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HGohwell
Jun '23
1

Been seeing an increase in people asking for genuine critique on their writing recently, and that's great, because I love seeing people wanting to improve their craft. So, I figured since we've done summaries recently, the next thing is your first episode/chapter (and beyond because many of these things apply across the board).

As always, advice isn't universal, apply as necessary, this is just my opinion and feel free to discuss and share your own. But, here are some quick, fast to implement, practical tips to improve your first episode and writing over all:

A hook is not what you think it is, calm down. Many people will tell you a hook is something big and dramatic. It's a killer first line. It's something shocking. It's something that grabs your reader by the throat and won't let go. No. While it is often your first line, it doesn't have to be, nor does it have to be something big and dramatic. It's something the catches your readers interest. That's all. Yes, it is fantastic if your first line is quotable and ominous and grabs the reader by the throat, but in reality, all it has to do is not be so bad people will put the book down until you get to what makes your reader ask questions. I would take "He was a weaselly, ferret of a man." over an overwrought, flowery metaphor or try hard shock value attention grabber. Look at some of your favourite books, do you see how mundane some of their first lines are? Your first line really can be basic as long as you back it up with strong writing.

Questions and mystery are your friends, information is not. In the first chapter, I want mysteries, I want questions, I want to feel like I'm about to see the answers unfold before me. If your first episode is you explaining everything about your world and your characters and the species in it and the backstory, you're not only not hooking the reader, but you're not leaving anything to explore in your world. Show me what's going on, don't tell me why. Show me just enough of your world to go ooooh that seems cool. Flash your story's sexy ankle at me, don't display the entire leg, there's no mystery and allure in that. Your hook, as above, is a question. What questions am I asking that make me want to read on and find answers? That said:

Void Syndrome. Or White Room Syndrome. You don't have to info dump for paragraphs about what everything looks like in lists, but for the love of writing give me some idea what things look like. If I can't picture anything about your world or characters in the first episode, I'm going to lose interest fast. A well placed sentence or two here and there can make the world wonderfully vivid. Did they step outside into the sun, the rain or a grey autumn morning? Are the cobbles uneven beneath their feet, smooth tarmac hot enough to cook an egg, icy slick mud or crunching pink leaves? Is their coat ill fitting and patched up or brand new and never been worn? Make the most of little, scattered details to inform both how the world or character look and the personality of the the world and character.

Grab the scissors and red pen and rip your writing apart. Anywhere from one to two thirds of is waffle (over all, not per episode). Unnecessary information. Lists of descriptions. Character motivation. The history of your world. Repetition. Things that break the flow and could be better served in other places or not at all. Go through your writing and be absolutely brutal about your writing. Is it necessary? Does it forward character or plot as well as the world? Ideally everything should do at least two things, plot, character or world and world is the least important part. A good world will live through the character and plot.

Watch out for filter words. Thing like (MC) noticed, thought, felt, saw, spotted, realised, wondered, decided, smelled, watched, believed, assumed, knew ect. There are lists across the internet, but essentially, "He saw her smile." is much stronger as "She smiled." in almost all circumstances. Now, there are some times when these are necessary or do work, but most of the time they make your writing weaker and push your reader back from the narrative. Especially avoid this in 1st person perspective.

Read aloud or put it through a text to speech tool. If you or the text to speech don't read it with a natural easy flow, even in monotone, and still get the emotion across, you need a rework. Sometimes, it's a simple as a rejig to stop a scene falling flat, and this can be forgiven, but if your work is actively hard to read, it doesn't matter if you're going for that as a style, readers will quickly DNF a book that's hard to read, especially here on Tapas where you don't even have the sunk cost fallacy to keep you going.

Set the tone. You don't need go full shock and gore. You don't need to go full romance. But you do need to set the tone. If your first chapter is a gore fest, the readers will be disappointed when the rest is fluff and romance. If the start is cute slice of life, suddenly pivoting to dark horror will lose you a lot of readers. Yes, you can twist (every time I say things like this, people still go "but PMMM" and yes, that pulled the twist but the tone of PMMM hints at the darker nature from the start) but you have to set expectations. Your first episode is how you filter out people who will and won't like your story. If it's a dark horror, leave sprinkles or tone. If it's romance, sprinkle in romance and fluff. Your other option is a slow gradual tone change, but this of often accidental and much harder to pull off naturally.

