The Writer's Toolbox: My Own Most Used Tool (Part 2) · 5:07am Nov 12th, 2017
Part 1 is here if you missed it. I'm just going to jump right in.
The Social Game; or How to Make Your Best Friends Sick of Your Story in Three Easy Steps
As a writer, I’m an emotionally needy basket case and attention whore, and it’s thanks to the long suffering efforts of bats, Jake R, GhostOfHeraclitus, Bradel, and MercTheJerk (along with the less-long suffering efforts of many other people who pass through my circle, including, currently Axis of Rotation, BlazzingInferno, and Themaskedferret) that you all are spared the brunt of my personal issues. A round of applause is in order.
If someone forced me to write a story totally by myself, it would be a perfectly good story, and I would be a nervous wreck. One of my biggest flaws as a writer and as a person is anxiety, and my wonderful amazing friends are the people who help me overcome that.
In my writing process, there are three places they typically offer the most support, and for my part I try to put as little pressure on them as I can, to spread the crises out between them, and to make it clear that the final decisions on the fic are mine and I’ll never blame them for a suggestion I take or dismiss that bites me in the ass.
Brainstorming, aka Bothering People About My Fic
This happens at random times when I’m figuring out whose story it is and through the actual writing, including my third act panic.
My third act panic usually happens when I’m in the middle of writing the second act, and I decide that the third act outlined is either too predictable, too complicated, or not in character. So I change it. This is not a good way to write a story, because half the story is already written and I’m unlikely to want to do major rewrites, so it’s kind of like taking the foundation of one house and trying to use it to build a totally different house.
That it sometimes works is a testament to the patience and creativity of my friends as much as my skill.
Unfortunately, records of my third act panic on Lost Time have been eaten by skype, and while I've had some pretty good third act panic on Sun and Hearth (to the point where I actually have a separate outline of just the third act because I was spending so much time reworking things), it's spoilery still so I can't show you much.
I can show you a more typical Bothering People session, which looks something like this (from writing Sun and Hearth chapter 8). It's maybe a bit spoilery if you haven't read the fic and planned to and didn't want any information about it, so I'll stick it under spoilers:
bookplayer: Hey, bats, are you around? I need a second opinion on some Twilight characterization.
bats: I am
bookplayer: Okay. So, I have a scene where Smart Cookie is being introduced to Twilight and Cadance by having them to tea. Except that Celestia has decided that she and Cookie will invite them and introduce them under Cookie's alias, letting them wonder why three princesses are going to have tea with a baker on the outskirts of a small town.
My problem centers around the question, by the time she gets to Cookie's house, how crazy with curiosity and desperate for answers is Twilight? What I have now is polite conversation not really disguising a thinly veiled game of twenty questions on Twilight's part, but I'm not sure if that's over the top.
I'm also having trouble deciding if she could put together who he is or not, but that depends a lot on specifics.
bats: I think it depends a lot on how visible the thread of the mystery was to Twilight at the start whether or not she ends up pulling it. If it never occurs to her to bother wondering what makes this guy important, she'd just be a normal amount curious, but if something jumpstarted a 'this is really weird, there's something going on here and someone is hiding something' feedback loop in her own head, 20 questionsing him isn't over-the-top at all.
bookplayer: I would imagine that if she was issued an invitation like that, with no explanation, she'd probably ask Princess Celestia about it, right? And then if Princess Celestia was evasive, because she's trolling the hell out of Twilight, that would probably set Twilight off.
bats: Probably so. Then she starts thinking about who it could be, realizes she has no idea who it could be, and falls into a loop
bookplayer: The trouble is that I only have Celestia and Cookie as POV characters, and I wanted this scene from Cookie's POV for first impressions and such, so it's hard to imply all of that over tea.
bats: Hmm, yeah, that complicates things. Is the issued invitation/evasive Celestia something that's shown? Celestia would probably pick up that Twilight's bit down and wasn't letting go, so if it's from her perspective it could probably be conveyed, and if it's from Cookie's perspective he could maybe pick up something of a 'brace yourself' vibe from Celestia.
bookplayer: Not shown, but stated: "Celestia smirked at him. They’d agreed not to reveal his nature to the girls until later; both so they’d have a proper chance to explain and answer questions, and -- Cookie suspected primarily in Celestia’s case -- because it would be funny."
bats: Okay, I have a better picture of how this is fitting into a story now, and I think you're fine. Twilight being curious and trying to probe out some answers in an oblique way, which I imagine Celestia would find amusing, feels like she's being predictable to form, not over-reactionary. If you feel the need to sell her motivations, which I don't think you really need to do, having a payoff moment of "FINALLY, I've been driving myself crazy figure this out since you invited me!' for Twilight down the line would do it.
bookplayer: Okay, that sounds about right. Thanks!
bats: Welcome. :)
You might notice that bats pretty much just gave me permission to do what I wanted to do. That’s about 75% of these conversations. The other 25% is where either they convince me it’s stupid or I asked about something I have no idea about, and people give me ideas until I suddenly go silent because I found something I liked and went back to writing. I am an awesome friend.
Now, one downside of this is the many of my friends are also my prereaders, so I often have to be careful to find an extra prereader who hasn’t been signing my permission slips for story decisions the whole time, so that I’m sure the story works without me explaining every detail in advance. But that’s just part of my thinking about prereading, so let’s talk about that.
Prereading, aka Who I Listen to about What and Why
Despite leaning on my friends so hard, I don’t trust them about my story. At least not all of them, all the time.
To start with, I’m perfectly aware that they’re my friends. While none of them would purposely kiss my butt, most of us started talking because we happen to like one another’s stories, so I know this is not an unbiased group.
