bettsfic
great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
human of rapidly rotating special interests, writer of many fandoms | writing coach, teacher, editor | EIC @oficmag | leader @fanauthorworkshop | newsletter: betts.substack.com | 30s | she/her | i mostly answer asks and reblog gifsets of Paul Newman
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Crosshair: My cold dead heart feels no affection for anyone.
Omega: *sneezes*
Crosshair: ARE YOU SICK?? WHERE'S YOUR JACKET? SOMEONE GET A DOCTOR
#guess who's 3k into a tbb fic that is basically just this but it's an 80s au set in rural missouri#i don't know why or how it came to be#it just happened
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imagine if every chapter in a real book ended with an author's note
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when i was a teenager in the early 00s, i carried a disposable camera everywhere. i worked at a restaurant and didn't make much money, so i didn't take a ton of pictures because i knew how expensive it would be to get them developed. (i almost forgot that verb. i was about to write "printed." god.) so i only took pictures of things that were important to me, and they all came out kinda shitty because that's how disposable cameras worked, but i bought a tacky-looking photo album at a CVS one day while waiting for the 1-hour photo, and every time i got a roll developed, i put all the pictures, even the shitty ones, in the album.
i've had a smart phone since 2010. i've probably accumulated thousands if not tens of thousands of pictures. but there are so many that i just don't go back and look at them. nowadays when you want to take a picture of something, you take a few so you can get the shot right. but i didn't have that option with a disposable camera; you took one shot of one moment, and if it didn't come out, it was lost. and that was fine.
on the cloud, i have 14 years of pictures and memories that i never look through unless i happen to be looking for something specific. but every time i clean my apartment and i'm dusting off my bookshelf, i see that ugly CVS photo album of my old disposables and flip through the pictures i took, and they're not good memories really, but it's not something i would ever think to do with digital photos, which feel far less real and important to me.
i miss tangibility. i miss holding ephemera in my hands. and i know i'm not alone in this, and i see posts about it all the time, but i wonder what, if anything, can be done about it. i don't think it's an old-man-shakes-fist-at-cloud thing. i see young people, people who may not have consciously known that we used to "develop" photos instead of "print" them, struggling with the same thing because it's human nature to touch stuff, and care for it, and put special things on a shelf to look at when we clean, and depriving of us that deprives us of something in ourselves. something that, if we found it again, might alleviate a bit of the depression and anxiety we've accumulated as a society whose memories exist in the cloud.
smartphone storage plateauing in favor of just storing everything in the cloud is such dogshit. i should be able to have like a fucking terabyte of data on my phone at this point. i hate the fucking cloud
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tgcf is like if xie lian was faced with the trolley problem every single day and every day he said "i'll choose a third option!" and that option was throwing himself in front of the trolley to stop it but instead it flips over and kills/maims everyone on both tracks and xie lian himself
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I’m taking another break from writing and I really want this break to be different so that when/if I go back to writing I’ll actually stick with it and have some of my walls pulled down so that I have less resistance to working on a project. Do you have any tips on how to step away from a project to recoup mentally and then go back feeling ready to tackle writing a novel again?
I don’t want to just avoid writing by watching tv and stuff but also be ready for a new project:
If this helps, here’s what happened:
I was working on a story idea off and on for 6 months and I noticed it becoming a story I did not plan on and one I didn’t think my skill set was ready for. It made me avoid the project for days at a time or build up walls around the idea of writing because I have attempted this thing for 2 years now with no significant progress. Just starting and stopping an idea and hating myself and slowly hating writing in the process with each failure.
As someone who is goal oriented I set mile stones, like query in 5 years finish my first novel this year,etc….
But it feels daunting when you stand on square one and feel like your ideas not right or your not skilled, people are going to hate it, and you are afraid of self-inserts(I don’t like to read self-inserts so I’d hate to write one of my own by accident).
So now I’m burnt out and has lost touch with what’s fun about writing.
it's interesting that you mention the idea of walls multiple times here. that seems to be both the problem and the solution. it sounds like you're writing from two different minds: the half of you feeling creative and inspired, and the half who wants to do the job to the standards you set yourself.
the problem is that you can't do one task with both minds, so you have to give each their own task. the half of you that wants to make something and have a good time with it can become the generative half. you use that energy to plot, draft, daydream, etc. the other half of you needs to do something they're good at, because they don't seem to be very helpful with generation.
my recommendation is to create an independent study for yourself. this project sounds very important to you, and you want to do it justice, and that means that second half of you needs to devote itself to developing the scaffolding that will allow your generative side to build the thing you want to make. if you've done any kind of teaching before, great. if not, think back to how your favorite class you've ever taken was structured and go off of that. write a whole syllabus if that sounds fun to you (creating syllabi is very fun for me).
