#craft essay

[brandedfool]

Notes from the Deathworld Earth: a new Prologue

“Brandedfool, what the hell have you been doing for the last two weeks?” Aside from eating too much Christmas dinner and suffering through a cold, I’ve been editing like a madwoman. So far, I have cut an additional 4,000 words. As part of the process, I’ve made several adjustments to the overall story. The biggest change is that “Dron” has now become “Dro’shl.” I won’t be making this edit to…

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[airplanned]

Ned Talks About Fight Scenes

I write a lot of fight scenes, and I consider it something I'm good at.  There are a lot of things to consider when writing a fight scene and they all intersect with each other.  I'm going to talk about three things: Clarity, Emotion, and Flow. 

Clarity is important, because you don't want your reader to stop and say, "Wait, there's another guy?" "Since when did they have an axe?" "I thought they were on the ground?"  "When did they get inside?"  Anything that pulls the reader out of the story disrupts your flow and is bad.  You need things to clip along, so be sure that your choreography makes sense and that you're clear about what's going on.  

The biggest problem I see in fight scenes is when a transition is missed so a character is over here, and then all of a sudden they're over there or facing a different way.  I'm not saying that there needs to be a whole big thing made about the transition, because that will affect your flow and slow you down with excess description, making it feel bloated.  But saying, "He turned around," takes up minimal space and will sometimes save you a lot of grief.  

I think the easiest example to show of this is actually a make-out scene I read ages ago.  (Make-out scenes and fight scenes have a lot in common.) It went something like this: "He came up behind her, wrapped his arms around her waist, and kissed her shoulder.  She hopped up and wrapped her legs around his waist."  ...   The picture I have in my head is that he’s still behind her, but her legs are folded backward like a ballerina.  This would be easily preventable with a simple "She turned around and..."  

Now, this example is a very close example.  The characters are attentive to every little moment, so a jump into a different position is jarring.  A fight scene example would be if you have a one-on-one duel, and it's emotional and calculating, and your character is very attuned to every movement that their opponent makes.  It's a little different if you have a sweeping battle scene with a horde of hundreds of enemies, like if you're writing an Age of Calamity battle.  Your main character isn't thinking in minute steps, but rather in sweeping moves, so your reader is fine not hearing that your character has turned around, but wouldn't be fine not knowing that your character is suddenly bleeding from dozens of fatal wounds or is half way through a battle with a big monster that actually matters.  So be aware of the scope of your scene, and that will guide you in how detailed you need to be.  (Also keep in mind that you can zoom in, like you fight a big Age of Calamity battle, but then things get more personal when you meet the boss and fight them.)

I know that just saying "don't so this" is not super helpful.  First of all, sometimes something is so clear in your head that you don't even know that your reader isn't following you.  The main solution to that is a beta reader.  A second set of eyes can easily point out these moments.  You can also draw stick figures (it's fun!).  For each sentence, draw where they would be and make sure the change between them makes sense.  

Sometimes, you might have something very complicated in mind.  But if you cant describe it clearly, it's not worth it and it might be worth scaling back.  Killing your darlings happens.

Sometimes, the fight will be a huge mess and our hero will be flailing around, not knowing what's going on or which way is up or when it's going to be over.  But in that case, you can just say that.  Be clear about it.  And then tell us what your POV character does know.  If they're overwhelmed, tell us what they feel.  Adding in emotion can actually be clarifying in explaining to the reader why the character acts the way they do.

Which brings us to

Emotion.  It's important for a lot of reasons.  First of all, if you leave out the emotion completely and have it be straight action the whole time, then your hero looks as if it's no big thing.  This battle is simple and they are a killing machine.  Maybe that's what you want.  But if there's no tension for your character, there won't be any tension in your reader.  If you say that this scene is no sweat, I (the reader) will not be sweating.  But if your character is struggling, if they're fearing, if they're exhausted or hurt, I'm going to worry for them and you automatically have tension.

Second of all, I tend to write more character driven things, and what's the point of the fight scene if it doesn't have some effect on the character or show something about them?  What purpose does it serve in the story?  Maybe it's just to be cool, and that's okay, but don't expect more from it if that's the case.

The other cool thing about including emotion is that if you have a paragraph in the middle of a fight scene where the character is thinking about how hard the fight is or worrying about protecting someone or excited to finally be using a sword again after a long hiatus, then your reader will assume that time is passing while they're thinking, and then when you pull out of that paragraph and back int the action, your character can be in a new place, fighting a new monster.  It's one way to avoid that jarring lack of transition that we talked about earlier.

So returning regularly to your POV character in a fight scene is a good idea.  I tend to do one pass where I just write the choreography (unless some big, climactic emotional moment is the whole point of the scene/story, in which case I'll write that first), then I'll do a second pass inserting some interiority. 

