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farla"Shattered Phoenix" is something to keep an eye on. Also, the author's cafe is looking particularly failtastic. Only on Serebii could people actually be debating the inclusion of filler. And then suggesting even worse ideas.
For example, say some character, named Character A, is walking along Route 7, a rather boring Kanto route. There is nothing there but trees, grass and an entrance to the Underground Passage. Instead of saying, "Character A walked on Route 7 from Saffron to Celadon.", it is probably better to say:
"Character A began walking on the currently windy Route 7, knowing Celadon was not too far away. He looked at the entrance to the underground passage, and then the violently swaying trees, which reminded him of those ones in Pallet, his hometown. Character A wondered if the trees there were also being tossed about. He knew his mother did not like wind. He hoped she was alright - after all, Character A and his mother had never been apart for more than twelve hours until his adventure had begun many months and three gym badges ago. He decided to sit under one of the trees and, ignoring the many passersby between the big cities Saffron and Celadon, several of whom looked at the ten year old with curiosity, wrote a short letter to his mother, asking about the weather and her mood. It was the first letter Character A had written since his departure from Pallet, for in his excitement about raising his Charmander and eventually his Pikachu, Mankey and Abra he had not paid much attention to communication outside of the Pokemon Center's videophone. Yet he knew she would appreciate seeing his words written in the style which uniquely belonged to Character A."
Meanwhile there's another thread on "OMG why are people so unfair and judgemental about journey fics!!!! it's just because newbie authors do them and not because we all suck let me tell you internets, i have written a journeyfic and therefore they are totally awesome done well"
There is some beautiful Not Getting It in the very first post. To take a mere tidbit from the mass of insanity:
To tackle the above reviewer's argument against journey fics, let's take this piece by piece, starting with the most common argument:
1) "They're easy to write."
Really? Then why are there only five or so (point is, not many) decent journey fics (and I'm pretty lenient on decent) in the complete section at SPPf, two (Ross Ferguson's Journey of Champion: in Kanto and Archangel A.J.'s R.J. -- Legacy of a Master) not completed? If it's "easy" then why do most authors abandon their journey fic within the first five chapters?
It gets dumber from there. I mean, the very next post on the "omg journeyfic is so oppressed by haters" is someone (agreeing, no less) chiming in that they like the genre.
There's some lone voices of sanity (...okay, only Negrek) and Dragonfree appears to... I never know quite how to classify Dragonfree, who's generally saying things that make sense in the broad sort of way, but in context are terrible, terrible suggestions. I guess basically it's a matter of being unable to accept that certain things, while not absolutely awful in every single appearance, are still, on balance, going to be worse a lot more often than other ways of doing it. So she's often fighting the good fight for "it can technically be done decently" which ends up defeating any hope people have of getting useful advice. It's like having a thread on grammar that's half people arguing that it's possible to write without capitals or punctuation and still have a good story.
Finally, on page three Yamato shows up to make me not feel guilty for never emailing him back as well as confirm my assumptions that generally, if someone on Serebii shows up to say Idea X is not a bad idea because they've made a good story about it, Idea X is a terrible idea and their story is shit.
Then there's a thread listing/collecting names. I mean what the fuck.
Sometimes I think I'd be satisfied if people on Serebii got just slightly more elitist so their terrible ideas about stories would at least stop reaching FFN, but it'd probably result in non-Serebiians getting even more convinced it's good advice and directing each other to relevant threads.
Anyway, I guess the moral here is that Unoriginality doesn't cut it, I need to make an actual original trainer writing guide. Stupid Serebii.
