Writer's Corner: Writing for fun and profit (but mostly fun)

[CarpeGuitarrem]

I think if you're gonna break a rule, know why the rule exists and then break it for a reason. Until then, the rules are there for a reason, because some stuff works and some doesn't. You'll eventually have to learn why they work (and when to break them), of course.

Of course, that makes you an editor's nightmare. You should always listen to your editor.

[AdmiralCheez]

Of course, that makes you an editor's nightmare. You should always listen to your editor.

Yup, your editor can tell you what works, what doesn't, what's confusing, etc. After all, they're a member of your audience reading your story for the first time. You, on the other hand, have the benefit of knowing everything you were trying to do, and thus are biased.

[Mx.Silver]

I think it depends a lot on the rule. I brought it up more with regard to ideas like giving characters an interest unrelated to plot; it's not exactly bad advice, but following it really won't help make a bad work (or even just a bad character) any less bad and breaking is rarely the reason a bad work is bad. It's useful to keep in mind, but there's really no obligation to follow it.

I will say, with regard to following and diverging from conventional wisdom more generally, diverging from conventional wisdom is probably more likely to lead an inexperienced writer to produce a bad product, but I think it's more likely to produce a bad product they can learn from.

Yes, but what they'll be learning most of that time are things that were already known. As a species we've been writing for centuries. At least consider the possibility that some of these have become guidelines for a reason. By all means experiment, but those experiments are far more likely to work if you understand the tools you're messing around with.

I don't know if I've ever scoffed at them in the context of revising a concept, really. I think I just kind of scoff at them in general.

I remember on one of the first days of a high school creative writing class, my teacher told us you couldn't kill off the main character if the story was told in the first person; otherwise, how would they be narrating it? This wasn't in response to me, or anyone else in the class, having done so or planning to do so. It was just a guideline we were given one day, I maybe even as an example of how there are "rules" of writing. I don't really recall the circumstances, I just recall the color of her face when my "finger exercise" that day was a scene depicting two goofy academics discussing their perspectives on Sunset Blvd, As I Lay Dying, Survivor, The Lovely Bones, and so on.

More astute observers will notice that none of those were written by teenage schoolchildren*.

That attitude is precisely what I'm talking about: the ignorance/arrogance that when you think of comparisons to your body of work which does not even exist yet you immediately jump to classics. Not seeing anything wrong with the thought: "if it worked for William Faulkner then why shouldn't it apply to me?"
Never considering that Christopher Paolini, Stephanie Meyer, etc. thought the same way. Or even if you did, not letting yourself extrapolate from that.

Not considering that by pre-emptively putting your own (potential) work on that sort of pedestal you are setting yourself up for much more disappointment when you discover that your early writing is crap. Which it will be.



That's really the essence of it. When you start writing you are going to be bad at it(just like if you were taking up drawing or painting). Don't be too quick to throw away advice on how to be less bad out of some Dunning-Kruger induced sense of pride. Flexing your skills require that you've actually built some up. And to that end: write something. Also read things, but more importantly write something.


*while more generous observers might have wondered if said advice was intended to discourage students from killing off the first-person narrator in stories that weren't specifically based around the concept of the narrator dying or being dead.

Yup, your editor can tell you what works, what doesn't, what's confusing, etc. After all, they're a member of your audience reading your story for the first time. You, on the other hand, have the benefit of knowing everything you were trying to do, and thus are biased.

Indeed. Hell, any form of involved criticism is going to be useful, regardless of whether they're a professional editor or just another member of your writing group.

[Zrak]

Yes, but what they'll be learning most of that time are things that were already known. As a species we've been writing for centuries. At least consider the possibility that some of these have become guidelines for a reason. By all means experiment, but those experiments are far more likely to work if you understand the tools you're messing around with.

I didn't say not to consider them. In fact, I specifically said to do so. I said not to feel obligated to follow them.

More astute observers will notice that none of those were written by teenage schoolchildren*.

