Tropes are Tools

THE yves. CRITIQUE ESSENTIALS

The yves. Critique Seder & critique document sample

The two documents I can't live (or get critique) without-- a Critique Seder to standardize feedback and process among big groups of critiquers, and a critique document to organize all feedback received and turn it into actionable editing steps! Comments are enabled if you have questions on the reasoning behind anything in these documents.

THE yves. CRITIQUE SEDER

I found myself frustrated in writing workshops by critique sessions that lapsed into silence, or went round and round without focus. Then I made this! I used it to lead workshops in the class I taught last quarter, and so far I've only received positive feedback on it. Modify as you so choose, and distribute freely with credit.

CRITIQUE DOCUMENT SAMPLE

I can't stand scattered thoughts, or nebulous feedback, or editing. I need it all in one place, clear as crystal, and set up step-by-step so I can proceed in a confident order. While this doc is extremely simple (essentially no plot edits), I hope it'll prove useful in organizing your future revisions!

N.B.: Sample doc gets a little spicy because I write good romance, but nothing more than jokes. Any resemblance to projects, critiquers, or Google Docs living or dead are purely coincidental. Due to its links, this post will not show up in Tumblr search, so please help by sharing it!

Take frequent breaks (drink water too!) and do your goddamn wrist stretches

Is their background cliche or their falling in love? I don’t personally think anything you’ve said sounds cliche. Even if it did, your writing voice could still be unique enough to help that not make a difference. You could be retelling Cinderella or Snow White for the thousandth time and you could still write it in such a way that would not be cliche.

That being said, why I think your premise is not a cliche: falling in love is not cliche, it’s a dream for a lot of people, and like everything else comes down to how it’s told. Being dissatisfied with one’s life & lifestyle is pretty common, but choosing to work in a brothel after being part of nobility? Turns that on its head. The heir to throne finds her at a brothel? That provokes so many questions, gives us complications right off the bat, to the point I don’t think there’s really anything cliche about this

For starters: what rough time period is this? Is it a time period where STIs are rampant and contraceptives and/or abortions scarce? If so, brothel-work would be impossible to get out of thanks to the resulting problems of having so many sexual partners (long term effects of STIs are not pretty). Condoms weren’t widespread and were barely effective, so there weren’t really that many barriers for either STIs or childbirth back in the day.

It’s actually one of the reasons full service work was made illegal around the turn of the 1900s. It was not a good situation for the women involved. The laws just haven’t caught up to the modern reality of contraceptives, so sex worker laws are stuck in the past.

If this is a time period (or setting) where there’s less risk to being a sex worker, what is it about the setting that makes it safer? How do you get around the risks? You have to know them in order to properly write them, and properly write someone transitioning in/out of the work, without perpetuating a narrative that sex work is evil for simply existing.

Second off: why is this character doing brothel work when she’s bored with her high class life? Is it based off misconceptions around the “glamorous sex worker lifestyle”? This is a form of fetishization that leads to sex worker culture (such as pole work) getting appropriated (yes, appropriated, like culturally appropriated) by non sex workers trying to get all the glitz and none of the realities. 

Sex work is not glamorous, and depending on the situational factors, was often a last resort kind of thing. In modern times (and in some periods throughout history) you can get people who chose to have their ideal careers as sex workers, but that’s thanks to certain factors making it safer (contraceptives, sex work that is not full service, a time with less STIs, etc). You can see my breakdown of sex work types here.

It’s a job like any other. If you like people, acting, exercise, and power dynamics, it can be great. But it’s not rolling in money and being a badass all the time. More often than not it looks like a negotiation on what is allowed, sexily trying to stop them from doing what’s not allowed, and standing there demanding pay before you even start.

Third: if she was a high class lady, why wouldn’t she use her money to buy herself whatever education, social circle, or really anything she wanted? Rich women back in the day had the power that money brought, and you can just look at King Christina of Sweden to see just the kind of life you could lead as a rich woman bored of being high class.

Money > womanhood. There were hundreds if not thousands of well-monied women being scandalously unladylike throughout history, and rich ladies were educated. Therefore, they could and often did run in some very intellectually stimulating circles, they just never got any credit for it. They could even be mistresses to these various intellectuals, if you wanted to get the sexual side of things in there. You can see how bold people would be to get official mistress positions with Madame du Pompadour, the official mistress to King Louis XV.

Fourth: sex worker clients rarely make good significant others. The rich ones you’d find with high class call girl/ sugaring/ the girlfriend experience often have reasons they’re not taken (aka, they’re often not exactly the best men, either looks or personality wise. Some clients are great and society doesn’t give them a chance, but others are definitely not), not to mention they are often cheaters. In a setting with nobility, this means a lot of potential bastard children.

