Chapter Titles: Part 2, Naming

     On Friday I posted a blog about chapter numbering, with the promise that I would later bring you chapter naming.  Well never fear, my SpiderReaders, I am here to deliver on said promise!  Today's post is all about what kinds of chapter naming conventions you might use to your advantage.

1.  Before the Name

    Before you even name the chapter itself, ask yourself--is it even a chapter?  Or is it, perhaps, a Stave?  

     For those of you who don't recognize the reference right off the bat, one of the most famous classical English writers was a man by the name of Charles Dickens, and one of his most famous stories is a little number by the name of A Christmas Carol.  

     A Christmas Carol is divided into Staves instead of chapters, because a Stave is the song equivalent of a stanza (which is the poem equivalent of a paragraph) and Charles Dickens was a clever little shit back in the day.

     I ONE HUNDRED PERCENT approve of any efforts you may have to improve upon this model; do you want to have staves?  Verses?  A chorus?  Is your story modeled after a Greek Tragedy?  Why not have a fucking Stasima, Strophe and Anti-Strophe and all!  Does poetry feature heavily in your work?  Divide it into stanzas!  Does theatre feature heavily in your novel?  Divide it into Acts and Scenes!

     Or, if that seems too gimicky or just doesn't fit with your story?  Stick with chapters.  No one will fault you; chapters are the default for a reason.

2.  POV/Place Shifts

     One simple way to name chapters is as a way to announce POV shifts.  Neal Shusterman does this in his series Unwind by naming each chapter after whichever character's head we're in.  It's simple, it doesn't require much energy, and it automatically lets you know whose hands are on the wheel, so you're not fumbling around in the dark or left with POV whiplash.  As a writer, it can also help keep you from sliding into omniscient third person if you're trying to write in limited third.

     If you tend more toward omniscient third and dealing with a large cast, you can do this with groups, too--in my WIP Captive Stars, I use the name of the packs that the characters belong to, which narrows the focus of the chapter and keeps POV switch whiplash to a minimum.

     Or, if your POV is more stable (or less), you could name each chapter using the area in which it takes place (useful for travel stories) or the time/date.  Or you can combine the methods.

     Again; short, simple, straight-forward.

3.  Suit The Mood

     In a light-hearted book, or for light-hearted chapters, sometimes a play on words is in order; in one of my WIPs, I introduced the protagonist, Ben Desdon, in a chapter called "Ben There, Desdon That," because I'm a fucking loser and Ben is the kind of loveable dork-ass that would not only make that pun, but giggle uncontrollably all the while.

     Because I'm an unforgivable swarm of linguistic humor, I take advantage of every opportunity I can to make the chapter titles into jokes; I have lots of fun with it.

     But I'm just as eager to turn a poetic phrase when the chapter is more serious; "Of Mortal Concerns," for instance, is a great title name for a chapter concerning death, or if your books is about immortals, the literal concerns of mortals as compared to those of the Gods.  This technique is great for foreshadowing events to come without being heavy-handed, too.

     Basically, using witty one-liners or quick poetic quips as your chapter heading can help set the mood and get the audience into the mindset you want them in.

4.  Hyper-Descriptive

     And sometimes, much like a textbook chapter heading, you just want a chapter title that'll tell it how it is; Mark Twain was fond of this one, and used it in Tom Sawyer.  It lets the audience know what we're in for, and has the secondary use of letting kids who didn't read the assignment save the tiniest bit of face because at least they can check the chapter heading for a clue!

     This type of chapter heading has pretty much completely gone out of style, but it's an option if you wanted to revive it.  I think it could be of particular use in a first-person narrative, where the protagonist can be assumed to be the one writing the chapter names, or if the narrator is established to be heavily descriptive or overly technical in their writing.

     What's your favorite method for naming chapters?  Are you particularly attached to any one method, or does it depend on the project?  Are there any other methods you like the use?

Chapter Titles: Part 1, Numbering

      Writing is fun.  Or at least it should be!  ...  Most of the time!  But you know what else is fun?  The parts of writing that we don't usually think of as writing.

     But wait, you say!  There's more to writing than just WRITING?  How can it be!?  Well my friend my buddy my palhoncho amigo freundmeister general, I'll tell you!  There's lots of writing to be done outside of your writing--namely, within the structure that's used to categorize the different parts of your novel.  In other words, look to your chapter titles!

1.  Numerology (just not the mystical kind)

     The way that you structure your novel can happen organically, one thing folding out from another, or you could plan it all out from the start.  Personally, I usually just let my novels unfold on their own, then fiddle with them later.  When it comes to chaptering, you can play with a couple different things--the number of chapters you have could carry great significance for the plot or characters, for instance.

     Maybe 19 is a recurring number within your fantasy book, full of great power and mystique, so you structure your book into nineteen chapters, to strengthen the theme, or your book is all about duality, so you make sure that your number of chapters is always a multiple of two.  In one of my shelved WIPs, I ended up with fourteen chapters--one for each level of the twelve-story building the main character lived in (counting the roof and basement, naturally).

