General Fanfiction Discussion 2: Electric Boogaloo

[Nitramy]

Doesn't it trouble you that the biggest critics are often the ones with little to no positive contribution to your stories as possible?

And when you do ask for help about some element in your story, they are conspicuously... absent.

[tehprognoob]

Doesn't it trouble you that the biggest critics are often the ones with little to no positive contribution to your stories as possible?

And when you do ask for help about some element in your story, they are conspicuously... absent.

No, it doesn't.
It's easy to put critiques down, but harder and more time consuming to read through a story and help people with it.
There is a critique thread, though; I'm sure the few people on there would be happy to help you, if you ask nicely.

[Antares]

With critique, it's always a little iffy with fiction. It's possible to get positive feedback alone, even if it might be a little rare. I always like to think that if they've gone through the trouble of reading+comprehending, their comments deserve my attention. Of course then there are those people who read without pausing to comprehend and comment accordingly. Luckily those tend to be easy to spot in time.

When you write for academia, it'll be a rare day when you'll be roundly praised by everyone around you, and even if you are, I'd be very suspicious. For the most part writing is supposed to be a little thought-provoking or even controversial, or invoking the reader's emotions to get a response. Then there are the nitpickers such as myself who point out things like "that mecha doesn't work like that". It's up to each author who seriously to deal with that because you can't please everyone with your narrative. Some want it simple, some want it graphically described, and some will never read your story because its title seemed boring to them. Take your pick.

[tehprognoob]

Yea; someone just left this forum because he/she couldn't take the critiquing, even though everyone poured their experience out for him. I guess some people are just a bit sensitive about this. Don't be; critique is always good for you

[Rob DS Zeta]

Yea; someone just left this forum because he/she couldn't take the critiquing, even though everyone poured their experience out for him. I guess some people are just a bit sensitive about this. Don't be; critique is always good for you

Then I guess that it's really bad that reason I don't post anything is because I fear negative critiquing.

[Vent Noir]

I'd personally rather have the problems someone finds with my work pointed out in a constructive manner than just "it was good" and no indication of what worked or didn't work.

[Nitramy]

General story-related question: how do you give a very good hook to your story without actually spoiling most of the important details in the plot?

[Big B]

Do something that's noticeable, but not bizzare. Follow that by slowly dropping in subtle hints about what will happen. That's the sort of writing I like, so that's my suggestion.

[Seraphic]

He means "How do I advertise my story without giving away the plot twist?"

To be honest I have the same problem with my project called 313. The twists are very important, but I can't really make people read it unless they know the story is unique. Anyway, I can tell you it's the ultimate mind vs body experience. =p

[Nitramy]

*facedesks repeatedly*

I just waded through the crap that is an unpleasable reviewer.

So I post links to my story and ask the question (and this is basically the point), "how do I make this story better"?

And then some schmuck has to walk in and say (and I quote) "This was a badly written story. So bad in fact, I could not get past the first part of the scound chapter."

When asked for details, said poster goes into such an unintelligible mess that even I can't find anything more than two legitimate points he or she made (that someone already did, and which I'm already working on), and then passed it off on a learning disability (which I find suspicious).

And, well, it kind of ruins the urge to write, because you know there are always the [zoink'd] who come out of the woodwork.

Sigh...

[Black Knight]

The best reason I've found to write is to please yourself. Someone will always dislike a given work. It's more common than Gundamjackings in the first three episode of a new Gundam TV series. More dependable than mid-season upgrades, even.

If you really want to find constructive criticism, I suggest finding a few people who's stories you like who are willing to give you feedback on what you write yourself. Random readers aren't necessarily going to be able to provide meaningful feedback, and sometimes you might be trying to go down a certain route with a plot arc or a character, and the reader simply doesn't get it, because everyone has their own opinion of what a given type of story "should be like'.

Even when you're trying to improve your storytelling, remember that some people who respond will simply have bad comments, and should be ignored. I once had someone tell me off for writing a side-story of a movie without having the movie immediately to hand as a reference. They didn't tell me spots where I'd gotten a reference to the movie wrong; they simply said I was a fool for writing a side-story without the primary source as an immediate reference. I promptly ignored that response, because it told me nothing I didn't already know.

