writing, creating, ficcing

meta talk about fanfiction, writing & creativity

[brawlite]

honestly sometimes there's no better feeling than rereading a fic you've written and coming out of it going, "yeah that actually this DOES slap. exactly what i wanted to read. fucking nailed it."

[powerful-owl]

pick one

your ship goes canon

your favorite ao3 writer drops 100k of your ship + your favorite trope

Remaining time: 12 hours 27 minutes

[boitterfly]

it’s so special to me that so much of fan culture is textual analysis for the love of the game. like thank god there are people in my phone who are also thinking about this thing i love so much that they are writing transformative fiction as character studies and setting clips of the show to music with theme-relevant lyrics and writing long text posts analyzing every line of dialogue like!! yay!!!

[littlelav107]

i love thinking about the character! *actively pacing around the room, breathing heavily, on the verge of tears*

[star-shard]

Sometimes, fanfiction is carefully plotted out stories, with plot points and call backs and themes that all tie it up in a meaningful and exciting way.

And sometimes fanfiction is, ‘Watch me do a fucking KICK FLIP off this cool sentence!! Also here's some sex'

Both are beautiful forms of writing.

[redstonedust]

unfortunately i dont think its queerbaiting if the creator is just so terminally heterosexual that they never remotely considered the same gender relationship their show is centered around could be read as romantic. it is deeply painful however.

[melanqueerly]

Maybe accidental queer baiting? The way someone may not mean to say something rude, but it may come off rude, so it's rude. Frustrating either way.

[phinarei]

Not being a dick, just a friendly clarification.

By definition you can't accidentally queerbait. Queerbaiting is specifically using a same sex pair from the show to market the show to queer audiences with no intention of ever following through on a romantic relationship.

There is officially licensed Destiel merch signed off on by Kripke. Teen Wolf had a commercial with the actors for Derek and Stiles draped over each other talking about being "on a ship." Both shows actively used scenes between them as marketing while actively mocking fans for wanting them together. Sherlock has multiple characters refer to Johnlock as a couple, including characters we're supposed to believe are never wrong about human behavior and pushed those scenes in marketing. Then they acted insulted when fans saw them as a couple.

That's queerbaiting.

Done on accident it would just be queer subtext. Done because they had no other choice due to censorship is queer coding.

The specific meaning of the word is really starting to get lost and it's a pretty important one to keep accurate. It describes a very specific phenomenon that was done repeatedly and maliciously for decades and is meant to examine that specifically.

Doing it on accident sucks, but it isn't a tactic of capitalism intentionally intended to suppress queer representation while making money from queer fans.

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

[lysimachias]

Not "The Character did nothing wrong" or "The Character is irredeemably awful" but a secret third thing: The Character may display moments of deep love & compassion, may even have a strong sense of ethics, and may also be capable of brutal cruelty that is irreconcilable with those traits. The constant tension between the different sides of The Character's nature is exactly what makes them compelling, and attempting to reduce them down to simply "a terrible person" or "innocent & misunderstood" is missing the point of the questions a media with nuanced characters is asking you to consider

[madlori]

[commiefaggoth]

so embarrassing to watch yourself become obsessed with a character that feels tailor made for you specifically to become obsessed with. feels like i fell into a trap made just for me. like damn they got me. those are all the things i like and go crazy for

[racketghost]

kissing the people who leave comments on old fics directly on the forehead

[transxfiles]

me: *writes fic*

me: great! time to post to ao3-

ao3 summary box: *exists*

me: 

ao3 summary box:

me:

ao3 summary box: 

me:

[rooksandravens]

[rjeddystone]

Ooh, this is actually kinda a neat thing, because you can think of it as a checklist:

Who: Main character(s)

Why: Character goal or desire (stated)

Why: Character need (implied)

When: Inciting Incident

What: Means (that achieves the goal/need)

Where: Place A >> Place B

How: The Plan

Obstacle(s): antagonist or challenge

For example:

Who: Bilbo Baggins, a respectable hobbit of Hobbiton

Why: Treasure, wealth (stated)

Why: Adventure, self-respect (implied)

When: After supper

What: Quest

Where: Hobbiton >> The Lonely Mountain

How: A company of dwarves, a wizard, and an ancient map and key

Main antagonist(s): a dragon

Thus, in less than 100 words:

