Fic Talk > General Discussion
The Writing Thread: Orlando Passaggio (aka The Writing Thread 3)
nicksgal:
--- Quote from: RokofAges75 on March 13, 2021, 09:46:45 PM ---Yeah, I think it's just because AO3 is newer. There are way more than 1,400 BSB fanfics out there, but the majority of them were written in the late 90s or early 2000s and are either still out there on Angelfire or Tripod sites that haven't been updated in 20+ years or went down with Geocities. I'm sure AC has the largest collection of them on one site.
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Oh man, Angelfire and Tripod! Those are two other things I haven't thought about in a while. Late 90's/early 00's internet was a wild and lawless time.
--- Quote from: RokofAges75 on March 13, 2021, 09:46:45 PM ---The tags! Everything is a tag there LOL. It honestly drives me nuts. I guess I can see why you might like to search out stories tagged "kidnapping" (there are 14 BSB fics with this tag) or "bus crash" (none!!), but hello spoilers! That's the reason I didn't tag most of my stories as medical dramas specifically - unless it's obvious in the summary or happens in the first chapter, that's a spoiler! Judging by the tags, readers on AO3 seem to care more about the character pairings and sexual positions than genres or plot points though.
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I guess in a tag-culture, people don't really care about spoilers if it ends up searchable in the tags? I also don't like to reveal spoilers in tags (as I've mentioned many times in my perceived difference between "death" and "major character death"), so I figured that was why you only had two listed as "medical," as I mentioned. They also don't have a standard section for genres, which seems weird to me. Like why are warnings a section, but genres are only a tag? Bizarre.
Our dreams are answered though, apparently "I suck at summaries" is a tag and there are 204 people willing to admit it on all of AO3. There's also 11 "really wordy" tags, lol.
--- Quote from: RokofAges75 on March 13, 2021, 09:46:45 PM ---I mostly tagged mine with characters and genres because that's how I'm used to classifying them, both here on AC and on my site. I guess that's mainly what I look at after the summary when I'm browsing for stories to read - what's it about, who's it about, and what kind of story is it? I definitely don't need to know if there's anal sex in it or not LOL. If it's a slash, I'm going to assume there is. But maybe this is just us being old-school. The whole concept of tags is a newer thing; we didn't have those back in the day LOL.
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I think it's the natural progression for a story in a world with #s and @s. There's a lot less subtext (or more and it's really blatant, haha). There's probably a world in the future where publish novels can be sorted by "hurt/comfort" too. I don't think I've ever wanted to click a tag either? Sorting by genre or characters makes sense to me, but even though I love a good trope, I don't think I feel the need to sort by a specific one? There's 4,850 stories with the tag "demons" if anyone wanted to know. Talking about this has basically became a fascinating adventure in searching for things in the name of science. I won't lie to to you all, I may have also done a quick "is PBox in any of these other fandoms" scan just in case (and curiosity got the better of me, there are 14 pages of stories called "Pandora's Box" on AO3, but only one of them is PBox that I can tell... it glitched halfway through my flicking and started being the same stories over and over again).
--- Quote from: RokofAges75 on March 13, 2021, 09:46:45 PM ---Thanks for doing all that research! Holy shit, there's a lot of BTS fanfics! I wonder how many BSB fics there would have been on AO3 if it had been the main place to post fanfics back in the late 90s. I also wonder if they would have been overwhelmingly slash like they are now. Somehow I don't think so. Slash has always been around, but I think het romance was more popular in the peak days of BSB fic.
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Happy to help us all in the name of science, two coffees, and minimal inspiration. I guess ff.net would be comparable? Rose might know that answer best, I think she was most involved with it back in the day.
I mean, AC as comparison could be helpful, so I'll do some more specific math. Let's say all slash stories on AC are included in the romance genre and that each possible page of genre has the full 15 stories on it (for the sake of quickness of math, not perfect accuracy).
We know that AC has 3,187 stories. The above logic assumes that 1,485 of them are romance and 180 of them are slash. 47% of the stories on AC have romance as a genre, 6% of the stories are slash. 12% of the romances are slash.
