Stumbling Through Writing, One Word at a Time

Blog to throw all my thoughts about writing a novel, from someone who's not at all qualified to write a novel. She/Her. pfp by the overly talented @lutraslutra; background credit: Raymond Lam

[writingdose]

[fixyourwritinghabits]

How do you recognize if the IP you want to develop is too fanfiction-ish? Like, waking up in a tv show or traveling through AUs

I got to admit, I find this question just as baffling as it is fascinating. I could point to dozens of recently published works that could be described as fanfic-y. I could point out a couple that used to be fanfic and were marketed as such (controversially, but that is besides the point).

However, your question is if something can feel too fanfiction-ish, and I'd say no. The romance genre is filled with what could be called coffeeshop AUs. Traveling through AUs is Waking up on a TV show or traveling through AUs are just interesting Sci-Fi ideas. You can turn any idea that feels like a fanfic to you into an original series that feels fresh and fun to a new audience. Naomi Novak's first series was just that!

Ultimately, what makes something feel like fanfiction versus original fiction is how you write the story. Fanfiction operates on the assumption that you know and love these characters even if you are writing an AU. Stories that feel like fanfiction to me are ones that don't put enough effort into making my care about the characters or their wants, because when you are writing a fanfiction everyone knows what that is already (no matter how AU it is).

That can be the struggle with writing original fiction, and it's something you have to be careful about if you've mainly written fanfiction before. But the basis of your plot can truly be anything, be it Sherlock Holmes versus Cthulhu (a series by Lois H Gresh) or Doctor Who But Magical (Diana Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci books). The idea will develop and evolve - it's your spin on it that will sell it. Write away!

[fixyourwritinghabits]

Also I'm not trying to reduce the Chrestomanci books into "Magical Doctor Who" - those books are great and you should read them - but what I am trying to say is that any concept can sound like fanfic if you boil it down to its bare bones. You can make anything sound derivative. It's the execution that makes the story.

[paperplateprose]

not now kitten. daddy's realizing that the scene he invested 1000 words into could be significantly improved but only if he started over from scratch

[errant-i-rant]

But, naturally, you must put those words in a special cut content document on the off chance that you can use them again someday!

(And not just go back and look at them occasionally and reminisce over your own word choice.)

[lavenderpanic]

all of my writing is actually just thinly-veiled fantasy about being seen at your worst and still being loved

[caprart1]

i DO believe that a good writer can make mischaracterization work. oh there's a character who doesn't normally cry? figure it out!! disect the character. make the situation cryable for them. make that character cry ugly tears even if it goes against their very nature. YOU CAN MAKE IT WORK!!!

[amyrosedefensesquad]

A great piece of advice I've seen is "Don't fixate about what the character would never do. Think about the circumstances that would drive them to do this, even if they wouldn't normally."

[ficsinhistory]

Best advice ever!

[elumish]

I keep trying to record something on how books are bad at writing fighting training, and it keeps being like 12 minutes long

[stonecoldspaghetti]

Bad as in prose? Or bad as in how training to fight actually works?

I'm just curious

[elumish]

The latter.

Basically, "more skilled person just beats the person they're training at sparring until the person they're training improves without doing any fundamentals or teaching them the right way to do things" is a cruel and useless form of "training" and only makes sense if you're trying to show that the "teacher" is being cruel or doesn't know how to teach. Showing it as a legitimate and useful form of training indicates to me that the author didn't bother to do any real research.

[rockshitty]

There are sort of two ways to look at it as a trope.

It’s either one of those tropes that has no real world basis, but looks/sounds cool in storytelling and is useful for moving the plot along (see: torture, knocking someone unconscious, a lot of medieval fantasy government stuff)

Or it’s one of those things where the overlap between people who write books and people who practice martial arts is so small that most writers trust the trope blindly and never think past it.

[sourb0i]

Just a few tips from someone who's been doing HEMA fighting (and training) for about a year

-Drills. So many drills. Just doing the same motion, or set of motions, over and over and over until it's muscle memory. And then do it some more. These can be done with another person, so you can get a feel for hitting someone (else's sword), or they might be done to a dummy, or just to the air as part of a series of steps

-there is a surprising amount of reading! A lot of what we do is based on styles that originated in the 11th-15th centuries, and were literally written in manuals for future people to use. Sometimes the explanations and diagrams are very clear. Sometimes they are not.

