book or whatever.
Even if their new lives include dangerous occupations like
military service, the characters are under the reasonable
impression that all the "big excitement" is over and they can get
on with living their lives normally.  Silly characters!  We only
get to see these new lives and routines in order to appreciate
the return of chaos and uncertainty -- that is, the plot of the
sequel -- to disrupt them.

A good example of a story which skimps -- to its detriment -- on
the foundation it needs is "Prophecies?  We Don' Need No Stinkin'
Prophecies" by Greywizard (found on Twisting The Hellmouth).  A
megacrossover rotating around the axis of "Harry Potter" and 
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer", it takes place several years after 
the end of the "Buffy" TV series.  But these are several very 
*radical* years, in terms of the organization and personal 
relationships between the "Buffy" characters.  Unfortunately, the 
author, in his haste to get to what he obviously thinks is the 
"meat" of the story, dismisses many of these changes in a few 
breathlessly rapid, expository passages.  For example, here is 
the sum total of the text dealing with Buffy's history prior to 
the start of the story:

      Buffy had announced that she was taking a sabbatical from
   Slaying, to try to find the woman she had once been, the one
   who had been overshadowed and lost when her Slayer-aspect had
   taken over her life. The blonde Slayer had then gone back to
   college to complete her degree and had majored in Psychology,
   her own troubled life and then her short stint as a student
   counselor apparently having piqued her interest in helping to
   guide troubled children. In her senior year, she had begun a
   whirlwind relationship with one of her classmates - a
   completely normal young man with no supernatural ties of any
   kind that could be discovered by any of the investigators
   Giles had hired to check him out (various bets had been paid
   off as appropriate) and had called Dawn two short months
   after the start of the semester to announce their spur of the
   moment wedding plans and invite all of the Sunnydale
   survivors to the ceremony....
      Dawn's subsequent disclosure of her sister's pregnancy and
   then, a month later, her separation and the ensuing quick
   divorce hadn't elicited any signs of interest in the one-time
   carpenter at all, and the Key had still been in the process
   of trying to decide whether that was a good or a bad thing
   when she and Xander had been tapped for a mission...

Throwing all this material at the reader in only two paragraphs
is just criminal.  (It's worse, actually, because so much of it
is dumped on the reader in a couple of massive run-on sentences.)  
If it's so important that it changes the canon behaviors and 
relationships of a character, it damned well ought to get more 
than this.  This is the material of an entire chapter -- if not 
an entire *story* -- on its own.

    (put a couple more samples from "Prophecies" here, esp.
    "Willow got over Tara and broke up with Kennedy and is now
    in a threesome with Oz and Faith.")

First, these are *classic* examples of "telling" instead of
"showing", and as such they're ultimately unsatisfying.  And
because they describe such radical changes in the web of
relationships that makes up the "Buffy" dynamic, they skirt the
edge of Willing Suspension of Disbelief.  The changes are *so*
radical in places that throwing them in the reader's face this
briefly and blithely is *inviting* the reader to say, "This isn't
the 'Buffy' cast I know, why should I care?"

Taking a few more paragraphs for each change, just showing the
differences as part of the *action*, would soften this blow, but
even better would have been to actually spend the time showing
how the changes took place.  There are several entire stories of
their own in these throwaway sentences, but the author couldn't
be bothered with telling them, because he's in too big a hurry to
get to his cool idea or scene.  Sadly, everybody loses because of
that. The readers lose good stories, and the author loses readers
who don't like his cavalier attitude toward the backstory.

Which is a shame, because this otherwise looks to be a rather
good story, even though it is incomplete at the time I write
this.  If the author would go back and expand the things he
glossed over in the first five or six chapters and actually show
us all the changes and growth that he dispenses with so casually,
it would have the potential to be excellent.




xx.  Assuming Familiarity With Your Sources

This is a hard one to call, but if I have to come down on one
side or another, I will encourage fanfic authors to write their
stories so that someone unfamiliar with the source(s) on which
they are based will not be utterly lost.  Which means taking the
time to establish or explain the characters and settings as if
they were your own original creations.

This also helps *casual* fans of the particular setting remember
who's who and what's what in the universe.  Only the most die-
hard adherents of a work will remember *every* detail about it;
providing the essential background in your story will refresh the
other fans' memories.