most people i know see everything in one step: do the thing. but try breaking all your goals up into at least two steps: teach yourself how to do the thing, then do the thing. especially for people like you who are goal driven and organized (and probably were/are very good students), it can be extremely fun and satisfying to become your own teacher.
here are some individual activities you can try that i think might keep you focused on your project and relieve the burnout:
write a list of learning objectives. this can be anything from specific craft mechanics to mindfulness and meditation.
create a reading list. find some relevant texts that will help inform your project. you say, "I don’t want to just avoid writing by watching tv and stuff," but if you watch tv through the lens of your project, it becomes a productive exercise. take notes, then organize and index your notes. personally, i love taking notes about the tv i watch and then indexing my notes.
craft small assignments that use what you learned from the reading list to reach the learning objectives. if one of your learning objectives is "learn how to write in first person," you take your favorite first-person reading and use it as a prompt for a short piece of prose.
make a final assignment. maybe your final assignment is a drafting plan (not an outline) for how you want to tackle your return to drafting. maybe it's a sample/practice chapter of your project. maybe it's an actual "what i learned in this course" style book report.
this isn't advice i would give to everyone. there are a lot of writers out there who would read this and go "absolutely fucken not" because they are the "just do it and see what happens" sort, or they had such a horrible primary education that the thought of framing creativity within the structure of a course seems agonizing. but for writers who get in their own way, who have both tastes and ideas that outweigh their current skill level, i definitely recommend training your scaffolding brain to tasks that are more actionable, and taking the time to learn what you want to write before writing it.
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Hi Betts,
How do I become the kind of person that can write 50-100k in a month?
anon, i am so fascinated by the phrasing of this question. not "how do i write 50-100k in a month" but "how do i become the kind of person that can write 50-100k in a month."
writing 50k in a month seems easier than changing who you are in order to write 50k in a month. because once you do it, you then become that thing; you don't become the thing and then do it. if that makes sense.
to write 50k in a month, what you really have to be is the sort of person who can write very badly for a very long time. that's the key to high word counts: shitty writing. that's also the downside to high word counts: you don't keep the shitty writing. you write 100k in a month, you end up with tennis elbow and maybe a couple thousand words that'll make it to the next draft.
don't get me wrong, i think things like nanowrimo are great. every once in a while, it can be good to set a high word count goal and meet it. but only every once in a while, when you plan for it and set your mind to it, and accept the discomfort of spending a whole month prioritizing quantity over quality. word count is only one metric by which to measure progress.
so i guess my answer is that to be the kind of person who writes 50k in a month, you have to be the kind of person who makes a plan to write 50k in a month, the kind of person to see it through, and the kind of person who, if you don't meet your goal, tries it again later.
and lastly, word count is not actually about writing. it's about sentence-making. writing is the umbrella term we use to describe what is actually about a hundred different smaller tasks. sentence-making is just one of them. practicing sentence-making won't make you a better writer, just a faster one. you begin to internalize sentence structures and paragraphing, and then it becomes easier to deploy them, because you don't have to think about things like "should i make this a clause or a new sentence." that work eventually becomes less conscious and you're free to render the stuff in your head in a more intuitive way, that you later revise in a more intentional one.
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just curious as they're always things i've never questioned just doing but people in my life are often surprised that i don't mind doing them alone
🔁 pls reblog for sample size
#i do all of these alone all the time#in fact i do them more often alone than with other people#i haven't traveled with someone else in years#i go to the movies alone every week#i eat alone at restaurants pretty frequently#i don't go to many shows or concerts but i have gone to them alone before#i went to cirque di soleil alone in las vegas and made friends with the couple sitting next to me#i just find that i'm such a people pleaser that when i'm with someone else#i prioritize being with them and paying attention to them#and because i can't pay attention to multiple things#i end up ignoring everything else#and missing out on a lot#when i travel alone and see movies alone and eat alone i'm free to pay attention to the place and the story and the food and the music#when i was 23 i went to peru by myself on a whim and after that doing everything alone became the default
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kid who desperately wanted to be a butcher when they grew up but instead became a boring old toymaker:
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Have you ever thought about writing a craft book of your own? I love how practical your advice is. Also I saw on your latest newsletter you were thinking of moving your writing advice to Obsidian, I'm really excited for that!! Obsidian is great for organising data and you can publish your notes (and link to other notes if you prefer) super easily. The plugins are super useful too.
