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onwriting-hrarby · 1 year ago

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hi hera! what are some tips you can recommend for world building?

hi anon! <3 thanks for the question! i don't know if i'm authorized to talk about worldbuilding, because even though i use it to create novels (they all have a kind of dystopian, political reality) i still don't write sci-fi or fantasy, in which worldbuilding is much more important. i do read them, though, sparsely. (coming back here after finishing to say that i think i know more than i thought, and also that this is going to be a long post).

of course, first i'd like to throw you the question: are you asking about creating or about depicting?

creating

for creating worlds, i truly have no "special" advise: i'd say that it can go before establishing your characters or later, but in any way, the worldbuilding should be tied with the ambitions/anxieties of your hero(es). for example, i am now writing a novel about a political disruption, but essentially it is a novel about friendship amidst of that. i have to make sure that the worldbuilding is strong enough so that it interferes in said friendship: there's a revolution coming, and my heroes don't know which side to choose (they choose different sides, and therefore, what happens with their friendship?). even though the revolution is not the cause of their friendship to fall apart, it is important enough.

because i knew this was going to be important, i was sure to think about the history of the world, what brought the country there, establish their politics (what do people from this country face? how do politics work?) and culture (which language to they speak? does it encompass my heroes' reality?). but this is all very basic, and i'm sure you can find fantasy or sci-fi guides that will tell you so and much more.

HOWEVER: although i would stress that you have to read about the genre, please, do not only read that genre. for me, the best novels are not only one thing but many, they take from many genres. for example: a share of night by mariana enríquez is basically a story about a father and a son tangled up in black magic amidst the political uproar in argentina. so, we have: family saga (literary fiction, how the characters develop, even a bildungsroman) with a fantasy novel (the hero gets tangled up in a mess and has to choose their path towards this magic) with thriller (because it's told from different povs, you don't really know what's happening, you discover it along the characters, so it's terrifying) and political novel (they are all touched by politics). so, i'd say, break the genre. i don't think that any fantasy or sci-fi novel doesn't have any politics or any other genre in between, but i do believe that if you want to make a good fantasy novel, you can infer much more "literary fiction", whereas if you want to do a good literary fiction, you can infuse fantasy to bring it up a notch. (that's my opinion, anyway)

depicting

now, this is i think where the tricky part comes. it's difficult to explain your worldbuilding without explaining to much or doing an info-dump.

i recently read a book (fourth wing, by rebecca yarros) that didn't do a good job on that, and the first 3/4 chapters i felt like i was reading a wikipedia sometimes. this happened because the infodump wasn't justified. the main protagonist, violet, has lived in this world FOREVER, yet, even though the novel was in first pov, she was explaining it. and that completely threw me out of the loop. it wouldn't happen because when we think we tend to know our world as the palm of our hand. when the novel advanced and violet knew more people with whom she could talk, the worldbuilding was revealed little by little through dialogs and conversations, which i think was great and how it should be.

i'd say that one can reveal it in different ways:

the main protagonist is a estranger to this world: essentially, a little bit like harry potter, eragon or memories of idhun (one of my fave books when i was young), or even cornelia funke's ink blood: the protagonist stomps into a world they don't know and thus, they make questions about it. constantly, small questions in each step so that it doesn't overflow the reader and the reader keeps on discovering things until the end. in the example of "harry potter", harry is not a magician so must of the info-dumping on the magic world comes from hagrid when they go shopping. however, rowling makes sure to only say some things during that time, what has to do with the shopping itself: we know that people have pets, that they fly brooms, that they have a bank with their own money; we do not know how hogwarts works (instead, mcgonagall explains before entering the sorting hat) or nothing about voldemort (this is the main incognita of the book, and it gets revealed little by little). what rowling does is camouflage the real incognita by another one: the philosopher's stone. but truly, this is just a coy so that we get more worldbuilding (chess moves, prohibited section in the library, dog with three heads, snape is terrifying). a lot of it is revealed through conversations and also harry's pov about things, filled with surprised and exclamations from the others, who are not strangers to this.

confidante: we could argue that the characters of hp are confidantes to harry, but this wouldn't be what i'm talking about. take, for example, game of thrones (i'm talking about the series, not the books). in the first episode, we get the introduction between the most important families (yet, it is said that there are many others—by only showing those two, grr martin makes sure that we are seeing the main enemies) and in the same episode, we have the conversation between robert and ned. they talk about the main conflict, which is the long winter, and the revolution that robert led. they talk about this with such normalcy, because it's their world and they know it perfectly. it's okay not to know all the details, they are going to be revealed bit by bit as the series progresses. similarly to their conversation, we have daenerys and viserys convo about their condition as targaryen. we can piece together that they were thrown out of the throne, but we don't know how many years that was, or how exactly it happened (many seasons later, we learnt that jamie has a nickname because he killed the targaryen king). we can't forget that the politics and reality of a world is what makes us, so our characters need to be the same. when i meet new people, or when i talk with friends, i do not explain the history and culture of my country all at the same time. i begin with what's affecting my reality now, and maybe as i get to know them, i give them more info about everything.

through books/manuscripts/recordings: "the fourth wing" does that in every chapter, in which they cite a bible, or a recording, or something that talks a little bit more about worldbuilding. in game of thrones, we also have the little girl in the jail (i don't remember her name know) which the skin condition that talks about what's in her book. in harry potter, they discover the philosopher's stone because there's a recording about it. i think in the game of thrones books it's already explained like there was being a recording about it (as if, you're reading a historical recording of what happened in the world), which i think it's very clever because you can infodump asa much as you like without it being weird.

make all of this interact (read further on an example)

also, use the povs available. in "a share of night" by mariana enríquez (what a book, i can't recommend it enough), the father knows about the dark magic, the history of the family (to a certain extent), because his wife, now death, told him about it. however, his pov and information is limited because his wife was hiding things, and he also limits it in regards to gaspar, the son, because he doesn't want him to find out certain things and wants to protect it. but gaspar has secrets of his own (regarding dark magic itself), yet he's not able to fully grasp it, the world has been hidden. SO: when we read from the father's pov (not 1st person, but 3rd limited), we get the pov of a confidante because the way he talks with people about their reality signals that they know about it. but when we read from gaspar's pov (again, 3rd person limited) we get the view of the stranger. furthermore, gaspar sneaks in conversations with two or more confidantes, and also finds recordings and books. so, if you make the three interact and each character have their own thing, it makes it much more interesting.

anyway, as i told you this is not my main area of expertise! but this is all i've learnt through observation and critical reading! i hope it helps a little bit.

(ah, after writing, make it read to someone whom you haven't talked about this world. ask if there are questions by the end of the book, if they got bored, in which point... i think it helps!)

#writing #writer on tumblr #writing advice #worldbuilding #fantasy #sci-fi #writing inspiration #writers on tumblr #creative writing #writers #writeblr #writing community #writing exercise #hrarbycraft

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onwriting-hrarby · 2 years ago

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a thought about depicting love

while uploading chapter two of liquid confidence today, i received two comments that made me think. they went on about how "pathetic" it was that eren was waiting on mikasa as she loved kenzo and hadn't have relationships (although he states that he did) and also on how could it be possible that mikasa loves eren if she loves kenzo.

at first, it nagged me because so much of their prejudice and critique was lacking reading comprehension. then, i decided to do a twitter thread about love, but i think what i'm writing needs to speak for itself.

however, here are some random thoughts about love and loving—and, therefore, maybe of how i depict love.

1. there's not "one type of love", nor "one direction of love"

love is something that is nurtured and flourishes, and you can love multiple people at the same, because there's not just romantic love, but also friendly love, familial love, admiration love, possessive love. not all love is the same, and not all love is directed towards just one person. different loves can coexist.

2. love and being in love is not the same

you can be in love with someone but love your significant other. you don't have to be in love to marry someone, nor you have to love someone to have a good time. being in love lasts months—after that, you love the other. because love is not a magical thing that appears, but something nurtured. that's why, if there are different types of loves, you can love multiple people at the same time—rarely be in love with multiple people, though. because being in love is built on admiration and dazziness, and as we get to know the other person, this diminishes to bring out a more "human" approach.

3. love is not "deserved"

you don't deserve someone's love, because nobody owes you love. even if the other person has been waiting around for you all of their life, if you don't feel for them—if you don't love them—it's much better that you're not with them. loving and caring is one of the most free things humans can do, so if love chains someone, it's not a worthy love. because love is not something that flourishes but something constant, you don't owe anyone certain feelings you cannot maintain.

