Satan’s usually pretty chill in the way he runs Hell. Today he’s scrambling to make it look as miserable as possible because God is soon to visit

Every 21st century piece of writing advice: Make us CARE about the character from page 1! Make us empathize with them! Make them interesting and different but still relatable and likable!

Every piece of classic literature: Hi. It's me. The bland everyman whose only purpose is to tell you this story. I have no actual personality. Here's the story of the time I encountered the worst people I ever met in my life. But first, ten pages of description about the place in which I met them.

Modern writing advice: Yes your protagonist should have flaws but ultimately we should root for them and like them from the beginning :)

Charles Dickens: Here is the worst ugliest rudest meanest nastiest bitch you’ve ever met in your life.

Modern writing advice: Make sure your POV character goes through a significant arc! Make sure they are changed by the narrative! Make sure they learn a lesson!

Narrators of every book of the 19th century: the lesson I learned is these people fucking suck, sayonara you freaks

Modern writing advice: It’s all about the character overcoming obstacles and learning! They learn their lesson so they can fix their mistakes and make good choices in the future! It’s a character arc! It’s called growth! Readers love it!

Everyone from ancient times through the 19th century: would you like to watch a Guy fuck up twenty times in a row

i’ve started to think about ao3 audience interaction as kinda comparable to doing a live reading in an intimate little bookstore, like kudos are everybody who stayed til the end and applauded, comments are everybody who waited to come up to talk to you afterwards, and bookmark comments are the little snatches of conversation you overhear outside.

this helps me feel better/less anxious about responding to comments with some form of thanks, because if someone walked up to me in person and said they liked my work right after reading it, i would compulsively say thanks. it also helps contextualize audience size in a healthy way i think, bc most of us naturally crave more attention on our fic, but if we were actually in the room with even like 20 people applauding and five people waiting after to tell us how awesome we are we’d be fuckin elated.  

So I’m on AO3 and I see a lot of people who put “I do not own [insert fandom here]” before their story.

Like, I came on this site to read FAN fiction. This is a FAN fiction site. I’m fully aware that you don’t own the fandom or the characters. That’s why it’s called FAN FICTION.

Oh you youngins… How quickly they forget.

Back in the day, before fan fiction was mainstream and even encouraged by creators… This was your “please don’t sue me, I’m poor and just here for a good time” plea.

Cause guess what? That shit used to happen.

how soon they forget ann rice’s lawyers.

What happened with her lawyers.

History became legend. Legend became myth….  And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.

I worked with one of the women that got contacted by Rice’s lawyers. Scared the hell out of her and she never touched fandom again. The first time I saw a commission post on tumblr for fanart, I was shocked.

One of the reasons I fell out of love with her writing was her treatment of the fans… (that and the opening chapter of Lasher gave me such heebie-jeebies with the whole underage sex thing I felt unclean just reading it.)

I have zero problem with fanart/fic so long as the creators aren’t making money off of it. It is someone else’s intellectual property and people who create fan related works need to respect that (and a solid 98% of them do.)

The remaining 2% are either easily swayed by being gently prompted to not cash in on someone else’s IP. Or they DGAF… and they are the ones who will eventually land themselves in hot water. Either way: this isn’t much of an excuse to persecute your entire fanbase.

But Anne Rice went off the deep end with this stuff by actively attacking people who were expressing their love for her work and were not profiteering from it.

The Vampire Chronicles was a dangerous fandom to be in back in the day. Most of the works I read/saw were hidden away in the dark recesses of the internet and covered by disclaimers (a lot of them reading like thoroughly researched legal documents.)

And woe betide anyone who was into shipping anyone with ANYONE in that fandom. You were most at risk, it seemed, if your vision of the characters deviated from the creators ‘original intentions.’ (Hypocritical of a woman who made most of her living writing erotica.)

Imagine getting sued over a headcanon…

Put simply: we all lived in fear of her team of highly paid lawyers descending from the heavens and taking us to court over a slashfic less than 500 words long.

all of this

Reblogging because I can’t believe there are people out there who don’t know the story behind fan fiction disclaimers. 

Yep I used to have disclaimers on all my Buffy fic back in the day. The Buffy creators were mostly pretty chill about fandom but it’s not like it is now. You did NOT talk about fandom with anyone except other fandom people and bringing it up at cons was a massive no no because of stuff like this.

I think Supernatural (and Misha Collins specifically) was when that wall between fandom and creators started to break down. It’s a relatively new thing.

I remember going to a Merlin panel down in London and a girl sitting next to me asked the cast about slash and I thought she was going to get kicked out!

Fandom history is important.

Oh, this brings back some not so-awesome ‘90s fandom memories! 

