On Wed, 8 Oct 1997, Andrew Huang wrote:

	Three major "good writing" types.

I'll add a fourth.
 

  1. The Epic Weaver. The writer manages to draw together vast plots and
many diverse characters into one story, without losing sight of detail
and the individual storylines and people within the larger picture.

[Snip various stuff]

  Example: John Biles. The man's a genius for epics: Sailor Moon Z,
Dance of Shiva, even Lemon Sherbert. Large, grand stories which manage
to mesh seemingly unrelated plot points into one complete story.

I love writing epics.  I can't stop myself.  This drives my co-authors
crazy in my joint projects as my episodes tend to include several plots
that don't directly connect, but will connect in the longer term.  So then
I get forced to trash all but one of them ^_-
 
A fourth type is the Character Author, in which getting inside the mind of
the characters is the important thing.  The plot may be flimsy, but this
type of author is very good at conveying the whole person of his/her/its
characters, from dialogue to mannerisms, to personality.  A good character
study in the fanfic universe takes some colorless character and adds new
dimension to them, explaining why they are the way they are, or expanding
on their persona as given in the series.  My story 'Monster' is an example
of this.  I try to do a lot of 'character' work in my stories, though one
of my biggest weakness as an author is an aspect of this:  dialogue.  I
tend to write everyone as if they all had a giant vocabulary and were
versed in a variety of literature, science, RPGS, fantasy novels, history,
etc.  My Ranma ACTS like Ranma, but he talks like me.  I'm working on it,
but it's still a major weakness of mine.


John Walter Biles :  MA-History, Ph.D Wannabe at U. Kansas         
ranma@falcon.cc.ukans.edu       
rhea@tass.org              http://www.tass.org/~rhea/falcon.html
rhea@maison-otaku.net      http://www.maison-otaku.net/~rhea/

New CS Lewis Quote :)
"This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn.  We must play.
but our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest
kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each
other seriously--no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.  And out
charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in
spite of which we love the sinner--no mere tolerance or indulgence which
parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment."
--The Weight of Glory