4. you can love someone and still make it a mess

because being in love equals admiration, we normally don't make messes in those months. but after, love is kept with communication, perseverance, patience—not only feelings. that's why, you can wake up one day and have enough: i don't want to work on that anymore. and that's fine. it doesn't mean you have stopped loving, but you are tired of meeting some requirements of the relationship which don't satisfy you anymore. you're not a "feeling-less monster". we cannot love the same people all of our life.

5. you need to learn how to love

similarly, loving doesn't always imply that we are natural doing so. we don't know the codes, the meanings. we've been taught on possessiveness, jealousy, owning, romantic toxic love. we have matrimony—a farse in the old sense, because it makes you feel guilty if you have "impure" thoughts (that you're bound to have sometime) and we have the promise of being "successful" if we're in a long relationship. love is no bonds. love is freedom. love is not success. love is falling and having a hand that will help you stand again.

and, furthermore: writing is about exploring. so please, do write about whatever interests you, the little nuances and moral greys of the whole life.

#hrarbycraft #love #philosophy #thoughts #writing #on writing #writing community

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onwriting-hrarby · 2 years ago

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Hi Hera! I have a question about writing and the first person that came to my mind was you!

It is about the use of quotation marks and the interruption of a dialogue. We were wondering (a friend and I together haha) if when you interrupt a dialogue with the long dash, do you have to close the quotation mark?

eg: “No! I won’t— or “No! I won’t—”

It's a very stupid question but so far I haven't read any books where there are conversations interrupted, so I don't have a reference for it.

Thanks for your time!

Hello, dear! Thank you for thinking about me while you had doubts! The answer is: yes, they go inside the quotation mark. So, you have to close the quotation mark.

Think of it as: the quotation mark signals that the speaker is using a dialogue. When the speaker is abruptly interrupted, the dialogue cuts off, right? So, you need quotation marks to signal that the dialogue is over. The em dash signals that they've been interrupted, and the quotation marks, that they've effectively ended the dialogue.

If the reader was interrupted but kept on speaking (as if he doubted) we would have something like this: "I am sorry—I mean, I wasn't—It's not like I wanted to do it!"

I found a web that explains punctuation quite well! I hope this helps! https://mybookcave.com/authorpost/punctuation-with-quotation-marks/

<3<3<3

#hrarby #hrarbyanswers #hrarbycraft

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onwriting-hrarby · 2 years ago

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And here I am, just admiring Karizards' way of writing comedy / dark comedy. I feel it's much more difficult to write something funny (even if we don't have the knowledge to be funny) than to write something angsty.

When writing angst, I rely a lot on words—metaphos, sentences, the rhythm. It's very easy to get wordy and to go inside the mind of the character: if you know them well, you can feel the grief and describe it. But with comedy (and also with the type of angst that is not descriptive it aka the angst I can't do) one needs to be much more specific and concise. You cannot explain a joke in many words: you have to leave the space big enough for the reader to fill in the gaps and get them themselves, which I think it's so incredibly difficult to do in comparison to angst.

For me, writing angst is an accumulation, and comedy, a reduction. I completely admire people who can write comedy (or have few words to describe angst, too).

Writing angst is, though, a catharsis for me. But not in the way that I can transfer my sadness over my characters—when I'm sad, I cannot write angst at all! I feel like angst comes from this energy I have, so I only write it when I'm in a good day or mood, or very awake in the morning. For me, it would be like a flame that I fire: it burns a lot, but quickly. When I'm done with angst, I'm so happy with myself but not because I have gotten over my own feelings—more as if I had just had a good workout.

Anyway, read @karizard-ao3's works because she's so concise as a writer, so imaginative, leaves a lot for the imagination of the reader which makes yourself feel part of the prose and story. She's amazing!

On Writing Angst (and my WIP)

I really admire people who can write angst without dying a little bit inside, because I decided to challenge myself and see if I could write something painful and it has been excruciating. Part of that could be because I drew so heavily on my own struggles for many of the characters and I prefer to spend as little time wandering my own emotional landscape as possible, part of it could be that I really love the characters I'm borrowing for my fic and I don't like to hurt them, part of it could be that I'm just not that kind of writer. There have been times I've written things and thought to myself, "This is all drama," only to show it to someone have them start laughing their asses off. (That's not a flex, by the way.) On the other hand, I've written things thinking, "This is pretty mild stuff," only to get comments that I made people cry. In both cases, its entirely unintentional.

I guess what I'm getting at is that being able to purposefully write something that will invoke sadness in the reader is not something that comes naturally to me, and I admire people that can do it. As I'm getting closer to being able to post it, I'm getting more and more anxious about how it will be received. I already know that it's funny. I have no control over that. But will it also keep any of the readers awake, anguishing over what has and will happen to the characters? Did I put words to anyone else's lingering heartbreaks? Or did I miss the mark completely?

Also, does writing angst actually bring anyone catharsis? I'm sure it must. I admire the people who can do that, too. Although, now that I think about it, it is kind of funny that this is probably the only instance when it's okay to hurt other people to heal yourself. It hasn't worked out that way for me, though. Writing the climax at the end was an absolute joy after months of focusing so much of my free time on describing trauma and insecurity and mental illness, but after the initial moment of "Finally! Something good happens!" the weight of spending so much time on such depressing topics settled back down on my shoulders, and I am just as exhausted by it all as I was before. I'm ready for a break.

In short, shout out to the angst writers, because I dipped my toe in the waters and I don't think I have the fortitude to get all the way in.

Also, in truth, what I've actually written is probably more of a dark comedy. I don't know if I can, in good conscience, tell people its angst. It's just that, in contrast with my other works, it's angstier.

#fic-rec #on angst #onwriting #hrarbycraft

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onwriting-hrarby · 2 years ago

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On inspiration

Quite often, I get questions on how to craft a story. "I want to write, but I don't know what to tell", they tell me. I try not to roll my eyes, and don't seem judgemental, because sometimes we don't have a story, but we have the urge to write anyway. I tell people to start writing a diary, because they'll find their topics. Sometimes, though, people don't want topics, just to write a story.

But, to write a good story, it's inevitable to think about the topic.

Topics—what is ours, what is not

I have this romantic view of writing as something that is innate to us. The need and habit to tell stories to others are millenary and it reaches even before we knew how to talk or even have an alphabet to do so. Even without writing it on paper, people learnt the stories by heart and sang them to the public to entertain. Not only entertain, also to show something, learn something from it.

So, I get the urge to write. But if you're writing without a topic, I feel that you're writing without a message.

There's nothing easier than finding a topic around you craft you story, I believe. It can be the simplest thing—the particular smell of coffee in the morning—or the abstracts that we know about—hate, love. But what I normally tell is that topics shouldn't be hard to find. Because, one: topics are within yourself. You're naturally drawn to some topics when you read or watch films, the same way your eyes are draw to specific things when you try to draw, or you enjoy the cadence of classical music instead of the up-beat of the pop. Along our years, we've crafted preferences—that's why I, too, think it's difficult to be a great writer if you're not aged.

But, despite this last affirmation, topics age very slowly. We can be drawn to the same things at 15 and at 45. Our optics about the topic might have changed, and we might have expanded our vision while tackling it, but normally, topics that interest us are as old as we have knowledge to say what a "topic" is.

A topic is not only ours—because humankind has been writing for ages—but the approach can be. And that's why writing, I feel, is such a vulnerable state of ours. Because we choose a topic that is universal, but we pour our understanding of that topic onto the page.

What precedes us and the repetition

Some people say that topics come to rise when we're children. Maybe. Certainly, what we experience as children follows us our whole life.

Once, when I was 23 and already writing my first novel (not my first: my first "serious" novel, as I had been writing novels since I was 16) I went on a walking trip with my boyfriend. With 8 hours of walking ahead of us, it was only natural that we ended up rambling about writing. I was telling him about my new exciting idea for the novel. I kept on repeating "new" like it was a mantra. He gazed at me and told me that he was sorry, but he thought I had only three topics, and I circled around them.

I was dumbfounded, but we went through them: mental health, gender, and oppression. My novels so far included a schizophrenic professor who had been in love with a Jewish girl during WWII and tried to find her again; a woman who had been silenced and invisibilized in favour of his husband who had Alzheimer; a dystopia about two clans, one oppressed by the government and forced to exile; and multiple stories about girls, women, etc, oppressed by the system.

So, of course, I was bound to repetition. When I realized this—when I suddenly thought about what my topics were—I felt relieved. It felt so natural that I shall be writing about this, and realized that all my topics and all my novels could be threaded into my childhood and my personal life somehow, without making it personal.

Of course, my personal life is changing, and over the years, I realize I don't look up to one topic anymore in favour of the other, or vice versa. I can't no longer tackle a novel that I wrote in 2020 because the weight of the topic has changed in me, or because I changed the optics.

