After a brief break, I have now read Part 5 of Never Say You Can't Survive by Charlie Jane Anders.

(Only semi-related, but I noticed that Taylor has this author's All the Birds in the Sky on one of their TBR shelves. I haven't read any of her works besides this one, but it felt like a cute coincidence.)

Chapter 22 is about finding and cultivating your voice as a writer.

On voice:

This is something I could stand to cultivate a little bit more. I feel like my general writing style, such as it is, shows my early influence. I read a lot of Mercedes Lackey as a teenager, haha. In general, I feel like my writing isn't terribly flashy, but is more the type that's designed to be relatively unnoticeable, so that the content takes center stage as opposed to the style.

But also... I have been very reluctant to really try for much "style." I don't think I can really blame this one on specific bad advice (the way I've attributed some of my struggles to baggage from early exposure to Mary Sue Litmus Tests and such), so it may just be a general symptom of lack of confidence. I feel very reluctant to "go for" any sort of flourish-y description, for fear that it will land badly.

Then again, I followed some writing snark comms in ye olde LJ days, and one of the things mocked most brutally was "purple prose." And while there are some egregious examples out there, and I've cringed at plenty at various times... I also saw a lot of stuff torn apart for including any amount of description or imagery. Perhaps this is another thing I took to heart a bit too thoroughly!

I don't think I'm ever destined for a particularly poetic style, but it probably would be worthwhile for me to at least give it a try to see if I can find a style that incorporates a little more in the way of imagery and such.

Chapter 23 is about the narrator of your story, and the importance of both POV and tone.

On narration:

This is another of those things that I'm very familiar with as a reader, but go back and forth on how confident I am in harnessing it deliberately as a writer. 

Everything I write obviously has its narrator, and its general POV and vibe to the story. And I have worked in different stories to cultivate those fairly specifically. I wanted (and I hope achieved!) very different tones between "All Strange Wonders" (the Kingdom Hearts/Howl's Moving Castle mashup, with a mostly-light, romantic fantasy tone) and "Outbreak" (the Silent Hill fic about a supernatural illness.) Even so, I feel like some of it is the sort of "learning by osmosis" rather than deliberate action on my part. I have done those things on purpose, but by trying to do the things that "feel" right, rather than a formal understanding? If that makes sense?

I appreciate the suggestion to think of tone as a venn diagram, where you have all the different moods that the story encompasses, and how they all overlap with each other. The overlap may be the meatier aspect of the story, or that overlap may allow you to shift in a really meaningful or impactful way toward one single mood for a time.

Also appreciated the shoutout to The Fifth Season's second person narration, because agreed, it is so effective when it crops up. (Fuck, I want to reread that trilogy, but no I will be strong and minimize my rereading until I get through more of the things I haven't read yet...)

It was also funny, because as I was thinking about one of the examples (how two very different narrators may describe a castle, and what that description would tell you to expect of the story's tone), and was considering how describing the same series of events from the perspective of very different narrators would be a fun writing exercise... and then that was a writing exercise she suggested later in the chapter, haha. (Though her suggestion went more in-depth than my thoughts did, lol.)

Chapter 24 is about the structure of your story, and how you use time.

On structure:

This is something that I feel like I haven't really considered in much depth. As with the stuff I talked about above, yes, I do make choices about what things I want to focus on vs. what things I plan to skip past and summarize with just a few sentences, but it feels like something I don't plan for so much. 

One of my fics I like best (the Silent Hill one) has prose chapters about different characters' experiences alternating with epistolary chapters detailing one character's report on the events, which is probably the strongest example of something I wrote where the structure matters a lot to the story.

She mentions NK Jemisin again, and man, not to keep bringing it up, but The Fifth Season (and the Broken Earth trilogy as a whole) really did do great shit with the passage of time and breaking the story into multiple timelines. Witch King by Martha Wells did a good job of two separate timelines that I really enjoyed recently, too.

In general, I really love stories that fuck with time in some fashion. Both the Zero Escape series and the AI: The Somnium Files series come to mind for some of my favorite examples... and though those are both video game series (by the same director), they are also *visual novels*, which means they get some of those same advantages that prose can offer that this chapter talks about.

This is a way in which I feel like my writing does tend toward being quite straightforward. As much as I love it as a reader, I don't tend to do much to mess with the timeline in my stories. I tend to want to write chronologically and tell the story itself chronologically. I wonder if this is something I should try to break away from?

Chapter 25 talks about emotion in the work, specifically...

On empathy and irony:

She talks about both of these being frequent strong points in writing, both the ability to look at a bigger picture and the flaws and hypocrisies within it, and the ability to empathize with all sorts of different characters, whether they initially seem sympathetic or not.

The easier of the two for me is empathy. That is something I value deeply as a reader and as a writer, and want to do my best to cultivate in fiction and in real life. She points out that a good bit of succeeding at this with written works does come down again to the strength of your character and their POV and how well you get into their head and perspective... which is again where I end up struggling, and am trying hard to get past some baggage around. I struggle with trying to preempt criticism and make my characters likeable, and prevent them from doing or thinking anything "bad" or that would make people dislike them. Of course, that tends to make them flat and bland and again, it's the "sanded into a shapeless blob" problem.

I'll say this is something my current read (The Luminous Dead) has done really well. The perspective character has gone through bouts of anger and paranoia, has made good and bad decisions, and I've enjoyed all of it! Trying to keep in mind that my characters are also allowed to make bad choices and be wrong about things.

