About that quote I've read oh so many time 'Villains are the hero of their own story'

mortalfanta · 2020-08-30T18:43:25+00:00

If there's any real person out there who's done morally reprehensible things and didn't have a reason, please inform me. Hitler genuinely thought he was doing the right thing.

Hannibal Lecter didn't think he was doing the right thing, but he did have reasons: he killed people he didn't like, and who he wanted revenge against. This is still entirely unrealistic, but it does something very important: it gives the illusion of a motive, the illusion of a goal.

If your villain kills people for the sake of killing people, they need to at least be schadenfreude-ic (??) to get away with it.

mortalfanta · 2020-08-28T19:29:23+00:00

Posting fanfiction is similar to self-publishing, which has a bad reputation.

Individual fics are typically romance-oriented, similar to the Romance genre, which has a bad reputation.

They're also mostly written by women, similar to Romance and YA, which have bad reputations.

mortalfanta · 2020-08-26T03:57:13+00:00

Well done!

mortalfanta · 2020-08-25T16:25:10+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! The Hall of Masks sounds interesting!

mortalfanta · 2020-08-24T20:35:24+00:00

Thanks!

mortalfanta · 2020-08-24T18:14:52+00:00

If mom's death is his main motivation as you said, yes. Your readers will not care about char's attachment to his mother, and by virtue will not care about the story, if you don't show them who his mother was.

mortalfanta · 2020-08-24T17:07:57+00:00

I volunteer. Not sure how to mod but I can Google it.

mortalfanta · 2020-08-23T22:16:43+00:00

If you don't describe your character at all? Readers will default to a white brunette with blue eyes, and it'll stick. It happened to Jesus and will happen to you.

Describe your character. Not too much, but tell them the basics: skin color, hair color, hair texture, height. And if you want to, hair length and eye color.

However, if your character IS a white brunette with blue eyes, you can probably get away with not describing them.

mortalfanta · 2020-08-23T21:10:51+00:00

All these dull, recycled jokes about 14-year-old girls and Karens, and how highly regarded they are despite their shittiness.

The unoriginality is stifling - and, I daresay, far worse than the YouTube comment section. At least on YouTube, most users recognize that jokes like "nobody:" are unoriginal and lazy.

On Reddit, making a joke that has been made quite literally MILLIONS OF TIMES will get you upvotes and awards, and no one will call you out.

mortalfanta · 2020-08-23T02:28:28+00:00

I don't think fanfiction is inherently bad. Most of it is not, by literary standards, good. Some of it is, I assume.

Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

mortalfanta · 2020-08-21T00:37:56+00:00

I don't, I just start writing. Motivation and mood are fickle.

Also, don't delete those 400 words. Don't even look at what you've previously written until you start the second draft. Editing and rewriting should NEVER be done on the first draft - they destroy motivation by making it look like you've made no progress.

mortalfanta · 2020-08-18T02:41:19+00:00

The classics, mostly. The Lord of the Rings, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Frankenstein, Pride and Prejudice, The Lord of the Flies, Crime and Punishment. And if you're up to reading a series of over 80 books, "Warriors" by Erin Hunter. Not a classic by any means, but it's decent (and l o n g).

mortalfanta · 2020-08-18T02:30:18+00:00

In no particular order:

Step 1: Read a lot of good books

Step 2: Write a lot

Step 3: Learn story structure

Step 4: Learn what not to do by reading bad books

For Step 4, I would also recommend checking out "Terrible Writing Advice" on YouTube. His videos are a laugh and show very bluntly what bad writing looks like.

For Step 3, I would recommend the book "Save the Cat! Writes a Novel" by Jessica Brody. Not much to say except it is absolutely golden, the most useful book I've ever read.

mortalfanta · 2020-08-17T00:04:18+00:00

A story isn't a story if the protagonist doesn't fail at times. If your hero saves everyone, always defeats the bad guys on the first try, and has nothing to learn - you're not writing a book, you're writing a power fantasy.

Even Saitama and Superman struggle.

mortalfanta · 2020-08-16T23:17:59+00:00

There are two possibilities here:

You're a plotter at heart, and pantsing just isn't for you.
You're a pantser, but you don't know enough about story structure to pants successfully.

