Toph-Nata
Interesting I'm only on the second part but it seams to be a good guide. Although I highly disagree with turning off your spell checker, though I understand if it's the auto-correct type. I do not need Sasuke showing up as Sapsucker However appropriate of a nickname that is. and Kenpachi showing up as Kentuckian.
edited 23rd Feb '11 6:53:00 PM by Vyctornian
"Every anime character is bisexual until proven otherwise." - A comment a found on youtube.
Was?
You know it is easy to add words to the program's dictionary right? Just do that with names and jargon and you should be fine.
Toph-Nata
Thats what I do. :D
I have to admit this thing is pretty useful, and hilarious when reading some of the 'Take Thats'. I'm tempted to show this to a friend.
"Every anime character is bisexual until proven otherwise." - A comment a found on youtube.
Street Writing Man
A lot of good advice in here. I knew some of it but not all of it. Nice to see it all in the same place, however.
If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~
I rather enjoy parenthetical asides when they're used consistently, but I can see why you'd warn people away from them.
Just so folks know: a month ago I relocated my website to its own domain. The URL for the writers' guide is now http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/guide/fwg.txt
— and it's been updated a little. Not much, but a little.
That's a very good guide, and I'd want to point out that a lot of this advice is just as good for original fiction. You could just as well call it "Guide For Beginning Writers", except for a few sections relating to canon behaviors and the fact that most beginning writers on the web seem to be fanfic writers anyway.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
That what I was thinking of too when reading the guide. I need to read it again.
Lucha Libre goddess
permissiomn to YKTTW The guide ?
Umm...The guide is quite a few pages long.
EDIT: I disagree with the "not using ellipses to denote blanks in dialogue" part. I use them all the time, and they help flesh out my character's speaking patterns.
Oh, and this example sentence seems a little awkward:
The order of events are presented strangely. And I know I'm violating the guide right now.
edited 16th Apr '11 4:51:17 PM by chihuahua0
However, I totally agree with this part:
((Illuminatus-itis: The tendency to scene break without any clue to the reader, so the poor reader can be 6-10 lines into a new scene without noticing it. Named for the work which foisted this style on us first.))
Two of The Big Three of Young Adult Literature suffers from this. Guess which two.
I am making sense!
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The page is gone. :(
edited 16th Apr '11 9:00:51 PM by Vyctorian
Rarely active, try DA/Tumblr Avatar by pippanaffie.deviantart.com
No, it's not. Try scrolling down next time. [1]
Prince of Dorne
The text is good in having so many details. Still, it also has some negative points, so, ah, criticisms and suggestions:
-It appears a bit unordered at times, with the text jumping from thought to thought even within single points, often going on overly long tangents.
-Of course part of it may be that the text is still in development? I assume that's what all the notes in parenthesis and the headlines without text mean. Would it not then be better to have a work version with those things for you, and a provisional published version without them for the reader?
-Particularly problematic in that regards is IMO the far too large example list of "eggcorns". Or the sudden tangent about Britishisms. Maybe both should go to an annex or something, instead of being in the text proper.
-Generally it seems IMO to devote too much time on words, grammar, vocabulary. Sure, those are the tools of the trade. But that means that to a degree they should maybe considered to be already sufficiently well. Then again, you seem to have a way higher tolerance for bad FF than I have, so maybe you simply have not given up on bad stories all together as I have
-About the "Expo Speak" - IMO the easiest way to avoid "As you know, Jack..." is to have the point infodumped in the description If all characters already know what it is, the narrator voice is well justified in knowing this, too, without it being too overboarding as (correctly) warned against elsewhere in the text.
-You seem to conflate advise against Boring Invincible Hero es with advice to not slavishly adhere to demands for a perfect happy ending. Both are valid points, but distinct points. You can throw all kinda shit at your characters and still have a happy ending, after all. Or as TV Tropes calls it: Earn Your Happy Ending.
-The part about chapter sizes should maybe have more FF-appropriate relations and example. Not using Dan Brown as bad example, but maybe telling how many F Fs have chapters of just some few hundred words, and then explaining why it is bad.
-As an addendum to the "Eternal Now": This also works the other way round, i.e. assuming all sci-fi future will be exactly like the year it's written in, except maybe with lasers and FTL tech. That of course is something quite, quite many if not most professional sci-fi franchises do, so fanfiction writers are forgiven to follow those conventions, but IMO it is always worth encouraging that they should think about what little details may be different in the future. Little details always make stories more lively. And pop-culture references to the Eternal Now from somebody 200 years in the future or whatever are of course also mostly a bad thing...
edited 17th Apr '11 7:21:48 AM by Octo
Unbent, Unbowed, Unbroken. Unrelated ME1 Fanfic
See ALL the stars!
edited 17th Apr '11 8:37:41 AM by Yej
Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.
Me Too!. I skimmed the long lists of stuff. Make them appendixes.
I think it would be better if the sentence was split in two:
edited 17th Apr '11 9:08:37 AM by chihuahua0
See ALL the stars!
BTW, is there a reason it's plain text? You use psuedo-bold in places, for instance, which would look better as actual HTML.
edited 17th Apr '11 3:37:08 PM by Yej
Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.
Chaotic New Troll
I wanna read it, but the link is broken somehow...
Would you kindly click my dragons?
The original guide? I think it's gone.
edited 17th Apr '11 7:14:23 PM by chihuahua0
See ALL the stars!
Influenced in part by the comments in this thread, I've done some edits on the guide and a new version is now at the accessdenied-rms.net URL above.
Octo, it is disorganized because it is still being written, in fits and starts, as opportunity and the muse take me.
I should note, by the way, that anything in ((double parens)) or in >email quote style is a comment from someone else which I found useful and intend to incorporate into the text... eventually.
Oh, I was checking that the other day for updates.
What did you updated this time?
Well, I lopped all the eggcorns out into a separate file. They were intended to be just a few choice examples, but I got too into finding and listing every funny/stupid error I came across. People were right that there way too many of them. I left the initial few "top examples", and I may add a couple more back eventually, but for now, I'll leave them out.
To the section on not throwing out your deletions, I added a largish paragraph about considering the use of free version control software to maintain an archive/history of your work.
There're also a lot of little one-sentence changes all over. Sadly, though, I haven't finished any of the incomplete sections yet.
edited 14th Oct '11 10:53:30 AM by LooneyToons
http://www.eclipse.net/~rms/guide/fwg.txt
While surfing This Very Wiki, I came across this document, linked to from The Big List of Booboos and Blunders. It was written by LooneyToons. I decided to link to it here to see what other tropers think about it.
Currently taking a break from the site. See my user page for more information.