So you decided to sabotage your career: a pro as fuck guide to longfics · 8:16am Apr 16th, 2016
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted a blog. Mainly because I’ve been trying to finish the TLS sequel. Guess what?
It’s done now.
Bad news: Done doesn’t mean finished. This thing is going to need editing and prereading to make sure it’s up to snuff to publish (my apologies into the poor saps that agreed on reading this. But look on the bright side: eventually it ends)
So it’s going to be just a bit longer before it gets the ol’ publishareno. But hey, until then, you can savor the sweet, melodious sound of my voice* as these words come out at ya like baller rhymes.
*In order for Merc to audibly read this to you in the sweet, melodious sound of his voice, please buy the ‘Barking Mad’ DLC pack for this blog. #powertothegamers
Anyway, today I’m going to run through six all-purpose tips for writing longfics, then four you can use all the time on your fimfiction stories (because fuck working on your original fiction. There’s only time to write about big-titted humanized horses.)
So, now that I’ve finished my contractually obligated introduction blurb, we can get to the actual meat of this bit! Let’s go!
1) Don’t Do It.
This one seems fairly obvious and self-explanatory. Don’t do them, dumbass. You know how much it breaks my heart seeing cool stories that go for forty chapters until the writer has an embolism and dies midway through? A lot, that’s how much. Longfics you have to make sure you’ll be dedicated on doing, otherwise you’ll just be another schmuck that quits a story right as Fluttershy is biting a pillow as Big Mac prepares to play gynecologist.
No, it wasn’t a sex fic, they’re just actors for ponyville’s newest musical: The Vagina Monologues.
Spike’s lucky, he got to play the main protagonist: Clitty the Clitoris.
To real talk: I was going to continue this joke until I ran it into the ground, but I forgot where I was going with it. I know I was hoping to end it with saying something like ‘the clitoris and the hair’ as a pun on the Aesop fable, but I think that only works if you pronounce clitoris in a certain way. Once again proving that humor has culture boundaries.
Anyway, what I’m getting at is that you need to know that you’ll be around to finish it. Because only halfway publishing a story on this site is depressing. Even if I think you might be legit-tier autistic with your fic about Goku developing a diaper fetish and fucking Rainbow Dash so they can conceive an abomination that’s half-horse half-monkey-man that can save the world from Chairman Mao, I want you to finish it. I’ll hate it probably with every fiber of my being, but I’ll still want you to finish it so you get that sweet, sweet endorphin release in your brain that goes with accomplishment.
Seriously, though, where are all the DBZ stories with Krillin as the protag? He’s a manlett that ends up with a hot and tall android wife and kids. This Krillin nigga apparently has sperm so potent that he can impregnate a robot from space.
Now that I’ve made two jokes about sex organs, maybe I should move on to tip two.
Though seriously one last word of warning: you don’t know what you’re getting into if you do a longfic early on in your writing career. It’s like deciding to burn your palm on a stove in order to deaden your nerves instead of just deciding to not hurt yourself. It’s one of the worst ways to get followers unless you already have a good rapport with people. (more on that to come).
2) Outline
I can’t stress enough how important that is, and I’m not even good at it compared to someone like Bookplayer, who’s like fuckin’ Rainman with that shit, but even then. I know you need to have a fairly cohesive theme or approach to your story, every chapter needs to be interesting in some form, and that there should be a clear and concise way to sum the story up. Outlines help that a ton on delivering the story you want to tell while at the same time wiping filler from the face of the earth.
You need to be precise, consistent with your message (if you’re a Aesopfag at least. Not every story needs a moral tied to it, after all! I mark this with an exclaiming point to exclaim loudly that this is true!), and allow for the maximum of expression with a minimum of dialogue, if possible.