I guess there can be pairings without romance, but it's kind of weird to me that the number of slash stories is overwhelmingly higher than the ones tagged as romance.
If anything, our numbers tell me that BSB fans enjoy drama as a genre more than anything else, lol. I wonder if slash is more popular now because it seems easier to remove a wife for another Boy than an OC female love interest. Or because so many of us have done everything that we've all now tried things we originally said we wouldn't, like slash. Or pairings and AUs are such a big part of fanfic these days that slash and AU are just more popular because of that. Or people are writing more one-chapter things than novels, so the tags are inflated with the preferences of those one-chapter authors who happen to like slash.
I looked out of curiosity and most of the stuff on AO3 doesn't start being multi-chapter (or x/?) until it hits about 11,000 words; based on what updates, I'd be willing to give an extra page of intended multi-chaptered works, plus one more for the few I saw along the way even though their word counts were smaller. So of the 1,465 works on AO3, only about 300 of them have more than one chapter. AC doesn't let you sort by word count, but everything on the most recent page is multi-chapter.
I am so useless today, haha.
RokofAges75:
--- Quote from: nicksgal on March 14, 2021, 12:12:31 AM ---I guess in a tag-culture, people don't really care about spoilers if it ends up searchable in the tags? I also don't like to reveal spoilers in tags (as I've mentioned many times in my perceived difference between "death" and "major character death"), so I figured that was why you only had two listed as "medical," as I mentioned. They also don't have a standard section for genres, which seems weird to me. Like why are warnings a section, but genres are only a tag? Bizarre.
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Yeah, it's definitely a different culture over there. I'm fine with a warnings section, although I haven't used it for most of my stories on AO3 (again, spoilers - and yes, "Major Character Death" gives away a lot more than general "Death"), but I wish there was a genre section too.
Now that I think about it, most of my medical dramas actually aren't on AO3 yet. I think the only other one I could have given that tag was Curtain Call. I consider Bethlehem more of a survival story than a medical drama since most of it's set outside a hospital.
--- Quote from: nicksgal on March 14, 2021, 12:12:31 AM ---Our dreams are answered though, apparently "I suck at summaries" is a tag and there are 204 people willing to admit it on all of AO3. There's also 11 "really wordy" tags, lol.
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LOL! Well, if I ever get bored enough to post BMS on there, I now know another tag to include.
--- Quote from: nicksgal on March 14, 2021, 12:12:31 AM ---I think it's the natural progression for a story in a world with #s and @s. There's a lot less subtext (or more and it's really blatant, haha). There's probably a world in the future where publish novels can be sorted by "hurt/comfort" too. I don't think I've ever wanted to click a tag either? Sorting by genre or characters makes sense to me, but even though I love a good trope, I don't think I feel the need to sort by a specific one? There's 4,850 stories with the tag "demons" if anyone wanted to know. Talking about this has basically became a fascinating adventure in searching for things in the name of science. I won't lie to to you all, I may have also done a quick "is PBox in any of these other fandoms" scan just in case (and curiosity got the better of me, there are 14 pages of stories called "Pandora's Box" on AO3, but only one of them is PBox that I can tell... it glitched halfway through my flicking and started being the same stories over and over again).
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LOL I also went down a rabbit hole of tags earlier, which led to my discovery of two Dobby/Hagrid slash stories by different authors in the Harry Potter fandom. https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Dobby*s*Rubeus%20Hagrid/works I read them both out of morbid curiosity and got a good laugh. I think they were both written as jokes...
I came across a Child's Play slash on there a couple years ago... Chucky the killer doll and Andy the little boy. There was no murder in it at all, just doll sex. Rule #34 strikes again. LOL
--- Quote from: nicksgal on March 14, 2021, 12:12:31 AM ---I guess there can be pairings without romance, but it's kind of weird to me that the number of slash stories is overwhelmingly higher than the ones tagged as romance.
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I think that's because a lot of them are just porn without any of the romance that would normally lead up to a sex scene.