Flow deals with how the scene reads.  You want it to read fast (action packed!) because your character will be thinking fast and things will be moving fast and you want your reader's heart to be beating fast.

You can achieve a lot of this on a micro level with just word and punctuation choices.  1. Commas: a comma is a way to show a pause for breath, so in some cases, misusing commas and using a run-on sentences is your friend.  Lists are also your friend, because you can have this happening and that happening and something else over there and they felt dizzy and tired and yet the list goes on.  

2. Longer sentences tend to pul you forward through the sentence whereas short, choppy sentences have a lot of periods, which are hard pauses.  

3. To Be Verbs slow you down.  A "to be" verb is any conjugation of "to be": was, is, were, are, be, am.  You might have heard this in high school English class and rolled your eyes, and I have strong feelings about how this is not a hard and fast rule that should be used in all situations.  However, to be verbs DO slow you down, and that's not what you want here.  So let's use a test sentence like, "He was running towards the moblin."  The thing about this is that "run" isn't the verb.  "Was" is the verb.  What was he doing?  He was existing.  Which is more exciting: existing or running?  Change this to "He ran towards the moblin," and already that reads faster.  

4. Over-specificity will slow you down too.  There are so many fight scenes out there where I think they're trying not to fall into the trap discussed earlier of being unclear, so they go hard in the other direction and over-specify.  If you want to tell me at the very start that our hero has a sword in his left hand and a dagger in his right, go for it, but I don't want to hear about what anyone's left hand and right hand are doing during the actual fight.  (Unless handedness is a theme or something in your story?) I don't need to know how many degrees they turned to block a blow.  I don't need to know too many adjectives, because each of your adjectives should be hitting me in the face.

There's a lot more I could say about flow.  I do a lot of work with numbers of syllables and length of syllables, which means that certain words won't fit in the sentence I'm working on.  I do a lot with timing the big moments and arranging the white space around paragraphs so that the reader has a pause to go "oh shit!" when I want them to go "oh shit!"  I do a lot of onomatopoeia (sound effects) as shorthand for movement. "ClashClashClash. Boom!"  But I feel like getting into all that will be a bit too much and it's kind of more of a feeling than a science, so I'll stop here.

Good luck!

[fromnefelibata]

MY WRITING JOURNEY

A Craft Essay by Kyle Christian Malonzo

A consistent honor student since pre-elementary without reading and just listening. I simply listen to the lecture of my teacher and simply comply. I am proud that I am always in the honor roll without the exertion of reading and asking for somebody's support. Even if there is an upcoming quarterly examination, I would rather play outside with friends and have fun instead of getting exhausted by reading my books, which I have never tried. I was independent and confident and thought that I was perfect and smart. 

Time went by, I was in 7th grade. I was very disappointed that I wasted time. I should have read more books and enhanced my vocabulary and imagination. Then, for the very first moment, we were tasked to write an essay. I was frightened because I cannot put my opinions into words and I felt the pressure because everyone can. I looked down on myself. 

Turning 15 and my vocabulary is as deep as a puddle. Thinking about when I will be better. How can I be better if I am not even trying hard? The only action that I made was to listen. Listening to music and lessons from my teachers. Watching movies and cartoons. Aside from reading books, watching english movies and listening to music became my companion to expand my vocabulary and to be a good writer. 

It is difficult for me, as an introvert, to write based on experiences because I spend most of my time at home, alone. Although, being alone does not necessarily mean that I am lonely. Being alone brings the better in me. I am also glad that God blessed me with a vast imagination which works better when I work alone. Most of the time I use my imagination to write. Since writing was not really my specialty, I solely write when it is a requirement for school. To be honest, writing makes me delighted and relieved, especially when we are tasked to create a poem. Because when I was 8, I was exposed to Filipino rap music and rap battles. It fascinates me how these artists play with words and make them rhyme. Although, sometimes it does not even mean anything, it just simply rhymes. However, Gloc-9, my favorite artist, was one of the artists that I  respected. I was too young to understand the message that his music conveyed. But I truly like to sing along with him through the speaker all day long. My family and relatives were even surprised at how good I rap. But today, it is not as good as it used to be. He became my inspiration to write poems related to current events and existence. I also tried to start a diary but I was always occupied by video games.

Today, I am 18 and this is what a writer I became. Small and slow progress but it is still progress. Presently, I apply the knowledge I have learned in the subject of Creative Writing. I feel relaxed whenever I write about my frustrations and problems. It was indeed a tough year and writing became one of my coping tools. I am hoping that I will be better in the future.

