Natalie's Writing School for Weirdos - Part One

To understand and express the needs and wants of the public over your own principles and position can be considered “Business Type,” whereas to ignore the needs of the public and write only what one wants to write can be considered “Passion Type.” If you can figure out which one you are as soon as possible, I think you should be able to move forward without losing your way.

If you’re a “Business Type,” devote yourself to calm and calculated work, and even if you make a mistake don’t misunderstand what you’re doing for a hobby.

And if you’re a “Passion Type,” devote yourself to writing according to your desires, writing for the sake of writing. But in exchange, even if no one reads your work, you must never worry about that.

If you’re a “Passion Type” able to work within the schedule of a “Business Type”, you can evolve into an invincible “Perfect Type!”

Am I one of these?

I’m just an old guy who’s a broken down “Passion Type.”

~Ryukishi07, author of Umineko no Naku Koro Ni

Hello everyone! There seemed to be a notable amount of interest in me rambling about how I go about writing stories, so I'm starting a little miniature series about that, which I will poke away at when I have the motivation and time. This isn't going to be regularly scheduled, and isn't ever going to take priority over regular chapters. It is also, if I've done this right, tier-independant and free for everyone to read. I personally believe that education should be free and available to everyone, so I'm not putting a paywall in front of anything I try to teach. I should note, however, that I will be using my own stories as examples for things (it is my understanding that most people here probably like those) and there will be unlabeled spoilers, though only for things I've already released.

Though on the subject of education… fair warning, all ye who enter here. I have no formal academic background whatsoever in creative writing or English education. I majored in business, and the primary thing I learned about business is that it's awful and worthless and that you should be intensely suspicious of anyone who is legitimately proud of having a business major. While I do hope that my experience as an author means I have some useful things to say, I feel the need to emphasize that there are probably formal academic terms for most of this shit and I just don't know what they are. This is true for most things in my life.

I learn by doing. Most of the things I know come from wanting to accomplish something, and then taking as straight and direct a path as possible towards that goal, picking up whatever skills I absolutely have to in order to make it work. This often means I end up being the wizard that casts fireball by tearing open a miniature interdimensional portal to the fire dimension instead of just igniting the oxygen in the air. For example, I learned how to program because I wanted to make a mod of Super Smash Bros. Brawl. So I learned how to program… entirely in post-compiled Nintendo Wii assembly code. And I got pretty fucking good at it! However, when my friend tried to teach me a real programming language and told me what functions are, the first words out of my mouth were "Oh! So it's like a goto-return!" and I'm pretty sure I scarred them for life.

I learned writing the same way. Everything I know is from practice, criticism, error, and osmosis.The stuff I'm about to tell you might be obvious, and it might be alien, and I genuinely have no conception of which is which. So… I'll just give as much as I can, and hope it helps. This is going to be less of a guide and more of a ramble.

Let's break things up into sections, for my sanity just as much as yours. Let's also order it in terms of the steps I go through when writing a new story, since I'm currently doing just that at the time of writing this.

Those steps are vaguely as follows:

1. Story Concept and Worldbuilding (The Fun Part)
2. Character and Plot Design (Making a Plan)
3. Writing the First Chapter (Perfectionist's Corner)
4. Writing All of the Other Chapters (Burnout & You)
5. Finishing a Series (and Learning From Mistakes)

I reserve the right to change my mind and/or go on whatever tangents I want, but until then… let's get started!

Part One: Story Concept and Worldbuilding (The Fun Part)

In order to write fiction, you need a fictional idea. This is tautologically how fiction works. Some people find this part really hard. I do not.

A question I get asked a lot (particularly by my dad, about every other time I see him) is 'where do you get your ideas from?' See also: 'how do you not run out of ideas?' and 'how do you think of this stuff?' If this is the step you happen to be struggling with, then bad news! You have come to the wrong place. I'll answer the question anyway, though.

I get my ideas from everywhere.

I get my ideas from watching birds float on updrafts in the mountains. I get my ideas from replaying the horrible mistakes I made in middle school in my mind a hundred times. I get my ideas from people who have hurt me. I get my ideas from the wishes and desires of those closest to me. I get my ideas from books that are almost like something I want but just barely miss the mark in a way that leaves me longing for something better. I get my ideas from traumas I have suffered in the past. I get my ideas from people I regret hurting. I get my ideas thinking up funny jokes in the shower.

