Stratagemini,
I think you have the right idea by having Genma tell things from his
perspective and having him lie to us on a regular basis. We expect Genma to
be as self-serving about it as he can while relating his version of the
story to us. Your big challenge here is to tell us all a very familiar story
while telling it to us in way we find entertaining. That's an awfully tall
order.
Fortunately, you have a lot of wiggle room. One, of course is Genma's
penchant to be self-serving. The other is that he was not there for
everything that happened between volumes 1 through 8, so he would be
relating the story to us based on second or third hand information. Further,
Genma is exceedingly proud of Ranma. After all, Ranma is Genma's great work
of art. We should not be astonished, much less distraught then, if Genma
tells a story that departs significantly from the story Takahashi-sensei
told us. It would be reasonable of us to expect Genma to embellish any given
part of the story that will make Ranma, or Genma himself seem a bit...er...
larger than life, shall we say? He will want to brag on his boy and on his
own abilities as a trainer even as he tells what a sorry-assed father he has
been.
If you are going to pull this off, you will have to take full advantage of
these circumstances. Just telling us what Takahashi has already related to
us in the Manga will fail to entertain your audience.
I won't trouble you very much with the grammatical flaws in this piece. That
will come with practice and being nagged by FFML membership. What I am going
to focus on is where I think you have come up short in telling the tale, in
other words, where I think you can improve your storytelling. This is
necessarily a matter of judgment and what you will be reading is my judgment
calls. You or any number of other people may not agree with every one of my
assessments. That's okay. This is your story and you are the one who must
tell it. You should invite others to express their opinions on this and by
all means, listen to those who disagree with me very closely. I lay no claim
to omniscience. Also, please do bear in mind that I am doing my best to help
out. It is not my intention to hurt your feelings or make you look bad in
front of the forum. I know how it feels to be shot at, because I drawn more
than a little criticism on the FFML. As painful as that was, I am a better
writer for it. I hope your experience turns out the same.
Allow me to offer you one cautionary note about Genma and Nodoka. Too many
fanfic authors are inclined to demonize Genma while rendering Nodoka as some
kind of motherly angel. I invite your attention to the canon. It is not
Genma who is so overly concerned with Ranma's manliness per se. That happens
to be Nodoka's priority, not Genma's. The only reason Genma worries about it
so much is because of the deal he made with her before he took Ranma on
their ten year long Odyssey in the Martial Arts. Check out the latter part
of the series available on the Ranma1/2 Project and you'll see what I mean.
Nodoka is a wee bit further out of plumb than is Genma.
Regards,
Don Granberry.
A first person story about the training trip he took
[The first person POV (Point of View) is well suited for this particular
yarn, but be advised that it is one of the most difficult of the POV's to
use. It is full of traps that are difficult to avoid, even for a writer that
has managed to complete a few stories. You should switch to another POV at
every opportunity. That is not as difficult as it may sound. I'll flag the
spots where I think it would improve the story by changing POV.]
Genma's View
Chapter 1
By Evil Stratagemini
I am not a crook, wait... wrong speech...
I do not own Ranma 1/2, Even if I did, would you believe me if I said so?
I am not making this for money, after all who would pay for a fanfic?
And finally don't sue me, I have no money, and most of my stuff is worthless
to sane people.
With all that out of the way let's proceed to the Fanfic!
[Concerning disclaimers: This sort of thing was kind of cute the first time
I read it. Now it is not the least bit funny and in truth, it is rather rude
to Takahashi-san. I recommend that you either insert a real disclaimer or
refrain from using one altogether.]
*****
My name is Genma Saotome, and I am a failure as a father.
I wasn't always this miserable drunken wretch you see before you. I
wasn't always pathetic. Let me tell you about when my son was first born. My
wife Nodoka was nine months pregnant, and her water had just broken. We
rushed to the hospital in our neighbor's car (not having one of our own), and
I was scared out of my wits. I mean my beautiful wife of five years was in
pain, she was gasping and her face was red, I had no idea what to do.
We got to Tokyo General okay, and the doctor's rushed her to the
maternity ward. For 7 hours she was in horrendous pain and it terrified me to
no end. I had never had a child before and neither had she, but I knew 7
hours was a long delivery time. When the clock struck 10:50 Ranma was born,
my first glimpse of him was a bloody blue infant, something that looked very
little like the child my wife and I would grow to love, but the nurse dried
him off and wrapped him in a blanket and when he finally gained some color in
his skin handed him to my wife. The look in her eyes made it all worthwhile.