I’m not saying dialogue is bad by any means, hell, just look at my shit 95% of the time, I enjoy writing character dialogue for most of my stories, just remember dialogue needs to be written like a scene, as in cut out the bullshit first and foremost until it’s a well-honed knife (unless it needs to be meandering and winding for character purposes, remember that there’s an exception to every rule in life. Aside from maybe doing cocaine, you should probably follow the rules on not taking that so your life isn’t ruined, tbh fam). Don’t talk about the weather or idle conversation for more than a line or two max, unless you’re doing it to show a character’s relationship with another. IE, AJ and Rarity exchanging friendly and coy bants if they’re both bros in a story, or actual harsh jabs on one-another’s lifestyle choices if there’s animosity between them, Twilight discussing animal habitats with Yellow Autism when the story isn’t about habitats or it doesn’t serve as a metaphor for a point you’re trying to showcase about the characters or setting, Dash talking to Spike about SPORTSBALL, ect. Keep superfluous dialogue to a minimum, focus your actual convos on the meat of what you’re trying to accomplish.
Going back on point, outlining can help this a ton, if you make a note on what the conversation hopes to accomplish, an overall topic theme. If you need ideas on how to do this, watch some movies. Things like Good Will Hunting showcase how to have characters that have an obvious relationship between one-another, but still manage to stay on target and not ramble. Concise is the name of the game, baby, gotta keep interest held high in-between the antics, be they punching someone so hard their skeleton pops out, a jobblow between a Timberwolf and a godawful abomination between a horse and human, or someone getting a pie in the face. Concise. Breath that word in and out. Yeah, there we go. Lovely.
3) Don’t Bite Off More Than You Can Chew
Am I repeating myself a hair here? Good. I’ll even repeat myself explicitly here: Don’t bite off more than you can chew, for the love of all things that are holy.
Unless you want to spend the next 3 years of your life writing about how Superman needs the 8 dragon balls to defeat the elite squad of Chrysalis, Joker, Dio Brando, Mewtwo and Hillary Clinton, and so he goes to Equestria and joins forces with the mane 6, plus Spider-Man, the Burger King Kid’s Club, the Boxcar Children, the cast of Cheers, Sherlock Holmes from the 22nd century, and the comic relief character: Clone-Mecha Adolf Hitler, whose gas is used as a tool of good and justice like it was all those years ago.
What? He was a bug exterminator before the whole Nazi thing, right? Pretty sure that’s what that Chinese documentary I watched said.
Anyway, in order for this fiction to have any really valid story behind it, you need a reason for everyone to join together, some things to make them not be one-dimensional, their own motivations, hopes and dreams, how the war effort for the God Queen and King of Mankind (Celestia and Donald Trump, respectively), wears them out or fills them with righteous zeal, the list goes on. Having characters that associate with other characters eats up a ton of time if you’re even halfway attempting effort, and that’s before we even start talking about Superman getting the dragon balls or, God forbid, actually engaging the enemy early-on and having to realize he needs balls to defeat them. (A metaphorical and a literal sense, of course, as the dragon balls are physical objects, but balls is also an oft used term for testicular fortitude and raw, unabashed courage. That’s why women with a pair of large, swinging balls in real life and in stories are the best things ever)
You are easily looking at years of writing time unless your special talent is pushing out 1st draft stories with the speed of a crack-fueled sperg, and know an editor that can keep up the same pace as you.
If you’re willing to make that commitment, more power to you, I guess. But if not, think about cutting some things back. Like, what if it’s just the mane 6, Superman, and maybe Norm or Woody from Cheers, instead of half the total population of Greenland that you have to write for?
Answer, you just saved yourself over 40k of words. Probably. Which means weeks of headaches gone, and you can work on making the smaller cast to the best of your ability, and can make the quest to hold those swollen dragon balls in their sweaty, eager hands even more memorable. Don’t overextend, don’t make checks your butt can’t cash, but, even more importantly…
4) Write What You Know Or Enjoy
This is some general writing tips 101, I know, and I’ve said it before in an earlier blog, but it’s absolute key in how to make a character you feel compelled to write for, even if she’s a bitch, or he’s a manwhoring piece of shit. Maybe she enjoys a good hamburger, or he’s captain of the football team (sorry guys, I’m a J2n (jock-nerd transitioning), so football captains are still fun to write for me. Look out, ladies, Chad Rockpec, the man who took the rag-tag Armadillos to state, is on the scene). I’ll focus on her enjoying a burger far more than I will on how she is a math wiz, or how Chad’s a calligraphy enthusiast. Can they be important facets to their characters? Of course, maybe Chad is embarrassed by his hobby, or is scared he might damage his artistic hands when he runs directly into a seven foot tall French defensive linebacker the coach from their rival team imported just to counter Chad “the miracle man” Rockpec’s insane aggressive plays. Maybe, let’s call her Stella, maybe Stella is such a standoffish bitch because she’s trying to solve an impossible to crack mathematical equation in her free time.
