Advice needed for beginning writer

[ImmaDeker]

I'll also add: never learn anything from fanfiction.

Ever.

[dramspringfeald]

I'll also add: never learn anything from fanfiction.

Ever.

well at least you can learn what not to do.

[ImmaDeker]

I'll also add: never learn anything from fanfiction.

Ever.

well at least you can learn what not to do.

Ever.

[Taleweaver]

I'm starting to think OP may no longer watch this thread. The only time he logged in was when he wrote it.

Nice discussion we're having, though.

[Applegate]

I'll also add: never learn anything from fanfiction.

Ever.

well at least you can learn what not to do.

Ever.

Deker seems like an upstanding gentleman. He's right in that you shouldn't study Fanfiction to get better at writing. Key to remember is that you should copy from the professionals, not the amateurs; learn from those who're accomplished in an area.

Writing has an especially low bar of entry, considering stringing together words to form sentences and combining those sentences into paragraphs is a basic skill we all learn at school. "Creative Writing" classes also tend to make people feel like they're writing as well, but unfortunately most "Creative Writing" class material I've read isn't up to standard for actual stories.

To compound on that, while it's easy to spot mistakes in artistic works, it's harder to spot them in writing. Show of hands: Who all recognise terrible anatomy when they see it, and how many of you are artists? Every human being has a basic sense of anatomy, and everyone can compare drawn figures with the figures they are meant to represent.

You can then contrast and compare, and come to the conclusion that this drawing of a bike moreso resembles a horse than a bicycle.

With writing, that is a little more difficult. It's not immediately obvious to us that one thing is bad writing and the other is good writing. We don't have anything to contrast or compare with other than other pieces of writing: There's no reality to compare it to. As a result, those who produce "bad writing" don't always recognise that they have an artist's equivalent of a stickfigure with colours bleeding from the lines.

So the bar of entry is much lower. It's easy to recognise bad art, but bad writing? That takes some effort. The only way to learn the way to write is to study writers you admire. Look at how they produce their works, and use that as a basis for producing your own works.

In this stage, it's important that you look to writers who write well. The difference between good writing and bad writing is that good writing leaves out all the parts people skip, but includes all the parts people want to read. If you learn from a bad writer, your work will mimick that and become bad in turn.

To make a long story short, and I am unfortunately inclined to very long stories (comes with being pretentious), I agree with Deker. Never study Fanfiction.

Always study the things you SHOULD do. Not what you SHOULDN'T do.

Imagine every way of writing as an option. SHOULD do makes you prioritise options while keeping everything possible. SHOULDN'T do decreases your options, but there's still plenty of options that're less than optimal.

Go for the one that narrows best what option works for you, and which you enjoy.

[ImmaDeker]

It also, for me, comes down to it as a learning tool. As an immediate example, since I just watched it, let's say you're a big fan of Ben 10 and you want to write a Ben story. If you just want to express your love of Ben 10, I see no issue with writing fanfiction.

But if you want to learn how to be a writer, I see all the problem in the world with writing Ben 10 fanfiction. Like all TV, a single story in that series is crafted around the notion that you only have roughly 22 minutes to tell a story. All the characterization choices, the pacing, and the structure of this story is based around three clear acts that amount to 22 minutes of story. You won't really learn much from exploring a character outside of that format. It's the same complaints Alan Moore rightly had about adapting Watchmen. I actually liked the Watchmen movie a great deal, but it's not really a Watchmen movie because the format it was in required you to essentially strip down...all the actual thematic elements of Watchmen.

That's not to say you can't do stories in multiple mediums: Some John Steinbeck works doubled as plays, great franchises on TV have gone onto comics, etc. But you have to account for all those mediums. Cutting your teeth, very minorly, on fanfiction probably isn't that bad of an idea...but given the divorce of mediums, you might as well just be writing a story about your own characters. Even fanfic of other prose stories is ultimately divorced from the requirements of a professional novel under the scrutiny of an editor.

[Savo]

Being varied helps.

If you absolutely REFUSE to read a book to learn writing, that's a shame but it might be salvageable. If you want to write for a visual medium, read the scripts of visual mediums. Is there a movie you really like? Find its screenplay. Is there a TV show you adore? Find its scripts (which isn't that difficult, as the Angel scriptbook I have is a testament to that). Figure out what works you enjoy the most and then figure out how THEY were written as a way to give you an idea about things. Don't ape any particular writer's style, but don't be afraid to draw influence either.

