Okay, the OT guide plan
Feb. 1st, 2010 10:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
farlaSince it's hard to rearrange or discuss stuff posted on the FFN forums, I'm thinking I'll post stuff here and see if people think there's anything that needs changing beforehand.
101 Guide
This guide intended is to walk new authors through writing a story. The focus is on original trainer stories, because they're the most common thing people have trouble with.
This is not meant to be the only or best way of doing things. It is meant to be reliable and avoid the major problems writers run into.
For the purpose of this guide, you need to follow my advice. Not all of it may work for you, but you won't know what does and what doesn't until you try. It can be very tempting to say that you don't need to bother doing something, but it's a mistake. It's also very easy to say that you don't see any reason it has to be done my way - again, try it anyway, and you'll see why.
Before we begin, a couple points:
1) Writing an OT fic is harder than it seems. If this is your first story, you're better off trying something shorter. This guide is meant to help you avoid major problems because I assume you're going to want to try it anyway, but I can't honestly tell you the guide is going to do enough.
If you want to jump right into OT fic, I strongly advise writing short stories as well.
2) Your story needs to be in third person, not first. Third person works better and runs into fewer problems.
3) Your story needs to stick with canon areas. You can still include new pokemon/locations/people/gyms/types or whatever else you've thought of, but no new regions. It's just one more thing to trip you up.
4) You can't include every good idea you have right now in this story. You have to pick the major one and go with that. That's okay - you can always write more stories.
5) This guide is going to involve planning, not just writing. Actually do the planning, or you're going to spend most of your chapters trying to explain away the problems in your other chapters, instead of writing about your story. It's not that hard.
6) Your story will not involve filler. If you can't think of anything interesting happening between point A and point B, you do what absolutely everyone else does: You skip the damn thing.
201 Guide
So you've written stories before and are looking to try out original trainer stories, or possibly already started one.
We still start out with certain points before we begin.
1) It really can't be repeated too often: OT fic is hard. Before you say that you can do it because you're not the sort of person that abandons a story, understand I mean that it's very easy to write something in the first chapter that will screw up the next forty chapters you write. It's also going to mean a pretty big investment of your time.
If the thing you want to write about is a non-journey, non-badge plot, you really should just write that. It's a better idea on every level.
2) First person is still a bad idea. Don't use it unless you understand why I would say this, have already written in first person for shorter stories, are absolutely certain you won't need to switch perspectives or write about something that won't have observers, and are extremely good at description and narrative voice.
Don't think that picking the harder option is going to automatically make your story better. The harder option is not the advanced version, it's not the better writing version, it's just the version that's more likely to make you unhappy and your story bad.
3) The only good reason to have a new region is if you have a major plot point that conflicts with the canon regions. Look at the canon region maps. See all that vast empty space? That's where your new additions belong, instead being used to make an equally (or even more) empty new region. If you really want to write a full OT fic, you're going to want as much stuff jammed in there as possible.
Remember how in GS you went to Kanto, and there was a radio tower in Lavender, and new gym leaders? And there were all those new pokemon around? It's canon that canon regions are not static. You can mess around with them, you don't need to invent a completely new area to justify new gym leaders or pokemon or anything.
4) Seriously, don't include every idea you have. Especially if they're conflicting, or fighting for space, or have nothing to do with the story and are just there to tell people that your own opinion on how the pokeworld functions is X.
Subplots are different than plots, and just because you can juggle thirty successfully doesn't mean you should or that it's good writing to do so. For the most part, subplots need to have a similar arc to your main story. They can begin later on and end sooner on, but mostly they should be around at the same time. Constantly adding and resolving subplots is bad - subplots are not supposed to be separate, they're supposed to all be part of the story's main progression.
5) This guide is going to involve a lot of planning. You're still going to have to do it. When I say it's important for writers, I don't mean "for those stupid other guys, not for awesome people like you". I mean it's important for writers. If you skip ten minutes of planning now, you'll regret it three chapters when you're starting to realize it would have worked better if you'd done it differently and spend a half hour trying to figure out how to fix things, and you'll really regret it thirteen chapters in when your continual attempts to fix things keep writing your further and further into a corner. You may have not needed much planning for other stories. Don't try it with an OT fic.
6) I do not care what you heard. No fucking filler. No beach episodes. No random flashbacks, no stream of consciousness padding, no villain-of-the-day, no spending ten paragraphs on what the trees looked like, none of it. You are not getting paid by the word and your readers aren't either.
Anything I missed or that you don't think is necessary?
Second part.
101 Guide
This guide intended is to walk new authors through writing a story. The focus is on original trainer stories, because they're the most common thing people have trouble with.
This is not meant to be the only or best way of doing things. It is meant to be reliable and avoid the major problems writers run into.
For the purpose of this guide, you need to follow my advice. Not all of it may work for you, but you won't know what does and what doesn't until you try. It can be very tempting to say that you don't need to bother doing something, but it's a mistake. It's also very easy to say that you don't see any reason it has to be done my way - again, try it anyway, and you'll see why.
