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taylor-titmouse · 2 months

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hey i want to talk about how you should be promoting your work as an erotic author/illustrator

i'm writing this up because the marketing aspect of my work as an erotic author/illustrator is a science to me, and also because i'm the guy who gets unreasonably annoyed when i see other creators not properly advertising their work. you presumably want to make money off your work. this post will be written under the assumption you want to make money off your work but are doing a bad job at it. it will be very confrontational. if you read this and feel attacked you're right and i am attacking you.

this is geared toward selling erotic comics/writing/books/art as products. i will probably write more than one post about this subject so if i didn't touch on something you want to know more about, comment/send me an ask and i'll keep it in mind for the next one.

i will start with my first and least specific but most important point:

DON'T GET FUCKING CUTE

hi are you paying attention. i'm gripping you by the sides of your face. do not get fucking cute with what you are trying to sell. you are not a big enough property to get cute, nobody LIKES it when big properties get cute, and you are selling porn. you have to own this. you have to be up front about this. don't be tongue in cheek, don't be all teehee i wonder what this could be~, don't be secretive. you are selling a product. you have to fucking act like it. you are an adult selling pornography to other adults. i am GRIPPING your HEAD you NEED to understand this.

and to be clear when i say 'cute' i mean coy. i don't mean cutesy, as in the aesthetic. you can be as hello kitty pastel ten emojis a post uwu as you like when you're building your audience and generating hype. but when you start trying to sell, don't be vague, don't be sarcastic, don't mislabel your work as a joke and assume everyone is on it. because they're not.

you must always assume 75% of the people seeing the thing you are advertising have no fucking idea who you are. and that includes a huge chunk of the people who already follow you. they do not know who you are or what you've been working on for two months or why they should care about it. they just got here. somebody just reposted it. they are seeing it for the first time. most people are only looking at social media for a tiny chunk of their day. they are not keeping up with you. you cannot get cute about what you are trying to sell because nobody knows what it is until you tell them.

okay are you still with me. we are going to talk about clarity now.

YOU GOTTA TELL ME WHAT IT IS

good lord the amount of times i have gone to buy somebody's comic or book and had no idea what's actually in it or what it's about. who are the characters? why should i care about them? what do they do in it? what is the premise of this thing you want me to spend $5 on? why would you not tell me? i'm shaking you again. please i have to know what i'm buying i only have so much money to spend on porn.

porn, arguably more than any other genre, relies on knowing exactly what is in it. you do not want to surprise your readers with a kink they were unaware of! and on the flip side, you do not want to miss out on your target audience! if your book contains a hot spider babe laying eggs in an elf, you have to say so. not just so people who don't want to read about eggs know it isn't for them, but so the people who are egg crazy can see that and go "oh fuck YES i love EGGS here is my $5 and an extra $2 tip for catering to me specifically". a contents/features list is as much an advertisement as it is a warning!

as for re: who the characters are and why should i care, i'm sorry but you need to learn how to write sales copy. you have to write blurbs. you have to get good at the shit that goes on the back of a book. we all hate it but we have to do it. i want to know who the characters are and what the context is. i, personally, am not interested in contemporary stories as much as fantasy and historical. please tell me what genre this porn exists in so i know if it aesthetically appeals to me. pull some books off your shelves and see how they do it. hell man go look at mine.

while you're there, note that every single book of mine has a sample of what's in it. this feels like such a no-brainer to me but again! the amount of times i have gone to buy somebody's work and they don't show me what their work looks like! you gotta give me the first page or two! just enough that i know if i like the way your writing sounds, or the way you draw your comics! i don't know you! i am not going to trust that you're good at what you do just based on a cover. the cover is to get me to this step, it is not the only step. you have to show me that you're worth spending my money on!

to put it less cynically, you want to catch my interest. you want me to go 'oh i want to see more of this', you want me to go 'ahh i want to know where this goes!' you need to get me invested and craving more. earn my $5!!!