As the doctor examined my hand (Nodoka had crushed it in delivery) I leaned
in to kiss my wife and son. Her smile was radiant as she beamed at the young
child she held in her arms, and when the doctor asked her what his name would
be, she replied "Ranma, Saotome Ranma, after his father." That was one of the
happiest days in my life, as I stood there smiling at my wife and son, I
promised myself that he would succeed where I failed, that his life would be
better than the life my father gave me. And that's where things all started
to go horribly wrong.
[You are trying to jam ten pounds of story into five pounds worth of text
here. Put another way, you are using too few words to tell too much story.
It is better to write too much during the drafting of story. After all,
creation is difficult. Everyone is a born critic so editing is easier than
creating the story. Create first, then edit. Do NOT try to do both at one
and the same time. Do NOT worry about length. Most beginners on FFML tend to
write too little rather than too much.
Avoid the use of parenthesis in fiction. This is not a hard and fast rule,
but they do tend to jar the reader out of the story, spoiling the mood.
Separate dialogue from narrative. Narrative almost always belongs in a
paragraph of its own. Example:
...The look in her eyes made it all worthwhile. While the doctor examined my
hand, Nodoka crushed it during the last few moments of delivery,I leaned in
to kiss my wife and son. Her smile was radiant as she beamed at the child
she held in her arms.
When the doctor asked her what his name would be, Nodoka replied, "Ranma.
Saotome Ranma, after his father."
That was one of the...]
*****
When Ranma was four I decided to train him in the Art, to make him the
martial artist that I never was. It worked for a year, but then his mother
started taking more of an interest. She started interfering with Ranma's
training, stopping him from achieving his true potential. I was a fool, I
wanted the best for my son, and I wanted him to be the best. I still regret
my actions to this day; they stole ten years with my wife from me and a
loving mother from my son. But I was a fool then, and I wrote up that damned
Seppuku contract, a suicide pact for Kami's sake! I gave it to my son, my
only son, and with the ink he finger painted all over it. We left that night,
without a word to my wife leaving nothing but that damned contract to replace
us, and causing no end of troubles for my son.
[Right here is where you had a chance to tell us something new and
different, but didn't. How, exactly, did Nodoka interfere. Did she really
interfere with Ranma's training? Remember, Nodoka is the one who demands
that Ranma becone a "Man Among Men". If you examine the canon closely, you
have to wonder about the real reasons for Genma's departure from wife and
home. There definitely seems to be more to the matter than what meets the
eye. Read the episode where Ryuu Kumon shows up and reveals himself to
Nodoka as her long-lost son, Ranma. It is very informative. I bring all this
up, because this is one of those places where you have a lot of room in
which to play and you definitely need to use that room if you are going to
meet the challeng you have undertaken.]
*****
I had the best of intentions, I never intended to be gone for ten years,
but I'm a perfectionist with regards to my son, he was never good enough,
never "Manly" enough. So for ten years we trained. Ten years straight you
ask? No. I had my son go to school, using what money I could earn doing what
odd jobs I could to get him into a good private school, no public school was
good enough for my boy.
[Here you DID use some of that room I've been going on about, but once
again, you try to jam too much story into too few words. If you are going to
write, then go ahead and write! Don't take half-steps with it. I would have
expected Genma to brag on how quickly the boy picked up the basics of The
Art, okay? So here is an opportunity to tell us some things that Takahashi
didn't tell us and you have a chance to make it funny and outlandish at the
same time.
Further, this was also an opportunity to shift the POV from the first person
to the third person or even the dreadful "Omniscient observer's POV. I
strongly recommend against the latter. Set the POV up early in the start of
a scene and set it up with one of the characters whenever possible. In this
case, you would want to use a character other than that of Genma. Of course,
you would have to write a lot more story to do this, but you need to do that
anyway.
Grammatical issues:
This is a comma splice followed by a comma splice.
I had the best of intentions, I never intended to be gone for ten years,
but I'm a perfectionist with regards to my son, he was never good enough,
never "Manly" enough.
You used commas where you should have used periods and capital letters. To
wit:
I had the best of intentions. I never intended to be gone for ten years, but
I am a perfectionist with regards to my son. He was never good enough--never
"manly" enough.
You can, if you wish, use a semi-colon to splice two complete sentences
together, but I have a rule about that which has held up quite well in
practice. If a sentence needs a semi-colon, it is too long or it is too
complex or it is both and it therefore needs to be re-written. Use periods
until you have polished your skills a bit more.]
