Faces of Fylifa · 6:39pm May 10th, 2019
Original Meme, Do Not Steal.
>tfw you first post a story and send it out into the world of ‘New’
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>when it gets an upvote!
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>when it gets favorited but not an upvote.
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>when it gets a comment!
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>when it gets a comment and upvote!
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>when it gets a favorite, an upvote, a bookshelf add, and FoME comments on it.
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>when it gets a downvote after a week, likely meaning someone took the time to read it.
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>when it gets a downvote in the first five minutes, meaning someone didn’t read it.
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>when your perfect, no-downvote ratio on an innocent, older fluff story is spoiled by someone who immediately downvotes your entire story collection a minute after you post your newest one. (still salty )
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>when it's hours to a contest deadline and you're on your fifth cup of coffee and on your second page of story.
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>the day after
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—Art by the wonderful Wolfmask
May is an interesting month for me. It’s the anniversary when I first decided to try my hand hoof at fanfiction writing after reading some of Clancrusher’s works and recommendation of fandom staples. I was a bumbling novice then, but now three years later I like to think I am a bumbling apprentice.
Maybe even a bumbling journeyman journeymare!
Let’s see if I can share what anecdotal insights I’ve gotten from being on this wild ride for three years. And I say this with absolutely zero authority whatsoever. I’m not Aragon. Not...yet. And if some of these motes of advice sound like cliché, tired tropes, one hears all the time… well, they are tired cliché tropes for a reason.
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First impressions are important, but you have all the time in the world to prepare. If you spent hours, days, months, years writing your story. You can take an extra fifteen minutes to proofread it. Heck even use Fimfiction’s built in screen reader if it works on your browser. Even listening to the robot say a sentence can give you insight on if it's a clumsy one. Our eyes and brains can get so used to ruts that anything to put a little distance between you and the work can help.
Re-read while you write. Re-read before you post. And do yourself and your audience a favor and read after you post just to see if Fimfiction agreed with the formatting and to catch any last minute mistakes.
How important is this? You don’t want the very first comment. On the very first story you ever written to mention a typo.
Or see a comment, written by a famous author in the fandom. Mention only a messed up bracket.
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You can see the users active on the site at a time if you scroll all the way to the bottom on the front page. 1,500 is roughly the start of high tide that up-trends to 1,800. Ideal posting windows for a new story is when it starts to trend upward.
Best days to post Friday, Sunday, Monday. Site moves slowest on Wednesdays.
Watch the new page, especially during holidays. Contests can disrupt the flow and if you're trying to break out your story will get buried fast under the wave of rapid new postings.
Alternatively, there are dry spells where nothing seems moving at all, might be a unique opportunity to throw your story in.
Always remember if you're posting a new chapter the next day to wait the full 24 hours, to the very second, or else you won’t get the appearance in the ‘updated’ column
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Every writer wants an upvote.
Every writer lives for comments.
If you're a reader and like something in a story. Write a comment about your favorite part. No matter how small. It’s never bothering an author. Those little motes of happiness keep us alive sometimes. If you can’t say anything at all, but still enjoyed the story. That one thumbs up can still mean the world to a writer.
Likewise, if you're an author, talk with your commentators. While sometimes it's impossible to respond to all of them, even a general post to let them know you're paying attention does wonders. Fanfiction and fimfiction, in particular, provides us the unique ability to give and take running feedback and interaction.
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Every writer loathes downvotes.
They always hurt. Every single one.
But like death and taxes they are inevitable, and in most cases you can expect to get downvotes that will appear no matter what the quality of the story or how well you prepare a reader or what your standing is as a writer.
- Any mature story with sex or porn tag regardless of sexual content. (Though the kinkier the fetish mentioned in the description, the harder the downvotes )
- Any story with gore.
- Any story with an OC in the main character role
- Any story with non-conventional gender. Doesn’t matter if it’s mares using temporary transformation magic instead of a strap-on for their fun or a deep, in-depth emotional story about coping with sexual identity.
- Any story with shipping-war starting characters IE: Flash Sentry, Timber, Zephyr, etc. (You’ll either get a downvote from one side for them being in a story. Or a downvote from the other side if they exist in a non-romantic way.)
