currentlycryingaboutlancelot:

writing tip they don’t tell you is that in addition to reading good books you should occasionally read one really bad one so that it inspires you to write something better out of pure rage

edwardcreel:

bardic-tales:

allthingswhumpyandangsty:

thisisjustfuckingsterling:

allthingswhumpyandangsty:

saw this being debated and just wanted to talk about it too.

“is it rude if I politely ask a writer if they use ai or chatgpt on their works because I’m almost certain they do?”

1. yes, it is rude. no matter how polite you are being when you ask them this.
2. you say you are almost certain. so you are not absolutely certain.
3. unless you are absolutely, undoubtedly certain — with actual proof — that their writing is ai generated, never ever ask an artist if their work is ai generated.
4. I know several writers who would stop writing and delete all of their works if they were ever accused of using ai. so it doesn’t matter if you are polite when you ask them this, you are suggesting that their works are ai generated, that they didn’t create the works they could have spent hours, days, weeks, months or years working on.
5. ai and chatgpt are trained on real humans’ works, they are trained to mimic the way real humans write. so if you say a genuine writer’s work “looks ai”, I’m gonna have to ask you what you think ai was trained on.
6. a writer whose English isn’t their first language may also write in a way that “looks ai” to some, if they write in English and have to rely on translator.
7. using em dash isn’t a sign of ai. I do it all the time. my fellow writers all love em dash.
8. having long paragraphs with “overly described scenes” isn’t a sign of ai. I do it all the time, and so do my fellow writers.
9. all the “ai signs” are actually just what most writers actually do. they get mistaken for “ai signs” because sometimes the way writers write or describe a scene in a fanfic or an original work is different than the way people talk or text. because they’re writing a fic and describing a scene, not chatting with a friend. the way I talk is different than the way I write my fics.
10. if you suspect a work was ai generated, but are not 100% sure, you can always just stop reading said work without saying anything.
11. if someone does use ai to write, they will either a.) deny and continue using ai to write or b.) admit because they see nothing wrong with it and continue using ai to write.
12. if a genuine writer was wrongly accused of using ai, they may stop writing altogether.

asking a writer if they use ai or chatgpt to write will always do more harm than good. witch hunting will always do more harm than good.

you are not “fighting against ai” by throwing around such accusations. you are harming genuine writers and artists.

It isnt an accusation. Its a fucking question. One that protects the very communities and artists that this post claims to defend.

all of the fanfic writers, whom I personally know, say the same thing that they would feel discouraged and might delete all their works if they were asked this.

it’s not “hey do you like x or y” question. it’s a subtle implication that your work looks like it was written by a robot within a minute. if you personally don’t find that offensive, that’s cool. but I know a lot of writers do. and they have the rights to be discouraged by it.

also we are talking about fanfic writers who write as their hobby, getaway or safe place, writers whose works you read for free. not writers who sell their works and are making profit from what they write. fanfic writers don’t owe you anything.

This just came across my dash. I’m going to be blunt.

Asking a writer or artist if they “use AI” is an accusation, no matter how you dress it up. It’s not neutral. It implies you think their effort, style, or voice is artificial. It implies that their human work doesn’t look human enough for you.

You don’t protect the community by policing people who are actually creating from scratch. You protect it by supporting human creators, reporting confirmed AI misuse when there’s evidence, and learning the difference between this sounds different than what I’d write and this is machine-generated.

Writers—especially fanfic authors—already pour their time, emotion, and identity into what they share for free. They don’t owe anyone proof of authenticity on top of that. And if your question makes someone want to quit writing, it’s not protecting the community. It’s shrinking it.

If you’re not 100% sure, just scroll. AI ethics don’t need to turn into public inquisition season.

“And if your question makes someone want to quit writing, it’s not protecting the community. It’s shrinking it.”

^^^^ this

drawingden:

I’ve found this nifty reference website for artists called www.dimensions.com that has a database of exact measurements for various objects, plants, and animals

They have a premium version with 3D models that I haven’t tried yet, but it’s definitely very informative if you’re trying to get the anatomy and proportions for different species of animals right!

