Reading Fic Pre-Posting: No typos whatsoever. Reads well. Flows beautifully. I have definitely found all possible spelling and grammar errors.
Reading Fic After Posting: A typo every three lines. Ten grammatical errors. Switches tense twice. POV changes for no discernible reason. Uses the word “look” five times in one sentence.
Weak Trope: Having a character’s driving motivation be REVENGE up until the last second when they pull the “revenge won’t bring my wife/sister/town/three-eared dog back” and leave the bastard they’ve been hunting down alive.
Strong Trope: Hello! My Name! Is Inigo Montoya! You Killed My Father! Prepare! TO! DIE! *corners count rugen* Beg for your life *slashes cheek* Offer me anything I want in the world! *slashes other cheek* I WANT MY FATHER BACK, YOU SON OF A BITCH. *stabs count rugen to death*
Sticking a landing will royally fuck up your joints and possibly shatter your ankles, depending on how high you’re jumping/falling from. There’s a very good reason free-runners dive and roll.
Hand-to-hand fights usually only last a matter of seconds, sometimes a few minutes. It’s exhausting work and unless you have a lot of training and history with hand-to-hand combat, you’re going to tire out really fast.
Arrows are very effective and you can’t just yank them out without doing a lot of damage. Most of the time the head of the arrow will break off inside the body if you try pulling it out, and arrows are built to pierce deep. An arrow wound demands medical attention.
Throwing your opponent across the room is really not all that smart. You’re giving them the chance to get up and run away. Unless you’re trying to put distance between you so you can shoot them or something, don’t throw them.
Everyone has something called a “flinch response” when they fight. This is pretty much the brain’s way of telling you “get the fuck out of here or we’re gonna die.” Experienced fighters have trained to suppress this. Think about how long your character has been fighting. A character in a fist fight for the first time is going to take a few hits before their survival instinct kicks in and they start hitting back. A character in a fist fight for the eighth time that week is going to respond a little differently.
ADRENALINE WORKS AGAINST YOU WHEN YOU FIGHT. THIS IS IMPORTANT. A lot of times people think that adrenaline will kick in and give you some badass fighting skills, but it’s actually the opposite. Adrenaline is what tires you out in a battle and it also affects the fighter’s efficacy – meaning it makes them shaky and inaccurate, and overall they lose about 60% of their fighting skill because their brain is focusing on not dying. Adrenaline keeps you alive, it doesn’t give you the skill to pull off a perfect roundhouse kick to the opponent’s face.
Swords WILL bend or break if you hit something hard enough. They also dull easily and take a lot of maintenance. In reality, someone who fights with a sword would have to have to repair or replace it constantly.
Fights get messy. There’s blood and sweat everywhere, and that will make it hard to hold your weapon or get a good grip on someone.
A serious battle also smells horrible. There’s lots of sweat, but also the smell of urine and feces. After someone dies, their bowels and bladder empty. There might also be some questionable things on the ground which can be very psychologically traumatizing. Remember to think about all of the character’s senses when they’re in a fight. Everything WILL affect them in some way.
ARCHERS ARE STRONG TOO. Have you ever drawn a bow? It takes a lot of strength, especially when you’re shooting a bow with a higher draw weight. Draw weight basically means “the amount of force you have to use to pull this sucker back enough to fire it.” To give you an idea of how that works, here’s a helpful link to tell you about finding bow sizes and draw weights for your characters. (CLICK ME)
If an archer has to use a bow they’re not used to, it will probably throw them off a little until they’ve done a few practice shots with it and figured out its draw weight and stability.
People bleed. If they get punched in the face, they’ll probably get a bloody nose. If they get stabbed or cut somehow, they’ll bleed accordingly. And if they’ve been fighting for a while, they’ve got a LOT of blood rushing around to provide them with oxygen. They’re going to bleed a lot.
Here’s a link to a chart to show you how much blood a person can lose without dying. (CLICK ME)
If you want a more in-depth medical chart, try this one. (CLICK ME)
Hopefully this helps someone out there. If you reblog, feel free to add more tips for writers or correct anything I’ve gotten wrong here.
Neon. Neon. Neon. Newt suspected that there weren’t any other kinds of lights in Las Vegas.
