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farlaSo. The Guide to Writing Non-Sucky Pokemon Fan Fiction doesn't look any less sucky today than yesterday.
I came across this while I was checking back on a bunch of stories I reviewed earlier to see what the other readers had thought. One such story was What type? which is a cutesy story, passable enough, with one major story issue and a couple of grammar errors. I noticed someone else had left a critical review along the lines of mine, only more abrasive and with less actual explanation. (Although I'm typically accused of being unfairly cruel, reviews like this indicate I'm a lot closer to middle than harsh on the overall continuum) But hey, thinking reviewer!...with the staggeringly mature name of Stinkoman20X6. Huh.
Following up on this apparent incongruity, I discovered that they were male, seventeen, and, as their seven-digit account number suggested, a moderately recent arrival, signing up on late January of this year.
Well. Not only is age not really much of an indicator of immaturity online these days, but seventeen is well into the upper ranges of the pokemon community anyway. Recently joining doesn't mean much of anything either - they could easily have plenty of experience elsewhere, and arrived at FFN only now. (Although it's more generally the other way around, as far as I can tell)
And, scrolling slightly further down. I see they're writing a pokemon fanfic guide. So a somewhat older writer (at least for this community) who cares about good writing. What can this be but positive? (My learning curve on this matter is pathetic, I admit) So I scroll an inch further to see what wonderful stories they must write.
Huh. One. Written this March and not updated past the first chapter. And it's their first story.
And it's an Ash/Misty story. (My personal misgivings about the subgenre aside, Ash/Misty stories tend to have little in common with the pokemon fandom in particular, tending to have more to do with the general pan-fandom rules that cover virtually all romantic writing instead. Although it's perhaps unfair, I'd question someone's qualifications to write a Pokemon Fanfic Guide without ever writing a story where the pokemon world is a noticeable part of it.)
But that may well be a general bias against Ash/Misty writers that makes me suspicious about the quality. After all, they may well have a good grasp of overall pokemon fiction and a well thought out guide.
So I check it out.
And I swear, it's like there is some kind of law that every time someone tries to write a pokemon fanfic guide, it must contain multiple, crippling flaws.
It's set up to be twenty-one chapters, although most of the chapters aren't written yet. (One would think this would mean he wouldn't link to unwritten chapters, but...it appears it's also a rule that all sites hosting pokemon fanfic guides must be unnavigable in some way. If they're not half-covered in oversized graphics, you need link problems. At least there's no hot pink font on white backgrounds.)
Chapter the first, and already, we're not off to an auspicious start.
It starts off saying most pokemon fanfiction sucks. Why?
Because of this, the large majority of Pokémon fans are young, immature, and have under-developed writing skills. Obviously, this is a gross generalization (I and many of my friends of high school and college age still enjoy Pokémon), but it is still a fact.
If it's a gross generalization, then no, it's not a fact.
The pokemon category does have younger writers. However, to be fair, "younger" covers people well into high school and even college. Harry Potter, say, has a lot of adult writers as part of it, which Pokemon doesn't. The high-schoolers are not saving the category. They're writing plenty of the crap. People my age and even older are not automatically the good writers, and people younger than me are not automatically the damn noobs ruining it for the rest of us.
But, well, perhaps it's more poor wording than anything.
Except that a mere two paragraphs later, I read,
While this guide is intended for people writing Pokémon fan fiction, in reality almost all of the rules and suggestions made apply to any sort of fiction-writing. I will use examples from Pokémon fan fiction and talk about specific issues of that fandom, but otherwise this guide can help anybody trying to become a better writer.
Well then, it's not really a guide to writing pokemon fanfiction, now is it? In fact, it's not even a guide to writing fanfiction.
I might even go so far as to say it's not even a guide that applies to pokemon fanfiction, as anyone competent enough to write a guide would be competent enough to understand that pokemon fanfiction in particular, and fanfiction in general, are not completely identical to original fiction, and that a guide relating specifically to either would need chapters addressing the particular bits that are unique to those. Ignoring this suggests that the guide's writer is not a good enough writer to even be aware of those distinctions.
My experience writing fan fiction, however, is severely limited. Some of you may think that I am unqualified to write this guide, but this is not the case. I am a very knowledgeable writer (I hesitate to call myself a good one), but I am primarily bad at writing fiction because I have no imagination. That does not, however, stop me from recognizing good fiction or from knowing how best to write good fiction.
I propose a third fandom law, if you don't mind. First we have Yami-chan going around blurring the distinction between "constructive criticism" and "being a bitch" (as well as "harassment"). Now we have someone apparently hellbent on disproving the statement that reviewers are still qualified to give advice if they aren't writers.
Preemptively: reviewing is based on what you feel about what you read. You're giving advice on making it better to read. Giving advice on how to write itself is where the issue of "but do you know jack shit about writing?!" starts to get a bit harder to avoid.
Still hoping that when we actually get to the advice, it won't be too bad? Not to worry, the next chapter should dissuade you of that, and without even getting to the advice!
See, a first chapter consisting entirely of introductions wasn't slow enough. Instead, we have Chapter 2: Glossary of Important Terms, in which our cutting-edge writer defines such confusing words as "fanfiction", then a couple general terms like POV, then some romance-only terms like Shipping, and then finally Lemon (understandable in itself, but it's virtually the only term of the type he bothers defining, which makes it...odd he found it so important).
And because finishing and cleaning up your work isan important part of writing for suckers, despite this being a posted guide, he's left in placeholders for future links, ending most definitions with discussed in more detail in CHAPTER.
