How hard can it be to make a webcomic anyways?

Writing and art tutorials, along with my own works. Feel free to offer critique and opinions. Icon by giraffadon.

[nyazuline-deactivated20200505]

i made my own expression meme for fun lol

u can use it but PLEASE do not repost on other sites, or trace it. if you want to share it elsewhere i would appreciate it if you could just link this post! please do not remove this caption

[writingdotcoffee]

“A story should entertain the writer, too.”

— Stephen King

[mystical-knight-dragon]

I used to think it was a “bad habit” to write what I’d want to read. It’s hammered into your skull to write “with your audience in mind.” Let me tell you, I’ve had much more success with the stories I write for myself–because I’m genuinely enjoying what I’m writing, and the audience can tell.

[h-brook-writes]

I always enjoy books more when it’s obvious the writer had fun with it. If they’re not invested or excited about a single word in the story, then why would I be?

[amezure]

Some expression notes ! 💖 | Instagram

[elumish]

People talk a lot about how reading is necessary for writing, but when you really want to improve your writing, it’s important to go beyond just simple reading. Here are some things to do when reading:

Note how they begin and end the story. There are a ton of rather contradictory pieces of advice about starting stories, so see how they do it in the stories you enjoy. Don’t only look at the most popular stories, but look at your more obscure favorites.

See what strikes you. Is it fast or complicated scenes with a lot of emotions? Is it stark lines? Pithy dialogue? What do you remember the next day?

Pay attention to different styles. It’s not just whether they use past or present tense, first or third person. It’s whether the writing is more neutral or deeper inside character’s heads. Do they use italics? Parentheses? Other interesting stylistic choices? Take the ones you like and try them out in your own writing. See what works and what doesn’t.

Keep track of how they deal with other characters. Do we see a lot of secondary character each for very brief periods of time or are there a couple that show up a lot? How much information do we get about secondary characters? Do they have their own plots or do their plots revolve entirely around the main characters? 

Count how many plots there are. Is there just one main plot or are there multiple subplots? Are the storylines mostly plot-based or character-based?  

Pay attention to what you don’t like. If you don’t like what’s going on in a book or even just a scene, note what it is. Does the dialogue feel awkward? Are the characters inconsistent? Does the plot feel too convenient or cobbled together? Does the wording just feel off? See if you can spot those issues in your own writing, especially when reading a completed draft or beginning a later draft.

[gg-writes]

(Great advice! I wanted to tack on other things I look for when reading)

Pay attention to how they introduce characters. Very rarely will it be all at once, and I guarantee the author went over the intro of each major character again and again while editing, so I always like paying extra close attention! Did the intro endear you to the character? Make you dislike them? How did the author impart that emotion?

Note instances of worldbuilding/info dumps, especially parts that don’t seem like worldbuilding/info dumps. Maybe the character mentions something offhand about a location you’ll see five chapters later. Maybe the internal dialogue makes a comparison to the character’s childhood. Was the information effective or did it leave you wanting more? Make note of anything that made you go, “ooh, neat!”

After you finish the story, try to find foreshadowing that you missed the first time through! It can be as simple as skimming and looking for phrases you know are important after finishing the story. Most authors add foreshadowing in the editing stage, so I tend to ponder how the story would read before they added it. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the story seems more magical for it and it’s just nice to appreciate.

What plot structures could the story fit into? We all know about the three arc stories, hero’s journey, etc. Sometimes stories can fit into more than one category. During the read and after, keep it in the back of your mind. Can you predict where the climax of the story will hit? Is it man v man or man v nature? Does the predictability (or lack thereof) add to or take away from the story?

[thewritingumbrellas]

Writing advice from my uni teachers:

If your dialog feels flat, rewrite the scene pretending the characters cannot at any cost say exactly what they mean. No one says “I’m mad” but they can say it in 100 other ways.

Wrote a chapter but you dislike it? Rewrite it again from memory. That way you’re only remembering the main parts and can fill in extra details. My teacher who was a playwright literally writes every single script twice because of this.

Don’t overuse metaphors, or they lose their potency. Limit yourself.