YOU HAVE TO MAKE IT EASY TO GIVE YOU MONEY

hey go look at your bio right now. go look at your pinned post. do you have a link to your patreon there? do you have a link to your itchio/gumroad/whatever? do i have to click more than once to get to the places you want me to go to give you money? why? why are you making me click twice? have we learned nothing from every website making you click an extra time when they make some stupid UI update and how much it pisses us off? i have already given up, i have forgotten you, i am not giving you my $5 today. put your links in the easiest places to get to them.

god literally as i was writing this post i went to go find somebody's itchio to see how they described their work and it was not anywhere on their profile. grabbing you and shaking you PUT THE LINK WHERE I CAN FIND IT. don't make it hard! make it easy! i am a dickhead sitting on the toilet scrolling, saw your post, and was interested enough to read further. but you made me go to your bio to find your linktree and oops i have already gone back to my timeline to look at the boobies in the next post. stop wasting precious bio space on DNIs and put your fuckin links there!!!

this is more for the twitter people, but: just put the link in the damn post. just say the word commission. just say it's for patreon. "wuh wuh the algorithm" it is not the damn algorithm it's that everybody hates advertising and nobody wants to retweet ads. putting slashes in the words doesn't do anything and you look like a fool. i have posted so much art that says it's 'a commission for ___" and it did exactly as good as any other art despite having the word commission in it. and by doing the slashes you just made it impossible for anybody to search your account for your commission information (which should be at the VERY LEAST in a post under your pinned tweet if you're not actively posting about them being open).

okay that went on a tangent i'm going to back to the point of putting the link in the tweet. put it in the first post. not in the first reply. don't tell them to go to your bio. put it in the post people are actually going to share. it's fine to put more information in the thread but people are only ever going to share the first post. so put the link there. you have to make it easy. putting links in tweets can hurt you algorithmically, even in the replies. so you're better off having it in the post that actually gets seen and shared. i don't want to open the tweet and scroll to get to your sales page where i ASSUME you will have put all the information anyway. put it in the tweet that just got retweeted by itself onto my dash!

also you have to share it a ton of times. i repost my shit every few hours when i'm trying to push a new product. as i said before people are not 24/7 looking at their timelines. they missed it the first time. they missed it the second time. they didn't get paid yet that week but they were after the eighth time and you reminded them again so they finally bought it. that i will still get sales every time i repost a book ad weeks after release says there are always people who missed it, or who only just showed up.

abandon your pride and shill. shills pay their bills. anyone who gets annoyed about it isn't giving you money in the first place. don't worry about looking like a sell out. don't apologize for plugging your own work. post about it often, post about it in different ways. post about it. post about it. you are not going to make money if people don't know you have something to sell them. if you want to make a career out of it, you need to act like it.

I DON'T HAVE A FOURTH POINT

kisses your forehead. i'm sorry for yelling at you. i've been making and publishing and selling adult art for the past two-three years and have got myself to the point where it pays my rent, and i got there by paying attention to what does and does not work.

please do your best to make money. i want you to make money.

as i said above i plan to write more posts on this subject, such as cover design, how to actually write sales copy, and best practices with running a patreon, but if there's things you would want to hear more about leave a comment or send an ask! i will probably be less aggressive on future topics. these are just things that have grinded my gears for a grip.

#tt talks writing #tt talks drawing

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crybaby-bkg · 10 months

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Yakuza boss Deku that’s sooo sweet and gentle with you, that you had no clue what he did in terms of work. You just assumed that maybe he was an heir to a big corporation, or hustled a lot on the side whenever you weren’t around. You couldn’t be further from the truth, but it’s all still so baffling. At how gentle he is with you, how kind he is, sweet and caring. It’s only been a few weeks since you started seeing each other, and he was nothing if not a gentleman.

Your sexual explorations with each other never went very far. He never got fully undressed, despite you laying bare in front of him. But oh, would he worship you. Get down on his knees and eat you out for hours, it was a wonder his jaw wasn’t tired. And even then, would he just keep going and going until you passed out, unable to ask him if he wanted to switch places.

But, one day, you’re determined to do something for him. Izuku was just too kind, it was unfair how he never let you treat him as well as he treated you. So when he comes over to your place one day, tired, with his head resting on the back of your couch, do you finally worship him the way he deserves.

“What’re you doing?” He asks in a gasp, catching your hands in his own big ones as you start undoing his belt. You can only look up at him with big, rounded eyes, hope he caves as easily as he always does when it comes to you.

“It’s unfair,” you pout. “You never let me touch you too. I just wanna please you, ‘Zuku.” Your voice is so soft and your mouth is so warm where you kiss at his knuckles. You’ll ask him later where that one bruise came from, but for now, you rest your head in his lap. Try not to grin when you feel his cock jump under your cheek, batting your lashes when he swallows audibly.

