Before Writing
1. Before writing from scratch make a rough
story outline: Many
writers don’t like to plan because they think it’s a waste of time, but I personally
do it because it really ensures the story has a strong structure. It also
ensures no great ideas get forgotten. Believe me when I say ideas can just
randomly pop into your head and disappear just as quickly within a few hours. So,
whenever an idea pops into my head I just jot it down quickly before I forget.
Every story and chapter follow the basic structure of introduction, body and conclusion.
The introduction sets up the story, the body is where the action of the story
happens and the conclusion is where the story wraps up or resolves the conflict.
Try to classify your bullet point ideas under these categories to flesh out a
nice structure and make sure your ideas flow together. I will attach an
example of my very first story ‘it’s just a Bug’ rough plan as an example
2. Create a list of characters
including names, gender, and ages: Remember your characters are what carry the stories.
Their interactions and behaviours with the surrounding environment are the main
bulk of the story. What I tend to do is write their name, age and gender along
with a short and sweet description of their personality and identity. I will
give a more detailed outlook on how to create great character development and a
great character in a later section
3. Create an intriguing title: Remember 90% of the time, when a
reader comes across a title, the very first thing that will catch his or her eye
is the title. Try to have a short to a medium-length title that sells the
general idea and the concept of the story without giving too much away but
leaves them with a catchy memorable title. For example, ‘It’s just a bug’ gives
the impression that the giantess interactions in this story will involve unaware
crushing and tragedy of tinies similar to how most girls squish bugs in real
life.
4. Get a rough estimate of how long the
story is going to be: Is it going to be a single one-shot short story with no chapters or a
longer story with several chapters?
5. Always use an anonymous pen name
when posting a story: especially if you are writing adult-orientated, sexually explicit, or offensive
material: Poison pens touched on this as well. While it is fun,
entertaining and sometimes arousing to write adult material some people, especially
serious type professional boomers could find it offensive. You can never know
who can be reading your story: your friends, your mother, your sister, your
teacher, or your boss! This particularly applies to me because I have a very unique
name that no one else has. Even my first name is very unique, I have never met
a single person in my entire life who has the same name as me so if I post with
my first name all my friends, family and people I know in my life will immediately
know it’s me. That is why I took the penname LittleBigPlanet. Also is quite exciting
and exhilarating to take up an anonymous identity online 😂
While writing Your First Draft
6.
Describing the scene and setting of the environment: You should start any story by
setting up the general environment and describing where it takes place. The environment
of a story has a big impact on a character’s personality traits and behaviours so
you should try to make the audience understand why the characters are the way
they are by the upbringing they have had. Setting up the scene also gives clues
to the audience about what kind of a story it is going to be. This leads me to my next point
7. Do Not over-describe: I sound a bit hypocritical because I
do it sometimes myself, but you don’t need to describe every single detail. Remember
your audience has an imagination of their own who like to envision the story in
their own head. Give them that little bit of freedom to have their own
interpretation. For example, when describing a house there is no need to describe
the types of bricks used or the shape of the house because everyone knows what
a basic house looks like. If you describe too much it can be tedious and overbearing
for the audience and on top of that your word count balloons.
8. Always paragraph: It is very imitating and unappealing
for a reader to see a giant block of text and really demotivates readers because
it is really hard to follow. Each specific giantess and tiny character interaction
should have a separate paragraph as well as a specific environmental setting
description as well as feature description. Each dialogue line should be a new
line for each different character, so it is easy to follow the conversation
Once the first Draft is finished
9. Always proofread at least once
before submitting: I
know proofreading can be a pain in the ass, especially if your chapter or story
is quite long. But there is nothing more unappealing to the reader than poor grammar,
missing words, pronouns, and prepositions as well as spelling errors. I am not
a grammar Nazi, but if it is quite frequent it can ruin the flow of the story.
I tend to use the read-aloud function on Microsoft word to catch out any poorly
structured sentences, missing words and additional descriptions or dialogue to
polish it up. Because I am a student, I also use Grammarly which is super
helpful however just the two points should be enough
10. Save your story on your hard drive, DO NOT DELETE
IT EVER: You can
never know what will happen, maybe the site could go down or some uptight
moderator could force you to delete it. That is why I save all my stories on my
hard drive, so I have a backup to post somewhere else if that happens
11. The summary: The summary is just like the blurb
of a book and is very similar to the title and is what catches the audience’s eye.
Always make sure to explain the main concept and premise of the story without giving
away any spoilers. But always leave it on sort of a cliff-hanger to entice the
audience into what happens next. For example, for the story ‘It’s just a bug’ I
used the following summary:
A
physics student and her boyfriend are working on a shrink ray for an upcoming
science competition. However, when an accident happens that causes her
boyfriend to be shrunk to a few millimetres tall, she rushes out to gather
equipment and information to reverse the process
Unfortunately,
her dim-witted and nosy younger sister arrives home and begins snooping around
her room.
