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Author Topic: The Writing Thread: Orlando Passaggio (aka The Writing Thread 3)  (Read 131416 times)

mare

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Re: The Writing Thread: Orlando Passaggio (aka The Writing Thread 3)
« Reply #60 on: March 13, 2021, 09:19:39 PM »

It is never random! If you brought this up two weeks from now, I may have forgotten the original discussion, but not when we talked about it on Thursday.

I can't remember, Mare, did you switch between the POVs evenly or were they skewed toward one of the Boys (I assume Nick if that's the case)? I don't feel like your stories were ever confusing because of it, regardless.

On the ones that are all five points of view, it was never really focused on any one person. At least I never intended it to be. Nick seemed to have the most dramatic chapters because Nick was always the most dramatic lol but I always gave them equal time and an equal amount of chapters.
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RokofAges75

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Re: The Writing Thread: Orlando Passaggio (aka The Writing Thread 3)
« Reply #61 on: March 13, 2021, 09:46:45 PM »

It's weird that there's only about 1,400 BSB fanfics on AO3. I guess it makes sense since AO3 didn't exist in our fanfic heyday, but I know there's way more than 1,400 BSB fanfics out there. And it's weird to think about when fanfiction.net removed all its RPF fandoms and so we all had to go rogue, haha. One Direction and BTS fans are lucky they didn't have to deal with that. (I also have found that there are 66 fanfics about TSwift's Bad Blood music video?)

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.


I also found out "face f-ing" is a tag? And that story is tagged "fantasy" in a way the genre is not intended (I assume, I didn't click on it) in addition to "sexual fantasy" that might be valid?

I guess our "Additional tags" section included more things that I would call genres and the other two had more subtags for sex (as I noted above with anal sex being listed for all three fandoms in the "additional tags" section) or character related tags. So we might define our work by genre more than the other fandoms do? I also realized I didn't initially look up historical fiction and added it in. And then I realized it was 8pm and I hadn't eaten dinner yet.

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.

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.

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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nicksgal

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Re: The Writing Thread: Orlando Passaggio (aka The Writing Thread 3)
« Reply #62 on: March 13, 2021, 10:54:39 PM »

I asked the age question because I was curious to see how many of us were around the same age when we had that leap in writing development.  I was also 17 when I started Broken, so we are alike in that way!

I was curious too (for science), so I'm glad you did! I hope other people write long diatribes about their novels too! :) Or short diatribes. Y'all know I'm long-winded.


Wow, that is some friend!  Was it hard to hear "this sucks" from her then, or did you welcome the harsh but honest feedback?  I'm glad it helped you look at your writing through another lens and learn from her constructive criticism.

The amount of times we edited the first chapter was insane! It hurt a little at the beginning, because I don't think anyone likes to hear that something they wrote sucks? I assume this is universally true? But I'm also grateful that I had that frame for constructive criticism early. In my mind, no one is going to give constructive criticism from a bad place, it all comes from a good place of wanting to get the best story out of it. Especially when it is someone close to you who also cares about your stories or how your writing is going. Similar to how a teacher will only tell you to fix something before a final draft because they want you to get the best grade you possibly can. I definitely think it gave me a thicker skin earlier while also showing me that there's always things to improve, even on something you love. I was definitely better for it in the long run, especially knowing that after reworking things, I usually got "this is much better/more interesting/makes more sense" in that case. So I figured that something like that was true in all cases.


Yeah, it's definitely easier to use characters who already exist, whether they're people we know in real life or celebrities.  It can be fun to base characters on people, too, but it's also fun to create your own.  I think the problem with most of the teenybopper Mary Sue stories back in the day was that if the writers created an original character instead of a self-insert, they focused more on her external traits, like her appearance and clothing, than internal traits, so they ended up with this flat drawing of a pretty girl who everyone seemed to love even though she had no substance, rather than a realistic, three-dimensional character.  The ability to create one of those comes with experience, so self-inserts may have been a better choice for beginning writers.

I think Mary Sue characters are fairly flat in general, or their flaws aren't really flaws (I'm looking at you "clumsy, but in an endearing way.") There was also a danger in the self-inserts that they also lacked flaws because I feel like it's harder to admit your own flaws, let alone write them down for the whole world to see. But at least self-inserts had a little more personality to them in general. Even if the Boys cared more about Nick's relationship with Gypsydoodle than they cared about their own problems.

I feel like we've had this conversation many times, lol.


Just don't crash the bus, Nick!  Or do, and then we can get another fanfic out of it.

