Subject: [FFML] Re: [Fanfic] [Ranma] [Alternate] Death And Rebirth
From: Gary Kleppe
Date: 12/6/2000, 9:51 PM
To: "Fox The Wanderer" <fox1@colla.com>
CC: <ffml@fanfic.com>

"Fox The Wanderer" <fox1@colla.com> wrote:



Disclaimer : Here boy. Whistle. Disclaimer come here.



First suggestion: Delete this thing and credit Takahashi. You'll have

infinite opportunity to write funny scenes in your fanfics to impress us

with your wit. The disclaimer is the place to give credit where credit

is due to the person whose characters you're using.



As for your story... first, a couple of points on the mechanics:



* Paragraphs are your friend. Organizing your narration into paragraphs

will help people follow it better.



* Don't capitalize words just because you think they're important. Other

than the beginning of a sentence, only proper names should be

capitalized. Temple Of Immortality is fine, for example, but "demon"

doesn't get capitalized unless it's the name of a specific person or

thing. It's *a* demon, it's not *named* demon.



Now, as to the story itself, it needs, well... detail. Slow down. You

can't just say X happened, Y happened, and so on and expect the reader

to be convinced. You need to show us *how* X happened, *how* Y happened,

how one event follows from another. This goes to almost ridiculous

extremes in your ending. Oh, by the way, they lived for millions of

years and founded a whole new universe and hmmm... I wonder what's for

dinner tonight?



This is especially a problem when you try to tell us things that

contradict what we know from the manga. Akane as a lesbian, Kasumi

throwing a shishi hokodan, Ranma in love with Kasumi and vice-versa --

you're asking us to believe all these things but nothing in your story

convinces us that they're true or even plausible, given what we already

know about the characters from Takahashi.



Along the same lines, you need to show conflict. Conflict is,

ultimately, what makes any story interesting. Conflict means that

there's more than one possible ending, and that there are significant

forces (of some sort or other) trying to push the story toward each of

the endings. When an author railroads his story toward the ending that

he wants to see -- as you quite obviously do here -- there's no

conflict, and hence in a very real sense, no story.



Hope this gives you something to think about. Keep writing... but keep

working on making your writing better.





Gary Kleppe

http://www.akane.org/gary/comics.html





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