#((OTL IM so tired but I feel so bad. I’m sorry everyone lol))

[drinkitfrommymouthsuou]

outofroses: hey everyone! I wanted to pop on here and apologize for hiw quiet I’ve been. Work has been crazy lately; it’s been kicking my butt.

I’m going ti go lay down, I’ll get to the rest of my asks (and replies) tomorrow; they’ve all been drafted. Anyway. Just wanted to give a heads up! I’m not ignoring anyone, and I do want to interact with every one if you.

[araminthe-ispwitch]

hi so i love your writing its amazing i especially love gay highschool romance its my favourite i was wondering if i could have some advice im trying to write a school fic and im not sure how to transition between different characters since theres quite a lot. its in third person if that helps. if you have any other tips for school fics id be happy to hear them :)

WOWOKAY HOLY SHIT IT’S BEEN A WHILE SINCE SOMEONE PRAISED MY KNB FIC

(Alsoshit I have to update OTL)

((butalso wOW??? SOMEONE’S ASKING FOR WRITING ADVICE FROM ME???))

(((Okay,I rambled way too much here with advice when you were just asking aboutcharacter transitions… so uh I’ll just put this under Keep Reading. Anon, yourspecific question is answered on #6. If anyone’s interested in writing tips, feel free to skip some ramblings.)))

Well,okay, actually, The ExaggeratedlyPerilous Journey of a Gay High School Romance or GHSR had been my veryfirst school fic (I can’t count that one DNAngel fic ‘cause the setting washalf-outside of school…) and the one thing I noticed while writing it was that ahuge cast of characters needs to be handled with care, otherwise things cangrow way out of proportion.

Letme give a little more exposition on what happened to me exactly first, so you’llunderstand how important writing this fic had been for me:

GHSRwas my second fic in my entire life. After my DNAngel fic (which I really don’t encourage you guys to readunless you want a cringe-y flashback to your teenage weaboo days), I took along break from writing until KnB came along and inspired me. Now, whathappened in that break was that I got slowly influenced by other writers’styles as I read and read, so once I started creating GHSR, it was oodles morerefined than my first fic.

Butit still had that weaboo factor in it somewhere. I hadn’t practiced in a while,so I haven’t gotten rid of that thing yet.

(Andhere I will admit that my first writing style was really heavily inspired by acertain DNAngel fic author. She had written crackfics and I unfortunately adoptedher habit of using “blunette, blue orbs, teardropped, etc.” Yeah. Are youcringing yet? ‘Cause I am. Still, thanks for inspiring me, lady.)

Now,when I wrote Ch. 1 and 2 of GHSR, I was still using my old style. But as Iwrote chapters 3, 4, and 5—and as my word count climbed higher and higher forevery chapter jesus christ—I finally started to find my own style and startedcorrecting all the cringe-y habits I had before (hence why I had refined Chapter1 a while back). So what I’m saying here,anon, is that that experimental school fic of mine practically made me realize howto properly write a school fic.

(I’msorry this will be a bit longer pls bear with me let’s focus on the advice partnow)

Okay,first of all, if your school fic will be having a huge cast (because you canactually writing a fic set in a school without writing a lot of characters init), it’s best to really know each character’s persona. This is easy since if youread a lot of fanfics about the fandom you’re going to write for, you will havea lot of references on how the character is written by the majority. Forexample, I learned how to write Takao by reading works about him, and then Ijust added my own interpretation of him a bit and viola, I now have a Takao whofits my “everyone goes to one school” AU. It’s amazing because a lot of myreaders tell me Takao is so in-character in my fic, but when you really thinkabout it, his entire character isn’t completely shown in the canon as opposedto Kuroko or Kagami, right? But I managed to write him well enough that heseems natural to the readers because they’ve read other works about him, too—andall because I did my research on how his character works!

Anotherexample for this is when I fucked up Kagami’s character. OTL

Backin GHSR’s Ch. 1, I freely wrote Kagami as this food-loving delinquent who ispretty much down to fight. I was sofucking wrong. Watching the next seasons of KnB, I realized with horrorthat I fudged him up so bad and was really so embarrassed and basically, Iwanted to delete my fic right then and there. He’s a food lover, yeah, but he’snot actually actively looking fortrouble. He’s actually a well-mannered kid who is just skirting close todelinquency due to his looks, but is actually just a huge basketball dork.Those times he gets in trouble with authorities? Not actually his fault becausehe’s a mischievous kid—he’s just really unlucky lmao.