Then we end with the proof that he is not at all qualified to write a guide on fanfic.
And, finally, the following terms are those that I wish weren't on this list, but, unfortunately, they do exist and I feel obligated to define them:
drabble - A drabble is a fanfic (I hesitate to call it a "story") of exactly 100 words. More commonly, "drabble" is used to refer to any very short story that, rather than having a plot, displays an emotioinal snapshot of some character. Because I believe that the drabble is really a very lame variety of story, I do not use the term or recognize the form. Instead, for very short stories, I have developed my own term, the "über-short," as discussed further in Chapter 11: Story Length - The Long and the Über-short of It.
Pokémorph - I shudder as I write this, but it is a sacrifice I as an author am required to make. A Pokémorph is a creature that is a combination of a Pokémon and a human. It is essentially the Pokémon equivalent of a furry. (If you don't know what a furry is, consider yourself lucky.) Pokémorphs (and the stories that include them) are very popular in furry circles, and should be avoided at all costs.
To anyone else ever intending to write something like this:
I do not fucking care what your hangups are. You do not get to say entire sections of the fandom should not exist because they are icky.
You don't like emotional snapshots? Fine. Some people don't like cookie-cutter romance, yet I don't say AAML shouldn't exist. You think the term is commonly used to refer to emotional snapshots in general? I think AAML is commonly used to refer to original fiction, but I don't claim that's the term's use. You don't like what that a majority of them are? Fine. You don't make up your own damn term for the subset you like and say the rest doesn't count. There are some valid problems with a lot of drabble writing. "I like reading long AAMRN" or "I hate emotions" is not one of them.
And I'm not touching the pokemorph bit.
So, we haven't even gotten to any actual advice. After that last bit, your standards should be pretty low. Perhaps that's the master plan? A number of otherwise well-done guides and stories have slow, plodding, even outright stupid openings. It remains possible that some of the advice will be good...right?
Chapter 3: General Writing Advice - And Your Bird Can Write opens with the jar-dropping piece of advice.
Take your time. This is something that people do not do nearly enough. Why do you think that novels are so much more fun to read than government reports, even though they may oftentimes be of similar length? Because authors of novels (with a few notable exceptions) often pour years into their books, while government documents, as well as many works of fan fiction, are hashed together over the course of days or an afternoon. As a result, many works of fan fiction are about as dry and boring as a federal budget report. Taking time to truly craft your piece will give you the chance to analyze it closely, choose metaphors with care, fix any gaping plot holes, and generally polish your work to a lustrous finish.
Yes indeed. Write Congress today and demand all government writers put more time into writing their reports. Then we'll have all the good writing we could ever want!
Next he tells writers to plan out their work, which would be good advice if the opening sentence didn't begin Unless you are writing oneshot (Polishing your work, it appears, is very much one of those do what I say not as I do things) At any rate, much like drabbles, government reports, pokemorph stories, or, by all appearances, anything that's not AAML, he doesn't appear to have ever read one-shots that were long enough to need some minimum planning. Either that, or, as he has, remember, virtually no experience writing, he's never realized plenty of the one-shots he read were planned out. This, you see, is why reviewers, while qualified to discuss the finished story, are not necessarily qualified to disperse writing tips.)
(Did I mention that he's peppering the guide with fanfiction examples? All of which are AAML and only tangentially related to pokemon itself. Remember my suggestion that authors who wrote these kinds of stories were perhaps not that qualified to write a pokemon fanfiction guide? Yeah.)
Finally, he ends the chapter by giving the perfectly good, if by this point trite, advice that it's important to write a lot. This is notable only because he's been giving near-daily updates on his progress on writing the second chapter of his only story, which detail mainly how he has not been writing it.
But slog on I shall, because I'm sick and procrastinating and this is a lovely timewaste.
Chapter 4.1: Spelling - how 2 rite gud opens with Spelling, grammar, and punctuation. This trifecta, this triumvirate of sheer literary brilliance, is what separates the professional from the amateur and the amateur from the idiot and the idiot from the mass-average fan fiction author. Ignoring the abrasive tone, do I even need to point out the idiocy of saying that skill in bare standards of writing apparently is all that divides up writers in ability? Or is everyone else smarter than that?
I certainly hope so. Let's move on.
Blah blah, internet, blah blah I don't understand this isn't a school essay and I don't need padding, blah, more about internet, ah, finally, the advice!...
At the very bottom of the page, it informs you to use spellcheck (does that really need a paragraph explaining, let alone the eight paragraphs leading up to it?), then Read your story backward when editing.
You know, I have to admit, I'd probably have a lot fewer errors if I did this. In part because I'd catch a few more errors (not many - anything spellcheck doesn't catch isn't a misspelling, meaning it's usually the grammar that lets you pick it up, which you won't notice while reading backward) but mainly because if I had to read everything I wrote backward, I'd write a hell of a lot less. If you're not running spellcheck, this would be useful, but if you're too lazy to run spellcheck, I don't think you're much into the whole proofreading scene to start.
Two pieces of advice, one obvious, one inane. He felt this needed an entire section. Last chapter he mentioned the importance of pacing. I guess he's using a Lady Umbra way of getting that across.
We're denied his undoubtedly staggeringly original advice on grammar (and whatever misattributed quote he intends to use there), as he hasn't yet written it despite the link at the bottom "Advance to Chapter 4.2: Grammar - CLEVER TITLE >>>" Yes, it's another placeholder, folks. Aren't you stunned by the effort?
Unfortunately, he has written the next chapter. Chapter 5: Summaries - Tell It Like It Is includes some advice about writing summaries. Not good advice, but that goes without saying at this point, doesn't it?
