Fanfic Writer Problems - Tumblr Posts

One under-appreciated breed of fic writer are the ones who hyperfocus on logistics to the exclusion of all canon shortcuts, and thus usually strike upon an awesome way to flesh out the worldbuilding or characters.

Like, I’m not necessarily talking realism here since often it’s still pretty far from realistic, but more like, “someone has to be running spies in this fantasy kingdom, and we’ve seen the whole royal court, so which background character is it? How does that change these three major interactions?” Or “real life historical nobility did in fact have some things to do that were like jobs, how does this human disaster cope with running an estate?” Or “there’s no reason for a sci-fi robot detective to know how to whitewater kayak, where’d she learn?” Or “if this guy is serving the emperor directly he has to be way high up in the space empire servant hierarchy, why is he doing this menial task for someone else? What’s his motive? Does he perhaps have the secret space telepathy?”

Anyway I’m always DELIGHTED to find a fic or writer who asks these questions because the fics themselves are universally bangers.

So, I counted my WIPs again today. They have multiplied like crazy. There's now 794 of them, and I just started a new one yesterday. I'll have over 800 in less than a week at the pace I'm going. As for posted stuff, I have 21 works in progress on AO3, but one of them is completely written, and will be posted in its entirety by Nov 8th. None of my WIPs are abandoned, but some are absolutely feeling the neglect by now. And don't get me started on the comments I have yet to get around to answering... My AO3 inbox is becoming really intimidating, and I fear it may soon acquire its own gravity... 🥲 Mess is putting it lightly.

Being a fic writer is having 2 fully abandoned projects, 3 on-going series, 4 docs currently open, 15 future stories in your head or half written that will probably never get finished and yet you continue to come up with more with your fellow unhinged writer friends every single day.

It’s a mess over here.

Currently me at the moment ☺️😂

Fanfic writers and readers watching the new Bridgerton show on Nextflix:

I’ve got to stop making so many drafts of future ASoIaF stories . . . Seriously, I have over 15 bloody drafts and I’m trying to finish Golden Rose so I can move on to other WIP’s and yet my brain keeps making up more ideas. If you’re curious as to what my WIP’s are they’re xreaders with Jon Snow (Stark, (I’m a N+A=J shipper)), Sandor Clegane, Tywin Lannister (multiple WIP’s with him), Brandon Stark (complete AU), Robb Stark, Ageon Targaryen (Young Griff), and Tyrion Lannister. Why, just why can’t I stop with the drafts and ideas??? And when I am going to write all these ideas? Never! Cause once I start, guess what happens, I get another blasted idea!! I just can’t win. Ughhh 😑😩

Anyways, the next chapter of The Golden Rose should be out next weekend. This weekend I’m going out to a Bday vacation so I won’t be able to write or publish the next chapter. ✨ see ya in the next post!

so many writers go on a hiatus when their fics don’t get interaction & then people will complain that the [character] x reader tag isn’t as active as it used to be.

you need to start supporting people by reblogging & commenting on their fics — especially NON-CREATORS because whenever i see comments, it’s by other content creators 99% of the time.

non-creators like the fics they enjoy at most & that’s it. obviously, you’re not obligated to interact but don’t be surprised that the tag is dry af or when people stop writing for characters & move onto something that will get them better interaction.

obviously, creators do this too but they’re much more likely to interact with your content.

I woke up with a Random Unsolicited Plot Bunny for a Supernatural season 7 crazy!Cas fic/let featuring both angst and smut and angst. Yes, I have three boths.

I barely have the physical energy to type shallow hashtags on a Tumblr reblog. Spoons, there are none. Brains, there are few.

Help. How do I say 'no' to the wide-eyed, broken woobie angel and his bees, and his honey, and his anecdotal comic nudity, and his anxious conflict-avoidance, and his sidelong-glance-at-reality dissociative coping mechanisms post-megalomaniacal meltdown?

Why did I wake up with a vivid new "fuck or die" plotbunny? What about me lying there unconscious for 12 hours then being prodded awake by a small cat lends itself to this development?

AI, Oh My

I've been using the generative-AI-free Ellipsus for failing at writing for the past few days. Using it to keeping track of notes about the long fanfics I've been sampling to help me write feedback, too. So far I love it to pieces. I love the clean interface. I love that it's in my browser like Google Docs but isn't Google Docs. It's really nice to create text away from that constant push to incorporate generative-AI into the process somehow. Or to click the annoying, distracting thing that sits in the corner of my vision that wants me to pay for an upgrade to some AI feature I didn't want in the first place, and wouldn't save me time or effort if I did. (Grammarly. Just fucking stop and tell me when I use a comma wrong or double a word, okay?)

I did play with AI writing tools while I was ill last year, mainly to pass the time and get up to date with what all the fuss and controversy was about. I squirted a simple 2000-word fanfic I wrote in the 1990s into each one and played to see what the various tools could do with it. Then I tried to get them to generate a similar piece from scratch using prompts. The whole unethical, 'this model was trained on everything we ever put on AO3, wasn't it?' aspect quickly became glaringly apparent once I introduced the subject of fanfiction - or even just asked a factual question about a character from a TV show. (ChatGPT totally 'ships the Thirteenth Doctor with Yaz, a 'ship which must've been at its peak AO3 output when all that data was hoovered up.)

