Writing Tips Pt. 13 - Research

Writing Tips Pt. 13 - Research

Do Research.

No, seriously. Make sure you do research for your story, whether it's original fiction or fanfiction. This doesn't have to be college-level research, with interviews and experiments and hours upon hours spent combing through the stacks at the library to find every last blessed detail about a thing. But a little Googling can be your friend in this regard.

Researching for original fiction? You might have a character with a medical background and need to know terms or procedures in a hospital setting, or what the difference between a stent and a catheter are. Or your character might be a bodybuilder and so you'll need a passing idea of workout regimens to get the right level of bulk, and what sort of food they eat. Or your character might be a serial killer, and you'll want to know basic anatomy and also what the consistency of blood is or what a burning body smells like. Or you might be writing a fantasy story with characters traveling across the kingdom by horse, and you need to make sure you don't overwork the horse and that you know the basics of camping without modern luxuries like flashlights and RVs and matches.

Many of these things aren't going to be something you just know off-hand (unless you're a major trivia buff, but even then...). A little research can help add that bit of verisimilitude for when someone who actually knows that information then reads your story. The last thing you need is a medical student dropping your book and screaming "a stent doesn't go there!"

And if you're writing fanfiction? It's important to know details about the world you're writing in and the characters you're using. Something as simple as reading the wiki entries for your fandom can help you make sure you don't write someone out of character or forget an important detail about the setting. I've seen stories forget what species a non-human character is, spell a character's name or other terms wrong repeatedly, get the wrong relationships between characters, or make a given special power capable of feats it can't manage normally.

Just as misinformation about real-world topics will bother readers who notice them, so will fandom misinformation bother the fans who spot the incorrect details. Just a little research can go a long way to avoiding this problem.

And then you do finally track it down when you realize you had one of the characters wrong.

The true AO3 experience is trying to remember a very specific fic you read some time between 2013 and 2019 but you can only remember two of the characters, a vague idea of the plot outside of one specific scene, and you have no clue what the tags could have been.

for real, if you see a fic that seems abandoned but you really want to see if it might be completed

i would genuinely suggest not mentioning the fact its abandoned at all. instead, just leave the most effusive comment you can. tell the author specifically what you liked. if they are in a position they might continue it, you might remind them what they liked about the story, and thus maybe revive it.

that is probably your best bet to get a story finished, much more than asking “hey is this abandoned” or asking for it to be continued.

Writing Tips Pt. 8 - Show Don't Tell

Ah, the dreaded "Show, don't tell." The answer that gets trotted out in many a discussion when the question of "How do I improve my prose?" comes up. "Oh, but this is prose. Everything is telling!" some might cry (to which I say, "yes, buuuuut...that's not the point"). But none of that's helpful if you don't know what it means.

So let me show you.

First, for your consideration, an example:

Alice was scared. Bob was hunting her, and she feared for her life.

This is telling. We've told the reader that Alice is scared, that she's fearing for her life. That's as plain as the words on the screen. But it feels flat. There's no real depth to it. The reader can't really empathize with Alice, because while they know she's scared, they don't feel that she's scared.

We've told the reader, but we haven't shown the reader.

A brief diversion. The best example I've seen for how to write this actually comes from another Tumblr post, about how to write pain, though it can be applied to anything abstract.

Please go read because it's very good. I'll wait.

Done? Good.

The short of it is this: the post compares writing pain (or anything abstract, really) to drawing an egg, but you aren't given a white pencil, because we already know the egg is white. We need to see how the light hits it and the colors of the shadows and where the table reflects against the shell and the background behind it. Draw around the egg.

So with emotions, you need to write around them. Don't tell us Claire is happy. Show us, by writing the things that convey that happiness. Describe the bounce in her step, the brightness of the sunshine, the warmth in her chest. Show us Frank's heartache in his shortness of breath, the clenching of his heart, his narrowed focus, the muffled sounds around him. Set the mood rather than just telling us what the mood is.

Or consider a screenplay. In movies and television, characters don't just walk out onto the stage and announce, "I'm angry," and then deliver their lines. They stomp. They throw things. They slam doors. Their facial expressions contort. They flail their arms around in huge gestures and raise their voices. But they don't announce their feelings. You can use this in prose by describing the actions of a character to demonstrate how they feel, rather than just announcing their emotion to the reader.

Back to Alice.

Alice's shoulders quivered, skin dripping with sweat, breath coming in short, desperate gasps as she hid behind the couch. Bob's footsteps thundered through the silent house. The slap of the baseball bat in his hand tapped a tattoo against her eardrums. Louder. Closer. Beating in sync with the rapid flutter of her racing heart.

Now, instead of simply telling the reader that Alice is scared, we've pulled them into her world with description and metaphor to convey how being scared feels. The word "scared" doesn't even appear in the new example, but the reader still gets the message quite clearly.

This is how you show.

