From PrettyGothGirl's Pen

Headers: They're more like Guidelines anyways, Genres.

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 21:40:51 GMT

In which we discuss genres, what they are, their importance and list 35 genres with definitions and examples.

In the general headers discussion, a genre was defined as a category with a specific theme or content. Genres came about from the part of human nature that has to classify everything. If you are familiar with the Christian/Judaic mythos, classifying and naming all the plants and animals was the first thing that Adam did after he was created. For thousands of years, as soon as something was created or invented, mankind had to categorize it, know what style of work it was, put the object into the proper place so it was known and not something to be feared. This urge is so ingrained most don’t even think to question the necessity of it.

Fan Fiction is part of everything. In fact, fan fiction is a classification of fiction, that is stories that are written by fans of another person’s characters and settings. As fan fiction falls under the heading of fiction, it feels natural to classify them under the genres that are included in bookstores. Bookstores sort their books by content type, literature, age group and non-fiction. But since it is fan fiction that doesn’t mean it is solely based off the written word. Fan Fiction is also written about movies, comics, cartoons and anything else that has a fan following. The fan fiction genre list has expanded to include the genres that are part of those types of media, most particularly movie and manga genres. Though not every category is used, say if the writer was basing their story on a show or manga about cooking, it would be assumed that the story itself was in the category of cooking and that the writer was writing a specific type of say, romance or adventure story underneath that cooking genre. Then, fan fiction also has categories that they have created that aren’t recognized by the literary or film world but are so prevalent in fan fiction itself that they have become a genre of their own.

Whether or not genres are important is up to you, the writer. Genres are categories that help the reader find things that they want to read. A genre helps narrow down their selection and makes things easier for them especially in larger archiving sites or journaling communities that accept every type of fan fiction or a specific canon fan fiction. Some readers choose what they want to read based upon the genre because they have an aversion to certain types of fan fiction such as romance or action or horror. Other readers like to know the genre of the story because it gives them a broad idea of what to expect within the story and others don’t like genres because they don’t want to know what to expect or to be held to certain expectations.

Okay, unnecessary metaphor time. It’s like going into a bookstore. A lot of times unless you know exactly what you want of the literature shelves, you are likely to find a romance story next to a story about the supernatural or a mystery. Whereas, if you go to the shelves that are labeled science fiction, you know you are going to get a story that involves highly evolved technological civilizations often with aliens no matter what. If you go to the western section of the bookstore, you know you are going to find stories about cowboys and Indians fighting or helping each other. Knowing the category or the genre of the story or type of book you want to read saves time and effort searching throughout an entire shelf just sorted by title or author.

There are a lot of genres. In fact, there are so many of them that many people know what they mean in context, but when they are presented with a list of them to choose from they don’t know how to apply them to their own stories or they are confused by so many choices and so choose the ‘general’ category for it could cover anything when in fact it doesn’t.

Following is a list of common genres and their definitions. Categories found at FanFiction.net, OneManga.com and FilmSite.org.

Action: A story that plays out through the clash of physical forces and activities, possibly extended chase scenes, races, rescues, battles, martial arts, mountains, destructive disasters, fights, escapes, non-stop motion, spectacular rhythm and pacing involving adventurous heroes. E.G. Shoot ‘Em Up, The Transporter, Dante’s Peak

Adventure: A story that involves travels, conquests, explorations, the creation of empires, struggles and other bold risky undertakings that involve hazardous actions with uncertain outcomes that confront the main characters. E.G. King Kong, Indiana Jones, Zorro, Robin Hood and Tarzan, Finding Nemo

Alternate Universe: A story using canonical characters and changing the canonical story line at a key point or placing them in a different setting, a different time period or reality or changing them into magical races or giving them fantastical (and not so fantastical) occupations. E.G. Tenchi Muyo Ryo-Ohki versus Tenchi Universe versus Tenchi in Tokyo

Angst: A story that deals with the anguish of life with the hope of overcoming the unbearable situation no matter if the hope is fulfilled or not. Angst stories generally contain dark, depressing, angry or brooding emotions or actions from the characters. Depending on the writer may or may not be typified as a tragedy.

Comedy/Humor: A story where the point of the story is to be funny, amusing or gets one to laugh. Humor can involve wit, slapstick, irony, farce, pun/word play, parody and so on and so forth. E.G. The Three Stooges, Bringing Up Baby, Beetlejuice, The Mask

Cooking: A story in a cooking/kitchen setting where the characters are usually competing to become the best chef or the trials and tribulations that come from running a restaurant.

Crime: Stories whose struggle is about catching a criminal often highlighting the life of a crime figure or a crime’s victims. Or they glorify the rise and fall of a particular criminal. Often they are morality tales with the criminal doomed to failure or death. E.G. The Godfather, Scarface, Reservoir Dogs, Snatch, The Italian Job

Crossover: A story where the characters of one canon end up in the setting and meeting the characters of another. A true crossover are stories where the characters in the same universe with their own stories meet up with each other and have adventures before going their separate ways. Such as cross over episodes of Buffy and Angel, where Angel shows up on Buffy or Buffy shows up on Angel.

Drama: A story with serious plot driven presentations that deal with realistic characters, settings, life situations that involve character development and interaction. E.G. Taxi Driver, Traffic, American Beauty, Rebel Without A Cause, To Kill A Mockingbird

Epic: A story that starts in the middle of the action and includes all different genre characteristics in its telling. Usually there is some interference by supernatural forces, covers great distances of geography and often includes a trip to the underworld. E.G. Hercules, Final Fantasy, Beowulf, The Epic of Gilgamesh

Family: A story that appeals to all age groups and has no content unfit for children. Or a story focused upon the family unit, family dynamics and family life. E.G. The Brady Bunch, Cheaper by the Dozen, Yours, Mine and Ours

Fantasy: A story that take place in an imaginary world or the clash between the imaginary world and the ‘real’ world, and the hero often under goes some mystical experience and must as for aid from a superhuman on the outside, usually they involve magic in one form or the other. E.G. Pan’s Labyrinth, Shrek, The Black Cauldron, The Lord of the Rings

Friendship: A story that features friendship and the conflicts that arrive during friendship as the focus, where romantic relationships are either not involved or are of secondary importance. Usually the main characters are two men or two women. E.G. Lethal Weapon, Blues Brothers, Twins, Thelma & Louise

Gender Bender: A story that revolves around the switching of the sexes, whether it is gender roles, clothes or bodies. E.G. ½ Prince

General: Not specifically any other genre. Often used to denote friend or family stories. Usually stories not focused upon a romantic relationship pairing. Written for general audiences, with characters portrayed as they are in the canon without homosexual subtext. Can be plot focused or slice of life stories often used to explore the dynamics of the ensemble cast.

Harem: A story involving one male or one female character and many characters of the opposite sex all attracted and trying to win the affection of the main character and trying to defeat their rivals through various methods. Often, the main character is a bland everyman/woman who does not know what all these women/men see in them. E.G. Tenchi Muyo, Strawberry 100%, Love Hina, Video Girl AI

Historical: A story based off an historical even or a story that is set in a historical time period using the customs, clothing and language of that time. E.G. Ben Hur, Troy, 300, Cleopatra, Gone With The Wind, Gods & Generals

Horror: A story that revolves around escaping from and eventually defeating a ‘monster’ designed to frighten or to invoke our worst hidden fears, often in a shocking finale while both captivating and entertaining us. E.G. Dracula, Nosferatu, The Mummy, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, The Wolf Man, Tremors, Saw, Halloween, Friday the 13th

Hurt/Comfort: A story in which one protagonist is hurt and the other comforts them, sometimes with sex and sometimes the one doing the comforting is the same character that did the hurting.

Martial Arts: A story that involves a lot of fighting incorporating fighting styles of the world. It may involve martial arts competitions, street fighting, school life or the defeat of an enemy or teacher. A subdivision of action. E.G. Enter the Dragon, The Street Fighter, Rocky, The Karate Kid, Fight Club, Ong-Bak

Mecha: A story that revolves around robots, usually large and deadly. The story often focuses upon a war, the interactions of the pilots of the robots, the pilot’s histories, and their various usually unrequited love interests. E.G. Gundam, Macross Saga, Voltron, Neon Genesis Evangelion

Medical: A story that is set in a medical environment focused upon doctors solving patients’ ailments and the relationships between the doctors and the staff. E.G. House, Grey’s Anatomy, Scrubs

Music: A story that is set in a musical environment or deals with music in some way, whether it is singing, dancing or playing a specific musical instrument. It often deals with conflicts between musicians or groups of musicians often to win a competition, get a contract or become the best in the group. E.G. Rigoletto, Dragon Voice, Othello (manga)

Mystery: A story that focuses on the main character who is searching for the solution to an unsolved crime or other puzzling event and the adventures and challenges they face while doing so until it is settled at then end. A subdivision of a crime film. E.G. Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Castle, NCIS, Bones, Agatha Christie, Clive Cussler Dirk Pit, The Cat Who… Series.

Parody: A story with a humorous or satirical imitation of a serious piece of literature or writing for purposes of ridicule or irony. A subdivision of humor. E.G. Robin Hood Men in Tights, Zorro, The Gay Blade, Scream, Austin Powers, Hot Shots, Galaxy Quest, SpaceBalls

Romance: A story that focuses upon the courting or wooing of a suitor or lover. A romance may or may not involve the trappings of romance or use whatever the characters feel is romantic. Sometimes it is made up, exaggerated or invention based upon a bit of reality. E.G. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Sheik, Platinum Blonde, It Happened One Night, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, 27 Dresses

School Life: A story that is set in a school, high school, elementary or university and deals with the lives of school students and/or the teachers of the school. Plot elements may include the student council, competition between clubs and student social groups and romantic rivalries. E.G. GTO, Marmalade Boy, Ouran High School Host Club, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Mean Girls

Science Fiction: A story whose struggle involves the technology and tools of a scientifically imaginable world, often complete with far away worlds, aliens and advanced gadgets. It often expresses the potential of technology to destroy humankind or humankind’s identity. In many tales, aliens, creatures or beings are unearthed and take the fight to new metaphoric dimensions or planes in an eternal fight of good vs. evil. E.G. Star Wars, Star Trek, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Men In Black Anne McCaffery’s Talent Series, Aliens, Chronicles of Riddick

Slice of Life: A story centered on the tribulations of day-to-day living for a protagonist or group of protagonists. These challenges and events could actually happen in real life and are often set in a present day world that mirrors our own though not always.

Spiritual: Stories that are about human potentiality with the attempt to be uplifting and optimistic. They often try to shed light on or deal with the big questions such as ‘Why are we here?’ ‘What is the meaning of life?’ ‘Is there a God’ and ‘Why is there evil in the world?’ Plots often include metaphysical or supernatural beings such as aliens, angels, time travel, saints, hero myths and after life depictions. E.G. Touched by An Angel

Sports: A story that has a sports setting usually revolving around the journey to a major sports event and focused on an athlete or group of athletes and the trials and tribulations they must overcome to get there and win. Sometimes based upon true-life events. E.G. Prince of Tennis, Cool Runnings, Ali, Caddyshack, Rocky, Any Given Sunday, Friday Night Lights, A League of Their Own, National Velvet

Supernatural: A story that uses gods, goddesses, spirits, ghosts, apparitions, miracles of other ideas or depictions of the extraordinary. Usually supernatural stories are combined with other genres. E.G. Casper, Practical Magic, The Sixth Sense, Ghostbusters, Sleepy Hollow

Suspense/Thrillers/Psychological: A story where tension is the key goal. The character is often placed in a menacing situation, mystery, escape or dangerous mission from which escape seems impossible. Life itself is threatened, because the character is unsuspectingly involved in a dangerous situation. The audience expects something bad to happen and is powerless to prevent it or is not entirely sure what the bad event will be. These stories often deal with character conflict or characters in conflict with outside forces and their states of mind, usually unbalanced. The menace is sometimes abstract or in the shadows. E.G. Anything Alfred Hitchcock, The Lovely Bones, The Manchurain Candidate, Donnie Darko, Double Jeopardy, Congo, Jurassic Park

Tragedy: A story that does not go well or end well. Often the story deals with a serious or somber theme, typically that of a great person destined through a flaw of character or conflict with some overpowering force, as fate or society, to downfall or destruction. E.G. Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, Titus Andronicus, Oedipus Rex, Antigone

Western: A story that focuses on the society of the American Western frontier following the civil war, portraying the conquest of the wilderness and subordination of nature in an effort to maintain law and order in an easily corrupted society, including the fight or desire to coexist with the noble savage. E.G. The Last of the Mohicans, the works of Zane Gray, the works of Louis L’Amour, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Walker: Texas Ranger, Gunslingers, An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, Tombstone, Maverick, City Slickers, Wagons East!, Bonanza, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, Gunsmoke, Little House of the Prairie, The Lone Ranger.

These thirty-five genres still do not cover every single category that there is in detail. However, these categories should be enough to be able to label your story within a decent range of whatever the story is. Some unlisted categories are even more general, such as Shonen, which is manga directed at boys or Shouja, manga directed and marketed to girls. Shonen-ai and Shouja-ai in retrospect are stories about boy love or girl love.

The great thing about fan fiction is because the writer is writing for fun and themselves. They can combine, toss aside and use whatever genre they want in their stories. In fact, some writers do not like the genre labeling system for fan fiction because of that idea. They do not want to be contained into a box or category when it comes to writing their stories. They want to write whatever they want to write. So these writers may not label the genre of their story in their headers. In fact, when writing a story, most fan fiction writers don’t even think about what genre the story is until presented with a genre list from a story archive site like fanfiction.net.

The thing is, without knowing what the genre’s are, the writer cannot bend or break the genres. It is an example of how you can’t break the rules if you don’t know what they are in the first place. So, genres are useful to know and if you have read this article and understood it, feel free to throw the information out and do whatever you want. You might end up writing to a genre anyways, but at least you would know what it is.

Therefore, genres are useful categories that help the reader find a story that they want to read faster and easier. Genres are available to writers to help them determine what type of story they are writing or to know so they can break the guidelines of what happens in such a story.

Headers: On caution, yellow lights and Warnings.

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 21:28:08 GMT

In which we discuss warnings, what warnings are, what they cover and the arguments for and against them...

Fan fiction covers a broad range of topics and ideas because the pool of writers and taste is large, huge and vast. Like in novels and Literature and even autobiographies, these topics and ideas can be at times risqué, disturbing, horrifying and traumatic. What falls in this scale is different from writer to writer and reader to reader. And in fan fiction, unlike novels, movies, television, video games, comics and music, the writer has an option to expressly and specifically notify or advise the reader of things that might be outside of the norm. This is simply and appropriately called a Warning.