This looks like a great tool for writing too! It doesn’t just give dimensions. They have a bunch of different models of furniture and things with descriptions that could help with fleshing out scenes or understanding how something works well enough to describe it.

periodicallypurple:

Thought this might help others who struggle when writing. I know I get in my head too much.

freshgratednutmeg:

big-dreams-gangster:

aurorawest:

squeaktheawesome:

dduane:

naamahdarling:

aurorawest:

PACING IS ABOUT LOAD BEARING WALLS.

*staples violently to my own forehead*

This is such good advice.

All I will add is: WRITE THOSE BREAKFAST SCENES if you want to, they can be absolutely critical in getting a handle on your characters. Or even on the setting. Write them all to fuck. Go hogwild.

Then cut them. They’re for you, and for the characters. Not the readers.

Lo these many years ago, in an elevator at some convention or other, Larry Niven gave me some of the best writing advice ever:

“You can always burn it.”

Go ahead and write that stuff. The breakfasts, the staring-into-empty-space scenes, whatever. Then pull them out of your work if they serve too little useful purpose. If you feel the need, shove such material into a separate folder to examine for possible usefulness later.

Even if you don’t put it where other people can see it, no writing is ever wasted. Every sentence will teach you something. But if a passage or sequence doesn’t help illuminate character, build the world, or advance the plot, get it the hell out of your narrative.

Your readers’ time is precious. Do them the courtesy of not wasting it.

I actually hate this. This is the kinda mentality that led to 6 episode seasons with approximately 0 character development.

Yeah, I don’t agree with this. Sometimes the small, boring moments are sooooo important to the reader. Maybe only a certain kind of reader?

Idk. Me, they’re important to me. Like no, I don’t want three hundred straight pages of domesticity, but sometimes the small moments are what make you care.

No offense to Ally, because she’s a good writer! But I read some of her spy YA back in the day, and she specializes in fast paced plots with romance. It makes books very readable, very beach. It just isn’t often MY thing. I think that’s most evinced by the other stuff I read ~back in the day~ (twenty some odd years ago when I was a teenager reading Gallagher Girls or whatever). I could not tell you a thing about those books except that there’s a girl at a school with uniforms who does spy shit.

BUT and this my huge but - there’s plenty of other books I read back when that were slower and more character driven that I remember very clearly, or perhaps have even reread.

There’s such specific lit world rules about writing. About paring yourself down. About how every sentence is not the gem you think it is. And there’s definitely merit in being like “hey, read through this shit. Make sure it’s as genius as you think it is.” But there’s also something that gets lost in trying to make everything snappy and tight.

Like just look at all the fandoms built around big sprawling, self-indulgent epics. Tragedies. Fuck, calling myself out here, but thirty year bandoms.

Sometimes you want to sit with the characters. Sometimes you WANT to know how their sister likes their hash browns.

Nothing is one size fits all etc etc etc don’t let bad writing advice get you down.

I mean this respectfully, but I think you’re missing some of the key points in the OP’s thread. They are specifically saying that a plot moment should advance at least two of: character, world, plot. The example about the sister and the MC eating breakfast… the only thing after that was that they learned how the MC feels about eating hashbrowns. The breakfast scene *could* have advanced character (showing the relationship between the sisters, which is what you’re alluding to) and the world they live in (the hashbrowns are… idk, frozen budget ones, but that remind one of childhood, or made of whatever fantasy potatoes they are if it’s scifi/fantasy, or made from back yard garden potatoes or or or) (world). I also DEEPLY love the boring moments in books (reading Haunting of Hill House right now and DEEPLY in love with the chapter where Eleanor drives to the house. Entirely internal, and ‘nothing’ happens. But the quiet moments you’re talking about *are* part of pacing, and important parts of it! Pacing doesn’t inherently need to mean 'fast paced’ it means…. it’s moving (and moving all at pedal to the medal speeds are BAD pacing). I’d also argue that the loss of bottle episodes and beach episodes are very much part of bad pacing, because they are important moments that advance Character and World (and the OP does reply emphasizing character when they replied with that specific screenshot). I haven’t read any of Ally’s books and can’t speak to how well they do (or don’t) follow their own advice. But like… breakfast between two characters that shows that they love each other/have a tense relationship/have unresolved sibling rivalry *is* a critical part of the plot. It’s sortof the 'curtains are blue’ problem. Sometimes a scene about breakfast is just… a scene about breakfast. Sometimes a scene about breakfast is 'these are *who* these people are and how they relate to one another and the slice of the world they inhabit.’ I think the 6 episode seasons (which i hate) are the direct result of people (well, massively profit driven at the expense of plot corporations) fully taking this advice at the shallowest possible level (among other factors).

