Seeking to share your fantasies with others but don’t know where to share them? Why not try AO3? Archive of Our Own, or AO3 for short, is a known fanfiction site. It is recommended to search for pairings of characters when searching for stories you want to read, so let’s start from there.
To start off, decide on the protagonists of your story. The pairing can be platonic or romantic, it doesn’t matter. I recommend writing on google docs or Microsoft Word or even on your phone’s notes app. In other words, do not start directly on AO3 for there is a chance that you might not finish that chapter in one goal and all your progress may not be saved.
What I personally like about AO3 is the fact that there is no need for a cover photo. This way, no one would judge a book by its cover. Quite literally. Therefore, this makes your hashtags and description a lot more important when posting a work on AO3. So do think very carefully on that before you start writing. Of course, you may add or delete any of your hashtags at any point of your story.
Make sure you have an account, if you don’t, go make one at https://archiveofourown.org/
Upon entering your account, you should see something like this (minus the fact that there’s recent works here).
Tap on “Post New” and it should take you to this page.
Based on your story, give your story archive warnings, Fandoms (Which book/drama/movie are your characters from?), Categories (Gen means no romantic relationships, or that is not the main focus of the story), Relationships (All your character pairings), Characters and any additional tags. This is very important for it will give your readers a vague understanding of any warning, details or tropes that may entice them into reading your book.
When you scroll down the page, you would see this.
The Work Title is exactly what the name suggests, your story’s title. As for the Summary, it is the description of your story, the synopsis and what readers will read to determine whether your story is worth the read. So do make sure you ponder over this and be make sure it is intriguing enough. But in the event where you wish to change your Summary, you can still do so later.
Going further in, this is where your text goes. You can copy and paste your story here and do any other minor edits to it before posting. Personally, I don’t see a difference between “Rich Text” and “HTML”, so I usually just stick to HTML.
If you want your words to be in italics, do add <em> and </em> before and after the word/s respectively. To bold the words, add <strong> and </strong>, just like for italics.
For example: <em>Thank you</em> for reading my story.
If you have been using the site for a while now, you would realise there are four boxes beside the title of the stories (Refer to the second picture above. Beside “Your Mask” are four boxes with symbols). These symbols carry meanings and here’s a pictorial guide of what some of these symbols represent.
With all these information, now you can get started on writing your very first story on AO3! It may be a little daunting at first for some but once you get the hang of it, this platform will be a great place to share your very own creative works.
If you would prefer to read fanfictions instead, (shameless self-promotion) click here to read my fanfiction up on AO3!
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