(Andthat is why I rewrote Ch. 1. I didn’t do enough research on him and I felt bad.OTL)

Okay,so basically this first advice is me telling you to read other fanfics and do your research. Major characters arepretty easy since they’re popular. It’s the side/minor ones you have to payattention to if you’re going to make them protagonists like what I did withGHSR, since they’re not fully fleshed out and it’s up to the fans to give themtheir own interpretation (like what I did with Sakurai Ryou). A word ofcaution, though: you have to be carefulin distinguishing canon from fanon during your writing. Fanon tends tooverwhelm the canon when the fandom accepts it more—when in reality, the fanonis inaccurate. I can’t think of an example in KnB, but in Yuri on Ice, OtabekAltin had become an Ensemble Dark Horse character in the anime because of hisconnection to Yuri Plisetsky, one of the major characters. Despite his littlescreen time, he’s now one of the most popular guys in the fandom and because ofhis character profile’s small size, the fans have pretty much supplied itthemselves—which kind of ruined his persona a bit. I’ve seen some fanworkswhere he seemed out of character, and that’s a bit dangerous when you’rewriting. So tread carefully when researching characters through fanworks.

Secondadvice: research school fics by reading school fics. Yep, this oneis pretty simple. Just find a school fic, and if you can’t put it down, keepreading and enjoy. You can come back for serious studying on it. (You can do soon my fic lol.) Even better: find a school fic on the fandom you’re going towrite for! If its style is within your standards, then go ahead and use it as astudy material. You might think I’m telling you to copy it, but oh no, I’m actuallytelling you to let it influence yourknowledge of how school fics work. For example, when I was inspired towrite for DNAngel, I never bothered about the mechanics of how schools incertain countries work—because I thoughtthat all schools in the world worked the same. (I hate teenage me.) It wasonly through spending enough time with anime and fanfics that bothered todescribe the Japanese schools’ inside slipper system that I realized that “oh fuck I’ve been basing Japanese schoolson my country’s schools oH SHIT”. Now, I can get away with that in DNAngel,where the rules and the world are a bit screwy. But I cannot bullshit my way through KnB, an anime that is fucking based in Japan. I, as a writer, amexpected to be responsible enough to research the setting of KnB, which is Japan’s education system. So not only amI telling you to research by reading school fics, I am also telling you toresearch the setting of the story. Chances are, there will be some differencesfrom what you know and what is actually real. And not only the setting, too, butthe culture of the school—not all schools mandate their students to clean theirrooms by themselves, and not all schools freely allow their students to go therestroom (looking at you, America). These are simple things you can look up onGoogle, and if you’re lucky, you’ll come across stuff like this in Tumblr, too.

Thirdadvice: it’s okay to be vague sometimes.There’s no need for you to be specific on a lot of details or even reverentlywrite what happened to a character the whole day. You can skip the time to amore interesting event or just be general about something. Because if you getway too focused on giving out every detail, not only will it bore your readers,it will also bore you and tire you out. Take GHSR, for example. In Ch. 5, thetimeline was from Tuesday to Friday, but despite my overly-long chapter, I didn’tactually write every single day on the story from morning to night. I showedwhat was happening in school in general and skipped to the really important andeventful moments for my characters to give movement to the story. Because I can’tjust put so much interaction if it doesn’t mean anything—that would be pointlessand exhausting. This really helpswhen your school fic has a huge cast, like mine. (In fact, the only reason thefirst few chapters were reverently following each day was because the startingcast was small, but it’ll soon grow and I’ll have to put plenty of time-skips.)

Eventhough what you’re writing is a school fic, you still have a designatedprotagonist, so most of the story revolves around them, hence the need to notdetail every single aspect of their life. It’s only called a school fic becausethat’s their setting.

Fourthadvice: your protagonist doesn’t have totalk to everybody in the room. Imagine Kagami in his classroom in my fic,with Aomine beside him, and Kuroko and Sakurai at the back. And then all theother classmates have been replaced with the cast of KnB—so technically, everyoneknows each other inside that room. Now, just because Kagami knows everyonedoesn’t mean he’s entitled to chat all of them up—nor are you entitled to forcehim to. Some writers (most especially those starting out, as I saw this yearsago, but hopefully, this generation has learned) think they have to forceinteractions for everybody so it won’t be boring, but actually, that would besuch a tedious process. You have to think about this realistically, even thoughit’s fiction. Even the most social butterfly in KnB would get tired if theyhold conversations with everyone in the span of a certain period of time. Thepurpose of a school fic is to emulate a school setting, and you don’t reallysee everyone interacting with each other, right? That would be chaos. Let therebe peace—in intervals. For example, when Misdirection was having their firstpractice in GHSR back in Ch. 4, everyone knew each other in the clubroom, but Ididn’t write them all talking to each other. Aomine and Midorima were isolatedfrom the rest and hadn’t talked to the others unless necessary. So unless your character wants to interact with someone specifically, it’sokay to just let them be silent.

