Considering the shift of views of the dsmp Fandom towards shipping. If you were to change the dynamics and or ways of showing affection in your fanfics, would you make them explicitly romantic? I like the jokes of "Beeduo fanfic writers were itching to make them kiss." but I guess sometimes people may purposefully just enjoy queer platonic relationships without kissing scenes.
Hi! That’s an interesting question.
For starters, there’s nothing I would change about how I wrote my works. The character relationships as they are depicted are ones I wanted to create and explore, and they are exactly as I intended them to be. I understand there’s been a shift and relaxing towards shipping in the fandom as a whole, and I do believe a more laid-back environment is better for the overall fandom health, but I personally prefer to keep my pairings largely unlabeled.
I enjoy writing closeness and intimacy between characters, and I believe it can be found in many forms, whether it be between siblings, family, friends, or life partners. How people show affection and love for one another is one of the greatest treasures of life, and I like exploring the different ways that can manifest. To me, kissing is not the end all be all for romantic or intimate connection, and I’m honestly really grateful I became part of a fandom where so many people related to that as well and enjoyed seeing other depictions of close bonds between two individuals!
The only thing that was ever censored about my works was not really allowing my characters to discuss or consider their sexualities, which was a direct result of the fandom at the time. Going forwards though, I don’t think I would change that aspect about my writing for the dsmp. It's hard feeling entirely comfortable in this space even though much has changed, and I’m not really interested or open to discussing the matter further! /srs /nm
That’s one of the reasons I’ve largely moved on to writing my own works, and it’s been very liberating to finally express my creativity fully!
Heyyyyy so um, I wasn't able to submit a question before the form closed because I've been a little MIA, off the internet or whatever, and I've had this question since...a while.
How do you go about Worldbuilding? Cuz like, Event Horizon was so full stuff and the languages and the history, holy shit it was absolutely amazing and comprehensible. How did you come up with languages and planet names and like,, where did kostka come from? Soludum? Stelledore?? Frickin heulwen?? It's all so interesting and feels so intricate and cool, I'm just in awe about it all and so curious of how it came to be, how it was organized and created. I want to write similarly worldbuilt(?) things and want to learn from the best.
Please feel free to take as long as you want answering, it can be during the stream, it can be after the stream, for all I care it can be next year, I'm just super in awe of your universe you've created.
Hi hello!
First off thank you for your patience and secondly thanks for reading! Glad you enjoyed :D
I've gotten a couple questions before about the world building in EH, and also just how I do it in general, and I think this post covers a good chunk of it!
But to add a little bit onto that, mostly how I do world building is take real aspects of human history and tweak them to fit my purposes. For EH, that involved adding a lot of sci-fi elements so it would feel like scenes out of a star wars movie! I am an incurable history nerd and anthropology enthralls me to no end, so I really enjoy learning about other cultures and histories from around the globe.
For the languages in EH, most of them are courtesy of our dear friend google translate XD
Apian is a franken language made up of latin, italian, and Spanish, that was willy nilly spliced together until the Vibe Was Right.
Enderian is literally just Welsh. Horribly, google translated Welsh (sorry Wales).
And lots of the other 'alien' words are just common words in other languages! Like kostka for example is just "ankle" in Polish, and I can't remember where it is, but some word translates out as "hairbrush" in I think Russian just because I thought it'd be funny for anyone that spoke Russian.
Sometimes though I just play around with sounds to make words like Soludum (alien solitary) and then Nirox, which I wanted to sound like regal and imperious and vaguely sharp. Other times it's just to be silly goofy like the infamous planet Hjhjhjhjhjhjhjhjhjhjhj, which is naturally just keysmash.
There's a lot of jokes to myself in how I name things, like Ozzi being named basically Bonebone from planet Skeleton, and also, what I think are, clever references like Tubbo's bee planet being called Apidae which is the scientific name for the family bee's belong to.
Besides language silliness and history nerdiness, I kinda just add/create world background details as needed?
Organization is not my strong suit, and neither Ad Astra nor De Terra really had concrete outlines for the story, much less for the world building. I talk about it in the post I linked earlier, but anytime I needed a random world for them to visit, I just made it "space INSERT RANDOM REAL WORLD EQUIVALENT" so I didn't really have all those lined up and ready to go!
