#also I've barely written anything other than for uni work in months 🫠

[x-neurodivergent-reader]

Heyy i Hope You’re Doing well! I’m a new writing acc and I don’t really have any requests or an audience, can I please ask for your advice on how to start writing more or gaining an audience, because I struggle to write without any ideas being given or a prompt list.

Sending love!! Byee

Hello, welcome to the world of writing fanfiction! Since this might get a bit rambly, I'll stick my advice under the cut. I'll also break it up into categories, and bold the most important parts, just for easier readability.

Writing a particular niche/experience

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how universal my experience with writing/the following I built is, because my blog is directed towards a specific niche? It was genuinely a case of there being very few fics directed at/including neurodivergent readers, deciding "fine, I'll do it myself", and then the people who also wanted more of such fics were drawn to my writing as they came across it.

As such, writing one or two things based on your unique personal experiences (that you're comfortable sharing) might be a good start?

Your blog doesn't have to be centred around those experiences for you to write about them, and it doesn't have to be very specific, either (a few of my first posts were literally HCs for "[character] x Autistic!Reader - Established Relationship"). My more specific/unique ideas came along as I wrote more, and from the requests that came in over time.

There'll always be someone out there who not only relates to your experiences and feelings, but is waiting to see themselves in your stories!

Prompt lists (even without anyone to send them!)

Other than that, though: there's no shame in starting with a prompt list! Even if there's no one to give you a prompt yet, you might be able to find a small list, and then put the numbers/prompts into a random name picker to choose it for you?

I've just had a look for some examples, and a lot of prompt lists tend to be fairly long, from what I'm seeing (around 15-25 prompts seems to be the average) - but I've found this blog, that has some smaller lists to choose from. If anyone else knows of any others that anon might find useful, feel free to share them here!

An extra bit of advice...

This isn't really relevant to your question, but is the No. 1 bit of advice I would give to a new fic writer: figure out what you are/aren't comfortable writing before you start taking requests.

When I got my first request, the requester ended up having to change it a couple times, because I hadn't considered that, for example, someone could request a character I wasn't familiar with - leading to the "don't request characters I haven't already written for" rule in my guidelines. In hindsight, I'd recommend writing several fics before you start taking requests, so you have a better idea of what your boundaries are, and can list them out for people to take note of. It'll save you, and the requesters, a lot of trouble!

It's also important to not let anyone intentionally try to break those boundaries (e.g. by blatantly guilt-tripping you). While it's wonderful to have people appreciate your writing enough to want to see more from you, they aren't entitled to cross the line like that - it's OK to stand up for yourself. Do no harm, take no shit, etc. etc.

And that's all I've got!

I hope this was at least a little bit helpful - again, I'm not sure how universal the way my blog grew is, but hopefully there's something you'll be able to take away from this!

I hope you have fun writing! c: