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blorbologist · 1 year

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heyooo I just started writing fan fic and I really have no idea what I'm doing haha, can you explain how you draft and edit and write you long fics? i don't know what to do besides just starting at the beginning and writing to the end. (also sending this to multiple writiers so I can get lots of opinions)

Hi anon! I’m really flattered you’ve reached out <33

An amorphous list of advice from someone who has written over 300k words in under a year:

Make sure to note all your ideas for the fic down. You will not remember your plot twist thought up on the walk home in a few hours - *write it down!* It could be gushing to a friend about it or a notepad or whatever - and then make sure to compile it wherever you’re keeping your ideas for that fic.

Be kind to yourself! Sometimes it takes weeks or months to write a scene the way you want it - maybe you aren’t inspired, maybe you can’t get it to Work, maybe, maybe - don’t beat yourself up about it. It’s art. There is no timeline.

Likewise, if you’re new: I’d really recommend against a longfic! Do some oneshots first - seeing a work to completion and posting it will really help your confidence. A longfic is a long commitment, and if you end up changing plans or abandoning it it can be very discouraging for you to have that incomplete work be one of your first. It’s like training for a marathon :D

Get a bullet point list if you can of scenes you want to do or information/things that need to happen for those scenes to make sense. Even if you don’t have the details - I have the note ‘they find Tary in hell, because he overheard them and thought it was an adventurous place to be’ in my main fic doc. I didn’t know *how* they were going to meet him, or under what context, and figured that out as I wrote. You don’t need to break it up by chapter, just timeline.

Speaking of timeline, here’s a neat trick: muse is a fickle thing, you don’t *have* to trudge through content you don’t want to write to get to the good stuff. I usually prefer to - I like having the full emotional context for scenes clear in my head - but when writer’s block gets me I’ll often jump to self indulgent writing something fun I’ve wanted to get to. You can always go back and edit things and add in a scene later, so long as you haven’t posted yet…

… which is why I strongly, strongly, strongly recommend having a buffer when you can, or at least letting a chapter sit overnight while you sleep on it. I get the urge to post something you just made, hot off the press, but you would not believe the number of typos or inconsistencies I find after reading things over with fresh eyes. This is true for both oneshots and longfics - the chapters y’all are seeing for Two for joy were mostly complete around November during NaNoWriMo! It also means you have room to go back and edit things - if you stumble on a cool plot twist you can foreshadow it more effectively, or if a character arc changed in ways you didn’t expect you can lay more groundwork for it. It’s less stressful knowing that if gradschool goes to hell I’ve got… hang on… 13 weeks of wiggle room while still keeping to my schedule. And even if it did run out - this is free content, people would understand if I went on hiatus for a bit. You have all the time in the world - use it!

BUT, in a similar vein, feedback and encouragement are super important to keeping your muse up. Which is why I strongly recommend having a friend or two in fandom you can bombard with snippets and spoilers and ideas! One for sorrow / Two for joy would likely have sputtered and fizzled out without @rightpastnowhere, @katia-dreamer, @burr-ell, @essayofthoughts, @romeoandjulietyouwish - and the fandom community I found early on that were so excited for the fic! Engage with your commenters, they can make for really great friends, betas and/or tormented souls when you offhand chuck your most evil plot twists at them >:D

Remember that fanfic is supposed to be fun. You’re having fun. You’re writing, for free. I’ve mostly written for Critical Role as a fandom, but I promise you it’s not as scary as you might think it is. I haven’t gotten a single nasty comment or anon yet, despite, uhhhh, breaking up my OTP and piling angst galore on people (and making Vax trans). By in large, it's a supportive space - but don't be afraid to curate it to your needs. Writing is for you and whatever you want to get out of it: validation for your ideas/HCs/skill, new friendships and a sense of community, improving your own skill, self-indulgent things you want to see in fiction, working through trauma, hella hot porn, etc. We’re all allowed to look to fic for different things, If it stops being what you need, if it feels like work, like a chore? You can drop it.

Hope this was of some help!

#writing fanfic #cr fanfic #fanfic #tumblr writers #my writing #idk what to tag this and I gotta scram KJNGTKTRHNT BYEEE

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willowmckinley · 7 months

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For the ask game... 22

Thank you, Justie.

22. describe your writing process from scratch to finish.

Oh, what a doozy! But a fun one, haha. Typically it starts with an image in my head, usually a concept or a scene. Take, for example, "The Opposite Of." That started as the idea "RaylanxBoyd" if Boyd had left Harlan with Raylan.

I open a word document and take as many notes for the idea as I can, problem solving/working out plot as I can. I jot down some scenes I want to write or might fit well with the story.

Then I start with one scene and take it as far as I can. For "The Opposite Of" the first scene, I think, was their stupid little wedding in front of that stupid little gazebo that I'm obsessed with. So I write as much of that scene as I can, then go back and write what kind of scenarios or events would lead up to it.

After, I write out the next scene. I like to write in chronological order, because often I don't know what will happen until I know what causes it to happen, trying to focus on "if, then" for a lot of my plotting. I try to write transitions as they come up, because they help me figure out what flow and pacing I want, and I've discovered transitions really help with that.

I edit as I write, meaning I like to really craft sentences as I put them to page, saving less editing for later. If a sentence or word or detail is really catching me, I'll make a note of it to come back to, but I prefer to instead work on another fic if I really get caught by a scene or a character motivation.

When I do get caught, I set it aside, and usually go over the scene or character motivation before bed. I have really bad insomnia anyway, so it helps me to have something to focus on so I don't drive myself crazy, haha. Plus, without the pressure of turning ideas into sentences, I usually figure it out, even if it takes me a few nights of this, working on other stories in the meantime.

I will switch between scenes if one catches my attention, but I try to finish whole thoughts before moving on, making notes of other ideas and plots and themes to put in my fic.

By now, the fic is really shaping up to be something. At this point, I'm reviewing for themes and continuity. I go back to earlier paragraphs and see if I can add any good foreshadowing or narrative through-lines. I see if anything I wrote by now has answered a question posed in another scene, whether for me or for the reader.

Finally, I do my last edits. Now is the time to catch typos, missing words, incomplete sentences, and awkwardness. If I'm lucky, I'll have a chance to myself to read it aloud to see if it sounds natural. If I don't, I usually post without it, haha.

Then, I read my fic on AO3, and catch even more mistakes, haha.

I think that's it? I really am happy to have found a writing system that works for me, haha.

#justie games #the opposite of

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brilliantfantasticgeronimo · 4 years

Text

ive been struggling to be more open about my life over here... beyond the sporadic gifsets of things im watching i cant really say ive shared much. but like, i cant keep on avoiding the mortifying ordeal of being known forever (also so much is going through my head all the time and i dont got anyone irl to vent so i gotta do it somewhere, even if it’s 2 the void) so here’s some life updates:

ive got a bunch of unfinished art i owe ppl so that’s what i’ve been trying to get through this past month....

...without much success, usually i come home so tired from school + work i cant be bothered to draw. this is the main thing im working hard about fixing rn. i have doodled more and have done some studies (haven’t posted them tho because i don’t feel great about them ugh)

one thing i’ve decided to try to see if it helps is regular exercise (in the form of solo capoeira training and trail running) + biphasic sleep schedule. in theory both of these things will give me the energy needed to draw...

after / meanwhile tho, the fancomic project that ive been cooking for about a year-ish is still, at least, slowly progressing... i haven't posted anything about it (tho i have talked to some ppl about it privately ) but i might have to bc i know it’s only a matter of time before someone else does this idea, and i will be v pissed if that happens after i have spent so much creative energy on it lol

im currently on a research + outlining step of said project... these are the books i’m plowing through, to give you a little idea of the (ridiculously bitting-more-than-she-can-chew) scope of the story sklajdksad)

national/regional/international politics are exhausting and draining as always (more than usual?) and tbh im sort of... actively tuning out of them atm. im trying to focus on “the big picture” so that means less time and mental energy for keeping track of whatever new apocalyptic headline crops up on the news. literally all my time reading, reflecting and studying is going toward collapse(tm) related literature and focused more on deep global issues and it is quite a lot of stuff to study, reflect and read,

(am i using all that as an excuse to not deal w/ the immediate surrounding? that might be part of it, perhaps... this is the only workable solution i have found that doesn’t involve weekly emotional breakdowns tho)

on that note, ive been using the ashes ashes podcast as a guideline for those studies. it’s great stuff and i highly recommend. the guys in charge of it are really nice, and the scope+breath of their research is impeccable. i’ve been telling everyone i meet about it bc it really has been a game-changer of a resouerce.

have felt very depressed at times for various reasons. some new, some not so new... not much to say in that area. v loneliness. much sad. whatevs

university and work were kicking my ass a couple weeks ago, but im getting them under control now (...i think). im getting a kind of ~synergy going too where im using knowledge learned in one place and applying it somewhere else

(like im learning sketchup for design class, but im hoping to later use it for making assets for the graphic designs at work. and the visual + communications stuff i have had to research for work is helping with both uni and my personal projects...)

arrowverse rewatch however is kicking my ass. and im only rlly watching supergirl + flash + batwoman ! but god. it’s literally.... endless... episodes.... if i have to hear another character say “no more secrets!” again im gonna flip

my enthusiasm for crisis and stuff is making me soldier on tho. (as is my hyperfixation w/ supercorp that has even managed to lure a fellow nerd coworker into it lmao)

while on the topic of tv: i *am* keeping up with the last season of the good place... i haven’t felt the need to talk much about it tho bc i mostly just discuss it with one of my cousins (who is also watching ) and we got our own like little after-show routine where we discuss theories and stuff :)

im watching hdm when it repeats on hbo latam. it’s nice to watch on hd for once rather than crummy 120p streaming sites...

havent sat down to watch 7 worlds 1 planet fully yet but i did watch the first 10 minutes of ep 1: antarctic and predictably cried

#anyway thanks @anyone who reads this and my mutuals in general lol #u are all troppers #personal #edit: incomplete ideas and typos

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chestertophat · 2 years

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Five words

Enemies to lovers w P03

There is one fic on Ao3 that fits this and it's incomplete

Ok finally starting on this one! Sorry it took so long it's just I'm not that good at this kinda stuff! Enemies to lovers is not my forte.

