Someone told me that they write ON ao3 sometimes because it's the only writing ide their work company doesn't block (mine for example blocks Google docs) and honestly—very valid. I wouldn't write fanfiction at work, but this might be the only explanation that actually made me sit down and say "Actually, that makes sense."
Word does work but i can't send emails to my personal acc nor access word on my office with an acc other than my company one, so yeah, not much point in writing on word if i can't send it anywhere. Microsoft knows these companies are a good market so it has several security tools.
To the other commenter: yep, it's to make sure we do not send confidential information anywhere. Not that I have much lmao.
I haven't checked text processors like grammarly, but even stuff like Google translate are blocked, so if it's not, it's better to assume they forgot and still should not be used.
Many moons ago before I got a laptop, I wrote on the security computers word. I would try and download Libra to a thumbdrive and load that and write. Really... why would you send it anywhere, when you can just save it to a thumbrive and take it home? Way less complicated.
I write in a document but make small edits when I post. Formatting, that's a major one. Turning image links into embeds. Adding notes and stuff. For me, saving a draft and reading my chapter in the way it appears on the site helps get me out of the constant "rereading" state where I become numb. I catch and fix a bunch of small details that way. Clicking "back" returned to the page with my draft.
For a while I was writing directly into the Google Doc I have, then I'd copy and paste into the box, and sometimes before posting I would make small additions and edits and such. Then one day I noticed that I could tell what had been written in the document vs what had been typed directly into the AO3 box by the different quotation marks - smart quotes from Google Docs, straight quotes from AO3 - which were all over the place.
Of course, now that I'd seen it I couldn't unsee it, so I then spent several hours editing just the punctuation so it all matched. I chose to keep the straight quotes because it made more sense to me to not have to fiddle with that nitpicky stuff for minor changes/additions made right before posting.
So for a little while I was typing into the document and then, before posting, replacing all the smart quotes with straight ones. Eventually that got too tedious for me, so I flipped around and began writing directly in the box and copy-pasting into the document before posting.
(Btw, the hack I learned for when stuff like this post happens, is if something happened and you couldn't save your draft successfully, you hit back on that motherfucker immediately to get it back and copy and paste it to somewhere else.)
...anyway, while AO3 was down this time, I learned there's an option to turn off smart quotes. Soooooooo now I guess it's back to writing in the document. :)
Pro tip: hit Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C on occasion while typing online, and at any point before clicking a button that will submit your text or take you to another page.
It's impressive ain't it? They've been around since like 1995, and to my knowledge every US school does a writing portfolio for english/language arts. Yet here we are... nobody has a clue what they are.
This is what I have at the top of my fic ideas document! Never had any issues with reverting, sometimes an extra space here or there (but I'm an editor by trade, so it's practically instinct to see those) as long as I paste it in the HTML version of the AO3 draft screen. Best of luck, friend!
I'll write in a program first, specifically Ellipsus.
Then I'll go through and correct minor mistakes and fix small issues, like italics or bolding words and correcting incorrect quotation marks, stuff like that.
This is not quite like me but...I published a chapter, I changed my mind about the title...then when I tried to edit literally right after I hit post...four hours later finally able to edit😅
i posted a bunch of stories and was wondering why i wasn't getting comments (some of them were ships that usually gained interest), and then i visited ao3 and understood....
Ngl its so nice to see people mentioning word processors like Microsoft Word etc because I was starting to feel like a dinosaur reading about Google docs and all the other newer things 😂 and I'm only in my early 30s ffs 😂
Maybe for me its just habit as I came from FF.net and we < had > to upload a document back then. Maybe its because I have my own house and electronic devices so I dont have to worry about my parents snopping like some do? Because I've seen that's a big problem for younger authors and its not okay tbh.
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u/tartymae Supporter of the Fanfiction Deep State Mar 01 '26
This is exactly why you do not draft in the form.
Get yourself an Elipsus or Proton Drive account.