As you said, no writing advice is one size fits all, but if the 'boring’ moments are so profoundly impactful on a conversational level between two characters, then they are *absolutely* part of a well paced book because they are letting the plot breathe and have a break while advancing the other two aspects, especially character, because if they leave that much of an impact, they’re load bearing scenes for the character and characterization.

mylordshesacactus:

beatrice-otter:

strongwomenunited:

badwolfkaily:

This.

I don’t know about others but the only reason I put both is so that whichever someone clicks on, they will find my fic. So if there is supposed to be rules, I guarantee you that no writer knows these ones. We can barely get people to comment, you think we’re going to specifically choose & or / ? Hell no.

I’ve been in fandom for twenty years, and “/” means romance and “&” means no romance was literally one of the first things I learned. It dates back to Star Trek fanfiction of the 70s. I’m boggled by the fact that anyone who’s been reading fic on AO3 for more than like five minutes wouldn’t know that, and I’m curious as to what fanfic community you come out of.

I don’t think that tagging with both is actually going to get your fic in front of more readers. People looking for romance often exclude the “&” tag if there are too many gen fics tagged with both. People looking for gen often exclude the “/” tag if there are too many fics with both. So rather than putting your fic in front of twice the people, you are in fact more likely to get your target audience ignoring your fic because it has a tag they don’t want.

Also, by overtagging you are more likely to annoy potential readers away from your fic than entice them. A fic tagged both & and / better have both romance and a ton of platonic interaction between the two characters, like a slow burn romance friends-to-lovers arc. If it isn’t, I’m going to be very unhappy because the author lied to me with the tags to try and trick me into reading a fic with deceptive advertising.

When I’m in a fandom and see tagging where some of the tags don’t really apply and are just there to get it in front of more eyes, I’m going to assume one of two things. Either the author is a newb who doesn’t know anything, or the author is purposefully spamming the tags because they don’t care about lying to their potential audience and think that “spray and pray” is an effective tactic. In the first case, their writing probably will not be very good, so why bother reading their fic. In the second case, the fact that I can’t trust the tags to be accurate means I’m not going to read it to see if it’s interesting even if it has a tag I like. Chances are, that tag isn’t actually in the fic anyway, and even if it is, by spam-tagging the author is making the archive harder to use for everybody. Why would I reward bad behavior with attention? No. Far better to mute the author and move on.

More to the point–and no, I will never stop harping on this, because we have GOT to stop leaving our strongest points in the drawer–it doesn’t matter if you heard of this convention before joining AO3 or not, because it’s in AO3’s tagging FAQ.

[id: the “How do I tag a romantic or platonic relationship?” section of the tagging FAQ here.]

“But Jo,” you may argue, because you’re wrong. “There’s no way to find that without digging through site FAQ menus, and that’s really inaccessible!”

sure

except

that when you go to post a new fic, and you go to put in those relationship tags, you see this

[id: the Relationships field]

and that tooltip, the one THERE TO EXPLAIN HOW THE FIELD WORKS, links to the Relationships segment of the tag FAQ, which explicitly lays this shit out.

I don’t care if you don’t know fandom history. I don’t care if you’ve never heard a goddamn word about the spirk shippers. I don’t care if you’ve never been exposed to fandom culture in your life. It is, frankly, not fair to expect those things of everyone.

What is entirely fair to expect is that you will READ THE INSTRUCTIONS PRINTED NEXT TO THE FUCKING BOX, actually. Forget fandom conventions. It genuinely doesn’t matter whether you agree with or respect fandom conventions. This is a site policy. This is explicitly how tagging on AO3, specifically, works.

osterby:

With October and all its fanfic prompt lists just around the corner, I, as a fan of oneshots, want to beg anyone posting to AO3 to please post your works individually and not cram the whole month into one big multichapter work.

