#too fun figuring out where people are in this storyworld and how they can all be their worst selves still <3< /div> Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[pynkhues]

seeing you say that you were doing some plotting for the courtesan au is making me very excited !!!

It's going to be multi-chapter, and alternating POVs, anon!

[skullsandwineglasses]

Lost Romance Final Review (Taiwanese Drama)

I wrote about my first impressions of the drama after watching the first three episodes, and my first impression about it being cringey still stands even after having finished it. But, I admit that I did end up enjoying it despite my qualms. My thoughts about the whole drama are below. 

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

The fictional world

The ML’s fictional persona (Situ Aoran) is hella douchey, and the drama only gives an explanation for why he was like that in the final episode. Essentially, Situ Aoran is the worst version of He Tinxing that he’s tried to hard to suppress and overcome over the years. It’s the version of him that’s childish, immature, arrogant, irresponsible, unreasonable. And yet, the FL, Zheng Xiao’en, still falls for this version of him. It’s a story about unwavering, unconditional love no matter who you are. On the other hand, Xiao’en begins as a “villainous” person in Aoran’s eyes, and yet, he learns to fall in love with her as well.  

But, this meant that for the first 15 episodes of the drama, which is basically three quarters of the drama, I was constantly annoyed by Aoran/the fictional ML. Even when he got together with Xiao’en in the fictional world, I found it hard to ship them. Yes, Marcus Chang and Vivian Sung have chemistry, but I just didn’t enjoy the romance in the fictional world all that much. 

I wasn’t hooked on the drama until episode 8ish when he finally showed some signs of liking Xiao’en, and then it picks up in episode 10 when he finally starts to take more initiative. But for the most part, it was Qingfeng, the second ML was the one who stole the show. 

I’ve never had second male lead syndrome before, but I think that’s because in most dramas I’ve watched, even though the second male lead may unconditionally devoted to the FL, the ML still somehow does more. 

But in Lost Romance, because the ML keep was dismissive, insensitive, and kept inadvertently hurting the FL, you end up finding that Qingfeng is actually someone who is dependable, supportive, a ray of sunshine, and an all-around better person in Xiao’en’s life. Not only that, but he’s hella charming as well. Simon Lian has such as mischievous glint in his eyes, and he carries himself with easy confidence. He flirts with Xiao’en, and she doesn’t even realize it. He’s a fictional character who’s become self-aware, and this sense of awareness and wisdom that no one else in the fictional world has makes him an even more attractive character since he’s able to see through everyone. What’s more, he goes against the script and falls for Xiao’en even when he isn’t supposed to. Him falling for Xiao’en made more sense than Aoran falling for Xiao’en. 

Xiao’en and Aoran’s romance in the fictional world was very predictable. She lives in his house as a housekeeper, and he slowly warms up to her, but denies his feelings. When she leaves, he begins to miss her and gets jealous whenever she hangs out with the SML. He falls for her because she gives him a sense of safety and comfort. He feels at home with her, a feeling that he was deprived of since he was young. But because of this, it felt like the only reason he fell for her was because of what she can provide for him. And Xiao’en fell for him because he at first reminded her of He Tianxing, and then because he’s role as the ML in the story. And then she fell for him for real, flaws and all. But I guess this is a reflection of how love develops irl where both parties are able to offer something to the other in the relationship. 

Qingfeng’s feelings for Xiao’en felt more pure and altruistic, which albeit makes it unrealistic, but I guess it suits his character, since he is an idealized fictional character after all. 

The real world

Because Qingfeng is a fictional character, he has no real-world counterpart, so we don’t see him again after episode 15. He gets his “happy ending” in the last episode when the author finally finishes his story and he’s reunited with his storyworld sweetheart, but I still felt like there was no proper closure for his character. He finally developed real feelings, but then he’s forced back into his scripted role. 

I liked how the ML and FL’s real life personas were different from the fictional world, and the drama takes a more serious tone when they return to the real world. He Tianxing is much more kind, considerate, and thoughtful than Aoran. His costuming also changed to reflect that: he no longer wears an earring, his hair is combed up instead of hanging over his forehead, and he doesn’t wear flashy rings and necklaces. He’s much more down-to-earth and humble, and you start to like him more. 

