Writing Tips with Nonagon · 9:20am May 21st, 2015
Yo.
Periodically, I'll mention how to me fanfiction is a playground where I can experiment and get better at writing. I've been doing this for about four years now, and my goodness does it ever show. I can barely read some of my old stuff any more, while my new work is getting better and better. But that's vague, and despite what English teachers will tell you, reading good writing isn't the same as learning good writing. So after all that posturing, what have I actually learned?
Here are a few things I didn't learn from the training manuals. In no particular order, these are the things I've picked up from years of writing and editing fanfics. They're my methods, so they might not apply to everyone, but they're the things I keep in mind when I'm writing my stories. Hope it helps some.
Part 1: Style
The Comma Balance
This one is super obvious, but took years to master. "Where to put commas" is something that no one picks up right away, and those of us who say we did are lying. Yes, objectively we know that they're used to separate clauses, but stick purely to one rule and you'll end up with dry, flat writing. This goes doubly so when characters are talking, since realistic dialogue sounds nothing like narration. A rule of thumb is to read your own writing out loud, preferably in a monotone while overexaggerating every comma pause. The problem with this is that it will get you most of the way in balance, but not completely. Use of this technique can lead to the infamous "Shatnerian Comma" in which, commas, are not placed between, clauses, but in the places, where pauses, for emphasis, occur. The same technique was what led me into the trap of skipping commas that occupy shorter pauses, creating run-on sentences that left readers mentally gasping for breath.
A more useful simile is to think of sentence structure like music. Each paragraph has its own cadence that needs to flow smoothly and can be read either silently or out loud. If your paragraphs read awkwardly, try reading some poetry or writing some lyrics to the tune of your favorite song. It's up to you to decide how you want your writing to sound, just like there is no single type of music. Keep practicing, and eventually you'll develop your own rhythm without even realizing you're doing it. But sooner or later you'll have to take notice, because this leads right into my second point...
Sentence Length Is King
More than content, more than words, the length of a sentence will determine how a story feels. Obviously, my preference is for long, often rambling sentences with multiple clauses, so that is my "default" for doing narration. But if this isn't exactly what I need, a scene and the experience of writing it can quickly turn sour. Sometimes, you need to be sharp! You need to be snappy! You need to go, go, go, punctuating for emphasis, shortening your clauses, to really hammer something home! Efficiency is key here; shorter sentences create the impression of time moving faster.
Shorter paragraphs are related. Even the same amount of content will seem to go by quicker if it's broken up. A longer paragraph will create a visual block that slows things down. (My editors have had to wean me off of fourteen-line paragraphs. Even for important stuff, that's a bit much.)
The basic rule is short sentences for action scenes, long sentences for calm or informative scenes. Of course, it's much more complicated than that. Think about what you're doing on a sentence-by-sentence basis and decide what fits best in any given place. And don't be afraid to mix it up - lots of sentences of exactly the same type becomes noticeably repetitive. But readers can tell if you're forcing it, too. As above, keep practicing until you don't notice you're doing it any more.
Don't Write A Character, Write In Character
This one is a little trickier. Writing about someone is fairly easy; writing about being someone is harder. The basic philosophy is that every description is actually describing two things: the thing itself, and the person describing it. When used carefully, every single thing - every description, every action, every simple word choice - can be used to give exposition about the character whose point of view we're following. It's easy to come up with simple examples of this; characters should be consistent and three dimensional. Obviously one who describes a hill as a "disgusting mount" will be very different from someone who calls it a "beautiful crest". This applies to everything in terms of content and style. The details they see, the sentence lengths, the choice of words both speaking and thinking, all serve to make characters distinct from one another. It drives me up the wall when a writer tells a story with multiple points of view and they all sound exactly the same.
