Hello! I’m trying to use Tumblr as more of a platform for my writing stuff, so I decided to make a blog for just that to be separate from my more fandom/meme/generally all over the place blog that is my main.
My name is Connor Fitzgerald (he/him). I’m in my mid/late 20s. My default genre is fantasy, but I’ve been known to branch out into plenty of other fiction genres as well. My true base is the comedy genre, which has evolved to mean that most of my writing involves some level of trope de-construction. (One of my favorite things I’ve written was a tragedy because it was written to “parody” a comedy that someone else had written. More on that later.)
A lot of my writing in influenced by D&D, which I play very regularly as both a player and DM. So I do steal from myself on occasion if a character or storyline plays really well at the table or if I think there’s more to them then the game allows us to dive into.
A lot of the short stories and such that I post here will probably feature some of my OCs in unconfirmed canon or AU settings. I’ll try to remember to keep them tagged and organized appropriately.
I’d love to connect with other writers and readers on here as critique partners, accountability partners, beta-readers, etc. Really just the whole writing community experience.
Writing Prompt Stories
I’ve challenged myself to write at least 1 short story per month based on a writing prompt that I will post here and link below. I’ll also be tagging them under #writing prompt. I’ve compiled these below as well for easy access.
Unconfirmed Canon for My OCs
-Shipwrecked Villainy (featuring Caleb)
-Finding Home (featuring Caleb & Shelby)
-Plus One (featuring Mallory & Alifras)
-The In-Laws From Hell (featuring Caleb)
-For Our Future (featuring Caleb & Shelby)
AUs for my OCs
-A Stranger’s Smile (featuring Abigail & Tessa)
-Retired in Peace (featuring Alifras, Amara, and Joy)
-A Minor Inconvenience (featuring Alifras, Lyla, and Joy)
-Heroic Oversight (featuring Joy, Amara, and Lyla)
-Android Affections (featuring Abigail & Tessa)
-Culling of the Clones (featuring Marcus)
-Survival of the Strongest (featuring Marcus)
-Fisticuffs (featuring Marcus)
-Tyrannical Redux (featuring Alifras)
Other Stuff
-Unfamiliar
-The Salesman
-Space Bards
-Invasive Maneuvers
-To Justify the Means
-Leveling Up
My WIPs
My current WIP is a high fantasy that is in the late phases of editing and which I am planning to grow into a 9 book series. The book is called “A Legally Mandated Adventure.” I don’t have a set name for the series as a whole yet. All the same, I think I’ll be talking about this one under the #the winning play series tag. Because the first book in the series is inspired by a one-act play I wrote in high school that ended up winning my school’s annual play competition. (I also named it the Winning Play shortly after I had started writing it because I was a cocky little shit. (But I was right, so I guess it was justified?)). If I post excerpts from my WIP, I’ll try to remember to compile them here:
-Dialogue Scene 1
-Excerpt 1
-Excerpt 2
-Excerpt 3
WIP Summary:
“A Legally Mandated Adventure” is about a young man, named Timmy, who learns that his grandfather’s will dictates that he must go on an adventure to prove himself worthy of his inheritance. His grandfather, who is still alive, will accompany him, as will his grandfather’s lawyer, to make sure the terms of an adventure are met. Along the way, they find friends, enemies, and (wouldn’t you know it) adventure.
Writing for a Visual Medium
If you’re at all interested in seeing where I first started writing, here is the sketch comedy group that I was essentially the head writer for in high school. Also on this channel are 3 short films that I wrote and directed in college. (Not everything on the channel is written by me, but much of it is. Send an ask if you have questions, I guess.)
A lot of my current strengths I think can be seen in the fact that the first several years of my writing journey was meant to be for a visual medium. If I can humblebrag here for a second, I think my dialogue and staging is pretty solid on the page. The things that I need to think about more actively in my process are descriptions since when it’s for video or stage, I don’t need to really describe past a reference point of what I need to look for from a setting/prop master perspective.
You can also definitely see the evolution of my writing style (specifically comedically) from the early more ridiculous stuff to trope parody bits to the short films which actually tell a full story while still getting into more subtle trope de-construction elements.