- Adding stories to groups increase exposure, but also increases risk. Try not to add too many, too early or parse vague rules. It doesn’t matter how well written your passionate romance is, or how much plot you put behind the porn if you put a clopfic into ‘Shipping’ people will down you on tags alone. (The group description says clop is allowed but ‘discouraged’. Discourage in this case means instant, no-read downvotes.)
- Subfandoms such as Human in Equestria / Friendship is Optimal / Fallout: Equestria / Displaced / Fall of Equestria /Conversion Bureau / Anon / RGRE / etc. (Good stories of these settings can exist, but people are not going to get past the summary before downvoting.)
“Gee Fylifa, that’s sure a lot of tripwires. How will I write a story that avoids these?”
You don’t. You just expect it and let that expectation be an armor against being discouraged. You can’t stop the tide or rail against the greater forces at play. But take heart, a good story that gets people talking will eventually win out over the snap first-day downvotes. It’s actually rare that a story stays with more downvotes than upvotes in general.
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Every writer hates the Feature Box.
Every writer desires the Feature Box.
We are all sensitive creatures, sharing our beloved hobby with the world. We want validation. It’s easy to see Feature as a proxy for acceptance. For Quality. To rage at it when we are snubbed. To see the 1’s and 0’s of a math formula as The Beast.
But at the end of the day, the biggest factor in getting featured is… being popular already with tons of followers.
If that seems unfair, remember to get those tons of followers they had to start someplace, and they had to give much sweat, blood, and tears to the altar of horsewords to get where they are today.
Not that it’s impossible to break through as a new writer. A catchy title, a cute cover, and a strong premise can draw eyes and clicks. Aragon has a great write up on this.
Remember. A feature box can get you a spur of popularity for a few days. But writing an engrossing story will last longer in people’s memories (and their bookshelves).
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Think about readers, as readers. That is, the physical act of reading a story and the logistics involved.
Be careful of posting too much, too quickly. A reader is like a dog that will eat until its full, or there is no more on their plate. You might think you're doing them a favor by putting out 100k words on a single day, but anyone hooked will binge the whole thing all at once then go on to forget half of it the day after.
Make a posting schedule and keep to it. Give your readers time to read, react, and yearn. Most of the excitement, comments, and talking comes when a story is fresh and active like a TV show. Finished stories barely get any from those who come after, and readers will think you moved on and don’t care about their comment. (Even if you do, you really really do!)
You're a magician, tricking people into believing you know what you're doing or have a grand plan. Don’t be afraid to make use of a good idea in the comments or a trending expectation. Sometimes adding a scene based on feedback can become the best scene in the story. Subverting Expectations can be fun for a memorable trick, but sometimes people really do want what they say they want.
Readers enjoy stability. Finish a story then post it by chapter, regularly. If you write-as-you-go type, try writing a buffer for yourself to give you time to finish while keeping a regular update.
...or if you're insane, a masochist, or a wizard with words, write as you go and post a chapter of what you've written that day daily, for nearly a year.
There’s nothing more terrible for a fan to see ‘incomplete’ on a story they really liked whose last update was 4 years ago. ‘On-Hiatus’ and ‘Canceled’ exist as buttons too. Give people closure.
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Contests can provide a prompt and a side project from main stories. You might even win a prize. But keep in mind that winning a contest doesn’t offer fame or even all that much exposure.
Basically, do it for fun and don’t sweat the competition. If anything a big contest can bring people together for love of the game.
Depending on how many enter it might feel like a lot of work for very little reward. When you enter a contest, do
it for love of the subject and perhaps try out an idea that would normally wouldn’t gain much traction.
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Not everyone can be lucky to have an editor or even friends who want to read your fics. I’ve driven my share of them nuts. But if you do get someone to be your editor/ beta / pre-reader. Be Open Minded to Criticism
Every one of my stories I can point to a scene, situation or moment that existed only because a pre-reader pointed it out. Even if you might not think it’s an issue in your story, chances are if someone is tripping over a part in the story other people will stub their toe too.
