The Pecman

I think another key point is: don't bore the audience with a long intro. You could eschew the entire intro and just dive in and show the boys in question and not talk about who they are or where they come from. It's OK for you to think about their background as you write the material, but it's not necessarily interesting for the reader. I think the reader can figure out that one of the boys is preternaturally intelligent just from dialogue and the response of the people around him. A crucial rule for film and TV shows is to start at least a third of the way into the scene whenever possible so you avoid all the introductory stuff and just get to the heart of the story. I think this applies well to any kind of storytelling. I get that you want to establish the mood and feel of the setting when the story begins, but I think there's a way to do this with fewer words and just get to the point. I also think there's a hundred cliches that mar a lot of teen romance stories -- the "alarm clock" open, or the "getting dressed and having breakfast" open -- and I think a lot of them can be avoided if you try. One thing that helps is to find a favorite author (published or online) and dissect their work and look at the mechanism of how they tell the story. Once you understand their tricks in terms of structure and character and story, the pieces will fall into place and you should be able to use a lot of those tools with your own work.

Ah, but don't forget: Jake Chambers was killed off several times, and he still survives in many other dimensions. "There are worlds other than these." BTW, here is a shot of actor Tom Taylor, who will be playing Jake Chambers in the upcoming Dark Tower movies:

Maybe that's a new story. Many great works of literature and films and TV shows end one major part of the story, wait a while, then start a continuing part of the story as a new novel, new film, new season. Nothing wrong with that. I would much rather authors do that then just drag out a novel into 500,000 words and 100 chapters or something. Find a natural place to bail, then call it "Book 2" or something. I think these are wise words (albeit from a decade ago). If you wound up making readers care so much about an imaginary character that they objected to the character getting killed, then on some level you wrote a pretty good story. I've gotten angry letters from readers on occasion and almost had to tell them, "HEY! This is just ASCII text on a screen! None of this actually happened!" But I thanked them for their email and accepted what they had to say as a compliment of sorts.

Then again: my partner and I recently watched the 2-hour finale to the Showtime gay series Looking, about a group of gay men and women living in San Francisco, most of whom are searching for the right person to settle down with. The show was low-rated, won no major awards, and did not do well. The problem I had with the show is that it wasn't dramatic enough, the stories were so true-to-life that they lacked a lot of passion and conflict, and they were... well... boring. My idea of a far more entertaining show was Queer as Folk, which (though it was on 15 years ago) had a lot more drama and held my interest a lot more thoroughly. No question, QAF was occasionally over-the-top and nutty, but by god, it was never boring. I don't dispute that the types of gay characters depicted on Looking are more like the people I know in real life, but they weren't telling me the kinds of stories I want to see as entertainment. So the gay characters were fine... the plots and stories, not so much.

I find the type of over-the-top gay people in Modern Family to be pretty offensive, kind of a "Steppin' Fetchit" kind of lame stereotype. I think gay people in real life run the gamut of a lot of different kinds of personalities, and I feel like they just used a cliched way to present those characters. The gay kid on The Real O'Neals -- which is a very different ABC sitcom -- is a lot closer to what I see in real life. I don't think the show is very good, but at least in terms of how a gay character is portrayed in mainstream media, it's not too bad.

As an experiment, I wrote a novel some years back with a very flawed teenager as the protagonist, a kid who's denied being gay and completely reinvented himself at a new school, new city, new house, new life. Events conspire to eventually force him to face part of the traumatic issues he avoided when moving away from another city 3 years earlier. He starts off a bit cocky and arrogant, but he gets brought down to size by a blackmail scheme and several other dramatic scenes, including being framed for murder. By the end of the story, the kid has been run through the mill to the point where he's forced to re-examine his life and change the parts on which he was dishonest, and the story ends with him a much better person.

Stephen King has a great quote in his book On Writing: "The road to hell is paved with adverbs." I think he's right.

