A writer is a world trapped in a person.
Victor Hugo (via post-traumatic-apathy)
Do you think there’s any point in writing fanfiction if no one really reads it?
Absolutely. I write some pairs that I know very few people will read or care about, but I still write it because it makes me (and maybe one or two other people) happy. I write fics sometimes just for me that I end up not posting at all.
If writing makes you happy, do it. It doesn’t matter fuckall what other people think. It doesn’t matter if one person or 5 or 10,000 people read it. Write because you want to. Write what you want to write because you want to.
I know sometimes it can be discouraging to think no one is reading what you put out there, but people will come. And you’l find those that support you through it. Heck if you need to, my ask is always open.
I strongly support writing, any writing. Don’t let anyone tell you that what you write is worth less then anyone else’s just because it’s fanfiction, or something they aren’t interested in. Write it anyway.
My lovely Merinda, I hope you don’t mind if I happen to hijack the shit out of this post.
Dearest, Darlingest Nonny,
It is of utmost importance that if you feel like you want to write, that you write.
On my blog, if you search the term “fic rec”, you’ll find 152 pages, with 15 posts per page of fics that I have read and rec’ed. Currently, I have three browser windows open, one with 18 tabs of fics, one with 56 tabs of fics, and another with 19 tabs of fics. I have more than 550 drafts saved and over half of that is fics. I rec at least two fics every day, and I have dedicated Fridays for the saving of all the NSFW fics that I have found to post then in honor of Penis Fridays. I am planning for this coming Friday to hit my post limit by rec’ing my favorite authors for the one year anniversary of this particular tradition. I asked people what they wanted to read, and I have hopefully found fics for them that they can enjoy.
There’s going to be someone out there who will read what you’ve written. Maybe you’re not sure about where to post? Make a friend with someone on Ao3 and get an invite. If that doesn’t work, there’s always livejournal and FF.net. If you’re not sure you want your name attached to your work, there are kinkmemes galore out there. And just because it has ‘kink’ in the title, doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily all crazy wild sex all the time.
Have you ever looked at some of the stats on ao3? If you check them out, you can see that there are nearly 56,000 fics having to do with Sherlock Holmes in some way, shape or form. Doctor Who has about 30,000 fics, Supernatural has around 66,000 fics. And this is just on the ao3. I remember when I first started reading fics, on FF.net, there were tens of thousands of fics for the fandoms in which I happened to read.
Maybe you’re not sure about your grammar or other such technicalities? There are betas who volunteer their love and kindness to help both aspiring and well-established authors along the way. As someone who used to beta heavily (about ten years ago), it’s kind of thrilling to get to watch a fic evolve in many ways, shapes and forms.
I know enough people in fandom that answer my calls for fics. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had wonderful people drop links in my inbox. People tel me, “hey, I saw this fic and thought you’d like it”. And you know what? OMG it’s the best thing ever. I’m actually stockpiling fics of 10K+ right now on my iPad because in July I’m going to South Africa and the flying time is going to be about 28 hours each way. I’m going to need something to keep me entertained. I’ve got over 250 fics saved up. I’m pretty pumped.
Since I got home tonight at 7:30, I’ve already read and decided to rec 10 fics. I’ve obviously read more than ten tonight, but so far only these ones have caught my eye.
Did you know that there are tumblr blogs that have been set up that are ao3 feeds? There’s a blog that makes a post for each and every johnlock fic that is posted to ao3. I follow it. That’s how I find most of my johnlock fics. There are SPN feeds. Accidentally, I was following the SPN master feed, which makes a post for each and every fic in the SPN fandom, while simultaneously following the destiel and wincest feeds. Suffice to say, I was overloaded with a lot of fic repeats.
If you want people to read what you write, put it out there for it to be read. Ask people to read it and see what you think. As you can tell, I’ll pretty much read just about anything. I’ll pass along my recommendations for just about any fic, as long as it doesn’t have too many errors and has a general sort of coherence. If you’re an author I like, I’ll pretty much rec every fic you write. Because you’re just that damn awesome.