Before you write your novel, write a page of anything from your characters POV so you can get their voice right. Do this for every main character introduced.

[mxdam-a]

i saw a post on my dash with image sites that basically was like “it’s okay to use pictures off pinterest etc. for your edits because it’ll be hard for the original photographer to find and sue you,” which, um, made me a bit annoyed, so here is a list of 100% free stock photo sites, many of which have quite aesthetic-y photos! please do not steal photos in your work, guys!

freeimages

pixabay

pexels

publicdomainarchive

gratisography

picography

stocksnap.io

unsplash

everystockphoto

morguefile

flickr commons

deviantart’s resources section (check creators’ pages for specific terms of use)

[laurellynnleake]

The Creative Commons are great too! Their search engine checks through some of these sites as well. 

[tlirsgender]

Throwback thursday to when I was like 12 and I was putting out new writing DAILY...... Like entire Chapters of my then-current wips just, over an afternoon. What the fuck was I on

[tlirsgender]

Nobody:

Me, age 12, just started drinking coffee:

[tlirsgender]

[bagh0st-deactivated20240223]

I drew 14 pictures during the day, and wrote 32 pages a night. Now I can’t do shit.

[audliminal]

A huge part of this is because you've gotten better! And now, when you're drawing/writing/doing whatever creative task, you're not just mindlessly throwing thoughts at your paper, you're thinking as you do it. Children can churn out a lot more work because it's not yet refined, but when you're older and have more practice, you work with all these thoughts running through your head about form and shape, color palettes or word choice. Now, you're making a dozen decisions with every moment of work, and you're also questioning the decisions you've just made, wondering if you can do it better. Don't beat yourself up about producing less work now than you did back then, because every sentence or shape involves a lot more effort for you now, than it did when you were ten and brand new to this hobby.

[dragonheartftherpays]

You also probably have a lot more responsibilities and stress now than you did then, and a lot more going on with your life just in general. You had a lot more time when you were younger than you do now.

[henry-cavill-bootay]

THIS.

[nifflerdream-blog-deactivated20]

me as a writer: Oh no I can’t write that, somebody else already has

me as a reader: hell yes give me all the fics about this one scenario. The more the merrier

[obsessivewriter]

This one is so hard to accept. Reblogging to knock that into my brain.

[primarybufferpanel]

Me as a writer: I feel like I’m repeating myself, I’ve already used that theme, I’ve already written that kink, that other character uses that speech pattern so this one in another fandom can’t, I feel like I’m writing predictable things, is this different enough from that other thing I wrote, are people filling out bingo cards by my work? :sobbing:

Me as a reader: oh hell yeah this hit the spot exactly, I hope this writer has written 20 more just like it

[deelaundry]

As one friend said when I felt I was reusing a theme too much, nobody ever says, Did Agatha Christie write about murder again?

[moonlit-sunflower-books]

How To Get Back Into Your Wip

Hi! I have 2 main wips (and about 20 side ones, but let’s not go into that) and trying to find time to write both of them is difficult. And if I write one, I usually get incredibly involved in it and find it difficult to go back to writing the other.

Or I just don’t write anything for three months and then can’t find the motivation to write again. But either way.

These are just some tips that I found worked for me!

1. Reread old work

I know that I personally do not really enjoy rereading my old work, but sometimes when going through it I begin to remember why I enjoyed writing it in the first place. Just today I was reorganising the files on my laptop and I found the drafts of one of my old wips which I actually really enjoyed writing. It made me want to continue the story! You created those characters and that world in that situation because you wanted to. And chances are, some part of you still wants to continue that story.

2. Moodboards

I’m not even kidding. Making character moodboards or setting moodboards is one of the most relaxing and satisfying things to do in spare time, and it allows you to understand or re-understand your characters. I find that especially when writing in first person, having a character moodboard helps me to understand their aesthetic and my brain basically revolves around aesthetics. It also lets you feel like you’re being productive without actually having to write.