And she
doesn't like bugs.................
See how I
didn’t spoil the story but highlighted the key character traits and concepts of
the story. The audience is thinking: What happened to that guy? How small did
he get? How does the stupid little sister treat bugs? It is questions like that
that will entice the audience into reading the story
First Perspective, Second Perspective and Third Perspective
When
writing a story, it is important to consider the perspective you will be
writing from which essentially is what point of view the story is told by.
12. First Perspective (Also known as POV):
This perspective is
the most common one used for younger writers and relies on a single character’s
point of view which is almost always the protagonist or one of the major characters.
Pronouns such as “I”, ‘Me’ and ‘Myself’ are often used. When I was a younger
kid I loved using the first perspective since I liked to envision myself as the
character to whom the action was happening and in situations the character
found themselves in. (Ironically, I am writing this guide in first person and
second person 😂). The main problem I discovered
as I got older is that the first perspective is quite limited. Remember a first-person
narrator can become quite unreliable. Since the story is being told from their perspective
only, so their biases, personality and opinions could skew how the story can be
viewed. Another issue is that since the first-person narrator is an active participating
character in the story, they can’t describe what they did not witness or is not
aware of. Limitations like this eventually made me switch to the third person
later on as the preferred method. However, there is nothing wrong with using the
first person as long as you think about what you want your audience to experience.
Personally, I would recommend the first person for shorter stories but not
longer ones
13. Second Perspective (Hardest one to
master): This is
the most difficult one to master. Jacksmith’s entire A Little Blackmail series
(One of my favourites) with the exception of A Little Blackmail 4: Big Sister
Diaries is written in the second person. The Choose Your Own Adventure books
are also written in the second person. The perspective aims to bring the reader
(whomever he or she might be) into the story by trying to have the story told
through the reader’s perspective. The reader could be anyone with different opinions
and perspectives which is why the second person is so hard to write since you
are trying to directly engage the audience. Pronouns such as ‘you’, ‘your’, and
‘yourself’ are used frequently. If it is not used correctly however the flow of
the story can become really awkward. This is why beginner writers should not use
the second person until they have mastered the other two. I personally have not
used the second person yet however I might in the future
14. Third person (most common for longer
stories): If you are going to write a longer story like I am with ‘Antopia:
The Greatest Story Never Told’ with multiple different chapters it is highly recommended
you used the third person. The third person is essentially a perspective where
the perspective is being told by an external outsider who does not participate
in the story in any way but instead watches it from and describes it from afar.
There are two types of third-person: third-person objective and third-person omniscient.
The third-person objective is limited as it is only able to describe the physical
actions and events of the story without being able to know the motivations or thoughts.
It is kind of like a sports commentator who is able to describe the action. Third-person
omniscient on the other hand (the favourite one I use) can describe a lot more,
being able to describe the main character’s thoughts, feelings, backstories, and
motivations and can be used for many characters. Essentially think of this as a
sky god watching from above who is able to peer into his creations’ heads. Third-person
omniscient is my favourite since it provides so many different story perspectives
and I have very few limitations on how to tell the story, after all, the characters
are my creations, and I am their literal god 😏. When
writing third person pronouns such as ‘they’, ‘he’ ‘she’ ‘him’ and ‘her’ are
used.
15. Multiple Perspectives: This is essentially an extension of
the first-person perspective but instead of using just one character protagonist,
they use several. This is common for longer stories that want their reader to
experience the story as the characters themselves but don’t want to be limited
to just one character’s POV. Some novel authors such as Rick Riordan have done
this with his Kane Chronicles series. Personally, I have never done this but
would like to experiment with it in the future
Other story elements to Consider
16. Difference between erotica and pornography:
Poison Pens also touched
on this as well, but I would like to expand on this as well. Contrary to
popular belief (including my friends), erotica and pornography are not the same
things. Pornography is used primarily for sexual gratification and arousal and
nothing else. There is little character development or coherent storyline. The
main body of the text focuses on sexual interaction and nothing else, tending
to be purely explicitly sexual and portrayed. Erotica while having sexual themes
does have a coherent storyline with character development. It can also serve as
a standalone purely entertainment story while being sexually arousing to the ones
who choose to use it that way.
17. Unintentional erotica and Intentional
erotica: The truth
is that anyone can be sexually aroused by anything, even the most innocent of
things. In fact, that is why I think the real reason Disney cancelled their
animated musical Gigantic (I was really pissed off about that) was that they were
worried about it possibly becoming erotic. In reality, you can’t control if
some of your audience become sexually aroused by non-sexually explicit content.