--- Quote from: nicksgal on March 14, 2021, 12:12:31 AM ---If anything, our numbers tell me that BSB fans enjoy drama as a genre more than anything else, lol. I wonder if slash is more popular now because it seems easier to remove a wife for another Boy than an OC female love interest. Or because so many of us have done everything that we've all now tried things we originally said we wouldn't, like slash. Or pairings and AUs are such a big part of fanfic these days that slash and AU are just more popular because of that. Or people are writing more one-chapter things than novels, so the tags are inflated with the preferences of those one-chapter authors who happen to like slash.
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Yes, we all love the drama!
Those definitely could be reasons why slash has seen a rise in popularity. I wonder if it's also because homosexuality is more accepted now than it was in the 90s. It's a bigger part of pop culture, and gay characters are more common now.
--- Quote from: nicksgal on March 14, 2021, 12:12:31 AM ---I looked out of curiosity and most of the stuff on AO3 doesn't start being multi-chapter (or x/?) until it hits about 11,000 words; based on what updates, I'd be willing to give an extra page of intended multi-chaptered works, plus one more for the few I saw along the way even though their word counts were smaller. So of the 1,465 works on AO3, only about 300 of them have more than one chapter. AC doesn't let you sort by word count, but everything on the most recent page is multi-chapter.
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I have also noticed that about AO3; there are a lot more one-shots and short stories. Our really long, complete novels are a rarity there. Which is exactly why we should keep posting them.
RokofAges75:
I better answer these myself before they get buried too deep in this thread.
What was your breakout story?
Broken
When did you write it, and/or how old were you when you wrote it?
January 2003 - March 2004. I was 17 when I started it and 18 when I finished.
How did that story change you as a writer?
I got a lot better at description and character development during the writing of Broken. You can see that development happen over the course of the story. It starts off still a little teenybopperish and cringey, but it gets better as it goes on. I spent a lot of time in Broken Nick's head, and I think it shows. He really changes throughout the story as I break him down and build him back up. And I think Claire is still one of the strongest original characters I've ever created.
This is also the story that taught me how to research for a fanfic. I had looked things when writing before, especially for Code Blue, but not to the level I had to for Broken, especially once I got to the choppage section because I knew nothing about that and had to learn a lot to be able to write it realistically. That definitely changed the way I write because now I research a ton.
Why do you think the quality of your writing improved with that story?
I think it was a mixture of inspiration and maturity. The idea for Broken came from reading the Swollen Issues series, specifically Swollen Issues II. I was obsessed with that story, and while it wasn't the best quality of writing I've ever read in a fanfic, it hooked me with its strong characters, detailed descriptions, and emotional punch. I wasn't even a big Nick fan back then, but that story just made me want to give him a huge hug. As I refreshed the site it was on multiple times a day as I desperately waited for updates, I wished I could create something that would give my readers that kind of reaction. So when I started writing Broken, that's what I tried to do.
At the same time, I was a senior in high school, taking AP English, where of course we read and analyzed classic literature. I think all our discussions and essays about symbolism and imagery in "The Great Gatsby" and "Of Mice and Men" is what sparked the dream interpretation phase I mentioned not too long ago. I made a lot of awkward attempts at putting some symbolism of my own into Broken, and while they weren't great, they at least added some more depth to my writing.
Then I went away to college, where I wrote the last part of the story, the post-choppage section, which I think is the strongest part. I didn't plan it that way, but it just happened to coincide that my Nick was undergoing a huge life change in the story at the same time I was in real life. I don't know if being on my own for the first time and the life experience and maturity that came with it actually spilled over into my writing or if that would have been the natural progression of it anyway, but that is where I really seemed to make the jump from teenybopper to young adult writer.
nicksgal:
--- Quote from: RokofAges75 on March 14, 2021, 01:43:04 AM ---Yeah, it's definitely a different culture over there. I'm fine with a warnings section, although I haven't used it for most of my stories on AO3 (again, spoilers - and yes, "Major Character Death" gives away a lot more than general "Death"), but I wish there was a genre section too.
Now that I think about it, most of my medical dramas actually aren't on AO3 yet. I think the only other one I could have given that tag was Curtain Call. I consider Bethlehem more of a survival story than a medical drama since most of it's set outside a hospital.