3. Pinterest Boards

Not great at photo editing? You can do the same thing as moodboards, except make a pinterest board! What I like about this is that it allows you to have a board for your entire wip, and have subsections for each character, or for a chapter, or even subsections for different plotlines! This is also a fun way to get back involved with your wip that I really enjoy.

4. Incorrect Quotes

When working with ocs, incorrect quotes are some of my favourite ways to interact with my characters because it allows me to draw connections from them to some of my favourite characters in modern media.

5. Remind yourself why you started

What I do each time I start a new project is that I make a doc with all of my ideas, the prompts I want to use, character sketches, aesthetic boards that I make - just to get my thoughts down before I start my project. And I usually keep adding to it as I write. But when I’m stuck or unmotivated, looking back at this page reminds me why I started the project in the first place and is one of my favourite ways to motivate myself to continue with it.

6. Listen to your wip playlist

I know that a lot of my writer friends create playlists for their wip or for their characters. Whenever you are stuck, listening to that playlist should get you in the mood to write again by reminding you of your wip!

7. Force yourself to write

This is kind of a last resort, but often when I really can’t find inspiration, I just force myself to sit at my keyboard and write. Set a goal that is easily achievable; tell yourself to write 20 words. Then once you’ve written 20, increase it to 50. Then 100. You may not get further than 100, and that’s okay! But when you write a little bit, it often helps you to find inspiration. And once you’ve written a little bit, writing more gets easier - even if you don’t write a scene in chronological order! Maybe just find a dialogue prompt and choose two of your characters and write a short scene inspired by that. It may help you to get back in touch with your characters and motivate you to continue writing your story.

These are just some tips that work for me, they may not work for you - but try them out if you want! And feel free to add more :) ily

[ao3commentoftheday]

How to get dark mode in google docs (mobile app)

1. Open docs

2. Tap on the hamburger menu at the top left

3. Tap on Settings

4. Tap on Theme

5. Choose Dark

6. Enjoy

[deepwaterfiction]

Text: The flying trapezist had ruined shoulders, where someone had obviously clipped a pair of wings. 

[jenroses]

important for AO3 writers

So a while ago I asked staff at AO3 why it was that I could post a work, update it with chapters, and have it appear no higher than tenth, ever, even with new chapters, on a busy fandom. I finally got an explanation. 

“If, however, your work is appearing below works that were already visible, it’s possible you’re running into an issue that occurs when a work is posted between 12:00 AM and 5 AM UTC - works posted during this time frame cause the system to believe the work has had a posting date set manually. (Normally you would do this by ticking “Set a different publication date” in the posting form.) This also applies to works that were initially saved as a draft on a date previous to the day they are posted. Works that have been backdated are assigned a default time of day, which may be earlier than the actual time you posted the work.”

So don’t post during that time. It just HAPPENS to be between 5 pm and 10 pm Pacific time so posting things after dinner is RIGHT OUT if you happen to live on the west coast of the US. That’s between 8 pm and 1 am east coast time.

So until they fix this (and it’s been going on a LONG time, they’re working on it but it’s a massive code overhaul, apparently) I’ll be posting fics OTHER times.  This means if you’re posting a long, multichapter work, posting the first chapter in the evening can screw up the entire rest of your posting. Posting a draft before posting for reals will also keep you from being at the top of the list. And this probably explains why some of my fics have done better than others.  What does this look like? Someone posts at, say, 4 in the afternoon my time. I come along and post around 8 pm, which is pretty typical for me, but it gets marked as “set manually” and given a time much earlier in the day, and thus appears behind everything posted that day. So it’s never on top, people start reading down the list, think they’ve seen everything that’s at the top, and don’t poke any farther.  So for writers, DO NOT POST BETWEEN  12:00 AM and 5 AM UTC. Google will translate, just plug in 12 am UTC and it will pop up your local time in most places.  For readers, realize this exists and that you’re probably missing something. Scroll back if it’s between those hours, and after those hours. 

And at some point they’ll fix this to something less arcane.

[kurowrites]

Jesus fucking christ. But at least now I know.