So. Clearly, I have too many ideas. The real question, and the question most of you were probably asking, is 'how do I choose which idea to write, and how do I make it good?' After all, the difference between a good idea and a bad idea isn't actually the idea at all, it's the execution. It is the skill with which you put it all together. And some of that skill goes into physically writing, sure, but… before you can write it, an idea needs to be complete first.

When I go about the process of planning a new story, I'll usually have a few different ideas competing for dominance at first. Some of them will be culled, some of them will be merged… but all of them start as somewhat of a seed that the full story can grow out of, with proper nurturing. There are two main kinds of seeds I start with: settings and situations.

Settings are, of course, the universe a story takes place in. Most of my stories with high fantasy elements start here. The way I design fantasy settings starts with a very simple question:

"What is the single coolest environmental feature I can think of?"

Specifically, my metric is that I want a world so intrinsically cool that you don't need to actually know anything about the plot or characters of the book to be interested in reading a story that takes place there. I should be able to describe my setting entirely absent of context, in just a couple sentences, and the people hearing it should say 'that sounds sick as hell.' Instant hook, instant interest. That's my goal.

The place you start doesn't have to be that right at the beginning, but it should have the promise of it. The single coolest environmental feature I could think of when planning Vigor Mortis was floating islands. I'm a sucker for sky islands. I love them. So I decided my setting would have sky islands. That is where everything began, before I ever had a single character or even the concept of the Mistwatcher. The Mistwatcher came from step two:

"What questions does this environmental feature lead you to asking, and what answers would be the most interesting?"

If your feature is a mountain with a giant hole in it creating a sickass eye-of-sauron esque backdrop for the sunrise every morning, the question is of course 'how did that giant hole get there?' Was there a war where someone set off a really big bomb? Did a cabal of mages accidentally an entire city? Did God come down and shoot some kind of Really Big Laser Beam at one specific asshole in particular? That's for you to decide! But as soon as you answer the question, you then proceed to ask it again. What questions does this new feature imply? Who is the asshole? What kind of gods does this universe have? Why was god mad at the asshole? Was the asshole maybe a hero and the god evil? Woah! Now we're getting subversive! The questions just keep coming.

The Mistwatcher from Vigor Mortis exists because after deciding I wanted sky islands, I thought the two most obvious follow up questions were "how do the islands float?" and "what is underneath the islands?" Because like, you gotta know what's underneath the islands. You've only done sky islands correctly if the coolest part of the sky islands is the goddamn ground. I went through a dozen different ideas for what it could be before finally settling on 'space-bound eldritch abomination holding the atmosphere together with magic' but once I hit that idea I knew I had a winner. From there, you keep moving on.

Eventually, though, you run out of questions, or you reach a point where you have multiple possible answers to a question and you can't decide between them. At this point, you switch tracks, go to a different aspect of the story or setting, and repeat the process with another problem. Eventually, multiple problems will converge, and you'll find solutions to one questions in answers from another.

For example, once I hit my dead end after deciding on The Mistwatcher (not what I called it in the planning process, of course, it was just 'the eldritch abomination' in my notes for most of it) I started deciding things about the world that I thought would be interesting. I wanted the story to be (at least until the planet-eating reveal) a fantasy, and have traditional fantasy-level technology and culture, but one of the things that always bugs me about fantasy stories where a civilization is rebuilding after their more technologically advanced precursor exploded is when they don't explain why people don't just like… reverse engineer stuff. Obviously, if you're blasted back to the stone age, you have more important things to worry about than how to reinvent computers, but any fantasy setting with a stable enough society to have literate commoners should be experiencing fairly rapid technological advancement, especially with the bonus of having advanced technology to study… unless something is preventing it. So, I thought to myself, what would prevent the recovery of most lost technology from Earth? Well, pretty much all of it requires metalworking, right?

…And that's why the Mistwatcher eats metal. The idea was formed because it was a functional answer to a question that had been bothering me. And best of all, this led to a lot of situations that were really fucking cool, like Perception Events and the way metal interacts with my magic system, which was itself determined in response to the question 'why does the Mistwatcher eat metal,' and then that led to the justification for why the Skybreak happens, and so on and so forth. From there, creating the society that inhabits the island of Skyhope was mainly a matter of taking a standard fantasy setting and adjusting it for the difficulty of working without metal and the necessity to collect alternative materials. Chitin and bone were obvious substitutes because of all the horrible magic monsters I wanted to have simply for the sake of having horrible magic monsters, and so on and so forth.