-------------------------------------------

He would despise you at first, but slowly he starts to admire you secretly. He's confused by it but keeps up the harsh act.

He sees emotions such as love as a weakness, so it's best to not confess early on if you realize how you feel, him convincing himself that he hates you would probably shun you. And feel horrible after.

Though if you confess to him later on, he'll stay quiet for a moment or two. He thinks "maybe, just maybe I love them? Their stupid face, their stupid laugh and smile. Their stupid personality and charm and- ah shit"

Than, after a bit of debating with himself, he'll quietly say that he thinks he feels the same. "But that doesn't mean it's set in stone!!"

-------------------------------------------

I had no ideas, I hope it was good!

July 17, 2022 edit: I just fixed I few things, and one typo. Personally, I think this one is short and sweet, but not my favorite.

#inscryption p03 x reader #inscryption fanfic #inscryption x reader #inscryption #inscryption p03 #p03 x reader #p03 #inscryption po3 x reader #inscryption po3 #po3 #po3 x reader

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savrenim · 3 years

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hi hi hi. so I just got into the Hamilton fandom, I swear I am four years late where did everybody go, and, well. I am apparently a hamburr shipper. bcs that is my life now. anyway I saw your fic ifmlam and I swear it is my favourite of all the fics I've ever read (and trust me I've read literally thousands). I love it so so much, how do you write fics like that??? I cried about four times during the whole thing, I stayed up till 4am reading it even when I had to wake up at 7 because it is just. that. good. I could not stop thinking about it for days afterwards and ifmlam has just ruined me. I can't think of listen to Hamilton without thinking of ifmlam anymore.

on to my qursttion: is it abandoned? of course it's perfectly FINE if it is. don't let anyone tell u differently, your fic is YOURS and u are amazing.

but pls I really need closure from ur fic, it has been haunting me if its abandoned or ongoing and I've read ur other fics and they are just chefskiss and thank you so much for writing them all. thank you thank you thank you, I will never be able to thank you enough for writing this fic and for everything it's done for me. I am probably thousands of miles away but I am sending you virtual jugs through a co.puter screen right now.

(don't feel pressured to reply to this or update it flam, I know how overwhelming it can get with so many messages and after a while u get desensitized to it. u can literally reply "thx. itfmlam is abandoned" and I would still be amazingly star struck. anyway has gotten way too long and I need to sleep and I'm sorry u probably won't see this so I'm just talking to myself right now but bye!!)

and thank you so so much for writing itfmlam.

aaaah hello anon!

thank you so so much???? I am so??? honored??? that ifmlam rates so highly to you, and also that you've read my other fics??????

the answer to the "is ifmlam abandoned" question is probably the worst possible one, which is pretty much "I do want to finish it, both for the folks that still want closure as well as it bothers to me have abandoned projects that are in the public eye/ already partially published, but also, it is last on my current writing projects list"

my current actually active writing projects list, kind of in order of priority, is

I'm literally three chapters away from being Actually Fully Done with the not-quite-first-not-quite-second let's call it 1.5th draft of an actual?? full?? original?? novel?? Opus which of course then goes out to beta readers and then gets who-knows-how-much edited and then maybe beta readers again if a lot does change and then a copyeditor my mom, my copyeditor is my mom, and maybe my little brother he's one of the betas but is very good at catching typos and then I!!! get to publish it!!!! which is the single thing I am most excited for!!!!!!!!! this should be closed up in the next week or two, and then take a while for people to actually read the draft and get back to me.

I really desperately want to finish my open-but-like-90%-written fic, which means we raise it up, the final chapter of to the bottom of the river bc I realized that it was kind of incomplete, and the second chapter of a buried and a burning flame because any more work there will need to wait until the author publishes the next book in the series. this should be closed up in the next month or two.

Speedwrite the draft of the second book of the Opus series so that hopefully by the time book 1 edits are happening, I have an almost complete draft of the second book. this is mostly me side-eyeing myself about taking nearly four years to write the first book, but that is solidly in part because I had so many other open projects which point 2 is about clearing that docket. this should be done in the next year.

And then just have my major projects be, at least until books 1-5 are written and published, books 1-5 of that because that is arguably the first major 'plot arc' of the series, so if I'm looking for a pause point on writing, that's probably where to stop.

There are two or three other short side projects (a weird fun second person short story tentatively titled witch-queen, a collection of four short stories Memoirs about a not-so-evil necromancer and the shenanigans he gets up to trying to rule a kingdom, working title Perfectly Normal Recipe Blog which is a collaborative project about a perfectly normal recipe blog that definitely doesn't include anything out of the normal) that will happen when they happen

There are other projects that are on the backburner -- The Numanok Files, a series of probably 12-15 short novellas about a mercenary/ bounty hunter esque person in space whose specialty is dealing with hauntings, but, like, 80% of their jobs is actually "you are effectively a space home inspector pointing out faulty wiring reacting to solar flares/ there's a weird alien fungus/ it's carbon monoxide okay change your atmosphere filters" and 20% of it is punching ghosts; there's a post-post apocalypse novel that I want to write that I know characters and general pacing and half the setting but need to work out the other half and figure out how much aesthetic I want to commit to; there's Strangeside7 aka spacerace book that is my reaction to how much I love how Redline the anime movie commits itself to "no we are about a race, like 60% of the screentime is just fully going to be an utterly ridiculous sci fi space race"; there's even a ridiculous YA trilogy that I would have to completely transplant the setting but might end up writing because the interplay between angel-physics and physics-physics was one of my favorite things in the world. and I guess the weird ridiculous technically a sequel series to ifmlam that was going to be published as original books that was basically me having fun with 'okay I fucking love star wars prequels old rotting space bureaucracy galactic republic style' except with seers and that also still might happen because it does have some of the coolest sci fi concepts and honestly I thiiiink that's all?

but the tl;dr of that timeline is I'm trying to finish a punch of projects Right Now, so that I can write books 2-5 of Opus, and then when I'm done that (which honestly, my average fiction-writing output is close to 100k a year. if I'm concentrating purely on one project, and writing books that are about 100k, we are talking four years. although my job situation is super up in the air in that period and writing might get put solidly on the backburner as I try to make it in academia, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) I will re-evaluate which projects go next, and that's when ifmlam is likely to come up for review.

I do not have any expectations that I will make it as an original author. I'm planning on posting all of my stuff online for free, but, like. it is incredibly difficult to convince people to try out even a piece of free and easily accessibly original work even if one has a huge following, I am a very small fanfiction author, and from what I can tell the majority of the people who are interested in my work are mostly interested in me finishing ifmlam. writing is a hobby for me, and while I'm writing mostly for me--and hence the for me bit at least for the next five years is pretty solidly going to be this series that I am deeply excited about and have sunk my heart and soul into every single aspect of--I'm human, and I don't really like shouting into the void, and I expect if I spend five years publishing to absolutely no response I will either stop writing for a while and do other things gods know my life is busy enough, return to fandom in general to write some other fanfic about whatever I get deeply into, or return to a work that I actually get response to. so ifmlam will probably start getting worked on a bit at that point one way or another. unless, of course, we are in the incredibly rare timeline in which I do make it as an original author, there are people who are deeply hyped for my original works and an actual demand for them, in which case as you may have noticed there are enough ideas there to keep me busy for a decade or two, and they will just get my full attention instead of fanfiction*. in this timeline, I will do what I was considering doing a few years ago, which is officially declare ifmlam otherwise abandoned and make one more giant chapter update which is a full and cleaned up outline of what I was going to write, interspersed with the scenes already written, and have ifmlam be given at least that closure.

*I want to make it clear that I very much love fanfiction and am proud to have been a fanfiction author and in my heart of hearts would keep writing it forever, I just also have a lot of ideas for characters and settings and magic systems and Aesthetics and I have been biting at the bit to write something that is //mine// and all mine and only mine for a while, I don't see original work as superior so much as there are a dozen fandoms that I am currently in and bursting to make content about except oops these fandoms currently only exist in my head, and I want to correct that

of course given how much as writing is my vent activity and I write what I'm in the mood for, there's a chance I'll feel ifmlam cravings before then, just... expect it to take a couple of years for an update, but also for there to be an update one way of another in a couple of years? but as for right now, I'm turning to original writing, because that is what brings me joy.

but I am really deeply honored that it brought you so much joy!!! and while I will never publish spoilers in a public place, if you message me off anon I am perfectly happy to give a run-down of my current plans for the ending, bc I know "wait a couple years and see" is not the most satisfactory of answers! and hey maybe you'll be like me and once you've given Opus a try you'll decide you like it better too, it does have Seers although they are deeply different Seers than in ifmlam but imo it's very gay and fun and at least politics on one side

#my life #my writing #ifmlam

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corpsentry · 4 years

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behind the taylor swift gundam was in fact another, smaller gundam: a brief inquiry into the events of june 2020

so back in june this year june and i got together and we made this motherfucker of a story with this motherfucker of a thread to keep track of it all. but you already know that! and i’ve already got one foot and three elbows in my grave, so i’ll spare you the long-winded stuff. you wanna know how i wrote 93,035 words in 4 weeks? i’ll tell you how i wrote 93,035 words in 4 weeks-

-by linking you guys to copies of my planning documents because i feel like those words speak louder than any words i can offer in the present day. these are long documents. but they are also historical artifacts. very interesting. very weird. very, uh, full of cussing. so anyway, here’s

