Young Writers Society

Hello again. As described in my last post, I am starting to write a series of short stories. However, I had a few questions:

1. Do I have to write my friend's personalities parallel to how they are in real life?
In my short story series, I am writing my friends and myself as characters. Do I have to make them talk and act exactly like they do in real life? I don't know exactly how all of my friends would react to things in real life, so this would be pretty difficult.

2. Does my character have to be parallel to me?
I am obviously going to write my character resembling my real life self, but can II deviate a bit? After all, it is fiction? Can I add aspects to my life I wish I had (not including the epic powers and adventures) and keep some things out (a.k.a. my OCD)? I have always wanted a younger brother, so can I make my character have one? I don't want my character to have OCD (which I have in real life) either, so can I exclude that?

3. How do I dig through my mind for ideas for my opening story and the rest of them?
For stories I've been imaging for years, it sure is hard to get them on paper? I want the opening story to include an introduction to my character and a few others, Discovering The Vest of Knowledge, the main villain(s), and perhaps a bit of history behind The Vest of Knowledge (not all of it, though!). Any ideas for brainstorming? Anything else you think I should include in the opening story?

These are just some questions I'm asking myself, and I would love your input!!! Thank you, everyone!!!!!

4. My stories' settings vary A TON... how do I tie them into one setting?
My settings vary from the town my character lives in to the forest to outer space. Do I just include a lot of traveling?

Also, feel free to ask my about anything I might already know about the story.

For the first two: No. Your characters don't "have" to be anything, and you can mess around with personality a bit. These are inspired by real people, not actually depicting real people.

For the third: Pick a place to start and write. That's about as simple as it gets. You will probably restart it ten times, smash the beginning to bits, move the beginning earlier, later, sideways— and eventually something'll work. But you can't figure out what'll work until you get the story down on paper (I only realized where my novel should begin after I finished the entirety of the first draft).

Don't worry about picking "the right place" to start because it doesn't exist.

For the fourth: Depends on if you include magic or not. You could have a spell, a place, a vehicle, or anything else you can think of. Magic Tree House series had, well, a tree house, and Magic School Bus had— you guessed it— a school bus. By addressing the issue with "magic" you can have no travel time and just have them poof into a new location to have adventures.

But past that, whatever you want. There is no "right way" to tie a bunch of settings together. So long as you're using the same characters, people will pick up that these adventures go everywhere and you'll change settings almost every story without you having to explain it. Can even be an inside joke they get themselves into the weirdest places, no explanation given.

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Honestly, I'm going to say it again:

There are no shoulds in writing. There is only what's best for the story

Determine what the story needs, what you want the story to look like, and what works best. That's something you determine.

I know it's hard to let go of that perfectionism. I have a very, very hard time letting go of "should"s, and what I ended up doing was forgetting everything. I actively shoved any thoughts about readers liking my work out of my head. Every time I caught myself obsessing over something that "should" happen, I relentlessly reminded myself that nothing "should" happen. It's about what the story needs. It's about what works.

You don't need approval on everything you do. Writing is all about proving to readers you can make whatever plot you want work.

Just show the world what you want to see written. Don't listen when the world tells you what you should write.

Rosey Unicorn wrote:For the first two: No. Your characters don't "have" to be anything, and you can mess around with personality a bit. These are inspired by real people, not actually depicting real people.

For the third: Pick a place to start and write. That's about as simple as it gets. You will probably restart it ten times, smash the beginning to bits, move the beginning earlier, later, sideways— and eventually something'll work. But you can't figure out what'll work until you get the story down on paper (I only realized where my novel should begin after I finished the entirety of the first draft).

Don't worry about picking "the right place" to start because it doesn't exist.

For the fourth: Depends on if you include magic or not. You could have a spell, a place, a vehicle, or anything else you can think of. Magic Tree House series had, well, a tree house, and Magic School Bus had— you guessed it— a school bus. By addressing the issue with "magic" you can have no travel time and just have them poof into a new location to have adventures.

But past that, whatever you want. There is no "right way" to tie a bunch of settings together. So long as you're using the same characters, people will pick up that these adventures go everywhere and you'll change settings almost every story without you having to explain it. Can even be an inside joke they get themselves into the weirdest places, no explanation given.

----

Honestly, I'm going to say it again:

There are no shoulds in writing. There is only what's best for the story

Determine what the story needs, what you want the story to look like, and what works best. That's something you determine.

I know it's hard to let go of that perfectionism. I have a very, very hard time letting go of "should"s, and what I ended up doing was forgetting everything. I actively shoved any thoughts about readers liking my work out of my head. Every time I caught myself obsessing over something that "should" happen, I relentlessly reminded myself that nothing "should" happen. It's about what the story needs. It's about what works.

You don't need approval on everything you do. Writing is all about proving to readers you can make whatever plot you want work.

Just show the world what you want to see written. Don't listen when the world tells you what you should write.

That method of just picking a place and starting with it is exactly how my friend and I came up with the idea for my Pokemon fan fiction. It took several ideas to finally know which ones to keep and add the ideas my friend suggested to create the ultimate story.

Just out of curiosity, how often do you plan your stories? You seem like the type that thinks of an idea, starts from scratch, and rewrites the beginning of the story until it's correct.

Haha, well, while I rewrite a lot, I'm actually the biggest advocate against rewriting until the story's done.

I used to rewrite in the name of perfection a lot. I have drafts for my novel in the double digits, far into the double digits, but I realized awhile ago that I was not improving at all and simply writing myself in circles trying to search for "the best" and not actually progressing in the story.

Basically, I was stuck in an endless loop of searching for a perfect beginning and neglecting everything else in the story.

After a few years of this, nearly a decade, I got sick of never finishing anything. So I grit my teeth, ignored my inner editor, and applied good old persistence to finish a single draft. It took me three years, but I did it. In the process, I learned so much about crafting a story and realized my skills regarding middles and endings were extremely weak— because I'd spent all my time polishing beginnings.

I've smashed well over 20 beginnings to bits, and I only came up with one that had some semblance of "feeling right" after I finished the whole draft. I had to know where I was going in order to write the beginning properly.

So with that said.

I'm a bridge builder planner, with a healthy stock of dynamite.

I figure out a bunch of plot points I want to happen. Some are well thought out, some very much are not. I then proceed to work from what I believe is my start point to what I believe is my end point, with a bunch of stops in between. The metaphor for what this area looks like is basically a whole bunch of protruding land masses and something very dangerous between them, so I have to build bridges (aka make it up as I go along) between those protruding land masses. On the one side is my start point, a solid landmass, and on the other side is my end point, a solid land mass.

Sometimes, these bridges work. I make it across to the next plot point without issue and begin to build the next bridge. In a perfect world, this is how writing would be, but we are not in a perfect world.

This is where the dynamite comes in.

When I realize a bridge is not working, a plot point is not working, or something isn't working, I toss a stick of dynamite on the whole thing. Sometimes I destroy multiple bridges as plot points still don't work. I basically back up until I'm on a plot point that has possibility to move forward from, then I pick a new direction.

That's the only rewriting I allow myself to do, and I only do it when the plot does not work at all. Usually when that happens I show it to other people and they go "I don't like this" at which point I go "oh that's been my issue for the past few thousand words *cuts*". Some people can change the plot on a dime, I can't, so I rewrite starting from the part of the story the plot still worked.

Rinse, repeat, keep adapting to the story and where your characters want to go, and get out of your own way when writing. We are in many ways our own worst enemies, because we have such rigid ideas for what the story should be. Your characters have much better ideas of what the story should be, so I suggest letting go of your own ideas and letting them drive.