The basic premise here is actually passable, understandable since heavy readers can usually figure out what's good and bad about summaries. It's presented abysmally, however, combining mechanical errors with the summaries at random even though it's purportedly about how to give information.
More importantly, he's blissfully unaware of the concept of "summary limit". His final version summary is "Ash discovers Team Rocket's latest plan for world domination and must infiltrate their headquarters in order to stop it. But when he realizes he needs the help of his (former) friend and rival Gary Oak, will the duo be able to set aside their differences to stop the organization's sinister plot? R&R.", a mere fifty words over FFN's summary limit. Huh, you think maybe that might be why some writers are a bit too vague in their summaries for your tastes? No, they're just idiots. Keep right on with your useful, useful advice.
He goes on to say that this final version summary isn't quite perfect because it gives away too much of the plot, then never gives an example of what he thinks the perfect summary would be, a pretty glaring omission. Instead, he charges merrily into bitching about the term R&R, stating that the addition of "R&R" at the end ruins what otherwise appears to be a very professional-looking summary. At NO point should you ever include "R&R" in your summaries. The closest thing you should ever have is, if you are attempting to polish a fully-written but uncompleted story, something along the lines of "Please review critically."
Okay, so he's obviously unaware that R&R is less chat-based laziness and more based around letter limits. However, see the second bit of what he's saying? About how you can only say his allowed "please review critically" if it's fully written AND uncompleted?
Yeah. That's stupid on a couple levels. It's an oxymoron, so I'm assuming there's a typo or he thinks the words have different meanings (uncompleted as in not fully posted, say). But he's also saying writers should only ask for reviews except to polish their work, and once that's done, stop.
If that's the real reason people post stories on the internet, I will be very surprised.
Then he gives a short list of things not to ever put in your summary. First is the dreaded R&R (did I miss some reader revolt over the term? What's so infuriating about "read and review"?). Next, "oneshot". Never, ever use the generally accepted term to inform people in your summary that your one-chapter story is complete. Because there are people who like one-shots, and they are all jackasses, so we want them to have as little chance of finding stories they want as possible. In fact, try to write your summary so it sounds like it's the opening chapter to some long five hundred chapter epic that you'll never actually update, which readers who like one-shots usually avoid like the plague. We'll drive those bastards from the fandom yet! They're probably all drabble writing furry perverts anyway. Now, back to some nice, wholesome AAMLemons written by twelve year olds.
Speaking of AAM, the next paragraph contains an interesting line.
If the underlying theme of your story is a budding romance between Ash and May (see CHAPTER on shipping for my opinions on that
Unfortunately, he has not yet written up his opus on what shippings you're allowed to write, so I can't mock it. Yet.
He encourages the NamexName format, which, while understandable, is, first, a lost cause in the fandom, and second, not at all needed. There are only a few shipping names around these days, and they're in general use. People looking for "AshxMisty" are going to search AAML and pokeshipping/pokeshippy. (That, and the NamexName format has a marked tendency to denote a sexual relationship in other fandoms). This point was relevant when it was made years ago. Not so much now.
He goes on to explain how if you're writing any romance story, you MUST include the pairing in the summary (He's also under some interesting delusions: Yes, "Features AshxMay" is a complete sentence, as much as you may not want to believe it. What if I don't want to believe it because it isn't, technically, true?) and continues his ignorance of summary limits (writing just "AshxMay" is, of course, completely unprofessional)
There's some truth to listing pairings being important, but seriously, does anyone think this is a problem writers have? Pairings are overlisted, not under. You see people listing the pairing for stories about love triangles. "Who will she choose, Ash or Gary? (AAML!!!)" is bad. It is not being vague to not resolve the story's basic plot in the summary, kay?
He then lists a few other phrases that can be included in summaries, interestingly, ones I've virtually never seen before and many of which take up a huge amount of space. It looks like he wrote the second bit before the first, because a number of things are rehashes, like when he repeats "AshxMay" and explains that the ship is important in those stories.
He starts off with his bit about "Please review critically", though, which is useful because you can at least understand his reworded explanation: This is good to have for a newer story, but should be removed once you are satisfied with the piece.
Such a good piece of advice!
I, like all writers, never want reviews except for new stories to fix mistakes. You guys who review to say you liked it? I hate you SO MUCH. You bastards.
The link to Chapter Six is even worse than the last dead link. It contains the same "something clever" placeholder, but this one leads back to Chapter Four, meaning he's copy-pasting his layout and didn't bother to fix this stuff. It's about author notes, so I'm assuming it's probably not a huge loss.
The next several chapters don't exist. Only two more, then!
Chapter 11: Story Length - The Long and the Über-short of It. Ah, yes, remember the "uber-short" he mentioned a bit before? Explaining his special "uber-short" is the opening.
Uber-shorts, not being that non-story crap drabblesthat are probably written by furry perverts, are not 100 words, because nothing good can ever be done in a hundred words. Instead, they're between 200 and 1000 words. Huh, you know, I thought we already had a word for short-stories-that-are-longer-than-drabbles. They were called "shorts". More, since when is a thousand words really "uber short"? I mean, seriously, there are 555 pages in the pokemon category right now. If I restrict that to only stories under a thousand words, I get 161 pages of stories. That's more than a third of all the stories posted. It is not a meaningful distinction, is my point.
He goes on to say that when writing any short story, ever, you may never establish context outside of the story. No author note saying "this takes place between X and Y", nothing. I have no idea what author note context did to him, but it must have been a lot more than just run over his dog, because he says it's better to just not establish any timeline context than put a one line author note in. Maybe it ran over his dog and then beat his family to death with the corpse or something, I don't know.