On inspiration

So, does inspiration truly exist? I wonder that sometimes. There's the myth that you need to be working to be struck by inspiration (cue Picasso). But we have all experience that burst of sudden revelation in the middle of the street, hitting us with the idea.

I dare say, though, that inspiration only happens because you know your topics. Suddenly, you find something, even if subconscious, that triggers your interest of that topic and boom, you get the idea.

Once, I came across an ice cream place that was empty. Not only empty—the vendor was outside of the shop, looking from side to side, wondering if someone would come. My question was immediate: How much time is he spending outside? Does he have a clientele? Can he make it? I was really sad. I went down my sadness: I was sad because the old man reminded me of my grandmother—who suffered a mental illness—and because my city is disappearing as I know it—full of tourists—and because we cannot change this capitalist system that is changing my city.

I could have easily wrote a story about the man, or make it one of my characters. I didn't because I can't write everything I get ideas for, and so I left the idea to simmer, maybe another me will pick it up soon.

While watching the man, I might have not seen the mother and the baby on the other side of the street, or the stray cat next to the garbage can, or the teenagers snogging. My eyes were somehow trained to pick what I just wanted to see—what interested me the most—and so my mind went to that.

Introspection

So yes, for me, inspiration happens, but it does because we've done introspection as writers. We allow ourselves to go with the flow but we know, too, what we want to talk about. Doing a story per se it's not sufficient, because if the topic doesn't interest us, we won't make it further to page 50. We are, after all, our first readers.

I know I am too rational, maybe. I love sitting and thinking and maybe not letting myself feel. But, at first, when I was 12 and didn't rationalize a lot, I did let myself feel, and surprisingly, the topics have remained for the most part.

Just as we are children of experiences, we're children of topics, and without a topic, we won't have an idea, much less a story, I fear.

Good news is: we only have to look within ourselves. Turns out, our topics were hidden inside of us all along.

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onwriting-hrarby · 2 years ago

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On writing advice

Countless blogs. Countless articles. Books by great authors, books by mediocre authors, books by bad authors. Physical courses and online courses and tweets and Tumblrs all dedicated to: make you write better.

As if writing was a sole thing, a sole notion, a commonplace and designation for everyone in the world, the same. As if writing was a natural thing where all humans converge—immovable, static.

How restricting—how incredibly boring.

Their advice

I've been seeing a lot of Tumblrs and blogs creating masterlists about "How to write a scene between a villain and a hero", "How to write a kiss", "How to write an angry character". All of their tips sound as if there was something so exact about writing. They make us believe there's a sole way to do this, and this is how you should do it (disclaimer: I do believe in the reader's criticism, and I acknowledge these tips might be helpful for a lot of people, so if they are for you, it's all good! But bear in me for a little longer).

But writing is not something universal—rather, the universality of writing stems from its specificity of it. Writing pours out of our own experience, vision and caleidoscope of ideology, experiences and semantics, and reducing everything to simple tips feels, at least, misleading.

First, we can differ in characters. Why? Because everyone has had their fair share of experiences with people. If I want to write a villain that is nuanced, I should be able to do that; but if someone wants to write a villain that is plain "villainous", it doesn't mean that they are not doing it correctly.

We feel the appeal of literature because it shapes our world—and it does because we're shaping literature in return, too.

It doesn't make sense that everything should be written the same, because not everyone experiences the same, in the same parts of the world, with the same ideology. How I, the daughter of an ex-dictatorship country, might depict a dictator, might differ completely from the depiction of someone who hasn't lived in a dictatorship. Expecting everyone to write the same is not also reductive and unfreeing, but also completely privileged and biased.

Why writing advice is often privileged

I believe that those who write this advice come from the same place. And I do, myself, when I give advice on planning. We come from higher education, or access to literature, or even access to a computer. We come from places we can turn on our TV and watch series and learn about pacing, or watch some tropes, or feel some way or another about daily topics.

But literature is not only writing, and writing (as it often happens) is not always literature. To write literature, there must be something else (I'll refer to it as truth, and speak about it largely after). Sure, everyone can put down a thousand well-written words, making sense, even with metaphors, and dialogues. But is this really literature—if we regard literature as something that transcends the writing and shapes us?

Because, if we do regard writing as literature, what do we do about the people who have so much to tell, but not the privilege to tell their stories?

When we tell someone about "writing power dynamics", are we all understanding the same? What about a kid who has been raised in a household with power dynamics, but can't rebel, or society doesn't allow him to see that? What about people who, for example, are not taught that their story matters?

This is the problem of a single story, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains. And while I think we're progressing in this sense (more and more new, unheard voices in literature and the book publishing sector), I am still baffled by how we keep normalizing certain writing advice on how to write certain scenes, and certain tropes, as something you should regard in terms of writing. Because not all experience is the same, and therefore, the advice that some people claim as universal might differ.

Because everything is your own tradition

Everything is a fashion, and everything is tradition. My literary tradition might not be your tradition. When someone tells me that "stories can be told in a consecutive way, in media res or from the end", or any other advice on how to plot, this feels so simplistic to me. There is just not one way—there are hundreds of ways to begin a story and tell it.

You can begin my merging voices of the beginning, the in media res or the end of the story. You can put different adventures in the middle of the main plot—coming back to what happened, but not in a chronological way (the way The Odyssey does). You can begin in the middle of the action and never address what happened before (Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin; The Transformation by Franz Kafka)—so that the "story" that was "worth" being told is not the "story" that is actually being told.

Pacing: "be sure not to use a lot of commas. Use full stops when you want to speed things up", etc. How about you get the help of the music, as if writing was writing a partiture (the way Thomas Bernhard did)?

The three acts of writing: What about you do five, or four, or basically, concentrate your whole plot in just an event? You can focus your story in just a day (Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Ulysses by James Joyce)—not caring about the plot altogether.

You can write characters that are already "evolved" by the beginning of the story (Humbert Humbert in Lolita), that will never evolve (Werther in The pains and sorrows of young Werther). And so on.

This is the great joy—and obvious mess—about writing.

The infinite possibilities allow us to explain a story that is completely ours. Even if what we are telling is similar to another person's, the scope of the story might change completely depending on the words you pick, the way you use dialogue—every single little decision.

Cover the basics

Of course, it doesn't mean that you should not cover the basics. Orthography, grammar, syntaxis, vocabulary—this all comes in handy. It is handy, especially for non-English native writing in English (aka me) to have posts that signal you the use of "" for dialogues, and how punctuation goes.

But don't let the rules constrict you, it's all I'm saying. People that gives this kind of advice are well read, and have really studied this, and maybe have even gone to grad school for that—but what they normally fail to mention is that maybe rules are there to be learnt, then bended when we need.

You just need to be mindful of how you're writing.

Of course you should learn how to write in in media res, because if you don't, maybe you won't know when or if you're doing it and the plotting might be a whole mess. And you can't pretend to write a character evolving without having learnt that characters evolve.

Just like how we are taught verb inflection in a language, but then when we're fluid, we totally miss it and bend it to adequate it to the talk in the streets—writing is finding your best channel to portray what you want. Maybe the writing advice doesn't work. It doesn't mean that you're not doing it right.

But what writing advice fails to say

And this is the thing that angers me the most—maybe the reason why I've decided to write all of this—is that they never tell you to read.

It infuriates me: read all my writing advice, but forbid you to read a book. Maybe it's the kind of thing that's happening everywhere—we gobble easy content, and it's undoubtedly easier to read a short article on writing than reading a novel of 500 pages.

But it will never be the same.

Because what you can get from reading (or even better, a re-reading) is your own interpretation of the literature you've been given, and there's nothing more powerful to understand yourself—therefore, to understand your motives, your aspirations, your topics as a writer—than seeing how you, as a reader, react to structures, plot, dialogue, character ideology.

Use all the writing advice you want, but your writing will lack truth if you don't read.

Because few people have this spark—this truth about them that makes a reading special. And trust me: I read a lot of manuscripts, very good written, decent in plot. But this is not all. There is something, and I can't quite explain it—a soul, a spark, maybe. It is the moment when you read something and go: "Ah". It's like sighing of relief, having your heart clenched, being absorbed by something—plot, style, whatever. It's that word that the author has used that is so unique in that context, like you feel that no one has ever used that before.

Some people have the craft and the truth but, to me, they are extremely rare. And it's always much better to have the truth than the craft—the craft, you need to learn, and that's more or less easy (you'll find a ton of articles, haven't we said?). But the truth takes years, even a lifetime, because we are in constant development—after all, never forget that even if we apply the best advice to our writing, we're still human: inherently flawed.

