Welcome back to another Being a Better Writer post! I've got a lot to do today (tax season) so I'm diving right into this one as quickly as possible. Today's topic comes from the request post I made several months ago (which I've been slowly digging through ever since), but it's a topic that I've heard brought up before in writing panels as well as in other places. And it's a good question, one every author will either probably consider or run afoul of in the course of their

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Welcome back, readers! It was a long and busy weekend, and as much fun as it was I'm glad to be back to work, fingers to keyboard once more.

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I apologize for the lateness of this post. Despite not having work at my part-time due to a knee injury yesterday, this post ended up so long (my longest yet) that it wasn’t done in time to post.

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First off, thank you all who commented on my last blog post when I was feeling rather annoyed and exasperated. It was much appreciated and I will be replying to you individually later tonight. But without ado, let's get this guide started!

Introduction

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This guide is mainly for people who are new to Fimfiction, because there's no great "How to Groups" tutorial on the site. I've explained it a lot over the years to new people, and I wanted a permanent blog I could just link to, plus I figure it might help some of the new authors following me (and even some long time ones don't really get the importance of this). Because it's aimed at new authors, I'm gonna explain pretty much everything in detail, assuming you know nothing about how groups

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Welcome back, everyone! Being a Better Writer has returned at last! I know it's only been two weeks since the last post, but honestly, with all that's going on it felt like quite a bit longer.

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Hey everyone! It's been a couple weeks since I've given you guys a blog update, and enough things have happened since then that I figured I ought to toss one out. A word of warning, though—there's quite a bit to get through here.

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As you might have noticed if you're one of those who waits on the morning of, today's post is a little late. My apologies. I wasn't quite as quick to arise this morning because I was catching up on sleep. And I was doing that because the injury I gave myself on Saturday didn't let me sleep that well that same night. Turns out, cracked ribs can be quite the pain. Who knew, aside from those with cracked ribs.

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Well, this should be a short one. That, or today we'll be learning from the mentality of "Those who don't, teach."

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Today's post is going to be a shorter one, as I still have more near-final proofreading to get done by tomorrow on Unusual Events, and I need to get to work on that to make sure I reach the January 19th upload date (after which you'll be able to pre-order it, huzzah!).

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You ever watch an old movie? Not like black-and-white, pre-talkies era, but forties or fifties-era flick. You know, color, but early color, surprisingly regular inclination to break into song and dance?

It was a thing.

Anyway, if you've ever sat down and watched one of these older flicks with friends, family, or even on your lonesome, it's likely that at some point during the runtime of the film, a comment similar to the following was made:

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One of the most difficult parts of getting a story on FimFiction comes after actually writing it. You publish a story and it sits there, not getting any views or attention. You've poured your soul onto the page and no one has come along to look at it.

Why? And what can we do to fix that?

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So, years ago I actually started writing out a guide of random but mostly useless information about Asylum and Broadhoof after I received permission from folks to write fan-fiction based on my fan-fiction. It was a humbling but invigorating experience. So in my exuberance, I decided that I should craft something that would help provide the reader a more coherent world for their shared narrative. It was filled with schedules and codes and even some history of the hospital.

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Disclaimer

The purpose of this guide is to teach you, the writer, what you should and shouldn’t do to assure the quality of your stories, and to show you how to best communicate with other authors as well as your audience. We, the authors of this guide, understand this will come across as telling you what to do, but that is the point of any style guide or anyone offering advice. There are many ways of creating and viewing storytelling. We are merely providing our viewpoints on it.

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I’m pretty sure that all of you have read more than one story in your life, and I’d bet that most of you noticed that stories can be told from a variety of perspectives. If you prefer a somewhat fancier term, such a perspective can be also called a point of view (POV for short). Types of POVs, their usage, and common pitfalls are what’s this miniguide going to be about. Just like in case of the guides previously published here (and archived in my blogs), this is meant primarily for beginners

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Creating a ‘good’ character is an evergreen topic in many groups on this site, so I thought it might be worth a shot to dedicate another miniguide to it. Here I’ll focus primarily on some aspects of a character’s role in a story and the ways in which these aspects affect character creation. The guide might be also a bit messier than usual as putting together these various tidbits of advice would require a far longer text to be somewhat coherently connected.

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Bit of a shorter post today, as it's Thanksgiving week here in the US and I'm trying to set myself up for a trip to visit the relatives. With that in mind, no time to socialize: let's dive right into it!

So, naming things. This is, as you might guess, a requested topic. And to be honest, I think it's one worth talking about.

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So a few months ago I picked up a fantasy book from the library. Pretty good book, actually; it kept me gripped well enough and had me staying up into the early hours of the morning to see how it panned out. But there was something interesting about it that I felt applied to today's topic.

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