BIG DADDY: THE ORIGINAL PLANNING DOCUMENT

for those, like me, who have no motivation left in life to do anything and rely on summaries from others to acquire new knowledge, it all started with a single line.

prince of a fallen kingdom atsumu tries to kill hinata but falls in love with him instead

june, april something, 2020

with that in mind i tested the concept out with a few paragraphs of text, which you can find at the bottom of the Big Daddy document in the graveyard segment, accidentally sold my soul to the image of hinata with epaulettes, and then worked backwards, structuring an entire plot around two images:

a) hinata getting the shit beat out of him, with snark b) hinata and atsumu dancing in an empty ballroom under the stars

if you want a betrayal, you have to have something worth losing. if you want to fall in love with someone you don’t know, you have to meet them. if you have to meet them, there has to be a reason for that meeting, and so somewhere in between atsumu became a sword instructor and hinata the prince with daddy issues. june and i used this method of glancing anxiously over your shoulder to see what you’d missed to fill out the blanks in the story, after which i tacked up a bunch of post-its, typed out the plot, consulted june, typed out the plot again, and then broke the characters down into a bunch of questions, like ‘what do they want?’ and ‘what do they have?’ and ‘what are they afraid of?’

with the plot more or less ironed out, i decided it was time to start writing, and then i decided that i was actually too scared to start writing after all, so instead i set a couple of timers using classroomtimers.com (15-20 minutes long) and i sat down and i wrote about the world that hinata and atsumu inhabited.

each warm-up was 300-500 words long, and for the first few days, i’d write one before getting into writing the story proper. later these evolved into simply picking a scene from the story and launching straight into it, which became useful for opening those scenes later when i got to them organically.

then i got lazy! so i stopped. but these shitty little exercises were really useful for me because, unfettered by plot, convention, or any kind of tradition hovering over my shoulder, i was able to fuck around loosely enough to realize what i wanted this story to be. it was a very contrived kind of trial-and-error, an exploration of the characters, the story, but most importantly, the tone.

RESEARCH, PLANNING, AND VICTORIAN BOUGIE FASHION

this is a loose map of the castle and Important Locations within it, which i drew up at the start so i could keep track of where everything was and how i could get my characters from point A to point B. i wanted the story to have Some kind of internal logic, you know, even if that logic amounted to ‘a compass would function normally in this world whereas kageyama tobio would not’.

99% of my planning and organizing within those five weeks took place in this lovely dotted cat journal which my sister gave me for my birthday and i repurposed into a metaphorical Diary of Suffering while working on juno. i used it for everything from keeping track of narrative threads to clothing consistency checks, but the main purpose was this: each day at about 10 pm i’d crack open the cat book to a fresh page, stamp the date and the day of suffering at the top, and then write down a list of things i wanted to write, address, or fix today. then i’d sit at my laptop and write like a madman until about 7 in the morning. with breaks, of course, for sitting in the bathroom and staring at the wall and sitting in the kitchen and staring at the wall, but mostly i was writing. and complaining about writing. you were there, you probably remember that.

anyway, here are some pages from the cat book.

aside from the fact that my handwriting is complete shit, you can see that i made zero effort for any of this to be presentable. it was mainly a way for me to keep track of my thoughts because i have the attention span of an ikea wardrobe and tend to forget things as soon as i think of them. the lack of structure also mirrored the way that i went about writing juno. while i did proceed, for the most part, in chronological order, i had a lot of weird and useless revelations during lunch, which by this point was happening around 2 am, and in the 5 minutes before the exhaustion finally hit and carried me down to hell. i changed A Lot. again, to understand exactly how much the story evolved from day one onwards, please consult the big daddy document.

in the meantime, here’s something else.

once june sent over hinata and atsumu’s character designs i sat down like the fucking fool i am and spent 2 hours poring over a document about victorian and other fashion movements of the past so i could assign a noun, adjective, and verb to each element of their outfits. i don’t know why i did this. i certainly could have not, but i attempted to make sense of their ‘fits from a logistical perspective and that went into the cat book too. everything went into the cat book. the cat book is a relic of the past now, stuffed with artifacts such as the birth of oikawa tooru, and also his demise.

MEDIUM DADDY: EDITING, PROOFREADING, AND CREEPY MURDER CATS

i finished writing on june 26th, 2020, approximately a month after i’d first started planning, somewhere around may 27th or 28th. at that point i had about 90,000 words’ worth of story and no sanity left whatsoever, so i took a day-long break to stare at a wall and listen to taylor swift’s enchanted on loop.

and then i made a new document, which you can look at using the link above, and i laid out everything i had to do. i’d discovered a fuck ton of plot inconsistencies and general errors while writing and lying awake in bed at 9 a.m., sleepless in seattle, and now that i was free of the demon egging me towards the first finish line, it was time to Deal with them. i speed-scrolled through the draft, which was 200+ pages compressed into one google doc, because i like to tempt god’s wrath, and fixed up all the plot issues over the course of a few days. this was the fun part.

the actual, hard editing was the extremely un-fun part. i reread the entire thing, paragraph by paragraph, line by damn line, from start to finish, paying especially close attention to awkward phrasing, incomplete dialogue, and moments which had fallen flat in my haste to get on to the next one. this was really fucking terrible. i spent more time lying facedown on the floor than actually editing anything, but after a long time (about a week), that, too was done.

SMALL DADDY: TITLES, SUMMARIES, AND GOOD FUCKING BYES

i spent a good eighty days thinking about the title, though hilariously enough we ended up with something that was a blend of our names. june + elmo = juno, which is, all things considered, pretty perfect, but the process of picking the title was Hell, and i Did Not Come Up With The Title until about 2 hours before posting. you can take a look at the haphazard clusterfuck of my title-selecting process in small daddy, which is linked above.

so the title was a last-minute choice. so was the summary. and the chapter divisions. and actually all the songs in the playlist for juno. the day we dropped juno onto planet earth like a newborn baby pitched out of the sky, i spent an hour hunched over my laptop, cutting my 213 page google doc into chapters based on nothing more than a Vibe. two days before that, i also attempted to voice-act the entirety of juno, an affair which ended at the 20,000 word mark with a sore throat and the kind of exhaustion one typically wants to sleep in a coffin for 23 years to get rid of. so in all honesty, i did very little editing, which is why there are definitely minor typos and/or mistakes hanging out somewhere on that chunky ao3 webpage. but whatever.

my attitude by july 5th (was it july 5th? or 4th? somewhere around there) was basically whatever. anything so i could get finish this damn thing, chuck it out of the window, and never see another google doc until the next century. i’ve been asked a few times how exactly i wrote at a rate of roughly 2000-3000 words per day for four weeks straight, and my answer has always been this: i died. what died, you ask? my soul. my spirit. my Will To Live. i’m a creature of fixations, and juno was my fixation for june. will i ever be able to do this again? would i recommend this experience to anyone? is god real? the answer to all of the above is probably no. juno was a fever dream, and so is my cat book. and so are all the lattes i had. and so was my 9 am to 4 pm sleep schedule.

but what we made is real. the research, oikawa tooru, the 4 am conversations in which i was like ‘how the fuck do i end this’ and june was like ‘jade proposal’ (the proposal was her idea. all rise for twitter user atsuhinas. she is the mastermind behind all of the Inch Resting moments in this story; i just flapped a korok leaf in her direction and made sure the air circulation was working properly) are real as fuck, and looking back, there’s a lot i’d change, but i’m lazy. and college is starting. and anyway, i did write 93,035 words in just under five weeks, four if you don’t count the week of Editing Hell, so i think that’s pretty cool.

thank you for reading this to the end, and for following us on our journey through the enigmatic taylor swift gundam fic which quite literally consumed my entire twitter account for the five weeks i spent working on it. retrospectively speaking i really was butt-obsessed so i am frankly incredibly impressed with everyone around me for putting up with a Husk of a Man for a month. thank you for doing that. thank you for indulging my vague tweeting, and our butterfly dns, and for reading 93 thousand words of gay fanfiction set in a high fantasy world with epaulettes and galettes. on behalf of june, once again, we are incredibly grateful for all your support.

if you have any questions about specific aspects of the writing process, or anything you’d like to know in general with reference to JUNO, feel free to drop me an ask through my tumblr inbox, or through my curiouscat over here. i’m aware i didn’t cover everything, but there’s frankly too much to put in a tumblr post without passing away somewhere around the 56% mark, so let me know what’s on your mind, and i’ll try to answer that to the best of my abilities. but anyway, before i go, here are some

TAKEAWAYS

one: don’t try to write 93,000 words in five weeks. seriously don’t fucking do it you will end up jittery and sleep-deprived and you will leave all your friends on read for a month. pace yourself. set realistic goals. you wrote 2k this week? that’s fantastic. you wrote 4k in a day? you absolute motherfucker. i hope you’re taking a long fucking break tomorrow. your story will not run away from you, but if you run too fast, you will get tired, and then you will pass away.

two: you don’t have to know everything about your story before you start writing. in fact if you have a single camera shot of two characters holding hands under a rose garden awning, i think that’s fucking wonderful. if you look at big daddy, you’ll realize that my initial plot draft, and all the ones following that, are not perfectly aligned with the final version of juno. i improvised over half of the scenes in this motherfucker, and to be completely honest, some of the improvised scenes were the best. fucking oikawa tooru was improvised out of nowhere. he only got written in way later, around chapter 8 or something, because i realized i needed a plot device and a source of information to keep the playing table from toppling over. i Sat Down one day and was like ‘okay, it’s time to write oikawa into the introduction. because he matters now. he didn’t matter last week but now he does, and soon he’s going to be the fulcrum of the entire story, because it’s like that with oikawa tooru’. it’s okay to change your mind halfway. it’s okay to go back and rewrite entire scenes or segments. it’s okay to highlight 4 pages of fresh, sentimental writing, and hit delete. writing is a fluid process, and you Will make discoveries as you progress through your story alongside your characters. be understanding of that iterative process. be kind to yourself.