Xiao’en is also much more mature. She isn’t fawning and lusting over him like in the fictional world, and she doesn’t force herself onto him, or to make him remember her. She knows that she loves Aoran, and tries to keep her attraction for Tianxing separate because she still hasn’t yet figured out whether they’re the same person. When her bestfriend asks her why she doesn’t assert herself more to jog his memory, Xian’en says that this is real life. It isn’t like the fictional world where you can be shameless with no consequence. 

This means that the romantic dynamics become reversed in the real world. It’s now Tianxing’s turn to pursue Xiao’en, and Xiao’en resists. And I admit, it was cute. We get to see Tianxing fall for Xiao’en for herself and who she is as a person, and not because she’s his housemaid and lives with him. He becomes curious about her: he buys and reads all the books he’s edited, he asks her questions about her childhood and upbringing, and asks her about her feelings and opinions on things, he asks her about her memorable experiences. In the real world, he actually cares about her, not just what she can offer him. We also see Xiao’en learn about Tianxing and fall for his real-life traits. It’s an opportunity for them to truly learn about each other and fall for each other again. 

The part when Tianxing reads the novel and regained his memories felt too abrupt and easy. It would have been more fun for the memories to come back in parts over time and him trying to figure out the pieces of the puzzle. It would have also have been nice to see him spend more time trying to convince Xiao’en that he really does remember and isn’t just regurgitating details from the novel. In other words, I’m a masochistic viewer and would have appreciated more drawn-out angst, but they quickly resolved this plotline within through a single gesture in the scene. 

Tianxing’s relentless and determined pursuit to win over Xiao’en was cute, but only the context of this drama. He overtly stalks her using a drone, but as payback because that was how she stalked him at the beginning. A part of me knew that in any other drama, this would be creepy and overstepping boundaries, but I still couldn’t help but smile at these antics in Lost Romance. Maybe because Tianxing was reversing their roles and now he’s doing the heavy lifting to win her back, but in any case, it worked and was charming. 

The family business drama

Honestly, I couldn’t care less. I skipped most scenes whenever the real-world family drama was shown, and I was still able to understand what happened in the end. The evil sister stops being evil and realizes the error of her ways (and actually has a pretty sympathetic backstory to explain her previous actions and motives) and joins forces with the ML, her younger half brother that she had wanted to kill, in order to take down a once-trusted employee who is now trying to take over and destroy the family business. 

These scenes dragged out the story, but I guess they served as a reminder that the real world is still alive and kicking while the ML and FL were in a three-month long coma. 

Questions

Like with most fantasy dramas, you end up accepting the plot holes and rolling with them. But there are still a few questions I still can’t get over:

1. How exactly did He Tianxing and Xiao’en end up in the fictional world of a random novel together? Why was only Xiao’en self-aware but Tianxing wasn’t? Was it because Xiao’en was editing the book so she already knew part of the story? Why did Tianxing fall into Situ Aoran’s character and why didn’t he have agency over his actions and feelings until later, while Xiao’en was a self-insert with full agency?

2. Why were only Tianxing and Xiao’en inhabiting fictional bodies, while the other characters only had the likeliness of people from real life but not the “soul” (since the characters were still conscious in real life)? Were Tianxing and Xiao’en projecting their memories of the appearances of the people they knew onto the characters in the storyworld, thereby creating a jointly shared fictional world? For instance, only Tianxing knew Chuchu irl, but Xiao’en didn’t, so he projected his image of ChuChu onto the character that Xiao’en could also see? But the fictional world was shown to be a parallel universe that had real consequences in the real-world, so the explanation for the appearance of the fictional characters can’t just be due to Tianxing and Xiao’en projecting their memories. These characters truly exist as separate, alternate entities in the storyworld. So, what exactly are these characters? Souless entities?

3. Qingfeng says that he floats from one story to the next. So why are some fictional characters fully fictional like Qingfeng, but other characters have real-life counterparts?

4. Why and how does the novel change irl when the fictional world changes? It’s also a pity that the author is completely uninvolved with all of these shenenigans, and it’s unfortunate that her novel is being using as the ML and FL’s playground. She basically lost control of her own story.

Overall impressions

It’s refreshing for a cdrama/twdrama, and they managed to keep Qingfeng’s identity a mystery for good part of the plot to keep you guessing. But for the most part, it’s another predictable, tropey modern romance drama. Even when they tried to subvert the tropes, their method of subversion was predictable. The chemistry and comedy was good, so I’d recommend it only if you have a high tolerance for cringe, since the cringe never really ends but does get better towards the last act of the drama when they return to the real world and gets more serious. 

