#the writing life
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Saw my first post with someone admitting they used chatGPT to ‘write a fic’ which they then shared here on tumblr and on Ao3.
To be clear, using AI to churn out a piece of fiction is not writing.
Using a bot (possibly one that was trained using a scrape of Ao3, that is to say, the theft of work from every writer who has posted their work on Ao3) is NOT WRITING.
It is theft. It isn’t creation. It’s a regurgitation of the consumed collective work and effort and heart and time of every writer who has shared their work on Ao3.
‘I’m not a good writer’ is no excuse.
Want to be a writer? Put in the time everyone else does to practice.
Don’t feel confident in your work? Open yourself up to the same vulnerability and risk that the rest of us do.
You don’t get to use a fucking bot to vomit out an approximation of a story and pretend you’ve got skin in the game.
The sad thing? This bot-assembled fic wasn’t bad. It was bland, but it had internal logic, some passing context to character and canon. It wasn’t like those early AI art pieces that had surreal compositions and extra fingers. It wasn’t immediately obvious it was made by a bot.
In this instance the person who posted it admitted they had used a bot. Which, actually, I have some respect for. But it probably isn’t the first and it won’t be the last.
I don’t know that there’s a solution to this, but it is both hurting my heart and enraging me.
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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
#book quotes#annie dillard#the writing life#writing quotes#books and writing#books and libraries#literature#quotes on writing
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When you badly want to write that one scene now but you're still in this one boring scene that has to happen in order for that one scene to make sense
#this is how it feels like writing slow burn#weird#writing#writers#writers on tumblr#writer#tumblr writers#writerblr#being a writer#thoughts#writing stuff#am writing#novel writing#romance writing#story writing#the writing life#tumblr writing community#writing community#writing humor#writing humour#writing problems#writing life#writing memes#writing things
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the thing about threesomes is:
I just want each character in them to see both of the others as equally amazing
none of that "blorbo and their two admirers who at best cordially tolerate each other"
or that "these two are only friends and romantic love is superior so I don't have to pay them any mind"
I don't need every side of the triangle to be the same but I need them to be equally meaningful, and treated as such by the story
#propaganda from big throuple#the writing life#fandom#june rambles#I don't dislike V-shaped triads but they often fall victim to this#a triad is three relationships!#not just your otp with bonus content#or I mean#do what you want#I'm not the boss of you#but I will find it unsatisfying
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Writing Captain Presley nudging his boat into a tributary from the main river has become shockingly…suggestive.
I was not prepared for this, they don’t teach you this in fanfic school, y’all.
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AO3 meme
I was tagged by @faejilly and I am in turn tagging @ladymatt @silver-lily-louise @lightwormsiblings @electricshoebox @lynne-monstr @michellemisfit and whoever else wants to do this!
Rules: Give us the links to your wonderful words with the most hits, most kudos, most comments, most bookmarks, most words, and least words.
I'm doing a Shadowhunters-only edition, so unsurprisingly these are all Magnus x Alec.
Most hits: Talking With Strangers, the university AU friends-to-lovers one which broke 20K hits a little before I could finish it. A departure from my usual repertoire but clearly well worth it!
Most kudos: bodies full of untold stories, the accidental soul bond case fic you never knew you wanted, which has been my one reasonably enduring hit in the SH fandom. Still a fic close to my heart.
Most comments: The Stair Into the Sea, the mystery/stealth ghost story channelling the spirit of Maggie Stiefvater's The Raven Cycle and plenty of old-school urban fantasy (albeit it's set in a remote seaside village). This is the fic I most want to finish—it's been a long time coming, and life has not been gentle in the last two years, but it's never left my mind. So it is up next!
Most bookmarks: This one is also bodies full of untold stories, but as a fine runner-up there is Walkers of the Winding Path, my Shadowhunters/The Witcher fusion, which, I'm delighted to say, has found its own weird niche audience. Truly the little monster-hunting romance romp that could.
Most words: Still The Stair Into the Sea by a tiny margin.
Least words: The Morning of a War, a small coda for episode 3.07 of Shadowhunters. This was a tiny slice of melancholy fluff to round out the Institute corridor hug in that episode.
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Great advice... No, wait.
