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fanfiction writers assemble!

@fandomscribblers / fandomscribblers.tumblr.com

The Fandom Scribblers Network is a brand new network where writers of fanfiction from fandoms all across the board can gather ‘round and discuss plot bunnies. Feel free to send us prompts, suggestions or advice on our writing!
Tell us who should win our first challenge by voting here.
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headacheaesthetic

Shout-out to fan-fiction writers who don’t or can’t write the 50k fan-fictions, because of a lack of focus or motivation, or mental illness.

Shout-out to fan-fiction writers who don’t or can’t write smut, but are still lumped into a group that is almost expected to write smut. 

Shout-out to fan-fiction writers who can’t update chapters frequently for maybe a multitude of reasons, and get messages daily from people asking for “their” new chapter. 

Shout-out to fan-fiction writers who aren’t big name fans and hardly get ten kudos or one comment on their fan-fictions. 

Shout-out to fan-fiction writers who stay up all night editing and rewriting and don’t get much attention on their work no matter how much they feel like they promote their writing.

Shout-out to fan-fiction writers who don’t write a lot and are constantly asked to write more but can’t for whatever valid reason they have. 

Shout-out to fan-fiction writers who have the courage to post their writing online and only have it publicly made fun of for grammar or poor characterization. 

Shout-out to fan-fiction writers for writing their fan-fiction, posting it online, and continuing to do it no matter how much or little attention they get, and constantly improving as a writer with every upload.

You all rock.

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everybirdfellsilent

About writing:

Some people see the beginning and the end before they write a story, and see where the middle takes them.

I only see the beginning and a general “this way” blinky sign.

Most the time with writers block it’s only a “you are here” blinky sign.

#kristen the word slinger
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real life update

My short story “The Boy on the Streetcar” is a finalist for the 2015 U of T Magazine Writing Contest!

They are currently running a poll to choose the “People’s Choice” story. If you like the story, please vote for me. It will be much appreciated! :)

Voting ends on August 24.

To read the story, click here

Or if you just want to go directly to the voting, click HERE ;)

Note: It seems that another story has been accidentally posted right after mine ends. To avoid confusion, please note that my story ends with the line: “So many chances.”

xo,

T

#kristen#kristen the word slinger#my friend
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signaturist
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anomalously-written
Image

You know what I love?  Names.  You know what I love more than just names?  Geographically accurate names.

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(Current popular names all over the world)

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The following information was found here

Names From The Ancient World

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Medieval European Names Medieval English Names

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Anglo-Saxon/Old English Names

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CELTIC

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Modern English First Names

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Western European Names

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Eastern European Names

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Scandinavian Names

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Former Soviet Union Names

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African Names

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Northern Native American Names

Southern and Central Native American Names

  • Aztec [History, Male, Female, Religion, Calendars, Rulers]
  • Inca [Male, Female, Religion, Calendars]
  • Maya [History, Male, Female, Religion, Calendars]
  • Amazonian [Names from tribes living in the rain forests]

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India

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Middle and Near Eastern 

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Pacific 

#kristen
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maxkirin

Hello, writerly friends~ ♥︎

My Writing Advice Masterpost is back! Now featuring the best questions and answers from the last three years, along with all of the videos from my writing advice YouTube Channel!

This post will be updated every week with new writing advice videos, playlists, and responses! So, make sure to bookmark THIS page and follow my blog (maxkirin.tumblr.com) so you don’t miss a thing!

Writing Advice Compilations

Writing Exercises & Prompts

Motivation & Inspiration

Planning, Outlining, and Getting Started

Dialogue

Editing & Revision

Hot-Button Issues

General Advice

Publishing

Writing Music & Playlists

Miscellaneous

Last Updated: 01-10-14. Click HERE to see the latest update. Latest posts are in Italics.

#lz writes
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storyweathers
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writeworld-blog

Nineteen Exercises

Note: Some of these exercises will produce bad writing. That’s fine. These are not guidelines of things you should do to every (or any) piece you write. They are just nifty little activities to try.

Writers fall into habits. We use the same words over and over, or repeat the same techniques. These exercises are designed to push you to strain your fiction, style, and vocabulary so that the habits die. Feel free to adjust to exercises to fit your needs, but don’t feel free to cheat. Some of these are hard, and they’re hard for a reason.