A good rule of thumb to remember is that the more obscure a 
series or character is, the less you should assume is known about 
them by the "average" reader.  And don't go by your own personal 
reference pool -- just because *you* don't think something is 
obscure doesn't mean it's not.  Double-check.  For example, 
practically anyone even marginally interested in anime fanfiction 
probably knows what Ranma Saotome looks like, even all these 
years after "Ranma 1/2" ended -- and if they don't, a quick 
Google search will net them thousands of relevant pages and 
images.  On the other hand, if a Google search for a character's 
name doesn't find at least a few web sites and images of them *on 
the first page*, a full description should be worked into the 
text when they first appear.

Something else to consider -- today's fandoms are not necessarily
going to be familiar to a future reader.  Everything eventually
fades into (relative) obscurity.  You might want to write so that
a reader who finds your story in ten, twenty or even fifty years
can understand and enjoy it.

The model to emulate here is Ken Wolfe's story "Heaven Can Wait"
(https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6200/1/Heaven-Can-Wait), which is a 
one-shot crossover blending the anime "Vampire Princess Miyu" and 
the short-lived 1998 Fox TV series, "Brimstone".  The beauty of 
Wolfe's work is that if the reader is (as I was) unfamiliar with 
either or both shows, he will learn everything he needs to know 
about them before he's more than a third of the way into the 
story -- without impeding the story at all, even for a reader who 
*is* familiar.


(( Another example is "A Wand For Skitter".  You don't have to know
*anything* about "Worm" to understand the main character and what's
going on.))



You don't *have* to do it, but if you do, you open up vast vistas
of potential new readership for your work, and ensure its 
accessibility for future generations of readers.  And isn't that 
what you want, to be read?






xx.  Engage *All* Your Reader's Senses

An editor to whom I once sold a story told me when I submitted
its first draft that too often beginning writers tended to focus
solely on sight and sound when describing the action of their
stories.  And it's true -- I certainly did it (and still do if
I'm not careful), and even a casual survey of new writers at any
fanfic site on the web will uncover enough examples to validate
the claim.

I suspect that this may be the legacy of over a century of film 
and nigh on three-quarters of a century of television -- the only 
things they can bring across *are* sight and sound.  And given 
how for many of us they are often the primary channels through 
which we receive fiction, starting early in life when we are pre-
literate, it's not hard to see how a beginning writer might, 
consciously or unconsciously, think in their terms when first 
starting to write.

However, words on the page or screen are *not* limited in the way
cinema and video are.  The writer can -- and *should* -- describe
more than the way things look and sound.  If your character is
walking through a forest, don't just say he saw pine trees and
heard the wind whistling through them.  Talk about the crisp
breeze, the crunch of the pine cones underfoot and the scent of 
the pine needles.  If you're describing a dinner, don't just talk 
about how good the dishes looked, tell the reader about the 
delicious scents wafting from them, the snap of the snowpeas and
the melt-in-your-mouth tenderness of the meat, and how the
delicate blend of flavors performed a tango across the willing 
dance floor of the narrator's tongue.

The senses are the palette through which you paint your story for
a reader.  Don't limit yourself to only two colors.




xx.  Characterization (Heroes)

((Heroes should make mistakes, doubt themselves, make bad
decisions, get in fights with friends.  A paragon is
uninteresting to read and wins too fast to properly carry a
story.))


xx.  Characterization (Villains)

   "Your villain is never a villain in his own eyes.  Keep this
   in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend.  If not,
   you can usually kill him without hatred -- and quickly."
   -- Woodrow Wilson Smith (as told to Robert A. Heinlein), "The
   Notebooks of Lazarus Long"

With very few exceptions, it is only in Victorian melodrama (and
tales based on or parodying it) that the villain of the piece
knows he is a villain and deliberately acts in a villainous
manner -- not to mention dressing the part right down to the
waxed mustaches he twirls as he ties the poor damsel to the train
tracks while gloating about how evil he is.

Need I note that no one takes this kind of villain seriously any
more?  In fiction, just as in real life, people are more
complicated than that.  While evil as a concept may be absolute,
a character's perspective on it will be intensely personal and
colored by his experiences and beliefs.  As a result, a good
villain ("good" here meaning good for the purpose of telling a
story and opposing your hero) will not normally think of himself
as a villain.  He is the main character of his own story;
naturally he will see himself as its hero.  And everything he
does in furtherance of his story will have a reason or
justification that makes sense from this point of view, as 
warped, dark or twisted as it may be.