Worldbuilding like this is like completing a jigsaw puzzle. It all feels disconnected and overwhelming at first, but as long as you have the border in place you can move to a totally different part of the puzzle whenever you get stuck. Each time you put in a piece, no matter where, it lowers the number of remaining pieces you need to worry about no matter what part of the puzzle you complete next. Just keep going, and no matter what direction you started from you'll end up in the middle with the puzzle done sooner or later. If, then, therefore. If, then, therefore. Therefore, therefore, therefore. And if at any part of the process you find things have stopped being Sick As Fuck, back up and redo. 

…But once you have a setting, you do need like, characters and a plot and stuff. You can also start there, if you prefer. The order you do these things in doesn't really matter, but next on our list is:

"What is the story about?"

Planning a story plot-first is my less commonly used and less preferred method, because I find making settings really fun. It is what I did for my most recent stories at the time of writing, though: Are You Even Human and Magical Girl Mechanical Heart. Both of these stories came from a fairly straightforward starting concept: "I want to write a story about a shapeshifter because nobody else is doing shapeshifters right and I'm mad about it" and "I want to write a story where a fucked up evil lady turns the main character into a robot because it would make my deranged friends wiggle a whole lot," respectively. The planning process for this kind of thing is the same jigsaw-puzzle-like series of questions and answers leading to more questions, but the thrust of your objective is different. 

When designing a setting, you only really need the setting to be two things: internally consistent and sick as fuck. The first is important because it helps you avoid pitfalls, plot holes, and other issues that break the suspension of disbelief. An internally consistent setting is one in which you know the answer to any question someone could ask you, not because you knew every answer before they asked (though you should know most), but because the setting is well-made enough that the answer to anything you don't know becomes is extremely easy for you to figure out. Everything that exists within it runs on the same internal and intuitive logic. By the time the setting is ready for writing, you are its god. A sick as fuck setting is cool and makes people want to read more of it. It is a source of joy and wonder. It is intrinsically interesting and, along with the internal consistency, evokes a sense of depth and mystery that you can continue revealing and expanding as the story progresses. It's just the natural result of all the work you put in, if you were doing the work well.

When designing a plot, though, you need both of those things and also so much more. Plots need characters, histories, motivations, and ideally themes. They are complicated and easy to mess up. There isn't an easy or exact art to making a good one, but I will help where I can.

First and foremost: themes. You don't have to make a book that's 'about' something. You can just write something because you think it would be cool. But only the coolest people believe that thinking deeply about the world and the mark you want to leave in it is cool, and there's nothing as good at communicating something important to you as writing a story. But counterintuitively, at least for me, deciding on a theme to a story is usually one of the last things I do when writing characters and plots. I don't usually go into planning with a message I want to get across; I plan the story, and then determine what kind of message I think is most important and most fitting to add to it.

This is odd to me because a theme isn't a moral you add to the end of the episode. A theme is something that informs the entirety of my work. It's something I can turn to when I'm stuck to remind myself of the direction the story needs to take. And I've struggled with that in the past—Vigor Mortis had a somewhat disconnected theme that I only really decided on halfway through writing it—but it's very rewarding when you figure it out and see it through. From experience I'll tell you that once you're done with a story, once it is finished, the things you'll remember as the author are the themes and lessons you were trying to impart more so than just the cool scenes you managed to craft. 

Magical Girl Mechanical Heart touches on themes of codependency, as that is an issue that has been painfully relevant to me at several points in my life. (I feel like it may be an issue that affects trans girls with abnormally high frequency, but this isn't really the best place to have that conversation.) Consequently, I've had the story move through several different variations of toxic relationships with Luna's obligatory slavery standing in for the codependent half of the relationship and her master—and this is the part where I remind you that this is metaphorical and should not be taken as one-to-one in any regard—taking the role of the dependant. Melpomene, obviously, is a total piece of shit in this role, and abuses Luna quite clearly, making her extremely miserable. Luna's story here is an attempt to extract herself from the role of codependent even while circumstances make that next to impossible. When Thea becomes her master, the story instead touches on the ways that Thea and Luna consistently hurt each other in spite of how much they love and care for one another, and the ultimate conclusion that they need to find a way to separate and grow as people or else their relationship will never be a good idea. It's not an issue of ill intentions between them, it's not an issue of a lack of love, and it's not an issue of a lack of effort. The problem is within Luna and Thea themselves—Luna, her slavery routines and how much easier it is for her to just obey them and focus on Thea over all else, and Thea her anxieties and personal issues that make her struggle to avoid setting off Luna's obligatory obedience. If Luna didn't have her issues, Thea's issues might be considered relatively minor as character flaws go. And if Thea didn't have her issues, well… Luna would still be a slave and their relationship would likely still have problems, but again this is metaphorical and it is my hope that people are capable of reading between the lines to find the correct lessons here. Point being, it is my hope that my writing can be of some help to people in toxic relationships, some of whom may not even know that their relationships are toxic.