#writing #writing advice #mywriting #thoughts #literature #books #books & libraries #bookworld #article #journalism #on writing #sometimes i give advice #hrarbywritingdiaries #hrarbycraft

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onwriting-hrarby · 2 years ago

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On writing — My nano recap

On deciding the Nanowrimo—Or how I gave up

When I started November, I knew I wanted to create my own goal of writing. Nano has never been my thing: I don't write well under pressure or words or chapters or pages. I write under hours, or time, and a little bit every day. This persistence only stays with writing—I don't study with that energy anymore, and I tend to live other things for the last minute.

The last times I had ever tried Nano, I ended up losing motivation right at the end. It didn't felt right, that I was neglecting my brain when it said, that's it, you've had enough for today. I felt like I was being pushed, and I decided I didn't want my creative flow to feel overwhelmed. I am a very pragmatic, rational person—I follow structure and timetables and routines.

But this October was a mess, creatively. I abandoned my novel, which I had been working on for 5 years, at just 30 pages of revision. I was feeling very down with Rotten Judgement and wanted to focus on other things. I felt detached from fandom, people in fandom, and literature in general—I barely read.

So, I took November as "a vacation": I promised myself I would not push myself to write certain something or work on some pages. I would not get up at 6 AM to write before work. I would just enjoy that writing is available to me, in all forms—computer, notebook, schemes and head.

The tracker

I downloaded a wordcount that allowed me to change how many words I wrote. I duplicated the sheets in different projects: Rotten Judgement, Novel, Other projects and Final word count. On this last one, I made all the words per day sum each other to determine how many words I had written (in all projects).

True, I still set myself some word goals that I knew I was not going to make: 40K for RJ, 20K for other projects.

I didn't look at the word counter every day. I had no interest in knowing if I was on the right word path with some of the projects or not. Admittedly, that made it difficult to track the words written because sometimes I would have to go back several days and count on Word (or by hand if I had used the notebook) :')

But this allowed me not to be pressured, and, what's better: to know if I was writing because of compromise, or if I was writing because I wanted to.

The results

In all of November, I wrote 28.192 words. I wrote those in a total of 21 days, because I didn't write anything for 9 days (almost all Thursdays and Fridays).

I wrote Rotten Judgement only 8 days in November, amounting to 8753 words (and I believe they were all used in Chapter 17).

I only wrote my new novel 4 days, which says a lot: I need to plan, I need to let it simmer a little more until it is boiling. I wrote 4382 words for it.

I wrote 15057 words for other projects, mainly my #rivamika shot "A dreadful night", which tells me that I was in the right and I indeed needed some vacations for the novel and the fic to focus on other endeavours for a while.

But I didn't stop writing. I always came back, and I never went with a week without writing. It might be small, but to me, it's big. And I don't even feel it as an accomplishment: it's just natural.

I am part of this, and this is part of me. I am indivisible from my projects and my works.

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onwriting-hrarby · 2 years ago

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this is such an interesting question! does anyone have the answer (really)?

there are so many things to consider.

the wording first, i would not say that they are worse: maybe they are lacking something. i think the approach in wording is important because yes, maybe it is worse, maybe in saying "worse" there's a kind of feeling of static, whereas lacking something brings out the question: "what it is lacking"?

revision is the last, last step

now, revising is very hard work that we're not taught. everyone is taught to write, but i was just reading yesterday that a good writer is a good corrector, too (maybe, in this sense, the article on "Editing" that i put up can help you).

but just before correcting or revising, i think it's important to visualize what you want your writing to look like! do you want it to be fast-paced? more introspective? have lines that are a punch in the gut? maybe be inspired by the way this favourite writer of yours writes?

3. references // reverse-engineering

then, i would look up for references. every good writer, i believe, starts being so by imitation. that is because, at the core of "a writer that strikes us" there's the most difficult thing to have as a writer, and that is a style or a voice. by style, it can be from how they approach a topic, to how they always play with their timelines, to how they phrase certain feelings or pause their punctuation. a voice is something much more inherent and genetic (and some writers would say, some writers do have a voice and others don't).

so when looking to references or think about our own writing, we can think of them as: a) i want to write like this (style) and/or b) i want to make stories like this (structure, plot, characters).

what i do at this stage is that, whenever i read something i like, i do reverse-engineering for a bit. say that i've read a work with an incredible plot-twist: how have we arrived here? when were the hints dropped, if any? what was the wording or the phrasing of the plot-twist so that it left an incredible effect on me? or, maybe i loved a distinct paragraph in which they talk about emotions or introspection: how do they manage pronouns? is there a repetition of certain words and syntax structures? which is the effect of that? which are the adjectives used, and are they abundant?

and so on.

i think by doing this naturally, or integrating it, some of us end up having a style that's ours (an amalgam of the style of everyone we have ever read and loved) and therefore when we write, one has the feeling that, if not lacking, at least it's something inherently ours.

but this is my approach hehehe! and it's not universal!

i hope it works <3 and DON'T get demotivated! if you love writing, do it, independently from what the others write. comparison is a bad, bad thing (i know, i do it too) and if we're not careful with it, we end up being sad all along.

About the writing craft — Masterlist

Hello everyone! Since the followers on this tumblr have grown a little since I first started back in March, I've thought about doing a recap on the writing advice / craft posts I've done.

As you know, I am quite picky in calling in "writing advice", so these are much more meant to be like a "behind-the-scenes" "take-what-you-want" kind of posts.

[Disclaimer: the posts refer to a specific fanfiction, but they can be applied to anything—and I do apply them to original stories too)

PRE-PRODUCTION: Plotting, Inspiration, Ideas, Character design

About the fear before beginning to write a long story

Designing characters: The characters and the leitmotivs

On how I plot and divide the chapters

The foreshadowing series: How I introduced clues all along to foreshadow some events in the story (Part 1 || Part 2 || Part 3 coming soon.)

POST-PRODUCTION: Editing, rewriting

In killing your darlings when something doesn't work—and how necessary it is

On editing (from a real-life editor): The macro, the micro, an introduction to everyone

WRITING IN GENERAL

On why Nanowrimo doesn't work for me and what I do about it

On why I don't believe in "Writing advice"—and you should just read

On the difference between fiction and reality—and how people nowadays just confuse the tw

If this is of any need to you, don't hesitate to save it or reblog it! I'm still writing about writing, but I thought there was no harm in doing a master list if anyone can find it interesting.

Also, do not hesitate to hit the ask box!

—hera

(pd: taggin @writeblrsupport in case they want to reblog for other writers!)

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onwriting-hrarby · 2 years ago

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Rotten Judgement - On foreshadowing (I)

While thinking about what I wanted to do with Rotten Judgement, I realized that I had already begun my journey in Instead, they said: the story starts when we, as a reader, don’t know what has happened between two people, and it’s time to figure it out. However, I didn’t want to get chronological about it and repeat what I had done with ITS. Rather, I wanted to ration the information I was giving each chapter, and get flashbacks of the past, to (hopefully) build the tension and the intrigue.

That’s why planning with anticipation was key, in RJ, as well as establishing some leit motives that would get recurrent in the narration, in concordance with the major events from the past.

Now that the second past is over—and so is the past story that the readers have to know—I thought it would be funny to go down onto the memory lane and tell you where all the hints were placed.

The first entrance is going to be the hint for the first big major event: The janitor’s closet.

The hints of what happened in the janitor’s closet are first introduced in chapter 1, actually! A long, long time ago (hello, March 2022), but what truly happened in the janitor’s closet is not said until chapter 12. I realize this wasn’t much of a surprise, since it was quite clear from the beginning that Armin and Mikasa had had some sort of special relationship when Eren wasn’t in the picture.

Right in the first meeting, the first scene in the whole fic, we already have the Armin POV of who Mikasa is: “The beaming figure is none other than his first-ever-lots-of-things, and one of his former best friends, Mikasa Ackerman.” After they talk, Armin begins noticing changes in her, and when they hug after reuniting, it is stated: “Mikasa’s Ackerman changes are even more palpable than Armin’s, because he used to know her face like a map of the treasure, every crevice and every muscle under the white skin. […] It’s not that touching Mikasa is something new — because, after all, he used to know every bone of her shoulders and hips”.

To keep with the janitor’s closet without it being too explicit, I pin-pointed two or three leitmotivs for Armin and Mikasa: The bodies, The whispers and rumors and The secrets.

The bodies

Armin and Mikasa are their each other’s firsts (not technically since they didn’t go all the way, but still) so it was evident to me that when Mikasa came back, Armin had to be pulled to the past and the way he felt the body of Mikasa. This was very special to me because his horniness had to come from another place, instead of the fetishization that Mikasa has always suffered in school.

