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[amaskontwofaces]

As a writer the image is so vivid in my mind that I actually struggle to capture is all in coherent words. There’s so much I want to talk about, but not all of those thoughts can be presented one after another in a linear fashion and it’s honestly such a pain.

I know as a reader, I prefer less detail, since I usually start seeing the scene before they can describe it all. I’ve been thrown out of the immersion before just by a simple mention of someone reaching across with their left hand, because they were definitely sitting on the other side of character b in my head, and that’s a lot of brain power to reverse that now. Because of that, when I write, I do my best to just describe what’s immediately relevant, otherwise I will get bogged down writing three pages trying to describe exactly how Hawkeye is situated on top of that fridge and why he likes those sight lines and never get to the dialogue.

I wonder if the reason why I don't spend a lot of time on description in my writing is because I just don't think in images. I never have a picture in my head when I'm writing and I almost never have one in my head when I'm reading. That's just not how my brain works.

If you're a writer who thinks in images, do you spend a lot of time describing things in your works? Or is this a case of correlation not implying causation? 🤣

[amaskontwofaces]

For me, the first thing that comes to mind when you talk about scenes being described is some character being given a new fancy room, and the author getting really excited and spending five paragraphs talking about every excruciating detail of what exact furniture is where. But the same thing I think applies to describing what someone’s wearing, what they look like, or even long action scenes like battles. I think a lot of the time lengthy descriptions feel lengthy because they’re not actually relevant to the plot and they’re not how people naturally think. People don’t do things like walk into a room and instantly catalog every little detail and know the names for all the furniture styles. More natural would be to talk about what main points instantly catch the character’s eye and gives a sense for how a space /feels/. Like saying it’s too big, or that the canopied bed looks sooo plush and is covered in a mountain of velvet pillows. Or that it feels dark and under-lit. The wallpaper looks fancy. There’s a large wardrobe to the side that’s made up of dark wood and veritably /covered/ in intricate carvings. They can imagine using that writing desk under the window to send so many letters home. Give their opinions, give their thoughts, give their dreams on how they might use the space. Use the description to tell us about the character, and give hints for the plot ahead. All the little minute details can actually bog things down. One or two work, but getting into 20 details is an unrealistic thought process, one which your readers also don’t follow, and therefore will end up skipping past. If you know exactly where each piece of furniture goes, draw a floor plan and stick that in there. Know you’re talking about this really specific lamp? Include a picture. Create an entire moodboard if you get really into it, but when it comes to the description itself, focus less on the what and more on the how and why. Lengthy descriptions feel lengthy because they get too technical, and don’t stay connected enough to the personable.

Follow up question for readers: if you think in images, can you actually see a scene that's well-described?

I have to admit that I get to a point with description where I just start skimming and looking for the dialogue. 😔

[amaskontwofaces]

What does "dead dove don't eat" mean? I'd Google it but I'm afraid of getting graphic images of deceased birds in the results.

It’s a meme from an old episode of Arrested Development. You’ve seen it here on tumblr, but not always with the original context. 

The character sees a paper bag in the fridge labelled “Dead Dove Do Not Eat.” He takes the bag out of the fridge, opens it up, makes a disgusted face, and then the famous “I don’t know what I expected.”

There really was a dead dove in the bag.

When you see a fic tagged with “dead dove do not eat” it basically means, “this fic is clearly labelled (tagged) indicating content that some people will not want to read. If you read it anyway, it’s your own fault. I warned you.”

It can also be interpreted as “See those tags and warnings? I’m not joking around. Pay attention to them.”

[amaskontwofaces]

Hello! I would like to say that if you do want to see how much people like your work on AO3, you can do a little bit of math (sorry!) to figure this out.

Essentially, Kudos by themselves are an arbitrary number. They show you how many people liked your thing after they finished reading your thing. The fact that the Kudos button is at the end of the chapters, and that you can only Kudos once per piece, tends to mean that people wait until they have read through all of your content to give Kudos.

(Which, on a side note, means that the longer the fic is, the less likely people are to finish it. This usually has nothing to do with your writing! Life happens while people are reading! Maybe the bus reached their stop, maybe they accidentally closed the tab, maybe they are just literally unable to focus for long periods of time despite their best intentions. Fics that can be read in 5 minutes or less will tend to get noticibly more Kudos than fics that require several hours.)

Anyways; math. The number of Kudos by itself is really quite arbitrary. What you want is to see how many Kudos there are compared to Hits. If Kudos are the number of people who read to the end and enjoyed it (or just read to the end; some people might Kudos everything they read), then Hits are the number of people who thought your fic looked interesting and clicked on it.

Medievalraven was mainly giving ways to drive up Hits; the number of people to click on your fic and start reading it, which will drive up the number of Kudos as a result.

However, if you are trying to judge your own quality, looking at “how many people who thought they might like the fic” versus “how many people actually did” can be a good indicator. This can also control for variables like niche or old fandoms, since these will drive down Hit numbers, and therefore drive down your Kudos as well.

So. Take the rough number of Kudos and divide that by your rough number of hits. This is your Kudos to Hits Ratio (KHR).

For the fandoms I tend to be in, somewhere between a 5-10% KHR is perfectly respectable. Anything over 20% tends to signify something exceptional. Though I must put a major disclaimer that every fandom has different KHR rates. A 10% KHR might me a brilliant fic and one fandom and an okay one in another.

In my personal experience, I use this most as a rough judge of fic quality as a reader browsing titles. Essentially asking the question, “do people tend to enjoy the storytelling and technical proficiency of this fic?”

HOWEVER, this is just a rough rule. Fics with lower KHRs can be perfectly enjoyable! Perhaps there’s lower technical ability, but the actual story being told is very creative and interesting. Perhaps the summary didn’t capture the true vibe of a fic, and a lot of people clicked back out when they realized it’s not what they thought it was, and they wanted to continue looking for something else.

Let’s take a look at an example in practice (this is using KHRs similar to what you’d see in the Marvel or HP fandoms):

Say a fic has 832 Hits.

For the sake of simple maths, round to the nearest 1-2 significant figures. In this case, calling it 800 Hits should get you close enough.

10% is your “base ten”. This would be around 80 Kudos. Solid fic. Most people enjoy it very much.

20% is double that, approaching 160 Kudos. Astounding. 10/10 recommend this to everyone.

5% is half your original “base ten”. Perfectly respectable. May be a little rough around the edges, but either the plot or delivery more than make up for it.

1% is noticeablely small. 8 Kudos to the 800 hits. There might be a major disconnect between the summary/tags/etc. and the actual content of the fic. The technical proficiency might be low, so readers have a hard time following the plot. The delivery isn’t engaging enough to keep people’s attention for the several hundred of thousands of words long that it is. The fic is in first person. (Real thing: fanfic readers DESPISE reading first person. They will click away as soon as they see that first “I”).

This is not a means to rail on others (I just tend to be very blunt). As a reader, I use KHR to judge whether a fic might be worth the mental, emotional, and temporal investment involved in deciding to read it. As a writer, I use it to judge how many people enjoyed the content, so I can see what I might want to invest my time in working on going forward. That does not mean that my fics with KHRs of less than 5% are “bad”. As long as someone out there enjoys the product, I feel that warm little fuzzy glow of joy.

Hey, I know you write fanfiction so I wanted to ask a couple of questions. How can you be objective about your work? How can tell whether it’s good without being biased? It’s easy to think your work is amazing when you’ve put a lot of effort into it. I’m some who’s done quite well academically in English, and that’s given me a bit of confidence to start in fanfiction. But there’s a relative lack of recognition or ‘kudos’ on my work. You probably shouldn’t compare your work to others, but it’s inevitable. I know that I'm very new, that the fandom I’m writing for is quite niche and not very active anymore, and I don’t have a social media following either, but I don’t know if this is the reason and don’t want to delude myself. Rarely will someone ever tell you your work is not good, but if it isn't, I would like to know.

