#I wish people would comment more but at least I'm getting kudos on the regular still | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

sapphiresonstrings · 2 years ago

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OK, I'm going to do this as a reblog since this is going to be an effortpost.

Warning: This is going to be relentlessly negative, because I am a relentlessly negative person. However, despite that, I think you're closer to being good at this than you think. You've clearly rejected the lower forms of art like naked wish fulfillment to pursue a higher standard. Contra the platitude, if you shoot for the Moon and miss you don't end up among the stars, you crash and burn. If you'd aimed lower you might have achieved that goal, but you didn't. You set a high goal and now you need to learn how to reach it. That's not a bad thing.

Second warning: This is very long.

Here are my premises: I'm going to be talking only about raising mass appeal. Like you, I'm deeply invested in getting a high number of kudos/reblogs/likes/comments/reviews/etc. Self actualization can go suck a lemon. I believe in picking one goal and optimizing for it, at least to begin with.

I'm going to start with the material from the post itself, but I did read through the middle fic (A Room Full of Your Posters) as well and I'll get to that later.

Here's a phrase in this post that jumped out at me: "the Bojack Horseman of BNHA fanfiction."

Bojack Horseman is a very successful show, but it's done in a very particular style: Psychological realism. The plots don't hinge on action, or the suspense of whether the hero will win or lose. They hinge on the characters' feelings. People like Bojack Horseman because it connects to real human experiences. You can look at members of the cast and see yourself in them.

In terms of the ratio of required writing skill to popular appeal, psychological realism is really tough for young writers. C.S. Lewis moved more towards psychological realism towards the end of his career, and the result is illustrative. It's widely accepted that Till We Have Faces, a deep dive into the psychology of a single person, was his most mature work. The Chronicles of Narnia, which has a few flashes of psychological realism but is mostly a fantasy adventure, is the one that sold 100 million copies and got a movie adaptation.

This isn't to say that psychological realism is bad. In some ways it's the king, the most dignified, the most respected. It's also in many ways the hardest.

BNHA is not psychologically realistic. This isn't a problem, per se, since you can totally do a fanfic that changes the style of the original, but it brings demands. You would need to remove the hinges that BNHA already turns on and replace them with new ones.

Midoriya doesn't have psychological depth the way Bojack does. His traits are working really hard, using his brain to make the best of any situation, and wanting to be a hero more than anything. He's a heroic archetype, not a person. Midoriya would crush the psychological challenges of Bojack Horseman like an aluminum can in a hydraulic press, because he was built for the needs of a different genre.

Bojack confronts fantastical challenges that are rooted in the mundane weaknesses of real people. He avoids work because he fears failure. He wants people to see him one way, but instead they see him another. These are feelings we all share.

Midoriya confronts fantastical challenges that are rooted in ideals. He works day and night for months to train his body to be strong enough to bear One-For-All. He chooses to use his power over and over again, even knowing it's destroying his body. These aren't human realities, they're human ideals.

What would it mean to give Midoriya challenges that are rooted in the mundane? What would it take to bring his world of superheroics down to the level of ordinary, day-to-day life? What would it take to make Midoriya's feats possible for a regular guy? The world of BNHA would need to become easier to accommodate psychological realism, because Midoriya would need to be a weaker person to be psychologically realistic.

It would help to really study the appeal of BHNA and Bojack. What do we care about moment-to-moment, scene-to-scene, and episode-to-episode?

Which brings me to the other phrase that jumped out at me:

"I actually never liked the show (Boku no Hero Academia)...I specifically disliked how almost all of the characters are Mary Sues who always win and never have anything truly bad happen to them or do anything truly bad..."

This is, to put it mildly, a rough place to start from. Not knowing the appeal of BNHA, you're trying to bring in readers who want more of the part of BNHA that appeals.

The core of BNHA, like a lot of superhero media, is this: We root for the hero because we know he is Good. (This is sometimes called Save the Cat). To stop something Bad from happening, the hero has to face risk, often against a superior foe. We, the audience, feel tension because we don't know whether the hero will succeed, and we don't know what it will cost if he does. The hero prevails in the end, and we feel catharsis.