     The same thing can be done with Acts/Books/Parts/Whatever You Want To Call Them.  Andrew Hussie split his webcomic Homestuck into seven acts to reflect the creation myth at the center of the story, because as the saying goes, God made the world in seven days.

2.  Structural Integrity

     No, I'm not talking about if we can ride a U-Haul across your chapter title without pitching fifty feet into the candiru-infested waters below, nor am I referring to the structural integrity of your story; just the numbers.  The numbering system, to be exact.

     There are a number of different ways to structure your story; sometimes a simple "Chapter One," "Chapter 2," "Chapter III," etc., (ideally keeping the number system consistent, of course).  But sometimes you need to split things into Books, Parts, Acts; sometimes even that isn't enough, and you need subchapter headings within your chapters.

     You could approach this by having simple headers Placed like you'd see in a textbook or other nonfiction work, or by using what I refer to as the Stephen King method, where you denote chapter numbers using either Arabic numerals or written numbers, then use Roman numerals to denote sub-chapters.

     Or you could switch it up, combine methods--go crazy, as long as it makes sense and it's internally consistent.  Begin each chapter with a letter of the alphabet instead of a number, or with a symbol, upload your own font and use the numbers from your alien conlang if you think it would work.  Just make sure that it's consistent and doesn't detract from the story being told.

3.  To Name Or Not To Name

     Then comes the REAL fun; naming the chapter!

     The first question you'll want to ask yourself is whether or not you want to name the chapters at all.  Does your narrative call for naming, or would it distract from the flow of the actual story?  Sometimes an old-fashioned, "Chapter One" is more than sufficient.  It's like the word "said;" the audience will acknowledge that it's there, but only barely.  It may serve as a place to put a bookmark, but otherwise they'll just pass over it without remark or pause.

     Chapter titles can slow down the narrative, depending on how goofy or drawn-out they are, or they can speed up the heart if it's something short that makes your adrenaline pump, like "Oil Slick" or "Blood Volcano" or "A Bitter Finale."

     If chapter naming isn't for you, then you're pretty much done here; congratulations!  But if you'd like to learn a little bit more about naming chapters, stay tuned for the next piece of the series, where I'll talk about the actual naming conventions you could use to your advantage.

A Few Notes on Details

     Recently, I published a post on using specificity in your writing.  On that same note, here are a few scattered notes about how specificity can hurt or help you.

1.  Rough Estimates

     Rough estimates are a natural part of life--you look out at a crowd and you say, "Oh, that looks like about two hundred people."  Unless you're some kind of magic, or actually have the sales numbers in front of you, there's pretty much no way you could ken that at a glance.  That doesn't stop some characters from managing it, but excluding those, estimates are a necessary part of life and of writing.

     There does come a point, though, where estimates become unrealistic.  It takes me out of the story, for example, when someone says something like, "four or five people walked down the street."  For me, that's an automatic, "Wait, what?"  Maybe if the person's view is obstructed, or they're going by a sense other than sight, or the POV character has a problem with processing numbers or something I can understand it, but if you have a clear view of the street, the difference between four and five people should be easily told at a glance by most.

     It's difficult to say when numbers can be given over to estimation, and it does depend on the person, but I would be much more likely, myself, to accept an estimation of "five or six" than "four or five," but probably wouldn't estimate until at least "seven or eight."

     Every character, author, and reader is different, but be careful when estimating that it's realistic for someone to be confused over the number of something.  If someone flashed a picture at me, then burned it and asked me to tell them how many things were in it, I'd have a much harder time telling four from five than if I was sitting in detention with a bunch of stationary students.  I'd also have a much harder time telling four from five if it were dots I was meant to be counting, or even dogs--our brains block out information they don't see as important, which is one of the reasons estimation is necessary in the first place, so the smaller something is (and the less personable or important), the more difficult it becomes to count.

2.  Brands

     My specific grievance here is more of a pet peeve, I guess (or rather, my mother's pet peeve, which I am here to voice on her behalf) concerning clothing in particular, but it could apply just as well to other types of brands.

     One of the things my mother often complains about with books is being bombarded with descriptions of clothing using brand names like "Armani" and "Gucci" and "Leviathan All Hail, All Hail Leviathan."

     Being working class tomboys by birth, and for the most part having lifestyle tastes which match our income, the term "Gucci handbag" means nothing to us; I have a picture in my head of a leather purse.  But you could say "Armani handbag" or "Prada handbag" or some made up company, and it won't change anything; a handbag is a handbag unless you tell me what it actually looks like.  My entire thought process when you start throwing brand names around is "Clothes are happening.  This character has money."

     Most books aren't written for working class women with no taste in clothing, of course--unlike my mother, I have simply become accustomed to this reality.  Still, there's a lesson to be learned here; when you include brand names, will your audience know what you're talking about?  And more importantly, does your character?

     If your character is a rich woman who's never so much as been inside a laundry room, is she really likely to know the difference between Tide and All?  Pinesol and Spic And Span?  If your character is a twelve-year-old girl who spends most of her time biking around town and antagonizing bullies, is she likely to know the difference between a Periwinkle diamond, a Kay diamond, and a rhinestone?