What's less simple is remembering that this principle applies not only to the words on the page, but what isn't stated as well. Telling a character-driven story means getting inside their head, which means knowing that what they say isn't always reliable. (A background in theatre may help here.) Whether a character is snarky is just as important as whether they know that they're snarky, and the real challenge becomes revealing this to the reader without the character catching on. This can be done by having them make statements of debatable authenticity: "I was justified in killing that whale," for example, or "She knows that I ate her haggis." A favorite technique of mine is the hypocritical statement: Have the character condemn a person or thing while exactly describing themself. As an example:
I used to date bad boys. Boy, was that ever a fucking mistake. All I'd been looking for was someone who could keep up with me, both physically and mentally, but none of those pricks had it in them. Their priorities were all wrong, always thinking about themselves, never me. That, and once you stripped away the top layer, anyone who went out of their way to show off how cool they were always turned out to be an insecure creep with mommy issues who wasn't nearly as good in bed as they thought they were.
I may be a little proud of that one.
Obviously, a lot of this depends on the intent of the story, the character in question, and the point of view being used. The above applies most to first person, though a dedicated third person limited can use it as well. "I sneered at them. They were creeps, the bunch of them." reads identically to "He sneered at them. They were creeps, the bunch of them." My preference is third person limited, sticking exclusively to the point of view of one character at a time like a camera perched on their shoulder, inside their head in all but terms. But if you're going to make a third person narrator unreliable - if you're going to make them a separate character at all - you've got to commit to it.
Use Descriptions Exactly Once
Early on, I was caught by the common sickness of Lavender Unicorn Syndrome. An especially common ailment of ponyfics, LUS's main symptom is an insistence on referring to characters by their description, such as calling Twilight Sparkle "the lavender unicorn" instead of "Twilight" or, more preferably, "she". This crops up commonly in all-female stories in which "she" and "her" don't necessarily denote a specific character. I'm far from the first to comment on this; you can read elsewhere all about how it bogs down narration with useless information and that, despite what your brain is telling you, pronouns are invisible to the reader. What we can learn from this is that this applies to everything.
When a new thing appears in your story, location or character or whatever, describe it. (Actually, that's a lie. Describe it when it becomes relevant, not before.) Then, once that job is done, never mention how it looks again. You're allowed to refer back to details for emphasis/comparisons or to enforce how a specific character perceives it, but unless that thing is specifically the subject, just leave it out. (Example: If the colour of a character's skin is going to be important, that should really be foreshadowed by other means anyway. Just stating it once and then letting it naturally arise over the course of the story is more effective than straight-facedly reminding us that she's polka-dotted every few pages, or, just as bad, not mentioning it for two hundred pages, then springing it on the reader all at once, and then getting huffy when they get confused. But now we're getting into pacing issues.) If the reader isn't sure what you're talking about when it comes up again, it's because you didn't do your job properly the first time. Above all else, make your descriptions vivid. Be poetic, be precise, use similes that make my face flush and my pulse quicken, but whatever works for you, paint a picture that will last the reader for the entire rest of the story. I don't care if it's literally the blandest, dullest thing in the universe, commit to it. Use as many words as you need.
And that there leads me to the flip side of this: Sometimes, as many words as you need is none. Do you have any idea how many books there are out there, some of them the best ever, in which the author never tells you what the main character looks like? Given a basic framework, the reader can fill in a shocking amount of details on their own. Limit yourself to the number of details that are necessary to make the story beautiful, and then really devote yourself to those. Doing a small number of things really, really well gets better results.
The Best Symbolism Is At The Sentence Level
This, ladies and the other ones, is what your English teachers were talking about.
My personal hierarchy of stories is as follows: Basic stories, the kind any idiot can crank out, is just a sequence of events. Good stories, the kind that get remembered, are about characters, and the experience of being human in the face of the events. But great stories, the truly important ones, are about themes. They're about something greater than the story itself or the people in it, something that touches the real world in a true, personal way. This rough framework is layered; you can't have themes unless you have characters to live them, and you can't have characters unless you give them something to do. (Look, I know that a study of literature will prove this utterly wrong, but I find it helpful so this is the model that I work with.) The basic path of a fiction writer is to start at the bottom and write about things happening (knight kills dragon), then make it personal (Erik and his emotional struggle to fight the dragon) and then start to think about what it all means (Erik and the dragon: a tale of fiscal responsibility). I've been doing this all my life, and I am just barely starting to crack the top layer. I'm not fully qualified to talk about this. But here we go.
