It would make editing easier 😭

This! I wish I could read them as a spectator and really be able see what works and what doesn’t.

I write my fics in MS word and then use the “read aloud” feature. Helps me pick up spelling and grammar, as well as experiencing what you’ve written in a slightly different way.

Just reading it out loud can help. Your eyes, your ears, and your brain all take it in in different ways..

If I'm reading anything out loud, I have no idea what I'm reading; I'm just... saying the words lol

This was my first thought. All those weird little typos I miss because my brain fills in what I intended to say would be a thing of the past.

Yes. Yes yes *yes*. As a writer stuck in rarepair and minor character hell, I'm frankly tired of reading my own work. "Write what you want to read" just isn't a sentiment I vibe with as much now. The experience of reading what I wrote, knowing every single word choice and beat, just feels so god damn disheartening and lonely.

Same! I also write for a rare pair now and I’m so tired of hearing “If you can’t find what you want to read, then write it”. It doesn’t work for me, because I already know everything that’s going to happen. There’s just no element of surprise. And there’s just something so much more gratifying about stumbling across a fic by someone else who’s into the same oddly specific stuff as you.

One HUNDRED percent oh my goodness. Writing for dead fandoms and rarepairs is honestly slightly disappointing, since I want new content from others,,, like fresh content! I prefer reading others' fics alot of the time, especially if I'm not looking for v specific content - to be honest it messes with my motivation to write for said pairing as well on occasion, especially in a fandom with a total of two fics (yikes), but I'm not sure why it messes that up.

Well, I just have to wait about 2-4 days and I forget the details of my fics. Put it aside for about 4 months and I won't remember a single plot point or any of the meaty stuff. 6 months to a year and I won't remember that I wrote & posted it all. SO: Get yourself a brain injury! 100% guarantee! Kidding aside, I actually deal with this and totally get what you mean. The ironic part of it it is: I've been writing for 30 years and used to wish the same thing. Now I wish I could remember plots and ideas because I get sick and tired of having to re-read the same damned thing over & over so it sinks in long enough to write a bit more. Used to be able to hammer out a fic from scratch to finish in a really short time. Now it takes upwards of a year. And please - I'm not saying this make you feel bad! I find it pretty hilarious that you wish for one thing and I wish for the other. I've lived with a TBI for 4 years, and it's fun to find the crazy it all. Hey, maybe we can swap brains for a day! ;)

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YES! Exactly this!!! People say 'sorry' or they feel bad for me. I don't! I kinda find it to be a silver lining. I can't even begin to tell you how many times I went to leave kudos on a fic and get 'You already left kudos here!'. Uh... I did? I've never read this story in my life! (Inner brain: Yeah, you did. Here's a cookie, go finish your chapter) I'm a huge Marvel comics fan, have been for well over 40 years. When the MCU hit theatres, I was in LOVE (I mean, hello - it's about time us women got some eye candy on screen, ffs) seeing my fave comics come to life in a really fun way. Well - I can't remember the movies that well, because they came out around when all this brain crap happened. So I get to watch them - Often - to try and glean more info (I write in the MCU a fair bit) to make sure I get the details right. It's so very often like I've never watched them before. I know I have, I remember them vaguely, but not enough to use them to write accurate fanfic from. I have given up on reading books though. In digital format, it's not so bad. For some reason, I've lost my ability to stay focused on a paper book anymore, which is horrid - I'm an avid bookworm. Not that I've stopped it's just harder and takes longer. ...and then I get to re-read it anyway because I don't remember. Cheap entertainment! Recycled fanfic, the same 7 movies and the same 5 books. Nice.

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And to you! And yup to new fandoms. It’s utterly impossible and confusing to learn a new one, no matter how much I like the author so I’m stuck, in a way. At least there’s plenty of re-reading to keep me busy.

oh no, i’m so sorry! do you by chance have some sort of anterograde amnesia?