LMFAO! He doesn't technically know what a bus is, but I guess he's fine because it's a metaphorical bus? Maybe that's what PBox related writer's block is, Nick crashing the bus. Hopefully the others do something useful and Howie doesn't spend the whole time winking. lmao


I can relate to this too.  Broken doesn't seem that dark to me now, but it is certainly angsty and depressing in parts.  Back when I was writing it, I had a lot of angst over the impending amputation.  I don't know why because I had already put the Boys through all kinds of tragedies in my earlier stories, even killed some of them... but for whatever reason, chopping off Nick's leg felt like a really big deal to me.  But it was also a compelling enough idea that I committed to it, and that is when I learned to take risks, cross lines, embrace the darkness, and run with it.  The fact that Broken doesn't seem that dark and chopping off Nick's leg doesn't seem like a big deal to me now just shows me how much darker I've gotten since then LOL.  As we've talked about before, it's good to occasionally cross lines and write things that make you uncomfortable because by stepping outside your comfort zone, you're more likely to learn and grow.  That being said, there's still a place for comic relief and flashes of light in a dark story, and there's nothing wrong with fun-fest jokey writing when it fits the story.  I don't know if "Death by Snail" fits your definition of fun-fest jokey writing, being more of a dark humor, but I'm looking forward to it!

I can see why chopping off Nick's leg made you feel angsty, especially if it was around the time your writing improved. It's easy enough to say "And he died and everyone was sad, but then they moved on and there was a wedding" or whatever, but it's harder to portray a character's emotions about a dark thing happening to them. Which I know I didn't have pre-Gobosei and still didn't refine until going through PBox. If Broken was your breakout piece, you had to make sure that Nick's feelings about being an amputee were adequately explored, shark dreams and all. ;) :) I agree with all of that! I'm grateful PBox gave me a chance to grow and push boundaries. I knew the potential for dark was there, but the stories never felt like the right place to commit to the dark. I guess with PBox, I just finally thought, "cool, let's get dark?" I think we've discussed before that it's equally important to have those comic relief moments and flashes of light in a dark story; even in dark situations, nothing is always all dark.

Edited to Add: I meant to comment on this and forgot. I'd say, overall "Death by Snail" has a little more of the "fun-fest jokey" type stuff, at least in the beginning.


I'm always impressed by the level of research you do, as well as your attention to detail when it comes to building worlds and creating characters.  I know we've already discussed the strange things we've looked up for stories, but another question could be, "What random knowledge have you acquired thanks to fanfic?"  Like parts of weapons and the rules of fencing!

Thanks! It has been extensive, but it helps that I like learning about random things, haha. The internet has only made it easier. I love that question! I'll have to come up with a more detailed list. On the topic of parts of weapons, it has always bothered me that "gripped" is one of my go-to verbs, because I cannot properly call the part of a sword's handle that is held the "grip" rather than referring to the whole thing as a "hilt" because variants of "gripped the grip" sound ridiculous. And I know there are other verbs, but "gripped" the verb!


I also admire how much thought you put into your characters and their actions and words.  It's one thing to come up with all little quirks, like Nick always standing with his back against the wall in the beginning, but then to write them in such a subtle and nuanced way so that your readers may not even notice that or realize why...  That takes a certain level of sophistication .  When you spend a lot of time researching and crafting a character or world, it's tempting to want to include every detail you know in the actual story.  I struggle with that temptation of wanting to over-explain and include details that don't really need to be in the story just because I find them interesting.

Thanks again! I'm super touched by these nice compliments about my hard work researching and character crafting!  :bighug: I work really hard on it, even if it doesn't all end up in the narrative. That's why I like chatting here, because I can share all these interesting facts and details in the context of our discussions without the story feeling bloated from them.

I joked that I wanted to add a chapter called "castles are super f-in interesting," because... well castles are really interesting, first of all, and then I'd have a spot to really explain why the capital of Safaiananpou is a walled city surrounding a castle and the other countries' capitals aren't that way. The short answer is that castle compounds typically house what the sovereign deems essential to running their empire, which typically does not include the average citizen of their empire, but obviously Howie would consider everyone and everything to be essential. Which then leads to the rest of the country being fairly sparse, untouched natural elements and the inherent problems with housing your entire country in the same place (chiefly that it's fairly easy to wipe your entire civilization out if it's in one spot and you're not constantly prepared for that threat, but it's also a choice based directly on an earlier event in universe, so... I digress again).

However, I don't think I've quite obtained Victor Hugo status to natter on about things that interest me for many pages and include it in the narrative, but I also thought it was fascinating to learn all about the Paris sewer system from him (I don't think everyone has this same opinion, haha). I think we all just need to create companion books titled "All the super interesting things I learned while researching x story," then there might be less temptation to bog down the narrative with it? Because I feel you, I also would love to include so much of my research because I find it fascinating (clearly, I wrote a whole story that required me to find it), but I agree that there's places for it in the narrative and there's places where it really doesn't need to be.


With description, I think it's important to find a balance between "not enough" and "too much."  Obviously, description is needed to help bring a story to life in the reader's head.  But too much description can bog down the story, bore the reader, and put you in purple prose territory.  With fantasy, I think it makes sense to save your longer descriptions for things that don't exist the same way in our world.  That helps the reader picture and understand the world you've created for your story.  They don't need a detailed description of every leaf on a tree.  They also don't need constant reminders of what the Backstreet Boys look like, although I never mind a description of their pretty eyes or smiles.  Or hair!