So, there's some quick tips. Feel free to drop your own from your experience too, I always love discussing these things and I hope it helps some.

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DokiDokiTsuna
Jun '23

These are some great tips; I hope more people read them! ^^

To this I would add-- information may not be your BFF, but it's not your enemy, either. I have experience with a certain long-form story that was absolutely obsessed with making everything into a mystery; trying to get you to go "ooh, what could that mean...?" for every character introduction and new plot direction...and then, it turned out that they didn't actually know how to do anything else. =/

The result was a story that strung its audience along for years, promising interesting developments in the future while delivering next to nothing in the present. And when it came time for them to make good on those promises, each "big reveal" was a letdown that couldn't live up to the hype, shying away from actually answering questions and instead relying on additional mysteries and cliffhangers to try to force the audience to stay invested.

TL;DR: You don't want to overload your audience with information, but you don't want to starve them, either. Info should be sprinkled in strategically; give your readers the clues necessary to put things together and anticipate your next steps as the story progresses. If they have nothing to work with before each big reveal, how can you expect them to stay engaged until then?

It's really weird how people overlook ^that...the very first episode has the characters rescue a wounded "animal" and get attacked by a bunch of nightmarish sketch-demons with hollow eyes. Like, MadoMagi wasn't actually just "harmless innocent slice of life" until Mami's death, the tone starts sliding into darker territory from the beginning, and the clues are there if you have eyes to see them. ^^;;;

HGohwell
Jun '23

Definitely this. I might not have made it clear enough, this is more about just piling on information (hence, you know, flash the ankle of info, you still have show something) I think this goes with what I was saying about how ideally everything should be pulling double time. But also, maybe it's just me, but I think setting a mystery and questions requires you to give out some information. You can't set up a murder mystery without telling us someone is dead and showing us some details but (unless you're Columbo where the tension is actually in how he catches them rather than who did it) you can't just info dump the entire murder scene and expect people to still care. And I think that's what should be applied to most stories in their own way.

I really don't know how people miss or ignore it either. The design of the monsters, the soundtrack, the framing and the tone, hell it's right there in the damn prologue with the black and white room and the fight with Homura. I don't know how people ever act like the "twist" of oh it's actually dark and messed up really came from nowhere.

cherrystark
Jun '23

It's okay to take your time.

Scheduling

I have seen a lot of writers make posts asking about "scheduling" and when is the best time to post or would readers notice if you did X. There are no right answers to these questions. If it takes you a week to post your best work, it takes a week. If posting every other day gives you the drive to finish a piece, do that. Nobody cares. If a reader can get the general idea of when you're posting, they'll come back. And after a while, newer readers won't care what your schedule is because there will be work available to read. As long as you're periodically communicating delays, they'll be fine. Your schedule should only work for you.

Pacing Your Stories

No matter your writing style, it seems to be a trend to have one chapter per "event". For example, a chapter about the morning routine, another shopping, etc. In serial fiction, pacing becomes a bigger challenge because you run the risk of them losing interest and leaving the page. However, this does not mean you have to cram as many events in the early chapters to keep the reader's interest.

To help put it into perspective, if you are writing an epic fantasy novel that is going to culminate in a big battle at the climax. This battle is theoretically only going to take 1-2 days. Battle scenes are complicated to write but if your world has dragons or legions of undead warriors ready to go to war at your mysterious ranger hero's command - it's likely that people are going to die quickly.

It's not unreasonable to have 2-3 chapters for the characters to GET to the battleground, another 4-5 chapters preparing for the battle in their camp, 4-5 chapters for the actual battle, and another 3-4 chapters or more to cover the aftermath. 20 chapters might seem like overkill, but if the big battle scene is going to change everything for your plot and characters - make it count.

Word count is important. Following an outline is important. But if you want readers to care about a certain moment, give it the time it deserves. The pendulum for story pacing swings in both directions. If you are going to make me sit through ten chapters while the MC goes shopping with a list of random other female characters and them graciously taking care of everything the MC will need for (insert random event) please make it more than "female bounding".

darthmongoose
Jun '23

Yesss a thread of good food.:hype_01:

If you can't bear to see your OC change, they're not a good story character

Okay, hot take, but I stand by it. I think the internet's obsession with having "OCs" gets in the way of telling good stories. OCs are static. They're a set of concrete statistics written out like a list; they have an age, height, gender identity, sexuality, likes, dislikes and a list of traits. There's nothing wrong with having an OC like this, perhaps for RP or illustrations or just as a reassuring imaginary friend... but I just don't think you can tell a compelling story with a character who can't change. If your character isn't changed at all by what happens, the stuff that happens has no weight to it. There have to be consequences, and that means your beloved OC might change; they might become somebody you'd like to be friends with less, or somebody you can relate to less.

