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Tips for Beginners

Edited/Updated 4-8-19

When typing this title, my phone autocorrected it to “Tips for Whiners” which is hilarious given the circumstances surrounding this post. However, my conscience got the best of me and I decided to title it differently (even though there was peer pressure for the original title). However, not all beginners are whiners (by far) and I figured it wasn’t fair to lump people into a group. Plus, this post is meant to be far more informative and encouraging than it is critical and teasing.

So why write this post? New writers are always looking for help, whether that’s tools to use to get their writing “out there,” wherever that is, ways to improve their writing, or how to develop relationships. They want to build their audience, which means gaining followers and more notes on posts. They seek out help from fellow writers, work on their own blogs, and write--a lot.

However, some new writers fall into traps of jealousy, complaining, giving up, and other negative pitfalls. They become frustrated, then turn their frustration into jealousy or aggression pointed at other, more “established” writers and bloggers. Or they turn away from the community, resign themselves to being lonely forever, convinced that no one likes them. Some whine about not getting notes and followers, they complain about blogging cliques and unfair treatment, and they adopt an attitude of “Woe is me. The blogosphere is against me.”

And I get it, to a certain extent. Writing is hard, and making a place for yourself in a space that is saturated with other bloggers and headed by accounts that can boast thousands, or even tens of thousands, of followers can be intimidating and discouraging. But it doesn’t have to be.

This post is meant to help new writers, or any writers really, by providing both useful tips and reality checks for when you feel yourself becoming too negative. You might find that I come across sassy at times, and that may be true, but at no point do I intend to be hateful or mean. I like to put things plainly while understanding where people are coming from. As an aside, if you don’t like what I have to say, you can stop reading this post at any time. You can also take what works for you and throw out the rest. Nothing here is a blanket statement.

But let’s just get on with it. (And it is a long one)

Tips

Follow lots of writing blogs. Get your name out there. Start getting to know the community. Some people will automatically follow you back. Use hashtags and key words to find people. See who other people follow, and follow those people.

Join Writing groups/Follow advice blogs. Joining these are so helpful, especially when you’re first starting out. They connect you to other writers, they get your pieces exposure, and they offer other kinds of support and advice. Here’s some blogs that I know of for Supernatural specifically

@spnfanficpond

Weekly chats on skype with specific discussion topics hosted by fellow bloggers

Monthly awards

Reblog submitted fics

Host challenges

Find betas

Find mutuals

Tag fellow pond members

@hazelsfanfictionguide: My own personal blog for posting writing tips and advice all in one place

@atc74: a fellow SPN writer who is willing to help

Tagging. Tag. Your. Fics. This gets you exposure to people who are searching for Supernatural fan fiction. The first five tags are searchable, so make use of those. See what the more established writers are using. See what tags are popular. Tag characters, tropes, plots points, pairings, etc.

Mentions. Start building a list of readers who want to be tagged in your pieces. This can be done many ways, but the easiest and most efficient tool that I’ve found is Google sheets to keep track of accounts. Also, look for writers who ask to be tagged and who organize rec lists. Ask other blogs if they care for you to tag them. A lot won’t mind if you’re nice. This will get your writing more exposure.

@mrswhozeewhatsis runs a tag list here where you can find people who want to read the type of fic you’re writing

The Pond runs a list of members you can tag in fics

Reading.

Read other people’s fics, comment on them, reblog them. This may not seem like it helps you, but being generous towards others is a great way to end up helping yourself. It can make you friends. It can make other authors aware of your presence in the writing community. And if it ends up not doing much for you, at least you’ve been a nice person. Participating in the community is key.

Read books when you can. And pay attention to how the author writes. This will improve your own writing. You can see what you like, what you don’t like, styles you want to emulate, and how they build worlds and stories. You will learn new vocabulary and pick up on things that make someone’s writing good.