So, the fact that not once Armin focuses on her long legs, but Floch and the others do, is completely wanted. Instead, Armin speaks about crevices, wrinkles, bones. He doesn’t see Mikasa as a fetish, but as a true body. He feels attracted to Mikasa for whom she is (his friend). In Chapter 5, for example: “Armin watches the movements—the limbs he knew so well, used to kiss feverishly when they mixed up their feelings—and feels the relief off his chest thinking that he wants to kiss Annie’s, and explain it to Annie, and feels the head all drunk by Annie.” When Armin speaks about her body, he talks almost technically about it, as if Mikasa was nothing more than organs put together.

Yes, friends, remember what Armin does in the first scene of the fic, right in page 2? “The task has included Armin moving across Shingashina with the cut-finger of one of Hange’s corpses.”

When Mikasa and Armin begin being more sexual, and Armin experiences his sexual awakening, he even speaks about it: “It was so natural, so he wouldn’t know when it started, that he began feeling his limbs consumed by her closeness, the stomach churning in revolution, the tickling in his ears. He felt Mikasa deep into his chore when she hugged him […]” (Chapter 9)

But Armin is still aware of the sexuality they both bore for each other. When he meets Eren at the pharmacy after Eren and Mikasa have drunkenly hooked up, he sees traces of how Mikasa played in Eren: “And Armin knows just one with the fetish—with the same digits, marked on his neck once, as she attacked his lips and kissed and bit them.” (Chapter 8)

Levi as the witness

Levi, who was a witness of the janitor’s closet too, sees Mikasa’s body in a whole another way. As you can see, how people saw her body is quite important for the story because Mikasa was not taught how to see her body healthily (and what it meant, even if it meant anything). Levi sees Mikasa as limbs and as harsh edges. The harsh edges/walls/steel/iron are words that come around a lot to signal when Eren and Mikasa shut down from the world and started on their autopilot to survive.

Already on chapter 2, we know what Levi witnessed: “Levi nods —the disgusting image coming to his mind again, from ten years back, the janitor closet, the need to look for a lightbulb, his hand on the doorknob, the two bodies pressed together, the skirt up, the trousers down.” Forward to Chapter 8, we know that it is first Levi who keeps them in the closet after Eren has rejected Mikasa: “Levi ushered them to the janitor’s closet, and trapped them inside. It would become their place ever since.”

This isn’t accidental: I wanted Levi to be both the person who wants Mikasa to get adopted and, unconsciously, the one who presents Mikasa with the place where her adoption will be endangered. I wanted Levi to both shelter Mikasa from pain (after the rejection) and to see Mikasa exposed and completely pained (after being discovered with Armin). Levi is the only one that knows Mikasa since she was a little girl, and he is the one who has seen her change the most. Through their anger and their disappointment, I wanted to show that even if Mikasa thought that Levi had forgotten about her, he always had her back (in fact, this favouritism got him problems in school. It is stated in Chapter 2 and Chapter 8, before we witness the scene where he protects Mikasa in Chapter 12: “the sheer memory of him bowing his head to the school director and accepting that yes, he had made the mistake of having favourites, is something unforgivable” [Chapter 2]).

And we proceed to see how Levi how she’s changed (also in Chapter 2, but this will be stated whenever there’s a Levi POV in the past): “She’s more vulnerable, he can see, with all the vulnerability that crafted Mikasa but she took care in hiding from people. She carries herself gentler, cocooned. She’s pained and hurt, as she’s always been, Levi figures, but it stems out of her pores as if it was a warning. She was all harsh edges —on her jaw, in her long limbs— and now she’s all rounded and soft, even her cheeks and her wide, surprised eyes.” (Again, you can see that to depict Mikasa’s body I use limbs. And I want to clearly differentiate it from “legs”, which is why she gets catcalled by Floch & co.)

The whispers

There are a lot of instances in which Levi says that he would have had to be aware of how they were treating Mikasa (especially in Chapter 12, as we go back to the past in his POV). This is because the whispers precede Mikasa from a very young age (“The whispers travelled through the walls and with the breeze and arrived at the children as hushed secrets” [Chapter 2]), but specially more when we talk about what happened on the janitor’s closet:

“Mikasa is pulled back to the time where the whispers surrounded her and her past —and, after some years, also surrounded her and her body, what she did with it. She turns around to the stairs, to the intruder, and she finds the very object of the rumours of her body —you know, there were caught doing… I heard she was on top of him, can you believe it […] And he was everything to her, during months, because they only had each other and they only came back to each other, the whispers surrounding them both —I heard they moaned so loud they…, Armin Arlelt, with her, how on earth.” (Chapter 2)

When Mikasa goes away, she leaves Armin to deal with the whispers: “Mikasa went away with his feelings and his secret, and now she’s back without any of the feelings that they bore for each other and still the same secret that they swore not to tell a soul. Even if it made the whispers in their school become screams.” (Chapter 4)

Butt the whispers also precede what happened with Eren in the rooftop (the rejection), which I will talk about in the next post: “They stay in silence. The silence expands through them and pours over the bodies and washes them anew. With every wave, there are the whispers that belonged to them —I heard she called him on the roof and…; Did you see how he looked at her?— coming back to punch them in the gut.” (Chapter 3).

Even Eren is completely aware of the rumors and the whispers: “And he [Eren] doesn’t want to ask Armin, either —they are not best friends anymore, it’s not his place to be aware of such things, to ask him if the rumours were true.” (Chapter 4) And this need of Eren wanting to know the truth doesn’t go away, as he says in Chapter 5: “The gushing need to go back to the past—to ask them, beg them to answer him: why are people speaking about you two in a closet? But then, he wonders, if I did know the truth—what use would it do—it would be just so bitter, and I would have to gulp it down.”

The secrets

In this sense, Eren and Annie parallel in their thirst to know the secrets. Annie grows suspicious of Mikasa in Chapter 4, when they meet at the café. Armin knows about Annie’s worry, too:

“I still need to explain to her what happened in the closet. She doesn’t trust you much.”

She [Mikasa] bites her lower lip. “I wouldn’t jump on you now.” (Chapter 4)

But Armin is almost relieved that he loves Annie, because it is stated several times in the fic (it would be too long to put it here!) that Armin doesn’t think his relationship with Mikasa was healthy. He says, in Chapter 4: “Armin watches the movements—the limbs he knew so well, used to kiss feverishly when they mixed up their feelings—and feels the relief off his chest thinking that he wants to kiss Annie’s, and explain it to Annie, and feels the head all drunk by Annie.”

But still, the way Mikasa and Armin think about both Eren and Annie and the reveal is completely different. While Armin is afraid of telling Annie for him (he’s scarred of what happened: “I am not ashamed of what we did—I am ashamed of why we did it” [Chapter 9]), Mikasa doesn’t want to tell Eren their secret because she’s afraid it will devastate Eren.

Armin says: “Because he was never the one to know how to keep secrets —but he has always had to keep them, that’s his role, the secrets-keeper, the boy in the closet[…]—never telling Eren what they did in the closet.” (Chapter 4)

Mikasa, instead: “But Mikasa knows—Eren could not stand this. Not the younger Eren, not the new one. She’s seen his looks when she’s spoken through the phone.

“We cannot break him”, she mutters.” (Chapter 10)

Before going (this is getting long!) I wanted to note on the juxtaposition of “silence” to “whispers”. Whenever “silence stretches” between the characters, it is either because they remember “the whispers” or because they are not knowing how to process what they did. This happens between EMA mostly, while the “silence/voice” to Eren and Mikasa has a different feeling.

Next on “The hints” series is: Eren’s marriage proposal and Mikasa’s rejection. I know people were intrigued by this one! But, again… It is stated quite early in the fic! ;)

Thank you always for reading.

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onwriting-hrarby · 3 years ago

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Rotten Judgement — How I edit

I thought, for this entry of the Writing Diaries, I would share some of my screenshots while editing!

Editing is the process of tweaking and introducing changes to the writing, whether to a macro-level or a micro-level. On a macro-level, we would look for the coherence of the work as a whole: is the message understood? Can it be explained better? Do the characters work? And the order of the chapters? On a micro-level, we look for the correction and tweaking of sentences or paragraphs.

There's no way one of editing, and it varies a lot depending on who does the editing, so what I'm going to do is not 100% what should be. Since I have already planned the whole fanfic, I don't do much macro-level as a whole, but you can still see some changes in it.

What do I look for when editing?

