friendly reminder that you are allowed to write selfishly. Your writing is allowed to be self-indulgent. You can have self-insert characters. Your stories can be pure wish-fulfillment.
Sometimes we get so caught up in wanting to please the theoretical reader that we forget our writing is first and foremost for us. It’s our art, our self-expression, and we do it for our passion and our joy.
Use other voices and perspectives to grow your own perspective and bring more to your writing. But you don’t owe it to anyone to create art for them, the way they want it.
Your writing can be a love letter to yourself.
Tag: writing
Productive…?
*re-reads my own story*: Damn this is some good shit
*gets to the part where I stopped writing*: WTF WHERE’S THE REST OF IT HOW DO I GET MORE
Brain: You’re the author, if you want more you have to write it
Me: *flips tables*
A note for fanfic readers.
I am currently in the process of porting a lot of my older fanfic onto AO3, because I want it all in one place/don’t want it to be lost/want to revise it to be a little more in-line with my current standards of both quality and language use. It’s so quick and easy! I can’t remember why I didn’t do this before!
…oh, right, she says, as the hit counter goes higher without the comments, or even the kudos, to match. Because I feel like I’m screaming into the void.
I come from very comment-heavy fic environments, and like most fanfic authors I have known, I am a little twitchy about “what if this is awful what if I am awful what if nobody likes my shit at all.” So when I have 50 hits and one kudo, I actually feel pretty rotten, which makes me less eager to do the job of cleaning and posting.
This is hence a plea on behalf of all fanfic authors: remember that the people who write the stories you enjoy are not getting paid for their time in anything other than “you did good, have a cookie” comments from people. Please consider commenting if you liked a story. Please consider leaving a kudo if you read all the way to the end. There are stories that are qualitatively bad that I’ve left kudos on, because hey, I read them, they gave me an hour of enjoyment, they deserve a cookie.
We have infinite cookies to give. We should share them freely, because wow, does it suck when fanfic makes fanfic writers sad.
That’s all.
This feels particularly relevant to a lot of chatter I’m seeing cross my dash.
Writing is hard. Writing is scary. Writing takes time and effort and care and love love love. Which is true of any fanwork of course, but fanfiction also requires a significant investment from its audience before it can even begin to be seen. With art or gifsets or any other visual medium, the work can be consumed, appreciated, and commented/reblogged/whatever within seconds. It takes longer than that just to read the description on a work of fanfiction.
But in the same vein, your fanfic writers give you hours of entertainment in return. Whether it’s a smile or a sob delivered in ten minute ficlets or 100k monsters you’re still reading at 3 am, fanfiction will give you a level of immersion unique to the fandom experience. With fanfiction, the characters live forever and the story never ends.
Still, that commitment from the audience means we’re already looking at a sliver of the same attention, without hope of the same scale of interaction and response. That makes what we DO get so very critical.
If you read something, take a moment to click those kudos or likes or whatever. If you liked it, leave a comment, If you loved it, love your fanfic author back and tell them. TELL THEM EVERYTHING I PROMISE YOU WE WANT TO HEAR
Remember that the only thing that nourishes fandom creators are your responses. Your fanfic writers are timid, starving creatures. Feed them. Love them. I said the characters live forever and the story never ends, but that’s only true if the storytellers keep telling stories. To do that, they need an audience. Make sure they know they have one.
My book needs to be perfect by May. I’m on part 2/5. Gotta get all of it written, gaps filled, critiqued, revised, etc… by May. Which I can do.
…or at least I would if my MC would actually TALK TO ME but he’s so emotionally stunted he doesn’t want to say or do anything. Which, you know, for a bit I thought “this can work… this is a good illustration of what PTSD is like…” but even if he doesn’t wANT to discuss things, stuff still HAPPENS that the readers need to know…
We can’t just skip over several months because the book would be over and there would be no resolution???
