Bonus Features for Anarchycox's Fics

A place for behind the scenes information, fancasts, my research, anything to do with my stories on AO3

[aletheiawriting]

why you should keep writing your story

because it’s a puzzle no one else will ever arrange the same way as you.

because there are ideas that simply won’t come to you until you write down the wrong words.

because all the bad scenes are the bones of the wonderful scenes.

because someone will love it: someone will read it once, and twice, and thrice; someone will ramble to you about the complexity of it; someone will doodle your characters out of love; someone will find it in exactly what they were looking for with or without knowing it.

because they have things to say, your characters. they’ve told you all those secrets and they have more to tell you, if you will listen.

because you love it even when you don’t; even when it drives you mad or when it accidentally turns into apathy; even when you think you’re doing it all wrong; you love it, and it loves you back.

because you can get a treasure even from things that go wrong; because if a story crumbles down you can build a shinier one on the same spot; because you won’t know where it will take you until it takes you there.

[cogesque-deactivated20210410]

remember not to overdo your first chapter. i’ve read so many stiff first chapters that are the result of overworking bc the author is concerned with getting it exactly perfect. give it no more edits or attention than anything else.

don’t try too hard. it’ll be ok. you’ll be ok.

[cogesque-deactivated20210410]

y'know that writer feeling of needing every sentence to be perfect? don’t give in. if every sentence is individually perfectly fine-tuned, people will notice.

it’s our job as writers to make people forget that they’re reading and get lost in the world we’ve created–to make people not notice.

[git-writing-good]

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” Elmore Leonard.

Consistency and flow are great, and keeping everything tame makes a few great lines stand out. If every sentence sounds like it’s supposed to be a quote on someone’s moodboard, guaranteed the reading will be stiff.

[absentlyabbie]

one of my absolute favorite things about fanfiction is the the way it just “i will take this shamelessly self-indulgent/ridiculous as absolute crack concept and i will treat it seriously.”

because my god it lets you explore those really insane contrived ideas, or the ones that 14 year old you would have sighed about but been embarrassed by, but in a way that really examines it all, lets it have depth and nuance, lets you turn it over at every angle to find the surprises and the touching moments and the painful parts and the ways it both is and isn’t silly or exactly what you want it to be.

it takes all those ideas and just lets them have dignity.

fanfiction will let you write or read about two dudes accidentally raising a baby while running their coffee shop which one of them uses as a front for their assassin side gig all while they slowly fall in love, or about a woman who is just like you and so many like you, even in the embarrassing, not-cute-quirky ways, who survives an apocalypse and has to do so at the side of the actor she loved so much but would never have looked twice at her before the end of the world.

and it lets you do all that while plumbing the emotional, moral, philosophical depths, and the ways the dream holds up and where it wrinkles, how you can let realism in, but not in a way that ruins the fantasy, instead only enhancing it.

mainstream literature and published genre fiction has been doing a lot of this kind of thing for straight, white, cis men for a long, long time now, and it has strongly boxed out everyone else and fostered a culture that ridiculed anyone else for wanting to have that for themselves.

but fanfiction lets us all have that, and it doesn’t ask us to present it with a wince, with a shy mumble; it never asks us to be embarrassed by what we love or what we want.

just take it seriously, fanfiction offers. because you deserve to.

[ifeveristoday]

Be prepared to get comments like "Your hair is so pretty. You wrote her hair so pretty. Why is she so pretty?" And "Your writing is so good. I can really tell what he's saying and oh he smells so nice. That's a cool looking bag. Your beta has awesome shoes I bet. What's her name?"

Let the endless compliment cycle begin.

[talesandfluff]

writing fanfiction is so interesting because it requires both A LOT of effort of characterization (I gotta prove to the readers that this character is the one they know, not a cardboard cutout with their name on it!) but also a lot of shortcuts (if a character does this, the readers will instinctively make the link back to the original story and believe this narrative with only minimal effort on my part)

it's just really interesting to me the duality of it

[shipping-ppl-ugh]

Have you ever read a fan fic that has destroyed you physically and mentally and yet when you finished, you just sat there looking at the phone screen thinking

“Shit, this changed me as a person”

[shadesofmauve]

On Fanfiction

I was cruising through the net, following the cold trail of one of the periodic “Is or is not Fanfic the Ultimate Literary Evil?” arguments that crop up regularly, and I’m now bursting to make a point that I never see made by fic defenders.