Most importantly? Learn structure. There's a beginning, middle, and end to stories. How does one of these acts flow into another? Writing, especially for visual media, is a bit more technical than most would ever say or realize. When a story is properly structured, you usually won't notice it is. Find something you really like and look at how the story escalates. Look at how it paces certain things over others. If you're writing for visual media, you're writing a blueprint for a larger production. The structure of the story, the spine of the entire production, is essentially on you.

Be discerning about what you read or watch. Be critical. Don't just watch something. STUDY IT. Figure out WHY you like something.

Also, be sure to actually write things.

I like your advice. I vastly prefer visual mediums for my stories, as I feel they have advantages that simply can't be achieved in a non-visual format. Although I haven't taken to reading scripts, I do like to think about why my favorite movies, television shows, etc work, or just why they impacted me. Perhaps I will begin being even more critical of my favorite visual stories.

Your advice about actually writing things is solid as well. It's easy to talk about writing something, doing it is another thing.

I'm starting to think OP may no longer watch this thread. The only time he logged in was when he wrote it.

Nice discussion we're having, though.

I've been reading it, but I just haven't been logged in because I thought I was automatically logged in for some reason haha.

Deker seems like an upstanding gentleman. He's right in that you shouldn't study Fanfiction to get better at writing. Key to remember is that you should copy from the professionals, not the amateurs; learn from those who're accomplished in an area.

Writing has an especially low bar of entry, considering stringing together words to form sentences and combining those sentences into paragraphs is a basic skill we all learn at school. "Creative Writing" classes also tend to make people feel like they're writing as well, but unfortunately most "Creative Writing" class material I've read isn't up to standard for actual stories.

To compound on that, while it's easy to spot mistakes in artistic works, it's harder to spot them in writing. Show of hands: Who all recognise terrible anatomy when they see it, and how many of you are artists? Every human being has a basic sense of anatomy, and everyone can compare drawn figures with the figures they are meant to represent.

You can then contrast and compare, and come to the conclusion that this drawing of a bike moreso resembles a horse than a bicycle.

With writing, that is a little more difficult. It's not immediately obvious to us that one thing is bad writing and the other is good writing. We don't have anything to contrast or compare with other than other pieces of writing: There's no reality to compare it to. As a result, those who produce "bad writing" don't always recognise that they have an artist's equivalent of a stickfigure with colours bleeding from the lines.

So the bar of entry is much lower. It's easy to recognise bad art, but bad writing? That takes some effort. The only way to learn the way to write is to study writers you admire. Look at how they produce their works, and use that as a basis for producing your own works.

In this stage, it's important that you look to writers who write well. The difference between good writing and bad writing is that good writing leaves out all the parts people skip, but includes all the parts people want to read. If you learn from a bad writer, your work will mimick that and become bad in turn.

To make a long story short, and I am unfortunately inclined to very long stories (comes with being pretentious), I agree with Deker. Never study Fanfiction.

Always study the things you SHOULD do. Not what you SHOULDN'T do.

Imagine every way of writing as an option. SHOULD do makes you prioritise options while keeping everything possible. SHOULDN'T do decreases your options, but there's still plenty of options that're less than optimal.

Go for the one that narrows best what option works for you, and which you enjoy.

Fanfiction usually makes me weep tears of blood just reading it, so I don't think I'll have to worry about that haha. You are right about writing being a much more difficult form of art to critique. Writing is subjective, but I think there's a general consensus of "good writing", that the majority subscribes to (a story that makes sense, is paced well, etc). So yes, I would agree that it's best to try to draw inspiration from writers who are considered to be talented by the general populace, just so you don't embarrass yourself.

[Taleweaver]

I've been reading it, but I just haven't been logged in because I thought I was automatically logged in for some reason haha.

And here I went thinking you were only a one-timer.

Anyway, a short note about the fanfiction thing: While it's true that most fanfiction is terrible, terrible writing (mostly because most fanfiction writers lack any experience in reading OR writing), not all of it is, and a few things can be learned from reading good and bad fanfiction alike. As for the bad ones, you learn how not to do it; purple prose, for instance, is best avoided by seeing what some fanfiction does and how unintentionally funny that comes out. As for the good ones - technically, all of the Star Wars novels (especially Timothy Zahn's "Heir to the Empire" trilogy) and the Indiana Jones novels are fanfiction, though professional fanfiction, and from them you can learn how to set up a story with a pre-determined universe in the back, which will become invaluable once you start writing stories in a historical setting and need to get 17th century Japan or 18th century France right.