For one year every thing went smoothly, but then something happened.
Nodoka had somehow gotten wind of where we were staying, and was on the look
out for us searching our neighborhood.
Why was she out looking? Another missed opportunity.
We had to leave. As soon as the month
was through and school let out Ranma and I were off to Kansai. When we
arrived I once again enrolled Ranma in a private school. Every day he we
would be up at dawn and practicing, then he would be off to school for the
day and I would go to my work as a construction worker. It was during this
job that I developed the Yama-sen-ken.
When Ranma came home from school we would head out to the park. I would
train, perfecting my new school of the Thousand Mountain Fist and Ranma, well
[We need a comma after the word "well". We almost always need a comma after
the word "well", unless it is being used in the sense of a water well or oil
well, or some other well out of which one draws something.]
he got into trouble.
[Techno-grump: It is Yama (Mountain) Sen (Thousand) Ken (Fist). Properly
translated then, it should read Mountain-thousand-fist, which is a long noun
phrase. The Japanese use them a lot. Also be advised that whenever you see
the work "ken" used, it very often entails more than simply "fist". In the
real martial arts, a technique with a name including the ten-stroke kanji
for fist almost always means that the technique is arcane, esoteric and
employs the use of one's ki.]
How you ask? Well I'll tell you. There was a Yattai that
was run by an old man and his daughter that usually set up in this park, the
daughter's name was Ukyou Kounji, the man's was Ichiro Kounji. The whole
thing was started with Ranma snatching an Okonomiyaki fresh off the grill, I
guess he was hungry or something, he would have gotten away cleanly and that
would have been the end of it, if not for Ukyou.
[Comma after "well". Do NOT capitalize "yattai". It is a noun, not a proper
name.]
[Missed an opportunity to have Genma brag and embellish. Also missed an
opportunity to shift POV. Having Genma lay this mess off on Ranma is pretty
much in character for Genma, but I think you could do a little better if put
your imagination to it.]
You see Ukyou was practicing her family style of martial arts Okonomiyaki
just a few feet from Ranma when he stole the food, and she attacked him,
hoping to use her training to stop the thief. Once more this would have been
the end of it, if not for Ranma's winning so spectacularly. He defeated Ukyou
with no hands all without dropping his food. Not that impressive you say?
Humph! I'll have you know that my boy was doing flip kicks and 4 foot jumps
in that fight, The Saotome Ryu is an aerial after all. Well Ichiro was so
impressed with my son that he gave him the Okonomiyaki free of charge, and
thus began a daily ritual. Every day Ranma and I would go to the park, and
every day he would slip away to commit more thievery against the Kounji's.
Everyday Ukyou would catch him, and every day Ranma would defeat her.
Sometimes they got into little adventures like that gambling king fiasco, and
sometimes they just talked.
[Again, too much story in too few words! I have, just for giggles,
"novelised" one or two of these stories from the Ranma 1/2 Manga. I can tell
you right now that you expect to write about ten-thousand words per part in
order to get it right. I would leave out the bit about the Gambler King.
There is no indication that I can immediately recall to suggest that Genma
knew about the incident prior to the Gambler King's arrival in Nerima. The
same would go for the problem with the Ten Year Old Secret Sauce fiasco.
Worse, this merely adds to your already difficult workload.
I think you should explore the real reason behind this engagement. Here is
the truly puzzling thing about it. What on earth was going on in
Kuonji-san's mind when he made this deal with Genma? You could play this for
some really great laughs, or give it a great deal of pathos. Either way,
there is a lot of untapped potential here. The canon never makes the matter
clear.]
This went on for nearly a month, until Ukyou approached her father about
an engagement to my boy. Now I don't know why she did it, I don't know why
Ichiro agreed, but the next day, Ichiro told my boy that he wanted to speak
to me. Ranma led him to where I was practicing, and Ichiro approached me
about the engagement. Now I didn't remember the engagement to the Tendo's I
was drunk when I made it, and all that stuff I said about him having prior
arrangements was just so much hot air. When Kounji told me about the dowry
however well, a Yattai is more than a New York hotdog stand; it's a whole
miniature restaurant. You're wondering what happened to the yattai? Well we
had to leave it behind once we went to china a few years later, but it helped
tremendously until then. It was another week until I heard Nodoka was
catching on to us again, we left for Osaka Ranma riding on the yattai and me
pulling it behind me. What's that you ask? What happened to the whole Ukyou
vs. Okonomiyaki question? Never happened, I made it up to avoid another
beating. What you think I like pain?