They both have integral, important aspects there that round off their characters. Will I use them as small focal points?
Of course. You need to have small tics to make the characters interesting.
Will they play a major role in the story? Will Stella solve the equation through a series of complex algorithms and become a better woman because of it? Will Chad end up suffering an existential crisis when he breaks his beautiful fingers accidentally against Pierre “Brickhouse” Beauchamp’s impossibly hard torso and, therefore, can’t create magnificent kanji with his mangled hand?
Hell fucking no. Never in a million years.
I’m sure they can be good plot hooks for certain people, and can be written (wrote?) well by those people, but they don’t interest me in the absolute slightest aside from as footnotes to a character’s story. They’re used as simple springboards for a character, rather than the main focus of them. Knowing how to divide and conquer a character is important and the same can be said about an overall plot. Some writers will be enthralled by the thought of a chess tournament or a night out on the town as the plot hook, others are far more comfortable writing about a kung-fu tournament or cowboys in the west. Play to your strengths, nerds, and you can do anything.
If you’re wanting a more personal example, let me tell you a little ditty about a character, then contrast her with another character I adore writing.
AJ as shown in canon is a hardworking, dependable, honest, and moral character, the Steve Rogers of the show (Steed Rogers if I want to do a horse pun, dohoho). She’s also a farmer that oversees a large amount of acreage alongside her brother.
I like writing her for those reasons, since she serves as a fantastic rock for other characters to play with, but I also like writing her for her family angle and, growing up on a farm, I can empathize with her more than a lot of characters in the show. And, because of that farming angle, I can put more interest into her hobbies and profession.
Like, for example, if we’re talking a humanized setting, it’s a lot easier to go into detail and expand from what you see on the show, what with working cattle, mending fences, dealing with bullshit bills and regulations, tending to livestock, working dairy, that sort of thing. I can envision the good things and the bad with a farm and the issues that come with owning your own slice of heaven and having to improvise answers to problems when they aren’t always obvious. I can take the farm aspect of her and run wild.
What I don’t tend to do is use her country euphemisms or have her go full-retard on some aspects of her character. As a country boy from Missouri, hearing her say stuff like “dat der’s purdier than a lil’ wagon going up a hill over yonder” or “I’m feelin’ lower than a snake in a wagon rut”, that kind of thing, it feels forced as hell a lot of times in the show, and as such I tend to lessen their appearance in my own work. I grew up around hicks, had a graduating class of a whopping 54 kids, a record size at the time, to give you an idea on how small-town my hometown is, and the only time we said those kinds of things was when we were intentionally pretending to be retarded or overly hickish around dem der city-folk. (Kinda unrelated to my point, but I also hate how there’s a banjo leitmotif ninety percent of the time when the screen focuses on her character. There are a ton of other southern vibe instruments, show guys, use them sometime instead.)
I know it’s a kids cartoon, so exaggeration is the name of the game, but shit son. Though exaggeration does bring me to my counter example.
Rarity is my second favorite character to write, as she has stuff I adore about her character, her being an established businesswoman, she’s shrewd in the sense of using her feminine wiles to take advantage of assholes (and the occasional schmuck, but usually assholes), her to-a-fault generous nature at times, her love of her sister, her ‘will reluctantly do it if it’s necessary’ attitude, even when it’s something she doesn’t like, and her dry remarks. She’s like an entry-level appreciation for a sometimes high-maintenance character, and a shining example that not all high-end women need to suck dick as characters, that there can be fantastic ones, when they’re given a solid core underneath the makeup.