He elaborates that: A good example of this is one of the classic AAML plots, in which Ash and Misty, some night at their campsite, realize their feelings for each other and somehow end up admitting it to each other. The number of stories with this plot structure simply proves that it doesn't matter if they're in Kanto or Hoenn or Johto or Shinnoh or if Ash is 12 and Misty is 14 or if they're both 16 or whether it's eleven at night or two in the morning or six in the morning. When your plot is straightforward and your characters are already established, none of these factors matters. As a result, you can oftentimes get away with simple ignoring these and getting right on with the plot.
Yes. Because those stories are such stellar examples of good writing. Everyone, please write more stories where the characters are so completely indistinguishable that it is impossible to tell when it takes place. Don't describe the setting at all, either. You might accidentally mention that they're camping out near a known city or see one of the pokemon unique to each region or the time or something! Be as vague as possible, because the location can be given away in a mere word or two. Feel free to extend this vagueness to actual canon fact, like age differences. Also, maybe you could throw some misspellings in? Or at least a couple typos, as he masterfully demonstrates.
Anyway, he goes on to lay out the short story (1000-5000 words), the "medium" story (5000-25,000 words) and then the long story (25,000-200,000) (I'm pretty sure he just picked arbitrary boundaries that he liked) and says some generic stuff about them. He seems to be under the impression most writers try to write to a particular word limit, and talks about what you can and can't fit into such stories, rather than realizing that most writers try to write the story and find out how long it is by checking the word count later.
Then, because I guess the incompetence quota wasn't covered by the "uber-short" drivel, he decides to define the term "novel" for us. A novel, he explains, has a very clear beginning, a very clear ending, a very clear plot and resolution, and a situation at the end of the story that is significantly changed from the situation at the beginning.
Some of you might think that this sounds more like the definition of a properly done story. Some others might want to point out that you've actually read some literal novels that had very similar opening and ending situations, so that might not be an actual requirement. If so, go hit yourself in the head with something. Once you're managed to kill whatever part of your brain housed that information, you're good to go. Soon, you, too, can be a non-sucky writer!
He ends talking about the episodic story. Rather than pointing out anything halfway relevant about this (a good point, for example, is that most episodic stories were originally written to the format for some reason that doesn't apply to fanfic - television episodes are episodes because of time slots. Episodic short stories, serials, were common in published serials. Notice a pattern here? The episodic format was a distribution restriction. A lot of writers decide to mimic it without understanding this.) he talks about the real problem - There is nothing worse than reading through thirty "episodes" of a story, only to find out that the author has stopped updating and hasn't written anything in the last four years. I cry a single emo tear for his suffering.
Remember what I said about him and Yami-chan? This guy is a walking argument against letting non-writers say anything about writing.
I just mentioned a big problem with episodic writing. Well, the huge, huge benefit of episodic writing is that the stories are standalone. If an author writes a chapter story and stops midway through, the story is unfinished. Episodic writing is forever ongoing and forever complete. If an author stops partway through, each story can still stand on its own because each bit had its own resolution. You may want more, or for some threads to be resolved, but that's honestly not much different than if the author did finish it, and you just wanted them to write another story.
Unfinished serial stories are far, far better than unfinished chapter stories. Often, writers deliberately chose the format, which is a lot harder to write, for this exact reason. Why he feels the need to only bitch about writers who don't finish serials and how they'd better because all their readers will hate them is beyond me.
The link at the bottom is dead, and we skip over a few more unfinished chapters (including, mercifully, the chapter dedicated to "Lemon") right up to the bit about reviews.
At first thought, you'd think that a guy who's primary, almost only, qualification was as a reader/reviewer, would be pretty qualified to write this, especially in comparison to everything else.
Pause a second. This may well be the bit he's least qualified to write. Think about it.
Do you get it?
On to Chapter 15: Review Writing: One Line So Doesn't Count.
This one opens with some more filler drivel about the internet. Skipping past that, he starts talking about more specific reviews to give.
Of course, he's talking from the perspective of a guy whose main experience with reviews is reading other people's, so it's all about how a simple review indicating you liked it fails to explain what about the story makes it worth reading.
You might easily mistake that for a reader complaining that they wanted reviews to indicate if the story was good or bad beforehand, but this is not true. This is totally an issue for writers. I know I really hate it when people tell me they liked my story without explaining exactly why it was worth reading.
He goes on to give some generic advice. It's not exactly wrong, just incredibly general and obviously with no idea how it is to be reading and trying to make sense of a review, and he doesn't seem to have any idea that it's good to quote errors and explain them rather than just saying that there were mistakes. He also advocates balance, not just that a lot of negatives should be balanced by positives (sugar-coating if extreme, but minor use can be used to get across tone better), but that you shouldn't have many positives without negatives. I assume this explains those weird reviews I get sometimes by someone who seems to really like the story, then points out some "error" that isn't at all wrong.
Interestingly, while he's adamant about how useless reviews are and how just saying what amounts to "thanks for writing that!" is the bane of existence, he's also adamant that authors should thank their readers:
while they may have not put in as much time as you did to write the story, they still invested their valuable time into both reading your story and commenting on it. It is not difficult to take a minute to send a reply in thanks.
He has quite a long bit on how authors should respond to reviews actually, and it's about as close as he gets to original in the whole thing.
It's almost as if he has ample experience reviewing so that he knows how nice it is to get a simple reply to your five/twenty minute review, yet no experience writing so he doesn't realize authors might appreciate a simple reply to something they spent three/twenty days on. And that he's completely unable to draw any parallel between the two.
