Tag: Writing

Fan Fiction on Discord

We’ve been around since 2016, when a handful of people from the /r/FanFiction subreddit decided they needed yet another method to procrastinate their writing.  And while we’ve been working really hard on being successful at that, we haven’t been able to stop people from joining and being immensely creative. More than once someone ends up popping in and getting inspired to start writing and posting and Can you believe it? Writing? On our writing server?

Several. People. Are. Typing. Ohgods.

Who we are:  We’re writers. Readers. Artists. Friends.  
What we are: A multi-fandom environment bringing together everyone, with 2000 members and steadily growing.
What you’d find if you were to come by: An inclusive and friendly environment, where we support each other in our every day lives as fans and writers. 

Why We Write.

 But what do we do? Aside of not writing? 

Help each other with exactly that. We have channels dedicated to helping with rubber ducking, plot hole stuffing, spag, and one for when you need help with adding extra spice to your smut fic. And if you’re the competitive sort, then you’re likely to find someone to sprint with.

On top of that we host regular events, such as drabble nights in which we get together to write 100 word ficlets over the course of an hour. Other highlights include Story Time, a fan fiction reading event which will hopefully see its return in 2019, since we’ve had a lot of success with it previously.  We even had our very first Creative Writing Workshop recently!

Interested?

I’d recommend reading through our rules and our channel guidelines, too. Though you’ll be able to find them on there if you decide to come visit. The basics are rather simple though: 

Be kind to each other and to each other’s fandoms, don’t be an arse, and keep topics relevant to the channel they ought to be in.

Get an invite link right here, or grab it from the /r/FanFiction Subreddit.

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The Magic of Writing

Welcome to my amazing friend’s debut post on her writing blog.  @owlishments will be sharing with us what she’s experienced, past and present, during her long and rewarding writing journey.

Go on, have a read.  It’s well worth it.

Have faith, fellow writer.

All Night Writing

Writing is magic. It’s true. Think about it: Using varying combinations of twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks, you can build an entire world. You can create brand new people for your readers to meet. You can make people feel love, hate, and everything between.

Pure magic.

But you don’t have to wait for your letter to Hogwarts to wield it. You don’t even need a wand—unless you want to pretend you pen is one, because it might as well be. The power to tell a story comes from inside you. It’s something we learn as small children playing games in the backyard, imagining that the trees are giants and the ants are our friends. With time, practice, and a drive to tell your story, you can learn to write.

It isn’t easy. Art never is. The words you write are an extension of yourself.  A piece of…

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Dying Light: Latchkey Hero

Season 3, #SaveHarran

. . . is outlined.  For the first time, I’m actually seeing the ending in front of me.  Not just by thinking about it, but by flipping through the notepad that I’ve had with me from the start, where Latchkey Hero’s first few words were written, and where I’ve plotted and outlined almost all of season two and three.

 

It’s falling apart, I admit, but with all the abuse it’s been getting I am not surprised.  And with abuse I mean waking up in the middle of the night, having an idea and figuring something out and dropping the thing three times before finding a pen.

But what delights me the most?  How absolutely perfectly it fit.

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No one can tell me that this isn’t a sign.  That Kyle Crane’s and Zofia’s journey isn’t about to pause where it ought to, because they’ve done the unthinkable and been with me for two years of incredible joy and headache.  Mostly joy though.  And pride.  I am so proud of them.

Yeah, it was Latchkey’s two year birthday on the 14th of April.  🎊

Neat.  Right?

So.  What now?  Now I got to write everything that I’ve outlined, and get back to posting once I’ve caught up.  Which, I’ll be honest, feels a bit like I’m staring at the Mount Everest right now.  It’s all a little scary.

But we got this.  748 words and counting.

Latchkey Notepad

 

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A Shielding Thing: Day 0

When I was twelve or so, I was neck deep in imagining a world that knew no boundaries, where one day little Taff would chop at the air with a lightsaber, and the other she’d battle fierce Xenomorphs.  Or why not both at once?  It was a world, where velociraptors were friendly, and horses had feathers, and dragons liked it when you rode the skies with them.

It was great.

But then life happened, innocence was lost, and while I grew up, so did the carefree and boundless world.  It changed.  Over. And. Over. Again.  Until the only thing that I could still recognize, was a single name in it:  Shielding. 