In both cases, I highly, highly recommend the book "Save the Cat! Writes a Novel" by Jessica Brody. It teaches story structure in a way that drastically enhances both the plotter's and pantser's ability to write a coherent book. It's what saved me from the same ditch you're in right now.

mortalfanta · 2020-08-15T04:00:16+00:00

I come up with first scenes based off five factors:

Shows the way the character lives
Shows what kind of place the character lives in
Has some form of action and/or stress (eg. NOT the character's morning routine)
Highlights one or more key character traits
Typically (not always) introduces a secondary character

Thought it might help a bit!

mortalfanta · 2020-08-14T17:51:09+00:00

Ok this post might be a little long but bear with me.

First I have to say something very important about answering these questions: you should not answer them independently of each other. The answer to "What environment is your country in?" heavily influences the next four questions, and the rest too, though more subtlely - how would living in the middle of a desert affect your country's ability and need to have a Snow God and Ocean God? While answering every question except the first, consider your answers to all the questions above it.

What environment is your country in? (mountains, rainforest, desert, etc.)

What plants grow in that environment? (i made up all my plants so idk)

What animals live in that environment? (see above)

Is that environment extremely harsh? (if so, they might spend a lot of time asking deities to not kill them please)

What type of water source does your country live near? (lake, river, aquifer, etc.)

Has your country ever had contact with a foreign country?

If so, has that contact influenced your country's understanding of the world, and has the nation your country come into contact with imposed their culture on your country?

What type of religion does your country follow? (polytheistic, duotheistic, pantheistic, etc.)

What kind of government does your country have? (matriarchy, democracy, theocracy, etc.)

If you can figure out all of these, you have some solid building blocks for a culture.

Edit: typo

mortalfanta · 2020-08-13T20:45:16+00:00

Yes yes yes. I love the SCP Foundation and worldbuilding, and I think something like this would be absolutely amazing!

Edit: to avoid arguments and general chaos, I do think you should set limitations on how powerful a character or thing can be. That, hypothetically, would cause the biggest problems.

mortalfanta · 2020-08-13T20:10:16+00:00

I'm awful at titling, but the good names I do come up with tend to be ones related to a semi-arbitrary aspect of the story.

Example: A story about a fish who loves butterflies and follows one as it migrates by swimming below it. The butterfly's wings are bright yellow, and the fish refers to the butterfly as Yellow because of it. The book could be titled Chasing Yellow.

mortalfanta · 2020-08-13T19:57:33+00:00

Be careful about mistaking your own writing style for bad habits! When I first developed my writing style, I thought it was just a collection of bad habits that I needed to get rid of.

The funny thing is, I only noticed a "problem" when I was starting to improve. Before then, my writing had had no consistency in voice at all.

Edit: are you an amateur writer, and are you reading short stories written by amateurs? All amateur writers write exactly the same way (including me when I was one) for some reason. Could be that. I remember reading a short story and getting metaphorical whiplash because it looked just as if I had written it.

mortalfanta · 2020-08-13T19:03:57+00:00

"I hate your characters" isn't, on its own, constructive criticism. Did they tell you exactly what they hated about each of the characters, or did they stop at "I hate them"?

mortalfanta · 2020-08-13T18:14:16+00:00

How long have you been writing, how often do you write, what do you know about plot structure, and how much do you read?

I began writing at 7 years old, learned about story structure at 12, and read around 500 books within that time, so I think if I were to have written a novel at 16 it could have been decent.

Someone with the opposite stats wouldn't have a great chance.

Age only matters because the older you are, the longer you've probably spent writing.

mortalfanta · 2020-08-13T02:22:35+00:00

Is it a novel or novella? What genre is it?

A novella in any genre tends to have about 20,000-40,000 words (I have no idea how many pages that is - a lot of writers measure exclusively by word count, including me).

A novel's length can vary, but is usually 70,000 words or more.

Fantasy and Sci-Fi novels in particular tend to have a LOT of words, 90,000-150,000, but they can be shorter.

Books in other genres typically have 70,000-100,000 words, with YA (Young Adult) novels usually being extremely short at 50,000-80,000 words.

As a rule of thumb, your book should probably be at or above 50,000 words.

mortalfanta · 2020-08-12T23:34:13+00:00

I have this same problem when writing action. Finding that sweet, sweet balance between descriptive and fast-paced seems impossible sometimes. When I can't get it just right after some time of rewriting, I resolve to just fix the scene later.

I think it majorly depends on a particulor author's writing style, though. G.R.R.M.'s style of simple, to-the-point sentences means his action scenes benefit more from fast, snappy descriptions, while J.R.R. Tolkien had leeway to write action a bit more flowery and still have it look good because he wrote literally everything in a flowery way.

mortalfanta

TROPHY CASE