(If you’re wondering what my favorite thing on this channel is, it’s this 7 minute short film. It was a direct parody of a romantic comedy someone else had written for our school’s film festival the previous year. Like a reverse Airplane. I wrote the script in a single all-nighter and shot the first draft and it turned out EXACTLY the way I had imagined it, which isn’t easy when you need to shoot around class schedules and have no budget. Huge props to my friend who played the main character as well because he absolutely crushed that role.)
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This might be unpopular but I’m not going to use simpler vocabulary in my writing if it’s out of character for the narrator. If my POV character is a botanist, he’s going to call a plant by its name. If you don’t know what it is you can either Google it or move on just knowing it’s a plant of some sort.
I don’t like this trend of readers being angry that not everything is 100% understandable for them. I want my characters to be believable as people and sometimes people use words people outside of their field will not understand. That’s not a bad thing.
You don’t have to understand every word to get the gist of what’s happening. I’m not going to slow down an action scene to describe every weapon because someone might not know them by name. They can just assume it’s a weapon because that makes sense in the context of the scene.
I just had a debate with myself over using the word mezzanine, wondering if I should describe it instead. Ultimately I decided the character would call it a mezzanine, and therefore readers could look up a new word if they didn't know.
It's how I learned words like myriad as a seven year old reading Lord of the Rings for the first time, why would I steal that experiance from someone else by simplifying language?
I can't even imagine wanting to write a book for people too uncurious to learn new words. I don't even want to be reminded people like that exist, let alone cater to them.
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God sometimes I'm writing smut and I'll like, delete a sentence because I'm like, no, I can't write that. It's too indulgent. And then it's like. Girl, what the fuck are you even going to the candy store for if you're just going to buy raisins. Get real.
I've noticed a lot of people advise writers to read their stories aloud. And I absolutely agree. But I've also mostly seen people mention it in like a 'you'll better notice where there are little mistakes, and where the phrasing is awkward' way. Which, again, is absolutely true.
But that's a 'read the story aloud to see what's wrong with it' advice.
And I think there's maybe an even more important reason to read your fic aloud.
It will show you all the things that are RIGHT about your story.
Because there inevitably comes a point where you've read your own story in your head so many times that all the words are a bland mush that will leave you convinced that there's absolutely nothing interesting or good in your writing.
And if you go back to it many months later, you might realize... oh, this is a pretty interesting fic. And that's because the brain has had time to forget every tiny detail of phrasing you came up with, and you can actually read it like a reader, not the author.
But that road takes months, and until then, you might be inherently convinced that the story is literally the absolute worst thing you've ever written.
But... WHEN YOU READ ALOUD, you automatically start giving the words inflection, inflection that, when you're reading something that you haven't written yourself, you kind of hear even when reading quietly. But for your own story, all that inflection and weight has been sucked out by way too many rereads while you were looking for grammatical errors. The fastest way to be able to see it again? To hear it.
Anyway, read aloud to defeat the monster on your shoulder telling you your writing sucks.
how non-writers think writing works: creating a detailed outline and plan, writing each section carefully and weaving in all the different story threads like a master creator, expertly creating a masterpiece with care and precision
how writing actually works: daydreaming that one scene, creating a half-formed plot in a daze all around it, swearing at characters that don't magic themselves into existence, becoming absolutely obsessed with the story for a solid week, it becomes your entire life, you sit down open a blank word document and write approximately two and a half chapters, lose interest, daydream an entirely new idea for a new story, rinse and repeat
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"what's the worst thing you can do as an artist" is not "shade with black" or "not use references" or whatever the worst thing you can do as an artist is hate yourself. and that includes the person you used to be
"look at how bad my old art is" "this was so cringe" "it's embarrassing to look at this" what are you gaining here? belatedly being your own bully? is it more acceptable to hate a kid if it's the kid you used to be? shut the fuck up. be kind to yourself or don't say anything at all. people are really not laughing with you when you mock yourself and if they are maybe consider hanging out with nicer people. imo.