I have a harder time with the irony side. I'm actually not 100% sure I understand her idea of what using irony well is. The one example she gave was from a piece of media I'm not familiar with.

I agree with a lot of the individual points made, like not letting your use of humor undercut your characters or story (which is one of the reasons I think my knee-jerk reaction is to say I don't like humor in writing, when actually I often really do! Just not when it seems like getting in the "funny/quirky/clever quip" was prioritized at the expense of the story or the characters.) 

She also points out how the concept of irony as a whole has been sort of warped in recent years by things like "ironic racism" or "ironic sexism." She also points out the frequent attitude that irony is almost a sort of nihilism, where it's just deciding that nothing really matters or has any real meaning to it. 

I think this is my general issue with it as a whole, because so much out there feels "irony-poisoned." I am frustrated by people who refuse to allow themselves any glimpse of sincerity, as audiences who refuse to engage with a work genuinely, but especially as creators that refuse to engage as well. There are so many works that go out of their way to undercut themselves, like they're trying to do it before the audience can, or that feel like they're trying to mock the genre that they're a part of. Sure, sometimes it IS funny to have a character in a horror story be aware that they're making a terrible character-in-a-horror-story mistake, or a character in a fantasy story to acknowledge fairy tale tropes. Self-aware stories can be really good! But too often it instead comes across as sneering about "yes, of course genre fiction is stupid, so can you believe the stupid genre stuff that's happening? Ugh, it's so lame, am I right?" That is usually what I expect from something that's intended to be ironic, so I again have that knee-jerk negative reaction to it.

It leaves me feeling better equipped in terms of what NOT to do than what TO do. I'll let it keep turning over in my head.

Chapter 26 is the final chapter, about the importance of writing the story that only you can tell.

On self:

This one is a bit tricky, because to an extent it feels like everything could only be written by the person who writes it. Even the sort of bland or derivative stuff... the person who wrote it is the only one who would write it exactly like that. The same plot bunny could be executed completely differently by any number of different writers!

But I also get it. Writing something to chase a trend (when it's something you don't care about otherwise), or because you think it's what you should write, or because you're trying to mimic something else too completely, is all likely to not be your best or most unique or meaningful work. Projects that you have personal investment and connection to really do seem to have something extra to them.

I appreciate the encouragement to not try and force yourself into following a too-specific outline format. (She calls it mad-libs style structure.) 

There's a lot of stuff out there, like Save the Cat, that really do have the "exactly x% of the way through, on page #y, this specific event must happen" advice/commands. I know that has its utility, and for a couple years I was trying in vain to unlock some foolproof way to outline that somehow works for every project, and does basically just let me fill in the blanks and have a workable story to start writing. I used seven point outlining for a few projects, and at least for one it lined up really well, and helped me to avoid massive issues with pacing in the middle!

But now I've been struggling with a few of my more recent projects because the various events don't line up at the "correct" points where climaxes or setbacks or whatnot are "supposed" to happen. I kept trying to make the story fit the outline structure by removing bits or shuffling them around... and it kept making the story feel worse. So fuck it, lol.

(Though it does make me think some about deliberately formulaic writing, like a lot of the romance ebook series and such. The quantity demanded by the almighty algorithm means that having a formula to fall back on is about the only way to produce it, and it is about writing to a market that wants more of the same sorts of stories that don't deviate too drastically from expectations. And even before it was the sea of kindle unlimited series, it was true of category romance, which produced new books following the same general sets of tropes every month. I don't feel like these books, even if they are sometimes of iffy quality, somehow don't count as books, or that I don't believe any of the authors cared about their work... but it also definitely doesn't feel so much like "only this one person could have told this story.")

I also do wonder what she might have said (in this chapter or others) if generative AI for writing had been the issue that it is now, because "write the thing that only you can" is very much the opposite of "have chat GPT spit out the writing for you." (And maybe she has shared thoughts on AI! I haven't looked.)

This section is also about how the act of writing and finding your own stories can help you know yourself better. And it's true that looking back at older stories (or even just the ideas for stories that I didn't ever write, but spent time thinking about) remind me of who I was at the time. Looking at the things I'm focusing on now will probably make me feel similarly in the future. And as she said about her own writing, there's an aspect of future projects being about the person she wants to be.

(On one of my bad teenage fanfics, a friend said something like "this definitely sounds like you wrote it!" It was meant positively, I'm fairly sure, but it has haunted me for almost two decades now. What did she mean by that? lol. Was it the word choice? Something about the plot? I don't know!)

Though now there's a part of me trying to decide if anything of mine is truly a story only I could write, because I'm not sure I believe that any of it is unique enough for it to be the case. I think it was supposed to be encouraging advice, but instead I'm just anxious about it, haha.

BUT. I'm gonna try. The book as a whole has reminded me of many of the things I haven't always thought about enough, and reminded me of some of the places where I'm still carrying some baggage that I need to figure out how to put down. I'm not 100% convinced that it's worth it to try and go for it on writing through The Times We're Living Through, because I'm still not convinced there is a "through." But I also know that doomerism isn't helpful, and like I said before when bumping up against a loved one's doomer feelings... Worst case, I spend some time reading books and writing stories before everything collapses completely and I die. Best case... we come out the other side (somehow) and I still spent time reading and writing and have something to show for the time.