Hopefully, these observers will be astute enough to notice the abject irrelevance of this fact, considering that works written by teenage schoolchildren in which the narrator survives are not held in comparable esteem to any of the selected works. As such, the message to take away is not that one shouldn't kill narrators, but that one shouldn't be a teenage schoolchild.

That attitude is precisely what I'm talking about: the ignorance/arrogance that when you think of comparisons to your body of work which does not even exist yet you immediately jump to classics.

You are drawing inferences unsupported by the text. I did not compare my body of work to anything. The only reference to my work, in fact, described to a finger exercise narrated in omniscient third person. You may be confusing something I said with something you wished I had said because it would have supported your point.
Also, let's not go calling Survivor (although it's probably the best work in Palahniuk's dude-smell-this-it's-gross oeuvre) or The Lovely Bones "classics."

Not seeing anything wrong with the thought: "if it worked for William Faulkner then why shouldn't it apply to me?"
Never considering that Christopher Paolini, Stephanie Meyer, etc. thought the same way. Or even if you did, not letting yourself extrapolate from that.

If either of them had actually thought that, their books would at least be a more interesting kind of bad. If they thought the same way, but about other writers, maybe they should have looked at what worked for better writers.
I mean, I'm not even trying to contest the point, I don't think. I just think it's pretty obvious from looking at their actual writing that trying to be Faulkner was not the problem.

Not considering that by pre-emptively putting your own (potential) work on that sort of pedestal you are setting yourself up for much more disappointment when you discover that your early writing is crap. Which it will be.

Again, I don't really see where you have the idea that I am placing my work, actual or potential, on any pedestal. My work has nothing to do with this; the fact that my early writing would be (and was) crap whether I followed that rule or not is relevant; the fact that whether or not I eventually stop(ped) writing crap would have nothing to with whether or not I follow the rule is relevant; but what I actually think of my work or potential work doesn't really matter.

[Mx.Silver]

You are drawing inferences unsupported by the text. I did not compare my body of work to anything. The only reference to my work, in fact, described to a finger exercise narrated in omniscient third person. You may be confusing something I said with something you wished I had said because it would have supported your point.

I'm using the specific instance as a jumping-off point to talk about a general attitude. The 'you' throughout that section is unspecified, rather than referring to (past) Zrak in particular.
Sorry if that wasn't clear (quite a few posts I make post-midnight sometimes lack for clarity).

EDIT: Actually, looking back on it, my post does come across as being needlessly antagonistic. Sorry about that.

[Zrak]

Haha, no worries. I really was confused, since the "you" in your post didn't seem like say or believe the things I said. Sorry if my response therefore came across as overly defensive.

[Yora]

This is a fairly reasonable question. On some level, your answer is all that's really needed to justify doing it, but to be particular, there's actually a good narrative reason to justify some of my choices. I'll provide an example.

Spoiler: Mostly irrelevant justifications.

Show

Elves have a mostly tribal society with a natural spiritualist culture. Their creator god doesn't like humans corrupting nature with invention/pollution/industry. Since those things are a part of human nature, the god made a non-human race specifically to provide additional psychological distance from humans and ensure their culture remains separate from humans so their society remains tribal hunter-gatherer (or early agrarian) as long as possible an in balance with the natural world.

Effectively, it's meant as a measure to prevent other cultures/philosophy from mixing too much with elves and corrupting the creator god's original intentions. This sort of explanation could be used to justify any non-human or unique race's purpose in any general setting (ones with creator gods, at least). But I feel that this particular use is especially sensible because it ties into the creator god's sense of a moral philosophy needing to resist the evils of being out of balance with nature, so to speak. There's one other non-human race that exists for that same reason.

There's also a couple aquatic races around because they were created to live within an oceanic region. So they exist that way to make the best use of their given native habitat.