i have thought about writing a craft book! i would love to write a beginner process book so Bird by Bird is no longer the default (or worse, On Writing), which has not aged well at all. Lamott has that kind of zany vodka aunt humor that just reads as tasteless bordering on offensive nowadays, and i feel like i can no longer recommend it to people just starting out. so i'd like to write a more sincere but still accessible "how to approach the blank page" sort of book. i also want to write a fanfiction craft book (which may have to be two books: one to establish fanfiction *as* craft, and the other which will actually get into the theory by referring back to the first), and then a book on my theory of the ideal, which i probably won't be able to write for 10 years or so because i don't know enough about it yet. in fact my research folder is called "things to write when i'm 45."
tl;dr a basics book, a fanfiction craft book, and a "here's my contribution to craft theory, now i can die knowing i did the big thing i set out to do with my life" book.
unfortunately to publish a craft book you need to have published a novel and that novel needs to have done well. so that's what i'm working on. i want to put at least one novel in the world (and maybe only one) and then focus my attention on craft and teaching.
i'm not really writing much right now so i hope i get time soon to figure out how obsidian works and set up an organizational system. @nonsequitur22 offered to help, so it already feels far more manageable than it did. also i'd love to do like an annual, chronological ebook of writing advice asks for people to buy if they want a more bookish version to read. unfortunately that presents a whole new set of logistical problems, so that's on the backburner for now.
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this is another reason i think the writing of SDV is brilliant. it would've been so easy to make Pierre the underdog good guy to the evil Joja hireling Morris. but CA wrote him simply as the lesser of two evils. and as someone who spent many years working with small business owners, i can't emphasize enough how real that is. just because Pierre isn't a link in a chain of some corporate bureaucracy doesn't mean he's not a capitalist. the most righteous and good-meaning companies in the world still have to resort to underhanded business strategies just to stay afloat. that's all Pierre is trying to do: get by. and he does it in shitty ways to help sway the fine people of Pelican Town away from Joja.
i'm no Pierre sympathizer, but i do appreciate the nuance he's given as a character and how it speaks to the complexity of the greater themes at play.
she’s gonna fucking kill him!!!!
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a xenomorph. so no, i wouldn't survive, but neither would anyone else.
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Betts! This is just an ask to let you know how influential you have been to my writing life. Your advice is always so insightful and so honest, and your approach to feedback so inclusive and open-minded, you have genuinely made me look at writing - and the world! - in a different way. And you’ve also made me believe that I have something to offer the world with my writing, which is what keeps me trying. Not to mention your incredible writing! I feel lucky to know you even peripherally.
Thank you for being the wonderful writer and teacher that you are.
i think believing you have something to offer the world is one of the hardest lessons to learn but has some of the greatest benefits. thank you so much for the kind words, anon! 💖
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Introducing the FAW Summer Asynch Session!
Many people have mentioned that the times I lead the spring and fall workshops aren’t accessible for those with busy/unpredictable schedules, but they would still like to participate in the workshop and join the FAW community. To address that feedback, I’m running an asynchronous summer session. An asynch session doesn’t have a set meeting time. Instead, you’ll read up to 2 pieces presented each week by fellow participants, write them crit letters, and participate in discussion over Discord.
The only required* meeting is an individual 30 minute Zoom call with me any time during the two weeks prior to the start of workshop. We'll use that time to go over the syllabus together and I can answer any questions you have. You'll book via Calendly once I send the welcome email.
*Optional for previous participants
Participants of the workshop receive:
Attendance in a 4-6 week asynchronous course during which you’ll provide feedback to your peers and workshop one piece of your own work, up to 6,000 words.
Access to the Fanauthor Workshop Discord server, an active community where we host weekly accountability meetings, writing sprints, a twice monthly short story club, and other events.
A 15-30 minute pre-workshop consultation with me to go over the syllabus and any questions you have.
A 30-45 minute post-workshop consultation with me to discuss the feedback you received, come up with a plan for revision and/or publication, or anything else you’d like to discuss regarding your writing.
Open enrollment option in future workshops.
Timeline
Applications close: June 14
Syllabus calls: July 1 - 12
Workshop begins: July 15
Workshop ends: Before August 23, depending on the number of participants
Cost
The recommended amount is $150. If you’re experiencing financial hardship and unable to pay, or can't pay the full amount, please let me know.
How to apply
Eligibility
Anyone over the age of 18 who considers themselves a participant of fandom and who is familiar with fanfiction may apply. A stable internet connection is also required. Submissions must be written in English.
Application requirements
To apply, you will need:
A brief cover letter discussing your fan history and goals as a (fan)writer (more specific instructions on submittable).
Maximum 1,000 words of your writing, either original work or fanfiction. This may be previously published/posted.
