Tag: writing and whatnot

10 Questions Every Fic Writer Secretly Wants to be Asked

pherryt:

wyseink:

There are a lot of fic questions that float around online, but rarely do they ever ask specific questions about the fics themselves. Ask any writer one or more of these ten questions to learn more about the fic and show support.

1. Of the fics you’ve written, which is your favorite and why?

2. Which scene was your favorite to write in [title of fic]?

3. Which part of [title] was hardest to write?

4. If you could change anything in [title], what would it be?

5. Did you make an outline for [title]? Did you stick to it?

6. Which scenes did you cut, and which were added in [title]?

7. Who was your favorite character to write in [title]?

8. Which came first, the title or the fic?

9. Which idea came to you first in [title]?

10. What are some facts readers may not know about [title]?

i’m actually home during the evening for once. why not send some asks while i beta read something?

I’ve been feeling really low about myself and my writing ability recently. (’Cause depressive episode – fuckin’ yay.) But the other day I got a really sweet message from an artist who showed me a piece they created based off one of my works and it made me cry. I was so damn honored that I had inspired someone else to create something that I teared up. And, you know, it didn’t fix everything but it did help me be less hard on myself and my abilities. It gave me perspective. 

Part of the reason I write is because of fandom. Sure, I want attention but I also write because I want to share with this community. I want to make other people feel things and hopefully inspire them to write or draw or fill the tags with headcanons and ideas. I like sharing and I like sharing as part of a community of people who build on the ideas of other people. It makes me feel good to be a part of something.

So I guess I just want to say that if you’re a writer or an artist and you feel like you’re not doing good enough that it’s just not true. Your work reaches people and it makes an impact. Your audience might be small but you’re touching the lives of every person who engages with your work. You might never know the impact you’re making, but you are making an impact. Your work matters and you may never know how much and to who, but it does. 

golbatgender:

I have to say—and I can hardly believe that I do—that I am wholeheartedly against restricting what authors and creators are “allowed” to write, or shunning and bullying the ones who write something you find distressing.

Yes, good for you, you drove one racist author off a social media site or whatever, but you’ve also harassed dozens of queer people, allowed child molesters and rapists and abusers to slip under the radar because now everybody thinks that accusations just mean someone wrote gritty fiction once, and created a culture where literary innovation is stifled. Because it’s somehow been deemed appropriation to write about anybody who differs in the least from oneself, or fetishizing if there’s the least hint of sexual content. Because people might get ideas, even if it’s scientifically proven that reading about bad things marked as such does not make people more likely to do those things.

May I remind you that we live in a time of increasing religious and right-wing radicalism. May I remind you that we are affected by our environments and that “intracommunity” discourse does not arise in a vacuum, but instead reflects the larger ideological milieu. May I remind you that oppressors wish to hurt us, and would love for us to willingly submit to our own oppression, and in the past have dedicated much funding to doing so—infiltration is far from unlikely.

It saddens and angers me to see supposed liberators proclaim the rhetoric of the oppressors—censorship, racial and gender separation, binary thinking, sexual conservatism, dismissal of individual consent, but most of all, fear. Fear of desire, fear of the individual’s autonomy, fear of reading, fear of complexity; fear of the other and synonymized invader. Right-wing politics is a politics of fear, and so is every exclusionary movement or “feminist” anti-porn crusade.

When you accept a politics of fear, you accept the politics of genocidal racists, of homophobes, of trans-exterminators, of austerity pushers, of war hawks, of theocrats. Oh, your targets may be different, for now, but you have accepted their patterns of thought and softened yourself for those hatreds. Or you may even have exactly the same targets—porn you don’t like, for example—but you’re doing it for the right reasons, so if you collude with the people who are doing it for the wrong reasons, and give them some concessions in return…do you see?

Do not base your politics on fear. That is, without exaggerating, death, and likely for you, not just “the bad ones.” Give me a politics of love, or at least a politics self-critical enough not to parrot the fucking KKK’s invasion rhetoric or the Catholic Church’s stance on pornography and violent videogames, and leave people in peace.

People I need to include more in fic
– Mildred Baker
– Lily Sunder
– Victor Heinrickson
– Ceasar and Jesse (I can’t remember their last name)
– Andy
– Ash
– Max, Alicia, and Tasha Banes
– Hannah

Questions for Writer Friends

rosemoonweaver:

So these have been on my mind lately and I just wanted to throw them out there to see what other people thought.

1. What do you consider Major Character Death? Is it any character important to the plot or just someone in the main ship?
2. What warrants an Underage tag? Is it any sexual relationship under age 18? Under age 16? Do you base it off the consent laws where you live?
3. What do you classify as darkfic? Is tone or content more important to the classification?
4. How violent does a fic have to be to warrant Graphic Depictions of Violence?
5. How do you rate fics? How mature is Mature as compared to Teen?
6. How do you decide what to change about a character when writing AUs? Have you ever writren a character so divorced from canon that you yourself had trouble distinguishing where canon ended and artistic interpretation began?
7. How do you decide how to write charactera that don’t appear in canon much?
8. Has writing ever changed your opinion on a certain character? If so, who and how?

