I think people forget just how starved we writers are for feedback. Like every time someone tells me how much they liked my writing or how it touched them I do an internal breakdance while crying for five minutes straight.
Kudos to fanfiction writers for writing about all the trauma and emotional and mental turmoil that the original content creators dont acknowledge when putting characters through hell
Also kudos to writers for acknowledging that a character even exists when they havent appeared in the original content for like a million years yall are saints
Kudos to fic writers who also give anguish-prone characters a break once in a while by writing them into light-hearted and fun situations. Writers who rescue shallow plot-convenience characters and breathe new life into them. Writers who try to “fix” the problems made by the creators. Fic writers are awesome.
you know why I like redemption narratives? because a redemption narrative says: no matter how broken or wrong or bad or stupid or ridiculous or harmful or sad or terrible, you can atone.
there is still a road back. it might be rocky and steep, complicated and messy. walking it may take all your life. you may lose your foothold, slip and fall back into the abyss, but the wall is still there. the ascent is still there. hard is not the same as impossible.
you are never too far gone. you are never beyond saving.
You are born with the ability to see whether people listen more often to the angel or the devil on their shoulder, based on the opacity of each- if they listen more to the angel, it’s more solid and the demon is more transparent, and vice versa. You recently met a guy online and you’re finally going to meet. You go in for a handshake and glance at his shoulders, but you can’t see the angel. Only a solid demon.
Run. That’s my first thought and it keeps playing in my head over and over again. Run!
“You OK?” asks the man before me.
I realize I’ve been standing frozen, probably looking spooked. “Yes,” I fake what I hope is a convincing smile. I look back at his right shoulder, there’s nothing there, then to his left shoulder where a solid colored devil rests.
As he turns to our table I glance over the restaurant to make sure my powers are still working. There’s a woman one table away with a transparent devil and a translucent angel, she listens to the angel more. The woman across from her has a devil that’s translucent, she listens to it a little more than she should.
I’ve had this power my whole life, to see which side one listens to, but never before have I seen a completely solid devil, never before have I seen the angel completely gone…
Run!
Turning back to him I seen he’s pulled my chair out for me, watching me expectantly.
I could run now but what if he follows? Maybe it’s best I don’t tip him off, assuming I haven’t already, and sneak out while he’s not looking.
“Thank you,” I sit down.
He sits across from me and looks down, pulling on his long sleeves. “Order whatever you want,” he mumbles, “don’t pay attention to the price.”
“Oh, OK thank you.” I can barely pay attention to the menu. I glance over the restaurant, planning an escape route from the restroom.
“It was at 5:50,” he says, picking right up from where our last conversation online left off.
“I watched that video a dozen times and couldn’t see it.”
As we talk he seems just like the shy sweet boy I met online but then I glance at the devil on his shoulder and remember to be scared.
I’m looking at his shoulder so often that he glances back to see what I’m looking at. Worried about it I glance down and gape; on his arm a cut peeks out from under his sleeve.
He sees me seeing it and panics, pulling his sleeves down.
My gaze falls to the table and we sit there in silence.
This whole time I’ve been avoiding the people with the more solid devils because they listen to them more, I never questioned what the devils were saying. His devil isn’t telling him to hurt me, it’s telling him to hurt himself, that he’s worthless and doesn’t deserve me; and me acting scared of him isn’t helping.
“Don’t listen,” slips out before I’ve finished getting my thoughts together. I take in a long breath and speak slowly. “Don’t listen to the voice that tells you you’re useless, that you’ll never make a difference… You’ve made a huge difference to me.”
I risk looking up and see him teary eyed. “Thank you,” he whispers, and beside his head a barely visible angel fades back into existence.
Thank you so much for doing this prompt @hannahcbrown!
To all the amigos out there, know that you are loved ❤️
I just showed my 11-year-old son how many coffee shop AUs there are on AO3.
Why?
He sat down the other day to write a Minecraft story about three kids who go through a portal in their back yard and end up in the world of Minecraft where they have to battle all the big bosses (I didn’t even realize there WERE big bosses in Minecraft but that’s beside the point). He wrote three chapters with a little input from me – his first beta – and y’all?
He was fucking excited. To be writing a story.
Today he came home from school and seemed a little down, so I asked him about it only to find out that some little asshole at his school told him, “There is already a Minecraft story.”
Me: Okay? So what?
Lucifer: If there’s already a story, no one will read mine.