"The tree had many leaves, they all looked the same: green, jagged, slightly oval. Just like you would imagine a tree looked. They were also next to this building you've never heard of, but we can't talk about that next time. This magnificent specimen of natural beauty was..." lmao. This is why I don't bother describing terrain aside from "surrounded by a forest" unless knowing something specific about it is important or that same element pops up later for some reason. I'll say that I spend 0.05% of my time waxing poetic about some natural feature because I felt like it; it's not there often, but it is there sometimes. "Gardens of an estate" fall into the same category as "buildings that exist in the imagined world of PBox" for me, so I don't count them in that 0.05%.

Same. Eyes, smiles, hair, Kevin's eyebrows, facial hair. I assume most of us feel the same, so I never feel bad including it or waxing poetic on it (within reason). I won't call it totally purple, but possibly periwinkle prose.
« Last Edit: March 14, 2021, 12:54:18 PM by nicksgal »
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People think it would be fun to be a bird because you could fly. But they forget the negative side, which is the preening.

From "And Now, Deep Thoughts" by Jack Handey

nicksgal

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Re: The Writing Thread: Orlando Passaggio (aka The Writing Thread 3)
« Reply #63 on: March 13, 2021, 11:14:25 PM »

Definitely!  I'm sure it helped that I was already about halfway through BMS when I started student teaching, so it wasn't like I was writing a new story.  I already knew those characters well and was committed to telling the rest of their story, so it was easy to stay inspired and write when I had time.

This was also before smartphones and social media, which have really hurt my focus. The only thing I had to distract me at that time was IM, but even that was usually helpful in the same way this forum is.  Most of the people I chatted with were fellow fanfic authors or at least readers (who were reading my story), so we could encourage each other and bounce ideas off each other.  There were plenty of nights when I'd have an IM window open with a friend who was also writing, and we would just use it to occasionally check in on each other.  "How's the writing going?"  "I've written two pages so far!  You?"  Then we'd send each other chapters to read and give feedback on before we posted them for the rest of the world.  We never called it beta-reading, but that's basically what we were doing.

Also true! It's definitely harder to start something new when you feel busy and have to plan or research without feeling committed to the characters or story yet.

Oh, I miss IM and just having it open in the tray while working on something else, it was nice to occasionally check in and get some quick feedback if you needed to bounce something. I often wish that I had joined twitter when it started so I could be twitter famous. I like to think I'm funny, but I just never got super into it.


This is always me toward the end of a novel, too.  Sometimes I know (or think I know) what idea I'm going to write next, and I get so excited about it that it's hard to stay focused on finishing the in-progress story.  Other times I have no idea what idea I'm going to tackle next, and the uncertainty is what interferes with my focus.  And it's dumb because even when I think I know what idea I'm going to work on, that doesn't always end up being the one I really do write next.  I always figure it out eventually though.

I'm glad you're feeling better and hope the two coffees help!

It's pretty much me deciding whether to keep going through the next book or take a break and do something different. I think Nick's deliberately pouting right now because he knows what needs to happen  in the story and supports his decision, but simultaneously hates it and doesn't want it to happen. So he's being agonizingly silent to stall the inevitable. Stop being complicated like a real person, Nick, and fix whatever broke on the bus so you can keep driving! I don't know if I'm super excited about any of the next ideas yet (other than writing pieces of the next novel of the series), but it's definitely crossed my mind.

If nothing else, the two coffees helped me in my quest to figure out genre numbers for similar fandoms, lol. Which is a different kind of productive?


I didn't write much on any of those days - maybe Monday, which is I think when I finished Chapter 5.  I only had like two paragraphs written for Chapter 6 before today.  Now I'm up to 1500 words, which is fairly productive for me these days.  But it's taken me the better part of the day to get to that point.  I wrote all morning, then took a break to shower, eat, watch TV, and do a bit of cleaning, and then wrote more this afternoon.  But I am definitely into it, which I'm happy about - I wasn't sure how that would go for my first Kevin story LOL.

Woo! 1,500 words plus personal needs, breaks, and home needs! I'm glad your first Kevin story is going well and you're into it. :)
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~*Dee*~

People think it would be fun to be a bird because you could fly. But they forget the negative side, which is the preening.

From "And Now, Deep Thoughts" by Jack Handey

nicksgal

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Re: The Writing Thread: Orlando Passaggio (aka The Writing Thread 3)
« Reply #64 on: March 13, 2021, 11:15:59 PM »

On the ones that are all five points of view, it was never really focused on any one person. At least I never intended it to be. Nick seemed to have the most dramatic chapters because Nick was always the most dramatic lol but I always gave them equal time and an equal amount of chapters.

Nick is the most dramatic.

Mare is so wise and balanced. Teach me your ways, Mare. I keep finding myself saying I should have listened to you a long time ago, lol!
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~*Dee*~

People think it would be fun to be a bird because you could fly. But they forget the negative side, which is the preening.