Some of the things I try to get across with the revision are:

Macro-level: on the chapter as a whole

The scenes > - The order of the scenes in a chapter: does it make sense organically? Does it make the rhythm flow, or rather it's a big break for the reader? I tend to do that while I'm planning, but there have been instances when, even that, the order I thought, in the beginning, wasn't the working order. - Deleting or adding scenes in the chapter: can it be that I'm not getting the point across because a scene is lacking? Or rather, is it too long, it doesn't flow well, so I have to delete a scene? Example: Here I wrote 3 pages of Jean grieving for Marco, but the chapter ended up being too long and distracting from the true nature of the chapter, which was Mikasa and Eren's aftermath. Even if Jean's was an aftermath too, I decided I could keep it into Chapter 9, which is called The Ghosts, and hence I deleted the whole scene.

Of course, that made me introduce changes to what followed this scenes, too: I had to make sure that Jean was lacking from the interactions that followed, and twitch and rewrite some of the sentences:

2. Repetition of ideas in the chapter as a whole > Because we write in different days, it can be that the message we want to get across repeats itself all the time. We have to make sure that the message is spread across the chapter consistently, but without it being repeated endlessly.

Example: Here I deleted a whole paragraph because the idea that Eren had always loved Mikasa was repeated in the pharmacy and in the end. I could have deleted it from the end, but I thought it would be nicer from him to realize when he sees her again, and if I kept it on the pharmacy, such answer couldn't have made him be as confused as I pretended to.

Micro-level: on the sentences or paragraphs as a whole

The descriptions > Sometimes, a description can be too long or too short. I normally lack the last one, so I tend to introduce sentences here or there to bring some environment to the scene. It's important to show the actions of the characters, rather than just saying them, so that people can get a view of how they are operating. My brain whirrs as a manga panel: I'm always thinking, what would this panel focus on, if it was a manga? You can also think in terms of a camera.

Example: Ending the sentence with "Eren thinks" would have been easy, but it wouldn't have said anything of how Eren is thinking. So by adding the movement of him watching his hand, the reader can get that despite what he's thinking, he's not being sure he's right.

2. Repetitions > I try to avoid them at all costs. When writing, we can repeat whole expressions or words. It's important to go back and read again and note these repetitions, which can reverberate on the reader and make them feel like the whole chapter is spiriling.

Example: In my case, I don't know why I was writing "turmoil" and "can avoid it" all the time in the chapter, so I needed to get rid of the expressions. Here are two instances in which I did.

3. Clarity > Sometimes, the referents of the sentences (the pronouns) are not too clear for the reader. Who am I referring to? There can be, also, some instances in which the phrase is confusing in itself, so I try to add some clarity.

For example, 1: "From the other side of the bed" -> I needed to add that because it had already been almost a page since I mentioned that Eren and Mikasa were sleeping together. So "Mikasa doesn't move" could have been understood, but I feel that it wouldn't have been as fluid, because moving from where?

*Careful: sometimes, too much clarity can bring over-explaining. It is a fine line, and honestly, I do that myself too. The thing in rereading is to think that the readers are intelligent. Even if you can see that it's not clear enough for intelligent readers, then you should add your clarity

For example, 2: "On the fact that she thinks" / "Oh, no". In the first instance, I added "on the fact that she thinks" because of the rhythm of the sentence, too, and because the transition from what she was thinking in third-person omniscient to first person ("his skin is beautiful") didn't make it fluent or clear. So I decided to keep it in the third-person.

In the "Oh, no", I decided to add it because it wasn't clear who was speaking the question. The idea was that it's Mikasa, but since her thoughts get interrupted, one could have thought that it was Eren. By adding the "Oh, no", we introduce a realization in Mikasa's mind, and it naturally flows onto the question.

4. Order of sentences: It is important to establish a rhythm while writing. The rhythm is almost a cadence of how the words, sentences and paragraphs come together, and it's very intuitive, so everyone has its own. I like my rhythm to play with short sentences, and then long sentences. But for the rhythm to be how I like it, I need to avoid confusion, hence search for clarity, too. In tweaking some of the order on the micro-level, it makes it easier.

Example 1: As you can see, if I had left the initial sentence, it would have been too long and gone together with another sentences of three adjectives in a row, with a lot of description. So, by changing the order, I don't only give a hint of who it is by mentioning Dalia at the beginning, but I also create two whole sentences (before and after the hyphen) that have a good cadence. And after the long sentence, a short one: "He sneers."

Example 2: "Connie nods, long and slow. Hm, he says". Similarly to the last one, and to the clarity one, it made much sense that this sentence was in the green position. 1) It introduced much better what Connie was saying about Ethan, without it making to over-explain who was saying the sentence. 2) By deleting the sentence from the initial paragraph, the focus of the reader is on Eren's actions and the cadence of the paragraphs flows much better.

*To get a rhythm, I used to read out loud. After doing so sometimes, I now play my own voice in my head. Every work has its rhythm and its cadence, I feel, so I do it every time I edit something.

5. Effect: There haven't been any instances in this chapter, but I also look for effect when I work in a sentence. For example, does the order of the sentence bring effect to the reader, or not?

An example: "And I watched her, cheeks all red, twirling a strand of her hair as she sipped her coffee." > This is a normal sentence that is preparing us for something else, right? Maybe a little scene. It surely feels descriptive, doesn't it? But what if we didn't want description, but effect? What if the important thing wasn't how the main character watched her, but what stroke him? Then we could change the order: "And I watched her as she sipped her coffee, twirling a strand of hair, cheeks all red." Even for more effect, I would change the punctuation: "a strand of hair. Cheeks all red." (Even if it's not grammatically correct).

This was quite a shitty example, but it just occurred my mind.

___

So, to end this incredible long post: You do you! I have only shared some of my tricks when I look at the chapter. I can't stress enough the importance of editing. It can really change a chapter from A to B, but be careful not to edit too much: the first intuitive writing is always the raw, most honest one. You should not be losing that spark, but you can make the whole a little bit better, too.

I might be speaking of macro-editing in another post, when we near the end or we finish Part 2 of RJ, so that I can tell you how the order of the chapters changed, and such.

Thank you very much for reading, as always!

#editing #writing #writing advice #editing chapters #aotfanfiction #eremika #rotten judgement fanfiction #hrarby craft #hrarbycraft

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onwriting-hrarby · 2 years ago

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a writing year—in which i wanted to become famous but didn't

i like to go back to january and recap what i've been doing in a year. writing—writing achievements—is something i often don't want to talk about because i feel like i haven't done my best, i haven't been the most productive or i haven't really achieved anything. normally, because achieving something would be to get published, which i'm actively working on.

however, i feel like this year i could finally assess my skills without the productivity tag on them, and therapy finally allowed me to feel productive without maybe having been productive at all. last year, i was on the path of truly learning this, but it hadn't settled in. this year, though, i've approached my writing with the mindset that it is fine to fail, that i don't have to rush, that no one published their masterwerk at 28, and that i love doing this. i am, published or not, a writer. i am truly a writer, and sometimes, more of a writer than some people i've known who've published.

writing original novels: how to deal with myself (i still don't have an answer)

in january, i flew to rome and when i came back i got the flu. thinking it was covid, i stayed at home for some days and decided to finish my novel. it was an exhilarating feeling, but bittersweet—i knew i had to edit it to the extreme, and this was just the raw version. being an editor myself makes me not feel excited at all about finish a novel, since i know the hard work it still needs—and, probably, a few twitches until it fits my high demands.

i didn't touch the novel since april, when i printed it and began reading it and pinpointing what it needed—a lot of cutting, less description, more agility. i told myself i would get it to a literary prize in october, but i didn't begin the editing itself until september, so of course i couldn't submit it. and part of this tiredness and demotivation, i understood in the end, was that i really didn't want to work on it. i didn't like it.

i decided to abandon the novel i had been writing for 5 years.

so, hating myself for it, i decided to abandon the novel i had been writing for 5 years. and this is it. and here i am. i worked on a page last week, just for the sake of it, but i really don't know if i'm going to come back fully.

oh, also, a friend of mine told me to write a proposal novel in a month and a half. i wrote 2/3 halves of it and i abandoned it. i didn't like it—and he didn't either. maybe it would have been my breakthrough!

at the same time... i have a new idea... and it's been simmering in my head for two months, now. slowly, slowly, i'm getting the structure and the characters. i can't wait to begin writing. i think i talked more about this in one of the posts—i also talked about the language, since i will write in English.

i understood a lot of things about myself this year: 1) i don't work well under pressure. 2) if i don't love it, i will hate it. 3) i'm the best at raw, but i don't like editing my own work. 4) i'm way too harsh to myself!

and part of this tiredness and demotivation, i understood in the end, was that i really didn't want to work on it. i didn't like it.