One of the reasons BNHA is so successful is because it has a second core, and each cores is strong enough to carry a franchise on its own. The second core is: There is an underdog who wants something really bad, but can't have it. He suffers for wanting it, and we feel his pain. Then he gets that thing, and we feel happy for him, and we feel catharsis. (This model is really popular in Japan and China.)

BNHA uses these cores sequentially. There's a complete story built around the underdog-has-his-day core, which ends when Midoriya gets his superpowers and never returns. This serves the purpose of hooking the audience and making them root for Midoriya. Afterwards, we use the first core to drive the plot, repeating with a new villain every time we get bored of the old one.

The story of Midoriya after he gets his superpowers would be pretty much the same without this underdog hook, so there's a sense in which this is a dirty writing trick. 95% of the content has nothing to do with the fact that Midoriya originally didn't have a Quirk. But without that first plotline, it would just be another story about the guy with the strongest superpower, which is so commonplace nowadays that it wouldn't stand out in the crowded market. This fact is worthy of study.

I haven't made any concrete recommendations yet, I know. I personally believe the most important thing in learning to write is learning how to pick out the parts of fiction that engage people, analyzing how they work, and learning to replicate them.

I'll move on to some specifics, though. I read through A Room Full of Your Posters, which is 17,000 words long and sits at 233 Comments and 393 Kudos on AO3. The blurb, which is what a prospective reader would see before deciding whether to read the first chapter or not, is as follows:

>Villain!Midoriya. The slime villain didn't attack. Bakugou never needed rescuing. No wondrous event proved he deserved All Might's Quirk. He was still desperate to know whether a Quirkless boy could become a hero.

>If only there were some way to get All Might's attention...

There are 13 chapters, averaging 1,300 words per chapter. Each chapter takes the form of, essentially, a vignette, with a medium break in time between chapters. Individual events do not carry between chapters.

I want to contrast this with the popular webfiction writer Wildbow, just to illustrate. (For anyone who doesn't know: Wildbow wrote Worm, Pact, Twig, Ward, and Pale. He earns over CA$7,000 per month on Pateron.)

Wildbow has written individual fight scenes, spread across multiple 4k-9k word chapters, that are longer than this entire fic. I don't say that to mean long fight scenes are better. If anything it's the opposite. I'm raising it as the opposite extreme to what you did with A Room Full of Your Posters.

One of the most common comments you'll hear from someone reading Worm is that it's exhausting. This has a lot to do with the plot: The protagonist is constantly being either attacked or provoked. The stakes are high yet always rising. New crises crop up faster than they're resolved.

But that's not all there is to it. Part of the reason Worm is so tiring to read is because there's so much material, and it all bleeds seamlessly together. The chapters are very long. When you reach the end of one, there's always unresolved suspense pulling you toward the next one. If you put it down, you wonder what happens next. If you don't put it down, you get sucked into the next chapter, which introduces new crises and raises the stakes even higher.

That intensity is a big part of the appeal.

Short chapters can be a lot of things, but they have hard limits on their intensity because of how human emotions work. The reader starts out not at all immersed in your work, and reads in that state of low emotion until something in the work hooks them. This can bring them to an elevated state of emotion, which can build if the story's tension continues to rise. When they hit a break, like the end of a chapter where they need to click through to get to the next, that emotion is interrupted. An engrossing work can pull them right back in if there's a throughline between the chapters, which is how people end up binge-reading. If there's no throughline, the emotional intensity is limited by the length of the chapter, because human emotions can't rise that quickly in response to text fiction alone. The chapter essentially becomes a self-contained story, with the next chapter being a sequel.

This can be great if the chapter ends in catharsis. People have made careers on self-contained episodes that contain whole stories within themselves, ending in catharsis.

Sidenote, when writing serial webfiction, I personally aim for longer chapters, usually 4k-6k words. You want each chapter to be an experience in and of itself so that the reader will keep coming back every week.

Two possible approaches (I don't know how many there are in the infinite possibilities of the thingspace) are ending a chapter in suspense, and ending a chapter in catharsis. Suspense makes the reader come back looking for catharsis, catharsis makes the reader recognize that they enjoyed their reading experience and think of you as a source of positive experiences. Suspense is generally the more effective method, which is why cliffhangers are so popular.