“Just,” Izuku swallows again, slowly releasing your hands as he undoes his own belt, pushing his black slacks down until they rest just beneath his balls. “Just this once, okay?”

And it’s all you need to hear. You kiss and lick at the side of his cock, nuzzling your cheek against it, mouthing at the forking veins up the side. Izuku can’t help his noises, his little grunts and sighs, his deep groan when you finally put the head in your mouth. He’s so gentle, holding your cheek softly in his grip, feeling it hollow in a suctioning motion as you slide a little further past his tip.

He doesn’t buck his hips or push your head down, and in a sense, you wish he would. So you move his hand to the back of your head, encouraging him to guide you, moaning around his length when he twitches in your mouth.

“I don’t wanna hurt you,” you hear him say in a gasp the moment you slide down on his cock. His tip hits the back of your throat and you gag, holding still despite Izuku trying to pull you back up for air. But you don’t budge, only let your jaw hang a little, panting, tongue dancing up the underside, relishing in the brief tug at your hair before it loosens.

You don’t answer him verbally, but instead sink down on his cock again and again, until you’re sure the back of your mouth is bruised in the shape of his tip. You never take him out of your mouth, only pull back until his head rests on your tongue, jerking the rest of it sloppily with your hand. You stare up at him all the while, feeling yourself throb at the sight of him.

Izuku has always been a composed man. Always stood tall and sure of himself, always handled himself with the confidence that made you start to fall for him. But now? Now, his hair is a disheveled mess, like he’s been running a hand through it the entire time. His emerald eyes are dull, blown out by lust, pupils dilated in pleasure. His mouth hangs open, and you can see the strain in his white button up as he tries not to shove your head down. Something terrible must glint in your eyes, because he does just that.

Shoves you down until you choke and splutter, nails digging into his thighs as he starts using your mouth for his own pleasure. He’s full of apologies the whole time as he abuses your throat, thighs tensing at the gagging sounds you emit, whining high in his throat when you gurgle around his balls.

“Fuck, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to—fuck!” Izuku hisses through his teeth, feeling his sack tighten as he’s about to cum. He rips your mouth off of him, watching the drool and precum messy your lips and chin, connecting to his twitching cock, and it’s enough to do him in. He finishes all over your face, still holding your hair in his hands as he jerks himself off, cum splattering over your eyes and nose and that big grin you never seem to lose.

When he finishes and catches his breath, you attempt to clean him up, pull his pants down even further so that maybe he could shower with you. But as you go to yank them off of him, you get a glimpse of some ink on his thigh. Izuku stops you quickly, post haze going up in flames as he looks at you with wild eyes. He blinks a few times, wonders if you’ve seen too much, and only speaks when you don’t get that terrified look so many have had in the past.

“Let’s go to your room, so I can reward you. Yeah?” He hopes he doesn’t sound as breathless from nervousness, that you equate it to still coming down from his high. And you seem none the wiser, nodding your head as you stand on shaky legs, grabbing his hand and pulling him to your bedroom. You only hope if you confront him about the tattoos, he doesn’t do what Yakuza members know best.

#I was hesitant to write this bc I know bkg posts do better #but I said FICK YHAY I write for myself ^_^#also I was only gonna write the concept down so I wouldn’t forget #but ended up writing the whole thing even tho I’m supposed to be leaving in a few mins wksjdkd #also I saw one of those Reddit story time tt’s and it talked about yakuza members breaking this guys legs #cause he kicked a kid in the chest and I was like. wow. dk core.#anyway pls enjoy this as I try not to cry putting my headwrap on :)#—new treat in the streets! 🍫#deku treats! 🍬

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silverwhittlingknife · 4 months

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the reason why nu52 Dick is so simultaneously messy and yet boring is because they don't let him be bitchy enough whilst simultaneously making him a little bitch

sdfsdfdsfs I don't totally understand what this means and yet I feel like I agree with the spirit, anon <3

Outsiders 21 - preboot Dick yelling at Bruce my beloved

Yeah, caveat that there's plenty of nu52 Dick stuff that I haven't read and I don't think it's all bad, but also... man, he is not for me. As far I'm concerned, the main good thing that came out of n52/Rebirth is some setups for sad!Dick fanfic. And yeah, "Dick is not bitchy enough" is actually a pretty good summary of my complaints sdfdsfs

The thing is, nu52 Dick has some similarities to preboot Tim, in that he'll sometimes be insincerely fake-cheerful even when actually upset, plus he periodically seems uncomfortable with direct confrontation so instead he lies to avoid confrontation. And mmm I mean, I like these qualities in preboot Tim, so it's not like I think these are terrible traits to have!!

