The guide for aspiring fiction writers who want to improve, sharpen, review, and/or learn.
Warning! This book encourages editing and contains many tips that often require revision. Practice makes perfect, and it's good to workout your mental musc...
Lots of writers write about things they know or don't have a lot of experience in. That's understandable, especially considering that many of us have not lived in an apocalyptic 2335 or rode in spaceships or got thrown through the air by a ghost or had the hottest guy in school take us to prom.
Depending on how much knowledge you have with writing, sometimes it can be difficult to write the scene you want and have it sound halfway decent. It's only natural to seek help. I see this a lot.
How do I write a kissing scene?
How do I make something romantic?
How do I write a murder?
How do I write sadness?
Etc.
And by and large you'll probably get a lot of the generic responses you'd get if you searched in google.
If you need help with writing something, BE SPECIFIC when you ask for advice. Give some details. The people willing to help you will be able to zero in on your dilemma and provide meaningful, relevant feedback. It's the difference between:
I'm going to adopt a dog. How do I take care of it? and
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I'm going to adopt an Old English Bulldog. How do I take care of him?
You're going to get a lot of similar answers, because a lot of the general taking care of dog information applies to bulldogs (take him for walks, feed him, train him to sit and stay, etc). But if you ask about bulldogs, you can get information and details that are specific to them, enabling you to get some good, informative feedback you might not have gotten otherwise (cleaning their facial folds, tails, and ears; bulldogs aren't built for swimming, so you need careful supervision around water).
It's okay to want just general information and there are lots of situations where you may just want something nonspecific, just be aware that if you don't guide people in the direction you're thinking, some answers might be less helpful than they could have been because people have a wider range of answers.
Take 'how do I write a murder?'
You have a victim's perspective, a narrator's perspective, the killer's perspective, an extra's perspective, etc. You have all the character's emotions, motivations, and physical abilities (or disabilities) to consider. There's the actual kind of murder, the setting, the witnesses or evidence, if any, the kind of story this is, the maturity level, the time it takes place, the plot unique to your story.
There are hundreds of areas people might comment on, but if they don't know you're writing in the 1920s in an amazon jungle between two warring tribes, where the leader of one is murdered by a one-armed, young werepanther girl, you might have people telling you to go to a dark, isolated location where there aren't any video cameras. It's not entirely unhelpful, you just have to think a little more to apply it to your story.