And for so long- for more than a century -I’ve doubted that I would ever be able to pluck that world from my head at all.  Because everyone says they’ll write a book one day, don’t they?  Well.  A lot of them, anyway, except then they never actually do.

Just look at Google’s opinion on the matter of:

howmany

Out of every 1,000 people that set out to write a book, only 30 actually finish. And if you then add on top of that the fact that only 20% of people who write a book actually publish it, this means only 6 people get published. [source]

Don’t quote me on that tho’ – it’s from 2012, and we’ve got self publishing really taking off now, which, hey- was mostly why I’ve finally decided that I’ve run out of excuses.  Because once you’ve put almost four novels worth of content out there, have finished three books, there’s really no more room to argue “But, I can’t.” 

Shielding Thing - A Valiant Remedy

Latchkey Hero, my Dying Light fan fiction, has made it into a solid third season, with two whole books finished.  Season two and three are good as original already, giving me an opportunity to practice building a plot from the bottom up.

A Valiant Remedy ended at 200k words, and… doesn’t suck.  Who’d have thought bringing A Shielding Thing together with Chris Redfield Resident Evil, would actually work?

So.

Buckle up.

We are getting started.  And since I’m posting this there, I suppose I got to take responsibility for actually following through.

Part 1 of the first book has been outlined.  Sort of.

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Reviewing Fan Fiction ?

comment

Have you ever wondered how to go about telling your favourite author how amazing their work is?  Or would you like to be able to help a budding fan fiction writer improve their craft?  Preferably without chasing them off the pasture?

If you have, read on.  If you haven’t- well- uh- have a puppy.

puppy

I read a decent amount of Fan Fiction.  Maybe not as much as others, but there’s a good reason for that:  While someone else might go and consume everything out there with their particular OTP in it, or dig into the trenches of their fandom’s archive, I read what I’m being given on the /r/FanFiction Discord server.  Sometimes that means I will read a short.   Sometimes a single chapter of a novel length piece.  Or, at occassion, the whole 350k word behemoth.

And I read to review.  Hardly ever will I leave a fic without dropping a comment / review on my way out.  Most often than not multiple ones, since I firmly believe every individual chapter deserves my attention.

Depending on my relationship with the author, or their explict wishes, I may even try to leave constructive critisim.  Though at the end of the day it is not my job to try and edit their work, or mold their writing to fit my taste or standard.  Considering that they are doing this for the joy of it, and not for profit, throwing unwanted advice their way can have a very discouraging effect.

So, what do I do if I am being asked to review / beta / callitwatchawant a piece that doesn’t live up to the quality I am otherwise used to?  Yeah, I might think Oh boy, but-

That. Does. Not. Mean. It. Sucks.

All it really means, is that the author has picked writing fan fiction as a hobby, but isn’t necessarily very good at it. Yet. We’ve all been there, an universal truth that we sometimes forget.

So.

Let us assume that I’ve read a fic by someone who does not have English as their native language, therefore obviously has grammatical errors in them.  They are also rather new to pacing and to character development / introduction, and make mistakes such as using the word orbs for eyes and mentioning everyone by the colour of their hair.

I’m being given ten chapters of all those clumsy little words, and asked to tell them exactly what I think.

What do I do?

Pick my battles.

Throwing myself in there and lumping it all together would likely feel like I’m absolutely slamming them.  And that would have the opposite effect to what I am trying to accomplish.  It’d drive them off.  Maybe even make them want to stop writing.

We do not want that.

So what I tend to do is, for each chapter, I pick up things that I believe should be addressed. I might mention specific grammatical mistakes in each, a handful at best. Sometimes I correct them in detail two or three times, before only mentioning them in passing.

Then, I mention what I like.  I highlight sentances that were good.  Show them what they are doing right, because not only will that take away the sting from before, but it’ll also provide a comparison to what they did wrong.

In short: This is how you shouldn’t do it, but look, this is right!  Keep doing this.  But stop doing that.

Then I move on to the next chapter, giving them the same treatment there, but focusing on a different set of errors.  If I talked about grammer first, I might now touch on the epithet elephants in the room.  Or hand them a few alternatives for orbs.  Like actual eyeballs.  Squishy, squishy eyeballs.

Before too long, we are back on what they did well, and by the end, I hope to have a tall stack of nicely layered critique sandwiches.

sammich

Mmmm… tasty tasty sammiches.  After all, they deserve the good stuff too, more so still than the advice I have to give.  If anything, I prefer encouragement, and to show them that however bad they think their writing might be, it is not a lost cause. No writing ever is.

