Tips on prompting/Dear Author letters/Doing Yuletide

[lilka]

OMG, sign-ups are almost upon us! I'm so excited. It's about this time that I go digging through meta from previous years, to remind myself of the pearls of wisdom people have compiled about how to get the most out of your Yultide experience. These are my favourites:

liviapenn: How to Not Ruin Yuletide

penknife: Eight ways to break your ficathon writer's brain

Comments

[emily_shore]

Some old meta from me:

Yuletide letters and -isms in fiction

HOW TO HAVE FUN AT YULETIDE

[calenlily]

Ooh, thank you for linking that post on -isms. Interesting discussion, and it reminded me that there are a number of problematic elements in one of my canons that it would be good to make a note about the treatment of.

[emily_shore]

You're welcome! I think it's always helpful to know how your recipient engages with canon and the problematic stuff is definitely worth a mention.

[lilka]

Oooh, I'd forgotten about your -isms round-up, that'a really useful! I'll add these to the post.

[lynndyre]

Seconding this. If I know what they like about the characters and the way they interact, it lets me find the right angles to tell a story from.

[chiana606]

One of my favorite characters ever was one that I hardly noticed until I read a Dear Yulegoat letter from somebody who wanted fic about her, and explained why they loved her. I ended up writing the fic as a treat, and now write this character with some regularity.

Said request was cool because it included an interpretation that I'd never thought of before, but really worked.

[bitchygrrl]

This exactly. Knowing the why of fannish love makes it so much easier to write. If I understand what it is about a pairing that gets a person going I can write to that.

[lizzy_someone]

I know this goes against conventional wisdom, and most people are...more creative, I guess, than I am, but I have to say that I have never seen a prompt too specific for me. I want structure! I want you to help me write stuff I know you'll like! I don't want to face that blank page all alone!

Alternatively, advice that is probably more widely applicable: I like each request to contain a variety of prompts. "I would love an A/B story, or C backstory, or what happened to D post-canon, or..." Then I have options, but it's not so open-ended that I'm paralyzed with indecision.

[chiana606]

I also like requests with lots of different prompts. They give me something to go off of, while also giving me options.

[calenlily]

Glad to see other people like having lots of prompts. I'm actually almost afraid that I'm giving too many this year. Adding more possibilities can't hurt, can it?

I just have too many ideas.

[astrogirl2]

I like to hear this, because I always worry a little bit that I might overwhelm my writer with suggestions. :)

[calenlily]

What I find most helpful is if the request includes some prompts. They don't need to - and probably shouldn't - be especially detailed, but just some seeds of ideas that give me a place to start out from. It's wonderful if a variety of these are offered.

It's also great if people tell me about narrative kinks or specific elements they enjoy seeing in stories, and if they mention what kind of tome they want the story to have.

Talking about why they love the canon and/or the characters is to me a nice addition to those things, but not very useful on its own; I need something a bit more concrete to latch onto.

[calenlily]

Specific prompts are what tend to inspire me to write treats/extra stories too. Every once in a while I'll write an extra or NYR for a request without details just because I like the characters so much that I can't let someone requesting them not get fic about them. Other than that, extra stories are because I see a prompt and go "I like that idea. I want to write that fic."

[ankaret]

I also like prompts! Particularly if there are several short prompts for each fandom, because quite often I only match on one fandom and if the one prompt of their heart is, I don't know, very plotty police procedural fic or something else that I know I can't do, it makes me nervous.

I don't need prompts to be detailed at all, I'm just always glad when I see 'Maybe a futurefic when they meet years later? Or something involving karaoke? Or, oh, hey, what about a space opera AU?' rather than 'A / B. Anything'.

I'm absolutely not saying I think prompts should be mandatory, just that a scatter of not-too-detailed prompts is what I prefer.

[andelendir]

Just from one year - and writing some stocking-stuffing and pinches - I like a clearcut warning about triggers if you have any, but else the largest possible freedom. I'm kinky, love and write slash and erotica, and there are people (in other challenges mostly) who received stories they probably would never have sought out on their own, wouldn't show to their neighbour, but still immensely enjoyed while the door to their study was well locked

not directed at poster, per se, but just in general

[jedi_penguin]

The stifling can go the other way and should also be avoided. The first year I did yuletide, I didn't really understand about optional details being optional and I wrote a terrible story to meet someone's demand for pr0n. (This person wrote the same, undifferentiated prompt for all four requests: "graphic NC-17 sex.") The problem was I just didn't see the two characters I'd agreed to write going beyond UST because one of them always struck me as straight. If all you want is smut, you need to leave some leeway as to the characters you'll accept together, because your writer might not see the same OTP/3 that you do. If you don't want to see your OTP split up, leave your writer room to write a gen story... pretty much exactly like your best prompt did for you!

Re: not directed at poster, per se, but just in general

[andelendir]

Oh, but that's precisely what I wrote myself there: don't stifle, don't insist on one thing only, or absence of something which is no hard limit

Re: not directed at poster, per se, but just in general

[jedi_penguin]

Oh, but that's precisely what I wrote myself there: don't stifle, don't insist on one thing only, or absence of something which is no hard limit.

I wasn't disagreeing, just elaborating. *grin* That's cool that you don't do OTPs, but many people find it difficult to separate their chosen pairing from their enjoyment of the text. The writer and recipient may both desperately love all the requested characters, and perhaps even see them the same way, but that doesn't guarantee that they'll see the relationships between characters in quite the same way, and that's what I was trying to add in to your comment about squicks-vs-vague preferences.