Sta.sh
Whatever way you intend to welcome in 2013, I hope you're surrounded by love and that you do it safely!
) - deadline June 21
General Photography from 3wyl
Site Update: Literature Thumbs. Sta.sh Submit
Fix That Miscat! is a series of articles aiming to help you distinguish between galleries that are commonly confused or abused in the category system here on deviantART.
Why should I care? 1) If your work isn't in the right gallery, the people most interested in reading it are never gonna find it! 2) Miscatted works cannot be featured as DDs, to put it simply. 3) Some galleries are more full of miscats than others, and this makes it very difficult to find what you're looking for.
Whether you're an art appreciator or trying to get your art appreciated, miscats affect your site experience. Please help us get the word out there!
Fanfiction
Fanfiction has its very own category under the Fan Art gallery:
NOTE: Fanfiction is a genre rather than a style, so poems, scripts, character sheets, etc. that are fan works belong in this category as well. The gallery is not limited to stories.
What is fanfiction? On deviantART, fanfiction is defined as any work that uses pieces of an existing universe—setting or characters—as a starting point or beyond.
Basically, if you need to know about another author's work to understand the piece, it's fanfiction.
A story where Lewis Carroll's Red Queen is the President of France, a story where you and your friends (or your OCs—original characters) are dropped into the world of 'Ender's Game,' a poem about the Marvel versions of Loki and Thor, Hetalia-themed 'reader inserts': all of these are fanfiction. In all cases, the stories use a character or setting created by someone else, and will make the most sense if your readers are familiar with the source material.
Fiction
Only the Prose gallery has a Fiction section. It can be found here:
Poetry isn't divided this way, so if you want to make it clear whether your poetry is non- or fictional, please indicate as such in your Artists' Comments.
What is fiction? Fiction is anything made-up. This doesn't mean it has to be completely made-up like fantasy or science fiction, but that the events described never took place.
A story about Shakespeare's secret lover set in that time period, a story about you and your friends discovering a boatload of pirate treasure, a story about a real feeling you've experienced but with different characters and made-up conversations: all of these are fiction. None of these could be printed as news.
Nonfiction
Only the Prose gallery has a Nonfiction section. It can be found here:
What is nonfiction? Nonfiction is true stories, or retellings of true stories, with an attempt to stick as close to what really happened as possible. (Changing names for privacy is acceptable and not uncommon.)
A story about your day in school, your review of a book you just finished, your (or someone else's) thoughts on current events or philosophy, an account of da Vinci's exploits in Florence, essays about existing topics: these are all nonfiction. Some nonfiction does include invented dialogues (usually to add more of a narrative feel), but in these cases the notes will include source material for the dialogue as well as a note that the dialogue didn't actually take place or has been imperfectly recorded. Aside from small things like names and the actual words in a dialogue (the people should be representing their own opinions), nonfiction can be taken as truth. It may be biased, but it is mostly accurate to life.
Questions?
If you're not sure what something counts as, please post here. And remember to spread the word!
All questions welcome.
Why isn't there a just link under the Literature genre that sends us to fanfic genre. If you have to post a sign for something "simple" then I have to wonder if I did something wrong making my setup. A link is pretty easy to insert, isn't it?
Then there are the rather meager offerings of folders to choose from for the classification of a fanfic story. Is sci-fi so popular out here that fantasy doesn't register?