BUT :

1) Preboot Tim has no authority. But preboot Dick does, and it's frustrating to take it away from him in nu52.

There's some post-2011 panel where Dick lies to Batman and is cheery about it, a la Tim bragging to his friends about lying to Batman in Teen Titans, and I had to stare at it for ages trying to figure out why it felt like such a record scratch moment to me.

But it's because there is a huge difference between a presumably independent superhero lying to another superhero vs. a sidekick and his sidekick friends secretly joyriding in Batman's car.

Like, Tim lies to authority figures more-or-less constantly, because he doesn't want to be told what to do, but also because - importantly!! - those authority figures reasonably assume they have authority over him that he has to evade. Of course he tries to avoid direct confrontation with the JLA / Batman / Red Tornado / Starfire - they're not his equals and a direct confrontation would end badly!

Whereas Nightwing lying to Batman feels like putting him in a subordinate position in a way that preboot Dick never is. Preboot Dick always tells Batman off to his face, because preboot Dick cares about being equals and refuses to accept being subordinate. He doesn't sneak around behind Bruce's back - he fights back! If he doesn't agree with Bruce's position, he tries to argue Bruce into his own. He'll do stuff without asking Bruce's permission, but he won't conceal it; he'll make a point of making sure Bruce knows what he did and also that he isn't sorry.

2) Preboot Tim's lying / tendency to be fake with people is a consistent personality trait that's also consistently problematized. nu52 Dick's characterization is wildly all over the map.

In preboot, Tim is a liar and obsessive compartmentalizer, which is both a strength (disguises, sneaking around authority) and a problem (loved ones who are hurt by it). He's self-aware about his lies, periodically resolves to lie less, and generally fails at it.

Tim's consistent enough that you can track this character trait in all his relationships: he lies to his dad. He lies to Batman. He lies to his girlfriends. He refuses to tell Babs his real name for ages for basically no reason. He stalks Dick and then tries to run away from him in his origin story and then tries to avoid telling Dick his name. And this evasiveness consistently causes him problems!! Dick's suspicious of him. Ariana's suspicious of him. His dad is suspicious of him. Young Justice and Steph get annoyed with his secret-keeping. Young Justice want him to take off the mask. Steph wants to know his real name. When she finds out and calls him by his real name, he has a panic attack and literally runs away. When upset, he insists he's fine and fake-smiles at people. In Teen Titans, when Tim's busy being fake-cheerful and Conner is startled to see him there right after his dad died, Tim gets upset and angry at Conner and demands that he not tell anyone about Jack. Fine, Conner says, I guess it's another secret. In AC 3, he's lying to Conner again and Conner accuses him of having an insincere "Starfire voice," which is a hilarious callback to Tim being fake-agreeable-yet-secretly-bitchy at Kory when he first meets her. I feel like I get that the lying is a Tim Character Trait which is sometimes endearing and sometimes less so and which all the people who love him are gonna have different feelings about.

By contrast, nu52 Dick spends a ton of time lying but it's hard for me to model his characterization in the same way? He's sometimes fake and ... sometimes that's totally cool and sometimes people punch him! also, does it say something about him? ehhhhh maybe? no? who can say!! At the end of nu52 Nightwing, he doesn't want to go undercover and Bruce beats him up, but then in Grayson he seems totally on board with his mission and willing to actively lie to everyone, and then in Batman and Robin Eternal he carries out a whole secret mission behind nuTim's back because he thinks nuTim is maybe a spy and is scared (?) of confronting him directly, but also he's so sloppy about it that he gets followed and the bad guys find nuTim's parents. Oopsie! He represents The Heart and is super-caring but also somewhat ditzy with a tendency to leap before he looks, and also he's very very very goodlooking and Grayson would really like you to know that.

You can try to make sense of this character's internal motivations and I have read various enjoyable fanfics that do, but in the comics I don't feel like he's clearly characterized.

3) Dick should be a convincing team leader

I know I kind of talked about this earlier but it bothers me SO MUCH that I have to talk about it again dsfdsfds

Preboot Dick is a natural leader: he seizes control of the feuding personalities in the Fab Five; he does the same thing in the NTT; he stands up to Bruce. He can overrule strong personalities like Pantha and Roy; he can hold his ground against the Outsiders. He doesn't back down and he doesn't quit. He's got instinctive authority, and he's a forceful and aggressive enough leader that he can lead teams even when his teammates are feuding or difficult or arguing with each other. Sometimes he's a little too forceful and it backfires on him, but for the most part, it works!