Fanfiction has its uses. Not that you should focus on creating it, unless you get paid for the job.

[neowired]

Fanfiction has its uses. Not that you should focus on creating it, unless you get paid for the job.

I read tons of fanfiction, and while most of it is utter crap, there are times when a fanfic is much more enjoyable, creative, and deeper than the original which it was based on.
Also, about "amateurs" and "professionals", amateur means one is passionate about the subject, professional means one does the thing for money. Amateurs can and often know more about what interests them than some of the "professionals" who don't really care about anything other than money. Someone can be both an amateur and a professional at the same time.

Having said that, you shouldn't base your writing on writing of others.
I think you should base your writing primarily on your understanding of the real world, on your understanding of yourself and of other people, and the writing of others can be used as a secondary guideline... in which case simply look for the artists who you yourself enjoy to read, doesn't matter if they are "professionals" or not, and try to understand what it is about their writing that you like so much, and then try to apply that to your own writing.

[ImmaDeker]

there are times when a fanfic is much more enjoyable, creative, and deeper than the original which it was based on.

Everyone who's ever told me this has always been wrong.

Every single time.

@Taleweaver: Those aren't professional fanfiction. They're called licensed novels because that's what they are. People have been writing sanctioned fiction in other worlds since before you could even sanction fiction. Fanfiction is born out of a specific audience culture that the rest of these works aren't.

[Anarchy]

there are times when a fanfic is much more enjoyable, creative, and deeper than the original which it was based on.

Everyone who's ever told me this has always been wrong.

Every single time.

Well, when the original is something like Naruto...

[neowired]

"Everyone who's ever told me this has always been wrong.
Every single time.

Sure, if you say so, and I disagree.

Well, when the original is something like Naruto...

I often read fanfiction of stories which were originally average or even bad, why? Because it's interesting to see how other writers can make it better and more interesting, how they can expand it in various creative way. Fanfiction often includes mixing very unusual ideas which original fiction rarely tries to do, that's what makes it so interesting.

Often the original has something which I enjoy but the overall quality feels lacking, this is often remedied by fanfiction.

[ImmaDeker]

Well, when the original is something like Naruto...

Yeah, but that's still incredibly flawed for several reasons. Sure, Naruto is terrible, but it's also got certain production hassles: only, what, 17 pages per week? Television episodes that're written around comic book pacing and not television pacing?

Sure. You could debate that Naruto, being the king of Shonen Jump comics, probably has terrible storytelling economy and couldn't use most of its panels to their fullest potential and that the TV episodes would probably be ten times better if they weren't written to adapt a comic book panel for panel and tried to properly appropriate different aspects of the comic into genuine scripts. I mean, you're not arguing this, but I'm raising it both to make a point and because we both accept it as true:

What does writing something "better" prove? Most of Naruto's character arcs are fairly melodramatic, but the audience is also children. Sasuke Uchiha isn't GOOD, but he's written for his audience: as laughable as he is, he's also just hormonal enough and written just broadly enough that an angsty kid could relate to him. It's not GOOD, but it's written to its audience (which, quite frankly, is more important than having quality when you're trying to earn a living). Sure, you wrote a better story, but you're not exactly getting paid for it and it's a little bit obnoxious to write a better fanfic version of something when apparently, if you can do that, the fact you're just not writing good ORIGINAL fiction comes into question very quickly.

Let's assume for the sake of argument someone wrote a fanfic of Naruto better than the source material (which I'll say I don't believe exists, but feel free to prove me wrong). Let's say he took Sasuke Uchiha's incredibly melodramatic and poorly conceived character arc and completely made it believable. He made me laugh, he made me cry, he made me believe a real person was at the lowest point of his life. Let's look at the hassle Kishimoto has to go through every single week to write a single story:

-Discuss with his editor, who may or may not veto certain concepts and ease probably varies from week to week.
-Compose a manuscript for the story of that week.
-Direct his assistants and himself to compose the comic. And no, directing his assistants would pose its own unique challenges that would hardly give him a pass. Even hugely staffed animated series give their storyboarders directors.

