there is a new scourge on AO3 that I discovered recently...

that scourge is "Placeholder fics". This is thing, where someone posts a "fic" on AO3 with a summary and tags (and sometimes even a complete tag), but when you click on the "fic" the content of the "fic" is something like:

"coming soon" or "in progress" or "an idea I'll write someday"

This is a scourge on AO3 tags that directly violates TOS Section IV, as it is spam (sect B) and inappropriate content (sect H) (not, strictly speaking a fanwork).

If you see these "placeholder fics" on AO3 REPORT THEM. It is easy to do.

Link the fic in report and in the description, you can write something like this:

(This, btw is the actual thing that I wrote to report one of these a few weeks ago)

If you want to get jazzy you can even mention that you believe the "fic" violates TOS IV.H (which is what the AO3 mod told me in the email response to my report) or TOS IV.B.

You can report anonymously if you want afaik. Once you submit a report the AO3 moderators will get back to you at some point to update you on that report and action taken.

This is a simple way that YOU can make AO3 better today. If you see a "fic" that violates TOS in any way, REPORT IT. There are literally millions of fics on AO3 and the moderators can't possibly go through all of them without YOUR help.

I suspect that the people who are posting these "placeholder fics" are probably very young people who are very new to fandom and fanfiction and do not know better. If you are reading this post, and you are one of these people, know that I don't hate you, I just want you to know that what you are doing is a violation of the AO3 TOS and that it fills AO3 tags with spam, preventing readers from finding actual fic to read. There can be (and certainly are) MANY fics on AO3 with the SAME names, if that's what is motivating this.

AO3 isn't a social media site, it's an ARCHIVE for fanfiction. If you want to communicate with your following that you are planning on writing a new fic, use your tumblr, your reddit, your dreamwidth, your substack, your pillowfort, your livejournal, your bird site or whatever the fuck you have to do this. Link your socials in your bio on AO3 if you must. Mention it in the author's notes on your latest work. IDK, just don't post empty "fics" on the ARCHIVE.

Ok, so, i can see why this could be annoying, and i understand that it may be a scourge.

BUT as someone who does this, i would like for you to understand that it is another way for me to motivate myself. By posting these "empty fics" and getting them out there for people in that famdom to see the potential, i then have forced myself into writing it.

I do not have any sort of following on socials, as with many fanfic writers, so that is not a viable option for me. By promising these people this fic, i have also promised myself to write.

(Also, does it count if i have a trailer chapter that has actual content? But like the content is a very brief snippets, cause i usually do that)

Might I propose we start tagging such fics as something like "under constuction" or "coming soon to an ao3 near you"? Because then you, a reader who does not wish to see fics like that, can either filter them out, or just skip them, and then writers who need to just get something down first can also do that.

Of course, the tag name can be disputed later, but i just wanted to help you understand my side of this problem

Of course you can completely disagree, i just wanted atleast the possibility of a truce.

I would love for more input if you would like, because i only know my side and the above glimps of your side(cause i haven't really seen any fics like you described except my own(NOT TO INVALIDATE YOUR EXPERIENCE!!!! Just sharing mine.(i swear, every word i spout feels like I'm adding fuel to the fire)))

As the op stated, ao3 is an archive, not an advertising space, which is what you’re trying to do. Even if you “promise the fic” to others, there are going to be many more who went to read a fic and found none. It’s a betrayal of the community that uses the archive, even with tags stating the intent. You will only make yourself notorious for violating both the terms of service and the social contract of ao3, and people will block you in droves so you never get those readers you’re trying to appeal to.

You’re better off posting in tumblr tags and things like that cause people follow those, too, so you’re not just dumping ideas and placeholders out to people who don’t event want to see it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a “following” because if you post things properly you will find people interested in your fics. Most tumblr users don’t use the algorithm option, so it’s much easier to “break through” and get noticed because if you’ve posted in whatever tag recently, people will see it.

Needing to force yourself into writing is a personal problem; don’t make it the rest of ao3’s readers. And again, it is in the terms of service that you cannot do this. If you continue to try to dodge the rules, you will only come off as entitled and disrespectful and people will avoid your fics out of spite.

