Tips And Advice - Tumblr Posts - Page 2

hey hm. can you help me?

im newbie writer. and i know nothing about creating titles and summaries, but i think i can get my way on that. So hm i want to write a muder mystery (just to my friends), the thing is, its all in my head and i cant write it down, besides that i wanna write it in english and im not fluent on it.

Another thing, it's that the plot looks too shitty... Like the murderer is a girl obsessed with her beauty and it's pretty vain, but you know the "murderer" it's to be reveled to much later, and it's too obvious it's her... Oh My what a shame...

----

Start by writing your ideas down (on paper, in a Google Doc, whatever). It doesn't have to be in English if that's not your most fluent language. Organize your thoughts this way. From there, you can try writing it. Don't worry if it seems terrible at first. The best way to improve is to practice. And again, the story doesn't have to be in English if that's not what you're fluent in. Write it in your native language, or whichever language feels most comfortable to you. The story can be translated later (if not by you, then sometimes you can find people online who can do it for you).

And as for how your plot looks, don't worry about that when you're a new writer. Write it anyway. If it's just for your friends, then it doesn't matter as much if it's an idea that's been done thousands of times before, because this is your story, and you can tell it the way you want to tell it.

how do you consistently draw the same character without it looking weird or off every different time?? also how do i coordinate faces, i always make the eyes too far apart or too big or too small or make the mouth too close to the nose or chin edge. If you have any advice I'd really appreciate it since it looks like you have your art shit figured out 🙏

Oh man SO so much of it is just practice, and you're not alone! I honestly think everyone struggles with a sort of "generification" of their characters' features the more they draw them, even seasoned professionals. There's a tendency to just sort of average everything out into an unrecognizable mush over time, and it takes a lot of conscious effort to push back against that.

Here are a couple tips and tricks that I've found to be helpful over the years:

Make turnarounds and model sheets. There's a reason animation/game studios do this, and it is because we are all still bad at drawing a consistent face. Despite being gainfully employed. What are we, graphic novelists?? We wish. Anyway it's a great way to familiarize yourself with your character's face from multiple angles, and it gives you a single source of truth to return to anytime you need a refresher:

Gather real-life reference. Anytime I'm designing a character I'm pulling together a ton of reference of actual people who look, to some degree, like the character in my head. It's always a collection of analogues, never just a single person, but it can be a great cheat sheet for understanding how your character might move, emote, etc:

Make a 3D model. I know it seems daunting, but with the advent of programs like Blender and Nomad Sculpt it's becoming remarkably more accessible. Heck, even James Gurney was sculpting maquettes out of clay for Dinotopia back in the day! It doesn't have to be particularly detailed—just a sort of proportionate lump will do—but it's another great way to have dynamic reference that you can rotate and light accordingly:

Practice, practice, practice. Make expression sheets for your character! Either right there on the spot, just start drawin' expressions, or you can slowly collect drawings of your character that you like, as you draw them, and compile them all in one place for your own reference. Need to draw your character's head from a weird angle? Maybe you've already drawn it before and you can copy your own homework! Doesn't count as stealing when the call's coming from inside the house 😎

I'd love to pretend there's a magical point where you can just immediately rotate your character's head in your brain like some sort of photorealistic apple in a twitter meme, but a lot of the time it's reference, hard work, and whole lotta repetition. 😐👍🏼

Posting Fic - How to prep your writing to display correctly on AO3 (via LibreOffice)

So I've seen guides online about how to convert your fanfic for AO3 after writing it in Google Docs, because a lot of people use GDocs to do their writing (which is a decent option, since it saves it in the cloud and all that). I'm not planning on repeating that here.

But I don't do my writing in GDocs, I do my writing in LibreOffice Writer, because it emulates an older version of Word (which is what I grew up on and am most used to), and because I can have more robust spellchecking than on GDocs. And when I was first considering finally posting my work to AO3, I'd heard lots of commentary about how often pasting into the rich text editor sometimes loses formatting, or what hoops people had to jump through to make sure everything looked good.

So I'm here with the actually-pretty-darn-simple method I use to post to AO3 for anyone who needs this, because I want to be helpful.

Please note: this is largely for the basic formatting one might use on AO3. I haven't tested it with fancier things (not even smallcaps yet, though I'm hoping that won't prove too difficult when I finally get around to a chapter that needs that functionality). Also, these instructions are for Windows, which is what I use.

The first step is, obviously, to write up your story in LibreOffice Writer. I have some formatting standards I prefer because it makes my works look like they're publication-ready, which helps me stay in the "I'm actually writing fiction here" groove.

Once you're done writing, you need to make sure the file is ready to save for AO3. With how I write, the only thing I change is that I remove that first-line indent across the whole document. This is easy enough. Select everything, and then go to Format > Paragraph.

Once in that dialog, change the first line indent to 0. If you don't see a number there at all, just enter the number in there.

Then press "OK." This will realign all the paragraphs, including their first lines, to the left margin.

Note that I haven't changed the spacing between paragraphs at all. It's still single-spaced, and that's fine, because the next step can handle that.

DON'T SAVE OVER THE ORIGINAL.

What you want to do at this point is select "Save As" and make sure to save it as an html file, not whatever file format you normally use. LibreOffice will probably ask if you want to do that or use its native format, and you can just tell it "use html format."

You should now have an html file wherever you saved it. If you double-click it, it will open in your default browser, and you can check that the formatting carried over properly if you want. It should look ready for posting, complete with the internet-standard single empty line between paragraphs. LibreOffice knows to wrap each paragraph in html paragraph tags, which is what AO3 likes, and AO3 (and generally the rest of the internet) reads that as the extra empty space between paragraphs, just like you should see here on Tumblr.

Now you need to navigate to where you have the file on your computer via your file manager of choice (I'm on Windows, so I use File Explorer, which I can reach just by right-clicking on the Start button, but I also have a shortcut to it on my taskbar). Right-click on the file, and "open with" Notepad. You can also just open Notepad and open the file from within the program.

You should see the html code for the file.

This is all set and ready to go. Copy everything between the "body" tags in the file (I also skip the lines that are for the chapter title, because I can enter that in a different spot on AO3).

Copy the selected code and paste it into the HTML editor on AO3. If you want AO3 to do a bit of cleanup for you, you can click over to the Rich Text editor, then back to HTML, and it will clean up extra carriage returns and such, but this isn't necessary. Double-check that everything looks good by clicking "Preview," and if you're happy, click "Post."

This even preserves smart quotes, which I don't bother to change to straight quotes, though I suppose you could do so if you wanted.

But honestly, that's how easy it is. Save the file as html, copy the html over to AO3, and done. No scripts, no file converters, no worrying if your formatting is going to survive being pasted into the Rich Text editor. Just LibreOffice and Notepad.