About to take on a challenge and I need advice!

[shiko]

I thought that Twilight was a bad book right so I said " I can write a better high school vampire romance!" I would like to make it as realistic as possible and put my own personal spin like for example it's a yaoi romance, but I'm writing it from a first person point of view to make the challenge more interesting so any advice for the challenge I'm about take on?

[Deleted]

Uh...you're going to need to be more specific I think.

[Eduardo]

Don't do it. Write something cool like a yaoi robotic vampire high school mystery series that combines the magic of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. Or maybe a vampire space opera with werewolf aliens.

But seriously, don't do what you just described. Yaoi will never be a unique personal spin.

[shiko]

Jan 30, 2011 16:09:25 GMT -8 @reillymouse said:

Uh...you're going to need to be more specific I think.

I want to to see if I can write better romance then twilight.

Don't do it. Write something cool like a yaoi robotic vampire high school mystery series that combines the magic of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. Or maybe a vampire space opera with werewolf aliens.

But seriously, don't do what you just described. Yaoi will never be a unique personal spin.

Then what should I do then? I still want to see if I can write something.

[WolfGod]

Well you're going to need a solid background. That is, you'll have to have read a lot of romances and actually learned to understand them. You'll need to memorize the phrase, "Love untested is not true love," until it's practically imprinted on your retina. You should probably do some studying on the Jungian shadow self and how it relates to romantic relationships. Studying Jungian archetypes and the Myers-Briggs personality type system wouldn't be a bad start either. If you must do the supernatural angle, you'll need to bone up on lore, superstition and myth. Joseph Campbell is required reading here. The more of his works you read the better. And of course it would help if you've had some past relationships to draw experience from.

Romance is actually very difficult to write well. It's much easier to just crank out Harlequin romances with the usual cookie cutter plots and characters. Hell, that's pretty much what the Japanese entertainment industry has been banking on since at least the 80's.

Putting a unique personal spin on something requires at least a working knowledge of narrative deconstruction. TV Tropes provides a nice introduction to this concept, though eventually you'll need to start reading books and literary and artistic theory/history. You'll have to take a scalpel to the tropes, but every change made must have a reason. Just making it a homosexual romance is not a unique personal spin, it's a gimmick. On top of that, it's a gimmick that hack writers have been using ever since Anne Rice first published "Interview with the Vampire" as they desperately try to ride her coattails.

[Deleted]

Jan 30, 2011 16:27:08 GMT -8 shiko said:

I want to to see if I can write better romance then twilight.

I know what you want to do, but you're asking for very vauge help. If you asked how to develop a character or solve a plot hole, it would be easier to help. But you've told us nothing about this story, what problems you think you'll have, or anything similar, just that it's going to be a vampire high school yaoi romance. That may seem like a lot of information, but it's really not.

You've asked us to describe the picture on blank canvas.

[Lord Lovrina]

I second what Sir Reilly, Eduardo and WolfGod said. Just because it's yaoi high school fic doesn't make it automatically better than Twilight; it's more of a gimmick that a lot of writers use to make their story "edgy" and stand out from the crowd. Also I've noticed the trend of writing paranormal type stories as a marketing gimmick; it will take a lot of research to make a story stand out.

Believe me when I say that I see stories similiar to that on gay publishing websites and amazon; it's very common to the point that it's become another cliche. It strongly depends on how the cliche is twisted and used; a character's sexual orientation does not automatically make strong or believable characterization.

I'm speaking from my past publishing experience when I say that. When I worked with the staff of my college's literary magazine, we used to get a lot of yaoi and yuri stories possibly due to that reasoning. I once published a short story about zombies that had gay characters for the shock value; believe me it's been done before.

[shiko]

Thanks, this gave me alot to think about. I guess I have to back to the drawing board now...