Disclaimer:This is not a full on tutorial on how to write. These are just tiny, tiny little grains of wisdom of things I realized here and there. Do not eat this advice like a full course meal. It isn’t one. It’s just a dusting of some spices, and I am salt bae-ing them over you, but they are not calorically relevant without a story.
1. Help your readers read your story.
AKA: If you want your readers to build a house, you better take them to a Home Depot and teach them how to use a screwdriver first.
You want your readers to read your story easily? You gotta make your story easy to read. That means learning how to make sentences easier to understand. That means breaking up walls of text into smaller bites. That means - yes - spelling words consistently and using accessible (not Correct, necessarily, but ACCESSIBLE) grammar!
You want your readers to understand your world? You gotta give your readers tools to understand it with. That means explaining new concepts! That means describing stuff a lot! That means using visual language if you don’t have actual visuals!
Your readers will not read your mind to know what you MEANT to say. You have to say what you mean. You have to mean what you write. Learn to write clearly. Learn to help your readers.
2. Something that takes you a month to make will take your audience ten minutes to read.
You want to spend an hour drawing one comic panel? Great. You wanna spend an hour writing a single paragraph? Fantastic. You wanna use up a week perfecting a script? Amazing!
Your readers will still glance at that panel for a second before moving on. Your readers will still eat that paragraph in a bite. Your readers will skim that script. If you’re lucky.
You cannot control how much your work is appreciated. But you CAN control how much of your time you sacrifice to make it.
Balance the scales.
3. You are not talented.
Neither am I. Nor are any of us.
Listen to me. Listen.
Talent is a beautiful, useful word. But it often lies to us. It suggests that we are born better than others.
This is not often accurate. What talent hides within itself is not pre-ordained inherent skill. It is not something you are birthed being. It is not a statistical difference of physicality.
Talent starts with passion.
Maybe you have passion for stories - so you beg your grandfather to read to you before you can recognize words, and you write a lot in every school assignment, and you pay attention to EVERY story you watch in school plays, and you observe all the characters you see in movies, and you CARE. So. Much. And this moves you to try to write, and then to try again, and then to try harder.
Talent does not exist, because no amount of ‘you were made for running’ can make you run. No amount of 'you were the son of great authors’ can make you write.
But inherent curiosity can push you forward. Inherent curiosity can make you watch, and observe, even before you understand you are observing. Inherent curiosity for your personal interests makes you a fan of writing, of drawing, of world-building. It makes you research how to be a great author before you even know what research is. It auto-tunes you to what you know is good about these things, and it gives you the necessary tools to know what will work and what won’t.
So when you think you are talented, understand that this is not something that was done to you in the womb. It was something you raised, and watered like a seed, before you even knew what you were growing.
Don’t rely on talent. Understand that you got this far because you CARE about this thing. And don’t forget to care. Because that’s what has carried you this far, and it is the only thing that can carry you even farther.
The Chosen One is dead, killed while facing the Dark Lord. Grief and hatred together give rise to an unlikely pair of heroes who come together to defeat the evil now taking over the world unchecked. The Chosen One’s parents are out for revenge, and there is no room for mercy anymore.
The days bleed together, time warping strangely around the rising and setting of the sun, colors leeching out of the fields you and your husband tend together.
You know it’s been three whole days since the messenger came to the door. It doesn’t feel like it though. It’s as if you’ve only blinked and your husband has gone from catching you as your knees gave out to standing beside you.
Phil’s hand is wrapped tightly around yours, colder than the shadows slowly growing all around you. His eyes are fixed on the mound of earth lying under the orchard’s oldest tree. Neither of you have spoken a word since that damned messenger left, but you didn’t need words to decide where to bury the medals they returned instead of her body. Antonia spent almost her entire childhood in the embrace of this apple tree. When she wasn’t in the tree, she was in your arms.
And now she’s gone.
She’s gone, she’s gone, she’s gone and somewhere far away her blood has dried on hands that never had the right to touch her.
