How to put “wrote fan-fiction” on your résumé:

Leveraged an inventory of established fictional character and setting elements to generate a disruptive custom-curated narrative entertainment asset.

I worked in HR, handling applications and interviews, and if someone turned in that string of techno babble nonsense, I would have rejected them out of hand.

A resume doesn’t need to sound fancy or overly technical, it needs to tell us why we should hire you.

“Independent novelist/writer” is more than sufficient here. If you want to express the skills that fan fiction taught you, something like, “creative writing, editing, and publication,” will get you a lot further than… Whatever that just was.

A resume should be tailored to the position, if you can afford the time and energy for that. But if not, then just think about what writing got fandom taught you. How to respond to criticism, how to present a professional pubic face, how to correct punished mistakes, creative thinking, project planning, persuasion via emotional leverage, html formatting, office suite fluency.

There are a lot of actual, marketable skills that go into fan fiction.

How to put “I was in a zine” on your resume

Writer:

Artist:

Merch artist / graphic designer:

Running a zine

Added some more

life's too short to write for an imaginary critic that you fear will hate what you wrote

to be clear, odds are good that someone will hate what you wrote, but that doesn't mean the writing is bad. That means they aren't part of your audience.

don't write for them.

Character Agency

Your characters should have agency. That means they have the power to influence what’s happening around them. We talked a bit about agency last time, revolving around how many female characters get agency stripped away from them. But overall, agency is important for any character to make them active participants in their own stories and feel necessary to the plot.

              So here’s how you enable your characters agency:

1. They make active decisions

Okay this is the obvious one in theory, but still manages to sneak by in stories undetected. An active character with agency makes things happen through their decisions, instead of just their reactions. Take these two examples of a scene plan:

Vs.

In the second example John isn’t just reacting but making a choice that’s changed something in the world. He may just happen to run into Mya, but it was his decision to run up to her, to offer her his umbrella. This action is a great indicator of his personality—he’s kind, trusting, and thoughtful even towards strangers.

That’s the most important part. A character who just reacts to everything doesn’t show off any personality, whereas action lets you demonstrate who your character is at their core (especially in difficult situations that call for difficult decisions).

2. Their actions have consequences

Similarly, the decisions your active character makes aren’t really decisions if they don’t impact any part of their world. For good or for bad, every decision your character makes should have a consequence. This could be shown through their relationships with others, their environment, or even their own mental, physical, or spiritual state.

If we’re going from the example above, John sharing his umbrella with Mya maybe starts their friendship, but her jealous, toxic boyfriend sees them through his window, making her and now his life difficult.

It’s a decision that has multiple consequences throughout his life—a new friendship, and also a new enemy. And Mya is also facing consequences—from her decision to walk with him, and his decision to offer her the umbrella.

Make sense? How do you ensure your character has agency?

How To (Realistically) Make A Habit Of Writing

To clarify: Works with my autism. WORKS WITH MY AUTISM!!! I’ve been meeting my goals since I made them my New Year’s resolution! Anyway I’m so sick of all those ‘how to’ guides that don’t actually tell you what the process is they’re just like ‘just do it, but don’t burn yourself out, do what’s best for you!’ because you’re not telling me what I’m not supposed to be burning myself out over but okay, so I made my own. Hope this helps

1. Choose your fighter metric. What works better for you as a measurement of your progress; time spent writing or your word count? Personally I get very motivated and encouraged by seeing my word count go up and making a note of where it should be when I’m done, so I measure by that. At the same time, a lot of people are also very discouraged by their word count and it can negatively impact their motivation to write, and in that case you may be better off working from how much time you spend writing rather than where the word count is

2. Choose your starter Pokémon time frame. How often can you write before it starts to feel like a chore or a burden rather than something fun you look forward to? Many people believe that they have to write daily, but for some people this can do more harm than good. Maybe every two or three days? Weekly? Figure out what fits your schedule and go with it

3. Choose your funny third joke goal. Now that you’ve got your chosen time frame to complete your goal in, what’s a reasonable goal to aim to complete within that time frame based on the metric you chose? If your metric is your word count, how much can you reasonably and consistently write within your chosen time frame? If your metric is time spent writing, how much time can you reasonably and consistently spend writing within that time? Maybe 1000 words per week works, or maybe 10 minutes per day? The goal here is to find something that works for you and your own schedule without burning you out