Regarding your “trailer” idea, I’d expect a full chapter to be posted at the same time or else it’s just a one shot that may be expanded upon later.

I was naively reading the first part thinking it was just an AO3 newbie who hadn’t figured out the ‘save as draft’ function…oops

(I miss the age where the ‘read more’ could say things besides ‘read more’…anyway, either skip or prepare to scroll)

I think the newer arrivals to AO3 have had no experience of the ‘archive’ intention of AO3. It’s not terrible to think of your creativity as a living thing that thrives on community, and there is one here. But it doesn’t grow in the same pattern as social media. The archive is for finished works, and by that I mean finished for posting. Even if you never write another chapter, or return constantly to edit the WIP you’re struggling with, or revamp the whole thing on a whim. What you posted was a whole piece of work, which you wrote with the simple intention of writing it. Adding something to the archive which is not a work, but a promotion of the possibility of future work, seems counterproductive to the whole system. Not to mention frustrating to author, readers and archivists.

If you need external motivation to begin creating that’s not bad either, just not a task for the archive. There are some great communities out there, and AO3 will be waiting with its kudos function to receive the results when you do start writing. Blogs, writing groups, Discord servers, Tumblr, Twitter…lots of choice. Also, there’s nothing wrong with just starting to write on AO3 and tagging the thing “wip”. There are people who will see and appreciate it eventually. Trying to rush the process with empty chapters might end up putting off readers instead. @squirrelstone put this better than I did, but it needs repeating that AO3 specifically does not allow this self-promotion.

It’s also my opinion that it’s refreshing to just produce content without having to pander to algorithms once in a while. People can be smart about it with tagging and posting times, and boosting on their social media, but…just writing, posting and seeing what happens is good too.

(Were people doing this on Wattpad? I was never on it so I don’t know if it was a regular practice there.)

TLDR: if you need motivation to write maybe find a community first, and then post stuff to AO3. Empty “trailer”-style posts might annoy potential readers, and WIPS often attract passers-by anyway.

For a long project, so that I’m sure that I’m gonna finish it, I need to have it all written down before I start posting, otherwise the pressure of having to write it down combined with the pressure of having readers waiting for an update will scare me into never looking at that project again. I will certainly still edit it and maybe even add some scenes as I proof pread for posting day, but most of it needs to be written down.

Long fics scare the hell out of me, so what I do is focus on it one scene at a time, cause I will get overwhelmed if I know I have 5, 10, 20, 40 more scenes to write.

Just write the scene you have on your mind now - or do it chronologically, whatever works best for you - as if it is your only worry.

I, particularly, go back and forth a lot, though I leave all the scenes in their respective “space”, leaving little notes to myself so that I know that I need to add another scene in a certain place, a transition paragraph, anything like that.

I know a lot of people make a plan for the fic, and that sounds really smart, but it doesn’t really work for me. I go with the flow, always rereading what is already written so that I can have a feel for what needs to come next. This approach also makes me end up with quite a few discarded scenes, but it is what it is 🤷‍♀️

While pantsing is valid, I think that it's worth giving a shot at planning in Anon's case. I too am writing a super ambitious au, and it took me 9 months to thought-dump on-and-off, and another three to plan out the plot, characters, and world in detail. Yes, I am on the extreme side of things, but here's some wisdom I can share.

First of all, I feel like planning gets a bad rap for being "homework". Like I've heard "Oh, it stifles creativity" or "It feels like the story has already been told so why write it?" and I just... don't get that at all?

Sometimes planning doesn't work for you, and that's okay, but planning is an intensely creative process! This is where you lay the skeleton of your story down, and then actually writing it is where you lay on the flesh. Along the way, you may have to rearrange a few bones here and there, but you see a finishing point ahead.

Having a general path to follow is what gets be through longfics. I can't stand to run in blind. I need to see the gist of what's ahead of me. To some people, they feel outlining the story means there's no point in telling it because it's "already been told" but to me it's like inhaling a binge-worthy book at lightning speed and then writing the fic is like rereading the story to pick up on countless details, clues, and foreshadowing that flew over my head the first time. Even with my meticulous planning, the drafting process continues to delight and surprise all the time. It just comes from the details rather than the trajectory of the story.