A warning isn’t a law. A law is there to protect and provide and must be followed and there will be consequences if it is not followed. A warning is a suggestion for your protection. They are the labels on your food and the yellow signs on roadsides. Caution, curve ahead, slow to safe suggested speed. Whether or not you follow the warning is up to you. Warnings are optional.

That is correct. Warnings are optional. A warning doesn’t have to be there. If it is there, you don’t have to obey the warning or even heed the warning. Warnings can be very specific or exceedingly vague. A warning could be, ‘contains rape and dismemberment,’ versus a vague ‘contains mature and adult content’. Warnings can be placed about anywhere, in the summary, in the author’s note or in it’s own little section titled, Warnings. Some believe that a rating itself, such as R, M or NC-17 can also be considered a warning.

Warnings, because they are optional and highly subjective, are a hotly debated subject within the writing portion of fandom. There are three general sides to the issue; those who insist on warnings; those in favor of warnings; and those opposed to warnings.

Those who insist on warnings believe warnings are their moral right. It is the writer’s responsibility to place a warning somewhere on the story. They absolutely insist every story that they read has a warning upon it and often times won’t read a story unless there is an obvious, specific warning placed upon it. Because it is their moral right and the writer has ‘violated’ that moral right, they have no time for said writer. If they do read a story that doesn’t have a warning on it and come across a scene that may or may not fall within a context of needing a warning, they will inform the writer that they feel that a warning should be placed upon the story with varying degrees of politeness.

The most common argument to support this view is to protect those who have been harmed in the past from being triggered and reliving past harm. Because of this argument they prefer their warnings to be specific. Therefore, if the story has a rape scene in it, they want to have the warning specifically notify the reader the story contains rape to protect a rape survivor from unexpectedly having flashbacks of their own rape. The same goes for torture or post traumatic stress disorder and so on and so forth. Some would go so far as to warn for homosexuality, incest or romance.

The other argument is that a warning helps a reader pick and choose what they want or going to read. A warning gives the reader an expectation of what the story is going to be about and thus if the person doesn’t want to read about sexual content, rape or violence, they can read the warning and skip that story.

Those in favor of warnings believe that warnings are a common courtesy and that it is polite to put warnings up somewhere visible to the reader. They understand that some scenes might be traumatic for certain readers, but they also understand that a warning is optional and up to the writer’s discretion. They know what might traumatize one person may not even disgust another. Thus, they don’t require their warnings to be specific or they don’t require warnings at all. If there is a warning, they feel it is nice, but it is not required.

They agree that warnings are for protection and can help with story selection. They also argue that if a reader is unsure of whether or not to read a certain story they can read other people’s reviews of said story or they can find recommendations from other readers about the story. This does require more effort on the reader’s part.

Basically, to those who favor warnings, the warning is not the be all and end all of the header. The reader can find more information about the story from its rating, summary, genre (if included) and any pairing given, plus reviews and recommendations. This may not always work because summaries may be inaccurate, reviews may not be comprehensive or worded in such ways to give the least amount of plot away as possible and the reader might not know anyone or anywhere to get recommendations for the story. In this case, the reader may or may not decide to take the risk of reading the story.

Lastly, there are those who oppose warnings. They feel that they are unnecessary and if they are writers, they may feel that it is not their job to cater to the reader’s whims. If the reader doesn’t like where the story is headed, the reader always has the option to not read, and hit the back button. Whether or not the reader is a legal adult, the reader always has a choice and if they continue reading past what might need to be warned, it is not the writer’s responsibility.

To them, life doesn’t come with warning labels. There are no signs on a dark alley that there is a rapist or burglar lurking there. The reader needs to use sense when choosing what to read or in this case whether or not to go down the alley. Likewise, on books there are no labels saying that the book contains adult and graphic material. Comics, manga, movies and television have rating systems and music has warning labels about adult content. Books, the written word, do not. Words, because they are not an visual or audio medium provide a slight cushion of protection to the reader because the details of whatever is going on is left up to their imaginations.

Plus, if the writer had posted a warning and the warning stated something that wasn’t to the reader’s interest, the reader might miss out on a well presented and well written story that despite the content that was against the reader’s preference, the reader could still enjoy because it was thought out and dealt with in a respectful manner. How often this is the case, depends on how much fan fiction the reader read. At least without the warning, the reader gives the story a fair chance before deciding it isn’t worth their time.

The other argument is that once you do start warning, where do you stop? Because warnings are exceptionally subjective, there is no common consensus on what really needs warnings and what does not. For instance, it is fairly common to warn for sex, rape and violence, but would it also not be fair to warn about the sounds of a heartbeat as well. A heartbeat might remind someone of a trauma involving a heartbeat. You just never know. And if there are warnings, do you warn for more than just sex and violence. Do you warn for romance? Some people don’t want to read about romance. Do you warn for out of character-ness? What a writer might not feel is out of character, the reader might. Do you warn for character sexuality? Sure, in bookstores there are sections for homosexual and lesbian literature, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be showing up in any other novel in other sections. How far for warnings is far enough? Where is the general consensus and where do you draw the line?

Because some writers don’t know where the line is and feel damned if they do and damned if they don’t. They just won’t warn because it is safer. They can put up a warning and it might be wrong or the fan base might feel it didn’t go far enough or others might get angry because the warning spoiled the plot for them or they didn’t feel it was necessary. Those who don’t warn might be just stepping out of the fight all together.

So what are some of the more common warnings?

Most of them involve sex or violence in some way.

Sexual content: This story contains scenes of sex or sexual in nature.
Rape or Non-con: This story contains scenes of rape or non consensual sex.
Dub-con: This story contains scenes of dubious consensual sex.
Violence: This story contains scenes of violence.
Torture: This story contains scenes of torture.
Mutilation: This story contains scenes of character mutilation.
Goru or Vore: This story contains scenes of dismemberment and sex.
Incest: This story contains scenes of siblings having sex.
Gunplay: This story contains scenes of having sex with guns.
Bondage: This story contains scenes of having sex while tied up.
BDSM: The story contains scenes of dominant and submissive sado-masochism.
Other sexual fetishes: This story contains scenes of a specific sexual fetish.
Slash or Femmeslash (Yaoi, Yuri): This story contains scenes of two characters of the same gender in a relationship or having sex.
Foul language: This story contains scenes with cursing.
Character death: This story contains a major character dying.
Angst: This story contains sad and dark emotions.
Hurt/Comfort: This story contains scenes of characters hurting then comforting the other.
Spoilers: This story contains information that might ruin the ending of the given canon.
Humor: This story contains silliness.
Fluff: This story contains warm and fuzzy scenes to make one smile.
Crack!fic: This story is not meant to be taken seriously and is for sheer entertainment value.
Crack pairing: This story contains a relationship that is not popular or accepted among the fandom or the canon.

Notice that this list is not nearly comprehensive and contains examples of only some content warnings.

If the writer decides to use warnings, a difficulty arises in where to put them due to the many different type of sites there are to post fiction on and due to the fact that some readers consider warnings spoilers, which will ruin the plot for them. In journal type sites like LiveJournal, it is very easy to place a warning anywhere the writer wants. The formatting and placement of everything in the journal post is up to the discretion of the writer. The writer on journaling sites can even place the warning behind a cut tag for those who do not like spoilers. The same can be said of personal fiction posting websites. The writer can place warnings wherever they wish and at their discretion. They can even create warning text the same color as the site background for those who don’t want the plot ruined for them. However, for story database sites such as fanfiction.net that have specific information that shows up in the list, warnings can be harder. The only way to warn the reader before they click on the story is to put the warning in the summary. Summaries on most database sites have a specific character limit and the warning might be cut off. The other place to put the warning is in a note at the beginning of the story or story chapter. If the reader does not read the notes before the story or chapter, they still may not get the warning.

Whether or not you, the writer, use warnings is up to your discretion. Warnings are a tool at the writer’s disposal to attract or turn away readers. The decision is up to you, no one else’s opinion should matter.

Headers: Being on the top of things

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 21:13:30 GMT

In which we discuss, what is a header, and what does the header contain...

In the introductory entry for this journal, I said a header is like the bio for a story. What does this mean and what exactly is a header? A header is what comes at the ‘head’ of the story. When one is working with html there is also a tag called header. This tag contains important things like the title of the webpage and can also include key words and summaries of what is going on. You can’t see all the information in a header tag unless you look at the source document. The header of the story like the header of a website also contains important information and is the stories ‘biography’ with ‘key words’ and ‘summaries.’ What this means is that the header is a section at the top of your story that contains all the general information that the reader needs to know what the story is about and if they want to read it.

Another good comparison to make is that the header of a story is like the cover of a book. Sometimes they will even come with title pictures put together by the author. No matter what you want to compare a header to, its purpose is to draw the reader in to actually read the story. What makes up a good header varies from reader to reader and writer to writer much like what each person thinks a good book cover is.

There are two ways to come up with a header, either you code it yourself or the website does it for you. If you’re posting to an automated archive, as you enter information in for the story, the archive puts it in the database and makes the header for you. This is easier because you aren’t responsible for a lot of information once it’s entered in to the database. However, it is also more restrictive because you are limited to what that particular archive thinks is important for the readers to know rather than what you think the readers need to know. This is where a journaling site like LiveJournal or having a personal website makes a difference. On these websites you choose the information and how to word the information you put at the top of your story.

Information that goes in a header is varied from writer to writer and at times from fandom to fandom. The basic information that goes in a header is the title, the writer and a summary. Like this:

Title:
Author:
Summary:

This is just like the cover of a book. The title is the name of the story. The author tells you who wrote it and is the creative force behind it. Lastly, the summary gives you a general and hopefully accurate idea of what the story is about. Every site, whether it’s an archive or journal type or website contains those three basic pieces of information. However, for most fan fiction that isn’t enough.

With fan fiction no matter what type of website it is, the fandom that the story is for is included. Sometimes, the reader cannot tell what fandom the story is written for just by looking at the character names in the summary. Many fandoms, particularly Japanese fandoms have similar names in many stories.

So, the header would now look like this.

Title:
Fandom:
Author:
Summary:

Then, there are some less optional and more optional pieces of information that can be included. A less optional piece of information is a rating. Unlike at a bookstore, fan fiction isn’t presorted into children’s, young adult, literature, genre fiction and adult mature fiction. Without a rating put upon the story, the reader will not know whom the story is appropriate for and what type of themes it might contain. Different sites and different writers use different rating systems. It doesn’t really matter what type of rating system you use as long as it is simple and comprehensible.

Most writers either use the movie guide ratings, ratings provided by the ESRB for video games, or publishers’ manga ratings, or the same ratings as fanfiction.net, which has adopted the fictionratings.com guide. Or, they could even use combinations of all of them.

To learn more about these rating systems follow these handy links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainment_Software_Rating_Board or http://www.esrb.org/ratings/ratings_guide.jsp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association_of_America_film_rating_system or http://www.mpaa.org/FilmRatings.asp
http://www.fictionratings.com/guide.php
http://manga.about.com/od/readingcollectingmanga/a/ageratings.htm

Now our header looks like this:

Title:
Fandom:
Author:
Rating:
Summary:

Another optional, but slightly more optional than others piece of information in a header is the genre of the story. Quickly, what is a genre? A genre is a category with a particular theme or content. Movies have genres. Art has genres. Books have genres. And these are the categories that you find in a bookstore: Horror, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Western, Romance, Mystery, True Crime and so on and so forth. Automatic Archiving type websites like fanfiction.net like to place genres in their database so that people can look at the story and know what type or category of story it is from what genre the writer has chosen. A romance story can be very different from an action story. That is if a writer knows the differences between the genres themselves. Fandom also has created a few categories of their own that aren’t explained if one looks up movies or book genre categories. Anyways, our header if we decide to include genre in it will now look like this:

Title:
Fandom:
Author:
Rating:
Genre:
Summary:

Then there is the category of the header that is titled the Author’s Note. The Author’s Note is just that, a quick note to the readers about whatever is on the writer’s mind. It could be about anything, preferably something to do with the story but it doesn’t have to be. Author’s Notes are good for making excuses to why you haven’t posted, thanking betas, wishing fans happy birthday and recommending music among other things. The thing to remember about them is that they are indeed notes are meant to be kept short.

Our header now looks like this:

Title:
Fandom:
Author:
Rating:
Genre:
Summary:
Author’s Notes:

What follows now are either the most optional parts of the header or the most controversial parts of a header. Sometimes, for the following, the writer might not even have the information to fill these parts out. Archiving websites often include word counts as their programs can tally up the words in a document quickly and with some accuracy. Some writers adopt this habit and check the word counts of their documents before posting them to personal or journal type sites. This way the reader has some idea how long the story is going to be and maybe how much time it will take them to read it. Some readers don’t want to read anything that is shorter than 500 words and others only want to read stories of 100 words or so.

The header now looks like this:

Title:
Fandom:
Author:
Rating:
Genre:
Word Count:
Summary:
Author’s Notes:

Some automated archive sites, if they are not already dedicated to a particular pairing or character set, will have drop down boxes for the writer to choose what characters the story is focusing on. Many readers, especially those who identify themselves as ‘shippers’ or those who follow a particular relationship in the canon, find this useful to find stories that center on their favorite characters. This is particularly helpful in larger journal communities or personal websites where stories of every type and every character combination are posted rather than in smaller communities that only focus on one set of characters. This doesn’t only apply to pairings of course. This section can also be used to tell what characters are in the story though they might not be necessarily in a romantic relationship.

Our header keeps getting longer and now looks like so:

Title:
Fandom:
Author:
Rating:
Genre:
Pairing/Characters:
Word Count:
Summary:
Author’s Notes:

If you are in a large international community or posting on a larger archiving site, English might not be the only language of those posting. Thus some writers and some sites place the language of the story in a section of the header so readers can find stories easily in their native language.

Title:
Fandom:
Author:
Language:
Rating:
Genre:
Pairing/Characters:
Word Count:
Summary:
Author’s Notes:

And sometimes the canonical series might be ongoing or there might be people who haven’t seen the entire thing or watched it all. So, out of politeness for those readers who don’t want to have part of a series ruined for them that they haven’t watched yet, many writers will put down to where in the canonical story their story takes place in, usually an episode or volume number. These are called Spoilers.

Title:
Fandom:
Author:
Language:
Rating:
Genre:
Pairing/Characters:
Word Count:
Spoilers:
Summary:
Author’s Notes:

The story itself might be a chaptered or work in progress story. And there are three optional entries that can be added to the header. In a series type work, the title section of the header could refer to the current chapter title and underneath the chapter title would new section called series with the series title after it. Some writers who know how long their series is if they have either planned it all out or finished it will put a completeness section is with numbers. This way the reader can keep track of how far in the story that they are.