     When you use a Brand Name in your work, take a moment to think about these things.  If your narrator/POV character would know what it is, and your target audience would know what it is, great!  You're all set!  If your character/narrator know what it is but your audience wouldn't, then think about what it is you want to convey with the use of the brand name.

     If you just want to show that the character is rich and has expensive tastes, "Gucci handbag" might be the way to go, but if this handbag is important, or is supposed to tell us something about the character, maybe throw in an adjective or two.  If your character is mopping the floor with Pinesol, is it because she likes the smell?  Does it mean something to her?  And if your rebellious preteen finds a handful of diamonds, does it matter what brand they are?  Or does it matter more what they look like, and whether or not they're real?

Specificity In Writing

     Spe-ci-ficity!

     If you've ever taken an acting class, you've probably heard a spiel or two about how important specificity is in deciding your character's actions; the way you speak, how you interact with your surroundings, the way you pick up a pencil and scrawl your character's signature, can all provide a wealth of information about who the character is, what they want, where they come from, etc.  In acting it's necessary that the actor create these specificities for their character because scripts tend to be pretty bare-bones.

     But when writing a novel or short story (or even dialogue for a script), specificity is every bit as important.  In fact, when writing a novel or short story or poem, etc, specificity can be the difference between an okay story, and a GREAT story.

     Which sounds more compelling?

     a)  "He walked in with his gun and looked around.  There were some hand prints on the wall and some stuff on the floor.  It took him a while to realize the blood was fresh."

     OR

     b)  "He entered silently, scanning the room with gun at the ready.  It was bare, containing only exposed copper wiring coated in dust and a few metal chains.  Seven gluey red hand prints decorated the filthy yellow walls, and it was thirty full seconds before it hit him--the blood was fresh."

     The second paragraph is much more compelling, isn't it?  Yes, part of that has to do with style and suchlike, but without the specificity of detail, there wouldn't be much to stylize!

     The more specific you are when describing something, the more easily the audience can envision what you see.  And details can carry significant weight--the difference between thirty seconds and thirty-seven seconds, for example, is an ocean--thirty seconds is usually either timed out using a stopwatch, or used as shorthand for "roughly half a minute."

     Thirty-seven seconds, though--that says "this is the real time that had passed, and your narrator knows it for a FACT!"  Exact times exude confidence--exact details exude confidence, correctness, a feeling that we're being told how it is.  It makes the audience take notice, and feel like they can trust you, because obviously you know what you're talking about when you can tell us exactly what material the walls are made from and what country that hat was made in.

     Take a look at your work.  Look for places where the details have been hand-waved, "some" this, "roughly" that, etc.  Ask yourself if a generalization fits the passage best, or if it could benefit from a few more specifics.

     Hint:  The more important something is, the more detailed and specific you'll want it to be.  Unless of course you're writing a mystery and trying to lay down some red herrings....

More Podcasting Tips

     *Throws podcasting tips in your face and runs away*

1.  Record in the same room if at all possible

     When you don't have millions of dollars to throw at private recording studios and sound-proof walls, sound quality and background noise can be an issue.  If you can find a room to record in that's relatively impenetrable (windows shut, if you can't find a room with no windows), without fans, heaters, or air conditions, then you have your recording room right there!

     For me, this is difficult--at school all the rooms have air conditioning at all times of the year, and at home the walls are very thin.  My solution?  Try to find the room with the least sound, or sound you can best explain away, and stay there for at least the duration of that episode.

     Usually, I try to fit the episode's environment to the room--air conditioning and loud refrigerators can be an issue, but if your character lives in an abandoned carpet warehouse that runs on home-built generators and you have robots running around everywhere, the sound of air blowing and motors whirring makes sense.  But if the character is a teenage girl in her room, recording where you can hear wind chimes and birdsong might make the most sense.

     But really, people will tune anything out if it doesn't cause too much brain function--if birds are chirping when you're in a volcano, there might be some cognitive dissonance going on, but as for white noise, people will come to block it out if it doesn't interfere as long as it remains constant, and if you have that white-noise room, you can always add necessary sound effects in post.

2.  Kill your darlings (there can only be one)

   Okay, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration--you can have plenty of darlings.  Just not all of them.
   
     You've probably heard this phrase used in relation to writing before; it's one of those little tidbits of artistic life that apply to pretty much every medium.  If you're writing a podcast script, you obviously need to slay some darlings in the script writing process, but even once you record it, you'll sometimes come across bits that just don't fit.  Maybe the line isn't as funny spoken as it is written, or it throws the pacing off, or it's just not important or entertaining enough to warrant taking up the audience's precious time.

     You may have worked very hard on this darling little line; it may, on its own, be pure gold!  But if it doesn't work with the rest of the piece, it might as well be a show pony at a racetrack; at best it'll look pretty while it loses.

      At any and every step of the process you have to know when something adds value, and when it detracts; when it detracts, you have to cut, cut, cut.

     My experience is with story podcasting, of course, which means I don't know if this is true for interview or conversational podcasts, but if anyone with experience wants to drop a comment below, it would be nice to know!

