Please Note: These tips are compiled by TkN, who is neither a professional writer, nor is she excellent with manipulating words. Thus, please keep in mind that the following words are not a recipe that must be followed step-by-step. For any inquiries, suggestions, and/or complaints, please address them to tkn@avodyssey.net
Introduction
People approach stories differently. Sources of ideas include, but not limited to, personal experiences, experiences of strangers/friends, notions/concepts/images from fiction, poetry, movies, plays, songs, and/or ideas suggested by dreams. With such a wide spectrum of inspirations, it is without a doubt that each author, each story takes on a different approach, a different style. Thus, please keep in mind that you need to be flexible throughout this tutorial (for lack of a better word). Its purpose is to provide you helpful tips for writing, but you must tailor them into your personal habit and style.
"The art of writing is rewriting." – Sean O’Faolain. I hope that you are reading this tutorial because you wish to improve/enhance your writing. Please keep in mind that the very first step to improving one’s skills is to know your weaknesses and how to tackle them. Thus, rewriting is a very important procedure for a writer. Through each draft, we will see clearer our mistakes and how to fix them. I strongly encourage you to write at least two drafts for each chapter of your fanfiction (as this will also correct any typos or minor grammatical errors you’ve made the first time).
Let's begin! :)
I. Point of View
The point of view you employ should express something in itself – it should not seem to the reader to have been arbitrarily chosen, or chosen as the easiest one for you to use. Your choice should be, in every way, the inevitable choice.
In several major novels, for instance, the relationship between a kind of hero and characters who witness his behavior produces the point of view structure for the works. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby offers an example that is simple in structure but complex in its various consequences: Nick Carrroway tells the story of Gatsby; what makes Gatsby a hero is his effect on Nick’s storytelling consciousness. Logically, a personal story should be told in first narrative, and one describing a heroic act should be told using third person narration (for the actual hero might not view his actions as being heroic). The hero will seem greater than life if he is kept at a distance and the witness/narrator fancies his actions. Either way, choose the point of view before writing any fan fiction, and you must stay consistent with your narrating.
II. Style
• Does your style fail to work upon all the reader’s senses?
Your reader expects to see, hear, touch, smell, and taste. Bald statements do not necessarily stimulate the reader's senses. "Coughing, the tall man wearing a wool suit, reeking of garlic, ran into the flower shop." That sentence may or may not have stimulated one or more of your senses, despite the overt, rather strained effort to do so. A cluster of sensory experiences may not be as effective in a given context as focus on a single sentence. "Fires on the dry mountain slopes surrounding the town had been smoldering for days." We can see that, but we can also smell it, even, or especially, without including such a phrase as "and I could smell the burning leaves throughout the village." No other sense is as difficult to stimulate in fiction as smell. But most senses are more sharply stimulated by implication than by direct attempts. "The man was so tall he had to stoop to enter the room" is less effective than "John entered the room, followed by a man who had to stoop."
• Do you tell your reader when to show would be more effective?
Show don't tell. Telling, declaring, is the province of nonfiction; showing or rendering is the province of fiction. Telling is a passive experience; showing is active, immediate, involving the senses. To tell is easy; to show is difficult. And "show" doesn't just mean pictures, images in motion along a plot line. It involves stimulation of all the senses through subtlety and implication, a rhythmic modulation of the literal and the suggestive. An example is illustrated below:
Draft 1: In a taxi, Charlie crossed the Seine, and he felt the sudden provincial quality of the left bank. "I spoiled this city for myself," he thought. "I didn't realize it, but..."
Draft 2: Charlie directed his taxi to the Avenue de L'Opera, which was out of his way. But he wanted to see the blue hour spread over the magnificent facade, and imagine that the cab horns, playing endlessly the first few bars of Le Plus que Lent, were the trumpets of the Second Empire. They were closing the iron grill in front of Brentano's Bookstore, and people were already at dinner behind the trim little bourgeois hedge of Duval's. He had never eaten at a really cheap restaurant in Paris. Five-course dinner, four francs fifty, eighteen cents, wine included. For some odd reasons he wished that he had. As they rolled on to the Left Bank and he felt its sudden provincialism, he thought, "I spoiled this city for myself. I didn't realize it, but..."