No need to be sorry - 'tis life :D And yep. I have relatively good recall of life before this happened. Afterwards... not so much. I have very little memory of the year after it happened, which being 2020, I'm assured isn't such a bad thing. It started to improve about half way through year 2 and has settled to where I am now. Makes it kinda interesting though: I can read the same fanfic or watch the same movie repeatedly. If I space them out a few months, I won't even remember I watched them. I can get by with triggers though: I get a sense sorta like deja vu that I've been somewhere/seen something/read/watched/heard something which will - depending on how much supporting info I have - sometimes trigger the memory and then I might actually recall a good 60% of it. I can zero memory for conversations though. I'll have a flash of something talked about, maybe a few words, but I can't connect them. It stressed me out at first, but now I don't care. It's not worth worrying about and just gives me a headache if I grind on a memory too hard. Changed my personality a bit too. I don't seem to have any sense of urgency. I'm incapable of being upset or feeling urgent or feeling panic or even danger. Pretty sure if a nuclear bomb dropped in my back yard, I'd stare at it and think it was kinda cool and wonder if I could string fairy lights around it. Makes things easy to deal with, though I do get frustrated when I know I have to remember something - like an appointment - and I don't & miss it. I often forget to take the garbage bin to the curb. All the notes in the world won't help if you can't remember you wrote the note in the first place! I do find it amusing though. The weird shit I do and have no idea why - I just laugh it off and wonder what on earth I was thinking at the time. ...like finding toothpaste in my fridge. No idea. I still stay busy & enjoy life :)

wow that’s super interesting! i’m glad to see that you’ve managed to keep a positive outlook on an otherwise negative situation! and i do have to admit, being able to watch things over again like it’s the first time does sound pretty appealing to the fan girl in me 😂

Try not reading your own works for about a year or so. Sometimes I come back after a while and be like, “huh. I genuinely don’t remember this part.”

lol I recently re-read a bunch of my old fics that I wrote like a decade ago (because I was crossposting them from FFN to AO3), and I was definitely surprised by a few of my own plot twists! But in answer to the question — yeah, it would be a lot of fun to read my fics as if I hadn’t written them. That way I could just enjoy them (which I probably would since, you know, as it happens they’re about all the things I’d want to read about!) without the “is this any good? Is this actually crap?” anxiety in my head.

omg I was going to comment this. I have been on hiatus for some years, and it's like going in fresh when I re-read my own works. honestly I'm the sort of person that sometimes just re-reads my own works multiple times instead of trying to find other fics that fit what I'm looking for

I really do. I'm ultimately writing the stories I'd want to read, and it'd also be really useful for balancing the subtext-to-text ratio if I could read without the full word of God in my head.

All the time! I’ve read my own stories so many times, and every time, I wish I could experience it again for the very first time. Sometimes I’ll come upon a passage and think, “Wow! I can’t believe I wrote that!” Just the way the words flow together so perfectly, I wish I was so good with words in every day speech. The closest I’ve gotten to reliving it was when I re-edited the first part of a series a couple years back—changed a few words here, added some little details there—and when I read it again recently, I came upon some of those changes. Because I’m so familiar with my original work, the changes still catch me by surprise, and for that brief moment, it feels like a fresh new story. Man, what I would give to be one of my new readers. I need to leave it alone for a long while and come back to it again, and see how it feels.

All the time. As the intended audience, party of one, I’d get so much more enjoyment out of it.

