Lily and Alice

by engineerwenlock

This is the bittersweet tale of a war that brought two remarkable women together and made them the best of friends, before it ripped their families apart. Abandoned for good reason. This was my first ever attempt at fanfiction and it shows.

6. Author's note

Don't get excited, this is an authors note, not a new chapter.

I've decided that I will not be completing this story. I had a lot of fun writing it and learned a lot, but it was my first ever attempt at writing something like this. I would like to share a bit of what i learned while writing it for the other aspiring writers on this site.

1. Know where your story is going before you start. This includes planning the middle! I knew the beginning and the end, but I hadn't planned how to get there before I started writing.

2. Write what you want to write. I originally planned this story as a way to explore the friendship between Lily and Alice as they went through pregnancy and new motherhood together. I was dealing with postpartum depressission and i thought this would be an interesting way to explore that and other aspects of new motherhood. But I got too bogged down in back story to wwritethe story I wanted to write. Don't do that. Subtext is way better than over exposition of back story.

3. Don't try to say everything through dialogue. It is boring and unnatural. What can I say? Rookie mistake.

4. If you are going to write an action sequence with quick changes between multiple viewpoints, make sure you have a good way to let the readers know when a POV changes and who it changes to.

5. Don't bite off more than you can chew. If you start a project, make it feasible and set a goal to finish it.