I think you can work a mention of condoms into a sex scene, but I wouldn't dwell on it. I also think there are circumstances where unsafe sex make more sense in very special circumstances. But I would also say that the same rules apply for straight erotica or gay erotica. A lot depends on the nature of the scene, and I don't think there are blanket rules that apply.

Eh, I'd just call this syndrome a hero who has unbelievable luck or skills. You know it's a "thing" when there's an entire entry on Wikipedia devoted to Mary Sue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue

Guilty as charged.

I just caught this on the "Words on Words" website and thought this was hilarious. And I totally cop to some of my stories needing these warning labels. http://johndopp.com/writers/amazons-new-warning-labels/

Note that with 3rd person Omniscient, you can get inside of any character's head. The key is to not overdo it, and just concentrate on a single character per scene. The advantage of 3rd person is that you can explore situations and ideas that your main character does not yet know about, and this is a crucial difference.

I agree with Thorn. I'd say the word "very" (and, in fact, many adverbs) is a far bigger problem than "that's."

And always remember there's a good chance the performing artist may not have written the song at all. It's always important when you're quoting lyrics to actually cite the person responsible for creating them.

Emphasis and intensity. If you're not just mad, but you're very mad, then it's easier to say that than to say, "I'm fucking livid! My head's going to explode!" Not only should very be avoided when possible, I also think you have to be careful about the use of adverbs: all the dreaded ly words that pepper a lot of first drafts. No less than Stephen King has said, "after I do my first drafts, I cut out about 85% of the adverbs and usually the novel gets shaved down another 50 pages."

The moment the character describes himself or herself, I'm gone. To me, that's a totally amateur move that's unnecessary and silly. I think it's much more subtle to let the reader learn who the lead characters are over time. For example, in one scene the character fumbles for his glasses... now we know he wears glasses. Or somebody shoves him on the street and calls him a shrimp... we know he's short. You can learn a lot through the actions of other characters and how they react to your leads. The other cheesy move is to have the character look at himself or herself in the mirror and wince at all their faults. I've done this in older stories, and it's cheesy. I wouldn't do it again today -- too obvious and heavy-handed.

I get antsy when people use "horror" to describe a movie like Psycho, which to me is more a mystery/suspense/thriller, not a horror film at all. I think it has to have a supernatural element like ghosts, demons, zombies, and stuff like that in order to qualify as horror. Often all the labels are boil down to how the book or film or TV show can be marketed. There is a weird dividing line between horror, fantasy, and science fiction, and there are certainly movies that have two or more of these elements. To me, fantasy is more along the lines of Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, stuff like that. On the other hand, George Lucas always insisted that Star Wars was "space fantasy," so who knows?

Generally, published books will add the appropriate copyright notices in the indicia at the beginning of the novel. There's been some fairly huge novels where at the last minute, the music publisher asked for a huge amount of money and the song lyrics had to be deleted. This actually happened to no less than Stephen King, who quoted from the Beach Boys' "Help Me, Rhonda" or something like that in one of his 1990s stories, and the publisher (Almo Music) wanted like $50K or something, which is outrageous. King dropped the song and used a competing one like "I Live for the Sun" or something like that, one that cost him nothing more than a permission letter and a printed thank you. I think if it's just something with a very narrow audience on the internet, they're not ever going to find you. But in the interest of fairness, keep the excerpt short (maybe two or three bars), then attribute the composers, the publisher, and the name of the artist. You can find out the name of the publisher and proper names of the songwriters on BMI.com, ASCAP.com, and SESAC.com. If your novel is being posted online chapter-by-chapter, I think a footnote at the very end of the chapter with the songwriter/publisher info is fine. Once the novel is finished, move it to the very end of the novel or the very beginning, whichever works best for layout.

For a novel, I go with right around 7000 words, but I've gone 2000 words high or low on occasion, breaking whenever the scene needed to shift and it seemed like a good point to stop. Coming from TV, I kind of look upon a chapter as a commercial break, but there's an art to making it feel natural and unforced. I also create scene transitions within each chapter, and every writer has a different way to handle that -- sometimes with descriptions, sometimes with dialogue, sometimes with a combination, sometimes a change in location... there's lots of ways to make it work.