At least he's not a particularly well-known author, so there's a decent chance his masterpiece of advice will languish in glorious, non-fandom-affecting obscurity.
Okay, I'm done. Hopefully, another chapter of PR will be posted today.
I came across this while I was checking back on a bunch of stories I reviewed earlier to see what the other readers had thought. One such story was What type? which is a cutesy story, passable enough, with one major story issue and a couple of grammar errors. I noticed someone else had left a critical review along the lines of mine, only more abrasive and with less actual explanation. (Although I'm typically accused of being unfairly cruel, reviews like this indicate I'm a lot closer to middle than harsh on the overall continuum) But hey, thinking reviewer!...with the staggeringly mature name of Stinkoman20X6. Huh.
Following up on this apparent incongruity, I discovered that they were male, seventeen, and, as their seven-digit account number suggested, a moderately recent arrival, signing up on late January of this year.
Well. Not only is age not really much of an indicator of immaturity online these days, but seventeen is well into the upper ranges of the pokemon community anyway. Recently joining doesn't mean much of anything either - they could easily have plenty of experience elsewhere, and arrived at FFN only now. (Although it's more generally the other way around, as far as I can tell)
And, scrolling slightly further down. I see they're writing a pokemon fanfic guide. So a somewhat older writer (at least for this community) who cares about good writing. What can this be but positive? (My learning curve on this matter is pathetic, I admit) So I scroll an inch further to see what wonderful stories they must write.
Huh. One. Written this March and not updated past the first chapter. And it's their first story.
And it's an Ash/Misty story. (My personal misgivings about the subgenre aside, Ash/Misty stories tend to have little in common with the pokemon fandom in particular, tending to have more to do with the general pan-fandom rules that cover virtually all romantic writing instead. Although it's perhaps unfair, I'd question someone's qualifications to write a Pokemon Fanfic Guide without ever writing a story where the pokemon world is a noticeable part of it.)
But that may well be a general bias against Ash/Misty writers that makes me suspicious about the quality. After all, they may well have a good grasp of overall pokemon fiction and a well thought out guide.
So I check it out.
And I swear, it's like there is some kind of law that every time someone tries to write a pokemon fanfic guide, it must contain multiple, crippling flaws.
It's set up to be twenty-one chapters, although most of the chapters aren't written yet. (One would think this would mean he wouldn't link to unwritten chapters, but...it appears it's also a rule that all sites hosting pokemon fanfic guides must be unnavigable in some way. If they're not half-covered in oversized graphics, you need link problems. At least there's no hot pink font on white backgrounds.)
Chapter the first, and already, we're not off to an auspicious start.
It starts off saying most pokemon fanfiction sucks. Why?
Because of this, the large majority of Pokémon fans are young, immature, and have under-developed writing skills. Obviously, this is a gross generalization (I and many of my friends of high school and college age still enjoy Pokémon), but it is still a fact.
If it's a gross generalization, then no, it's not a fact.
The pokemon category does have younger writers. However, to be fair, "younger" covers people well into high school and even college. Harry Potter, say, has a lot of adult writers as part of it, which Pokemon doesn't. The high-schoolers are not saving the category. They're writing plenty of the crap. People my age and even older are not automatically the good writers, and people younger than me are not automatically the damn noobs ruining it for the rest of us.
But, well, perhaps it's more poor wording than anything.
Except that a mere two paragraphs later, I read,
While this guide is intended for people writing Pokémon fan fiction, in reality almost all of the rules and suggestions made apply to any sort of fiction-writing. I will use examples from Pokémon fan fiction and talk about specific issues of that fandom, but otherwise this guide can help anybody trying to become a better writer.
Well then, it's not really a guide to writing pokemon fanfiction, now is it? In fact, it's not even a guide to writing fanfiction.
I might even go so far as to say it's not even a guide that applies to pokemon fanfiction, as anyone competent enough to write a guide would be competent enough to understand that pokemon fanfiction in particular, and fanfiction in general, are not completely identical to original fiction, and that a guide relating specifically to either would need chapters addressing the particular bits that are unique to those. Ignoring this suggests that the guide's writer is not a good enough writer to even be aware of those distinctions.
My experience writing fan fiction, however, is severely limited. Some of you may think that I am unqualified to write this guide, but this is not the case. I am a very knowledgeable writer (I hesitate to call myself a good one), but I am primarily bad at writing fiction because I have no imagination. That does not, however, stop me from recognizing good fiction or from knowing how best to write good fiction.
I propose a third fandom law, if you don't mind. First we have Yami-chan going around blurring the distinction between "constructive criticism" and "being a bitch" (as well as "harassment"). Now we have someone apparently hellbent on disproving the statement that reviewers are still qualified to give advice if they aren't writers.
Preemptively: reviewing is based on what you feel about what you read. You're giving advice on making it better to read. Giving advice on how to write itself is where the issue of "but do you know jack shit about writing?!" starts to get a bit harder to avoid.
Still hoping that when we actually get to the advice, it won't be too bad? Not to worry, the next chapter should dissuade you of that, and without even getting to the advice!
See, a first chapter consisting entirely of introductions wasn't slow enough. Instead, we have Chapter 2: Glossary of Important Terms, in which our cutting-edge writer defines such confusing words as "fanfiction", then a couple general terms like POV, then some romance-only terms like Shipping, and then finally Lemon (understandable in itself, but it's virtually the only term of the type he bothers defining, which makes it...odd he found it so important).