I think I’d give this drama a 7.5, mostly because I gave My Girlfriend is an Alien an 8. So if I gave Lost Romance an 8, I would bump MGIAA an 8.5 to keep it relative. 

Both dramas feature a ML who deals with memory loss. The arc in Lost Romance was more serious and emotional since the FL is heartbroken over the loss, but the part where the ML regains his memory was a bit rushed. The arc in MGIAA is more comedic, but the part where he regains his memory had a bigger emotional payoff since memory loss was a major problem that the ML had been trying to overcome throughout the drama. 

Might be an unpopular opinion but I think might have enjoyed this more than the Romance of Tiger and Rose. The Romance of Tiger and Rose was good, but it wasn’t very memorable. I watched it last summer, but I barely remember any details about it besides finding Zhao Lusi to be really cute. I think this drama made me feel more emotions: from frustration to embarrassment to relief to having butterflies to angst to sadness to amused. 

Aoran/Tianxing and Qingfeng are also more interesting than Han Shuo. I guess I’ll wait 8 months to see if I still feel anything for this drama, or if it fades with time too. 

Some other interesting notes

I had thought this drama was filmed in 2019 until I saw a sign on a bus that said “No boarding without a mask”. Turns out it was filmed in April 2020 or so, and then released in June. I was surprised that this was filmed during the peak of the pandemic when most western countries were in lockdown, but I understand that Taiwan already had things under control by then. But still, even if there wasn’t a pandemic, they filmed this in only 2-3 months, which is a quick and impressive turnaround time to film and edit a drama (even if it’s only 20 episode long). There was no indication this was filmed during a pandemic, except for the bus sign, and also the people walking in the background at the temple. You could tell many were wearing masks. Meanwhile, it’s been over a year since the pandemic started, and I’m still stuck at home, schools and outdoor activities are still closed where I am, and it just feels like my life is on hold. And yet, they filmed an entire ass drama during a pandemic. I still can’t get over that. 

I haven’t watched a Taiwanese drama in a while, so there are some notable cultural differences I noticed between Taiwanese dramas and cdramas when I watched Lost Romance. 

1. The uncensored intimate scenes 2. Swearing (?). Can’t remember when exactly, but I think Vivian Sung at one point said “wo kao” when she woke up and stumbled to the bathroom 3. The casual (and accurate) integration of English words and phrases. You can tell that Taiwan is much more open and comfortable with sprinkling English into their everyday vernacular. Hong Kong dramas do this as well. You see this less so in cdramas. English and other foreign languages are only used when the character is speaking to a foreign character.  4. No use of heavy filters and diffusers. Cdramas tend to look very glowy and dreamy, and they seem to use wide apertures to get a bokeh effect. Lost Romance had a more down-to-earth look. Granted, at points it did look a little dated, but I still appreciated this more toned-down, natural look.  5. LQBTQ+ references. Not only was there an accidental kiss scene between the FL and SFL, but they also mentioned how one of the male characters might be having an affair with a man. While there are BL idol dramas in China, all of the relationship dynamics are usually only heavily implied. There aren’t many explicit references to LGBTQ+ relationships in cdramas due to censorship.  6. References and homages/parodies of kdramas. Have there been cdramas that pay homage to foreign dramas as much as Lost Romance? 7. Original, non-dubbed voices. Yes, there are plenty of cdramas that use the original voices of actors, but there are also a lot of cdramas that use dubbed voices. Sometimes I’d binge watch 3 cdramas in a row, and the FLs and MLs have the same respective voice actors across all 3 dramas. The reason why I chose to watch Lost Romance was because I wanted to watch The Legends, but the FL uses the same voice actress as the FL in MGIAA, which I had just finished, so I needed a drama in between with different voices to help cleanse my palate.  8. Excessive cuts/commercial breaks. Always right before a character is about to say something pivotal, it cuts to a themesong break, which was really annoying. It really ruins the mood and suspense of the scene. And when it cuts back, it replays the last 20 seconds of the scene, while you’re on the end of your seat, yelling at the screen to tell them to get on with it and get to the point. 

Anyway. Time to watch Cafe. Waiting. Love for Marcus and Vivian. 