You look up at your husband. Already his face is turning gaunt from grief, shadows pooling in the hollows of his cheeks and slipping down from his heavy brow. You will never see him smile like he did with your daughter. You will never know the pleasurecontenmentpridejoy that flooded through you each time you saw them together again. You will never have so many things all because your daughter was Chosen and you believed the King when he claimed she would not fight alone.
You let that bubble within you, that helpless rage, as you wait for your husband to look at you. Maybe he can feel the weight of your gaze, maybe he can feel the heat returning to the hand clutched in his, maybe he just knows you, knows you like you know him because he turns.
The real irony is there is plenty of fanfiction that goes through more rigorous editing than some published fiction. So the difference in quality between fanfiction and “professional writing” is totally arbitrary and made up. Except that some things that are more expensive are worse.
People think fanfiction isn’t high end writing because it’s not paid for, as if paying for it defines the quality somehow. We think people can’t possibly make quality stuff if they aren’t paid but art has never been about defining quality by how much it costs. We provide at and if we are lucky we get paid. But because people have made it so hard to get payment for art, we just end up doing it for free. Writing in all forms should be valued. Just because it’s fanfiction doesn’t get rid of the fact that a human person wrote it.
You’re welcome! I’m just happy so many people are finding them useful.
I made 3 variations. Ordered from fanciest to simplest:
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HTML code:
left: <img src=“https://i.ibb.co/QfgCJ2T/batch-of-kudos-1.png” alt=“batch of kudos”>
middle: <img src=“https://i.ibb.co/VvTX6kh/batch-of-kudos-2.png” alt=“batch of kudos”>
right: <img src=“https://i.ibb.co/P63hBJk/batch-of-kudos4.png” alt=“batch of kudos”>
Hope it’s what you had in mind!
LOOK LOOK! I’ve just used it!!!! This is amazing!!!!
(I credited you between parenthesis, below the kudos cookie; hope it’s okay :))
awww you used the fancy one (my fav)! glad it’s working!
you’re welcome to credit to let other people know where to get the code but otherwise just use them ❤️
(this goes for all of them - use as much as you like, they’re here to spread joy! just don’t take credit for them yourself or y'know, sell them or something, not that I think anyone would do that)
I have asked this myself in the past and never gotten an answer.
Maybe today will be the day we are both finally enlightened.
woodsgotweird said: man i just jumped on the bandwagon because i am a sheep. i have no idea where it came from and i ask myself this question all the time
Maybe someone made a typo and it just got out of hand?
I kinda feel like panic!at the disco started the whole exclamation point thing and then it caught on around the internet, but maybe they got it from somewhere else, IDK.
The world may never know…
Maybe it’s something mathematical?
I’ve been in fandom since *about* when Panic! formed and the adjective!character thing was already going strong, pretty sure it predates them.
It’s a way of referring to particular variations of (usually) a character — dark!Will, junkie!Sherlock, et cetera. I have suspected for a while that it originated from some archive system that didn’t accommodate spaces in its tags, so to make common interpretations/versions of the characters searchable, people started jamming the words together with an infix.
(Lately I’ve seen people use the ! notation when the suffix isn’t the full name, but is actually the second part of a common fandom portmanteau. This bothers me a lot but it happens, so it’s worth being aware of.)
“Bang paths” (! is called a “bang"when not used for emphasis) were the first addressing scheme for email, before modern automatic routing was set up. If you wanted to write a mail to the Steve here in Engineering, you just wrote “Steve” in the to: field and the computer sent it to the local account named Steve. But if it was Steve over in the physics department you wrote it to phys!Steve; the computer sent it to the “phys” computer, which sent it in turn to the Steve account. To get Steve in the Art department over at NYU, you wrote NYU!art!Steve- your computer sends it to the NYU gateway computer sends it to the “art” computer sends it to the Steve account. Etc. (“Bang"s were just chosen because they were on the keyboard, not too visually noisy, and not used for a huge lot already).