There's minor things like flight having a symbolic meaning for a race of fliers and their sense of a freedom-y moral philosophy, but it's not really the sort of thing that is strictly necessary for the culture to make them physically distinct from regular humans. In that case, the symbolism is there, but it's not quite the same as the elven god's intentions for the race partly being backed by their creation.

Although there's not necessarily a strict literary need for these choices, I think it also adds flavor to a setting and makes it feel more fantastic, colorful and full of life. And that for its own sake, is another perfectly valid reason.

My main reason why the world has elves because to some degree the overall concept is "Generic Fantasy World, 4,000 ya". The world where dragons, giants, lizardmen, and elves are the big players in the world. Almost all fantasy with nonhumans is set in a Tolkien-like world. Dragons are gone, elves are leaving, and dwarves become irrelevant, with humans taking over everything. But those setting tend to have a period in the distant past, where elves and dwarves build great kingdoms and fought against dragons and giant. Such an age seems a lot more interesting than one in which all the fantastic elements are going away.
The main role of elves in my concept is to communicate it to the audience that these stories are set in such a world. (Similar for the dwarf-gnome-helfling-hybrids, which for simplicity are simply called gnomes, but I already have some good ideas to make them feel nonhuman.) It's a good reason to have the elves, but doesn't really offer much in ways to make them behave different.

[Math_Mage]

Well, some ways I would approach the question:

• Are there humans in this setting? What peculiarities attach to their behavior/society? How would an elf answer the previous question?
• Are your elves long-lived? (By a human's standards, or a dragon's?) If so, how does their lifespan affect their attitude towards short-lived races, children, danger, death, etc.?
• Is there magic in the setting? If so, how much, and what do elves do with it?
• How did elves come to be?

[Yora]

• The main population of humans are the descendants of nomads from a distant land that settled down to become vassals/mercenaries for wars among the elven clan chiefs. The two minor ones live on tropical islands dominated by lizardmen, and as semi-nomadic reindeer herders in the tundra. The elves also live in clans, though some of the bigger ones have kings, and they have a handful of small cities. The humans have one large fortress, no own cities, and also no ships, even though long-distance travel and trade is mostly by sea.
• Not particularly. (three to four human lifetimes)
• Like everyone else (shamans, skalds, and elementalists)
• Like everyone else (evolved from animals)

You can see the little problem here.There isn't anything inherently special about elves, and this is kind of important. The only real cultural advantages elves have is that they simply started earlier than anyone else (except lizardmen, whose culture is just as old).
I think the best approach would probably be something like Vulcans or Qunari. Normal people with some quite unusual cultural norms. But ideally
it would be something based on biological trait and not just social values which would work just the same in a human culture.

[Math_Mage]

One body, two hands, two eyes, two ears, one head, hairless, disappointingly symmetrical, not much in the way of gender polymorphism...well, some things are out. Hm.

Random offers: reproductive biology (what if they lay eggs? Presumably they don't have the Moties' problem with explosive reproductive rates--would they cull children? By trial, or by war? Maybe they only have one reproductive cycle in their lifetime?). Sleep cycle (maybe they sleep three minutes in ten, or three months). Sensory perception (maybe they can see magical energy, but not color). Diet. I dunno, just throwing stuff off the top of my head.

[Grinner]

I'm not sure if this will help the ongoing discussion, but the Story Bundle is having a sale on writing guides (including one by the aforementioned Chuck Wendig) in preparation for NaNoWriMo.

Just thought you all might like to know.

[Mx.Silver]

My main reason why the world has elves because to some degree the overall concept is "Generic Fantasy World, 4,000 ya". The world where dragons, giants, lizardmen, and elves are the big players in the world. Almost all fantasy with nonhumans is set in a Tolkien-like world. Dragons are gone, elves are leaving, and dwarves become irrelevant, with humans taking over everything. But those setting tend to have a period in the distant past, where elves and dwarves build great kingdoms and fought against dragons and giant. Such an age seems a lot more interesting than one in which all the fantastic elements are going away.
The main role of elves in my concept is to communicate it to the audience that these stories are set in such a world. (Similar for the dwarf-gnome-helfling-hybrids, which for simplicity are simply called gnomes, but I already have some good ideas to make them feel nonhuman.) It's a good reason to have the elves, but doesn't really offer much in ways to make them behave different.