So when you are laying the groundwork for a story, take the time
to step back and look at it from the other side.  Figure out why
the villain does what he does.  You don't have to agree with his
justifications, but he *must* have them, and they *must* make
sense within the context of his life.  The villain is *always* a
hero to the other side, and this should be reflected in how you
write him.

(Okay, it's not an immutable imperative.  You can leave a
villain's motives and reasons unclear.  But believe me, even if
you never explicitly explain them to the reader, just knowing a
few "why"s about a villain's behavior will change how you write
him, which in turn will elevate him well beyond Snidely Whiplash 
in complexity and interest to the reader.)

Now in fanfiction, it turns out that sometimes you need to do
this with an established character because the original creative
team *didn't*.  (Or in the case of TV or film series that were
never finished, they didn't get the chance to.)  Figuring out
what drives an otherwise simple-seeming villain can give you an
incredible handle on which to hang a story.

A case in point would be my story "Drunkard's Walk II".  In the
original "Bubblegum Crisis", Chairman Quincy of GENOM is the
quintessential Evil Overlord.  He does things -- like order the
release of uncontrolled combat robots on city streets -- that
seem to have no reason except simply to be eeeevul.  Even given
that GENOM is effectively above the law and no real repercussions 
will come from such actions, it *still* makes no sense.  Part of 
the task that I set myself when I began writing DW2 was to find a
justification for this behavior that made sense, if only in
Quincy's own mind.  I won't say here what I came up with, but if
the reactions of readers at the release of the final chapter of
DW2 were any indication, I succeeded to the point that some 
readers *agreed* with Quincy's motivations.

That's what you should strive for, whether it's for your own
villains, or those already in your chosen fandom -- make their 
reasons not just believable, but *convincing*.


xx.  Keep your notes separate from your text

This is to say, don't cut and paste the descriptions you have
created of your characters directly into your story.  *Always*
rephrase them, especially if those descriptions are being 
delivered to the reader via a viewpoint character.  Otherwise
you may end up with different people (as well as the narrative
voice) using the *exact same words* to describe someone, over 
and over again.

Don't laugh.  I'm writing this section because I have just been
reading a huge and well-done megacrossover story (centered around
Harry Potter and the Marvel Cinematic Universe) where the author 
has done *exactly* this.  The exact same description for one 
particular character, right down to specific turns of phrases, 
show up in the inner monologues of upwards of half a dozen other
characters, whose own voices are so different that it is in no 
way possible for them to have done so.

One result of this is a violation of suspension of disbelief.
Another is the impression that the author is sloppy and careless.

Even if your definitive character descriptions exist only in your
head, don't use them in the story text.  

((rewrite this section))


xx.  Multithreaded Plots

1.  A plots and B plots
   a.  B-plot example:  DW2, Lisa growing into a hero in her own
      right
2.  Converging plots -- "working the same case"
   a.  Optional, and all subplots should not converge with the
      main plot


xx.  Viewpoint

xx.  The Rashomon



xx.  Pacing

   One of the oldest devices of the novelist -- some would call
   it a vice -- is to bring his narrative (after many an
   excursion) to a pitch of excitement where the reader no matter
   how cultivated is reduced to a beast who can pant no faster
   than to ask "And then what?  Then what happens?"  At which
   point the novelist, consummate cruel lover, introduces a
   digression, aware that delay at this point helps to deepen the
   addiction of his audience.
   -- Norman Mailer, "The Armies of the Night"






xx.  Be Hard On Your Characters

	Create characters you (and your readers) will love,
	then rip their arms off.  -- Alexandra Honigsberg

A friend in a writers' group I was once part of phrased it as,
"Get'em up a tree and throw rocks at'em."  She was talking about
giving your characters something to struggle against.  A story
needs conflict and tension to drive the action.  And it needs the
heroes to be in some kind of serious jeopardy.  If it doesn't
have this, there's no interest to sustain a reader.