That's not to say you can never tell. Sometimes you need to. For instance, if your characters are going to have a long discussion about the intricate details of their preparations for a journey, you probably don't need to actually show us every last bit of that conversation. You can summarize it just fine. Or shorten a journey to a few lines if the destination is what matters more.

But for the most part, use your action words, flex your descriptive muscles, and show us what's going on rather than just telling us, especially when it comes to abstract things.

Source

Writing Tips Pt. 11 - Points of View

So tense involves whether a story is narrated in the past, present, or future relative to events. But what about the POV, or point of view? I've seen a lot of confusion about this, especially among novice writers, so I'll try to clarify what they are.

Imagine you're standing in a crowded space, having a conversation with your reader. You're telling them a story, making you the narrator.

If you are the main character of the story, that is First Person POV. You will use "I/me" pronouns.

If your reader is the main character, that is Second Person POV. You will use "you" pronouns.

If one of the other people around you is the main character (not you and not your reader), that is Third Person POV. You will use "he/she/it/they" pronouns.

So the POV is relative to who the main character is.

Obviously, not every first person POV is going to be literally about you. But they will be told as if you, the narrator, are the one experiencing events. The main thing to remember with such stories is that your viewpoint character needs to be interesting or likeable enough to keep the reader's attention. No one is going to want to read an entire story with a flat, boring, or extremely unlikable viewpoint character. It's also easy to get enmired in the character's thoughts a little too much and forget to tell the story.

Of the three POVs, second person is probably the trickiest to write well, and is not normally encountered in fiction, but it isn't completely unheard of. Classic Choose Your Own Adventure books are written in second person to facilitate the conceit that the reader is the one experiencing the story, the main character. The Monster at the End of This Book, The Book With No Pictures, and other similar books for children that have interactive elements also work well, with the narrator or narrating character talking to the reader throughout the story. Self-help books and other articles will frequently use second person POV as well, as does fanfiction that puts the reader in the main character's shoes in order to ship them with a character.

Now, you may have heard of limited and omniscient POVs, specifically for third person. I've heard different ideas of what each of these mean, or how to use them, with a lot of misconceptions, so let's try to clear that up.

Third person limited POV is limited to one character's thoughts and feelings at a time. Think of it as riding in that person's head. You can hear their thoughts, know their feelings, but you don't know what's going on inside any other character's head. You learn what the main character learns, but if someone else is keeping secrets from them, you won't know those secrets. Limited POV is good for drama because it's easier to keep the reader from knowing things they shouldn't. This POV still allows you to use a character's "voice" in the narration, as with first person POV, just with third person pronouns.

Emily scrubbed the dishes with increasing vigor, glaring daggers at John over in the dining room the whole time. It's like he doesn't even care that I'm angry, she thought, dropping another handful of forks into the drain tray with a rattle. Staying out all night, not a word about where he's been or what he's been up to. And who needs that many shipping boxes anyway? Her thoughts spiraled away from her.

With this POV, you can stick with one viewpoint character for an entire work, or you can change as often as needed for the purposes of your story, but it's best to keep such changes at scene and chapter breaks to avoid confusing your readers.

Third person omniscient POV is aware of all characters' thoughts and feelings as needed. Omniscient means "all-knowing." The narrator of this story might tell us what a few characters are feeling, or inform us of a bit of backstory for a newly-introduced character without necessarily riding inside that character's head. Many older works of fiction were written in this style. This is arguably the simplest POV to write, and yet also the easiest to mismanage.

Many authors make the mistake of trying to write third person omniscient by constantly changing which character's head we're in. This is called head-hopping, and can cause literary whiplash for your readers as you keep bouncing around from one character to the next. One way to avoid this pitfall is to avoid getting so deeply into any character's head that you're writing out their actual thoughts. Create more distance between the narrator and the characters.

Emily scrubbed the dishes with increasing vigor, glaring daggers at John over in the dining room the whole time. Her thoughts jumbled about as she mused over where he might have been the night before, where he might have been every night for the past three weeks, and what all those shipping boxes that arrived every day might contain, unaware that John had been meticulously planning a surprise party for her—one that was about to go horribly awry, all thanks to assumptions and lack of communication.

In this example, you can see where I distanced myself from Emily's direct thoughts, so that it wouldn't be as jarring when I also shared John's side of things, along with a little narrative foreknowledge that neither of our characters could conceivably know at this point in time. I am by no means an expert in third person omniscient—I prefer limited for my writing—so I highly recommend checking out guides online for better examples on how to do it right.

One last thing: as with tense, it's important to be consistent, but that doesn't mean you absolutely must stick to one POV for your entire story. Perhaps you want to switch characters periodically, but you want one character's chapters to be in first person POV. Perhaps you want to include letters written between two characters as interlude chapters and thus need to switch to second person. Perhaps one person is literally a deity and thus has a more omniscient viewpoint in their scenes. This is fine, but be consistent within the guidelines you have set for your story. If Emily's scenes are written third person limited, don't switch to first person for one scene.