Listen to your editors if you have one, lovable, pain in the ass flank that they are.
—
This is an EM Dash — They aren’t on a standard computer keyboard. To make one, you either have to copy and paste one on the screen, use Window’s character map. Or hold Alt, type 0151 on the numpad then let go of alt.
Why you need to know that? Open any paperback or hardcover and flip through. You’ll eventually see one. They are used universally in published works since typewriters, yet woefully underused in fanfiction. But they help with readability.
Most word processors let you set autocorrect options. You can set it to turn two dashes into an em dash -- to —
(In Openoffice it's under Tools>autocorrect>autocorrect options> Replace.
(In Google Docs it's Tools>Preferences)
Alternatively, you can write your chapter using double dash and then manually do a ‘find and replace’ at the end to replace them all at once.
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While we are on the subject of grammar. Watch this video and memorize the lyrics.
Always check your contractions, especially if you're using them in a speech sense instead of narration. While some characters might speak without some contractions for effect, emphasis or speech quirk make sure you're doing that on purpose. People notice when the common ones are missing in a text. A search for: 'I am' / 'It is' / 'You are' can save you heartache.
Also do a search for wishy-washy terms like 'seem' 'seemingly' 'seemed' while you're at it. Those can exist from the POV's character observation when they're unsure, but never in narration.
On the subject of narration, when the camera is pulled back to give us the whole scene it can be tempting to write everything. Every little thought, every little action, every consequence of such action. For instance:
'Zephyr Breeze returned to Fluttershy's cottage. Yet again having lost another job and making her have to threaten him with eviction if he didn't find another one. He hated how disappointed she was of him though tried to keep his cool exterior.'
A line like that is almost always better to play out in real time. The great tell vs show argument. Even inconsequential scenes can sometimes bloom out to big opportunities for drama and storytelling. Let us see him go to Fluttershy. Let us hear their stressful argument. Show the boiling over of emotions. Etc. Etc.
Try not to make every character smirk. Smirks are great, everyone loves them and the confident, self assured characters that do them. However, overuse will make all your characters all part Cheshire Cat and weaken the impact. If you absolutely must, try pointing it out in the text before your readers do. 'Somepony kept her smirk.' 'Somepony smirked again.'
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If you've gotten a few stories under your belt. Go back occasionally to your earlier ones. Re-read your own older stuff with your current brain. Even if it's painfully cringy to see. It can be good edit practice and a marker of how far you've grown as a writer.
Plus any current year people coming across your work will be thankful they don't have older you quality.
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No one has ever changed their mind because of a shouting match. Always be civil to your fellow fandom members even if they might leave a sour comment.
You're always going to get a response that you won't agree with. Maybe it'll be from some rando nobody. Maybe it'll be from a fan, maybe it'll be from someone you admire. Or maybe it'll be an actual troll trying to get under your skin. You're still going to get them. Even if you could somehow magically write the literal best story ever. You're still going to get downs and that one guy who has something critical to say about it. Sometimes they are right, sometimes they are not.
But above all, keep your cool. Play nice. And never, ever, ever delete comments. Reader trust is ephemeral in many ways. Let people talk. Noone is ever explicitly out to see someone fail and even the critical comments can be insightful to what you did wrong or at least what readers respond to.
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Community is important and so is perspective.
We are all lovers of a silly show about magical friendship ponies and their cute adventures.
That alone is a happenstance of beautiful coincidences that fans of the show can even come together, talk, write, draw, act out and share in their love. In a way we are lucky the phenomenon happened when it did. Imagine trying to build this community if it was in the internet-less 80s. At least Star Trek and Star Wars fans had the benefit of being able to talk to each other in a somewhat mainstream way.
Even in current times, where the biggest movie ever is the final arc of a long-running comic book series. You go up to someone who chats about their magical space superheroes shooting laser beams and gathering six powerful elements of Harmony Infinity to defeat a big bad. You say “Hey I like cartoon ponies.” They go “Wow way to be into kid stuff, weirdo.”
So, be happy for all the passion and effort that goes into the fandom. Because other than my friend, the biggest influence on me wanting to actually sit down and write stories was seeing what kind of place Fimfiction was.