On top of that, as mentioned above, many of them are going into the fic knowing the summary, outline, and intentions for different scenes. This is good in some ways, if I really missed the boat, but if I’m slightly off I need someone who doesn’t already know what I’m talking about.
And, probably most importantly, I know my friends. I know what they write, and what they think of what I write. I know what they’re amazing at and what they struggle with.
Actually, an awesome example of this happened on The Spirit of a Pegasus:
Question I asked on the doc: Did the council session go on too long?
GhostOfHeraclitus: You don't want me to answer that. I'd set a whole story at a council session and offer a digression on road-building techniques. :)
...Ghost is correct, he’s not the person to tell me if it went on too long. On the other hand, if he said it was dull, you’d better believe I’d fix something. If GhostOfHeraclitus is bored by the workings of your fictional government, you pay attention.
As a general matter, I mentally divide my prereaders into three groups, and I want some of each of these:
People I would trust to write this: This should, ideally, be people who work in the same genres and style of story I’m writing, and whose work I've enjoyed. These people need to understand what I’m writing, they’re going to be my big picture people and probably bear the brunt of the third act panic, as well as most Bothering People sessions.
People who are good writers or editors: What it says on the tin. These are the people I trust to say "punch this up," "cut this," "I'm not getting a good read on this character." These are my quality of prose, characterization, worldbuilding, etc. people, or the specialists I turn to for a certain character or aspect of the fic. They might not like the big picture, or at least think I could do better, and that’s okay as long as it’s not something typically in their wheelhouse. While I will totally hear anyone out on anything, I don’t rely on a comedy writer to give the best advice on shipping, or someone who’s really good at writing the Mane Six to be picking out problems with my Celestia.
People who will read the thing: These are people of various levels and preferences who don’t know anything about what I’m asking them to read beyond a one line description. They don’t need to be writers, or great editors (though sometimes they are,) they just need some time and a willingness to comment if they particularly like or are confused by something. They give me a better idea of what to expect from readers, who might not notice problems my writer prereaders think are huge, or get hung up on things my writer prereaders got right away.
So, with these divides in mind, I set people loose on the fic, or whichever part of the fic I have finished right now.
Some of my friends will give people editing privileges, and I think that is insane. Every suggestion on my fic is a suggestion, filtered through which group the prereader falls into. Even poor Journcy, who is proofreading for me on Sun and Hearth, has to leave comments or suggestions because I have some intentional punctuation quirks (for example, very few characters speak in semicolons. Most characters pause either period length or comma length, and if that makes sentence fragments or run-on sentences in dialogue, so be it.)
It generally takes a lot to make me completely rewrite something, though people rarely suggest I do it anyway, and even if they think they’re suggesting it I can do some pretty crazy things with a few extra lines of dialogue and description. On the other hand, I will tweak and tweak until the second I hit publish.
Speaking of hitting publish, that’s when I need my friends again.
The Support Group; or How To Tell When it’s Time to Go to the Grocery Store
I am a nervous wreck when I publish a story, and remain a nervous wreck for at least twenty-four hours, at which point I either calm down if the story was successful (got a handful of comments or made the feature box,) or I mope around, complain about the wretched state of My Little Pony fanfiction these days, and contemplate my life choices if it wasn’t.
Obviously the party, pity or otherwise, wouldn’t be any fun without my friends there.
I’ve found the first hour or so after publishing is especially torturous. Unless the fic is only a few thousand words, no one has even had time to read it, so it’s out there and I have no idea what’s happening to it. If a friend is around during that time, I’ll stick around with two FiMfiction windows open: one for the story and one for the What’s Hot? ranking (having already acquainted myself with what’s in the feature box or recently fell out, I can estimate if I’m going to make it or not.) I will then obsessively reload these and pop into a skype chat with any observations, usually along the lines of “That SunLight fic has been sitting there for three days, it’s gotta fall out, right?” and “Got another <upvote/downvote/comment.>”
The other thing I do with my friends when I’ve just published a fic is make them add it to groups they’re in. The way I see it, that gives the notifications in people’s feeds three possible for selling points: It’s a story that belongs in whatever group they follow, it was written by me, and it’s endorsed by whoever added it to the group.
Now, if my friends are not around when I post a fic, I’ll toss it in the groups myself, and then go to the grocery store. Or take Trixie for a walk, or empty the dishwasher, or anything that keeps me from sitting by myself, obsessively reloading a screen. I know that when I get back, something will probably have happened.
So, those are the important parts of how a fic gets from my brain to your screen.
And when bookplayer's next story features a discussion of the Condorcet Paradox as applied to direct democracy, you will know who to blame...
Always happy to give advice where I can on your stories, Book. Granted, most involve me telling you to add more violence and action, but it's the thought that counts gosh-darn it.
Tbh I 100% agree with you RE: editing privileges. Google Docs has such nice suggestions features, why would you let someone just change things? Also, they're human too, and could easily also make mistakes.
Happy to be of assistance in any fashion n_n
I appreciate this! But if you ever do take a suggestion of mine that bites you in the ass, tell me. ^.^ I want to know so I can get better as an editor/prereader. It's useful feedback. :)
You think you're a basket case? When I publish my first fic expect me to be an absolute balling wreck breathing through a paper bag. I might need a doctor in the room.
Happy to help
So, here's the most important question: how do I sign up for the support group for writers with this level of neuroses? Because you pretty much just described my process nearly verbatim.
That being said, there are some best practices in here (especially in regard to the editing process) that I'm definitely taking to heart.