Some of you may not feel like you have any lessons you'd like to impart to the world, and that's fine, but if there is something you're feeling strongly about, even if it's something you yourself haven't even entirely worked through personally, I'd encourage you to make your story about it if you think you can. I've started several of my stories with a question but no answer, Bioshifter being one of them. Bioshifter, after all, is about being trapped in an overwhelmingly miserable situation with no way out. It is about depression and suicidal ideation and having damn good reasons to feel that way. It is about existing in a world that is cruel to you for reasons you cannot control. It is about existing in a way that makes you believe yourself to be an irredeemable monster. Suffice it to say, I was going through some shit when I decided I wanted to take a story in that direction, and I wasn't even thinking about how I'd conclude the damn thing when I decided to go into it. But go through it I did, and in the process of needing to find a reason for Hannah to live for the sake of the story, I found many things about myself, and answers to terrible, dark questions that I am very thankful to have now. This, too, is the power of writing a theme into your plot.

…What else. Oh yeah! Characters. I hear those are important. I've gotten many compliments on my character work, and most of my stories are arguably character dramas first and fantasy second. I enjoy having character work pay off just as much as I enjoy getting to do one of my big setting reveals, after all. Writing good characters is difficult, and I've seen a ton of different advice on how to write believable and interesting characters, but… I think most of that advice misses the point. There's really only one one thing you need to be able to write a compelling character, and that's being really, really good at theory of mind.

'Theory of mind' generally refers to the cognitive capacity to imagine beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, and thoughts other than your own. It's a pretty basic skill, and in many ways it's just a fancy way of saying 'empathy.' But if you aspire to be an author, I'd advise you take it several steps further. You should endeavor to understand any and every kind of person, and I mean really understand them. Even if you find someone utterly repulsive, you should try to be able to conceptualize the experience of being them. You should understand their thoughts, their justifications, their pain and their trauma. You should be able to look at someone you hate and understand deeply why another person might love them. You should be able to look at someone you love and understand why someone would hate them. You should be able to empathize and sympathize with the evil and the wretched. You should be able to believe in the goodness of the noble and joyous. 

Good character work isn't about interesting flaws or compelling motivations or complicated relationships or harrowing trauma. A good character will likely have all of those things, but that's because most real people have all of those things. And the more people you know, the more people you understand, the more you can empathize and imagine someone as full and complete as you, the better your characters will be. 

Also, I hate to say it, but the more general variety of life experiences you have, the better of an author it will make you. This is my least favorite truth because I am a shut-in and I want to stay at my computer literally all day. Being a well-rounded person is by no means a requirement to be a good author, but unfortunately it helps. The more people you meet, the easier it will be to understand different kinds of people as well. It kinda sucks, but it's also great, which is really annoying. Oh, well.

…For the rest of it all, other people will give you better advice than me. Constructing a plot is a slow and steady process, and often a deeply personal one. I can give you some more rapid-fire advice like 'the hero's journey is complete horseshit, just ignore it' and 'you should consider making all of your main characters girls, as a treat' but realistically you just start with any idea at all and fill it in with the same jigsaw puzzle method you use for settings. Or, well, that's what I do. And that's all we're talking about here right now. Writing a plot is less of a science, less even of an art, and ultimately more like magic. You're breathing parts of yourself into the world, guided exclusively by your own sense of joy and excitement. Construct the sort of story that would make your heart race and your face unconsciously pull into a grin, and you'll get there. 

Write things for yourself. Write what you want to write and what you want to read. You're not alone in this vast world. If you want it, there is an audience for it. So pull it all out of your heart, and keep constructing it step by step. 

…And that'll about cover it for part one. Not sure when I'll get around to the next part, but I hope this has helped at least some of you. See you in the next one!