-Burnt Out

-Unmotivated

-Overly critical of their work

-Horny

I’m curious—what’s your biggest fanfic dealbreaker?

For me, it’s two things:

1. When the author drops a massive wall of text with no paragraph breaks. Like, my eyes hurt just looking at it.

2. When they don’t use quotation marks for dialogue. I get that some writers are trying to be stylistic or whatever, but it just confuses me and takes me out of the story immediately.

What about y’all? What instantly makes you hit the back button, no matter how interesting the summary or tags are?

This is crazy lol

I’ve struggled for years with horrific depression and recently went through a series of experimental treatments in an attempt to help. Instead, it made me into a shell of who I was, stripped bare of all my creativity. Gone overnight was my ability to daydream, and my writing skills went up in smoke.

Well, in the wee hours of the morning today I finally managed to post something for the first time in close to half a year, and received this response only hours later.

Man. Sometimes, readers just know what to say to make you feel SEEN and LOVED. 🥺❤️

What new ship have you gotten into recently? Doesn’t have to be new to everyone, but new to you? Is it similar to your others or are this a new dynamic?

I’ve been obsessed with The Pitt recently and wouldn’t you guess there’s two men with a fairly big age gap who are realistically never going to be canon lol and I love them!! It’s like this cake was baked just for meeeee

Talk to me, what’s your newest ship!

Yea so I finally gather all my courage to hit “post” on a fic I’ve been working on. It was freaking terrifying.

Anyways just wanna let y’all fic writers know I appreciate you a lot because formatting and tagging on AO3 are not for the weak. Or I’m just dumb lol

I’m very new to fic writing, so any and all advice is very much appreciated. I’m not a native English speaker at all so it takes me a long time to figure out all the words and their nuances in situations.

Anyways. As a long time reader/ lurker I just wanna say I appreciate everyone a lot more now that I also understand some struggles writers faced.

So thank you, writers. That’s all!

We as fanfic writers are constantly battling with our inner critics, imposter syndrome, intrusive thoughts about how our writing is bad, that others write better, and our hard work will never measure up to them. And so, let's play a sort of game where we find something we're good at and admit that we're good at it. It can be anything: setting a mood, characterization, descriptions, smut scenes, writing good endings, anything works.

It'd be especially great to hear from those who lack confidence in their own writing, because sometimes voicing something out loud (or typing, in this case) might actually help you start believing in it.

I'll start: I think I'm great at characterization. The moment I warm up to the character and make them mine, I have no trouble keeping up with consistency of their characterizations. I also think that I'm pretty good at making badass characters/scenes to actually feel badass which is something I'm immensely proud of.

Your turn :)

To be clear I didn't even dislike it, I just thought it was a little ridiculous lmao. 💀💀💀

Apparently fic writers weren't the first ones to use the "eyes as orbs" description, after all ....

Honestly, just interested to know why other people do it (or if they do it at all). I personally have muted people a few times, like when the author has a ton of works in a fandom (usually a collection) and I tried some, didn't like them, yet they keep popping up, so I muted them. Or the time when an author has many works in the fandom (love these people, respect to them) and they write stuff I don't enjoy (like Modern AU) and don't tag it (making it impossible to exclude by filtering tags) so when I get annoyed enough times I mute them. I have blocked & muted the people in fandoms I'm a part of for writing stories using AI (no regrets whatsoever). However these are very simple (and quite petty reasons) so I'd like to know if I alone mute people easily, or do you do it too? And if so, what is your reasoning?

Lmao if

Lately I've had a question about when is the moment that makes you give up on a story. The straw that breaks the camel's back and makes you delete it or abandon it.

I was trying to figure out how to tag my fic in which a character puts their child up for adoption. Scrolling through the suggested tags I came across “work up for adoption” and completely thought it was talking about a character trying to get up the courage to put their child up for adoption. It wasn’t until I actually clicked on it that I realized what it was meant for lol. It’s actually for people who aren’t planning on finishing a fic and would let someone else “adopt” the fic and finish it for them.

I’m curious if anyone else has similar experiences, especially for things that aren’t the usual ones that cause misunderstandings (I feel like “water sports” is the most common one for this).

I'm hoping I flaired this correctly but if not tell me if I need to change it.

Have you ever gotten a comment that you've never gotten or seen others get before that's just stuck with you because of how creative/funny/interesting it was?

Idk if this is unique but I once got called "the pioneer of doomed yuri" because I wrote a fic for a ship that didn't become popular until like 2 years later.

Stats aren’t adding up though. 0 hits, 1 kudos, 1 comment??? Ok then😂

The whited out name is the character I created. So this person is claiming to have Dissociative Identity Disorder and says one of their identities is the character I created. ????? Absolutely not what I expected to read first thing in the morning.

Personally i like little mini descriptions of what characters are noticing in the surroundings that doesn’t necessarily have to do with the plot but does reflect how they’re feeling like for example the first line in the uglies series goes something like this. ‘The sky was the pinkish yellow color of cat puke.’ The color of the sky doesn’t matter but the way it’s described reflects the character and what she’s feeling.

Here's my contender. More than eleven years, my jaw dropped when I realised. Wish I was that dedicated, damn...

I've I've seeing a lot of clips of interviews with Quentin Tarantino come up on YouTube shorts recently, and the way he describes his process and talks about his work is incredibly educational. He talks about his characters, writing himself into a corner at times and so many things that are universal in story telling.

One of my favorite things about how he talks about his work, however, is how completely unapologetic he is about what he writes.

I think we can all take a page out of his book on that front. I'm reminded that writing is art, and, to paraphrase Rainbow Rowell, "Art isn't supposed to look nice; it's supposed to make you feel something."

Let's do more writing and less hand wringing. Write what you want. You won't be everyone's cup of tea and that's ok.