World building can seem like a super daunting ordeal, but I've found you don't necessarily need to fill in every gap to get the feeling of a rich background for your story to take place in! That's just my vibe though! If you like getting nitty gritty with your details, go for it! I just don't tend to have a lot of patience and once I get a concept down, I'm ready to start writing.
I think a good way to come at the task of world building though is to not only consider the history of the place, but also the geography and the people that inhabit it, and how both of those things would impact your narrative. Like what do the people look like? What do they wear? What food do they eat and how do they get it? How do they celebrate their traditions and what songs do they sing?
Things like that!
Of course you don't need all of this in hyper detail to begin writing, I find a lot of pieces as I go, but having a general vibe that you're confident in is a good place to start!
Thank you so much for your kind words! I'm by no means an expert, and this is just what works best for me, but if you have any further questions, my inbox is always open!
Helloooo, some questions about Fading Lights (spoilers!! for anyone reading this who isn't you)
One of my favorite things about it is how co-ordinated it is. There's the beginning which shares much of the same languaging as the end, and of course the two final sentences correspond to ones early in the book.
But that's not all: throughout the story, there are recurring themes, words, and thoughts that come up again and again without fail, showing the way the main character grows and changes. This is so impressive (when I write I forget what the previous chapter was about and have to go back and remind myself).
So my question is...did you plan it all out? Did you outline Fading Lights from the beginning, with all those little repeated connections? Did you know Ranboo was going to be an alien when you started, or did you only figure it out as you went along? I am so curious. :D
Hi hello! Sorry in advance I kinda went on a long ramble.
So the Hellenite writing process is a bit odd compared to a lot of other writers, but generically speaking I don’t usually plan much of anything out!
Like when I start a story, I have a solid idea of my opening, like the scene I want to start with, and then I know my ending, maybe a few scenes I want in between, but that’s kinda it. Then I just. Go for it.
I figure out a lot of stuff as I go, and some ideas don’t get used, but I’ve never planned out a story from beginning to end.
Some of my other works, like Event Horizon or my OC book, What Goes Bump In The Night, have a fair bit of world building to them, so sometimes I take notes (I’ve taken a lot of notes for WGBITN, but it’s gonna be a much longer series so), but I don’t outline like, hardly at all. The only thing I ever really planned out was the final two chapters to De Terra, but other than that I honestly just vibe.
If you’re looking for a lil more generic writing tips, there’s some floating around under the tag how hellen writes
But specifically Fading Lights!
Easy question first! Yes I knew Ranboo was gonna be an alien when I first started! I was sketchy on some of the specifics, but I do love the ‘backwoods mountain creature’ trope, so he got creature-ified from day one. I picked out a lot of inspo from Karl’s Tales of The SMP, because I love the fucked up little system he created for the time travelers and I figured it’d be a nice mirroring tragedy! Both Fading Lights Tubbo and Ranboo feel like they have destinies they can’t escape.
I’ve mentioned it before but Fading Lights actually has zero outline! Not even a notes doc. All I have is the dump doc (where I go throw pieces that aren’t working), and fun fact but it’s titled ‘redneck garabge dump’ so that’s fun. FL is very heavily based off the area I grew up in/live in now, and I mostly just wanted to capture the vibe of my mountains and tell a slow story about loss and moving on.
I wouldn’t say its necessarily based on my life? But I’ve lived in a similar area and know people with similar stories, so I didn’t feel like I had to do too much outlining for it.
As for recurring themes and that kinda overarching thing, each story I’m telling usually has a central theme that sometimes I figure out before hand or while writing, and it’s hard to accurately describe how I work it into my writing. Most of the time I’m not thinking about it too much, it’s just kinda the overall structure that I’m working in, and sometimes I do have to sit down and make sure I’m stilly carrying the through line of the story, but that’s usually only once I get to the end!
Gotta wrap those loose ends up nice and pretty!
For phrases/words that repeat, I usually just come up with some prose while I’m writing the beginning and carry it along until the end, but I don’t go into writing a story with preset ideas for what’s going to be impactful like that! Off the top of my head, the line about not using breaks in the first chapter of FL gets referenced a lot throughout the piece, because it fits very well with the kind of careless, out of control lifestyle Tubbo has been living, which fits nicely within his overall character design, but it’s not something I planned out before I wrote those first few paragraphs.
