Site Post » How to Get Your Story Approved · 9:26pm Jun 2nd, 2014
Hi guys. Today we're going to talk about the mystical, magical art of getting your story approved for posting on Fimfiction.net. You got your story all written up and you're so excited you can hardly contain yourself. It's like you swallowed a battery or something, and you should probably call poison control regarding that. But first, you want to submit your story so that people all over Fimfiction will see it! Tentatively, you click the "Submit Story" button, totally skimming over all the rules you should be aware of when you submit, and confirming your submission...
And, not a short while later, you receive a message from a staff member saying that your story has failed moderation and must be fixed! What's the deal? What gives? Who are these jerks to tell you that your story can't go up? Rebel! Topple the oppressors! Seid ihr das essen? Nein, wir sind die jaeger!
Ahem.
Let's talk about this, and some of the bigger issues you can avoid when you submit your story.
So, before I go any further on this:
I'm assuming you've given Fimfiction's FAQ a good read-through. Particularly the sub-headings marked Rules (which contains most of the rules for submitting stories) and Stories (which explains things like story tagging in detail). While you're at it, you may want to look at the wonderful Writing Guide by Ezn.
I know that can sound like a lot to go over, but... frankly, like 99% of the reasons your story might fail moderation when you submit it are already covered in one or more of these sources. I'm going to try to cover some of the bigger issues in greater detail here, but for like the vast majority of minor stuff, and even a lot of the bigger things, most of your questions can honestly be answered by taking a look. It's in a book.
(The Reading Rainbow)
Day One: Descriptions
So, descriptions. Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em, am I right?
So, when you make your story, there are two boxes you need to fill out: one for the short description (which is used variously around the site) and one for the long description (which displays when someone's on your story's page). You need to fill both of these boxes out to get your story approved, and they both need to give some indication of what the heck is actually going on with your story.
See these? Please fill them out, and please put something in them that'll tell people what your story's about. Do it for the readers, and more importantly, do it for yourself, because if you don't, getting your story failed is a pretty reasonable possibility. Sure it takes like five minutes to fix, but why waste the time? Get approved on the first try, man. Be a hero.
Generally speaking, we're pretty lenient about how you sell your story. Some people get poetic, some people are very to-the-point. It's your business as to how you pitch it. Occasionally if you get a little too artsy or vague, we might have to send you back, but for the most part as long as your description tells people what your story does, you'll be all right. "Discord goes to have tea at Fluttershy's cottage. Wacky shenanigans ensue!" Easy, right?
Weirdly enough, not everyone seems to get this. We see a bunch of descriptions that just... don't describe anything, and it's these we'll generally send back on sight.
Here's a list of some actual, real things I've seen in descriptions boxes when going through stories, with some slight paraphrasing:
-Look at the title.
-Look at the short description.
-My Little Ponies owned by Hasbro
-This is my first fanfic, so go easy please
-[OC] belongs to me. [Other OC] belongs to [Other Person]
-I don't care
-kkjlelajjkjhq
-This is what happens when I drink too much coffee
-Sometimes I just have to be random, okay?
-Too random for words
The Rule of Thumb: If reading your short or long description gives nobody a flippin' clue as to what your story's about, it probably won't fly.
Other things:
-If you don't write anything in your short description box, you will get an error message when you try to submit. The staff gets an unreal number of people asking why they get errors when they try to submit their story. "I have 1000 words published, so I think this might be a glitch," is a very common refrain. I... have no idea honestly why people don't write short descriptions in, but there you go. If you get an error when submitting your story, you have at least a thousand words, and no short description written... That's why!
-BBCode does not work in short descriptions. I'm not sure why people keep doing this one, but we get a weirdly large number of stories where people tried to italicize, bold, underline, or link something in their short descriptions... and it doesn't work. It's not supposed to. Don't try it, else your short description'll just look messy. If you have to bold, italicize, underline, or link something, do it in your long description. It will work there.
-And, uh, this is just a by the by... but honestly, make sure there aren't any glaring spelling mistakes or grammatical issues in your descriptions. It's a very small piece of text to check over, and it's the major thing people will look at when trying to figure out if they should read your story. So even if your grammar's not perfect in other places, at least try to make your description look as nice as you can make it.
***
Day Two: Tagging
So, once you've described your story, it's time to go and look at all these weird things you can do to tell people the sort of content your story contains:
For most of these, you don't need to worry too hard. It's not our job, really, to tell you your story is (or, at least, won't be) a dark romantic comedy. Your readers might take some issue if your story clearly isn't a dark romantic comedy, but if you don't care about them, you'll probably be all right. If a little weird.