If she was a lower class brothel worker, then it’s very unlikely anyone rich would be her client. Brothels (and other sex establishments) are stratified by class, and you can most definitely find “rich men’s clubs” serving millionaires that are different from dive clubs that serve your average joe making thirty grand a year. The clientele are just as stratified as the girls.

Rich women tended to aim towards being mistresses of richer men, instead of brothels. It was safer, more secure, and often came with many, many, many perks (such as titles, which they could then give to their family, which then secured them for a couple of generations at least). There can be many love stories found in plots like this.

Four point five: If he was going to the brothel to pick a woman to “save”, that is at its core toxic. Not just because the concept of saviours tend to be toxic, but because there is a subset of people, known as Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminists, or SWERFs, who use old, outdated, and misleading statistics to say all sex work is bad and needs to be banned. If that looks an awful lot like TERF, it’s because the two groups heavily overlap.

I know I said that back in the day sex work was a last resort thing that wasn’t that great for women. And I know I said that modern sex work is not glamorous. But the solution is not to “save” the people within the profession—it’s to make the profession safer. Even back in the day, when it was exploitative and dangerous, the solution should have been to make it safer.

Even if you’re writing a period piece, or a fantasy, the story would be read in the real, modern world. This is a world where SWERF attitudes run rampant, and as such, sex work representation is often really disrespectful because of it. You can mitigate sex worker risk factors (a time period with less STIs, people extremely aware of their own fertility, magic, etc), but you have to be careful not to fall into saviour narratives without consulting sex workers. Especially if she was an elective worker (elective workers often come in situations where sex work is less dangerous).

Fifth: queens are more often than not taken for political instead of love ends. So unless this guy hadn’t been slated from a very young age to marry for politics, he wouldn’t even be available to have a queen. The nobility often proxy-married extremely young, and it’s more likely than not he’d already be engaged.

If he was already engaged, he’d have a mistress, which can be a very, very influential position (and perhaps even more powerful than a queen), but it tweaks the ending just a tad. If he wasn’t already engaged, you’d have to have him risk potential political suicide by marrying someone not of the ruling class and ruining his prospects of making political ties with another princess. (the ask specifies high class, but high class does not equal ruling class, and high class can easily be the servant class to the ruling class. They’re still often filthy rich; they just don’t have claims to titles)

The second, fourth, and fifth points are really, really my sticking points here. It seems to just assume full service sex work is easy and fun and an endless party— when in reality it’s not enough lube, birth control as a business expense, faking orgasms, having sex with men old enough to be your father with bad breath, and making sure you’ve made enough for rent and food this month. 

Not to mention, as a queen, she’d really not want someone with such a potential for straying. It leads to messy claims to the thrones and potential succession wars down the line, and considering her security is tied to being the mother of the heir, that would be dodgy. It’s possible to capture a man’s heart to the point you become mostly-exclusive, but that is a skill in and of itself and is not something you develop at the drop of a hat.

As a mistress, she’d be looking to work her position and maintain exclusivity based on charm, wit, and political acumen. It’s a much different kind of work, but it can be just as fascinating, and can have just as many plot points. It results in being the official mother of bastard children, which has its own perks.

If he met the love of his life based off her sex worker persona, he’s going to be disappointed with the real her (if she ever dares show it, which she might not, especially if you go the mistress route). Sex workers are paid to be fantasy, and making this sort of relationship start work takes a lot of effort. You have to really establish what makes this person different from her other clients, because lemme tell you—men get to all sound the same after awhile in the industry.

Deadpool is the most often cited version of doing this some semblance of well, so I’d strongly suggest looking at how Vanessa was humanized as a sex worker love interest and base things off that. 

Your other option is to look more towards official court mistresses like Madame de Pompadour, and how much training and education it takes to maintain the fantasy for an extended period of time. But this would limit the number of sexual partners she takes, and she’d likely never be a queen thanks to the sheer level of scandal it would cause.

Basically, is it love, or is it love of security?

Also take a very hard look at Tits and Sass+ their suggested media+ try to find sex worker help blogs to see what sex work in modern times is really like, because right now this just seems like “oh, I’ll just drop out of school to be a stripper”, without considering what that actually means.

I am very serious when I say that these places are characters to me, just as much as any of the living, breathing human (or nonhuman) characters in the story and once I get attached their loss affects me on an equally visceral level. And, in fact, a creator’s decision to destroy or abandon that “home base” can affect my interest in continuing to emotionally invest in a story just as much as when they cavalierly kill off a character for shock value. 

And someday I will figure out how to put down all my Thoughts on that.

That definitely plays a part, I think, because just like actual character deaths, and injury, peril, and other such disruption and drama with people and relationships, those things can form a good and necessary (and enjoyable!) part of storytelling.

However, I feel like when an author too easily destroys or abandons that “home base” concept, it can be a sign that they’re not really committed to developing other core elements (character relationships, character arcs, key dynamics of what I enjoyed to begin with) and therefore are likely to discard rather than develop and grow those as well. Some creators are really great at setting up concepts, but seem to have no idea what to actually do with them once they’re there.

