Pretty Hate Machine - My Thoughts - Writing Style

Particular writing styles were essential for this story to work and had to adapt to the situation of who was telling it, whether it was me or Ulrich. I enjoyed telling the story, and also writing it in Ulrich's point of view for the first three chapters of the story. So, I'm going to go through the writing in Ulrich's point of view first.

Being in somebody else's shoes was incredibly difficult, especially since it's not your own thoughts portrayed through writing, but somebody else's portrayed through my writing. It was a good thing that I did feel that I had many things in common with Ulrich, along with something else that I'm going to elaborate three paragraphs down.

The main thing to be in character with Ulrich was having plenty of internal thoughts about the situation. Ulrich struck me more as a thinker and actually stops and thinks before he does something stupid. He was rather methodical of how he would go about things and seemed to know what was the right course of action. Of course, that rule was thrown out the window when a person he cares (or anybody he doesn't have a grudge against) about was in danger and he puts himself in the firing line, putting him in more or unnecessary danger. So he doesn't think a lot during those times, he just does what needs to be done. With Ulrich's actions and reactions, I mostly went for a stream of consciousness sort of approach to it, which is a more relaxed style of writing, and it helps with getting a character's voice out.

To capture his traumatized reaction to the events of 'that night', and going through the process of his grief and devastation in his point of view was incredibly difficult to portray through my writing normally. But there was something that did happen to me during that time that made what was usually an incredibly difficult section of writing easier. I was suffering a lot of grief while I was writing the first three chapters of the story. My close friend left me and I just tumbled into depression. I don't want to go into details about our relationship here except we both knew that we were more than friends. But, if it wasn't for him leaving the quality of writing style wouldn't have been so high and realistic. I'm not sure if I could say it to him directly, since he's probably never heard of the story, but if I did, I hope he sees it as one way I tried to overcome my grief.

After the first three chapters, I was finally able to tell the story, from a third person perspective all the way through the chapters. It was much easier writing it from third person, as I didn't have to worry about being in Ulrich's shoes anymore. But I curved my writing style to still make it sound personal. And it made the debut chapter for third person, chapter 4, a success, despite it being short and having next to no action in it. It was then I decided to have a central character for each scene, and flesh out their feelings as they interacted with the other characters. I didn't want to neglect the other characters too (especially during the finding out scene in chapter 7), so I had a little bit on their thoughts so the fanfiction was balanced.

Believe it or not, repetition was important too. I usually find it annoying, but it worked effectively in areas of the story. I used the phase, 'cold, stone, marble' in consecutive chapters as Ulrich was reminded of the incident with his father. And once again, I'm going to mention the quote 'revenge is a dark light that blinds all who see it', because it was used in two chapters, by the same character, in two different situations. It drove home the message that revenge wasn't the right path to take, a prominent theme throughout the story.

Most of the tiny themes from this fanfic that have reinforced the two main themes of hate and revenge are quite subtle, and I didn't notice some of them while writing it either. Family is one of them that came up frequently, especially with the Ishiyamas' involvement in the story

Finally, it was important to remind the reader the events of the story frequently (but not too frequently), especially if it was the reason to explain how the character felt. It also makes it easier for the reader to remember such events instead of looking back through the story for them.

I guess that's it for writing style. I found it difficult to describe my style since I'd never really thought about it too deeply, but it was nice to look back on most of it.