Now that I got my circlejerking of her character out of the way, here’s the thing about her:
She has aspects I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole and, as such, aspects I wouldn’t be assed to write about.
They’re things that are a part of her character, and things that deserve a mention in a story as they’re as integral of a part of her as AJ’s farm is, but they’d never be a focus for me because I just don’t care enough or maybe don’t understand enough to do justice.
For an example: the fashion industry.
Sure, you do need to mention how she’s someone striving to make her mark, to be the next (I dunno fashion people, especially not in the modern world, so go ahead and put a name here) of the community, and that is important to her character, making an attempt to be the toast of the town with her designs and being a walkway artist.
At the same time, though, I think she wouldn’t devote her entire career to that sort of transit, ‘fire and forget’ aspect of the industry. I would also see her being the queen of high-end, long-lasting clothing in the sense of suits, remarkable dresses that stand the test of time, and practical clothing that also serve as works of art. When it comes to discussing the aspect of her jobs, I write her far more like her striving for the later, the men’s clothing and attempt to be iconic as a woman who still is held in high-regard for her exquisite taste in creating a fashion that lasts not just years, but generations, rather than a footnote as the chick that reintroduced bell-bottoms when they were in fashion.
So that aspect of her, the aspect that would see insult at the term ‘tailor’ (even though a personal tailor is something a king has, and was held in high regard alongside blacksmiths in the early aspects of life) I would gloss over, and would let her carry her tailor title with pride.
Is this a slap in the face of her established character? I don’t think so. It’s just a different aspect of her priorities I focus on, in the same way someone who doesn’t care about a farm would focus their attention to other aspects of AJ in a story.
Am I misinterpreting her character with a more lax view on the fashion industry and her role as a town’s seamstress?
Nah. Don’t think so really. I still have her at her core when I write her, a stubborn woman who likes what she likes and some of those likes involve high-end wines, romantic getaways, and succulent Chinese dinners. I just tend to skim over the stuff I could care less about with her character, leaving it as a footnote for her, rather than the end-all be all and what her entire written world revolves around.
But yeah, that rambling manifesto? All there to say ‘write what you enjoy’. Next time just skim my stuff instead of thinking I’ll have a deep, introspective and well thought out series of paragraphs. You done goofed.
5) Pre-Read Before Calling It Finished
Holy shit is this important. Take a break after getting a story done, then read it like you have no fucking clue what’s next in your plot. Read it like you’re an idiot-savant that’s obsessive-compulsive when it comes to werds. Look for issues like plot holes, repetition, be they of words or ideas in the story (some repetition is good, just as a friendly reminder here, since it can be a great tool for reinforcing ideals), if it’s fanfiction, OOCness, and general formatting. A blatant case of ‘ounce of prevention’ here. A story is like a house of cards, pull the wrong one out and it comes crumbling down. A character breaking his or her mannerisms to twist a knife or offer an olive branch without some pre-established reason can really break immersion and hurt a suspension of disbelief that’s necessary for any story to flourish.
I’d even go far enough to say make sure your characterization and plot should be top priority over any other type of issue, fuck grammar, fuck messing up on paragraphs, fuck even something like spelling. Sure, they’re important things to spot and fix, but there’s no point in fixing those if your base is diseased. Characters and their struggles are the heart of a story, the foundation of a home, and you need a solid foundation before building higher, otherwise it can ruin everything above it.
6) Do Projects In-Between
This is a huge thing I should mention. If you focus on the same thing every day for weeks at a time, you're going to get burnt out. You're not gonna wanna do it anymore. I don't care if it's your dream story, with dream characters and a dream world all wrapped up in a bright, cozy dream blanket. My favorite food is a thin-crust sausage and pepperoni pizza, but the thought of eating it every day makes my stomach hurt. You diversify food so you can appreciate when your favorites come a-knockin'.