That’s the reality because people are individuals with different tastes. Intentional
erotica on the other hand contains explicit sexual material because they want their
audience to become aroused and the majority of the audience would be aroused by
it.
18. Character Development: When developing a major character,
especially a protagonist and antagonist, first think of a name, gender and age.
Then introduce key personality traits, family members and friends as well as
the interactions with the world around them. When including a backstory to a character,
make sure it is relevant to the current interactions of the character. For example,
in my Antopia story, Lucy Firewall sucks at maths and is bullied at school so
she uses this bottled-up anger to take it out on the ants. Divya Bandaranayake
on the other hand is an animal-loving vegetarian, a nerd with a single father and
very few friends which explains why she hangs out with Lucy a lot of the time
and tutors her. Her animal-loving nature and religious Buddhism also explains
why she is so sweet and gentle with the ants. Her best friend being the polar
opposite also creates a very interesting character conflict of personalities.
You see my friends using past character traits and backstories really helps
sells and explain the present-day interactions.
19. Character Description: Character description is very similar
to setting description. Be careful not to over-describe and rather describe
while they are doing something or engaging in something rather than describing
them upfront. What I like to do is pick out a few traits and focus on them and
let the audience use their imagination to envision the rest. For example, I
focus on Lucy Firewall’s ginger-red hair and Divya Bandaranayake’s Sri Lankan Sinhalese
ethnicity. Some traits can become important, such as Divya’s ethnicity, since
it plays a pivotal role in her interactions
20. Age of the characters: The age of the characters plays a big role in deciding the behaviour and
personality of the character. Have that character behave appropriately to their
age. For example, a 7-year-old Lucy Firewall in my Antopia story would be
playing with dolls while a 12-year-old Lucy Firewall would behave quite
differently and be more mature and stop playing with toys and focus on more teen-oriented
activities such as pop music or fashion. I have seen some authors make this
mistake in the past. No 12-year-old girl is playing with barbie dolls and talks
at the same vocabulary level as an 8-year-old.
21. Underage characters (Under 16): This is one of the most controversial
things to write about. Many authors (including myself have gotten backlash in
the past). What I classify as underage characters are characters under the age
of consent. Here’s my principle: If you don’t make anything explicitly
sexual with underage characters it’s completely fine. Explicitly sexual
refers to sexual intercourse, the character becoming sexually aroused and
nudity. Young teens and children are not mature enough to participate in anything
explicitly sexual, so this is primarily why I don’t have them engaging in that
activity. The reason why I sometimes write about underage characters is that it’s
interesting to see a young person in a position of unlimited power when they
are normally mostly powerless against the world around them (A Little Bit of Everything
explains this the best). There are some people who just can’t understand that
for some reason and that’s their problem. Also, there are books such as Lolita and
the 120 days of Sodom that are considered literature art and have sexually explicit
content of minors in them and I bet some people get aroused by that. This ties into
my philosophy of you can’t control what content an individual will get aroused by.
As long as you don’t make anything explicitly sexual since 90% of the audience will
be when into stuff like that, you should be fine. Remember the younger the character
is the more limitations you will have.
22. Who is the story for? This ties into ratings and adult-orientated
material. You need to think about what is considered adult-oriented and it’s
not just sexually explicit material. It’s graphic violence, blood and gore, profanity
and mature, pop culture and political themes a younger audience would probably
not understand. You need to think about the average age of your audience. For
me, since I am a young lad, most of my characters tend to be between 15 and 24
since that is the age group I associate with the most and understand the most. The
ratings on Giantessworld use the American Motion Picture Association film
rating system which, to be honest, I am not familiar with. That is why I use
the Australian system and try my best to convert to the American one.
23. Be careful of your tense: Sometimes I have made this mistake;
I go into the past tense for one paragraph and then accidentally switch to the
present tense in another paragraph. When a reader reads this, it can seem weird
and awkward. Always try to keep it in the same tense.
Final Notes:
24. If you see a story that is of high quality,
and you really enjoyed it don’t hesitate to leave a review. Even if it’s just a
sentence a few words or a rating, I will tell as a writer which puts in a lot of
effort, nothing makes me happier than to see a person having an opinion of my story.
It will really make their day
25. Brainstorming using music: Sometimes I like gently listening to
Confederate civil war songs while brainstorming ideas and I know some other authors
like to listen to different types of music as well. It isn’t for everyone but
if it helps you get the creative juices flowing go for it.
26. Always respond to your reviewers
unless it’s spam or trolls: Your audience is why your story is being written in the first place. A
person reviewing means they have taken the time of day to judge and voice their
opinion on your story. It’s just a bit of common courtesy that I always try to
do……eventually
Happy
Writing!