Making a story on Fimfiction is a simple process but some elements of it might confuse you as a new user. This tutorial is designed to guide you through the process, making sure you can join the thousands of other users sharing stories on the site!

Creating A New Story

First of all we need to actually create the story. Look in the user bar at the top of your page and you will see a drop down with your name. By hovering over it and then hovering over "stories", you'll see the "new story" button. Click that and you'll be taken to create your brand new story.

There are a variety of fields to fill out for creating your story, but most are very self explanatory. Some fields have little question marks next to them which you can hover over to find out more about it.

Categorising Your Story

One field that might not be so obvious is the "series" field. You must select one of the MLP series tags to post your story.

By typing "my" into the text box we can see tags come up. Friendship is Magic, Equestria Girls, The Movie and The Comic are all tags that quality as MLP tags and will suffice for posting your story on the site.

It's important you select the correct rating for your story. More information can be found on the tag information page.

Having Others Proof Read Your Story

Stories on Fimfiction must be approved before they can be seen by everyone. However, you can set a “view password” for your story which lets people view your story even while it is unapproved.

Users must be logged in to Fimfiction to be able to enter the password and view the story. Link them to your story page and they will be greeted with a login page where the password can be used.

Choosing What Feedback To Receive

By default, stories can be rated and commented on by other users. You can disable this functionality for your story by changing these options. Note that by removing ratings, your story cannot gain “heat” which the site uses to identify popular stories to place in the featured box on the frontpage, so there is a downside to disallowing ratings.

Stories on Fimfiction can be added to groups by other users. By default, any groups your story is added to will show next to the story on the story page. If you wish to stop a group showing, you can blacklist it from that list. By toggling the “feature groups by default” option on the edit story page, you can reverse this behaviour so groups do not automatically show up and you must manually approved them.

Adding Chapters

When you save your story, you will be taken to the story page which is what users will see when they click on your story. Right now it's pretty bare though! Let's add your first chapter to fix that.

Click the "new chapter" button at the top left of the story and (optionally) add a title in the popup that comes up. After creating the chapter you'll be taken to the chapter page to add the actual chapter content.

Writing Your Chapter

Chapters use BBCode for formatting. You can learn more about BBCode on our BBCode help page. The bottom bar of the chapter editor lets you see how many words you're written and how many paragraphs your story has.

It's important your story has paragraphs and you can find out more in our article about paragraphs.

You should also check our article about story formatting to see what kind of stories we allow on Fimfiction and restrictions we place on chapter formatting.

Save your chapter’s content by clicking the green “Save” button at the bottom left of the editor.

The "Format" dropdown at the top left of the editor has a few features to help you writing.

• Fix Capitalisation - Replace small letters at the start of sentences with capitalised versions.
• Fix Paragraph Spacing - Automatically convert all single line breaks into double line breaks.
• Fix Trailing Whitespace - Remove all unnecessary whitespace at the end of lines.
• Curly Quotes - Turn basic quotes ( "Example" ) into curly quotes ( “Example” )

Publishing Your Chapter

Remember to click the publish button at the top of the chapter when you want your chapter to actually be visible in your story. Unpublished chapters do not count towards the 1,000 word count minimum.

Submitting Your Story

Almost there! You're created a story and added a chapter but now we need to submit it so it can go through the approval process and appear on the site for everyone to see. First of all, here's a checklist of basic things you should get right before clicking submit.

• Make sure your story has a suitable title
• Make sure your story has a short description that briefly describes the content of the story
• Make sure your story has a suitable cover image (see our nsfw image policy)
• Ensure you have at least 1 published chapter and that there are at least 1,000 words across the chapters you have published.
• Chapters should be formatted with paragraphs and have a basic level of grammatical correctness

Now we've got all those out of the way, it's time to submit. Click the "submit" button on the story toolbar and you'll see a popup letting you submit your story.

This is another opportunity for you to read our rules and make sure your story is above board. When you've made sure that's the case, you can click the submit button and then it's just a case of waiting for your story to be approved and be visible on the site!

The Approval Process

Your first story will have to go through our approval process. This involves having a moderator take a quick look at your story to see if everything is ok. This can take a while if staff aren't around to deal with your story. Please be patient and know that your story is not forgotten or missed. Bugging staff won't make your story get seen to quicker.

If your story has problems, it will fail the process and you'll be told exactly why. Fix up the problems and you'll be able to submit again and, assuming you fixed them, have it pass the next time.