There are some things you will need to take note of and do, though, depending on what your story contains. A few types of stories require certain tags on them, so that readers understand what they're getting into. Two such types we have to send back pretty often are as follows:
-Stories with Humans in them that don't use the Human tag. If your story's got humans in it, even if they aren't even the main characters or whatever, even if they get turned into ponies by the end of chapter one... you're going to want the Human tag. Just trust me on that one.
-Stories with content from other creative works that don't use the Crossover tag. If your story invokes content from a creative work that is not MLP, it needs the Crossover tag. This means Fallout Equestria and Doctor Whooves stories too. While Doctor Whooves and Fallout Equestria are endemic to the fandom, Daleks and T-51B Power Armor simply ain't from My Little Pony, and stories involving them do need to be tagged with the Crossover tag.
The Rule of Thumb: Just... try to tag your story correctly. If it's got Humans, use the Human tag. If it's a Crossover, use the Crossover tag.
***
Day Two-and-a-Half: Rating
In regards to rating your story Everyone/Teen/Mature, this one's always going to be a bit of a hazy subject, and dependent largely on how your story specifically is written. That said, here are some basic guidelines to the Teen/Mature ratings to give you a general sense of what your story might need to be rated as:
If your story contains:
-Blood Everywhere
-Swearing/Profanity
-Reference to sexual things (to the effect of "Wink wink, nudge nudge")
-Physical violence (typically leading to Blood Everywhere)
-Nonsexual fetishy content
You will likely need at least a Teen rating.
If your story contains:
-Blood and Guts, oozily described in loving detail.
-Actual sex acts/descriptions of genitalia
-Sexual fetishy content
-Swearing/Profanity in the title/description, where even people who don't click on the story would see it.
You will likely need to rate your story Mature.
Again, the FAQ covers a lot of this stuff, so if you need more details on rating your story Everyone/Teen/Mature with Sex/Gore taggings, be sure to check there. Some of this stuff can get a little hazy, like "How much Blood and Gore is okay before it gets Mature?" or "How sexually implicit can I be before I need to be Mature?" so, if all else fails, the option does exist to check with a mod aforehand.
***
Day Three: Grammar/Formatting
This one's kind of weird to talk about, because we're usually really lenient about grammar, spelling, and the like. That said, we do look for some general minimums of readability, for the readers' sake. And for ours. Because, well, if we can't even read your story, we can't actually be sure if it contains stuff it ought not to. Which means we have to send it back to you until we can read it.
The three biggies are as follows:
1. The story is just... entirely unreadable. Nothing is spelled right, the grammar's from Google Translate, and so on.
There's no easy fix for this, but hopefully you're able at least to recognize that your writing doesn't look quite as polished as it ought to. So, y'know, here's a few resources for finding editors and suchlike, which you can check for people who might be willing to help:
-Looking for Editors
-Proofreading, Prereading, and Editing
-Overly Extensive Editors
-Editors-R-Us
2. You have multiple characters talking in the same paragraphs.
Frankly, just read the Writing Guide's explanation on this. It explains the problem and the solution much better than I ever could.
3. You have no indentation or paragraph spacing, and nobody can tell where the first paragraph is supposed to start and the second is supposed to end.
Again, the Writing Guide explains this issue in wonderful detail. Please read this part of it, if nothing else.
If all else fails and you simply can't be bothered to tab-indent or double-space your paragraphs out, Fimfiction actually provides a button on your chapter editor that'll do this for you automatically:
Clicking the "Indent Paragraphs" button will instantly indent anything Fimfiction's chapter editor recognizes to be a paragraph. If you do that and you find you've accidentally screwed something up, you can undo it with the "Outdent Paragraphs" button right beside it. And then go back and maybe indent or double-space your stuff manually.
The Rule of Thumb: The more readable your story is, the less likely it is you'll fail for it. You may pass with worse, but making your story easy to read is just a good thing to do. It helps your readers, it helps you as an author, and it helps us. It's a win-win-win.
***
The Final Day: MLP-related Content
Well, of course.
All right, so... We see stories with some variant of the below an awful, awful lot:
-Nothing MLP-related is ever mentioned in the only submitted chapter.
-Something MLP-related is mentioned once or twice. In an 8k word long chapter.
-MLP-related content is referenced in super vague terms. "I landed in a weird grassy meadow." "I saw talking quadrupedal creatures." "I heard a voice."
-The characters are human/ized, and one of them's a girl named Ramona "Rainbow" Dash, but there'd be no way to tell the story's a My Little Pony fanfic if she were just named Cheryl instead.
-A big chapter of nothing related to MLP. And ponies only show up in the very last paragraph.