[Many, many comma splices and unclear phrases. Again, we have Nodoka in
pursuit of Genma and he's running. Why? Most guys like Genma would at least
meet up with their wife long enough to get laid then sneak off. At least a
hint of what must really be going on is in order here.]
*****
In Osaka I made the biggest mistake of my career as a sensei. The
Neko-Ken. When I first came upon the technique it was like a dream come true,
if Ranma learned the Neko-Ken then he would be an unstoppable martial artist,
and we would finally be able to go home, or so I thought. My reasons for
attempting the technique when it clearly would hurt my son? Well that's a
simple answer. When I trained under my master every technique that we learned
we learned through pain, the more painful the training the more effective the
technique. We learned by having the technique used on us, and what better way
of learning a fighting style based on cats then to be attacked by them? Yeah
I know it doesn't make that much sense, but I was more excited than a child
with a new toy and as they say hindsight is always 20/20.
So, you ask, why did I repeat it? Well, as amazing as my son is it at the
martial arts, he doesn't always learn a technique the first time he sees it.
The fear wasn't evident at first and I thought his complaining was just that,
the complaints of a child. I guess I should have read the whole thing, but it
was one mistake, a mistake that gave my son a horrible Ailurophobia true, but
a mistake none the less, I mean it's not as if I threw him to the lions.
The little old lady? Well she was just a nearly blind old lady. Ranma didn
't love her, she was just a warm lap to lie down in, a warm lap that hadn't
thrown him into a pit of starving cats.
[Once again, elaboration is in order. Missed opportunity to shif POV and do
some real writing. This is an almost perfunctory telling of the tale. It is,
in word, boring. Genma is no longer relating his story to the bartender, who
we have no reason to expect to know anything about any of this, and has
begun speaking directly to us the audience. We do know about all of this
stuff so he is offering us excuses. That doesn't work.]
*****
We left Osaka later that week, something about charges of pet napping,
animal cruelty, and child abuse. We headed for Kyoto, and we stayed there
until Ranma was 13. It was there he met Ryouga Hibiki. I didn't know much
about him, in fact I only met him once, but the reason Ranma didn't wait 4
days for him? I knocked him out and dragged him to China. Oh come now do you
really think one fight would have settled matters for that boy? The reason he
was mad in the first place was the fact that my son beat him day after day in
the cafeteria. It was in Kyoto that I met the Kumons. I was busy developing
the Umi-sen-ken, and when I ran across the Kumon dojo, I was in a generous
mood. You see these techniques were built upon attacking the body like you
would a house, and as a result they could be used both as martial arts
techniques and arts of thievery. The crumbling Kumon Dojo struck a chord in
me I guess; I don't really know why I gave them the Yama-sen-ken scroll. But
I did, and I hoped that it would help them more than it did me.
[Kansai includes Kyoto. Pick another town. Once again, Genma is no longer
speaking to a bartender, but to us the audience. I can see where a drunk
might well do this, and if you are going to stick with it, you need to
switch over to the bartender's POV once in a while, or switch over to the
POV of an anonymous third party who tells us how the bartender is reacting
and what have you. Personally, I think you are much better finding a way to
relate the whole story, but a different story from the one Takahashi has
already told us.]
I am going to let up on you past here because the rest of the piece suffers
from the same flaws. Writing in the first person is fraught with dangers and
difficulties because it invites and encourages the writer to do exactly what
you have done in this piece. We get too much narrative and not nearly enough
action or description of scenes. Writing in this POV also encourages the
writer to forgo dialogue, which makes for a deadly-dull piece of prose. You
haven't nearly enough dialogue in this piece to keep it going. Yes, I know!
Punctuating dialogue is a pain in the ass and it will take you a while to
get the hang of it. Take your best shot at it and forum members will help
you clean it up. It is the only way you will ever learn to handle it.
Please do NOT take all these criticisms the wrong way. You are onto a very
neat little project here. You have hit on a writer's gold mine, but you will
need to put in a bit more work before it will pay off.
What? You thought this was going to be easy? It is an art! Weren't you
paying any attention to what Ranma went through for the sake of his art?
What made you think this would be easy?
Here's the secret. It becomes easier with practice. That means you have to
write and put up with curmudgeons like me for a while. In the end, you'll
discover you really are a writer.
See ya,
Don Granberry.
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