4. Trial and error. Experiment with your new target and adapt it accordingly. Most people can’t consistently write 1667 words per day like you do in NaNoWriMo, so we want to avoid that and aim somewhere more reasonable. If you feel like it’s too much to do in such a short time frame, either give yourself less to do or more time to do it in. If you find yourself begrudgingly writing so often that it constantly feels more like a chore than something fun, maybe consider adapting things. And if you think that you gave yourself too much wiggle room and you could do more than this consistently, give yourself more of a challenge. Everything needs to suit you and your pace and needs

5. Run your own race. Don’t feel like you’re not accomplishing enough in comparison to others or not working fast enough to satisfy some arbitrary feeling of doubt. Everybody works at their own pace and slower work doesn’t mean worse work. You could be on one word per day and you’ll still see consistent results, which is still one word per day more than you could originally count on. All progress is progress, regardless of its speed

how to draw arms ? ? 

holy fuck

holy fuck is right… but… does it work with legs???

yes !!

but how much extend

^^^^^^^^^^

I NEARLY CHOKED

ENJFDFNFATFVFDF

finally. i can be accurate

This is too fucking great to not reblog

I give it MASCLES

BIG MACHO

LMAOOOOOO

Okay but for anyone who legit wants to know how to calculate it correctly:

The elbow joint on average rests a couple inches higher than the navel, so if you measure how long the distance is from the middle of the shoulder to that point then you have the length of the upper and fore arms!

So if anyone’s wondering about legs too, the simplest rule of thumb is that the length from the top of the leg to the knee is equal to the distance between the top of the leg and the bottom of the pectorals:

And I wanna stress that when i say “top of the leg” i’m not talking about the crotch (please don’t flag me tumblr it’s an anatomical term) i’m talking about the point where the femur connects to the pelvis, which is higher up on the hips:

It’s easier to see what I’m talking about in this photo of a man squatting: 

So yeah if you use that measurement when using this technique you should get fairly realistically proportioned legs:

But remember! messing with proportions is an important and fun part of character design! Know the rules first so you can then break them however you please!

HOW THE HELL DID I FIND THIS POST OMG

Licherally in the midst of drawing a guy and crying at how bad the arms are. Thanks Tumbles

I only ever saw the part where people started drawing the limbs outrageously long and genuinely wanted to know how to fix that, so I’m really thankful to see the rest.

This is just reminding me that I need to pick up a pencil. But I know I’m not going to ever finish the drawing. 🤷‍♀️

Broke:

Belle has Stockholm syndrome because she falls in love with the Beast, her kidnapper.

Woke:

Stockholm syndrome was coined to slander a woman who had been in a hostage situation but openly criticized the poor police response which recklessly put her in more danger and escalated the violence. She was then belittled and discredited publically by the police for this.

So. Yeah. Maybe Belle does have Stockholm syndrome actually.

If anyone is curious here is the wikipedia section describing this.

[ID: Gif image from Disney's Beauty and the Beast with Gaston leading a large group of villagers down the road holding a torch. The atmosphere is dark.

Wikipedia screenshot containing the following:

According to accounts by Kristin Enmark, one of the hostages, the police however was acting incompetently, with little care for the hostages' safety, which forced the hostages to negotiate for their life and release with the robbers on their own. In the process the hostages saw the robbers behaving more rationally than police negotiators and therefore developed a deep distrust towards the latter. Enmark had criticized Bejerot specifically for endangering their lives by behaving aggressively and agitating the captors. She had criticized the police for pointing guns at the convicts while the hostages were in the line of fire and she had told news outlets that one of the captors tried to protect the hostages from being caught in the crossfire. She was also critical of prime minister Olof Palme, as she had negotiated with the captors for freedom, but the prime minister told her that she would have to content herself to die at her post rather than give in to the captors' demands. Ultimately, Enmark explained she was more afraid of the police whose attitude seemed to be a much larger, direct threat to her life than the robbers.]

Hope the ID helps, it's my first time writing one.

Here are some other facts you should know about Nils Bejerot: He had a major influence (this involved founding the "Swedish National Association for a Drug-free Society") on Sweden's zero-tolerance approach to drug use.

And he wrote "Barn, Serier, Samhälle" (Children, Comics, Society), basically the Swedish version of "Seduction of the Innocent"; an infamous anti-comics book by Fredric Wertham that led to the Comics Code Authority.