So, here's the thing. I get that, for a lot of people, your stories are playing the long game. You need time to set up your human characters, or explain how Darth Vader finds the mysterious magic portal. The pacing just doesn't work if it's all about My Little Pony in the very first chapter, so you don't mention it. That's cool and all, but Fimfiction is a site for hosting MLP fanfiction, and while we're inclined to lenience on some level, we generally will ask that you meet a certain basic minimum of "Is this actually about MLP?" before your story can go up.
A lot of people try to dodge this and look for workarounds. "Oh, a sentence at the end of ten-thousand words where Pinkie Pie says hello isn't sufficient? Well... what about TWO sentences? THREE?" is not rare to see. "What!? One of the characters clearly mentions Equestria and magic in the fifteenth paragraph!" is not an uncommon refrain either.
"He'll meet the ponies next chapter, okay?"
A My Little Pony Fanfic
Realistically, if the first chapter of your story just isn't going to deal with My Little Pony that much, just try to wait until you've written the second chapter, where you'll start dealing more with MLP. Trying to push our boundaries by slapping another sentence or two of MLP when your story fails makes it feel like you're trying to sneak past us on the bare minimum of MLP content... and, personally, it kinda makes me think you're more concerned with pushing your story past us than making your story look its best. If he's going to meet the ponies next chapter, just wait until you've got the next chapter done, yeah?
The Rule of Thumb: If one can sub out a few names or vocabulary terms from your story's text and be unable to tell that your story is actually a My Little Pony fanfic, it probably isn't pony enough.
***
Phew, that's a lot of text again. Hope you've stuck with me this far, and that you've found the above all helpful. Just got one last thing to say:
Final Disclaimer: Admittedly, the staff is not comprised of factory model fusion-powered cyber-giraffes. This is unfortunate, but can't be helped. We're humans, with differing opinions and biological makeups, and this means that we're not always going to be equally harsh about enforcing certain issues. Particularly ones with very subjective lines, like "Is this story basically readable?" That said, this shouldn't be taken as your go-ahead to skimp out on anything I've mentioned above, because while it's possible that you may slip by with ugly misspellings and terrible grammar, you shouldn't even be trying to slip by in the first place. It doesn't do your readers any good to see your spelling mistakes and barebones description, and it doesn't do you any good to have it. It's just a disservice to everyone all around. Especially to you.
Don't shoot for the bare minimum. You're better than that. You deserve to do better than that. Shoot for the stars. Make your story look as nice as you can make it, with proper taggings and descriptions and everything. Not only will you be that much more likely to pass when you submit your story, you'll just... have a much nicer-looking story for your efforts, and that's a cool thing for everyone.
Have a nice day.
Now if their was only a way to like this blog more than once.
~Emperor Archsage
Ha! Attack on Titan reference!
I read this post as quickly as I read the rules: By scrolling quickly past them so I can get to the good stuff.
I read the rules once, and the only time I've had my story fail moderation is when I submitted the third part of a trilogy and it contained a profane word that had existed in both of the previous stories, but was found on the third one to be unacceptable. Just thought I'd share that story.
...Wow, I figured that this would be self-explanatory... Mr. Ob, this is sad if you need to make one of these...
...Why is this a thing?
This shouldn't be a thing.
At all.
Ever.
~Skeeter The Lurker
How-to: Make Your Story Page Interesting
Some shameless self-promotion, cause this blog here might be as fitting as it could ever be. :V
I had one job obselescence - and I failed you!
2168549
2168553
Some of these issues, like the necessity of the Human/Crossover tags, the line between Teen/Mature, and the issues regarding MLP-related content can be a little non-obvious, and not entirely understood by younger authors or people who're new to Fimfiction.
While in an ideal world, everybody'd just know what's up (or at least read the FAQ/Writing Guide) the staff's worked with explaining these issues enough that going into some greater and (in some cases) simpler detail on them really couldn't hurt.
Also, I'm personally just kind of tired of people sending messages wondering why they get an error when trying to submit their story.
Strange, I've seen a bunch of stories where the grammar looks like it's from Google translate on Fimfic all the time.
Well met!
[Hipster]I like MINE better.[/hipster]
Oh, so I can have swearing in the title?! Excuse me, I must go write Bubble Berry Fucks Equestria.
I want a cyber-giraffe.
Yet I've seen walls of text with absolutely no grammar or punctuation get through. I get that you guys are human and all, but the only conceivable way I can see something like that getting through is when you are all sleep-deprived and so drunk you can't see straight.
2168575
It's been in the FAQ for a good while now, I think. :P
i.gyazo.com/92670de73d90b62bab33fb425b4036fa.png
I'm getting a weird sense of déjà vu here. Granted, it comes from a similar comedic post from Wanderer D that was created last year (though I disremember when, exactly).