Hiya!  Thanks for thinking of me for this question and I’m sorry it’s taken me exactly 84 years to answer it :(

So I think your question really boils down to a whether or not your fics are “good” because they receive a low amount of engagement.

Now I’m not a big fan of using any kind of qualifications like good or bad when it comes to fiction or really any creative outlet.  This is mainly (1) because the inherent value of something shouldn’t be based on the reception it receives but more in the act of creating itself and (2) because “goodness” is deeply personal and contingent on individual preferences, life experiences, and opinions. 

There are a lot of super popular fics in my various fandoms that have just never connected for me.  This doesn’t mean those fics are “bad”, it just means I don’t personally like them.  These are fics that maybe feature tropes I don’t enjoy or have characterizations that don’t align to my personal beliefs - but ultimately they’re still something that the general fandom enjoyed for whatever reason.  

Really what I’m trying to say here is that goodness doesn’t exist in fanfic and that popularity can be a fickle and arbitrary thing to achieve.  So I wouldn’t necessarily take the lack of engagement as a commentary on your skills as a writer - especially in a more niche and inactive fandom.  

These statistics aren’t reflective of you or your work - don’t give them the power to influence you or change what you’re doing.  What’s important is whether or not you enjoy or like what you’ve created and if you achieved whatever your goal was for the piece.

I actually recently read a couple interesting posts by @ao3commentoftheday that touched on something similar with the lack of comments/engagement in fandom and how for some people it was less about the comments themselves and more about wanting to build a connection to others and share this enthusiasm for a show/ship/plot.  

I’m going to link the posts here and here because I think they’re both worth a read - and I don’t want to assume anything from your ask, but I think maybe this is at the core of what you might want too.  That maybe you want people to talk to about your writing and these characters that you clearly love and enjoy?

So the question, I think, becomes how do you build or join a community?  Well there’s a couple things that you could do:

Fandom as a whole is a very reciprocal environment.  People are more inclined to engage with people that engage with them.  So if you’re looking to receive comments or kudos on your work make sure you’re doing that for others too!  Or send other authors asks when they do ask games! Or reblog their fic posts and leave nice tags!  I know this can seem especially daunting when you’re new to a fandom - but I think this is probably one of the most important things you can do to start making friends.  I’ve met some of my closest fandom friends through fic comment sections or through tags or just by sending a funny ask.  All you have to do is be brave for just one minute!  

(As a side-note to this - I don’t want to discourage you from going for your fandom’s BNFs with the above approach, but sometimes it’s hard to breakthrough with this group and they might not be interested in branching out, etc.  So don’t forget to also look for other “smaller” blogs or people who joined around the time you did.)

Post about your work on your blog and make sure to use your fandom’s popular tags.  Not everyone in fandom is refreshing the AO3 tag (or whatever equivalent site) every single day - so it might be that people in your fandom just aren’t aware there’s even new fic being posted.

Do a graphic for the fic.  Now personally I’m not a big fan of doing graphics, but it’s hard not to argue that they’re eye-catching and could be what makes someone consider reading your fic.  So don’t be afraid to do a title graphic or a mood-board or inspo post.

Don’t forget to add a link or shout-out to your tumblr page in your author’s note when you update (if you’re comfortable with that).  This is a great way for people who really like your fic to connect with you and send you asks or comments!

And like one of the posts I linked above suggests - think about joining in fandom activities (assuming your fandom does them).  This is a great way to get an almost built-in audience.  

These things can all invite conversation about your work (or even just canon in general) while building connections and a name for you in the fandom.  And maybe this won’t increase your kudos, but this could make you feel more valuable in the fandom and reduce the importance kudos have on you and your work.

Now all of this assumes that your goal in writing is to make connections, but maybe you’re just looking for validation or kudos.  There’s nothing wrong with that - and doing the things above can still help you in achieving that goal.  But I think then you could also take a look at what’s popular in your fandom.  Are there common tropes or pairings or themes?  A lot of popular fics stem from writing things that either don’t exist in or differ greatly from canon, so you can use that as a guide in your creation.  