3.  Print out a physical copy of the script

     It's only recently that I've had the good sense to start actually printing out my scripts--because I have two laptops (I use the much older one for recording and the newer one for school and writing), I've been in the bad habit of reading my script off my laptop.  On the few occasions that I did think to print out a copy, it was necessary to lend it to a co-actor that had forgotten to bring their own.

     Why is this important?

     It's cumbersome. first of all--either your laptop (or phone, as the case may be) is so small you have to squint, or so big it's a pain to transport.  If you do have something in between, the tapping of keys or glass often makes more noise than paper, which isn't great when you're trying to record.

     It's also easier to lose your place on a computer--not only can you lose your place on the page, but with one accidental flick of the mousepad or press of a button, you could lose the entire page itself, which is a huge pain in the ass.  The risk increases if you're skipping around, and it's harder to find the next place you need to record, because highlighting doesn't have the same effect on a computer that it does on paper.

     To remedy this, I would CTRL+F it and type the desired character name followed by a colon.  The thing is, this worked only when the character name wasn't separated from the colon by a parenthetical (since I write my scripts in the British format), which meant there were times when I would skip important lines by accident.  When they were just my lines it was fine, and I could record again later, but when it was someone else's lines, it became an ORDEAL.  I would either have to work around the omission, or call them in for another session, neither of which was desirable.

     All in all, it's beneficial to have a physical paper copy of the script in your hand, highlighted, pen-marked, hell, post-it-noted if you need it, ahead of time.

4.  Never throw out old scripts (digitally, at least)

     Much like with other writing projects, it's important to keep all your old drafts filed away somewhere; you never know when you'll need to check back to make sure you're staying on point with the continuity or character executions.

     Even when you scrap a script, keep what you've got filed somewhere--you might use the pieces again in the future, bit-by-bit, general ideas, or even chunks torn out wholesale.

     The worst that happens when you keep old scripts around is using up a few extra MilliBytes that never see the light of day again.  But chances are good that they will.

Writing Marginalized Characters: A Ramble

     I grew up afraid to write minority characters.  For me this came from two primary places; the first was the idea pervasive to our culture that people who aren't white, cis, heterosexual, middle-class/wealthy, able-bodied, neurotypical males are "other" to such an extent that they're often seen as not fully human, or maybe human but in a different way.  Society insists that those who don't fit inside the rigid little sector it's blocked off as "normal" aren't really people in the same sense that those who do fit into the sector are.

     Obviously, I'm not all of the above; however, society's belittling of marginalized groups is so pervasive that it's not uncommon for marginalized people to marginalize themselves (see: internalized sexism, racism, ableism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, intra ableism, intra racism, biracialism, etc.).

     Growing up a tomboy in a primarily masculine household, I came to see women as lesser, and later fell prey to the many ailments inherited by young girls--the conflicting standards, the fear of being seen as inferior, the apologies, the feeling of being a burden, etc, etc, etc.  Unlearning these things was (is) a long process I won't talk about now, but I guess my point is that when I started writing novels at the ripe old age of nine, the only reason I felt comfortable writing girl characters was because I was a girl, and even still I had a lot of trouble at first with writing female characters that weren't either based off of real people or stereotypes.

     The other thing that caused this fear was my limited experiential resources.

     I grew up in two towns, one of them full of rich white people and the other full of not-rich white people.  In the town I usually say I'm "from," I had exactly one black classmate, and the only black classmate I had in the town I "grew up in" moved away after first grade.

     I never thought of people who were different than me as really different.  They were people just the same as I was, and I recognized them as such, as I'm sure many people do when they meet "othered" people face to face, especially in their youth.  Even with my internalized sexism, I still judged every girl on her own merits once I met her--I generalized groups, not individuals.

     But when writing, and trying to be socially conscious in our writing, we all have groups that we feel ishy writing about, not necessarily because we don't want to write them, but because we're scared to get it wrong.

     As a kid I was afraid to write people of color--a pretty common fear among white kids, because after they teach you about slavery and genocide and Jim Crow laws in first grade the last thing you want to do is exacerbate that White Guilt everybody's always talking about, and you certainly don't want anyone to think you're racist or, even worse, to find out that you are, in fact, a racist.

     The only way to keep yourself safe and cozy is not to bother, and say things like "I'll leave it to them to write themselves into a story."  As a little kid that feels very valid, especially when you grow up in an environment where racism isn't something you notice in your day-to-day life, and is instead subliminally flashed into your brain as you watch your all-white-with-maybe-a-token-PoC cartoons.

     Sadly, leaving it to a marginalized group doesn't always work--how often do you see black authors being lauded?  For a book that isn't exclusively about white people?  When was the last time a female author got big in something that wasn't YA or Romance?  Do you even know of any books written by someone with a disability?  I guarantee you it's not from lack of talent or trying--unfortunately, the system is still heavily weighted in such a way that it's exponentially more difficult for a marginalized individual to make it big--or make it at all--than for a white abled cishetero male of the same or lesser talents, and the exponent tends to multiply if the author-of-marginalized-origins writes about characters who are also not white cishetero males.

     Sometimes, when you're at a party and things are loud and crowded, the only way to get people to listen to the guest of honor is for the host to jump out with a microphone and shut 'em up.