And because finishing and cleaning up your work is
Then we end with the proof that he is not at all qualified to write a guide on fanfic.
And, finally, the following terms are those that I wish weren't on this list, but, unfortunately, they do exist and I feel obligated to define them:
drabble - A drabble is a fanfic (I hesitate to call it a "story") of exactly 100 words. More commonly, "drabble" is used to refer to any very short story that, rather than having a plot, displays an emotioinal snapshot of some character. Because I believe that the drabble is really a very lame variety of story, I do not use the term or recognize the form. Instead, for very short stories, I have developed my own term, the "über-short," as discussed further in Chapter 11: Story Length - The Long and the Über-short of It.
Pokémorph - I shudder as I write this, but it is a sacrifice I as an author am required to make. A Pokémorph is a creature that is a combination of a Pokémon and a human. It is essentially the Pokémon equivalent of a furry. (If you don't know what a furry is, consider yourself lucky.) Pokémorphs (and the stories that include them) are very popular in furry circles, and should be avoided at all costs.
To anyone else ever intending to write something like this:
I do not fucking care what your hangups are. You do not get to say entire sections of the fandom should not exist because they are icky.
You don't like emotional snapshots? Fine. Some people don't like cookie-cutter romance, yet I don't say AAML shouldn't exist. You think the term is commonly used to refer to emotional snapshots in general? I think AAML is commonly used to refer to original fiction, but I don't claim that's the term's use. You don't like what that a majority of them are? Fine. You don't make up your own damn term for the subset you like and say the rest doesn't count. There are some valid problems with a lot of drabble writing. "I like reading long AAMRN" or "I hate emotions" is not one of them.
And I'm not touching the pokemorph bit.
So, we haven't even gotten to any actual advice. After that last bit, your standards should be pretty low. Perhaps that's the master plan? A number of otherwise well-done guides and stories have slow, plodding, even outright stupid openings. It remains possible that some of the advice will be good...right?
Chapter 3: General Writing Advice - And Your Bird Can Write opens with the jar-dropping piece of advice.
Take your time. This is something that people do not do nearly enough. Why do you think that novels are so much more fun to read than government reports, even though they may oftentimes be of similar length? Because authors of novels (with a few notable exceptions) often pour years into their books, while government documents, as well as many works of fan fiction, are hashed together over the course of days or an afternoon. As a result, many works of fan fiction are about as dry and boring as a federal budget report. Taking time to truly craft your piece will give you the chance to analyze it closely, choose metaphors with care, fix any gaping plot holes, and generally polish your work to a lustrous finish.
Yes indeed. Write Congress today and demand all government writers put more time into writing their reports. Then we'll have all the good writing we could ever want!
Next he tells writers to plan out their work, which would be good advice if the opening sentence didn't begin Unless you are writing oneshot (Polishing your work, it appears, is very much one of those do what I say not as I do things) At any rate, much like drabbles, government reports, pokemorph stories, or, by all appearances, anything that's not AAML, he doesn't appear to have ever read one-shots that were long enough to need some minimum planning. Either that, or, as he has, remember, virtually no experience writing, he's never realized plenty of the one-shots he read were planned out. This, you see, is why reviewers, while qualified to discuss the finished story, are not necessarily qualified to disperse writing tips.)
(Did I mention that he's peppering the guide with fanfiction examples? All of which are AAML and only tangentially related to pokemon itself. Remember my suggestion that authors who wrote these kinds of stories were perhaps not that qualified to write a pokemon fanfiction guide? Yeah.)
Finally, he ends the chapter by giving the perfectly good, if by this point trite, advice that it's important to write a lot. This is notable only because he's been giving near-daily updates on his progress on writing the second chapter of his only story, which detail mainly how he has not been writing it.
But slog on I shall, because I'm sick and procrastinating and this is a lovely timewaste.
Chapter 4.1: Spelling - how 2 rite gud opens with Spelling, grammar, and punctuation. This trifecta, this triumvirate of sheer literary brilliance, is what separates the professional from the amateur and the amateur from the idiot and the idiot from the mass-average fan fiction author. Ignoring the abrasive tone, do I even need to point out the idiocy of saying that skill in bare standards of writing apparently is all that divides up writers in ability? Or is everyone else smarter than that?
I certainly hope so. Let's move on.
Blah blah, internet, blah blah I don't understand this isn't a school essay and I don't need padding, blah, more about internet, ah, finally, the advice!...
At the very bottom of the page, it informs you to use spellcheck (does that really need a paragraph explaining, let alone the eight paragraphs leading up to it?), then Read your story backward when editing.
You know, I have to admit, I'd probably have a lot fewer errors if I did this. In part because I'd catch a few more errors (not many - anything spellcheck doesn't catch isn't a misspelling, meaning it's usually the grammar that lets you pick it up, which you won't notice while reading backward) but mainly because if I had to read everything I wrote backward, I'd write a hell of a lot less. If you're not running spellcheck, this would be useful, but if you're too lazy to run spellcheck, I don't think you're much into the whole proofreading scene to start.
Two pieces of advice, one obvious, one inane. He felt this needed an entire section. Last chapter he mentioned the importance of pacing. I guess he's using a Lady Umbra way of getting that across.
We're denied his undoubtedly staggeringly original advice on grammar (and whatever misattributed quote he intends to use there), as he hasn't yet written it despite the link at the bottom "Advance to Chapter 4.2: Grammar - CLEVER TITLE >>>" Yes, it's another placeholder, folks. Aren't you stunned by the effort?