...
We're gonna have to go through this ever year, aren't we?
Not that I mind, of course.
What if we have someone from a different show in the story for a very short amount of time and than you never see them again. Should it just be random?
My rule of thumb is that if the long and/or short description is riddled with grammar, spelling, or punctuation errors, I'll ignore the story altogether.
Can you tell I used to be an English teacher?
It boggles my mind that people submit stories that fail this site's very permissive standards.
~The lizardman found a loophole in this rule
2168544 or just a German phrase... Nevertheless AoT is majest.
2168588
Hmm, interesting. I think I had a story up with a stable amount of profanity in the description that was rated Mature and it didn't pass, but maybe that was because it was too much for Mature. I'm a foul-mouthed motherfucker, goddammit.
It apparently is your job to tell people their story isn't a tearjerker comedy, though.
2168594
It depends generally on how pervasive the references are. I don't think you'd be at great risk of failing for a lack of a Crossover tag if there's just a one-line cameo in a bigger story. If it runs on for a few paragraphs, or if the story is frequently making cameos/references to other creative works, though, it's gonna start creeping into needing a Crossover tag.
2168560 Okay, i can see that now. Still can't believe I did that that one time.
That one made me feel like a moron of ages...
2168560 Actually, who needs a guide for this? We all know that everything get's through. No matter what, no exceptions. I mean, if we needed this guide for real. How did Mystquestria get through?
I refuse to believe anyone has ever been rejected on these grounds, because I've seen a lot of absolute garbage that's made it through the process.
2168571 I was actually thinking about this one, but that works, too. Like I said, I think we might have to see something like this every year or until people actually start reading the rules.
Great blog post if you ask me. Especially the one about not shooting for the minimum. I have seen some stories where the word total is exactly 1,000 and it seemed like the author cared more about meeting the minimum that the quality of the story.
2168571
Luvs, D. <3
2168631
Honestly, you'd be surprised.
2168548
Like he said, they're human. They probably missed the inclusion of the word in your first two story descriptions.
Sooooo..... You're pretty much saying only the worst of the worst fics without even a small bit of effort are revoked.
Come on people! It only takes you a few extra minutes to make sure you get your fic right. Try to make it make sense and appealing for others to read.
Ok, my rant is over. Make me leave before I go on
2168621 OK. Well what if language is censored?
i.imgur.com/Juvtl.gif
I'm lonely.
-The Lonely Swordsman, Pyriel
2168643
Oh no, I've seen shit like that get through.
2168597 Not until you said so. Good for you! Hope your students weren't too evil.
I have never had Any of my fics rejected.
Yes, be jealous. I am Le Superior Literature Buff Author.
FIMFiction's mods recognize Genius when they see it. Too bad some of its users cannot.
A Mature Sex and Gore Twilicorn story tagged Romance, Tragedy, Dark, Anthro, Comedy, and Crossover.
No way I'm reading that. How the heck does that make sense?
2168656
A RomCom with especially dark humour that loses the romantic and comedic aspects for tragedy later on?
2168637
I imagine I would, 'cause I'd be happy to hunt up some links to examples...
2168643
See above.
I don't now, sometimes, I wish had higher standers on what can be submitted.
Maybe an odd question, but... Do you ever get any stories submitted in SMS language (textese)?
Something like, "O Applejack, u so silly, lol"?
Just wondering, cause I do know that some essays and other written assignments in schools have been turned in, and because of the use of SMS language, the assignments failed. It'd be interesting to see if the same happens here.
I didn't got any problems for approval It was even fast and I'm not a good writer.
One last thing!
Seid ihr das Essen? Nein, wir sind die Jäger!
So wird das geschrieben!
2168639
I've since read the blog post, but at the time of my initial comment, I had not yet.
I was being honest in my initial statement of scrolling quickly past the text.
I actually briefly discussed my use of profanities with the moderator denying my story, and the difference was that I'd used the word "badass" in the short description that time, rather than just in the long descriptions, in a teen story, which is what inspired him to deny my third story, but not the first two.
Prior to this, my reading of the rules had not picked out use of profanities, and I didn't feel the word "badass" was explicit, though now that I have been educated on the specific rule against profanities, I'm not going to make the same mistake again.
All I have to say is that I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE with the Attack on Titan reference.
Sie können Deustch sprechen? Auch ich
2168642
There's a fic for that.
Um, I have spaces between my paragraphs. Is indenting then really necessary? Just asking.
2168696
Indenting or double-spacing generally works. You don't need both.
2168695 Shameless self promotion, much?