“There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”
Tumblr: why do misogynists like to invalidate strong female characters???????????
If we’re going to be fair here, the reason so many people get upset when a female character is called a Mary Sue is because that label is thrown around so haphazardly and so very often handed to characters who really don’t deserve to be labeled as such. The controversy of the term comes from its overuse and misuse.
The term can be used correctly, but it is too often misused by people who see a capable strong female character and have a gut instinct to burn the witch and return to their male hero power fantasy.
“So, there’s this girl. She’s tragically orphaned and richer than anyone on the planet. Every guy she meets falls in love with her, but in between torrid romances she rejects them all because she dedicated to what is Pure and Good. She has genius level intellect, Olympic-athelete level athletic ability and incredible good looks. She is consumed by terrible angst, but this only makes guys want her more. She has no superhuman abilities, yet she is more competent than her superhuman friends and defeats superhumans with ease. She has unshakably loyal friends and allies, despite the fact she treats them pretty badly. They fear and respect her, and defer to her orders. Everyone is obsessed with her, even her enemies are attracted to her. She can plan ahead for anything and she’s generally right with any conclusion she makes. People who defy her are inevitably wrong.
The problem isn’t that characters are unrealistic. Heroes often are unrealistic and it’s ok to criticize media.
However, female characters are criticized where male characters aren’t.
Everything in OP’s post could apply to Luke Skywalker (and definitely applies to Anakin) but those characters won’t be criticized the way Rey has been (even though everything Rey does in The Force Awakens is believable). We are more willingly to believe in a male chosen one who can just do amazing things because he’s the hero.
Boys can have wishfulment stories but girls can only have realistic stories.
^^^^
So, there’s this interesting thing where a certain degree of saturation in stories will train the audience to just accept stuff that’d normally strike them as bizarre or unrealistic, and move on without questioning it. It’s sort of like ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, except that phrasing doesn’t really encapsulate it precisely. It’s more like… commonality breeds acceptance.
For example, a humble young boy who rises to prominence and becomes a hero is such a standard piece of storytelling, that virtually no one ever sits down to watch a movie and actually goes ‘well, but, this is just a young farm lad – surely he can’t do a single thing to help stop the Forces of Evil!’ People in the movie might do that. But unless the audience is very, very young, or has somehow managed to avoid most books, movies, songs, comics, television shows, and oral traditions for the whole of their life, they’re going to sit down and think ‘ah yes, here’s our guy’.
Even though, in real life, it actually IS still pretty far-fetched for Ye Humble Village Lad to turn out to be the only thing standing between mankind and destruction.
The interesting thing, though, is that if you change enough elements of what is so common as to be thoughtlessly accepted, the image you present will no longer resemble the familiar narrative. Even if, below the surface, the other components are exactly the same.
This, along with the above-mentioned misogyny, is another contributing factor to the Mary Sue thing.
Because there are fewer female heroes who are just unabashed power fantasies, embodying unlikely rises to success or mastery of untold skills, if you take a very typical story that stars a dude and swap him out for a lady, the elements once rendered invisible by familiarity, are now noticeable again. The audience is jolted out of complacency, and begins to think more critically about what they’re being asked to believe. (You can accomplish the same thing with other demographics, too, i.e. putting characters of colour in roles typically given to white actors, or having LGBT+ characters with the same abundance as straight ones, and so on and so forth.)
So even people who like to think of themselves as totally fair and unprejudiced can end up enforcing double-standards in entertainment. Because if you don’t catch yourself, you will not even realize that you managed to sit through three Iron Man movies without ever questioning the premise of Tony Stark’s genius, but somehow Shuri in Black Panther just struck you as ‘unrealistic’.
All characters are self-insert characters. They are you a little to the left, or a particular piece of you dialed up to 11, or the you that you would have been if the path of your life had angled just slightly differently, or you if you never learned this one important thing.