(from Disenchantment S1E18: "In Her Own Write")
#disenchantment#writeblr#writing tips#writing#procrastination#novel writing#fiction writing#writing advice#bean#luci#the writing life#writer demon#nice window#purple sofa
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Photograph of Annie Dillard receiving the National Humanities Medal from President @barackobama in 2014. (Alex Wong)
* * * *
“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
― Annie Dillard, "The Writing Life"
[Follies Of God]
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Can’t seem to write without considering what I would want my author career to be like or what readers are looking for and I feel like to a certain extent this crippled creativity. I’m in no way saying there things should never be considered but sometimes, especially in the beginning it can feel like too much. Thoughts?
it is definitely too much. i used to feel it too. but once i started getting some wins, once i started really listening to the kind things people were telling me over the criticisms, i started to take myself more seriously. and then once i was on the other side of the mentor/mentee divide, when i realized i had been lifted up by writers who believed in me and my work and that i could lift others by believing in them and theirs, i started to see myself as one link in a long chain. and when you're part of a chain, nobody can move faster than you or slower than you; you all move together.
it's natural to consider your audience when writing. it's also natural to consider your market. every artist in history has experienced to some degree this same anxiety. it's the anxiety of creating something that you want to be see welcomed into the world. that fear abates but it never goes away entirely, so you've got to build up defenses against it. mine was 1 part hope, 1 part blind (possibly unearned) faith in myself, and 7 parts spite. hope, faith, and spite can take you a long way. "i hope this will happen," then "i have faith this will happen," then "fuck you, this is going to happen."
an audience isn't something that already exists. you're not a performer walking on stage for a theater of people waiting for you. you're a busker, or a mime, or one of those human statue guys. you're on the street trying to grab the attention of people who don't want to acknowledge you. you're saying, "hey, look at me, i've got something worth seeing," and you wave it around in front of them until they're finally forced to look at you. you're not just a creator of your work, you're also a salesman of it. success is all about the footwork.
and lastly, although novels are made from inspiration and skill, author careers are made of boring administrative tasks. sending your work out, receiving rejections, tracking rejections, finding more places to send your work out, replying to emails, applying for funding, querying agents, filling boxes of text labeled "please describe your current project" but only give you 250 characters to do so. the sooner you separate the ideas of "careers" and "audience," i think the happier you'll be. stories take creativity; careers take tenacity. writing is about words; publishing is about numbers. if you can't have hope for your work, or faith in yourself, or a simmering pool of spite, you can always rely on organizational tedium. you never have to learn how to Be A Writer. you only have to learn how to attach a PDF to a form and hit "submit."
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20 Questions For Fic Writers
I was tagged by both @gretchensinister and @insufferablearchanist and am thus compelled by their charm and glamour to surrender my secrets! [grin]
1. How many works do you have on AO3?
93 at last count. It will probably stay at that number until 31 March 2024, which is when ROTG Hope Week starts. [I get a lot of mileage out of fandom events that are prompt-based.] My goal between now and the month of March is to complete or add to the chapter count of at least three of the multiple-chapter longfics I've got in various states of progress.
2. What’s your total word count?
AO3 says it's 220,945. I don't know if that counts chapters saved in draft on several of my works, which act as notes files for me. So I'm going to underestimate by a lot and say my word count is more than 200K and will leave it at that.
3. What fandoms do you write for?
I'm most well-known for fics in the RISE OF THE GUARDIANS/GUARDIANS OF CHILDHOOD fandom and its subfandom Nightmare Dork University. in the last two years I've ventured into writing fics set in the milieu of DELTARUNE [the videogame by Toby Fox], but those fics are so far into the realm of AU country that I can't claim to "write for the DELTARUNE fandom".
4. Top 5 fics by kudos?
A CITIZEN OF THE UNIVERSE AND A GENTLEMAN TO BOOT, which is the first fanfic I posted on AO3 and is still in progress. It's set after the ROTG movie and involves plot threads from the GOC books, as well as featuring several characters from the Rankin/Bass holiday specials.
"Fleecy Shining Streaming Gleaming/Gimme A Mare With Hair", a giftfic based on a prompt from the ROTG Kinkmeme on Dreamwidth from years agone. Still in progress; my giftee is ***extremely*** patient. [sob]
[[ATTIC]] [[NEST]] [[HOME]], my first DELTARUNE fanfic, set in an AU created by @penbwl and featuring the Swatchton pairing.
"A Temptation Averted", set in my Six Guardians AU series, and apparently everybody's favourite of my ROTG Blackice stories, probably because it's so schmoopy.
CALL SIGNS. Ah, CALL SIGNS. The mammoth fic that has eaten most of my current brain capacity, to the point where I have dreams about it. [and plans for sequels] It was supposed to be so simple. A "what if" story where two DELTARUNE characters met in a human!AU and at a different point in their timelines than they did in-game. Then it suddenly roared to life as a whole sequence of events lifted from my own experiences, spread out over an ever-increasing number of protagonists, not to mention featuring cameos from NDU characters. I wrote it to be accessible to people who haven't played the game and had no familiarity with the characters, and I've been told I've succeeded. I expect it will move up in the kudos count the longer it runs... so far it's the highest word-count work I have ever written. EVER.
5. Do you respond to comments?
99.9999% of the time, yes. [see the answer to questions 8 and 11]. I love comments... short comments, long comments, comments that are nothing but emojis and keysmashes, comments that are well-thought-out analyses. As long as the comment is offered in good faith, I'll answer it.