[brynwrites]

Ask Compile!

Topics covered: 

Tips for indexing notes.

Thoughts on second person pov.

Tips for writing smut.

Writing non-binary protagonists perceived as villains.

Knowing when to use or ignore feedback.

I also received two questions (writing elementals and character growth) which are already going to be covered by longer articles in my queue. 

Indexing Notes

@kantuck​: Good day: Do you have any advice on how to index previously taken notes? I have gigs of notes on paper, and electronic over the years and now I'd like to be able to index them someway so that I can write within this storyworld?

Set aside a huge chunk of time, plan to do it for 15 or 20 minutes every even, whatever works best for your schedule, just make it a plan and then follow through.

Use an organization tool with a folder system made for note taking (like scrivener or evernote), not a system like google docs where you have to load each document on it’s own. 

Decide how you’re organizing them ahead of time. I usually have my outline itself split into the major points I already know I need to hit, along with individual character files and a few dozen worldbuilding related files.

Put things in every folder or file they relate to. If you have something important to a certain character and a certain setting and the character’s species, put that information in all the relevant files. 

(I hope this was what you were looking for?)

Second Person

Okay, so I absolutely despise 2nd person point of view. But it seems like it's popular, especially with fanfics. I'm just wondering why? And do you like 2nd person point of view?

I’m not a fan of second person either, so I feel you. I think the general draw of it (especially in fanfiction, even more so in erotic fanfiction) is the fact that you’re supposed to be the person doing the things, existing in this world with the characters you love. It gives every reader their own self-insert. 

In my opinion, it’s kind of ridiculous outside of choose your own adventure type stories, but some readers really enjoy it, so all the power to them, I guess?

Writing smut

Sorry if this is an odd question. But, how do you write smut? For a friends birthday I want to write a smut fic of her favorite pair, but I just cant write smut. You don't have to answer if it makes you uncomfortable. Thanks!

Fun fact: I wrote a lot of smut during my university years. (That was pretty much the only thing I wrote, actually.) It had a negative effect on my mental health though, so I’ve backed out of that whole scene pretty thoroughly. 

Honestly, smut for the sake of smut is pretty much just imagining a steamy scene you get off on, and then writing it out. The most prominent things to watch for are what you’re calling everyone’s junk (there’s a nice line between too technical and too outrageous, and you can probably find long lists of people’s opinions if you search around enough), and whether you’re describing the positions the characters are in well enough for the reader to picture them. Throw in some simple and common metaphors for sensual sensations, and remember to focus on the emotional, romantic aspects too (especially during repetitive motions or anything that makes you slightly uncomfortable to write/read.) 

If you’re writing a sex scene as a scene in a non-erotic novel, things get a lot more complicated really quickly, because you have to take into account things like prior emotion states, character growth, relationship development, and plot.

Non-binary protagonists perceived as villains

Hi, I read a post of yours regarding binary people writing non-binary characters and I figured asking a non-binary person was the best way to go about this. The protagonist in one of my wip's is non-binary, however, this character is generally seen as a 'villain' by others despite not necessarily being one due to context and lore implications. Can I ask for advice on how to write such a character without enforcing any negative stereotypes surrounding non-binary people? Thanks for your time.

The nonbinary collab team has finally started work on a post which will cover these kinds of topics in more detail, so keep a look out for that, but I’ll mention a few things here anyways:

1. One of the most prominent negative stereotypes surrounding non-binary people being villains involves using the non-binary identity to show how “corrupt” or “insane” or “inhuman” the villain is. (This happens both in fiction and through specifically pointing out the non-gender-conformity of historical immoral people while denying that the heroes of those cultures held the same level of non-gender-conformity.) There’s nothing inherently wrong with writing a villain who just happens to be nonbinary, but a villain should never be a villain because they’re nonbinary.

2. In any situation where you have an oppressed people group represented as a villain, it’s always a good rule of thumb to also have at least one character of that group represented in the heroes “team” (or, in cases where there’s no heroes, by a team with differing beliefs or goals, preferably by decently moral characters.) 