And sometimes, when a character is in danger, he gets hurt.  If
you're writing "original flavor" tales for most properties, or a
story that's explicitly set at a specific point in a TV series'
timeline, you can get away with no long-term consequences.  But
if you're intending to shake up the fictional world with major
changes, don't skimp on consequences for heroic actions.  People
get wounded; people lose limbs, or minds, or lives.  It's only on
TV series that the heroes are all guaranteed to live to fight
another day -- and as fans of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and a
few other properties will be quick to point out, not even then.

If the characters seem -- or *are* -- invulnerable, then they are
never at any risk, and the dramatic tension of the story drops,
taking the story quality with it.  This was a problem that dogged
the writers for Superman in the Silver Age of comic books (the
late 1950s through the early 1970s, for those unfamiliar with the
term), because they'd escalated him to the point where he was a
virtual god.  Having written themselves into that corner, they
had to resort to all manner of silly plot devices to create *any*
stories with any kind of dramatic tension to them.

(And if your story has no tension in it, nor any threat of
conflict, you might as well be writing "Winnie the Pooh Goes For
A Walk".)

This is, sadly, a lesson I still haven't learned completely.  I
don't want my characters to suffer.  But if they don't have bad
things happen to them, the stories won't be good.

This applies to fanfiction in a different way, as well.  It is a
fairly common thing to see an idea like "That Halloween made
Xander a superhero", or "Harry Potter is a magus with power 
beyond Dumbledore and Voldemort combined".  Or "My insert 
character can beat anyone at anything", to boil down the classic 
Mary Sue to its bare bones.  If that's all you do, the character 
you're favoring will have no challenges or threats, and your 
story will have no tension in it, and consequently will have 
nothing to hold a reader's interests.

There's nothing wrong with writing a super-character.  But if
you're going to write a *good*, *interesting* story with him, 
he's going to need equally super opposition.  Or as one fanwriter 
out there puts it on his FF.net profile page, "If you give Frodo 
a lightsaber, you have to give Sauron the Death Star."  
Alternately, your hero should have a weakness or flaw which gives
his opposition a major *advantage* over him.  This is good general 
advice:  your villains should *always* be stronger than your hero, 
because that way when he beats them it *means* something.  And 
failure should always cost your hero more than he believes should 
be paid.



As for American Culture's shrieking demand for fully happy
endings with no bad stuff happening to anyone but the villains, I
suspect that the problem essentially traces all the way back to
the Hays Office and the Production Code that ruled movies before
the ratings system took over in the 1960s.

In order that a movie would be certified as "acceptable" -- and
thus able to make money for the studio -- its script had to
ensure that the good guys won and that evil was punished, and
that there was absolutely no ambiguity about anything on either
side.  Existing stories and plays, even *incidents from history*,
were all warped by the Hays Office to fit its definition of
"wholesome".  When television came on the scene, its writing was
informed by the movie standards of the time, and thus reflected
exactly the same artificial values system.  As a result, several
generations of Americans were conditioned to expect simple black-
and-white plot solutions/conclusions, and even now, over half a 
century after the demise of the Production Code, its influence
remains, propagating itself through the collective hive mind of
TV and movie writers as "common wisdom".  American culture has
started to break free from these presumptions over the past
generation or two, but the average American reader/viewer *still*
wants his conclusions simple, black-and-white, with no confusing
ambiguity in the assignment of winners, losers, good guys and bad
guys.


xx.  Don't Restore The Status Quo

When the story is over, things should have changed -- mostly for
the better -- even if the world superficially looks the same as
it was at the start.  If there is no change, then any sacrifices
made by the heroes were ultimately meaningless.  And that makes
the story meaningless.  Stories of futility are great for emo 
angst, but they don't often make satisfying reads.  And if you 
don't even have the angst, then you just have another episode of 
"Gilligan's Island", where you know that even if the entire Fifth 
Fleet docks at the island for R&R and spends it all in the huts 
with the castaways, at the end of the show the castaways are 
still going to be stuck there by themselves and nothing will have 
changed.

One of the things many "Star Trek" fans hated about "Star Trek:
Voyager" was how they kept "hitting the reset button"; the
situation at the end of almost every episode was identical to
that at the beginning.  The anime "Sailor Moon SuperS" also 
suffered from excessive restoration of the status quo.  Both of 
these series are widely considered by fans to be the weakest part 
of their respective canons.

