Tag: writing

in every fandom there is that 1 fic that goes above and beyond and ruins reading for you cause nothing will ever measure up to that 1 fic’s absolute shining glory. Sansukh is that fic in the LOTR/Hobbit fandom.

omg that’s fabulously kind of you, Nonnie, and I am STAGGERING with the flattery and the gratitude and the bashful stammery blushery flail…!

I’m so glad you enjoy Sansukh, and I’m thrilled that it’s made such an impression on you! But I gotta gently disagree with the ‘1 fic’ thing, bc there are always LOADS. Every fandom i’ve been in is the same – it isn’t just one fic, there are a whole boatload of works that make you stagger and reel with how inhumanly talented everybody is, how did they think of this perfect au setting, that incredible bit of dialogue, characterisation so perfect that it is uncanny, that stupendous jawdropping climax…!?!

There are INCREDIBLE fics out there in the LOTR fandom, I can name 20 without even thinking hard about it, that are just. game-changingly awesome. 

This is an old fandom, too, and it’ll continue after all the current folks have meandered on elsewhere. There are fics yet to be written that will kick the shit out of Sansukh, and I can’t WAIT to read them!

Hi Dets! Do you have any advice for someone embarking on a very long lotr fic? Also, how can I make OC’s more realistic and fit better into the story? Thank you sm you’re wonderful!

Hey Nonnie! 

ohgod, look, I stumbled into this the way I stumble into everything, but okay, I guess I can tell you what works for me? It will be different for you, but I hope some of this applies anyway 🙂

I began with absurdly high expectations of myself. Frankly, I STILL have absurdly high expectations of myself. 

Never give up, never surrender! See it through, no matter how damn long it takes. You aren’t abandoning it: you’re on hiatus. Totally different thing.

Research is awesome and great and fun, and you can dive into it for hours and get lost in all the minutiae of this world Tolkien gifted us with… but don’t forget to tell the story. The story is what people are here to read, after all. Keep it moving forward and don’t get bogged down by the endless details.

Stop thinking of your OCs as ‘OCs’. Start thinking of them just as characters. Because they are, they are as much a character as the canon characters are. You just have to be the one to establish them, rather than the source material.

Make your characters – ALL of them, original or canon – affect the story. They must affect it, change its direction. If your original characters are only there as wallpaper while the canon ones do all the action, then of course they will feel less real. Real people affect the world. For instance, in Sansukh the original characters that change the direction and even the tone of the narrative are Gimizh, Merilin, Baris, Gimris, Bani, Thira, Laindawar, Laerophen, Jeri, Kara… I could go on!!! They affect each other, they affect the story and they affect the world. They may not always affect the narrative of the canon characters – but they change the story by their presence. They have narrative weight.  

Give characters conflicting views and motivations. Make them struggle and strive for their goal. Let the reader see them fail, and succeed, and fail, and succeed again. If you want your reader to sympathise with a character for a long long time, they need to be able to fail. There need to be consequences for that failure. And those consequences need to be dealt with.

Don’t bash the canon characters – somebody out there loves that character, I promise you, and will be hurt and pissed if you demonise them. Find more motivation for them instead, or a journey that takes them into their challenge zone. I did this for Thranduil especially. But I was also careful not to demonise Denethor – he was poisoned by the Palantir and Sauron, after all.

Think of the building of tension as a slow SLOW crescendo, leading to the high point (peak tension or change of circumstances!) and then a swift decrescendo (denouement/new situation or result). Rinse and repeat, don’t waste a moment before allowing the tension to begin building again. Don’t allow the tension to slacken entirely. Make a change of circumstances count. Otherwise, why have the climax in the first place? This makes your action more dramatic and meaningful in the long term. It also helps with working out the flow of a long story.

If you are desperate to write a particular scene, write it. Skip the stuff in between, and write the scene that is bugging your brain and won’t leave you alone. Then fill in the intervening stuff. 