I love adventure and drama and peril and suffering and struggle in a story and will gladly come through a whole lot of sadness… if I can trust that the author will bring it to a good place in the end and is going for more than cheap Drama Points, intending to just leave all the good and promising things broken and scattered in their wake while they move on to bigger, more exciting Events. In which case -

Denying the characters that also denies the audience that respite. A story may careen headlong through so much action that Michael Bay might tell you that excessive but is there is no rest, no reader will want to finish the story.

That’s definitely another aspect of it!

The home base represents to varying degrees rest, relief, recovery, safety, a chance for everyone to take a breather and take stock of the situation. Violating that, having it damaged, having a villain come in and harm them or take something from them in a place where they thought they were secure, or otherwise threatening that space can have a POWERFUL effect and that can be very, very good storytelling. 

Used effectively (as mentioned by someone else in the tags), it can also be a really excellent metaphor for the characters’ own emotional/physical state. But just like conflict between characters is a good and important aspect of storytelling, but incessant interpersonal conflict put in just for the sake of making things interesting, without ever allowing for resolution/repair/growth/etc., can wear your audience as well as your characters, denying the audience that respite in this context can be an issue too.

It’s okay to have a chapter that’s ten thousand words long followed by a chapter that’s five hundred words long.

It’s okay to have a chapter that’s one sentence long.

Heck, one of the most famous and well-regarded novels in the whole of the world’s literary canon has a chapter that contains no text at all.

More often than not I’ll crack into a sprawling fantasy series and, while I appreciate the luscious descriptions of furniture, landscapes, and clothing, all I’m focused on is that I don’t actually know how this world works. I only know what it looks like.  

Including some functionality to your universe can add to immersion and give your reader a strong foundation on which to build their mental model of your universe. 

You certainly don’t need to use all of these questions! In fact, I recommend against that, as all of these certainly won’t make it into your final draft. I personally find that starting my worldbuilding off with 5 to 10 functional questions helps pave the way for glittery and elaborate aesthetic development later on.

How is the healthcare funded in your world?

How does healthcare functionally differ between the wealthy and the poor? (i.e. can only the wealthy go to hospitals? do poor families often have to rely on back-alley procedures?)

Where are health centers (i.e. hospitals, small clinics, etc.) organized in your cities?

Does it differ in smaller towns?

How does this affect people’s ability to get healthcare?

Is healthcare magical, and if it is, how does that affect the healthcare system? 

If healing is instantaneous, how does that affect people’s views on injury, illness, and chronic ailments?

If you have both magical and physical healthcare, which one is deemed superior and how does that affect society? 

What illnesses are common in your world? 

How does this affect daily life? 

What do the people in your world think illnesses are? 

Is it a miasma theory? 

Humor theory? 

Demons? 

Do they know about biological viruses and bacteria? 

How does this affect healthcare?

How do people get water? 

Is the water sanitary and if not, how do they sanitize it?

How does agriculture work? 

Is it large corporations or individual farms?

What sort of agricultural technology exists in your world and how does it affect food production?

Are farmers wealthy or poor?

What sort of natural resources does your world/country(ies) have and how are they obtained?

How does this affect the average wealth of the country?

How does this wealth affect the culture? 

What livestock or beasts of burden are most valued? Least valued? Why?

What is considered a luxury good vs. a regular good?

What forms of transportation does your world have?

What classes use what forms of transportation?

How far has the average citizen traveled, given your transportation limitations?

Which cities are the most accessible and which are the least? Why?

How do popular transportation methods change how cities/towns are laid out?

Does your world have public transportation? What is it?

Is there a coming-of-age aspect to travel?

Describe your world’s postal system or whatever equivalent there is. 

Who pays for it? 

How reliable is it? 

Are there emergency methods for transporting information?

How does your world keep time (i.e. watches, sundials, water clock, etc.)?

Does your world have a currency system, barter system, or something else? 

If you have multiple countries, do different currencies have different values across said countries?

How does this affect travel?

Do you have banks in your world and if so, how are they run?

Who owns the banks? Government? Wealthy? How does this affect the economy and/or class system?

How does credit operate in your universe?

Does your world operate more on big corporations or small business? Something in between?

How are workers/labourers treated in your world? 

Are there workers unions and if so, what are common views on unions? 

Describe your tax system. If you don’t have a tax system, explain why and how your world is affected by that. 

Can certain social classes not own property, certain livestock, certain businesses, etc.? Why?

How are business records kept? Are business records kept?

If your world has technology, does your world prioritize developing entertainment tech, communications tech, transportation tech or something else entirely?

What does this say about your world?

How does this affect your economy?

To the closest approximation, what type of government does your world have? 

How are rulers/presidents/nobles put in place? 