The last suggestion I have is more in the technicality of writing itself.  If you’re maybe more serious about creating and wanting to challenge yourself while receiving direct critiques and suggestions then you could consider getting a beta.  Betas can help with grammatical elements in your writing, but they can also help you with things like characterizations, plot development, outlining, and just serve as a dedicated sounding board if you have questions or concerns.  I know my confidence as a writer really grew when I started using a beta or really when I started sharing ideas with friends in my fandom.  

Hopefully some of these things help you out!  And hey if I happen to be in the fandom you’re writing for let me know if I can help you out at all - my dms and inbox are always open :)

(And if anyone has gotten to this point and would like to add more advice - please do!!!)

[amaskontwofaces]

Porphyrellus formosus

[amaskontwofaces]

This has got to be the coolest use of color I have ever seen

Ekaterina Popova.

[amaskontwofaces]

Oooo. I’m pretty sure I’m an agile project manager for fic writing. I need the knowledge that people are looking at my work to motivate me to continue the project, otherwise my hyperfocusing self will get distracted by some other shiny thing and never return to finish it. At least knowing some other person out there has read part of the story and has some interest in knowing how it continues gives me reason to come back to that project after I’m done being distracted by the shiny.

I am very much a chronological writer, as the pacing of the previous section determines where I need to go with the next part. I will occasionally jump ahead to leave myself a bullet point that might vaugely describe where I want to take the story, but fuller plans often stifle my creative steaks. Even when it’s late and I just want to get the ideas in my head out on the page before I go to bed and forget them, I don’t tend to go back and change what I threw down that much, often just cleaning up the grammar and punctuation I originally left out for the sake of expediency, but not really expanding on those bare bones sentences. What I wrote is what I wrote, and I will follow that flow wherever it takes me.

The few times I’ve attempted to follow the waterfall method, I’ve gotten too impatient several chapters in (usually around chapter 6 or 7) and just started posting the thing anyways. One shots are the only ones that I post whole from the get go, but that’s still an agile process, since there is no smaller, pared down version of a one shot that you can release.

When it comes to research for me, I don’t usually even have the idea to write about things that I don’t already have an ingrained, intrinsic knowledge of. I guess what specifically the research is about determines how necessary it is. Canon plot? Who cares. If anything I find that deviations from the original plot that flow naturally in the premise of the fic are a heck of a lot more interesting to read. Verifying the accuracy of a little detail here and there? Sure. But if I’m researching more than a couple minutes, is that information really important enough to the story I’m trying to tell that it is worth this time investment?

hi! i need help. i've got an idea for a fic i've been sitting on for a while now, but it's a bit of an ambitious au that requires research and an actual plot that makes sense. i don't know where to start, and i'm the type of person who bases their worth on their productivity (something i need to work on, i know). i've had lots of free time, but even then i haven't written anything. any tips on where/how to start? or not feel shitty about this? thanks ✨✨

Bear with me for a moment while I talk about something that might seem totally unrelated: project management methodology.

There are two major ways that I've encountered for managing a project. One way is called Waterfall and the other way is called Agile. In Waterfall project management, you basically build the whole thing and then release a finished product. This is useful in a situation like baking a cake. Giving people the uncooked batter probably won't go over well.

In Agile project management, you build something that's referred to as the minimum viable product. This is a sort of stripped down version of the final product. It still does whatever it's meant to do, but it doesn't have all of the bells and whistles on it. If you play video games, you'll be familiar with this. They release the base game and then add more functionalities and levels over time, but meanwhile people are buying and playing the game and those sales help to finance further development.

So what does this have to do with writing a big fic? Well, writing longfic is its own kind of project management. Depending on your own personality, either a Waterfall or an Agile approach could work for you.

Based on this ask, I think you might want to take an Agile approach. Look at the overall story and think: what's the core story I'm trying to tell? That's the minimum viable product. You can add in all of the world building and the subplots etc. after you've got the main thread figured out, but that main thread is what you should focus on first. Any research on the main thread gets priority. Any research on the side stuff can wait for later.