Anthologies of short fics on AO3 cause huge obnoxious hurdles for anyone wanting to find or avoid works like yours, and also muck up the numbers for anyone doing a stats dive.

Anything real that someone might try to accomplish with an anthology can be better accomplished with a series or with tags.

Teal deer: I want to read your promptober fics. Post them as fics and not as fake chapters so I can find them and read them.

–

Here’s the nitty gritty.

Anthologized works cannot be filtered for word or chapter counts:

I like to read fic under 5k, so I do this:

ALT

Someone else likes longfic, so they do this:

ALT

Only people who do NOT want to see oneshots will see your oneshots.

–

All tags on anthologies cannot be trusted and must be assumed to be inaccurate:

This is true of literally every tag on an anthology, including fandoms, ships, categories (m/m, f/f, etc.), and archive warnings.

I want to read Cleric Beast/Hunter vivisection fic. Someone else wants to read Cleric Beast/Hunter fic and is squicked out by vivisection. Your anthology features a Cleric Beast/Hunter coffee shop date fic and a Sam/Dean vivisection fic, and therefore carries both tags. I find a coffee shop fic I don’t care to read, and the other person never finds the Cleric Beast/Hunter coffee shop date fic of their dreams because they’re filtering out vivisection.

Mad lib that example with literally any combination of tags and it’s the same. Only people who do not want to read the anthologized fics will find them.

(PS the tag for Cleric Beast/Hunter doesn’t exist, I should get on that)

–

Anthologies throw false positives for crossovers:

According to AO3’s search filter, a crossover is any work which carries tags for more than one distinct fandom.

In our example above, Bloodborne and SPN fics were anthologized together. Neither fic is a crossover, but the anthology will be removed from searches that exclude crossovers, and will spam the search results of anyone looking specifically for Bloodborne or SPN crossovers.

–

The ratings on anthologies cannot be trusted:

An anthology must be labeled for the highest rated fic it contains. If you anthologize porn without plot or ultra graphic vivisection in the same work as as tooth rotting fluff, the whole thing will have to be labelled as explicit (or unrated).

People looking for explicit work will find the the G rated fluff, people looking for G rated fluff will filter it out because it’s erroneously labeled as explicit.

Only the people who do not want to read the work will find it. Are we noticing the pattern here?

–

To break the pattern a bit:

Individually posted short works belong on the archive.

Archive of Our Own is aptly named, it’s an archive. It is designed to house fanworks, all fanworks, no matter how small, and the search function is designed to make those fanworks easy to find and sort. You are not “spamming” by archiving any quantity of correctly labeled archive materials.

If someone clicks on a tag and sees a front page full of your works and decides they hate you, they can just filter out your username or change the sort criteria. But chances are they’ll go “sweet, twenty new works for the thing I searched for!”

–

Anthologies muck up the statistics.

I do a fair bit of searching AO3 to grab numbers rather than to find fics to read. For these numbers to have any meaning, we have to assume that the fics that show up in the searches are correctly labeled.

ALT

If I run two searches like this, I can say that these characters have about the same amount of fic. But anecdotally, Elden Ring oneshots are anthologized more often than Silmarillion oneshots. Perhaps there are actually more Ranni fics on AO3 than Turin fics, and they’re lumped together and hidden from the site stats while more of the Turin fics are being counted individually.

If I wanted to dig deeper and crunch some numbers, the problem would intensify. What if I wanted to scrape all the metadata and say there were so many millions of words of Ranni fic? If I wanted that to be accurate, I’d have to manually go through nearly one thousand works to exclude the “chapters” that aren’t fics with Ranni in them and have been falsely included in the Ranni tag.

And all this assumes that an anthology tagged “Ranni the Witch (Elden Ring)” even has Ranni in it at all. Overtagging is always an issue, but anthologies are often tagged for future fics the author intends to write and include in the figure; not even trace of nuts tagging or tagging, but literally tagging a fic that does not exist. (I see this with highly specific kink tags on kinktober fill anthologies often enough that it’s a personal pet peeve in addition to a data accuracy pet peeve).