From "And Now, Deep Thoughts" by Jack Handey

nicksgal

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Re: The Writing Thread: Orlando Passaggio (aka The Writing Thread 3)
« Reply #65 on: March 14, 2021, 12:12:31 AM »

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.

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.


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.

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.


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.

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).


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.

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.
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~*Dee*~

People think it would be fun to be a bird because you could fly. But they forget the negative side, which is the preening.

From "And Now, Deep Thoughts" by Jack Handey

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Re: The Writing Thread: Orlando Passaggio (aka The Writing Thread 3)
« Reply #66 on: March 14, 2021, 01:43:04 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.

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.

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.

LOL!  Well, if I ever get bored enough to post BMS on there, I now know another tag to include.


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).

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


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.

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.


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.

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 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 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.
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Re: The Writing Thread: Orlando Passaggio (aka The Writing Thread 3)
« Reply #67 on: March 14, 2021, 03:17:04 AM »

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.
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Re: The Writing Thread: Orlando Passaggio (aka The Writing Thread 3)
« Reply #68 on: March 14, 2021, 11:58:40 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.

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.


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

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.


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.

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.


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.

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).
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nicksgal

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Re: The Writing Thread: Orlando Passaggio (aka The Writing Thread 3)
« Reply #69 on: March 14, 2021, 12:37:04 PM »

I better answer these myself before they get buried too deep in this thread.

lol! As Mare said, that tends to happen.

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.

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?


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.

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.


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.

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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RokofAges75

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Re: The Writing Thread: Orlando Passaggio (aka The Writing Thread 3)
« Reply #70 on: March 14, 2021, 01:51:59 PM »

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?

LOL Yeah, that just shows how fast I used to write compared to now.  I was very consistent; I think the longest break I took was about a week when I moved to college.  I wasn't sure how much  fanfic writing I would get done in a dorm room, but thankfully, my roommate had a double major, a job, and a boyfriend, so she was gone a lot, which gave me time to write uninterrupted.


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.

Thanks!  I agree with what you said about "care and investment" of characters.  I have always been more of a plot-driven writer than character-driven, but at a certain point, I started thinking more deeply about not just what was going to happen to the characters, but how that would change them.  I definitely spent more time living in Nick's head and developing Claire's character than I had in previous stories.


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.

Thanks again!  Yeah, I couldn't exactly write it like the children's book version LOL.  "Nick, we need to amputate your leg now."  "Oh noes!"  Nick was sad at first, but then he put on his peg leg and limped out of the hospital and lived happily ever after.  The End!

I think the fact that I knew absolutely nothing about it at first actually helped because it forced me to research thoroughly.  Whereas with the cancer stuff earlier in the story, I still relied a lot on the background knowledge I already had, which came mostly from reading outdated and simplistic Lurlene McDaniel YA books from the 80s, and it shows.  Nick's bone cancer is written more accurately than Claire's leukemia and bone marrow transplant because Lurlene didn't have a book about bone cancer, so I did have to look up some stuff for that LOL.  But with the choppage stuff, I looked up everything.  I learned a lot, and that probably did make that part of the story more interesting.  It was interesting to write, at least.

Folders are your best friend when it comes to organizing bookmarks!  I don't know how I would find anything without folders.  I organize everything by story and then by subtopic within the story.


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. :)

Absolutely!  Everyone does have to start somewhere, and no one's first attempt at writing is their best.  (I would hope not - how sad would it be to peak with your first story?  You'd have nowhere else to go but down.)  Practice makes progress!

This also shows how important it is to read and learn from other writers, whether it's fellow fanfic writers or published authors.  Reading inspires us and helps us grow as writers.


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

LOL I know, I always wondered that too.  I hated analyzing literature for class for that reason.  I felt like my teachers always tried to get us to interpret the symbols a certain way and didn't leave a lot of room for our own interpretation .  From my teacher perspective now working with younger students who are mostly still pretty literal in their thinking, I get the need to push them to think deeper and model more abstract thinking for them, but it was frustrating to me as a high school student to be forced to read books and then told how to interpret them.  Maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald really did just like the color green! LOL


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.

LOL Oh same here, for sure!  I am an introvert and a homebody, so for me to go away to college by myself and live in a dorm with a roommate I didn't know before the start of the semester was a huge step for me.  I'm sure having Broken to write helped me work through my own anxiety about this change, and I probably channeled a lot of that into Nick's angst.  It worked out perfectly - for me more so than poor Nick, who would have preferred to keep his leg.