What's always worked best for me is to use my friends who, like me, have delusions of being a somewhat competent writer to bounce ideas upon and check over my writing for everything from spelling & grammar errors to continuity issues (if it's fanfiction) to just plain storytelling issues; as the author, I tend to know more about the characters than the potential readers, and sometimes I forget that what I think is normal behavior for a character isn't evident as such to the readers, who don't have the same level of knowledge about the cast that I do.

[PrissAsagiri UK]

To throw a question out there that has some bearing on a project I'm working on: what conventions do people prefer when several different languages are supposedly being spoken during different scenes in a fic?

I know that Gundam canon itself is pretty monolingual; at least, language barriers rarely (if ever?) become plot points and almost everyone speaks Japanese (or, if you prefer, everyone is speaking the same language which happens to be presented at Japanese for the convenience of the original intended audience).

As far as textual conventions for highlighting the fact that someone is speaking a language other than the one that a piece of text is being presented in, I've often seem italics used in purely textual presentations, or, less often, angle brackets in prose and comic formats. I know angle brackets can present some issues with various message board software, though, depending on how precisely it's configured.

For reference, the project is an original Gundam AU in which several different political entities have different primary languages. In particular, the primary language of one heavily-featured entity/faction is French, whereas the primary language of the protagonists is English; the majority of characters (and other setting inhabitants) are bilingual or multilingual, but I don't want to go purely 'language blind' and/or work on the assumption that since almost everyone can probably understand the multiple languages being spoken, it's not worth highlighting that there are multiple languages being spoken. I feel it communicates something important about the setting and characters that differeng languages are spoken by different groups, and what I'm looking for are suggestions for the most elegant way to convey that in the text.

It may be that, when only one language is being spoken in a scene, context is sufficient to establish which language is being spoken (for example, if characters X and Y are known to speak French as their first language, and they are the only characters speaking in a scene, it may not be necessary to indicate explicitly that they're speaking French because there's no reason that they wouldn't be) but in scenes where multiple languages are being spoken, I'd like to have some clear way to indicate that, and I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts and suggestions on the topic.

[Black Knight]

Amusingly, I think checking a sampling of war films (especially WWII) can be a good way to look for ideas to handle this particular situation.

In some war films, everyone speaks English, even the people who are supposed to be from another nation (The Battle of the Bulge, for example). Other times, everyone speaks their native language, and subtitles appear (A Bridge Too Far), which generally doesn't take anything away. In one of the most interesting takes, however, the native language is used, but only a general sense of what the characters are saying is provided to the viewer via voice-over narration (The Gallant Hours). All have their benefits, all their detractions.

For myself, with text, I find running across foreign languages, without translation, to be interesting. It can be used to provide an interesting degree of foreign-ness, when trying to emphasize the differences between groups or individuals. I'm not such a fan of Gratuitous German, or the use of a foreign language just to make people seem cooler. That said, I have an annoying tendency to work in latin phrases whenever possible, so I am not always able to practice what I preach.

[Heretic]

General story-related question: how do you give a very good hook to your story without actually spoiling most of the important details in the plot?

Getting back to this because I don't think anyone really touched on it.

When it comes to stories, Characters are the primary thing that draw me in. A book can be predictable and done a thousand times before, but if it has characters that draw you in and makes you care about what happens to them, predictability isn't too big an issue and readers will enjoy the twists all the more.

To extend that, in a majority of stories, the protagonist will probably live/win/get the girl/etc. We still watch movies, TV and read books knowing this. We watch and read because we want to know how it all happens.

Let the story and the characters be their own hook.

[Antares]

On the use of languages:
In MAHQ we do have a lot of different nationalities, but for the most part we discuss in English. That is the lingua franca of the Net, after all. The same tends to apply to most anime shows too, where the lingua franca e.g. in Code Geass is de facto Japanese, when one would hardly expect Charles, king of Britannia, to utter a single word of a language spoken by people he sees as his inferiors. As was noted, this is done to make it easier for the intended audience to follow. And on occasion when Japanese voice actors do turn to English the results are so jarringly mispronounced that I'd rather they stuck to Japanese. In movies you can obviously help the audience out with subtitles like Black Knight said.