If you can't do that with your OCs because you don't want them to change, make new characters specifically for storytelling. Throwaway characters (or they will be at first, you'll probably grow to love them) who are made with the intention of changing. Let their personalities change, let them get scars or discover things about their sexuality or gender identity, let them grow or accumulate trauma or work through it. It's a fine thing to tell a person "you're fine and worthy as love just as you are." but I feel like people often internalise this as "allowing the world to change you at all, or allowing yourself to change your mind about anything is bad and that goes for fictional people too". People change; let your characters change.

Set up the dominoes

When I'm planning chapters and storyarcs, I plan the destination first. Then I write out a list of what the audience needs to understand what will happen, who needs to be in what location and what events need to be in motion to make that work.
So let's say, our goal is: "Luke Skywalker rescues Princess Leia from the Death Star".
Okay, so we have a list now. We need to set up who Luke is (a farm boy), and who Leia is (a rebellious princess), we need to get Leia captured so she's on the Death Star and we need to get Luke into space, and have him be informed that there's a princess imprisoned so he'll feel motivated to free her. So now, we can construct scenes and add characters that will allow us to get to this destination. Have a scene where Leia's ship is attacked, and she's captured, but not before sending a message asking for help. Have a scene on the farm where Luke expresses he wants to go to space, then have a scene where Luke finds the message from Leia... boom! The plot is rolling!

If you know you're going to have your love interest make a mad dash to the airport on a bike as a key scene in advance, rather than it being something you come up with when you get to it and go "oh crap I need a climax, errr-", you have the opportunity to establish that every day he passes a bike rack with this one unloved bike nobody even steals, and perhaps to have him remark to the reader that he hates cycling ever since he injured himself as a kid, and would only do it if his life was on the line. Now the bike ride doesn't come out of nowhere and it'll feel so much more satisfying. He runs, thinking "I'll never make it-!" then sees that bike rack, with that one bike on it that was mentioned earlier! Then we see his character growth and commitment to his love as he rides it, symbolising that he is now willing to heal from past wounds, and to grow and change for his love!

Think of a climax first, then start lining up your dominoes to get there, giving priority to information or scenes that are absolutely necessary for this payoff to make sense. You can even test a few different paths if you need to.

TheLemmaLlama
Jun '23

But they did actually succeed in stringing along said audience? That sounds to me like they executed the setup incredibly well if anything, and it's the follow-through which they failed at, which I'd say is a different issue :sweat_02: I agree with the spirit of what you're saying though; I hate info-dumps as much as the next person, but if I'm completely confused and have literally zero idea what's going on, I'm not going to feel very motivated to continue :'D

I feel like there's another way to deal with this, which is to have your OC grow into the OC you know and love, rather than have them start the story that way and growing out of it. People who write backstories for their OCs wouldn't find this objectionable, I'd imagine.

Another option is to have them as an 'anchor character' for an episodic series where each episode is really about some character-of-the-week who actually does the changing. (If the series ends up running long enough, I feel like the 'anchor MC' would probably end up changing anyway just to remain someone who resonates with the author, who would also have changed even if only a little :P)

DokiDokiTsuna
Jun '23

It's like, yes and no...I would say yes, they succeeded (and made tons of money) but only because they had built up trust in the beginning, when the story had a different tone. Back then, it didn't matter as much that they spent most of the story "stalling"; they were able to fill the wait with lots of funny, entertaining subplots. Like a kids' cartoon that maintains the status quo until each season finale.

Then the story became "darker" and they couldn't fill the wait with cute stuff anymore, So they decided to do...nothing. ^^; Rather than taking their story more seriously in turn and using it to develop their characters, they just shove them along on an "epic quest" and pretend that, even though the previous super-serious event ultimately didn't change them in any meaningful way, the next one definitely will. :wink: And the next one, and the next one...

And I'm being generous. There are lots of critics who believe even the lighter half of the story was just a different flavor of 'wasted time', and there's very little in the plot that might grab the attention of any sort of mature viewer. And although I enjoyed that first half...at the same time, I can't really disagree with those critics...