WHIP THEM INSTRUCTORS (and get points!)

Okay. So you regular members don't know about this, but basically, the moderators of YWS basically beat our instructors (the people in purple!) regularly. It actually looks something like this:



Anyway, we've kind of run out of ideas, so now we're making them fill The Official Writing Tips Knowledge Base for the Young Writers Society. I know! We like the fancy name as well.

However, they're being a little... rebellious and they're pretending to have writers block.

That's where you come in!

If you have any questions about writing or whatever that you would like to see a tutorial for, post the idea here on this thread. If your idea is legitimate (i.e. I want to see questions about writing, not hydrocrackers) ends up stumping the instructors, I will award you points.

Cool? I think so!

Post your ideas here!

I'm not sure I can stump any intructors, but you've seen me ranting about character development before. You gave me some great advice on my blog and I've love to see an article with more tips on a more advanced form of character development--what to do once you have the general idea fleshed out and you're trying to pull it all together.
Thanks! =)

Lucinda wrote:I'm not sure I can stump any intructors, but you've seen me ranting about character development before. You gave me some great advice on my blog and I've love to see an article with more tips on a more advanced form of character development--what to do once you have the general idea fleshed out and you're trying to pull it all together.
Thanks! =)

Besides writing? Oh, how we love to procrastinate from the thing we love!

And yep... I think you'll stump them. MWHAHAHA-- I mean, yay! Let's see what they do next...

How to defeat the plot bunnies? That aught to get them thinking....

Snoink wrote:

Lucinda wrote:I'm not sure I can stump any intructors, but you've seen me ranting about character development before. You gave me some great advice on my blog and I've love to see an article with more tips on a more advanced form of character development--what to do once you have the general idea fleshed out and you're trying to pull it all together.
Thanks! =)

Besides writing? Oh, how we love to procrastinate from the thing we love!

And yep... I think you'll stump them. MWHAHAHA-- I mean, yay! Let's see what they do next...

XD Yep, besides writing. I'm pretty sure that once I get to college, I'll major in procrastination.

What about starting at all? For me, coming up with a setting is easy, but where can I go from there? What's first?

If that doesn't stump them, I'll eat my shoe.

How about a cliche guide?

Mr.Knightley wrote:What about starting at all? For me, coming up with a setting is easy, but where can I go from there? What's first?

If that doesn't stump them, I'll eat my shoe.

And by "starting" you mean "beginnings"? If that's the case, here.

Merlin- Google "*Your genre* cliches" (Example: Fantasy Cliches) and you'll get a bunch.

asxz wrote:How to defeat the plot bunnies? That aught to get them thinking....

LOL. Be more specific! What particular elements of plot are you struggling with? I.E. do your plot bunnies look like this:



or this:



?

So specific requests work better.

I like that idea of a cliche guide... and no, googling isn't an option. WE MUST KEEP OUR USERS ON YWS FOREVER, MWHAHAHAAHAHAHA!!!!!

*kicks an instructor*

The twenty best ways (tried and tested) to defeat major writers block.

*kicks an instructor*

That is the reason I became a Greeter.

Rosey Unicorn wrote:

Mr.Knightley wrote:What about starting at all? For me, coming up with a setting is easy, but where can I go from there? What's first?

If that doesn't stump them, I'll eat my shoe.

And by "starting" you mean "beginnings"? If that's the case, here.

Sorry, I wasn't very clear on that. I mean... You have your setting. (i.e. "a magical realm full of cliches and unicorns") You can think of little snippets of dialogue, action, deaths, e.t.c. that you want to come into being, but how do you start planning? I mean seriously planning. What comes first: cast of characters, plot, e.t.c.? Say I had all these things; how would I start writing my story? Chapter by chapter, prologue, epilogue... Which comes first in all of these things? I know that most people say it's not a very good idea to start a story right from the beginning, but that doesn't make it very clear on where I should start. All of these things prevent me from even beginning to write something I'm passionate about. (even if I know it will be terrible) I hear all the time "Just write, write, write, write,!" But how can that be any help for me if I have now idea from what direction to dissect all of the above, the must-haves of any story, good or bad?