[fairest]

Nabokov wants to tell us how important it is to notice. His fiction is always becoming propaganda on behalf of good noticing

James Woods

[chenchenwrites]

In the midst of a buried hour when everything around me is sleeping and straining and I do not know how shallow or deep, my friend H writes to me from the other side of the world: 'Prayer cannot exist if there’s any certainty that it will be heard.' This, I suspect, is at the heart of the contradiction that propels me, though I barely know what it means.

Jennifer S. Cheng, from “Dear Blank Space: A Literacy Narrative” in Entropy

[brandedfool]

Draft 1.5: The Major Edits, Notes from the Deathworld Earth

Hi, everyone! I hope you enjoy the picture of my kitten. I’m going to attach one to each of these essay posts I make in the future. As a little bonus and because I love them so much. I’ve been trying to guess how much of Notes from the Deathworld Earth I wrote on public transit. I think it’s probably close to 25%, as that’s the closest thing to down-time for the last several months of the…

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[airplanned]

Ned Talks About Describing Things

Okay, so.  Descriptions are boring.  So the question is, how do I make sure my reader follows this while not boring them so much that they close the window?

Over simplification: if your reader knows what a thing looks like, you don't need to describe it.  A convenience store.  A high school.  A grocery store.  A boring office.  I know what those look like.  You know what those look like.  If you explain how there are three rows of shelves at the connivence store, one with candy, one with snacks, one with cleaning products, I will slap you.  Now, this doesn't mean that you can't sprinkle some details in there.  That adds some color.  Saying that she was staring at the three varieties of sunflower seeds without making a decision, can tell me a lot about the character's feelings right then, and is also kind of funny.  Saying "she opened her locker, which was the color of a dying houseplant" does the same thing.  But the thing is that these are lines dropped into the action of the scene, and what we really want to talk about is when to devote a whole paragraph to description.

I can think of three reasons you would need a block of description: 1. You need to know this to follow the story, 2. it will explain a character better, and  3. it's cool and your reader will enjoy hearing about it.

1. You need to know this.   Do I need to know what the convenience store looks like, or is it fine if I have my own version in my head even if it's not exactly what you the writer have in your head?  You have to give up some control and let your reader live their life.  There is no way you will ever make the scene in your reader's head exactly the way it is in your head.  Just get over that now and let your reader imagine the bathroom.

But let's say there is a setting with a very large, perilous cliff off to the side, and later a major character is going to fall off that cliff.  By all means, describe that cliff to me.  I want to know the stakes if someone falls (sharp rocks at the bottom, how the wind screams and pulls at you, how you can't even see it until you're right there.)  This instantly makes me worry that someone's going to fall off that cliff. Let's say they're at the connivence store, but the lights are red.  That's weird!  That goes against my expectations, and I need to know that because it's probably important. 

But now, if you're only describing plot relevant things, the reader will pick up on it and whatever you describe will become Chekov's gun.  If the only thing you lovingly describe is a cliff, I'll bet you $10 someone's going over that cliff.  I once beta'ed a novel for a friend where he went into extensive detail about a seaplane.  I knew that seaplane better than I knew the main character.  I was so excited for a seaplane chase!  Guess what.  That plane was never seen again, and I was ticked.

The cool thing abut fanfic is that all your readers know what all the locations and the characters look like!  Unless you're doing an AU or something, this is one of the main things that fanfic scaffolds for, and you don't need to describe all that much.

2. It will explain a character better.  If a character is neat and tidily dressed with perfectly applied makeup, that tells me something about them.  If they have three nose rings and a motorcycle helmet tucked under their arm, that tells me something.  If their room has a Backstreet Boys poster, that tells me something.  Remember that bathroom you let someone imagine earlier?  Well, what if it's a VERY FANCY bathroom and our main character was already feeling out of place in this rich person's house, so they hide in the bathroom, but!  Even this bathroom is alienating!  There's marble and some sort of water feature and little mints in a basket and a bidet!  Ack!  Yes!  Tell me about the bathroom.

Describing a character is something that probably needs to happen, and needs to happen up front (if you're not writing fic).  Because if I find out a character has glasses half way through the book, and I had not been picturing them with glasses, I will reject that description and continue to pretend they don't have glasses and be a little bitter.  It can be a chore, but you can make the description interesting or funny in a way that strikes your reader enough to stick with them and give them as sense of the character without going through the laundry list of hair color and eye color and height and blah blah blah.  (Lev Grossman with the Magicians series does a lot of things I don't care for, but his descriptions of characters are like well aimed knives and worth picking apart).