By contrast, nu52 Dick often comes off as kinda... hapless? He's definitely not a force to be reckoned with.

Like, just to take one small example, in post-Crisis's Red Robin 14, Tim and Damian are fighting and Dick wants them to cut it out, so he throws a batarang at Tim's staff and snaps at him, and the fight stops immediately. By contrast, in nu52's Batman and Robin 10, Tim and Damian are arguing and Dick wants them to cut it out, but nuDick is incapable of confronting anyone over anything so he just sighs about it, passive-aggressive and ineffectual.

And "ineffectual" is too often the vibe I get from n52 Dick in general. You put that man with Pantha, and he'll probably be bemused, but he won't be able to make Pantha do anything, and he wouldn't be able to make Danny Chase do anything, and he can't or won't stand up to Bruce so he has to lie the way Tim does, and he would never have a fistfight with Roy over the proper way to lead a team.

And in a lot of ways this makes sense, because n52 Dick isn't a team leader, because they've deleted the Titans. He's just a guy. He's nice, I guess.

But even though he gets all kinds of excellent woobie plotlines that I'd normally enjoy (an evil organization is stalking him personally! his dad is beating him up and forcing him into becoming a spy! he's losing his memory!) his personality is usually so far off from the character I like that I struggle to get invested.

Because the thing is, Dick's leadership instincts aren't incidental to what I like about him. They're all wrapped up in his outsized sense of personal responsibility and instinctive belief that if anything is going wrong anywhere near him then it is his obligation to handle it and if anything goes wrong then it's his fault if he was involved and also his fault if he wasn't involved and actually if you have ever gotten within five feet of him and unrelatedly something bad happened to you then it's probably his fault and he FAILED. This belief gives Dick a lot of control issues and makes him bitchy sometimes and is not great for his mental health, but it's also very endearing and an outgrowth of how much Dick cares!

Anyway, re:bitchiness, I have similar feelings about various choices in Batgirls and in Tim Drake: Robin and in current Nightwing; like, I don't think any of these stories are bad ipso facto, I don't begrudge anyone who likes them, and I certainly enjoy fluffy fanfic sometimes - I don't always want the same things in transformative fandom that I want in canon.

But in comics, I often want the characters to have a bit of edge, to be cranky and difficult and just... y'know, clearly the kind of people who would choose to be vigilantes. I want them to care enough to be bitchy about it. And I often feel like I'm missing that, post-2011.

#long post #going through my old drafts and this one is SO OLD but i still stand by it #i think i was going to revise it so that it was less rambling & long #but i'm too lazy so here you are #dick grayson #tim drake #it's more about dick but i talked about tim enough i think it makes sense to tag him #I do think that the pendulum in e.g. Waid's Teen Titans is slowly swinging back to the kind of Dick characterization that I like #so this is happily not as true as it was back whenever I started writing the answer to this ask #but it's still my feelings about tt's nightwing so. sdfdsfdsfs

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nerdasaurus1200 · 2 months

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I wanna thank my boi here

My sweet cinnamon roll. He just saved me a very frustrating plot hole. And I love him for it.

#tts #rta #tangled #tangled the series #rapunzel's tangled adventure #nerd talks #varian #writing

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michaeljoncarter · 3 months

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I feel like half of the reason TK got so big is he's been partnered with incredible artists

god, yeah. where's that one post that's like "heartbreaking! best artist you've ever seen paired with some guy named tom" bc that's it exactly

#ask #anonymous #him & taylor both rely almost entirely on the skill of their artists #and their ability to talk in circles about 'politics' to make libs feel like their writing is deep when rly theyre saying... nothing lol #but tk's gimmick is that nerds are hot for the fact that he's ex-cia #and tt's gimmick is that he's more than willing to regurgitate whatever takes he sees gaining traction in twt into his comics&make it canon

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michelle4eve · 13 days

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Holy fuck

My social anxiety-

Please why do i have to have this??

@zehina @writingforstraykids and fucking everyone here

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dulcesiabits · 7 months

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hope i'm not over stepping my boundaries but i am curious. you said that there are some tactics you use in fanfics that cannot be used in "serious" writing. what are some of these things? or what do you think the differences between fanfic and "serious" writing is?

