#how to ask a writer to write something

[the-blind-assassin-12]

Hey! This is the person that did the inquisitor request. I just wanted to say I didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings at all! I’ve tried requesting things to one person and get no response, so I didn’t think it was bad to ask multiple people I admire but I see how it can be rude. Sorry if I offended you!!

Hi, anon!

So I want to start off by saying how much I genuinely appreciate this apology message. It's not easy for a lot of people to own up to their mistakes - especially ones that they didn't necessarily realize they were making - so truly, thank you for coming forward and saying something. It means a lot to me, and I'm sure it means a lot to other writers who might read this, too.

The rest is going under a cut because it got kind of long.

I believe you when you say that you didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings. Unfortunately -in my own inbox and from posts I've seen others make - I've seen what anon messages look like when they are intentionally mean or hurtful, and the request that you sent was not like those at all. Nothing that you said in the actual request was offensive, whereas there are people who use the anon function just to be nasty.

But that doesn't mean that it was the best way to go about making this request, and I think you understand that now based on you sending this message, which again I thank you for doing. Sending the same request to multiple writers just hoping someone writes it makes us feel like you see us as interchangeable, like we don't all have our own unique writing style and voice. It makes us feel like you see us as on demand streaming services, like if Hulu doesn't have the show you're looking for you can just change the channel and go try Netflix or Amazon Prime. But we're not on demand streaming services, we are people who have lives and jobs and pets and families and other interests and obligations and we choose to share the stories that we write with the rest of the world for free.

I'm sorry that you've not had luck making requests in the past. It can be a bummer to not be able to find the types of stories that you want to read. You can, of course, try your hand at writing it yourself. That can seem daunting if you've never tried to write a story before, but it sounds like you have pretty specific ideas for plots and characters so it might be worth a shot / a fun challenge for yourself. But if you're not interested in giving that a go, here are some tips from a writer on how to get your requests written:

Make sure that the writer that you're sending the request to takes requests. Some people put that info right on their page but others don't. It doesn't hurt to ask before sending a request. Just shoot a message like: "Hey, I've read some of your work and really enjoy your writing. I was wondering if you took requests and if you do, would it be alright if I sent one?" Most people, if you ask nicely, will answer nicely, even if the answer is no.

Be willing to wait. A lot of writers, even if they openly encourage requests, already have a lot on their creative plates. They might be trying to finish a wip they've been working on for weeks or months or even years. They might love the request that you sent in, but might not be able to work on it right away because they're focusing on other things. It might have to simmer on the back burner while they think about the best way to execute it, so try to be patient whenever you make requests. You can even add in something like : "I know you're probably working on other things so don't feel rushed or pressured!" That goes a long way to help a writer feel appreciated for the work they are doing, as well as encouraged to continue working on things both new and old.

Think about the request that you want to make and try to figure out which writer that you've read work from might be the best fit for it. One size doesn't typically fit all for... well for anything, except maybe those giant foam finger things they sell at sporting events. Chances are if you read a lot of fic from a lot of different writers, you've started to figure out what their style is like and what types of tropes and themes they tend to write. A more targeted request based on matching the nature of the prompt with a writer who you think will do well with it has a better chance of getting written, because it shows the writer that you see them and their strengths as a writer and you think that the challenge you're presenting is one that they can handle really well. You can say something like "I read your story XXX and the way that you wrote Din's emotional response to the plot twist was excellent. I think you would be great at writing {insert request here} because of how you handled that story."

I hope you found this helpful, anon, and I hope that going forward you are able to make requests and get to read the types of things you are looking for. And I truly hope that you have a lovely night!

[mister-writes]

Hey writeblr I have a question!

So I often see posts in the same vein as this one here:

Things along the lines of "oh my characters are always changing the story, they're the ones that are really in charge."

[stealingpotatoes]

Once in an interview I think the actor of Yord said that Anakin blew up the Death Star.

let him cook maybe he's onto something

[varyathevillain]

no joke but what I really want for Buddy Daddies as a fandom is to make fanart and fanfic post present time ep12 where Rei wears an arm orthosis when working.

I think varied disability aids being represented would be fantastic, and personally would write Rei as someone being deeply proud of something he's done for his family, but also understanding with time that using an orthosis also helps him at work and in raising Miri. with a giant portion of mobility/motorics aids being represented by prosthetics, seeing more variety and exploring it in fiction would also help making a step in normalising disability treatments.

[piko-power]

Don't mind me, just making a collection of Sonic and Knuckles being together because I want more of their sibling dynamic and I love them

If anybody is wondering, I took these pictures from YouTube, NOT Paramount+. The first full episode is out for free if you wanna check it out.

Please do not tag as ship.