three: You Are That Motherfucker. you, me, your dog, your dog’s friend, your dog’s enemy, all of us are that motherfucker. i never thought i’d be able to write anything longer than the great big map, which was a much simpler, linear story in which the other main character did not appear in the current timeline until like the eighth chapter. juno was different. juno was the motherfucker, and i was scared shitless of it, and to cope with that fear joked constantly while writing that it’d never see the light of day.

but it did. it was a rocky process, and i was awake for 48 hours after posting it because of the sheer adrenalin stuck in my skull, but i got through it. and i wouldn’t have been able to do it without june, who stepped in when i flopped over facedown on the floor and dragged me to my feet like the badass friend she is, and without everyone else in my life, who put up with me talking about The Thing that i couldn’t really talk about, but juno’s up there now. forever, or until the internet collapses and civilization goes extinct. and if the nineteen year old clown with the attention span of an ikea armchair and an a level certificate from hell wrote the 93,000 word long thing, so can you. i mean this completely unironically and with every ounce of genuine emotion i can summon from the cracked asshole of my heart.

writing is hard. writing is scary. writing is an investigation of the world around you and therefore, by extension, yourself, and that kind of honesty is freaky. it’s like going skinny-dipping next to the president’s mansion. who’s going to see you? what if they take a photo? what if you lose your spot at university?

but don’t think about that. our world is overrun with stories the way cereal bowls are full of cereal, but it’s those stories that keep us all sane in the disgusting day-to-day muck of reality, so think about your story. what’s haunting you today? what message do you want to leave printed in font size 666 comic sans across the southern hemisphere of the planet? what will you be tomorrow?

a writer. you’re going to be a motherfucking writer.

#my stuff

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ohnobjyx · 4 years

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Hello, I'm new here and i heard gg made post with kadian 18:XX during the filming of OOL but i couldn't see it on gg weibo since he made his prev posts private. Do you have any ideas of these and what are those posts about? Thank you and sorry for troubling you :)

Hi do you have screenshots of when dd supposedly posted on the 23rd of each month and of when gg posted at 18:xx every time when he was filming ool?

Hi, anon! I do have a few about gg’s 18, but since I wasn’t in the fandom then, I don’t know if there are more. I found 3, which is one every month (which is quite frequent when all things are considered) but maybe there are more I don’t know about. And about dd’s posting on the 23rd... you’ll see below, but I’m afraid it may not be useful.

(Nothing to see under the cut unless bjyxszd).

Disclaimer: all fake, all fake, if you take it to heart you lose.

Gg was filming OOL from August to the 6th of November.

Note that these are all from 2019, but the year doesn’t show because the screenshots are from last year.

The first one is a commercial, and I can’t think of anything remarkable about this one except for the kadian (18:20 = yibo, I love you).

This is actually a w/ibo story (I don’t have the video, sorry), and it showed a sunset from Abu Dabi. Bxg think he filmed this short video on the 5th of August, around 00:00 (local time in China, which would make it the sunset time in Abu Dabi). He must have sent this to dd then (privately, since there was nothing on the Internet), why post it again publicly on the 16th of October?

That same day, the episode 3 of 爱思不si aired (”Ai si bu shi si”，”Love doesn’t die”) and the poster with gg’s photo and his phrase during this interview “I may never have a romantic relationship in my life” all over it were everywhere in w/ibo.

So bxg think that he posted it, with such a kadian (”yibo, zhan loves”), and the caption “something I had in stock, you must be healthy and happy everyday!”, to send a message to dd. Bxg speculate that the “be happy everyday” is actually gg asking him not take his interview to heart.

This one is remarkable because the kadian here is played backwards (gg does this sometimes) so it does contain the “18″, but not very visibly.

1321 518 = “I love you for all of my life, WYB”

Regarding dd’s posts every 23rd... (this is more “incomplete” in the sense that I’m not very sure that these are the correct posts, but I tried my best).

I didn’t found them anywhere, so I went to w/ibo and made screenshots myself (that’s why the quality of the images is rather poor). I started from summer 2018, because I don’t know when did he start, and found nothing too remarkable on 2018 (only his post from 23rd November, with kadian 13:52 = “I love for a lifetime”, but that may be about motorcycles 😂).

To be honest, I don’t think there was so much of a pattern (he starts on April, but skips June, August and September), but I understand why bxg might have been head over heals with the last two.

If we look at them one by one:

190423: this one is actually remarkable because the caption says: “the happiness of the first encounter” (dd started following gg on w/ibo on 180423, so maybe he received a notification about that and thought to post something for gg?).

190523: I don’t think this one was a message for gg, he’s congratulating YH for their 10th anniversary.

190723: ... maybe? I mean, dd is known for deleting posts and posting them again if he has made a typo, but this one was edited (he does that when he wants to keep the kadian). But I can’t think a meaning for 18:06 (if someone knows, please tell me!)

191023: he uses here the kadian “13″, so it could be understood as “23 13″ = “love zhan for my whole life”.

191123: 21:41 = “love you, missing you”. This was a w/ibo story with him practicing with the skateboard. The caption says “after work~”.

191223: he shared a photo from his Oasis account, with the cover of his single “No sense”. 12:28 = yao ai, ai bo “if you love, love ‘bo”.

The one from December was actually the last, because he did post one on 23rd of January, but that was to cheer Wuhan and has nothing to do with gg.

So he did “several” months in a row, and the last two aren’t so work related. However, I wasn’t in the fandom, so I can only offer some “facts” (all fake, mind you) and I’ll update this if I find anything better.

#yizhan #bjyx #gg's 18 #dd's 23 #ask #my post

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nicolewrites · 4 years

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author’s thoughts: i apologize for my divinity (it is never enough)

I don’t know if anyone is actually going to read this, but I wanted to get this down. Before you read, know that I will be massively spoiling a lot of things from the fic so I’d recommend you read it before you continue. Part I is on Tumblr here and here for AO3 and FFN.

So, now let’s talk.

Fire Emblem Three Houses was my first Fire Emblem game. I had no idea what to expect beyond a close friend of mine insisting that Fire Emblem was one of his favourite game series. I knew it was a turn-based combat game, but I didn’t have high hopes. I started playing it mostly out of curiosity. and I adored it.

My first route was the Blue Lions route, though it was a hard choice between the Blue Lions and the Golden Deer. I ended up falling in love with every character I used, even if my recruiting was lacking. I found the story intriguing, but almost incomplete. I finished the route and I had Some Thoughts.

So I wondered, what happens if I write them down? So I did and part 1 of the fic was born. And it was 5.5K words, to my absolute surprise. But, I was having fun and I wanted to finish it with Azure Moon. At this point, I also began a NG+ playthrough of the Golden Deer route.

I came to realize that as complete as the Blue Lions route felt it almost felt lacking in the lore department of the story. So I decided to end part 2 by tearing Byleth’s heart to pieces and sending her back to do an ultimate run via the Golden Deer. To do this, I decided to focus on that moment with Dimitri and Edelgard as the turning point as to me, that was one of my favourite cutscenes in the whole playthrough.

So part 3 was born and I used Claude, my favourite character from Golden Deer, to continually connect Byleth to the current life while also remembering and trying to fix the past life. I had considered changing Edelgard’s reveal and motivation, but I liked the idea of the futility and inevitability of a lot of what Byleth was going through because that’s what I felt on my second playthrough. I will say, however, the reveal with Dimitri was a much more powerful moment for me with the Blue Lions.

After this point, part 3 was almost 8000 words and my page of outline notes was now two pages. There were characters I wanted to explore and scenes I wanted to write, and quite frankly, angst I wanted to bestow. It was around this point I made a list of characters who could, in my opinion, logically die or be removed from the narrative.

As I crafted part 4, I thought about all of these things. Ferdinand, in particular, was a character I liked, but I almost enjoyed the idea of his rivalry with Edelgard developing into something that could get him killed over and over. I also liked the image it represented that not everything was changing the second time.

I chose to save Dimitri via Byleth which is one of the only decisions I wasn’t sure about. I think that the way I ended up placing it in part 5, using the visions from the first life, was my way of respecting Rodrigue’s original sacrifice and the recovery that Dimitri undergoes with the Blue Lion route. Taking back Fhirdiad was also a part of this.

But I wanted the connection between Claude and Byleth to be as real as it was between Byleth and Dimitri. I chose to have both lords play a major part because while this was Claude’s storyline, Dimitri was a king and he was important to Byleth.

Parts 5 and 6 should have originally been one part. But then I kept thinking of things I wanted to write. Part 6, originally, was going to only be the Shambhala, Rhea, Nemesis, and a shortened version of the Dimitri and Claude scenes. Instead, it’s the longest part, to my surprise.

Still, I don’t think I would have changed anything about the way that it turned out. I started writing January 10 and I finished January 30. I wrote 45 000 words in 20 days. While in university. Mostly between the hours of 8 and 11pm each night. I don’t know how it happened either.

According to Google Docs where the entire fic was born in a single document, I had 111 pages, 44 024 words, and 246 242 characters. My editing was lacking because I knew that if I mulled I would change it and lose the authenticity of the emotion that I wrote with.

If anyone actually read this little rant, congratulations and thank you? I’m always happy to take questions in my ask box or messages here on Tumblr. I hope that this story resonated with you and you were able to ignore my many typos since, as we say in the Fire Emblem fandom,

No Beta, We Die Like Glenn.