The last section for chaptered works is slightly more controversial. Some writers will put in their header links to the first chapter and the previous chapter of their story so that if it has been a long time or even a short time readers can go back and refresh their memories of what has already happened and find it without too much trouble searching. Some readers don’t care about this and are willing to click on a few links and take the time to find the previous story sections themselves if the writer does not include them. Other readers will not read a story at all if the writer does not include previous chapter links for them and at times say they have no respect for the writer who doesn’t include them. They feel that previous chapter links are common courtesy and that every writer should include them out of respect for the reader.

Our header now looks like this:

Title:
Series:
Fandom:
Author:
Completeness:
Language:
Rating:
Genre:
Pairing/Characters:
Word Count:
Spoilers:
Summary:
Author’s Notes:
Previous Chapter Links:

A popular fan fiction and even original fiction action is to accept challenges set out by other fans. There are many different types of fiction challenge communities on livejournal and randomizer sites over the internet that can provide other challenges. There are even challenges within non-challenge communities for their writers specifically. Thus, if the writer does respond to a challenge they often place in their header what challenge that they are responding too and if it is a community it usually comes with a link.

Our header continues to grow:

Title:
Series:
Fandom:
Challenge:
Author:
Completeness:
Language:
Rating:
Genre:
Pairing/Characters:
Word Count:
Spoilers:
Summary:
Author’s Notes:
Previous Chapter Links:

Let’s face it. Sometimes the reader wants to contact the author to say something to them. Many archive sites have systems already in place for you to be able to comment on a writer’s work, as do journaling sites. Archive sites and journaling sites also allow for the writer to put their contact information in profiles that are easily accessible. This is not so for personal websites. Thus, some writers, even at journaling sites, will include contact information in their header, usually near their name.

So now our header looks like so:

Title:
Series:
Fandom:
Challenge:
Author:
Contact:
Completeness:
Language:
Rating:
Genre:
Pairing/Characters:
Word Count:
Spoilers:
Summary:
Author’s Notes:
Previous Chapter Links:

The last two items that are commonly added into the header are the most controversial. They are the warning and the disclaimer. The warning is rather like a spoiler. A warning ‘warns’ the reader that the story might contain objectionable content and usually makes what the content is explicitly clear. Some readers will not read the story unless there is an explicit warning in place for any adult or mature material such as acts of sex or violence. Then others don’t want the story ruined for them and others feel that warnings can hamper plot flow.

A disclaimer is a statement that the writer doesn’t own the canonical work they are writing in, they did not create it and they are not making any money off writing their story. The idea behind a disclaimer is that it is an informal way to legally protect the writer from being sued by the owner of the copyrighted work for infringement of copyright. Whether or not this works is open for debate. Some say that is courtesy and will help you and others say that if the lawyers do come after you a disclaimer is going to be no protection because it implies that you are knowingly and willfully infringing on the owners copyright. Infringing on copyright is at the heart of this debate, because some sides say that fan fiction falls under fair use and other sides say that it does not. So, it’s up to you the writer to form your own opinion about them.

Our header now looks like this:

Title:
Series:
Fandom:
Challenge:
Author:
Contact:
Completeness:
Language:
Rating:
Warnings:
Genre:
Pairing/Characters:
Word Count:
Spoilers:
Summary:
Author’s Notes:
Disclaimer:
Previous Chapter Links:

As you can see, a header can quickly get out of control. The list above contains eighteen different options of information that you can put into a header. Of course, not all of these options will apply all the time. Nor do these options have to be organized in a vertical list manner or even be part of the list at all. For instance, on a journaling site, the fandom could go up into the subject line. Otherwise, The list could be arranged horizontally or whatever makes you, the writer, feel comfortable. What information you put in the header is ultimately up to you and will depend on what you feel comfortable with the reader knowing before they read the story.

Emotions: Showing and Telling

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 18:49:04 GMT

In which we discuss the difficulty that is conveying emotion and how to show and tell them:

Emotions, feelings, in writing they are some of the hardest ideas to convey from the character to the reader. The problem is that everybody has feelings. They may be damped down and buried. They might be compartmentalized or they might be exploding out all over because the character figuratively wears their heart on their sleeve for everyone to see. These emotions are integral to your story as they will effect the way a character acts, behaves and the decisions that are made throughout the tale.

In John Long’s “Writer’s Little Book of Wisdom” he says to: “Muster up the feelings and the reader lives two lives at once: his own, and the one he is reading.”

Because everyone has emotions, emotions connect us most profoundly to the character and what is happening in the story. We may not understand or relate to their situation, but we can relate to their loneliness, their loss or their anger. Emotions pull us into their situation and enthrall us to not want to put the book down just to see what happens next.

Conveying emotions to the reader is difficult. Emotions are ephemeral. They tend not to have concrete forms. Rage is not really red haze and sadness doesn’t actually turn somebody ‘blue.’ To convey emotions, one needs to use the appropriate amount of showing and telling to ‘connect’ with the reader’s brain.

Quick recap of showing and telling: Telling is stating the idea, thought, emotion, or object explicitly usually using a form of the verb ‘to be.’ Showing is using actions, expressions and dialogue to convey an emotion or trait.

It is very simple to tell an emotion.

Rikku was sad.

Gippal was angry.

Kimhari was calm and contemplative.

Sometimes, when a writer is trying to show an emotion by using thoughts they still end up telling the emotion because they use the thought alone.

She thought. “Mother, I love you, but I don’t really care.”

What these examples have in common is that they don’t show us how the character is sad or angry or calm and neither do they tell us why they feel this way. Without knowing the how and the why, it is impossible for the reader to connect to them. The reader is much like the last example, they may love you the writer and they may love the character but they can’t muster up the ability to care about you or the character.

To better convey emotion, think about an actor on the big screen, perhaps your favorite actor. When watching a movie or a television show, we don’t have the character’s inward thoughts to go upon to know what they are feeling. We rely on the actor’s face and body cues. A ‘wooden’ actor is an actor accused of not being able to portray a character since their acting is stiff and immobile. They’re not being able to convey the character’s emotions to the audience because they aren’t moving their face or their body or they don’t know what the character is feeling.

Showing an emotion involves using the character’s bodily language and actions and also the character’s bodily functions. These will vary from character to character as they do from person to person. It’s like playing poker, every one has a ‘tell’ or a characteristic action that once the opponent learns it will show them whether or not the character has a good hand, a bad hand or if they are bluffing.

There are two types of body language. There is what the characters face is doing and what their body is doing. They work together to tell a story about what the character is feeling or even what the character is trying to hide in regards to their feelings.

Facial expressions involve the entirety of the face and when showing a feeling on the face it depends on the emotion how much of the expression is needed to get the point across. Something as simple as raising an eyebrow can convey skepticism while curling a lip can show disgust or arrogance.

Then there is the rest of the body. Shifting on one’s feet in different manners can express different things. If you bounce on the toes, you could be excited. If you roll back and forth, nervous, if you rock back onto your heels, shocked. If you tap your toes you could be impatient. A way a person stands can indicate emotion as well. Do they cock their hip? Are they crossing their arms? Perhaps they are rubbing the back of their neck or their fingers through their hair or tugging on their clothes.

Rikku for instance has several tells. When she’s frustrated, she narrows her eyes, bends her elbows, clenches her fists and stomps her feet rapidly. When she’s thinking about something when standing, she puts one hand on her hip and the other hand finger pointed on her chin. When she’s sitting and thinking, she either has her hands behind her head and feet stretched out or she’ll be squatting with her arms around her knees. When angry, she stands with both hands on her hips and tends to lean towards the person she’s angry at. When excited she’ll pump her fist into the air. When sad, she lowers her head and stares at her feet. Rikku has never cried during the canon. When embarrassed she’ll cover her face with her hands and turn away.

These types of actions are overt and obvious to see. There are other types of obvious actions that are related to emotions, flushing for instance when embarrassed or angry. The way a person walks, if they are stomping or strutting or strolling can show something about their mood. How a character moves, whether their motions are languid and fluid or short and abrupt. Tears, jaw clenching, muscles tensing, tics, eyebrows moving, fingers moving, tapping, snapping or popping, feet and toes moving, wiggling or curling can all tell the reader something outward of what the character is feeling. Their reactions can also tell their emotion, if they are slamming or throwing things they might be angry for instance.

And then there are the inward bodily actions that the outside observer can’t see. Most of these involve some sort of metaphor or idiom that many people are familiar with. When someone is angry it is often said that a red haze falls across their vision or they get tunnel vision. Or if the person is nervous they have butterflies in their stomach. If someone is sad sometimes their chest or their heart literally aches. Other actions don’t have metaphors and can be as simple as the stomach knotting when jealous or churning when mad. It could be the back of the eyes tickling when trying not to cry or feeling the hot pooling of those tears before they fall.

Showing emotions through invisible body functions requires having an awareness of your own body and how you own body reacts to certain feelings. It might not be the same as another persons. Different people react to the same feelings in different ways. It is a good basis to start from.

In the story Unrequited, I use mainly Rikku’s body language and actions to show what she is feeling. Rikku’s actions are bolded:

Rikku bit her lip and tried to ignore the pain in her chest. He glanced at her and she smiled at him. “You look it.” She forced past the lump in her throat, and it wasn’t because of her. There was another girl. Gippal had a girlfriend. Rikku hadn’t seen this coming. The two of them were so close. It had seemed like they were on the edge of a real relationship and one step would have put them there and now this.

He leaned back and grinned. “Really?”

“Really.” She kept eye contact with force of will. It was the only way she knew how to lie to him. He could read her other tells so easily if he wasn’t pinned down by her eyes.

“Well, I am.”

Rikku dropped her eyes to the food and picked up a fry. She twirled it around in her fingers. “So, when do I get to meet her?” She took a little bite and swallowed. She didn’t want to meet her. She didn’t want to know what she had been measured to and lost.

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

The actions show what Rikku is feeling, while the rest of the story tells why she is feeling that way. The story wouldn’t be able to move forward without both of these attributes.

The last way to convey emotion is through dialogue or thought and attribution. This is what the character says or thinks and the tone in which the character says it. Because characters are people, everything they say does not have to be put into complete sentences and they can be interrupted. It is natural for a person to stumble over their words, to change in mid sentence or maybe not be able to get something out due to laughing or crying. So can the characters in a story. Thoughts especially do not have to be coherent or complete.

In Desert Rose, Chapter Fifteen, Rikku escapes from a girl’s raid and is thinking about why she left. The bolded areas are her thoughts:

Her thoughts tumbled about her head, a combination of what they had said and her observations. It only served to make her angry and her anger kept her warm all the way out to the disputed territories. Her vision was a little blurry from time to time and she wiped away tears on her bare shoulder. Have to now, only after Gippal, insult to my father, more than one village, no one cared before, object, trophy, slur.

She shut the hover off and got off the bike. She hugged herself as she walked towards the oasis. Not good enough until, not one, how could they, think I wouldn’t notice, callous, assholes. She shivered and sat down, pulling her nightgown down to her ankles, much like she had done on Gippal’s bed. She buried her head in her knees. Have, left me always, not a girl, laughing.

She choked and warm tears seeped from her eyes. She shuddered once before breaking out into sobs. Not theirs to take, just another boy in the end, not attracted, why should they be, just cute, ruffle my hair and pinch my cheeks, when you’re older. Didn’t happen. Pops never upset. Not pretty enough in his eyes either. Not like mom.

Momma.

She rocked back and forth. Momma, I miss you.

Not a lady like you momma. I’ve tried. I’ve tried so hard. I just, don’t know how! They’d take you. I know they would, before another tribe did.

Rikku curled up on the ground and cried herself to sleep.

Another way to show emotion in dialogue is where the character would place emphasis on the words. A simple change of how forcefully the words are said can mean the difference between sincerity and sarcasm and panic.

For instance:

“Sorry.”

And:

“Sorry.”

Or:

“Sorry.”

Attributions are basically ‘he said’ and ‘she said.’ Those are the simplest and clear attributions that can be given. Of course, there are other ways to go about it that do not use adverbs and also tell how the character said whatever they said. If a character is babbling they might be tired or nervous. If a character barks out something, they are giving a sharp order. If a character growls or snarls, they could be angry or just waking up.

Finding the correct amount of showing and telling is up to you, the writer. Remember, it’s a balancing act that needs to fit with your style. It is the combination of thoughts, actions and dialogue that truly make the character come alive emotionally. Let’s put it all together.

To show what I mean, here is a rather longish example from Desert Rose, Chapter Twenty-Eight:

Rikku wiped her hands on her pants for a third time and swallowed. She did have most everything ready at her tent. She wasn’t going to get her hopes up too high. She stiffened her shoulders to keep her muscles from trembling. She licked her lips to make them wet. They were dry, just like her mouth. She swallowed again to try and work up some moisture.

Why did girls have to eat in groups? She’d never quite understood the appeal. Of course, she tended to eat with groups of guys when she was around them. Then again, she often ended up eating alone. She eyed the group she’d chosen to speak to first. There were only six of them. Her palms shouldn’t feel this damp. She wiped them on her pants again. Maybe, maybe if they said yes, she wouldn’t feel quite so shaky approaching the next group.

She pushed her hair behind her back and steeled herself. She approached at an angle and tried to listen in on what they were saying. But she couldn’t quite hear before she got there. They dissolved into stifled giggles just as she came up next to them.

Rikku swallowed again. Were they laughing at her? She bit the inside of her lip and clasped her hands in front of her. The back of her eyes tickled. Well, it didn’t matter. She’d go through it anyways. The worst they could do is say no.

Her heart thudded in her chest and she waited for the giggles to die down. Sweat gathered in the small of her back, her armpits. Sands, she wished they would settle down so she could get it over with. It took her a few seconds to recognize the silence and notice six pairs of eyes looking up at her. “Hi.” She said weakly. She licked her lips and tried to ignore the way the smiles faded. “I was wanting to throw a small get together tonight just girls.” She swallowed and went on before they could say anything. “Not anything fancy, but I was hoping you would come.” She stopped speaking. The eyes had widened and the smiles weren’t returning. They looked at her like she had lost her mind or something. She waited. Their expressions didn’t change as they looked at each other. Rikku felt as if someone had kicked her in the gut. They didn’t want to come. They had plans, they didn’t like her or she just wasn’t cut out for this. She swallowed past the lump in her throat and her eyes watered. “If not, I guess-“

“Rikku!” Keyakku yelled, interrupting her.

Her shoulders slumped and she spun. “Never mind.” She murmured.