Every character is part of you, but more than that every character starts with a piece of you, big or small, it’s you in one way or another at the beginning. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact it’s essential. That seed of you, that lives in them, it’s what gives them life, breath and blood and bone. And then you tend it, growing it, shaping them along paths you could never have walked nor imagined for yourself. Until they become someone else entirely. A wholly fictional character. But also you, a little bit, somewhere in there in the heart of themselves.
Every character is a self-insert character. It’s only a matter of degrees how much of yourself there is in them when you finally put them out into the world. Stop worrying so much about self-inserts. Worry more about putting that little you into a story that will shape them into a big, beautiful character.
THIS
I am super glad to read this because just about every character I write has pieces of me in them. Because I like to write realistically, and if I’ve experienced it, I can write it. And a lot of the time, I like to go out and experience the exact thing I’m gonna write about. And then I’m like “Fuck” because everything feels like a self-insert… And I feel The Guilt. And… Yes. This is nice to read.
In which I have crises of faith about my writing
So like, things are GOOD but also, FUCK.
I’m around all these really cool people who do REALLY cool and creative, fascinating things with their writing. And do it super well.
Like one person gives enough detail that there is detail, but isn’t weighed down in detail and verbosity. One person does THIRD DRAFTS on their writing.
I was in a conversation today and I don’t even have a solid grasp of English, it feels.
And it’s just unsettling because I’m used to being the best writer in the room. Usually ‘cause I’m the ONLY writer in the room. And I’m used to having a relatively solid grasp of things… And I do, but then I see these people who are just… so GOOD at it. And I feel like a kid with a shitty drawing, and they’re like, fucking Da Vinci and Van Gogh.
Much of it is practice. Much of it is about what matters. Some of it is age. Some of it is time. Some of them are literally professional writers, or professional editors.
Like, for me, I don’t do re-writes. But perhaps I should.
I don’t write the whole story and then post it; I post it when I’m about halfway though. And maybe I should wait?
Some of these people are taking their craft and their hobby seriously, and maybe I ought to. I know it’s for fun but it can be fun AND be taken seriously.
I just feel all this internal crisis because I’ve had to question everything I know about kink lately. And everything I know about language.
And it’s all learning. Up until three years ago I didn’t know that you could end a quotation with a full stop. I thought it ALWAYS had to end with a comma or question mark etc. I was never taught you can end it with a full stop.Until my beta three years ago pointed it out.
In my current writing I’m learning how to decrease my abuse of commas which is awesome. I apparently put them where I would pause when I speak; but it makes for clunky reading.
Anyway. Point is… I bet those writers I really look up to don’t freeform write and then post without a proper beta read. They probably do a rewrite or two. And that’s why they are AMAZING. They probably have a clearer understanding of their characters and the things they want to say.
I kind of feel like a kid with ADHD and a bunch of thinky thoughts and just write write write and pray that what comes out isn’t shit.
Anyway. Just. Feeling crappy about my writing but at least I have some ideas on how to improve things.
write about 5000 words of porn or more – 3000 or more also acceptable, but you don’t really want to go under that. don’t tab to indent, i swear to god, it fucks with amazon’s formatting so bad. don’t write any porn that’d send you to jail IRL, amazon naturally (and thank god) doesn’t accept that shit.
on the ‘bookshelf’ tab, you click ‘add new title’, fill out everything, upload a cover – you can get one free image a month (or maybe a week now, i dunno) from bigstock.com if you need some stock images of people’s abs and stuff but can’t put cash down for anything just yet – and amazon has a cover making application built right into the process too to make things easier or if you don’t know shit about photoshop or whatever.
then you upload the document itself. click save and continue. choose how much you want your title to cost – 2.99 is generally what most people price theirs at, because that’s where amazon’s 70 percent royalties starts at. enroll in kindle select if you want that 70 percent royalties to apply to the whole world, so you’re getting the same royalties no matter where you sell.
then you hit publish and wait and wait and wait and wait for amazon to actually publish the fucking thing.
then you wait 60 days after the end of the month to get your royalties! don’t know why, but that’s how amazon rolls.