Hi!! This isn't overstepping at all! I'd be happy to elaborate on my thought process, but I do want to make several caveats!

I think "serious writing" wasn't a really good term for what I meant, so I regret that wording! A better term would be original writing instead. I do take every piece of writing I do seriously, even if it's considered "lowbrow," and I didn't want to imply that fanfiction was less serious or important to me. Every piece of writing deserves respect and love, because an act of creativity should be celebrated!

These are my personal thoughts, and mostly pertain to my own style of writing, so the advice I give here might not be applicable to everyone. The issue with creative writing is that there are no real rules as to what makes a piece good; it's all subjective. There might be some general guidelines for good writing, but every rule has exceptions, and can be broken if done right. This is partly why it's so hard to write, haha.

But let me answer your questions! Let me start off with your second question, just so it can set the groundwork for the first.

What do you think the differences between fanfic and "serious" writing is?

There are a lot of different categories for writing; an instruction manual is writing, just as much a piece of poetry or a short story can be. When I say "serious" writing, I meant my original writing, or my more "literary" works (said with quotations because even the very definition of literature can be debated endlessly; what gives a work merit? Sorry if I keep giving vague answers! These ideas can be approached from so many different angles that I want to give it justice and acknowledge the various complexities).

(Original writing might not be the best term, either, because non-fanfiction genres are so varied... YA, adult, literary, sci-fi, fantasy, etc... but I'm trying to keep this as general as possible).

In this case, I think that both fanfiction and original writing have their own merits; they're just different subcategories of writing, and it's like comparing apples and oranges. They're both fruit, but the flavors, taste and growth process are different, even if they share similarities. So, they're both forms of creative writing, but the skillsets that they require are different.

There are some similarities, though; they both require knowledge of prose and how it functions, characterization, the use of literary devices (similes, metaphors, etc), an understanding of pacing and how plot moves, and so on.

However, one of the major differences isn't even the craft of writing itself: it's "public perception." Fanfiction is seen as lowbrow, or embarrassing, and "original writing," while it can also be mocked, is seen as a bit more "highbrow" (not a hard and fast rule, as I'm generalizing here). Because fanfiction draws on a source material, people assume it's not as creative, silly, or requires less effort, when fanfiction writers know that's not true.

Some of the major differences between these writings involve characterization and world-building. In original writing, you'd need to build these completely from scratch, but in fanfiction, these worlds and characters are already there. Instead of building a character from the ground up, you interpret and translate an existing character into your own work (I use the term interpret and translate because all fanfiction writers are analyzing and writing their own versions of an existing character, so no one interpretation is more correct than the other (unless you completely disregard the source material), because none of us are the original author. If we were, it wouldn't be fanfiction). At the same time, fanfiction authors might build off existing characters and world-building to formulate new understandings of both (ie expanding a character or world beyond what we seen of them in a story). Both forms of writing require the ability to analyze and understand characterization and world-building, but apply them differently (creation vs interpretation).

Additionally, there are certain conventions to original writing and fanfiction writing, respectively, and the troupes utilized in both are different because they're different forms of writing. In fanfiction, you're working with a world and characters that your audience already recognizes. They already have context for the world, which means you can focus on other aspects of the narrative. "5+1," drabbles, headcanons, "AUs": these are all structures of fanfiction writing that we're familiar with, that are made possible precisely because the material you're working with is fanfiction. You couldn't necessarily do the same thing in original writing, when the audience doesn't have an attachment to or understanding of these characters.

In original writing, however, your audience doesn't know who these characters are or what the world is. Since you're working to build that connection, you have to develop the narrative as a whole, instead of taking pieces of it. "Insta-love," "boy next door love interest and brooding dark haired love interest," "secret evil religious institution," "it was all a dream": these are also some troupes that take place in some forms of original writing, which happen because original writing follows different patterns from fanfiction writing, but nonetheless, still have their own patterns and structures (which vary from genre to genre).

I do want to recognize that there are still similar troupes in both original writing and fanfiction writing! Forced proximity, pining, etc... these are used in both forms of writing (though potentially applied differently), because sometimes original writing can be just as self-indulgent or wish-fulfilling as fanfiction writing, just like how fanfiction writing can be just as literary and thoughtful as original writing.