Whatever your plot is, it should leave the world permanently
altered at some level.  Even the simplest plot -- "beat the bad
guy" -- results in change:  at the end of the story, the bad guy
is either dead or otherwise rendered incapable of being bad (or
at least *as bad* as he used to be).  If your plot doesn't result
in some kind of change, then your story is either boring or
futile, and readers do not like a story that is either, or worse,
both.

While it is possible that a futile story may, with the proper
framing and planning, be entertaining, it probably won't be
satisfying.  Most readers will feel vaguely cheated by a story
which doesn't accomplish anything.  And very often the futile
story is simply a device for an author to explore self-indulgent
angst on one level or another -- which while occasionally
artistic is rarely entertaining.


xx.  Formatting

If you are writing for a specific professional market, your
editor will usually tell you what they require -- and more
importantly, what they *don't* want -- in the way of formatting
your manuscript.  Depending on the market (and the editor), this
can range from "anything goes" to very restrictive.

The fan author, though, will rarely have an authority above him
laying down the law on what conventions they expect and which
they will refuse to deal with.  As a result, some fics can get
rather... baroque with their idiosyncratic encrustations of
typographic fancy.

This isn't always to the benefit of the story.

Now, this topic is *very* subjective.  Ask any ten fan writers
what they think, and you'll probably get twelve different
opinions.  The following are *my* personal rules-of-thumb, which
are admittedly informed by both my experience as a professional
writer who started writing in the pre-word processor era, and my 
rather minimalist aesthetic.  But even so, I don't think many
would argue (or at least argue strongly) with my basic guideline:
Simpler is Better -- for both writer and reader.

Thus...

If you feel you must use a format fancier than plain text, pick
one font/typeface for your titles/headers, and one font/typeface
for your body text.  Anything more and your work will be visually
confused/confusing and hard to read.  Try to limit your font
styles to plain, bold and italic, and those last two only for
emphasis, not for dialogue (unless it's also in some type of
quotes) -- and consider using CAPS or *asterisks* instead of bold
for the occasional emphasized word.

(You may even want to ditch bold entirely and stick to plain and
italic, except perhaps for section/chapter titles if you don't
have a separate font for them.  Some feel that bold "pops" too
much, distracting the reader from the story.)

Either way, the loss will be minimal if/when it is converted to
plain text -- which, even if you don't do it, some of your
readers will.  Plus these days growing numbers of readers (and
websites!) are converting fics directly into one of the several
eBook formats -- and none of them support *everything* you can do
with fonts and styles in a word processor (or HTML).  Again -- 
Simpler is Better, for everyone concerned.  Maximize the 
portability of your work, and you maximize your audience.

(As always there *is* an exception:  sometimes it's okay to use
different typefaces, usually deliberately contrasting with your
"base" font, for special effects.  The late Terry Pratchett, for 
example, played with this in his Discworld books.  But remember 
that if you do, readers may lose this aspect of your work if they 
convert it to a different format.)

If you need multiple types of quotation mark-up to distinguish
between languages or to indicate telepathy or other unusual means
of communication, try to limit quoting-characters to "double
quotes", *asterisks* -- and perhaps 'single quotes', /slashes/,
-dashes- and :colons: (if you really, *truly*, need that many).
(Parentheses) can easily be mistaken for in-line author notes or
regular parenthetical statements.  [Square brackets], <angle
brackets> and \backslashes\ are easily eaten by the software on
which many sites or forums run, and {braces} can look too similar
to parentheses, depending on the font and size.

*Don't* include a key to these markups at the top of the story,
though.  That looks amateurish.  It's more professional and
effective to give that information through context:

    *I think it's time I learned a little Occlumency,* Harry's
    mental voice resonated clearly in her mind.

    "<Son of a bitch!>" Ukyou swore in Basque when she realized
    the implications.



xx.  The Importance of Summaries

   "If you can't write a decent summary, how the hell am I
   supposed to expect you to write a decent fanfic?  Geez, at
   least if there's no summary at all, that way I can assume
   you're just lazy."  -- "I Suck At Summaries" page on 
   http://allthetropes.org

One of the things I used to be required to do when I pitched a 
proposal for a new book to my usual publisher was write the blurb 
that would appear on its back cover.  (Not any more, though; they 
changed their submission guidelines.)  The justification was that 
if I couldn't compose a two-paragraph summary of the book, I 
didn't have a good enough idea of what I was proposing to 
actually *write* it.