“Rikku!” Keyakku yelled again.

She sighed. “I’m coming.” She walked away, so much for all her plans. “I’m coming.” She said a second time softly. Didn’t matter. They hadn’t wanted to come anyways. They didn’t want anything to do with her. She was too above them or too below them. She could never figure out exactly which. In a stupid way, having Gippal had made her hope that she was worthy of their friendship. Though why Gippal would matter made no logical sense. It was just stupid. She glanced over her shoulder. Their heads were together again. They were probably whispering to each other, whispering about her. The lump in her throat got a little larger.

Keyakku grabbed her arm. “Rikku, the Matriarchs are here.”

Her head shot up and a tear she didn’t know was in her eye streaked down her cheek. “What!” She wiped it away. “The other matriarchs?”

Keyakku frowned. “Are you okay?”

She tugged her arm from his grip. “It’s nothing.”

Keyakku lowered his voice. “You’re crying.” He knew how well voices carried at night.

She blinked. “It’s nothing. Never mind. It was a stupid idea. Besides, the Matriarchs are here.

It’s probably about Nhadala and I have to attend. Excuse me.”

“What was a stupid idea?” Keyakku grabbed at her again. She evaded him with a twitch of her shoulders. “Rikku.”

“It’s not your problem, brother. It’s mine.” She walked away from him quickly. She didn’t dare look over her shoulder again. She sniffled and rubbed her eyes. She had to get this under control before she came to the Matriarch gathering. She reached the tent far too soon and stood outside collecting her emotions and pushing them away. She had to deal with them later. With a final deep inhalation, she swept the door aside.

Showing and telling the emotions can take time and words. It also takes an understanding of the characters. The end results are more than worth the effort as it makes the character more rounded, real and approachable.

Good luck!

Reviewing and Commenting for the Writer

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:54:09 GMT

In which we discuss the writers view on reviews and how to respond to them.

Feedback (reviews, comments, constructive criticism et al) means different things to different writers. There is no one true definition because different writers get different things out of reviews. Thus for a writer, reviews can be a gift, a treat, a reward, just compensation, validation or for the truly egotistical their due (either that or it means nothing to them and they could care less if you leave feedback or not). All in all, most writers would agree that feedback is a lovely thing to get and they do wish they got more of it.

With feedback comes the trap of writing for feedback instead of for oneself. And this may lead to all sorts of problems farther down the line. The best thing to keep in mind after you post a story, that if you do get feedback, it’s not because you deserve to get feedback. It’s because someone enjoyed your story enough to leave you a reply.

Repeat after me: You are not entitled to reviews.

You, the writer, put the story voluntarily of your own free will (no one was twisting your arm I hope) and they, the readers, will respond of their own free will.

There are some attitudes that happen when a person starts thinking that they deserve reviews instead of knowing that these reviews are a gift. The first of these is complaining about the reviews you have gotten, the reviews you would like to get and the fact you aren’t getting enough reviews.

I don’t care who you are, what fandoms you have previously been in or what your status in those fandoms are, in a new fandom you will not be instantly popular. Please, don’t expect to be. When you post your first story, whether it’s in a new fandom or your very first fandom, you will be a total stranger to everyone else. It’s a scary feeling posting something like that and sometimes over time it doesn’t go away. You always wonder things like “what will they think of me? What if I did something wrong? What if I made a huge mistake and no one points it out and they all laugh at me?” See, scary. If you’ve never had these questions, I nod to your suave coolness. Otherwise, take a deep breath, relax and give it some time because very few people are likely going to notice your first story anyways.

You see you can’t expect recognition in a fandom if you don’t participate in said fandom. This may mean you need to post more stories so people see your name more. It might mean reading and reviewing other peoples’ works in the fandom. It might mean participating in a discussion. If you are a naturally shy person, this might be hard for you. Just be polite and most people will welcome you with open arms.

If you do expect insta-popularity (just add nuts) and then complain about it in a public forum then the rest of the fandom you wanted to enter finds out. You most likely will not be accepted into that fandom with open arms. Most fans don’t like the idea that when someone walks into the room they are expected to bow down and kiss their feet. Fans tend to be highly individual and eccentric people. I can guarantee you that this will not happen. It’s best to be respectful of the already established fans. It’s not that they know better than you. They might not be better writers than you. It was that they were there first. They have been there working hard to make the fandom a place you want to be in. That work deserves respect.

Otherwise complaining about the reviews you get in a public place gives the readers and other fans a bad impression of you. Yes, unless you are seeking nothing more than validation, there are times when every writer wishes that they would get more than “I liked it, write more” type of reviews. Complaining at length about it in an author’s note is not going to encourage your readers to leave you longer reviews, in fact, it might turn some readers off from leaving you feedback at all and the ones who don’t really care for you in the first place may stop reading all together.

Complaining makes you seem ungrateful for the gifts you’ve been given. Sure, everyone gets a review they disagree with or an entitled fan telling them what to do or even the odd personal insult. Complaining about those is all fine and good as long as it’s in a semi-private place. Complaining about the reviews the readers leave you in good faith telling you that they liked it and will come back for more is plain rude.

Being rude isn’t going to gain you any friends.

The second bad behavior happens when someone is new to fandom in general or feels that they aren’t getting enough attention or even when they are talking to other people in the fandom trying to establish themselves: review begging.

It can take different forms. The most common is a writer saying that they will not post the next part of a story without so many reviews (generally a double digit number like ten). The other way that people beg for reviews is to leave someone else a review and ask them to read their story and comment it upon it (often without commenting about the story they just read) or if they know that person, to ask them point blank if they have read the story that the writer just posted so many odd minutes, hours, days ago. Most of the time, the reaction to review begging is for the reader to be turned off and either a) not leave a review and b) not come back and read the story ever again. The worst place I’ve seen review begging is in summaries. Asking people to please read and review when they know nothing about the story usually tends to make readers skip the story entirely.

Begging for reviews tends to make one look immature and desperate. It’s best to be exceedingly neutral about reviews and leave the decision whether or not to leave a review entirely up to the reader. Something like, reviews are crack, feed my addiction?! Or my personal one, reviews are love, love me?!

So, if you aren’t getting reviews and you aren’t a) complaining about them or b) begging for them or otherwise acting in a rude or immature manner, there are other reasons you may not be receiving feedback.

A lot of it depends on how big or how popular the fandom you are writing for is. If you are not in the biggest, most current, most popular fandom of the moment, you might not get a lot of reviews. This goes double if you are in a fandom that is a bit older or is more obscure. If you are in the current most popular and shiny fandom and you still aren’t getting reviews, you might need to look at what you are writing and what everyone else is writing. Perhaps, you are writing for pairing that doesn’t have many followers or are writing a romance story in among a ton of action stories. To get more feedback, you might want to either tailor your story to fit the audience you are writing for or find a place to post that fits your story better.

This leads to the fact that there are a lot of places to post your fiction. Fanfiction.net is the biggest and most widely known fan fiction archive in existence. It has been around for roughly ten years. That is a long time to gather stories. It is very easy for a story to get lost in the database especially if the fandom is popular and has hundreds of stories or updates being posted in it daily. Broad general LiveJournal communities dedicated to a single fandom can be the same way. You might be better off looking for a community dedicated to the pairing or character that you are writing. Or, if you are posting solely to a pairing community then you might need to look for a broader audience for your works. Many fandoms have newsletters that bring together all the stories from either a particular pairing or even just a particular overall fandom. You might try subscribing to one of those. There are also other websites than LiveJournal (and it’s various clones) and Fanfiction.net to post. Most fan sites have a fan fiction submission section and now, some shows official forums have fan fiction areas. In the end, you might want to post your story in several places at once for maximum impact and see where you get the best feedback. Look around, you might find an archive website that is dedicated solely to your fandom. The Internet is a big place.

Once you start getting feedback there is the conundrum of what do you do next? What you do once you get feedback is going to reflect on how other people look and feel about you. Really, there are two choices, either you respond to it or you don’t.

There are different attitudes from the people who decide not to respond to feedback. The bigger one is that they don’t know how and feel stupid saying the same things over and over. This is especially big on LiveJournal where the reader can see what the writer told the other readers before them. A lot of times, readers don’t leave a lot for the writer to respond too. There are only so many ways to react to “I liked it, write more.”

Another one is that some writers think it’s stupid to respond at all to a comment that took someone thirty seconds to write when they put three hours into writing the story in the first place. They would rather ignore their readers because in the end, they and their ego don’t really care about what readers think. Partially, this attitude is a good thing. They aren’t writing for the readers. They will continue writing no matter what other people think until they aren’t having fun anymore. It’s a bad thing, because this tends to not make them pleasant people to know.

The last reason that some writers don’t respond to reviews is because of time factors. Sometimes a writer misses an email or forgets about an email or doesn’t get an email about a review or a comment and by the time that they do find the email it feels dumb to respond to it. Some writers say that they don’t have time to respond to any of their reviews at all.

Most times, not responding to reviews turns people off from reading anything else by that writer. It doesn’t matter what the reasoning behind not responding is. The reader doesn’t care. They care about the fact that they went out of their way and the writer didn’t acknowledge them. For some readers, it takes a lot of courage to hit the comment link or button and talk to a random stranger. To have that random stranger completely ignore them is exceedingly insulting and it will not encourage them to try and do it again. The writer might be shy and the reader might think that you’re stuck up.

Therefore, the best thing to do even if it feels stupid is to respond. The easiest thing to say is thank you. If you can’t think of anything else to say (which if the reader didn’t leave much to work with, this can be a common thing) then thank you is all you really need to say. It shouldn’t matter if you’ve said this ten times before and you’ll be saying it ten times after. Saying thank you is the simplest form of reply and the most courteous. Even if they express an opinion or a view that you don’t agree with, thanking them for voicing it won’t harm them or you. You are also fully within your rights to tell them you don’t agree with what they said. A lot of times I find that people who do leave feedback that isn’t complimentary do so anonymously and without anyway to get back to them. Whether or not that makes things easier on the writer when responding depends on your point of view. (I find it frustrating.)

Otherwise, in review responses I also try to welcome new readers and say that I hope they come back and I see them again. It also doesn’t go amiss to say that you are appreciative they enjoyed what you wrote. And if they do leave you something more specific to respond to, you can say something about that. You may not end up having close relationships with most of your readers. However, there will be one or two that develop into better friendships over time. They may not last for long periods of time before someone else replaces them but they will be there.

Reviews are what you make of them. How you go about things and how you respond to feedback will influence how you feel and how you are received in the overall fandom community. It’s one of the places where your personality shines through instead of the characters you are writing.

Reviewing and Commenting for the Reader

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 05:39:47 GMT

In which we discuss, what is a review, what does one talk about in a review and why should one leave them.

On most fan related sites or sites where fans can post their work whether the site is fan related or not, there usually is the ability to leave a comment at the end of the post, page, large block of text that contains whatever the fan put up. It might be a button, it might be a link or it might be a form of some sort. Whatever it is, it’s important enough to be there and shouldn’t be ignored because it is the ability of the reader (you) to leave your opinion about the story or a review.

A review in the real world is usually a summary of the work (movie, book, art piece) with the reviewer’s short analysis attached and whether or not they liked it. It tends to come with stars or thumbs up/ thumbs down and can be far longer than they really need to be. In fandom terms, a review is generally a short response to telling the creator whether or not the person liked the work and sometimes (hopefully) what they liked about it. A fandom review can be one word. “Cute!” Sometimes it’s two words. “Write more!” It can be three words. “I liked it!” Or it can be as long as the word limit of the site allows. Reviews/comments are very flexible.

My sample reviews above are very short. Those types of reviews or a combination there of are the most common types of reviews I personally receive and have seen others receive. There is nothing wrong with those types of reviews. They are the bread and butter of comments and I know I am always grateful to get them. To me it means, someone is reading. Thank goodness.

The fact is that many people don’t know what to talk about in a review. So, they won’t leave one at all. Sites like fanfiction.net have statistic counters to let the author know that their work has been read, whereas places like livejournal.com, unless you pay for them or add a counter to the post itself, comments are the only way you will know if your work is being read or not. It can be very depressing for an author to post and not receive any comments at sites like that. Sometimes, a reader won’t leave a review because maybe there are other reviews and everything they wanted to say, someone else has already said. Or perhaps, they don't want to be actively involved in a particular fandom. Other times, readers won’t leave a review because they see that the author doesn’t reply to other people’s comments. And sometimes, they are being polite because they can’t think of anything good to say about the story.

The great thing about reviews is they don’t really have to be that difficult. A review, or a comment can be about anything in the story. Anything. From the simple, “I liked it,” to pointing out a piece of dialog you think captured the story or a plot element that really stood out to you.

The primary thing about leaving a longer review is to be polite. It’s important to remember that everything you’re saying is an opinion. The writer doesn’t owe you anything and suggestions should be phrased as just that, suggestions. Reviewing is also not the place for personal commentary about the writer. The same rules that apply to constructive criticism apply to reviews.

Since a review can be about anything in the story, here are some ideas in the form of questions. Most of these questions are yes and no. It’s always great to back up what you say in your review with something from the story or a reason why you have formed an opinion.

Did you like it? This is very important to the writer. Whether or not you liked it gives them an idea on what the audience they’re writing for (other than themselves, they come first) wants to read.

Did the writer do a good job conveying or writing the story in your opinion? This usually ties in with whether you liked it or not. Though it doesn’t have to, you don’t have to like a story to think that the writer did a good job writing the story. Telling them they did a good job does encourage the writer though. You don’t have to say it like “Good dog, good job, pat pat.” But being encouraging and telling them it was well done helps the writer know they are doing something correctly.

What first attracted you to the story? It is perfectly kosher to comment about what first attracted your eye about the story. Was their title creative? Was the summary interesting (and did it actually reflect what was going on in the story)? Was it the type of story (romance, general friends stuff) that made you stop? Or was it the rating, and was the rating appropriate to what you read? And if it was a romance story was it the pairing unusual or a particular favorite of yours that caught your eye?

Was the story readable? Did the story have decent spelling, grammar and formatting? Did you see any spelling mistakes or blatant grammar errors? It is fine to politely point out if they do have spelling and grammar mistakes. Sometimes, a blatant spelling error is quite embarrassing and doesn’t always get caught no matter how many times the writer reads through the story before posting.

Did you enjoy the characterization? Every writer has their own version of character a and character b. Some are closer to canon than others. If you did enjoy their characterization, why did you do so? Were the characters well rounded? Did you enjoy their actions and reactions? Were you able to relate to a character(s)? And with the story or chapter over, what do you feel for or about the character(s)? Did the writer’s characterization change your mind about the character at all? If so, why? If you didn’t enjoy their characterization, what in your opinion did the writer do wrong? Was there not enough of the character fleshed out enough to get a sense of them? Could they do something different to make their characterizations better?