How much power does an individual ruler have? 

Is there a veto process? 

If you have multiple countries, do they have different types of rulers?

Describe any large-scale alliances (i.e. countries, factions, etc.) that are present in your world. 

How did they come about and how are they maintained? 

Are they strained or peaceful? 

How does it affect the greater politics of your world?

Describe how wars are fought both internationally and nationally. 

Do methods of war differ between countries/races? 

What about philosophies about war?

If there is a military, what is its hierarchy structure?

How does the military recruit?

Is the military looked upon favourably in your society?

What weapons are used by each country/type of people during warfare, and how does that affect war strategies?

Describe the sentencing system of your world. 

Is your accused innocent until proven guilty, or guilty until proven innocent?

How are lawbreakers punished? 

If you have prisons, describe how they are organized and run, and who owns them. 

Does differing ownership change how the prisons operate?

What are the major ways in which laws between countries vary? 

Do laws between cities vary? If so, how and why?

How does citizenship work in your world? What rights and privileges do citizens have that others do not? 

Can certain classes or races not become citizens?

Are there certain taboo subjects or opinions that artist/authors/musicians are not allowed to depict (i.e. portraying the official religion in a negative light, explicit sexual material, etc.)? What does this say about your society?

How do people get around these censorship laws?

What is the official hierarchy of duty in your world? (i.e. is family the most important, or patriotism? What about clan?)

How many languages are there in your world, and how many languages share a common origin? 

How many people are multilingual? 

Which language is the most common?

How is multilingualism viewed?

How are different languages viewed? (i.e. is one language ugly/barbaric while another is romantic and sensual?)

Let’s talk narrative structure.

(this is gonna be long)

So, it’s April and the internet is all abuzz over new upcoming material from two big franchises: the new Star Wars trailer, and the new Avengers movie. My investment in both is simple, uncomplicated, a tourist’s interest, not a pilgrim’s. But I am very curious about them as a storyteller, because I think both use a narrative structure that’s going to dominate the next few decades. It’s gonna be one of those things when people say “remember all those movies and books from the naughts that did x and y?” and everyone who came of age in this time is going to nostalgically sigh and say ‘oh, man, they don’t make movies like that anymore’ and everyone who came of age a few decades before will hiss ‘thank GOD’ and the generation who came of age a few decades before them will say ‘I don’t know what you’re even talking about, they’re just movies.’

The thing about trends is that they will be just movies to people who are first really paying to media now. They will be normal, and whatever comes next will be the New Thing. 

A Note About Trends And The Dominant Damn Paradigm

Trends happen when a particular subject, shape, or storytelling tic becomes so normalized in the mainstream that it becomes invisible to the average viewer or reader. They don’t see them as innovative, experimental, or even as stylization. It feels ‘real’ and so therefore communicates emotion and information straight to the consumer with the same efficacy as real life events. Some of these invisible trends are so evergreen that they seem permanent: Three act structure, training montages, prologues that take place in a completely different timeline. None of these are actually inherent to telling a story (there are all kinds of historical stories that don’t use them), but they’re so commonly used that they feel that way to most people. They’re just there. They’re just story. 

Other things that are even less inherent can also be so normalized that viewers begin to not notice their use as unusual: a happy ending, having a good-looking guy as our narrator/ hero, having a woman die to begin the hero’s arc, blue/ orange filters, onscreen murder, characters breaking into song, a two hour run time, a 350 page count, etc., etc. 

Narrative structure can trend as easily as anything else, and that’s what we’re looking at now. We’re moving from the age of break-up songs to the age of epics, a transition made weirder by the break-up songs still playing in the background.

Possibly when you read on you’ll immediately think of fourteen movies and books that don’t match the pattern I’m talking about. This is because Ppop culture doesn’t eat stuff that doesn’t fit in it — it just shades it with its huge, homogenous, trendy mass. There’s still stuff out there that is doing its own thing. Not everyone wore big shoulder pads and white pants in the ‘80s either, but we all know how we remember it. 

Why Do I Care?

Because as a professional storyteller, it’s my job to know what is invisible (and thus costs the reader nothing) versus what is now outside the norm (and thus costs the reader something to process). I don’t mind asking the reader to work for things that are important to me, but I need to know when I’m doing it in order to make sure I can keep their overall load light enough that they don’t lose emotional investment and trade my novel for Netflix. 

A Brief Pedagogical Interlude

I am often asked in my writing seminars to talk about how I handled point-of-view in the Raven Cycle, my four-book series that started in ‘12 and finished in ‘16 (although if that end date makes you sad, know that there’s a spin off trilogy beginning this fall). Folks often don’t even know what to call it. They call it third person. Third person close. Multiple third person. Omniscient.

Technically, it’s close third person broken occasionally by a few omniscient chapters used under certain conditions (for instance, on a group of psychics, on villains, on sentient forests). 

