BronyCon Wrap Up Part 2: Advanced Writing - Extended Edition · 9:24pm Aug 10th, 2015
Before I get on to important writing topics, I need to share my husband's moment of glory:
Our friend Sam made the costume, but he needed someone taller to be the head. Since being the center of attention without doing any work is James's favorite thing ever, he was thrilled. (And he didn't even have to be the ass!)
It was even tweeted on the official BronyCon Twitter. I've never been prouder. 
Now, on to Advanced Writing...
So... one of the problems with Advanced Writing is that it's really hard to summarize. We got through about half of our planned discussion.
Bad Horse and Wanderer D were both great and smart, and I think I missed about half of what they said as I was trying to figure out how to sound as smart as them. It was an honor to be on the panel with both of them, and I offer my thanks for the opportunity and all the work they put in.
Among that work was Bad Horse putting together a virtual handout, featuring our notes and additional material, including the parts of the panel we never got to. That's there for anyone who wants to check it out, whether you were at the con or not.
There are few few things on there I didn't really get to touch on, or didn't get to say as much about as I would have liked. So let me cover/explain those here (and take advantage of the lack of time limit):
How to Think About What "Good" means:
So, this goes back to what I wrote about in the blog post Objectivity and Semantics. My basic way of looking at it is that any group you're look at has stories that it collectively considers "good." This will be different for different groups: FiMfiction has stories it considers good, The Royal Canterlot Library has stories it considers good, and the AppleDash Group has stories it considers good. These are probably not the same stories. But it's important to note that within the group there's usually some sort of consensus. Not everyone in the AppleDash group will agree on the single best AppleDash fic, but if you ask them about good AppleDash fics the same titles will often come up.
Now, you might totally disagree with those groups. Maybe you really like comedies, but you find that the stories you like are never considered good by other people who like comedies. There are agreed upon "classic" comedy stories, but you don't see the appeal. Many people at this point will just argue that "good" is subjective, and their good stories are no better than your good stories. But this doesn't take into account that a lot of other people's subjective opinions tend to agree, and they never got together and talked about it.
If you want to be a good writer, and you want people who like comedy to like your comedy stories, you need to know what makes a "good" comedy story to them.
I borrowed the term "taste level" from Project Runway, where the judges are often concerned about some designers taste level, because he keeps making evening gowns that look like business suits, or business suits that look like witch costumes, and he seems to really think they're good even when the judges point this out. Often most of the designers dress themselves in a weird and eclectic way, they like pushing the envelope, but to make it as a designer they need to know how far the people who will be wearing their clothes will want to push the envelope, and what they'll expect from various kinds of clothing.
Being a misunderstood genius is a tempting pose for any artist, but by publishing your stories you're implicitly trying to be understood. You're trying to be read by people. You're trying to be considered good.
To that end, it's important to have a good "taste level," to be able to estimate what your target audience considers good. You'll never know exactly, because not even a niche audience can agree on exactly what they like, but you should be able to see if you're in that ballpark, and accept if they point out you're not.
The best way to do this is to read what they consider good, and some of what they consider bad, and look at what these things have in common. Is your target audience picky about grammar? Do they seem to like thick prose? Do they focus on characterization, or readily accept broad interpretations? Do they like pop culture references? You can't usually make a checklist, but often you can get a feel for what they're looking for in a story.
Once you have this info, you don't have to write the same kind of story they've always liked, but you can incorporate these things into your own vision, and avoid things they seem not to like.
So I think that's how authors (and other artists) should think about "good."
Editors:
Editors, like writers, have various skill levels and individual talents. It's important to be realistic about that, and make sure your editor or team is right for your fic.
To start with, any editor should be able to present him or herself online as someone who knows how to communicate. An editor's job is not only to tell if your story is communicating effectively, but to communicate with you when it isn't. If they want to edit for people they need to show you they can do that.
Past that, take your editors with a grain of salt until you get to know them and know what they're good at. One of my editors isn't great at picking out story or characterization problems, but he's really good at proofreading and identifying sentences and paragraphs that aren't clear. I have another editor who is very, very busy, so I don't like to bother him with fiddly bits of writing, but he's awesome at getting the overall theme and seeing big picture issues. Personally, I'm pretty useless as an editor in both of those ways, but I'm good at characterization and dialogue, and have gone in to help clean that up for other writers.
Then there are people who are great to bring in for specific kinds of projects. An editor who knows a genre is going to be better at catching cliches and polishing the important aspects of that genre, while an editor who doesn't know the genre you're writing in might focus on all of the wrong things. The same thing is true if you're writing a character you don't usually write, or something more serious or subtle than you usually do. And there are certain topics you might want to pull in specialists for; it might be useful to bring in someone who's in the military if your story focuses a lot on that subject, or from personal experience (despite being female myself) I called in every female editor I knew at the time when I was working on a Judy Blume-style story about the CMC going through puberty.
