battlemastercoffeeco

[battlemastercoffeeco]

fanfiction is like. here's a piece of my soul! here's the parts of me i didn't know what else to do with! i wrapped them up in something i love in an attempt to understand my own feelings and morals and maybe the whole world. hope you like it.

[battlemastercoffeeco]

One of the best writing advice I have gotten in all the months I have been writing is "if you can't go anywhere from a sentence, the problem isn't in you, it's in the last sentence." and I'm mad because it works so well and barely anyone talks about it. If you're stuck at a line, go back. Backspace those last two lines and write it from another angle or take it to some other route. You're stuck because you thought up to that exact sentence and nothing after that. Well, delete that sentence, make your brain think because the dead end is gone. It has worked wonders for me for so long it's unreal

[battlemastercoffeeco]

The most important writing lesson I ever learned was not in a screenwriting class, but a fiction class.

This was senior year of college.  Most of us had already been accepted into grad school of some sort. We felt powerful, we felt talented, and most of all, we felt artistic.

It was the advanced fiction workshop, and we did an entire round of workshops with everyone’s best stories, their most advanced work, their most polished pieces. It was very technical and, most of all, very artistic.

IE: They were boring pieces of pretentious crap.

Now the teacher was either a genius OR was tired of our shit, and decided to give us a challenge.  Flash fiction, he said. Write something as quickly as possible.  Make it stupid.  Make it not mean a thing, just be a quick little blast of words. 

And, of course, we all got stupid.  Little one and two pages of prose without the barriers that it must be good. Little flashes of characters, little bits of scenarios.

And they were electric.  All of them. So interesting, so vivid, not held back by the need to write important things or artistic things. 

One sticks in my mind even today.  The guys original piece was a thinky, thoughtful piece relating the breaking up of threesomes to volcanoes and uncontrolled eruptions that was just annoying to read. But his flash fiction was this three page bit about a homeless man who stole a truck full of coca cola and had to bribe people to drink the soda so he could return the cans to recycling so he could afford one night with the prostitute he loved.

It was funny, it was heartfelt, and it was so, so, so well written.

And just that one little bit of advice, the write something short and stupid, changed a ton of people’s writing styles for the better.

It was amazing. So go.  Go write something small.  Go write something that’s not artistic.  Go write something stupid. Go have fun.

[battlemastercoffeeco]

saw an elderly woman walking around with a tote bag whose design were the four AO3 fic category squares and she very excitedly asked if i was a reader or a writer bcs nobody else at the con had recognized it, and after telling her that i've been writing fic since fanfic.net, she solemnly nodded and explained that she'd been reading fic since "the days of personal websites" but that she only started writing fanfic when she was 47 and oh my god when i tell you that i genuinely teared up on the spot!!!!! like!!! HELL YEAH???? LITERALLY NEVER TOO OLD TO START WRITING. NEVER TOO OLD TO WRITE AND SHARE YOUR FIC.

her enthusiastic "i'm a very nice and bubbly person, i swear! but i love writing angst and major character death :)" nearly took me the fuck out.

icon. legend. diva. i wish her nothing but a kajillion million comments and kudos. i hope her fic updates crash AO3. i hope she knows i'm promoting her to my personal patron saint of AO3.

[battlemastercoffeeco]

I beg you, please stop deleting your fics on ao3.

Please use the orphan function if you don't want to be connected to a fic any longer or if you want to delete your account.

Ao3 is an archive, please use it as such.

[battlemastercoffeeco]

It really is crazy how if you mention you write fanfiction with people outside fandom, they're always like "you should change the names and try to sell it." It misses the point (fun), but more importantly to me, I get slightly (and I know irrationally) insulted on a craft level. Excuse me, my fanfic is entwined with the canon, thank you very much. I wish sometimes less entwined. You wouldn't believe the stupid bullshit some of my fics have to include because of canon.

[battlemastercoffeeco]

"i want a dislike button on ao3" so you want less fanfic. even if you don't think you want less fanfic you want less fanfic. because when people start getting dislikes on their fanfic they will want to write less fanfic. hope this helps <3

[battlemastercoffeeco]

[battlemastercoffeeco]

current fan creation landscape is kinda like if you went to a party with a homemade cake and everyone takes a slice and silently thumbs up at you with no attempt to start a conversation except for occasionally some guy sits in the corner with a tape recorder critiquing the cake as though he was a restaurant critic and another guy is handing the cake to an uber driver like "yeah i need you to find a restaurant that makes cake like this so i can have more of it" and the only person that's talked to you in 30 minutes is a very sweet little guy who was like "hey i liked your cake" and then ran away apologizing for bothering you the moment you said thank you.

[battlemastercoffeeco]

Nothing beats the feeling when you start getting comments on every fic in a fandom or ship from one person, and it’s clear that they’re going on a fic-binge. 

[battlemastercoffeeco]

Pondering my orbs.

[battlemastercoffeeco]

kill the imposter syndrome in your head because not only is there someone out there doing it worse than you, they’re also using chat gpt to do it

[battlemastercoffeeco]

What they don't tell you about writing is that as you write, you discover scenes and entire plots that you hadn't accounted for that need to be written. So you can spend two hours writing and editing only to realise you're further away from the finish line than you thought you were when you started

[battlemastercoffeeco]

the current state of fandom needs to be old yellered immediately. im loading up the shotgun as we speak

[battlemastercoffeeco]

i actually never ever want AO3 to be censored bc nothing is more fun than reading the tags on a fic and going “huh. didn’t know there was a market for that.”

[battlemastercoffeeco]

PSA

Just a heads up, there are bots going around on AO3 accusing people of using AI. Considering the timing, this is likely AI bros' retaliation for AO3 users calling them out for scraping their work. Examples of what you might be sent:

Screenshots from here.

If you get a comment like this, just report for spam and delete.

[battlemastercoffeeco]

unless they specifically asked, you don’t get to tell a fanfic writer you think they mischaracterized the character by the way. because the second someone writes a fanfic about a character, that character becomes the writer’s own version of the character. canon is only a suggestion, but whether or not an author will follow it / how much of canon an author will take is entirely up to them. you don’t get to stick your nose in their world and tell them “hey this is not to my liking therefore I think you’re doing it wrong” when you can simply leave quietly and move on to something else you may enjoy