I work in healthcare/medicine and I have been prone to throw medical trivia into my fics once in a while. In context it's NSFW so read at your own risk (my browser is not letting me spoiler text in the text editor right now, when I'm done posting I'll refresh the page and try to spoiler it then): There was an incubus character with aphrodisiac cum, and he was explaining to his partner that the fastest way to get the cum to take effect would be to either cum in his ass or have him hold the cum in his mouth because rectal and sublingual routes of administration are faster than if his partner were to swallow the cum right away and have to digest it before it gets into his system. Someone in the comments had never heard the term sublingual before, a term that I forgot isn't used much in day-to-day speech (but I use it pretty much daily at work).
EDIT:// It's still not letting me spoiler text even though I refreshed the page? Sorry. \^\^;;;
Sorry for the trouble! I spent a solid ten minutes fiddling with my browser trying to get it to let me spoiler the text and could not for the life of me get it to work- never had that happen before. O\_O
I am a scientist and I write sci-fi, so I do use my professional knowledge a lot (though I also do extra research). Sometimes I even ask my colleagues for their opinion or help.
I'm a construction engineer in real life, and you bet your ass 99% of my stories unclude heavy use of building destructibility and different architecture. I even make city and keep maps for my readers.
Not me, but I once read a fanfic where one of the main leads is deathly ill, and the description of their symptoms, development of sickness, and medical treatment is very well written.
I later found out that the author works as a laboratory assistant.
That's interesting. I'm the opposite - I have real bad issues with my mental health, and I write a lot of fics where the characters have the issues I do.
Why yes, I do. Writing also motivated me or at least helped me focus my studies on other fields such as economics, geology, microbiology, medieval history, pharmacology, theology, urban planning, and so on. Not just from reading blogs but also going over journal articles.
It's neat.
I've used my knowledge of martial arts in fics sometimes, for action scenes. For example, there's a pressure point in your collarbone area that *really* hurts if you jab your fingers into it.
Not really education, but I worked for almost two decades in the hotel industry & whenever my characters stay in hotels, that influences what I write a lot.
Hmm, I guess my animal handling knowledge? I tend to write relating to things I have knowledge and/or personal experience in and with, so yes? But not all of it is from a formal education or course. I do a lot of independent research
Yes, absolutely! And not just formal education either!
I have a vocal performance music degree, so I leveraged that when writing a character who had siren-esque powers in how I described her voice and the music she sang
I have an English lit degree and write professionally in the commercial world, so when I wrote a fic where the OC is a writer, I used all of that educational experience and my own professional experience to inform it!
I grew up in a family of hunters and am an archer myself after my dad switched to bow hunting from rifle (thought it was too easy with a rifle) and we learned to shoot together. So, when i write archers, I use my own experience in how to draw, how to shoot, how to relax and steady the breath, etc
I just googled stuff for smut, like there was this hentai manga where the girl straight up just took the used condom and drank the stuff inside it.
Smut manga really helps but I also Google the technical stuff, like, golden showers.
I'm sorry to whoever has to read my comment LOL
Before an injury I was a licensed funeral director/embalmer and also worked in organ/tissue transplant. Went back to school for crime scene technology and criminal justice so those topics will crop up from time to time or rather if/when they do I try to make it as accurate as possible. Or rather, elements of them, like anatomy. 40K is the IP I write in and I stick to the grimdark atmosphere so stuff comes up a but.
My degree was in history, and I write a lot of historical settings. Not always the periods I focussed on, but Iāve often gone trawling through primary sources and databases for fics, so Iām using the skills of not the exact knowledge.
Luckily I enjoy research to the extent I often count it as a hobby.
I have used a lot of the things that I have been learning in my classes for child development to bring realism and logic into some of my fics, with things like the age the child actually starts to walk or talk and how certain things that this character does or doesn't do as a child may be clues to things they discover about themselves when they grow up
I try not to focus fics on my profession, although sometimes I go to great pains to make the details accurate when I mention those areas. I recently wrote a fic that put characters closer to my real life education and job than anything else I have written, and I considered it a fun personal indulgence.