this also goes for having your personal blog tags be like "nobody cares (name)" or "shut up (name)" or whatever. why are you being mean to yourself. its not preventing other people from being mean to you just because you get the first shot in it just means you get shot twice. how is that better. how is any of that better
this is advice I've given friends directly before and I've probably also posted it but I really like giving it so here it is potentially again: do not create something for an imaginary bad faith reader.
there will always be someone who finds fault in your work. there will be people who read the messages on it wrong. there will be people who will take every compelling aspect about your work off of it so they can put in their own.
you cannot make art for these people.
you will never write a story that is free from criticism. you will never draw a piece that everyone finds appealing. you will never compose a song that everyone enjoys hearing. you cannot, fundamentally, set out to create something and only think of how you can avoid someone not liking it.
because, and this is key, there will be someone who sees every angle of your story and feels its intent in their heart and gushes to their friends about it. you will draw someone's favorite art and they will make it their phone wallpaper because they want to see it every day. someone will fall in love with your song and loop it on their way to work because it gets them through the day. and THOSE are the people your work is for. THOSE are the people you have to care about, because they love what you make for what it is - because it's itself.
if you set out to create something and file off every sharp edge, prune every thorn, you will be left with something fragile and weak, and it will be fragile and weak for the sake of someone who does not exist but that you were scared of anyway.
sharing art is complex and tangled and powerful, and anything you care enough to create deserves to flourish as itself. get sillay.
Literally cannot emphasize enough that my #1 writing advice is to stop being afraid. Stop being afraid of sounding too cringe, or too stupid, or too horrifying, or too horny, or too weird, or too much, or too little, or too you. You need to put your entire pussy into your art. Sure, it won't be to everyone's tastes, but if you keep yourself to the blandest tamest safest roads possible you will be of no one's tastes, not even yours.
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ID - A screenshot of a tweet by @\LocalSoundwave reading "Imagine being a bigot and into nerdy shit. Bro you're the villain in every story lmaooooo", following up with "'Oh no they hate the X-Men because they're different ☹️' that's YOU you dumb ass motherfucker LMAO"
I think about this a lot and I think it’s actually not something you can control for, because the nature of stories is to put the audience in the shoes of the protagonist by evoking aspects of human experience that anyone can identify with.
The problem is that people are going to identify with the difficulties and struggles the protagonist has experienced whether they’ve experienced the proportionately similar trials of bigotry making them feel less for their whole lives or the relatively **much** more minor feeling of having one person be mean to them in the hallway in their school. Because everyone experiences negative emotions. Everyone experiences being treated poorly. It’s just a matter of degree.
If you’re a marginalized kid who’s been hated by the society around you your whole life, you’re gonna identify with the outsider protagonist, because you’ve experienced being an outsider.
But if you’re a privileged kid whose strongest negative experience was being made fun of one time by an adult or a parent or another kid, you are **also** gonna identify with the outsider protagonist, because that experience—even though it was objectively way less intense or all-consuming—still makes you think you’ve experienced being an outsider.
Also, people identify with protagonists who look like them. Privileged white people have always had protagonists who look like them.
And lastly, people identify with the protagonist of any story because it’s the nature of a good story to make you identify with the protagonist. So if you show a bully a story about an underdog, he’s gonna identify with the underdog, because the underdog is the main character, and the bully also feels like the main character.
I dunno, I’m not sure there’s a way around this problem. It hinges on a lack of media literacy (something most people don’t have a lot of anyway) and the nature of stories.
One way to start: Kill the "hero's journey" storyline. Have fewer stories about the Lone Protagonist Who Conquers Demons And Returns Home A Hero.
More ensemble stories. More romances - the largest genre of not-heros-journey plotlines. More mysteries with asshole detectives... who are shown to be unhappy at the end of the story, because while they like solving crimes, they're also pretty damn lonely. More stories that shift perspectives, that seem to have A Lone Hero and then flip to the point of view of the people he's stomping over on his way to demon-slaying. (Or that flip to the POV of the demon, who turns out to be stuck in his own set of problems with no way out.)
In modern US society: More women protagonists who aren't Lone Heroes, who have family ties and friendships, who don't solve problems by being smart or sneaky or unkillable, but by having networks of talented people willing to help them.
More protagonists who don't win by being Singularly Awesome, but by being connected, by being kind... by being forgiven.