6. What’s the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?
If we're being strictly literal with the use of the word "ending", then it's a toss-up between "His Days Like Crazy Paving", "Exit", and
"Making Fire".
7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?
So many of my stories are windows into my characters' "middles", rather than having narrative endings, and I tend to the fluph side of the writing scale. So here's a sampling of one-shots that conclude on a happy note... "Caterpillar", "Starmeadow", "Your First Memory Of All", "Bedtime Story", and "Centres Small And Still".
8. Do you get hate on fics?
I've never gotten out-and-out hate on fics. I *have* had someone react negatively when they wanted to use my comment space to plug fics they had written in fandoms I wasn't interested in and I said as much in reply.
9. Do you write smut?
On occasion. I *enjoy* smut... a lot... but I read more smut than I write. "The Joy Of First Flight" is probably my most explicit work to date, and even that is not terribly steamy.
10. Do you write crossovers?
Again, on occasion. CITIZEN ended up being a crossover about halfway in, surprising me rather completely. CALL SIGNS features cameos from other fanon characters, but isn't technically a crossover. AND FEAR AS MY COMPANION is the only work I've written with the initial intent of being a crossover between RISE OF THE GUARDIANS and DOCTOR WHO.
11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?
Not that I'm aware of. I **have**, however, fallen victim to being fooled by AI bots writing what I thought were truly sincere and sweet comments, which I foolishly answered before realizing the truth. Still kicking myself for how gullible I was, but it was at a low point in my confidence as a writer and I was starved for reassurance.
12. Have you ever had a fic translated?
Into a language other than English? Not that I've been informed about. However, someone did make a podfic of my drabble "Hope In A Storm", if that counts as "translation" rather than "transformation".
13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?
I've collaboratively tossed ideas around with @ksclaw and @piratekingpitchblack that have made their way into character development and plotlines for more than a few Nightmare Dork University stories.
14. What’s your all-time favorite ship?
HOW CAN I CHOOOOOOOOOOOOSE?
The one that started it all, that punched me in the gut not even twenty minutes after I saw RISE OF THE GUARDIANS for the first time, was Blackice. I devoured then and continue to devour now every Blackice shipfic I can get my little paws on. From there, once I found the NDU subfandom, it was NDU StageFright all the way, although it's now running neck-and-neck with NDU Nightmare Galleon as far as fics I've written. And currently, I have a very active Tumblr tag labelled "i have fallen down the swatchton sinkhole don't even try to rescue me", if that gives any hints.
15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you will?
I am realllllllllllllllllllly hoping that I can get inspiration for "Sweater Weather" going again.
16. What are your writing strengths?
RESEARCH.
17. What are your writing weaknesses?
Falling into the timesink that research leads to. [sob]
18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language?
That hasn't come up in any of my fics so far, other than throwing gratuitous Italian into dialogue for my OC Mama Michelina.
19. First fandom you wrote for?
If you don't count the self-insert novelization of YELLOW SUBMARINE that I wrote when I was fourteen, then ROTG would be the first fandom I've written for.
20. Favorite fic you’ve ever written?
That's a toughie. The most ***personally satisfying*** fics I've written have been "Deal The Cards", which is a love letter to one of my favourite relatives, now deceased, and "Which Witch", one of the few times a story came pouring out of me without needing to be edited to shreds.
I am hesitant to tag people because when I've done so in other ask games, it has often backfired on me. I love all my mutuals and don't want anyone to feel left out. Therefore.....
WHOEVER READS THIS AND WANTS TO PLAY, CONSIDER YOURSELF TAGGED.
#ask game#writeblr#the writing life#sylph writes#fanfiction has eaten my brain#rise of the guardians#nightmare dork university#deltarune
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*slams head onto desk*
I cannot come up with more Dasey ideas; I cannot come up with more Dasey ideas; I cannot come up with more Dasey ideas; I cannot—
WHY THE SUDDEN NEED FOR VAMPIRE!CASEY AND WEREWOLF!DEREK?!?!?!
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I am starting to believe that the only job of writers is to create characters and write.
What do you mean by hashing out our characters and their personalities??? I wrote my character as someone who knows how to play guitar. Now she's telling me she doesn't know shit about guitar and instead, she plays volleyball?! Now I got to learn sports terminologies!
#writer#writing#thoughts#writers#writers on tumblr#writerblr#tumblr writers#writing stuff#about writing#am writing#fic writing#novel writing#romance writing#story writing#the writing life#writing characters#writing fiction#writing humor#writing humour#writing life#writing meme#writing memes#writing on tumblr#writing struggles#writing things#writeblr#writerscommunity#being a writer#just writer things#lesbian writers
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guess who just passed one million words posted on ao3
it only took me nineteen years (counting from the actual posting date of the oldest fic I have up on the archive, which predates the archive)
still, not bad for an amateur obsessively polishing most words she puts out into the world
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