#we're building a good writer/beta relationship

[uwudonoodle]

That one scene I got sidetracked with? I thought it would take 1 or 2 days to write... It ended up taking like 3 weeks and became an almost 20 page chapter. I had a hard time with this one. The emotions ran from silly, to romantic, to frustrating, to devastating, to tender.

I was nervous sharing it with my beta reader because I had struggled and changed things so many times. Even though the reading took more than an hour, he said he was engaged and entertained the whole time, and the rollercoaster emotional arc felt very natural. He even laughed at a couple of my jokes, and pointed out lines he loved that were extremely in character. He only gave me a couple of suggestions, which were legitimately good additions.

It's so nice to know that after all the struggle, that I solved the problems, and made something that hit all the notes I wanted it to. My beta is getting to know my writing better too. He pointed out one spot that he said seemed less polished than the rest, and he was right. I'd spent the least amount of time on that part, and had been editing it right before I showed him. I'm so lucky to have such a good beta reader. Showing him my finished chapters is such a highlight of my writing time.

[dark--whisperings]

How do you become a beta reader without sounding like you’re saying that you think their writing needs help? I want to be an editor some day, so I’ve been commenting on people’s works to build relationships/recognition. I’m worried that asking someone if they need an editor would sound like a criticism?

This is a fantastic question, and a concern I've absolutely shared. IMO (and this goes for both editing and being a beta-reader) I think it's about framing your request as building a connection, rather than merely editing their work. I'll preface this by saying that these are just suggestions from my personal experience... this is not exhaustive! Also, we're all unique flavours of humans, so not all fic writers might agree with what I've included below.

As much as it may surprise people, many writers (even the most popular ones) can often feel a bit of trepidation and self-consciousness about posting a work publicly. It's scary as fuck to share a labour of your love, especially not knowing if it will get the attention you want. Because, as much as we tell ourselves that we write fic for ourselves (which we do!), it also feels damn good to get those comments and kudos. So having someone to cheer you on and work collaboratively to help you put forward your best work is amazing (though I'm sure it's also not for everyone).

So... back to that connection! IMO... just ask (a dm is probably best, rather than a public comment though)! You could start by say that your a fan of their work and that, while you absolutely don't think they need a beta, you'd love the chance to collaborate with them, if it's something they've ever considered. The worst they can say is no!

If they agree, the most important part is then asking how they'd like you to show up for them. Do they just want spelling and grammar? Do they only want suggestions on plot and flow? Do they just want you to cheer them on as they write? Some unique combination of the above? This part is really about getting to know them as an author because, as a beta, your job isn't to edit their voice out of their work, but to provide suggestions (and I stress suggestions) for ways to make that voice shine.

All in all, the writer/beta relationship is a very special connection to make (I'm looking at you @tideswept, @mischievouschan4, @stardustnsunshine, @innominatta, @sopherfly, & @boguspreston 👀).

I hope that this is helpful @captkarnivore! Thanks for such a great ask! 💜💜💜

(also... I've been noodling over making a post along the lines of "so you want to be a beta-reader, now what?" to dive into this topic a bit more in detail... would there be any interest in this?)

[greenerteacups]

Hello GT, I absolutely love Lionheart!

I published my first fic and have been dealing with some criticism; it’s not anythjng super hateful, but it’s not anything meant to make me improve either. I’ve been feeling sort of down because of it. My question is: have you ever dealt with hate or criticism before? What is your attitude towards it?

I find your work and answers on here super insightful and inspiring! I hope you have a nice day ❤️

Fuck em. Like, seriously, just fuck em. There's a time and place for writers to take critique and be strict with themselves; it's necessary for any artist to grow. That place is with a chosen group of creatives whose work you admire and whose judgment you trust. A rando on the Internet, while they may in fact be the next Marcel Proust, probably isn't. And I was raised to believe that while it's appropriate and kind to pay compliments to strangers when they're performing — just as you'd smile at a busker on the sidewalk, and or compliment a chalk artist — it's not appropriate to criticize them when what they do isn't to your tastes. They're providing you with their art for free. No one forced you to read it; no one forced you to listen. If you don't like it, it costs $0 to shut the fuck up.

Also — that thing I said about artists taking critique? That assumes that you're doing this out of a desire to improve your writing, which, while noble, is not actually a thing you need to do if you're a hobby writer. I like trying to improve; it makes me feel good. But at the end of the day, I do this for fun. I do this because in my real job, I am ruthless and self-critical and try really fucking hard to do well, and you need parts of your life that Aren't Like that. You need parts of your life where you're not worrying about whether you're Doing It Right. And living without that anxiety of critique is, paradoxically, the only way you'll find the artistic courage to take risks and develop new skills. Everyone is a little bit rough around the edges to begin with. (Not saying you're a beginner — you merely said "publish," and I certainly wrote a lot of things before I started publishing! But every artist is always trying to develop new skills and techniques; in the grand scope of things, we're all beginners.) Giving someone blunt critique when they're in the beginning phases of their journey as an artist is about as helpful as screaming at your six-year-old kid because he can't swim the butterfly.