and you just keep making more and more titles in the meanwhile to build up that income cuz you’re not likely to make a lot from just one title.
there’s no real ‘gatekeepers’ in kindle erotica – you just start writing and publishing and you keep doing it and building up a library. some genres/kinks/niches sell better than others, and trends come and go, but it’s really all up to you – to do the writing, the publishing, the marketing, and then more writing and publishing. you just keep at it, bit by bit. this is a market where it’s really all about quantity… the bigger your library is, the more sales you’ll start to rack up, building like a snowball. even better if you release titles on like a regular schedule. ideally you want to put up like 2 titles a week, but 1 a week is a good initial goal to shoot for.
you can also go to amazon’s author central to set up an author page to get all your titles in one place and help build a reader base/link readers and buyers in general to.
godspeed anon!
hm.
HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.
adding in my own hmmmmms
… I am seriously considering this. And also considering getting a proper pen name
Okay literally I’m reblogging this for the erotica how-to but also this is how Amazon self-pub works no matter what you write, like subject-wise, this is it for everything. OFC it doesn’t cover stuff like editing, cover art, marketing or pre-orders (Amazon used to have a pretty brutal pre-order deadline system, but they seem to be relaxing it after the last update? I can’t tell for absolute sure?), but in a bare-bones nutshell, yes, this is universal, and good information.
(I haven’t done Amazon Select because I like to get my stuff in with other sellers like Barnes and Noble/iBooks/Kobo – bc some people don’t buy from Amazon, and Select means you can’t sell anywhere but Amazon, in exchange for some extra promotional tools. If you want to do this, I suggest looking into the distributor ‘Draft2Digital,’ it’s a very easy all-in-one free service. Smashwords is also an indie standard, but more difficult to work with; I feel Ways about Smashwords.)
But yes, if you just want to do Amazon self-pub, this is a very good basic start.
So just a heads up for anyone who may not be familiar with taxes!
Amazon pays you as an independent contractor/self-employed, which means a couple of things. First, it means that the income you receive from Amazon will not be taxed! You’ll receive the full amount of whatever you earn from your sales, instead of the chopped up paycheck most employees are used to seeing.
This does not mean you don’t owe taxes! Sometime in January following the year you earn money from them, Amazon will send you a 1099-misc form listing the total amount of income you received in the previous year. If you use TurboTax/etc, it will walk you through how to input that, so don’t worry about that!
Here’s the stuff to note: If you makes less than $600 during the year, Amazon is not required to send you a 1099, but you are still supposed to report the income. The chance of you being audited for owing the IRS less than $100 is probably slim (it is barely worth what it costs to audit someone), but please take note and report the income as needed!
And the biggest thing!!!! Because your income is not being taxed upfront, it means you will OWE taxes come the following year!!! Self-employment tax is 15.3% (which you will notice is MUCH LOWER than what gets taken out of your employee/W2-based paycheck), so you will owe AT LEAST that the following year (more if you make TONS of money). Now if you are working as an employee, there’s a good chance that any money you owe will be cancelled out by whatever extra money the government took from your employee paycheck during the year.
BUT. If you earn a significant amount of self-employment income, or self-employment is your ONLY form of income, you will owe the government money in April!
The smartest thing to do when you earn any sort of self-employment income is to put 20% of that paycheck into a separate savings accounts. Just put it there and leave it there. If you can get a savings account with good interest, even better, but not necessary! That way when your taxes come due in April of the following year, you aren’t scrambling for money to pay them; the money will be sitting right there in your savings account!