Unfortunately, he has written the next chapter. Chapter 5: Summaries - Tell It Like It Is includes some advice about writing summaries. Not good advice, but that goes without saying at this point, doesn't it?
The basic premise here is actually passable, understandable since heavy readers can usually figure out what's good and bad about summaries. It's presented abysmally, however, combining mechanical errors with the summaries at random even though it's purportedly about how to give information.
More importantly, he's blissfully unaware of the concept of "summary limit". His final version summary is "Ash discovers Team Rocket's latest plan for world domination and must infiltrate their headquarters in order to stop it. But when he realizes he needs the help of his (former) friend and rival Gary Oak, will the duo be able to set aside their differences to stop the organization's sinister plot? R&R.", a mere fifty words over FFN's summary limit. Huh, you think maybe that might be why some writers are a bit too vague in their summaries for your tastes? No, they're just idiots. Keep right on with your useful, useful advice.
He goes on to say that this final version summary isn't quite perfect because it gives away too much of the plot, then never gives an example of what he thinks the perfect summary would be, a pretty glaring omission. Instead, he charges merrily into bitching about the term R&R, stating that the addition of "R&R" at the end ruins what otherwise appears to be a very professional-looking summary. At NO point should you ever include "R&R" in your summaries. The closest thing you should ever have is, if you are attempting to polish a fully-written but uncompleted story, something along the lines of "Please review critically."
Okay, so he's obviously unaware that R&R is less chat-based laziness and more based around letter limits. However, see the second bit of what he's saying? About how you can only say his allowed "please review critically" if it's fully written AND uncompleted?
Yeah. That's stupid on a couple levels. It's an oxymoron, so I'm assuming there's a typo or he thinks the words have different meanings (uncompleted as in not fully posted, say). But he's also saying writers should only ask for reviews except to polish their work, and once that's done, stop.
If that's the real reason people post stories on the internet, I will be very surprised.
Then he gives a short list of things not to ever put in your summary. First is the dreaded R&R (did I miss some reader revolt over the term? What's so infuriating about "read and review"?). Next, "oneshot". Never, ever use the generally accepted term to inform people in your summary that your one-chapter story is complete. Because there are people who like one-shots, and they are all jackasses, so we want them to have as little chance of finding stories they want as possible. In fact, try to write your summary so it sounds like it's the opening chapter to some long five hundred chapter epic that you'll never actually update, which readers who like one-shots usually avoid like the plague. We'll drive those bastards from the fandom yet! They're probably all drabble writing furry perverts anyway. Now, back to some nice, wholesome AAMLemons written by twelve year olds.
Speaking of AAM, the next paragraph contains an interesting line.
If the underlying theme of your story is a budding romance between Ash and May (see CHAPTER on shipping for my opinions on that
Unfortunately, he has not yet written up his opus on what shippings you're allowed to write, so I can't mock it. Yet.
He encourages the NamexName format, which, while understandable, is, first, a lost cause in the fandom, and second, not at all needed. There are only a few shipping names around these days, and they're in general use. People looking for "AshxMisty" are going to search AAML and pokeshipping/pokeshippy. (That, and the NamexName format has a marked tendency to denote a sexual relationship in other fandoms). This point was relevant when it was made years ago. Not so much now.
He goes on to explain how if you're writing any romance story, you MUST include the pairing in the summary (He's also under some interesting delusions: Yes, "Features AshxMay" is a complete sentence, as much as you may not want to believe it. What if I don't want to believe it because it isn't, technically, true?) and continues his ignorance of summary limits (writing just "AshxMay" is, of course, completely unprofessional)
There's some truth to listing pairings being important, but seriously, does anyone think this is a problem writers have? Pairings are overlisted, not under. You see people listing the pairing for stories about love triangles. "Who will she choose, Ash or Gary? (AAML!!!)" is bad. It is not being vague to not resolve the story's basic plot in the summary, kay?
He then lists a few other phrases that can be included in summaries, interestingly, ones I've virtually never seen before and many of which take up a huge amount of space. It looks like he wrote the second bit before the first, because a number of things are rehashes, like when he repeats "AshxMay" and explains that the ship is important in those stories.
He starts off with his bit about "Please review critically", though, which is useful because you can at least understand his reworded explanation: This is good to have for a newer story, but should be removed once you are satisfied with the piece.
Such a good piece of advice!
I, like all writers, never want reviews except for new stories to fix mistakes. You guys who review to say you liked it? I hate you SO MUCH. You bastards.
The link to Chapter Six is even worse than the last dead link. It contains the same "something clever" placeholder, but this one leads back to Chapter Four, meaning he's copy-pasting his layout and didn't bother to fix this stuff. It's about author notes, so I'm assuming it's probably not a huge loss.
The next several chapters don't exist. Only two more, then!
Chapter 11: Story Length - The Long and the Über-short of It. Ah, yes, remember the "uber-short" he mentioned a bit before? Explaining his special "uber-short" is the opening.
Uber-shorts, not being that non-story crap drabbles
He goes on to say that when writing any short story, ever, you may never establish context outside of the story. No author note saying "this takes place between X and Y", nothing. I have no idea what author note context did to him, but it must have been a lot more than just run over his dog, because he says it's better to just not establish any timeline context than put a one line author note in. Maybe it ran over his dog and then beat his family to death with the corpse or something, I don't know.
He elaborates that: A good example of this is one of the classic AAML plots, in which Ash and Misty, some night at their campsite, realize their feelings for each other and somehow end up admitting it to each other. The number of stories with this plot structure simply proves that it doesn't matter if they're in Kanto or Hoenn or Johto or Shinnoh or if Ash is 12 and Misty is 14 or if they're both 16 or whether it's eleven at night or two in the morning or six in the morning. When your plot is straightforward and your characters are already established, none of these factors matters. As a result, you can oftentimes get away with simple ignoring these and getting right on with the plot.