You can apply via submittable. Applications close June 14. There is no fee for applying.
FAQ and other info under the cut.
FAQ
Are there any content restrictions to what I can workshop?
The only restriction is word count (max 6k), with the following caveats:
If you workshop a piece in a form other than prose (for example, a script), your peers may not be able to offer constructive feedback on that aspect of the work. Participants are asked only to have a familiarity with prose.
Content warnings are required for each piece (if applicable), and participants who are uncomfortable reading certain subject matter may abstain from your workshop.
What is the time commitment of the workshop?
As a participant of the workshop, you'll be asked to:
Workshop any piece of your own prose up to 6k words, which will need to be uploaded no later than the Sunday prior to your workshop week. For example, if you sign up to workshop in week 2, your submission will be due July 14. Participants will have a week to read it and write their crit letter, and discussion will begin over Discord on July 22.
Read 2 pieces per week, write a 1-page crit letter for the author, and participate in the Discord discussion.
What are the benefits of being in the Fanauthor Workshop community?
We have an active Discord server open only to those who have participated in the workshop. Once you've completed the workshop, you'll have access to attend our weekly accountability meetings*, writing sprints, our twice monthly short story club, and other events we host.
*I'm working on figuring out an asynch accountability group.
You'll also have an open enrollment option in future workshops, where in lieu of applying again, you can pay a portion of what you intend to pay and secure your seat in the upcoming workshop.
I'll be working on rolling out additional events and benefits throughout the year.
Can workshop participants submit to OFIC Magazine?
Yes! Part of the reason I run the workshop is to inspire and promote the original work of fanwriters. You can follow us on tumblr @oficmag.
Who is running the workshop?
@bettsfic! In short, I lived a dreary cubicle life as a banker until I found fanfiction at 24. I loved it so much that I quit my job to get an MFA in creative writing. I loved the MFA so much that I became a writing teacher. I have some publications, awards, an agent, and 2 million words of fic on ao3. I don't have a book out yet but I'm getting there.
Currently I'm a writing coach and freelance editor. I also have a lowkey writing-related newsletter. And I've been answering writing advice asks on my blog for 10 years.
If you want an idea of the kind of writing activities I create, last summer I worked with @books on a workshop series which includes craft essays and some fun prompts.
If you're interested in my original work, my short story "Not If, When" is a good representation of my writing. For something darker, check out "Shut Up and Kill Me."
What is the workshop like?
Check out G's experience of attending the workshop. And here's some feedback from previous participants.
One final note: This is the first summer asynch session so there may be some hiccups. I've taught asynch classes before so it's not totally new to me, but there's still bound to be some pivoting when the workflow that makes sense in my head doesn't work super well in reality. It happens sometimes. I'm always taking feedback and trying to improve the workshop.
If you have questions about the workshop or application process, you can shoot me an ask, DM me, or add me on Discord (I'm bettsfic there too). Or you can email me at [email protected].
#excited to try out the asynch model!#figuring out the workflow nearly broke my brain but i think it'll work#all my asynch pedagogy classes during covid really bummed me out but oh boy are they coming in clutch#faw
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Thank you for everything you do for the fannish writing community. Writing can be so hard, but you convinced me not to give up on something I love.
i'm so happy to hear it! 💗
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Hellllooooooooo!! I just wanted to stop in and say a huge thank you for inspiring me! Your newsletter has absolutely blown me away, and your constant advice about the process and writing as a craft lit a fire in my belly! You've made me take up writing again after many, many years. Thank you for your passion, I hope you know how important it is to spread it, and I'm so grateful it reached me. I hope you have the most wonderful day <3
thank you! and i'm to hear that you're writing again after some time away. i'd love to know how it goes!
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Just wanted to hop in and say that the way you talk about writing has been like a revelation to me! I've learned more from you than I have from the dozens of writing craft books I've read. You're creating an army of great writers and more than that, writers who believe in theirselves. What a cool superpower to have!!
i really appreciate this, thank you!! also i would love your list of craft books if you ever want to share
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Betts. each time i read one of your responses you give to your asks--where you so carefully, expertly, explain some key aspects of what it means to be a writer--I've just gotta. sit. and soak it in. somehow, you're able to see every single one of my insecurities, strip them down, and show how to piece myself back together into a stronger writer. a stronger person. i've been a huge fan of your writing for years. but that's nothing compared to how much you've literally shaped who i am as a person because you're offering this advice. free of charge. explained in such a way that it actually becomes accessible to understand. thank you for what you do.
this means so much to me, anon! i really appreciate you reaching out, and i'm so glad to be reminded that i'm not just shouting into a void. thank you!
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