# Writing - Read a tip, Post a tip



## LoganGreypaw (May 14, 2018)

Thought this might be useful for the writing subforum; it's a bit like a forum game.

First, read the tip in the post above yours and say something about it. Could just be "useful to know" or something more in-depth, up to you!

Then, post a tip yourself. It could be anything; writing, formatting, but ideally something specific to writing furry fiction and the way fiction tends to work on FA and furry websites.

*So, to start things off:
*
As a writer, you can choose to write original fiction or fanfiction. Both will attract readers, if you do a decent job of it. However, in my experience, original fiction will mainly be read at the time you post it and later by your own watchers, but not many others. Fanfiction can attract fewer readers in the first few days but you'll still see people finding & reading it days/weeks after posting. This is kinda obvious in retrospect, because people are going to still be looking for "Judy Hopps" long after you post, but not necessarily be looking for the abstract tags you may have in original stories.


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## Moogie69 (May 16, 2018)

Absolutely, and in that way I think fanfiction is a great way to build a long-term audience who will then transition to reading your original works. You're providing an initial hook to get people interested in your work before asking them to take a gamble with their time in reading something completely unknown. Great tip!

My tip is going to be about style. You may have read some advice floating around to avoid using the word 'said' as much as possible, expanding your vocabulary and using lots of alternatives instead. Actually, that is quite bad advice! The bigger effort you make to put a different dialog tag to every line, the more the reader is going to pick up on this-- and be annoyed by it. It slows the reader down and runs the risk of you making your characters sound silly. For example, 'he grunted', 'she spat', 'he chuckled'. Have you ever tried to grunt an entire sentence? Or chuckled all the way through one? Because that is what those tags imply. You can easily avoid this trap by sticking to 'said' and putting the action of grunting or chuckling before or after the dialog.

(You can, of course, grunt a single word. Remember, there are always exceptions to the rules!)

While there are many legitimate situations in which you may need to use a different dialog tag, 'said' is all but invisible to the reader and usually the best choice. You may initially feel as though you're over-using it, but this may be an indicator that you aren't varying the cadence of your dialog. So instead of something like this:

"You'll never guess what I found at the shop today," he said.
"What's that?" she said.
"Only the biggest easter egg you've ever laid eyes on!" he said.
"Wow! That thing is huge!" she said.

...which, reads pretty awful, you might try to make it flow better by omitting some tags entirely, or changing their placement:

"You'll never guess what I found at the shop today," he said.
"What's that?"
"Only the biggest easter egg you've ever laid eyes on!"
"Wow!" she said. "That thing is huge!"

It's not a perfect example, but does give you an idea how you can spice up the flow of dialog without using 'said' on every line.


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## LoganGreypaw (May 16, 2018)

That's really good advice *Moogle69*. Dialogue tags are a bit of a _thing_ in that there is some conflicting advice out there. Writing, like most things, goes through "fashions" and fads. Back in the 90s, I'm pretty sure best-seller paperback authors used to employ very varied and exotic dialogue tags on a frequent basis, which rubbed off on a generation of readers. These days, though, the advice to use "said" (and to be economical with your tags) has prevailed, and I think it's for the better.

My tip is remember to *break up your paragraphs*. One problem with writing prose to be read online is you don't have _that_ much control over the formatting, but you _can_ at least put a newline between your paragraphs to space them out.

Having no spacing in your story is a real killer. I find it very hard to read stories that don't at least have the occasional blank line to break up the wall of text.

If you need to add a newline to every one of your paragraphs, you can do this really quickly. Open your story in *Notepad++* and go to search >> replace >> select "extended characters" >> then in the field, search for "\n" and replace it with "\n\n". This will change every single new-line in your story to two lines.


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## DaWaffleWolf (Jun 6, 2018)

So long..
Here’s a short tip. Before hand you must decide if you want the story to be based on comedy and story because from my experience they don’t mix well


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