So, your reason for having elves is to make it obvious that your setting is a take on Generic Fantasyland?

Well, it would certainly accomplish that.

[Yora]

No. Please continue reading after the first half-line. There is of course much more to it, but I don't think it useful to dump a big worldbuilding document here just for this conversation. No need to be insulting.

[Mx.Silver]

No. Please continue reading after the first half-line.

I did.

There is of course much more to it, but I don't think it useful to dump a big worldbuilding document here just for this conversation. No need to be insulting.

'Generic Fantasy World' was your own phrase
I suppose 'yet another' might have come off as a bit harsh though, so I've removed that.

[-Sentinel-]

If anyone's interested, a NaNoWriMo thread is up.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Grinner
I'm not sure if this will help the ongoing discussion, but the Story Bundle is having a sale on writing guides (including one by the aforementioned Chuck Wendig) in preparation for NaNoWriMo.

Thanks for posting this; I'd never heard of Story Bundle before. Looks interesting, it's appreciated.

[Grinner]

Thanks for posting this; I'd never heard of Story Bundle before. Looks interesting, it's appreciated.

Ah...You've been missing out...I'm so sorry.

[Yora]

Random offers: reproductive biology (what if they lay eggs? Presumably they don't have the Moties' problem with explosive reproductive rates--would they cull children? By trial, or by war? Maybe they only have one reproductive cycle in their lifetime?). Sleep cycle (maybe they sleep three minutes in ten, or three months). Sensory perception (maybe they can see magical energy, but not color). Diet. I dunno, just throwing stuff off the top of my head.

One way to approach it, which could be quite interesting, would be to consider what their culture regards as virtues and vices.

For example, the gnomes in my setting are physically inferior to pretty much all other humanoids and they know it. To have a real chance in warfare they need to pick their fights carefully and simply can't afford to fight in unfavorable circumstances. While other races may put high value in defending ones honor or at least get out of a dangerous situation that allows one to save face, this means very little to gnomes. A gnome commander who decides to keep fighting for honor rather than to run away when things start to look really bad is not an asset for his people, but a liability.
Other races might see gnomes as treacherous and cowards, but pulling off a fake rout to lure a stronger enemy into an ambush would be praiseworthy as gnomes see it.

The lizard people lay clutches of eggs and young are raised together by caretakers. Infant mortality is not something they would lose a lot of sleep over, since they don't have a close connection to each of their own offspring. Might look cold hearted and uncaring to others, but its something that can be understood in some way.

All action works towards some intended result, and which results are prefered over others depends entirely on the values of a society. I think if you come up with just a few odd cultural values for a society and keep it in mind as you write the characters and their culture, things will simply snowball into all kinds of unusual behavior. And I think it might be quite rewarding for readers to think about what these nonhuman characters are doing and make the conclusion that it makes kind off sense in light of their values.

[Yora]

I got another thought on the subject on using nonhumans, particularly elves, dwarves, and orcs.

Even though there is commonly strong opposition to "humans with pointy ears", I think the main reason we see them so often is because they have basically become public domain cultures. You can't just take a human culture someone invented and put them into your own work without being called out for just copying it, but you can do that with the generic nonhuman races. And that's why wood elves, high elves, dark elves, dwarves, and orcs always seem to be so very similar in every setting without major changes in their culture. What people really like about the races is their culture!
And when you look at fantasy settings, there are huge numbers of cultures that really are just straight Vikings, Mongols, Aztecs, and Japanese. Amazons also fall into this category, being both a human culture (though mostly fictional) and fictional race. The choice to have wood elves in your setting is the same choice as having vikings.