What a story's about is rarely obvious at first. There's a saying that writing a book goes thus: You write the book, then you edit it, then you edit it some more, until it's absolutely perfect. And then, now that you know what the story is about, you can write the book. Themes can be overt, like a big speech or a white whale, but what it all means is much harder to plan out because it seldom has to do with events. Symbolism pretty much has to arise organically while writing the text, and it relies heavily on your use of rhetoric. Told by a different writer, 1984 would be the happy tale of a just state doing the hapless job of quashing terrorists. Without specific word choices, Moby Dick would just be an innocent sea mammal. It's your job as a writer to touch the intangible, to give names to things that non-writers don't know how to express. You're not just telling your story, you're giving it a thesis. This is really, really hard.
But this is a column about advice, not just me wittering unhelpfully about ideals, so here goes: If you see an opportunity, go for it. Train yourself to keep an eye out for chances to make statements. Use expressions; have your characters sweep things under the rug, hit the nail on the head, and look up for guidance. Surprise yourself. Listen to music while writing. Use recurring symbols as shorthand. Capitalize on your characters' emotional struggles and draw clear contrasts between them. Duality is your friend. Expect to be totally unsubtle the first few times you try this. And, and this might seem counter-intuitive, don't devote too much attention to it. If you're invested in your world enough, if you understand your characters and their goals, then it'll come out. Don't worry. You'll figure it out.
Part 2: Content
Choose What To Front-Load
"Front-loading" is a term for information, or events that serve no purpose but giving information, that are presented to the reader before the story starts. At least I think it is. I started using it one day and I have no idea where I picked it up. Think of it as the opening narration of a movie and you'll see what I mean, chiefly because opening narration is one of the most hated storytelling techniques of all time and a universal sign of lazy screenwriting. But wait, that can't be right - The Lord of the Rings starts with a voiceover that no one minded, and one of the most famous cinematic openings ever is Star Wars' text crawl. So what's going on here?
Any writing guide will tell you that the beginning is the most important part of a story. This is a reader's first look at your world, and if they have to spend it memorizing names and taking science lessons, they're going to get bored fast. So let's fix that: Let's say you open up in medias res, give us an action sequence, set up some mythology, and explosively smash cut to the opening credits (so to speak). Surely now would be the time to offload all that backstory, right? Hold your horses there, y'all! You've just set up the same problem again. This was never about introductions. This was about information efficiency.
The real tragedy of front-loaded information is it deprives the characters of a chance to experience these things. Any time spent with the narrator is time spent not experiencing the story. Okay, confession time: I may write extremely complicated stories with lots of different characters, but I am also extremely easily confused by complicated stories with lots of characters. I find them very difficult to keep track of, often to little avail. Ergo, one thing I prize in a writer is the ability to deliver information in packets. New information should arise as the reader needs to understand it, keeping them up-to-date without leaving too many unanswered questions. But there's the rub; drop a reader in with nothing at all and they'll be left with nothing but unanswered questions, leading to an unsatisfying first experience.
This one is hecka complicated and involves a lot of fine tuning. If it helps, I consider introductory information to be like a tutorial for the rest of the story. As in a game, if it's done right, the reader won't even notice it's there. (And now we can add "game design" to the list of things I recommend you study.)
Start Your Characters From Scratch
I've said this bit a bunch of times before, so I'll be brief: No matter how much planning you do, you never know who a character is going to be until you actually start writing them. People evolve in unexpected ways. They develop voices you never intended for them. Important ones can turn out to be useless, while minor ones can steal the show. This might not make sense until you've been writing for a while, but let your characters do what they want. The more "real" you think of them in your head, the less dependent on your thought patterns they are, and the easier it is for them to surprise you. Put them in a sandbox for a while and let them play until they've figured out who they want to be. Then, when it's time to edit, you can buckle down and weave them into the story.