     I didn't know all that when I was little.  I just knew I wanted to write about superheroes and dragons and magic and weird science.

     The funny thing is though, unlike a lot of people I've spoken to over the years, I wrote about people with higher melanin counts before I became afraid.  In part it was actually because I wrote about them that I became afraid.

     I should probably explain:  My uncle is very, very racist.  I hate him.  I don't just hate him because he's racist, I have a lot of reasons to hate him, but this has certainly always been a point of contention between us.  I didn't always hate him of course, because when I was younger I was small and naive and thought that shared blood meant shared love.  Probably should've realized sooner how bullshit that was.

     I was a creative little kid, and after finishing my second novel at age eleven, I wanted to tell everyone about it.  As I was going through the first edit, I stumbled upon something that didn't make sense and asked his opinion--in order to do this I had to explain the concept to him--four types of shape-shifters live on an island and fight amongst themselves, sort of Animorphs meets Warriors meets gorn-tastic political intrigue/adventure-fantasy.

     Instead of helping, my uncle, being as uncouth as he is, decided to ask me which group were the "n" words--I was repulsed by the language, but was all at once struck by the realization that not only could the division between the shifter-types be construed allegorically as a division between the races, but that I had written people of color into my story--I hadn't thought about it as I wrote, I just sort of correlated fur color to human skin color, so shapeshifters with darker fur ended up with darker skin, and shapeshifters with lighter fur had lighter skin; it wasn't like any group was composed all of one human race or another, they were completely mixed-color societies, but I was still afraid.

     I didn't go back and white-wash my draft, what was done was done, but I wouldn't write people of color into my drafts for a long time afterward because I was afraid of doing it wrong.  I don't exactly know now what I thought the "right" way was, but that was the only way I wanted it done; I was a conscientious child and didn't want to offend anyone, and since I was only just getting the hang of the internet I had no idea that there were places where writers gathered in bulk to discuss such things.

     My resolve to write only about white cishetero abled rich men and women--or, even better, aliens and robots and monsters, oh my!--lasted until I discovered Tumblr as a thirteen-year-old.

     I know, I know, Tumblr has a mixed bag of a reputation among the liberal crowd, but for a white girl in a town of 1,000 people, 98% of whom are white, and most of whom are also hetero and cissexual, middle-ish class, able-bodied, and neurotypical, Tumblr was the best place for me to break into a world that was, up to then, largely unavailable to me.  Today it's known as a toxic wasteland, and some parts are, but it was an important part of my development as both a writer and a liberal (in case you couldn't already tell which way I lean).

     Within a year I was writing stories with "othered" individuals again--people of color, people with disabilities, people of a multitude of genders, sexualities, religions, you name it.  Through Tumblr, and the many websites it introduced me to, I'd found out there were tons of resources on how to write this group and that group and the other group, and I learned that it was okay to trust my own real-life experiences and those of my family and friends; every experience was valid.  And though there are going to be different characterizations and complications with each new type of character you create, it was freeing to find out that everything truly boiled down to something I'd known all along--people are people.  Nothing more, nothing less.

     That's what it all comes down to.  People are people--we all have wants, needs, feelings, we all have things we care about, we are all our own.  What makes me different from someone of a different race has less to do with race itself than with upbringing and societal pressure and our personal likes and dislikes.

     Fear can be good--I think, in my case, fear was good, because it drove (and still drives) me to seek out the information I need to avoid creating a caricature or a stereotype in place of a human being; fear led me to ask questions and make sure that I did (and do) everything in my power to not just keep from offending people, but to keep myself from harming myself and others with poor portrayals of certain out-groups, and to make sure that I use my privilege as a white person not for accolades and the like but to assist and teach, to encourage others to hear the voices of those whose voices aren't being heard, and to normalize what should already be, but is not yet seen as, normal.

     Fear can also stop us in our tracks--and if you write marginalized characters, you're going to end up being criticized for it, even if you are yourself part of the group you're writing about!  But you can't please everyone; every time I write a sensitive male character, someone tells me he's not realistic even though I know for a fact that everything the character does is nothing I haven't seen my brothers and my male friends do, and every time I write a female character I risk being called out on her promiscuity or her aloofness or her hatred of babies because no matter how hard you work to go against a stereotype or humanize someone, even yourself, someone is always going to get pissy about it; that's how life works.

     So yes, it's important for people without privilege to speak up and have their stories heard, and their voices are going to ring the most true and should hold more weight.

     A story written by someone with absolutely every privilege there is probably won't be authentic, of course, but it's important for people with privilege to speak up as well--not to drown out the voices of your downtrodden kin (as some are, unfortunately, wont to do), but to help raise awareness and compassion and facilitate love and understanding and conversation in ways that some, through the horrors of a discriminatory society, are unable to do.

   So write.  Whoever you are, whatever you want to write, write it; try to include marginalized characters when you can, because the sad truth is that there's not a lot out there, and even less of it is well-written.  Be careful, don't be too afraid--just don't be a dick, either.