• Have you failed to use repetition as a device for emphasis?
Unnecessary, awkward, or ineffective deliberate repetition is one of the blemishes in style you will work hard in revision to delete. But controlled repetition for emphasis is an essential element of style. Repetition serves to emphasize an image, a character's speech patterns, the narrator's tone or attitude, and so on.
• Do you neglect to play short sentences and long sentences off each other and vary the length of paragraphs to achieve rhythm?
Rhythm is the alteration of stressed and unstressed phrases and long and short units of expression, from sentences to paragraphs, and the alternation of varying kinds of narrative elements, to achieve variety and combat monotony. Try to alternate long sentences with short ones to achieve a flow, a tempo. Sometimes it may be best to turn several short sentences into a longer one by combining them. Sometimes it is best to compress one long sentence into a short one to concentrate the effect.
• Are the verb tenses inconsistent?
• Is the tone of your style inappropriate?
Tone is the pervasive sense of the writer's attitude toward his characters and their dilemmas and/or his readers. Ask yourself: Have I imagined the appropriate tone for the kind of experience I am trying to create? The pervasive tone of a work may be tragic, comic, ironic, skeptical, pessimistic, compassionate, sentimental, formal, informal, and so on. Is there a unity of tone, or a deliberate contrast in tone?
III. Characters
• Does your protagonist fail to grow, experience changes in attitude and fortune?
• Does the protagonist fail to affect other characters?
• Are the relationships among the characters unclear?
• Do you need to clarify the underlying motives of your characters?
Motivation is the cause, inducement, stimulus to act - conscious or unconscious - of a character's behavior. Unless you have a reason, at any given point, not to, make clear the motives that make a character move. Consider the following:
Draft 1: It was interesting to speculate upon just why everyone was so desirous of possessing this particular pistol... Perhaps... he had not yet, at nineteen, acquired the equipment with which to speculate deeply enough to find the real reason. All he knew was that everyone wanted it, wanted it badly, and that he was having a hard time keeping it... The sense of personal safety that it gave him, the awareness that here at last was one object which he could actually depend on, the almost positive knowledge that it would one day actually save him, all of these comforted him as he lay rolled up in his two blankets and one shelterhalf with the rocky ground jabbing him in the flanks or as he toiled backbreakingly all day long at the never-ending job of putting up barbed wire. The world was going to hell in a basket, but if he could only hold on to the pistol, remain in possession of taht extra margin of safety its beautiful blued-steel pregnant weight offered him, he could be saved, could come through it.
Draft 2: All Mast knew was the feeling that the pistol gave him. And that was that it comforted him. As he lay rolled up in his two blankets and one shelterhalf at night with the rock ground jabbing him in the ribs or flanks and the wind buffeting his head and ears, or he worked with his arms numb to the shoulder all day long at the never-ending job of putting up recalcitrant barbed wire, it comforted him. Thy rod and thy staff. Perhaps he had no staff - unless you could call his rifle that - but he had a "rod". And it would be his salvation. One day it would save him. The sense of personal defensive safety that it gave him was tremendous... The world was rocketing to hell in a bucket, but if he could only hold onto his pistol, remain in possession of the promise of salvation its beautifu blue-steel bullet-charged weight offered him, he could be saved.
The two versions say essentially the same things; what is different is how they are expressed. One way to make your characters' motivations clear is to intrude in the omniscient voice of the author, saying, in effect, "Now here is why my character feels and acts as does." The first draft takes this approach. But in the second draft, we see him trying to suggest that Mast himself is sorting out his motives; and such more specific images help to eliminate the abstract language.
• Are you inconsistent in the presentation of your characters?
More coming soon...
- Narrative
- Description
- Dialogues
- Devices
- General Considerations
- Overused Endings