Challenges. Lots of blogs host these and you can join any of them, most of the time. Some blogs require that you follow them first, some don’t. Either way, joining challenges is fun, it stretches your creativity, and it can gain your work exposure because hosts will reblog your fics and put them on a masterlist. Many blogs host random challenges throughout the year, but there are also “big bangs” if you’re up for writing long fics about your favorite pairings.

@deancasbigbang: A yearly challenge for destiel shippers. Involves writing a lengthy fic.

@supernaturaltropecelebration: Another long fic challenge for any pairing

@samiferbigbang

Connections. This is one of the most important, most difficult, and often most overlooked tips. You must make friends in the writing community. It’s ok to feel nervous about it, to be shy, or to worry that people won’t like you. We all did at first, but you will be able to make friends if you’re patient. It doesn’t matter who those friends are. It doesn’t matter how many followers these friends have. It only matters that you have them. How do you make these friends?

Message writers about their work. Talk about why you loved it.

Reach out and ask someone to read your work.

Participate in ask games, send nice asks to your favorite authors, participate in other online activities with authors. I host SPN CAH games sometimes, as do other authors. I’ve met lots of new people through those games.

Join open chats. I’ve met some of my best Tumblr friends through chats. These can happen on Skype, Discord, or other online platforms.

Realize that sometimes making a friend just....happens. You’ll hit it off with someone and you won’t know why. Usually this happens because you’ve used one of the above methods to talk to people, or they messaged you first.

Write. Write things you want to publish, write things that no one else will see, write things you immediately delete, write things for only your friends to read. Just, write. This is the only way to improve your writing skills and it will help you grow your blog because people will enjoy your writing more. We all start out kind of crappy, trust me. And we all have to grow. We all go back and read something we wrote months ago and cringe. Yes, even that author that has 5k followers and gets 500 notes on every fic and seems to have perfect stories. Yes, they’ve cringed at their own work. The point, though, is that they’ve grown and worked hard to get where they are and you will have to as well. You can not get better if you don’t write. And you’ll have to write a lot.

Write Better. It’s a hard truth that sometimes what we write isn’t the best quality, but it’s not the end of the world. Nobody’s born an amazing writer and even the best can learn more. Better writing will make it more likely that people will want to read your stories and share them. You can improve your writing by doing some of the following:

Write as much as you can

Read as much as you can

Follow writing advice blogs (!!!)

Find a trusted beta who will work with you to make your stories the best they can be

Now, say you’ve been doing some or all of these things, and you’re not growing as much as you’d like. Maybe you feel like the tips aren’t working for you like they work for other people. Here are some other things to consider, because success isn’t just about numbers.

Are you having fun? Do you enjoy writing? Do you enjoy being on Tumblr? Do you enjoy reading other fics? Do you enjoy being in the fandom? If the answer is yes, and you still love to be on this site posting stories or whatever else you do, then focus on that. Having fun and actually enjoying this is kind of the point.

Do you have friends? Maybe you haven’t made a ton. Maybe you don’t have a huge group of buddies. But do you have someone? Maybe a couple people? If yes, then focus on those friends. Find ways to support each other. Stop pining after the elusive “in-crowd” or “popularity gauge.” It does not exist. There is no clique, just blogs that know each other because they’ve been here awhile

Do you have some interaction on your fics? Maybe you don’t get 500 notes, maybe you don’t even get 50. But what are you getting? You won’t get much at first. That’s just the truth. But eventually, you’ll get something, and then you’ll start getting more. You don’t need tons of reblogs to feel good about your writing. Focus on the comments you do get, reply to them, and thank people for taking time to read your fics. Thank people for liking your fics. Be grateful and count your blessings and all that stuff your mom probably told you growing up.

Now that we’ve talked a lot about what to do, let’s quickly brush over some things NOT to do.

Don’t give up. If writing is something you really, truly enjoy, then keep doing it. If you try it, and find out it’s not really for you, then stop. But don’t stop because you aren’t where you want to be yet. Also, try another platform. Wattpad, AO3, and fanfiction.net are just a few.