     And when you think you're finished with that manuscript; stop, wait a minute, fill that cup put some liquor in it--now pour it out, take a deep breath, and go look for some critique partners and beta readers that know what's what in whatever subject you've chosen, because no matter how well you think you know something, if you're writing from a place of privilege you're bound to make mistakes

     The fewer mistakes make it out into the real world, the better it'll be for everybody.

     And even if you're writing from a point of diminished privilege yourself, it never hurts to have extra eyes on the ground.  No two experiences are ever exactly alike, and you may not be as enlightened as you think--I like to think of myself as having cleansed myself of my internalized sexism, but on occasion I still catch myself mentally criticizing a woman for doing something I wouldn't think twice about a man doing, or using the phrase "like a little girl" in a derogatory fashion.

     When we write only from our own experiences, we're also at risk of making every character's experience practically the same, which serves to homogenize the group and sometimes creates a new stereotype.  I don't think we need any more stereotypes than we already have.
   

TL;DR:  Don't be afraid to write marginalized characters, no matter how privileged you are; just remember to treat everyone as human beings, do your research, ask questions, and seek out the opinions of people with first hand experience before you go tell the world about how great you are (for writing something that may actually be offensive).

Bildungsroman: A College Entrance Essay

Adulthood is not achieved in a single step.  It is a process of years, the first seeds 

planted in the milestones of childhood—in the four-year-old’s first self-cooked hotdog, 

the six-year-old’s first attempt at babysitting, the ten-year-old’s acceptance of a 

constantly changing world beyond their control.  Often we try to pinpoint the exact 

moment of maturation, attempting to capture the concept in something as simple as a 

jumped train or special birthday, but the reality of the situation is that childhood is not a 

garment, not a cloak to be ripped off all at once to reveal the adulthood 

beneath—childhood is a skin we shed scale-by-scale throughout the years, the inches 

slipping away until one day we peer back and realize that new flesh is all we now 

possess.  That singularity we seek is not really a moment of becoming—it’s a cosmic 

instant in which some portion of the world recognizes the denouement of the childhood 

journey and the quickening of a new age of life.   

 In the eyes of my community, the culmination of my maturation came shortly 

after my diagnosis of Tourette’s Syndrome.  In September of 2010, I was diagnosed with 

a late-onset and increasingly active case of Tourette’s, which included violent physical 

tics and loud verbal tics, such as coprolalia. 

As the news spread and my classmates became accustomed to my outbursts, it 

became clear that word-of-mouth was not enough; upperclassmen could be brutal, 

lowerclassmen could be petty, and teachers, ignorant of my disorder, badgered me to 

tears.  Education, I posited, was the key; in the dark, we are afraid because we cannot see, 

and if ignorance is dismantled, enlightenment casts out the fear that leads us to ostracize 

others.  Thus, in a meeting with the principal, I proposed that I give a series of 

presentations on Tourette’s to the school.  

Within a month, I had given presentations to the student body, the faculty, and the 

school board.  The teasing vanished almost completely. 

I was asked by a local human service agency to present to their groups in nine 

counties and to speak at the Families Together Conference in Albany, but my greatest 

achievement occurred in the library at the Newark Valley Elementary School, where I 

advocated for a second-grader with Tourette’s, fighting to receive the necessary services 

from the school. 

I spoke to the entire faculty, fluidly and with authority; I easily answered every 

question.  My presentation was interactive and the audience was required to simulate two 

tics while writing the Pledge of Allegiance in ninety seconds or less; they would erase 

every third word written and rewrite it, and tap their pinky to the corner of the desk each 

time I clapped my hands.  As expected, no one was able to complete the task.  

It was in that moment that I reached, in my own heart, the climax of my childhood 

journey.  I, still a student, aged fourteen, had become a teacher of teachers, the educator 

of administrators, and the key to a young boy’s education.  I could see the gears turning 

in the minds of the faculty, the lights going on behind their eyes.  It was a wave of 

understanding, and the response to my lecture was almost immediate—in the space of 

perhaps an hour, administrators who had completely refused the idea of a 504 were eager 

to sit down and properly hash out a plan to put the boy on track. 

The transition to adulthood is little more and nothing less than a slow process of 

taking on responsibilities, one-by-one, until the world acknowledges your capacity to 

contribute.  An adult is defined by their ability to do for others as well as for themselves, 

so it wasn’t until I took to advocating for others that the scales I had been shedding came 

loose, the shredded leather torn away in the strong winter winds to reveal the woman 

beneath. 

On A Quest For Critique Partners: The Casual Ties of War and After The End (There Is No End)

    Howdy everyone!  It's Maggie again, your spideriest writeriest nerd dork, back on a quest for CPs.  After going over The Casual Ties of War three dozen times over the last year, I'd still like to get another few sets of eyes on it.  Plus I have a newer project, a screenplay by the title After The End (There Is No End), which I'd like to get some input on.

     The description of each project is below, so if you're at all interested in trading manuscripts, let me know!  Your project doesn't have to be a stage or screenplay, either--if you have a novel or a collection of poems or short stories you'd like a critique partner for, I'm down for that too.

     If you'd like to get in touch after reading the blurbs below, send me an email at TheSpiderWriter@gmail.com with a summary of the work you'd like critique on, and we can talk shop.  I hope to hear from you soon!