This is the man who coined the phrase "Stockholm syndrome", guys.

Too many people are unclear on the history of this term.

show, don't tell:

anticipation - bouncing legs - darting eyes - breathing deeply - useless / mindless tasks - eyes on the clock - checking and re-checking

frustration - grumbling - heavy footsteps - hot flush - narrowed eyes - pointing fingers - pacing / stomping

sadness - eyes filling up with tears - blinking quickly - hiccuped breaths - face turned away - red / burning cheeks - short sentences with gulps

happiness - smiling / cheeks hurting - animated - chest hurts from laughing - rapid movements - eye contact - quick speaking

boredom - complaining - sighing - grumbling - pacing - leg bouncing - picking at nails

fear - quick heartbeat - shaking / clammy hands - pinching self - tuck away - closing eyes - clenched hands

disappointment - no eye contact - hard swallow - clenched hands - tears, occasionally - mhm-hmm

tiredness - spacing out - eyes closing - nodding head absently - long sighs - no eye contact - grim smile

confidence - prolonged eye contact - appreciates instead of apologizing - active listening - shoulders back - micro reactions

I spy, with my little eye, a photo that was faked by an AI image generator! Can you spot the clues?

FB is turning into a parade of fake AI images churned out by click-farming pages. More misinformation is on the way. Learn some tricks for spotting AI photos!

I would also like to give a shout-out to Medieval Names Archive my beloved 💖

Kindle Vella and Radish are two popular platforms for publishing episodic stories or serials. Tapas, Yonder, and Inkitt are others. I'm not sure about which genres do best where, but they're all worth looking into.

As for Wattpad, although romance and fan-fiction do really well there, YA, fantasy, sci-fi, and supernatural are all said to do well there also. Mystery/thriller are said to be gaining traction there as well.

Here are some articles to Google with some great information:

-- How to Write Serialized Fiction for Kindle Vella by Jill Williamson (via Go Teen Writers) -- How to Write a Serialized Story: 4 Reasons to Write Serial Fiction (via MasterClass)

-- The Joys (and Perils) of Serial Novel Writing by Will Willingham (via Jane Friedman)

-- Serial Writing, An FAQ by Alexander Wales

-- Plotting Addictive Serials Workshop + Free Serial Fiction Outlining Sheet (via Storytellers Rule the World on YouTube)

-- PLOT A STORY | Story Structure for Serials + FREE TEMPLATES (Scrivener) (via Author Brittany Wang on YouTube)

Happy writing!

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

I forgot how lonely it is to write original fiction.

Where are the kudos? The subscriptions? The comments? The people cheerleading me chapter to chapter? Where are the kind words and compliments and reassurances that what I'm writing isn't complete crap? Where are the unhinged emojis? The asks on Tumblr? Where are my mutuals in my dms apologizing for not reading the latest chapter right away (side note, you know you don't have to apologize at all, right??). Where is the fanart? Where are the recs?

Where is my motivation to keep going?

It's something I've been thinking about a lot, actually, lately. How the experience of writing fanfic is so unique. How you already have an audience, willing and waiting and captive. And that's really it, isn't it? You have an audience. It's almost performative, writing fanfic. It's being on a stage, a one-person show (or two, if you do it with a friend); it's getting live reactions to your performance, it's feeding off the energy of the crowd and informing it back in a feedback loop; it's improvised, sometimes, in almost-real-time. It's building something that you couldn't have built by yourself. A thing that takes on a life of its own.

It's an experience you can't get writing original fiction, and, honestly, not having it is making it hard to write something original at all.

"Where is my motivation to keep going?"

It's where it always was before fanfic, before online support; before recs, before asks, before moots, before fanart.

It's in realizing you're the story's only way out into the world.

In a world full of gatekeeping, this is the gate that only you keep. Turn your back on the responsibility to open the portal to the unborn (original) story and keep it open, and the story dies. And that death is on you.

Yes, it's lonely work, without the constant rush of input we've been trained to be used to. It's been lonely work for a long time: since the first storyteller came up against the silence that wanted to keep the story away from the breath that would make it real in other people's ears. And you could make a case that all the online adornments are just our recent generations' way of keeping both the storytellers and the listeners from being overwhelmed by that loneliness. (Because the listeners have their own version of it: the fear of what happens when the people who can tell stories fall silent. Good storytellers respect that fear, and remember every day their responsibility to do something about it.)