Editing to add:  Did you ever read the novel "Fangirl" by Rainbow Rowell?  If not, I highly recommend it for any fanfic author.  It's about a girl who writes fanfic for a fictional fandom that's basically Harry Potter and how her life changes when she goes away to college.  It didn't come out until I was out of college, but reading it brought back so many memories of my freshman year and writing Broken.
« Last Edit: March 14, 2021, 01:57:58 PM by RokofAges75 »
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nicksgal

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Re: The Writing Thread: Orlando Passaggio (aka The Writing Thread 3)
« Reply #71 on: March 14, 2021, 02:20:14 PM »

LOL Yeah, that just shows how fast I used to write compared to now.  I was very consistent; I think the longest break I took was about a week when I moved to college.  I wasn't sure how much  fanfic writing I would get done in a dorm room, but thankfully, my roommate had a double major, a job, and a boyfriend, so she was gone a lot, which gave me time to write uninterrupted.

I blame real life for our current pace, haha. Moving always makes me useless. I think in half those "where is everybody" threads, I mentioned that I was busy moving, lol. I'm glad it worked out for you. What would you have done if your roommate had been around all the time? Even better, what if your roommate was around all the time, but then it turned out that they were also writing BSB fanfics? That would have been crazy!


Thanks!  I agree with what you said about "care and investment" of characters.  I have always been more of a plot-driven writer than character-driven, but at a certain point, I started thinking more deeply about not just what was going to happen to the characters, but how that would change them.  I definitely spent more time living in Nick's head and developing Claire's character than I had in previous stories.

Your hard work and time speaks for itself. :)


Thanks again!  Yeah, I couldn't exactly write it like the children's book version LOL.  "Nick, we need to amputate your leg now."  "Oh noes!"  Nick was sad at first, but then he put on his peg leg and limped out of the hospital and lived happily ever after.  The End!

I think the fact that I knew absolutely nothing about it at first actually helped because it forced me to research thoroughly.  Whereas with the cancer stuff earlier in the story, I still relied a lot on the background knowledge I already had, which came mostly from reading outdated and simplistic Lurlene McDaniel YA books from the 80s, and it shows.  Nick's bone cancer is written more accurately than Claire's leukemia and bone marrow transplant because Lurlene didn't have a book about bone cancer, so I did have to look up some stuff for that LOL.  But with the choppage stuff, I looked up everything.  I learned a lot, and that probably did make that part of the story more interesting.  It was interesting to write, at least.

Folders are your best friend when it comes to organizing bookmarks!  I don't know how I would find anything without folders.  I organize everything by story and then by subtopic within the story.

What a short story Broken would have been if you did, lol! Oh noes! Not Nick's peg leg! At least he lived happily ever after with it! I was worried the choppage wouldn't go well! lol

I'm glad we all stumbled on "I know absolutely nothing about this" ideas, because I agree, it forces you to grow and do better. lol, I love that your initial justification for research was "Well, Lurlene doesn't have a book about bone cancer, so I guess I'd better figure it out somewhere else!" Whatever makes it happen, right? That's kind of why I think the "write what you know" advice is a little simplistic. It should honestly be "write feelings/emotions/reactions with what you know; write anything else with what you know or what you can thoroughly research." I think when something is interesting to write, it shines through in the narrative. We've all said it, we can tell when writers are doing things for genuine care and when they're doing things for external reasons.

I just didn't keep those bookmarks back then, let alone with that level of organization! That's the problem, haha.


Absolutely!  Everyone does have to start somewhere, and no one's first attempt at writing is their best.  (I would hope not - how sad would it be to peak with your first story?  You'd have nowhere else to go but down.)  Practice makes progress!

This also shows how important it is to read and learn from other writers, whether it's fellow fanfic writers or published authors.  Reading inspires us and helps us grow as writers.

I'd be curious to hear from someone who thought their first story was their best. It would be an interesting perspective! Because I agree with you, practice makes progress.

That's always the biggest advice I see from published authors is to read as much as you write. There's only so many things to do in a bubble.


LOL I know, I always wondered that too.  I hated analyzing literature for class for that reason.  I felt like my teachers always tried to get us to interpret the symbols a certain way and didn't leave a lot of room for our own interpretation .  From my teacher perspective now working with younger students who are mostly still pretty literal in their thinking, I get the need to push them to think deeper and model more abstract thinking for them, but it was frustrating to me as a high school student to be forced to read books and then told how to interpret them.  Maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald really did just like the color green! LOL

I always hated that too! Unless an author comes out and says "there's a lot of x symbolism" is in the story, why try to force interpretation s on it? Reading is an inherently person activity, so each reader should be able to take out the interpretation s and impressions they like! When they're younger, we're still trying to teach them those higher order thinking skills, so it's important to model and scaffold, but most high schoolers should be able to make interpretation s and connections based on their own experience if they had the skills taught and encouraged at a young age. There was a poetry course I took in high school where we did both analyzing and creating, and that teacher was awesome. She let everyone who wanted to discuss whatever symbolism or connections they had before she even inserted her opinion. If she disagreed, her question was always "I wonder why we thought about that differently" instead of saying "this is it, the only interpretation ." College was more like her teaching as well, thank goodness.


