CaptainSif on AO3

but: consider. if u genuinely like analyzing writing.. do u know ur just allowed to go through and quote your favorite parts and ramble abt what they mean to u and the author will LOSE IT WITH HYPE?

genuinely. i felt SO WEIRD the first time i did it.. but like. holy shit authors love it. its crack for authors. the first time i did it, it was on a fic that hadnt updated in half a year, give or take, and the author made 3 updates that month BECAUSE OF MY COMMENT.

I spent some time as copy editor for a newspaper before I moved up to senior board, but I still do a lot of copy work for it as we don't have a copy editor currently (copy is what we call the editing process of our articles, so similar to proofreading as a beta). We work in google docs and as we edit articles, we always use the suggestion mode to make sure we aren't making changes unilaterally that wouldn't be noticed, and that could be wrong. After two rounds of editing (one for grammar and one for fact-checking, although the latter is probably more relevant to newspaper than fic), the author of the article could go through the comments and decide if they agreed that they used one word too much or a paragraph should be moved to make a line flow better or to add a sentence, etc. or just ignore the comment. Their name would be on the article, so authors always have the final say.

There's obviously some differences in these two types of writing (especially as for newspaper work I have to follow a style guide and make comments about capitalization or how we write people's titles that had to be changed), and I can only talk more about shorter pieces as articles are only so long, but the "Suggestion Mode" method of thinking about betaing is something that I retain in fandom and I think is a good way to think about it. 

If you want to soften the blow as a beta, try phrasing your comment as a suggestion rather than a fact to avoid coming across as negative or accusatory. If you are the author and you're scared of rejection or harsh words, try to think of your beta's comments as light suggestions from a friend on improvements rather than them criticizing you, harsh, etc. They don't think you're a bad writer just because they said you used the word "glowing" too many times in one paragraph, and their opinion of you does not depend on your skill or your work, but who you are. It may not work for every case as everyone's preferences are different, but this "Suggestion Mode" method of working/thinking can help ease friction between betas and authors and I hope it helps!

Sometimes that's suggested changes for SPAG and unclear phrasing, sometimes that's highlighting lines to flag with comments or questions, sometimes it's big-picture developmental notes on the pacing or story progression or character voice, sometimes it's "omg please just fix my accidental tense changes," sometimes it's "please don't suggest wording changes, just let me know anywhere you're confused," sometimes it's even just "hey can you hype me up? I'm nervous about this one."

Ever since then I have only ever turned suggestion mode on, and communicated clearly with later betas on what I want. For me, that is mostly SPAG (for some fics, it's even just SPAG), because I mostly write short fics where I (think I) can keep plot consistent in my head, and then for (mostly longer) fics where I want more feedback, I tell my betas how I want it given so that we can best work together. In my case, that's usually telling me in which places things are unclear, either from phrasing or what is happening, and if I should rephrase something, I have them tell me which sentence/paragraph and what doesn't work, but it gives me the freedom to use my own words for the rewrite, so the work still feels like my own. Then I run the changed sentence/paragraph by them to see if it's clearer and then put it in. Or if I can't think of ways to rephrase, then I ask for suggestions on how to rephrase it.

This also puts you in a conversation, it's not "the beta says this has to be x", but for me it's usually been like "you can put it like x" and I'll be like "hm that is not quite what I was looking for, it sounds like it has y connotation and I was looking it to sound more like z" and then them "what about this instead?". If you're looking for connection and conversation in fandom, I find this is the way to go, because then a beta-writer relationship, no matter if just for one fic or for longer, doesn't feel transactional and instead feels like working together on a project and talking about something (your fandom, your ship, your au, your fic) that you care about.

As far as I remember, I've only ever had positive experiences with this approach because it means no one is disappointed. The writer isn't disappointed because the text no longer sounds like them or the beta replaced full passages, and the beta isn't disappointed because the writer changed their edits to something else.

As the above poster said, when I first started writing for fandom, I didn't know there was different ways to beta and that I was allowed to say "I don't care about consistency in this specific work, I just want the grammar to be fixed" or "I'd only like you to suggest and then reword things myself". The first few times I had betas after that first experience, I felt like I had to justify why I wanted a specific type of feedback and it took some comments from friendly betas encouraging me to voice how I'd like feedback to be given and them telling me that they like it that I have clear instructions for what I want in beta reading.

But you are allowed. Sure, sometimes a beta will have to be like "I don't think I'm comfortable with this type of beta reading", but that is okay because otherwise you'd have both been unsatisfied with the experience. Better to know it upfront than to find out at the end that one or both of you hated the experience or the end product.

fanfic is for fun. the standard is that you have fun writing it. there is no other requirement

starting is the hard part. write some bs at the top (I'm partial to something like "I'm gonna write this fic now instead of just daydreaming, i guess it starts with..."), use voice typing, anything to make the first few words easier

talk to yourself while you write. it makes your dialogue more natural and helps you figure out where to put commas (they go where you pause, most of the time)

edit it once or twice max. it's fic, don't stress it. read it aloud as you do, you'll catch more errors that way

one last scan before you click post. websites will change the font and that helps you spot typos

On the subject of AI, I have a confession to make: I use it. Not to write for me, but to help me check for inconsistencies, to brainstorm ideas, to write outlines, to give me a couple of lines when I've been stuck for hours, to be my beta reader, if you will. Generative AI is bad? Yes, but it also a useful tool if one isn't lazy. I don't ask: write me a story. I go with my story and ask: help me with continuity. Look, this paragraph is clunky, how do I make it better? The demonization of generative AI is fair, but to be honest, I also understand people who use it. Maybe they're afraid of writing themselves, maybe they're insecure and don't trust their prose. Maybe they have brilliannt ideas but they need help to make them become fics.