Practically, here’s what it is: influenced by film.

I don’t think I meant for it to be. I think probably if you’d asked me at the time what I was doing, I would have said it was meant to be shaped like a dream. But practically, it is influenced by film, because I’d watched enough film for that structure to become my normal. Invisible. 

And what do sprawling contemporary fantasy films look like? Multiple narrators with occasional villain cams and the snatch here and there of omniscient establishing shots of the setting or people who don’t carry a ton of the narrative but are tonally useful to eyeball for a second or two.

That is the Raven Cycle. It’s a structure that feels natural because we’ve seen it so often, but it’s actually a bit of a strange thing to translate it to written form. There’s a word for when a novel moves from protagonist to protagonist in short order, and it’s not a flattering one: head-hopping. It’s considered poor form, and for good reason. Readers only have so much emotional investment to spend, so the wisdom goes, and wouldn’t you rather they spent it all on your hero?

Or so the wisdom used to go. 

The Break-Up Song Is Always In First Person

Do you guys remember Sleepless in Seattle? Garden State? House? For the longest time, pop culture was focused on the hero’s journey. There are books and books written on this subject but really all we need for purposes of this blog post is this: hero (1)(one)(I). One hero per customer, one hero per lane, one hero per story. The standard story followed one hero through a series of trials. In a happy story, he started out shit and became great. In a tragedy he started out great and went to shit. There were other characters, but they were supporting roles. The antagonist foiled our hero. The love interest acted as stake and prize and mirror. The comic relief let off some steam. 

In novel form, this was even more pronounced, often focused through first person narration. You were sticking with this hero, dammit, to bitter end.

I remember a time in my twenties when we were up to our necks in the most intimate version of this. The shelves were chick lit, the screens were indie rock, the historical fiction followed one woman’s journey through one day of the plague in one small town in France as seen through her penned journal shared with no one. 

We were living the prose version of the break-up song genre. Dude, it wasn’t like we were going to hear a verse from the point of view of the person who broke the singer’s heart. This wasn’t about them. 

The Reaction to the Reaction

But writers are what they eat. Every writer writes stories that are responses to what they’ve taken in as consumers: a fond homage or an opposite reaction or a correction or a new angle.

And while the break-up song genre was happening, other films and books kept on being made. Thrillers and mysteries continued on even as pop culture had its moment with the intimate, character driven story of a single mother who died and haunted an olive oil decanter on a strange family’s shelf for a decade, and they began to rub off on each other. 

Even as the trend of intimate stories passed, the character-driven nature of them left its mark. Readers and viewers no longer believed in the straightforward hero’s journey. No one was that simple. Batman got rebooted, James Bond got some consequences. Heroes got more and more morally gray. The world was getting more and more morally gray, too, after all, and narrative kept up. What was the price of privilege? What was the price of winning? Was this really a happy ending?

Narrative answered the question by glancing at the situation from other points of view, and those glances got longer and longer and longer. One POV became two. Became three. Became four. 

Ok, Back To the Marvel and Star Wars Thing

Became Marvel and Star Wars. Now we’re fully into Trend: Epic. We humans have done this trend before, where everyone’s larger than life and the stakes are sky high and your backyard is full of giants and whatnot. But now this trend is being informed by coming on the heels of the break-up song. Readers and viewers developed a taste for deep character development in our emo phase and now want it at the same time that they now hunger for huge casts. 

Previously, it’s a conundrum that would’ve been resolved by narrowing down the focus onto one person within that cast, digging down deep into their journey, and reducing everyone else to a secondary or tertiary character. Villain, love interest, comic relief.*

But that doesn’t satisfy the current trend of epic, of nuance, of a vast cast explored as deeply as possible. Viewers don’t want Poe to be simply a walk-on. They want villainous Loki to have as much of a character arc as heroic Thor. If a character is interesting, they want them handed a camera for as long as possible. And the more noble a hero seems, the more they want to see the skeletons in his closet, because no one believes in empty closets these days.  

*interestingly, I just saw Venom last week, a film everyone had been telling me was “old-fashioned,” and what it gave me was precisely that old model.

You can see the difference in the way narrative point of view is handled if you compare the original Star Wars trilogy with the current. The two are close cousins, intentionally so, which makes for easy comparison. It doesn’t take long to see how the original trilogy focused quite tightly on the trio of Luke, Leia, and Han, and pretty tightly on Luke even within that, versus the new film, which follows the trend of spreading the character development as thick and deep as possible amongst a large cast who shares story as equitably as possible.

You can also track it in the length of commercial films. You need a ton of room to develop character, and you can watch block busters get longer and longer as they eek minutes here and there for a touching flashback or a crushing personal revelation or final hand clasp. 

There’s a lot of pros to stories like this: there’s feels everywhere, as the internet says. We’re asked to engage emotionally with every storyline rather than intellectually. We’re given lots of characters to love. Empathy is pumped to all time high across the board. 