Where do the characters come from? A surprising amount of the time, without warning, they muscle their way into the back of your brain and grab you by the hand (or hair) (or throat) and shout Tell about me! You have to tell them, there's no one else who can do it! ...Sometimes you have to sneak up on them from behind, as you do get the shy ones occasionally whom you have to take by the hand and pull into the light. But give them enough silence—build the space for them—and they'll come.

The silence may be key. One of the smartest pieces of advice I was ever given was that, for half an hour in the morning every day, before starting work, I should sit down and do nothing, and listen. No music, no TV, no news, no reading, no nothing. Sit and listen. It's not meditation; it's not mindfulness. It's listening. Story's voice can be hard to hear, sometimes, until you get better at pushing aside all that relentless rush of situational and sensorial input, and better at waiting to hear the story that's as yet too frail to push its way through the portal without assistance.

To be clear: Fanfic work (or any work in universes not of your making) is a different kind of listening. Working well in already-extant universes requires sharp attention to the tones, concerns and qualities of voices already speaking there; and to a certain extent, to the voices speaking about them. And if you love the characters, too—one of the best reasons for fanfic, really—that's a pleasure.

But when working in your own universes, the listening also requires a selective quality, as the characters find their voices and their proper passions. And as for the love... you're the only one there is to love them, till you get them out into the world. If you've ever been the only one to love somebody, you know how tough that can be.

Then add to that the fillip that those people (or situations) won't be really real until you've worked with them long enough, hard enough, all by yourself? It's a tough row to hoe. And you can't ever be really sure that a summer will come to reveal whether the crop's taken root, and whether it's all been worthwhile.

Nonetheless: it's good work. Some of us don't seem able to stop. Some of us even like it that way.

When you're ready, take that leap and come join us.

Y'know, I'm kinda surprised I haven't seen Jack Chains more in fantasy tbh, like it's a really interesting and low budget armor style, I'm legit surprised I've almost never seen it in media

Couple examples I pulled from google images

Actually kind of! It's built with a very interesting principle behind it and I'm gonna explain it below because it's neat

When I said “don’t throw the things”, this is why!

(Unless of course you have magic arrows from Santa)

Patreon - YouTube

You don’t have to pay for that fancy worldbuilding program

As mentioned in this post about writing with executive dysfunction, if one of your reasons to keep procrastinating on starting your book is not being able to afford something like World Anvil or Campfire, I’m here to tell you those programs are a luxury, not a necessity: Enter Google Suite (not sponsored but gosh I wish).

MS Office offers more processing power and more fine-tuning, but Office is expensive and only autosaves to OneDrive, and I have a perfectly healthy grudge against OneDrive for failing to sync and losing 19k words of a WIP that I never got back.

Google’s sync has never failed me, and the Google apps (at least for iPhone) aren’t nearly as buggy and clunky as Microsoft’s. So today I’m outlining the system I used for my upcoming fantasy novel with all the helpful pictures and diagrams. Maybe this won’t work for you, maybe you have something else, and that’s okay! I refuse to pay for what I can get legally for free and sometimes Google’s simplicity is to its benefit.

The biggest downside is that you have to manually input and update your data, but as someone who loves organizing and made all these willingly and for fun, I don’t mind.

So. Let’s start with Google Sheets.

The Character Cheat Sheet:

I organized it this way for several reasons:

On other tabs, I keep track of location names, deities, made-up vocabulary and definitions, and my chapter word count.

The Word Count Guide:

This is the most frustrating to update manually, especially if you don’t have separate docs for each chapter, but it really helps me stay consistent with chapter lengths and the formula for calculating the average and rising totals is super basic.

Not that all your chapters have to be uniform, but if you care about that, this little chart is a fantastic visualizer.

If you have multiple narrators, and this book does, you can also keep track of how many POVs each narrator has, and how spread out they are. I didn’t do that for this book since it’s not an ensemble team and matters less, but I did for my sci-fi WIP, pictured below.

As I was writing that one, I had “scripted” the chapters before going back and writing out all the glorious narrative, and updated the symbols from “scripted” to “finished” accordingly.

I also have a pie chart that I had to make manually on a convoluted iPhone app to color coordinate specifically the way I wanted to easily tell who narrates the most out of the cast, and who needs more representation.

—

Google Docs

Can’t show you much here unfortunately but I’d like to take an aside to talk about my “scene bits” docs.