LOL Oh same here, for sure!  I am an introvert and a homebody, so for me to go away to college by myself and live in a dorm with a roommate I didn't know before the start of the semester was a huge step for me.  I'm sure having Broken to write helped me work through my own anxiety about this change, and I probably channeled a lot of that into Nick's angst.  It worked out perfectly - for me more so than poor Nick, who would have preferred to keep his leg.

LMAO, sorry anxiety and learning to channel it productively led to you losing your leg, Nick. I also feel a little bad for Nick that he gets to embody anxiety constantly. It must be really stressful for him.
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People think it would be fun to be a bird because you could fly. But they forget the negative side, which is the preening.

From "And Now, Deep Thoughts" by Jack Handey

RokofAges75

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Re: The Writing Thread: Orlando Passaggio (aka The Writing Thread 3)
« Reply #72 on: March 14, 2021, 04:29:14 PM »

I blame real life for our current pace, haha. Moving always makes me useless. I think in half those "where is everybody" threads, I mentioned that I was busy moving, lol. I'm glad it worked out for you. What would you have done if your roommate had been around all the time? Even better, what if your roommate was around all the time, but then it turned out that they were also writing BSB fanfics? That would have been crazy!

So true!  Damn real life adult responsibiliti es getting in the way!

I dunno, I may have had to get more creative or go to the library or somewhere else to write.  She actually had liked BSB back in the day (as most teenage girls our age did at one point or another) and ended up going to two of their shows with me in 2005.  So it was fun to be able to talk BSB with her as a casual fan, but in the three years we lived together, I never let her find out about the fanfic.  It would have been crazy if she was also writing fanfic though.  I've sometimes wondered if I know anyone outside the fandom who has also written fanfic of some sort and never mentioned it.  I might be more willing to talk about it with real life friends if I knew they also wrote fanfic, even if it was for a different fandom.  At least there would be a certain level of understanding there.  Do any of you know anyone in real life (that you didn't meet through BSB) who writes it?


I'm glad we all stumbled on "I know absolutely nothing about this" ideas, because I agree, it forces you to grow and do better. lol, I love that your initial justification for research was "Well, Lurlene doesn't have a book about bone cancer, so I guess I'd better figure it out somewhere else!" Whatever makes it happen, right? That's kind of why I think the "write what you know" advice is a little simplistic. It should honestly be "write feelings/emotions/reactions with what you know; write anything else with what you know or what you can thoroughly research." I think when something is interesting to write, it shines through in the narrative. We've all said it, we can tell when writers are doing things for genuine care and when they're doing things for external reasons.

LOL I relied on Lurlene's books as my main source of medical information for way too long.  In fairness, I didn't have internet in my bedroom for the first year or two I wrote fanfic, so I had to be fairly stealthy in looking stuff up on my mom's computer in the den where anyone in my family could walk by and see the screen.  I didn't want them to know what I was doing or writing, so I would save the info I needed on a floppy disc and then delete my internet history and take it back to my own computer to write offline.  But I had a whole shelf full of Lurlene books with info on cancer treatments and organ transplants and whatnot in my room, so I used the resources I had on hand.  I think Code Blue was the first story where I really had to do more in-depth research, but not to the level I did for Broken.

I totally agree about "write what you know."  That is so limiting.  Like you said, I think it should be "write what you know or are willing to research."  Especially nowadays, when information is so easily accessible.  It can still be a challenge to write about an experience you've never had, but that's a big part of the fun of writing - you can put yourself in a character's shoes and imagine a life that's vastly different from your own.  That's why I'm so into what I'm researching and writing right now - it's new and interesting.


I just didn't keep those bookmarks back then, let alone with that level of organization! That's the problem, haha.

I bookmark just about everything so I can easily refer back to it if I need to fact-check, instead of going, "I know I read something about this, but I can't remember where..."  I have well over a hundred bookmarks already for My Brother's Keeper alone LOL.  That's why I keep them so organized, or it would take forever to sort through them all.


I'd be curious to hear from someone who thought their first story was their best. It would be an interesting perspective! Because I agree with you, practice makes progress.

I would too.  But so many of us started writing fanfic as adolescents.  I'm sure there are people who wrote their first piece of fic as an adult with more education and life experience than us, so it was probably a lot better written than our first stories were.  I still assume they would keep growing and getting better with practice because I've certainly gotten better since my first "adult" story, but it may go back to that question of if your "best" work is your best-written work or just the one you like best.  I can see how your first story would hold such a special place in your heart that you might consider it your best, even if it wasn't the best-written.  That is not my experience, but I will also say that my first story is not my worst either.


I always hated that too! Unless an author comes out and says "there's a lot of x symbolism" is in the story, why try to force interpretation s on it? Reading is an inherently person activity, so each reader should be able to take out the interpretation s and impressions they like! When they're younger, we're still trying to teach them those higher order thinking skills, so it's important to model and scaffold, but most high schoolers should be able to make interpretation s and connections based on their own experience if they had the skills taught and encouraged at a young age. There was a poetry course I took in high school where we did both analyzing and creating, and that teacher was awesome. She let everyone who wanted to discuss whatever symbolism or connections they had before she even inserted her opinion. If she disagreed, her question was always "I wonder why we thought about that differently" instead of saying "this is it, the only interpretation ." College was more like her teaching as well, thank goodness.