And the thing is, these people will bluster and say "well, I'm just being honest, I'm just trying to be helpful," but like: mmmmmmno, you're not! You're not. And it's disingenuous to say so. Because if you were actually trying to be helpful, you would introduce yourself, offer your skills as an editor/beta reader, and start building the relationship of trust that grounds any meaningful co-creative partnership. People do not just accept random critique that comes flying at them from the blue nowhere. And issuing it in that form is the best way to make them hostile, defensive, and unreceptive to it. Delivering harsh feedback without a context of care and support is almost sure to fail as a method of actually changing behavior, and either (1) you know that, and are doing it anyway — presumably because you want people to know how Terribly Clever and Better At Writing you are, or (2) you sincerely have never thought about the effect that context and word choice have on how other people receive your meaning.

Which tells me you are the last fucking person on the planet I want writing advice from.

[frozen-fountain]

I pinched this list of writer asks from @runicmagitek, and would love to read everyone else's answers if you have a few minutes to kill.

How many works do you have on AO3? 17

What's your total AO3 word count? 281,634. Not bad for three years!

What fandoms do you write for? Final Fantasies VI, VII OG, and X once when I was briefly possessed and wrote a fic from Anima's point of view.

What are your top 5 fics by kudos? Into the Night Uncharted (Vincent character study exploring his relationships with all the other mains) You Grow the Flowers Yourself (Elmyra's time in Shinra captivity and the point at which the canon diverged) Prints (a series of four flash fics about FFVII couples post-canon and their pets; not that fluffy) Penitent (the abovementioned screed from Anima's point of view) Negative Space (brief flash fic about Relm painting, well, guess)

The top two are what you'd expect, but I love that some of my more out-there ideas were (relatively) well-received.

Do you respond to comments? Why or why not? Every single one. I wouldn't if it was hate, but if you've stopped by to wish me well and tell me you enjoyed something I created? Of course I'm going to respond. I write these for me, but I post them in the hope of finding those brief moments of connection.

What's the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? Hard to say! Penitent is a miserable story about a woman stumbling from one nightmare to another and only finding relief when she's allowed to die; I intended for its ending to be salt in the wound, but a lot of people found it heartening, and I like that both options are there! My other foray into horror, Clownfish (the beginning of Jenova's influence on the Cetra), features the certain death of a child and imminent collapse of a civilization, so you can't get much bigger than that in terms of downers.

What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? My FFVII fics end on lighter notes of momentary resolution, even if there's always an element of bittersweetness and it's all building to something that's quite different. You could probably pick any one of the longer pieces.

Do you get hate on fics? Not regarding the fics themselves, no. I am on the mod team of r/FanFiction, though, and I think all of us have had a few nasty responses left on our fics when someone didn't like our decisions. But I don't take that sort of thing to heart, and it actually happens way less often than I expected when I took up the position.

Do you write smut? If so, what kind? Sometimes! I've written F/F, M/M, and M/F scenes, and something I'm chipping away at now also involves threesomes and group sex. What I've written is not purely vanilla but it's also nothing extreme. It's always there as another facet of a character study and contributes something I feel is important and powerful to the text, but I'm also not not trying to turn people on at the same time. To me a good sex scene is like a good horror – it's a good story even if it doesn't produce a particular kind of excitement in you.

Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written? Not really a crossover person. It's fun to have a long conversation about characters from different FFs hanging out, for example, but I don't feel inspired to actually make a story of it.

Have you ever had a fic stolen? Not to my knowledge.

Have you ever had a fic translated? As above.

Have you ever co-written a fic before? Kind of! My partner beta reads all my stuff, but we're both on this Final Fantasy kick together and a lot of my analysis and headcanons have been built out of talks we've had and ideas we've grown together. I've even lifted things she's said and put them straight into the story (with permission and credit, of course). Even if the actual writing is done by me, she definitely deserves an extra special credit for much she's given to helping me.

What's your all-time favorite ship? I don't have a definitive one I'd single out.

What's the WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will? I don't know if I'll see the FFVII series all the way through to the end, but I'd like to surprise myself! At the very least I want to finish the pieces I've actually started.

What are your writing strengths? General prose craftsmanship, having a distinct voice and style to all I do, being able to vary it up enough to characterise a protagonist through their narrative voice, creating evocative and immersive atmosphere and settings (and using a POV character's way of relating and observing their surroundings to say something about them), inner monologue, little human worldbuilding touches like Meteor truthers and the post-Meteor baby boom.

