Rant, Advice, Challenge (I should get more sleep) · 2:38am Feb 9th, 2015

Gonna start this thing off with a bit of grumbling, and then close her out with a bit of advice, and then a challenge. So hold on tightly to your adult beverages, kiddies.

First the grumbling.

I'd hoped to make some significant progress on some writing this weekend. I had a few hours on Saturday, after a friend's birthday dinner, and then if it was slow at the group home where I was working on Sunday, I could make an editing pass, and maybe have something ready to go on Monday.

Of course, on the way home from the aforementioned birthday dinner, the on-call person asked if I could work an overnight shift at a different group home. It's a sleeper shift, she told me, which means that I get paid to sleep.

Sure. Why not.

So I got home, had an hour to play on the internet and pack the necessities, and then it was back to Lansing.

Get to the house, and ask for a quick run-down from the departing staff: I've never worked an overnight at that house before, so I need to know what the schedule is like.

“Well,” she tells me, “Luigi [not his real name] will get up at 5 for his shower. He might want to check in, to see who's working.”

Lovely.

“And you might have to help John [also not his real name] in the shower.”

Even better.

So, I drag myself upstairs, resigning myself to—at best—five hours of sleep, and when I open the door to the sleeper room I discover what we have as a bed: a cot. With a sleeping bag.

So this was my night.

And Luigi did, in fact, get up at 5am.

Which meant that I pretty much got nothing done during the eight hour shift at the next group home, either, since I was struggling to stay awake.

Okay, enough of that. Now I'm going to dispense two pearls of wisdom, both involving writing. The first is show vs. tell.

Generally, in a story we want to show. Generally. For example

Twilight was sad.

isn't as good as

Twilight hung her head and blinked a tear out of the corner of her eye.

But, as with all things, it needs to be properly applied, or else you can fall into the purple prose trap.

It was noon.

is, in most cases, going to be better than

Celestia's sun hung directly over Ponyville, causing everypony's shadow to be directly underneath them. The town clock chimed once, twice, thrice . . . twelve times, the final peal of its bells echoing through the busy streets of town.

A pretty good rule of thumb to follow is that when describing character's emotions you should always show; when describing background stuff that really isn't important you should usually tell—but there is no hard and fast rule here. Just recently, I read one of SS&E's one-shots that could be used as an example of purple prose . . . but of course, skirts made it work.

And I should also say that different authors have different styles: Parker liked his novels sparse; MacLean loved using the environment as another character. So this is one of those things where there isn't a hard and fast rule. It's more of a guideline, really, and what you ought to do varies by what you're trying to accomplish in the story.

Looking back at what I just wrote, I'm not sure if I actually gave any useful advice. One of the problems with knowledge is that the more you know, the more you realize you don't know.

Oh well. Moving on.

My second little bit of writing advice—and here I do have a strong opinion.

It's often said to write what you know.

That's both good and bad advice, and I'm gonna tell you why. You still got your adult beverage handy, kids?

Writing what you know is probably one of the reasons we've got a metric crapton of Gary-Stued HiE fics on the site. A large number of writers are teenagers, and as all of us who are older and wiser know, teenagers don't know a damn thing. They think they do—and trust me, I was a teenager once, and I knew everything back then. But kids these days. . . .

Ahem. Sorry. My point is twofold. First, you should write what you know. If you don't, sooner or later, you're going to find out that your readers know more than you do, and they're going to be willing to tell you all about it in the comments. For example, I knew from watching Law and Order that guns have clips, which hold the ammo . . . except that readers of mine who actually have experience with guns know damn well that only n00bs call them 'clips'; everyone who knows anything about guns calls them magazines.

Ditto for fur. Ponies don't have fur, they have coats.

Now, it's okay for a character to be wrong. Rainbow Dash can say “I have mud in my fur,” and our Gary-Stu can loudly announce “I have another clip for my gun, you know.” But the author had better get it right in the descriptive text.

Why am I telling you this? Because, as should be obvious by now, I didn't know either of those things. If I wrote what I know, I could tell you about being an auto mechanic. I could tell you about working with developmentally disabled adults. I could give you some insight into driving a wrecker . . . but when I first started writing ponyfiction, I couldn't have told you where the withers are on a horse. I didn't know that the first movie predated the first electric power plant in the US, I was certain that the proper plural of pegasus is pegasi (it isn't [but you can use it and not feel bad because they do in the show, so even though it's technically wrong, it's canon]), and a thousand other things I didn't know. If you read through story notes on my blog, it's pretty much a long list of stuff I didn't know.

So maybe the advice ought to be: Write what you know. If you don't know, find out.

Seriously. Wikipedia'll give you general knowledge (but it will not make you an expert!). Your library has books. Read them. If you want to know what watching the moon landing was like, ask someone who watched it back in '69. I did, and now I know. Pester a veterinarian. Trust me, you'll be glad you did.

And now for the neat segue into the challenge. Some of y'all have noticed that recently, a bunch of people have been posting blog posts about “I write like...” Some online tool that takes your work, chews it up into and feeds it through a neat little algorithm, and can tell you that you write like Tolkein, or Joyce, or Gaimen, or Farles Wickens (with four m's and a silent q). One of these days, I'll toss in a few of my fics, and see what they come out as. Probably that guy that vandalizes public toilets, but hey. Somebody's got to be that guy.

Also recently, I was reading Tony Koester's latest Train of Thought column (probably only two of my readers know who he is, but that's okay).

You wouldn't think that having a lot of experience doing something would be a liability. As it turns out, it can be.
In an article in Aviation Week & Space Technology, a leading expert in the field of solar-cell powered aircraft observed his company pulled in experts from other fields such as Formula One racing and photovoltaic manufacturing. “In some ways, it was a big asset not to be too experienced,” the expert stated. “When you are are experienced, you go back to the solutions you know.”

This applies to writing, too, I think. Most of us aren't famous authors outside the fandom, so we don't have publishers breathing down out necks, insisting that the next installment of Twilight ought to be the same as the previous one, to keep the sales up and the paychecks flowing. But so many of us fall into a rut; so many of us keep writing in the same style, because it's what we know, it's where we're comfortable, and it's what we think our readers expect.

And that's not wrong—many of our readers are expecting that the new story will be much like the last story. And some of them might get peeved if the new story isn't like the last one, and maybe some of them won't read it. But that's okay, because other people will.

I've made a point of letting the story dictate the narrative voice. I've got first-, second-, and third-person stories. I've got omniscient narrators, and very limited viewpoints. I've done a few non-traditional present tense stories, I've done stories where I deliberately withhold information, fake-outs, double fake-outs, and the list goes on. I challenged myself in One-Shot-Ober to push my boundaries, and wrote my first-ever gore/dark fic, as well as a few EqG fics. I meant to write an anthro fic, too, but couldn't come up with anything. Heck, I never would have written a fic with graphic sex in it if there hadn't first been a Collab Cage challege (and y'all know I'll write nearly anything on a dare).

So to all of you writers out there: experiment. Try writing a story in a different narrative voice. Move out of your comfort zone. You might find that you like writing in first person, or have a talent for composing couplets—and even if you decide that it's not for you, at least you'll know something you didn't know before.

And for the rest of you—don't bitch when a writer tries an experiment. You can say you didn't like it. That's fine. That's honest. But don't insist that the writer gets back in his or her rut to make you happy. All that leads to is mediocrity, and eventually movies like Furious 7: Why Is This Still A Thing?