Setpieces Make Your World Beautiful
I remember vividly the first time I created something beautiful. That time was the writing of Death Note: Equestria chapter 26: Honesty. The scene was Rainbow Dash and Applejack's meeting beneath the grove of willow wisps, the ghosts of trees that rain spectral tears. After I wrote the description of that place, I stopped and just stared at the page for a little while. It didn't have to be in there, and from a standpoint of pure efficiency it shouldn't have been in there. But damn if it didn't cast a new light over the entire scene.
Never disregard your setpieces. It's tempting to not think of literature as a visual medium and describe everything on a purely human level, and most of the time you'll be right to. "The room", "the park", or "the graveyard" are adequate for your needs. But when you've got a recurring location or you need to sell a particular moment, do not forget to include the setting. Take the opportunity to make something unique and thematic and paint a picture in the mind's eye that will last the entire scene. Just for a minute, you're not a writer, you're a film director. Whether you're creating a confrontation, a love scene, or just a casual conversation, ask yourself "Would this be more dramatic if it took place somewhere else?"
Give Your Characters Something To Do
Related to the above, not really, sort of. If you're like me, your characters talk a lot. A lot a lot. And when they're not talking, they're thinking. And when they're not doing either, they're... honestly, with me, they're either banging the hell out of each other or someone's about to die. The point is that I use a lot of dialogue. Imagine you're a film director again - or, you know, stage director, whatever floats your goat. Something visual. Having two actors onstage delivering lines to each other isn't visually interesting, no matter how good the lines or how well they're performed. A lengthy back-and-forth across the page is just as bland and repetitive. And this is why I follow one simple rule (and this is one of my big ones) whenever I plot a scene with a lot of dialogue: No matter how little is going on in the scene, always give your characters something to do.
It doesn't have to be a lot. Let a conversation happen while someone's cooking dinner, or driving a car, or fighting off a living tree with one arm tied behind their back. The more, the merrier; use the setting to your advantage and, as above, come up with something that will subtly exposit about the speaker. If there's any chance that visual aids may be used, use them. Actions speak louder than words, and a lot of the time, violence really is the answer. And even if the scene is calm and subdued and set in the middle of nowhere, still give your characters something to do, even if that thing is nothing at all. Focus on the positions of their eyes and hands. Let them make faces and react to each other. Give them interiority and let them make the observations themselves. Keep the scene dynamic, keep it flowing, and keep your characters feeling like people.
Of course, once you've got your method down, don't feel that you're not allowed to throw in some occasional plain back-and-forth dialogue as well. No need to break up every sentence with an action.
Kill Your Little Darlings
This is not what you're probably thinking, but don't worry, I'll get to that.
This one's a toughie, but it's an important one. At the end of the day, you're going to have to accept that some ideas just won't work. Sometimes it's a scene, a character, or an entire premise that you're just going to have to throw out the window. And this can be hard, especially if you've put a lot of work into any of it, but if you're committed to creating something good then it's a task you're going to have to swallow sooner or later.
The name comes from a saying we had in university, referring to the fact that the pieces that belong the least in your story are usually the parts that you love the most. It's absolutely heartbreaking; I know that for me, my stories are my babies, and no one wants to be told that your baby shouldn't exist. But that's how it goes. The reasons can be many: lack of space, a poorly-conceived idea, unforseen implications, picking something too challenging, or just the realization that no matter how good it is, it doesn't mesh with the story you're trying to tell. Sometimes it can be cannibalized into another work or altered into a separate thing. Most of the time, your hard-carved words will have to just vanish into the aether.