Love you all xoxo

#the writing section #writing meta #f: fire emblem #fire emblem three houses #fic: i apologize for my divinity #fe3h #fe3h spoilers #shut up nikki #nicole.txt

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less-than-hash · 5 years

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Pardon My Interjection

This is one of my favorite things that I've ever experienced in any game. Seriously, I think about it all the time.

youtube

(Link.)

It’s probably my favorite example of a companion interjection, which is what we at Obsidian call it when a character who's accompanying you says something in a conversation with some third character. Other studios may have a different term for these.

This is going to be a bit of a deep dive, and it’ll get long. So that you might know exactly what you're getting into below the cut, these are the things I intend to touch on:

Interjections at their simplest

Why interjections exist

Variations on the above that are a bit more complex

How these can be structured behind the scenes

The limits of interjections

Things I'd like to see more of in games

Why the interjection above is my favorite from any game I've played

A WORD OF WARNING: I use examples from Beast of Winter throughout this post, so it contains some mild spoilers regarding that DLC. Plot-wise, it's nothing that you wouldn't learn by reading a review of that release, but if you want to approach every line of dialog as fresh as well-boiled water, beware.

At their simplest, interjections are lines of dialog delivered by a companion during a conversation with a different character. These can range from a comic quip to a strong critique of the player or whoever they're speaking with.

They - again, at their simplest - have no mechanical or narrative impact. They're not there to change anything, but to add flavor.

Because the characters who speak the interjection may or may not be present, the interjections must be designed in such a way that they are not integral. They can't be necessary to the quest, and - though they can advise the player - they can't be relied on to provide information that the player requires.

If Serafen or Ydwin weren't with the player in the capture above, they obviously wouldn't have said something. In this case - as in most cases - no one else would have said anything either. And the player should never have noticed anything missing.

Or, in short, this content is by its nature peripheral.

The goals of these interjections vary, but can generally be distilled down to one idea: they provide additional context to the player. They might be additional information about the world, about the quest, or about the character who interjects, but it's basically icing on the cake of the game.

Behind the scenes, in our conversation editor, this particular exchange looks like this:

You can see where the interjections occur at nodes 178 and 196. You'll notice in both cases that what those nodes flow into is exactly where the conversation would have gone without the presence of those nodes.

Since I wrote this conversation, I likely filled in Serafen's and Ydwin's interjections as I went, but had another designer written this, or had someone else been responsible for those two companions, nodes 178 and 196 might have read in our first draft something like this:

(LR here means "line request," and we use this structure to draw the attention of a writer to something they need to fill in. So, for example, if Paul Kirsch is responsible for Maia, he'll do searches of our conversation database for "LR Maia" to make sure he fills in any content she might have.)

If these are so shallow, what's the point?

Well, for one, even if these were nothing more than icing on the cake, we personally rather like icing. So there's an extent to which it's a design choice. We want our companions to speak up sometimes, so we let them.

In Deadfire, at least, there are also systemic reasons for interjections. They’re a big part of how our relationship system functions. But that’s well outside of the scope of this post.

That said, the narrative context added by these interjections is rarely only for flavor. Each word we write costs money, both in translation and in VO. (Not to mention whatever time we developers spend writing, reviewing, and editing it.) We generally want our dialog to accomplish as much as possible as efficiently as possible.

Serafen's interjection here, for example, reminds the player that Vatnir is a biased character with an incomplete understanding of his circumstances; he should not be understood to be an impartial authority. You might think "yeah, obviously - we just uncovered that he's terrified of the very death that he's been preaching as an unassailable good."

The thing is, the player's relationship with Vatnir also changed in that moment. The player may think they've broken through the lie and now hear the unvarnished truth. Serafen's interjection serves to remind them to stay skeptical. Even if Vatnir intends to tell the truth, he's not omniscient or an expert.

Note that Vatnir's more-or-less correct in this particular claim. The Vytmádh does lead to the White Void (kind of - but that metaphysics discussion is well outside of the scope of this post). Uncertainty, however, can add to the player experience of exploration and discovery, so I didn't want to banish it.

Interjections can also provide other information:

They can suggest alternative routes to approaching obstacles

They build upon the details of the world and the cultural expectations of the characters within the world

They provide a window into what player actions the companion will or will not be pleased by

I think it’s not unreasonable to claim that if we only ever express a companion's preferences through UI notifications after the fact we're not treating the player very fairly. Especially in cases where the change in relationship can be significant.

Serafen, for example, hates slavers. If the player only learned that when Serafen exploded at the player for having treated with slavers, I would consider that bad design. So Serafen speaks early and often about his loathing of the slave trade. If slavery (or even things like slavery, such as indentured servitude) crop up, Serafen expresses his feelings on the subject.

As a result, when the player encounters slavers, they should understand how he is likely to respond to the player working with them, even temporarily or as part of a ruse.

(A bit as he might to this.)

So this very simple implementation is fine... provided that the content within the interjection is straightforward, non-confrontational, and inoffensive - in short, if it doesn't demand any kind of response or follow-up.

Ydwin's wry commentary requires no response from the player or the characters in the scene.

But consider if she'd said something like, "How utterly simple of you, Watcher. Don’t listen to her, little monstroisty. I assure you that our doctrine is nothing like that." Would the conversation still flow well?

I'd say no.

The original Pillars of Eternity was criticized by some (myself included) for the companion interjections feeling divorced from the rest of the world. If Aloth, for example, speaks up during a conversation with an animancer to call him an idiot and a monster, and that character just continues on as if Aloth had never chimed in, the world feels less real and less reactive as a result. Yet that's what too often occurred in the original Pillars.

(This actually led to a fan theory that the companions were all ghosts that had attached themselves to the Watcher. I love this idea, but, alas, it is not the case.)

In Deadfire (and Tyranny) we aimed to avoid this by having some interjections be more complex. If a companion says something that demands a response from whoever the player is speaking to, for example, we always try to have that character react to the companion.

Sometimes we instead give the player an opportunity to respond to the companion:

(Nice typo, past me. Also, in the shipping version I cut "deaf" for "obstinate." I felt that Ydwin would differentiate between willful ignorance and a likely unasked-for physical condition.)

Sometimes other companions may respond, if present:

Other times, NPCs may initiate the interaction with the companion, in essence starting the “interjection:”

Cuitzitli’s third line here wouldn’t play if Serafen weren’t in the party.

Or there might be some combination of the above:

Obviously, these structures become much more complicated to implement. In the tools, the “I thought it was funny” example above looks like this.

Oh gods, it was worse than I imagined!

So why did I structure it like this?

Well, in part, obviously, because I hate myself.

But besides that!

So first off, Vatnir gets top billing for two reasons:

His comment makes the most sense as an immediate response to the player's words

He's the new hotness - by which I mean the companion added in Beast of Winter, in which this conversation takes place.

Okay, makes sense, but why the random node after?

There's a few reasons. One, it seemed important to have someone speak in response to this player choice if at all possible. Since we’ve no idea which characters will be at the player's side, I shot for what I considered a few likely candidates: Ydwin because she's also a focus of Beast of Winter; Edér and Pallegina because it's likely the player will have at least one of the two of them; and Serafen because...

...well, probably because he's the companion I know best and I was the one writing this conversation.

Now I could have still set this bank to go down the nodes and check for each companion, playing Pallegina's only if Edér weren't present, and Serafen's only if Edér wasn't in the party. Instead I chose to make it random so that different players would have different experiences in this moment.

Or, if the player had all four of those characters, for example, I didn't want them to only ever see Edér's comment.

Here's a much simpler multi-layered interjection: When the player speaks with Udyne at the Luminous Bathhouse, Serafen will interrupt her with a threat (assuming he knows she's had contact with the person he's seeking):

If Pallegina's also in the party, however:

In our conversation editor, this is incredibly simple in comparison to the example above.

(Yes, I translated the Hylspeak for the poor voiceover actor.)

It's basically an interjection within an interjection.

These can be very useful, especially for establishing differences in opinions between characters, but they're also tricky. If the chance of the player having a particular companion in the party at any given time is small, the chance of the player having a specific combination of companions is even smaller.

That said, there are ways we can make this a little cheaper.

For one, we can establish expectation - a player who has Serafen and Pallegina in their party can see the above and wonder if perhaps they should pair those two more often. (There are a few exchanges like the above scattered throughout Deadfire.)

We can also focus our work on companions we expect the player to carry into a specific piece of content. Xoti and Edér, for example, seem likely bets for content that involves Eothas. If we know the players are likely to take those two together, we can more easily justify having them converse.

Note that we don’t always do it that way. There’s quite a bit of sniping between Xoti and Vatnir in The Forgotten Sanctum, and I figure the number of people with the two of them in their party at the same time is probably pretty small.

That was a case of character trumping concerns of cost, which can be important - especially to those few players lugging both priests through the Halls Obscured.

But we could instead try a structural solution. In Forgotten Sanctum, for example, if Aloth and Edér are in the party, and Edér's feelings towards Aloth are positive, this bit of conversation will play:

Every node that evaluates as true within that bank will fire a line of dialog. If Pallegina isn't present, her node will not fire. If she is, it will.

But in order for her line to play, your party must include Aloth, Edér, and Pallegina. That seems relatively unlikely, and Pallegina’s line doesn’t provide much information, so why was it important to me to give Pallegina the potential to speak there?

The Forgotten Sanctum is the last of the DLC expansions for Deadfire. It's very nearly the end of this adventure for this group of characters. Further, this is the trio of returning Pillars of Eternity companions, the characters who have walked (/sailed) this path with the player the longest. I wanted to reflect on that relationship, to remind the player where this journey began and how far it's come.

That’s why everything in this explicitly connects back to the Dyrwood, whether Aloth's connection to Thaos and Woedica, Edér's faith, the statue beneath Caed Nua, or Copperlane, a district in Defiance Bay, where the player first met Pallegina.