For example, say some character, named Character A, is walking along Route 7, a rather boring Kanto route. There is nothing there but trees, grass and an entrance to the Underground Passage. Instead of saying, "Character A walked on Route 7 from Saffron to Celadon.", it is probably better to say:
"Character A began walking on the currently windy Route 7, knowing Celadon was not too far away. He looked at the entrance to the underground passage, and then the violently swaying trees, which reminded him of those ones in Pallet, his hometown. Character A wondered if the trees there were also being tossed about. He knew his mother did not like wind. He hoped she was alright - after all, Character A and his mother had never been apart for more than twelve hours until his adventure had begun many months and three gym badges ago. He decided to sit under one of the trees and, ignoring the many passersby between the big cities Saffron and Celadon, several of whom looked at the ten year old with curiosity, wrote a short letter to his mother, asking about the weather and her mood. It was the first letter Character A had written since his departure from Pallet, for in his excitement about raising his Charmander and eventually his Pikachu, Mankey and Abra he had not paid much attention to communication outside of the Pokemon Center's videophone. Yet he knew she would appreciate seeing his words written in the style which uniquely belonged to Character A."
Meanwhile there's another thread on "OMG why are people so unfair and judgemental about journey fics!!!! it's just because newbie authors do them and not because we all suck let me tell you internets, i have written a journeyfic and therefore they are totally awesome done well"
There is some beautiful Not Getting It in the very first post. To take a mere tidbit from the mass of insanity:
To tackle the above reviewer's argument against journey fics, let's take this piece by piece, starting with the most common argument:
1) "They're easy to write."
Really? Then why are there only five or so (point is, not many) decent journey fics (and I'm pretty lenient on decent) in the complete section at SPPf, two (Ross Ferguson's Journey of Champion: in Kanto and Archangel A.J.'s R.J. -- Legacy of a Master) not completed? If it's "easy" then why do most authors abandon their journey fic within the first five chapters?
It gets dumber from there. I mean, the very next post on the "omg journeyfic is so oppressed by haters" is someone (agreeing, no less) chiming in that they like the genre.
There's some lone voices of sanity (...okay, only Negrek) and Dragonfree appears to... I never know quite how to classify Dragonfree, who's generally saying things that make sense in the broad sort of way, but in context are terrible, terrible suggestions. I guess basically it's a matter of being unable to accept that certain things, while not absolutely awful in every single appearance, are still, on balance, going to be worse a lot more often than other ways of doing it. So she's often fighting the good fight for "it can technically be done decently" which ends up defeating any hope people have of getting useful advice. It's like having a thread on grammar that's half people arguing that it's possible to write without capitals or punctuation and still have a good story.
Finally, on page three Yamato shows up to make me not feel guilty for never emailing him back as well as confirm my assumptions that generally, if someone on Serebii shows up to say Idea X is not a bad idea because they've made a good story about it, Idea X is a terrible idea and their story is shit.
Then there's a thread listing/collecting names. I mean what the fuck.
Sometimes I think I'd be satisfied if people on Serebii got just slightly more elitist so their terrible ideas about stories would at least stop reaching FFN, but it'd probably result in non-Serebiians getting even more convinced it's good advice and directing each other to relevant threads.
Anyway, I guess the moral here is that Unoriginality doesn't cut it, I need to make an actual original trainer writing guide. Stupid Serebii.
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-30 10:46 pm (UTC)Anyways, I read Unoriginality and I thought it's a cool project you got there and gives me pointers on the right and wrong wrong ways of writing Pokemon stories. Hm...maybe you should post that story in Serebii, despite you already getting trouble with multiple accounts? If you won't, I will. I just need your permission. ;)
no subject
Date: 2010-01-30 11:41 pm (UTC)See, what I take from this is that while writing stories works for people of reasonable experience, for newbies it'd help to have something just going through in as simple language as possible, explaining the basics, kind of like the grammar guide I have over on the forum.
