liiilyevans

liz, writer, simp for gingers (particularly weasleys) and james potter

[takminusthepowerofjuju]

[yesluuh]

Angelina Johnson Aesthetic Moodboard

[petaltexturedskies]

Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus

[grindrbooks]

[luna-azzurra]

Most writers don't have a writing problem. they have a finishing problem. and finishing is its own completely different skill that has almost nothing to do with talent. finishing requires you to be okay with the thing being real, being done, existing in the world where people can have opinions about it.

And a lot of people would rather keep it unfinished and perfect in their head than done and flawed and out there. an unfinished draft can still be anything. once you finish it, it becomes one specific thing with specific failures that specific people can point to. so you keep tweaking. you keep saying it's not ready. you go back to the beginning again.

And the years pass and you are a person who is always working on something and never the person who made something. and those are two completely different people with two completely different relationships to this thing they claim to love.

[softest-punk]

While I understand the desire to make Big Art entirely and viscerally I think it's worth considering that small art often leaves an outsized impact on its audience. Short stories, teensy indie games, short films, sketches on scrap paper, carved or sculpted figures that would fit in the palm of your hand, etc. etc. are all things that, when they hit your psyche at just the right angle, can stay lodged in there forever specifically because they are small. It is not necessary for a thing to be sprawling for it to have impact.

[deerly-departed]

Man’s Best Friend

Something with James and Sirius as Padfoot? Padfoot being jealous of the cat?

Prompt from @vagueshadows-fics

[8nin]

I may post some horny shit but I’m actually a lover

[flightyalrighty]

never sand down your story or your characters to make them more appealing to a wider audience, ok? Do what YOU want

🫵

[spin-the-wheel-polls]

you have this superpower! BUT you have this side-effect

is it worth it?

yes!!

the side effect is bad but ITS WORTH IT

meh it's okay

the side effect makes it unusable/not worth it

Results/option I didn't think of

Voting ended onMay 20

[noah-wyles]

she's the best of us

[babymorte]

i know they say no one is coming to save you but why the fuck not

[muggleauformarauders]

Lily saying "I love you" first after James made her laugh so hard she almost peed herself. James was surprised. Because it was obvious how James felt for her but when Lily said it, he couldn't believe it. He made her repeat it over and over again. And obviously he said it back. Over and over again.

[picascribit]

There are 2 types of fanfic:

fanfic that I like

fanfic that is none of my business

[space-sweetheart]

I love people who have specific characters that are their "no one understands this character like me. not even the writers." because they're genuinely not joking. the way they understand those specific characters is so profound that it'll change your entire veiw.

[socialistfremenist]

[cactusringed]

I think fanfiction as a medium is different enough from mainstream literature in the tools it offers writers that it's a shame that it's not talked about more often. And it's not me saying "fanfic is better than books xD" because that sort of mindset is a symptom of people who aren't particularly well read in either medium. I'm just speaking of like... The little things you get to do with a fanfic that you genuinely can't really do in an original story.

I had a big fanfic in a previous fandom where one of the big reveals was the involvement of a kind of infamous villain, whose presence was built up to and foreshadowed through the whole fic until his reveal without ever mentioning his name, so that the name drop would be a gut punch. It worked especially well because of who the villain was and his presence in that fandom space specifically (it's very complicated) and if it was an original story this reveal wouldn't work at all the way it was written in the fic. Because if you don't have a predisposition to think about that character and his relationship to the hero in a very specific way, then just seeing their name won't do much to you; the reveal and the recontextualisation it pushes upon you hinges on your previous knowledge of the source material.

I think it's an interesting tool fanfic authors are given. One of my favorite fanfic of all time is partially a re-imagining of its source material's canon, and something it does is introduce antagonists much earlier in the story or deepen npcs' stories. It then works to evoke a tragic irony that again wouldn't work if you didn't know the source material, and it's something the author obviously has a lot of fun with.

You could call it cheap or a crutch and I mean, yeah, sure, it is a little bit: the fanfic relies on previously established emotional bonds and stakes to achieve its goal, and in some cases it saves the author from having to 'properly' build up its stakes. But I think it's INTERESTING that it has that tool at its disposal. I think it's a fun thing to play with and I think these built in expectations and emotional bonds are especially why I find story driven aus in particular to be fascinating in the amount of ways you can play with them. You know??

[whetstonefires]

notably, a lot of those methods and approaches show up in the canon of world literature. because rewriting a known story with your own focus and wording has historically been one of the major modes, especially of narrative poetic traditions.

this is one of the better reasons people say that i.e. shakespeare or paradise lost is fanfic--not just 'original concepts are not necessary for literary value' but 'some of the stuff we do in fic shows up here.'

the narrative structure of the iliad is completely bonkers if you don't approach it with the understanding that everyone was expected to already know the Trojan War story, and probably knew loads of versions even, and this was specifically a tragic dramatization of the emotional journey specifically Achilles went on toward the end of it, leading up to his death.

there's non-Achilles parts, as context and to create a well-rounded narrative and probably to appeal to people who just like Trojan War poems and will be mad if their blorbo doesn't show up at all, but this is the wrath and grief of achilles character study piece.

this is perfectly straightforward if you're used to the dynamics of a fandom space, but fairly hard to parse if you're used to the expectation that a writer is a least pretending to be making up a new story.

people still write books by remaking familiar stories all the time, of course, but since this is regarded as lazy and derivative by default, there's a tendency to change things for the sake of changing them as opposed to in service of the actual demands of the story you're telling, which sometimes introduces weaknesses to the work that really didn't need to be there.

remake and sequel films would be much better on average if the scriptwriters and directors were versed in the conventions of canon-compliant fanfiction.