#applying science to httyd books

[wolfie-dragon-rider]

Hi! 2,3 and 13 on the Meme for Fic Writers? :D

Thank you so much for asking! Questions are from here.

2) Is there a trope you’ve yet to try your hand at, but really want to?

Not really. I like my hurt/comfort angsty things I write. Though maybe there is something, but I’m not sure if there’s a name for this. But I once considered writing a silly lighthearted Modern AU Hiccstrid fic, with them being in college, and I was planning to basically have Hiccup do a Computer Science major, and then have every chapter start off with a... term or concept from CS, as it relates to his relationship woes. Such as “Complexity theory is about determining the complexity of problems. The more time or effort it takes to find a solution to a problem, the higher its complexity. Much research in CS is about finding faster algorithms for problems, and thus reducing their complexity. 

Hiccup considered the problem 'Figuring out what girls think' to have an extremely high complexity, requiring an amount of research generally rewarded with a Nobel Prize.” 

I once read a fic (unfortunately I can’t remember what it was called) which did such a thing for physics terms, and I thought it was cute and funny. Maybe one day I’ll write it.

3) Is there a trope you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole?

There are of course always the problematic tropes that I don’t want to get involved with, but one that is common in the HTTYD fandom that I hate, is the “Name kid after dead relative/lover/friend/pet/whatever” trope. I know, I know, sacrilege, but I just don’t like Hiccstrid naming their kid Finn or Stoick or something like that. I personally feel it’s a bit creepy. The kid is unique, a new person. It shouldn’t be a... replacement of the dead person. And I know it’s typically not meant to be, but to me that’s what it feels like. “We lost Stoick but we have a new Stoick now”. The baby is not a new Stoick, he’s a new person who is different from Stoick. 

13) What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever come across?

I think I benefited a lot from Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules of writing. This is probably getting a bit long, so I’ll post them all here and write down my thoughts about them below the cut:

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.I tend to interpret this in two ways. One, keep it short. Don’t waste the reader’s time with endless description of things that don’t matter, sideplots that go nowhere, or strange observations. Two, be upfront with your intentions. Don’t start a story that appears to start as a fluffy coffeeshop AU but halfway through suddenly turns into some kind of Hunger Games horror dystopia. The reader who probably followed the story for fluff will feel cheated, and the horror fan has to slog through chapters of other stuff, and you’ve wasted their time. 

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.The worst thing a reader can feel towards your characters is not hate or disgust. It’s indifference. It’s “I don’t care what happens to any of these people, so why should I keep reading?” Make sure the audience wants the protagonist to succeed. Wants them to overcome their troubles. Make sure the audience feels like the character has not been treated right, and deserves justice.  

Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.I find this incredibly good advice to keep in mind when writing side or background characters. Let’s say your characters are taking a cab. Remember that the cab driver is a person too. They have a name, and goals. They want to go home on time. They want to listen to their favorite radio channel. They want the characters to not be so loud. They want their kids to go to a school as good as the protagonist is going through. And sure, the audience doesn’t need to know their life story, far from it. But it can make your world feel so much more alive if the characters’ loud conversation is interrupted by the driver turning the volume of his music up. It allows you to show how your protagonist will react to this. Are they empathetic? Insulted? Maybe they love the music and start a conversation with the driver. Another point where this rule applies is for villains. Keep in mind that even though your villains do horrible things, they do them because they want to accomplish something. 

Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.I used to have my own addendum to this rule: Worldbuilding should also be a valid use for a sentence, I thought. But slowly I realized that it’s already in the other two things. Worldbuilding is cool, but I think that ultimately it should be subservient to the plot and characters. Especially when you’re looking through the eyes of a character, every sentence you write is what the character sees. And what the see, how they see it, how they respond, that shows character. What you show and how you show it reveals more about the plot and character than the world itself. 

Start as close to the end as possible.A remarkably simple rule, yet incredibly right. When starting a story, or editing it, always ask for the first couple of chapters “Are these necessary?” Interesting stories, no matter their genre, tend to start the same way: There is a status quo that is broken. Frodo’s calm life in the Shire is interrupted by his uncle’s birthday party and the magical ring he gets after it. The Dursleys’ perfectly normal life is interrupted when a magical boy is left on their doorstep. A friend disappears. A lover is murdered. Status Quo is broken: The world is not as it should be anymore, and the protagonist has to set it right. Another way to rephrase this rule is to say: Begin at the very start of your story, then simply throw everything away until something happens that the reader has to know. Delete until you’re forced to summarize the deleted events in the rest of your story. Because if the reader didn’t need to know it, they shouldn’t have to read it. 

Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.I love this rule. Not because I’m a sadist personally, heck, it hurts me when I write such horrible things. But because indeed, we don’t see the true strength of a character until they’re in their lowest point and they still don’t give up. Throw them over the edge of the cliff, and only then can you see them truly soar. You want your readers to wonder how in the world the character could ever overcome these hurdles. This quote from Lord of the Rings seems appropriate: It's like in the great stories Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened? And then, when the reader is wondering that, you make your character soar. They get back up, keep on fighting, and your audience will cheer and yell and cry in relief. 

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.This rule pretty much speaks for itself. There will always always always be people who don’t like what you write. Who don’t like the genre you write. Who don’t like the character you write. Screw those people. 

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.I should emphasize here that these are rules originally intended for short stories, but I agree with the rule in general regardless. I hate it when stories do this thing, which I call ‘the 4th wall censor’, where something important is referred to vaguely even though everybody in the room knows about it, simply because the audience doesn’t know. This is also the hallmark of a good detective or thriller story. Your twist or reveal shouldn’t depend on keeping something hidden from the audience. The signs should be there all along, in foreshadowing and offhand remarks that combine into a great picture once you realize it. Not the “Haha, turns out that the crime scene contained this vital clue that wasn’t mentioned before!”. Of course, there are circumstances where you want suspence or unreliable narration, but always ask yourself if it’s actually necessary. If the entire suspense is born from intentional miscommunication between you and the reader, then maybe the book wasn’t that clever to begin with.Probably way more than you wanted to know, but I hope you learned something! 

#asks #writing #writing is hard #tropes