Advice On How To Be A Good Writer

[Bartmanhomer]

Hey everybody. It's yours truly. It been a while since I last made a thread from this section anyway. I need some advice. I was thinking of writing a D&D fan fiction story about a group of Good-aligned Drow who face a powerful half-fiend elf. The group is four drow: A mature male drow fighter, a mature female drow cleric, a young male drow rogue and a young female drow wizard. The half-fiend elf is male and a fighter. So I'm pretty sure you get idea of it. So what's your advice to make a great D&D fan fiction story?

[Peelee]

Watch the film Throw Momma From the Train. Lot of good writing tips in there. Like that criss-cross bit from Strangers on a Train. Ya know, you kill my guy, and i kill yours.

Just lemme know when's good for you.

[Aedilred]

Well, that's a pretty broad-ranging question (and you might be better off in Arts and Crafts, or Media). There are whole libraries out there on how to write well, and it's probably possible to read and ingest them all and still not be a good writer. Realistically I'm going to limit my advice to a couple of salient points, given the medium.

Firstly, make sure it's a story. That it has a beginning, middle and end, that something happens, preferably that there's some character development, and so on. One of the reasons I find D&D campaign logs and video sessions and the like quite hard to engage with is that there often isn't a story, just some people wandering about interacting with their environment. A common piece of advice for GMs is that good stories don't always make good campaigns, and not to get too fixated on the idea of themselves as a "storyteller". That goes the other way round too: good campaigns don't always make good stories, or at least not without substantial editing and distillation.

Secondly, make sure you're familiar with all the usual fanfiction pitfalls, especially those surrounding self-insert and Mary Sue-type characters, and try to avoid them.

Thirdly, and related to #1, try not to get bogged down in the minutiae of the setting or, worse, the game system. Absolutely give in to the temptation to abstract away battle scenes if they don't add anything to the story, focussing only on the cool or plot-relevant details. Don't get bogged down in describing each spell, manoeuvre, special ability, or whatever. Try to avoid game terminology unless it's something the characters would do or say. Likewise don't feel inhibited by the limitations of the rules if there's something it would make sense for a character to do in a given instance but the rules wouldn't allow it.

Fourthly, decide what tone you're going for. Is this a serious story set in a mostly serious world, is it a lighthearted riff on the tropes of the game a la OOtS; is it a tale of high adventure and worldshaping destinies or a bunch of murderhobos bleeding to death in a ditch? A lot of the elements of D&D make for pretty crazy stories and settings -and some pretty unnatural dialogue and character activities - if taken at face value, so decide how you're going to deal with them - are you going to paper over them, give them some knowing winks, play them up, or write them out altogether? Some of this may be decided for you if you're working with a pre-established setting. Once you've worked this out, try to stick to it. It's ok to throw the reader a tone curveball or two, but you want to avoid veering between extremes, or too many cases of Mood Whiplash.

Lastly, all the other stuff that usually goes into making a story good. Get your perspective straight: third-person omniscient, third-person limited, etc. Make your characters distinctive and relatable but not caricatured. Don't be afraid of convention, but avoid cliché. Get your dialogue sounding natural but purposeful. Sort out formatting. And so on and so on.

[veti]

I'd just add: practise writing. Make sure you write something every day. (Arguing on web forums doesn't count. Short stories would, though.) An ideal to aim for would be a solid 30 minutes of creative writing every single day, week in and week out. Write something creative, doesn't matter what. I would write about my shopping list, or visiting the car wash, or whatever. Don't ask anyone else to read it.

Keep up that regime for at least a few weeks before you even start on what you want to write. You need practice before you can do it for real.

[shawnhcorey]

To become a good writer, you have to spend a lot of time finding out what doesn't work for you. :smalleek:

[Aedilred]

I'd just add: practise writing. Make sure you write something every day. (Arguing on web forums doesn't count. Short stories would, though.) An ideal to aim for would be a solid 30 minutes of creative writing every single day, week in and week out. Write something creative, doesn't matter what. I would write about my shopping list, or visiting the car wash, or whatever. Don't ask anyone else to read it.

Keep up that regime for at least a few weeks before you even start on what you want to write. You need practice before you can do it for real.

To be fair, I think that's what he's doing. Opinions are divided as to the ultimate merits of fanfiction for a writer but it's at least a way of getting practice. I don't honestly think there's a lot of point practising writing fiction before starting on his fanfiction story.

[NovenFromTheSun]

The first draft of 99.9% of all fiction is bad, so if you're work falls into that percentage remember that no one is giving you a limited amount of tries to make a story or part of one really work. I would have saved myself a lot of stress early on if I started out remembering this.