Just look how it compares to the other top fanfiction website.
That alone is certainly worth sending Knightly and the rest of the team a few dollars if you have the means.
And while you're at consider giving Derpibooru some love too. Heaven knows they are keeping a mountain upon their shoulders.
Sure they are not perfect sites, and there are some quibbles. (Let people downvote only after scrolling to the end of the first chapter, Knightly.) But they are still some of the best in their category.
Fanfiction is a fun hobby and made even better for the people met doing it, and that sense of friendship and belonging is probably the biggest thing I’ve learned in the last three years.
In any case, brilliant wisdom here. I'm going to have to link it from my user page (Disclaimer: FoME is currently posting from his phone and is going to a Magic tournament almost immediately after work. Expect delays.)
5056683
Well you do. But the point was more to say that your comment is an inevitable milestone that every author can come to expect. Like the change of seasons. For I am sure your end goal is to have a comment on every bit of fiction. Which you sort of proved just now. Hee.
Good luck with Friday Night Magic! And thank you for the endorsement. I hope my nostalgic drivel helps someone, someday too
Here's what I've learned in my time here:
oi67.tinypic.com/2625ibl.jpg
LOL that meme... xD
"Do not steal"... someone has missed the point of memes... :p
5056800
Hee hee. That phrase is in itself a meme
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/original-character-do-not-steal
Should I put the thumbs up? I only favorite mostly. I'll do the one I read.
Edit: false alarm I did put a thumbs up already.
5056886
By whatever mysterious design, favoriting a story doesn't up vote it. It just puts it on a personal bookshelf of 'favorites'.
It's kinda weird. Other sites like Derpibooru, for instance, auto-upvotes if you favorite a picture. On fimfiction you can run into the crazy situation where a story might have more favorites than upvotes.
And that's not the Reader's fault. I am sure most of them go "Well I favorited it! That's like better than an upvote, right?" But favorite amounts aren't public and some groups on the site have minimum upvote requirements. Along with the fact when you first push out a story, it doesn't even show the rating until there are ten votes total (up or down).
And while upvotes are not the be-all-end-all of a story's quality. People who don't see a green bar there already tend to scroll right by. Stories that are underrated gems, stay underrated because people don't think to look at them
So yes. Please upvote stuff you like! An Author will like you for the favorite, love you for the upvote. Want to marry you for a comment.
5056890
Ok thanks for the heads up. Keep being awesome.
Regarding that little point about needing to have read a chapter before being able to downvote, I used to think downvotes were used too liberally, too. Then I saw one of the mods (Eldorado, I think) point out that very few readers upvote or downvote a story anyway, and that's when all they have to do is click an icon at the top. Ideally, you'd want everyone voting on every story (unless they were truly indifferent to it) for the best picture of audience feedback. But, running the numbers on my own stories, my average is one upvote for every 25 views, which is a huge disparity. So I think the site designers are very reluctant to do anything to make voting any harder, because voter turnout is low enough as it is.
5056918 Also, while Knighty keeps a pretty tight lid on how exactly the feature box works (so people can't game the system), all the automated feedback I've seen is based on upvotes and downvotes more than anything else. A story's rating, for example, isn't affected by views, bookshelves or comments, but only by votes. To hit the feature box (and Popular Stories, too), you need a lot of upvotes in a short time, and not too many downvotes.
So it's the up/downvotes that have the most tangible reward for an author, and it can get pretty frustrating when lots of people favourite a story but don't cast a vote on it.
5057371
Thank you for the information your cool too I read your stories too although I can't remember their names.
5057378 Ooh, thanks!
Lots of good points here!
This is legitimately probably my biggest pet peeve these days, if only because more than 90% of the time, I'll forget the details of a favorited notification in, like, a day or two (Unless it's noteworthy because it's, like, hey, I know the person who favorited my story, that's pretty cool), but upvotes and comments are something that're all compiled in one handy place where it's easy to look over them in the future.
