Imagine being a writer, and then after your book’s release and when the hype goes through the roof, you write fanfiction for it, then you tweet “there is a fanfic out there that is totally canon. Try and find it.” Then all your readers are scouring every fanfic website, trying to find which one is yours, meanwhile helping all these fanfic writers get readers.
Schroedinger’s Writer is the state of being simultaneously convinced that you’re the person most capable of telling this story and also that you’re the person destined to fuck it up beyond all repair
Don’t trick yourself into thinking your writing is dull or lifeless just because you’re used to it.
And I don’t mean because you know what happens or you know what you wrote. I mean, there are particular turn-of-phrases and descriptions that you use all the time that are completely fresh and exciting to your readers. Don’t convince yourself that you have nothing new to say just because you’re used to how you say it. To someone out there, your “generic” word choice is unlike anything they’ve ever read before.
Sometimes writing fanfiction is so hard, you don’t have any ideas and you just stare at your screen for 2 hours. Then you give up and spent your whole day on tumblr.
And sometimes writing fanfiction is so easy, it just flows out of your fingers and even if you don’t know where you’re going, you keep typing and you keep having great ideas.
But most of the time, you have great ideas, but no words to describe it. Like you know where you’re going, but you don’t know how to get there.
tfw ur trying to write plot but ur brain only provides you with out-of-sequence snippets built on vague ideas and an endless number of potential outcomes that develop and branch out unnaturally over an unspecified timespan
What My Friends Think I Learned From Writing Fanfiction:
Human anatomy
What I Actually Learned From Writing Fanfiction:
How to build a flamethrower
Tajikistani geography
Proper cravat tying
How to convert from warp factor to mph
17 synonyms for “pining”
Sindarin verb formation
How to start a fire with laboratory solutions
Every poisonous plant found in Jamaica
Minor battles of the Crimean War
How to play the sousaphone
What a jabot is
How long it takes to fly from Jakarta to Bern
How to spot a forged painting
How to perform CPR on a dragon
Angst-written rivalries of 20th century British writers
22 French curse words
How to clear your search history so the NSA won’t think you’re a crazy terrorist who needs to perform CPR on a sousaphone-playing French dragon wounded in a chemically-induced explosion during the Crimean War
• Sindarin
Forget the verb formation, I learned Sindarin. I accidentally learned an entire language writing FanFic. I LEARNED an ENTIRE language that NO ONE speaks writing fanfic.
•Also the entire Metro transit system of NY, a city I have never visited.
And earned myself a Google-cache of things like “How to dispose of a body with lye” and “Which countries have extradition treaties with the US?” Not to mention the ever popular “List of firearms small enough to conceal inside of a corset” and “Time for piranhas to strip a skeleton”.
“Sir, this person just searched for arsenic, the Orient Express rail line and pre-modern-era lubricants? Wth?”
“Don’t worry Johnson – another fan fiction author.”
shealwaysreads 