Oh man, let me tell you about the X-Files fandom. Lawyers for FOX sued, threatened, and generally terrified the owners of fan websites on a regular basis. God help you if you wrote or created original art set in their (expansive) universe or worse - dared to write about their characters. Even people who weren’t creating fanworks, just hosting Geocities pages about how much people liked the show would be sent C&D orders or actually fined. When I was first discovering the concept, the first rule of fandom was you do not talk about fandom because the consequences could be devastating.

It was such a strange and uncomfortable experience for me when fans in LOTR and Potter fandoms suddenly started shoving their work in people’s faces speaking publicly about fandom and wanting to engage in dialogue with the creators and actors of the Thing they were into. Fan stuff was supposed to stay online, in archives and list-serves and zines we passed around because it just wasn’t cool to talk about it and it could get you in a boatload of trouble. The freedom we have to create and gather together in a shared space, or actually be acknowledged in any way by people outside the fandom was inconceivable to my fannish, teenaged self. I want fans these days to understand how amazing modern fandom really is, cherish the community, and appreciate what it took to get us here. 

“if you found this by googling yourself, hit back now. this means you, pete wentz”

Oh hey, even more blasts from the past.

I was one of the ones who got a love letter from Anne Rice’s lawyers. Bear in mind that up until that point her publisher had encouraged fanfic and worked with the archive keeper (one of my roommates at the time) to drum up publicity for upcoming books and so on.

I could tell such tales of how much Anne screwed over her fans back then. The tl;dr version is that she and her peeps would use fan projects as free market research and then bring in the lawyers once it was felt Anne could make money off of it herself. (Talismanic Tours being one of the most offensive examples of this.)

But where fanfic is concerned not only did we get nastygrams but one of my friends had Anne’s lawyer trying to fuck up her own privately owned business which had NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING ANNE RELATED. Said friend was a small business owner with health issues who wasn’t exactly rolling in money, so guess how well that went?

On top of that when yours truly tried to speak out about it I discovered that someone in Anne’s camp had been cyber stalking me to the point where they took all the tiny crumbs of personal information I had posted over the course of five years or so and used it to doxx me (before that was even a term and in early enough days of the WWW that this wasn’t an easy task) and post VERY personal information about me on the main fandom message board of the time. Luckily for me the mod was my friend and she took that down post haste, but it was still oodles of fun feeling that violated and why to this day I am very strict about keeping my fandom and personal lives separate online.

Hence why those of us in the fandom at the time who still gave enough of a shit to want to keep writing fic DID keep writing fic, but shoved it so far underground and slapped it with so many disclaimers they could’ve outweighed the word count of War & Peace. It wasn’t just for the purpose of protecting fic but for trying to protect our personal lives as well.

(Also would love to know who @tiger-in-the-flightdeck knew. Life paths crossing after so many years….)

Lucasfilm also sent cease-and-desist letters to Star Wars fanzines publishing slash.

My favourite bit I read from one included the idea that you weren’t allowed to have any explicit content, of which anything queer, no matter how tame, was included, to “preserve that innocence even Imperial crew members must be imagined to have”.

Yeah. The same Imperial crew members who helped build the Death Star to commit planetary genocide.

(It’s one reason Sinjir Velus, while I still have some issues with him, feels like such a delicious ‘f*** you’.)

Later on, they were apparently persuaded to ‘allow’ fans to write slash, provided in ‘remained within the nebulous bounds of good taste’.

(On a related note, if I wasn’t quite so attached to my URL, I would 100% change it to ‘Nebulous Bounds’, because that’s just downright catchy)

Anne McCaffrey had this huge long set of rules about how exactly you were allowed to play in her sandbox. Dragonriders of Pern was my first online fandom, and I was big into the Pern RP scene - and just about every fan-Weyr had a copy of these lists of rules McCaffrey wanted enforced. One of which was ‘no porn’ and another was basically ‘it can’t be gay’ (and for a while ‘no fanfiction posted online’? which??? anyway.)

She relaxed a little as time went on, but still. 

Let’s not forget: the reason AO3 is called ‘Archive of our own’  is because it was created in response to some bullshit that assholes were trying to play with fan creators. Basically (if I remember the fiasco correctly) trying to mine fandom creators for content which they could then use to generate ad profit on their shitty websites. When the series creators objected, the fans tried to pull their content, only to find that the website hoster resisted, claiming their content was all his now.

That wasn’t even all that long ago…

fandom history class

To this day, *talking* about writing or reading fanfiction - just acknowledging that it exists - to anyone other than people I know are in fandom as well, feels like a dangerous act. The strict separation I maintained between my real life identity, my online identity, and my fandom identity (yes, they were separate, because some of the most vicious and mocking people were fellow nerds) has broken down a bit these days, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to integrate them as freely as some younger fans do.