When it comes to planning a large fic, though, it helps to get visual. Go beyond the typical Word or notes document. I am once again quite extreme because I pay like $12 a month for Milanote, but I use it because it allows me to easily navigate between my notes, colour code them, add visuals, as well as put in a ton of detail while also being able to see the bigger picture. Look into using a free program that allows you to do the same thing, or spice up your document with bookmark links, coloured text, and pictures.

When it comes to the actual content, these are the three places to focus on:

Plotting is about ensuring that you have a strong throughline. You don't want to get side-tracked and you want to keep the pace. Where does the tension peak and rest? Planning will help you find that balance early on without having to do a ton of deleting or rewriting.

Character profiles will help you nail down how they've been shaped by this world, as well as consistency. The thing to focus on here are goals, motivations, values, and development. That's the real meat and potatoes. If you know that deeply, then it'll be easy to keep your characters in-character.

Worldbuilding isn't my favourite thing (and I like that fanfic lets me gloss over it most of the time) but this is where you focus on plot-relevant regions, magic systems, cultures, and political systems. This is also where pictures come in handy. Instead of writing tons of notes, just get some inspo pics, add a few sentences below it for context, and vola! Worldbuilding!

After you've finished your planning, read through all your notes again. See if there are any changes, big or small, that you want to make before you start. It'll save you a ton of hassle.

And after all that planning, your longfic should hopefully look a lot less intimidating because you know exactly what you're getting into. There's no running in blind because the path is clear and now you only have to pave it.

Hope that helped!

Wow, lots of amazing advice in here for comics creators too 🥰

I’ve never thought of myself as a writer, I’ve always been an illustrator. I don’t think I’m very good tbh, I had no training or practice outside my journal (I’ve read a lot of books by my favourite writers about how they write, but never did the exercises). But I’ve been sporadically writing fanfic since childhood because once in a while I desperately needed to read a particular story and no one had written it...so I did. The need to read and make that story was greater than my self-doubt.

Writing With Color – Featured Description Posts

Some of our most useful posts on describing People of Color, all in one place.

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–WWC

How to Plot a Complex Novel in One Day

Now first, I have to say, that the plot you’re able to come up with in one day is not going to be without its flaws, but coming up with it all at once, the entire story unfolds right in front of you and makes you want to keep going with it. So, where to begin?

why is it that writing advice is always written for people with a +1 on their executive function roll, and not people with a -7?

Maybe the only people who write writing advice are the +1′s, but only in writing? I mean, Stephen King wrote a brilliant book about how he writes every damn day including Christmas (which, dear God), and he wrote a whole book while blind drunk and wishes he could remember writing it, and then there’s George Orwell:

And the less said about Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, the better.

Looking Around: Horizontal Space

If there is one truth about the second half of the 20th Century it is that, by all accounts, we started moving out rather than up; horizontal rather than vertical. Not only through the process of suburbanization, the building of massive highways, and the rapid capital flight from cities, but also in how we designed everything from our homes to our workplaces. 

It could be said that, since the development of major highways, America has flattened – much in the same way that the invention of both the elevator and air conditioning brought skyscrapers to every major city in the first half of the 20th century. 

I-55 Under Construction, 1972. Public Domain. 

In his 1984 book Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, John Brinckerhoff Jackson obsertedves this transition: 

Jackson attributes this decline in vertical spaces to technological changes. Sprawling manufacturing plants with mile long assembly lines make more sense logistically than having to constantly have workflow between stories. “An efficiently planned office,” he notes “is now seen as a system of information flow, most flexible, most effective when horizontal.” Even new skyscrapers are less like the ones from the recent past, described as “… a stack of large, uninterrupted horizontal spaces: vastly improved construction methods have made this spaciousness possible.” (69)

The technology of the car has created for us a new way of perceiving the environment around us. Jackson cites “increased mobility, and even more, an experience of uninterrupted speed…bring with them a sharpened awareness of horizontal space.” (70) Vertical space can’t be seen as easily from the car, the de facto way of getting around in America. 

Residential Horizontalization

This transformation began with the Federal Housing Act of 1934, which established the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA originally provided home loans to qualifying (read: white) families during the Great Depression, as part of the New Deal, in an attempt to stabilize the mortgage market. 