The same concept applies to the fanfic writer.  Regardless of how
you release your story for reading, you're almost always going to
want or need a summary.  And writing that summary before you
finish (or begin!) the story is a good test of how well you've
planned out your story.

If you can't boil down at least the start of your fic to five or
six sentences, you probably don't have a good enough idea of what
you're doing or where you're going.  Which is to say, you've
bobbled the critical development stages of writing that lead to a
good story.  (See "Planning" and "Cohesion and Coherence" above.)
You have to stop what you're doing and put in that work, because
you're going to need it.

This of course assumes you're not just too lazy to bother with a
summary.  If you are, well, remember that a good summary will
pull in readers -- think of it as advertising.  If you *want*
people to read your work, it helps if you make the effort to
"sell" it.

And if despite that you're still too lazy to bother, well, you're
probably too lazy to care about writing well.  So maybe it's
better if you don't.  That way the number of disappointed readers
will be smaller.


(( "This may be a minor Peeve, but it is annoying anyway, and it 
is awfully common here in Creative Writing: When a crossover 
author uses some esoteric shorthand for the crossover universes 
("A ZnT/TM! crossover"), and then does not bother to use the 
actual name somewhere in the first chapter. You may need to leave 
out important details in the summary for lack of space -and 
Spacebattles does not even have a summary, so it is even more 
reasonable- but if so, then you need an author's note in the 
first chapter that fills in those details.
-- Rakhasa, Nov 29, 2012, spacebattles.com ))


xx.  Copyrights and Trademarks

First off, a definition:  a copyright is the legal right to 
control who may and may not reproduce and/or distribute a work.  
It is not the same thing as being the owner of a work, or its 
creator, although in the simplest cases all three will be or
belong to the same person.  It is also *not* the same thing as a
trademark, which is a legal right to the exclusive use of a mark,
image or slogan which is uniquely identified with a product,
business or service.  

Trademarks have to be "grown", for lack of simpler way of
describing it.  You create it, you put it on your product or your
ads, you stake a provisional claim to it by tagging it with a 
tiny "TM", and then when you've used it long enough you can 
register it with the government (at which point you start using 
the "R in a circle" symbol instead of the "TM").  Nobody can use
it but you, and you are required by law to "protect" the 
trademark to keep it yours, which means suing anyone who looks 
like they're infringing on it.  If you don't, you risk it 
becoming a part of the public domain.

You do not have to do anything to "get" a copyright for your 
work.  International copyright law automatically gives you a
copyright for your work the moment you create it.  You don't have 
to register it with any agency; it simply comes into existence 
along with your work.  (Although registration does help when it
comes to legally enforcing your rights in most jurisdictions.)

You cannot copyright a *fact*, or raw data.  The observation that 
the sky is blue cannot be copyrighted, nor can the population of 
your home town.  A specific way of communicating that information 
*can* be copyrighted -- "above me, the heavens were a beautiful
cerulean dotted with white cotton-candy clouds" -- but not the
information itself.

You also cannot copyright or trademark an *idea*.  You can only 
copyright or trademark an *expression* of that idea.  There are 
other exclusions, sometimes kind of weird.  You can't copyright a 
game, only the specific version of the rules that you write down 
for it.  You can't copyright a font, but you can get a trademark 
on a *name* for it.  Among other things.

Let me give you a concrete example:  Superman.

The *idea* of Superman cannot be protected (although DC certainly
tried in the 1940s and 1950s; look up what they did to Fawcett
Comics over Captain Marvel, for instance).  Anyone can legally
write a story about a man from another world with powers normal
people don't possess.  And just about everybody *has*.  <grin>  
(In fact, Superman is thought by many to be based on someone 
else's work -- the novel "Gladiator" by Philip Wylie, first 
published in 1930.)