Not everyone can write, you know. Not everyone can make gifsets. Not everyone can draw. There are those of us who are mostly just consumers of fandom. I know that I’ll never have photoshop talent, but that doesn’t stop me from reblogging awesome manips and tagging them and gushing over them. I know that I’ll probably never write for fandom again, but that doesn’t stop me from reading voraciously within my tastes, and occasionally stepping outside my normal reading parameters.
Writing doesn’t come easily for everyone. Sometimes you’ll think you’ve got a picture perfect idea in your head and when you sit down to bust it out on your computer, you find that you hopped on the struggle bus and you’re riding it all the way downtown. There are support groups within fandoms, like Sunday Six, where you post six sentences of a fic you’re writing. Six sentences, you may be thinking, isn’t a lot, but when those sentences are your blood, sweat and tears on the screen, it’s something of which you can be really proud. It might motivate you to not just stop at only six sentences.
There’s NaNoWriMo too, which happens in November. There are tons of prompts going around different fandoms at different times. About a month ago, I saw a list of cute prompts that had been collected on tumblr of like, alternate meetings. It had about six different ideas, and then about fifty bajillion reblogs underneath it saying something along the lines of “omg i have to read this fic right fucking now omg write it yesterday”.
There is an appetite for fics. It’s not a weak appetite. It’s strong and healthy. Some fandoms, obviously, lend themselves more easily to the written word. Some fandoms are bigger than others. But fandom is inspirational. Look at Sherlock Holmes in general. There’re the original writings by ACD, but if we look around, we see creations such as Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd century, BBC’s Sherlock, House MD, The Great Mouse Detective, the Guy Ritchie Films, the Granada Holmes series, just to name a few. ACD wrote in the late 1800’s, and we’re still obsessing over it today.
We can also look around many many fandoms and see how so many authors who write fanfiction also are published authors. And you don’t have to be just a regular person to be a fan of something. SE Hinton, the author of The Outsiders and Rumble Fish is a huge SPN fan.
Nonnie, there are safe spaces for you if you want to write. Fanfiction is a very large presence of many fandoms. It’s how fans deal. Two years of hiatus in the BBC Sherlock fandom is slowly becoming the norm. How many fics are ‘fix-its’? There was that one glorious moment this last year, when all the shows were on Winter hiatus when suddenly we had 10 days of Sherlock that came and went. The post-airing fics were the best parts of the fandom. As a reader, I want to see what a writer can do with what’s been given to us by TPTB. I can and will read 475 different fics of the same two characters meeting in slightly different ways. The AU is one of the most precious things given to fans. The ability to say, “Merlin and Arthur are so totally going to work for Torchwood because you know what, I want to see what Arthur would have to say to Captain Jack Harkness”.
Your creativity is a precious and valued thing. I want to know how you imagined “the pizza man and the babysitter” idea really played out in the middle of season 6. I want to see how many more adventures Donna and Ten went on. Hell, I think River and Nine would have made for smashing friends. I’d read the daylights out of that.
There are people around who are waiting for your creativity. Do what you want with it.
Best,
-Cinco xoxo
Do you think there’s any point in writing fanfiction if no one really reads it?
Absolutely. I write some pairs that I know very few people will read or care about, but I still write it because it makes me (and maybe one or two other people) happy. I write fics sometimes just for me that I end up not posting at all.
If writing makes you happy, do it. It doesn’t matter fuckall what other people think. It doesn’t matter if one person or 5 or 10,000 people read it. Write because you want to. Write what you want to write because you want to.
I know sometimes it can be discouraging to think no one is reading what you put out there, but people will come. And you’l find those that support you through it. Heck if you need to, my ask is always open.
I strongly support writing, any writing. Don’t let anyone tell you that what you write is worth less then anyone else’s just because it’s fanfiction, or something they aren’t interested in. Write it anyway.
How stable of a career would you say being an author is?
Try balancing a soft-boiled egg on its tip. Don’t use sand or salt, don’t crack the egg. Just balance it, and then take your finger away.