And this can also be a way for you to get feedback as you write. That's another core of Agile development - getting feedback from the stakeholders (in this case your audience) throughout the development process so that the final product fits the need. You can do this with a beta reader or by participating in things like Six Sentence Sunday.

You can also break your huge story down into a series of smaller stories that can be posted separately and grouped together in a series on ao3.

Decide what the most important part of the story is that you really want to tell and start there. Once you've got that part, you can build on it.

How do the rest of you figure out a huge story like this one? Can you offer anon any advice?

[amaskontwofaces]

I’m still not over the fact that The Falcon and The Winter Soldier used a red handprint as the main symbol for the Flag Smashers; the “terrorist” group, who were, first of all, just trying to get supplies to people who were systematically oppressed and prevent legislation from passing that would oppressthem further. Like, for a show that was supposed to confront topics around systematic racism, they could not have picked a worse idea for a “villain”. All they showed was a person getting too desperate, making decisions that created some really terrible press for her group, and her supposed friends not being strong enough to reel her back into the reality of what ideals they wanted to uphold as a group.

Anyways, the red handprint. Especially since it was used on the FACEmasks they wore, I feel like someone should have caught how that almost exactly mirrors the red handprints painted across faces (though typically across the mouth) to symbolize the silence about and solidarity with the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in North America. It was something that bothered me when I first saw the trailer the day it was released, and it is something that bothers me still months after I watched the show. Especially for a show that was supposed to confront themes about systematic rascism (which, there were some, especially for a superhero show, I’ll give them that), I feel that them associating the red handprint with an “evil terrorist” organization was extremely tone deaf and a massive disservice to the American Indigenous community as a whole.

[amaskontwofaces]

What’s more startling than suddenly seeing a large spider scuttle across the floor?

No longer seeing the spider that scuttled across your floor.

[amaskontwofaces]

[amaskontwofaces]

Hey while you're loving elephants: Denver Zoo has two teenage boy elephants and one Old Man Elephant named Groucho, and lately they've had the lads housed with him so he can teach them Proper Elephant Manners like how bulls raise teenage boy elephants in the wild. Bull elephants are apparently very into being parents but due to the matriarichal nature of most herds, they really only get to raise calves after they've hit puberty. My point is, one of the boys was being annoying and chasing rabbits so Groucho came up and jabbed him in the ass with a tusk, the lad ran around the enclosure crying then came back and did a lot of "I'm sorry I'll be good now dad" fawning and it was adorable.

OH MAN SEE SEE SEE i wish we knew so much more about how bull elephants interact with herds and families - we've documented bull elephants traveling to matriarchal herds and fake wrestling with male calves, and we've documented bulls protecting orphaned calves, but in god's name i want every in and out about it. everything we know about elephant social interaction is not enough. it's a Thing that introducing old bulls to a population lowers the amount of younger bulls in musth, also known as the state in which bull elephants desire nothing but murder and possibly sex, but - i want to know the precise mechanisms. old bull elephants teaching younger bulls manners renders me VERKLEMPT. i just wanna know every secret elephants have.

this is incredible though. peak teenage boy. groucho has his hands full and i fucking love him for that. get their asses, groucho.

[amaskontwofaces]

Irondad and spiderson fics be like

“”This kid is going to give me a heart attack one day.””

“Peter made Tony both want to be better and run for the hills.”

“Peter knew from the moment that he got up that morning, it was going to be a terrible day.”

“How’s your buddy, Ted?”

“The two of them were in sync, in so much that they rarely had to speak to communicate. They worked in rhythm with each other, occasionally handing a tool to the other.”

“He and Mr.Stark had gotten closer, ever since the whole homecoming incident. They even made peters fake internship a reality, and he comes over for lab time every Friday and sometimes the weekend when May has extra shifts.”

“Ever since the vulture incedent, Peter started bi-monthly visits to the tower, which turned into every other week, which turned into every Tuesday and Friday.”

“The vulture incedent”

“Since homecoming”

“Tony hesitatently combed his fingers through peter’s hair, and when peter melted into him, he continued with more confidence.”