To me, this is very much connected to my last ask where I was talking about how we don't have enough mentors in fandom to support the influx of people entering it.

All of the things that you're asking AI to do used to be done by a beta reader (or more than one!). A fandom friend (or even a random stranger who volunteered) would read through your work and help you with those issues.

Betas are amazing. They can help with grammar and spelling. They can regionalize language. They can provide sensitivity reading if they're from a marginalized community that you're writing about and aren't a member of. They can track canon, help with research, even just be a sounding board to discuss ideas with.

And sometimes, they're just a cheer reader - someone reading your story and telling you how awesome it is because they love it just as much as you do.

I understand turning to AI if you 1) don't know beta readers exist or 2) don't know how to obtain one. The need for that kind of support doesn't go away just because you can't access it.

But for anyone out there who needs this kind of help and wants to avoid Gen AI, you can write a post on your blog, add it to an author's note, check out resources like @needabeta or - if the time of year is right and you have the funds - place a bid on beta reading services during @fandomtrumpshate

Beta readers are often involved in fandom events like big bangs and exchanges, and if anyone is looking to host such an event, it's a great way to get people involved who aren't writers or artists but would love to help out.

I definitely recommend searching a beta reader within the fandom you're writing for rather than someone who knows nothing about it.

And when you don't immediately get a response, ask again. This comes from a person (me) who is now two and a half years into dating the girl who replied to my 'I need a beta reader' post that I was debating to reblog that day.

Sometimes I wonder where our lives would be if I hadn't reblogged it or if she had skipped past the post.

Fandom is a community of people with shared interests. It's supposed to make it easier for us to become friends, hang out and talk for hours.

Not a single AI tool in the world is capable of giving (fandom) writers/artists/creators what they actually need.

I had a big fanfic in a previous fandom where one of the big reveals was the involvement of a kind of infamous villain, whose presence was built up to and foreshadowed through the whole fic until his reveal without ever mentioning his name, so that the name drop would be a gut punch. It worked especially well because of who the villain was and his presence in that fandom space specifically (it's very complicated) and if it was an original story this reveal wouldn't work at all the way it was written in the fic. Because if you don't have a predisposition to think about that character and his relationship to the hero in a very specific way, then just seeing their name won't do much to you; the reveal and the recontextualisation it pushes upon you hinges on your previous knowledge of the source material.

I think it's an interesting tool fanfic authors are given. One of my favorite fanfic of all time is partially a re-imagining of its source material's canon, and something it does is introduce antagonists much earlier in the story or deepen npcs' stories. It then works to evoke a tragic irony that again wouldn't work if you didn't know the source material, and it's something the author obviously has a lot of fun with.

So I’m doing a poll. Please reblog for reach!

Because there is no way to tell with 100% accuracy that a piece of writing was created by or with the aid of generative AI, and anything less than 100% accuracy is completely unacceptable, no nuance, no exceptions. You can tell with 100% accuracy if something is not a fanwork--like an ISO or placeholder post that does not contain a fanwork--and you can tell with 100% accuracy if a fanwork contains a link to a payment apparatus or is otherwise soliciting payment for fic in violation of the TOS, so these things can be disallowed and, when discovered and reported as violations, dealt with by PAC. And you can tell with 100% accuracy that a fic has been plagiarized, meaning that it has pulled entire passages word for word from another fic and this can therefore be detailed in a report in order for PAC to take action. (This is important to note because while generative AI is in fact The Plagiarism Machine, that can only be proven on the back end via the datasets used to train it. You can't actually look at generative output and tell which place the words were ripped from, because LLMs operate on statistical probabilities of word order, not actually pulling phrases wholesale from a specific work.)

But you cannot tell with 100% accuracy that a particular passage has been generated with AI.

And we are already seeing the problem with spurious AI accusations! People are claiming that 'excessive use of em-dashes' is a 'tell' for AI, when the only reason em-dashes exist in AI-generated output is because the machines were trained on human-generated writing that used them! (And as a writer who frequently ODs on em-dashes and italics, I find that particular 'tell' especially insulting. My overuse of em-dashes comes from my own brain, thank you very much.) So the only way to actually tell that someone on Ao3 is using AI to write their fic is if the admit as much up-front.

Guess what would happen if Ao3 decided to ban AI fics from the platform? Those fics would stop being tagged, and then we'd run into the exact same problems we had on FFN with fics being grudge-reported by bad faith actors, which was one of many reasons Ao3 was created in the first place--so that people couldn't do that.