Story Q & A

swell:

I'm writing a story in present tense, and the main character has a flashback. Should I write the flashback in past or present tense (which one is more gramatically correct, I guess I'm asking?)

Personally I'd say the flashback should be in present tense, since the main story is in present tense – if the narrator is just describing something that happened in the past, that'd make sense to have in past tense, but since they're having a flashback, ie narrating the re-living of an event, I think it makes more sense to keep it in present tense, but just make sure you have some clear way of denoting that this is something that happened in the past. Either way, though, I think it depends on you and your style of writing; I don't think one is really more correct than the other.

@ dru's not growing up
@ battalions

Thank you! I ended up writing in present tense and italicised it but it ended up making sense.

Is it okay to use a part of the story in the summary, or should I not?
I'm really unsure about this.

@ world
You can use an extract of the story as the summary if you want! I'd suggest keeping it quite short and sweet as an extract though, people don't tend to read massive paragraphs of writing in the summary.

@ everybody dies;
Thank you

Welp I was the last poster but I've got another question.

What should I do if I believe a story has been plagiarized but it is not mine?

@ Diligence
If it's on this site, you should report it to an Admin with a link to the original story and the plagiarised story, briefly stating why you believe it has been plagiarised. If you know someone who is a Story Editor/any other section of staff and would prefer to report it to them, you can do as any report will end up being shown to the Admins.

@ Maleficent.
Thank you c:

So I have a story that's rated R and it has a fair amount of swearing in it, but if I include the c word, does the rating get bumped up to NC-17 or does it stay the same? I don't plan on writing heavy sex/gore/violence scenes of the sort, so.

*I don't have to include the word, but it's a word used in daily Aussie life and since my story is set in Australia, I feel like I should at least be true to it.

@ swell
R is used for explicit swearing. If you're not including gore, explicit sexual scenes or violence then there's no need to up it to NC-17.

@ Maleficent.
Ahk, thanks for clearing that up!

I'm having trouble writing lisps. One of my supporting characters speaks with a lisp where she misses her L's and R's... but I'm not really sure how to write it without it sounding completely weird. D: I was wondering if anyone had any tips about this or could help me?

@ AutisticAlice
A lot of time when people have a lisp, they replace one letter with another. For example, I have a mild lisp and (ironically enough) I can't say lisp, I say 'lithp' instead. Obviously, that isn't ideal to write in a story because someone will probably pull you up about spelling. What it might be better to do is to mention in the dialogue tags about the lisp. I always tend to find that lisps are something that other people around you get used to after a while, so realistically, whoever your character is speaking to will stop noticing it after a while. It's probably a good idea to mention it at the beginning (and if the word permits, you can usually slip one or two mis-spelled variations into speech to emphasise it in future chapters) but if you want it to be as realistic as possible, I'd mention it less and less as your character gets to know other characters.

I think that might have been a really roundabout way of answering your question and I'm not even sure if it did, but hopefully it helps a bit.

@ dougie poynter;
Okay thanks. O.O

This might sound dumb, but I'm knew to the site and I couldn't find this info anywhere. Is the site HTML capable and if it is, what tags are accepted? If not, how can I get certain lines to be centered/italics etc. I was also wondering how to get a picture at the top of my stories. The default picture doesn't show up, and when I go into layouts all I can find is how to set it in the background. Thanks for your help!!

@ NeverWakeMeUp

Mibba runs on BBcode, so in stories (minus the asterisks): bold = [b*]word[/b*], italics = [i*]word[/i*]. and underline = [u*]word[/u*]. You can find the other BBcode tags here.

To add a photo at the top of your stories as a banner, you have to add the direct link of the image from an image hosting site into the title background of the custom layout. A great tutorial for making custom layouts can be found here.

Hope that helps!

@ i saw sparks
Great! Thanks so much for your help!!

I need some help. Okay, I know I'm autistic and should probably be aware of it, but I'm not lol. My obsessions are different from what my character is into for one thing.

What I'm trying to ask is... what kind of interests do you think would fit a female eighteen year old with mild to moderate autism? I thought of anything to do with the ocean could be one. We usually have at least two or three obsessions, but I can't think of any because I can't speak for every person with autism.

I also thought of anime, but that would be hard. Anime has such a broad range that I wouldn't be able to name every single anime she likes, especially as the story progresses. Though, it does seem typical for her age level and autistic spectrum... so I don't know. Anyone have ideas?

How explicit does a story have to be for it to going from being rated R to NC-17? I know you can have sex scenes in R rated stories, I was just wondering how far detailed you can go without the rating going to NC-17?

@ Carpe diem;
The line between R & NC-17 can definitely be a bit fuzzy so you'll probably want more than one opinion on this, but as I see it, the line between "just short of explicit" and "explicit" is that in R stories you can't mention the actual anatomy or mechanics involved. Basically I don't think you can really talk about anything that goes on below the waist. Like if someone who did not know what sex actually consisted of were to read the scene for some reason, they wouldn't be able to picture what was actually happening other than people being in close proximity to each other and potentially naked. Does that make any sense?