Write notes. Take photos. Write other things (music, for me). Draw pictures. Enjoy this, it’s meant to be fun!

stereden:

deadcatwithaflamethrower:

louislachance:

theanishimori:

fuckingconversations:

nkfloofiepoof:

redseeker:

deathcomes4u:

peaceheather:

caitlynlynch:

Adding to this because of @illogicalilse‘s tags “
#*steeples fingers in-front of face*#i’ve read fanfiction longer than all of these

“

“Over 150,000 words = Epic Fanfiction”

Yeah, what do you call 400k?

Insanity

@devcon03 I remember you were wondering about this.

friendly reminder that fanfic authors write full length novels for free, and all most of us ask in return is exposure in the form of recommendations, reblogs, and feedback

Not just full length novels, but full-length BOOK SERIES.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stones was 76,944 words.

Eragon was 157k words

The Hobbit was 95,022.words (and yes, those 22 at the end are very important words~)

Anyway, please PLEASE review, comment, and share the fanfictions you like.

These authors are, for free, giving you hours and hours and hours of entertainment.

Thank them.

I have a story that’s over 555,000 words long and still not finished…..
:::sobbing mathematically:::

My first thought was @deadcatwithaflamethrower

I think I’ve hit the 1.5 million words point.

Where does that put me on this scale?

@determamfidd​. Sansukh is now 

533,141 words. Total wordcount, combined, for The Hobbit and the LotR trilogy is 550,147. 17,006 more words and you’ll have caught up to it! That’s what, one more chapter?

Also tagging @blackkatmagic because her stories seem unable to not cross the 100,000 words limit.

omg… I mean, I already knew I was gonna beat the wordcount of LOTR/The Hobbit (and if you count the Appendices, I already have… by quite a lot)

but the largest wordcount there in that table is 120K, and that can’t be right. surely novels are longer than that?!?!?!

Do you ever listen to music when you write? If so what kind? What’s your favorite? I think that sometimes what you’re listening to affects the writing, at least it does for me when I write.

Not really – I’m a muso, and I’ve been trained since a very young age to give music my full attention. It can be annoying, actually, particularly when you’re watching a film and you miss the dialogue bc you’re listening to the film score, ugh. 

So, I tend to listen to ambient soundscapes when I write, if I listen to anything at all. Mostly not, tbh. 

This is one that I used a bit when writing the Paths of the Dead, for instance.

And The Guild of Ambience are awesome. Seriously awesome. 

Or, I sometimes listen to a piece of music and then write, while the emotions & thoughts the music brought up in me are still strong and fresh. Sometimes I will hear a piece of music and it will instil the urge to write in me, without my direction or intention lmao.

When you write Sansukh, do the characters have voices in your head? Are they the voices of actors from the movies? The cast of the podfic? Really curious about how those inner voices might influence your writing, I know it influences mine sometimes. When the characters have voices, they feel a bit more real and less like I’m controlling them.

A bit of all-of-the-above!

At first, I had the actors from the films for many of the characters – however, not ALL. I did not always hear JRD for Gimli, for instance… I ‘heard’ someone similar, but closer to how I’d imagined Gimli speaking when I first read the books way back in the 90′s. It was a mishmash of actor voices and my own internal ideas of how the character should sound. Not always coherent!

After the podfic came out, I began hearing Cully as Gimli, without fail. Cully of the golden tonsils, my star! @culumacilinte

I hear Ricky unfailingly for the narration nowadays, and I write the descriptions with their smooth, engaging, flexible honey voice in mind. @fuckthisimgoingtoerebor

I still hear Christopher Lee for Saruman and John Noble for Denethor, etc…

But I 300% hear @baruk-hashem for Thorin now, and not Richard Armitage. @poplitealqueen‘s adorable goddamn voice is Pippin to me, not Billy Boyd. @morvidra IS Fili to me, not Deano.

I cannot CANNOT hear myself as Mahal. Frankly, I hear a nonspecific deep boomy voice when I write him!

fencer-x:

marcvscicero:

writing style: author from the 1800s with a severe love of commas whose sentences last half a page 

I came out here, to this point, to this place, hoping against all hope and despite signs and portends suggesting otherwise that I might, somehow, find myself having a pleasant experience, and yet here I stand, alone against the world, feeling assaulted, attacked on all fronts, knowing not my enemy’s name nor his face nor whether our battle is done.