LOL! Well, if I ever get bored enough to post BMS on there, I now know another tag to include.
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I'm also fine with a warning section, but, yes, I also wish genre was a section and not just tags.
Yeah, Bethlehem really only becomes a medical drama as a natural consequence of being a survival story. You can't spoil Curtain Call though, so it's better to just call it a drama.
You know, I thought about it for PBox, but I figured the word count spoke for itself. I looked out of curiosity and in the ten wordiest stories, I see you, Rose, Mare, and me. Mare fills out most of the rest of the twenty wordiest stories and I see another one that I know is on AC too. We're all the rebels with our novels in a one-shot world.
--- Quote from: RokofAges75 on March 14, 2021, 01:43:04 AM ---LOL I also went down a rabbit hole of tags earlier, which led to my discovery of two Dobby/Hagrid slash stories by different authors in the Harry Potter fandom. https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Dobby*s*Rubeus%20Hagrid/works I read them both out of morbid curiosity and got a good laugh. I think they were both written as jokes...
I came across a Child's Play slash on there a couple years ago... Chucky the killer doll and Andy the little boy. There was no murder in it at all, just doll sex. Rule #34 strikes again. LOL
--- End quote ---
lmao, Rule #34 strikes again! I think we can never assume things were written as jokes, but you're probably right. I also want to make a joke about BDSM and house elves so badly, but it's only half formed in my head. This will bother me all day.
But there was murder in that story. Andy's childhood was murdered by doll sex.
--- Quote from: RokofAges75 on March 14, 2021, 01:43:04 AM ---I think that's because a lot of them are just porn without any of the romance that would normally lead up to a sex scene.
--- End quote ---
I figured that was why as well. Which if you're only writing a one-shot type thing, you don't really need any romantic buildup to the sex.
--- Quote from: RokofAges75 on March 14, 2021, 01:43:04 AM ---Yes, we all love the drama!
Those definitely could be reasons why slash has seen a rise in popularity. I wonder if it's also because homosexuality is more accepted now than it was in the 90s. It's a bigger part of pop culture, and gay characters are more common now.
I have also noticed that about AO3; there are a lot more one-shots and short stories. Our really long, complete novels are a rarity there. Which is exactly why we should keep posting them.
--- End quote ---
I think loving drama is a characteristic we all share, regardless of our overall genre preferences. Although, I just looked and I've never listed PBox as a drama, even though it's very dramatic.
That might have a lot to do with it too! Just look at all our opinions back in the day "I will never write this," and many of us have at some point or another (although I've never written a BSB one and don't really have an interest in writing one still, reading is fine if it has a story and not just pwp). I think back in the day, it was always there for us too, but possibly a little more taboo.
If nothing else, it takes a lot less effort to write one-shots and short stories. The amount of research I've done for any of them is fairly minimal compared to a novel. When we all have several outside responsibiliti es (I assume), it's easier to put out consistent content if you're keeping it short (or being patient and hoarding).
nicksgal:
--- Quote from: RokofAges75 on March 14, 2021, 03:17:04 AM ---I better answer these myself before they get buried too deep in this thread.
--- End quote ---
lol! As Mare said, that tends to happen.
--- Quote from: RokofAges75 on March 14, 2021, 03:17:04 AM ---When did you write it, and/or how old were you when you wrote it?
January 2003 - March 2004. I was 17 when I started it and 18 when I finished.
--- End quote ---
I feel like I knew that you wrote the whole thing over the course of about a year, but it's always wild to me when I see it confirmed. Did you ever have times where you didn't write it for long stretches of time or were you always writing fairly consistently?
--- Quote from: RokofAges75 on March 14, 2021, 03:17:04 AM ---How did that story change you as a writer?
I got a lot better at description and character development during the writing of Broken. You can see that development happen over the course of the story. It starts off still a little teenybopperish and cringey, but it gets better as it goes on. I spent a lot of time in Broken Nick's head, and I think it shows. He really changes throughout the story as I break him down and build him back up. And I think Claire is still one of the strongest original characters I've ever created.