The *appearance* of Superman -- the distinctive costume and its
component parts and colors, the "S" shield, the spitcurl -- is a
trademark.  The "S" shield by itself is also a trademark.  (The
word "superman", though, is not -- it predates the DC character
by many years, as Nietzsche and George Bernard Shaw will tell 
you.)  No one can legally use images of Superman (or his shield) 
without DC's express permission because it is considered a mark 
that uniquely identifies their company and their product.  If 
anyone tried to create their own Superman comics, DC is *required 
by law* to at least try to find them and sue them into the dirt 
if they do.  (Likewise if someone is selling unauthorized 
Superman T-shirts.  Or window decals for cars.  Or any of a 
million other possible pirate products.)  If they don't at least 
make an effort to defend the trademark, Superman would become a 
public domain character.  DC doesn't want that.  DC defends 
*vigorously*.

Individual stories about Superman are copyrighted.  And here's
the thing for fanfic writers -- *they are not automatically 
copyright by DC*.  Not even the stories written *for* DC.  Comic
book writers working for DC agree to yield their copyright to DC
in something called "work for hire" -- their pay for a story also
buys all the rights to the story, forever.  But if J. Random 
Ficwriter writes a Superman story, he owns the copyright on it 
regardless of DC's trademarks and editorial policies.

(That isn't necessarily any protection if DC and their legal team
turn their attention to you, but that's another thing entirely.)

This leads us into point two:  having a copyright on a fanfic 
does not conflict with the copyright on the work you are writing 
about -- unless, of course, you're plagiarizing it, in which case 
you have other problems.  (At least some of them mental.)  The
fanfic, though, potentially infringes on one or more *trademarks*,
which makes you the potential target of legal action.  Thus the
classic fanfic disclaimer, in which the author acknowledges the
ownership of those trademarks, forswears all intent to challenge
their ownership, emphasizes that the work is not for profit, etc.

The jury is out -- more or less literally -- as to whether these
disclaimers are even worth the electrons used to display them on
a screen.  The simple fact is, if the owner of the property for
which you've written a fic wants to crush you like a bug, they 
probably can, with the combination of high-powered lawyers and 
trademark law itself.  Some companies will not hesitate to do so;
others do not out of either ignorance that the fanfic is out 
there or enlightened self-interest.  

Fortunately for the fic author, this last category seems to be 
growing in prevalence in parallel with the increasing awareness 
of fanfics in the general culture.  Most owners of ficcable 
intellectual properties understand (or realize eventually, after 
a backlash -- see Warner Brothers' near-disastrous missteps upon 
acquiring the movie rights to "Harry Potter") that suing the nice 
people who give them money for loving their work too much is a 
good way to alienate said people and make them stop giving their 
money.  These days, a ban on fan works is more often the 
exception than the rule, and many of the really big properties -- 
"Star Trek" and "Star Wars", just to name two -- have organized 
systems for accommodating fanwork while leaving their trademarks 
and other IP unthreatened.


...

recommendation: post a disclaimer and a copyright notice anyway, 
and use creative commons






xx.  Rules for Self-Inserts

1.  Your SI should be there to *supplement* the plot, not 
    *supplant* it.  Help the other characters achieve their 
    goals, do not achieve those goals for or instead of them.
2.  No one likes a show-off.  Even if you are far more competent
    or powerful than the other characters, do not run roughshod
    over them.  Complement them.  (*Not* "compliment".)  If 
	necessary, give yourself a valid and believable in-story 
	reason why you can't just wave your hand and fix everything, 
	even if that's actually in your power to do.
3.  At least some of the characters your SI meets and interacts
    with should *not* like your SI.  And I don't mean the bad 
    guys -- that's a given.  Some of the *heroes* should find him
    suspicious, or too mysterious to be trustworthy, or just 
    plain annoying (*especially* if he acts like a typical SI).
    Conflict drives a story, and conflict among the good guys
    makes it *interesting* -- what good is knowing the entire
    plot if no one wants to listen to you?  And what I said about
    the bad guys a moment ago?  What if some of the bad guys 
    *like* your SI regardless of his opinions on the matter?
4.  Similarly, your SI shouldn't automatically like all the 
    heroes and hate all the villains, even if he's coming in with
    full knowledge and awareness of what's going on.  He may 
    *want* to, but frankly, I can think of a dozen protagonists
    from as many genres whom I love to read about or watch but 
    whom I would find incredibly irritating in person.  Let your
    SI dislike anyone who deserves it -- and when appropriate, 
    *like* anyone who deserves it, as well -- regardless of their
    "side".
5.  Even if your SI is deliberately there to get involved in the
    plot, don't drop him right in the middle of the action.  A
    SI story will play better if your character arrives on the
    outskirts of what's going on, and accidentally stumbles over 
    it.  
6.  If your SI is allegedly unaware of what he's getting into,
    don't write his reactions with *your* knowledge.  The prime
    example of this is someone dropped into a whole new (and
	unfamiliar) world automatically sussing out who're the good 
	guys and who're the bad guys without any thought or effort.  
	Only in the most black-and-white worlds should this be 
	believable.  (example: "Ma Vie et Roses".)
7.  No matter how powerful or capable your SI is, *someone* will 
    at least *try* to get the better of him -- and you know, they
    should succeed at least once.  If you can't be beaten, you 
    can't be truly challenged, and if you can't be challenged, 
    you have no conflict to drive a story.  And remember -- they 
	don't have to challenge you where you excel.  Just because 
	you're invulnerable, can lift mountains, and can waltz 
	invisibly into the bad guys' headquarters doesn't mean you
	can't be out-thought or out-planned.