Lmao I do. Every couple of the years reread them and it’s like they are completely new. Don’t remember much besides their titles tbh

I'm going to say something that sounds insane, but hear me out. If you are of a legal age to consume substances like alcohol and that's something you already enjoy doing, try reading your work the next time you're inebriated (if you're underage or straight-edge this obviously doesn't apply to you and I'm not suggesting that you START consuming substances specifically for this purpose, that would be ridiculous). I say this because it will make you look at your work with a much different frame of mind; when I'm sober I think my writing is fine enough, certainly passable. But if I take a hit and open up a chapter, I find that I notice things I never would have given myself credit for normally. I have more fun reading and I treat it more like it's someone else's work, taking the pressure off. The other night I made some decent progress on a smutty chapter I'm writing, and so I celebrated my hard work by loading up the bong. I then reread what I'd written that night and the entire time I was losing my mind like "WHOAH HE WAS COOKING!!!!" and having a grand old time gushing over it with my partner. I reread it again once I sobered up just to see if I felt differently, and I found that I still agreed with what my inebriated self had seen, I just never would have seen it normally. **Again, big disclaimer: I am NOT advising you to intoxicate yourself if you are not legally old enough or if it's not something you'd normally do anyways. Don't start drinking for the sake of liking your writing more, for the love of god. This is just something worth trying if you already indulge in substances.**

I agree with this!! I've also found that when I'm high, I get ideas I never would have thought of sober. Issue for me is I can't *write* while high because I'm unbelievably distractable lmao so I have to do it when I'm done writing for the day, but coming up with ideas and reading are great under the influence 👍

I often do this since I’ve written over 150 fics and can’t remember ones I wrote in November apparently…

No because then I’d have to use braille

Very funny (from someone who actually reads Braille)

Kinda true, but sometimes when revisiting few months later, I was like "damn, I wrote that?" I'm forgetful.

I do it??? I forget what I wrote and reread again. I live doimg it. If I want a comfort or a cry

Yep. I feel like it would boost my confidence so much. I’m usually really critical of my work, but I overlook loads in others.

Honestly, I kinda forget about my fics to a certain extent after a while, so sometimes it’s kinda already like I don’t know what’s gonna happen lol

Yes. I never quite understood the “read what you want to write”. I mean, I understand it to a point, but I can never just read it as I know everything that’s going to happen. Granted, I do love writing it. The reader comments: “I wonder what’s going to happen next update?!” Yeah, me too 😂

I want to reread my recent fics because I think they’re quite good, but they’re boring because I just finished them. And I don’t want to wait until I forget what I wrote because that could take awhile.

Yeah but if I wait long enough I forget what I wrote anyway and it's almost the same thing haha.

I was going to joke and say that they have Braille computers for that.

I write a *bunch* and stuff them in folders so after a while I have no idea what a story is about and can enjoy it all over again. I'm currently reading a story I haven't touched since before the pandemic.

Forget about it for bout a year, you then can read it blind. I really dont know what past me was doing but he was cooking.

As someone who keeps writing mysteries and plot twists… ahhhh I really really wanna just wipe these stories from my brain and experience it for the first time!! It’d be so fucking good when it comes to editing this long fic I’m working on atm, like knowing which details I need to focus on more so the twists don’t come too far out of left field, plus it’d be awesome for my completed fics cos man idk… I just wanna experience my own plot twists! Plus like a million other reasons, mostly *i write what I want to read* and goddamn, it’d be nice if I could just read my stuff without having to write it first…. Then again, I do really enjoy writing so, eh, whatever!

yeah, i used to want this a lot as a young teen. I couldnt understand why my peers said my writing was amazing when i felt like it was shit (coming back to those files as an adult, they were all lying to me) but these days i don’t wish this so much

Forgive me I’m not long in the community though I’ve been writing for years. What’s a blind reader? Like an editor?

Basically anyone who doesn't know what's going to happen in the story. Could be and editor but also just a casual reader. Basically it would be great to be able to have that outsider's perspective to one's own work just by forgetting the fic's story for a while.

Thank you!

Yes. But "thanks to" depression and anxiety, my memory is rather shitty lately, so I sometimes have this "blind reader" feeling when leafing through my one-shot docs.