writing fanfiction: the breakthrough that never came (how i changed the plot of my fic because i'm incapable of writing anything but angst)

okay, i'm going to get REALLY personal in here. when i started interacting in fandom twitter (january, instead they said was at chapter 8, i believe), all i wanted was my work to be known. like, i wanted to promote my work, maybe because it was the only way of pouring out what i was writing and not getting anywhere (like the og novel). that's when i took twitter like a promotional tool. it helped, really, in making instead they said more famous—i got promoted by emdailyfics, which were of real help, and i got more followers.

but—bad things came. karma, maybe. it showed me that twitter is not a safe space for fandom things, not for the way i write or think about fiction. but, before that, as i was finishing ITS, i began plotting RJ. it was supposed to be a romcom, sitcom, romantic, cute type of fiction. i thought about it that way because i wanted to have readers, and instead they said, even thought it was well-written and romantic and touched a lot of hearts, wasn't just the kind of fiction that maybe fanfic readers were looking for. easy, amiable, something to distract themselves. smut, too (which i could never write).

rotten judgement was conceived to be a peak in my popularity... for all the wrong reasons. and that's when the twitter cancellation happened: i almost deleted my account (i came back, but ended up deactivating in august back again and i never came back. my account doesn't exist anymore). i was included in another community which understood me, and help me a lot to navigate the hate and the disappointment in my fandom. at one point, i didn't even want to continue rotten judgement, which was at chapter 2 at the time and hadn't even taken off plotwise.

twitter is not a safe space for fandom things, not for the way i write or think about fiction.

and that's when i realized too—no, rotten judgement wasn't a romcom, a sitcom, a romantic comedy. writing something that readers craved wasn't what i did well. i don't do that well. i don't know how to plot short chapters that leave you hanging. i don't know how to write sexual tension to have good smut. what i was crafting in my mind was everything i lacked as a writer. i wasn't the type of writer that could have thousands of kudos or readers and discourse on twitter and asks and mentions and fanarts. i wish i could be—but i'm simply not. and that's okay. at first, i regarded it as a failure. but then, i realized that i might be doing my own thing... i don't want to be famous in the fanfic world. validation is very, very important to me, but not that extreme, and not in a fandom that insulted me and my critical capacity of thinking in twitter; a fandom that called me racist for writing a story about racism (?); a fandom that thought i couldn't twitch canon to my own liking in fanfiction.

rotten judgement was conceived to be a peak in my popularity... for all the wrong reasons.

yes, these were either all comments in rj or comments in twitter that i saw, clearly referencing my fic. it's alright that they think like this—but this is not how i think. therefore, i'm not writing for this people. i am writing for my readers who are still following my work even after so many months. i don't want—i realized—to be in the twitter discourse. i don't want to be idolized in twitter, to be one of those fanfic authors who deserve the praise more than they deserve the hate they get for, literally, being idolized in twitter. i want to lay low. i am not that brave, i can't put myself upfront that way.

so, rotten judgement ended up being even angstier than instead they said, converging in some of the topics of i did not live until today. i think it might be the most choral, incisive fanfiction i have ever written. i hope it will not disappoint. i hope people can catch up to it (if the low readership is about that, really, i don't know what is). it's what i didn't know i wanted to do, but exactly what i needed to write.

i just hope 2023 will bring me more good stuff. i will finish RJ, i will move on from EM and AOT, i feel... i hope i can keep on finding good stuff along the way that will motivate me to write.

i want to do some "thanks" for the ones who have been in my journey, but i will mention them when i finish RJ. till now, they know who they are, i believe <3

#2023 recap #fanfiction #in writing #hrarbycraft #hrarbywritingdiaries #in which i wanted to be fandom famous but i didn't get it

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onwriting-hrarby · 3 years ago

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rotten judgement - the characters and the circle

Read Rotten Judgement on AO3

I write stories about characters. It differs from the stories about plot —where there are things happening all the time, and basically, to go from point A to point B. Writing about characters doesn't mean to forget about the plot, because otherwise the story wouldn't progress, but it means to focus on the change of these characters and how all of this constitutes the plot.

How do I plan the characters and what do they mean to the plot?

I have always written like this. I am not very good at dialogues, action-packed prose. In my real life, I am like a bull, always going straight-forward, charging against everything that's on my way, without having time to think. But when I do, I like to delve into who I am, who are the others. I am this kind of person that likes to hear about people stories because I think that's what constitutes them. So, when I write, I like to pause and reflect. I want to do introspection to understand the characters I'm writing about —and because I think introspection is universal, too, and in talking about one character, a person can see it as its reflection.

That's why, when I started thinking about Rotten Judgement, I knew that forging the characters and the introspection would be much more important than in Instead, they said, because there are simply more characters and because Eren and Mikasa are very complicated in this one (although, to be fair, they are very complicated in all of them, but in Instead they said and in IDNLUT they have each other to go through that).

I knew I wanted to write Enemies to Lovers, which I haven't done, and so that meant to have a constellation of people in which I could narratively rely to portray Eren and Mikasa's relationship from the outside, to have this décalage in between they are saying and feeling, and how people is seeing them. In this décalage, I'm allowed to compare both and not do introspection all of the time, which I know it can be a little complicated to read.

But having side-characters to ease-up your story can be seen as a narrative trick if they don't have struggles for themselves. In a character's story, I believe some of the secondary characters need to have their own struggles. That doesn't mean that they need to change (to be "round"), but they surely need to bring something into the story. So I give a main "topic" to the characters I want to develop further in the story, and this is the topic that I will get deeply into as the narrative progresses. Then, I trace the relationships between the characters, and how those relationships affect them.

So my characters' chart ended up being like this:

Eren Jaeger — Topic: REPENTANCE

Mikasa Ackerman — Topic: FORGIVENESS

Armin Arlelt — Topic: SECRECY

Levi Ackerman — Topic: MOURNING

Jean Kirstein — Topic: DEATH

Historia Reiss and Ymir — Topic: HYPOCRESY

How do I tie the plot from here:

I always like my plot and stories to be circular, or to be well-tied. Having topics for the characters (what they deal with) helps me make round characters (hopefully) and round plots. In this sense, for example —and without spoiling too much— I decided to name the three parts of the fic with each topic from EMA. The plot will grow and delve in those topics from here: Repetence — Secrecy — Forgiveness. So, in some ways, the structure depends on the characters of the story. This is the first time I do this, since in the other stories, what happened to the characters depended on the structure: in IDNLUT, Eren and Mikasa's relationship was tied up with the way of going back and forth in the story. In ITS, the parts were distinguished with stylistic choices, rather than focusing on the plot or the characters.

The topics of Levi, Jean and Historia are crucial to the rounding of the plot, since this is a story, foremost, of life and death, and in any one there's mourning. So while this characters will portray their respective topics, it allows me to talk about this big "topics" and connect them with the main protagonists.

And so, this is how Rotten Judgement started. Let's see how the experiment goes.

#eremika #rotten judgement #hrarby #onwriting #writingdiaries #writing diary #my writing #hrarby musings #rotten judgement fanfiction #hrarbycraft

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onwriting-hrarby · 3 years ago

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Rotten Judgement - On your character's shoes and the fiction

Some days ago, I stumbled across a tweet that made me reflect on how people were seeing my work and what they searched in fiction. Although this isn't meant to be inspired as a reply, I do think that I have some thoughts about fanfiction and the power of fiction that I have been meaning to share with you all since Chapter 3.

When I published Chapter 3—the first chapter in which Eren delves into the past, and we see a glimpse of Grisha being racist, how Eren and Armin meet Mikasa and the internalized racism they offer, and how Mikasa is basically set apart from the other kids not only because of her race but also because of her economical status—I got anxiety over what I was writing, and how people would interpret it. I wrote the longest author's note ever.

I was afraid because I know racism isn't something people look for in fanfiction. One of the criticisms I've gotten is that I've made fiction characters take one stand they didn't embody in canon. Well, the critique is not something I share: I do fanfiction not to recreate canon again, but to use characters I love to explore other sides of the human psyche. I know Eren is not a racist in canon—or Grisha—but in my works, in this distinctive work in fact, I want them to be. It works for my plot. It's OOC? Yes. But the canon material stands, and exists, you're free to go check your Eren every time you want. I don't feel like I'd like to write fanfiction if I were to be constrained into a character's psyche just because it's canon.

Secondly, I know most of us want tropes, and happy endings, and use fanfiction to escape the life, difficult in itself. However, it was one of the main topics in Rotten Judgement because it is one of the main topics in all my fiction. I do not write fiction just to deliver good times—I am selfish myself, and I write about topics that mostly interest me. Even if RJ began as this kind of lighthearted attempt in bringing a 90s, sitcom-y feel to AO3, I couldn't keep up with that: this is not the writer I am. Race, social issues, economical issues, politics, are always embedded in what I write because this is how I live my life. (At the same time, it would be high-nosed of me to pretend that this is what I read—god, please, no. I read, mostly, those fics that make me happy. I'm not even sure I could read what I write in fanfiction, and sometimes I have to say that I skip over the angst fics or the ones that delve into serious topics, so I get the why people wouldn't read my fic! And very thankful if you're one of the ones who do.)