This, though, I'm not sure, I'd agree with? I'm often surprised when I compare a story's view count to the author's follower count--looking at my most recent one, which got featured, over 90% of the views had to have come from people who don't follow me, which makes me theorize that follower count doesn't have nearly as much to do with getting featured as the other factors like eye-catching coverart, punchy descriptions, and popular genres do.
Not saying that follower count isn't a factor, just that I don't know if I'd agree with saying it's the biggest one.
5057371
I suppose it's the eternal tug of war. We need votes as a community for the engine of the site to work.
In a perfect world, we’d want the vote to be on merit. I think upvotes generally are. People go in, read until they get to a part they like and go “Awesome I am upvoting this.”
Downvotes are usually “Oh boo this story description says it has twiset, screw this person for liking girls kissing girls.” (And I know I got one based on that because my Terms story got put on a bookshelf called ‘Shitcan for Lesbian Bullshit’ )
It kinda rewards authors who don’t tag correctly or kink warn or mention dicey topics? Though those probably get the punishing downvote and scornful comments later on because people feel 'tricked'
I don’t have any easy solutions, vote systems are hard
we just have to live with that there will always be more fans than jerks on average.
5057454
And I did say this was anecdotal, so I could be wrong! But I was going more for the “Not all featured stories are from popular authors, but all popular author stories are featured.”
Any author with a 1,000+ followers will get a feature no matter what they write. I’ve seen some with ratios like 140 ups and 30 downs and its an Anon sex story boinking Pony x without even a cover. And you go “How does that hit feature.” and you see who wrote it and its some vet who’s got 50+ stories under their belt and cranking them out for commission work.
Like bless his heart for putting stories out there and if there are people paying for it then it means someone wants it, sure. But if some newbie starting out posted the same identical story on a fresh account, it’d sink like a brick.
To put it in another way. I think if you could somehow have the same group of 1,000 people read everyone’s story you’d get a lot of stories hitting feature. Once you get into the box votes skyrocket on a story because there will always be more people that like something instead of disliking and people who would have passed it up, now casually go view it to check it out.
At least that’s my impression, we are all rattling this damn black box trying to figure out how it works. Which I guess it’s what Knightly wanted.
5057537 That was something else Eldorado mentioned at the time - they're not really meant to be seen as upvotes and downvotes, more just like and dislike, and shouldn't be taken any more seriously than what you'd put on a Facebook post. If you liked a story, for whatever reason, whether that's because it was Cold in Gardez masterfully weaving a compelling narrative without any characters or plot, or Evictus giving two fingers to everyone trying to discourage him and going ahead with publishing his 400th story, if you liked it, give it an upvote. I don't think there's necessarily even any stipulation that you have to have read it - maybe it's a story for a pairing that isn't your thing, but all the same it's nice someone would write Twilight ending up loving a sock with googly eyes rather than Sunset.
Same with downvotes. If you didn't like it, you can press the dislike button, because that's all it's for. Whether that's because the author doesn't know what a capital letter is, or because the story is a detailed description of Fluttershy being violated in the kidneys.
I think there is something of a personal responsibility angle there, of not reading and downvoting something that the description made pretty clear you weren't likely to enjoy. But I honestly don't know how much that should apply - if someone handed you a box of books, would you really need to read them all to be able to sort them into 'like' and 'dislike' piles? Or could you just safely assume that anything with Zipporwhill in the cover art can go in the 'burn for eternity' pile?
That's not to say that should or shouldn't apply. Like I say, I'm really not sure. I do think one thing that would help would be if everyone used votes consistently, with the same ease of giving. I think writers, for example, are much slower to hand out dislikes, because we all know how that stings. Where a casual reader might up or down thumb everything in the feature box three times a day, and I don't know who's using the tools rightly or wrongly in that situation. But I do think that if the authors of those downvoted stories are thinking downvotes are something reserved for only the most hated stories they've encountered, they're going to be much more upset when people casually downvote theirs without a second thought than if they gave out downvotes with similar ease.
The idea, really, was that dislikes mean no more or less than likes, and the two should be given out with equal measure. I'm kind of glad that isn't really how they're treated, but it does rather skew the system.