With A Room Full of Your Posters, I just can't get sucked in. The protagonist wants something, which is good, but what he wants is fame and power, yet there's no Save the Cat moment to show me that he deserves these things more than anyone else. I can't see myself in him, like I can with Bojack. He isn't funny or interesting to watch in some other non-dramatic way (note that Bojack Horseman is also a comedy, and probably wouldn't function as a show without that). He's not a good person, so I can't root for him, but he isn't wicked or evil in an interesting way, either. There's no concrete vehicle for him to achieve his goals that I could get invested in, like a heist or a scheme. There are no real stakes for the first seven chapters, which could uncharitably be described as seven vignettes about a boy being sad. When the stakes arrive, they're basically just there to briefly angst about until the unhappy ending, which doesn't provide catharsis or resolve any particular conflict. We don't even strongly believe that Midoriya should be stopped, since we never really saw the negative consequences of his actions.

You rejected the wish fulfillment appeal of BNHA but didn't replace it with anything. That's a one-sentence summary of the problem at hand.

A good question to ask is, "What am I here for?" People show up to have a particular itch scratched, even for the hoitiest of toity psychologically real litfic about a fat middle aged professor cheating on his wife with a grad student. You self-admittedly don't like the appeal of BNHA, which means that it isn't present here. That means it needs to be replaced with something else.

Another good question to ask is, "When do they fuck?" This topic deserves its own post, but here's the short version: Imagine you're writing porn. Not erotica, not historical romance, not a sci-fi adventure thriller with a sex scene two thirds of the way through, just porn. Imagine your reader has one hand all the way down her pants before she clicks the link to your story.

She's here for the part where they fuck. How long does she have to wait to get there? She skips the exposition, the introductions, the descriptions of everyone's clothes (unless they're sexy clothes), the map of the world on the inside cover, the action scene (why is there an action scene in this porn, she wonders). Eventually she skips ahead to chapter 11 because that seems far enough in, and finds the fucking.

Now analogize that to all genres and all media. What's the good part? Which part fucks? No matter what it is, no matter how dignified or artistically relevant or scientifically accurate, there's fucking in there somewhere. You'll find it in the 20-minute clip on Youtube called BEST MOMENTS COMPILATION PART 2.

If the work is good, there'll be a lot of fucking involved, spread through the whole runtime start to finish. If it's bad, it might be all tease and no action. If it's no tease and no action, it won't even be published.

In a sci-fi short story like the Foundation series, it's the part where the hero's plan comes together. In a Disney movie, it's the musical numbers that mark the big plot developments, and one of them is usually the villain's song (Be Prepared and Poor Unfortunate Souls both fuck, for example). In a dark fantasy like A Song of Ice and Fire, it's the big death scenes. In psychological realism, it's the parts that reveal character, like the tousle-headed poet's self-descriptions in The Great Divorce. In a Christ allegory, it's the Crucifixion. In porn, it's the part where the main characters take their clothes off and have sex with each other.

In short, it's the part you would skip to, not the part you would skip past. The better the work, the more of its volume fucks. Something great like Jesus Christ Superstar is like 70% fucking by runtime.

Once you identify the part that fucks, put the impatient reader in your mind while you decide how to structure your work. The reader knows what she's here for, and if she doesn't identify it in what you're writing she'll be bored.

Every sentence should be either fuck or tease, and the tease parts should be specific to the fucking parts. By that I mean, the tease parts should contain the potential for the fucking parts in their entirety. Kurt Vonnegut said you should hide nothing from the audience, so if the last page of your book was missing the audience should be able to write it themselves. I say, the teasing should contain all the information the audience needs to write the fucking parts themselves, so the audience is always getting fucked even when you're teasing them.

...Okay, I'll stop now.