But there’s cons too: if a character arc doesn’t get enough time (and they can’t all, because there are so many going), the emotional beats can feel unearned and forced. We might feel like we’re going through the motions, landing on beats that we know ought to be there, and beats that we want to be there, but feeling dissatisfied with how we got there. 

It means that when it works, it works on an epic, massive, life shifting scale, everything snapping together with neat, agonizing emotion at the end.

It means that when it doesn’t work, we end up with empty spectacle that leaves us feeling disconnected and confused by why we didn’t love a thing that gave us everything we thought we wanted.

Oh God We’ve All Been Exposed!

I can feel it changing my narrative, too. At one point as I was working on Call Down the Hawk, the trilogy opener I mentioned up top, I realized that I’d spread my story too thin across characters. I was burning pages by the dozen as I tried to make sure they were all arcing in complicated, satisfying ways. When I shaved things down for pacing, I found myself with a skeletal, shallow plot outline. What the hell, I thought. You know better. Head-hopping is to be kept to a minimum. 

But not in 2019. You are what you eat, and I’d been eating a lot of media that sat right smack in the middle of this epic narrative structure. I had to sit back and ask myself: what is the story you actually want to tell? Pick your cameras and trust them. And then I cut my important arcs to two and pushed everyone else back to secondary and tertiary.

Because here’s the thing: I don’t actually care for the multi-cam break-up song epic thing we’ve got going on right now. The world’s making a lot of movies that aren’t really for me these days. I’m not too fussed about it because I know the reaction to the reaction to the reaction that comes around on the other side will probably swing it back my way, but for now, I leave the cinema with a shrug more often than not, and I put down a lot of novels.

But here’s the other thing:

Just Because You Don’t Like a Thing Doesn’t Mean It’s Bad

Sometimes it just means it’s not for you. 

At the beginning of all this I noted that the current story shape is going to feel like the default story shape to people coming of age now. Whatever was popular when you were coming of age is one of your default story shapes. 

The key to being an interesting and dynamic human is making sure that you’re curious and flexible enough to be willing to accept other shapes. You don’t have to like everything, but if you don’t want to become obsolete, you gotta at least give it a shot. We all know the person who only listens to the music from their childhood, who says “they don’t write books like they used to.” Don’t be that person. Before you shake your stick at the kids on your lawn and say “that sucks” maybe ask if it’s just not for you. 

And then wait a decade. ‘Cause it’ll come back around from the break up song to the epic to something totally different again and maybe to something that’s precisely your jam.

If not, no one’s stopping you from writing something that is.

The format of television shows almost REQUIRE several multi-character arcs, because the main goal of a show is usually to stretch the story into as many seasons as possible, and you can’t easily do that with just one protagonist. You need viewers to stay to watch every episode every season, and you need a lot of different types of stories to keep their interest. Of course, this leads to a big cast that grows as the show goes on, and viewers get more and more used to connecting with several different characters. Think of Friends, which started with Monica as an everygirl kind of protagonist with a group of eccentric friends, and then gradually morphed into a show that gave equal weight to every character in the main group, because that’s what the show needed to be to keep its viewership. 

But as you said about emotional beats potentially feeling unearned and forced, a lot of standalone films and books struggle with multi-character POVs because multi-character POVS just… did not originate in those formats. There’s a time constraint that just isn’t present in television. Television wants the story as long as you can make it. Films and books are limited and are usually trying to tell one story really well. And it’s a little sad to me that a lot of readers now expect equal weight to all their favorite characters, when books don’t have to require that to be worth reading.

Obviously, there’s a lot of examples of how equal, multi-character POVS have been done well in books (The Raven Cycle of course, Game of Thrones, Six of Crows also comes to mind), but notice that these tend to require several different books, not just one (like television episodes, perhaps??). I just find it interesting the ways that we’re using different formats to satisfy the same desire—loving as many characters as deeply as possible. (And in a roundabout way, I also think that’s partly why we’re in a golden age of television. Because television had multi-character POVS, which made us crave multi-character POVs, which caused an abundance of television that did that really well)

as my choir teacher has said time and time again: it’s much easier to reign in “too much” than it is to breathe life into “too little.”

first drafts are for making it exist

second drafts are for making it functional

If you have never been in, or aren’t around people who’ve been in, I would dearly love to give you a few pointers.

Let me preface this: I love it when people write military fics (be they AU or canon-fic). I love the characterizations, the story arcs you create, and the love with which you create the stories.

But I’d like to help you make the actions of military personnel as accurate as possible, so someone who’s actually in doesn’t start to read your fic and roll their eyes at some of the things you unknowingly write.

-First off, you do not salute in civilian clothes. It’s actually unauthorized. There are only two exceptions to this rule: the President is allowed to salute in civvies, and if the national anthem is playing outdoors, combat veterans are now allowed to salute. (That came about in 2010, for accurate reference.)