That being said, it seems like your protagonist isn’t actually evil themselves, so unless the reason other people in the world see them as a villain is because they see nonbinary people as villainous, I can’t imagine you’ll have any major issues :)

Bending the Elements 

Hey! Do you have tips on how to write bending of the elements? I got an idea for a book, but I can't seem to describe what people do when bending without making it sound like an Avatar The Last Airbender fanfiction. The only thing I have similar to the show is the bending of elements, the story in itself is hopefully original enough to hold its own, but still I make the bending sound like fanfiction... my story has nothing to do with Avatar. Any tips?

Hey there nonny! I’m planning to write a full post on describing the use of magic, so I can add in a section on elemental magic when I start that :)

When feedback doesn’t fit the picture.

@aerodragneel​: In my current WIP, the MC has to find the powerful superhero Vulcan from 15 years ago, who quit after losing to the main antagonist who’s resurfaced. I was told not to make him a vital part of the story, but Vulcan’s entire character arc is vital to his and the MC’s story. When I envision Vulcan, I see someone who wants to help, but after all he’s gone through, he just can’t anymore and when he meet’s the MC, that spark of being a hero is reignited. Thanks for the help and get better soon! 😉

No one knows your story and characters better than you. Write the story however it makes the most sense and feels strongest! If you think Vulcan needs to be present throughout the story to influence the MC’s arc, then by all means, include him. There will always be an opportunity to take him out later, and you’ll get much more accurate feedback from people once they’ve read the entire story, edited until you approve of it.

(And remember that not everyone will give you advice that’s beneficial to the story you want to write. Here’s some other good reasons not to change your story in order to accommodate a piece of feedback.)

Character growth

How do I go about writing about somebody who over time has a change of heart? My story is going to be about a woman who was originally set out to kill a man but ends up falling in love with him.

I have plans to write a post on redemption arcs, and a more thorough post on character development, so stay tuned for both of those!

[sayleeofkanto]

Hey! I'm a big fan of your nuzlocke run, and want to try one on my own now. Because your story's are so emotionally and thought through, like every little detail could be important later, and your world building is amazing. I'm happy every timewhen I see you posted a new chapter. Do you have a few tips to make a nuzlocke run successfully into a story? How to you don't get confused over so many details and people?

Ahhh, thank you so much! Glad to hear that you’re writing your own! I would like to recommend joining the Nuzlocke Forums--the community’s wonderful and very supportive while you’re posting your story!

So here’s my best tips that I’ve figured out over the past few years:

Play the whole run before you start writing the story proper, but take EXTENSIVE notes while you play. Who you catch and where, where and how deaths happened, where and how evolutions happened, details on how major battles went, but also particularly funny conversations with NPCs, interesting game landmarks, close encounters with trainers or wild Pokemon, etc. I’ve recently started outlining chapters as I play, but I already have a pretty sizeable world built XP If you’re writing your first story, you’re probably gonna discover the worldbuilding as you play and note. How many deaths you have and who kills them is definitely gonna influence parts of the story as you have to decide how and why those deaths happen. Knowing who lives and who dies is also helpful for planning what Pokemon to feature in your story--I’ve tried in the past to introduce every Pokemon I ever caught, but unless you have a distinct idea for what to do with the Pokemon you never use, better to stick with fleshing out the Pokemon who serve on your team. You can catch a Pokemon early in the game and only introduce them later in the story when they join your team after a death if you want, even if you’re introducing them in-story in a wildly different area to where you caught them ingame!

Give EVERY character a goal. Even if it never comes up in the story, make sure YOU know what every character’s goals are, and that these inform their actions. Even if your Pokemon don’t speak or don’t have human intelligence, give them goals, even if they’re simple ones like “getting scratches” or “having fights”. 

For that matter, it can be a fun exercise to figure out the life stories of a lot of characters, even if they’re not important. It’s a good rule of thumb for you to know a ton of information about both your characters and the world that might never appear in the story--but it’s good for YOU to know it, as the writer. 

Don’t ever force in information where it doesn’t need to be. Don’t open with a long explanation of your main character’s life story (I have been guilty of this) or every detail of the world. Just get your characters talking and let details come out as and when they’re relevant! Don’t make characters explain things they already know to each other--only explain things to characters who have reason to not already know! It’s very tempting to babble on about the details of your world, I know, but you’ve got some built-in interesting mysteries if the characters talk about a subject or person without explaining all the details for the reader, and y’know, readers are pretty smart. We like figuring things out from context clues!