If faced with the question of having a human culture that lives in the forest and is good at archery, or making them elves, the real thing to ask yourself is whether you want to explain the entire culture to your audience from scratch, or if want to start with some common archetypes and only explain what your personal take on it changes. Making the nonhuman characters think and act nonhuman isn't really the point. Using a generic fantasy race is simply a shortcut.

And I think this explains to me why I want to have wood elves in my setting: I like this culture and think I could make a better version of it than I've seen from other writers. And understanding that should make it really easier for me to use elves much more effectively in my stories.

[Grinner]

...Making the nonhuman characters think and act nonhuman isn't really the point. Using a generic fantasy race is simply a shortcut.

And I think this explains to me why I want to have wood elves in my setting: I like this culture and think I could make a better version of it than I've seen from other writers. And understanding that should make it really easier for me to use elves much more effectively in my stories.

By invoking an archetype rather than building the culture from the ground up, you're bringing in a lot of baggage as well, and as we've seen, that invites criticism.

The last couple of years have taught me that making things is hard, but you only get as much out as you put in. Whether you use the generic fantasy race shortcut or not, your wood elves need to be much more than plain old wood elves. If you go the shortcut route, that doesn't mean you don't have to put in the work detailing them; it just means you're pushing the work you need to do back a bit.

Or you could choose not to put in the effort, but that leaves one question: "Are you happy with that?"

[Math_Mage]

By invoking an archetype rather than building the culture from the ground up, you're bringing in a lot of baggage as well, and as we've seen, that invites criticism.

The last couple of years have taught me that making things is hard, but you only get as much out as you put in. Whether you use the generic fantasy race shortcut or not, your wood elves need to be much more than plain old wood elves. If you go the shortcut route, that doesn't mean you don't have to put in the work detailing them; it just means you're pushing the work you need to do back a bit.

Or you could choose not to put in the effort, but that leaves one question: "Are you happy with that?"

I doubt any writer goes to work thinking, "You know, I really want to do a stale take on elves this time."

[Yora]

Yes, but your vikings also need to be more than just vikings and your evil sorcerer more than just an evil sorcerer.

Shortcuts are not necessarily laziness, and there are very good reasons to use them. An important part of fantasy and science fiction is for the audience to learn about the world and come to understand how it works as the story progresses. But paradoxically, readers generally don't like info dumps and find it much more enjoyable to have a steady but small stream of new details as the story goes on. The more new stuff you have in a world, the higher you need to dial the influx of new information for readers to make sense of what's going on. The more familiar elements you have, the more amount of page space you can devote to plot. Setting information and plot progress are competing with each other for space, and as a writer you need to find a good balance between the two. By using shortcuts such as Vikings, elves, and space-nazis, you can draw on knowledge the reader already has and that doesn't need to be repeated in the pages. That way you can increase the pacing of the story or use the freed space to introduce other elements of the setting without increasing overall exposition bloat.

If you use a setting in which nothing is familiar and everythig new and original, yuo either have to subject the readers to big info dumps or leave them confused about what's going on. Shortcuts by making use of common memes and tropes are a hugely valuable tool to achieve a good balance of depth and pacing. But of course you really need to think well at which places you chose shortcuts and where you are better of with devoting some paragraphs for exposition,
As with pretty much all writing advice, it's a tool you have at hand, which is good to know in case you might need it. It's never a rule how something needs to be done. But in the case of elves, dwarves,orcs, and Vikings, it seems to be a tool that many people like to use, even if they can't say why.

[jseah]

The more familiar elements you have, the more amount of page space you can devote to plot. Setting information and plot progress are competing with each other for space, and as a writer you need to find a good balance between the two.

The worst part with this effect is that you are better off doing something that is completely new than "Elves with a twist". Explaining how "my elves are different" is very hard.

This is not to say that all-new fantasy creations aren't hard to write without being boring infodumps either.

Real world setting stories have it easy. Especially modern world settings. -.-

If you use a setting in which nothing is familiar and everythig new and original, yuo either have to subject the readers to big info dumps or leave them confused about what's going on.