Before we begin, a couple points:
1) Writing an OT fic is harder than it seems. If this is your first story, you're better off trying something shorter. This guide is meant to help you avoid major problems because I assume you're going to want to try it anyway, but I can't honestly tell you the guide is going to do enough.
If you want to jump right into OT fic, I strongly advise writing short stories as well.
2) Your story needs to be in third person, not first. Third person works better and runs into fewer problems.
3) Your story needs to stick with canon areas. You can still include new pokemon/locations/people/gyms/types or whatever else you've thought of, but no new regions. It's just one more thing to trip you up.
4) You can't include every good idea you have right now in this story. You have to pick the major one and go with that. That's okay - you can always write more stories.
5) This guide is going to involve planning, not just writing. Actually do the planning, or you're going to spend most of your chapters trying to explain away the problems in your other chapters, instead of writing about your story. It's not that hard.
6) Your story will not involve filler. If you can't think of anything interesting happening between point A and point B, you do what absolutely everyone else does: You skip the damn thing.
201 Guide
So you've written stories before and are looking to try out original trainer stories, or possibly already started one.
We still start out with certain points before we begin.
1) It really can't be repeated too often: OT fic is hard. Before you say that you can do it because you're not the sort of person that abandons a story, understand I mean that it's very easy to write something in the first chapter that will screw up the next forty chapters you write. It's also going to mean a pretty big investment of your time.
If the thing you want to write about is a non-journey, non-badge plot, you really should just write that. It's a better idea on every level.
2) First person is still a bad idea. Don't use it unless you understand why I would say this, have already written in first person for shorter stories, are absolutely certain you won't need to switch perspectives or write about something that won't have observers, and are extremely good at description and narrative voice.
Don't think that picking the harder option is going to automatically make your story better. The harder option is not the advanced version, it's not the better writing version, it's just the version that's more likely to make you unhappy and your story bad.
3) The only good reason to have a new region is if you have a major plot point that conflicts with the canon regions. Look at the canon region maps. See all that vast empty space? That's where your new additions belong, instead being used to make an equally (or even more) empty new region. If you really want to write a full OT fic, you're going to want as much stuff jammed in there as possible.
Remember how in GS you went to Kanto, and there was a radio tower in Lavender, and new gym leaders? And there were all those new pokemon around? It's canon that canon regions are not static. You can mess around with them, you don't need to invent a completely new area to justify new gym leaders or pokemon or anything.
4) Seriously, don't include every idea you have. Especially if they're conflicting, or fighting for space, or have nothing to do with the story and are just there to tell people that your own opinion on how the pokeworld functions is X.
Subplots are different than plots, and just because you can juggle thirty successfully doesn't mean you should or that it's good writing to do so. For the most part, subplots need to have a similar arc to your main story. They can begin later on and end sooner on, but mostly they should be around at the same time. Constantly adding and resolving subplots is bad - subplots are not supposed to be separate, they're supposed to all be part of the story's main progression.
5) This guide is going to involve a lot of planning. You're still going to have to do it. When I say it's important for writers, I don't mean "for those stupid other guys, not for awesome people like you". I mean it's important for writers. If you skip ten minutes of planning now, you'll regret it three chapters when you're starting to realize it would have worked better if you'd done it differently and spend a half hour trying to figure out how to fix things, and you'll really regret it thirteen chapters in when your continual attempts to fix things keep writing your further and further into a corner. You may have not needed much planning for other stories. Don't try it with an OT fic.
6) I do not care what you heard. No fucking filler. No beach episodes. No random flashbacks, no stream of consciousness padding, no villain-of-the-day, no spending ten paragraphs on what the trees looked like, none of it. You are not getting paid by the word and your readers aren't either.
Anything I missed or that you don't think is necessary?
Second part.
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no subject
Date: 2010-02-02 06:07 am (UTC)Hm, maybe talk a bit about how there are anime, game, and manga canons and also cocktailing in #3? Other than that, good start here. *thumbs up*
no subject
Date: 2010-02-02 06:08 pm (UTC)I plan to explain canon all by itself, because I need to get across why canon is helpful rather than something that's getting in their way. This is just laying down the ground rules of what isn't an option.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-02 10:22 pm (UTC)like romance,but I know for sure it's not that important in the story.no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 02:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-02 01:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-02 06:26 pm (UTC)Lucki required extensive planning, while Butterfly Wings has absolutely none - it's just "try to make sense of the plot of the game, and have another character running around". I have an idea of the ending and that's it. Inheritors has moderate planning - I only have a few locations he has to hit, and don't need to worry too much about his team composition or anything, but I need to watch more carefully as chapters go on. (The story's also extremely stripped down in other ways I probably couldn't get away with for human trainers.)
no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 03:28 am (UTC)Even when I get off the rails somewhat, it's more a matter of figuring out how the changes would and wouldn't affect other people and the wider world than writing whole cloth, and when in doubt/stuck I can always go back to canon until I see something else
remotely competentdifferent characters would change and then I can work out the consequences of that.Writing normal fanfic feels like a very different matter. I suppose further down the spectrum there's original fiction, which only needs to be internally consistent.