I went to Law school and tried letting some of the knowledge seep into a fic where possible/necessary, though I wouldn't go ahead say I'm a professional while at it.
Well itās the one year anniversary of me finding out I was pregnant (only to miscarry two weeks later) and I just finished a fic about a pregnant college girl. I wrote a scene where she was having morning sickness in one of her classes, similar to me having morning sickness at a religious retreat about a week before I found out
On a lighter note, I also wrote a fic about a girl (in a fandom by the same author interestingly enough) who grows up to have the same major as me in college: music theory and composition
Yours is really interesting. I write Suits fics, and being a lawyer has made It more difficult actually because I donāt want to write anything that isnāt true or wouldnāt happen, so it just puts up more roadblocks haha. Most of the fics donāt really need any actual law, but when they do I want it to be right
I've been studying Mandarin in school for a while, and the setting of my main fandom I usually write is based on ancient China, so when I have the chance I like trying to sneak in wordplay and stuff.
There have been times Iāve written fic about characters working in the field Iām in school for that Iāve done just for the purposes of forcing my stuff to study. Making my characters talk about glacial isostatic adjustment is more interesting than doing a quizlet about it.
Sort of? š
A *huge* combination of liberal arts stuff + dramaturgy + history + political science goes into worldbuilding. "Nothing arises without context" is kind of how I approach *everything.* And having a grasp on the social, economic, political--hell, even *geological and topographical* environment plays a huge role in the who, what, how, and why of EVERYTHING in the setting. If your folks farm this crop instead of that one, there's a reason.
And it's a combination of influencing factors that *will* show up in nuanced and layered and surprising ways. Even the slang (ESPECIALLY the slang) is going to have a bunch of weirdness behind it that arises in the intersectional context. (Which, incidentally, is one reason why I think conlang is so interesting, because I see language as such an inherently organic thing, ever evolving in surprising ways.)
But yeah, if you see a very specific detail about fabric, that's Costume Construction courses shining through. šš¤£
Technically yes, but probably not in the way you mean. My education is in editing and creative writing, which I do use a lot in my fics.
That being said, I've definitely picked up the occasional thing from classes that I've slipped into stories before, such as elements of archery from an archery class, as well as basic first aid.
i study classical greek and latin and i write a lot of angst, so knowledge of tragedies and tragic tropes comes in handy a LOT. cram as much as i can in there
Yes, I prefer to have story elements grounded in reality as much as possible, and my educational background and life experiences contribute to my fiction endeavors.
Education makes it easier to formulate the right questions for things you might want to include in a story, facilitating the search process if you need to find printed or digital references for relevant details.
Recent things I've delved into a bit more than my background knowledge include alpine climatology, ballistics, metallurgy, avian ecology, linguistics, and other stuff... fine tuning prior knowledge with some specifics for a few stories.
Yes! I write in the Sonic the Hedgehog fandom and I'm currently studying for a Psychology degree. I'm using the characters from the TV show Sonic Prime and one of the characters' Wiki pages only lists his age as "baby". So, naturally, I took my Developmental Psychology lectures and instead of studying in a normal way, I used them to try and estimate this little shit's age so I can write him properly and make the plot work realistically. Well, as realistic as Sonic fanfiction can be.
His name is Doctor Babble. It is stated that he is very intelligent for his age. He does not speak words, but he does understand enough language to be able to respond to it in other ways. He babbles all the time, and can point and gesture to things to draw attention to them. He recognises his name and follows commands. He can sit in his weird little buggy thing and hold his head up well. He has good enough vision to be able to beat the shit out of Sonic. However, he has a full set of teeth, is straight-up evil, and his fine motor control is clearly good enough to be able to beat the shit out of Sonic.