During the day It was so hot and dry that the sweat evaporated off of you before it even had the chance to cool your skin. Now, at 1:20am it was a little better. A nice mild… Newt checked his smartwatch. Jesus Christ. 87 degrees Fahrenheit.
Upon their arrival for the Jaeger Tech summit, Newt had been thrilled (“Cowboys! Showgirls! Light-shows! BRITNEY SPEARS!!”) and Hermann had been skeptical (Gambling. No windows to trick people into more gambling. 44•C weather.)
But now after three days on the strip they hadn’t made it to a single show because their presentation had gone… poorly and they found themselves on the defensive all weekend. Turns out saving the world only counts if your involvement isn’t heavily classified, and the goodwill they’d garnered as two of the Heroes of ‘25 was fifteen years stale. They both considered it lucky nearly to the point of miraculous that no one outside the PPDC ever had to find out about the “invasion,” or the multiverse or the obliteration of the Precursor threat, but Newt still kind of wished he could get his hands on some of that world-saving clout about now.
Desiring feedback is the perennial state of pretty much every fanfic writer I know. Fortunately, it is possible to increase the feedback you receive with a few simple and respectful tips! Unfortunately, there are many factors which are outside the writer’s control when it comes to receiving feedback, so you should be aware of those, but don’t worry about them.
Writing quality is subjective. We should always strive for quality, but we shouldn’t beat ourselves up over it or compare ourselves to other writers. All that does is slow you down, which in turn stifles your improvement. You are only ever competing against yourself. So I’m going to start with a few reasons why your fic might not be getting the feedback you think it deserves, before diving in to ways you can improve that.
– Fandom size: larger fandom will, naturally, have more readers. You should scale your expectation of Hits, Kudos, and Comments accordingly. In theory, if you’re starving for feedback you should focus your attention on larger fandoms, but I don’t recommend that. You should write what you’re passionate about.
– Fandom timing: The day after the sequel film hits the theater you’re going to have an inrush of fans who are looking for fixit, romance, canon AU, or any number of needs the film/book/comic release etc left them with but did not fulfill. Unfortunately, writing takes time, especially for long pieces. Audience interest tapers off over that same time, with the occasional bump from a DVD release or a sequel announcement to remind people of that thing they love.
Also, maybe you’re writing for a large fandom like the MCU, but it’s either flooded with writers or it’s been a while since they had a film focusing on your corner of it. Don’t despair that just because it’s a large fandom and you’re not getting attention that it’s necessarily a quality issue. It may just be there’s too much out there or there’s new, different content to disseminate and that’s where the majority of focus is.
– Reader trust: It takes time to build up an audience, and you need to be gentle with yourself and with your expectations of feedback during that time. Even if you’re the greatest writer in the world, your first fic in a new fandom doesn’t necessarily come with a lot to recommend it. You’re relying on curiosity or boredom from readers scrolling randomly through the section, especially if you don’t promote yourself elsewhere or have readers who are following you from a prior fandom. There’s a lot out there, and like with published books, many readers just stick to authors they already like and trust, or they may just have one specific idea they want to read which your story doesn’t fit, or they just don’t intend to spend a lot of time in the fandom (which not everyone does!) and they rely on kudos/comment/hit count to tell them based on other readers what has been considered to be popular (which is not always the same as good!) so don’t take it personally. Sometimes it’s just a product of fandom timing. Having that solidly written movie fix-it ready within the week the film came out will tend to shoot a story to the top of the list, even if a “higher quality” one comes out later.
Perennial rule for fanfic writers: do not compare yourself to other writers based on these metrics. There’s room enough for everyone. A larger number of fics in a fandom tends to INCREASE the number of readers, not decrease the amount of attention to go around. The presence of other fics and fic writers helps you, it doesn’t hurt you. You are colleagues, not competition. With that in mind, you should not be afraid to promote fellow fic writers! It’s very likely they will return the favor, but even if they don’t (and that’s fine!), it’s just a nice thing to do and makes you a positive member of fandom, which we should all strive to be. This can also serve as an aspect of winning reader trust if you are a known, positive entity in fandom.
With that in mind, let’s dive in to tips to increasing reader feedback. Most of my tips are going to focus on how to build an audience by increasing reader trust, the one thing a writer actually has some control over. See those below the cut.
Avelera 