Posts Tagged Online Writing

A new year always makes me think about what I want to get accomplished in the coming months. This blog was one of those projects last year. This year, I’m considering starting a webserial.

I’m feeling so inspired by fellow writers such as Heidi Cautrell, Nancy Brauer, Vanessa Brooks, and others who are offering excellent, original, serialized webfiction all over the place these days.

I’m still sorting through a handful of ideas and haven’t finalized anything yet, but my fiction tends to be somewhere between sci-fi and fantasy, not just one or the other.  I tend to subscribe to Arthur C. Clarke‘s idea that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and a lot of what I write tends to have an element of that philosophy within it.

I’m probably looking at posting once a week, perhaps more as I’ve got the time, but once a week will be my goal.  I am hoping to have the website, introduction, and first “chapter” up by sometime next week. (That is, if I can choose between the three ideas I’m batting around.)

I will, of course, need some handy volunteers as beta readers and critics, and I’m certainly happy to return the favor.

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RPGs (either pen-and-paper or online) and fanfiction are hardly the greatest sources of literature available, and have suitable reputations among the literary establishment for being exactly the opposite.  You can easily find some of the worst writing you have ever seen among either community, and without much effort.  The vast majority of role-playing stories, forum roleplay, or fanfiction writing tends to be written by young adolescents playing at writing stories.

There is of course some excellent fanfiction to be found, and a number of authors such as Cassandra Clare and Naomi Novik began as fanfiction writers.  I’m sure there are more that just don’t admit to it. I’ve written my own share of fanfiction here and there and actively roleplay on a number of games.

I’ve always thought that both have a great potential for being good educational resources for aspiring writers: both as a way to practice by dabbling in a universe not your own and without pressure, and as examples of what not to do.

So here’s a few lessons taken from these incredibly humble proving grounds:

• The Character’s the Thing:
  • While a decent plot is essential, a good character is what people will remember first and foremost, and really good characters can keep readers interested even at points when the plot itself may be a bit weak. Good, believable, multi-dimensional characters, much more than plot, can be the foundation-stone of your story and can hold it up on their shoulders when it gets weak.
  • Avoid the dreaded and despised Mary Sue!  A Mary Sue (or sometimes Gary Stu/Marty Stu for male characters) is usually a self-insertion, but a self-insertion of the way the writer wishes he or she really was. Perfect, popular, loved by all of the other characters in the story, capable of solving every problem, and with no faults whatsoever.  Where a good character can carry a weak story, the Mary Sue will send even good stories crashing to the ground.
    • Self insertions can work, if the character is believable and three-dimensional and realistic, but it is generally not advised in any situation.
• There Are No New Stories, only New Tellings of Old Ones:
  • Your characters won’t be the first to fall in love, go to school, have sex.  They won’t be the first to find themselves in the middle of a war, to fight an evil tyrant of whatever mundane or fantastic abilities, or be the first heroes to ever save a life.  Some of the best stories are where the author finds the common thread at the center of those old and over-used plots and twists it. (An excellent example of this is the TV series Dexter, which takes the now cliche and over-done forensic detective series and turns the hero scientist into a serial killer.)
• Sometimes the bad criticism is the best kind:
  • As flattering as it is to get a hundred “OMG I LOVE THIS FIC!” type reviews, they don’t really tell you a whole lot about how you actually did or how good your writing is.   Embrace the bad reviews.  Love them. Whatever you do, don’t ignore them!  Even the most malicious may have at its core some good suggestions for how you may become a better writer.  At the very least, you can use these reviews as an impetus to keep writing and keep getting better to prove that reviewer wrong.

You can learn as much (and possibly more) about writing from reading bad fiction as from reading masterpieces.  Unfortunately, fanfiction, in particular, tends to raise the ire of publishers (less so with most actual authors) due to intellectual property issues.  The fanficcers are generally doing it as a way to dabble in the worlds that they had grown to love and to keep that all-too special magic of a good story  going just a little bit longer, and never get any money from it, but publishers see plagiarists and imitation is only a sincere form of flattery when you’re not going to get sued for it.

I would love to see fanfiction used as a tool in the classroom, as a way to encourage creativity and a way to practice writing skills.  I think it could be a wonderful resource, even if using it just to compare the good writers with the bad and what makes each work or not work.  When a young writer can identify what doesn’t work in someone else’s writing, they’re one step closer to fixing what doesn’t work in their own.