Hey, I noticed those fanfictions that lady posted about Laindawar, and ummm… -looks back- Muil? What’s angry terrier elf’s feelings towards her?

Muil interacts with Laindawar in these wonderful AU-of-an-AU one-shots by uweyvi! 

Muil is @uweyvi‘s character, you see! She isn’t in Sansukh (and I think @fuckthisimgoingtoerebor would slow-roast me if I added yet more characters!!!). In the fic itself, it’s just Kara and Jeri that are accompanying Laindawar on the road to the Orocarni. 

(The Three Hunters redux – reimagined as the Three Rebels!)

An Incomplete List of Things A (Real) Small Kid Does And Says – A Reference

I’ve been reading some fics with lil kids in them recently, and it’s been a bit hit-and-miss, and dialogue especially can get a bit jarring. Writing kids’ dialogue/action is REALLY hard, and sometimes a little nudge can help. 🙂

How to help, though? I decided to take some notes and make a little reference sheet for folks out there who don’t often get to interact with small persons, but like to write kidfic!

So, for reference – my child is 2 years and 10 months old – very bright, happy, funny, loud and super-active. Loves books, singing, words, the alphabet, numbers, dinosaurs, music, ballerinas, and puzzles. She can count to thirty, and will point out the beginning letter of any word a million times (”DOUBYOU IS FOR WHALE! Is for Whale, Mummy!”).