Finally, there are times when might want to bring in an editor specifically to challenge your ideas. If you're building a philosophical argument through your story -- or even just trying to make a case for a certain headcanon -- editors or prereaders who don't agree with you will catch illogical leaps, inconsistencies, or straw man opponents in your stories better than getting edited by the choir you're preaching to. Or if you're concerned about a subplot or character stealing the focus of your story, and editor who doesn't like that element in general can make you really consider when and how you're using it.
But bookplayer, you might ask, where do you find all of these different kinds of editors?
On FimFiction, silly.
This goes back to one of the first items we talked about on the panel, and one of the first things listed on the outline: meet other writers. Specifically, interact with them.
* Follow people who post good stories, of course, but also look to see if people who make smart comments do any blogging, and follow them too.
* Join groups where good conversation tends to take place on the message boards.
* Comment on blog posts and stories and in groups, and read other people's comments and respond to them.
* Take part in contests and collabs you're interested in.
* If you have the time and inclination, join one of the skype groups that tends to spin off from groups on the site.
* Make sure your own comments and blog posts are well thought out and seem intelligent.
* Try not to make enemies (even if they're idiots, you never know who they're friends with) and generally be polite.
* Offer to help people when you think you can be of help, or just in a general way.
* Ask politely for help, and don't take it personally if an acquaintance doesn't have time to help, or doesn't think they can offer help with that project.
Basically, while FimFiction is a great place to make friends, it's also a great place to network and learn from other writers. Try to at least keep your "professionalism" hat in your back pocket, ready to put it on if you need to if a opportunity comes up.
Well, that about covers the stuff I didn't get to say. I'm happy to answer any questions about this, the outline, or the panel, or point you to Bad Horse or Wanderer D if they could answer them better. And I'll have a wrap up post for the Romance panel soon, I hope.
Like you needed to try.
~Skeeter The Lurker
"Try not to make enemies (even if they're idiots, you never know who they're friends with)..."
Let me expand on this a little. People are vast seas of unknown talents and hidden features. Just because somebody can be unsufferable in one particular area, does not mean they can't be a wealth of information and interest in another. I hang around farmers all of the time (comes with the job) and although every one of them has a talent in growing things, they disagree on *everything* from wimmenfolk to beer (Except a wimmenfolk holding a beer for them. On that, they'll all agree.)
SometimesMost of the time you will learn more from somebody who disagrees with you than any number of agreeable pleasant people. The key is not to get all upset and flustered about other's opinions. Disregard trigger warnings, microagressions, code words, and trivial offenses. Don't be afraid of a politically incorrect joke⁽*⁾, an incorrect opinion that clashes with your well thought-out stances, or even religious/ir-religious differences. God put everybody here as an example, some positive, some... not.A Conservative, a Liberal and a Feminist walk into a bar, and the Feminist says, "That's not funny!!"
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I totally agree with that. And it also cycles back into my original point there: If you don't treat those people with at least a basic amount of respect and politeness, you're going to get off on a bad foot with the people who know them better and understand their talents and limitations. Many people end up in odd friendships, and while often those people will be the first to admit that their friends can be a little abrasive at times, or seem to be allergic to spellcheck, or have a headcanon they'll defend past all reason and sanity, you're going to seem like a much better person to them if you can publicly keep your cool and avoid making things worse.
All that talk about editing, and I don't even get a mention.
I thought we had something special.
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I... don't think you've ever actually edited for me. I know that's just a technicality, but...
I mean, I can make a separate blog post telling everyone who reads my blog to contact you for editing, if you want. Just say the word.
Your section about what qualifies as good reminded me of a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot that’s interesting to me. There’s a cliché among a lot of professional writers when discussing the craft to write to please a single person instead of trying to please everybody. Most specifically, I always think of number seven in Kurt Vonnegut’s self-assessment: “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” Less specifically, Stephen King mentioned that he writes all of his novels with his ideal reader in mind as his wife.
I think someone could easily argue that this advice is the same advice in a lot of ways; since nothing can be universally good or bad, trying to write something that appeals to everyone leaves it thin and broad to the point of no impact and it’s best to understand who your audience actually is and shoot for them instead of everyone, and the ‘professional consensus’ is to abstract that group down into a single ideal reader. But in saying that, I’ve always struggled with this idea of the ideal reader, often because I don’t think any one writer really does have a singular ideal reader for all of their work unless they are incredibly restricted in the things they choose to write about. Even someone like Stephen King who is often thought of as a supernatural horror genre writer has a pretty large array of story types within that genre that makes the idea of a single reader less seemingly tenable, and that’s not even getting into his books that are in completely different genres.