Also, being self-employed allows you to report deductions for stuff, so you might want to look into that too, because it’ll save you money. After you pay your taxes, any money left in the account is yours to do whatever you want with!
source: I’ve been filing a 1099 as my sole source of income for about 4 years now (about to be 5)
hey betty! one thing i hear a lot in Writing Advice is ‘have faith in your story’ and ‘your voice matters!!’ and while i do wholeheartedly agree, i just. idk, do you have any Words of Wisdom on /why/ your specific, individual voice matters? (especially when you’re a teenage girl writing fanfic, and everything seems kind of- frivolous? Not Good Enough? idk man. i know most of that rhetoric is misogynistic bs, but some days it just feels pointless.) hope you’re having a good day!
this took me forever to respond to in part because i’ve been thinking a lot about how best to answer. this is definitely one of the most challenging writing asks i’ve ever gotten.
Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.
your voice matters because silence is not the default state of being. you have to speak, and more importantly, you have to be heard. it is a fundamental tenet of existence.
we are sad lonely humans trapped in cages of our singular sentience, and the only means of connecting our brains is to share our experience through language. so saying your voice feels frivolous and not good enough is the machine grinding you into dust. if you find meaning in something, YA or fanfic or sitcoms, other people will too. and if someone else doesn’t like it, or looks down on it, well, it wasn’t written for them. it was written for people who are invested in your perspective. who share and find truth, meaning, relief, and joy in your voice. and would you really want to deprive them of that?
some days, the bad ones, i let the machine grind me into dust. i make myself smaller and smaller until i don’t take up any space at all. i think, though, there is some freedom in non-space. if i am so small that no one can hear me, i’m free to scream without recourse. it is when i am small that i write my biggest risks, my largest truths, because i believe no one could, should, or will ever read it, and then later, when i start to take up space again, i have a piece of writing that is daring and weird and that no one else could have made. and to me, that’s when it feels like my voice matters most.
on all the other days, though, i practice self-aggrandizement. generally we assume our own averageness; we take our success in school and jobs and relationships, lift it up to compare with others, and go, “i guess i’m just like everybody else. if i were exceptional, i’d know by now.”
but what if that’s not true?
what if you’re truly exceptional, one of the best writers in the entire world – in all history, even – but you’re just not there yet? what if you only need to get down a million more words of practice to write the book that inspires an entire generation of writers that come after you?
“that doesn’t seem likely,” you might say.
no, it’s not likely. but we’re not talking about averages and probability and likelihood. we’re thinking in terms of exceptions. and you can only write exceptional work if you believe you have exceptional things to say. if you believe you have a perspective to offer that no one else could write the way that you would write it. you have a truth to show the world that no one else knows.
this is a good practice to get into. you don’t need to believe the words in order to write them, but you do need to write them, if for no other reason than to see what you want staring back at you, to make your potential real.
you cannot sabotage that potential because you believe you’re the rule rather than the exception. your future self deserves better than your present doubt. you might think you need to be humble about your skill and realistic about your chances. this is not true. practice telling yourself, “i am the exception.”
another voice might come back with, “what if i’m not?”
and you should answer, “i should give myself the opportunity to find out.”
“A character in a novel of mine—that most dangerous of creations: a novelist writing a novel—observed that there were three types of actions: purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. If the writer can show a character involved in a number of all three types of actions, the character will probably seem more real. This occurred to me when I was trying to analyze why some writers who can present perfectly well-drawn males cannot present a convincing female to save themselves—heroines or villainesses. I noticed with these writers that while their heroes (and villains) happily indulge in all types of actions, if there is a villainess, she is generally all purpose; if there is a heroine, she often does nothing but habitual actions, or nothing but gratuitous ones.”
— Samuel R. Delany, “Characters” in “On Writing”. (via oddhour)
I’m interested in the kinds of fanwork that goes on in the production of fanfiction; there’s more than we usually articulate, and I’ve often felt like we haven’t got the language to differentiate between the different kinds of beta work that goes on behind the scenes. So I’ve given a shot at articulating and classifying the various kinds of beta reading I’m familiar with.
SPAG Beta. Spelling, punctuation and grammar. This is your basic line edit. This is the person who catches your typos and silly mistakes.