For most artists, "give up" is a killing phrase. We've all experienced someone who's seen us or our work and told us to stop trying, to stop writing, to stop creating, as if this is all we're capable of and if we keep going it'll just be more of the same. In the first place, screw that person. You know who you are. In the second, giving up on a specific project may feel like you're giving up on your dream. But you're not. Everything is a chance to keep moving forward, and you learn a lot more from failing than you do from success. Yes, it will hurt, and you may well get flak for it from people who wanted you to keep going. Don't let it hold you back. If you have a writer's spirit, you will never stop coming up with ideas; the loss of one will become meaningless in the long term. Accept the good with the bad and never stop creating.
Make Them Cry
Now this one is what you're thinking of.
I may be wrong, but much of my writing is characterized by a certain emotional brutality. Put simply, I am really good at hurting people. My characters suffer. They feel pain, they experience loss. Yet there's a saying: It doesn't matter how many tears a character sheds if the audience isn't crying along with them. If you want to get people invested, you can't just hurt your characters and call it a day. Your first goal, front and centre, has to be to hurt the reader.
Except that's an oversimplification. The truth is more complicated.
Despite what you may think, I very rarely go out of my way to make people sad, mostly because such practices won't necessarily lead to good writing. I do, however, consider it a gateway to good writing, so if your stated goal is to make your readers "have feels" then by all means, go for it. Putting your characters through awful, awful situations will teach you one half of the skills you need to create emotional writing. Because in order to make your readers sad, you have to be good at two things: You have to know how to be incredibly cruel, and you have to know how to be incredibly kind.
In order to be cruel, in your own creations you have to not so much play God as play the devil. And naturally, as the devil, the greatest trick you have to pull is convince the reader that you don't exist. Readers can tell when they're being manipulated, even if they think they can't, and if something comes across as trying to provoke a reaction you'll get flak for it. Your job is to set things up so that awful events appear to arise naturally from within the universe, to the extent that you can simply stand back and say "Hey, I had nothing to do with it." More on that in a minute.
Of course, this doesn't mean you should keep things simple. Find ways to rip the rug out from under your readers. Make it poetic, ironic; use dualistic echoes, or go the classical route and have your characters bring their doom upon themselves. Emotional damage is more effective than physical, and in either case, inflicting it on someone the protagonist cares about usually counts double. Never use death lightly. NEVER USE DEATH LIGHTLY. A bigger buildup leads to a bigger payoff, and if you can get your reader guessing about the outcome, you've made them a party to it. Just make sure that what you come up with is just as spectacular as what they do. But lest you think you're setting yourself down a very dark path by imagining inventive, awful ways to hurt people, always bear the second part of the equation in mind.
Kindness, surprisingly, is the easy part. First, you have to be kind to your reader. If you want them to trust you with their emotions, you have to make them happy before you make them sad. This also falls into "hecka complicated" territory, and involves good introductions, likable characters, and interspersing drama and humour. Fanfiction is this with training wheels on, since most of the time you're going to be writing with characters and settings that the reader already has an attachment to, but you won't always have that luxury. But the really important part is that after everything you've done, you have to be kind to your characters.
Breaking a character is easy. Hit anyone in the right way or hard enough and you can reduce them to a sobbing, malfunctioning wreck in the space of a chapter. But pain is cheap, and no one benefits from it. If emotions were that easy, all my stories would be about gore and suicide. (Not to say those have no value, but it takes a skilled hand to pull either off.) But this isn't about sadism, and your purpose isn't to torture anyone. Your job, no more, no less, is to push your characters exactly as far as they can take it.
There's a saying that "The end comes when everything's okay. If it's not okay, it's not the end." (Or "It's always darkest just before the dawn" if you insist on something equally valid but less sappy.) The reader can tell early on whether or not a story will have a happy ending, and its exclusion will usually involve the crossing of certain lines. Learn where those lines are and don't cross them. If you do, that emotional investment will be cheapened or lost. Always leave open the possibility of an ending - not necessarily a happy ending, or even a good ending, but at least an ending in which, even in a small way, everything is okay. You are not telling the story of how a beloved character was mercilessly crushed by a force beyond her control, but how she went through an ordeal and lived to tell the tale.