Okay, so the secret to keeping track of huge numbers of characters: SPREADSHEETS. Here’s the one I use to keep track of Pokemon:

I use this as I’m writing--grey denotes dead Pokemon, blue current team members. 

Here’s the one I use to keep track of characters, with some spoilers for stuff coming after Dimensional Destruction redacted:

So if that’s pretty small, basically for ever character I have their title if they have one (Professor/Doctor/Marchioness/etc), surname, married name (if different), forename, nickname, if they’re an avatar (this is particular to my storyworld and how the god/human relationship works), the year of their birth (in my story’s year numbering) and their age at various important story events and during different fics. The outlined boxes are the character’s age during a story where they’re particularly relevant--for example, I’ve outlined Cyrus’ age during Dimensional Destruction only, but Burgh’s for the years of both Unova fics. There’s a bunch of other tabs on this spreadsheet to list leaders/E4/champion in different regions at different times, family trees, etc. I’m shit with numbers so this is great for helping me keep track of my own made-up year system that I felt pedantically compelled to make up, ages, when shit happens... for Dimensional Destruction and Deliverance, to keep them aligned, Key and I wrote a day-by-day calendar. How much detail you feel you need is up to you, but this is how I manage all the information.

Speaking of Key, this is my number #1 tip for success: have a writing buddy. Somebody you chat to as much as possible--Key and I talk pretty much every day and have for years, and lately so do Bri (writer of Eye of the Beholder, which is an all-around great story and particularly a great example of how to do a “protagonist from another world” story without getting too info-dumpy) and I, and it really is the best way both to keep your own juices flowing and to come up with ideas. Talk to somebody you feel safe to share ideas you’re nervous about with so they can help you figure them out. Talk to somebody you can share silly jokes with and then take far too seriously (aka how Johanna ended up marrying Byron--”haha Silver really looks like a younger Roark doesn’t he lol”). Talk to somebody you can babble AT LENGTH at about your latest idea and will enthuse about every word. Talk to somebody whose story you love reading and love hearing their story babble ideas about. Inspire each other and have fun :D

Read a lot of other nuzlockes, and try not to think “this is so much better than mine...” Instead, try to think “wow, that idea was really creative. This is how I’d do it...” Other nuzlockes can give you ideas for how to reinterpret things in the game, maybe things you hadn’t thought about trying to reinterpret! It really can help if you get stuck on where to take your story.

Write backwards. Know how things end, and then start working on how characters get there. If you have a distinct scene in your head, write it out and set it aside. Then, as you actually start writing the story, everything will change. That’s fine! Let it! Let the characters tell you what’s going on, then go back and add the foreshadowing.

Unless you’ve got something really, REALLY good, don’t try to explain how Escape Rope works. 

I hope some of these help! Send me a link when you start publishing your story, I’m excited to read it! Also, I just want to say that I love your Blue avatar a lot. SWAG.

[pynkhues]

1/2 i've got some writing questions for you, if you're up for answering, because i’m curious and you seem like a Real Writer: 1) do you use betas? 2) what exactly are betas supposed to do? i always figured they just checked for like grammar and stuff. megan @foxmagpie is betaing for me and she's done her very best to help me with figuring out my outline and character motivations and i always figured that was a bonus because she's a sweetheart and can see i'm a baby who knows nothing about what

2/2 she’s doing, but the writing asks going around made me start thinking maybe that's actually more standard?? 3) also, i know you're being traditionally published (btw congrats!!), so how different is a fic beta from an editor? thank you in advance if you decide to answer!! :)

Thank you for the congratulations, and of course!

This got a little long, so I’m dropping it behind a cut.

1. Do you use betas? 

I used to! I bounced around a few betas when I was a new writer, and then I met Melissa who I had a terrific creative relationship with for about five years? We’re still good friends, but she’s not in fandom anymore and decided she didn’t really have the time to beta anymore after she graduated from college and became a vet. It sort of worked out perfectly, because that was around the same time that I quit writing fic (something I’ve obviously come back to, haha).

I don’t use a beta currently, but I do sometimes talk plot / storyworld things through with @foxmagpie​ or share bits and ask for her opinion / if what I’m trying to get across comes across.

2) what exactly are betas supposed to do?