From another angle, is the sidebar for the Elden Ring tag that reports 2200 slash fics to 760 femslash fics accurate? Is it safe to assume that slash is anthologized at the same rate as femslash in the Elden Ring fandom? I’ve seen anthologies with “chapter” counts in the hundreds, how different would the sidebar look if all those fics were accurately labeled?

–

But Osterby, what if someone wants to subscribe to my kinktober fills but not my other work?

Put it in a series.

–

What if someone doesn’t want to see my coffee shop AU fic while scrolling through my profile which is primarily vivisection kink fic?

Thanks for thinking of me! I’ll filter out the coffee shop AU tag, or I’ll scroll through your vivisection kink series.

–

How will people know what order to read my loosely connected oneshots in?

That’s what a series is for.

–

How will someone find all my works with the same OC/setting/kink/trope/fandom?

Series.
Or tags.
You can give your own OCs and AU settings their own custom tags.

–

How will someone subscribe to my kinktober fills if they’re not all in the same work?

ALT

–

What if someone doesn’t want to filter and still hates my works?

Skill issue. On their part. Don’t prioritize haters over both your intended audience and over people who want to filter out 99% of your work but still want to read that one Cleric Beast/Hunter coffee shop fic.

And also you should block haters, not try grovel to them.

–

What if I want to bury a fic between other stuff and make it harder to find?

Try minimal tagging, nonspecific tags, empty or uninformative summary, and archive locking.

ALT

–

If you’ve stuck with me this long, I’ve probably convinced you to at least look into the series function.

To create a new series, just make up the name for it while posting (or editing) a fic. It’s a ticky box under “associations”, right above the “this work has multiple chapters” ticky.

ALT

–

And if you need more convincing, a series will allow your readers to leave kudos on each of your fics. Wouldn’t it be nice to get 31 kudos from me instead of just one? Pretty please let me kudos each of your shorts as I read through your entire bibliography in one go.

depsidase:

derinthescarletpescatarian:

consistent-sincerity:

derinthescarletpescatarian:

When I was a kid, I lived on a farm, and once a year the adults would go duck hunting and bring home a few ducks. One year, it was me and my brother’s job to pluck those ducks. We were, like, maybe eight or nine? Plenty old enough to pluck a duck, but with zero experience.

And that zero experience turned out to be a problem, because we hadn’t had much to do with birds and the thing about a bird’s feathers, right, is that you’ve got a feather that sits in a little sheath thing that’s rooted in the body. So what you want to do is pull the feather and sheath both out. But if you’re a little kid who’s never done this before, all too often, the feather comes out and leaves the sheath in the body. So we’d be doing our best but the ducks would come out maybe a quarter plucked properly and otherwise still full of these feather sheaths, and then it’s a matter of going back and pulling all these little sheaths out.

I remember quite clearly, my mother and aunt helping us with this part, because it’s fiddly and we were taking forever. They’d take the plucked ducks and re-pluck them properly. And I remember my mum making a remark to my aunt (not maliciously, she didn’t know I could hear and was just making conversation), “You know, it would’ve been easier for us to just do it from the start and not have to deal with all these fiddly little bits.” And she was absolutely right – my brother and I were involved for our benefit in the same way you get a young kid to “help” wash the dishes, we were learning a life skill. But even though we’d done most of the work, we’d removed most of the unwanted mass from the duck’s skin, we’d actually made things harder. We’d removed all the feathers and a quarter of the sheaths, but the sheaths are much easier to remove with the feathers attached, so working on a “mostly plucked” duck was a lot more work for the adults than just doing the whole duck from scratch would have been.

Anyway, I vividly remember this incident every time someone suggests saving time by writing with AI and then just editing it into something good.

Let me tell you what AI is good at doing: Initial proofreading for spelling, grammar, and consistency. Stuff an editor could do but in a fraction of the time that a human could do it.

Let me tell you what AI is bad at doing: Thinking things through. Creating new material. Feeling anything at all about the art right in front of it.

Y'know… the art part of art.