This doesn't sound like an awful lot, but man, do you realize how taxing that gets? You're not even PURELY focused on writing, you also have to draw the darn piece (which is a creative exhaustion in of itself). You also have to figure out how to pace what're ultimately grandiose wuxia arcs in a way that won't seem artificial to your audience. Good serialization is hard, especially if you're doing a serialized martial arcs story swamped in conspiracy. I'm not saying the end result is great (I love the initial Land of Waves arc as a clever brutalization of shonen themes, but I stopped watching at the Chuunin Exams because most of it was garbage), but given the sheer creativity of creating a wide variety of characters, combat styles, and ambitious aims of the story it's a fairly impressive work just on the level of its longetivity and, if nothing else, consistency.

Let's look at what a fanfic author, in contrast, has to deal with when composing his uber better Naruto fanfic:
-Being able to work at his leisure, in his own free time.
-Working, presumably, entirely in prose and thus does not have to worry about doubling as an artist on his project.
-Not having to pace a given installment to 17 or so pages of comic book and not being obligated to do this once a week.
-Literally all the advantage. Ever.

If someone's writing a "better" Naruto, they have all the advantage in the world that an actual professional who earned his place and chance to write and draw his story doesn't have. You have infinite free time. You have a completely different medium that lets you make a story despite having quantifiably less storytelling talents than the person you're doing "better" than (a writer isn't inherently less talented than an artist, but someone who can only write has less individual creative talents than someone who can write AND draw). And most damning of all?

You have a giant "don't do this" list in front of you. If you have a work you deem terrible, whether you're a disgruntled fan, a critic, or a loving fan who wants it to be "deeper" for some reason, you have a laundry list of things you don't like. Your creative process is literally "don't do that one thing I didn't like." You have the advantage of being able to do the exact opposite of what you didn't like, the advantage of pulling, adapting, or reinventing metric craptons of fan consensus, or just discussing the fundamental problems of your source material (again, for as much time as you like) in order to come up with what you need. Even if you didn't do ANY of that and you just think "this would be better if this happened," that still is incalculable volumes of advantage that this story you feel some perverse need to "improve" didn't actually have.

It takes no real thought. It takes reacting badly to a story and deciding to do the opposite of something, or do more of something. You're just piggybacking on the story you're "improving" soullessly. Even worse if your fanfic that gives this thing gravitas is actually wedged into the source material's continuity and your incredibly deep insight is still supported by really laughable adolescent character work as its build up. Your story's still utterly terrible when put into context because of that dissonance. Or maybe you're doing some "alternate universe" story, but given the above advantages you have I'd just straight up call you lazy. Because, quite frankly, nobody should be applauded for being able to create an alternate universe fanfic that improves its source material with no where near the number of professional hurdles when I guarantee the end product is still probably mediocre at best anyway.

Anyone who tries to do a "better" version of something in fanfic form is someone I will say with no reservation is a complete obnoxious douchebag who has a fundamental misunderstanding of the craft. As someone who really likes the mostly fan-hated Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal, seeing an "improved" rewrite fanfiction of the show made me laugh because (ignoring that it was worse than the show) it was incredible to me that someone had the gall to do a rewrite of a show designed to sell toys with no toy executives breathing down their necks. As if that's an accomplishment. Congrats, you won the Triathalon in your Dodge Viper! Well, in the case of that fic, she lost a foot race in a really fast car. But that's besides the point.

I feel the same if you do a little character piece spinning off of a moment in your source material. Congrats, you won the Triathalon in a jet plane. Would that make you feel like you accomplished something?

Reboots and reimaginings are interesting. Seeing how someone takes, say, Thundercats and tries to reimagine it for an audience under a completely different production environment and writing culture is interesting because that still has restrictions. That still had problems they had to work through to produce the best work they could. Spectacular Spider-Man is interesting from a production standpoint because of how impressive an adaptation it is of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko while using characters they either didn't create or didn't use the way the show did at all. But these are still telling stories under production restraints or the scrutiny of editors and very, very careful attempts to make these work within the specific constraint of thirteen episodes a season. They didn't have all the time in the world to improve what Leonard Starr or Stan Lee "did wrong", they had specific episode orders and budgets to try and reinterpret the intent of those creators for a new audience.

I would challenge any fanfic writer to do the same thing Naruto's creator does and be consistently "better". When he/she comes home crying after about a month at best, you'll see my point. Of course, you can still criticize or not like Naruto for whatever reason. I dislike it for more reasons than I could count. But on a forum where the self-proclaimed writers work in a largely visual medium, I find it unbelievable that even ONE member would argue that fanfic can be seen as an improvement over a source material in visual media with none of the restraints of said media. It shows such a fundamental misunderstanding of how writing is structured, paced, and composed for individual creative challenges that I am wide eyed in confusion.