This is also the story that taught me how to research for a fanfic. I had looked things when writing before, especially for Code Blue, but not to the level I had to for Broken, especially once I got to the choppage section because I knew nothing about that and had to learn a lot to be able to write it realistically. That definitely changed the way I write because now I research a ton.
--- End quote ---
I think the more time you spend with a character, the more nuanced they become, especially when you're directly in their head. Nick's character arc was great! And only became stronger as time went. Claire is definitely a strong original character and she only got better as time went on when she had more of her own motivations and goals. :) I know we've discussed it before, but it feels like that "care and investment" in the characters and their story might be a major turning point in the "teenybopper versus nuanced writer" divide. Or at least for you and I. While I enjoyed writing stories prior to the 2003 OF/Gobosei/PBox era, they lacked a lot of that care and investment that led me to really try crafting a better piece of work to really depict a complete story and write about things in realistic and believable ways.
That's true to your research as well, which I also love your care and attention for the accuracy of the smallest details! It's easy enough to say that Nick's leg was amputated, but in a story full of investment in the character, it almost feels like you gotta do it accurate justice for them, especially when it's something you know nothing about going in. I know I realized that research led to more interesting writing, as I'm sure you did too, so I think we're all better for our days of research. You're much better at keeping yours organized though! I've been slowly trying to recreate mine to keep in a safe place, rather than in the same spot in my head as the lyrics to QPG, haha.
--- Quote from: RokofAges75 on March 14, 2021, 03:17:04 AM ---Why do you think the quality of your writing improved with that story?
I think it was a mixture of inspiration and maturity. The idea for Broken came from reading the Swollen Issues series, specifically Swollen Issues II. I was obsessed with that story, and while it wasn't the best quality of writing I've ever read in a fanfic, it hooked me with its strong characters, detailed descriptions, and emotional punch. I wasn't even a big Nick fan back then, but that story just made me want to give him a huge hug. As I refreshed the site it was on multiple times a day as I desperately waited for updates, I wished I could create something that would give my readers that kind of reaction. So when I started writing Broken, that's what I tried to do.
At the same time, I was a senior in high school, taking AP English, where of course we read and analyzed classic literature. I think all our discussions and essays about symbolism and imagery in "The Great Gatsby" and "Of Mice and Men" is what sparked the dream interpretation phase I mentioned not too long ago. I made a lot of awkward attempts at putting some symbolism of my own into Broken, and while they weren't great, they at least added some more depth to my writing.
Then I went away to college, where I wrote the last part of the story, the post-choppage section, which I think is the strongest part. I didn't plan it that way, but it just happened to coincide that my Nick was undergoing a huge life change in the story at the same time I was in real life. I don't know if being on my own for the first time and the life experience and maturity that came with it actually spilled over into my writing or if that would have been the natural progression of it anyway, but that is where I really seemed to make the jump from teenybopper to young adult writer.
--- End quote ---
I bolded this part specifically because I think this is immensely important advice (sentiment?) for anyone aspiring to write something down. If a work touches you so much that you want to create the feeling of it, then do! (Easier said than done, I know.) But I think that if there's a spark of anything like that in anyone from reading something else, then they have that power to try. We're having a discussion here about breakout novels, but all of us have said we wrote many things before that. Many cringey things. But, we all eventually settled on something where there was care, love, and motivation that switched something on in our brains and forced this progression in writing ability. I'm not going to lie and say that writing is never frustrating (I especially don't think I can), but when there's so many strong feelings about wanting to do it, just doing it helps get you there. Everyone started from somewhere. :)
You know, all those discussions about analyzing literature have always made me wonder how much authors purposefully put things in to be symbolic and how much of it was just them thinking things like "awww, it's so hard for the big one because he loves little things, but doesn't know his own strength" or "I just really like the color green." lmao
It could be a little of both, but I definitely think writing is stronger for those types of "write what you know" things than the "I am very familiar with the climate of mountains" type things. It allows us to put a little of ourselves into the writing without blatantly being ourselves. I think Nick was stronger for his "huge life change" coming during your "huge life change." :)
I was the opposite of mature as a freshman, lmao. Anxious might be a better term. Apparently, I like to write PBox when I'm feeling anxious, haha.
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