   

The Casual Ties of War:  A ~13k dramedy of errors about love, duty, and the costs of war.

     Delial does not fall in love with her superiors!  ... Except maybe just this once.  But Soro is so sweet and kind, and better with a blade than anyone Delial's ever met!  And, technically she's not Delial's superior, just a superior.  She's not even older than Delilal, she's younger by two years and then some.  So it's not as bad as when her sister or best friend do it.

     ... Unless Delial mistook Soro for someone she's not, and Soro lied about who she really is in order to feel like she was someone's equal for once.  I mean, that could be so dangerous!  Especially if Delial wasn't who Soro thought, either--and if the mission Delial's on is meant to culminate in the death of someone that Soro's pretending she isn't....

     In the long-running war between Terra and Forma, tundra kingdoms of the frozen north, there's a lot that's been lost, but these young women will soon find out that even in a time of perpetual war, in a place of perpetual frost, there's a lot still left to lose.

After The End (There Is No End):  A ~21k urban fantasy about reincarnation, intertwined fates, and promises long since broken.

     When a struggling voice actor shows up at new president-elect Noel Estavez's celebratory party, famous screenwriter Cassandra Spell recognizes him instantly as her brother from a past life.  The one that killed himself before they saw their mission through to the end.

     That mission?  To kill the White Witch, the enchantress that stole them from the heavens and placed them in human bodies, now going by the name Noel Estavez.

     Constellations-made-flesh Cassandra and Barnabas fall back into step as they track down Andrew and Celeste, the former Andromeda and Cetus constellations, and resume their efforts to destroy the White Witch and her new Starchildren before they manage to overrun the world.

    But the lies Cassandra's been telling to protect her siblings-cum-lovers (and her habit of tipping the bottle) have to catch up with her sometime.  Eventually their war can't be fought in the dark any longer.  In time, all stars must die.

     The question is, can they take the Witch with them?  Or will they be extinguished before their timer runs down?

In Defense of ReaderX

     You may or may not know what I'm talking about with the title there.

     To start, some of you may have read my ode to fanfiction sometime back, in which I espoused the joys and even intimated the necessities of the craft.  Fanfiction is in my heart and soul and there's pretty much literally no downside; it allows fans of a work to express their love for it, critique its flaws, play around in the sandbox that was left to them, and even advertises the original work--there's more than one story/webcomic/movie I've read/watched/consumed primarily because my friends were writing fanfiction about it.

     Of course, fanfiction, like all fiction, has its downsides, like the dreaded (or maybe overblown?) Mary Sue character that wrankles everyone's hides, or the inevitable kinky stories that come about, inspiring nosebleeds and squick in roughly equal measure.  But perhaps most divisive, and extremely unique to the fanfiction genre (medium?) are ReaderX stories.

     These are stories that are typically told in the second person (the "you" form), and insert the reader as a character into the world of the story (or often an AU), as a potential love interest or current paramour to one or more of the characters within.  Occasionally these stories are told in a platonic sense, the Reader just hanging out with their best buds or going on an adventure, but it's usually romantic and often sexual.

     These types of stories take Mary Sue to the next level--Mega Sue perhaps?  MarySuetron?  Sailor Maryoon?--and don't even try to disguise the self-insert into the narrative; it is blatantly and purposefully an adventure of wish-fulfillment in romance land, often poorly written and more than a little clunky in execution.  This is largely because these types of stories are usually written by young (usually teen or preteen), inexperienced writers still trying to get a feel for how to write a story in general.  To compound the issue, that very phenomena creates an echo chamber of young, inexperienced writers with very few solid examples of how to pull off certain techniques which are in actuality quite advanced--the very idea of a ReaderX, while an old tradition, is still experimental, seldom done, and more extremely seldom done well.  How often have you seen someone write well just in the second person?

     R.L. Stine, Andrew Hussie, and a few fanfiction writers are the only examples I can think of.  Then you add an attempt to actually make it about the audience member sitting at home--not just a character which the audience member assumes the shape of in the telling--and it becomes a thousand times more complex.

     But many are still enjoyable despite the clunkiness, and some are even excellent in quality!  Like any other genre of fiction, there's a whole spectrum of quality.

     And yet, regardless of the quality of any individual piece, the ReaderX is a genre which is extremely polarizing; it seems like you either love it (in which case you consume and produce it voraciously) or you absolutely detest it, in which case you either distance yourself from it or make it part of your life's work to shit on it.

     To be clear, there are a lot of very valid reasons for people to hate the genre; some people don't care for second person, some people can't separate certain conventions of the genre from the potential that lies beneath, some people just don't care for it, and that's fine.  I'm not writing this to insist that everyone love ReaderX stories; what I am doing is entreating you to listen, open your mind, and allow me to make my case in their defense--and thereby, in the defense of those who write and read ReaderX.

   
     There's this thing that's very prevalent in the fanfiction community in which people are unable (or unwilling) to separate a fictional work from its author, so when something bothers someone they take it out on the person who wrote the piece.  Sometimes this is rooted in validity--when an author writes something that very clearly promotes queerphobia, misogyny, or racism, for instance, the desire to correct them stems from a good place, and is usually the right thing to do.

