A Suspicious Lack of Werewolves

fascinating that when you tell people "you have to learn the rules to break them" when talking about drawing/painting etc everyone nods and agrees but the second you say "you have to read books if you want to write better" there's a horde of contrarians begging to be the wrongest people ever all of a sudden

if one more person in the notes of this post says "omg op has clearly never talked to a beginner artist!!" as if im not a literal professional artist and was making a broad point........ this time im really gonna do it

I think it's important to point out why fanfiction is different - so much context and interest hooks depend on you already being interested in the source. You are familiar with these characters and therefore don't need to have the basics built into the story. With original work, you need all that underlying character development to be in the story you're writing to make us want to read it. You could 'cheat' and give us a modern Sherlock Holmes - but we still need your version explored in narrative to actually care about it. Dr. House is more than just Sherlock Holmes in a hospital, he has his own issues and foils and quirks. The Holmes from the TV show Sherlock and Elementary are vastly different takes on the same character. You need to read original fiction in order to learn how to do that in your own original fiction. Fanfic is great, but it intentional has gaps that make it a different form.

Actually making your selfinsert overpowered and friends with all your faves and a hybrid of the coolest species and in a relationship with your crush and the long lost sibling of the villain is called having fun and its cool as fuck

reblog if you have skilled writer friends and you're damn proud of them

Also, most published authors I know LOVE to respond to fan mail. Big authors usually can't respond to most, but that doesn't mean they don't like to.

honestly the second someone throws out "cringe" as a judgement I throw out their whole opinion. Come back when you've figured out "cringe" is something middle schoolers made up. And anon's version of adulthood- what?? 😂 You think I'm embarrassing for *checks notes* having a conversation with a fan?? Sounds like a you problem bud, good luck with that.

oh i never know how to explain this properly but i looooooooooooooooove when a story just absolutely TELLS you something and it’s so obvious it goes right by you. like the equivalent of hiding in plain sight. i’m thinking in the original cut(?) of alien where they showed the full xenomorph, crouched and ready to pounce, but because we’ve never seen it before, we can’t tell what it is and interpret it as part of the spaceship. or it’s a detail that seems so out of place or wildly insane that you automatically ignore it and assume you misinterpreted until that exact detail comes back in a big way? (like when noah the raven boy flat out tells everyone he’s a ghost and they take it as a joke, so the reader does too) is there a tvtropes name for this i’m obsessed with it

I think that this is known as “delayed decoding” in literary analysis. The term was coined by Ian Watt in the ‘70s, don’t remember the exact year, to describe a technique used by Joseph Conrad in Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, but a lot of writers picked it up. It’s basically what you described: you present a detailed image but don’t make its moral and psychological relevance obvious. You give facts but not their meaning, not until later, and the revelation can come directly from the characters who suddenly realize what they have observed or it can also be left in the text, to be understood by the reader. You can see why Modernists loved it!

It’s also really, really fun as an author.

most important part of the writing process actually is when you loop a single song on max volume and stare at the word document and imagine the characters doing things for 14 hours. this is known as getting in the zone

people might think creating OC lore involves a lot of thinking & planning, but in my personal experience, OC development is more like a divine vision from a god slamming you over the head with a mallet while ur doing the fuckin dishes or folding laundry

when people like your OCs it is truly one of the best feelings ever. but when they also UNDERSTAND your OCs??? When they say or do something that just makes you go "oh they get it." UNBEATABLE.

Tbh I think fandom generally needs to get better at sitting with the uncomfortable fact that a story/fanwork/meme/whatever can hurt one person and help another

This is why I think “tag warning” culture is kinder and more constructive than cancel culture / “no problematic content” culture. One size does not fit all, but if we learn to be more aware of the fact that the same thing can be emotionally validating or cathartic to one person and upsetting to another, and pick up a general mindset of thinking before we post, “what might people need a heads up for in this content?”, we grow more compassionate, more thoughtful, and more understanding of the differences in people’s experiences.

Do you guys have like. AMVs of the mind. Like fanvideos that you have edited in your head for specific media to certain songs and every time you hear the song (or at least sometimes) you think about this nonexistent fanvideo. Used to happen to me a lot in high school and now I still do it sometimes just for fun

sad reality of the fanfic-to-published work economy is that the weirdest people are willing to do it. that's why there's now hundreds of shitty no plot cishet hate-to-love enemies-to-lovers books that are ex reylo fanfic. and it's not even good. that's because the people who wrote book-quality steve/bucky and kirk/spock fic are too normal to think to themselves "i should get this porn published". they're too busy working in local government offices

everyone I am happy to announce that the stevebucky fanfic author I had in mind while writing this post has officially reblogged it.

Despite only having 13 notes, this post made it to another discord server I'm in lol. Sending it around again because it's still relevant

i think its so awesome that ocs exist. u can just make up some girl and put so many problems in her head