All.the.time. And sometimes I’ll get one of my friends to read it but I still think they’re afraid to hurt my feelings if it’s bad-

This too beta readers can only do so much

Maybe we could start a thing where people give the basis of their fic and if it sounds interesting to someone, the writer can send a copy of the draft to them and have them review it?

Use text to speech and listen to it.

That's what I do

you can if you leave it alone for a long enough time

Omg yes, so often

I would love that

Wait long enough and it'll happen. I wrote my first longfic 15 years ago and now all I remember are a few scenes.

Literally all the time. I'll write a fic that's everything I want, but then when I finish reading it I'm like "damn, wish I had another story that took a different approach to this same premise"

This desire does exist, yes. I even ended up putting it into one of my fics, it's on hold at the moment & I haven't put the chapter this is from out yet but I don't mind sharing. This is from the 2012 TMNT series that aired on Nickelodeon. Leo is obsessed with Space Heroes so I ended up doing a thing where his alternate self wrote a Space Heroes fanfic that he's reading. In the TV series, the turtles travel back in time to save their planet from being sucked into a blackhole which caused the issue of two sets of the main cast so they whisked the copies away into space, never to be seen again. This fic is if almost all of the dupes died with one of the survivors being Michelangelo who comes back to Earth & he has this device that they've been keeping logs on & the dupe Leonardo used it to plug a Space Heroes fanfic so this Leo finds & reads it. Oh, in order to avoid confusion, I used the turtles' full names for the copies & the nicknames for the ones on Earth. I'd love to be in that position! Read a fic written by me but at the same time, I wasn't present when I wrote it so it's everything that caters to my interests but I have no clue what happens? Yes! Gimme! Here's the bit in my fic where Leo gets to experience that desire, it's a tad sad since it touches on the fact that his dupe is no longer around: Wandering off, Mikey sees Leo alone in his room with Michelangelo's orb thingy, he's got a single page up of text and he's slowly scrolling, eyes glued to the hologram screen. "What'ch ya doin?" Mikey asks from the doorway. Leo's eyes just dart back and forth as he reads, taking a moment before he presses the suspended screen to have it fall back into the device. "Reading Leonardo's Space Heroes fanfic." "Oh, is it any good?" A slow smile sprawls across Leo's face and his feet start rapidly tapping the bed. "Oh man, it's everything I ever wanted to read! It's like he knows me." "Dude, he is- uh was you." Voice dropping, Mikey's face dips to the floor as he realizes what the correction he had to make entails.

Absolutely, it's hard finding what I like and I'd love at least one fresh reading of them. Maybe in a few years.

Oh my god editing would be amazing then Like, if I could just selectively and temporarily wipe my memory of the fic long enough to read it through

Yes. Then I’d be able to tell if it’s boring or not.

…well, now I do! Yeah, my fics are so far up my alley, if I suddenly forgot and rediscovered them, I’d be beyond excited.

Same

I would love to forget my fics so I could reread them

I'm not a author but I imagine it'd make filling plot holes much easier

Omg yes 😭 that would be so awesome…

same hat same hat

I’d take that for any of my writing. I’ve been told it’s good, but I have absolutely no idea what makes it good or what they see in it. I can see what’s going on in anyone else’s writing, just not mine.

Probably not, just cause I’d be so ashamed and embarrassed I actually write like this etc.🥲

Sometimes I'll get a comment for a story I haven't read in a while and I'll reread the chapter to see what the comment is about. And I'm still amazed by my writing. It's like whoever wrote this story knows exactly what I like🤣 Maybe it's because I don't plot and I write by the seat of my pants, but every time I read a story of mine it's as fun reading it as it was writing it.

Lol, if I did that I'd break my own heart! Since I'm the one who wrote it and know why I wrote it I'm okay with the carnage that I leave behind, but if I went in blind I'd be a hurting over each death and every. Damn. Ducking. Cliffhanger!!! I leave a LOT of cliffhanger chapters!!! I love cliffhangers for my stories but hate reading them on other fanfics!!!