So I wanted to bring these back up because I’ve gotten a few really interesting responses and there seems to be some agreement and some disagreement when it comes to these topics. Based on having this hang around for a while and with absolutely no scientific weight, here are some things that interest me.

1. What do you consider Major Character Death? Is it any character important to the plot or just someone in the main ship?
With few exceptions, it seems like the general consensus is that if a character who is important to the plot of the story or the show dies, the fic gets an MCD warning. That makes sense, of course.
2. What warrants an Underage tag? Is it any sexual relationship under age 18? Under age 16? Do you base it off the consent laws where you live? 
Again, with very little variation, underage is considered anyone under the age of 18 and extreme underage warrants it’s own separate content tag. I’m both unsurprised and surprised by this. Personally, I had always thought about underage in terms of consent laws where I live, which is 17. In this respect, I tend to think about it in terms of teenage sexuality. I can absolutely see tagging a fic underage if the people involved are 15 or younger, or if there was an age gap that would be considered illegal where I live. But to me, the idea of two sixteen-year-olds having sex isn’t something I want to read but it doesn’t seem that big of a deal to me. I think, to me, the connotation of an underage tag was more present in my thinking. But I completely understand the reasoning and I will change my own thinking.
3. What do you classify as darkfic? Is tone or content more important to the classification? 
This one was really mixed. Some people said it was content, some said it was tone, and others argued that it was a combination. There does seem to be a few things that make a fic automatically dark to some (rape, serial killers, torture, horror) but other things were subjective. Some people claimed that the content can be dark but the tone can be light and that doesn’t make the fic “dark” while others argued that a lighter tone with heavy content makes the fic darker than usual. It was very interesting and very subject, honestly. I suppose, as with many things, it comes down to how the author chooses to tag it.
4. How violent does a fic have to be to warrant Graphic Depictions of Violence?
This one was really revealing in my opinion. Obviously, if the violence is “graphic”, meaning described in detail, it warrants this tag but something like a punch to the face doesn’t really. But what I found interesting is that some people said that if the violence level was higher than that shown on screen (for Supernatural in this case) it got the tag but show typical violence was fine. Which to me is absolutely wild because regardless of cuts and how “off screen” it usually is, there are definitely scenes on SPN that I think qualify for this tag, if for no other reason than the sounds. But, that’s me.
5. How do you rate fics? How mature is Mature as compared to Teen? 
The general consensus seems to be that fics with light kissing or fics a person would be comfortable reading to their young kids are G rated.
Fics with make outs and swearing are typically Teen rated.
Mature seems to be where people are divided. Some say that implication of sex is fine for Teen rated fics, others say that’s a Mature rating. Some say light sexual content and fade to black is Mature, while others say that fade to black is Teen and sex just can’t be described in detail in Mature fics.
Explicit seems to feature detailed sex scenes.
What really surprised me, though, was that no one (or maybe one or two people) mentioned violence having anything to do with their ratings. I would have figured that a fic with Graphic Depictions of Violence as a tag would at least get a Mature rating, but apparently, violence doesn’t come to mind when fic rating is concerned. I found it interesting.
6. How do you decide what to change about a character when writing AUs? Have you ever written a character so divorced from canon that you yourself had trouble distinguishing where canon ended and artistic interpretation began?
In general, writers said that they either try to boil a character down to what they think their core personality is and change details based on the AU or that they don’t write AUs at all. There did seem to be a little discussion about when other writers get it wrong and write a character in a way that doesn’t seem true to the reader, which I also find very interesting. This is a question I think about a lot, and I tend to think about what characters would be like if they lived different lives. To me, AUs are an opportunity to do a bit of character study and obviously, that’s not going to be the same for everyone.
It’s also interesting to me the way in which AUs are approached. There does seem to be an element of character archetyping, by which I mean that Dean, Sam, and Cas all fit into certain archetypal roles, and those can be used to inform where the character goes in a story. It’s quite interesting in regards to different approaches and I think I’d like to explore that further.  
7. How do you decide how to write charactera that don’t appear in canon much?
Unsurprisingly, the consensus seems to be that rarer characters are blank slates and are used to explore headcanons and/or to advance the plot.
8. Has writing ever changed your opinion on a certain character? If so, who and how?
I was really surprised to see a lot of no’s with this one. While some people answered that they learn a little more about the character by writing them (like their personality, their mannerisms, the way they see the world) most people stated they write from their own personal interpretations of characters.

So, anyway, thank you to all the people who took the time to answer my questions. You all have given me some things to think about.

penbrydd:

Your reminder that fictional characters are not always expressing the objective truth about themselves or their world, and the author is under no obligation to explain that, when the character speaks.

‘They’re lying’ and ‘they’re wrong’ are totally valid plot twists, and they’re not necessarily retcons.

I mean, for fuck’s sake, in the real world, we’re still learning new things about actual history all the time, to the point where like, some books published fifty years ago, about things that happened a thousand years ago, are no longer considered correct. Or shit where people published ‘studies’ that were improperly reviewed total bullshit and it took thirty years for anyone to question it and then actually do the studies to find the actual results. We didn’t retcon shit. We just gained new information that straightened out earlier bad assumptions. Fiction can also work like this. You can build human fallibility right into the story.