     But often the issue isn't with the author at all--the reader just doesn't like the genre of the fic, or the way it's written, or something about it squicks them, and instead of just saying, "I don't like this" or trying to give the author constructive criticism, they take it out on the author for having the audacity to write something so atrocious, how dare they, and they lump anyone and everyone who writes in that genre into this category of HORRIBLE BAD EVIL and toss them in the public fires of shame.

     Again, there's nothing wrong with not liking something!  But publicly shaming an entire group of people for the things they like to read and write isn't a solution to the problem; the solution is to not look that thing up.  Put it on Tumblr Blacklist, read the tags or summary before you dive in, and avoid it if you know you don't like it; don't beat kids up for liking something.  Because that's what you're doing, in this specific instance; beating up kids.

     ReaderX fics are silly, self-indulgent, are often poorly written, contain too little substance, and can on occasion develop their own cultish subfollowings that are breeding grounds for toxicity (like any and every work of literature that has ever existed), and they're difficult at times to take seriously. but they aren't meant to be taken seriously!

     In my experience, ReaderX fics are written and read by preteen and teenage girls that are absorbed in a fictional work to the exclusion of social lives they probably didn't have to begin with.  They have crushes on the fictional characters in a given work--as many people of all ages, sexes, and sexualities do--and they want to explore that attraction in the only place possible; fiction.  There's no chance that they'll ever meet these characters in real life, let alone have a relationship with them, and they know that.  They're not deluding themselves into thinking that the laws of reality will bend so they can smooch APH Germany or go superhero hunting with Megamind.

     The kids who wind up deeply entrenched in ReaderX culture are often depressed and isolated.  They're the type of person who has always retreated to fiction because the real world didn't want them, and all they want is to be wanted; they need that outlet, those twenty minutes of smiling as they pretend that this person they've attached themselves to cares about them.  It's no different from pretending that you're your favorite character as you read a book, except the story in question was specifically written with that in mind.

     To kids like this, ReaderX stories can be very therapeutic.  It's like daydreaming on paper, but sharing that daydream in such a way that others can experience it too, exposing themselves to daydream scenarios that they never would have thought up by themselves while simultaneously allowing themselves to step outside their own heads.  

      As one of those kids myself, ReaderX stories helped me survive depression.  It definitely wasn't the prevailing reason that I lived through it, but it helped; in the seven and a half years during which my depression was at its worst, I probably put in enough hours reading ReaderXes to fill up at least a month.  ReaderXes allowed me to leap into the head of a blank template that had friends that loved her and a romantic interest that valued her, and because it didn't just happen in my head, like a daydream, I wasn't beholden to all the things my brain insisted were Cold Hard Fact--the "you're unloveable"s, the "this is stupid"s, the "everyone hates you"s that often made daydreams unsustainable and entirely unsatisfying.

     Even if a kid isn't depressed and has no mental health issues, if they're just a perfectly healthy child with an active imagination and they want to indulge themselves in a fluffy adventure of which they're the central figure, so what?  It's as healthy as daydreaming, and more productive, since any writing at all is practice in story-telling and reading can teach a great many things (even if it's just what not to do).

     Actually, it may be healthier than daydreaming, which has been linked to Alzheimer's; daydreaming can cause false memory paths to be created which go nowhere--they trail off and wither, taking up space in the brain.  At least if it's written down, it has a basis in the concrete world, and when read it's neurologically no different from reading a short story.

     Reading and writing ReaderXes is really no different from playing pretend as a child and trying to save the princess from the tower, though admittedly it is a less physically active pursuit.

     Are ReaderXes the pinnacle of literature?  Hell no!  But there's nothing wrong with them, and I think it's time we stopped acting like there was.  More to the point, it's time we stopped acting like there's something wrong with reading or writing them.  When you attack someone for reading/writing something you don't like, you're telling them that it's not all right to like that thing, and in my experience the kids who revel in self-indulgent literature are the ones who are most likely to believe you when you badmouth them.  Saying they're shitty isn't revealing new information, you're just reinforcing what they already believe about themselves, and shoving them deeper into the very mindset that made many of them flee to self-inserts in the first place.

     I mean for Christ's sakes, just let kids be kids!  The act of enjoying a story about themselves isn't hurting you, or anyone else for that matter.  You liked ridiculous stuff when you were that age, too, and no matter how far you try to run, you'll never be able to escape that; nor should you.  Interest in things that seem silly or unproductive is nothing to be ashamed of; we're all human, and we all like to indulge ourselves from time to time.

     So next time you're thinking about tearing someone down for reading or writing ReaderX fanfiction, type "Reader/[your favorite character]" into AO3 and see if you still hate them when you're done.

     Or better yet, just don't.  Keep your complaints to the fics themselves if you have to, and away from the people who write them.  Otherwise you might have to put up with me *cracks knuckles* Tourette's Girl, protector of outcast children everywhere!

     (But seriously guys, being mean to kids isn't cool and it doesn't make you "edgy" or anti-establishment; it just makes you a bully.  Grow up.  Learn to separate the wrongs of an author from flaws in their artwork.)