  • Describe a barn from the perspective of a man whose son has just died in a war. Do not mention the son, the war, death, or the man. (From John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction).
  • Tell the following story in ten different styles: A man walks into a coffee shop, orders a drink, spills it, and the clerk offers to get him another. You might try a tall tale, a poem, a fairytale, a noir mystery, a satire, a news article, and a bunch of other kinds of writing. You might just use ten different voices.
  • Double the length of a short story without adding any new scenes.
  • Cut a short story in half without eliminating any scenes.
  • Write a story with no adverbs in narration (characters may speak however they want). Replace every would-be adverb with a more descriptive verb. For example, turn “searched clumsily” into “rummaged.”
  • Write a story with no sentence longer than ten words. Keep syntax as varied as possible.
  • Write a story in which no two consecutive sentence describe any object, person, or place visually. Keep description vivid.
  • Write a story in which no backstory is explicitly stated by the narrator. Instead, imply all of it with details and dialogue. Backstory should be as clear as is necessary.
  • Rewrite every sentence of an existing story while maintaining the story’s feel, plot, and all that jazz.
  • Write a prequel that covers the events that took place immediately prior to the beginning of your story.
  • Find a newspaper article you find interesting and make a story out of it. Feel free to make assumptions, guesses, and fabrications.
  • Write five unconnected scenes (300 words maximum each) involving only two characters. After reading all five, the reader should have a firm understanding of the two characters and their relationship.
  • Write five versions of a disagreement between two characters. The disagreement should be largely the same in nature (maybe not in subject matter) but the setting (in terms of location and time) should be radically different for each one.
  • Write out a conversation you had yesterday as if it was a scene.
  • Eavesdrop on a conversation (try not to be too creepy). Write a conversation between the same two people but about a different topic.
  • Walk down a main street (or any street with a number of storefronts). Write down the five most interesting details about each building.
  • Revise a story such that the verb “to be” (and all of its conjugations) are eliminated from the narration.
  • Reread a story you wrote. Find the first (non-trivial) decision that a character makes. Have the character make a different decisions and write out the rest of the story from there.
  • Do a rewrite per character. On your first pass, only edit your narration (and your narrator’s dialogue, if applicable). On the next pass, only edit the second most important character’s dialogue. Continue until you run out of characters.

Let us know if you have any questions about these prompts or writing in general. If you want us to read something you wrote, tag it with writeworld, and we’ll be sure to check it out!

- O

#sunny#et queue brute?
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storyweathers

Ways to Shock Your Characters (and Your Readers)

Boring stories are often boring because they lack tension. If your story doesn’t quite pack the punch you wish it did, you should take a look at how much tension you’re creating. It’s important to remember that you don’t need an explosive scene to create tension; it could also be something simple. As long as you stay true to your characters and plot, you’ll be able to build scenes that will put your readers on the edge of their seats. Here’s a few ways to jolt your characters to the next level:

Make them question their beliefs

Nothing shocks your characters quite like giving them an identity crisis. If a character has believed something for a long time only to find out they’ve been misinformed or lied to, their world shatters. If you can make your character question who they really are, you’ll add tension and intrigue your readers. You’ll also succeed in giving your character the motivation to figure things out.  The need for self-understanding is often a good motivational factor and will shock your characters into action.

Raise the stakes

The best way to add tension to your story is to raise the stakes. Say your character needs to get something from your antagonist, but you don’t know how to make it more exciting. Add something to it that will make your character need to act right away. Maybe the world will end in three days if your character can’t get whatever they need to get. Put a time limit on something. Force them into acting fast. There are countless ways you can raise the stakes for your characters, so you can come up with something that will fit your story.

Take away something they love

A great way to shock your characters is to take something away from them that means a lot. However, be careful not to create a character just to die for motivational purposes. For example, setting up a weak love interest and then having them die, so that the main character will want revenge. Try to focus on something that will help with your protagonist’s characterization. Say your main character really loves their job and they’re climbing up the ranks, but then suddenly they get fired and they don’t know what to do next. You’ve taken away something they love and understand and also made them question their beliefs and their place in the world. You can add more to this. Maybe the antagonist got them fired. This might motivate them to seek revenge. These are just simple examples, but taking away something important to a character will help add tension.

-Kris Noel

#sunny
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storyweathers
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writeworld-blog

Nineteen More

About six months ago, we made a post called Nineteen Exercises. People seemed to like it, so here’s a list of nineteen more. For those of you who missed the first list and aren’t going to read the introductory material there (even though we linked to it), here it is again:

Note: Some of these exercises will produce bad writing. That’s fine. These are not guidelines of things you should do to every (or any) piece you write. They are just nifty little activities to try.
Writers fall into habits. We use the same words over and over, or repeat the same techniques. These exercises are designed to push you to strain your fiction, style, and vocabulary so that the habits die. Feel free to adjust to exercises to fit your needs, but don’t feel free to cheat. Some of these are hard, and they’re hard for a reason.