Also it’s very accurate. Mountain people do not use their breaks.
The, “Nothing is simple. Nothing is easy.” , lines from the first chapter do make a reappearance in the last one and that was done very deliberately! I wanted to kinda full circle the whole story, and that line isnt used right at the start of the story, but eh its close enough you get the vibe.
Also the opening to the final section, the part with Ranboo’s letter, in Magnolia, also very heavily references the opening lines to FL, but mirrored. Hot wind vs cold, suffocating press of the truck vs quiet contentment, which just shows how much has changed since then and now!
I think that’s about it! Also don’t worry about forgetting stuff. I forget stuff constantly and I do a lot of rereading as well when I’m working on something, which makes the final installment of whatever take longer to come out because I’m having to do so much back reading.
how has the process been for writing your book and how has it been different to writing your fics?? :)
Oh man, I didn't think it'd be much of a difference but it really is
I've always cared about what I've written, and I never wanted my fics to be bad or anything, but I feel like there's way less pressure when it comes to fanfiction?
Like, I at least always have the reassurance with fanfic that someone is already a fan of said original piece of media, so I feel like I don't have to try as hard to get them to like my writing.
But with my oc book, it's all me, there's no familiar ground for people to fall back on and be like "oh yeah I enjoy this content so I should like this as well" and it's been kinda scary for me. I get in my own head too much and worry that I'm not writing WGBITN like a mainstream audience would enjoy, but that's not why I started writing and I have to remind myself of that a lot!
For both fanfic and now my book, I'm writing because I love it and I feel like it's a story that needs to be told.
WGBITN has also been harder to write because it's quickly snowballed into a much larger catalog of books, and even though I'm only on instillation one, I have to keep in mind everything I know is coming.
In the past, I was just writing the one story without really thinking about what would come next in a sequel, and then once I was done, I'd have some new ideas I wanted to explore so boom. Book two.
WGBITN is gonna have way more than 2 books, and trying to get the plot pointed in the correct direction, while managing character arcs, relationship threads, and the overarching themes of the series is like herding cats, and I do love cats, but good lord, can it be a mess sometimes.
All this to say that novel writing has been a tad different than what I've been doing, but the core of it is very much the same, and I wouldn't be where I am now without having written all that I have before. WGBITN stands on the shoulders of Ad Astra and Underhill and Fading Lights and I couldn't be more grateful to those works for helping shape who I am as an author.
Hi do you write? Would you like some feedback on an excerpt of your work?
Well good news!
We're planning another Hellen Brand Writing Critique Stream!
When: August 26th, 7pm EST
Where: twitch
Why: it's fun and helpful and I like reading what you guys make /gen
How: submit your works here! please keep in mind there is a 1.5k word cap! Any works that go too far over this limit* will be put in the naughty box (not read on stream) *if your piece is like 1504 that's fine finish your sentence. If your work is 2k that is less bueno
If you have any questions throw them in my ask box!
Hi Hellen!! Fellow author here. I too am trying to write a book, and it's becoming a lot. Do you have any writing tips that might help?
Gasp! Another.
Wooooh boy, book writing sure is a beast isnt it? Like. I’ve written a good chunk of fanfiction (I don’t wanna talk about how long De Terra is), but jeeze, something about cracking out on my first oc novel is so much harder than I originally thought it would be. I put a lot of love into all my writing, and I stand by most of my fanfiction as good works of fiction, but writing for a book has really been a lot different.
For starters the scope is way more massive for me (thinking like maybe 7 books in total?) and I’m not sure if you’re doing a stand alone book, or something that’s a part of a longer series, but planning for that kinda scope is. So hard. And I totally get how overwhelming and scary it can be trying to weave all that narrative and plot together!
No matter the length of your story though, I think I’ve got some tips that might help with the strain!
(Take these all with a grain of salt as what works for me might not be what works for you)
Okay for starters, try breaking things up into smaller, accomplishable chunks. Focusing on the overarching scale of the book is good to an extent, but it can easily become very overwhelming thinking about everything you’ve got to accomplish. Personally, I’m not huge on planning every single detail, but I had beats I wanted the first book to hit, and I just focused on breaking them down into individual chapters.