From there on out, it is up to them.  Do I hope that they’ve learned something?  Sure, why wouldn’t I.  Would I feel dejected if they decide to disregard what I’ve told them?  Yeeaaah- probably, though since we assumed that they’d asked for help, we’re more entering “How to accept advice.” territory here.

What I’ll never do though, and what gets my blood boiling if I see it done, is throw their writing under the bus.  It’s not my place to do so.  It’s no one’s place to do so.  To think a writer (or any artist, really) would abandon a craft they love because someone couldn’t keep civil, breaks my heart.

*The above is written with Fan Fiction in mind, and not meant to represent the job of a paid editor working with an author preparing a book for publishing.  Neither does it cover betaing or editing agreements between Fan Fiction writers who want to get their work torn to pieces.

 

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How Taff plots and outlines.

There’s a lot of information out there on how to plot and outline.  People have written whole books about the same, and thinking how they had to outline that is way more amusing to me than it probably should be.

Outlining can be a really daunting thought for many, and sometimes I hate it. I abso-fucking-lutely detest it, because what am I getting done?  Nothing, the instant-gratification-greedy-ID screams. You could have written the first chapter and started posting!  Instead you wasted a week with this shit?  Eh. That little bitch is wrong.

Because once its done, I love it.

plot.png

Latchkey Hero’s first season didn’t need a lot of outlining, since it mostly followed the source material close enough to let me get away without a great deal of preparation.  Once I hit season two though, which has an entirely original plot line, I didn’t have that existing framework to play with any more.  And I was stumped.  Least until I figured out that even without the need to, I’d already started practising my outlining with the first season, it just wasn’t as clear to me back then.  In fact, I think I did the same thing with the already existing story, sort of reverse engineering it to be able to fit Zofia into it and see where she would begin derailing things.

End. Middle. Start.

My stories come out ass first.  Yep.

For both Valiant and Latchkey, I knew how they were going to end much sooner than I knew how they were going to start.  I’m not saying I knew what the last chapter was going to be, how it’d all go down exactly, but I knew what I wanted to achieve.   And while I wasn’t a 100% clear on the details yet, I also had an idea on how I wanted to get there.  What was left to figure out was where to open it up, where the story should begin so it could lead to what I wanted to achieve, and how I wanted it to do so.

For that purpose I usually grab a big sheet of paper, draw a line across it, and pencil in the three main touch points from Start to End.  The empty white space in-between will then be filled with…

What do we have to lose?

Here is where I take a look at the cast, and what their stakes in this whole deal is.  That includes a villain.  Each character gets a card with their motivation, goals, and my eventual choice on whether or not they win or lose.  Call it their own personal subplots if you’d like, although I like to think that my characters lead the plot, and not the other way around.

I set these cards on the page, so I can reference them, and I move on to…

The story skeleton

There’s lots of ways to build that.  Wanna follow the classic Hero’s Journey?  Have at it.  Would you rather go all Snowball method on it?  There’s tons of ways to go about it, and a lot better places to go look for them, to be fair.  Me, I’ve settled on a bastardised version of the Tent Pole method, paired with specific Scenes and Sequences to fill the timeline.

I start with arcs.  Usually three or four, each labelled clearly with what needs to happen and what the overall theme of the arc is.   They are written down on a set of cards, much like my character motivations, and kept close for reference.

After that I begin to distil the parts I’d just gathered up into scenes (chapters/sequences/whateveryawannacallem) and write them down on the line that I mentioned at the beginning.

And- done. 

Does that mean that everything is now set in stone and writing this will have lost some measure of its excitement?  Hell no.  There is still a lot to discover, and the outline will never survive entirely intact once the characters show up and begin having their say.  But I will not be lost.  I’ll have a compass, and that compass is incredibly reassuring when writers block comes knocking.  Since all you’ve got to do now is laugh in its face and slap it around with your handy outline.

But Taaaafff, you might cry.  Do I really need to outline?  It’s boring and I just wanna write.  Well.  Nothing wrong with that.  Valiant Remedy was written entirely only based on the ending in sight, with maybe four scenes that wanted in there, while everything else just had to fall in place around it.  Admittedly though, Valiant was my first ever long project, and I think I came away from this with a desire to be a little bit more organised.

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