Maybe if I make spaghetti I can coax him into giving me something.
never let anybody tell you that spite isn’t a motivator. i’ve gotten out of writer’s block and finished drabbles and shortfics because of spite. i’ve done swaths of fanart for whole fandoms out of sheer seething over a notp. i’ve gotten up and done laundry and all the dishes in the house because i saw some nasty ship art and needed to step away from the computer. misdirected fictional butthurt is a fossil fuel my friend and some days you gotta leave a carbon footprint
Spite has motivated many of my viewing and purchasing decisions after seeing the sort of people who didn’t like something. “Oh, hey, this has been roundly condemned by the sort of people who use SJW unironically, that seems like a good reason to buy this product and/or service”
It’s actually rarely steered me wrong. Like I probably would not have paid attention to Fury Road if it weren’t for all the folks going “This movie is a feminist plot!”
Spite got me my first publishing contract!
“Yesss, use your
hatespite!” XD
As a writer, how do you know it’s time to move on to the next MS? is over 100 rejections a clue?
You can keep querying, but you should work on something else. As soon as you start querying, open a new document and start writing something else. (not a sequel–something totally new)
Nobody writes and revises in a vacuum. … The only way to grow as a writer is 1) keep writing more books and 2) get feedback from other writers.
Kara Taylor, author of the PREP SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL series, on how to grow as a writer. Hear the full interview here! (via firstdraftwithsarahenni)
Holiday Story
I went to a writing party last night (at @anyahatesbunnies‘ house!) and wrote a little Christmas story during one of the sprints. It’s not going to be in the novel at all, so I thought I’d post it here. But, as usual, it’s kind of depressing, so feel free to skip. 🙂
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[Salmon Coal, age 12- Lyndoch, Massachusetts]
I watched the snow from the couch, ribs pressed into the backing until it hurt to breathe. My breath fogged the glass, but it didn’t really matter; it was too dark to see past the four foot circle of light cast by the lantern even if he /was/ coming home. Sighing, I let my forehead drop against the cool pane of glass and closed my eyes.
There wasn’t a point to waiting up. Mom had given up two hours ago. The same thing happened last year, and the year before that.
“He’s working,” she’d said. “You know how it is with film production studios; they have deadlines and tight budgets. It makes it hard for them to live a normal life.”
So why, then, did he get married and have a kid? Why buy a house all the way across the country?
“Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean that he’s not human, that he doesn’t want to do those things…”
Her excuses slipped further and further away from reason and confidence. I knew she wanted to know, too.
I could get by most of the time without him. I went to school, did my homework at the library, and read until I fell asleep. I ran around with Theo and tried to help him with his grand schemes, even when they didn’t make any sense. Hell, I made sure to watch his show every week- new episodes every Thursday night -and it almost felt like he was home.
But it was Christmas eve. Or, well, Christmas now… 12:05 am… and he wasn’t here.
Who doesn’t go home for Christmas?
Who has a family and stays at work anyway?
The card he’d sent, promising that he’d be there, had been abandoned on the table long before Mom had even gone to bed.
“He probably had his assistant sign it for him.” She’d sniffed, wrinkling her nose like the card smelled rotten, and dropped it into my hands for me to look at. “Can’t even make time to sign a card… God, William…”
I let myself look at the dark driveway again- still empty -and drew a frowning face over my dim reflection. The snow was undisturbed; white and pure, unmarred by any tire tracks or footprints. If he’d come, even if he had to park on the street, I’d go out and help bring his things in. I wasn’t wearing any shoes, but that didn’t matter. I’d run.
“Dad.” I muttered, keeping my voice low just in case Mom wasn’t really asleep upstairs. “Come home.”
If you come home, I’ll forgive you.
If you come home, it’ll be okay.
Mom won’t make good on her promise of this being the last time. She won’t give up on you. I won’t, either.
There’s still time.
I settled back down on the cushions, breathing out slowly in relief when my side stopped hurting.
The snow fell, drifting in careless circles before settling down to rest with its family.
Maybe I should give up, too. If he really wasn’t coming, I could still go crawl into bed with Mom and keep her company until Christmas morning. Why was I sitting in my pajamas against the window? I was cold and stiff and my body hurt, cramped from being so still for so long.
I was tired. All of me was.
I looked to the stairs, dark except for the Christmas lights wrapped around the railing, then at the Christmas tree in the corner. Presents, wrapped by Mom and me, crowded around the trunk of our very real tree.
Did we need Dad for a merry Christmas?