But how about writers then? Well, there are quite a few, Dorothy Dunnett came to mind first, who writes historical fiction and in the time she sets her stories in, English, in England, was often the language of the peasants. The nobels could, and had to speak French as a sign of their social class. It fit the narrative. Some might even easily recite Latin or more languages. I don't speak a word of (proper) French myself, so I tended to simply skip those (usually short) bits, confident that I didn't miss anything important. Quite often the narrator or other character does a bit of paraphrasing for the benefit of the reader anyway.

Yes, adding local vernacular adds immersion to the story, and can also give a brief smile to those who speak the language to see it used. A few off-the-cuff comments would seem quite likely; people most often burst out in their native tongue when shocked/surprised, etc. But if you're going to use a lot of non-English in an otherwise "English" story, I think adding the translation in summary in italics would be quite feasible, and also easy on the reader. And yeah, in scenes where the only language spoken in not English, the story can go on as if it were, just as long as you've established previously that these people talk amongst themselves in another language. You can still do the narration in English, no probs.

[Rob DS Zeta]

Does anyone here know a good cure for the plot bunnies? I keep starting new things without finishing my old things!

[Arbiter GUNDAM]

Does anyone here know a good cure for the plot bunnies? I keep starting new things without finishing my old things!

Discipline. It's all about discipline.

Anywho, as I'm writing one of my new stories, Alternate Mobile Report Gundam Wing, I find a couple of dangling plot points that I'm still pondering.

First of all, everyone's favorite pacifist princess, Relena! I was going to have her already be the Princess of the Sanc Kingdom right from the get-go, but now I thinking about writing her more as she was at the beginning of Gundam Wing.

Second, I think I'm going to leave Romefeller out of this entirely, or just have them play a very minor role. That way I can avoid some of that "evil organization of the week" that Wing had so much.

Third, I'm thinking that, in order to prevent Zechs from having to go through The Three Stages of Highly Effective Char-Clones, I would make the person he wants to take revenge on someone in White Fang or maybe OZ.

What do you guys think?

[Black Knight]

With #2, if the guy Zechs wants to kill is in any organization he joins (OZ or White Fang) then in your attempts to avoid his Char-clone-ness you will have, in fact, taken another rung on the ladder of Char-clones, by having him join and rise to high positions in the ranks of the organization whose leaders/members he wants to kill. Trowa would go undercover to learn information on objectives, but Char did it more to get close to people he wanted to kill.

Wing TV only had four "evil organizations", two of them, we learn later, at the instigation of another of them, and the fourth...well, depends entirely on one's view of White Fang. Did it get convoluted that the Alliance was led by the nose by OZ, which itself was being led by Romefeller? Sure. But throughout history large organizations and political bodies are frequently directed more and less obviously by a handful of fanatics (look up the French Revolution between 1789 and 1799 some time for a classic example). It doesn't make for a good story, but it is realistic. And I, for one, like the idea of Romefeller constantly discarding organizations it has created or directed as the people in them start to realize how far out Romefeller's ideas are.

[Rob DS Zeta]

Discipline. It's all about discipline.

Of course... It's gonna be one of those things I can't seem to handle.

[Arbiter GUNDAM]

How about this: If you must work on multiple stories, do so one chapter at a time. Dont write here a little and there a little on each story as your fancy dictates, becuase you know what? You will NEVER get anything done. Trust me, I tried it. So remember: One chapter at a time. I really liked your Gundam Dynasty Warriors story. The thought of Haman leading Kira around is amusing.


@Black Knight: I'm still thinking about Zechs but as far as organizations go, I tend to agree with the Gundamn! guys when they said that the people/organization you are fighting against at the start of a story generally should be the same people you are fighting at the end of the story. I think that April 7, AC195 to December 25, AC195 is a pretty compressed amount of time to go from the UESA having total dominion over earth and space to the unrealistically pacifist ESUN.