Topic Call for Being a Better Writer! · 7:15pm Mar 19th, 2021
It’s back! The time has come! Topic List #16 lies broken and battered, all but one of its topics spent. While Topic List #17 is fresh and pristine, ready to be decorated with concepts and ideas.
So the time comes once more, readers: What do you want to see Being a Better Writer discuss? What writing topics do you want to know about? What writing concepts do you want to hear more of? What puzzles and questions do you seek answers to?
Are they questions of editing? Of writing point-of-view? Of framing? Tone? Emotion? Depth? What are you looking to learn about? What do you want to know?
Whatever it is, now is the time to hit “comment” and post away! Because this is the Being a Better Writer topic call!
Seriously, hit “comment” and give us all something for the list!
Building your world from scratch – generating geography that makes sense (and maybe even describing it, at least to yourself). I have it on good authority that you've made up a couple of planets yourself, after all. So what choices have you made and why? What sort of tips and tricks and sources are there to aid in the development of the story's physical word, be it based on earth or alien in nature?
How to handle low tension/slow paced chapters without boring the reader.
Despite there being a couple of BaBW posts on names (especially regarding the use of apostrophes therin), I think there's room left for a post on the way names lean on cultures/languages in the world (perhaps with examples from real life). Arguably, this is the sort of topic a writer such as myself should/could do research on independantly, but it seems obiquitously useful enough that you could still make a post on it. Even our most boring everyday names have roots, after all.
More ideas that might even relate to suggestions on the Unusual Things post:
Managing complexity - setting aside the oft-suggested solution of avoiding excessive amounts to begin with, are there any good ways to keep things clear and uncomplicated for the readers (and, of course, yourself)? E.g. when you've got a dozen characters in a setting each with a reason to take part of the focus (a round-table discussion as a toss-out example).
Implications - do you have any tips and tricks for improving the odds that an attempt to imply something will land as desired before you send it out to alpha readers? For foreshadowing and otherwise (e.g. as a handy, possibly even lively, way to expand on your world without resorting to blocky exposition).
Generally planning out what the readers are supposed to know and when - a perspective that can be hard to achieve for an inexperienced writer. That and, again, what can you do to make sure that your writing accomplishes the plan before the alpha-reading phase?
I'm back! You probably thought I was done, didn't you?
Here's another one for you: How do you write about something that your readers possibly, if not probably, know all about, but your POV character(s) don't? Worst-case, when it's something that your readers have already seen described or treated like some piece of trivia time and time again, and not only is the idea familiar, but the concept of discussing it is also familiar? Something that isn't easy to avoid because it's important to your story?
I'm having a bit of trouble coming up with a truly general case as an example to illustrate what I'm getting at, so I'll throw in one that I bumped into and is extremely common on this site (and fanfiction in general): Rewriting an episode as an AU, especially when dealing with subtle changes rather than sweeping ones, even if only a few things overlap this way (the problem being worse, of course, as the new story overlaps more and more with the old one).
"So what if character X makes a slightly different statement with implications that'll eventually snowball into something significant? This scene is exactly the same in every other way!"
Admittedly, fanfiction has a greater problem with this than original fiction, because the degree that everybody's experience lines up is so high; everybody gets to see everything from the source material from literally the same perspective. From here, though, I bet you can extrapolate what this means for original fiction better than I can.