tenshinoakuma | (no subject)

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My mind's a massive jumble of thoughts right now, so I apologise for incoherency.

I kind of re-realised that I don't read a lot of multi-chaptered stories. Mostly because of time, I think, but also because many to-be multi-chaptered stories on the internet never make it to their finish.

I was just reading The Fifth Act by

sinnatious (I can't believe it's taken me this long!) for the first time, and even though I don't know the characters who were introduced in the newer FF7 materials (having only played the original game and watched the movie), there's a kind of life that has been breathed into them that I can really appreciate. There are countless others who will write multi-chaptered stories, but to me, most of them are missing that tiny element, those small things that can throw someone off balance, those tiny unexpected elements that can give comfort, that raw humanness of character. As a side note regarding The Fifth Act, I'm wondering how the 'original' timeline is doing.

Ignoring my issues of learning how to pace and learning how you set up a story that will reel people in and keep them engaged, after reading the Fifth Act, it really... hmm, how should I put it...? Made apparent how differently I write when writing drabbles or one-shots compared to the way I write multi-chaptered stories. Even though the Fifth Act makes it soul crushingly clear (I exaggerate) that I am not good at multi-chaptered stories, I enjoy having another piece of multi-chaptered work that I can draw inspiration from and 'steal' writing techniques from; I didn't become good at writing short fanfiction on my own.

However, for multi-chaptered work (more apparent now that I've started writing multi-chaptered stories again), I have a very difficult time balancing the emotional/life/feeling part of writing with the STUFF HAPPENING RIGHT NOW part of things. I suppose what I'm saying is that my writing in multi-chaptered stories tends to be... well, bland. Some of this might be artist's cynicism, but I do think it's a legitimate concern. Maybe it's because I haven't written a lengthy multi-chapter in years and the first one I try not only has a HUGE cast present at the same scenes (which is a whole box of other problems), but has a cast of characters I'm not as familiar with as I probably should be. It doesn't help that I'm taking a limited 3rd person point of view with a character type that... well, let's say Tai isn't exactly a character I write a lot.

I think in some ways, it may be unfair that I compare my multi-chaptered writing with my drabbles and one-shots, because I have far more experience in the latter, especially when most of their content involves Joshua, who I've been writing/RPing for almost 3 years now (giving me time to iron out a lot of the issues I had when I first started writing him). I like to write introspective. The problem starts when the featured character is most definitely not introspective, and I have to actually write things happening, which tends to end up in a pile of boring description.

But knowing all this, I'm still writing this Digimon/TWEWY mutlichaptered crossover story; I'm not going to get better if I don't practice. If I don't let myself make mistakes so I can learn from them. I GUESS THIS IS KIND OF AWKWARD TALKING SO MUCH ABOUT STORIES THAT PEOPLE ON MY F-LIST WRITE but I was thinking back to one of

sinnatious's earlier stories, Another Witchmaker, that I read several years back. I'm talking nearly 10 years ago. At the time, I loved it, and though I haven't actually gone back and re-read now that I've put on some years of maturity and fussiness, I'd hazard a guess that I'd still find it pretty good. But then I look at the Fifth Act, and I can say with absolute certainty that the improvement over the years is immense.

Practice.

Being able to write well doesn't come magically or immediately. Sometimes I forget that.

On the subject of writing me not being able to write good multichaptered stories, I just started the Digimon/TWEWY crossover. I've been kind of dragging my feet about pimping it at their respective fandom communities (

digimon and

subarashiki_ds), though. I guess I kind of feel bad about putting it up when (in my opinion) there's so little content at the moment, and in the case of the TWEWY community, it feels bad to pimp it there when most of the first 10 chapters will heavily focused on the Digimon cast. I'm still kind of undecided about pimping the crossover out (I've never been all that good at advertising myself to begin with).

What do you guys think of me pimping out crossovers in fandom communities, especially if they may not be particularly relevant to a particular fandom until chapters later?

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Haa, I nearly didn't comment, since it's kind of weird commenting on something referencing your own work, but you're talking about writing and god I love talking about that.