EDIT: Okay so apparently I can't find the full episode on YouTube anymore lol. Just wanted to put that out there in case anyone didn't know.

[hellsite-detective]

I'm looking for a comic. But sadly I only have some very vague recollections. All I remember about it is:

It was very long. i'm talking like color of the sky long or longer. or felt like it at least.

i think, essentially, it is about the entropy of the universe. maybe. like how eventually there is just nothingness left??

i believe its the journey two souls take over the course of that time, but starts with them alive as people??

it had a bittersweet sort of vibe to it. sad, but beautiful.

pretty sure the majority of it is black and white.

i wanna say i found it here on tumblr but it could have been imgur. idk. it was many many years ago.

apologies for not having better details to assist in the hunt.

never in my time as a detective have i been taken on a journey quite like this one. to answer your question, this one originated on imgur. however, i'm makin' an exception here because this... this is art.

lookin' up "tumblr entropy of the universe" yielded no results. but searching for "imgur entropy of the universe" got me to an image result linkin' me to imgur. and there it was. the comic in all its glory.

when i was told this would be "color of the sky" long, i think that sold this short. i know color of the sky. i know it all too well. i've seen it so many times i've lost count, courtesy of Madame Curator. but this? this outdoes it. this was pure beauty. enjoy this comic, anon. it's incredible. have a great day!

Post Case: Closed

[stevethehairington]

really fucking sick and tired of people who really fucking love the eddie book jumping on people who don't like or are even remotely critical of it's posts and like crusading their opinions around from the top of their high horses and shoving it down our throats.

if you like the book, great! that's awesome! love that for you! i am genuinely glad that you were able to find good in it and enjoy it!!

but not everyone did, and not everyone is going to agree with you. so, instead of going on some grand crusade where you find every single post that includes anything even remotely negative or negative adjacent or even neutrally critical and spending ALL this time and effort trying to provide unwanted rebuttals to every single thing, maybe you should just stay in your lane and find people who DO like the book and chat about it with them.

because i can PROMISE YOU, none of us appreciate it when you come onto our posts and start accusing us of "hating on" the author or "being rude" about her and her work and RIDICULOUS shit like that.

being critical of something and pointing out it's flaws is NOT inherently hating on it. i, frankly, do not know where people got that notion, but it's not fucking true so can we fucking quit assuming it is? and, critiquing something is also NOT the same as saying this is shit and it sucks and the author is a piece of garbage. again, where the fuck that came from is beyond me. you can be critical of something and still enjoy it. as soooo many of you love to point out, it's not perfect, why should it be perfect? so D U H. of course that means criticism can and should arise???

also. hot take (by which i mean ice fucking cold because it's NOT a fucking hot take), but going around toting FALSE facts as part of your "defense" does not make you or your argument look good. you, like the author, should maybe do a basic fact check first. 🙃

tldr, if you like the book, that's genuinely great, but stay in your fucking lane and stop seeking out posts from people who didn't like it to start shit in the notes.

[xenon-demon]

I fucking love pretty much every version of the “celebrity x Just Some Guy™” trope that there is for Steddie, but in honor of having a totally reasonable amount of wine I’m going to tell you about the version I’m currently thinking about all the time, one of my dumbest yet also funniest AU concepts: modern!AU with streamers Steve & Robin and Hardcore Fan™ Eddie who writes reader-insert fic about Steve.

Steve and Robin, aka EvenStevens and BirdBox_ on Twitch (“My name is spelled with a P-H, Robin, that’s such a stupid name.” “No, it’s actually even better this way! You don’t want to just use your real government name for something like this, and you would just make your username ‘SteveHarrington01′ or something equally uninspired-”) frequently stream together and have a shared YouTube channel. They got popular doing reaction videos that quickly devolve into the pair of them bickering on camera, and since the internet just loves the ‘snarky woman and her emotional support himbo’ dynamic, they got very big, very quick. Plus, it certainly doesn’t hurt that they had the combined might of Dustin and Erica to help them bend the algorithm to their whims.

While most people recognize their platonic-with-a-capital-P soulmatism, there are still some that are convinced they’re secretly dating - they can’t decide if it’s hilarious or absolutely maddening that every time they try to disprove the rumors, they somehow get stronger. Robin doesn’t feel comfortable coming out to the internet yet, and without that trump card some people just can’t understand why they’re not dating.

...there are other sections of their fandom, however, that absolutely do believe they’re not dating. Mainly because they’d rather be dating Steve or Robin (or both!) themselves, and write all the reader-insert fanfiction you could ever possibly need about it. Robin is largely ambivalent to the concept of fanfiction being written about herself as long as they’re not writing smut, since at least that way they’re not insisting she’s dating Steve.