Everybody should know that AO3 is just one project of the Organization for Transformative Works. Their mission is much broader than just hosting a (very good) fanfic site. They do all kinds of fandom history archiving and publish an academic journal, but most importantly, they perform legal advocacy to protect the fair use rights of people who make fanfic or fanart.

The OTW Legal Committee’s mission includes education, assistance, and advocacy.

I haven’t been involved in fandom stuff all that long, but I find this stuff so fascinating!

whew, i feel old, but that’s mostly bc i was on forums way way waaaaay too young. but this? yes. all the way. people had password protected forums on the weirdest, most unconventional websites. before you could even be approved by the mods they would search your blog, your other accounts, question you, everything, all because we were broke teens and preteens trying to do something for fun and if someone got in who could doxx you or send your work over to a lawyer? that was it, you were OVER. that’s also part of where fandom wars and the defense of fandom came from: quote unquote “enemy” fandoms would infiltrate just to hurt you. @theglintoftherail makes a very good point: ao3 is a goddamn haven. and they’re a great team of lawyers and people dedicated to protecting fanworks! part of the reason it’s so great is because they know there’s no one like them out there. they also go to the ends of the damned earth to protect you and to be inclusive, which is why there’s shit like tentacle porn and underage and dubcon. because they’re dedicated to protecting readers and creators to the death. they don’t advocate for it and they have the extensive rating and tagging system because of that (legit the best tagging system i’ve ever seen) but they don’t know if you’re dealing with trauma or if you need to get something out. do not forget your fandom, kids. jesus

Who else knew nothing about this? A show of hands

I’m just the right age to remember the disclaimers and to have HEARD about the Anne Rice, Anne McCaffrey, and X-Files fiascos, but I was never in any of those fandoms and I was more or less on the tail end of that. I can’t imagine having to be scared to tell people I write fanfic. So glad we’ve come so far.

Every time I start reading fanfics, I thank all of you people whose neverending resilience and the drive to be creative made it possible for me to consume content freely and without worry 🖤

@aprillikesthings

Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. Attitudes from the owners of copyrights have become more lenient as they have understood how futile and brand-harming it is to combat fanworks, but the risk for crackdowns is still there. Thankfully, the BBC Sherlock fandom is based on a reimagining of a reimagining of literary works most of which have expired copyrights.

There are still plenty of reasons to actively prevent creators and fic from mixing. Fic is for us, and for litigatory reasons they cannot safely look at it. I bet many of them do, though. 

Here’s an overview of fic-related court cases.

Know your history.

Is and continues to be my favorite dance video. Dude’s so unexpectedly fluid.

> You don’t see too many YouTube videos from 2005..

i think this is my favorite video of all time. ive been utterly enamored with it for years – i really believe it captures such a genuine, delightful aspect of humanity and culture from the 2000s, and its so fun to watch!!

when shaw told erik to move the coin or he'd shoot his mom, he couldn't do it. it wasn't until shaw killed his mom (and laughed) that he was able to, and from that moment on erik associated his power with his anger. his entire identity was built upon it, believing that the only reason he was alive/survived was because of it. it wasn't until he met charles and was shown kindness/treated like a human being instead of 'frankenstein's monster' that he was able to unlock the full potential of his power. charles was the first person in decades that reached out his hand to erik and told him he wasn't alone. erik's mutation emerged because of his love for his mother, and grew stronger because of his love for charles. and idk that just gets me

if you’re ever about to comment on a writer’s work and think, oh, they probably know how good they are, you’re definitely wrong. every time a writer posts or publishes anything, no matter how many years they’ve been doing it and no matter how many readers they have, they are struck with the idea that perhaps they aren’t very good at all.

if you think you’re annoying for commenting, or that we won’t see your comments anyway, you’re wrong. we see your comments. we actively look for them. we are starved for them no matter how many we get. we remember them and they fuel us. leave comments, even if it’s just saying “oh i like this”. i see an “oh i like this” and my heart grows three times its size and i am seized with an urge to provide you more writing just to hear you say “oh i like this” again.

It took multiple years of nice comments and kind constructive criticism for me to realize I am actually a pretty good writer. And even now, half the time I post stuff FULLY believing it is garbage in some respect that I’m trying to refine.

Please tell me if you like the stuff I’m sharing with you. I am trying to share. Please let me know that I’m succeeding.

Kudos/likes, but especially comments, make my day

Job postings these days are like

Wanted: Virgin, with 3 years of sexual experience

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Re-blogging again because that comment fucking killed me

Chapters: 3/3 Words: 24,446 Fandom: Supernatural Relationships: Lucifer/Original Female Character

Summary: Chuck couldn’t leave with Amara before he fixed the mistakes he made with Lucifer. Sarah went looking for God and wound up as the devil’s babysitter.

