Today is the last day to join, so if you want in on it, be sure to read over the rules and PM Shakespearicles!OPWA: Episode Eight · 11:09pm May 31st, 2016
Overpriced Writing Advice
Where you can learn the stuff I paid thousands of dollars to have taught to me, for free.
Creating World Depth Via Hints
Establishing your story’s setting is a vital part of writing, regardless of the world or time period your tale is based in. I say that because it doesn’t matter if your story is in present-day LA or some alien world light-years away. If you fail to give a sense of depth to your character’s surroundings, then your story will feel weaker for it. This is particularly true for a world like MLP’s. Answering questions about pony life and their land is pretty important. Certainly, it’s not the CENTRAL concern to any MLP story, but without that attention to detail it would feel implausible. The creators for the show and the comics do this visually. Us writers? We gotta use our wordz, yo.
If you want tips on how to conduct research to help your writing, check out my first three posts on the subject. Here, however, I’ll be focusing more on how to make your story feel like it has a fully developed setting and/or world… without ruining your pacing.
That’s one challenge of science fiction and fantasy: making people believe your world is a viable and fitting place for your story to take place without resorting to info-dumps. What you want to aim for is skimming the surface enough to give the reader the sense of depth. Think of your world as the ocean. You know it’s deep. What details can you provide as a writer to convey that your story’s world is equally as deep without actually plunging into the waves?
Use Canon Wisely
In fanfiction, authors have the benefit of mining the canon for setting details. This is also true for character history. The danger lies in relying on this too heavily. It comes across as lazy and lacking in imagination. What you want to do is augment the canon with your own ideas, and if you ever refer to the canon, try to space out your references. Devoting a lot of attention to details from the show for too long (or too obnoxiously) can have the effect of feeling contrived--like you’re trying to remind everyone you wrote a fanfiction. Pro-tip: don’t do that. It breaks immersion. If you have pastel ponies and/or manage to capture the spirit of the show somehow, then we’ll know it’s fanfiction. Don’t waste time trying to prove it to your readers.
Channel Your Inner Tour Guide - Give a Glimpse, Then Keep Going
Drop hints. Poignant hints. Easier said than done, but if you practice at it, it can start to feel second-nature. Even in non-speculative settings, like the EqG world, this can do wonders for the depth of your story. Basically, what hints do is illustrate that there is a world independent of your characters. You never want your readers to get the sense that the world “revolves” around your cast. This makes the plot feel formulaic and mindless, thus detracting from the believability of your hero’s journey. Nobody likes seeing the zipper in the costume, the tear in the backdrop, the repeat in the animatronic’s dance. Once again, it breaks immersion.
In my EqG FlutterDash fic, What They Expect to Give, there’s a chapter where Fluttershy goes to a soccer practice of Rainbow’s. I mention other people being there. It’s just one paragraph, but what I aimed to do was to make each person I describe feel like real people you might see out on the street. They were unique and distinguishable, but their descriptions were short. Had to be. They were in the background. BUT, if I chose to, I could have a character return and have attentive readers go, “Oh! We saw them before!” I knew who these background characters were. Their backstories. Why they were there and how they even got there. But I didn’t mention any of that. I just took my knowledge to describe how such people would look to Fluttershy at a glance:
The evening air was cool and pleasant. There was a few other people there in the stands; an older woman with a scarf wrapped around the lower half of her face; two giggling girls that looked far too young for college; and a young man with green hair who kept bouncing his knees as he sat hunched in a dark windbreaker. Fluttershy sat apart from them in the upper seats, and no one paid her any attention.
Hints. You want to give your readers hints.
Who is the lady who feels the need to wrap her face despite it not being that cold? Maybe someone’s mom or grandma who is fighting off a cold? She must really love the person she’s there for to brave her discomfort for them. Who are the two underage girls that are giggling? Perhaps one or both are younger siblings of a player? Or maybe they’ve even got a crush on someone who used to be their upperclassmen and are just hanging out? The guy with the green hair… He’s nervous. Hunched. Someone’s boyfriend who has bad news to share? Maybe his relationship is on the rocks?
After the hints, you move on.
Knowing When To Expand, and When to Keep Quiet
The trick is knowing when to give hints and when to pause and spend some more time describing something of complexity in your world. J.K. Rowling shows this time and again in the Harry Potter series. How many strange and wonderful glimpses did Harry catch of the wizarding world without ever having the benefit of having each of these moments explained? One moment that stands out to me was the African wizard at the quidditch world cup. He was sitting at a camp with blue fire. What spell was that? And as an African wizard, were his methods to casting magic different from European magic users? But J.K. Rowling doesn’t pause the whole story to explain this to us. Why? Because it doesn’t matter to the plot. It certainly helps to enrich the depth of Harry’s magical world, but it’s not necessary to go into the details. Leave that to the fanfic writer to do some strange foray into that unnamed character’s life. The author has other things to worry about.