Dropped Words Beta. Some people might be both a SPAG and a dropped words beta, but I feel this one deserves pulling out. I don’t know about you, but I can’t write a damn sentence without dropping at least a word or two. I think the word is there, I can practically see it there, but it’s not there. Many (if not most) people will add the lost at or an or the in there for you in their minds and not notice, but the laser eyes of a dropped word beta will put you to rights again. To be a dropped words beta you need to be able to look at the text without getting drawn into the story, and that’s both a special skill and a sacrifice for someone who actually likes your story. So anyone who can do this: you are a treasure, a gift, and made of gold.
Plot Beta. This is work that happens at the very beginning, as well as throughout a story. A plot beta is the person you talk your story out with, she’s your sounding board in the creation process. She may not be into SPAG or dropped words, and might not be a britpicker or formatting genius, but that doesn’t matter. Your plot beta’s not really there to worry about your word choice. She’s there to help birth a story with you. I write very long stories, so plot betas come in early go through my outline with me as I construct it. A plot beta is one of the few who end up beta reading an outline, in my experience. Many betas I’ve worked with don’t want to know what’s going to happen next in a story. They don’t want to be spoiled. So you can keep the spoiling conversations between you and your plot beta, and keep surprising a SPAG and formatting beta.
Research beta. This person works with you to help you pin down the bizarre facts you need to get your story right. Like a plot beta, they can act as a sounding board and help you construct the fine details.
Character Beta. This is someone who will act as a north star for you on a particular character. This is helpful if you’re writing about a character you don’t feel entirely certain about, or you just want someone to argue with you about the actions of a particular character so you can feel confident that s/he is at least close to being in character. It’s actually hard to keep the canon core of a character in your mind as you morph and change him/her, so having someone around who isn’t off on your flights of fantasy with you can be helpful in that respect.
Emotional Flow Beta. This is someone who reads your story for its emotional flow. Is it working? Does it ring true? They’re not there to debate whether the characters are OOC, just to tell you if the actions you’re describing feels real. This is related to a plot beta, and can be related to a character beta, but is different than both. Your emotional flow beta might have no idea where you’re story is headed and is just reacting to what’s on the page right now, which is useful. (hiddenlacuna suggests: whump!beta.)
Settings and Location Beta. This is someone who is attuned to the places you’re setting your stories, works well with Google Maps, and is anal retentive enough to correct you if you say it takes forty minutes to walk to that Tesco when it actually takes about twenty-five. This person is often also your Britpicker, but this is a separate service, I’d say.
Britpicker. Everyone knows what a Britpicker is, right? The person who tells you you’ve used the word “gotten” again, and that “recognize” doesn’t have a z in it in the UK. Also it’s a lift for God’s sake, not an elevator! In other fandoms, you may need an Americanpicker or other. (I’ve yet to be asked to act as a Canuckpicker, much to my disappointment.)
*-picker. You can call in an expert on anything, really. If you have violins in your story, call in a violin expert! Cricket? The inner workings of the BBC? Find a picker for that! It never hurts to call in someone with specialist knowledge.
Smut Beta. The person who helps you sort out those insanely complicated sex scenes. This is someone you trust not to laugh their bums off at you as you stumble through this terrifying territory.
Canon Beta. Someone whose inner knowledge of the canon in question is exquisite, and who can make sure you haven’t made any egregious mistakes.
Formatting Beta. This is a person who makes sure your code is clear to be posted. In more complicated stories, this might be a bigger deal than usual.
One person can be many of these things; obviously they’re not mutually exclusive. I think you could merge a few of the pieces and end up with a sort of sounding board beta you talk to before and during the writing, and then the person with the laser eyes you call in once you have something to actually look at. But these are (at least some) of the work that is behind the scenes of a fanfiction story.
If you are someone who would like to be someone’s sounding board, but you don’t really want to be responsible for line editing, you can still offer to beta. It’s just a different kind of relationship, and different expectations on both sides! All kinds of betas are welcome, useful, and intensely valuable!
Did I miss any?
I alternate between like, adorable cuteness/cuteness, to like HEAVY HTP.
hannahbelleeeebackup 