do you have any tips for boosting word count in a meaningful way? i feel kind of sad when i write a 3k that'd take a few weeks (if i'm lucky) then see someone's output on ao3 be more consistent and with more count to boot. qq
i think obviously the biggest piece of advice i should give is not to care. in an ideal world, it doesn’t matter if someone writes faster, or more words than you, everyone goes at their own pace, and does what they can, and yada yada etc etc. that doesn’t really work in practice, and i know it, so if you wanna write longer, and write faster i do have a few tips that can help. (and ofc all of these pertain to my style and my experiences, and someone else would prob have different opinions)
1 one of the best ways to bolster your word count, and one of the things i see most constantly overlooked in a lot of fics is a character’s thoughts. actions and dialogue are good for keeping the plot moving, they’re helpful, everybody loves them, but what really fascinates me is the why those actions and dialogues are happening. maybe it’s the theatre kid in me, but one of the things i always start with once i have a plot is character motivations, and how they feel, and react to everything happening internally as well as externally, and by working through those processes on paper it can both make your fics longer, and make your characters feel more three dimensional
2 on that same note, having an actual outline can really help too. a lot of the time, i just kinda wing it, i won’t lie, but even in my head there’s some sort of outline of what’s going on, and the times when ive transferred that to paper have been, in my opinion, some of my best works (and my longest, too). if you know what’s happening in a story before it happens, you can more purposefully control things like pacing, as well as include foreshadowing if you’d like, and it provides more room to think about why things are happening, rather than the fact that they just kind of are, and this depth of understanding allows you to better flesh out your works
3 this one is gonna seem really obvious in theory, but in practice it might not be, at least for me. one of the best things you can do is just read. read, and read some more, and, you guessed it, fucking read some more. read works of characters you like, to get ideas on how you want to portray them, read works on characters you don’t like, so you know what you don’t want to do, read works that have nothing at fucking all to do with what your writing because i guarantee you that you’ll find some kind of inspiration in them. also, read actual fucking books. don’t just read fanfiction, read real life, published books, by authors who do this for a living. that doesn’t mean you have to just read grimy classics that’ll make you fall asleep, there’s a lot of new books being published all the time and some of them are very good, but read something original, with substance, and that you’ll enjoy. my friends and i have a book club where we pick out a book each month, read it, and then we meet up and discuss it, this month we’re reading jurassic park, which obviously isn’t shakespeare, so just read something that isn’t fanfiction sometimes (and if you can, talk about it with someone)
4 this’ll be my last one i promise, but something i feel like mentioning is that it’s important to remember that everyone is different, be it in circumstance, motivation, free time, abilities, etc. not everyone can write like someone else, but guess what? that’s fine! chances are, that author that’s cranking out fics on ao3 either has a lot of free time, and that’s what they like to do with it, or that’s what they do to destress, and so they do it a lot. to this end, and this goes for all artistic pursuits, be it music, writing, visual arts, performance arts, etc, you don’t need to compare yourself to others. you want to, and it’s impossible not to, but at the end of the day you’re you, and they’re them, and you’re different people with different perspectives, abilities, and lives. it can be good to find motivation in other people’s works, i do that a lot, but letting it turn into a sort of negativity hinders more than it helps, i promise (also, they prob have more experience than you, whether you can see that experience or not, so just write more, it’ll come to you i promise)
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