Did you enjoy the plot? What about the plot do you or do you not enjoy? Is it too cliché or tropeish? Not every plot is going to be your cup of tea. Some plots might feel too slow and others might be too fast. Or maybe they don’t make any sense at all. And in some cases, you might want an action plot rather than a romance plot. Plot is closely tied to characterization as well, since often the characters actions influence what happens next. In the end, it is the writer’s story and how they want to write it is entirely up to them. However, telling them what you liked and what you don’t liked about what they are doing now can help them later on with another story. It is very hard for a writer to change a large plot mid-story.

Did you enjoy the dialog or narration? Was there a piece of dialog in the story that stuck out to you as being particularly spot on to the character or witty? Or maybe it is the opposite, not true to the character at all and it falls flat because of it. In a review, it’s fine to talk about the dialog in general or to pick out your favorite sentence and comment upon it. It is a fine way to show that you are paying attention to the details in a writer’s story.

Did the setting make sense? Depending on whether the story is an alternate universe or not did the setting make sense to the canon of the original work? Is the technology or magic correct? Are they following the physics and social customs of the world? Do the features of the different races in the story match to the canonical versions? All in all, did anything about the setting pull you out of the story? Sometimes being pulled out of a story can be as simple as coca cola and blue jeans in a fantasy world on a fantasy character. If the setting is an alternate universe of the canon, did you enjoy the setting? Would you read more of the setting if it were presented to you? Did it feel complete and true to the characters and original universe? If so or not, why?

Was there a fitting sense of completion? No matter the ending of the story, did the story end. Were all the obvious plot lines finished or if it was a one shot, did the story feel complete as to where it left off?

And lastly, would you like to see more? Whether or not you liked the story, think the story could improve or perhaps you think it is a train wreck you can’t look away from, telling the author you would read more of the story makes the writer happy. The exception to this would be if the story were a one shot or stand-alone. Most often, these are labeled complete and no amount of begging and pleading will have the writer writing more to the story.

It is also acceptable to respond to any of the notes the writer makes at the beginning or ending of the story. Sometimes, something they say may jump out at you and this lets the writer know the audience is actually listening.

If a review starts to go in depth about character analysis and grammar and sentence structure, it becomes constructive criticism. Constructive criticism is a type of review that most writers love and hate to get. I’ve gone into constructive criticism here and here. Constructive criticism is the most difficult form of review to give, which is why it gets it’s own posts.

Reviews are really the only form of compensation that a writer gets. It’s a way of thanking a writer for their hard work and effort and posting something they didn’t have to for you to enjoy. That’s right. They didn’t have to post what they’ve written. You aren’t entitled to the story or even a continuation of the story. Your comment might be the only compensation they receive other than the pleasure of writing. This is why it is important to leave them. It’s respectful. Statistics are great, but they aren’t personal and they don’t get the reader and the writer involved with each other. Commenting back and forth creates a sense of community. It’s a give and take.

Reviews might often be the only thing keeping a writer going on that story. Make no mistake, sometimes reviews do feel like an unfair amount of pressure upon a writer because the writer is writing for fun not money. This shouldn’t stop anyone from commenting on a story or asking for more because the very same thing can be motivation for them to continue. Sometimes a writer just gets stuck or can be feeling down and a comment can help them move forward or feel better.

Not only that, reviews can help another person decide whether or not they want to read the story. They can be a gauge on well the writer is doing or how popular they are and if the time needed to invest in reading the story is worth it. Though more reviews does not necessarily mean a better writer and with three word reviews such as “I liked it” will not help others decide whether or not to read the story either.

In the end, reviews don’t have to be well thought out or exceedingly difficult. A simple “I liked it, write more,” can mean just as much to a writer as a whole paragraph detailing the strengths of the story. Longer reviews, more thought out reviews, will have more meaning to a writer. It’s really all about sharing the love and the joy that the story brought to both of you.

…

(That is if the story did bring love and joy to you the reader. The writer always hopes that this so but will not know, unless you tell them. So when you read, please review.)

One Fish, Two Fish, Alpha Fish, Beta Fish

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:02:38 GMT

In which we discuss what is a beta, what does a beta do and do you need a beta?

There are times when one reads an author’s note, that they come across in bold or italicized letters “thank you to my lovely beta, so and so,” and then tends to continue on praising this beta person. And, if one doesn’t know what a beta is, one is often left wondering why this is so important it deserves bolded letters and what does a colorful fish have to do with anything?

A beta (not to be confused with the Siamese fighting fish of the same name or an unfinished program or the Greek letter) is a person that an unfinished story is sent to for proofreading, editing and other feedback before the final version is published. A beta can be the first source a writer turns to for constructive criticism. I’m not entirely sure where the name came from, however I always felt it referred to the second letter of the Greek alphabet signifying that the beta was the second reader after the alpha, the writer. A beta is a person that the writer generally trusts to tell them the truth when the rest of the Internet is singing their praises.

Betas can do a lot of things. It all really depends on the skill and knowledge of the writer and the skill and knowledge of the beta. Different writers tend to want different things from their betas. So, for a good beta relationship, clear, polite communication is absolutely necessary. It needs to be a back and forth and a give and take. For them to be able to help you, they must know what you want and need to know what they can do.

The most common duty of a beta is as a proofreader. Sometimes, no matter how many times a writer re-reads their work, they will still miss a misspelled word or that comma splice. A beta reader is like a pair of fresh eyes. They can see and correct spelling and grammar for you.

Betas can also be editors. Editing deals with many different parts of the story. It can be help with point of view, tenses, the active versus the passive voice and the other nuts and bolts of writing. It can be more geared towards refining the characters and keeping them in character to the story and to the canon world in or keeping the setting accurate. Then there are the editors who are there to help you fine tune the story, and your writing style.

Nuts and bolts editing tries to take the talent of the writer and push it forward into something more polished. This type of editing is not very opinion based and deals with the knowledge of what works when writing and what doesn’t.

Character and setting editing is much more opinionated. In the fandom, everyone is going to have a different interpretation of what the character thinks and how a character would react in a new situation. The presentation of the character in the source material should be a basis for the character and should be kept as close to the basis as possible no matter if one is writing a story within the source material’s current setting or in an alternate universe. The character should still be recognizable as the character, and a beta can tell you this.

The same goes for a game setting. It is one thing for the setting to be an actual or historical city on Earth and another for the setting to be some semi-fantastic world with entire new continents and technology. If the setting is a present day or historical setting there is less room for interpretation of culture and social rules than say, if it is a completely made up setting. In a made up setting there is much more leeway to play within the information that you are given. A beta that knows the setting can tell you whether or not your interpretations are reasonable within this framework of information.

A fine-tuning editor can be the most helpful and at times the most unhelpful of editors. Fine tuning editors help rephrase awkward sentences and paragraphs, keep the plot on track, they tell you if you are conveying things in a clear manner so that the reader who doesn’t have all the information that you, the writer does, can understand or tell you if you’ve given too much information and other fun things. As the writer, it can be hard to look at your own work impartially. You have all the information worked out in your head and because you know everything, you can forget things easily. A fine tuning beta can stand apart from your work and tell you that you need to input more information so the readers can understand what is going on in the story and what is coming up when you finally get there. Or they can tell you to subtract information if you have shown too much, so the readers won’t guess what your ‘surprise’ or ‘twist’ ending is going to be. They can tell you if you repeat phrases or themes or even situations over and over in your work and suggest ways to change. Sentence structure and word phrasing and plot advancement are a matter of style and a writer’s style is a very personal and opinion laden thing. Sometimes, a beta can see that you aren’t conveying information clearly, but they always can’t tell you why. It can be very frustrating both for you and for them.

A beta can also be someone to bounce ideas with. Talking with a beta can lead to new thought paths that lead to new turns in a story or even a new story. Bouncing ideas with a beta and a beta telling you what you should do are two different things. A good beta should never tell you exactly where you should take your story without it being their opinion and only their opinion. This is different than a beta telling you to try different writing techniques to convey mood and tone better. Otherwise, you never know where you might find an idea for a story and a beta can be a good person to work on developing the idea into something more solid.

There are different types of betas. Some betas only want work with the nuts and bolts, the grammar and spelling of a story. These types of betas are very hands off. Other betas are willing to do more and actually help improve your writing. Then there are betas who are no holds barred, will rip your work to shreds (sort of like two male fighting fish going at it in a bowl). This is a matter of editing style and is subjective to what you want and what you need in a beta.

A beta is generally not a requirement for writing in fandom. Whether or not you really want or need a beta is up to you, the writer’s discretion. If you don’t see the need for one and think you get along just fine without someone else to read your work for errors before posting, then by all means, don’t look for a beta. That’s okay. It’s perfectly acceptable. Fandom is supposed to be fun! And if you’re happy, then no one else should have a say in the matter.

Some writing communities might require that you have a beta to post there. If this bothers you, don’t join that community. Because this is fandom, you can choose what to write and where you post it. It doesn’t mean that you can’t use that communities’ challenges and prompts, it just means you can’t post it there. If there is another community for your fandom, you can post the un-betaed story there, all fandom fiction communities love new stories.

If you do want a beta, remember, communicate, communicate and communicate. It might take some time to find the beta that is right for you. If having an editor to help you improve is that important to you, don’t give up.

As for how to edit, that falls under the purview of constructive criticism. Read what that is and my rules for it, here and here.

For another good take on betas and the betaing process see synecdochic's post about this very topic.

Remodeling, Improving and Building...

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:52:29 GMT

In which we discuss constructive criticism, positive and negative criticism, persuasion tactics and shortly what it can address.

What is constructive criticism? Writers often ask for it, tend not to like it when they do receive it and the writers that you wish would give it, won’t.

Webster’s New World Dictionary defines constructive as, helping to construct; leading to improvement, and criticism as, the act of making judgments, especially literary or artistic work. Interestingly, the word construct comes from the Latin words com- meaning together and struere- meaning to pile up. This seems to say that there can’t be any building up without more than one person. The word critic comes from the Greek krinein, which means to discern. Discerning can be considered using one’s best judgment. When using one’s judgment, you determine what is good and what is bad and whether or not the effort to improve something is worthwhile. Breaking it down to the simplest words, construct means to build, devise, etc and the verb, to criticize, means to analyze and judge.

When you put this all together constructive criticism is analyzing and judging an artistic work to help build up the writer and lead towards improvement. Thus, breaking down the story, presenting a statement with support to persuade the writer to change and help improve the story.

There are two types of criticism, positive and negative. Here is where things might become slightly confusing. Mainly, because of the connotations that positive and negative have as words. In the general meaning of things, positive is good. It’s about adding and being happy, optimistic. Whereas, negative is bad. It’s about subtraction and being gloomy, pessimistic or sad or dream crushing. Now, constructive criticism has implications that to build something up you have to tear it down or apart first. When you’re analyzing the story or the art work, you have to break it down to it’s base level and start from there to work towards improvement. This gives the idea that constructive criticism is negative because one is tearing the work apart, before you build it back up. Some writers cannot see past the first statement to get to the second. I want to present to you the truth that constructive criticism is positive criticism.

This is because of the relationship that the words positive and negative actually have when paired with the word criticism. When you are being a critic, discerning and analyzing and making judgments about something, if you give the recipient of your critique nothing but praise and adulation, this is bad. This type of criticism is negative. It doesn’t contribute towards building up and improving the work. To build up or improve the work, to be a positive influence as a critic, you need to show or tell the writer or artist the things they did well and then the areas that you feel they could improve next time. This is good and optimistic, it’s positive.

Confused?

Positive criticism = what is good and what could be done better.
Negative criticism = flattery and praise

Constructive criticism is about how you go about it. It’s always important to remember that on the Internet you aren’t as anonymous as you think you are. Your identity can be found out. A good rule of thumb is to be the same person on the Internet as you are off the Internet. To help someone out, one doesn’t have to be cruel about it. If you are cruel, and the writer knows how to find out your identity or report you for abuse of the terms of service, it is perfectly within their rights to get your Internet services or accounts suspended.

Be honest. One cannot help the writer effectively otherwise. Honesty also does not equal cruelty. As a critic, one isn’t analyzing the writer, the writer’s intelligence, personal habits or their sexual orientation. There is no need to insult the writer at any time. The critic is analyzing the writer’s work and only the writer’s work in an honest and forthright manner. You are trying to be objective, standing outside your personal feelings about the writer and about their story and the story’s subject matter. There is also no need to insult the writer’s story at any point. Be honest, be forthright and most importantly be polite.

When giving constructive critique, one is trying to persuade the writer that they are, well, not really wrong, they are on the right track and that your solution will get them closer to whatever goal as a writer they have for themselves and for the story. Thus, in your breakdown of the story, some of the tools of persuasion come in handy. Rules such as, referring to an object or person of authority, such as a dictionary or a book of writing tips and secrets; providing examples of the writer’s work to support the analysis and then examples of how it could be improved, thus in a way comparing and contrasting the before and after; repeating things over and over; providing reasons for why what they are doing isn’t working as well as it should and lastly being consistent in what you say, how you say it and what you do around the internet will help move the writer to see your way of things.

This leaves us at what does constructive criticism address?

Simple, anything and everything that has to do with the story, constructive criticism can apply to grammar, style, word phrasing, characterizations, plot, setting, summaries and so on and so forth. If you, the critic, feel that some part of the story can be analyzed and improved, then it can be part of a constructive critique of the story. Constructive criticism can be long, it can be in depth and it most likely will not leave the writer very comfortable when it’s done.

No matter how polite you are and no matter how objective and impersonal you try to be, writing and artwork are expressions of creativity and thus are very personal to the creator. It will depend on the creator’s maturity level on how they will respond to the critique. For some, if you give them any positive (remember, positive means telling them that they can improve) critique, you have insulted them. Many writers may say they want constructive critique, when what they really want is validation. They want to know that they can do no wrong. Sadly, you will not be able to tell the difference between the two at first glance.

Good luck.

To learn ten ‘unwritten’ rules of Internet constructive critique, go here.

Ten "Unwritten" Internet Rules of Constructive Critique

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:44:35 GMT

In which we discuss a few rules that should help keep you out of trouble around the internet...

I’ve compared writing constructive criticism like touching the flesh of a cactus, most likely you’ll get pricked, things will swell out of proportion and it’s not really worth the bother. It doesn’t always stop people from doing it. In my experience running about the Internet, I’ve come across some unwritten rules of constructive criticism that ‘everybody’ should know without being told.

Rule 1: Don’t give constructive criticism.