There's such a big difference between short stories and multi-chaptered stories! It's actually really hard to switch between them, isn't it? I've always viewed it a bit like the difference between ping pong and tennis. On the surface, they're similar, but being awesome at ping pong won't necessarily make you great at tennis, and vice versa, even if some of the skills cross over. So it sounds like you've got a big challenge ahead of you! (Digimon/TWEWY - what an unexpected combination! Makes me wish I knew more about Digimon.)

I really struggle with drabbles and one-shots, so can kind of empathise, just in the other direction. Big casts present in the same scene, too - that IS a tough one (I sometimes make up reasons for some characters to be elsewhere just to avoid that particular snarl). But how is writing things happening the boring part? Always thought that was the most exciting bit - it's the introspection that always runs the risk of being the most boring.

(Also please don't ever go back and reread Another Witchmaker - some of the later chapters aren't quite so bad, but the first twenty or so make me want to die of embarrassment. o__o)

As for pimping out the crossover, maybe pimp it in the digimon comm first, and then start pimping it in the TWEWY one once you start reaching that content? (With a back catalogue of links.) If you include a note when you post it saying that it's predominately digimon until a certain point, people should be understanding. (You might even hook a few digimon fans who don't know TWEWY).

Haha, sorry. If it's any better, it's kind of weird talking about stories people on my f-list have written? XD

While writing this crossover, sometimes I wish I knew more about Digimon, since I never watched the movies or played the games or... well, watched anything past season 2 xD I'm only working off the very first Season with little bits that connect with the second season, since I hear everything after that is a different continuity. I'm kind of viewing this as a practice run in writing multi-chapters + crossovers so I can do the Devil Survivor/TWEWY crossover better.

I think it's less that it's boring, it just comes out as boring when I do it xD Because I've written drabbles for a lot of the last year or so, when I write, I picture 'scenes' in my head, and those are what I tend to write. But for multi-chapters, it's something like a series of multiple scenes, but I have difficulty filling in the transition between them. And that's when I run into the trouble of falling into bland descriptions "he did this" and "she did that" without the same kind of... I guess you could say, 'spirit' that the sections of writing that I could picture clearly have. That's part of why I've had so many incomplete drabbles lately xD

I think there might also be a kind of fear of mine that extended conversations between characters end up script-like. Which is probably why you don't ever see extended conversations when I write (hooray for me avoiding things I'm not good at |D;; )

Sounds like a good plan!

As a tangent, I can't stop playing around with Google Street View in Shibuya (http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=35.65982,139.700319&spn=0.001587,0.003755&z=19&layer=c&cbll=35.659461,139.700512&panoid=cNwgpw_xBKzsdT7tX-2QyQ&cbp=1,0,,0,5).

Edited 2011-04-23 08:34 (UTC)

Heh! Avoiding things you're not so confident with sounds like a perfectly fine strategy to me! :D

Ahhh, I get you now. Transitions. These are also the bane of my existence. As in, you have Scene A, and then you have Scene E, but you have all this blank space where scenes Scene B, C and D should be? For what it's worth, at some point I realised that you actually don't usually need scenes B, C, and D, and just leaping straight on can be surprisingly effective. Depends on your writing style, obviously, but it works for me sometimes.

It's that strategy again! No good with transitions? Cut 'em. :D Easier said than done, of course. If you figure out some other way at dealing with it, I would like to know. ^_^;

Ahahaha, oh noes, Google street view is like going window shopping for holidays! (Addictive, though. *___*)

Haha yeah, I usually cut scenes as much as possible to get the effect I want, which is how I turned a multi-chapter story about Joshua's past into... a single, 6k word one-shot story (I'M SO GOOD AT THIS). But at the same time, I think there's a point where you do have to write those 'blank' scenes (I'm thinking the kind where you know vaguely what needs to happen to progress the story, but can't clearly picture it. Not padding) lest your story becomes too choppy or too full of jumps that just makes for a lot of confusion. But I do oh-so-love cutting out things I don't want to write; I'm a slow and lazy writer so I'm happy to not have to do something that won't add to the story xD

I do think writing for TWEWY lets me be a little more generous with the chopping and jumps forward and backward in recollections, though, just because of the nature of the original content. I'm thinking of following a little bit in the game's footsteps, in the sense that I'm lazy to write out explanations of the Game's rules (which are a bit different when you consider the time difference between 1999 and 2008), especially when their explicit details aren't too important to the story. So I'm probably going to go with little recollections of what the characters had been told while they're playing the Game rather than flat out writing the rules out.