Bilbo Baggins is a respectable hobbit in Hobbiton, never making any trouble or having any adventures. But when a wizard and a company of dwarves invite themselves to dinner, Bilbo finds himself joining their quest from the shires of Hobbiton to the legendary Lonely Mountain, the home of a long lost treasure, and quite, possibly, a dragon.  

~~~~

The Anatomy of Story by John Truby is a really good book by the by, if anyone’s interested in this sort of thing.

[roguecompanion1812]

This is super helpful!’

[feyd-meowtha]

[canonkiller]

I think u should start writing your original story btw. I want to read it.

[puyopuyopopee]

I’m noticing an increase in new fic writers on AO3 who…uh…mayy not know how to format their fics correctly..so here is a quick and VERY important tip

Using a random fic of mine as example..

The left example: ✅✅✅

The right example: ❌❌❌

Idk how many times I’ve read a good fic summary and been so excited to read before clicking on it and being met with an ugly wall of text. When I see a huge text brick with zero full line breaks my eyes blur and I just siiiigh bc either I click out immediately or I grin and bear it…it’s insufferable!

If a new character speaks, you need a line break. If you notice a paragraph is becoming too large, go ahead and make a line break and/or maybe reconfigure the paragraph to flow better. I’m not a pro writer or even a huge fic writer but…please…ty…

[ao3-shenanigans]

This is a good thing to keep in mind! It is often and unfortunate that a really good fic doesn’t get love because its formatting makes it too difficult to read!

[asymmetryestablished]

I think I figured out why this happens!

AO3's posting form has two modes: Rich Text and HTML. the vast majority of people write in Rich Text editors, aka any normal word processing software (MS Word, Google Docs, Apple Pages, what have you). but when you first open it, the posting form opens in HTML view. if you paste formatted text into HTML view, it erases every piece of formatting, including paragraph spacing.

this is an easy fix. when you go to post your fic, make sure the posting form looks like this:

not like this:

and please spread the word! this is an important piece of computer literacy that nobody is teaching to the new generations and they deserve to know

[myriad-thoughts]

and the reverse happens when pasting from some places (google doc, ms word) into rich-text where it doubles the spaces between lines. If you look at the html it generates </p><p> </p><p> tags - an extra paragraph containing a single space, which you can search and replace down to a single </p><p> (end paragraph, start new one).

[ruffboi-mags]

Also, since sometimes working with the rich text editor can be a pain even when copy-pasting from another rich text editor, there is a Google Docs script that will format your document in HTML and make it appropriate for posting into the AO3 html editor. I swear by this and I use it every time I post to AO3. It's literally just a specific Google doc that you can make a copy of that includes a script where you just select a menu option and it will automatically convert formatting to HTML, and using this script + pasting into the HTML editor has bypassed the issues of "extra line breaks between paragraphs" and "a space after italics where there shouldn't be" for me.

The original google doc is here and it includes directions both for getting a copy of it into your own google drive and for using it to prepare your fic for posting on AO3.

[mysteryteacup]

Also be aware that if you write in Scrivener it will not keep your formatting when you paste it into AO3, even in the Rich Text editor.

There's a reason I'm only writing one fic in Scrivener (it's the timey wimey one where I need the corkboards function on Scrivener in order to function).

[thegoldenavenger]

adding on that if you use ellipsus (online alternative to Google docs) there is a native "export to ao3" function which automatically copies an html version of your fic including the spacing and formatting and opens a new tab for a new work in ao3. Just paste into the text box and you'll be set!

[janeways-coffees]

Best one shot I've ever read lmao

[janeways-coffees]

(By the excellent @motleyfam )

[janeways-coffees]

Holy shit

[alexseanchai]

[image 1: AO3 chapter note that reads, "So as we all know from math class, '5/5' is just a fancy way of saying '1', meaning this story is most definitely still a oneshot 😌". image 2: AO3 chapter note that reads, "The funny thing about fractions is that, mathematically speaking, there is no difference between 5/5 and 6/6 (except for my sanity)".]

[lavenderprose]

I love how some fics are called shit like "They Only Shoot The Birds Who Cannot Sing" and it's like the most insane porn you're ever read and then some fics are called Spit On Me and it's 18,000 words of the most achingly id-scratching prose you've ever read and they're both. They're both so fucking good. thank God for fanfiction.

[crowttore]

Are you currently suffering from The Character?