5057537
Thanks for elaborating! When you put it this way, it sounds much more believable to me. I'd still suggest that it isn't quite that absolute--SS&E put out several Flash Sentry stories, not all of which were featured (this one wasn't), so I think there's a limit to what you can get away with and still be popular, even if you have a whole lot of followers, and you still have to post at good times and present eye-catching cover art and descriptions to get featured reliably.
Of course, the corollary to that, if the fastest way to get popular stories is to make them eye-catching and clickbaity, is that the authors who get popular are the ones who're really good at making their stories enticing anyway, so it's very hard to say for certain what's going on exactly.
In particular, I do feel at times that people are also less particular about quality when it comes to porn--the amount of stories like that with shaky-if-not-worse grammar that still get popular is truly mind-boggling to me, and I don't think that's nearly as much the case with non-porn stories, so I've wondered if content matters much more than anything else in that genre. I don't read much of that at all, though, so it could very well be that it's just a few really bad ones getting featured that's skewed my view of the trend as a whole.
Some really great comments here! Glad to get people talking. Even if it’s to writer-nerd a bit about site mechanics
5057632
Hey, I'm happy for any exception to the popular author carousal.The box might favor popular authors, but at least it’s possible for a no-name upstart to slam into the box with a surprise fic and the site gives you other methods of getting on the front page IE: the updated column or popular story column’.
5057566
I think you hit the nail right on the head with that! It’s like the different in perspective over comments. Like you ask a casual person “Why don’t you comment” “oh I don’t think its important, or it might be silly to just add one on an old story. Author probably doesn’t care” and its like “That author probably goes back to their old stories and re-reads their comments every other day”
At least I do. Whenever I feel stuck or the mind goblins are telling me I am a crap writer and all I am doing is utter dreck that noone will ever like. I scroll to comments to make me feel better. A really nice one left on one of my old stories got deleted when the person deleted their account and I feel like I'm missing a tooth every time I go back there.
The way you are describing how the downvotes should be, actually does make sense… but votes are given so much presence and do so much to be just an expression of someone’s opinion. Someone out to find a new story, sorts a list by ratio or ups and if they see a big red bar they scroll right by. Or someone hit ‘about’ on an author’s page its using votes to tell you ‘okay these four are the author’s highest rated stories.’ ”
People keep telling us votes aren’t the end-all-be-all of story quality. But its damn bitter pill to swallow when everyone else is treating it like one. But again it’s all we have and a lot of the trouble just comes from trying to put an objective system on a subjective thing. I wish I could magically get a story out to all the people who would like the thing without all the people who dislike it getting it in the way. Maybe that does eventually happen. My most popular story is also my second most downvoted one.
One saving grace is that. Again for all the grousing. Fimfiction is doing a better job. I sometimes browse reddit’s /r/fanfiction group and some people get starry eyed that they got 100 views or ten upvotes and everyone cheers them on for such a massive success. We pony writers do have it better than other fandoms.
5056691
Update: Went 2-1 with green-blue proliferate, splashing for Enter the God-Eternals. Got a 15/15 Mowu, Goodest Boy in one game, which made for a beautiful revenge after my opponent got the nut draw in the previous game and Ilharg'd out a Tolsimir.
Also finally put your blog post on my user page second from the top, right below Elric of Melnipony's Advice to New Writers.
All I needed to see was 'grammar' and 'video' to know which song and artist. It's beautiful.
5073830
derpicdn.net/img/view/2014/1/31/539767.gif
5073837
The cheesiness is in quantities fun enough to sandwich in a joke.
"It's what it's." is by far the most painful thing anyone has said to me that I couldn't say had some typo, at least none that I know of. Mayhaps you have knowledge of some forgotten rule?
...blush?
Now I'm a little embarrassed, as eventually, my own story ended up in the popular updates section of the featured box. And it was pretty terrible, especially grammar-wise, during the early half of the story. Probably still are tons of typos in the latter half.
How dare you...call me out like this.
All seriousness, though, the meme was funny and there was some good information in all this. ESPECIALLY THE REREADING YOUR OWN WORK thing. Rereading your own work is painful, at times, but it's never a bad idea.