Immediately, I dragged him in and pulled up my AO3 account. My boys know I write fanfiction, so I showed him my account and how many subscribers I have. Then I showed him how many Teen Wolf stories there are. And then, because it seemed like the perfect analogy, I said, “What if I wrote a story where two characters meet in a coffee shop and fall in love? No werewolves, nothing at all to do with the actual Teen Wolf universe. Just Stiles and Derek meet in a coffeeshop and fall in love.”
He laughed.
I showed him Mornings Aren’t For Everyone. Showed him how many hits it had, how many kudos, how many lovely comments.
Then I said, “So do you think, if anyone else wrote a story about those exact same characters meeting in a coffee shop and falling in love… would anyone read it?”
He laughed and said, “No because you already did.”
So I clicked on the Sterek tag and refined to coffee shop AU. His mind was blown to see that they ALL had thousands of hits and kudos and comments. Then I clicked on JUST the coffee shop AU tag and showed him all the fics across all the fandoms written by countless different people.
I’m going to tell you all now what I told him because it applies to everyone.
Write your story. It doesn’t matter that someone else has written a story about that subject. They didn’t write YOUR story. Only you can do that.
And I want to read your story.
Holy crap, this is A+ parenting and such a good lesson.
Seriously, for anyone out there who have ever thought “Oh, it’s been done,” you know what? DO IT ANYWAY BECAUSE IT WILL BE YOUR STORY AND THAT ALONE IS AMAZING.
If you’re looking for an easy way to style text messages on AO3 so they look a little more like a phone interface, here’s the method I use that involves blockquotes and a work skin. If you have questions about how to use this, or if you want to do something different, send a message or ask me on twitter!
Christopher Tolkien explains why his father, JRR Tolkien, wrote down “The Hobbit” in the first place, when it was originally intended to be an oral bedtime story for his children.
(found in the forward to The Hobbit Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, 1987)
It’s an absolute pain to get started, with all the grunting and groaning and pushing and shoving to bring it to life.
Once it’s going, you’re good. Maybe you hit a stick or a rock here and there, but your semi-trusty lawnmower keeps trucking along until the whole yard looks much nicer.
And then you sit over by the shed with it still running because you’re afraid to turn it off. It took so long to get the thing going, what of you can’t turn it back on?
Eventually you turn it off, only to realize you’ve missed a piece lawn and have a 15-minute fit over whether you care enough to fight with the mower and finish the job. Maybe you just grab a pair of scissors and angrily chop at the grass like it’ll make a difference.
Then you walk away, confused as to how a 90% good job has left you 112% unsatisfied.
Character takes something for granted? Take it away from them.
Character loves something desperately and practically needs it to live? Take that away too.
My personal writing creed is “happiness is boring.”
If I may, from my own personal perspective on life and writing.
If people truly understood what it takes in life to become “happy,” they would understand the years of pain, the suffering, the regret, the struggle, the inherent and even natural violence in the acts that often stand as the price-tag for happiness.
If writers understand that happiness is at once a wonderful and fleeting thing, and that its impermanence is the cause of desires both noble and selfish, and how willing we are to sacrifice for it, whether we sacrifice ourselves or others (willing or unwilling),
If at last we understand that happiness is a temporary product of a life full of waves that crest below us and crash down upon us, and that the longer we live we are more likely to drown in life’s experiences than to consistently ride atop the waves,
We would say that happiness is many things, but it is NEVER boring.
I think what @emeralddodge is getting at isn’t that happiness itself is boring, but that having characters who are completely satisfied is. And even if they are satisfied, there should be currents of tension and fear of losing that happiness. Pure angst is also boring, as is pure grief or horror or romance or fear or excitement.
Like you said, the negatives are often the cost of getting the positives. One without the other is blergh. In my writing, whenever characters have happiness it is at the very least threatened.
My original point was that if they are taking something for granted, so is the reader. Nothing is sacred and taking it away reminds them that the danger the character is facing is real and makes their motives resonate more loudly.
On the flip side, if they desperately want and love something, I’m practically promising the reader that it is endangered. Taking it makes my threats ring true and when I threatened something again, they’ll really be scared I’ll follow up. It’s the reading equivalent of “how DARE you what ELSE will she do??”
Satisfaction is boring. Security is snooze-worthy 80% of the time in writing. But only fear/grief/angst is exhausting and, as you said in your tags, overdone.
Moral of the post: moderation in everything.
Continue shitposting, writers.
We would say that happiness is many things, but it is NEVER boring.
I know exactly what I meant, and I think you do, too. Fifteen years of honing my craft has taught me one thing: happiness is boring, and readers don’t want it. They generally want it at the end, but they won’t turn 300 pages filled with satisfied, happy characters.
@katekarl, thank you for elaborating. You’ve described the core of tension and stakes, something I wish more writers understood. 🙂
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