Sudowrite came the closest to being able to do what I need from an automated writing assistant, which is to help me keep track of a long piece by creating and updating a beat sheet and character profiles as I go, or to generate an accurate set of chapter summaries from a giant dollop of existing text. None of these tools can handle a million word epic without going into a death-spiral of confusion and spouting nonsense. None of them can, yet, follow a lengthy or detailed plot well enough to help me re-remember things when I need to. ChatGPT could manage quite large chunks of text for a while in early 2023, then it went downhill fast, started limiting input hard, and started making shit up instead of summarising what text I fed it. I swear to god that thing got incrementally less useful as it got upgraded and as features were added. Nothing else I've tried even felt remotely useful to a writer of fiction, but getting to know the various options did train me to spot and avoid AI-generated articles at two hundred paces, even just from the title or headline much of the time, which has to be a good thing.

I don't want writing done for me, not ever, but if tech can someday help with the remembering-plot-things and keeping-character-things-organised, that would be spiffing. If I could someday rely on it to go, "Whoa, girl, you just contradicted line 23 of chapter 19 with [insert offending text and line number here], at a level of detail that it'd be unreaonable to expect a beta reader to spot in a spread-out WIP, I'd actually pay a lot of money. I want help managing what I write and coping with my cognitive disabilities so I can keep writing stories that are too big for my brain to hold in one dollop. We ain't there yet, but maybe, one day? If we can ever get past the ethics of training the models on other people's data in the first place, and the environmental impact of using these tools at all?

Sudowrite is nowhere near being able to do this for a long story, yet. And the free version is plenty if I just want a quck summary of the story's vibe, tropes, or themes for reference. That I do find useful for clarity, because condensing ideas and summarising fiction is not something I'm good at doing myself. I think Sudowrite might, eventually, be able to help me understand how I write.

So far, so underwhelmed.

things writers can (probably) relate to

-making the facial expression your character’s making and trying to describe it

-writing entire scenes in your head as you shower and not remembering most of it by the time you get to your computer

-deciding you can’t do something you’ve been looking forward to until you write what you told yourself you were going to write, resulting in you laying in your bed doing nothing

-having two completely different ideas for your story to go in and both seem equally good but you can’t do both and you also can’t choose

-having docs with stories you know you’ll never finish but not deleting them anyway, even if they’re only a couple sentences long

-getting random bursts of productivity that could go towards homework or cleaning your room or writing and you know you’ll only be able to do one

-getting inspiration from the most random things

-writing at inopportune times because a perfect line or dialogue just popped into your head and you have to get it down before you forget it

-“what are you writing?” “……..a story”

- “what do you want to do when you grow up?” “uunnghnnggguughhhhh”

-reveling in the embarrassment you put your characters through

<-OP's tags

This one is for grammarly.

I see you.

I see you after all you've done to me.

You come in, sweep me off my feet, correct my comma usage and wrap me around your little finger making me dependent on you.

You taunt me with your premium features, making me wish I had just a little more money to fully commit to you and you never go on any good sale.

Then you drop me into a filthy hole with the rest of the garbage by incorporating ai that can't tell the difference between its and it's and leave me to rot.

So I move on, I find something better than you could ever be. Just for you to flash a 50% off sale in my face like we were nothing. Like I never meant a goddamn thing to you.

Now you want me back?!?!

After all this, this how you want to wine and dine me back into your arms?

Well, I won't play your game. I've grieved our parting already and now I feel nothing but utter indifference toward you.

It's Whumptober and I wanted to be whumping the pretend people. I should really put any energy I can scrape together into my WIPs, but... whuuuuuuuump.

writing a fanfic, day 1: haha fun little porn fic lots of fluff no angst happy ending :)

writing a fanfic, day 30: so it turns out japan signed the 1929 geneva convention on the sick and the wounded but NOT the geneva convention on the treatment of prisoners of war and therefore the definition of "war crime" in this situation is

*thinks up an idea for a silly quick piece* okay haha let's whip something up real quick

*idea gets more complicated*

*idea gets more complicated*

*idea gets more complicated*

*idea gets more complicated*

oh no

You'd think writing a chapter would make you one chapter closer to being done with a fic. You'd think that, wouldn't you??

But no, you are in fact 3 chapters further away.

My biggest tip for fanfic writers is this: if you get a character's mannerisms and speech pattern down, you can make them do pretty much whatever you want and it'll feel in character.

Logic: Characters, just like real people, are mallable. There is typically very little that's so truly, heinously out of character that you absolutely cannot make it work under any circumstance. In addition, most fans are also willing to accept characterization stretches if it makes the fic work. Yeah, we all know the villain and the hero wouldn't cuddle for warmth in canon. But if they did do that, how would they do it?

What counts is often not so much 'would the character do this?' and more 'if the character did do this, how would they do it?' If you get 'how' part right, your readers will probably be willing to buy the rest, because it will still feel like their favourite character. But if it doesn't feel like the character anymore, why are they even reading the fic?

Worry less about whether a character would do something, and more about how they'd sound while doing it.

grrrr writing fight scenes is so frustrating especially when physical contact isn't allowed.

"Call me Lord Voldemort."

"You see?" he whispered. "It was a name I was already using at Hogwarts, to my most intimate friends only, of course..."

I am literally debating right now whether I should chuck Tom's angsty little teenage "I am Lord Voldemort" moment with the "Knights of Walpurgis" into the Void Of Unpublished Scenes and whether I am actually going to bother calling the collection of morons that because it's driving me up the wall and I don't think Tom feels utterly convinced either.

Not me watching the End of the F***ing World and then realising it’s going to look like I ripped off the plot for the second and third parts of my fic.

For the record, I did not.

Me, writing chapters of Three Can Keep A Secret: must plan. very suspense. drop hints. red herrings.

Also me: crying because I just want to write about Tom causing havoc and ruining lives and it’s not the right time yet.