3. It's cool.  So let's say we get to a thing that is just WILD.  You've been imagining it for months.  You doodle pictures of it.  No one has done this before and you are so excited to write about it.  This thing has a sense of wonder about it.  Here, that wonder is a driving force that pulls your reader forward. If I'm interested, then you're not slowing anything down by telling me about it. If you are showing me a cool thing, then YES, SHOW ME THE COOL THING.  Tell me more!  

I have a friend who writes Sci-fi, and she's always worried that she's boring her readers with her descriptions of the absolutely bananas rainforest on this moon and the weird-assed weapons people carry around to walk through the jungle and how the telepaths can communicate with the creatures of the jungle, and I always send her stuff back with big old circles that say WHOA!  MORE OF THIS!  This is actually a pretty big trope in sci-fi.  There's a book called "2312," which is just a tour of the solar system that has been terraformed, and there's not a whole lot of plot, but that's okay, because I get these log descriptions about this city on a track on Mercury, and it's great.

[airplanned]

Ned Talks About Chronic Tension and Situational Tension

I want to talk about two kinds of sources of tension in stories.  And keep in mind that this is a framework.  It's a way of thinking about story structure that I find useful.  If you don't find it useful, that's fine.  This is in no way set-in-stone or how-all-stories-work.

Chronic Tension is a conflict that is ongoing.  It started well before your story starts and it might go long after your story is finished.  So some examples from things you might know: in Finding Nemo, Nemo's mom and all Nemo's egg siblings are killed, leaving Nemo's dad over-protective of Nemo and constantly worrying for his only son's safety.  In The Sound of Music, there is the chronic tension of Nazis and also the Maria wants to find adventure in the great wide somewhere.

Situational Tension has more to do with the actual plot of the story you're telling.  It's the problem that needs to be solved in the moment.  Generally, this problem arises at the start of the story and is solved at the climax. In our Finding Nemo example, the situational tension is that Nemo has been kidnapped and Nemo's dad has to rescue him.  In The Sound of Music, Maria needs to wrangle a bunch of children who happen to have a hot dad.

So you can see that these two kinds of tensions are different.  In Finding Nemo, the chronic tension has more to do with Nemo's dad's character and backstory.  It's on a low simmer in the background at all times.  The situational tension has action and gets other characters involved.  But you can see how these two sources of tension feed on each other.  If the chronic tension didn't exist: if Nemo's dad was a well-balanced, reasonable dude, then the situational tension of Nemo being kidnapped would not be as big a deal.  As it is, in Nemo's dad's head, this is the Worst Thing the Could Happen.  If we had that chronic tension of Nemo's dad being worried something will happen to Nemo, but then the movie was about...Nemo wants to win a race against his fish friends, then Nemo's dad's issues are just a weird character trait that are completely unrelated to the story.  

In The Sound of Music, Maria does get to leave her boring life and find a family and love and adventure with songs, so her situational tension might actually be the Best Thing that Could Happen.  Meanwhile, the Nazi chronic tension keeps ramping up in the background to the point where when the situational tension is satisfied, the chronic tension is so bad that they have to run away.  How do they get away?  Through the power of song, which is what Maria was bringing to the table the whole time with her personal chronic tension of being a weirdo who sings.

So the first step is identifying your tensions.  The second step is that you can use these two sources of tension to keep things...tense.  So if we're ever in a lull in the situational tension (because tension in a story naturally waxes and wanes), you can shift back to focusing on the chronic tension.  For example, if everyone is preparing for one final attack and it's a calm before the storm moment, our main character can be worrying about the chronic tension of how their family is holding out back home.

A lot of times, I'll write a story and it will feel really flat.  Not enough is going on.  And I'll realize that I've completely forgotten to put in chronic tension.  So I need to sit back and think about what could be happening in the character's background or in their relationships with other characters that will make the situation I've come up with hit harder.  Often, this will make a character or a situation more relatable, and can act as a grounding force in your story.  In Up, I don't know what it's like to fly off in a balloon house, but I do understand what it's like to lose someone you love so much that you want to run away from everything.

A lot of stories don't fit this model.  Fairy tales, for example are notable for being "flat."  You don't get a lot of chronic tension unless it's something like that everyone is dealing with poverty in the background.  A lot of action movies just kinda throw you into the action and you have a great time just watching fun things.  Some stories have a lot of different chronic tensions, and you could break the situational tension into phases or A plot/B plot.

So how could you use this in fanfic?  Well, canon has generally provided you with chronic tension, and you can tap into that while you come up with your own situational tension.  Zelda is dealing with self-confidence issues, so what can you come up with to really push her buttons?  Alternatively, what could you come up with that would cause her to overcome those issues?  Also, just don't forget that the chronic tension is there.  You can go off and make your own story that ignores that, but if it reads a little flat, that might be your issue.