-Do not salute indoors, unless during a formation (but I doubt people who don’t have intimate knowledge of drill and ceremony would bother writing about a formation, so that point is mostly just thrown in for shits and giggles). 

-The army and air force do not say, “sir, yes sir”. That’s a marine thing (I’m not sure about the navy, since I’m not in the navy, but I’m sure someone else could help out if there’s a question about it).

-Saying “black ops” isn’t really something we do. For the army, you’ve got SF (which is how we refer to special forces–the guys you’re probably thinking about (”green beret” is an old term for them that’s not really used anymore)) and Rangers for the two big special operations forces. SEALS are the navy force, and I apologize, but I don’t know the other branches’ special forces. Again, ask someone who’s served in that branch.

-People don’t usually refer to themselves (or others) by their ranks. Exceptions are usually made if hanging out with people from your unit speaking about a superior, such as “Yeah, LT and I were talking the other day and …”. 

-Sergeants are not referred to as “sarge”. You have no idea how many people got the shit smoked out of them in basic for that error.

-Army goes through Basic Training (or Basic Combat Training now; BCT for short), and marines go through Boot Camp. Yes, there is definitely a difference in terms. Army people tend to refer to their initial training as simply “basic”. I don’t know about marines or other branches.

-Calling someone “Soldier” is really something only done on TV/film. It’s usually mocked by people who are in.

-In the army, it is against regulation to just stick your hands in your pockets. We mockingly call them “Air Force gloves”, though I don’t know if they typically put their hands in their pockets. There is also a big stigma against wearing “snivel gear”: the poly pro cold-weather protection gear worn underneath your uniform.

-The everyday Army uniforms are called ACUs (Army Combat Uniform). They are never called anything else, but especially not fatigues. If you’re going back to 2003 or earlier, the uniform was BDUs, or the Battle Dress Uniform. The tan uniforms worn during the Gulf War and first few years of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF; Afghanistan) were called first chocolate chips (gulf war-era) and then DCUs (Desert Combat Uniform). 

-The dress uniform is called something different depending on what time period you’re going for. Saying “dress uniform” is usually a good bet, because you’ve also got Class A’s, Class B’s, ASUs, Dress Blues, Khakis, etc. 

-Typically when meeting someone else who’s in, the first things you ask are, “What’s your MOS (military occupational specialty–your job)? Where were you stationed?” Giving out rank and deployment backgrounds out of the blue don’t usually happen. 

-Time spent in the military is usually referred to as simply being “in”. “How long were you in for?” is heard way more often than “how long did you serve for?” That question is usually asked by civilians. 

-There are enlisted, and there are officers. Enlisted are those who start out as privates, work their way up through the NCO, or non-commissioned officer ranks: sergeant (called “buck sergeant” in a derogatory term for someone who has been freshly promoted), staff sergeant, sergeant first class, and eventually get to first sergeants and sergeants major after fifteen to thirty years in. Officers also usually start out as privates and specialists, then graduate from college and commission as second lieutenants (the derogatory term is “butter bar” and is usually used in reference to said officer’s lack of experience and knowledge) before working up to first lieutenant, captain, major, lieutenant colonel (”light colonel”), and colonel (”full bird”). The general timeline is making captain (”getting your railroad tracks”) after about 5-8 years for competent officers, and spending 5-10 years as a captain. 

-We do not stand at parade rest unless forced. Ever.

-Or at attention.

-When talking to an NCO, a lower enlisted will stand at parade rest. When talking to an officer, an enlisted will stand at attention.

-The highest ranking NCO is lower ranking than the lowest ranking officer. 

-If you want to throw in some humor, if there is a lower enlisted (E-4 (specialist) or below) joking with an NCO, and the lower enlisted says something, the NCO can snark back with, “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you because you weren’t standing at the position of parade rest.” It’s a dick move usually to call people out for that, but it happens often enough that if you put that in a fic, someone who’s in will likely laugh at that for a few minutes.

-There is a term for a slacker in the army called POG (pronounced “pohg” with a long o). It stands for Personnel Other than Grunt, meaning everyone who’s not infantry. The term has transformed to mean anyone who shirks their duty or is kind of a shitbag and should be kicked out. 

 -There’s also a bit of a stereotype that infantry are made up of dumb guys, because you don’t need a high GT score to get that MOS. Their nomenclature for their MOS is 11B (eleven bravo), which is often referred to as an “eleven bang-bang” when trying to insult them. 

-If someone is making someone else do push-ups, they do not say “drop and give me x number”. They’ll tell them either to push, or tell them to get in the front-leaning rest. The front-leaning rest position is the starting position for the push-up. 

