Random Writing Advice

 I think I might pop onto Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla for the seasonal festival and get a cool new sword, but otherwise I am still enjoying Ghost of Tsushima, I’m having a LOT of fun watching The Sandman, and re-watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. And! I’m reading a Redwall book too.

I was thinking about someone’s blog post about The Last Jedi and dialogue, and Whedon’s influence on genre fiction, so I have an idea about how so much fantasy nowadays is trying to make the fantastical… less fantastical? And how weird that is? And disappointing when you think about it.

But that would take an awful lot of time to write and I’m already behind. Because my computer has a complete breakdown every time it wants to do updates, which are ANNOYINGLY common. Also I had this other idea which I thought might be fun. So here we are!

Random Writing Advice!

I looked at a couple of Limyaael rants this week and I thought, hey, I have some ideas for writing advice that people don’t usually give, and that I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else. If I have, I don’t remember it. So here we go!

ONE: Basing characters off of people you know

After watching The Almighty Johnsons on Netflix in grad school, I had a bajillion ideas for different takes on the same basic concept, but with considerably less skeeviness: a family of people who were the human incarnations of a group of deities. I got a bit far on the Aztec mythology idea. But one of the possibilities that came up in my head was a generation of cousins from a Puerto Rican family, most on the island but some living in the US, finding out they were the incarnations of Taino deities.

At some point I quit because I thought, “If I write this, and it ever gets out, family members are going to ask or start guessing who’s based on who. And they’d be right to do so.”

I strongly encourage you to not write characters who are one-to-one fictionalized versions of people you know. It’s okay to include traits or bits of dialogue from real-life people. It’s fine! But it’s possible that people are already going to decide that your characters are based off of them, and decide whether or not they’re flattered, and it’s just a mess. It’s better to avoid that altogether, or do your best to hide it if you can’t. You don’t know how people would react to finding out that they’ve been fictionalized.

I also encourage you to avoid naming characters after people you know, or even having the same names if it’s not intentional. People in your social circle will assume that they’re based off of those people, even if it’s a common name. There was a ton of speculation of creepiness on Twilight when critics realized that Jacob (one of the lead’s possible love interests) has the same first name as the author’s brother.

TWO: Writing romance is HARD

I don’t have much experience writing romance, but I’ve noticed if you watch a lot of movies, television shows, and read a lot of books, you’ll come across plenty of couples with absolutely no chemistry who get together by virtue of being the male and female lead. They’re not good together, they don’t seem to like each other’s company, but they’re destined or something, so it works.

Nope!

I’ve seen plenty of essays on why not to do Designated Love Interests, or how to write convincing romance. Okay fine, go read those. But I just want to throw out there that it’s darn difficult to sell romance sometimes. Authors will often fall into the trap of trying to make this relationship “THE GREATEST LOVE STORY OF ALL TIME” and have plenty of angst and drama, but none of the actual affection, attraction, or courtship.

Nah, brah, if you’re going to write something like a convince romance story arc (Not even a full story! Just the arc!) and make us care about it, you’ve got to put some work into making us care about these two people and understand not just why they like each other, but why they see it worth each other’s time.

And maybe they’re not! One thing I do find really interesting about The Witcher books is that Geralt and Yennefer are kind of terrible for each other–and that’s okay for a fictional couple. They’re not a healthy relationship, but as long as you understand that you can tell an interesting story from that, it’ll be fine. But if you throw a dysfunctional couple at me and try to spin it as a relationship that the reader should aspire to, welp. Go think about your life.

THREE: Fictional culture names

I am bad with names. Scratch that, I am TERRIBLE with names. One thing that made Wheel of Time so confusing for me was that there are SO MANY named viewpoint characters, and I don’t remember most of them. And what doesn’t help is that there’s no indication as to the country of origin that you can work out from their names. It’s not like Saldeans have names that skew one way and Andorians have it another, at least not that I could tell.

Compare this to something like Lord of the Rings. Hobbit names sound different from Dwarven names, which sound different from Rohirrim names, which sound different from Elvish names. Or, as I’m rewatching Avatar: The Last Airbender, you’ll notice that Water Tribe names (often heavily rely on ‘k’s or ‘k’ sounds) are different from Fire Nation names (a lot of ‘z’s going around, “Lee/Li” is common) which are different from Earth Kingdom names.

If you are writing a fantasy world with a lot of fantasy cultures in it, you should have some sort of way of differentiating naming styles. That applies to both character names and place names. A lot of high fantasy does this by having different cultures as stand-ins for real-world cultures. In The Elder Scrolls for instance, the Imperials of Cyrodill have mostly Italian or Latin names, whereas the Nords are, well, Norse-sounding.

You don’t have to do that though. I remember Fool’s Gold (which I wasn’t a huge fan of in the end, but this was an interesting idea) had it so that all dragon names ended with ‘-ax’. You’ll notice in a lot of science-fiction that plenty of alien names tend to follow some sort of convention, if only that they’re hard to pronounce and have apostrophes or something.

FOUR: People believe their religions

Reading blog posts off of ACOUP, this point comes up a lot, but I think it bears repeating. You’ll notice in fantasy works like Game of Thrones and The Witcher that most of the main cast, especially the educated folks and nobles, don’t really believe the religions of their fantasy settings, and see it only as a means to an end, if not just a stupid superstition. To be intelligent is to be non-religious.

That’s not how it was historically. And even if it was, going against the religion that apparently everyone in your country believes is not a great way to stay in charge! If a powerful figure keeps doing things that the people believe might bring down the wrath of Heaven on them any second now, that power is going to switch pretty quick!

This attitude smacks of “I’m not working as hard on this aspect of worldbuilding.” Part of worldbuilding is making the reader believe in the aspects of the world they’ve built, and how they hold up. Except there’s this one aspect, the religion, that the author clearly doesn’t care about (except for maybe as an obstacle), and doesn’t expect the reader to care either. So no one important to the reader is invested in this, unless the character is a foaming-at-the-mouth fanatic.

Nope, sorry. Go back and try again. 

FIVE: Subversive =/= Good

There’s an episode of Community about conspiracy theories that ends with really random Plot Twists, and concludes by saying doing something like that is just “Doing random crap.” Look, subverting readers’ expectations can be really rewarding and cool, but if you do it too much? You’re just doing random crap.

And even if we’re not talking about Plot Twists, if we’re talking about doing a story that’s just meant to shock and alarm, that’s... not necessarily good, either.

I remember before A Song of Ice and Fire became mainstream that there was a post in a thread of a fantasy forum of someone gushing about a story he or she was working on, and how it was definitely NOT self-insert Mary Sue fantasy, and the main character was a soldier who was a murderer and rapist so that you know that the story’s not going to go the usual path from the get-go. This person seemed to miss that it also sounds like a horribly unpleasant read.

You can challenge expectations! You can happily decide to do something different than the norm. But doing those things don’t automatically make a story good. If you keep challenging expectations, your reader will probably not get attached to ANYTHING because you’re constantly pulling out the rug. Likely, the reader will decide that anything is fair game (which it might be) and either give up or find thing whole thing as some kind of demented joke.

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I hope you had fun with this? Or at least, that this wasn’t writing advice that you’ve seen ten times over. Some of the ideas I jotted down I thought were worth writing about (writing probably won’t make you rich, or don’t make a story into a pamphlet), but I also thought those were things you can probably read elsewhere, so they didn’t make the cut. Let me know if you think those would be good to write about as well!