I actually thought up a scenario where Sweetie Belle is cursed into being a demonic-looking monster filly. Rarity has to adapt to her appearance, while keeping her safe from those who would want to harm her. At the end, Rarity realizes that no matter what Sweetie looks like, she still loves her, which breaks the curse.

Pagetopper: Feels Edition

edited 7th Jul '12 8:47:51 PM by SuperGex

What, you wrote less than -2 pages?

Believe me, it's possible. In the past week or so, I've written a total of maybe 500 words because I keep cutting stuff and rewriting it.

I actually make it a policy to avoid doing any editing until I've written the entire story in first draft form. Cutting these pages was less a form of editing and more me finally realizing that the reason I couldn't stand to finish writing this scene is because the scene is terrible and doesn't need to exist at all.

More feelings.

Well my attempt at fanfiction never got beyond one paragraph.

@Blue: I'm too much of a perfectionist to do that; I'm constantly revising as I go. Although I have been trying to fight that tendency a bit lately.

edited 7th Jul '12 8:56:09 PM by JapaneseTeeth

Image rush, kekekekeke

She must NEVER Know

Erin totally needs to collab with the CMC and Featherweight

Strange and Powerful

Stifle!

At least you can write something.

It's different for fanfic anyway. An original novel you have to get used to the idea that no one's gonna see it until you've rewritten the whole thing 3 or 4 times.

Fanfics probably should be edited often though, because they face a lot more scrutiny as they're usually updated one segment at a time.

edited 7th Jul '12 8:57:54 PM by Bluespade

Beep beep

Why don't people edit their fanfics anyway? Is there some rule that if you release something on the internet, it's ok to be crap?

Seems to be that way to shippers and webcomic writers.

Maybe they lack a beta or editor, lol.

I think it's more that 1. people are too impatient to bother and just want to get it out there as quickly as possible 2. it can honestly be rather tough to find people willing to proofread for you.

@story: It's a lack of a solid peer-review stage combined with this hugbox mentality that people should be praised effusively for even managing to get five hundred words of barely coherent grammar into the uploader at fanfiction.net and hit 'post'.

Were you ever in the IWB Tg community? The fangame fad was way, way worse.

@Storyyeller: Lots of people edit their fanfics. Some writers care. But Sturgeon's Law is in full effect, lots of fanfic writers don't care how poorly their story is written.

Lots of non-fanfic writers also don't bother to edit their works, and as a result they never get published. Fanfic writers can 'publish' whenever they want though, so you end up seeing a lot of bad ones.

Anyway, I've finally done it, slain this awful, bloated, poorly paced, inconsistent chapter. It's going to need extensive, almost total rewriting, but I can now happily leave that up to my Future Self and focus on writing the next chapter which promises to be a fun one full of action and major plot developments.

It seems redundant that I Wanna Be the Guy even has fangames, anyway.

edited 7th Jul '12 9:11:16 PM by SuperGex

I wonder if there's anyone willing to proofread code.

Yeah, I don't get that. Even when I don't have an exhaustive peer review, I generally at least try to reread it first to make sure there are no glaring errors. Another issue with fanfic is that that it looks like the least intensive method for creating additional content. If you want to make art or music or a fangame, you have to have the right tools for it, so by default you have to invest more time into putting it together. For fanfic all you need is a word processor and an internet connection. So people with no writing skill or drive to learn how to write well will crap out stories because it takes the least amount of effort.

edited 7th Jul '12 9:10:11 PM by JapaneseTeeth

Even when I was doing a webnovel where I was trying to update as fast as possible, I still rewrote each chapter once then read through it a 3rd time looking for any mistakes to fix before uploading. Some people are just lazy I guess.

I like comics.

WHAT HAS SCIENCE DOOONE!?

Yeah, I think the laziness is a big factor. They figure "Eh, I'll probably get plenty of hits for this anyway, so why bother rewriting". I mean, I fully admit that I used to be way more lax (mainly because I was writing for my own enjoyment more than anything else), but even then I at least tried to make sure it was at least good enough to merit posting somewhere rather.

We've already established that the CMC combined turn into Cadence. I guess that was before your time, though.

edited 7th Jul '12 9:14:31 PM by JapaneseTeeth