It’s entirely up to you and your beta! They can just do grammar and punctuation. I know some betas who just check for Americanisms, Australianisms, Europe-isms, I know some who are hands on with workshopping a story, some who predominantly cheerlead, some who provide very detailed feedback and suggestions, some who provide very little, it all just depends what you, the writer, want, and what the beta is prepared or able to give.

It’s why I think every writer-beta relationship – no matter how close you are as friends – should start with a conversation about parameters and expectations. 

If you just want your fic proofread for grammar, that should absolutely be flagged by you, the writer. If you want feedback on plot, characterisation, etc. that should be flagged too.

I don’t tend to beta that much really, just because I’ve worked as a professional editor for many years and have been involved in a lot of writing workshops where you’re often workshopping multiple stories a week, and I find it really hard to turn off that part of my brain. As a result, when I do beta, I tend to do a condensed version of a full edit which includes a structural edit (broad story feedback and questions about world building, characters, etc), a copyedit (this is grammar plus sentence and paragraph structure, word repetition), fact checking (hence the glass bowl debate, hahaha), and write up a page or two on broader feedback for the author overall i.e. patterns in their writing, areas to improve, areas they do really well in, etc. 

This is obviously incredibly vigorous (and will take me usually a whole day or even two days - which is something I have to signpost when beta’ing too as I’ll need to have a day free to do it), and not something most betas do (as it probably should be, haha, fanfic should be fun after all). This sort of edit though is (hopefully) really about growth and improvement and challenging the writer to level up, so to speak. The writer definitely needs to be ready for it, and Megan was, which is how I ended up doing this for chapter 7 and now chapter 8 of Delinquents. 

Again though, this was something she and I negotiated and worked out that she wanted, and I was actually excited to do, because I love Megan’s writing, and if I could help her be more happy with it and grow and feel like she was growing, I’d be honoured to do that! 

If that’s not what she’d wanted, I wouldn’t have done it the way that I did it. 

As for Megan helping you with the outlining and character motivation, that is something that’s very sweet! Writing at that point can be really challenging, and while there are a lot of betas who talk through that sort of thing, there are a lot of betas too who only look at things after a draft is written as well. Having feedback and someone to talk to about a story in the early stages, particularly during outlining, can be really helpful and can save you a lot of issues down the track, because if you’re unsure of motivations and what’s propelling your characters through the story, it can often ground your writing to a halt.

One of the best bits of writing advice I ever got was to constantly be asking your story three questions.

1. What does my character want? 

2. What (or who) is standing in their way stopping them from getting what they want? 

3. What’s my character going to do to overcome it? 

Take these as literally or as broadly as you like, but those questions are really helpful at identifying what the narrative thrust of your story is at both a broader and scene-based level. :-)

3) How different is a fic beta from an editor? 

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this also varies, haha. It depends on what the beta does and what that process looks like. 

Like I said, I more or less do a condensed version of a full edit when I beta, but in traditional publishing (and what I’m going through at the moment with my publisher for my novel), the rounds of editing will usually be done by different people, so you get different opinions. So just to reiterate, a full edit involves:

Round 1: Structural Edit. This is done usually by a senior editor and involves broad feedback on the story and can include anything from scrapping characters to rearranging plots to changing settings. It usually includes a lot of questions which are designed to challenge the writer’s narrative choices or deepen understanding of story.

Round 2 & 3: Copy Edit. This is usually done by a junior editor (and they usually do it twice (or even more than twice if it’s a difficult manuscript or author) - so once, then the writer works on the changes and sends it back, then the editor does it again to the new draft), and is a closer look at the story. It rarely involves major story changes, and instead is focused on individual scenes, paragraph and sentence structure, and often character motivation or settings in specific scenes, as opposed to the broader story. 

Round 4: Proofreader. At a big publisher, this will usually done by a contractor outside of the publishing house so that it’s a very fresh reader who’s unfamiliar with the story. At a smaller publishing house or a magazine / journal, this’ll be done by an editorial assistant, intern or even the junior editor again. This is strictly grammar and punctuation. 

Round 5: Final proof. This goes back to everyone - the author, the structural editor, the copy editor and the proofreader, and is usually a PDF of the typeset pages, so everyone has one last chance to make minor changes before it goes to print.

So yes! A long process, haha.

I’d say most betas do a little bit of a structural and copy edit, but are predominantly proofreaders? Although, once again, it really just depends!

I hope this is a help, and feel free to ask if you have any other questions!