who? what? where? when? why? —

To start this, I’ll be going in order of all the question words that apply when writing (realistic) fan fiction stories. We may not all be able to see the importance of asking yourself such questions but believe me, it does matter in the end if you want to be any good at writing. As the author your role is being the all-knowing person. However, as a reader we, or I, may not be able to able to pinpoint what your goal or point of the story is.

Now first is the question ‘Who?’ that may be the most crucial to pay attention to when forming a plotline. The question ‘Who?’ can be referring to a lot of things. The two most important things that apply to this specific question word are your characters and your point of view. Point of view is something that I will expand on explaining the importance of later on in a different chapter. So, for now I’ll tell you the importance of characters, which is entirely different than characterization/character building in chapter one.

Before you write anything you should set out who your characters are and have a general idea of how you want them to act. You can never just jump into writing a story because things will look sloppy as you try to develop the story and add characters that actually make a difference (impact) on the plotline you came up with. At one moment you can’t have your protagonist be an angel and the next be a complete bully. It’s a contradiction in that case, which is bad.

Example, if your main character is overall a nice and friendly person then you have to assume that they have some type of high tolerance for nonsense to be able to be so kind to those who are dolts. You have to remember that your character is human! They all have breaking points. So when they do get mad that isn’t contradicting what you’ve already established about your character. If you make him or her all bipolar but don’t establish in black and white that he or she is bipolar than you are contradicting yourself but making this person have multiple personalities with explanation.

If you write character profiles in your Forward or Description I suggest that you keep them short and sweet; do not, under any circumstance, use anything but third person when writing them. By using first person for different characters you might confuse the reader on who is talking. More on point of view, or POV, will be discussed in its own chapter because I’ve seen many people with POV complications.

Now that one thing is complete I can move on to the second part of this tutorial chapter; the question word ‘What?’ and its importance. After writing a chapter, I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t proofread it right away until a couple hours later when someone comments on the chapter and I end up reading it over to see what exactly they’re commenting about if it was a specific comment that was dropped to be read.

One thing you never want to do is make/write a confusing chapter. It throws people off and causes readers, me being one of those picky people, to cease reading your story and go to something that is easier to comprehend. I’m not saying write like Shakespeare, Orwell, Tolkien or other famous writers but to at least make things neat prior to updating. I’m not saying, you can’t make mistakes when you write! I’m actually saying; just make sure that things are comprehendible before you click the ‘Add Chapter’ button.

The third element to this is the dreaded question ‘Where?’ that applies to location, location, location. Lucky for you bastards guys the fourth element ‘When?’ ties, and in fact goes hand in hand, with the third element in the way I wish to describe it to you now. Along with the question ‘When?’ you should be thinking of time. If you don’t then there’s something wrong with you you’re missing the point. Both of these queries apply to the dreaded setting. Coming up with a setting sometimes can be just as hard as thinking of a plot. Being a component of setting just makes these two things even more important than they were earlier, prior to starting.

No story can go without conflict but you never want it to be found within your category of setting. If your story takes place in the eighteen hundreds and your characters have access to an iPhone 4 then there’s something wrong with your story right then and there. It may be fiction, but assuming you are writing realistic fiction, that is far from the truth or realism. Then you have two options; change the era of which you are writing or take out any technology that is too far advanced for the odd time frame you’ve chosen.

Something that I frequently have issues with, even with oneshots believe it or not—only because I make my oneshot really long, is continuity. Explaining continuity can be found out through context clues or just by reading the following. This isn’t something too hard to understand that you have to look it up in the dictionary. Just break down the word continuity. You can clearly see the root word continue in the word continuity. Thus you can assume automatically that the two words have similar meanings in some way. If you figure that, then you’ll be able to know the definition of continuity without me even telling you.

If you haven’t figured it out, continuity—in the context of writing—is the consistency of writing. I’ll give you the perfect example of a continuity issue I have in my own writing. This is an excerpt from my story ‘The Thirteenth Floor’ in chapter seven.

“Watch where you’re ing driving!” Daesung shouted.

Seungri rolled his eyes. “Don’t talk to me in that ing tone! I wouldn’t be speeding if we left earlier. You can be such a maknae.”

There’re three issues with this. First, I used a fragment—guess where it is. The second is that Seungri, the maknae of Big Bang, called Daseung, his hyung, the maknae. The third mistake is that I got their ages mixed up and switched the maknae around with Dae. Later on in chapter ten I wrote this …

Daesung didn’t respond right away, leaving a long drag of silence appear in the car. “He said his brothers, meaning there’s more than one of them. He’s one of them. Shouldn’t we have just killed him when we got the chance?”

“Like how hyung? It’s near impossible. We didn’t have anything to defend ourselves and now we have headaches, or at least I do.” Seungri groaned.

At least there I did the right thing and had Seungri address Dae as hyung. Sadly, I still had a fragment somewhere. I have to admit, that wasn’t the best continuity issue example I could’ve given but it gets the point across. Just watch to make sure that your characters are always where you say they are, doing the things you say they’re doing, and whatnot. If you fail to do this then you have a continuity issue, no biggie but you have to make sure that what you have happen is consistent throughout each chapter.

The last of the question words, ‘Why?’, really goes along with cause and effect. Why did he or she do this? Why did he or she say that? And so on and so forth. By the end of your chapter you should be able to answer this question. Why did these following events occur? There’s no other way that I can explain this one here to you. I don’t see how you could mess have trouble with this unless your continuity issue overlaps into this particular section.