UniversalSatan

Also I'mma shut off reblogs if this breaks containment since I'm putting some rando's writing on blast but I need to share. Even if I delete this tomorrow morning I just. Need it to be known what I endured.

NSFW as HELL text--this shit's mature-labeled and minors look away but jesus h chrst I just

Here are a handful of quick tips to help you write believable characters! 

1. A character’s arc doesn’t need to grow linearly. Your protagonist doesn’t have to go from being weak to strong, shy to confident, or novice to professional in one straight line. It’s more realistic if they mess up their progress on the way and even decline a bit before reaching their goal.

2. Their past affects their present. Make their backstory matter by having their past events shape them into who they are. Growing up with strict parents might lead to a sneaky character, and a bad car accident might leave them fearful of driving.

3. Give reoccurring side characters something that makes them easily recognizable. This could be a scar, a unique hairstyle, an accent, or a location they’re always found at, etc.

4. Make sure their dialogue matches their personality. To make your characters more believable in conversation, give them speech patterns. Does the shy character mumble too low for anyone to ever hear, does the nervous one pace around and make everyone else on edge? 

5. Make your characters unpredictable. Real people do unexpected things all the time, and this can make life more exciting. The strict, straight-A student who decides to drink at a party. The pristine princess who likes to visit the muddy farm animals. When character’s decide to do things spontaneously or in the heat of the moment, it can create amazing twists and turns.

6. Give even your minor character’s a motive. This isn’t to say that all your characters need deep, intricate motives. However, every character should need or want something, and their actions should reflect that. What’s the motive behind a side character who follows your protagonist on their adventure? Perhaps they’ve always had dreams of leaving their small village or they want to protect your protagonist because of secret feelings.

"there's a bubble in time—sometime past the near-death by a train—that may only exist within the most covert memories of two men, drowned by their own misguided betrayal. (extended bit after the train scene)."

goncharov/andrey, 770 words, not rated but there's not really any violence or otherwise explicit content.

“Were you trying to kill yourself, you fucking coward?”

There’s no more bite left to Andrey’s words, only a soft puff of breath that whispers against the bristles that line Goncharov’s mouth: Goncharov caught a glance of Andrey’s expression as the air had been knocked from his chest—an ounce of panic, an ounce of weakness to which the traitor would never admit—but any anger that remained sapped away from Andrey’s body as they lay chest-to-chest, the steam train whirring past their heels like a roaring current. Their breaths had slowed—synched, perhaps distantly longing to be the same entity—but not once had Andrey’s gaze strayed to the piercing stare of the man—only a man, perhaps nothing more—beneath him, fixated stubbornly on the darkness at their side.

“Look me in the eye, and then call me a coward.”

People tell me I am a big name fan in my chosen fandom.  I don’t quite get that but for the purposes of this post, let’s roll with it.  On my latest one shot, less than 18% of the people who read it bothered to hit the kudos button.  Sure, okay, maybe that one sort of sucked.  Let’s look at the one shot posted before that - less than 16% left kudos.  Before that - 10%, and then 16%.  I’m not even going to get into the comments.  Let’s just say the numbers drop a lot.  I’m just looking at one shots here so we don’t have to worry about multiple hits from multiple chapters, people reading previous chapters over, etc.  And if I am a BNF, that means other people are getting significantly less kudos and comments.

Fandom is withering away because it feels like people don’t care about the works that are posted.  Why should I go to the trouble of posting my stories if no one reads them, and of the people who do read them, less than a fifth like them?  Even if you are not a huge fan of the story, if it kept your attention long enough for you to get to the bottom, go ahead and mash that kudos button.  It’s a drop of encouragement in a big desert. 

I also have a working background in online marketing. In social media 1:10 is what you would call a solid engagement score, when people actually care about your product (as opposed to “liking” your Facebook page so they could join a contest or whatever). If BNFs are getting 1:5 - and I do sometimes see it - that is sky-high engagement. Take any celebrity; take Harry Styles, who has just under 30M followers and doesn’t tweet all that often. He regularly gets 3-400K likes, 1-200K retweets. I’ve seen him get up to just under 1M likes on a tweet. That’s a 1:30 engagement ratio, for Harry Styles, and though some of you guys enjoy my fics and have said so, I don’t think you have as lasting a relationship with my stories as Harry Styles’s fans do with him. XD;

Stuff that is ONLY available for dollars are obviously going to have a different way of measuring this, but when it comes to ‘If people can consume something without engaging back in any fashion (hitting a like button, buying something, leaving a comment)’ the vast majority will.

And as a creator that is frustrating but as a consumer it’s pretty easy to see how it happens. I have gotten steadily worse at even liking posts, much less leaving comments on ones I enjoy, since I started using tumblr. It’s very difficult to engage consistently. I always kudo on any fanfic I read and comment on the vast majority, but then again I don’t read a lot of fanfic, if you are someone who browses AO3 constantly/regularly for months or years, I could see how it’s easy to stop engaging. I don’t remember to like every YT video or tumblr fanart I see, much less comment on them.

When we are constantly consuming free content it’s hard to remember to engage with it or what that engagement means to the creators. And lol, honestly that sucks. Certainly as consumers we should be better about it. But also like, as a creator be kinder to yourself by setting a realistic bar of what you can achieve. 