Kudos to your poetry teacher!  I think that's how it should be.  I feel like the most useful skill I learned in my high school English classes was how to bullshit my way through essays, which also came in handy in college.  I would just take whatever interpretation the teacher presented in class and write about that, whether I agreed with it or not, and I would get an A.  I was also the student that would write the essay first and then write the outline based on that if I was required to turn one in with the final draft.  I didn't see outlining as an important part of the writing process until I started doing it for fanfic LOL.


LMAO, sorry anxiety and learning to channel it productively led to you losing your leg, Nick. I also feel a little bad for Nick that he gets to embody anxiety constantly. It must be really stressful for him.

LOL Poor Nick.  We've put him through so much.
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nicksgal

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Re: The Writing Thread: Orlando Passaggio (aka The Writing Thread 3)
« Reply #73 on: March 14, 2021, 05:51:57 PM »

I dunno, I may have had to get more creative or go to the library or somewhere else to write.  She actually had liked BSB back in the day (as most teenage girls our age did at one point or another) and ended up going to two of their shows with me in 2005.  So it was fun to be able to talk BSB with her as a casual fan, but in the three years we lived together, I never let her find out about the fanfic.  It would have been crazy if she was also writing fanfic though.  I've sometimes wondered if I know anyone outside the fandom who has also written fanfic of some sort and never mentioned it.  I might be more willing to talk about it with real life friends if I knew they also wrote fanfic, even if it was for a different fandom.  At least there would be a certain level of understanding there.  Do any of you know anyone in real life (that you didn't meet through BSB) who writes it?

But the library is so public! lmao I guess a library, more than most places, people don't really creep on what other people are doing as much. And in a college library, there's more extended hours. You could have done it! Aw, it's fun that she was a BSB fan even if she wasn't a fanfic writer.

I don't know anyone who writes fanfic for any fandom except for you all. I don't know that any of us really tell people away from places like this that we do, so it would be hard to find them unless any of boisterously talked about it! I wonder what percentage of the BSB fandom is into fanfic at all and then what percentage of those people not only read them, but write them too.

We should be more vocal about it and find those people, haha. Maybe that's part of the stigma is people just don't talk about it.


LOL I relied on Lurlene's books as my main source of medical information for way too long.  In fairness, I didn't have internet in my bedroom for the first year or two I wrote fanfic, so I had to be fairly stealthy in looking stuff up on my mom's computer in the den where anyone in my family could walk by and see the screen.  I didn't want them to know what I was doing or writing, so I would save the info I needed on a floppy disc and then delete my internet history and take it back to my own computer to write offline.  But I had a whole shelf full of Lurlene books with info on cancer treatments and organ transplants and whatnot in my room, so I used the resources I had on hand.  I think Code Blue was the first story where I really had to do more in-depth research, but not to the level I did for Broken.

I totally agree about "write what you know."  That is so limiting.  Like you said, I think it should be "write what you know or are willing to research."  Especially nowadays, when information is so easily accessible.  It can still be a challenge to write about an experience you've never had, but that's a big part of the fun of writing - you can put yourself in a character's shoes and imagine a life that's vastly different from your own.  That's why I'm so into what I'm researching and writing right now - it's new and interesting.

So stealthy! Saving things on your floppy disks and deleting your internet history! I used to go to my mom's work with her on the weekends and didn't even think of that. They probably had such a weird search history, haha. I think as long as my mom saw the Boys at the top of whatever website, she didn't question a thing. Or maybe she did? Maybe my mother knows so many things about me that I have no idea. If they're the resources you had, at least you were using your resources. Any research is better than no research if it's a story that needs some level of research. Like if an oncology doctor wanted to write a story like Broken, I would trust them to have the appropriate medical knowledge without research; but for the majority of people, it would need at least something whether that Lurlene's books, internet, whatever.

The wealth of readily accessible things on the internet including academic sources for research is insane! At that point, anything should be researchable. I love researching, especially when it's something I'm interested in; I've learned so many interesting things. I'm glad you're having fun with My Brother's Keeper! :)


I bookmark just about everything so I can easily refer back to it if I need to fact-check, instead of going, "I know I read something about this, but I can't remember where..."  I have well over a hundred bookmarks already for My Brother's Keeper alone LOL.  That's why I keep them so organized, or it would take forever to sort through them all.

I'm starting to now, but I may need to go back and find things if I need to fact check. I gotta be better about saving, haha.


