Some comments:
Note that in many works of popular fiction by popular authors (Stephen King, Eddings and others spring to mind) that many of them use italics or other typographical tricks to set aside certain sets of narration as different then others.
While the use of italics is growing more common throughout the internet it is still not universal. You can't save italics in a pure .txt file, for example and that is still the best format for distributing fanfic. The use of parantheses can serve as a stopgap for that, where the liteary tricks that can be used with such formating can be brought to bear in your story as well.
Also parathetical references can sometimes be useful. Often you can simply stick them in via use of the comma, as I do right here, instead of going for the full on paratheses. Use of paratheses for side comments can be valuable, however.
One particularly use is the humourous aside. If you've read manga you've all seen them. The tiny little words written outside the speechballons near characters to give a little humourous juxtaposition to what the character is actually saying apear often. Perhaps one of the most extreme examples of this is the "Inner Sakura" from the Naruto manga which takes the cliche and inflates it to new heights.
By using parathetical sentences you can have such humourous non-sequitors appear in your story as well.
One of my favorite characters in Hybrid Theory ends every sentence in an exclamation points because yes he is that excited about everything.
Not only does the over large cast risk losing the reader, it also risks losing the author! It's hard to keep track of large casts when your writing. And if you fail to check in on them you end up with the "Is Matt still stuck under a wall?" question from the Wheel of Time books.
Star Wars doesn't start with Luke on Tattooine, it starts with a dramatic boarding action in space between two behemoth star cruisers!
In Media Res is one of the best ways to start a story. Jumping into the middle of the action is a great way of immediatly hooking the reader and pulling them along for the ride. It serves as an excellent "hook" as well.
Another good example of In Media Res opening os Final Fantasy VII (the console game). We start with Cloud and friends attacking a reactor that is killing the planet, fighting through hordes of soldiers and killer robots and blowing the hell out of everything in sight. Only later do we slow down to explain what is going on, and even then we leave of starting up the actual plot until we're several hours into the game!
The trick to a good In Media Res opening is that the reader should not HAVE to know anything to get it. Starting out a Buffy fanfic where she is fighting for her life against a powerful demon is cool. You dive right itno the action and you don't need any exposition that can not be understood beyond "Buffy good" "demon bad" and you're off.
Then, after you've hooked the reader with interesting action, you slow down and tell them WHY. Sometimes you literally flash back. One excellent story I read (which I forget the name of now) actually starts with the FINAL scene of the story and then flashes back to the beginning, constantly teasing us with how we get from A to B.
The important thing is that The Story Starts When The Story Starts. Don't get bogged down introducing the characters and their everyday lives. Your story starts when things begin to change for some reason. Harry Potter's story starts when he begins to dscover that magic exist in the world and what this means for him (and his past). Luke Skywalker's story starts when two droids stumble into his life. Don't get bogged down telling us how you got to here.
Bubblegum Crisis doesn't start with telling us how the Knight Sabers were formed. It starts with action! Then it gets around to telling us why this action is important and interesting later.
Be careful however, as you run the risk of frustrating the reader if you put off explanations for too long. You also run the risk of the "end of season infodump".
The "end of season infodump" is something I noticed about a large number of recent anime series, including Evangelion, Rahxephon, Serial Experiments Lain etc etc. In amy of these series the creators create an Abeyance concept, one that the readers want to find out more about ("What is Rei?" "What are Mulians?" "Who is Lain?" etc.) but then the creators begin to think the anticipation for the "big reveal" is all that's keeping the viewers watching. This leads to all of the major secrets being revealed in the last two or three episodes, usually in a broken, clogged and unintereting way which falls apart, ruingin the end of an otherwise perfectly good series.
I really became aware fo this problem when watching Rahxephon which was a fantastic series right up until the last two or three episodes which just became a storm of heavy-handed exposition that was a) rushed and b) uninteresting because of a. Then I watched Rahxephon: The Movie which had the exact same story but didn't dick around with the watcher and actaully told us what we needed to know as we needed to know it. As such, it was a much better story with a much better flow to it and didn't become a trainwreck of exposition near the end.
The moral of this story is that exposition is a delicate balancing act. Too much, too soon and you risk driving the reader away. Too little, too late and you risk frsutrating the reader and ultimatly ruining your story entirely!
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Epsilon
Quote:I would disagree with this to some extent.
xx. PARENTHESES
Note that in many works of popular fiction by popular authors (Stephen King, Eddings and others spring to mind) that many of them use italics or other typographical tricks to set aside certain sets of narration as different then others.
While the use of italics is growing more common throughout the internet it is still not universal. You can't save italics in a pure .txt file, for example and that is still the best format for distributing fanfic. The use of parantheses can serve as a stopgap for that, where the liteary tricks that can be used with such formating can be brought to bear in your story as well.
Also parathetical references can sometimes be useful. Often you can simply stick them in via use of the comma, as I do right here, instead of going for the full on paratheses. Use of paratheses for side comments can be valuable, however.
One particularly use is the humourous aside. If you've read manga you've all seen them. The tiny little words written outside the speechballons near characters to give a little humourous juxtaposition to what the character is actually saying apear often. Perhaps one of the most extreme examples of this is the "Inner Sakura" from the Naruto manga which takes the cliche and inflates it to new heights.
By using parathetical sentences you can have such humourous non-sequitors appear in your story as well.