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There seems to be a good many self-publishing services cropping up over the web, but I have to take them with a grain of salt. Regardless of how you do it, self-publishing is rarely a good way to get your book seen if you want it to hit mainstream audiences.

There are, however, a few good things that you can do with self-publishing.  My grandfather has a book that he treasures which lists our family genealogy back 500 years, with a history of the family researched and written up by a cousin who is a genealogy hobbyist. He’s also the one who went to the trouble of having hardcover editions of this book printed.  The book can mean little to nothing to anyone outside our family, will never be sold at a bookstore, and will never have much more than a few dozen issues printed.

That is one of the areas where self-publishing is useful and works well.   In these days of the E-Book, it is entirely possible for an author to self-publish without much cost whatsoever (as I plan to do, publishing my first novel as an e-book under creative commons).  However, this is more of a good way to get exposure in the publishing community than to actually…make a living off of your writing.

Unfortunately, to do that, you’ve still got to do it the hard way.  There may be a lucky few who self-publish and make it to the big leagues . . . but they are just that, lucky.  Especially without the assistance of a professional, experienced editor,even if you self-publish through a service that places your book at Amazon, it is unlikely that it will sell more than a few copies, much less gain the notice of critics.

I tend to take the same tack as Stephen King when it comes to editing: “To write is human, to edit is divine.”  Many times, it is the editor who can take what might be a mediocre, or just moderately good, piece of work and turn it into a great piece of writing.  Authors, myself included, have a tendency to treat our work as a sacred child, and sometimes it is necessary to cut out even your best loved passages to make a story work.

For what they provide, these self-publishing services do what they do well and offer a convenience that was hard to come by before, however a writer should not go to them expecting to be the next New York Times bestseller or to make a million dollars off of it.

After all, if you’ve come to writing in the first place expecting to be a millionaire….you’re probably writing for the wrong reasons anyway.

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As I was saying before I was interrupted by the Firefox 3.5 update.

I haven’t done one of my random all-encompassing update posts in a while, though, and I don’t have any real over-arching theme for today, so here goes some randomness:

• Remember that comic artist friend of mine, Steph Sakurai (aka S. Cherrywell), that I’ve mentioned on and off here? Well, she’s found a publisher for her first print book at Slavelabor Graphics, an indy comic publisher known for dark humor, but also for their contract work on several Disney properties, including Gargoyles. Steph’s book is due out in January, so start looking for it in your comic shops then!  I’ll have more information, and possibly some cover art previews for you closer to the release date. (For Steph’s webcomics, see Intragalactic and Gorgeous Princess Creamy Beamy)
• I’ve submitted a story to the NPR/New Yorker Three-Minute Fiction contest. If you’re a writer and have something short enough to submit, you should too! It should be any piece of short fiction that can be read in three minutes or less (about 500-600 words), and the winner will be read on national NPR stations.  Once the contest is over, I’ll be putting a copy of the piece up here on my portfolio.
• The hastily declared National GLBT Month of June has passed without comment here, rather as I expected.  Pride parades never seem to make it to small town bible thumping Georgia.  It was a nice gesture on the President’s part, but nothing more than a gesture. I can see both sides of the issue here, the President not wanting to endanger other issues by coming out too heavily on the side of Gay Rights, and the people who complain that what he’s done is no where near enough.
• The costumes still aren’t started, but I have a good picture in my head now of what I want, and fortunately it won’t take nearly as much work or time as The Giant Pink Dress.  Bryant’s costume may still change, however. Looking for some more ideas.
• The cats are being cats. This morning “Brother-Mew” decided he wanted to go to work with me again and went marching out into the garage in front of me and waiting for me at the car.  I  considered asking my boss if we could possibly employ him for part time “work snuggies.”
• Finally, before I bore you all completely to death, a quick congratulations goes out to Kari of Mythbusters on the birth of her baby, Neil Gaiman for winning the Locus award, and my boss for managing to make it through a whole vacation only calling the office once a day.  A fond farewell to Blogatelle, one of the best WoW RP blogs I’ve ever seen. That site, even non-updated, will continue to be a resource that I send new roleplayers to for information for as long as it remains.

And that’s that.  I promise I’ll have, you know, an actual topic when I post again Friday.

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