  • Speaks in third person sometimes, ‘MUMMY, OH! OH! [HER NAME] FELL OVER! OW! [HER NAME] HURT MY KNEE!” (and yes, she will mix up ‘my’ and ‘her’ because fuck third person/first person rules when you are two and cute as a button and just banged your knee.)
  • Has never used ‘Me loves’ or ‘Me wants’. EVER. I have never, ever, EVER heard a real living child use this ‘me’ instead of ‘I’ thing, and it’s ubiquitous in fic. It’s inescapable! Seriously. They get the difference between ‘me’ and ‘I’ REALLY FAST. If anything, they mix up ‘I’ and ‘I’m’ more often.
  • Mixes up who she’s speaking to – a LOT. I have been called everything from ‘Daddy’ to the cat’s name to the name of her daycare provider’s husband.
  • “Vegables” (I will be sad when this one disappears!)
  • When she got the hang of ‘-s’ to mean a plural, she started saying ‘sick’ instead of ‘six’. One, two, three, four, five, sick, seven. Because an ‘-s’ sound on the end meant that there was more than one six, yeah? Perfectly logical!
  • “I done” (I did), “I taked” (I took), “I putted” (I put). Past tense is difficult.  
  • And mixing up which tense in a full sentence, yup, it happens. “Mummy! I want going for a WALK!” “Mummy, I’m swinged on a swing!”
  • “Lellow” instead of ‘Yellow’. She knows it begins with ‘Y’ – she just says ‘Lellow!’ Probably because it is more fun to say.
  • When she was learning to count to twenty, she would count EVERYTHING. And also make up the names of new numbers when she couldn’t think of them. So. Much. Counting.
  • Related – SO. MUCH. ALPHABET. ‘Lion is an L! Doubyou is for WATERMELON!’
  • “Wiv” actually happens. Who knew?
  • I spin like a ballelina! Look mummy! I’m a beeyootiful Ballellina!
  • for that matter, longer words like ‘beautiful’ don’t get shortened. They get ELONGATED. She sounds out every vowel and dipthong, quite stretched out. “Ohhh. Is so beeyootiful.” Hearing the word ‘hippopotamus’ is a lengthy experience.
  • ‘No’ is a favourite word. It follows words, it precedes words, it is a complete sentence in itself. Always always always. No fic I have ever read ever shows the epic, EPIC overuse of NO in a toddler’s lexicon. Also, “I don’t WANT to/it” vs “I want it!!”
  • Repetition, endless ENDLESS repetition. Toddlers love repeating the last thing you say, too. So watch that language 😉
  • The ‘fwee’ instead of ‘three’ thing isn’t every kid, jeez. She can say ‘three’ perfectly well, and has been able to for at least a year. She can say GARDENING and HEXAGON and RHINOCEROS and DINOSAUR, ferchrissakes.
  • Likewise, a lisp and the ‘fw’ thing are not interchangeable to show ‘toddler speak’. A kid might have one of these, but it’s insanely unlikely to have BOTH.
  • Mixing up sentence order happens quite a lot! “It’s dinner time! Mummy, the clock is on sick! Is dinner time!” (The hand of the clock is on six – time for dinner!)
  • Context will often be completely ?????. She had quite a tantrum the other night because Daddy was going to give her three ‘stories’ after bath. We were confused – she LOVES reading, and always gets three books after bath, before bed. She absolutely adores it. But no, she didn’t want three STORIES – she wanted three books. To us, that was the same thing, but to her she wasn’t equating ‘story’ with ‘storybook’.
  • Likewise, when I asked her to point to something she wanted, she pointed her foot and said ‘point!’ I had meant to point her finger… but she didn’t know that it was CALLED ‘pointing’ her finger… she only knew ‘point’ in the context of pointing her foot!
  • Oh yes, vocalising/narrating everything she does. “I’m patting the pussycat!” “I’m bouncing on the bed!” “I’m riding the scootah!” (she totally says SCOOTAH) “I’m eating the peeeeeeeas!” “I’m playing the tea party!” “I’m in the bath!” “I’m on the toylut!” All. The. Time.
  • Incomprehensible mumbles between intelligble words every now and then. Her mouth can’t keep up, you see 🙂 So you end up with ‘MUMMY, (mumbleumble) a biscuit!’ You get the general gist, but the interim of the sentence is totally lost.
  • ‘Is’ begins a lot of declarations, rather than ‘It Is.” So, “Is a butterfly!” “Is a pajamas!” “Is a dragonfruit!” “Is a tea party!”
  • Gets finicky about food, even food she usually LOVES. They love to test things at this age! Also, bedtime manipulation tactics, to delay lights-off. Sneaky af. Her current one is to yell ‘help help!!’ the minute we turn off the light and shut her bedroom door – god knows what the neighbours think!!
  • Alternatively clingy as hell/independent as hell. One day you might love to have a cuddle, but she won’t even look up at you. Ah well! The next day, you can’t pry her off you. HUH. One day, “I CAN DO [HER NAME] SHOES UP MYSELF!” and the next: “Mummyyyyyyyy, I want to putting on my dressing down” (she means dressing gown – and I have to do it for her – and I gotta put mine on too, or we don’t match and she will get the grizzles)
  • THE SULKS. Even the most chill, even-tempered toddler will get the sulks sometimes. Perhaps after being told, ‘you shouldn’t play with [dangerous thing] because you might hurt yourself’ for instance. That’s ok and normal – some feelings are very big for a very small person to manage! Tantrums happen too: don’t shy away from making your cute little kid a REAL cute little kid, with all the socially-inappropriate little-kid reactions, whining, sulking and screaming in public and all. It makes the cuddly little toddler-hugs even more special.
  • Demanding things, sometimes very rudely or imperiously, because manners are difficult to remember. They will NOT always say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ – you gotta prompt them to say it. (When they DO say it without prompting? *ANGELIC CHOIR*)
  • Ending a sentence before it is finished. For example, “Mummy, I put my gumboots!” The word ‘on’ SHOULD be at the end, of course, but the important word to her is GUMBOOTS, because they are new and she loves them. So. Much. So the sentence ends there!
  • Oh yes, there’s always the mispronounced word that, no matter how many times you gently correct it, no matter how many times she repeats it properly, stubbornly remains mispronounced. Ours are currently ‘dressing down’, ‘vegebles’ ‘ballellina’ and ‘airloplane.’ AND SIX. oh my god, lmao I love that one.

So, there we have it, a little assortment of things a real toddler says, complete with syntax and context. Use them wisely, and have fun writing those kid characters.

(any other parents/guardians/teachers/carers out there, feel free to add!)