However, and first thing I wanted to say: just because a fic doesn't have what you were looking for, it doesn't invalidate its quality. I'm not talking specifically about RJ (I don't think my fic is worth of the best), but in general —it's something I've been seeing a lot in this fandom, people thinking the story is going one way, or another, and when the author does what they please, they feel that it is not a good story or that is "a lot" (in the negative meaning). Authors don't owe you anything. Works do. There are plenty of good stories with the content you are looking for there. If you feel that the content is not suitable for you, just move on. What's important is that the work, as an independent narrative being, makes sense, and is cohesive and coherent. That's good work, and that's what the readers should strive for, independently of whether it is what they were looking for or not (again, I can understand they look for a certain thing). You don't need to cry it out loud: the content is not usually created for you, it's created as the content itself.

The second issue was to equal the content and the discourse of the work with the discourse of the author and with the politics of the work. We're falling into the same trap we were back in the 50s, and this is the reason why I have talked a lot about censoring books and censoring authors.

This happens because we are equalling the discourse of the work with the politics of the work. Discourse is what the work says, and politics, what the work brings into the mechanism of discourse (I'm sure I'm making this up so forgive me for using terminology out of the right places). For example: a work presents an older man trying to get a younger girl (Lolita). What the work presents: older men can fall in love and be obsessive with younger girls. Politics of the work? Nabokov puts himself in the mind of Humbert Humbert to make you feel uncomfortable, because the politics of the work are romanticizing pedophilia through an unreliable narrator—hence, t ends up criticizing Humbert's decisions. (This brought him lots of problems, as you may know). So the discourse is, in fact, a critique on men like Humbert Humbert.

In the discourse of the work, there's no conversation per se—the conversation arises when we get to the politics of the work. Not all works have politics, some works can be just straight up discoursive, and that's fine (I don't dig them, though). The lack of discourse, however, is when things get ugly, because the authors are not crafty enough to hold a discourse on their own, so they use their own discourse. In those cases, the work lacks discourse and politics, but the reader can see those cases very clearly—it just feels as if they are trying to sell something to you. It's a pamphlet, somehow.

If discourse and politics are done right, however, the work offers some insight into other worlds, other thinkings, sometimes away from hegemonic stands—and we should fight for those discourse and politics to make a better world, although not all of them do (I have a pretty good idea of some works who have shaped some fucked-up politics into real life because they were crafty enough to make readers change their minds while reading the work, but the change was not good per se.)

Now, another tricky thing is to equal the discourse/politics of the characters to the discourse/politics of the author (or the discourse/politics of the work itself, too!). This is even clearer to see in the work itself, since if discourse/politics is difficult to see in plain sight, what the characters think and do is on the outer layer of the narration. So, the fact that it still gets confused with what the author thinks stills befuddles me.

Some comment I've gotten in RJ is that I am racist. My characters do racist things, therefore, by the logic, if I write from the POV of my characters, I must be racist or have internalized racism.

I am, indeed, writing about racism, right? So I write about a boy who's 5 and grows up with a racist, so he is a racist himself. I write about a society fixating on someone's eyes because they have internalized racism, and they think that features make someone different from one another in a negative way, not to celebrate it. I write about a girl who has, herself, internalized those criticisms so much, she is in awe when she discovers she's been hired to work with a bunch of people who are, also, not whites. And if anybody feels that what the characters say, some scenes I write, feel "racist", is because they are meant to feel this way.

They say that it's strange that I am describing Mikasa's eyes, but they fail to see that I am describing them because we're seeing Mikasa through people who have internalized racism as they are young. When Mikasa thinks that is strange to live with a pair of lesbians, this Mikasa is not embodying my thoughts as the author: it's embodying the thoughts of a girl who was brought up in a nun convent and needed her best friend to lend her "The second sex" to understand other identities.

As an author, I strive to put myself in my character's shoes. I want to challenge and question the world, and to be honest, I already know, as a person, where I stand, so to question myself again would be kind of redundant. Selfishly, then, I take the characters and put them in some situations in which questions can arouse (mainly because I think it makes the characters interesting, and the work itself). I've said, again and again, that I am not interested in black/white characters—because people are not like that.

I strive for my characters to have a psyche that comes alive by itself in the plot, and what the characters do and the plot that arises—with its problematics, and their disputes—constitutes the discourse of the characters, which is questioned by the politics of the work, which creates a discourse of the work.

It's like as if one should approach fiction, now, saying: The opinions expressed in the work do not embody the opinions of the author. It gets tiring, isn't it? Aren't we passed that? The true debate about the works should be: do they feel cohesive with the discourse of the characters, what they want to say, how they want to say it? If you're going to criticize my work (please, do), I'd rather you focus on the mechanics of it—does it work the way I'm trying to do that, is it really coming off as my intentions show, or am I not crafty enough and therefore falling into the discourse of the author?. It's much more interesting than to debate whether the characters are racist or not (or if they should be), how that makes you feel, or your vague assumptions about what my ideals behind a piece of work are. Those debates are completely sterile when we speak about fiction and the fiction that I, at least, strive to achieve.

(Again—I understand that if one is not crafty enough, the discourse of the characters can come off as the discourse of the work. This criticism is completely valid, and I wish we could debate in those terms, and not whether what I write means something about me, which to be honest, is past the time we move on from the autofictional/sacred personal place of writing.)

So, even if I feel down when I receive this criticism, a side of me is also happy to be receiving it: it means that this work is striking a chord and that what the characters do and think is horrible enough for them to question whether their psyche is also the author's psyche. I could tell you it is not, but surely, I don't think it's fun to judge a work like this.

The work must work in itself. If it doesn't, it loses all kinds of interest for me—what we authors think is not that interesting sometimes, but what happens in our brain can be.

I hope you enjoy the second part of the fic, in which we will delve into more internalized racism (Eren trying to come to terms with it), Armin and Mikasa's relationship and secrets, Jean discovering what love is, and Historia and Ymir trying to decide if they are hypocrites or not.

#rotten judgement fanfiction #hrarbycraft

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onwriting-hrarby · 3 years ago

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rotten judgement - on plotting and dividing the chapters

Read "Rotten Judgement" here

Hello! Today, with Chapter 4 (already!) I bring you the way I plot the stories. This is specifically for Rotten Judgement, but I have done it with all the stories.

Let's get started!

1- Determine the chronology

All my stories play with the chronology, but in Rotten Judgement it's specially important to get it right, since the reader doesn't have the full scope of what happened in the past. The way I conceive the reader is with a telescope—they look at each star individually, they note it down in a map (their mind) and finally they have a full scope of the universe.

So, not to get anything messy and to carefully think how to place each piece of information, I did a chronology of all the events (ordered chronologically.

2- Determine the parts

Do not read the image completely if you want to avoid spoilers

The second thing I did was to order the chronology in different parts. First, I stated that I wanted three parts/acts (I normally work in packs of 3, quite traditionally). The tie that binded everything together was Historia's pregnancy, so the acts are named after trimesters.

In this trimesters, I decided what events of the chronology I wanted to happen, and when. So I divide the main bullets points in different chapters, trying to tie the story together. This is where I determine how many chapters the story will have, although it can vary depending on the length of the chapter.

3- Heavy plotting: Every scene in a chapter

After that I plot each chapter separetely. This step allows me to delve into each scene much more deeply than step 2. Each line here is a different scene, so as you can see, in Chapter 3 there were a total of four scenes. Each bullet point is a little movement or scene inside the scene. This normally changes as I go, but because I have it written, if I skip one scene (like it has happened in Chapter 4) I know I have to put it in another one. Because I have already written what happens in each big separation/scene, it's not difficult to write or I don't get writer's block (in terms of plotting) because I already have everything done.

I normally plot 2 or 3 chapters at a time after a chapter. For example, when I wrote chapter 1, I plotted chapter 2 and 3. After chapter 2, I went back to re-plot chapter 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. So I have a very clear and precise idea of how the first trimester is going to go, and how many scenes I have to write. It still can change (and it will), but this helps me not to write too much and keep on track with the chapters! They only tend to vary in 2 or 3, in number.

And so, this is all! I hope you like the explanation, and as always, you can hit me up for any question, or headcanon, or any comment about Rotten Judgement.

#hrarbywritingdiaries #hrarby #hrarby writes #rotten judgement fanfiction #hrarbycraft

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