Quote:This is, of course, an ignorable rule if you want the characters to sound like they come from a Silver Age comic book. Particularly useful if you are basing the story off of said Sailver Age books, sentai/Japanese action hero stories or parodies of either.
Don't end every sentence in an exclamation point -- not only will you dilute the impact of *all* the exclamation marks in your story, nobody's ever that excited, and your dialogue will end up looking like it came out of a Silver Age comic book.
One of my favorite characters in Hybrid Theory ends every sentence in an exclamation points because yes he is that excited about everything.
Quote:Ugh. Oh god yes. Guilty as charged. To be fair, I had little choice given the kind of story I started out writing but man, NEVER again.
xx. STORY KILLERS
Over-large casts.
Not only does the over large cast risk losing the reader, it also risks losing the author! It's hard to keep track of large casts when your writing. And if you fail to check in on them you end up with the "Is Matt still stuck under a wall?" question from the Wheel of Time books.
Quote:I find it interesting that you use as an example of the slow build up into a story one of the greatest In Media Res openings of all time.
If you really can't figure out how or why this is better, think
about the way a movie is structured. You don't (usually) plunge right into the action in the first shot. Instead, a movie will often spend fifteen minutes to a half hour building up the core character(s). You get to know them in their everyday lives, get a sense of how they deal with people, get a sense of who they are. It's only after you get a baseline picture of them in their normal lives that you can really care about them when they get thrust into something extraordinary (i.e., the story the movie is going to tell). Imagine if "Star Wars" had simply put up a card
that read "Luke Skywalker is a farmboy on Tattooine, a planet with two suns. One day his Uncle Owen bought two droids. The next morning, one was missing" and then jumped right in to chasing down a runaway R2. Wouldn't you feel cheated, like something was lacking? Would you even care about Luke and the droids?
Star Wars doesn't start with Luke on Tattooine, it starts with a dramatic boarding action in space between two behemoth star cruisers!
In Media Res is one of the best ways to start a story. Jumping into the middle of the action is a great way of immediatly hooking the reader and pulling them along for the ride. It serves as an excellent "hook" as well.
Another good example of In Media Res opening os Final Fantasy VII (the console game). We start with Cloud and friends attacking a reactor that is killing the planet, fighting through hordes of soldiers and killer robots and blowing the hell out of everything in sight. Only later do we slow down to explain what is going on, and even then we leave of starting up the actual plot until we're several hours into the game!
The trick to a good In Media Res opening is that the reader should not HAVE to know anything to get it. Starting out a Buffy fanfic where she is fighting for her life against a powerful demon is cool. You dive right itno the action and you don't need any exposition that can not be understood beyond "Buffy good" "demon bad" and you're off.
Then, after you've hooked the reader with interesting action, you slow down and tell them WHY. Sometimes you literally flash back. One excellent story I read (which I forget the name of now) actually starts with the FINAL scene of the story and then flashes back to the beginning, constantly teasing us with how we get from A to B.
The important thing is that The Story Starts When The Story Starts. Don't get bogged down introducing the characters and their everyday lives. Your story starts when things begin to change for some reason. Harry Potter's story starts when he begins to dscover that magic exist in the world and what this means for him (and his past). Luke Skywalker's story starts when two droids stumble into his life. Don't get bogged down telling us how you got to here.
Bubblegum Crisis doesn't start with telling us how the Knight Sabers were formed. It starts with action! Then it gets around to telling us why this action is important and interesting later.
Quote:The term you are looking for here is Abeyance. The act of "setting aside" information for the readers later. It is a common feature of scifi and fantasy literature. You can safely introduce a term (say "meta-talent" or "The Force") and leave it to be explained later. If you put it in the right context, it will create its own small amount of suspense as the reader desire to learn more about this term.
Properly executed, you can stretch out an explanation for a
*long* time, turning it into a hook that keeps your readers
interested. For instance, look at the first few chapters of my story "Drunkard's Walk II". Doug shows up in Megatokyo, and during his turns as the narrator starts discusing songs, being a Warrior and a host of other things as though the reader already knows what he's talking about. It's not until chapter six that the readers have the answers to every question he raises just in his first ten or fifteen paragraphs. This was deliberate. See "Don't Tell Everything Right Away", elsewhere in this document.)
Be careful however, as you run the risk of frustrating the reader if you put off explanations for too long. You also run the risk of the "end of season infodump".
The "end of season infodump" is something I noticed about a large number of recent anime series, including Evangelion, Rahxephon, Serial Experiments Lain etc etc. In amy of these series the creators create an Abeyance concept, one that the readers want to find out more about ("What is Rei?" "What are Mulians?" "Who is Lain?" etc.) but then the creators begin to think the anticipation for the "big reveal" is all that's keeping the viewers watching. This leads to all of the major secrets being revealed in the last two or three episodes, usually in a broken, clogged and unintereting way which falls apart, ruingin the end of an otherwise perfectly good series.
I really became aware fo this problem when watching Rahxephon which was a fantastic series right up until the last two or three episodes which just became a storm of heavy-handed exposition that was a) rushed and b) uninteresting because of a. Then I watched Rahxephon: The Movie which had the exact same story but didn't dick around with the watcher and actaully told us what we needed to know as we needed to know it. As such, it was a much better story with a much better flow to it and didn't become a trainwreck of exposition near the end.
The moral of this story is that exposition is a delicate balancing act. Too much, too soon and you risk driving the reader away. Too little, too late and you risk frsutrating the reader and ultimatly ruining your story entirely!
----------------
Epsilon