Of course, this struggling is further compounded by my confusion over the non-abstract view of ideal readers as target audiences, like you’re discussing in this post. I think they’re great to consider on some larger issues for sure—off the top of my head, someone writing an AppleDash story ought to be thinking very long and very hard about what they’re bringing to the table if they want to have a homophobic Apple family disapproving of the relationship in their fic and want the story to be appealing to the AppleDash group—but the more you hone in on specifics, the more I find thinking about a specific demo like that less helpful and find it’s doing the same thing that the story-will-get-pneumonia advice is warning against. It starts encouraging, at least for me, this thought process of written-by-committee story construction. Can’t have this element since it might annoy these readers for this reason, can’t go in this direction because it might turn off these other readers for a different reason, until you’re left with something that feels more market researched than written. Plus there have been so many times where I’ve looked at a story and assumed something about its appeal (usually a lack thereof) and have been proven entirely wrong by the response to it, and that’s just frustrating and makes me feel like giving up on the whole idea of trying to understand these fimfic weirdos and what they like (
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For a long while my semi-compromise on this has been thinking about it in the kind of intentionally pompous-sounding way of writing stories with myself as the ideal reader. In addition to sounding so arrogant I can’t help but laugh at myself, the stories I like to write are the same sorts of stories I’d like to read, which makes me a shoe-in as my ideal representative audience member, so it sounds like a good solution, but it ultimately isn’t really true. Even factoring out the abstraction that the ideal reader is me ‘if I hadn’t had the story idea and was reading the story as if it was written by someone else,’ I think it’s ultimately not the best solution for approaching writing. It takes things from market researched to self-indulgent if you’re not careful, and I’m positive I’ve crossed that line in writing more than once.
I’m mostly rambling here. It’s one of those things where the more I think about writing and study the craft of it, the less I feel I know about it.
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I could be wrong, but it looks to me like you're getting hung up on the "checklist" that I mentioned you couldn't usually get. While there are occasional subjects that you should keep in mind are cliches or hot button issues for certain groups, I think it's usually more of a familiarity.
I don't really think the "ideal reader" is a useful concept because I'm thinking in terms of the authors who usually argue that "good is subjective" in response to people telling them their fics aren't good. In their minds, they already have an ideal reader, and they like it. At the same time, different stories have different objectives; a good comedy story might not be a good romance, but if it's a good comedy the level of romance isn't as important. Trying to (or expecting to) write something everyone will love is tilting at windmills.
But one of the big pieces of advice every writer will give is to read, and I think this is one of the many reasons for it. The more different kinds of "good stories" you consume, the more I think you can look at a totally new story and say "these people are likely to think this is good." And the more likely you are to be able to recognize those aspects, or deliberately subvert them, in your own fics.
You should always write things you think are good, but doing so to the exclusion of what everyone else thinks is good is dangerous unless you naturally have good taste in stories.
Can confirm; this list works.
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I agree with what you're saying here, I was sort of wandering off on a tangent to the actual point of the blog. As you said, this was a conversation about the good-is-subjective shield, it just reminded me of the ideal reader idea and how not happy I am with it, or with its alternative of thinking of demographics which is closer in line to what you were talking about here but still utterly tangential.
To be actually on topic, I do agree that taking in the wider consensus to account can be very important for double-checking one's perspective on things. Just saying that good is subjective to deflect all criticism is a good way to personally stagnate as a writer because it disallows outside ideas at least that coming from the direction of feedback and criticism. I totally agree that reading a lot is super-important, too, and even if you're nettled by criticism and want to shut it off you could still grow as a writer from the outside exposure reading can provide (though it's probably best to keep both directions open).
Oh my god I love that cosplay to death.
I was trapped in the CCG hall the whole time running events, but my friend saw that awesome costume and was thrilled. That's my sister's favorite scene of all time. I wish I'd known it was your husband!
(Also that I'd had time to attend panels or meet anyone or whatever, but that's more obvious.)
Jokes on you, everything I put on here is just loud shitposting.
....and my friend took like two or three pictures of that Crackle and I never knew. Wow.
I saw Crackle too! That was him??
Love your thinking on 'taste level' and how you've got to know the context of your audience to either target them or push the boundaries in ANY direction. But then you know I share that thinking, as I talked about it at length in 'The Fic Goes Ever Ever On'
The only reason I looked or rather sounded smart was because I had you and Bad Horse on either side sharing actual wisdom so I was smart by association!
Seriously it was a super fun experience to share a panel with both of you. I learned a lot through the whole process.
Also I'll probably come back to the good stories convo later when I'm not on my phone...