I suppose a good bit of the problem is people trying to write OT fics as a novelization of the game/anime featuring their characters and not understanding the difficulties of that: differences affordances of different media (ex. things that were boring in the original and would be even more boring in their fic, things that worked in the original but would be boring in their fic), that fact it's been done ten thousand times already and rarely well, the fact they're telling a story about their Ash-clone or Mary Sue rather than a story about truly interesting and engaging characters who interact with and explore the environment of the Pokemon world in further interesting ways, etc.
(Yeah, I've just been writing a long and impassioned discussion between a canon minor character and an OC about the moral implications of reincarnation in this world in terms of when does moral responsibility for the consequences a past life's actions end, during my English class on the interaction narrative and media, so I'm kind of babbling on the subject from my crazy cloud.)
no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 02:39 pm (UTC)I suppose further down the spectrum there's original fiction, which only needs to be internally consistent.
In practice, I think original fiction is the hardest. This might have to do with the fact I'm in favor of just ignoring canon if there's one random piece that conflicts with the rest of the story, and that's probably the one big drawback of fanfic vs original. It seems like it should be easier, but it means a lot more work. And I suspect it's actually harder to keep internally consistent if you're trying to make up a world and a plot at the same time - with fanfic, you can be reasonably sure you're starting with a world that isn't going to be inconsistent, and just need to worry about keeping your plot from conflicting.
Of course, if you have a plot that doesn't really work in canon, making it original would probably be easier than all the work you have to do to adapt canon.
Mm, I think the real problem with novelizations for the game are that the game isn't really a story. I mean, KH has a named character with a particular personality, who has a series of distinct events happen to him and any number of back and forth arguments with other characters, all of which is informed by that personality, in between violent fights for the fate of the universe.
While Pokemon is about an unnamed mute character who wanders around a flat world. There's a couple plotty events, but there's anomalies, and you're never in any real danger. And most of the time is just spent wandering around fighting wild or trained pokemon. So you can't novelize it, you have to invent your own story around the basic frame (character starts here, then goes in this order, and the team shows up in these locations) and the pacing's shot to hell before you even start (I suppose this would be a good example of canon actually making things worse). So then you change bits, and you're no longer doing something that's actually a novelization, which is a relatively strict form, it's an OC running around the world.
Yeah, I've just been writing a long and impassioned discussion between a canon minor character and an OC about the moral implications of reincarnation in this world in terms of when does moral responsibility for the consequences a past life's actions end
That's always really bothered me. Any conclusions?
no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 06:55 pm (UTC)No great conclusions on the reincarnation argument, though. The main character very adamantly believes that only who one is and what they do in the current life matters and reincarnation is a blank slate. Then again, a bunch of other people want to make her life miserable/kill her because of things she did in a past life that she doesn't remember, when she had a completely different personality. Her arguments come across as more sympathetic, I think. Various gray areas of amnesia are brought up, with the idea one is still responsible to a fairly large extent there, but the end conclusion is there's a lot of situational subjectivity and gray involved.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 04:06 pm (UTC)This is not meant to be the only or best way of doing things. It is meant to be reliable.
Mm. What bothers me is, well, are new authors actually going to want something "reliable"? It's not as if their life's ambition is usually to simply write and finish an OT fic. It strikes me that you're basically crossing out most of the reasons new authors like to write OT fics to begin with; I'd think usually they do it precisely because they feel there is no need for planning so it's easy to just dive right in, or because they made up a region and new Pokémon and want to show them off, or they want to stuff every good idea they've ever had into the story (I know I did). And I very much doubt they generally really want to commit themselves to actually finishing it; that means promising dozens of chapters and probably years of your free time, which you probably aren't really willing to do if you're just starting writing and just want a comfortable little sandbox to play around in.
So I can't help imagining most reactions to this from the actual target audience being either "Aw, OT fics aren't as fun/easy as I thought, so I guess I'll write something else" or "Screw this 'Farla' and her 'advice'! I'll write my OT fic however I want!"
Eh, I wouldn't precisely know what every new author in the fandom is going to think, but I definitely know this would've just turned me off OT fics entirely if I'd actually read it before I started, not made me write a better one. Which is not to say it isn't probably a very good thing to encourage newbie writers to start with shorter works instead of starting myriads of OT fics that are either never going to be finished or will be poorly planned and stuffed with bad ideas *cough*, but if there'll be a lengthy guide following, I can't help thinking there will be very few people left after the introduction. Eliminating so much of why OT fics are popular before you even begin just seems to take most of the incentive to actually bother with the guide out of it.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 04:15 pm (UTC)Also, one of the things I'm aiming for is making it so authors can write an OT fic without it needing dozens of chapters. I might say something about that, but OT fics are an absolutely terrible thing for a new author to try, and I don't think a newbie guide to them would be honest without including that warning. Plenty of people are going to do them anyway, but I should at least give people a chance to get out early.