[Quild]

A few thougts:

Writing style:
This might be way easier in English than in French, but be careful of which tense you use. The wrong one may seriously cramp your style.
You may avoid to write in a complicated style.
Think on how your story will be told. Is there a narrator? If there Is he one of the characters? Do you write what goes through your characters mind?

Mary Sue, Deus Ex Machina, Checkhov Gun:
It may seem like the Chosen-One stuff do work a lot, but it also often does not work and looks like a rip-off now.
If you want to include some clever twist without introducing a Deus Ex Machina, you'll need a Checkhov Gun. If you don't want it to be obvious, you need to introduce some useless stuff and to be subtle about it.
Don't make too much of useful stuff though, and do not shoehorn it.

Writing Process:
Know where you're going. First write the basic guidelines of your whole story. Then go in the details so you can know what you'll put in each chapter if you want to use chapters (Pratchett did not but reading stuff about why, it seems not to be easy to sell that to editors).
Write every day.
Get a place where you can concentrate on writing.

[Themrys]

Hey everybody. It's yours truly. It been a while since I last made a thread from this section anyway. I need some advice. I was thinking of writing a D&D fan fiction story about a group of Good-aligned Drow who face a powerful half-fiend elf. The group is four drow: A mature male drow fighter, a mature female drow cleric, a young male drow rogue and a young female drow wizard. The half-fiend elf is male and a fighter. So I'm pretty sure you get idea of it. So what's your advice to make a great D&D fan fiction story?


I don't play D&D, but as far as my second-hand knowledge of Drow goes, they seem to be a case of bad writing in and of themselves. An allegedly matriarchal society wherein women show dominance by wearing skimpy, male-pleasing clothes? Hello? One has to assume the inventors wrote this with one hand in their pants.

So, there is that. There is also the fact that you write about an entire group of good-aligned characters from a species that seems to be Always Evil by D&D rules.

I'd say you have to more or less reinvent Drow to make a story out of this which doesn't suffer from the nonsensical Drow backstory. (Like, start from the premise that "Everything you heard about Drows is untrue rumours! In fact, they're completely different!"
But then, some might say that not sticking to the official background means it is not good fanfic.

More general advice:

Read Ana Mardoll's takedown of the Narnia series. You should find it somewhere on the page: http://www.anamardoll.com/

It's not a writing advice blog, but she points out mistakes in the writing, which is very useful if you want to know what to avoid.

[Tyndmyr]

How to write?

Write.

That's it. There is no more. Practice is everything, no matter your topic.

[Mr Blobby]

God, there's so much advice that could be given for this, but I'll start with just one.

Read. Lots.

From modern classics to fanfiction, short stories in magazines to teen books written by hacks, swallow them whole. The subject is irrelevant - you're studying how they are writing. Once you're done, think about the story in objective terms. This part is critical.

Subjective criticism is naturally, different from person to person. Not liking the narrator as a character, not being really interested in the plot or setting are all subjective.

Objective criticism is looking at the technical ability of the writer. How do they introduce new characters? How often do they simply use 'Mr/Miss Exposition' to infodump large amounts of backstory which could have been done in a better way? Do they have a clunky plot? Are the characters believable? Is the story padded with pointless details or tangents which go nowhere? Is the writing so surgery you're developing diabetes?

The more you do this, the more technical tips you'll pick up. You'll develop 'the eye'. Soon enough, you'll be able to tell the craftsmanship rating of the author within reading a few hundred lines. A bit after that, you'll start coming up with suggestions for improvement. Then, with a head full of 'how not to write', writing yourself will be so much easier.

In my experience, there's many more writers out there who have a story to tell but aren't that good writers technically outnumber those who don't really have a story but are skilled at their craft.

[Asmodean_]

Three words. Don't. Drizzt. It.

Firstly it's one of the easiest ways to accidentally Mary/Gary Sue it, and secondly there are two entire trilogies where a Drow with an incorruptible Good alignment have been done well (and three where it hasn't). Try something new. Maybe have them make morally questionable decisions and then not spend eight chapters brooding over it.

(if you're making a comedic work rather than a serious one feel free to add in a lampshade moment with some scimitars.)

[TechnOkami]

Easy: Write.

Find enjoyment in the writing, what you're writing about and what you're writing for.

The rest should sort itself as long as you enjoy the process.

[Pluto!]

Lots of adverbs.

No matter how many adverbs you are using, you could be using more.

[Bartmanhomer]

Lots of adverbs.

No matter how many adverbs you are using, you could be using more. Why so many adverbs?

[Lethologica]

That was a joke. In threads like these, the usual advice is to limit adverbs. They're often used by novice writers in place of more evocative and effective vocabulary.