FanFiction Garret

Defining Minor Characters

Once the protagonist and antagonist are identified, minor characters are everyone else in the story from the protagonist's sidekick to the owner of the weapon shop who only has one scene.

Minor character have the same issues as your major characters. You need to make sure you know their backgrounds, how they would react, what makes them tick. The major difference is the less time the minor character spend in the story so the less you have to tell the reader.

Writing Tutorial #11 does not describe you as a writer. In fact, you get cold chills considering "winging it." You need everything worked out before you start writing. This is a technique created by Frederick C. Davis that I found in The Mystery Writer's Handbook. He describes it in detail using the brainstorming of his novel Drag the Dark featuring Schuyler Cole and Lucas Speare of the Cole Detective Agency.

"A pronoun is a word used in place of one or more nouns." (Warriner's 5) But don't write the pronouns off. Just think how monotonous writing would be if we always had to call things by their proper names or had to show possessions with a prepositional phrase starting with "of" not to mention asking questions and avoiding repetition would get a lot harder without pronouns.

Identify Your Villain

The next step in revision is to take a hard look at your villain or antagonist. Note that I use the singular—“villain” or “antagonist.” If you have more than one, you may be diffusing the impact of the character’s villainy by spreading it. Stein on Writing Page 280

By going step by step, we have discovered a major matter that needs correcting and will impact the entire story.

This is going to sound completely against everything I have told you previously in these tutorials: the story does not have to have a written outline.

"But you said write everything down!"

I had a professor (in the playwriting class I believe) who recommended creating a credo especially about your writing life and updating it every year. If you keep it up as a regular habit, you can use it to see your growth. I'm a few years behind and don't remember what I did with the last one I wrote. It's around somewhere; I never throw those things away.

We're covering the basics for the next few Grammar Guides. We've already defined verb tenses, verbals, and clichés. Now it's time for us to look at people, places, things, and the words that replace them in a sentence. Bear with me, I know you've heard all these definitions once already in school. Hopefully, now you're paying attention to the subject at hand and not the cute boy or girl sitting in the desk next to you.

The steps I am about to propose are not written in stone. Their order can be changed, as long as the principle is maintained: major matters are attended to first.
Stein on Writing page 278

We want to start with a hardcopy of the story you’re editing. It’s easier to work from paper, and after you’ve made major changes, you can reprint and look at a fresh copy. What are major changes? Anything that changes the bulk of the work; fixing characters, plot, setting, style. Grammar and spelling mistakes are easy.

Everyone working on novels will be glad to hear this section deals completely with you. A novel must have at least one subplot; otherwise all you have written is a really long short story. As Levin puts it: "A novel is not only longer than a short story, it's wider." (Get That Novel Written 67)

Two fanfics writers I know admitted to me that they don't read fanfics. This is such an alien concept to me, I don't know what to make of it and started this post to work it out. Why am I so befuddled?

I don't expect anyone to read the crazy amount of stuff I do. I was reading by age four and reached college-level texts by fourth grade (my teacher for that grade complained about it to my mother at open house). I started writing the year after that. But reading has never stopped in the mean time.