Okay, this is really a counter intuitive rule. I put it out there because you never know how the writer is going to accept your critique. You may put together the most objective, polite and justified critique of an writer’s work without ever insulting the writer personally once and still get ambushed by her alleged credentials, her friends, her fan club, her friends disguised as anonymous and various other people who decide insulting you personally is the best way to the next few hours. It will most likely end up on fandom_wank and you’ll have to decide whether to slink about in shame or just not let it bother you.

Once you accept that drama is a likely end result of constructive criticism. We can move forward. Because, you might meet a writer that’s really willing to improve their craft and will gladly take your advice with open arms.

Rule 2: Say something positive first.

Even if you can’t find anything good to say about the story, make something up and flatter the writer first. This appeases the writer’s ego and gives them hope that they can do something right. If you don’t say something positive in the very first sentence, it will be one of the first things that the inevitable posse will scream at you about if the critique upsets them. So, compliment them first, give them something sweet before moving forward to the negative.

Rule 3: Always be polite.

It seems rather simplistic. It’s harder than it sounds because when you say something in person, the other person has your hand gestures, facial expressions and tone of voice to go off of to know whether or not your being sarcastic or serious. The Internet is the written word and only the written word. What you type and what someone else reads and puts a mental voice to might be completely different. You may mean to be serious, but they read it as condescending and sarcastic. Smiley faces will not help your cause either.

Thus, be polite. Use complete sentences, leave out the l33t speak, don’t use smiley faces and don’t say anything personal about the writer, not even to try and reference their age. And don’t insult their story, because calling the idea that they have put time and effort into stupid is just like calling them stupid.

Rule 4: Provide examples from within the writer’s work.

The best way for a writer to improve is to see what they are doing wrong. When you are critiquing their writing, whether it is their characterizations, their sentence structure or repeated phrasing, back up what you are saying with their own stories. If you want to show how you would rephrase or do something in the story, first provide what they did and then underneath, show how you would edit it. You are trying to persuade the writer that you have legitimate reasons for what you are saying.

Saying that something is wrong without providing an example for it is rude and won’t help the person you are critiquing at all. Also, comparing the writer to another writer, no matter who the other writer is, will not help the writer you are critiquing. Depending on the writer you are comparing them too, you might have just insulted them or over praised them. Keep the technique of compare and contrast within the writer’s own story or stories.

The writer has given you everything you need to be able to give them a good analysis of their story. There is no need to look at another writer’s stories in the fandom. For grammar and story telling techniques, handbooks and guides are perfectly acceptable sources for helping with critique, as long as you once again, provide examples from the writer’s own work.

Rule 5: Always make characterization and plot advice your opinion.

Characterization and plot are highly personal selections for a writer. It is always best to make sure that the writer knows that if you are critiquing their characterization or their plot that it is your opinion. Thus, the phrases ‘I think,’ and ‘In my opinion,’ are always handy to have lying around.

Unless, we are talking about canonically stated character motivations, then it doesn’t have to be stated as an opinion, but as a polite reminder of what the canon says and perhaps an expression of desire to be shown in later chapters why they have changed said motivations.

Rule 6: Be firm about spelling, grammar and formatting.

If you can’t read their story because of the spelling, grammar or the formatting, say so politely and clearly. Grammar and spelling rules don’t change and aren’t as personal as characterization and plot devices. If they take your criticism well, offer to read their work before they post it. If they want to be taken seriously by anyone in the fandom, they will leap upon the chance.

Rule 7: Never tell any writer what they ‘should’ be doing.

In the end, look, it’s their story and they have the right to write it the way they want. For example, to tell a writer they should put up a warning because of out of character issues (that should be stated as your opinion) is rude. Another good example is telling them they should do this next or they should be writing an original story rather than a fandom story. The last example is complimentary, because it does say you think they have writing skill. It’s also insulting, because you aren’t respecting what the writer wants to write.

Overall, telling a writer what to do when they work for fun, free and reviews on their own time is rather entitled and makes you sound like a spoiled brat. It will ruin everything else you’re trying to say in your critique. Don’t tell them what they should be doing. Don’t ask them ‘when such and such’ is going to happen (especially if the writer hasn’t hinted towards that action) or say things like “I want to see this” if the writer hasn’t asked for ideas.

Remember Rule 3!

Rule 8: Leave out the ‘too much information.’

Writers don’t want to hear about how you got sexually off to their stories (or you picking your nose or anything else people don’t talk or do in public). If they are writing NC-17 sex scenes, and it makes you hot. They still don’t want to know about. Think about it this way, you’re telling a complete stranger about your sex life, the contents of your nose or belly button and about the lint between your toes. Complete strangers and usually your close friends and relatives, don’t want to know. It’s gross. Just leave it out. They’ll thank you for not having to use brain bleach. Really.

Rule 9: End on a positive note.

As you started out with something positive, end with something positive. Give them some encouragement. It will once again, sweeten everything you’ve said and give them hope that they can improve, because you do want them to improve.

Rule 10: Give them a way to get back to you.

This is a double-edged sword. They might get back to you to thank you or they might get back to you to blast you to the outer edges of the Solar System with how bad and mean and terrible a person you are. Look, the thin skinned writers will be upset you dared to leave them anything saying their story isn’t beautiful and perfect. The thicker-skinned writers will be upset if you don’t leave them a way to get back to you because they want to discuss what you said. Until you leave the feedback, you won’t know which type of writer they are. If they (and their posse) blast you, you know whom to avoid later on. If they thank you and open up for more discussion. Well, you’ve just made a friend and entered the realm called ‘community.’

All right.

Even after you follow all these rules, they still might blow up at you or if you’re lucky they’ll write you off and not care. Constructive critique is always going to upset a writer in one way or another. It might be because they have a different opinion than you, maybe they know more about the story than you do (maybe they don’t) because they’re the writer and they know what’s coming next. Or maybe, you missed a detail or two and they don’t agree because that detail is important and you need to reread the story in light of that. You never know until you do it.

Constructive critique. It’s dangerous work. Are you ready?

Dialogue: the Telling and Showing of...

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 17:07:13 GMT

In which we discuss showing and telling and how it relates to dialogue.

Pro tip: You must master dialogue. The end. (John Long, Writer's Little Book of Wisdom)

Another important part of the show and tell process is dialogue, the vocal speech between characters or even monologue, the vocal speech the character has with themselves. You notice in many if not most of my examples, somewhere there is dialogue. I have worked hard on improving or creating good dialogue that is interesting. When I was reading my ‘help’ books, this was the second most important rule of advice that stuck out in my head. The first was “There are three absolute rules of dramatic order, but unfortunately no one knows what they are.” The first was obviously for sheer humor purposes, but the second, mastering dialogue drove me to try and improve my craft. There is nothing, in my opinion that can ruin a story faster after endless telling as an unbelievable, campy, stilted section of dialogue.

Dialogue is one of those beautiful things that can be used for both showing and telling. It is one of those tools of balance. Telling dialogue is usually questions, explanations, statements of fact, emotion or motivations. Telling something in dialogue is called exposition. A classic (and possibly famous) bit of exposition is in The Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl where Jack explains to Will about the Black Pearl and Barbossa while in a prison cell. It is a beautifully scripted bit of telling that not only entertains but also explains something the watchers need to know, without the watchers caring they have just been told. Of course, the telling was more for Will’s benefit than the watchers. The watchers have been shown through action previously about the curse and Barbossa.

Showing dialogue is usually conversational dialogue that is consistent with your characters’ personalities and how those personalities would interact with each other. Good showing dialogue requires an understanding of your characters (more later) and how they think, react and talk.

Story dialogue should be based upon real life dialogue. Not from, say television dialogue, which is already a story. There is also the problem that many (not all but many) television shows use the question, answer, question, answer format for their dialogue. In real life, most of the time you do not talk in this way. Pay attention to your real life conversations and to your writing. If you are falling into a question, answer, question, answer exchanges between your characters, please step back and evaluate if those could be put in any other format. The problem with question, answer dialogue exchanges is that while they are engaging the other person and forcing them to participate, is that this is primarily telling type dialogue. It becomes all exposition.

In real dialogue, people are more apt to answer questions with questions or with a facial expression. In many cases questions are rhetorical or there are no questions at all. There are also interruptions, by other people, by bodily noises, and in the environment. Often, there can be long silences before people start talking again.

Another good source for studying dialogue is to analyze your favorite author’s and how they write dialogue or to pick up a play and read that. A play in written format is nothing but dialogue interspersed by stage commands.

Here is an example scene with lots of dialogue from Chapter Nine of Desert Rose. Showing dialogue will be in blue and telling dialogue will be in green.

Gippal surveyed the group of guys gathered around a fire in front of his work tent. They were all young, relatively handsome, if he was allowed to be a judge of his own sex. Most had tanned skin and some form of the high cheekbones that were the trademark of the Thunderbird tribe. A few had scars, but he was the only one missing an eye. They were drinking, lounging about, exchanging bawdy jokes and half drunken insults. If they had a girl, they’d be there making her feel special right about now. No matter how many male friends they had or what type of drink was offered. Gippal smirked into his cup. Yeah, this group was perfect.

He stood.

They all looked at him, quieting. It was the unspoken accord he was the leader or at least, the host. His lips twitched. “I have a plan.”

One laughed. “I knew this get together had a reason.”

“Gippal knows what’s best for his boys.”

Gippal raised his mug towards them. “It’s dangerous, an all around high risk venture. I wouldn’t trust it to anyone but you all, for it must be carried out in complete secrecy.”

“Sounds interesting. What’s in it for us?”

Gippal bowed his head. “I’m glad you asked. What does every boy want from time to time?”

“Food.”

“A good fuck.”

“A fight.”

Gippal rolled his eyes. “A girl.”

The boys broke out into loud guffaws. “A girl’s raid Gippal. That’s tame.”

Gippal rocked on his heels. “Ah, but that’s because you don’t have my genius.” There was more laughter. “I promise that this will be no tame raid.”

“Oh?” The laughter continued over his ‘delusions’ at making a girl’s raid ‘dangerous.’

“The Elder’s village.” That got their attention.

“You’re mad.” It was said in a whisper.

He smirked. “Up to and inclusive of taking the Tyibreha, whom I will capture myself so you won’t have to risk your marques and skins.”

“She’s the only one of rank that’d you’d have anyways!”

“Absolutely crazy.”

“If we do it right. The consequences will be minimal, if any.” Gippal raised a finger off his mug. “If we do it right.”

“All right, smartass, explain that.”

“Girl raids are traditional you dolt,” another swiped at the previous speaker’s shoulder. “If we follow the traditions to the letter, the Chieftains won’t be able to do anything to us since it’s just a boyish prank.”

“The girls though-“ One said darkly.

“Girls will be girls. There’s no pleasing them, give the girls around here a little competition and maybe they’ll come to their senses.”

They all chuckled.

“We leave late, slip through the patrols. We all know how loose they are, attack the camp, get the girls and hightail it back here before the sun rises.” Gippal narrowed his eye. “In a day or two we return them in broad daylight unharmed and unmolested.”

“Aww, that’s half the fun.” One mockingly whined and was immediately set upon by his fellows with words and a few lighthearted smacks and punches.

“You have the morals of a chocobo.”

“Dolt!”

“The fleas of one too.”

“Do not.”

“If the girls give permission,” Gippal said over the noise and they quieted, “to molest them. It’s another matter. Otherwise, keep your hands and other parts to yourself. You know the laws.”

They all nodded, a few looking particularly sober and those who had overactive imaginations shuddering.

“Well, I’m in,” said one.

“You only die once.”

“Here’s to an early grave.”

“Life’s been too dull.”

“I need to hear something between my ears than my thoughts.”

“Since they’re so boring. Sign me up.”

”Who wants to hear you think, much less speak.” There was more laughter.

One by one, Gippal’s friends all agreed. He sat back down and nodded. “All right, let’s plan this so we don’t get caught.” They gathered around closer and began to plan in earnest.

There is a lot of telling dialogue in this example, because Gippal is making a long explanatory speech with his friends reacting.

If you have trouble with dialogue, try your hand at writing purely dialogue stories between two or more characters without any attribution or direction. Remember, the dialogue should be individual enough that you know whom the characters are that are speaking without attribution. This is much more difficult than it sounds and I am still not sure I always get it right.

Tense & Voice: When is the story taking place and who is doing what....

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 16:46:42 GMT

In which we discuss, past and present tense and active and passive voice...

Tense, what is a tense? A tense deals with your verbs. Bedford describes tenses as “tenses indicate the time of an action in relation to the time of the speaking or writing about that action.” Webster’s New English Dictionary defines a tense as “any of the forms of a verb that show the time of its action or existence.” Both of these are rather confusing and what they boil down to is when did the action take place. Did it take place in the past, in the present or will it take place in the future? These are your simple tenses. Any other tenses are used under special situations in combination with the simple tenses and not for the entire length of a story.

As an author you must decide what tense to use, simple past or simple present. I address this because I have run across fiction that uses only the present tense. This seems to be solely a fandom phenomenon, because as of yet I haven’t run across a book written in the present tense. I strongly recommend using the past tense with uses of present tense where appropriate. I find present tense is very awkward to read over long periods of time. I have written a drabble on occasion in the present tense. A drabble is a story between 100 to 300 words (depending on who you talk to). Over this short period, present isn’t as difficult to read. However, when reading present tense works that are chapters in length, I automatically translate the present tense to past tense. Past tense also contributes to a more active voice, more later.

Present tense is used to describe habitual actions, actions occurring at the time of speaking and to state facts, general truths or to express future actions that are to occur at some specified time.

Past tense is used for actions completed entirely in the past.

Given the definition, it would seem to make more sense to write your fiction in the present tense. Especially if you wish the reader to believe that these actions are taking place right in this moment. However, if you take the idea that you are telling this story to an audience, this story happened already, in the past. Thus, past tense would be the appropriate tense to use. The story is not happening right this minute. It has already happened and you are just relaying it to the reader. Present tense would be used mostly for dialogue or general facts such as: Yuna is the High Summoner versus Yuna was the High Summoner (as hopefully, Yuna isn’t dead. If she happens to be dead in your story, then yes, Yuna was the High Summoner.)

In the original paragraph of After That, as shown in the POV post, Rikku is thinking in the present tense, but she’s thinking about past things. So, she switches to the past tense.

Here are two paragraphs of A Secret Not for Long, which was written in the past tense:

She ran towards him. She’d been so worried ever since he’d disappeared after Baralai at Bevelle and of course, she couldn’t say she’d been worried. And the only thing keeping her from going after him had been the transmission and the fact Yuna had seen him down here. And he was alive and okay and-

She straddled his hips and kissed him hard, the beating of her heart drowning out the strange sounds of the Farplane, the feel of his lips and hands gripping her waist pulling her closer made her warm. He was alive.