-Usually referring to basic training and AIT (advanced individual training, where you learn your military occupational specialty), you get “smoked” on a regular basis. This refers to PT (physical training), usually in the form of push-ups, flutter kicks, and sprints. It’s not fun. One of the least favorite phrases to hear in basic is, “Platoon, attention! Half-left face! Front leaning rest position, move. In cadence! Exercise!” Because that is the full command for getting people to do push-ups. There is literally no other reason for the half-left face movement. It honestly exists only for push-ups.

-It is awkward as fuck to be told “thank you for your service”. It’s wonderful that people want to show their support, but it is very difficult to respond to that without sounding like a douche.

I know I said a lot about basic training in there, but that’s because I tend to read a lot of fics that are either about basic or about deployments. I can give some pretty firm answers on basic, but everyone’s deployment is different, and I also could be violating a shit-ton of OPSEC (operation security) by telling you guys specific details about deployments. Everything I’ve told you is information you can look up on your own on the internet, but this is a bit more insider’s culture for you to help make your stuff more accurate.

And if you ever find yourself writing a military fic and have questions, by all means, inbox me. I’ve been in for almost nine years and I do have one deployment under my belt, so I can give you accurate army info. I’ve never served in any other branch, though, but I can probably give you a little bit more accurate info than what the movies do if you’ve got general questions.

Also, if you’ve got questions about PTSD, I can help with that. It’s not the cake walk that a good deal of fics portray it as, and it doesn’t always involve nightmares and aversion to touch. It can present as depression, intense anger issues, pulling away from loved ones, driving in the middle of the road, freaking out over pops, bangs, crashes and other unexpected noises, being easily startled by things other than noises, hypervigilance, the inability to sit with one’s back to the room, sudden bouts of anger, depression, tears, silence, or mood swings, among many others.

-Also, please, please, if you’re going to write about someone with a disability, or something that gave them a medical discharge, talk to me about the VA first, unless you’ve got a lot of knowledge about them. Not only am I in, but I’ve also worked professionally for the VA, some of that time in enrollment and eligibility, so I know a lot about disability pensions, who would qualify, what type of benefits they would qualify for, etc. I also know the ways that people can accidentally get screwed over from the VA. (It’s actually one of my long-term professional goals to change some of those things, so I am very passionate and very knowledgeable about it.)

Do people say this? What people? I’d love to see some links if you have them, because I haven’t heard this one.

I recall reading a lot of advice–that I wholeheartedly agree with–that white folks should be mindful of not perpetuating racist stereotypes of people of color in their fiction. And I’ve seen some great resources floating around on Tumblr and elsewhere about how to not be a racist shithead when writing about fictional people of color. But I’ve never heard anyone say that a white person “can’t or shouldn’t” include a person of color in their stories at all. In fact, it seems to me like white people writing fiction with a more diverse cast of characters, provided they do it well, sensitively, and for the right reasons, is an overall positive thing (with some caveats, like it sucks that a white person who writes about a person of color is more likely to get accolades and critical attention for their work than a person of color who writes about a person of color, although that’s been changing in recent years).

It seems to me like the “can’t/shouldn’t” story originates from butt-hurt white people who have heard the criticisms leveled at other white people for putting characters of color in tired, stereotypical roles and decided that means they are forever banned from doing it at all. It reminds me of the reactionary “You can’t hold the door open for a woman anymore!” complaints I used to hear from old men who were all confused about feminism. So personally I’m not inclined to put much stock in it. But if you have some links to persuasive posts–especially if they are written by people of color–I’d be curious to see if I might expand my opinion.

Anyone else want to chime in here…?

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white people should not write about issues that are centric to being PoC

Write a Black person when you’re not Black, by all means. But try to avoid writing a Struggle Narrative around being Black, because you won’t have the experience of being Black to know the nuances of that struggle. Microaggressions can be incorporated into the story to make it realistic, but if your plot completely falls apart if the character isn’t Black, you’re writing an identity story.

However, what I cannot do is critique someone else’s identity or culture or really delve into the nuances of a character’s struggle. I can write a story with a character who is black or indigenous, but I can’t write a story with a character who is black or indigenous that is about the misogyny or homophobia within those communities because that is not my place to do so. That is something that is best left for members of those communities.

As a white writer, I feel it is my job to bring legitimacy to the experiences of POC, to their identities, and their struggles, but it is not my job to criticize or interrogate those experiences, those identities, or those struggles, it’s not my place to explore flaws or criticism of those experiences, identities, or struggles because, quite frankly, it’s just kind of a shitty thing to do when you’re someone who is on the outside looking in and don’t have a deep understanding of what you’re criticizing.

1- amplification without speaking over, so if you end up asked about it (as a white writer), it’s best to have a list of PoC to learn from those issues instead

2- Avoid white-knighting; the issues are legitimate whether or not you bring attention to them, but your privilege allows others to see it in spaces they normally wouldn’t. it’s a subtle shift but can be the difference between amplification and exploitation