Point of View and perspective are vital to story telling. It's possible to write a story where the PoV character isn't there for major plot movements, but it means some complicated plot weaving to avoid Telling more than Showing. The plot in that sort of arrangement is one where the lack of information is the point of tension. (A classic mystery is ( Read more... )

Steve/Tony. We write it. We read it. We love it. It needs no plot (true PWP), nor setting (conversation-fic) and not even dialog. But what it does need is characters. Seriously, this is one bit of writing I can't think of a way around. If you write them as trees you are writing the trees as characters. Aliens, plants, animals, people, inanimate ( Read more... )

Genre is one of those places where fanfiction differs most sharply from published fiction. By its nature, published fiction has standardized genres. In Fandom, we tend to create genres on demand, creating a vast maze of options that mostly have to be intuited. For all of that, there seems to be surprisingly little focus on genre division. This ( Read more... )

Icon relevant, for once. This is where the meta starts to become less hazy and subjective, and a lot more factual. For the next several parts, the general topic will be overall story structure: plot, characters, setting, style, narration and genre. All of this has been hashed out by much smarter people than me, in books much more expensive than LJ ( Read more... )

The outline is where the meat of writing starts, where the brainstorms and daydreams come together to form a plot. Outlines are hugely individual. One author may write down every scene to a fare thee well, another may just have notes on the general plot arc. Some people just have them entirely in their head, and some may keep charts. Outlines are ( Read more... )

Greetings True Believers!We're finally starting to get into the meat of things: the actual planning/writing process. Today's topic is tropes to be wary of. As with any time I start throwing around the word "trope", be wary of TV Tropes links in the body of the text. I take no responsibility for anyone who clicks a link and gets lost on a Wiki Walk ( Read more... )

[shameless] Steve/Tony is a wonderful ship in many ways, but one of the ways that it's special to me is the existence of Universe 3490. Yes, that is Stark and Rogers on their wedding day. Though it's hard to tell with the angle, the armor, and Tony's history with his facial topiary, that is Natasha Stark, a biologically female version of Tony. Yes ( Read more... )

This is a skip ahead in the scheduled posting. Sorry for any confusion! Next week will cover Shipping, but this week some things came together, and I think that it's important to talk about Beta Reading. (This is hard to put into a Tony/Steve context, so most of this is very general.)

Note: Adult content behind the cuts!

I've said it over and ( Read more... )

Last time, I harangued you endlessly about researching your canon. Rejoice, for that is the last you'll hear about research (for a while, mwahahaha). This time, I'm going to touch on something I don't really think that I've seen much meta on: the audience ( Read more... )

I've only been in comics fandom for a little over a year-incidentally, that coincided with my discovery of Steve/Tony. (No, seriously, I have the exact moment that I discovered the joy of Steve/Tony bookmarked. I'm weird that way.) And you know, I got really, really lucky that I came in during a relative lull, and managed to not fall down a million ( Read more... )