Fifthadvice: DON’T PHYSICALLY DESCRIBE YOURCHARACTERS WHEN YOU’RE WRITING IN THEIR PERSPECTIVE.JUST DON’T. There’s this post I’ve found in Tumblr  (which I urge you to read) after finishing Chapter5, where it’s a bit demeaning to refer to the character you’re using with blandtitles/epithets like “the blonde” or “the male”, as if that was the only thing going for them. I admitted that it is, but at the same time, I gottause this style sometimes becausethere will always be scenes where several characters are all altogether. InGHSR, I can’t help but refer to Hyuga as the “bespectacled one” because thereare other black-haired upperclassmen besides him. Even with Kagami and Akashi—Ihave to distinguish the two. It helps that you describe their other features,but giving them titles like the ones above can be a bit too much if there’s noone else in the area that has the same description, ya know? So I propose this:

Don’tdo this:

The black-haired and blue-eyed kickboxer stared at the mop of blondehair he could see outside the gates and sighed.

Do this:

The kickboxer stared at the mop of blonde hair he could see outsidethe gates and sighed.      

“ButAra!” you say, with shocked eyes, “isn’t the first one your style? That line wasin the beginning of Chapter 5!”

Yes,it is. But you know what else? I wrote that line over two fucking years ago. I posted the chapter over a year ago and I didn’t edit that lineout. But over the course of a year, my style concerning this naming thing haschanged, and now I am actively trying to lessen that kind of thing in my works.I didn’t have to remind my readers that Kasamatsu Yukio had black hair and blueeyes. That was just my ego talking,being fancy as I add the descriptions to his title. That whole thing wasone of the very habits I’ve retained from my DNAngel days—and I fucking hate it actually so please don’t emulate me and just keepyour character’s self-perspective simple. Please.

Okay,sixth advice (and the last one for now because this has become too long): transitioning between characters inthird-person perspective is easy as long as you keep things SIMPLE. Sobasically, you just have to apply the simplicity above when leaping from onecharacter to another! It’s actually pretty easy when it involves dialogue:

Sakurai chuckled nervously at the answer. “I-I’m sure they canimprove, Sensei.”

“Oh, I’m hoping for it. Otherwise, we’ll all be in trouble,” said Kogawith an aggravated sigh.

“Maybe if you didn’t suspend us, we wouldn’t be struggling right now,”muttered Aomine, glancing sideways at the door.

See?For every line of dialogue, there was a corresponding character assigned to it.Dialogue tags and extra exposition helps.

Onthe other hand, for internal narration:

As much as Kise wanted to see Kasamatsu as soon as possible, hedecided to hold back since it was obvious his best friend needed a companion—anotion that Midorima rejected almost immediately, of course. Shintarou didn’tneed anyone tagging along with him as he switched from one department toanother. And he most definitely didn’t need Kise Ryouta pestering him withquestions about Takao.

Seehow in the first half, the narration was in Kise’s third-person POV, and thenon the other half, it’s Midorima’s? As long as you’re referring to who is thinkingat the moment and showing the readers whose mind it is you’re narrating,everything will be fine.

Thisalso works with dialogue-to-narration:

“You four are already in an agreement, correct?” he askedmatter-of-factly. The four high-schoolers paused at his words, staring at himin surprise and bubbling dread. There was something about the way the lightglinted off the math teacher’s glasses that warned them to be cautious, and sothey reluctantly nodded.

Thefirst sentence was in Koga-sensei’s POV, then the rest was showing what Kagami,Aomine, Kuroko, and Sakurai were experiencing.

Justkeep things simple. The best tip I can offer here is “if you’re gettingconfused by the transitions yourself,then chances are, your readers will be, too.”

Soagain:

1)Study your characters’ personas.

2)Research by finding similar works.

3)Being vague in storytelling is alright sometimes.

4)Social interaction with each character in a large group isn’t a must.

5)Don’t dump descriptions on your character all the time. (Unless you’re writingcomedy, but that’s for another lesson.)

6)Keep things simple so character transitions aren’t confusing or jarring.

That’sall I can think of for now. If you still have specific questions, don’t beafraid to message me! Honestly, though? Just keep on experimenting andpracticing with your writing. Read fanfics and do your research. That phasebetween DNAngel and KnB was my dominant experimental phase and actually, I’mstill improving and refining my own style, which you’ll notice if you check outmy new fics. Go and find your own style, too! :)