That stable.
Focusing on the Middle of Your Novel
Many writers worry about developing the middle of their novel or they simply lose motivation when they start thinking about what to write about. Even if you know the beginning and end of your novel, it can be difficult to connect the two and build an exciting plot inbetween. The best way to begin tackling this issue is to understand pacing and how your novel should be structured.
The basic structure is as follows:
Stasis
This includes the introduction, the description of the everyday life of your main character, and an explanation of your world. During this time you can focus on showing your audience what your world is like and how your characters interact with it on a daily basis. You can start to set things up.
Inciting Incident
This is your protagonist’s call-to-action. What forces your character to change their usual behavior? This is when your character decides to get in the action OR they are forced to get in on the action. I’ve written a longer post about this here.
The Quest
There’s something your protagonist needs to do or there’s a journey they must embark on. This doesn’t always mean an actual physical journey; it can be an emotional one depending on your story. The point is that they must set out to learn something as a result of the inciting incident. There’s some knowledge, item, etc. they must acquire.
Surprise
There should be obstacles, problems, trouble, conflict, etc. for your protagonist. This will make up most of the middle of your novel. What stands in your character’s way? What is preventing them from finishing their quest and returning to normal?
Critical Choice
What your character has learned or how they have developed over the course of your novel is often revealed during the critical choice. They should have to choose between two paths and their choices should reveal something about them. These choices will change the course of the novel.
Climax
This is the highest point of tension in your story, when your character has to deal with the critical choice they have made. Your story generally builds up to this point.
Reversal
The reversal is a result of the critical choice and the climax. The story is lead in a new direction because of these things. The events leading up to the climax begin to cool down and something happens that helps lead to the resolution. This is usually when your protagonist reverses the situation and finds a way out of the problem (or doesn’t).
Resolution
The resolution should lead into a new stasis for your characters. This doesn’t mean that everything ends up good for your characters; it just means that things have come full circle in a way. The story arc for his particular story is closed and lessons have been learned.
Once you begin to understand the structure of a story, you can begin focusing on the middle chunks of your novel, specifically the inciting incident-reversal stages.
Here are a few tips to prevent your novel from failing in the middle:
“I’m a writer” I whisper as I look up war statistics
“I’m a writer” I whisper as I look up when the blender was invented
“I’m a writer” I whisper as I figure out how many times you can get shot without dying
“I’M A WRITER” I shout when someone uses my laptop and I left the page open to stab-wound references.
“I’M A WRITER!” I yell as I stare at a wall for hours instead of actually writing.
I was in charge of the final writing workshop. I marched the poets onto my front lawn in lines of two. Part one of the assignment was this: you had to face your partner, look them directly in the eyes and say, You are an important person. Your writing is necessary. The recipient of this declaration had to wait thirty seconds, absorbing the truth of these words, never breaking eye contact, before replying, I know. Then the first recipient had to repeat this truth back to their partner.
If this sounds easy, I assure you, dear reader, it is not.
Which part do you think was the hardest? Receiving the compliment? Having to make eye contact with someone for thirty seconds? Or saying I know? Would you understand when I tell you that, after I told the poets they had to make direct eye contact with their partner, some of them broke down in tears upon hearing this instruction?
Holding eye contact was brutal, and many of us (or maybe it was just me) took more than thirty seconds to answer, I know. But once everyone got through it, we were changed. And you best believe that the poems written after this exercise were like incantations sprung from the soul. As poets, we often hide behind language, masking ourselves with metaphor. But our poetry cannot exist without us. We have to praise ourselves.
Go ahead. Find a friend or a mirror. Say it:
You are an important person. Your writing is necessary.
Rachel McKibbens, “Permission to Make Noise,” published on Richard Blanco’s poetry blog (via bostonpoetryslam)
it pisses me off how writing doesn’t get people money unless they’re like jk rowling like writing books should be one of the highest paying jobs in the world that shit is hard
i bet that open heart surgeries are harder
Open heart surgeries can be taught. You can’t teach a person a world that no one else has created.
you won this time.