Another difference is that, structurally, fanfiction can be shorter than original writing. You can write drabbles, snippets, and even multi-chapter fics that take years to complete, if they finish at all (I'm guilty of not finishing my own multi-chapter fic). But in original writing, you have to build the narrative yourself. You decide the plot, the character arcs, the ending, and the whole course of the story and its characters. Especially if you want to get published, you can't drop a story halfway through like you can with fanfiction (though there's no shame of getting bored with a WIP and dropping it), and there's no fandom to build your world for you.

You said that there are some tactics you use in fanfics that cannot be used in "serious" writing. What are some of these things?

When I said this, I was venting a bit about the frustrations in my own writing! I found that in my original writing, my literary writing, I'd skipped over the foundations of world-building and characterizations. I'm the sort of person who writes from the top down: I tend to focus on themes and motifs first before I decide on characters and individual scenes, and plan the end goal before I plan the details. But when I do this, sometimes the details get lost and my piece loses strength because I focus more on making my characters symbols instead of people. Fanfiction ties into this because I'm used to not having to build context for my characters and world, and when I don't do this, it's disastrous for my original writing. In fanfiction, people already know who Lyney and the Fatui are without me explaining it, but in original writing, people have no clue who my OCs or world are! If I forget to establish fundamental details of my world (like rules on how magic works, explaining the roles of certain institutions etc), it messes up my overall execution. I focused too much on the forest instead of individual trees, so to speak.

I also have a habit of making clean little sections in my fanfiction; I might do several drabbles that, together, make up a whole story, and I can skip scenes I don't want to write. However, sometimes my original writing requires that I write an extended scene, including all the "boring" set ups and character-building moments. Instead of certain context being built in, I have to write the context myself, which means I can't just skip around from emotional bit to emotional bit; I have to do the proper build-up for it (ie like how in my ruggie fic, I don't have to elaborate on what happened with Leona, and I jump around from emotional point to emotional point. But in original writing, I'd need to build the context for their relationship, why it fell apart, what made both of them act like that, their respective pasts, what NRC is, how the magic system works, etc).

When I write reader-inserts, I can be vague with details on who the reader character is, to make sure anyone can self-insert into them. However, if I were to use second-person POV in original writing, I'd need to think about intent (why this POV and not other POVs? what's effective about it? what purpose do I use this for?), and ensure I make the reader-character their own distinct person; you're not always supposed to self-insert in the reader-character in original writing, because the reasons for using second person POV are different.

In fanfiction writing, I can "let loose" and not worry over motifs or themes or other literary devices. I can just write for fun, but with my original writing, I'm more conscious of those things. Each detail has a purpose (my purpose in fanfiction is usually self-indulgence, but my purpose in original writing might be, say, to do a piece on the nature of grief, and as such, I have to pay more attention to the structure of my writing the devices I use).

Additionally, when it comes to fanfiction writing, I can lean on troupes (if I write a royalty AU, for example, there's no need to establish too many rules for the world because it's more about the characters playing different roles than the world itself), but in original writing, troupes are used with more care and purpose. Leaning on troupes and refusing to develop them beyond troupes can, in my opinion, lead to flat and uninteresting writing (if they're royalty, why? What's the world like? The system? Is there opposition? How does the government work? What's the history of the world? How does being royalty affect their interactions? Why did I make them royalty?). I can't do "short-hands" (ie leaning on troupes) in original writing, not if I want to be successful.

Also, in fanfiction writing, I can get away without a proper resolution. I can write a series of events, and explore a character's motivations and backstory, and never make it an actual "plot." But in original writing, I need resolution and a plot. I can't write a series of events, where we jump here and then there because I want to; I need those events to link together (or not link together) with a purpose (resolution is used loosely. If it's an ambiguous ending, or one where nothing changes, why? What's the purpose of that? What am I trying to express through a lack of resolution?).

So, the skills I've picked up from fanfiction writing have helped me become a better writer, but some of those skills don't translate quite as well to original writing.

#liya answers #THIS WAS SO LONG OMG....#My apologies if you were expecting a different answer anon TT TT #It was just a really interesting question so i found myself wanting to do it justice and give you a thorough answer!!!!#i can say a lot more on the subject... but i wanted to keep it general + brief #bc if i went in further with the nuances i'd be dropping a whole 20 page paper on your lap LOL #anywayz i love talking about the craft of writing!! hmu #id love to run a writing workshop sometimes lol (maybe for fanfic?)

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