- There is sparring, with variations on goals. Sometimes the goal is just 'hit each other'. Sometimes you will have specific caveats, like if you both deliver a 'killing blow' at the same time you have to run to opposite ends of the room and back

- Footwork drills

- lots of wrist and arm stretches, both with and without swords

- Moving through different blocks/base positions, and practicing different cuts from each position

- More drills, wearing armor or other appropriate gear

- Weights and cardio training! Both are extremely important for making sure you can 1. Swing your sword and 2. Keep swinging your sword when you're wearing 15 lbs of armor and have been hacking at people for a full 20 minutes

- Learning how to maintain your gear

- Practicing control of the blade- this is usually done by having a dummy target (or sometimes a real person), and swinging with full power but stopping before you actually make contact. Master swordsman can bring their blade within half an inch of their target.

- Even more drills

Obviously some of this is pretty modern, but I can't imagine that it would be incredibly novel even to people from 600 years ago. And if you have any questions, please feel free to ask!

[sourb0i]

Adding onto this with even more things, now that I'm nearly 2 years in and have done a couple of tournaments!

Footwork drills are really important! Learning how and when to move, and shift your weight on your feet, is crucial

When practicing solo I often do so in front of a full-length mirror so that I can actually see what I'm doing

There is also just a lot of sparring. Unfortunately you can't really get good at sword fighting without getting your butt kicked. A lot.

However! A good teacher will give you tips either during or after the fight, or both! A lot of the time it's things like 'you need to improve your footwork more, here are 10 different drills. Go do them.' However, there is also a fair bit of going back over certain 'plays' in slower motion, where they'll tell you exactly what you did wrong and how to fix it in the context of the fight.

Also, just as a side note, unless your character is the progeny of a wealthy lord, they are probably going to use borrowed equipment. It will not fit right. And it will reek with the stench of 1000 sweaty people. And if you train in it enough, when you do get your own gear that actually fits properly and only smells like your sweat, I swear you get 5x better overnight

At some point, everyone develops their own style. I've fought people who love to just make huge stabby lunges, people who make wild flourishes, big guys who just brute force it, guys who look like they'd blow away in a light breeze but are the fastest people you've ever met. It comes over time, and from learning as many different techniques as you can

Not sure how much they did this in Ye Olden Days but almost everyone I've met in HEMA now fights in at least two different styles (usually longsword and Sabre or rapier). As I said above, the more styles you learn, the better you get at all of them; many techniques that you learn from one style are applicable in some way to the other

Thats all I can think of for now, but if anyone has any questions feel free to reach out!

[elumish]

It's been a while since I've done martial arts, but this reminded me of some other points specifically about sparring as a training tool:

At least in the modern version of sparring, one of the things we learn is how to spar. There are standard protocols to sparring depending on the form you're learning, and it's super important that you follow them.

This is not just about learning how to be the attacker--you also need to know things like how to fall right, which you learn for real life but also for sparring, because it can be really unsafe for both you and the person you're sparring with if you don't know the basics of how to keep yourself safe.

Tapping out! When you're doing particularly forms where you're touching each other/grappling/doing joint locks/etc., one of the main ways you signal to stop is by tapping out. This is key to keeping people safe during sparring.

People can get hurt during sparring, especially if you screw up. I once almost dislocated someone's shoulder doing a joint lock (they were fine, they tapped out, we talked through it, we figured out what I did wrong), and I had someone hyperextend my elbow once. It also seriously exasperated my wrist's repetitive stress issue, particularly from someone repeatedly muscling through something they shouldn't be muscling through.

You can also give people concussions, cause bruises, or even break bones if you aren't careful. I got a bruise that took months to heal (probably a bone bruise) from falling the wrong way during some exhibition sparring on a wooden platform.