Which doesn’t sound like ground breaking advice- oh wow books have chapters thanks for the info Hellen /lhj- but for me, going from fanfiction where I had fuck all chapters with however long sections I wanted, to a more measured and consistent chapter length, it was a hard thing to get used to! Chapters are interesting. Like, obviously each one needs to accomplish something, but think about how it’s also moving you towards your ending (which I do always have in mind! Even if it gets tweaked), and how it changes your characters and your story.
Each chapter is a stepping stone leading you down the path to your conclusion, and going from thinking about my book as this insurmountable climb to that, has helped a lot in keeping me focused on just getting to the next stone. And the next. And the next. And the next.
Tip two. Stop. Worrying. About. Word. Count.
Seriously. Stop it. I know you’re doing it, I do it, we all do it. There is nothing worse than sitting there and despairing over only getting a few measly hundred words out, comparing yourself to every other author you know- bap bap bap bap bap! Stop. Don’t let the number rule your life. Instead, when you sit down, think about what you’d like to get accomplished like-
‘Oh I’d really like to finish that scene where they’re fighting the dragon’ or, ‘I should go back and tweak that part with the ice cream date’. I’ve found it’s so much more freeing to work this way, having little tasks I get to accomplish rather than trying to force words out that might not want to come. Also, I have the luxury of working on my book fulltime, so I do set hours for myself to be writing (8-12) and honestly my burnout has decreased drastically since I stopped pushing myself from like, 7 to 5.
That sucked. Don’t let your writing time be sucky.
I do think having some regiment helps build up a routine though, like trying to write at the same time every day or even just blocking out an hour or two if you can, and it helps remove the mental barrier that this is something hard and scary and impossible because you’re doing it every day!! It’s not so scary if you do it even a little every day <3
Tip 3! Talk about things with your friends!
I’ve got two very dedicated editors and a bunch of very supportive friends that let me ramble like Diogenes at the morning market in our server, and it honestly helps more than anything. Keeping your creative pursuits isolated from others leaves you with such a stagnant end product, and a lot of my plot holes, insights, and ideas have been resolved/suggested by my friends and I can never thank them enough.
Having fresh eyes look at your work is worth more than anything, and I understand that’s not always easily available to everyone, but try asking some of the people you’re close with just to take a look at it and tell you what they think! I know it can be very scary to have your work scrutinized by others, but its really the best way to polish and grow your skills as a creator.
Not everyone will like everything, and at the end of the day, it is your book, so do what you feel is best, and as someone once told me on ao3, “trust yourself you have the talent”.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand last tip I can think of because author is eepy and flying back to the US tomorrow, but read up on the printing/publishing industry!! Theres a lot of options out there, and if anyone wants a more detailed breakdown from me and what I’ve learned so far I can ramble no problem!!
But!! Learn your options. Understand how you’re going to get your book into circulation and how the industry works. I have a bit of a leg up since I’m also an artist, so I can self publish pretty easily since I can do my cover and run the formatting software. Not to discourage but. Things are a lot more expensive than you might think, so it’s good to get your head around the numbers and figure out what your options are!!
Don’t be intimidated by the process. It’s something new to learn but it’s not as impossible a task as it may seem. There are always ways forward, and sometimes it just takes a minute to find the right path.
Okiiiiiiiiiiiii I think that’s it? But if you have any follow up questions, feel free to drop them in the box! In quick wrap up; think in smaller chunks so its not so scary, ignore the numbers they are math and math is evil (/j), find friendos to infect with brainrot, do a little publishing research!!
And lastly, and probably most importantly, write for yourself. Don’t worry about appealing to an audience or a demographic or whatever. Write for yourself. Put all of your love into it, your passion, because the readers you want will find and learn that love through your words and they will return it to you a million times over. Write what you love, love what you write, and write for yourself.
Hi, I’m really sorry if you’ve already gotten this ask, but what, usually, is your world building process? I just finished re reading EH + FL once again, and I’m still left in awe at how amazingly detailed and thought out the worlds are. If you could answer, it’d be really really helpful! Thank you!
Hi helllo! I think I have talked about world building before but idk how in-depth it was. World building is a hard thing to pin down because it really depends on how much detail you wanna put in it ya’know? A lot of what I do is just pulling references from real life and tweaking them to fit whatever scenario I need. But! Taking a look at the two works you referenced;
Honestly I didn’t think Fading Lights had super creative world building? /gen
A lot of the alien/multi-dimensional stuff was reffing Karl’s Tales series so I can’t really take too much credit for how I morphed it to suit my needs. And then for all the regular earth stuff, I just wrote about my home area pretty much. I don’t quite live up in the mountains, but I live really close and so many summers as a kid were just like this, driving winding backroads in the middle of bumfuck nowhere.