It's also worth noting that there's a different exchange in the case that Edér's feelings about Aloth are more negative.

Which is to say that even when done efficiently, this kind of reactivity isn't done lightly. It's simply too expensive and too risk-prone to do without purpose.

Thing is, that exchange between Edér, Aloth, and Pallegina could very easily have been set up similarly to the one between Udyne, Serafen, and Pallegina above. It might even have been safer to do so (and clearer to any designers who came along after me to work on it) .

But that structure can also be used in much larger story moments that would be an absolute horror to try to build out as branches.

WARNING: This occurs near the end of Forgotten Sanctum, so if you want to avoid all spoilers, skip past the screen captures of our toolset.

Look at this, read the comments, and try to understand how it functions.

By default, every one of these would play, provided that the person who says it is in the party (which is clearly impossible). But we’ve set some of them only to play if certain other characters aren't in the party.

Serafen will only speak here, for example, if neither Pallegina nor Konstanten came along for the ride.

Some of the companions only speak if they're in a relationship with the player - and those are all bunched together within the bank.

That's because I'm trying to hit specific narrative beats here, to give this semi-random collection of comments narrative coherence. That's why some of the content - that for Edér and Rekke, for example, seems so similar.

These nodes exist not only to provide characterization and empathy, but to deliver the very real and concrete information of "What were the companions doing while the player was zoned out and chatting up a god?"

Between that initial beat from Pallegina, Konstanten, or Serafen and the follow-up from Edér or Rekke, the answer is a clear "watching and waiting" with a bit of "worrying about you" sprinkled in (and doubled down on if the player's lover is present).

Something worth considering: in Forgotten Sanctum alone there are five or six places where we use this structure, generally at big story moments. In every one of them, Vatnir is the last to speak. Why would this be?

With all of the above, I think our team does a pretty solid job of making the companions feel like part of the world, having that world react to them, letting them contradict or support one another, and letting the player respond to them, too.

What I think we could do a better job of is giving the companions agency and systemic weight within the narrative. The companions essentially act as (very complicated and often charming) accessories to the player. Sometimes we let the player call on them to solve a problem or answer a question, as below:

Dragon Age 2 does the same. In the video that began this post, for example, I believe that the player is able to call on Varric if they aren’t charming enough to make the claim of fire on their own.

But ultimately all of the decisions are almost always entirely up to the player.

On some occasions companions will act behind the player’s back without their knowledge. (This is essentially a staple of the Dragon Age series now.)

On others, the player will do something so egregiously against the companion’s beliefs that the companion is forced to stand up to the player. This can occur in several places in Deadfire and throughout the final act of Dragon Age 2, but one of my favorite examples of this is at the Temple of Sacred Ashes in Dragon Age: Origins.

In the former two games, the crisis moments are deeply tied to the plots of the characters. In Origins, however, Leliana’s response to a player desecrating the ashes of Andraste is character-driven rather than plot-driven. It’s not a result of the player acting against Leliana’s aspirations or a faction she’s aligned with - it’s her response to the player doing something she considers absolutely heinous.

I think that’s one of the reasons it’s so memorable.

Which brings me back to the video that began this post.

Here the player makes a successful “check,” and Merrill, merely by being in the party, undermines it and causes the player’s chosen action to fail.

By no means do I think that we should emulate this exactly all of the time. If our companions regularly ruin our player’s plots, we’re just going to make the players resent those characters.

But what we can do is respond appropriately, within the stakes established by the fiction, to the player’s choice of companions in a given situation.

If, for example, the player goes to speak with the chief magistrate of a city with a known criminal in their party, we need to respect that decision - not by having the magistrate ignore it (or quip about it before moving on), but by having meaningful consequences arise from the choice.

Perhaps the magistrate demands a bribe.

Perhaps the player is forced to talk their way out of trouble for themselves.

Perhaps the player becomes a known associate of a criminal - with other characters in the city commenting on it, or on the WANTED posters now baring the player character’s likeness.

We tend to gloss over the player’s choices of companions, to think of them as something that exists outside of the world’s consequences (much as the player tends to), but with none of the forcefulness and agency that the player’s ability to make decisions gives them.

They’re equipment the player added to their character.

I’d like to see us do better, to keep in mind the companions’ beliefs and have them act on them. If I take Anders with me into the chantry - okay, bad example...

If I bring Morrigan into a chantry, I want, at the very least, for her presence to make it more difficult for me to accomplish my goals there. If I end up having to talk our way out of a fight because of a comment she made about the Maker and where the Templars keep their truncheons, so much the better!

When I play tabletop, a tremendous part of the enjoyment I get out of that experience is not knowing how my fellow adventurers will respond to something.

Can I trust K’thir the kobold Wild Sorcerer enough to take him with me to negotiate a peace with the Bloodsalt gangs? Or is he going to throw another bottle of booze at a bugbear?

Note that this shouldn’t always result in unpleasant things for the player! If they take, say, Aveline to chat with the leadership of Kirkwall, she should be able to (proactively, without the player needing to select an option to call on her) smooth over problems, draw out additional information, or negotiate for better rewards by virtue of her relationship to the viscountship.

As devs, we shouldn’t consider this disrespectful of the player’s choices. The companions the player takes with them are more than who deals the most damage or who quips the funniest quips (or is possessed of the cutest whatever part of the anatomy or personality that appeals to you).

When the player builds their party, they’re making a statement about who they want to be with in the world. We should design the world to respond to that decision in meaningful ways.

Cheers, <#

#deadfire #pillars of eternity #narrative design #narrative #gamedev #game design #companions #dialog #dragon age #rpg

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oceanfalls-official · 6 years

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Quick Q/A

I received some questions from a reader about Oceanfalls and the work that goes behind it, and decided that posting them publicly would be a good idea!

More under the cut.

Q1. How much of the story of oceanfalls did you have planned out before you started updating it? how fleshed out was whatever story you had?

A. I had the whole story planned, but not up to every small detail. To put it simply it is just key plot points I want to hit at certain intervals, but no detailed paths between them. Since I would usually be filling in the road from plot point A to plot point B using user commands, I never saw a need to plan everything to a T, if that makes sense.

As for the fleshing out, I know how it will progress (again - barring the small details) and how it will end, so yes it’s pretty fleshed.

Q2. Sorta the same question, but for characterization. How long has nino been an idea? has he gone a different direction than you first thought? What about aria? five? kotori? suvillan? corona? solis? door?

A. Hmm, if I'm speaking of when I first came up with these characters, then they're all several years old by now. Nino was the first one I drew, and I designed every other one in relation to him quickly after. Of course at the time it was nothing serious or good by any means, just random fantasy OCs I made as a teen.

If we’re speaking of since Oceanfalls started on MSPFA, all these characters were ready and unchanged. I added no major new characters or made any major changes to the personalities/designs of currently existing characters, since my plans before I started the comic.

As for the direction they're going in... Well, the last answer applies. It isn't much different from my initial plans and expectations as of late. If you asked teen me, then it's wildly different from what I would’ve made those days, mainly in that they’re now actual characters and not just some cool edgy OCs. p:

I think, overall, Oceanfalls isn't vastly different from the initial serious plans I made for it. It's only really different in that I've improved my writing and art since the planning stages, but that's about it. I have made no major change to the plot and plans yet, and I don't believe I will.

Q3. how much time per day/week do you spend working on oceanfalls?

A. I couldn't give you a per-week estimate, but I'll do per day. I usually have a backlog of sketches for future panels prepared in advance for several upcoming updates, which I sometimes revise by adding more or removing anything redundant.

I do my work all on lining and coloring the panels either the night before the update day, or during the update day itself. Generally it takes me six to eight hours to finish up the panels and draft up the text parts if I’m working on it nonstop. (Ex, the latest 17 page update in October took me around seven hours with no breaks).

I usually take an extra hour or so to reread the update draft a couple times, and make edits if needed before posting it. Sometimes, I miss some things or make some typos, which are usually pointed out to me by readers just as the update goes live, and I fix them ASAP. That's about it.

Q4. Are there any general or miscellaneous tips and tricks you could give me? Every bit helps.

A. Read more literature, it will make you a better writer. Always practice the skill you want to improve, art or writing or whichever. It does pay off but you will only notice the effects way way later, because we subconsciously take the small improvements for granted and don't notice them until they pile up and grow.

Also, always take notes of any idea you have, just do it. You can and WILL forget it, or even worse, you'll forget only bits of it and end up remembering a sub-par incomplete idea.

#FAQ #questions #QnA #mspfa #oceanfalls #ocf #asks

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maiji · 6 years

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Process and wip images for A House That Holds Long Limbs (Part 8)

Previous process and wip documentation: Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Parts 6 and 7

Read the pages here: Part 8 (full complete version will be linked from YYH North Bound master post)

I personally love exploring character dynamics and character interaction! It's definitely what I tend to focus on in comics and stories. Plus you get to draw lots of closeups of people's faces and have a lot of fun with expressions. And that's what Part 8 is full of.

IN THIS EDITION, after the usual script and thumbnails, I'll take a bit of time to talk about expressions and characterization (my thoughts on Raizen and Hokushin specifically, but also some general thoughts on how I approach writing characters and character interactions). More details of some of the panels from part 8 so you can see the faces better!

Script and thumbnails

(If you look closely at the top of pg 2, you can see the page behind was where I started drawing my random dream sequence hahahah)

It’s always kind of funny to look back at the script and see my rushed typing (or texting on my phone, since I’m often doing this on mobile...) - odd typos and dangling/incomplete thoughts like ”my blodd” (lol).

