As A Reader, Believing/saying That Authors Should Just "write For Themselves" Without Expecting Kudos

sometimes you need dialogue tags and don't want to use the same four

Tips from a Beta Reading Writer

This one's for the scenes with multiple characters, and you're not sure how to keep everyone involved.

Writing group scenes is chaos. Someone’s talking, someone’s interrupting, someone’s zoning out thinking about breadsticks. And if you’re not careful, half your cast fades into the background like NPCs in a video game. I used to struggle with this so much—my characters would just exist in the scene without actually affecting it. But here’s what I've learned and have started implementing:

✨ Give everyone a job in the scene ✨

Not their literal job—like, not everyone needs to be solving a crime or casting spells. I mean: Why are they in this moment? What’s their role in the conversation?

My favourite examples are:

The Driver: Moves the convo forward. They have an agenda, they’re pushing the action.

The Instigator: Pokes the bear. Asks the messy questions. Stirring the pot like a chef on a mission.

The Voice of Reason: "Guys, maybe we don’t commit arson today?"

The Distracted One: Completely in their own world. Tuning out, doodling on a napkin, thinking about their ex.

The Observer: Not saying much, but noticing everything. (Quiet characters still have presence!)

The Wild Card: Who knows what they’ll do? Certainly not them. Probably about to make things worse.

If a character has no function, they’ll disappear. Give them something—even if it’s just a side comment, a reaction, or stealing fries off someone’s plate. Keep them interesting, and your readers will stay interested too.

𝐍𝐚𝐡, 𝐈’𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐧.

chu, i'm going to cry 'cause listen what just popped up in my brain;

le satoru waking up from his deep slumber because all of a sudden he can't breathe, and then he realizes that it's his little one sitting on his face, butt right on top of his nose and mouth.

turns out, our baby boy just wanted to sleep with his papa, which is an almost rare occurrence considering the fact that he is a mama's boy.

😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

- 🪷 (have a great day/noon/evening/night, love!)

suddenly it’s hard to breathe, and it smells too—!

satoru wakes up with a jerk and total fright as his breathing way is blocked off. it took him exactly one second to figure out that it is, in fact, his crawling baby’s butt and diapers right in his face.

“—!” he immediately snatches him and picks him off his face. “my god, you just sat on me! and— did you poop… on me?!”

the babbling baby looks up to him with total innocence, not even comprehending that his papa is so aghast at his antics.

“how could you?! only your mama is permitted to sit on my face,” he grumbles, levelling a disbelief stare on his own progeny. this kid… his rebelliousness must be from you.

baby puckers his lips, before crawling closer and nuzzles his face into his body.

“oh you…” satoru’s horror of being pooped on dissipates that instant when he realizes his mini-him is actually seeking comfort. he pats his little back, feeling so full and giddy, all his grumbles forgotten. “ahh!! you’re so adorable, come— come to papa!”

in the end, after he changes his diapers and washes his own face (because honestly… for such a small thing, his baby does smell) he pulls him closer, and chomps his face playfully.

“it’s only when mama is out that you come to me…” he sullenly accuses as his baby looks at him with total wonder. “you’re playing favorites! hmph!”

“bwa.”

“what? you want to sleep with me, don’t you?”

“mwa.”

“hmph noted. let’s sleep together~”

Okay.

As much as I love feral Satan, who lets his instincts run wild and growls, bites and everything else… his soft side is so fuckin’ cute.

The Satan that stares at you in confusion as you tend to a small cut on his hand he’d received on one of his rampages, unbothered by the mess around the two of you and concerned solely with him. How he doesn’t quite know why his chest feels so warm and tight as he looks at your gentle, concerned expression.

Satan, who doesn’t understand why he feels so weightless with you, why his heart flutters and why he wants to hold you so gently, as if cradling something precious.

Satan, whose anger fades just from your presence alone, overtaken with feelings he’s never experienced, that baffle him entirely but he can’t get enough.

Satan, who desperately throws himself into research just to understand you a little more, to put a name on how he feels about you— who’s just as afraid of his own feelings as he is elated by them.

Satan, who worries you’ll be frightened of him if his temper rises, but you never are, even when he tells you that you should be.

Satan, who lays beside you, watching your sleeping face and utterly baffled that you trust him so completely to allow him to see you in such a vulnerable state… who knows deep down he’ll protect you forever.

Satan, who fumbles each time he tries to explain any of this to you, whose face becomes adorably reddened with each failed attempt.

Satan, who realizes that you’ve accepted him entirely, his every fault, his everything, before he had even come close to accepting himself. Who loves you more than he could ever put to words, or that he could ever really comprehend.

Just him. You know? Ahh, just helping him come to terms with everything he doesn’t know, to grow and understand. Helping him, in the end, to love.

I don't even do outlines anymore, but this still happens. Planning means nothing; never has.

take a break while watching this little bunny cross your dash

not the dog tearing his blindfold :’D

You know what’s really disturbing to me? The culture that seems to have sprung up around fanfiction. Writers spend weeks and months working on a story – I think my record is six months on A Place For Us To Dream. And so many times readers expect to just be given a chapter even if they don’t give anything to the writer in return.

I’m going to date myself a bit here, but I’ve been reading/writing fanfiction for ten years. And when I first started it was a wonderful community. There was an unspoken rule – if you read/enjoyed it, you review it. You take thirty seconds to tell an author who probably spent anywhere from three days to a week writing that chapter you just enjoyed to tell them you enjoyed it. Even if it was as simple as “Great chapter, can’t wait to see what happens next!”

Writers spend so much time on stories, and then they post it because they have this thing that they’ve invested so many hours into and they want to share it with the world. They know how they feel about the story, and they want to know how other people feel, what other people think.

And when you read it and don’t review, you know what message you’re sending that author? That they’re not worth your time, or you didn’t enjoy their story. So why should they keep posting it? Yeah they might continue working on it in their own time, for their own enjoyment, but you might never see another chapter again because you couldn’t be bothered to take thirty seconds out of your day to tell them how you feel.

I’ve written stories in eight different fandoms, ranging from very small to very big (I’ll openly admit I wrote Twilight fanfiction once. Once. It was an Alice/Jasper story and haters can hate all they want but I’m still proud of it). I took a break for a few years because I fell out of fandoms during college, and when I came back apparently it’d become the norm to just greedily consume writing without telling writers how you feel. And that is one of the saddest things in the world to me because fanfiction is where I really started getting serious about writing. It’s how I’ve honed by skills and become the writer I am today. And that was largely in part because of all the support I got when I was an itty-bitty thirteen-year-old writing crappy W.I.T.C.H. fanfiction.

Everyone keeps saying “reviews don’t matter, you should just write for yourself.” Well, you’re wrong. Reviews make or break fanfiction. Reviews tell writers whether it’s worth their time to continue posting that story online or whether they should keep it on their hard drives and never share it with the world.

Kill the attitude that reviews don’t matter. Start telling writers you like their stories. And if you don’t, if you all just continue to be invisible readers? Don’t be surprised when that writer disappears.