Junpei posted:

newts posted:

I really dislike this too because people use it so often to distance themselves from their writing decisions. Just admit you wanted your characters to gently caress.

DropTheAnvil posted:

I think your post is from tumblr, and while it's not my cup of tea, I don't see the problem in a writer celebrating making progress on their work.

Junpei posted:

Which of these are you?



I'm definitely a #2 type: I'll explain my magic system, my cosmology, maybe the government if I deem it necessary but otherwise? PFFFT.

DropTheAnvil posted:

Sorry if I upset ya, was just adding my thoughts, and for what it's worth I don't mind memes being posted.

Junpei posted:

Megazver posted:

(This is assuming you post on RoyalRoad.) It helps to start out by posting a lot of small chapters - at least once a day, twice a day if you can manage it - for at least a week.

Dream Weaver posted:

https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/zogarth

Long answer there. All of her post are good.

Short answer: have a backlog, post consistently, write well, have a good blurb and cover.

I didn't post anything until I had 40 chapters and I keep 20 chapters in the bank.

Milkfred E. Moore posted:

Did someone say web serials?

quote:

Fanfic tends to have a distinctive style: heavy on sentence fragments, emotionally expressive actions, and one-sentence paragraphs; filled with italicized phrases, syntactical repetition, and present-tense verbs. These stylistic features arise from the genre’s particular demands. In fic, the writer’s task isn’t to create a character named “Han Solo” or “Barack Obama.” It’s to convince the reader of this particular instantiation of a character they already know. Backstory and general habits of mind can be excised without much loss; elements that intensify character presence and readerly identification—strong emotions and bodily descriptions—are emphasized. The result has a particular staccato rhythm. Everything, from syntax to narrative perspective, stresses immediacy.

Two modes of writing, then, that seem almost diametrically opposed: literary fiction, writing that emphasizes craft and wins awards; and fanfic, writing that emphasizes, and is born from, readerly pleasure and happily exists outside the prize economy. Except that, in recent years, some of the most lauded works of literary fiction have begun to read an awful lot like fanfic...

The Song of Achilles exemplifies literary fanfic because it has both fic content (it offers a new angle on a previous story) and fic style. Some examples of this hybrid genre have fic origins but not its formal features: Edward St. Aubyn’s Dunbar (2017), which reimagines King Lear as an unhoused, broken-down media titan, doing so with the English novelist’s typical mordant elegance; or John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond (2017), which picks up where The Portrait of a Lady leaves off, and employs Henry James’s endlessly unfolding, simultaneously revealing and withholding sentences. By contrast, Carmen Maria Machado’s excellent stories often exhibit the rhythms of fic, from the clipped style of “Especially Heinous,” a high-level reimagining of characters from Law & Order: SVU, to the driving immersiveness of “The Husband Stitch”: “He smiles at me, and rubs his jaw. A little of my blood smears across his skin, but he doesn’t notice, and I don’t say anything.” In both works that have fic content and those that have fic style, though, affect is the key. Banville writes a James sequel because he loves the original; Miller wants to make Achilles, and the reader, feel all the feels.

There are a number of possible explanations for this leakage of fan culture into literary culture. Literary fiction (A sad young BLANK …) could use some of the energy and feeling that characterizes much of fanfic. Fandom now is seen less as a mark of shame than as a badge of honor. Writers and readers are frustrated with an exclusive focus on craft at the expense of readerly identification. Whatever the root cause, what used to be a hard-and-fast division—literary fiction over here, fanfic over there—has become something of a revolving door.

REMEMBER SPONGE MONKEYS posted:

I dare say you’ve come to the right place!

ultrachrist posted:

Fanfic: The origin of short sentences, italics, repetition, and the present tense.