What I mean is, the audience is here for something, and that something should be in every word. If you look at a great short story like the first three Foundation stories, you'll see that the ending is basically chopped up and spread across the beginning and middle like a garnish. When Salvor Hardin, threatened by invasion from a vastly superior force, says "Violence is the last resort of the incompetent," the essence of the ending is present right there: He will stop the invasion with his brilliant plan, it will be nonviolent, and it will use the worldbuilding elements we've learned so far. Anything else would be a tragedy, and if it was a tragedy we would have to have seen his fatal flaw already or it wouldn't land. There is only one way things can end by the time he says that. The story isn't long enough to accommodate anything else.

Find the emotional core of what you want to write, identify it in a work that's already popular, and copy it. Good artists borrow, great artists steal. Don't fear copying. If you find the actual emotional core, it will be so abstract that no one will recognize is as copying and so universal no one can claim to own it. If anyone wants to try they can trace it back to Romeo And Juliet or The Epic of Gilgamesh for all it matters. If you copy anything recognizable (i.e. the meaningless trappings like dragons, outfits, superpowers, or other things that don't matter at all), you've missed the real emotional core. Ironically, the only people who get accused of copying art are those who lack the observational skills to successfully copy art. The real juice is always hidden beneath the facade.

Once you've found your emotional core, use it as the source of your power. Tie it into every sentence of your work. The story of the Crucifixion is fundamentally about Jesus being betrayed by Judas and dying on the cross. Every sentence you write should either tease one of those two events, be one of those two events, or be cut.

Or, to borrow Kurt Vonnegut again, "Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action."

My fanfiction

I don't think there's any way I can post this without lots of negativity. While of course I love compliments, it's not so much fishing for those as fishing for an explanation why. These suck; why do they suck?

I didn't post my fanfiction here for years because I, in a stupid haze of Dunning-Kruger arrogance, thought I was bound to become extremely popular. I wanted to curate my image in a way I don't on this account; for example, I didn't want to ever post any political opinions anywhere where my writing was associated with me. And I especially didn't want to associate my depressed rants about my writing with my actual writing. But that is stupid because I was never going to get big. I am too inherently shitty of a writer to ever become popular.

The first things I posted on AO3 were erotica since I had heard that's what was popular. I am not going to link that because that isn't where the confusion lies -- I can guess why that didn't get a response. I also did non-sexual responses to kink meme prompts (as you can tell by the title, most kink meme stuff is sexual, but it actually isn't 100 percent.) Instead I will link the three works I was most proud of before I posted them. I feel nothing but shame and disgust toward myself for feeling that way about works that got so few kudos. I was so wrong to feel pride for such mediocre little heaps of trash.

Writing popular stories is the most important thing in the world to me and the only thing I have ever strived for. The kudo count starting so pathetically small (even after all the study and practice I put in before I even started writing these, which I figured would give me a leg up on other writers but didn't because I am an eternal loser) would have been fine, I guess, if the number had gone up from fic to fic. It didn't. That was proof that I can never improve and am doomed to be a disgusting failed fanfiction writer (truly the worst thing one can be as a writer) forever.

One thing to note is that I actually never liked the show (Boku no Hero Academia) that I wrote for. I chose it because it was popular; I knew that Yudkowsky chose the Harry Potter fandom because it was popular and he had great success. He was criticized for not actually reading the books so I figured I would do better by watching the show and reading the manga. I specifically disliked how almost all of the characters are Mary Sues who always win and never have anything truly bad happen to them or do anything truly bad. I hate watching good people do good things. For context, my favorite show is Bojack Horseman. With some of my fic, I was trying write "the Bojack Horseman of BNHA fanfiction" (how contemptible of me to ever think a loser like me could create anything good enough to be spoken of in the same breath as Bojack).

Also AO3 sometimes has a bug where it will put a space before a punctuation after italicized text. I only learned about this well after I had realized I was too much of a shitty writer for it to be worth fixing, so whatever. Long gone are the days of eight hours of editing per thousand words.

Babes in the Wood

This was a kink meme prompt answer. One of the few potentially good things about the show that is never explored (at least before I stopped watching/reading) is how Bakugou bullies Midoriya but Midoriya still thinks of him as a friend despite all contrary evidence and looks up to him. Inspired by the kink meme prompt, I figured it would be fun to take that to a more extreme place (not romantic/sexual extreme, just fucked up).