Can you post stuff that isn't yours? Also, I'm not entirely sure what the Farla-banning criteria are, so maybe ask a mod first so no one thinks you're secretly me.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 12:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 12:12 am (UTC)Plus, I just assume people there are a lost cause.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 12:27 am (UTC)Maybe it was a long time ago or something and they've since changed the rules? I don't know, I'll go back to looking for it.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 01:38 am (UTC)So if you were interesting in trying to post Unoriginality, Bay, you could probably PM a mod with something like, "Hey, I saw that a few years back Yuugis Black Magician posted this story, which was written by a different author, here on SPPf. I was wondering whether it would be okay if I posted this story (link Unoriginality) from FFN over here. The author said it was fine, and I would be sure to give her credit." Can't hurt to see what they say, although I'm guessing there's extenuating circumstances on the example I found (e.g. the board might've eaten the original).
no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 01:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 02:00 am (UTC)I will admit that I didn't remember the fact that you specifically call out Serebii in one or two of the chapters, though.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 02:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 04:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-30 10:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-30 11:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-30 11:11 pm (UTC)Then there's a thread listing/collecting names. I mean what the fuck.
USE A BABY NAMES WEBSITE.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-30 11:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 02:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 12:25 am (UTC)Funnily enough, that "Rant on OT 'Fics" thread is one of few cases of me having a minor disagreement with Dragonfree; we tend to express very similar opinions most of the time.
Best of luck with your OT guide. I've been writing up some articles on how to handle various aspects of pokémon fanfiction, but nothing step-by-step.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 01:01 am (UTC)::shrugs:: Honestly, I tend to agree with the basic idea of what Dragonfree says, I just hate the context where she's saying it to people who really need concrete "this is a much better way to do this" and "this is a way that is very easy to fuck up" stuff, not a defense that technically, anything can be done well. It's like how I tend to tell people not to write in first person - I don't want first person scoured from the earth, it's just not a good style for inexperienced writers, especially those already having trouble with narration. Or for an even worse example, stories being told as a diary, which is insanely appealing to newbie writers but incredibly hard to actually write a story in.
Or, debates about the overall nature of writing are great but it's not a good idea mixed in with newbie advice and dear god does Serebii need decent newbie advice past the "spellcheck and punctuate" level. People are already going to go off and write the diary stories, the last thing they need is further encouragement.
I think an OT guide will need to be broken into several separate ones, plus a general advice thread. Ugh. It's just hard to organize it when there are a lot of different potential starting points as well as various things to watch out for.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 06:30 am (UTC)It is a problem for newbies especially, yes, in part because they haven't learned to filter advice very well... I imagine Venomfrog's post would look like good stuff to more than a few. At the same time, though, this is something you have to learn by yourself, isn't it? If you write your first story in first person, it's going to suck, yeah, but it would also have sucked if you wrote it in third; you can hear people say that it's bad to do lab scenes all you want, but to an extent you have to be able to look back on one that you wrote and realize it was unnecessary, or have grown enough in terms of sophistication to really understand the arguments about why it's bad. I guess if the idea is that people will take an "it's not always bad" argument and automatically decide that they must represent an exception, then that's a problem, but if they're going in with that mindset anyway, can anything short of a post aimed directly at their story really sway them anyway?
I think an OT guide will need to be broken into several separate ones, plus a general advice thread. Ugh. It's just hard to organize it when there are a lot of different potential starting points as well as various things to watch out for.
Yes, the restriction of having to make it threaded is a real pain, since it locks you into a linear presentation and makes it hard to go back and reorganize if you have anything substantial you want to add later on. Are you wedded to the idea of putting it all on your forums (at least, I assume that's where you're going at the moment)? I think it might make more sense to set up one general advice thread, starting with an introduction and real basics, and then just make the second post a collection of links to pages, hosted on an external site, that cover various topics of interest. You could do something similar with threads or posts, of course, and make the link navigation point to those instead, but I think trying to organize a guide into threads that way would be messy. Going primarily external also has the benefit of confining discussion to a single thread and not spamming up as much space on the forum register, although you have plenty of that for the moment. For such a small project, a free web host would be more than enough.
Admittedly, putting everything into internal links does up the effort involved in getting to the articles and returning to discuss or ask questions about them.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 07:42 am (UTC)And authors are just more likely to fail at some types than others. Third person is a lot easier to add description to, it lets you jump between characters or blather on about trees whenever you feel like it, it doesn't require you stay in a character's head the whole time. I see authors failing at first person a lot more - and I also see slightly more experienced people switching to third mid-story and saying it made it easier. Some of them manage to get through it, but they would have had an easier time with third.