The same can be applied to stories. When I'm not slowly pecking my way through TLS stuff, I'm working on a ton of other things, be they more pony shit with Bookplayer, Jake, or Peregrine Caged, or some original fiction of my own devices, I tend to leap in, make a mess, then leap to something else, pushing myself hardcore for a few days before needing a breather for a different story, in the same way I listen to a certain song or group for weeks at a time before hopping to a new jam.
Every song in this OST is fucking glorious.
If you have a mistress fiction on the side, it can only improve your main squeeze story. It lets you look over and catch things that you might have missed if you tried rushing. Trust me.
Ok, that concludes the general longfic advice and how to avoid the pratfalls of it, here are a few more tips if you're just talkin' fanfiction on the site and how to gain fame and positive recognition from your peers. Expect these bad boys to be shorter and more concise on their explanations, since, well, they're kinda obvious as soon as you see the listing. With that in mind, let's make you e-famous for writing make-believe stories for cartoon horses, baby!
7) Use Established Characters
Nothing will turn off a reader faster than an OC in a prominent role. That's just the name of the game. (ok, fics with a m/m romance might, as might a chapter over 10k in length, but those are both close seconds to OC stuff)
Is it unfair? Sure, there are plenty of good writers that can make OC's work and gel well with the established characters, and it can be fun to see how, exactly, you can get someone in buddy-buddy with 'em. Is that what it's normally used for?
We all know that's a load. OC's typically are there to sex up or outperform the cast and be the seventh element and Luna/Celestia's one true husbando. They have as bad of a reputation as humanized fics for wish-fulfillment and frankly—
Ok, scratch what I said, if you want e-fame, go ahead and use an OC that's easy to self-insert into. Shit, I forgot this was a guide to getting noticed, not a guide to writing good in general. Whew, forgot for a sec there. Yeah, just write a guy named Billy Cockem and his deviant misadventures in the land of Equestria and you'll make the view counts, son. But if you're wanting more critical success, stick to preestablished people/ponies. If you're wanting that sweet sex tag view count bonus, have an insert. Ez pz.
8) Have Other Releases Under Your Belt
People are willing to watch a long-ass magic trick from someone like David Blaine because he's an established magician and a 4th level deacon in the church of Lucifer. People won't be nearly as patient as a guy offering free card tricks and selling meth-mouthed blowjobs on the corner of the street.
That metaphor is like this: Someone like IJAB or Titanium Dragon will have more success in publishing a segmented longfic than Billy Bob who just got an account yesterday. The former have been established as having quality and have records for finishing stories. Actions speak louder than words here, and the actions of having things done already before you post your magnum opus will do nothing but help you in endgame by giving you more potential viewers and by spreading word-of-mouth (hopefully).
9) Update Regularly
People see a story constantly in updates/featured, and they're more inclined to click, likewise, your readers already invested into it will likely continue to read updates dripped to them via IV. If you don't get a constant drip, your audience will flatline, and we wouldn't want that. Otherwise you might end up with, say, a boxing fic that you love but don't have time to update for over a year, or a pony-on-earth story that gets pushed to the wayside because you realized that, holy shit, you forgot rule #3 on the listings I just gave you and you don't follow your own advice and the next thing you know you realize if you put everything in like you originally thought you'd do it'd be a huge clusterfuck of a story that would make part 3 of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure look like a walk across the street.
So you ignore it for the time being and feel sad about it. Anyway, update regularly, kiddos. It's the way to be somebody, rather than be somebody's fool.
10) Teen Rating Is Bread And Butter
Just plop down a sex tag and a comedy tag and watch the high-school audience lap that shit up, dawg.
Consider that my last tip for now. Maybe you learned something, maybe you didn't. But the important thing is, I got a new blog up. That's the most important lesson right there.
Bam. See you space cowboy.
3873735
Include memes and quips.
We want the Reddit audience, after all.
Excellent advice, some of which I could've really used back when one of my longer stories collapsed under its own weight. Thank you for it.
See me? Where?
3875067
Through your window.
For God's sake, pick up that jacket off the ground.