We’re all familiar with the normal defenses of fic: it’s done out of love, it’s training, it’s for fun. Those are all good and valid defenses!

But they miss something. They damn with faint praise. Because the thing is, when you commit this particular Ultimate Literary Evil you’ve now told a story. And stories are powerful. The fact that it wasn’t in an original world or with original characters doesn’t necessarily make it less powerful to any given reader.

I would never have made this argument a few years ago. A few years ago I hadn’t received messages from people who were deeply touched by something I wrote in fanfic. So what if it’s only two or three or four people, and I used someone else’s world and characters? For those two or three or four people, I wrote something fucking important. You cannot tell me that isn’t a valid use of my time and expect me to feel chastened. I don’t buy it. I won’t feel ashamed. I will laugh when you call something that touches other people ‘literary masturbation.’ Apparently you’re not too up on your sex terminology.

Someone could argue that if I’d managed the same thing with original characters in an original world, it could’ve touched more people. They might be right! On the other hand, it might never have been accepted for publication, or found a market if self published, and more importantly I would never have written it because I didn’t realize I could write. The story wouldn’t have happened. Instead, thanks to fanfic being a thing, it did. And for two or three or four people it mattered. When we talk about defending fanfic, can we occasionally talk about that?

[lsbaird]

I once had an active serviceman who told me that my FF7 and FF8 fic helped get him through the war. That’ll humble you. People have told me my fanfic helped get them through long nights, through grief, through hard times. It was a solace to people who needed solace. And because it was fanfic, it was easier to reach the people who needed it. They knew those people already. That world was dear to them already. They were being comforted by friends, not strangers.

Stories are like swords. Even if you’ve borrowed the sword, even if you didn’t forge it yourself from ore and fire, it’s still your body and your skill that makes use of it. It can still draw blood, it can strike down things that attack you, it can still defend something you hold dear. Don’t get me wrong, a sword you’ve made yourself is powerful. You know it down to its very molecules, are intimate with its heft and its reach. It is part of your own arm. But that can make you hesitate to use it sometimes, if you’re afraid that swinging it too recklessly will notch the blade. Is it strong enough, you think. Will it stand this? I worked so hard to make it. A blade you snatched up because you needed a weapon in your hand is not prey to such fears. You will use it to beat against your foes until it either saves you or it shatters.

But whether you made that sword yourself or picked it up from someone who fell on the field, the fight you fight with it is always yours.

[roachpatrol]

Literary critics who sneer at fanfic are so infuriatingly shortsighted, because they all totally ignore how their precious literature, as in individual stories that are created, disseminated, and protected as commercial products, are a totally modern industrial capitalist thing and honestly not how humans have ever done it before like a couple centuries ago. Plus like, who benefits most from literature? Same dudes who benefit most from capitalism: the people in power, the people with privilege. There’s a reason literary canon is composed of fucking white straight dudes who write about white straight dudes fucking. 

Fanfiction is a modern expression of the oral tradition—for the rest of us, by the rest of us, about the rest of us—and I think that’s fucking wonderful and speaks to a need that absolutely isn’t being met by the publishing industry. The need to come together as a close community, I think, and take the characters of our mythology and tell them getting drunk and married and tricked and left behind and sent to war and comforted and found again and learning the lessons that every generation learns over and over. It’s wonderful. I love it. I’m always going to love it. 

[kyraneko]

Stories are fractal by nature. Even when there’s just one version in print, you have it multiplied by every reader’s experience of it in light of who they are, what they like, what they want. And then many people will put themselves in the place of the protagonist, or another character, and spend a lot of time thinking about what they’d do in that character’s place. Or adjusting happenings so they like the results better.

That’s not fic yet, but it is a story.

But the best stories grow. This can happen in the language of capitalism—a remake of a classic movie, a series of books focusing on what happened afterwards or before—or it can happen in the language of humanity. Children playing with sticks as lightsabers, Jedi Princess Leia saving Alderaan by dueling Vader; a father reading his kids The Hobbit as a bedtime story as an interactive, “what would you like to happen next?” way so that the dwarves win the wargs over with doggie biscuits that they had in their pockets and ride to Erebor on giant wolves, people writing and sharing their ideas for deleted outtake scenes from Star Trek and slow-build fierce and tender romance with startling bursts of hot sex between Hawkeye and Agent Coulson.