(Alternate title: the Misadventures of Mary Poppins and Thor)

I love this story so much, can't let it pass without reblogging. 💖

— Rebecca Stead, Goodbye Stranger (via reveriiea)

Writing Agency in Hopeless Situations

This was prompted by a couple of people asking for clarification on the subject of survivor characters and agency.

I think a lot of writers assume that in order for a character’s actions or choices to have meaning in a story they need to be effective. That can add to this sense of not knowing what to do with a survivor character or a character who is trapped in a hopeless situation.

Whatever situation your characters are in and whatever they’ve survived I think it’s important that they have agency. The character’s hopes, dreams, wishes and actions are a big part of what make them seem like relatable people to readers. Without them characters can seem like two dimensional cut-outs or objects buffeted around by the plot.

This post is about helping you write characters with agency; characters who still have their dreams and still act in accordance to what’s important to them, even in the most hopeless situations.

What can your character practically do?

It sounds like an obvious question but bear with me.

Think about what your character is physically capable of in the situation they’re in. If they’re imprisoned then what’s in the cell? If they’re forced to work what materials or tools do they have access to? Is their movement or mobility restricted? Are they under surveillance and if so how closely are they watched?

Try writing a list of things the character has access to and another of actions they could potentially take. In a survivable situation*, however hopeless, characters are usually capable of more then you think.

What are the risks?

When deciding what your character does it’s important to try and gauge the risk from their perspective. Keep in mind that a character who’s imprisoned or otherwise has difficulty finding information might not have an accurate idea of the risks.

A prisoner might have spent every day of their sentence being told by the guards that anyone who escapes is instantly caught and turned in by the surrounding townsfolk. Only to escape and find the towns people going out their way to help hide them.

Once you’ve got an idea of how risky an act is think about what would make the character take that risk. Some of them might be willing straight off the bat. Some might need to wait for the right moment or need a narrative push to get them moving.

Focus on the character and don’t be afraid to experiment. If the situation isn’t working in the story change it, change the risks and see if that works better.

Effective vs Meaningful Action

As writers it’s easy to forget that our characters should fail sometimes. It’s often tempting to write characters or scenarios where everything becomes a success.

And I think that means we often confuse meaningful action with effective action. Acts that have no immediate or practical benefit can still be moving and can still tell readers a lot about the characters.

There’s a scene in Casablanca where the main characters come downstairs into a bar to find the occupying Nazi solders have taken over the piano and are singing about ‘the fatherland’. One of the main characters goes to the house band and tells them to play La Marseillaise (the French national anthem**.) The entire bar rises to their feet singing and drowning the Nazi’s out.

It’s one of the most moving scenes in the film but practically speaking it accomplishes nothing. The bar is immediately shut down. The main character is put in danger. The Nazis still hold Casablanca.

But now we (and they) know that hold is tenuous.

Once you know what your character can practically do think about what the character’s priorities are.

No, not the ones directly related to their survival. A well rounded character will always have more to worry about then that.

It could be their family, friends or supporters. It could be an ideal (religious or political). It could be outliving their captors or making the bastards regret catching them.

A desperate situation is a chance to show your readers what the character values most as well as showing off their personality.

Your character might not be able to speak to or help their child from jail. But a religious character could pray for them. A creative character might dream up stories to tell them when they get out. An influential one might find a way to smuggle letters out.

Any of those acts is meaningful to the character, even though they don’t have a practical benefit for the prisoner.

Agency when characters are constrained

The main thing I want readers to take away from this is that trauma shouldn’t make a character stop being a character.

If you’re choosing to have your character imprisoned, tortured or enslaved as part of your story that should put constraints on what they can do, but not who they are.

It is more work to come up with ways to show off a character when their actions are limited. You have to think outside of the box and you generally can’t fall back on tropes to help you through.

But it also leads to a more emotional and more engaging story. What your characters live through has more impact when they remain a person. Readers see them struggle and desperately try to hold on to the things which are important to them. They’re more relatable and human, readers connect with them more which helps bridge the gap of lived experience.

Treat it as a chance to be inventive. And don’t be afraid to have moments in your story that are more about the characters then the plot.

Available on Wordpress.

Disclaimer

*Being restrained in a way that leaves someone completely immobile and unable to talk is not survivable if it’s kept up for several days. People can easily choke or suffocate when gagged. Patients in full body restraints tend to have heart attacks. I don’t know why that happens but it’s part of the reason these restraints are a last resort.

Edit: I did indeed forget to include the second footnote.

**There’s a conversation to be had here about the fact a marker of French identity is used as a rallying cry in a colonised north African nation but I think the point of the scene comes across nonetheless.

no, i don’t have a “dream job.” i want to spend my days reading and writing and lazing in the afternoon sun. i want to bake bread and brownies and apple crumble. i want to grow my own vegetables and plant a rainbow of flowers. i want to be with nature. i want to be at peace.

Why does that poor man looks like gabriel ?