I'm curious, if you don't mind me asking, but how much planning do you usually do for your multi-chaptered stories? When I read the Fifth Act (and the Author Notes!), I noticed that from the beginning you said it'd be about 38 chapters, and I was impressed that it was, since I usually see claims like that either fall short, or end up far longer.

(I also managed to find a vending machine that looks exactly the same as Joshua's. It apparently sells coffee. BOSS coffee)

XD Multi-chapter down to 6k! Oh, you are good. I should actually be more brutal with cutting, but it's hard to bring yourself to throw the sometimes-unnecessary away! And you're right of course - you can't do that all the time, some of those blank scenes are important. Sometimes it's just hard to tell what's padding and what's necessary.

True, TWEWY works really well for that stylistically! And that technique for explaining the rules sounds like a great idea. I've read a couple of TWEWY fics that have lumped all that explanation at the start, makes my eyes glaze over and start to skim the text. Having more of the game revealed day by day was part of what the original game so compelling. (Also, way less you have to remember - you have time to let that information sink in and apply it before you have to worry about new information. It was probably a game design decision to manage the difficulty curve but I think it would work great as a storytelling technique too!)

Haaaa, planning? Not nearly as much as I should. In the case of Fifth Act I didn't think it would be exactly 38 chapters starting out (originally guessed it somewhere in the 30s), but by the time I started posting I was at about Chapter 25 and had a pretty good idea of how many chapters it would to get to the end. No magical estimation skills here! I normally know what the start and the conclusion is and have a rather skeletal and flexible outline in my head of how you get from one the other. What about yourself?

(I've seen those! Coffee LIKE A BOSS. XD)

Yeah, it is sometimes pretty hard to discard writing that you've put hard work into. But I think I've sort of learnt to be brutal with my cutting partly from when I draw, where I've redrawn parts of pictures (or sometimes the whole thing!) several times because it just looked not quite right. So it taught me to be just as brutal with my writing (and hey, sometimes starting a chapter/scene from scratch makes it flow better), where it's less obvious it can be done better, thus making me less inclined to discard it. Sometimes I do like to keep the discarded bits in a separate place, though; there can sometimes be content I like to touch upon later, whether later in the story or as another drabble.

I think it can really apply to many things. You're right in that it was likely initially a design choice, but from a character experiencing the Game's POV, they'd also forget everything if they were infodumped too xD And I think from running the Game's perspective, it'd be better for the Players to only be given key information and let them figure the rest out rather than spoonfeeding them everything. It's amazing how it just works on so many levels xD

All my previous multichapter stories I didn't plan out very well; I usually had a clear beginning, a clear end, but I was never really sure how to join the two together, which usually leaves me floundering once I'm past the beginning and then I drop the story. Sometimes I might have a vague idea of the middle, but I haven't given enough thought to the world building or the hows and then I get stuck. The Joshua backstory fic was a bit like that before I managed to cut it down; I find it's generally better not to be too specific when there's anything to do with him so I cut out a lot of content.

This time around, I had a lot of discussion (read: me throwing tl;dr at people who smiled and nodded) about world-building to try and hammer out what a meshed Digimon and TWEWY world would be like. (I do think a solid understanding of the world I intend to write for helps me a lot; I think my first TWEWY stories aren't as... well, 'rich' in a sense, since back then I'd only just completed the game.) I've got the first 'arc' more planned out than usual (I actually know what needs to happen in them!), but I've been freely moving events around to better suit the story and adding in some extras here and there as I think of them to better link events that happen earlier to later chapters. I haven't planned too far past that, but I do know how to ultimately bring everything together. Here's to hoping all this planning means I finally finish a multi-chapter story decently! xD

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