Event Horizon has more concentrated world building, and I know I’ve talked about it somewhere but I can’t find it, but basically the base world set up, with Nirox and everything, is just a space reskin of the British Empire more or less. I mean it could technically be any of the global empires form the age of colonization, but you get the point. I used to be a history major so I have a decent background in world history, and I use that a lot to build realistic global/intergalactic conflicts. Once you kinda understand how societies and people work, it’s easy to piece together what would motivate them and things like that!
Like in EH, Nirox’s motivations for expansion are pretty simple. Money. The more planets they have under their thumb, the more resources and manpower they get, and greed is one of the oldest motivators for people, especially those in power.
Besides that though, I’d just build the worlds I needed for other scenes based off simple, condensed versions of real places. I can’t remember half the dumb names I gave places, but it’d just be like “okay build a planet based off a street market in Tibet” or “make someplace that’s basically space Tokyo”, ya feel me? And then just add enough Odd Space Stuff to make it feel like it could be a stop in a star wars movie. For Annwyl and Apidae, I pulled more history and anthropology knowledge in, like how court systems work (hello France and the court of the sun king) and then how more agrarian areas get taken over and used for manufacturing (hi and sorry most of the rest of the world).
Long short of it is, I highly recommend learning some of our history and how people have interacted with each other over the years. It will help make your worlds more believable when you can understand how people are motivated, and the ways in which they go about trying to achieve those goals. That kind of thinking can be applied at super huge scales like global conflict, but it can also be applied on much smaller scales, like understanding the culture and customs of a particular area!
People are more alike than we tend to think. There are a lot of through lines in between customs practiced around the world, and it’s fun learning about new areas and making those connections! I might also be a massive nerd, so take that with a grain of salt.
Last little piece of advice, I generally never have all my details at once. I have like, a good sketch of an idea but I fill in chunks as I go along, so don’t think I’m sitting here on an encyclopedia of world building knowledge for my stories. I build them little pieces at a time, kinda like a quilt, so don’t worry if you don’t got it all yet :]
How do you stay motivated to keep writing? I’ve been struggling to write, so I thought maybe I was doing the process wrong, but I looked at your writing process post and I basically have the same process as you. So I’m doing the process right, I just… can’t stay motivated to keep writing. How do you do it? Is there a particular way you structure you time?
Hi hello! So productivity comes in many forms, and I really struggle with feeling like I'm actually doing productive work. I put a lot of pressure on myself to get things done really quickly, while also having it be at the level of quality I'm proud of, and it gets really exhausting.
My general advice is be gentle with yourself! Even proofreading and editing is work, even if it doesn't feel like it for you (this is me). I also have a really good group of beta readers and of course, my lovely best friend and number one editor, Mx. Gracie Starstickerx, who I can talk to and exchange ideas with.
I think a huge part of the creative process is collaborative, so the more you talk about it, the more it stays alive! I honestly can't put a super concrete finger on 'this is what I do every day to stay motivated', but I really really wanna tell my stories, and I think that's a large part of my drive, because I wanna share them with other people.
I've written for like, my entire life, but I didn't start finishing things until eh.....2021? And after I finished my first 40k fic, this like, barrier came down in my mind and I realized I could actually finish my stories. I feel like that's half the battle, so if you're maybe struggling to tackle a big novel, maybe try a short story first? Just to show yourself you can do this!
For how I structure my time, I have the luxury of only working part time, so on my days off, I usually get up at 7, have breakfast, and then I work from 8-6 with about an hour lunch! I'm a morning person (somehow) so I tend to get a lot done then, but I also listen to what my body is telling me, and if writing is not working, I'll switch to art or doing other projects I've got going on.
But even if you do have to work full-time, set yourself a small word goal every day, like maybe 300-500 words, and just keep trying to hit it. The more you get in the habit of writing, the more of a routine it becomes and then you'll be less likely to fall out of it!
I hope this helped some! Remember to be kind to yourself and talk with others!! You'll find something that works for you, and will be tip tapping away in no time :]