If you start sparring/partnered fighting when you don't have the foundation of how to fight, especially if you're partnered with someone who doesn't know how to properly guide you, it's really easy to build bad muscle memory. The right way to do something, is not always the instinctive way to do it, and if you get thrown into partnered fighting unprepared you will fall back on instinct, not training.

If sparring/partnered fighting is 100% losing with no real guidance, it won't teach you how to ever win, it will just teach you how to lose, which is actively unhelpful. The goal of sparring in that way becomes learning how to lose less badly, which may be great for self defense but isn't particularly great for actually learning how to successfully fight.

[luna-azzurra]

The thing about a good character flaw is that it has to be the same thing as their greatest strength just turned up too high. the person who loves deeply and therefore controls. the person who sees everything and therefore trusts nothing. the person who is so loyal they lose themselves. there are no clean villains and no clean heroes and once you understand that in fiction you can't unsee it in people. everyone is just their best quality at the wrong volume.

[bellisima-actually-writes]

This is a post for me to remind future me that when I feel like this:

When I want to take my book and do this:

When I feel like my writing is garbage and my story makes no sense and I should just:

It’s actually because I’m very close to figuring something important out that was just, ready to burst like one of those chest buster alien things. But it was hiding. Deep down and my brain couldn’t keep writing bc it needed to find it.

I hate it. It’s dreadful. But it’s true. So future me, quit being a drama queen and get back to work.

[bellisima-actually-writes]

Two things:

feeling this sort of dread beginning to creep up on me so, thanks past me for the reminder

i have no idea what I was struggling with when I wrote this, which is weird. It's incredible how quickly we move on and forget the struggle and focus on the win. Whatever it was is a core piece of this book now. And I can't even remember a time where it wasn't there.

[byoldervine]

I want magic. I want beauty. I want to learn and practice and create. I want to get better. I want to make something real and never look back

[luna-azzurra]

I sent my draft to a beta reader and they said "i have some notes" and then did not send the notes for eleven days. eleven days. i aged. i became a different person. i started three other projects to cope. i reorganised my entire desk. i considered changing careers. i made a soup. the notes arrived today. they were fine. mostly positive. i will never recover from those eleven days. the soup was good though.

[novlr]

A Beginner's Guide to Writing Tenses | The Novlr Reading Room

Writing tenses is easy when you realise we do it every day! Here's our top tips on how to use past, present and future tense in your stories

[bellisima-actually-writes]

Blinked and 60k came and went. Still so much story to tell, but we are getting there.

Pretty proud of what I wrote this week (still in progress) especially given how I did not know at the week's start how to frame the next few chapters. There's nothing more satisfying than when form begins to solidify in that muddled middle section of every story.

Happy weekend all!

[moninils]

And all of this at once.

[laestrellaa]

[bellisima-actually-writes]

So, here’s another pro tip from me to you:

If you’re writing a series, and you establish motives for your protagonist and antagonist in the first book, and then you say hey it would be cool to write how this whole thing came about, so you make the second book that story, going into the past and flushing all that out, don’t be shocked when they turn around and just NAH all over your motives and lay out their own halfway through that prequel.

Because they will, and then you’ll be stuck holding an entire other book saying, well fuck.

[rederiswrites]

Just watched Adam Conover (of Adam Ruins Everything) make such a solid point that I think we should spread far and wide. Yes, having AI write your emails is lazy, sure, but people love being lazy. We need to really emphasize that sending AI emails (or using AI responses on social media, or publishing AI flyers, or or or) is rude.

It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.

It's rude.

[lastvalyrian]

It's not just rude to make me read something you didn't want to write. It is that you expect me to respond to your email written by Claude. You don't even want me to talk to you. You want me to talk to Claude so that you can make Claude respond for you. It is rude to expect me to talk to a chatbot when I wanted to talk to you.

[luna-azzurra]

Something nobody prepares you for is that the better you get at writing the harder it becomes. beginners write freely because they don't know enough to know what's wrong. then you learn. and suddenly you can see every single flaw in real time as you're making it and you have to write anyway while your own brain is in the corner going "that's a weak verb. that transition is lazy. you've used that word three times." getting good at this is mostly just getting better at ignoring yourself.