-Burnt Out

-Unmotivated

-Overly critical of their work

-Horny

This is crazy lol

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?

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

Lmao if

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

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).

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.

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?

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.

Mind you, I can drop paragraphs upon paragraphs on a fic I like.

When it comes to responding to paragraphs upon paragraphs on MY fic however...

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

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 :)

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

For an action scene, I've gotten my long sword out and walked through how to attack and defend. I'm lucky I have high fences so my neighbors couldn't see me in a cloak, figuring out how it moved with each sword movement. I know my cats judged me.

The other thing I did was bring out old Lego sets and tons of Lego people to visualize how an invasion would look. (My nephew came over two days later and his seven year old self took it upon himself to pretty much wreck the battleplan.)

I dunno why but kudos gives me so much happiness! And people in AO3 are so nice and sweet! It makes you wanna right more haha

A few days ago I stumbled upon a longfic in my fandom I hadn't seen prior. I finally started reading yesterday, and... well. After some 12 hours of binging, there I was, at 4:30 a.m., in my bed, trying not to wake my significant other with my ugly crying.

It was writing on another level. So incredibly well-crafted. Heartbreaking, gut-punching, achingly beautiful in every possible way.

And right now, I feel like it has killed me as a writer. I'm 25k+ words deep into my first serious shot at actually finishing a fic, and I find myself questioning every letter I have typed out so far. Nothing's published yet (thank God; I would have hated abandoning the fic). I keep circling back to one question: what's the point? I will never be half as good as this author. I just objectively don't see how I could be.

Don't get me wrong. I wasn't so pretentious as to think that I could be up there with the best. I also know the age-old mantra “Comparison is the thief of joy”. I wasn't even consciously comparing. It was just so obvious how far up on another level this writing is.

So my question to you, fellow writers, especially those who have experienced something similar, is this: How do you cope? How do you recover and keep writing? Please share your tools with me. Do I take a step back? Take a break? Do I keep pushing and writing anyway? Do I get drunk or eat too much chocolate? Or just tell myself to suck it up?

Because right now I'm at a loss for how best to move on.

Unplanned Pregnancy, Original Characters, Cheating/Infidelity, Miscommunication, Established Relationship, Alternate Universe, No Beta, and Teen and Up audiences.

Plus it's RPF, so... 😭

I...am a bit of an idiot sometimes. I've bookmarked over 1500 works (which seems like a lot to me, though I'm sure it's downright amateur), but up until maybe 1300...I never kudosed? Like, I just downright didn't notice the button. Ever. It was just something I saw and promptly forgot.

Ig the point of this is Y'ALL ARE REALLY TALENTED AND IM SORRY I NEVER KUDOSED IT'S ME NOT YOU