Depth created. Mission accomplished. Back to the story.
Going back to pony fiction, let’s take a look at another writer’s work. In Anything But The Gala from Ponibius, we get some excellent world-building early in the first chapter. There’s a scene where Luna is leading a meeting with her advisors, and the subject of running the Gala comes up. Ponibius doesn’t spend forever breaking down how pony government works in his story. He does, however, provide us with believable little glimpses into what the running of Equestria might entail. The example below is more expanded than the ones I've provided above, but it's still just a small window of what is a much larger world, and he takes the time to linger a little more on these details (much like a tour bus slowing down for tourists to take pictures of that celebrity's mansion) before he keeps going. The trick he uses? He gives us stuff that is easy to digest and interesting to boot. It doesn't feel info-dumpy. It feels enlightening.
"It has gotten to the point that she tries to sabotage the Gala every year," Night Light said.
"Is that so?" Hearing that made me quite curious. True, my sister could be quite the trickster when she wished to be, something I knew from personal experience, but to resort to outright sabotage was something else entirely. "How is she going about that?"
"It generally differs each year." Night Light spoke more confidently now, like a pony relieved to get something off his chest. "For instance, a few years ago she brought rival delegates from the nations of Freeport and Westmarch when they had been in the middle of a rather fierce disagreement over the sugar tariffs. Long story short, they ended up getting into a food fight with one another. And, um—" He cleared his throat and sounded quite embarrassed as he continued, "—drew a good portion of the other Gala guests into the encounter. I'm sure you know how passionate some ponies can get about sugar prices."
Badda bing, badda boom. We get so much in this little bit. Characterization. World-building. Conflict (because Luna realizes her sister is trying to dump a lame job in her hooves.) Doing several things at once is a tricky art, but when you get the hang of it, your stories will feel less like shambling behemoths struggling across desolate landscapes, and more like lithe gazelles loping over green grasslands.
Be snappy. Be clever. Be focused.
Timing your glimpses into the "ocean" of your character's world is far better than crashing and sinking into its depths.
That’s all I’ve got. Sorry if it’s all over the place. I feel a bit all over the place, but if anyone wants clarification on this post, please don’t hesitate to ask. Maybe later, I’ll try and cover more in-depth world-building for the story planning stages.
EDIT (March 2021): Hey guys! I DID do that world-building post! You can find it here!
I also want to add that my using JK Rowling as a writing example was before she revealed what a dirty TERF she was, but until I can think of a better example to replace that with, I'll leave the post unchanged. Just know that I do NOT agree with her views on trans people at all.
How to tell if advice is overpriced: Realizing that you learned this on a subconscious level years ago, and just didn't bother to think about it.Let's all just ignore the insensitive jackass in the corner (me). That seems like a much better idea.
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King, you're a cool guy and all, and I'm fairly sure you're trying for some kind of wry humor or something...but all this gets out of me is:
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Not so much with regards to the overpriced joke. I wouldn't have called the series overpriced if I didn't think it was overpriced, obviously. But think: this is a blog series geared toward beginners. I'm not sure what you're hoping to achieve by potentially making someone feel like crap because they didn't have the super wonderful writing intuition you had "years ago". There's nothing constructive about your comment in this space that is meant to encourage new writers. This is kind of the second time you've done that, and I need you to know, I don't think it's cool behavior. Please stop. If you wanna drop knowledge to HELP people, or if you have a bone to pick with MY methods, then by all means. Share. But the snark toward newbies isn't wanted. Not here.
Edit: to clarify my meaning in the second to last sentence.
3987975 It was never my intention to degrade, insult, or otherwise direct snark towards new writers. I sincerely apologize for accidentally being a jerk. As for what I'm 'hoping to achieve by potentially making someone feel like crap', nothing. I didn't know there was that potential.
Again, sorry.
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Okay. Thanks for apologizing. And sorry if I came off strong. Today's been an up and down day, and I'm not good at reading tone online.
I guess I was just thinking about some of the folks I've met over the years in my various writing classes. Even in my degree program, I met people of all ages who were complete beginners at writing. Learning about acts, and archetypes, and how to avoid info-dumping... They had no idea. I swiftly learned that comments like, "Wow, this is so obvious. I was doing this at the age of seven!" made the seventeen-year-old who was flunking English literature, but who always wanted to write a comic script, feel like crap about themselves and not want to share during critique groups; or made that forty-year-old single mother of two coolly remind me that I was in "Creative Writing 1A", and the course for writing geniuses was "anywhere but here."
3988291 Definitely understandable. I myself have yet to attend a writing class where I'm not surrounded by people hovering gently around the same approximate skill level as me, so I've not learned that particular etiquette. Again, sincerest apologies.