Not reading the introductory material here would have been a serious mistake on your part. So let’s assume you did. Here we go:

  • Eavesdrop on a conversation. Write it out verbatim as it happens (this is hard–don’t sweat it if you fall a bit behind). Turn that into dialogue you think you would actually find in a word of fiction.
  • Eliminate your main character.
  • Eliminate emotion words (“happy,” “angry,”) etc., and all “I feel” (and similar) statements in narration and dialogue. Get emotion across anyway.
  • Replace every verb (except “to be”) with a synonym. Do not use a thesaurus.
  • Change the loyalty of your main supporting character.
  • Eliminate all dialogue.
  • Eliminate all narration.
  • Recreate a short story from memory. Essentially, write a second draft without referring to your first draft. Accuracy is the opposite of important here.
  • Tell one story a bunch of different times, using a different third-person narrator each time. Try to get at least three versions.
  • Describe something you see every day: a storefront, a bus, whatever. Describe it in as much detail as possible. Go back to it with your notes and see what you missed.
  • Rewrite a story such that no two consecutive sentences start with the sentence’s subject.
  • Figure out which character in your story does the least amount of stuff. Summarize the events of the story in that character’s voice with that character’s commentary.
  • Rewrite whatever you’re writing (be it a poem, story, whatever), as another kind of thing (a screenplay, letter, whatever).
  • Recall somewhere you have visited but have not lived. Put a character there and have this character walk around and describe stuff–and not just visually.
  • Take the characters (that you created) from one story and put them in a completely different story.
  • Completely adjust the structure of your story. If it is linear, fragment it. If it is fragmented, make it linear. If it’s epistolary, make it un-epistolary. Do something weird.
  • Eliminate ten percent of the content from each page of a story.
  • Introduce an irrelevant scene into a story and justify its inclusion.
  • Think about a kind of problem you’ve never had. Maybe you’ve never had your heart broken or had something really big fall apart. Write a story where that happens. 

Let us know if you have any questions about these prompts or writing in general. If you want us to read something you wrote, tag it with writeworld, and we’ll be sure to check it out!

#sunny
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storyweathers
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writeworld-blog

Nineteen Exercises

Note: Some of these exercises will produce bad writing. That’s fine. These are not guidelines of things you should do to every (or any) piece you write. They are just nifty little activities to try.

Writers fall into habits. We use the same words over and over, or repeat the same techniques. These exercises are designed to push you to strain your fiction, style, and vocabulary so that the habits die. Feel free to adjust to exercises to fit your needs, but don’t feel free to cheat. Some of these are hard, and they’re hard for a reason.

  • Describe a barn from the perspective of a man whose son has just died in a war. Do not mention the son, the war, death, or the man. (From John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction).
  • Tell the following story in ten different styles: A man walks into a coffee shop, orders a drink, spills it, and the clerk offers to get him another. You might try a tall tale, a poem, a fairytale, a noir mystery, a satire, a news article, and a bunch of other kinds of writing. You might just use ten different voices.
  • Double the length of a short story without adding any new scenes.
  • Cut a short story in half without eliminating any scenes.
  • Write a story with no adverbs in narration (characters may speak however they want). Replace every would-be adverb with a more descriptive verb. For example, turn “searched clumsily” into “rummaged.”
  • Write a story with no sentence longer than ten words. Keep syntax as varied as possible.
  • Write a story in which no two consecutive sentence describe any object, person, or place visually. Keep description vivid.
  • Write a story in which no backstory is explicitly stated by the narrator. Instead, imply all of it with details and dialogue. Backstory should be as clear as is necessary.
  • Rewrite every sentence of an existing story while maintaining the story’s feel, plot, and all that jazz.
  • Write a prequel that covers the events that took place immediately prior to the beginning of your story.
  • Find a newspaper article you find interesting and make a story out of it. Feel free to make assumptions, guesses, and fabrications.
  • Write five unconnected scenes (300 words maximum each) involving only two characters. After reading all five, the reader should have a firm understanding of the two characters and their relationship.
  • Write five versions of a disagreement between two characters. The disagreement should be largely the same in nature (maybe not in subject matter) but the setting (in terms of location and time) should be radically different for each one.
  • Write out a conversation you had yesterday as if it was a scene.
  • Eavesdrop on a conversation (try not to be too creepy). Write a conversation between the same two people but about a different topic.
  • Walk down a main street (or any street with a number of storefronts). Write down the five most interesting details about each building.
  • Revise a story such that the verb “to be” (and all of its conjugations) are eliminated from the narration.
  • Reread a story you wrote. Find the first (non-trivial) decision that a character makes. Have the character make a different decisions and write out the rest of the story from there.
  • Do a rewrite per character. On your first pass, only edit your narration (and your narrator’s dialogue, if applicable). On the next pass, only edit the second most important character’s dialogue. Continue until you run out of characters.

Let us know if you have any questions about these prompts or writing in general. If you want us to read something you wrote, tag it with writeworld, and we’ll be sure to check it out!

- O

#sunny
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jem-crystairs
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wingedbyday-blog-blog-blog

//Absurdly helpful for people writing royal characters and/or characters who interact with royalty and members of the nobility.

[x]

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stalinistqueens

Citizen is simpler and more beautiful~ but just in case anyone needs this.

DUDE BUT THIS IS WHAT I’VE BEEN TRYING TO TELL PEOPLE

in medieval times you ONLY addressed a king/queen with “Your Majesty”, NEVER “Your Highness”.  To address a king/queen with “Your Highness” was considered an insult.

#lz writes
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