Because that's what this is really about: survival. You are the dungeon master, throwing traps and trials at your protagonist as she struggles in your grip. But no matter what you hit her with, in secret you're still rooting for her to win. The greater the challenge, the more magnificent the victory. That's the real secret that lies at the root of my writing. No matter what she goes through, and even if it has to come about in an unorthodox way, she has to survive.
I kinda just outed myself really hard, huh.
A Timeline Is A Logic Puzzle
But forget about that wishy-washy emotion stuff. Let's get away from the meat of the story and into the bones. This is where all the real clever-thinky stuff happens, which I am in no way invalidating by using that term.
When a story is even a little bit time-sensitive, or longer than usual, or contains a lot of characters (oh, why oh why did I make my primary fic all three?), it quickly becomes important to remember where everyone is at all times. This might seem like a waste of time at first - in most stories, characters will just come and go and only exist when they're interacting with the protagonists. But this is an area where you really, really don't want to screw up, and it serves as a great opportunity to flesh out your characters. I seriously cannot say this enough: Never, ever forget about the logistics.
Make a complete map of your story, from beginning to end, of exactly where everyone is and what they're doing at all times. Do it, filly. It's good practice. I usually do mine chapter by chapter, and then, when I actually reach the chapter, do it scene by scene. Keep track of every point where you need someone to be at a certain place at a certain time. Now, don't pre-plan too much; characters have a way of surprising you. But keeping track of the bare bones of what needs to happen for the story to take place will make your job easier in the future.
Now, get ready to stretch your brain, because this timeline you've made has layers. Every character has feelings. Every character has motivations. Every character has incomplete information. All of these things need to be mapped. Yes, I can hear you groaning, but this is important. A good mystery depends on characters getting information in a specific order. A good romance depends on characters feeling certain ways in a specific order. And everything, from the overarching plot to the arguments in a single conversation, has to flow logically from one thing to the next.
Actually, that's a good point I just brought up: I plot individual scenes in the same way. When characters are about to have a long conversation, or especially an argument, I make a list of all the points that I need to cover over the course of the scene. Then I place them all in the order that makes the most logical sense and figuratively draw a line through them. There must be no leaps in logic, no characters suddenly changing topics or breaking character for the sake of the plot. Everything needs to progress on its own with no interference from you.
And that's the main thing. I often get frustrated with the mode of realism for various reasons, but one of the best things that it brought to us was literary inevitability. By the end of the story, the reader should ideally feel that the events that happened happened exactly as they would in real life and could not have happened in any other way. That's why keeping track of the timeline is so important, and why you need to pay special attention to the beginning. Your job is to put everything and everyone in exactly the right places so that, when you let the balls drop, they will spin around each other and land exactly where they need to be without a single extra touch from you. In other words, if you do your job right, no one will ever notice that you did anything at all.
No One Is Right
Ending on a mellow note. This one's a personal preference, and maybe it's just a sign of the times, but here goes: Be politically neutral. Not just literally, but yes, literally, but whenever you for whatever reason have two characters who disagree, don't take sides. If there are two sides to an issue, whether it's personal or political, make sure that both sides get to have their say and don't make a statement that you yourself don't understand. That's not to say a person can't be wrong, or that all arguments have to end in a tie. Just remember that if a person believes something, their reasons for doing so are usually valid, and you don't necessarily have to be in the right to win.
The reasons for this are twofold. First, it's just better storytelling. If one personal philosophy crushes another, it's usually a sign of the author speaking, not the characters. Real life just doesn't work that way. And second, nothing is better and more efficient at establishing characters than arguments. I would explain, but I should have been asleep five hours ago and it's about time to wrap this up.
Part 3: Conclusion
So, in conclusion: In order to write a story you have to be a musician, a director, a painter, a method actor, a psychologist, an ethicist, a logistician, an engineer, and also literally God. So, basically, everything except the actual act of putting words onto a page. This may take steps to explain why I never finish anything. What it doesn't explain is why I spent the past two days writing this instead of doing that editing I was supposed to be doing. (Please direct all hate mails to Laven Eclipse for inspiring this.)