I'm wondering if:
The idea of "taste level" is maybe the equivalent of the old "know your markets" advice. In terms of SF and fantasy short fiction, it was always "read a few issues of the magazine before you submit." Sending a fantasy story to Analog, for instance, is just wasting your time and the editor's, while Strange Horizons might not be the first place to send a hard nuts-n-bolts science-fiction piece.
Though it's a much taller order out here in the wild world of non-curated publication, I guess. Instead of trying to appeal to the tastes of one person--the acquiring editor at a magazine or publishing house--we who are slinging our stories out and about are trying to appeal directly to a diverser and more nebulous group: the readers themselves. Like you say, reading far and wide from both the stories and the comments on the stories will help, but for me, I'd say that's really been the biggest adjustment to writing fanfiction: instead of me writing and hoping the editor likes it, it's me writing and hoping the universe at large likes it...
Mike
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I think what we have online is somewhere between that and, say, a stand-up comedian learning to read a crowd. Online publishing like we do here is probably as close as you can get to writing as a performance art, with the near immediate and sometimes quite vocal reactions and all.
The "know your markets" advice is a bit different in that you write something and then look for a place to put it. You can sit down and say "I'm going to write something for Asimov's." but I don't think most writers work that way. But most writers do sit down and say "I want to make this story good."
And "Good" is a matter of public perception, so it's going to be a give and take, at least over the course of a writers career, as they learn where the perception falls for different groups. But we do have access to the history of what those people thought was good, and what other groups thought were good, even if those writers aren't exactly the same as us. So it's like watching videos of past preformances or other stand-ups and saying "what went differently here? where did the energy go up? Did he hold back a little there because the laughs were fading?"
This is, of course, ridiculously hard for a lot of people (and infuriatingly effortless for some) but I think that's the price for being good.
This is me:
Raising my hand. I've lost track of all the normal, everyday, human actions and reactions that leave me absolutely baffled. Doesn't stop me from writing stories to try and figure it out, though...
Mike Again
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Ugh. Recently I had an experience just like this. Was working on an in-progress Twilestia RomCom, got a few thousand words into it, and started showing it around for feedback. "Well," said the feedback, "Twilestia can be squicky if you're not already shipping it, so you should hedge your bets a bit and tread cautiously. Some of these jokes might be similarly creepy, so let's cut those. Oops, can't say this, you might trigger someone. I know this is a comedy and you're trying to rush to the jokes, but you need more setup/exposition. Oh, well now that you added more exposition, it broaches some questions that your original outline didn't address, so you should really explore those..."
I started writing the new draft, but the writing process was so painful. Eventually after a night of no progress, I stepped back and realized that the fic was nothing like what I'd started with. Practically all of the comedy had been stripped away, it was so watered down that even Tumblr wouldn't be triggered, and instead I was left with this weird navel-gazing piece about fate and destiny. Which, like, sometimes that works out, where your drafts slowly evolve into something completely different but better. But frankly, this wasn't the story I wanted to write, and it showed in my lack of progress. I ended up starting over again, mindful of some of the feedback on that first draft, but keeping a strong focus on writing the story I actually wanted to write. Like most things, it's all about balance.
I consider this to be absolutely true. I believe every writer wants, whether they realize it or not, to be thought well of by their readers. Once you accept this about yourself, you realize it's okay if you do things in a story which are geared towards attracting your readers. You don't sacrifice artistic integrity by being less than 100% "artsy"--indeed, the real artists know how to play their audiences like a fiddle while they express the deeper parts of themselves. Some simply express their souls, and many more only play the audience--few do both, I think. The dichotomy is often represented in complaints concerning the "plebeian" stories which make the feature box, and complaints of elitism against those who construct "high quality story" recommendation groups.
In my estimation, both sides have half the pie.
cough Writeoff cough
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Being a frequent commenter on Present Perfect's blog resulted in him volunteering to take me to Bronycon last year, which led to the best Bronycon I've had without a doubt. I'm not quite sure who else to follow and comment on. My head is a fog right now, and I'm feeling kind of bad that Bookplayer and Bradel et al knew how to have a better time at the con than I did this year.
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Heya, I just wanted to let you know that I'm planning on doing a blog post expanding on that list and how to go about those things. It's partially in response to this, but also influenced by a few other things I've come across in the past two weeks.
It should be posted sometime next Monday. Thank you for your part in inspiring it, and I hope maybe some of it is helpful.
Also, I'm sorry you didn't have as good a time at BronyCon. I would have been happy to hang out with you, but hanging out with me at BronyCon required a willingness to sit quietly in a corner or stairwell while Trixie slept, which isn't everyone's cup of tea.
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If there was an outlet near that corner, I would have been 100% okay with that! Thanks for the condolences.