People just starting out have no experience. For a lot of them, they don't even realize that writing different POVs is more than just the difference between using "I" and "he". They don't know why they're having so much trouble, and they give up. Once they're more experienced with writing, then they can learn for themselves what works and doesn't, but getting them there has to be the first step.
And, well, look at how people plot. That's the non-newbie version of this. A lot of the problem in the journeyfic thread is people assuming that there is only one way of writing an OT fic. So they follow the checklist. Then they try to pace the story by putting something meaningful and relevant at each point. Then they boggle at the idea of skipping one of the things on the list, because they've put something relevant there. Because they've been trying to write their whole story under the assumption all of those things are going to be required, and even worse, they've been doing it to the point they don't have any other storyline going on. So "skip the lab scene" sounds like "skip the story" because they have no idea where they can skip to, of some scenes being more important than others, of any of it. And a lot of the checklist is why OT fics stall in two or three chapters, because it just doesn't occur to people they could do it differently. Telling them it's required, or that it's not exactly required but good authors don't skip because they've put relevant stuff there...not helping.
It's more or less like mapping out a clear path from one point to another. There may be lots of interesting stuff all over the place and lots of ways to get to where you want, and maybe there really is a very pretty area you can see along the way if you manage to find the right place to cross the river, but if you've never seen the area and you just want to get to the end, it's better to have someone tell you one clear path that's pretty easy to follow instead of talking about how many choices you have. You can come back again once you have the lay of the land.
And this is all an even bigger problem when everyone's trying to write epics instead of one-shots. At least with a one-shot you can experiment, and still get to the end and try again.
...huh, I think that'd be good advice too. So many people drop out on their first fic, telling them to try out short stuff would probably help that.
Anyway.
It's going on the forum simply because that's where the people there are. The problem with anything fancy is that it's actually really hard to link up posts - the individual post link is actually the end of thread link, so I have to go through the emailed copies to put it together. And I can't link offsite there at all. If it's completely unworkable I could end up posting it here and linking from my profile, but I'm going to aim for linear first. It's not intended to be long enough to really have separate sections.
My plan is a how-to for writing an OT fic, which should be more or less linear and a second thread going through explaining how I planned out Lucki so people can see examples, since I still have all my notes for that. A third will just be general advice on the order of "but seriously, don't use first person". It's all intended to be the bare basics - once that's covered, then I can think about if I want to do more.
It'll depend, I suppose, on exactly how detailed I end up having to get.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 09:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 04:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 03:03 pm (UTC)An OT guide sounds like it could be useful for more general advise than Unoriginality. I think a lot of journey fic is checklist because though the author knows they want their OC to be chosen by Entei and beat the Elite 4 and Team Rocket, they don't have any more details of how they're going to get to that point. So they just write terribly inconsequential things following the anime or game on the way to the gym, then inside the gym, then on the way to the next gym... Lucki at least had interesting interactions between characters and evocative but not purple descriptions in the narration and a plot that was going to a specific place in a specific way.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 04:36 pm (UTC)Sometimes it's even worse than not knowing how to get there - they don't have a plot, so they just keep writing until one occurs to them ten chapters in. People have literally told me this. It's part of why I won't stand for anyone saying "okay, the first chapters suck but it gets better later on". No. Fuck you, author. I am not slogging through ten chapters to get to the part that doesn't completely suck. It is your job to not make ten chapters of garbage between me and your probably-not-even-that-good actual story.
And even when stuff has a heavy character-based component, there's the issue of what character. We follow Lucki's journey because the story requires we see her do the wrong thing at the start so it falls apart at the finish. (And even then, if she was just picking stuff up at the lab I'd have jumped right to her opening up the pokeball.) If their okay opening interaction is just going to set the stage for a general good relationship, you don't even need that much.
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