The FHA came to the forefront after WWII, when the Housing Act of 1949 began to systematically dismantle cities while simultaneously setting the guidelines of suburban sprawl. The Housing Act of 1949 worked in three parts: 

1.) Federal financing for slum clearance (often coupled with highway building) 2.) Promised 800,000 units of public housing (the act actually destroyed more units of housing than it built) 3.) Increased financing for rural home loans and gave the FHA more authority to issue mortgages. 

Poster from the 1940s.

This act had a devastating effect on cities. Not only did slum clearance destroy entire neighborhoods (often drawn along racial lines) and frequently replace them with highways (out to the suburbs!!), the process of Redlining (outlining areas deemed “high risk” and not worth issuing mortgages in, often in the inner city, almost always racially based) and the high preference for FHA-planned suburban communities over urban areas all but guaranteed a fully subsidized white flight from the cities. 

What little public housing was built quickly fell into decline, as maintenance costs were tied to tenant rents - this, coupled with resistance to forced integration after Brown v Board of Education (1954) from whites led to their rapid depopulation of public housing. As a result, the remaining tenants could not offset the costs of empty units. This, coupled with a high youth density (unsupervised youths were often the cause of many maintenance problems - even benign ones, like breaking the elevators playing games of ‘elevator tag’), meant that existing public housing was quickly deteriorating. It was this combination of socioeconomic circumstances that led to the decline, and ultimately, the failure of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis, Missouri. 

[For those of you who are interested in the policies and history of public housing, I recommend the books Public Housing Myths, and In Defense of Housing.]

The FHA and Suburb Planning

The FHA’s guidelines for issuing mortgages after the 1949 Housing Act centered around wide lots with driveways on streets organized to deter traffic, which had become a huge problem now that everyone had a car. 

These wandering neighborhoods were often attached to arterial roads, but built with few entrances to these busy thoroughfares. Zoning was a huge part of why the curvilinear streets and island-like neighborhoods developed: the FHA was more likely to sponsor home loans to those looking to purchase a home in single-family residential zoned areas as part of its goal to protect lots from “adjacent non-conforming uses.”

However, it wasn’t always this way. In the earlier post-war suburbs, the FHA suggested subdivisions that were close to school, churches, the occasional commercial unit, and parks. What changed this was the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, better known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, which subsidized the construction of over a million miles of local and interstate highways. After these roads expanded exponentially, planning for less traffic meant sprawling deep into the countryside and the beginning of entirely new horizontal landscapes. 

Garlinghouse Home Catalog insert from c. 1950

These policies imitated themselves in the architecture of common houses. The little post-war (white) working and middle-class Minimal Traditional house extended itself into the Ranch and Split-Level forms as lots grew larger and neighborhoods less dense. It was at this point that attached garages became ubiquitous, as car use had become increasingly necessary, cushioned by the increased lot size of the late 50s and beyond. 

Catalog from 1958. Via Archive.org 

Northern Homes Catalog, c. Mid 60s. Public Domain. 

For those who are curious, the origin of the McMansion lies in the Styled Ranches first popular in the 1930s in Hollywood and in more wealthier areas in the 1950s-1970s - these houses began the process of taking a basic built form (a Ranch) and applying various cladding materials and stylistic details to make it seem more elegant. For one-story McMansions, these houses are their predecessors. 

Styled Ranch (note the itch of the roof) from the 1970s

The Split-Level ensured that two-story homes became hot commodities amongst middle class homeowners. By the early 1980s, (after the end of the Energy Crisis) homeowners rejected the low ceiling height of the ranches and split-levels, and, coupled with less expensive building materials and riskier mortgages, the McMansion had arrived. Their massiveness of scale was, perhaps, the only verticalization that occurred during this time.

Commercial Horizontalization

The depletion of urban density was not just a matter of people moving to little boxes on winding streets. Business moved as well. Factories, once located in dense urban settings, moved to the suburbs, where massive horizontal plants were created to streamline the work process. After all, the assembly line works horizontally. 