It’s what it says on the tin, an entire doc all labeled with different heading styles with blurbs for each scene I want to include at some point in the book so I can hop around easily. Whether they make it into the manuscript or not, all practice is good practice and I like to keep old ideas because they might be useful in unsuspecting ways later.

Separate from that, I keep most of my deleted scenes and scene chunks for, again, possible use later in a “deleted scenes” doc, all labeled accordingly.

When I designed my alien language for the sci-fi series, I created a Word doc dictionary and my own "translation" matrix, for easy look-up or word generation whenever I needed it (do y'all want a breakdown for creating foreign languages? It's so fun).

Normally, as with my sci-fi series, I have an entire doc filled with character sheets and important details, I just… didn’t do that for this book. But the point is—you can still make those for free on any word processing software, you don’t need fancy gadgets.

—

I hope this helps anyone struggling! It doesn’t have to be fancy. It doesn’t have to be expensive. Everything I made here, minus the aforementioned timeline and pie chart, was done with basic excel skills and the paint bucket tool. I imagine this can be applicable to games, comics, what have you, it knows no bounds!

Now you have one less excuse to sit down and start writing.

Describing Body Types

Now, one thing a lot of young writers I see forget (especially those who write fanfiction) is that everyone does not have the same body type. One reason I noticed this was because it was a huge writing vice of mine; I got used to everyone already knowing basically what the characters looked like when I wrote fanfiction, so I got lazy in describing people.

So, body type is important, I think, for realism in writing. Because unlike on some cartoon show, people do not fit one mold. There’s a gazillion types out there, all valid and pretty in their own way.

It contributes to the idea that there is only one good body type for either gender when you either describe everyone similarly (unless it’s some sort of dystopian future, and they’re clones or modified on purpose) or give no description of body type at all.

You don’t need to go overboard and describe every person from their chest size to their head shape to whether they have cankles. But, a general idea might help your reader visualize, and yet not force an image on them too much.

For instance, ‘Carolina was top heavy, to the point that it looked like she would tip over if she leaned forward too far,’ or ‘Jace had a practically concave chest, and skinny, bony arms. He looked like someone whose bones had tried to outgrow his skin.’

Of course, you can take this any which way; just point out the most obvious parts of your character’s body type (heart-shaped face? wide hips? stocky build?) and go from there. It’s usually good to have some idea of what your character looks like beyond colors and height.

So, go wild!

This works great for painting a picture without getting too tied up in description and choking your readers’ imagination. I’m sure everyone knows not to do the ‘character checks the mirror trick’ (unless your character’s clothes are important, maybe?), but pick a defining feature and focus on it. If you need practice, go to a coffee shop and people watch!

When to describe setting

The trick I’ve been using for description is “dominant impression”. Simply put, describe the setting as your character interacts with it, and “interact” can mean setting a book down on a nightstand or looking out across the field or feeling the weather as she walks.

“Dominant impression” also means alluding to a character’s investment in their surroundings. She eases down a thrice-read book on a mahogany nightstand that was once her great grandmother’s, and she’s very careful with anything she braves setting atop the scraped lacquer. This not only adds character to the scene, but also adds new dimension to your character.

So, in short, I’d personally advise as you said: trickling details. Readers are more likely to remember description if there’s significance to it (even if it’s just the fact that the top stair of the porch has creaked since she was a toddler in a diaper, or whatever the case may be).

Here’s a ton of other links that expand a whole lot on the above and might help you with how and when to describe setting:

Hope this helps!

Describing Faces

Hair, eyes, defining feature. That’s it for most characters, unless you’re describing a romantic interest or the main character has some reason to describe their face in detail (say, in relation to their self-esteem).

What a defining facial feature is:

What a defining facial feature is not:

This is not to imply you shouldn’t mention race, but it shouldn’t be a defining physical feature when talking about someone’s face. That doesn’t mean you can’t describe someone’s facial features because they’re really common for a group of people, but a character isn’t an anonymous person standing in a crowd - a character should stand out and be defined, even if they play a minor role. Hone in your description skills to really capture somebody in quick sentences; that’ll help to get them to stick in the readers mind.

*(I have only seen this done once because it was plot relevant - an international adoptee being revealed that she was actually biracial. In all other uses I’ve seen, it was pointless and irritating to see. Unless it is plot relevant, leave the medical-sounding terms at the door.)