The fanfics are never better. They're either, at best, mediocre alternate universes that're only "better" because of a checklist or they're oddly introspective character pieces that, I'm sure, are way too deep for me but still founded on laughable characterization bases making them terrible in context.

I often read fanfiction of stuff which were originally average or even bad, why? Because it's interesting to see how other writers can make it better and more interesting, how they can expand it in various creative way. Fanfiction often includes mixing very unusual ideas which original fiction rarely tries to do, that's what makes it so interesting.

It's rude to praise someone winning a foot race on their giant tyrannosaurus rex.

Sure, if you say so, and I disagree. I don't think I'd enjoy reading anything from someone with your mindset.

You're missing out, I'm hilarious.

[neowired]

It's rude to praise someone winning a foot race on their giant tyrannosaurus rex.

Maybe, but watching such an event would be hilarious and very entertaining. And I could praise him for being creative, as well as for his T-rex driving skills, that's assuming the T-rex wouldn't eat up all the contestants... I suppose i could praise that for the dark humor...
And I don't think your allegory is very good anyway.

All art is a remix of either life or of other art, the difference with fanfiction is that the artists admit it is a remix. Some fanfiction keeps a lot of the original, while some fanfiction keeps nothing of the original other than the character names (and while it may be dubious to call it fanfiction, it is still placed in the fanfiction category)

To me fanfiction is just that, taking some ideas which you find interesting and expanding on them, sometimes you take more, sometimes you take less. It's the same with original fiction. And from what I've seen so far, the permutations are infinite and some are utterly fascinating.

I would say what you find as a weakness I find a strength. The strength of fanfiction is that, often you have some sort of predefined framework or at least a part of it, this way a bunch of writers can concentrate on just one aspect and change it in a hundred of different ways, thanks to which they attempt to do stuff which writers who write original fiction almost never do.

I'd agree that writing something from scratch is harder than writing something on an already constructed framework. But this also doesn't mean that the person who uses the framework can't put an equal amount of work into the new creation. In fanfiction it also happens that stories are "adopted" by other writers, I think of this as a type of collaborative writing which allows fiction to reach levels which it would never reach when written as original fiction, by just one author.

I particularly enjoy this as a reader, because it creates interesting things, and as a writer because it gives me interesting ideas and inspires me.
Looking at the fanfiction as a created work I'd say yes, it is often better than the original, this makes perfect sense exactly because good fanfiction builds on top of the original and polishes it, enhancing the original.
I generally don't find writing fanfiction to be interesting, but I quite enjoy reading it.

To me it's as if you were saying that a slice of bread is better without topping, because one person cut the bread and a different person added the cheese (or whatever else that you like on your bread), to me that doesn't make sense.

[Greeny]

Well. That escalated fast.

Personally, I think Visual Novel writers should focus on learning not only from written media (although they still should, to increase their writing capabilities, overall sentence structure, and style, independantly of what they do with it) but also from Visual Media. After all, a Visual Novel is more than a Novel with pictures tacked on it it. When you have a work of art with multiple mediums, each medium should complement the other while still holding meaning individually. As a VN writer, you must learn to think ahead; to not write something down when that can be better conveyed by the art or music, or even voice acting. It's not just that, it's also pacing and structure. With possible interactivity, a lot more thought needs to be put into the structure of your story, as often, you have interactivity and branching to think about.

In fact, as a Visual Novel writer, I highly recommend you take some time to look at theatre. Yes, theatre. Forget movies, books and videogames, theatre is perhaps the closest other medium to Visual Novels, as the focus thends much more on character development and dialogue, settings are limited (both in theatre and VNs because of resource limitations) and in theatre there is also sometimes interactivity with the audience. The way the plot is generally structured - in two or three acts - is also a lot more supportive of branching if you want to do it right.

The problem with a lot of romance VN's I see is that they don't have a good romance story. They have a setting, some driving mechanic, often unrelated to the romance, and then the player gets to choose which romance is tacked on to that. Rarely do we see a proper love triangle develop, something which is odd if you claim the central theme to be romance. After all, the main dramatic tension should have something to do with the central theme, don't you think?

One example of a VN I read that does this almost right is Taleweaver's 'Adrift'. I found it very notable how, even though you had to decide to 'go for' a character, the other characters don't simply disappear into the background, a grave mistake which many VNs tend to make.