Part 8 was one of the first sequences conceived in the development of this story. As a result, the script and the thumbnails both line up very closely to the final, because I’d already been thinking about it for so long and playing the scene out repeatedly in my head. I had a very concrete sense of how I wanted to direct it, unlike many of the action sequences from previous parts. The main areas I struggled with were historical details (the karaginu was originally labelled “tarp” in the script as a placeholder until I decided what it would be), and the biggest pagination change was probably moving Raizen’s “Maybe you just didn’t take enough off lol!” to the previous page so that Hokushin’s (literal) punchline would be at the beginning of the next.

Expressions

I have a huuuuge soft spot for subtle expressions - the kind where just a bit of extra line or texture around the eyes or the mouth, plus the dialogue or context of the scene, adds nuance to an expression. Especially ones that otherwise can read as relatively neutral. Even a very simple expression that’s just dots for eyes and straight lines for the upper/lower lids and eyebrows can have a lot of variation in how you interpret them, simply based on context and slight adjustments. Here are some examples with Raizen, where his face is super basic:

A: pretending nothing is wrong, calmly answering question

B: pleased with self for being smart - clearly a happer expression than A

C: similar to A, chillaxing and answering question

D: no big smiling mouth so he looks more like he’s focused on intensely sniffing the air

E: same as B basically, but a bigger smile of “everything’s fine!” (when you read the text)

F: extra thickness for his upper lid gives the sense that he’s in the middle of his casual sexy/chivalrous how ya doin’ expression

G: ... which changes in this panel to be more a realization (“oh shit I’m on fire”)

Actually, Raizen and Hokushin are both pretty difficult face types for me, being more “mature” looking male faces with stronger features/jawlines and narrower eyes. Hokushin especially has been challenging because his design has really low eyebrows which result in a default glare. Togashi still manages to make him fairly expressive and not look like he's glowering all the time. With my more limited art skill and lack of confidence, I tend to soften his expressions by really laying on the top line of his eye (this sounds like I'm putting mascara on him or something lmao), and also adjusting the size of his pupils (within reason or it starts to look even less like how I draw him normally, which is a big problem since his shaved head is a defining aspect of his series character design so he already looks pretty different). Here are some comparisons of his face - bearing in mind I had to keep his eyes wide open because of the seals in the story:

A: crying/relief

B: this one here is supposed to be a bit miserable/self-loathing because he really didn’t think Raizen was going to look for him

C: shock, unexpected

D: thinking + “ugh plan B”

E: worried/apologetic and then “OOF/URK”

F and G: a progression to show the differences in rendering the eye. First is a bit angry because he’s realizing where all the blood for the seals came from, then he notices Raizen’s hands, and G is that example of softened expression (more lines on the top eye, larger pupil) to show how bad he feels about Raizen’s injury.

One last thought on expressions. They can easily lose their nuance when inking (the slightest shift to a line can change the expression completely), and especially for someone like me who has unsteady hands it can be a bit of a nightmare. The nice thing about ballpoints is that they can retain a bit of the pencil sketch quality, which helped me freak out less when inking the last page with Hokushin’s glare. Here’s a comparison of the progress:

Though this particular expression isn’t that subtle, you can still see some differences as the drawing gets built up. When the pencil lines are gone and the drawing gets rendered in bw only, a lot of shading is lost. The messy lines can be interpreted more flexibly by your brain since they’re less defined and you haven’t “committed”, so the final version looks and feels less expressive. (This is why a lot of artists prefer their sketches to the finished piece, myself included...) Characterization This will get very specific to this comic, obviously, but hopefully my approach (and biases haha) will come through. With something like a fancomic, there are obviously existing expectations around the characters, but the benefit of working with these guys is that they’re not as prominent in the story or the fandom, so I feel more comfortable playing around and filling in the gaps. (This is probably why I like minor characters so much.)

In the case of Raizen and Hokushin, we know these two have a close relationship and history only through assumption and insinuation. We never see them interacting directly in the series at all. Actually, we don't see Raizen interact with anyone except Yusuke in non-flashback sequences (aside from the kudakusushi. In the anime, more scenes were added with his estranged friends, mostly their fond memories of him beating them up lmao). But it's very clear that they're extremely important to each other. Hokushin obviously speaks of his king in an exceedingly respectful fashion. Meanwhile, Hokushin is actually the last name Raizen says before he dies - his second last line, to Yusuke, is "Take care of Hokushin and the others" - or in my Taiwanese edition, "I leave Hokushin and the others to you". (Lol “the others”. Also I need to draw a comic about this at some point.) Despite this zero actual interaction, it's still extremely easy to imagine it because their characters are so clearly defined. In fact, they're both such consistent archetypes with enough particular quirks that they practically write themselves. So it wasn't difficult to extrapolate and imagine much younger versions of them, and how they may have interacted if they had only just met, which is the foundation of North Bound. Archetypes and stereotypes walk a fine line together, but they do serve as really useful building blocks for sketching characters quickly. This is why I really enjoy symbolic systems like astrology (or some of the the modern incarnations - personality assessment frameworks) because of all the character sketching it helps you do really quickly. Astrology in particular because, without even caring about birth dates or charts or whether astrology is "real" or not, the basic idea of a sign and its bucket of traits and symbols is simply a great resource when you want fleshed out character archetypes to build off of. I talked a bit about this in my Lenormand post, but I think of zodiac signs as one of the many games humans have developed in our attempts to categorize our world into recognizable patterns, and since we've been at it for thousands of years, there's a wealth of reference material, scenarios, analyses not only of the individual archetypes, but for all sorts of combinations and relationships. Some of it very well-thought out, and some of it just lots of fun to read. For my purposes, applying this to North Bound, Raizen is basically a Leo. He's dramatic, positive, powerful, passionate, a straight-shooter. Not only does he embody its main traits, he's literally a king (or eventually one in this story, I guess). And he even has a mane, for crying out loud. Meanwhile, Hokushin is a solid depiction of a quintessential Virgo - hardworking, practical, analytical, stoic, kind - and literally the loyal servant that typifies the Virgo paradigm. The Leo/Virgo duo is a classic partnership, and at the point where we meet them in the series, the relationship we can see has stabilized to exactly that. At the same time, there's tons of potential for a hilarious dynamic as well, especially imagining how they got to that point. (If you wanna have a laugh, look up some analyses of Leo and Virgo relationships and you'll see what I mean.) His freakouts next to Raizen's "hahhaa everything's fine!" carry most of the humour (similar to how his freakout at Yusuke's vandalism of the rurimaru stones carried a ton of the humour in that episode lol). Obviously there are other things that further finetune their characters so that they're more than bland cookie cutter personalities (Raizen's deep thinking about the future of the Demon World, for example, and Hokushin's sense of humour and appreciation/enjoyment of fighting), but in broad brushstrokes, these archetypes work incredibly well, and make it so easy to come up with scenarios and write interaction to the point that I'm now ridiculously behind in actually turning them into comics ahhhhh...

#yu yu hakusho #raizen #hokushin #comics #fanart #process #wip #swearing #profanity #character analysis #character thoughts #expressions #art by Maiji/Mary Huang

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ao3feed-snape · 5 years

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Read the Summary

read it on AO3 at https://ift.tt/2NukIbO

by younoknowme93

This is going to be a little weird. This is a collection of incomplete dabbles/ideas. All will be containing Severus. Some will be mature, others will not, and I will do my best to tag at the beginning of each 'chapter'. Each chapter is going to be a different idea that I've been working on. Do not feel obligated to read this, this is mostly just a log for me to keep track of. If you are curious though, feel free to read, each chapter is a different story and comment if it's an idea that you like. Be warned though, none are complete, all are ideas, and some may cut off in the middle of dialog or action all depending on where I left off. Some are long some are short. I always appreciate feedback, so tell me what you think. There will be a lot of 'chapters' once I post them all. This will exclude incomplete chapters for stories already posted on AO3. This will NOT exclude potential sequels. Will include typos since they are not completed and edited yet.

Each chapter, I will leave a tentative title for, the pairing, rating, tags, etc. Most I will not leave notes on so as a cursory saying, Onward my ducklings.

Words: 190, Chapters: 1/?, Language: English

Fandoms: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling

Rating: Not Rated

Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Categories: M/M

Characters: Severus Snape

Additional Tags: Incomplete

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/2NukIbO

#IFTTT #ao3feed #fanfic #Severus Snape #Snape #Professor Snape #SS

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tamaratrabuuniverse · 5 years

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Week 6 - 08.04.19 The question of the prototype

In today’s we talked about Prototyping. A prototype is an example that serves as a basis for future models. Prototyping can also be seen as a tool to express and show the thoughts of a designer. With a prototype you can figured out needs and problems you would not be aware of in sketches. An advantage of prototyping is also the price, you can really go quick and dirty.

There are two dimensions of prototypes:

the manifestation dimensionbased on:

Material- Prototypes are built of a lot of different materials like paper, wood, screen based, 3D and a lot more.

Resolution– which is the level of detail (database).

Space/Scope – includes the constraints, the environment and the context.

The second dimension is the filter dimension (appearance, data, functionality, interactivity, spatial structure).

These dimensions are connected and overlapping each other’s.

Incompleteness makes it a prototype. You do not have to have the final solution for showing somebody your idea. It is totally enough to “fake it till you make it”, to not fall into technical seduction. Sometimes paper prototypes are the best because the design of the typo or of the pictures does not disturb the basic idea. Clients cannot separate that, they always think your first try’s should already looks like the final product.

So Prototypes helps us as designers a lot.

- Save time and money

- Make your ideas visible for others

- Figure out problems

- Good as a reflection tool

- For tests in the environment

At the end of the presentation we did a little exercise. We built in a group of three persons, models of bridges that has to hold an orange or an apple. We had no choice of the material and just 2 minutes time for it. It was very interesting how every bridge looks different in the end. There were completely other ways of thinking and ideas how to build a bridge. I though the constrain of material and time was a good idea. You could not think to much, we were force to do it quick and dirty.

Readings

Montgomery, Will. 2013. “Machines for Living”. In Wire. 243. 28-35.