I would too.  But so many of us started writing fanfic as adolescents.  I'm sure there are people who wrote their first piece of fic as an adult with more education and life experience than us, so it was probably a lot better written than our first stories were.  I still assume they would keep growing and getting better with practice because I've certainly gotten better since my first "adult" story, but it may go back to that question of if your "best" work is your best-written work or just the one you like best.  I can see how your first story would hold such a special place in your heart that you might consider it your best, even if it wasn't the best-written.  That is not my experience, but I will also say that my first story is not my worst either.


Now we need more people who started writing later to weigh in! Is your early work as cringey for you? I couldn't even tell you what my first story was now. It holds no special places in my heart. I've named the three that do and the rest are kind of "eh, I wrote it?"


Kudos to your poetry teacher!  I think that's how it should be.  I feel like the most useful skill I learned in my high school English classes was how to bullshit my way through essays, which also came in handy in college.  I would just take whatever interpretation the teacher presented in class and write about that, whether I agreed with it or not, and I would get an A.  I was also the student that would write the essay first and then write the outline based on that if I was required to turn one in with the final draft.  I didn't see outlining as an important part of the writing process until I started doing it for fanfic LOL.

"Fake it 'til you make it" is regular life advice I spout to anyone who will listen to it, lmao. I also tailored essays to the teacher, but in a way, isn't that just knowing your potential audience? I also wrote the outline afterward if I needed one. It was not great. I do the same thing for fanfics. I am more than happy to write an outline to keep track of things once it's written, but while writing, I would rather work from vague scribbles and notes.


LOL Poor Nick.  We've put him through so much.

He's gotten stronger for it. I'd say "obviously he survived," but he doesn't always... lmao

Editing to add:  Did you ever read the novel "Fangirl" by Rainbow Rowell?  If not, I highly recommend it for any fanfic author.  It's about a girl who writes fanfic for a fictional fandom that's basically Harry Potter and how her life changes when she goes away to college.  It didn't come out until I was out of college, but reading it brought back so many memories of my freshman year and writing Broken.

I didn't read that! I'd heard of another one about fanfic for a GOT type series and the main fanfic writer in the story was writing with some dude who ended up actually being one of the actors. The one you're discussing sounds better, haha.
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RokofAges75

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Re: The Writing Thread: Orlando Passaggio (aka The Writing Thread 3)
« Reply #74 on: March 14, 2021, 07:39:49 PM »

But the library is so public! lmao I guess a library, more than most places, people don't really creep on what other people are doing as much. And in a college library, there's more extended hours. You could have done it! Aw, it's fun that she was a BSB fan even if she wasn't a fanfic writer.

My college library was awesome because it had like eight floors, so if I needed to go there, I could always find some empty area to work where no one would bother me.


We should be more vocal about it and find those people, haha. Maybe that's part of the stigma is people just don't talk about it.

That's probably true, but I'm never going to be the first to bring it up LOL.


So stealthy! Saving things on your floppy disks and deleting your internet history! I used to go to my mom's work with her on the weekends and didn't even think of that. They probably had such a weird search history, haha. I think as long as my mom saw the Boys at the top of whatever website, she didn't question a thing. Or maybe she did? Maybe my mother knows so many things about me that I have no idea.

LOL I used to read fanfic at my mom's work!  My mom's a computer teacher at the middle school I went to, which is basically right across the street from where my parents still live.  The summer I discovered fanfic (1999), she got mad at me for tying up the phone line all the time by getting on the dial-up and wasting printer paper and ink printing out fanfics to read offline, so she let me come over to the school computer lab where the internet was faster and read while she worked.  I found out what visuals were while I was on one of the school computers - whoops LOL.  I wasn't writing fanfic yet then though.


"Fake it 'til you make it" is regular life advice I spout to anyone who will listen to it, lmao. I also tailored essays to the teacher, but in a way, isn't that just knowing your potential audience? I also wrote the outline afterward if I needed one. It was not great. I do the same thing for fanfics. I am more than happy to write an outline to keep track of things once it's written, but while writing, I would rather work from vague scribbles and notes.

Haha, great points!  As far as actually outlining chapter by chapter, I'm like you - I don't usually do that all in advance, but more as I go if I do it at all.  My outlines are typically more timelines of events and when they happen, character info, and research notes.  If the timeline doesn't matter as much or if the story takes place in a short window of time, it's more just a synopsis of all the major events in the order they happen that I add to as I figure out more.  That's what Bethlehem's outline was, whereas My Brother's Keeper has the timeline-style outline because it takes place in a specific period of BSB history.


He's gotten stronger for it. I'd say "obviously he survived," but he doesn't always... lmao

No, no he does not.  But at least he's always resurrected for a new story.  He's like the Jason Vorhees of BSB fanfic LOL.


I didn't read that! I'd heard of another one about fanfic for a GOT type series and the main fanfic writer in the story was writing with some dude who ended up actually being one of the actors. The one you're discussing sounds better, haha.

I haven't heard of the GOT one, but that sounds interesting too.  Fangirl was a really fun and relatable read!
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"Sometimes writers and sociopaths are hard to tell apart." -J.K. Rowling
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