Exactly. Very well said. The key to me is to never let the reader glimpse the mechanism with which the story is being written. The heavy-handedness of changing 1st person observers is such a sledgehammer to me, there's no graceful way to execute it. Every time I see it done online, it's just gross. I don't dispute that it's possible for a really, really skilled writer to do it, but nobody has yet to give me a reason why 3rd-person omniscient can't do just as well. Most of my stuff has been 1st person, because I think it's easier to dive in and only reflect the story from one person's perspective, but I think you kind of have to do this for fish-out-of-water stories and other kinds of personal experiences. 3rd person absolutely takes more effort, but it can be fun provided you keep the jumping around to a bare minimum and not make it too "showy."

Whenever I see online fiction that uses 1st person POV and goes back and forth between different characters, it's always done very badly. I think you're much, much better off just using 3rd, which isn't nearly as clumsy. In 3rd, you can still get inside different people's heads, reflect their emotions, their feelings, their innermost thoughts, every bit as effectively as you can in 1st. I think it's a far more subtle way to go than abruptly changing points of view in 1st, which to me just gives me whiplash.

Although the problem with writing a novel entirely in 1st person is that you only have their point of view. With 3rd, you can present lots of information that the lead character has no way of being aware of, and that's a very powerful ability.

Naaa, let it go. As long as it's entertainment, I don't think melodrama is necessarily bad. I think there's degrees of melodrama, and as long as you don't cross the line into really hokey, over-the-top nuttiness, you should be OK. What you may be reacting to are just actual moments where perhaps your writing at that time is not as skilled as it is now. Any writer looking back a year, or five years, or ten years is going to be a different person today than they were then. Some of it you just have to chalk up to experience and let it go. There's some fairly popular books that definitely have some melodramatic moments. I would count Gone with the Wind in that category, as well as the Twilight vampire novels or the recent 50 Shades of Gray. Nothing wrong with those in terms of mass-market success. If you can transcend the melodrama and also provide good character detail and an interesting plot, so much the better.

I think the trick is not to dwell on the prurient parts of the ugly topic, but at the same time not shy away from the reality of the situation. I've had scenes with non-consensual sex, teenage drinking, drug use, blackmailers, incest, assaults, murders, and child molestation spread across five different novels (sounds like a typical week on Maury Povich's U.S. talk show). In all cases, I made sure the perpetrator was punished, the victim ultimately triumphs, and in one case the child molester was killed in a grisly but just manner. In my case, I chose not to linger on the really ugly details, and in the case of the child molesting, it all happens off-camera and we only begin thinking about it through various clues, eventually winding up with a violent confrontation (between stepfather and son). I think there's a way to do it that's dramatic but not sensational, realistic but not sordid, and entertaining but not repelling. And I never take the side of the criminal -- I'm always against what they do and am firmly on the side of the victim. There have been some interesting literary stories which follow murderers and other criminals and make them the primary focus of the story, to the point where you actually empathize with them... to a point. I've written stories where the lead characters commit very small crimes, or if they engage in bigger crimes, it's because they're confronted with monstrous evil that gives them no other choice. I think there's a way to study the balance of good and evil, present both sides, engage the reader, but see that justice prevails in some way. But I'd also defend any writers' creative right to go down a different path. Maybe the story of a criminal told solely from his or her point of view, could be done in an interesting way. But it's not something that I'm drawn to trying to write.

I think that's generally true. But that doesn't mean that the major characters can't suffer all kinds of tragedy, embarrassment, disasters, even breaking up for a time. I think there's a way to even take a tragedy and lean it into an optimistic direction -- maybe kind of wistful and poignant, as opposed to "happily ever after." But I don't think leaving the reader in agony and killing off the main characters and leaving everything upended and destroyed is very satisfying, either. Heck, I can think of some major romantic novels where the main characters broke up (or one died), then the lead meets somebody else and starts a new romance. Still technically an emotionally satisfying ending, still optimistic, but perhaps not the one you were expecting.