“”Dad -Mr. Stark””

“Tony has never been one to get a full nights rest. 2 hours at best. So it comes to no surprise that tonight isn’t any different, per usual; Tony is tinkering in his lab”

“Tony is there to pick up the pieces”

“The kid has no self preservation skills”

“And that’s how pepper found them, curled up against each other asleep on the couch. She quietly asked Friday to take a photo”

[amaskontwofaces]

So I was told that Human Planet had a segment about pigeons in the Cities episode that I might be interested in and I was honestly so underwhelmed. I haven’t finished the episode so maybe there’s more pigeon stuff but I feel like all I saw was more Birds Of Prey Are The Only Cool And Acceptable Birds and pigeons are Trespassers In Our Urban World Who Shit On Everything And Are Useless On Top Of It. Which isn’t true and I’m so tired of this being framed as some horrible burden that humanity must face. Pigeons are the victims here, not us. 

Hate of pigeons didn’t start until the 20th Century. Before that was about 9,900 years of loving them. The rock pigeon was domesticated 10,000 years ago and not only that, we took them freaking everywhere. Pigeons were the first domesticated bird and they were an all-around animal even though they were later bred into more specialised varieties. They were small but had a high feed conversion rate, in other words it didn’t cost a whole lot of money or space to keep and they provided a steady and reliable source of protein as eggs or meat. They home, so you could take them with you and then release them from wherever you were and they’d pretty reliably make their way back. Pigeons are actually among the fastest flyers and they can home over some incredible distances (what fantastic navigators!). They were an incredibly important line of communication for multiple civilisations in human history. You know the first ever Olympics? Pigeons were delivering that news around the Known World at the time. Also, their ability to breed any time of year regardless of temperature or photoperiod? That was us, we did that to them, back when people who couldn’t afford fancier animals could keep a pair or two for meat/eggs. 

Rooftop pigeon keeping isn’t new, it’s been around for centuries and is/was important to a whole variety of cultures. Pigeons live with us in cities because we put them there, we made them into city birds. I get that there are problems with bird droppings and there’s implications for too-large flocks. By all means those are things we should look to control, but you don’t need to hate pigeons with every fibre of your being. You don’t need to despise them or brush them off as stupid (they have been intelligence tested extensively as laboratory animals because guess what other setting they’re pretty well-adapted to? LABORATORIES!) because they aren’t stupid. They’re soft intelligent creatures and I don’t have time to list everything I love about pigeons again. You don’t need to aggressively fight them or have a deep desire to kill them at all. It’s so unnecessary, especially if you realise that the majority of reasons pigeons are so ubiquitous is a direct result of human interference.

We haven’t always hated pigeons though, Darwin’s pigeon chapter in The Origin of Species took so much of the spotlight that publishers at the time wanted him to make the book ONLY about pigeons and to hell with the rest because Victorian’s were obsessed with pigeons (as much as I would enjoy a book solely on pigeons, it’s probably best that he didn’t listen).  My point is, for millenia, we loved pigeons. We loved them so much we took them everywhere with us and shaped them into a bird very well adapted for living alongside us.

It’s only been very recently that we decided we hated them, that we decided to blame them for ruining our cities. The language we use to describe pigeons is pretty awful. But it wasn’t always, and I wish we remembered that. I wish we would stop blaming them for being what we made them, what they are, and spent more time actually tackling the problems our cities face.  

I just have a lot of feelings about how complex and multidimensional hating pigeons actually is

[amaskontwofaces]

fanfic speedrun: write the scene you want to write and skip the rest of the fic

(same goes on the reader side of things)

[amaskontwofaces]

i’m dying that robert downey jr posted this on his official facebook 😂😂😂 

[amaskontwofaces]

“That’s the thing about kindness. The best way to spread it is chaotically, lawlessly and randomly until everything around you starts to be madly beautiful.”

— Juansen Dizon, The thing about kindness  (via noorshirazie)

[amaskontwofaces]

This is so funny what