This one is quite bad for me. I found that the setting I was using was far too original in that an infodump to explain everything might be 500-1000 words long.

The original version of the story had something like 6k words and 5 chapters of character introductions in different situations just to showcase different portions of the setting. Let's just say that taking that long to get to anything happening doesn't work.

[BeerMug Paladin]

I doubt any writer goes to work thinking, "You know, I really want to do a stale take on elves this time."

Actually, I did something fairly similar with the elves I mentioned before in my setting. Elves are basically designed to look like a physical mary sue race, because their creator god made them look that way. They frequently have two differently colored eyes (heterochromia) and their hair always grows in two colors, often vibrant. They age very well and they've got an athletic build and tend to be tall and slender.

Usually, if there's a mary sue in a fantasy setting, they're an elf.

[Yora]

The main question is what response you want to get from the reader. If you want the reader to hate a certain group of characters, then this can work really well.
Where things just break apart is when the reader is presented with a lot of facts and details about something which lead to disliking the characters in question, but the author keeps saying between the lines that every reader should totally love them. The readers aversion to the book is not because the characters are unlikeable, but because the author keeps telling them what they are supposed to feel. That's when a Mary Sue in the strictest sense become an object of hate.

And why is it that so many people see that a work has elves and dwarves and go "Oh please no, not another story about elves and dwarve" *roll eyes*, but almost nobody ever questions it when a story has knights, wizards, and demons. These are just as optional as elves and dwarves are, are probably actually used much more often, but tend to be taken for granted with no objections. I do roll my eyes when I see a story that is about an assassin, but that seems to be just my personal thing, not something that is widely common among fantasy fans in general.
I personally would suspect that the main reason for that is because people who latch on to an archetype and badly praise its greatness to no end, tend to pick elves as the target of their obsession more often than any other fantasy archetype. But I wouldn't say elves are overused. Knights are used much more frequently and have even less variance of the theme, and nobody would call those overused. It's probably actually just because there are more high profile cases of really terribly portrayed elves than of anything else.

[Dhavaer]

Well, published my short story up on Smashwords. *crosses fingers*

[Zrak]

I don't know if I really buy the comparison you're making with knights. The knights in The Once and Future King alone have more thematic variance than the Dwarves in basically all of fantasy literature. Elves get a little more variety than Dwarves, but knights as a whole probably still vary more in theme. Otherwise, it's not really fair to compare a class/occupation to an entire species; Elves can have more variety in terms of their jobs and skills than knights tend to have, since "knight" tends to imply a set occupation and set of skills. Nonetheless, when the reader is introduced to an elf, the reader probably has a much better idea, regardless of the elf's skills and occupation, as to what kind of character the elf is going to be and how s/he will function in the text than they do when they are introduced to, say, Sandor Clegane or T.H. White's Gawaine.

I think the real problem isn't with having non-human characters but with the fact that the characterization of non-humans tends to be limited to, or at the very least overly limited by, their species. In typical fantasy fiction, Elves or Dwarves or whatever don't have the cultural or even personal diversity that humans do; not only do elves and (especially) dwarves tend have a sing species-spanning culture, but it's a very homogeneous one, at that.

[Yora]

My claim is that a lot of people don't treat elves as a culture, but as a character archetype. That people tend to do more variations of the knight archetype than with the elf archetype could be true and seems likely. But that would be a case of writers giving more effort to giving knights more individuality, not because of any inherent difference between the archetypes.

[Zrak]

Oh, yeah, then I agree entirely. I think "elf" being a character archetype sort of comes from the idea of "elf" being a culture. It's always been weird to me, when I read fantasy, that each demi-human species seems to have a single, species-wide culture, perhaps two cultures if there is an "always evil" variety.

[Yora]

Certainly doesn't help that the elves of Tolkien lack almost any trace of personalty. Even in the Silmarilion, it mostly comes down to wise Elf-knights and arrogrant Crusader-elves.