But seriously, I'm in this to help others as much as myself. I like when people like my stories, but knowing that I've even in a small way helped someone else to create a story of their own is where real joy lies. Editing helps with my anxiety. Fan art makes my entire month. Knowing that a part of my world has enriched someone else's is what makes this all worth it. Happy creating, everyone. I hope this wasn't completely useless.
You are now all free to tell me all the things I got wrong.
-9
Ok, I'll make sure to read it throughly before belching forth my next chapter.
Thank you for writing this, it was very informative. I've read a lot of different writing guides and blog posts similar to this, but this one actually had usable advice that can be applied.
You're very good at what you do, at least when it comes to the emotional impacts of your stories, especially the Mirror series. I don't think I've ever cried, raged, or just been plain frustrated by fictional characters as much as I have with the group of chuckle fucks that are its main characters. Keep up the good work.
First of is extra commas can be useful in dialog for a character that is hesitating slightly. As in they're nervous or unsure about the specific words being used or the content. I use it with Fluttershy a lot. "Rainbow Dash, I'm, not sure that's, really, a good idea. It seems, like that will make you, explode."
As for descriptions, while this may only be an issue for writing in first pony, sometimes you might need to keep using part of the description, but the name shouldn't logically come up so colors or limited bits of description are required. For example Flash is refered to as the orange foal for half a scene because because Dash doesn't know his name, and then the smart foal when after he compliments Dash before we get his name. Also no matter what it might make sense not to give every bit character a name, or if you do not mention it, so again a little of this might be the best way to get there, though depending on what they're doing can work depending on the situation, the guard, the thief, the brute, but it won't always work.
3087218 Personally, I'm strongly against the Shatnerian comma. They disrupt the flow of a sentence in a very unnatural, unstructured way. If you're going for a pause, there's... no reason not to use an ellipsis, or an, um, interjection. As for the overlap of descriptions and pronouns, yeah, there's a lot of wiggle room in situations like that. The important thing is to find one identifier and stick with it.
I made the connection with DMing exactly one paragraph before you did
The logistics is what I do (and still I find myself struggling with it in my own work, suddenly realising that I need to tweak some things around because they wouldn't work as I envisioned)
Dropping unfeasable ideas is still a problem for me.
So is describing the dialogue - even when I do find something for the characters to do, I feel like I'm falling into "x said: ..., Y said:..." template, and when trying to spice things up a bit I tend to fall into LUS instead.
Still, at the end of the day, writing is fun and it is nice to look at your old work even if just to see how much you have improved
3094922 Good question! To which the answer is... I just find something that fits, I guess.
For me personally, coming up with a title is one of the first parts of my process when writing a story. In fact, a number of times it's been literally the first thing; I'm known to come up with a good title and write a story around that. I need a name to be able to contextualize the story into its own world, and it usually provides a central theme to work around. The result is that I tend to be extremely literal with my titles. Death Note: Equestria is just Death Note, but in Equestria. Somepony who loves you is about love. Cynical Pone Parody is a parody about pones. Nonagon's Ultra-Short Bite-Size Pony Fics... you get the idea. Even Mirror Fidelity was spawned this way; even before I'd had the plot entirely nailed down, I understood based on the title that the story was going to be both about the "fidelity" of Twilight being mirrored with Princess, and the "fidelity" of her relationship with Flash Sentry. A sense of humour that revolves largely around puns helps a lot.
Chapter titles go the same way. I usually come up with them about halfway through writing the chapter, but in other cases I plan half a dozen of them in advance to help paint a path for where the story is going. I don't have any universal rules about them except that they must always follow a consistent theme. Some of them are obvious, others less so. The one I'm proudest of is Death Note: Equestria. As in the original, it's the rule that each chapter title has to be one word, but also that each one has to have a double meaning, even if some of them are incredibly subtle.