If you’ve ever traveled outside of Chicago, you pass through the exurb of Naperville. While also being a verifiable McMansion Hell (perhaps no group of people own more McMansions than the managerial class), the I-88 corridor from Naperville to Aurora offers one of the most spectacular arrays of office parks in existence. Uncommonly more than five floors and rarely more than ten, these monoliths languidly straddle the flat prairie landscape, neatly bundled up by ribbons of highway. 

Helmut Jahn’s interesting “N” Building off of I-88, Naperville, Illinois. 

After WWII, corporations began a new way of organizing their businesses in order to adapt to new means of national and later international expansion. The new system was called “managerial capitalism” described by Louise A. Mozingo as “a transparent, rationalized administrative hierarchy… Rather than conferring positions based on ownership or nepotism, corporations awarded management authority to a meritocracy of salaried, professional managers.” (3)

The bosses and managers needed a new space along the same highway as the new factory (perhaps deliberately away from the workers themselves) and more amenable to expansion and technological development. It was for them that the modern office park was born. 

It wasn’t just the office park - the highway also brought upon the world one of the most ubiquitous forms of building: the strip mall. 

But how did this sudden transformation come about? In her book about corporate campuses, Pastoral Capitalism, Mozingo details exactly how the entire commercial world was scattered across the formal countryside:

The car-oriented technocracy of mid-century urban planning, emerging global capitalism, and government policies, completely terraformed the American landscape and made it, well, a landscape - horizontal in shape and in scope.  Perhaps the most ironic aspect of these new developments is the appropriation of what they replaced. The banal, pastoral names of greenfield housing developments, malls, and strip malls, is but a memory of the eradicated landscape: Rolling Acres, Greenmeadow Heights, Slate Hills at Elysian Farms.

Photo by Sara Goth (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Re-Verticalization

In the cities, one by one, the lights of the old upper stories began to flicker out, entire avenues permanently for lease. The popularity of so-called “ruin porn” attests to the kind of nostalgic longing these old spaces engender in people young and old. 

But curiously enough, the edge is becoming the center once more. Old derelict factories become spacious lofts, skyscrapers repopulate, uses become mix, once more, the lights begin to flicker in the upper stories. For those with the financial mobility, the city is becoming vertical once more. As for the rest of us?

There is an ongoing and heady discussion about the repopulation of the cities. This essay is not the place for this discussion. As the infrastructure of the suburbs begins to wither and fray; as the malls close and the For Lease signs begin to shift from the city block to the office park, it is an interesting time to witness the shift of the American landscape into some semblance of verticality.

The 20th Century saw the simultaneous birth of skyscrapers in the first half, and the mass flattening of the landscape in the second half. This massive transformation occurred at such a blistering pace, it became the new normal within twenty years, the process of flattening something seen only in hindsight. We’re running out of folks who remember the world before the hegemony of the car. 

Abandoned Packard Auto Plant in Detroit. Photo by John Duce (CC BY-SA 3.0)

A few years ago, I woke up one day and read that the malls were dying. This news was shocking to me, despite the fact that I hadn’t been to a mall myself in years. Their sudden appearance and proliferation in the late 50s must have been seen as an equally surprising shock.

The purpose of Looking Around is to encourage people to take a critical look at the world they live in – to appreciate its nuances, and take note of its changes. For those of us who pass by life at 45-80 miles per hour (often not by choice but rather necessity), it’s easy for these changes to blur into the fabric of the scenery. For those of us in the cities, the news of the vacating office park surprises us, because we tend to believe that the edges - the burbs - are forever. Without taking a second to notice the day-to-day changes, one day we’ll wake up, flip on the news, and the whole world will suddenly be vertical again. 

Jack London (via literatureismyutopia)

literally one of my favorite romance tropes of all time is character a is a really notorious gang leader/well known feared ruler of some kind etc and no one dares cross them or talk back to them etc because they won’t make it out alive but character b can literally get away with saying whatever they want and everyone knows it’s because they have character a wrapped around their finger and character a is gentle with character b and everyone wouldn’t dare laying a finger on character b because then character a would literally chop their head off

did you mean: allurivan

To be fair I prefer the version in which character b might look sweet and frail compared to character a but can ALSO chop your head off

Getting down to the turn-of-the-century correspondence and it’s taking all my willpower not to read for hours.

Such handwriting goals.