I think as writers our assumption (my assumption anyway) is that the portion of hits that don’t convert to kudos equals the portion of readers who looked at your fic, didn’t like it, and never finished it. But it would seem that is an overly pessimistic assumption. 

The point about people rereading stories they love, or calling the link back up on their web browser to send to a friend, is really key here. If I find myself going back to a story again and again and getting the “you have already left kudos here” message, I try to at least leave a little comment to tell them that it is a favorite.

is writing the kind of author notes that encourage the reader to 1) think of commenting and 2) actually want to do that.

because i love hearing what people think; it’s not just the general boost of positivity though i love that, it’s every piece of positive to neutral feedback expands my experience of my own work in a way that reifies it and allows me to perceive it as a reader does, which is great for many reasons including i mostly write the things i want to read.

but ‘please comment!’ does not give people the feeling that i’m a person who wants to be talked to, and [tiresome textwall] does not give them the feeling that they want to talk to me. and the kind of note that will inspire that depends on the fandom and the vibe of the specific fic, so there’s a learning curve there.

So yeah if you’ve got a 50 chapter fanfic, and only 5% of readers leave kudos, that would mean that every single hit belongs to a person that read your full fanfic and left kudos. Is the ratio more out of sync? People are re-reading it.

Or maybe they thought the fic was something else, and upon clicking on it and getting a few chapters deep, realized that you were working with headcanons they werent interested in, so politely closed the tab and moved on. That’s not a fucking crime.

And lets be real here, the list of people that have left kudos on a fic is public knowledge; the whole thing is right there for anyone who wants to see. And with fandom purity culture being what it is, people may honestly not feel safe leaving kudos on a fic with the knowledge that the Morality Police might take offense to that fic and express that outrage by harassing everyone who interacted positively with that fic. I like reading pretty heavy content sometimes, and I can’t count how many times I’ve gotten through an excellent fic only to find a comments section with people screaming in outrage and declaring that the author and everyone who enjoyed the story is a complete monster for wanting to see content that isn’t fluff (don’t we know there are CHILDREN on the internet????), and sometimes it’s kind of hard to feel safe putting a target on my back to defend the fic.

firstly, bouncing off the previous reblog, i know this may not be as common but some people might not want to be associated with certain fandoms: i currently have 51 private bookmarks of a fandom i consider a guilty pleasure, but i don’t drop kudos or comments because i don’t want my name publicly listed there (should i log out and do so anonymously? probably, but there are also many fics that are only available to users). i’ve also gotten a comment on an explicit fic of mine that was anonymous because said person was embarrassed to be commenting via their user, and only did so when i recognized their name and gushed about how i was a fan of their work in not one but two obscure fandoms (you know who you are 😘)

aside from multi-chaptered fics versus oneshots, authors should also take individual fandoms and even types of fics into account. even though i’d only written two oneshots, one of the fandoms with the best engagement i’ve seen was Moomins back when there was a huge explosion on tumblr: both fics are approx. a 1:6-7 kudos ratio, and have a large collection of comments that genuinely mean a lot to me. the best fandom for stats for which i’ve written was hlvrai—something in which I wasn’t really invested but wrote a short oneshot for friends—yet even now, has just under a 1:5 kudo ratio. none of these fics were promoted. other fandoms that i would’ve thought to be more popular remain at around 1:9-15, even if they had been promoted in bangs and whatnot. as for “types” of fics, i want to take my star trek fics into account: an explicit crack oneshot (written as an academic joke, but something a reader would look at like “why would i ever want something like this”) is at 1:16 but with more coverage* and satisfying comments, a mature humorous oneshot at 1:7 (more coverage), an analysis (oneshot, romantic, a lot of retelling thru writing) at 1:11 (little coverage), and archiving of a star trek rp with friends with almost no kudos or coverage whatsoever. (*by coverage i mean how many people engaged with the fic: were hits in the hundreds, or were there a few thousand?)

lastly, i feel like we tend to forget about other factors such as bookmarks, collections, and subscriptions. subscriptions are harder to surmise due to only showing in the statistics tab, but i’ve often been surprised at thinking an ongoing fic had no interest whatsoever only to be baffled by the amount of subscriptions collected. as for bookmarks, i almost use them as an indicator more than i do kudos. being an author of tiny fandoms, i am often guilty of checking the “ranking” of my fic in the tag sorted by kudos; however, when looking at fic above mine, i always take into consideration a) the date fics were published (how many more years could another fic accumulate kudos?) and especially b) how are the bookmarks and collections comparable to the rest? bookmarks are often used as a saving-for-later, but it’s also a public statement of love, saying “i enjoyed this fic so much i want to display that on my profile”, and the amount of “comments” alone that i’ve read as bookmark tags/notes has also drastically influenced my motivation. the statistics tab also includes private bookmarks, which at least doubles the number, if not more (say, in the case of an explicit fic, where people may be more hesitant to display “what they’re into”). collections are a bit more of a rare case, but an incredible honor — sure, fics will be put into a collection for activities like bangs, but i’ve also had fic put into personal collections curated by someone who wants to showcase favorite fics in a fandom or even personal top favorites.