I guess that doesn't help much in terms of actual advice. Titles are things that every writer does differently, and I know a lot of people prefer to work in the exact opposite order. As with most forms of inspiration, it's really about training your brain to come up with ideas, and that's not a thing that can really be taught. You've just gotta keep at it and see what comes out.
3095120 I HATE THEM WITH A BURNING PASSION.
...but seriously, as far as I can tell it's a regional thing. I see no reason for them, but I've given up arguing against them. Depending on the formatting, most readers will neither notice nor care. Just be aware of who you're writing for.
Yknow, I really do like this blog post. At the risk of sounding like I'm parroting all the other comments, it's very insightful, descriptive, and has everything that a burgeoning writer should at least peruse if not memorize. It's really, really good, and I hope many writers can take a look at it (Hell, maybe it can get noticed by site admits or something!)
But...In some ways (and this is purely at a personal level to myself; I'm not attempting to nor claim to speak for anyone/pony else) it's kind of...antithetical? Like, I get on a logical level that this all helps me as a writer and I should read all this and commit it to memory, etc. But, emotionally and mentally, it just feels like another roadblock just got erected in front of me. It makes me feel less like "Hey, I can use this! I should start incorporating these right now!" And more "Oh, no, this is what good writers use? I don't even think I can do any of this. How am I going to write a story, much less a good/great story?"
I do realize on some level that this is a mental problem on my part, but it's equally frustrating and disheartening. I do want to reiterate that I have no problems with the blog itself and the analysis therein, just that this is me putting my reactions to it in writing. As self-centered/complaining as it sounds.
3138189 And with that, you have stumbled upon one of the primary difficulties in trying to learn how to write.
The difficulty with art, and for various reasons writing in particular, is that it can only be discovered, not taught. The closest anyone can do to showing you what to do is giving you examples of writing from people who have already figured it out and saying "Write like this." But you often can't tell what brush strokes a painter used just by looking at the finished portrait, nor the composition of the paint, nor the muse who inspired it. All you can do is try to create something similar. And if you pay attention then over time you can add individual tricks to your repertoire, learning new styles and methods that you can mix and match as you will. But no matter how many new ways you learn to create something, there will never be any exact lines to trace, no formula shorter than a novel's length for you to plug things into. The expectations for what a story should be are about as helpful on the level of detail as saying that a canvas should be a rectangle. You are perpetually on your own, blindly experimenting with one thing after another to figure out what your teacher is really asking when she tells you to write like this.
In order to be a good writer, you have to learn how to write beautiful sentences. This is indisputable and it is very difficult. When you look over your notes it's easy to feel like the only way to get anywhere is to think about everything at once, measuring everything you do against everything you need to make sure that it fits. But really, it's more of a layering process; you work on one thing until you stop noticing that you're even doing it, and then you move on to the next. And there is a time for getting out your tweezers and subjecting your words to every criticism I've laid out above and more, but that time is during the planning stage before you've even picked up a pen and the editing process once you've got what you want onto the page. The writing itself has a mind of its own.
Listen.
Inside your head is an entire universe. In that space are living, breathing worlds, many of which are not dissimilar to our own. And across those worlds, with every breath you breathe, the most important events in history are taking place. Real, living people are experiencing things that no one else has ever experienced before. You see them when you close your eyes. They linger in your unconscious thoughts. In one of your heartbeats you can watch the entirety of one of their lives. You feel what they feel and know what they know. You understand them both inside and outside and watch their lives play out from every angle. They are beyond your control, and yet you are responsible for them. Your entire being is a vessel for their stories.
Forget about the sentences. Write those stories down.
3139051 I guess, but...I just don't feel like I've ever gotten that feeling. Maybe in small little flashes when I'm RPing, but not when I'm thinking up story ideas or when I want to sit down and write something.
...And half the time I feel like I could be doing something different as soon as I get the gumption to write, too...Maybe I'm just too scatterbrained, or too self-critical?