A story at its most successful is a fully developed fractal, retold a million times and a million ways, with stories based on stories based on stories. Fanfic of fanfic of fanfic. Stories based on headcanons, stories based on prompts, stories that put the Guardians of the Galaxy in a coffee-shop AU and stories where the Transformers are planet-wandering nomads and stories where characters from one story are placed into a world from another. Stories that could be canon, stories that are the farthest thing from canon, stories that are plausible, stories that would never happen, stories that give depth to a character or explore the consequences of one different plot event or rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

This is what stories are supposed to be.

This is what stories are.

[wrangletangle]

Fandom and fan creations are a communal act. They do not disguise how they are influenced by each other. They revel in it.

Literature was once a communal act, too. Film as well. It’s only once we decided to extend and expand the idea of copyright and turn stories into primarily vehicles for profit that we rejected this communal structure. The literary canon shouldn’t be all dead white men. They didn’t build the novel. They didn’t build theater. They took what was already there and said “This is mine now,” and we believed them.

Creativity is communal. There is no such thing as the lone genius on a mountaintop. Ideas are passed around, handed back and forth, growing all the time. Fandom is what human creativity looks like in its normal form. Fandom is like this because humans are like this.

We didn’t just borrow the sword. We remade it because we saw in it the potential for something better. And we did that together, all of us.

[writing-and-nutmeg]

[anarchycox-fics]

Writing in Times of Confusion and Stress

Hi everyone,

I send you big virtual hugs. 

Things aren’t okay, and they aren’t going to be okay for a while. We’re all figuring out a new normal, while under tremendous strains. Emotional, physical, mental, financial. For some it is maybe one of these or maybe all of them.

Everything feels fucked up right now.

So I just want to say this. I love you, and I am proud of you.

I am proud whether you write a fucking novel in this time, one fucking sentence, or nothing at all. Any of it, all of it, none of it. I am proud of you.

It is okay if you don’t write. It is okay if you do. It is okay if you focus or all over the map. I’d love to be working on my main fandom right now, but my brain simply can’t focus on anything but a different fandom because it is what I was working on when everything changed rapidly.

And that is okay.

The only thing I want to encourage for all of you is this. That you make sure you have some measure of creativity in your life. Little things, big things. 

This can include trying a new hobby if writing is stuck for you.

Make mood boards, play lists, take up drawing, pick up that yarn you abandoned. Get creative with cooking.

Hell, paint your nails with sharpies.

But in the midst of all the confusion, and changes, take the time to nourish your soul.

Create, in whatever small ways you can. Every bit of creativity we put in the world -- even just colouring in a picture -- makes the world a better place.

It is scary, and it might not be what you thought you’d create, but create.

Be brave, create.

[pillowfort-social]

In case anyone needs to hear this today:

Drawing fanart DOESN’T make you any less of an artist.

Writing fanfiction DOESN’T make you any less of a writer.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Your work is important.

[pens-swords-stuff]

You don’t have to write while you’re in quarantine.

I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about how you should get off of tumblr and take advantage of your newfound free time to work on your WIP. 

It’s undeniable that it would be a great opportunity to do a lot of writing, but also… If you don’t want to write, that’s okay.

If you’re trying to write, and you can’t, that’s okay too.

Nothing is wrong with you, you’re not a failure, and you’re not a bad writer for not writing. It’s a stressful time right now, and there are a lot of valid reasons to take a break.

You can write if you want to. You also don’t have to write if you don’t want to.

Be kind to yourself, take care of yourself. 

Don’t let the internet pressure you into doing something you don’t want.

Your writing will be waiting patiently for you until you’re ready.

[saltoftheao3]

Man i really have to kill within that voice within me that insists that every story i write should be deep™ and meaningful™

if my story helped someone relax and unwind after a hard day

if my story made someone smile or chuckle as they rode the bus

if my story let time pass faster in the dentist’s waiting room

if my story made someone coo and feel shippy feels

if my story filled the boredom of a long train ride

then my story got the job done, then my story was worth writing and sharing, then my story had meaning. I have entertained!! sure it might be a cheesy cliché boring long-winded objectively bad story. But it doesn’t matter.

Stories don’t have to be good or grand to have worth. They have worth because we bothered to tell them.

[venom-loves-nasties]

[writerfae]

I refuse to feel ashamed of my writing and writing habits ever again. I can do whatever I want. I'm the God of my own writing universe.

[meggory84]

Fan fiction can have a little canon, as a treat

[venom-loves-nasties]

[celtic-pyro-deactivated20230725]

This fanfic I’m never going to write is really damn good.