Steve on the other hand finds it absolutely hilarious how despite how much he’s changed, he’s back to being the heartthrob he used to be in high school - and, he’ll be honest, he thrives on the attention. He’s given everyone the green light to write whatever they want - dared them to make it raunchier, even - to the point where it’s a running joke that Steve will read your reader-insert fanfiction about him unless you tag it with some form of ‘Steve don’t look’. He even used the prevalence of fic about himself to come out on stream.

(Steve’s in the middle of re-organizing his flower field in Animal Crossing when he’s interrupted by a donation. “Hey Steve, really sorry to tell you this but people are writing porn about you... and they’re making it gay. Like writing about you getting fucked by a dude. Just wanted you to know so you can say something about it.”

Steve stops dead, his screen freezing on his open inventory. “Hey, uh, why the fuck would I have a problem about a fictional version of me bottoming? Or- wait, do I seriously give off homophobic vibes? I’m literally bisexual. Hey Dustin, can you ban that guy please? Christ, the nerve of some people. If that’s how you feel about people being gay, or about people writing things that I’ve already said I have no problem with, you can leave this stream right now because I don’t want you here.“)

Many people lost their minds after that stream, one of them being popular tumblr blog whorefireclub.

Eddie didn’t plan on starting a tumblr blog for self-insert fanfiction about a twitch streamer. Really he didn’t, and every time he thinks about it in terms that plain he kind of dies a little on the inside. It’s really all Gareth’s fault, for getting fed up with Eddie’s dumb parasocial crush on a streamer and daring him to just “get it out of his system already”. So, using a bare-bones anonymous tumblr and many, many beers as his cover story, Eddie posted some of the most quickly written and unedited pieces of writing he’s ever produced in his life.

Except he wrote it with an AMAB reader character - and for those of you unfamiliar with the reader-insert sphere, that’s like fucking hen’s teeth. People are pretty good at making things gender neutral at least in their descriptions, and sometimes the anatomy is vague enough that it’s ambiguous, but the majority is written with AFAB genitalia for the reader character.

Eddie’s little drunken post blows up, and at first, he’s never regretted a life choice more.

After thinking about it, and seeing just how many people left comments with their reblogs or came into his askbox directly to thank him for giving them the representation they wanted, he starts to feel a bit better about the whole thing. In fact, it kind of tickles his “protector of the outcasts” instincts; there are people who can’t enjoy the content they want to because it doesn’t gel with their anatomy or gender identity. Eddie could, hypothetically, if he wanted to be absolutely insane about this one hot streamer guy, help fix that problem somewhat.

A couple of months later and he’s become “the guy who writes inclusive reader-insert fic”. While a fair amount of his work is gender-ambiguous, both in anatomy and in avoiding gendered language, more than half is written for anyone who finds themselves underrepresented in the usual reader-insert scene; anyone AMAB, AFAB people who can’t do female language, he’s even written a few oneshots with intersex reader characters. He did research for it and everything. It’s certainly not how he planned for this to work out, but it’s actually kind of... nice. He’d written a lot of fanfiction in his youth, mainly about Lord of the Rings and Star Trek, and while this isn’t how he’d imagined returning to the hobby it’s actually really fun. (It’s making his celebrity crush on Steve a million times worse, of course, but he’s in denial about that so it’s totally fine.)

He’s a little shit, so his blog header has - underneath his personal details - a PSA that reads “Steve, don’t look at this unless you have the balls to shout me out on stream ;)”. Eddie thinks he’s absolutely hilarious.

Right up until he wakes up to find his following has exploded overnight, and upon checking his DMs from his mutuals realizes that - oh shit - that bastard actually did it and talked about his blog on stream.

And Steve said he liked it. Steve likes the porn that Eddie wrote about him. Jesus H. Christ, Eddie is so unfathomably fucked.

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if this were to exist as a fic it would be told through social media posts/DMs. one of those fics that uses unconventional (i.e. non-prose) formatting, you know the ones. the concept actually came from the fact I fucking LOVE fics like that, I’m a slut for any of that House of Leaves-type shit. one time I read a fic that consisted of 8 short stories and each one had a HTML puzzle you had to solve to be able to read it, e.g. one you had to highlight because the text was in white, another you needed to hover your mouse over to make it scroll through the text - I can’t remember the rest but it was SO COOL.

(or, to put this another way, I read homestuck at a formative age and it forever changed how I feel about formatting stories.)