What are your writing weaknesses? Pacing, tension, trusting myself with what I have to say and whether or not it's worth saying at all, keeping it in the damn subtext.

Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic? I can understand why some readers would find this jarring or distracting, so that's something to bear in mind as an author, but I love it! Some languages just have words and phrases that convey a particular nuance better than anything in English, I always think it's neat when an author pours some of their own knowledge and interests into a fic, and I like having the chance to learn. Recently I read a friend's fic that features for a protagonist a detective who needs to be a polyglot by nature of his work, and when she included lines in languages other than English, she provided translations and links back and forth at the bottom. I found that, rather than breaking my immersion, it added to it – putting me in the head of someone who has to quickly and readjust to different ways of speaking.

First fandom you wrote for? I'll never tell!

Favorite fic you've ever written? I'm proud of each of them for their own strengths and unique attributes, but I'm going to single out the four drabbles I wrote this year. I'm a maximalist writer by nature, so it was a serious challenge to pare down anything to a mere hundred words; nonetheless, I think each of them manages to suggest characters and relationships, create an atmosphere, and communicate a conflict and resolution (or deliberate lack thereof) in the limited space allowed. Makes me feel like maybe I'm not so bad at the storytelling thing after all.

[new-eyes-extra-colors]

4 7 15 and 20 for Autumn! Hier sind kekse.

[meta asks for writers]

4. Share a sentence or paragraph from your writing that you’re really proud of (explain why, if you like)

I'm pretty fond of this monster of a sentence from my very first draft of WBotB:

"So instead of knocking, he’d turned quietly on his heel and stepped outside for a cigarette. But nicotine couldn’t quell synthetic nerves, so he’d been leaning up against the brick face of the building fiddling with his lighter and trying to decide between a second useless smoke and marching back to her room to make sure she was alright and to tell her he understood when she’d pushed open the front door and turned immediately to him with something approaching relief written on her face."

It's unlikely that I'll keep it, since in the moment Nick is relaying something that's already happened and in the present draft we're just going to be there for that scene, but it's a good sentence I think.

7. What do you think are the characteristics of your personal writing style? Would others agree?

I'd like to think I've got a snappy and to-the-point writing style that really gets across what's going through the characters' heads--even if I'm longwinded and like digging into weeds and minutiae, I hope I don't make things drag too much.

15. Which is harder: titles or summaries (or tags)?

Ugh, titles. Every title I come up with is a placeholder for a long time. Like, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted was Until Dawn until right before I published the first chapter (and it's still tagged as that on this tumblr). Ghost Lights needs a snappier (and more relevant) title and Eye of the Storm needs a less sinister one. It's just something I have to let percolate for a long, long time.

20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

There are a lot of birds-as-portents in WBotB, especially crows. Speaking of that fic, it's very interconnected, with lots of callbacks to itself as well as to in-game events that don't happen on-page, to the point that I'm actually having to balance what I include so I'm not either 1. reiterating game events that don't need to be reiterated or 2. reiterating so little that what story is left doesn't make sense. I guess an understood caveat of fanfic is you should be familiar with the source material, but I'm also running everything past a beta who's never played Fallout 4, so...

Probably my favorite friendship development in it is Piper and Nora. Nora sees a lot of herself in Piper--as the responsible older sister--and relates to her on a very personal level. A lot of Nora's past with her own sisters affects the way her relationship progresses with Piper, and she's able to come to peace with some of the things that happened while helping Piper. Ultimately it's just a very sweet friendship that I hope others like reading about.

As far as other fics go, there's a lot of interconnectedness in Eye of the Storm too. One of the characters in the first chapter even says "Everything's connected somehow." There's also a theme of cycles, and that everything that has happened before is happening now will happen again, and that it takes awareness and a conscious effort to break a cycle--but it can be done.

I'm sure I'll come up with symbolism for Ghost Lights but at the moment it's just an action- and violence-filled romp. Maybe it's about the power of friendship; we'll see.

[emilykaldwen]

This has always been my lingering issue with GRRM's books that the shows have taken and run even further with. GRRM handles it well, but it's very 'dark before the dawn'. His adaptations don't understand that you need to give those moments of release. It's how we've ended up in the gritty dark place. Conversely, this is also a big issue in a lot of books these days (and I will always remember my mom talking about rolling her eyes through 50 Shades).

There's something called the Trauma Event Horizon. What that is, is that there comes a point where your readers will no longer be able to process The Horrors and care about what's happening. This comes in a variety of ways.

Stories like The Hunger Games handles it very well because it's the core of the plot. It deals with the building PTSD and the horrors of war, it handles it with the gravitas it deserves. ASOIAF deals with this well, but it does occasionally stray into the 'oh my god we're doing this again?' territory. Not egregiously, but it's there (and I would say this is more of a side effect of the era of George's writing).