Yes. Because those stories are such stellar examples of good writing. Everyone, please write more stories where the characters are so completely indistinguishable that it is impossible to tell when it takes place. Don't describe the setting at all, either. You might accidentally mention that they're camping out near a known city or see one of the pokemon unique to each region or the time or something! Be as vague as possible, because the location can be given away in a mere word or two. Feel free to extend this vagueness to actual canon fact, like age differences. Also, maybe you could throw some misspellings in? Or at least a couple typos, as he masterfully demonstrates.
Anyway, he goes on to lay out the short story (1000-5000 words), the "medium" story (5000-25,000 words) and then the long story (25,000-200,000) (I'm pretty sure he just picked arbitrary boundaries that he liked) and says some generic stuff about them. He seems to be under the impression most writers try to write to a particular word limit, and talks about what you can and can't fit into such stories, rather than realizing that most writers try to write the story and find out how long it is by checking the word count later.
Then, because I guess the incompetence quota wasn't covered by the "uber-short" drivel, he decides to define the term "novel" for us. A novel, he explains, has a very clear beginning, a very clear ending, a very clear plot and resolution, and a situation at the end of the story that is significantly changed from the situation at the beginning.
Some of you might think that this sounds more like the definition of a properly done story. Some others might want to point out that you've actually read some literal novels that had very similar opening and ending situations, so that might not be an actual requirement. If so, go hit yourself in the head with something. Once you're managed to kill whatever part of your brain housed that information, you're good to go. Soon, you, too, can be a non-sucky writer!
He ends talking about the episodic story. Rather than pointing out anything halfway relevant about this (a good point, for example, is that most episodic stories were originally written to the format for some reason that doesn't apply to fanfic - television episodes are episodes because of time slots. Episodic short stories, serials, were common in published serials. Notice a pattern here? The episodic format was a distribution restriction. A lot of writers decide to mimic it without understanding this.) he talks about the real problem - There is nothing worse than reading through thirty "episodes" of a story, only to find out that the author has stopped updating and hasn't written anything in the last four years. I cry a single emo tear for his suffering.
Remember what I said about him and Yami-chan? This guy is a walking argument against letting non-writers say anything about writing.
I just mentioned a big problem with episodic writing. Well, the huge, huge benefit of episodic writing is that the stories are standalone. If an author writes a chapter story and stops midway through, the story is unfinished. Episodic writing is forever ongoing and forever complete. If an author stops partway through, each story can still stand on its own because each bit had its own resolution. You may want more, or for some threads to be resolved, but that's honestly not much different than if the author did finish it, and you just wanted them to write another story.
Unfinished serial stories are far, far better than unfinished chapter stories. Often, writers deliberately chose the format, which is a lot harder to write, for this exact reason. Why he feels the need to only bitch about writers who don't finish serials and how they'd better because all their readers will hate them is beyond me.
The link at the bottom is dead, and we skip over a few more unfinished chapters (including, mercifully, the chapter dedicated to "Lemon") right up to the bit about reviews.
At first thought, you'd think that a guy who's primary, almost only, qualification was as a reader/reviewer, would be pretty qualified to write this, especially in comparison to everything else.
Pause a second. This may well be the bit he's least qualified to write. Think about it.
Do you get it?
On to Chapter 15: Review Writing: One Line So Doesn't Count.
This one opens with some more filler drivel about the internet. Skipping past that, he starts talking about more specific reviews to give.
Of course, he's talking from the perspective of a guy whose main experience with reviews is reading other people's, so it's all about how a simple review indicating you liked it fails to explain what about the story makes it worth reading.
You might easily mistake that for a reader complaining that they wanted reviews to indicate if the story was good or bad beforehand, but this is not true. This is totally an issue for writers. I know I really hate it when people tell me they liked my story without explaining exactly why it was worth reading.
He goes on to give some generic advice. It's not exactly wrong, just incredibly general and obviously with no idea how it is to be reading and trying to make sense of a review, and he doesn't seem to have any idea that it's good to quote errors and explain them rather than just saying that there were mistakes. He also advocates balance, not just that a lot of negatives should be balanced by positives (sugar-coating if extreme, but minor use can be used to get across tone better), but that you shouldn't have many positives without negatives. I assume this explains those weird reviews I get sometimes by someone who seems to really like the story, then points out some "error" that isn't at all wrong.
Interestingly, while he's adamant about how useless reviews are and how just saying what amounts to "thanks for writing that!" is the bane of existence, he's also adamant that authors should thank their readers:
while they may have not put in as much time as you did to write the story, they still invested their valuable time into both reading your story and commenting on it. It is not difficult to take a minute to send a reply in thanks.
He has quite a long bit on how authors should respond to reviews actually, and it's about as close as he gets to original in the whole thing.
It's almost as if he has ample experience reviewing so that he knows how nice it is to get a simple reply to your five/twenty minute review, yet no experience writing so he doesn't realize authors might appreciate a simple reply to something they spent three/twenty days on. And that he's completely unable to draw any parallel between the two.
At least he's not a particularly well-known author, so there's a decent chance his masterpiece of advice will languish in glorious, non-fandom-affecting obscurity.
Okay, I'm done. Hopefully, another chapter of PR will be posted today.
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Date: 2007-05-21 07:59 pm (UTC)Unnnnnnh. T_T
I feel violated.