O’Sullivan, D. & Igoe, T. 2003. Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers. Premier Press.

Pask, Gordon. 1971. “A Comment, a Case History and a Plan.” In Cybernetics, Art, and Ideas. Edited Reichardt, Jasia. London: Studio Vista. 76-99.

Ramakers, Raf, Anderson, F., Grossman, T. & Fitzmaurice, G. 2016. “RetroFab: A Design Tool for Retrofitting Physical Interfaces using Actuators, Sensors and 3D Printing”. In Proceedings of CHI ’16.

YounKyung, L., Erik, S., & Josh, T. 2008. The anatomy of prototypes: Prototypes as filters, prototypes as manifestations of design ideas. In ACM Trans. Comput.Hum.Interact. 15(2). 1–27.

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sevdrag · 7 years

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dreamwidth update: about The Shattering

This is an experiment with writing. Basically, I've taken one of the many modern/urban fantasy worlds I've build in my head, dropped a couple barely-formed characters into it with a plot idea that might be 7 words long on a good day and pressed Go. The things I post are barely edited. They may have typos. They're not majorly-high-quality writing, in which I've lovingly labored over sentences and synonyms. They contain far too much punctuation and will probably systematically abuse italics. They're not going to be perfect. What I want to see is if - and how well - I can build something interesting, something resembling a story, out of these incomplete ideas and fragmented entries. This is word-and-story brainstorming. It's an experiment. I want to try to make something really cool (or at least decently cool) from this nearly nonexistent framework, and see what happens, and where it takes me. The process is simple: I open up DW during a break at work, and let my brain and fingers go. Whatever happens, I read it over once or twice to correct anything truly offensive, and then make myself post. It's casual, just to practice writing and practice creating to try to get back into the habit. So, that's what's going on here. ( the shattering's world )

For readers of this journal: you are welcome to read and comment and interact, or ignore, as much as you would like. Feel free to ask questions, point things out, make suggestions - whatever, I will love any feedback. comments Comment? http://ift.tt/2tn8o4g

#crossposted #dreamwidth

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dontjudgemeimawriter · 3 years

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When to Give Constructive Criticism: Fitting it to the draft

I’ve gotten pretty good at giving constructive criticism (I think), and I felt like I should lay out some advice.

If you’re a decently experienced writer, you can kinda tell what kind of draft it is by looking at it. There are different kinds of drafts you might be looking at. Knowing what type of writing and writer this is is will help. If you, for example, give to amateur writer who doens’t super know what they’re doing but has just started to get excited a deeply constructive critique, it can kill their excitement. But if you give me, a decently experienced writer, some generic “It was great, you have great ideas” then I’m going to be frustrated, especially if I’m looking for something constructive.

When NOT to be constructive

>When this is obviously a beginner.

You can tell when they’re a beginner. Maybe they don’t start a new paragraph with dialogue. Maybe they put exclamation marks in their narration. Maybe the first scene is a loner teen girl getting ready for her day and you feel like some band is about to adopt them. I can usually tell right away just by the voice, and that’s something I can’t pinpoint, but I can feel it, and as soon as I feel it I can spot other problems.

I say don’t be constructive here. Even if they want to know what you really think. Tbh, I try to avoid even getting to the point of giving feedback on these, just because it’s difficult for me to read, but sometimes it’s an assignment in your creative writing class or you already said you would because you’re The Writer Friend.

Here’s what you do for a beginner: avoid any line edits-- there will be too much. Instead, find the good things-- there will probably be something that’s a good idea, something that’s interesting. Some decent story idea that is currently trapped in beginner writing. Find it and pull it out, find things to like about it. And then ask questions! Encourage them to explore the answers-- word it like “I love this idea, you’ve made me curious about this. Are you going to explore the answer in future chapters?” Never suggest that it should have been there already-- it’s hard as a beginner to take feedback as constructive and instead it can feel like you did it wrong.

The only thing a beginner can do wrong is stop writing. You job is to encourage and validate them, and by finding a good idea and asking questions about it, they can be driven to write further.

(This could backfire in that they keep asking you for feedback further on.)

>When it’s obviously raw writing

Usually this won’t come up with people asking for feedback. For me this happens in a discord I’m in where after a sprint we post excerpts of it. It’s harder to tell here-- some people’s freewriting can sound VERY professional-- but context will help. If it’s posted on tumblr it may be tagged as something or indicated somewhere (If it’s just posted on tumblr, they probably don’t want constructive criticism anyway).

Raw writing is messy, but that doesn't mean you can’t be proud of it. Critiquing raw writing is useless. The only criticism I ever give to something like that is, if I’m friendly with the person, “Let yourself be messy when you’re drafting this sounds way too eloquent for a draft.”

Show excitement here! Show intrigue! Find things that draw you in, that make you wonder what’s going on, that make you interested in reading more. If there’s not a plot thing or a character, find something in the writing-- but don’t prioritize that. Style is not important in raw writing, though if it jumps out at you, go ahead and compliment!

>When it’s writing that the writer has no intention of writing the rest of

They might be answering a prompt or just going off their mind. If something’s confusing maybe point that out, but don’t be too critical-- it’s not supposed to be A Thing.

It’s good to show intrigue here or interest in story events, and if you think it has a lot of potential go ahead and encourage more. But the best thing to focus on here actually is style-- even if it’s raw. Their voice and style will be carried into other projects, not necessarily that plot. If you know this person and their other writing, it might be good to say like “The description is really good here, I’d like to see more of that in [their current] project].” But in general, things you like are best here.

>When they share it because they’re excited not because they want feedback

“Hey! I wrote a thing!”

Love it! Again, find something to like. They aren’t asking for feedback, just validation.

Perhaps once you read and say what you like about it, ask if they want more in-depth feedback.

>When it’s already published

No point in constructive feedback here, they can’t do anything about it. If you think they can take it you may be able to say what you didn’t like-- big things, not nitpicking-- but if not, just say things you liked about it (Even if you’re lying) and move on.

When giving Constructive Criticism

The different stages of drafts correspond to what type of criticism you’re giving. Are you a beta reader, an editor, or a proofreader?

>Beta

Ignore grammatical and spelling errors, unless you’re confused by the mistake. Ignore confusing or badly worded sentences, unless you missed something, in which case, it’s not “Fix this sentence like this to make more sense” it’s “Did I get this right? [restate what’s happening]”

Pay most attention to emotions while reading, things the author did well, moments you felt were slow. Critique when there’s plot holes or character inconsistencies or the character is flat or the description goes on to long (I got bored reading all this). And of course, if you’re sensitivity reading, pay attention to that in a critical way-- good idea to, even if you think something is okay, point out if it’s a bit iffy, why you thin it’s okay but also why someone might disagree).

Read like a reader, judge it based on how you’d judge a book you pick up for fun, with the ability to live-comment your reactions, and do so! If something surprises you, comment it, if you have a prediction, add it. But if something was too obvious, also say so. Pay attention to your feelings while reading and word it accordingly, rather than as instruction.

>Editor

Assuming you’re not a professional editor, in which case do your job. But if this is a later draft and they want you to give them real harsh feedback so they can fix it up:

Grammatical/spelling errors: I think it’s fine to point these out, but it’s not your job to look for them, and if there’s a bunch, I encourage one note (This paragraph is in present tense instead of past; Proper punctuation is to have a comma at the end of dialogue that’s tagged; etc) rather than fixing every one.

Do point out confusing sentences and suggest ways to clarify.

For the most part, reactions aren’t your job here, but channel those into advice/compliments. Look at why it’s happening-- instead of “Oooh I’m really nervous!” say “You’ve done a great job building suspense here!” or instead of “I got bored reading this exposition,” maybe “simplify the explanation here”

Point out character inconsistencies and plot holes, and actively look for them. Reread it a few times to figure it out, and bring in some analysis. Suggest subtle changes they could make, metaphors that may help, if the narration needs to be closer. Ask why they made certain choices and what they’d need to do to make those effective.

>Proofreader

Usually this isn’t your job unless specifically asked. It can be annoying, no matter your level of experience, to open feedback and see nothing but typo corrections. This is low priority until the final draft.

If you are asked to proofread though, read carefully, point out grammatical errors and typos. Reactions and large scale plot edits aren’t your concern-- if they’re really bad you may want to say “You might want to look at this plot element,” but it’s not your job to tear that apart-- you may want to ask them if they want you to, but then you become an editor, not proofreader.

>Incomplete drafts

Incompletes require a separate category, just because you can’t do the same thing. You can’t find plot holes and it may be hard to find character inconsistencies. You can, though, point out things that are interesting, things that are flat, and plenty of other things to criticize.

Them giving you an incomplete draft, though, likely means that they are looking for some validation, but they want to know if it has potential. Some people can take you telling them it has none, but that’s not usually the case. All stories have potential, I think, but that doesn’t always mean the writer will be good at it at first.

Do everything you might do as a beta, or even an editor, but instead of anything being wrong, it’s something to fix in the future, as they keep writing. Point out things that may trip them up now-- maybe a plot hole can be patched as they write-- and plot threads they should follow.

One note, though, is it’s okay to point out when they have a scene or tidbit that doesn’t add anything, but you never know if it will in the future, and imo, it’s okay to have some useless stuff in a first draft, especially if it’s a wip. Saying you didn’t see the point tot he scene can be helpful if they thought it did, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it has no place there.

On a closing note, something to keep in mind when receiving feedback

Something that took me a while to learn, something I have to remind myself, is that no matter what, a draft is okay. The critique I get doesn’t mean I should have done it like that in the first place, all it means is that I can improve it later. being a good writer isn’t about having a perfect first draft, and critiques are not evidence of being bad at it.

#constructive criticism #feedback #writing feedback #editing #beta reading #advice #long post

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