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Another long one for #160! And no, you don’t have to become an expert on everything your characters do, but especially if it’s an integral part of a protagonist’s story arc, at bare minimum you need to not make mistakes representing it. And you may want to say stuff like “OK, so what if my character is an exception?” For instance, what if one of your test readers says your police officer character wouldn’t do a certain thing because that’s not part of the protocol for the incident they’re responding to, and you want that character to break the usual rules and do it anyway? The answer there is you need nuance. You need someone to call it out or later acknowledge that the officer shouldn’t have done that or have the character’s inner monologue note that they’re ignoring protocol. You don’t want it to look like you just didn’t know how to write this.

Think about your own hobby or profession, and then think about the silly things you’ve seen in movies/TV or read in books about the way it’s represented. It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it, when these things are phoned in! But it’s not just about not wanting to get laughed at by experts. It’s about respecting your own work enough to represent an accurate picture of the character’s life. In researching these things, you may even find some insight that will help your story feel more authentic in general!

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Sometimes hanging out in “writing advice” circles, you see people claiming you have to come to your writing career the same way that worked for them. Some of them are immediately dismissive of anyone who thinks they can sell the first novel they wrote, even if they spent a lot of time and energy looking into how to write it and came up with something great. Some of them say playing around in fanfiction communities doesn’t teach you anything about originality or publishable writing, even though many people who enjoy that pastime have honed their talent and learned how to incorporate feedback better than those who only pursue original writing from the start. Some of them say you just KNOW you’re a writer because you’ve done it all your life and there’s no way you can start later in life because if you were a True Writer, the bug would have bitten you earlier. And some of them say if you’ve written a bunch of unsuccessful books you’ll probably just never get the knack and you should do something else. GUESS WHAT? Nobody’s got the formula that works for everyone, and there is room for all of us.

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Don’t you hate when you’re describing some project of yours and someone replies “Oh, so it’s influenced by [work you’ve never consumed], obviously, right?”

Ughhhhh. And it’s VERY POPULAR so nobody’s gonna believe you that you didn’t get the idea from them. . . .

Psst–you can still do it. If you didn’t actually rip off the thing, it won’t actually look like you’ve been influenced by it, and you’ll just have to change how you approach pitching. . . .  Pretending it just doesn’t exist isn’t a good idea, by the way.

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I know this has come up in some of my previous comics but . . .

*sigh*

Politics have always been part of your favorite stories. Almost every classic story has an underdog fighting oppression, a person seeking justice within an unfair system, a fight for rights or freedom, or at least some acknowledgment of differences in class. I’ve noticed a trend lately for people to say newer stories that intentionally include more diversity are somehow “ruining” what’s good about those stories by including historically and currently marginalized people. Interesting how that automatically makes them hostile to the possibility that it’s a good story (and more likely to blame the diversity for what they don’t like or subconsciously grade it harder because they feel these diversifications can only come at the sacrifice of quality). And interesting how they want to see characters fight the man if “the man” isn’t them.

For these folks to endlessly complain that relatability is so important and then also insist that a straight white man is broadly relatable is a shocking display of hypocrisy. They want the rest of us to continue relating to (and purchasing) entertainment that does not feature us at all (or features us in offensive ways), but if they’re asked to do so for the minority of new stories (whose numbers they will always exaggerate), they claim they are being targeted for exclusion. Well, if not being centered and coddled literally feels like an attack to them, how do they think we feel? With all the whining about “pandering to the woke agenda,” they sure do expect to be pandered to themselves, and think it’s okay for THEM to do it because they believe they’re the ones with buying power. Well, the fact that there has been more of a push for diversification sure does suggest the opposite is true, and you can’t both say your voice is the only one powerful enough to matter AND say the rest of us have the power to drown you out.

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It’s funny how certain authors tend to have common elements across very different works of fiction. For instance, one of my favorite authors in FOUR different novels created situations where human beings encountered non-humans and were exposed, non-consensually, to something that bonded them to the non-humans in a permanent, life-altering way, for some kind of mating-related purpose. She did it four different ways but it was all kind of eerie when I realized how often she liked to write characters getting trapped and transformed in these situations. (And I’m not saying it was a bad thing. I just wondered if the author knew it was a thing she was doing.) The example used here is not actually someone I know, incidentally. Authors, what weird little things do a bunch of your stories share?

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Maybe I just like abuse? I don’t know. It kinda feels like an adventure! Don’t hurt me.

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This isn’t the same thing as the ones where I read old work and cringe. It’s reading an old piece that got professional recognition, one of the first I had that collected NON-rejections, supposedly one of my best that still never made it. And yet. . . .

I look at it and think, yeah, is this actually good at all? Am I just more jaded and critical now but the work remains decent? Or was it always kinda meh and I didn’t know it?

Submitting it despite misgivings seems like a fun way to get my ass handed to me by people who will be happy to say if it sucks. 🙂

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Ya know, there aren’t that many hard and fast rules in the writing world, but here are a couple you can take to the bank:

1. If you’re trying to fake familiarity with your market, it will show.
2. Writers read.

Marketing isn’t easy, and figuring out how to sell your work isn’t the same skill as writing your work. But don’t turn your nose up at becoming familiar with the actual market of what you write. If you’re out here comparing yourself to authors that are nothing like you; or you’re trying to sell romance without knowing what the agents’ and editors’ preferences on heat levels and happy endings are; or you call your work high concept, upmarket, literary, or magical realism without knowing what those things ARE just because you think they sound cool; all you’ll accomplish is showing professionals that you didn’t do your homework or disappoint readers who were misled by you just not taking the time to understand what the heck you just wrote.

There’s no shame in asking for help figuring out how to describe your stuff, but misrepresenting your genre or age category is like if you paid for tile flooring and the contractor installed linoleum and couldn’t figure out why you weren’t satisfied. As a writer, you should be one of the first people to understand that words mean things! And really understanding your genre goes far beyond just figuring out what to call it.

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Ya know, I’m happy to get paid for something I loved doing, but sometimes the opposite arrangement makes me way less interested in doing it. I’ve been an author who actually sells work for quite a while now and while I love carefully crafting publishable, relevant stuff, I NEED to have personal projects where I’m not worrying about whether they’re marketable. My two webcomics are in that category, and I don’t want that to change. I’m awfully tired of people constantly wanting everything turned into a side hustle.

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Yeah. Most of us kinda always feel like it’s not quite done, that we can’t pull the trigger on that e-mail until we’re SURE it’s ready, that it might need another couple tweaks first. And even after it’s out under consideration, or under contract, or even PUBLISHED, we sometimes still feel like we should make changes, submit a new edition, update it, make changes, whatever.

There is a point where you really just have to decide it’s okay to be unsure of the project’s doneness and still submit it. If it’s for consideration, you’ll still have time for the professionals to suggest changes anyway–and while I’m a firm believer in “please don’t start submitting stuff professionally if you’re not actually done working on it,” it’s normal to do a lot of thinking about a project when it’s going places and you have some more improvements to make.

Just don’t let your project languish in the world of Never Quite Done or it’ll never get to what comes after this: the part where it’s out there, imperfect, and there’s nothing you can do about it. FUN!