Here are the same two paragraphs in present tense:

She runs towards him. She’s been so worried ever since he had disappeared after Baralai at Bevelle and of course, she can’t say she’s been worried. And the only thing keeping her from going after him has been the transmission and the fact Yuna had seen him down here. And he is alive and okay and-

She straddles his hips and kisses him hard, the beating of her heart drowning out the strange sounds of the Farplane, the feel of his lips and hands gripping her waist pulling her closer makes her warm. He is alive.

The second is very awkward sounding and doesn’t convey as active of a voice as the first example.

In an active voice, the subject does the action of the verb to the subject/object of the sentence. Rikku stomped on Gippal’s foot. Where as, a passive voice has the subjects receive the action or uses the verb to be, which conveys no action. Gippal’s foot was stomped on by Rikku. Both voices are grammatically correct. The active voice is simpler and more direct because most of the time you want to emphasize who is doing the action, rather than who is receiving the action.

In most cases, when a beginning author uses the passive tense in the form to be, they are telling a character’s emotion or what the character is wearing. As in, Rikku was happy (that she’d stomped on Gippal’s foot). Rather than showing Rikku was happy (that she’d stomped on Gippal’s foot) by saying that Rikku smirked or smiled or grinned and then said “Serves you right.” If Rikku thought she was happy, that would be an appropriate use of the passive tense. Rikku was happy she’d stomped on Gippal’s foot, but she didn’t let him see that by expressing it on her face.

Anyways, a past tense conveys action better. The best example I can think of is she did it versus she does it. She did it conveys the thoughts of a toddler learning how to stand or how to go potty. It’s an event. An action. You does it does not convey the excitement as much as you did it! Yay! It also conveys the stupidity and gah gah ness of adults who clap and cheer over the toddler learning an everyday event, but important life skill.

Point of View: The narrator and the narrator's distance from the story

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 16:23:12 GMT

In which we discuss the first and third person point of view.

There are three different types of points of view (from now on called POV for short) and two of them are mainly used in fiction writing, first and third POV. A POV is who is narrating the story and depend upon pronouns. The point of view must be decided before we write the first sentence of the story.

In the first person POV, there is one character telling what is going on and we, the reader, know only what that particular character knows. First person is the voice of the urban fantasy/horror genre. Laurell K. Hamiltion, Kim Harrison, Kelley Armstrong and Jim Butcher all use first POV. First POV uses the pronouns I, we or us often when writing. First person puts the attention on the narrator and not on the subject that the narrator is relaying. It is based entirely on the personal experience. Thus, it’s rather limited, and it is the POV used most often by beginning writers. On the positive side, there is the immediacy of thoughts and feelings given to the reader. We, the reader, are right there with the character feeling only what they are feeling and seeing only what they are seeing. Their thoughts and actions dominate the story, because it is 'their story.'

In the third person POV, the narrator is an objective bystander telling what is going on and we, the reader know what every character knows if not more. Third person is the voice of literature, fantasy and science fiction. JK Rowling, Isaac Asimov, C.S. Lewis, Brian Jacques, Anne Bishop, Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffery and Timothy Zahn all use third POV. Third POV uses he, she, it and they often when writing. Third person puts the attention on the subject that the narrator is relaying and not the narrator themselves. Third person allows the option of jumping from narrator to narrator or character to character in the story. It is the POV used by most professionals. Third person’s downside is a loss of that immediacy given in first POV, thoughts and emotions are not as easily translated. In third POV, most authors forget to put thoughts of the characters in at all. In third person, you, the reader, are seeing everything and know all the facts. It is everybody's story, not just the one characters and the plot is the focus, not the characters themselves. Unless, the focus of the story is another character whose point of view is never used at all. Third person provides the distance for the reader to know that what is going on isn't happening directly to them. Third person also can deluge the reader in information. That is why many authors will limit the number of people narrating in their story. They use specific characters/narrators at specific times to relay important events of the overall story. This is called, dum, dum, dum, limited omniscient third person.

Most of my stories I write in third person because I prefer the ability to change characters thoughts and feelings without having to stop, break what I’m doing, tell who is now speaking and start again. I have written some stories in the first person. For instance, After That. It was important to me that we only know what Rikku was thinking and feeling. I wanted it to be clear that it was her voice speaking and no one else.

Here is a paragraph in the original first person:

I think the worst part was I could feel the connection between us, or I thought I could feel the connection. I could be deluded for all I know. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve thought I’ve gone off the deep end. It was a wire stretched between us, taut and humming whenever something happened. I could feel it thrumming through my body and I just knew things. I wasn’t even sure when it all started. Did it start when I went looking or had it started before then, before I joined up with Yuna as a Guardian? There’d been many times I was afraid and upset for no reason. I thought it was because of Yuna, yet as we discovered more about what happened to the guys I began to wonder if it had been triggered by her at all. And if I had been feeling this connection with Gippal even before I had my talk with Tidus.

Here is the same paragraph as it would be in third person:

She thought the worst part was she could feel the connection between them, or she thought she could feel the connection. She could be deluded for all she knew. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d thought she’d gone off the deep end. It was a wire stretched between them, taut and humming whenever something happened. She could feel it thrumming through her body and she just knew things. She wasn’t even sure when it all started. Did it start when she went looking or had it started before then, before she joined up with Yuna as a Guardian? There’d been many times she was afraid and upset for no reason. She thought it was because of Yuna, yet as they had discovered more about what happened to the guys she began to wonder if it had been triggered by her at all. And if she had been feeling this connection with Gippal even before she had her talk with Tidus.

In third person, I could have switched to the thoughts and feelings (as of yet the unknown presence) of Gippal. His thoughts weren’t integral to the story. So, first person worked for this particular scenario.

Good stories can be told in both perspectives. It depends on what you, the author wants to convey through the story and what the story is about. How many people’s opinions are you trying to get across? Is the story plot driven or character driven or a mix of both? First person provides immediate access to the narrator’s thoughts and feelings, but if you want to tell another person’s thoughts and feelings you have to change to that character which would involve a chapter break and you wouldn’t have the access to the previous character. Third person negates these problems.

Don’t worry if you start your story in one POV and it is not working. Switch to the other POV and try again.

Plotting to take over the world, justification for being evil.

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:36:31 GMT

In which we discuss story, plot and the elements thereof.

I’m assuming that you are going to write of have written a piece of fiction, which is also known as a story. What is a story? What are its elements?

Everyone tells stories. They don’t even realize they are doing it. They tell a joke or relay an event in their life. They’ve just told a story. Stories have a few things in common. They have characters, a setting and a sequence of actions, also known as a plot. In fandom writing our characters and our setting are already created for us. We are providing a new story, a new plot. So, what is a story exactly and a plot and is there a difference?

According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, a story is the telling of event or events; account; narration; or the plot of a novel, play, etc. The synonyms for story are tale, narrative, chronicle, and anecdote. Where as, a plot is a secret, usually evil, scheme or the plan of action of a novel, play, etc. The synonyms for plot are plan, scheme, design and stratagem. So, in conclusion, your plan drives your telling of your narrative or your plot drives your story. The story is the details. The plot is the important events. (I enjoy plotting for the sake of being evil and scheming with the accompanying cackling. Voltaire’s “When You’re Evil” is a grand theme song for when you’re plotting.)

There are many different ways of telling a story. You hand different authors the same set of research and specific conditions and every author will give you back a different type of story. There are point of view differences, action differences, and even the way the story is told with different scenes where will be different. One author might prefer a long build up showing different reactions to an important event before telling the event itself where as another author will just skip straight to the event or show the event in a totally different manner. It’s author preference and their/your artistic style and voice.

Most stories fall into a certain pattern. They have parts. There are two systems for naming the parts of a story. There is the one you learn in school where the story has five parts, represented in a mountain on a plain diagram. They are introduction, rising action, conflict, falling action and denouement. Denouement is a fancy way of saying conclusion or resolution. The other system has three parts, which is conflict, crisis, and resolution. How long these parts last are up to the author. These parts outline the basic skeleton of the story and are… dum dum dum, your plot.

The first system is tidier than the second. The introduction is just that. The author introduces the world and characters. Then there is a point of crisis, which leads to the rising action. The rising action is just that, the actions taken to get to the conflict. For instance, in Final Fantasy X we are introduced to Tidus before he goes to a blitzball game and then at the blitzball game. Then there is a crisis, the city is attacked and Auron sends him through Sin into the ‘real world.’ In the rising action, we see him meet all the other characters, and join the pilgrimage. Then there is the conflict. The conflict is the turning point of the story. In FFX, they make it to Zanarkand, discover the fraud that has been going on, refuse to participate in it and then confront the fraud at Bevelle. This leads to the falling action, what the characters do or don’t do to resolve the conflict. The falling action in FFX is then they fight Sin and Yevon, after which Yuna sends them and Tidus disappears as well. Then lastly there is the resolution, the ending of the story where the reader knows that most of the story’s important threads have been completed. The resolution of the FFX is Yuna giving a speech and well if you haven’t watched the credits all the way through. I’m not going to tell you what happens. Go watch the credits to the very end and find out for yourself. (Check videogamesheaven.net. They have FFX as a ‘movie.’)

Conflict, crisis and resolution can cover more periods of time than the previous example. Crisis, Tidus is thrown into Spira. Conflict, Yevon is a fraud. Resolution, we kill Yevon. John Long presents this in a way during the character section of his book, the Writer’s Little Book of Wisdom. “A character faces a crisis. He must change, or die. Desperate, he takes action. Fill in the blanks.” Not only is this a good summary of the parts of a story. It is a good summary of a typical plot.

Now that you know what they are, you can freely toss these patterns out the window or bend them to suit your needs. In a good story, you won’t notice there is a pattern in it. You don’t have to plan your story to fit these patterns.

Your story, remember, is to convey your plan of action, your plot. Your plot doesn’t have to be decided completely out before writing. In many ways, I, personally, find this detrimental. If I know how the plot ends. I don’t have the motivation to write it out. This is because my audience is myself. I am writing to entertain me and once I’ve entertained me. I lose interest. Obviously, this means that a lot of the ideas I get into my head never make it to screen. Since many of those ideas aren’t the greatest. I’m actually thankful for this practice. I can have all the wild fantasies I want in my head (and if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, we’re both pervs) and I won’t push them on the rest of fandom. Another reason you don’t need to plan everything out before you start is because while you are writing you may get a new idea that sends you into an entirely new direction or adds a new sequence to the plot. Inspiration doesn’t stop coming because you’ve written a line of text.

Thus, it’s helpful to write your ideas down somewhere. In a notebook or typed into a document, so that when you are writing and forget where you were going or that you had the idea in the first place. You have something to look back on and go “Oh, right.” Some author’s find it helpful to create an outline of what they’re going to do. Whatever and however it works for you. Nothing is set in stone, a story is always fluid, until it is actually published.

Explanations and flat out statements; The Show and Tell Teeter-Totter

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:51:09 GMT

In which we explain showing versus telling and how to tell the difference.

At some point in a writer’s life, they have “show, don’t tell, show don’t tell,” hammered into their heads until they get so frustrated they never want to hear that phrase. They may not even know what it means. Sometimes, I’m not sure if teachers who give this piece of advice know what it means, even if they have good reason to say so. They say “show, don’t tell” to young writers because young writers have the tendency to ‘tell’ everything; the weather, character traits, appearance, clothes and so on and so forth. Since young authors tend to tell everything, teachers try to get them to show things instead.

So, what are showing and telling? and what is the difference?

In a previous post I said that “showing is using details to invoke an emotion or trait while telling is stating the emotion, trait or thought to the audience.” The difference is the purpose of what you are doing and how you are trying to connect to your reader.

Showing uses actions, expressions and dialogue to convey an emotion or trait. When you show something to someone, you go over all the details and demonstrate them. Think of showing as an active demonstration of how to run a toaster or the selling points of a car. Showing connects the reader physically to the character. Showing is running fingers through your hair, rubbing a forehead or the pinching of someone’s eyes. Showing is the way a person stands or how they move or how they speak. Showing is used in actions to move the story along.

Showing:

Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. She swallowed and tried to pull the tip of her tongue from behind her front teeth. “Sorry.” Her skin heated and she ducked her head, an involuntary action almost as her hair swung forward.

Telling uses thoughts, internal dialogue and statements of emotions and physical appearance. When you tell something it is the dialogue that goes with the details. You’re stating aloud for them what is so great about the product. Telling connects the reader mentally to the character. Telling is saying that the sky is blue, Auron is a man of few words, and Kimarhi speaks without pronouns.

Telling:

Inwardly she cursed her seeming inability to watch where she was going or even walk in a straight line. The fleeting glimpse she had of the boy she’d run into was a broad chest, full lips and razor sharp cheekbones. Handsome was too mild of a word.

Showing and telling are dependent on each other. You cannot have one without the other (or at least you shouldn’t have one without the other.) Showing provides details and telling provides the reasoning behind those details. There are some things you cannot show. Let’s put our examples together.

Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. Inwardly she cursed her seeming inability to watch where she was going or even walk in a straight line. She swallowed and tried to pull the tip of her tongue from behind her front teeth. “Sorry.” Her skin heated and she ducked her head, an involuntary action almost as her hair swung forward. The fleeting glimpse she had of the boy she’d run into was a broad chest, full lips and razor sharp cheekbones. Handsome was too mild of a word.

A good way to learn how to balance showing and telling is to filter the scene through the sense(s) of your character(s). Most often when an author is primarily telling in a story, it’s because they haven’t brought a character into play and are trying to remain an objective observer to the situation that rarely intrudes upon the character’s senses at all.

Here is an example:

The hot sun beat down on their heads and baked the sand underneath their feet. What little moisture there was in the desert evaporated in small clear waves upwards from the sand. It made their eyes ache and added to the experience of entering an Al Bhed village for the first time.

Noise assaulted their ears. Under nothing more than what amounted to primitive sunshades, men and women leaned over metal, their shouts and arguments competing with the banging as others beat it into shape with hammers or sorted it into piles. They reared back as under one tent an explosion blossomed and smoke poured out. The young woman began to rant and rave in what they assumed were curses and imprecations. Children ran by, dogs on their heels yapping and barking. Chocobos trilled from their pens near to the water and what little eye relaxing greenery the desert afforded. A man wove a tapestry, the rhythmic clacking of his loom soothing. Somewhere, food was cooking, the smell of meat, spices and tubers wafted on the air.