Sorry, I wasn't very clear on that. I mean... You have your setting. (i.e. "a magical realm full of cliches and unicorns") You can think of little snippets of dialogue, action, deaths, e.t.c. that you want to come into being, but how do you start planning? I mean seriously planning. What comes first: cast of characters, plot, e.t.c.? Say I had all these things; how would I start writing my story? Chapter by chapter, prologue, epilogue... Which comes first in all of these things? I know that most people say it's not a very good idea to start a story right from the beginning, but that doesn't make it very clear on where I should start. All of these things prevent me from even beginning to write something I'm passionate about. (even if I know it will be terrible) I hear all the time "Just write, write, write, write,!" But how can that be any help for me if I have now idea from what direction to dissect all of the above, the must-haves of any story, good or bad?

It varies from person to person, and it really depends on what all you have in your head at first. So ignore everyone who tells you how to do it or what you should be doing. It's different for everyone. For me, more often than not I will have a character or a story idea pop into my head. I'll think about it, then I'll have a few scenes/actions/bits and scraps of dialogue, etc. Just random bits. That's usually when I start making characters and matching them up to those random bits of fluff and stuff. Then I go back to my original story idea and begin asking myself where my characters came from, how did they come to be pulled into this situation, what happened before to set it all up so that this is what happened, and so on. Usually I have either a few more scenes (much more solid than the ones before) or a starting point for the story, or both. If both, I usually start with the beginning and start writing from there. If one or the other, I just start expanding the scenes forward and backward until they connect somewhere in between, or until I know how the story begins.

That's all the planning I do, really. Once I have that much and I start writing, everything blooms out for me. I don't know what happens in the next paragraph until I write it -- I have absolutely no idea. And that's part of the fun for me. If I do take the time to plan it out so I know everything that will happen in order and how it all goes... then I feel like I've already written the story and I don't really want to go back and rewrite it all in story format because that's just boring and the magic's all gone.

I can write a story and then re-write it from scratch, but that's because each draft is different. You might know several things that you plan to change, but for every item on your list there are ten more you don't know of until you write them down.

To answer your question, I start with the plot, even if I only know fragments of it. More often than not I get characters at the same time that I get plot, and once I have the characters down, they tend to take over the story, following the plot but treating it like a skeleton. Once I have my characters and an idea of my plot, then I go and develop the setting.

As far as where to start, you probably have a good idea of the key events in your story, yes? What's the one event that starts it all? Where's the one point where, once you cross it, the story really starts to happen or really starts to get interesting? Cut everything that comes before it and start there. Don't worry about explaining too much -- tie in bits of explanation here and there and you should be fine. But don't give an info-dump regarding how your characters came to be in this situation, because then you've just taken all the stuff you just deleted and pasted it in a different spot.

Otherwise, just take the turning point of your story, where the characters could have gone living normal lives had this not have happened, and start right there.

Did that help at all, or did I miss the mark by far?

Wow! That was brilliant! Huge help for me. You definitely deserve your instructor purpliness! This inspired me, somehow... I don't really know why, but it did. Thanks so much!


*donates,hugs*



Edit: Oops! I almost forgot. *eats shoe*

Do we get points if they can't stump us?

*rubs bruised sides*

I call for something against instructor abuse. (Jokes)

As for the cliche guide mentioned above:

Cliches are very numerous and cover a large range of things. Cliches are varied, depends on your reading, your education etc, you determine what is a cliche in your mind.

Cliche plots, cliche characters, cliche scenes, cliche stories in general. It is quite large of a request.
Also cliches can vary. You could just say a brown haired girl as a cliche, or you can develop with a unique situation, history, abilities etc.

So the guides you find will all be the same and very different in a way. I'm sure there is an instructor that would be willing to write several articles (Over the period of a long time xD) about cliches, so I suggest being a little bit more specific at what you want to see.

As Dreamer asked after her impressive article:

Is that what you needed? Or did I totally miss the point?