Don’t whine, complain, moan & groan. Don’t be that person that constantly whines about how hard you have it. Just don’t. We’ve all had it that hard. And we’ve all had to work hard to get to where we are. Frankly, it makes you sound immature and entitled. Because somehow you think followers and notes and popularity should magically appear to you while the rest of us took months and/or years to build that. Maybe that’s not how you actually feel, but remember... being nice and supportive in the community will get you far with people.

Don’t send hate or rude messages, anon or not. Do I really need to explain this one? What does it gain you, really? Some sick sense of superiority or self-righteousness? A little bit of negative attention? Yeah, it doesn’t get you much then.

Don’t steal work. People will find you out. And then no one will want to read from you again.

The last thing I’m going to talk about is perspective. We all need it from time to time because we get caught up in our own world and what’s happening to us. We forget other people’s experiences and we fail to realize how good we’ve got it or how far we’ve come. But it’s important to have perspective for many reasons. It makes us happier, it gives us patience and quells our frustrations, and it makes the people around us happier because we aren’t being rude to them. So here is some perspective for the writing world.

It will take you months, maybe years. I don’t know how many months it will take you to build your blog to a point where you’re happy with it, but it will take time. Some people take only a few months, others take over a year, maybe more. I wish I could tell you why, but I can’t. It’s just how it is.

There will be people who move faster than you. Story time. I’ve been writing on this blog for exactly a year now. I have 868 followers. (Update two years later, I’m at 2103, so it’s taken me 3 years to get to 2k). But guess what? I have friends who have been writing for less than six months who have almost 2k followers. And I have friends who have been writing about the same time as me who have far more followers than I do. I have gotten frustrated from time to time. It’s only natural. But what I haven’t done is the above things on the “don’t” list. Also, take notice that I said they’re my friends. I actually like these people. I’m not jealous of them.

There will be people who won’t notice you. With big follower and note counts comes lots and lots of notifications. It is easy to miss a comment or a reblog in the midst of that noise. Put personal lives on top of that and more “popular” blogs may have a pretty hard time keeping up with notifications. It’s not fair to them for you to be mad at them for not seeing your particular reblog in the middle of hundreds. And when you reach that point, it won’t be fair for someone to do that to you either.

You will never feel like you’ve “made it” or The Hedonic Treadmill. When you are a small blog, it is easy to look at blogs that have 1k, 5k, and 10k+ followers and feel like they’ve made it. They seem established, they seem to have reached the farthest goals. You aspire to this, and so you feel a huge gap between you and these blogs. You dream about when you reach that point. You dream about how you will feel accomplished and have a sense of finality in your endeavors. “I’ve made it,” you will say. But where exactly is it that you’ve made it to? Newsflash: No matter what goal you reach, you will feel happy about it for a moment and then you will move on and look for the next accomplishment. This is called the Hedonic Treadmill. It’s a common part of life and happens in all areas, including work and school. This is why athletes keep going after winning the olympics or people go back to school to get a second or third Ph.D. The point of all this is that it’s far better to be content where you’re at as you grow than to pine after a goal and place all your happiness and blog-worth on a follower or note goal.

We have a bad judgment of future happiness and sadness. This ties in to the last point. Humans exaggerate both how happy or sad they will feel about a future event. This makes things like reaching 20k followers, for example, seem so amazing and wonderful, but in reality, it’s cool for a little while and then you move on. Basically, we think having these high follower counts and lots of notes on our fics will satisfy us, but it won’t. You may get there and find out that the busyness from Tumblr stresses you out. You may find that you can’t keep up with all the notifications and then you realize you wish you could go back to being smaller. You may suddenly not have so much time to enjoy reading other fics. The grass is greener on the other side and all that. Moral of the story: try to find a way to be happy where you’re at.

Basically, to summarize this giant post, take joy in writing, make some friends, contribute to the community, and focus more on what you do have rather than what you don’t. Realize that everyone, including you, has to do the same hard work to build their blogs. No one else can do it for you. This will make your Tumblr experience so much more enjoyable and that’s what we’re here for, right? To have fun.

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