[saisai-chan]

if you ever feel bad for self inserts, please remember:

Sailor Moon and Sailor Venus were SI of the author and her family 

the Pines family from Gravity Falls were based on Alex Hirsch’s own family, with Alex being Dipper, his sister being Mabel, and his grandpa being Stan

Steven Universe was based on Rebecca Sugar’s younger brother, and the Crystal Gems were all based on different facets of Rebecca’s personality

long story short, don’t feel bad for self inserts y’all 

[creativepromptsforwriting]

Prompt #512

The time loop was starting to really annoy them.

[saathi1013]

On White Fear & Creating Diverse Transformative Works

So whenever fandom tries to address the question “Why aren’t there more works featuring characters of color?” there are a myriad of (predictable) responses.  One of which is appearing with increasing frequency: “Because we (usually: white creators of transformative works) are afraid of getting it wrong.”

And like.  I’ve already addressed how ‘thinking you’ll get it wrong’ is a failure of both imagination and of craft/skill (and a symptom of the racial empathy gap, which I forgot had a proper name when I wrote that post).  Meanwhile, @stitchmediamix absolutely accurately pointed out that the ‘fear’ being discussed is fear of being called racist, not necessarily fear of failure.

Now, we could go into the whole absurdity of white fragility here, but google is a thing and “white fragility” is discussed all over the place and I trust ya’ll to do the work if you actually give a shit about this subject… which I assume you do, if you’re reading this – but if you’re just here to find a way to dismiss the issue at hand, I’m gonna save you some time and recommend you scroll past.

Writers can also be fragile, especially in transformative works communities, where “if you don’t have anything nice to say, hit the back button and keep your mouth shut” is the primary expectation wrt feedback, and anything that deviates from that is considered a mortal insult (do you vageublog about my fic, sir?).  But if we’re willing to deploy an array of tools to make our writing not-My-Immortal-bad, from spellcheck to wikipedia to in-depth historical research to betas and britpickers and so on, then we should be willing to employ equivalent tools to avoid writing racist stories.

Incidentally, writing stories that erase/ignore extant characters of color, especially if they’re prominent in the source text? is racist.  So avoiding writing characters of color altogether is not the solution to making your writing not-racist.

And, okay.  I feel it’s important to acknowledge here, as I have before, that the Fear of Fucking Up is a very real fear that genuinely does affect people’s enthusiasm for / likelihood to write, regardless of the validity or fairness of that Fear’s origins, and I’m going to be generous enough to assume that there are some people who are acting in good faith when they say “I want to, but I’m scared.”

So. This is for those who are acting in good faith, from the perspective of a white fan who has written fic about characters of color in several fandoms and never gotten pilloried for it, even when I know for a fact (in retrospect) that I’ve fucked up details.

(oh, side note: I know this is mostly tackling things from a writing perspective, but a lot of this can apply to creating transformative works overall with a few tweaks.)

First: realize that the likelihood of getting called out is actually pretty low.  And fans of color aren’t as Mean and Angry and Unfairly Sensitive as some people want us to believe.  (Do you vagueblog about That Dumpster Fire Meta, sir?  /  No, sir, I do not vagueblog about That Meta sir; but I do vagueblog, sir.)

This is not to say that there aren’t people out there who’re more than willing to make a (justified) stink about egregiously racist writing.  But it’s actually very rare to get targeted, especially publicly by a large number of unhappy fans.  Because you know what? most fans, including fans of color, want to just have fun in fandom as much as anyone else.

It’s just, y’know, a little harder for fans of color to ‘just have fun’ when us white fans are showing our asses with stories involving “Dragon Lady” Elektra or “Angry Black Woman” Sally Donovan or “Spicy Latin Lover” Poe Dameron.  And sometimes us white fans only listen to what fans of color are saying when they make a Big Deal out of it. 

That’s not a failure of their ability to stay calm.  That’s our failure to listen before they get loud and organized.  Because I’m willing to bet that people who get called out publicly? got a few polite, private messages about their screwup first, and they doubled down instead of listening. 

Also: there is a thing where, no matter how politely they word their critique, fans of color, especially black fans, are more likely to be unjustly perceived as ‘mean’ and ‘angry’ by white fans.  Again, that’s our failure, not theirs.  Plus, even if they are angry, that doesn’t automatically mean they’re wrong (see: Tone Argument).

