literature

How to write stories my way

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When you make a story, you need to know the beginning and the ending. Then, once you have that concept, you start working on the little details. Sounds easy on words but it isn't. Since this is fanfiction, half of your research and creative work has already been done by the original author.

1.) Asking the right questions.
- What is your story about?

When you start writing a story, you always have some sort of concept. For example a beautiful princess from far far away ends up in foreign lands and is attacked by some bandits. She is rescued by the main protagonist and she begs him to help her go home. I'm not even talking about the story being a romance story, an action story or an adventure one or so on. It can even be a horror story. You know how it ends. The protagonist takes the princess back to her home country and he receives a hefty reward. From then on you have a lot of work. The simplest thing is to figure out what you want to shine through the story.

WHAT kind of person is your protagonist? Let's say it's Kakashi. He is quite aloof, distant and friendly/polite but still distant. He is a ninja prodigy and likes to read **, regardless of social norms and people's reactions. He is an extremely powerful and resourceful ninja and he uses a vast array of techniques. His aloofness can be quite aggravating and I'd imagine the princess (let's say her name is Ren :) ) would probably be horrified by his proactive perverseness. While he is all these things, he also has no idea from where the princess comes from. Let's say she comes from a country outside of the Elemental Continent or something like that. Furthermore they don't speak the same language( though that's for you to decide, after all its just a tool to create intrigue in the story). You can see just how from Kakashi's character you create the elements from your story.

WHAT is the Princess' character? The princess was raised as a future ruler or a second born child to the royal court. Just the fact you say princess brings along a whole array of detail to your character's background. Royalty have impecable behavior most of the time and even the kind ones have an air of arrogance and spoilness about them, as they have been raised in the best possible way, away from human misery and poorness. They're also well-educated, and know a lot about looking pretty, high and mighty. Let's say Princess Ren is the heiress to her father's throne and it is highly imperative to go home. From here you can choose how they do so. Kakashi can go with her straight away, though, knowing him, he would be more inclined to take her to Konoha first and then settle things with the Hokage (Either Sarutobi or Tsunade, depending on WHEN you want to write this story or if you intend to make it completely AU, but I'll tell you all about it in detail later). From then on you decide how they settle things. Konoha is a ninja village and the most possible thing is for the Hokage to settle the manner as a mission with delayed payment and stuff. You can also make the story about how the princess stays in Konoha through out the Manga's events, like the chuunin exam, Orochimaru's invasion and so on. But you can also send Kakashi with princess Ren all the way back to her distant country. The possibilities are endless. But the most important thing is to stick to the simple concept and then 'locally'work on the detail as much as you dare. Sometimes the detail can be so much that you forget about what exactly you've been working on. Then you have to re-read your old chapters and notes and that takes time.

Now that we figured out what the story is about, we need to figure out WHEN the story happened. So, the next question I will cover will be:

- WHEN does the story take place?

As you know very well, the Naruto Universe is on a fictional feudal world where we have modern technology, elements of the fantastical and old traditions mixed together. We have a lot of Eastern culture, as I can guarantee you that I have seen elements not just from Japan, but also from other Asian countries, the most obvious one being the Chinese Ten-Ten. That Asian/Eastern world is concentrated on the Elemental Countries. The movies have also shown us that we have a Renaissance level culture going on off the Elemental Countries, which you can also make it work pleasantly for your story (or the story I'm making especially for this tutorial). So, we know several eras in the Naruto Universe. There might be more, which you can make, but the notable historical Eras were the Sage of the Six Paths era,some 600 years prior the cannon storyline. The next one is some 80 to 100 years ago, when the first ninja villages were created. You can examine the manga further to take your own notes on specific details for those Eras. For example the ninja in the Sage era were like our own ninja, but it was the Sage who had created the first jutsu and the rest I bet you know. Basically, you need to know what you are working with and you need to have at least a vague idea of real life equivalents of those time periods in order to make a deliciously believable and consistent story. As for the modern day Narutoverse, all I can tell you is that they do not have guns, but they do have weird giant kunai and shuriken contraptions for mass destruction, which are extremely ridiculous. They also have 8-bit computers, which was personally explained by Kihimoto.

Now that you are armed with the basic knowledge for your probable timeline, you can work on it with what you know from our own, real, world. Since we're doing Kakashi and we want to stick to cannon timeline (out of convenience), we will go with the Time-skip period between vanilla Naruto and Shippuuden. We don't know much about what happened then, but we know that Akatsuki start attacking the jinchuuriki around the beginning of Shippuuden. That means they only do random missions during Time-Skip in order to raise funds for the organisations. You can figure out for yourself whether you can use the Akatsuki as your main antagonists, or for you can even use time itself as the main antagonist. For example the princess had gone with a convoy in search of a cure for her poisoned father or things like that. You can also create your own antagonist, but mind you that is a lot harder than a making a protagonist. The basic rule is to make the protagonist and main antagonist equally powerful, or at least matched in strength. People tend to make their protagonists like some sort of power behemoths which kills the story in the seed.

Anyways, I am STILL trying to keep this simple, so here is the next question:

- WHERE does the story take place?

I cannot stress enough the importance of using an honest to god map when figuring out where places are. There are tons of pictures about Narutoverse geography. SECOND: use Narutopedia to research basic information about the different countries. There is always something about their flora and fauna, some background history and so on. You can use that information and explore those areas through the eyes of the characters. Or your own view, depending on how you want to write and on your writing style in general.

-WHO is your story about? WHO are the characters?

So I spoke about the characters a bit in the WHAT section. It was essencial to add that there, since it is your character's decisions which create the story. For example, if Princess Ren was a scaredy-cat she would've never left her kingdome in search for a cure herself and therefore Kakashi would've never met her and there would be no story whatsoever. The WHO question is what runs your story. That and your dedication to writing.

------------------------------TO BE CONTINUED-----------------------------
So, I decided to help a person to whom I am a beta-reader from FFnet and I wrote this humongous personal message with this. Basically it's how I write stories and I thought that I could upload this tutorial here as well.

The tutorial applies for both original and fan fiction and I think it's a good one, considering I am adding an example story to go with it as well.
© 2011 - 2024 Fiarrella
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