It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.
So I’m guessing alternate character version tags probably came from that.
Word for today: bang path
The use of exclamation points to distinguish between variations of a character or name
These are just my opinions and some artists may not be discouraged by these things, but I’ve been artist on this site for over 10 years and felt some of these things were at least worth mentioning. Thanks for your kindness everyone!
Honestly be pretentious as fuck about the stuff you create. Do a press release for your fanfic updates. Do a Q&A about your webcomic. Make fake merch designs for your OCs. Commission "official" book covers. Very few of us will ever get to a stage where something we've created Makes It Big but even if you have an audience of 5 people plus a shoelace fucking indulge yourself and pretend!! It's the only way to live!!
Every year I see this comic passed around from people who are not the artist. Here’s the artist’s post, with details on hard-copies of that lovely little Halloween cat comic that we’ve all enjoyed so much over the years. If you’ve enjoyed it, too, and have the ability to support the artist, please consider picking up a copy!
And in these next 50 years you will eat so many delicious meals, laugh so many times with so many people you love, shout and scream and sing and cry and smile so hard your face hurts. And you will see such beautiful sunsets and feel fresh cold air on your face and feel warm and safe wrapped up in your favourite winter coat.
those posts criticizing common writing patterns in fanfiction are so fucking harmful and they ruined me
so like yknow what??? People tell you to avoid “smirk” and “chuckle” as descriptors because no one does those things (???) but then when I need to use those words I have a ten minute crisis about how I’m a shitty writer. So heres my unwarranted writing advice: If you want your characters to smirk and chuckle fucking let them and don’t let anyone tell you that no one smirks or chuckles because I do both on a daily basis whenever I tell a shitty pun, bye
I leave a comment on every single fic I read. Sometimes when I read published books I go and leave a comment somewhere the author can find it. Granted, I literally majored in ‘leaving comments on fics’ (English Education), but once you start doing it it just becomes second nature. Now you’re gonna go to the Ozymandias school of leaving comments:
Problem: I can’t leave kudos again.
Beginner: This is a second/third/fourth Kudos
Advanced: This is my second/third/fortieth time reading this, I still love it so much. Here are a few new things I noticed. I like the way you personally do x, y, z compared to other authors I’ve read (in this ship/genre/fandom).
Problem: I don’t know what to say :(
Beginner: Just list what you did to read this fic. “I stayed up late reading this”, “I read this on a crowded train”, “this kept me company while sick”.
Advanced: X,Y,Z parts made me get butterflies, and I had a physical reaction to this part of the story, I squealed outloud when characters did x,y,z. I blushed at this part. I laughed out loud here. Whatever.
Problem: I’m embarrassed to leave a comment (what if I annoy the author?)
Beginner: Short answer: you won’t EVER annoy the author (unless you’re needlessly mean) But to start, be generic, you don’t have to spill your soul in the comments section. “I liked this” “I enjoyed reading this” “nice fic”.
Advanced: This really meant a lot to me that you wrote this. This is something I feel like I’ve always wanted to read. This fic hit me in all the right places. Etc.
Problem: I don’t know how to express myself/my experience
Beginner: My beginners go to is to highlight a line, put that in your comment and say “i liked this” or to identify basic emotions you had while reading and comment those “this made me happy” “this part made me sad” “i almost cried” “you made me laugh” Advanced: “Highlighted line” This line made me smile because it has to do with character development/it’s really romantic/it’s so unique/it’s moving. Sometimes I don’t highlight a line at all, I just talk about the stuff I’ve noticed were unique to the fic. “I love the way you did this particular thing with this character”.
This? This is an amazing post. This is the Captain Awkward of commenting posts—it addresses all your fears directly and gives you actionable scripts for each one.
Hey! Some of this can apply to responding to works on writeblr, too! Wonderful advice for if you’re stuck on a comment but you really want to leave one (and you should, if you can!).
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