Fic description:

From the BNHA Kink Meme:

His pain tolerance is pretty insanely huge, right? I want to see something where Izuku's massive levels of pain tolerance comes up in middle school. Maybe to the horror of some of his classmates or teachers. It doesn't have to be a result of bullying inflicting an injury, but it should definitely be something hospital-worthy and red flag raising.

2. A Room Full of Your Posters

My most successful fic, so the one you're most likely (but still not very likely) to enjoy. Making Midoriya into a villain is a common fanfiction trope, but from the descriptions I read it was usually achieved through brainwashing, blackmail, or similar methods that went against his will. When he did become a villain of his own volition, it was via the whole "one bad day" trope, a sudden snap. I wanted to write him slowly spiraling into insanity before he kills people. I wanted to turn his typical Shonen protagonist trait of never giving up and his All Might fanboy thing into flaws (goodness knows he needs some). In retrospect, Midoriya's feelings about his impossible dream are similar to mine about being a popular writer. I thought I was doing a darker, more realistic take on the villain!deku trope. Guess not since it didn't get as many kudos as the other fics I mentioned!

Fic description:

Villain!Midoriya. The slime villain didn't attack. Bakugou never needed rescuing. No wondrous event proved he deserved All Might's Quirk. He was still desperate to know whether a Quirkless boy could become a hero.

If only there were some way to get All Might's attention...

3. It Deepens Like a Coastal Shelf

I noticed that the most popular ship in the fandom was Midoriya/Bakugou. A lot of people hated this ship since it shipped a bully and his victim, which is a fair enough objection, but those same people had an extreme hatred and disgust for Bakugou that didn't sit right with me since he is a child and my favorite character (not a fantastic character but the best one on the bad show). So I made a fic exploring that (they don't end up in a romantic relationship which is why I didn't tag it as such), but also mostly about child abuse which is kind of played for laughs in the show. I wanted to show what childhood is *actually* like since pretty much every coming-of-age story I have read gets it super wrong. In my stupid fantasies, this fic was going to be known even outside the fandom for how realistically it portrayed growing up.

This was the fic that killed me inside. Because the previous couple fics had been going up in kudos, I thought I was improving. Now I know that was just random fluctuation and I can never improve. Every weekly update where I would get 0-2 kudos would make me sick and I still hate myself for making something that got that little of a reaction and thinking it was good (stupid, laughable!) before I posted it and learned the truth. Why couldn't I see the damn truth before?

Fic description:

Mermaid AU. If you asked Katsuki Bakugou, he was a god among jealous mortals. If you asked his mother, Mitsuki, she would agree, except for the times she'd call him a brain-dead little bitch. If you asked his classmates, well. They knew to keep their mouths shut. So when Mitsuki bought a new, green-haired mer for the family's aquarium business, Katsuki wasn't exactly looking to have his mind changed. Unfortunately, Izuku Midoriya might force him to rethink who he is, what he believes in, and whether his "normal" -- his thoughts, his life, his mother, mers, everything -- is really how the world should be.

__________________________

So that's my fanfiction. I hate myself for making these. I hate that none of the books on writing, the college classes, all the reading, all the practice, none of it made a fucking difference in kudo count because I am unchangeable. I also hate the general AO3 culture of never leaving negative comments because I would do anything to know why these bombed so much. Please just tell me why I suck, it is painful not to know. I have guesses and partial answers but no complete picture. I have been miserable for years because of these kudo counts. Fame has been my goal my entire life and to know I can never reach it has stripped every scrap of happiness from me. There are fanfictions full of typos obviously written by 12-year-olds with more a whole lot more kudos than mine. That is how bad I am. I hate my stupid delusions of grandeur, thinking I could be successful at writing when I am not successful at anything else. It's been about two years since I started feeling miserable all the time about this. It hasn't really been getting better. I might do a longer post with even more context about why I feel like killing myself but I wanted to get one out there with the fic links first. As explanation and proof as to why I am so dumb.

And I get that to somebody who writes as a fun little side-hobby and gets most of their enjoyment and fulfillment from other things, this sounds really weird. If you didn't get many kudos that wouldn't mean much to you, wouldn't mark you as a permanent loser because you have other things going on that you care about. But to me it means everything.

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