A really good counter example would be Fifty Shades of Gray. How many times is ELJ trying to extend the plot by having... random horrible things happen. Suddenly Ana has a stalker, suddenly she's kidnapped, Oh no Christian goes into this helicopter crash and magically survived. There's no stakes, they're just dramatic events meant to evoke sympathy, meant to quickly raise those stakes.

Moments like Blood and Cheese and The Red Wedding are serious moments. The Red Wedding held the gravity that it deserved because it was the most horrific moment to happen to one of our main characters in the story. It had ramifications in so many ways that you know we're going to feel it (Tywin, I know you thought it was a good move but my guy, it's gonna bite you in the ass). It's why even though B&C was awkwardly handled on the show, you still had the ramifications of people believing Rhaenyra ordered the murder of Jaehaerys. (which this SHOULD have ramifications for!) I think you definitely ran into this with Sansa Stark's adaptation in the main series where it's just 'yes, of course these horrible things are happening to baby girl because she's the whipping child of the writers'.

We definitely get this Trauma Event Horizon in fic. There's only so much trauma you can pile onto a character's backstory where your reader is going to stop caring. IT's going to turn into 'Oh of course she had this horrible repressed memeory we're pulling out when there's a lull in the plot'. And that's not to say you can't have the horrors happen! Leah Bardugo does this wonderfully with my beloved Inej Ghafa, a character who has a very horrific and triggering character backstory that is always handled seriously and genuinely has an effect on Inej in her intimate relationships moving forward. On the flip side, how often do you see in fic/books/media that a character has a horrifically traumatizing (often sexual) past that has incredibly little effect on them.

It's a very easy trap to fall into! I myself have sat with my beta going 'should I be doing this to amp it up' and come back and see that there are stakes already.

To bring it back: I think if there was some more breathing room it wouldn't feel like trauma after trauma was being piled on, but at the same time, there's a big reason why I stopped watching the after episode BTS because the writers seemed very unaware that Aegon is being portrayed as sympathetic, when they said in the promo that we would feel sympathy and look to TG differently. In a lot of ways yes, we have, but there's just been so much that feels missing and left onf the cutting room floor that we just don't get that time

in writing aegon, sara hess and ryan condal have managed to be more unempathetic and braindead than casual hotd viewers who have the ability to acknowledge that there’s a point when a character’s trauma starts bordering more on gratuitous torture porn rather than something that’s adding nuance and complexity to someone who has already been mistreated and abused his entire life

[agwitow]

Without having read your story, it's hard to offer concrete suggestions, but here are some reasons you might feel like the ending isn't quite right...

1. UNRESOLVED PLOT POINTS

For every plot point you introduced, there needs to be some sort of resolution. That doesn't necessarily mean a problem is solved (cliffhangers are a thing, after all), but that it has been brought to a natural stopping point.

Let's say Bob accidentally threw a powerful magic spoon in the garbage, and so must recover it. If this is meant to span multiple books, then you might have it resolve when he tracks down the dump and realizes that that was only the first step. It leaves us wondering whether Bob will succeed in his quest, but also feels like a logical conclusion to this part of his arc.

2. MISSING BUILD UP

In our excitement/ rush/ creative stupor, we might gloss over some key details as we wrap up all the loose threads. So, when we go back to edit, we're left feeling that something is missing.

Continuing on with the Bob's magic spoon example, if Bob learnt there are three possible locations his garbage was taken, but then skip to him finding the right one, we've missed the important in-between step of him obtaining that information.

This issue usually requires additions prior to the ending itself, to properly set-up the resolution.

3. WRONG ENDING

Sometimes, despite our best efforts, the ending we envisioned for our story isn't the ending that it should have. If you've written a slightly silly high fantasy adventure, having everyone die at the end doesn't fit with the tone of the rest of the book.

It can be difficult to do, but try to look at your story as if you were reading it for the first time. How would you expect it to end? What would make the conclusion of this story satisfying?

4. YOU CAN'T TRUST YOUR INNER CRITIC

And sometimes your story's ending is good, even though you feel like it's the worst thing ever written.

Us writers don't have the healthiest relationship with our inner critics. Which is why the best thing we can do for a story is to take a break from it. If you're still not sure, you can always get feedback from critique partners and beta-readers.

They'll notice holes or mistakes you keep glossing over (because this is the 50th time you've read it), and be able to tell you what parts work (even though you're sure those specific bits are the worst).

And without more info, that's about the best advice I can offer.

Best of luck with your writing!

xoxo

Hey Tumblr, How do you write a good ending to your book? I finished my story but the ending feels out of place and rushed, but if I add more story it feels dragged on like I'm really milking these characters for all they're worth.