Step Two is: pay attention to discussions about racist tropes in fiction.  Yes, even when it’s crit of our favorite shows/movies/characters/etc.  If you understand the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope and why it’s harmful, or you understand the Bechdel-Wallace test, or you can have a meaningful discussion about Mary Sues, or you can (justifiably) rail about how Bury Your Gays sucks, then you can develop a similar appreciation for racial biases and stereotypes.  And then you can find ways to avoid them.  

No, no one’s expecting you to memorize bell hooks so you can write a drabble about Iris West, or demanding you write a dissertation on media stereotypes wrt the simultaneous fetishization and desexualization of Asian women (who aren’t a monolith, either, but Hollywood doesn’t seem to know that) before you’re ‘allowed’ to write Melinda May in a story, but like.  Pay attention when people, especially fans of color, are talking about common tropes so that you don’t unthinkingly replicate or perpetuate them in your fic.

Yes, racist writing can involve more than just thoughtless parroting of harmful tropes, but my best guess is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, fanwork getting ‘called out’ in fandom involves those tropes.  So avoiding them takes your chances of getting criticized from ‘low’ to ‘almost nonexistent.’  Less to fear, see?

Step Three is: more research – basically, at least as much as you’d be willing to invest in any equivalent white character.  @writingwithcolor is a great blog, and has links to additional resources; .  If you’re the type to get a beta or a britpicker, find a sensitivity reader or a beta of the appropriate background.  Not all fans of color are willing to do this kind of unpaid labor, just as not all fans are willing to britpick/beta, but they’re out there.  Approach them respectfully, and listen to them if they say that something in your story looks off.

It’s worth noting here that writing about characters of color doesn’t need to involve - and in fact, some advice recommends avoiding - telling Special Stories About Racism.  Stories about characters of color don’t need to be about slavery or civil rights or the constant parade of microaggressions they have to deal with daily in order to be realistic or compelling (or angsty, for those who love writing angst, as I do).  Research can turn up useful information that can inform our choices as writers, but if we don’t share the oppression our characters face, it’s not our job to tell stories specifically about that oppression.

Step Four is: before posting, anticipate the worst.  What will you do if someone says you fucked up?  If your answer is “argue with them and talk over their concerns,” stop.  Remember that you’re not a victim of a ‘mean fan of color,’ but that you’ve probably written something that they consider harmful.  Being told that you wrote something racist isn’t an attack on your moral fiber.  You’re not an irredeemable monster if you fuck up, but your response to being told you fucked up is far more telling.  Acknowledge their concerns, fix the issue if you can, learn from your mistake, and fail better next time.

You cannot improve if you don’t try in the first place.  Failure to try is failure, so try your best, and improve incrementally – just as you already do as a writer with any story.

In conclusion: The 4 Steps to Getting Over Yourself as a White Fanfic Writer: (1) recognize that the likelihood of getting called out is pretty low; (2) educate yourself about the most common racist writing issues, so that likelihood will be even lower; (3) do your due diligence when writing; (4) in case of the worst: apologize, fix the issue, learn from the experience, fail better in the future.

(And again, google is your friend – there are a lot of people who’ve written about this subject, like Kayla Ancrum, Morgan Jenkins, the mods at Writing with Color, Thao Le, and Monica Zepeda, among many, many, others.  I’m merely sharing my own perspective from what I’ve learned from listening to a lot of smart people, in case it might help some of you – if it doesn’t, keep looking, a ton of great resources are out there.)

[writing-prompt-s]

A prince/princess doesn’t wish to marry. So, to avoid an arranged marriage, they disguise themselves as their own suitor. Now they must simultaneously keep up this charade, all the while figuring out how to call off the wedding. In hindsight, this wasn’t such a good idea, was it?

[yourfonts]

Random Fonts  

 Please Like or reblog if you download it  

Amazing Books

 Guld script color

 Mikhaella 

Baby boomer

 Aliva Brush

 Ephemera Kingsford