XX.  One Way To Make Spellcheckers Work For You

If you're writing in a setting with a lot of custom vocabulary,
create a custom dictionary for it.  All spellcheckers these days
let you add words to their dictionary, and most allow you to 
create a custom dictionary to supplement their default 
dictionary.  

Make the best use of this feature by creating a document with only 
the unique words and usages from your setting.  (Many spellcheckers 
are case-sensitive, so this could include things like unusually 
capitalized words.)  After making sure you have every word right, 
spellcheck the document, and add all the words to a custom 
dictionary.  Then, every time you work in that setting, load the
custom dictionary.



   

   
xx.  Writing Magic

http://brandonsanderson.com/sandersons-first-law/

   Sanderson's First Law of Magics: An author's ability to solve 
   conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the 
   reader understands said magic.






   
xx.  Now, why to *ignore* my advice

   Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks
   your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings.
   -- Stephen King

Or at least some of it:

http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/murder-your-darlings/



IV.  Links and References

EZN's Guide to Writing (Fan)Fiction:
http://eznguide.rogerdodger.me/


Grammar, Usage and Vocabulary:

bartlett's

http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/
http://www.kissthisguy.com/ <-- mondegreens


Turkey City Lexicon
http://www.sfwa.org/writing/turkeycity.html
https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Turkey_City_Lexicon


Grand List of Overused SF Cliches
http://dragonwritingprompts.blogsome.com/2007/02/17/grand-list-of-overused-science-fiction-cliches/


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commonly_confused_homonyms

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_frequently_misused_English_words


Neil Gaiman's 8 Rules of Writing
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/28/neil-gaiman-8-rules-of-writing/

Kurt Vonnegut's 8 Tips on How to Write a Great Story
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/04/03/kurt-vonnegut-on-writing-stories/

10 Tips on Writing from David Ogilvy
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/02/07/david-ogilvy-on-writing/

Henry Miller's 11 Commandments of Writing & Daily Creative 
Routine
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/02/22/henry-miller-on-writing/

Jack Kerouac's List of 30 Beliefs and Techniques for Prose and 
Life
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/22/jack-kerouac-belief-and-technique-for-modern-prose/

Six Tips on Writing from John Steinbeck
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/12/john-steinbeck-six-tips-on-writing/

Susan Sontag on Writing
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/07/25/susan-sontag-on-writing/

A Fanfiction Writer's Guide to Publication
http://www.angelfire.com/scifi/delric/Publication.htm




V.  Contributors to this document

Necratoid
Custos Sophiae
Loki Laufeyjarson
Epsilon
Rob Kelk
Morganni
Griever
"Karsten Sethre" <ksethre@io.com>
Dot Warner <dotchan@dotchan.com>
Shaye Horwitz


Vilui at TVTropes.org, before I had my falling out with the
management there.


Special thanks go to the late George Scithers, one-time editor-
in-chief of "Asimov's Science Fiction" magazine.  I've cribbed
some of the material for this document from my fragmentary memory
of a set of advice/guidelines to "Asimov's" contributors that he
wrote and distributed circa 1980.  I suppose it's a bit of a
tribute to how influential that document was on me that I can
still remember large parts of it more than thirty-five years 
later...


This document is copyright (C) 2006-2022, Robert M. Schroeck,
and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike-
Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.