[ohmysatan42]

Guys I read a fanfiction where John oliver was Harry potter and it got progressively more unhinged and half the people on the daily show are witches and wizards and then stephen colbert was part veela and the author started a spin off about that and him mating with jon stewart and yeah it's bloody weird but also I need to find whoever wrote it and get them to write the end because I am HOOKED

[tantumuna]

what's crazy to me is multiple times i've received encouragement to start drawing again, even when i mention that the only reason i've considered drawing again is as a desperate ploy for attention

but whenever i talk about my writing i either get ignored or told to "write for yourself"

like just tell me you don't value writing as an art form. it'll be easier than having to dance through whatever the fuck this is

[raininyourblackeyes]

My cousin, a published writer, a well-known poet in my country and a literature professor, for whom I've always been no.1 support ever since her first attempts at writing in high school, told me that I must stop writing as a hobby because that's her thing and since I'm writing fantasy mostly my writing could never have any important artistic value anyways.

[foli-vora]

The anon button gives some cunts way too much fucking audacity on this hellsite. If you don’t have the nerve to send some judgemental/mean shit with your own fucking name on it, maybe don’t fucking say it at all and take your cowardly ass off this site. Kindness is free you fucking animals.

[that-was-anticlimactic]

one of the worst feelings ever is wanting to write but your hands hurt too much or the words just don’t want to work so you just sit there staring at a half finished doc with tears in your eyes bc you want to write and you need to write but everything is telling you that you can’t

[myymi]

oooh thanks for the tips!!! very helpful, as for what i personally struggle with.. i would say like, writing what om thinking?? likr i have the idea i know what i want to write about but i just cant write it down iys physically impossible helrp

the best advice i think i can give for this is to write down your idea very very poorly. like, the worst possible way you can write it.

for example;

this is usually how i write down my story ideas before i actually get into writing them a lot of the struggle, at least for me, is not being able to actually see the idea in front of me. when it's all in my head, it's hard to put it on paper. but when it's on paper, no matter how badly written it is, i can see what i need to do and edit it so it'll fit my vision better one of the main things that keeps people from writing is seeing a blank screen. it's overwhelming, and your brain just doesn't know where it should start. one of the best ways ive found to combat it is to write something horribly then go back and edit everything so it's actually cohesive if you write it as awfully as you can, it makes it so your project can only get better another you could do is instead of sitting down and writing your idea right off the bat, explain it. act like you're telling a friend about the idea instead of you writing it just get the idea on paper and see how it works for you from there. imagine you're leaving yourself notes so you don't forget the story and then slowly go through and edit it until it's at a point you're happy with another thing that could help is pretending you're either watching the scene fold out in front of you or you're in one of the character's shoes yourself. it's a little weird at first, but being able to visualize what's happening can help when trying to explain it. like if you're writing a report on a crime scene you witness you're going to include the details you saw. what the criminal looked like, what the area looked like, the criminal's behavior, etc. just pretend you're there and it'll be easier to describe the scene

[pawnshopsblue]

lorelais weird beef with jess in s2 is like. u are a grown woman. moreover the weird bit where she kinda sorta prioritizes her daughter's whiny bf over her actual daughter is. u are a grown woman and that is a teenage manchild.

[utnewfoundfamily]

Is this version of Asriel into video games like his Deltarune counterpart seems to be? And, now that he's got his SOUL back, has he tried his hand (or I guess paw) at romance? Or is he aroace like some people in our universe speculate?

Of course he’s into video games! It’s a great past time, but he does have other priorities to focus on. So gaming is at a minimum for Asriel, sadly. And on that note of his SOUL, the romance scene has never crossed his mind. I don’t think it’s for any other reason other than it’s just not what he wants or seeks. Rather than that, I think what he seeks is relationships that are more on the platonic side.

For example, the relationship Asriel has with Frisk. This one being built both before and after he had his own SOUL. Here’s the fun part though. There’s a type of action that takes place with SOULs and that’s called a “SOUL Dance.” Where two or more SOULs will dance and swirl together in harmony. Mind you, this is an action that is natural and not forced upon. The main component of this starts off by having a soul, obviously, yet the other is by having a strong bond with another person or persons that are mutual to one another. All bonds can be an array of things so not one person is excluded.

To monsters it’s a common thing, but to see it with a human is very fascinating. And colorful! The sensation is like being given a warm blanket or feeling a warming loving embrace. And the looks are what I’ve described previously. SOULs swirling & dancing around in harmony. Asriel has experienced this and it’s the best. Cause even if Frisk or any other person he’s danced with are gone, the feelings are still strong as if they were here with them. Here’s an example of how it looks like for Frisk an Azzy!:

Admittedly, his bond is a lot stronger with Frisk’s cause they did give a piece of themselves to him. So he may or may not be emotional about it. It’s a good emotional though. Does involve a little tears, but to feel is good. Makes you alive. And what is said here for Asriel could be repeated with Chara and Aster. What with sharing a piece of their SOUL and whatnot!