I absolutely would not recommend AI for proofreading. It’s so so bad at it. If you want a bot proofreader, find a non-AI one. There was a period not long ago when a bunch of proofreaders previously considered reliable, like Grammerly, suddenly went to absolute shit. The writers I know who use such tools were confused as fuck; any proofreader is going to be a little glitchy (there’s simply too many unusual cases in English and it’s impossible for a mass market bot to distinguish between error and stylistic choice) but they used to be good for finding typos and accidental missing or misspelled words, and suddenly they were complete garbage, recommending nonsense. More than one person experiencing an accidental ‘approve all changes’ moment (which happens) had their editor read their manuscripts and go “this doesn’t… sound like you, is everything okay?” and found that their manuscripts had been turned to fragmentary nonsense by an electronic proofreader that just couldn’t do its job. They started abandoning these products in droves, looking for ones that still fucking worked.

This massive drop in quality happened when these proofreaders stopped relying on human programming and started incorporating AI.

AI is not good at proofreading, even for simple things like spelling and grammar. We had tools that were good at that and incorporating AI into them made them almost useless. If you want to use an electronic checker, I’d recommend hunting down one that does not use AI, not necessarily for ideological reasons but just because incorporating AI flushes their reliability down the toilet.

captainkirkk:

What they don’t tell you about writing is that as you write, you discover scenes and entire plots that you hadn’t accounted for that need to be written. So you can spend two hours writing and editing only to realise you’re further away from the finish line than you thought you were when you started

notgreatbob:

“i wasted those years” who cares. you lived the only life you could’ve lived in those moments

memeuplift:

cyberneticnightmares:

saw an elderly woman walking around with a tote bag whose design were the four AO3 fic category squares and she very excitedly asked if i was a reader or a writer bcs nobody else at the con had recognized it, and after telling her that i’ve been writing fic since fanfic.net, she solemnly nodded and explained that she’d been reading fic since “the days of personal websites” but that she only started writing fanfic when she was 47 and oh my god when i tell you that i genuinely teared up on the spot!!!!! like!!! HELL YEAH???? LITERALLY NEVER TOO OLD TO START WRITING. NEVER TOO OLD TO WRITE AND SHARE YOUR FIC.

her enthusiastic “i’m a very nice and bubbly person, i swear! but i love writing angst and major character death :)” nearly took me the fuck out.

icon. legend. diva. i wish her nothing but a kajillion million comments and kudos. i hope her fic updates crash AO3. i hope she knows i’m promoting her to my personal patron saint of AO3.

vivianwrite:

For everyone who has an Itch account and is interested + able to support a whole lot of LGBT+ writers: Pride Book Fair is still going on until July 1! This is your chance to grab not only A Summer with the Immortal, but a lot of other books as well (over 100 if you go for the big bundle).

[Image descriptions:

Image 1: Pride Book Fair 2025 Bundle. The Big Bundle of Queer Awesomeness. 100+ books for $100! pridebookfair.carrd.co. An itch.io logo is in the corner. The background of the image is a blue-purple to pink gradient with a violet blob shape overlapping it. A sketched pink and purple ribbon sits to the right of the bottom portion of text.

Image 2: Pride Book Fair 2025 Bundle. Fantasy. pridebookfair.carrd.co. An itch.io logo is in the corner. The background of the image is a blue-purple to pink gradient with a violet blob shape overlapping it. A sketched, purple-colored crown sits to the left of the text. 18 fantasy book covers are tiled on the image, featuring: Natural Outlaws and Fractured Sovereignty by S.M. Pearce; The Hidden Crystals by R. Dawnraven ; Nomads of Zyden by Xine Fury, How I Became a Therapist in Another World vol. 1-4 Omnibus by C.A. Moss; Zimanges by MC Burnell; The Edge of a World by JD Rivers; Of All the Stars by Kris Madigan; Blade Broken by Niranjan; Colors of Magic by Liz Sauco; A Lake of Feathers and Moonbeams by Dax Murray; The Potent Solution by Ashley Nova; The Godsfang by Y. R. Liu; Chai and Cat-Tales by Lynn Strong; Awakenings by Claudie Arseneault; Rainbow Islands by Devin Harnois; A Summer with the Immortal by Paris Vivian; Of Spells and Love by Odessa Silver; Manipulator’s War by Elise Carlson.

End ID.]