These paragraphs have to them no action, no thoughts and in reality, no purpose other than description. There is nothing here to engage the reader. These two paragraphs could be broken down into a sentence. The Al Bhed village was noisy and hot. The sentences are tedious to read as the author (me) barrages the reader (you) with more and more information. However, if I just used only the actions to convey the scene, it would be just as tedious and boring.

On the other hand if we use a character to ‘screen’ the information, both showing and telling. It looks something like this:

The sun beat down on the back of Paine’s head, despite the parasol that High Summoner Lord Braska had insisted she carry to protect her pale skin. Paine felt that the thin material was frail protection in a desert. She carried it please him however, so didn’t put it down. She closed her eyes yet again to try and relieve the ache in the back of them and to create some moisture in this infernal place. How could people live here and why would they want to? She opened her eyes again and prayed to Yevon that the group of tents wavering in little waves were not figments of her imagination. Then she heard the beginnings of noise, the clash of steel on steel and the barking of dogs. She inhaled in relief and caught the scent of water, heavy and sweet, mixed with unknown spices.

Her hands clenched around the wooden handle of her parasol. Her heart pounded in her chest. She kept her face calm. She was an observer and this was history in the making. They were finally going to meet the leader of these strange people. She sat up straighter as they came closer, trusting her chocobo to follow the chocobo in front of her. The noise became louder until she wanted to cover her ears with her hands.

She looked to her left. Under a glorified sunshade a mohawked blonde man in goggles argued with another blonde in a facemask with raised hands and raised voices. A darker skinned blonde beat on a piece of metal almost as if he was so used to the arguing he was just trying to drown them out. A blonde woman stood nearby, her arms crossed. Paine frowned. Did everyone among the Al Bhed have some shade of golden blonde hair? The woman’s head snapped upwards as she noticed them passing. Their eyes met for a fraction of the second, the woman’s a bright green. The other two stopped arguing, their heads turning to look frozen in mid-motion. Paine realized she was craning her neck to see more and looked away, fighting a blush.

Here we see what Paine sees and know what Paine knows. Here we have used the character to show the setting instead of just telling the setting and we know how the character reacts to the setting. She’s excited. It’s a foreign world to her, one she isn’t used to. We have used gestures, facial expressions and mannerisms to try and convey emotion. It takes longer. Here, I have used twice the words to convey perhaps half the information in the previous example. I didn’t even get to Rikku ranting and raving over her exploding experiment. However, it engages the reader into what is happening around Paine and what is happening to Paine. She’s excited but trying to remain stoic, then she’s embarrassed to be caught staring. I could go back and add even more internal dialogue to ‘tell’ this more.

In conclusion, you show the actions, the settings and tell the thoughts. Emotions can be told and/or shown. Find your balance. A good rule of thumb is “When you want to say something [to the reader], show it instead.” (John Long, Little Book of Wisdom.)

Three sage pieces of advice that everything else falls under and one corollary.

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 18:14:51 GMT

In which, we discuss the three general pieces of advice that I give to everybody and the fourth piece of advice that often gets forgotten.

Giving out writing advice is tricky business. You have to balance the feelings of the writer against the quality of their work. It’s like trying to figure out where to put your finger on the flesh of a cactus and not get pricked by the thorns. You often fail. It hurts and if you give advice to the wrong person, things swell out of proportion and in the end it wasn’t worth the trouble. So, I’ve personally come up with three pieces of advice that I give to about everybody in self-defense. They are write, read and show, don’t tell. The fourth piece of advice is given out to only those who particularly need it. It’s called presentation. Every other bit of writing advice is details that fall under these four headers or at least they will in this journal.

Sage Advice Number One: Write.

Write everyday. Keep writing even when you feel it is hopeless, when you aren’t getting any feedback or ‘bad’ feedback. Write when you don’t feel like writing. Write when you do feel like writing. To get better or to maintain your proficiency you need to practice what you want to do. Yes, practice, it’s one of those dreaded words that begin with the letter p.

It seems simple in the context, doesn’t it? But, we all know that it’s not. When you are writing for fun, you don’t want to write when you’re feeling down or tired. Emotions can play a big factor in motivation. As does the amount and type of feedback you get. It’s great when the feedback you receive is all how much people love your work and they want more of it, but then there will be times when you get people who insult you (or your work and you may feel like they are insulting you) or give you the type of advice you just don’t want to hear or even say things that push the wrong buttons that they didn’t mean to push. Or even at times you want feedback that is more substantial than the write mores, I love you type. Then it becomes tough to write, because you’re doing it for fun. This isn’t your life’s work. You don’t have to be doing this.

Please, don’t get discouraged and keep writing.

You don’t always have to be writing for fandom. You can write in a journal or write letters or even write advice like this! Just, keep writing. Every bit of practice helps you become better. And when you write, challenge yourself to become better by working on something you feel needs improvement, whether that’s writing dialogue or using commas.

Sage Advice Number Two: Read.

Reading can be an overlooked part of the writing process. You can learn about writing and how to write (and sometimes how not to write) through reading. For example, I will freely admit that I don’t know grammar very well. I haven’t a conscious understanding of it. Yes, I learned grammar in high school and some in college. I can diagram a sentence and tell you the basic parts and types of sentences, but please don’t ask me about the rules of punctuation for instance. This is why, I will be trying to avoid discussing grammar and if I do discuss grammar it will be with my handy Bedford Handbook in my lap. However, I do write in a basic grammatical fashion. I subconsciously know the rules. I can look at something I have written and usually figure out why it’s right or wrong. I came by this knowledge through reading more than through actual grammar classes. You can learn all sorts of things while reading, how to construct a plot, foreshadowing, style, what resonates with you and what doesn’t and so on.

Reading also provides research for the writer. You don’t have to read encyclopedias or other reference type books to research what you want to write. Though say, reading “The Heroes Journey” will definitely help you understand archetypal characters and classic story construction. Reading fiction can also help you research cultural customs or give you bits of information that could be useful in your own story. Reading can also provide you with phrases that are in common usage or show you phrases you might want to avoid while writing. Reading connects you to humanity by portraying common struggles, conflicts and emotions. Input is important, it gives you ideas and feeds your creativity. Input can be more than just reading, it’s television, movies and the radio. You have to remember though, that those began as something that was written down.

Read whatever you can in whatever interests you. By reading you will eventually begin to see what is good writing and what is mediocre or even bad writing that has been published. Read different mediums as well. Read comics, fiction books of all types and genres, newspapers, reference books, role-playing manuals, and other fan author’s fiction. Read whatever and whenever you can. And remember, while stealing from one author is plagiarism, stealing from many is research!

Sage Advice Number Three: Show, don’t tell.

‘Show, don’t tell’ is the piece of advice that is given to beginning authors (and probably should be given to some not so beginning authors) the most often. In reality, this piece of advice should be reworded to say, find a balance between showing and telling. Remember when I said that writing is like balancing a knife on the tip of your finger? Well, this is part of what I meant and finding the balance between showing and telling can be difficult.

This piece of advice is also frustrating because no one is willing to sit down and explain what it means. They tell you “show, don’t tell” and expect you to know the answer, when it often doesn’t work that way. It’s the proverbial fist and brick wall situation, something eventually will give and it’s not going to be the brick wall, unless you’re trained in martial arts.

I want to go over the difference between showing and telling in detail in another post. To put it simply, showing is using details to invoke an emotion or trait while telling is stating the emotion, trait or thought to the audience. It’s the difference between saying “She jiggled her leg up and down, eyes darting around the room” and “She was nervous.” Yet, there has to be some telling in your work. Show too much, and it becomes boring. Conversely, tell too much and it becomes boring. There are things that need to be shown, then there are things that need to be told and then there are times where it is good to both show and tell the thing. It’s a teeter-totter. Show is on one side and Tell is on the other. You have to figure out how to make it balance by shifting the teeter-totter back and forth.
You will eventually find the balance that works for you and works for your readers.

Sage Piece of Advice Number Four or Corollary: Presentation

How you present your story to your readers is almost if not more important than the story itself. Proper grammar and paragraphing come under writing. What I’m talking about are things like your summary, your title and all the other types of information that you give the reader before they even get to your story. The header can depend on where you’re posting and what they allow you to put into your header or what you decide is important and what isn’t. What goes into your headers will largely depend on you and the audience you are catering for. There are disagreements about what should go into headers and what shouldn’t.

Your header is the bio for your story. You want your bio to accurately portray what is in your story. This is the first thing the person will see when they are searching for something to read and there is truth in old saws like “you never get a second chance to make a first impression.” And if you want readers to actually stay and read, that impression needs to be a good one.

The other thing about presentation is to think of posting your story or chapter of your story is to thinking about it as ‘published.’ Once you place something out on the Internet for your readers whether it’s at Livejournal or fanfiction.net it’s there, it’s published. It’s something final. The work may be ‘in progress,’ but what you have posted so far isn’t anymore.

The way you present your work, will tell a lot about you as an author and as a fan and about how seriously you want to be taken.

So, remember, write, read, the show and tell teeter-totter, and presentation!

The Strange Allure of the Written Word, Fan Fiction and Feedback Addiction; An Introduction

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 23:00:00 GMT

In which we answer the questions of "What is writing?" and "Why do we do it?"

I like to compare writing to balancing a knife on the tip of your finger. It’s hard work, takes practice and concentration and one wrong move, the knife will fall, you’ll get cut and the results won’t be pretty. Yet, I still enjoy doing it for myself and for others just for the wonder of it. Call me crazy if you will, I’ll agree with you.

There are a lot of things that writing could be considered; putting your ideas down, thinking on paper, using words to convey thoughts and emotions to tell a story. Most of the time we don’t think about the mechanics of writing. We simply write. This is also part of what writing is, knowing about when it is appropriate to do what where even if we don’t know why we know what we know. All of these are valid explanations to what writing is.

I consider writing an art form. There are many others who would disagree, primarily art university directors who think writing belongs in the liberal arts section and doesn’t deserve a college of it’s own. Unlike English professors who will shout from the rooftops that it takes skill, practice and training to be able to put your thoughts down on paper so that other people can understand them. You need to craft your words using a measure of knowing what already works, also known as ‘the rules’ and inborn talent. Then, the only way you can improve your art is through practice and discipline. It can be easy at times and agonizing during others. It requires creativity to come up with characters, settings and plots time after time, year after year.

When an author writes something compelling that resonates with you, those lines stick in your memory. It could be a technique, such as telling a story within a story or a simple piece of dialogue or a sentence of description. It could be from a published printed book or it could be from a published electronically story. It’s art and art takes creativity.

It doesn’t matter if you are writing an original work or writing using someone else’s world. It still takes creativity, which is the work of the mind and not of the muscles. That’s right. Let me repeat that. Even when we are writing using someone else’s material, it still takes creativity. It is work. The phenomenon known as fan fiction requires creative juices in the brain. At least, when writing fan fiction, the characters and settings are already given to you. It makes one part of writing easier, while the other parts of writing harder. For instance, we don’t have to create an appearance or personality of a character from scratch. We do have to try to maintain a consistency of character from the canon and knowledge of the setting and the setting’s rules.

So, if writing in another person’s world requires creativity, why do we bother? Wouldn’t it be more fulfilling to create a world and characters of our own and write them instead? Well, those are very personal questions and I don’t know your answers to them, but I do know mine.

For me, I enjoy the written word. It doesn’t matter if I am reading it or if I am writing. I am attracted to it. Bookstores are a personal weakness, as are libraries. I like learning things and visiting exotic places through the eyes of a person whose personality I enjoy. A book is much cheaper than going myself (of course, some of these places only exist in imagination as well.) I also enjoy a well told story and have a desire to know how a book ends even if I don’t enjoy it. Books have gotten me through a lot of rough times in my life and I often find good advice or interesting facts in them.

The other problem is, and it really does depend on whether or not you view it as a problem, is that once I discovered writing and how much I loved it. I cannot stop. There is an urge to write, that even writing stories in my head seems to fulfill. Give me a room with a computer, shove meals at me under the door, and try not to disturb me while I’m doing it, even if I’m pacing and muttering to myself. It could be considered a social disease, which like any other social disease must be managed while I’m in the throes of creation. If you haven’t read “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls” by Robert Heinlein, I strongly recommend it. He devotes the entire end of a chapter to this very idea. I am debating on whether or not I should adopt it as a manifesto.

As to why I write fan fiction, because I like to. And yes, I have heard the whole ‘you should write original fiction, you’re so talented’ argument before. For friends of fandom writers, this doesn’t make us want to stop writing our fandom related stuff any less. It is more likely to drive us to write more fandom related fiction because we are perverse like that. You aren’t helping matters any. Please stop.

On the one hand, I write for myself. I am my audience. If I don’t enjoy it, then there is no point to it. I come up with an idea that I want to see done and know well enough by now that if I do want to see it the way I want it, I best do it myself. There is a certain pride when you finish writing something as well. And right now, what I want to write, what I enjoy and well, let’s admit am a little obsessed about is fandom related writing. In specific, it’s Rikku/Gippal of the Final Fantasy X-2 fandom. (I have other favored pairings, but none that I’m as prolific in as this one.) If, I’m not writing for myself primarily, I need to examine why I am writing, especially for fandom. There’s no monetary reward. It’s an act of love. I love this setting. I love these characters. I love their dynamic and I have stories I want to tell with them that weren’t told by the original writers.

For my friends who persist in thinking that I should write an original novel. I will admit that if I ever come up with characters and a setting that I absolutely adore. I will write that novel and try to get it published. Onwards!

On the other hand, I do write for others. Let’s face it. I love feedback. Do you love feedback? If you say no, I say you are lying. Even when I do not understand the feedback or want to go beat on something because of feedback, I still love it. It isn’t knowing that ‘so and so’ reads my stories. It’s knowing that my story made someone have a better day. “It’s Tuesday. It’s Quality Time day! Oh thank god, I’ve been needing Quality Time.” Someone out there, loves what I’ve written as much as I do and they may see something in there that I didn’t intend when writing it or may wonder about this and that, but they still enjoyed it. Their happiness makes me happy, which keeps me writing.

It’s a give and take situation. That’s what this journal is about, giving back to the fandom. I intend to write about writing from primarily the fandom perspective, giving tips and advice that while they could be (and should and are) applied to original writing, are primarily for the fandom writer. I also intend to try and address purely fandom issues, such as headers, tenses and the songfic. I hope that it will be helpful for anyone who chooses to read, including myself as there will be times I am quite sure that I do need to take my own advice. I also intend to review and recommend writing guides and books.

Please feel free to comment at any time if there is a question, or a request. There are some topics I know that will be very opinion oriented and I will try to the best of my ability to make it clear what is opinion and what isn’t.