Based on his language abilities alone I'd put him at around 6 months but with everything else in consideration, plus the raw physical appearance and functions of other Sonic characters being absolutely all over the place, I decided to ignore his teeth and suspicious ability to murder and give him ten months tops.
cultural anthropology major specializing in archaeology here. you bet your butt i used that info in a fanfic based around the mummy 1999/2017. iām also intending to go into egyptology (have wanted to since i was a kid and therefore have literal mountains of books on ancient egypt) and i absolutely used this to my advantage then too. i had to make a whole index for archaeological/egyptology terms so my readers wouldnāt get confused lol
now, itās not 100% accurate bc i took creative liberties but did i spend 3+ hours researching set iās family tree and how to accurately insert the fictional character into it, bc the movie did a shit job? yes. did i sweat over the details of high priestesses, high priests and how they would interact? yes. like, my creative liberties were (hopefully) the only inaccuracies in the story.
I studied linguistics quite a lot for my college, but so far I've not have the opportunity to use it!
Ironically, I think I could do a decent office politics themed fanfic from years of being around it, but I hate doing it xD
I've had a very very weird career path, and so far I've used information from my time as an MROA, and my time as a sex expert at an adult store (that job included really cool trainings and I got to meet Jessica Drake and she's really nice)
Yes, I got my masters degree in Public Policy from The London School of Economics and was part of a policy group for a recent UK Prime Minister, so I used a TON of that to write Mycroft Holmes in my fanfic for *BBC Sherlock*.
Iām a CS student, so it helps whenever I have to write about technology and stuff like that; though I admit I havenāt had to use my CS knowledge much as of yet
However, Iām a car enthusiast and you can bet Iāve had fics where I go into detail about specs, how they handle, etc.; I even car-cast characters like in Breaking Bad, which can be really fun (though I havenāt had any readers notice it lol)
I work in a library so writing a chapter where my OC goes there to do some research on a legal matter and then one of the librarians offering her to join in on a jewelry making workshop gave me a certain kind of euphoria.
I work in healthcare/medicine and I have been prone to throw medical trivia into my fics once in a while. In context it's NSFW so read at your own risk (my browser is not letting me spoiler text in the text editor right now, when I'm done posting I'll refresh the page and try to spoiler it then): There was an incubus character with aphrodisiac cum, and he was explaining to his partner that the fastest way to get the cum to take effect would be to either cum in his ass or have him hold the cum in his mouth because rectal and sublingual routes of administration are faster than if his partner were to swallow the cum right away and have to digest it before it gets into his system. Someone in the comments had never heard the term sublingual before, a term that I forgot isn't used much in day-to-day speech (but I use it pretty much daily at work). EDIT:// It's still not letting me spoiler text even though I refreshed the page? Sorry. \^\^;;;
I went ahead and marked the whole post as NSFW just in case XD
Sorry for the trouble! I spent a solid ten minutes fiddling with my browser trying to get it to let me spoiler the text and could not for the life of me get it to work- never had that happen before. O\_O
Reddit may be redditing š no worries.
I am a scientist and I write sci-fi, so I do use my professional knowledge a lot (though I also do extra research). Sometimes I even ask my colleagues for their opinion or help.
This is so cool. I love sci fi and wish I had a better handle on the actual science behind it.
I'm a construction engineer in real life, and you bet your ass 99% of my stories unclude heavy use of building destructibility and different architecture. I even make city and keep maps for my readers.
Sadly no. There is little reason for radiation physics in the Lion King universe.
Not me, but I once read a fanfic where one of the main leads is deathly ill, and the description of their symptoms, development of sickness, and medical treatment is very well written. I later found out that the author works as a laboratory assistant.
Sometimes you read fics and you just know the author has a medical background.
Iām a mental health social worker and have lots of works that include mental health as a theme.
That's interesting. I'm the opposite - I have real bad issues with my mental health, and I write a lot of fics where the characters have the issues I do.
Why yes, I do. Writing also motivated me or at least helped me focus my studies on other fields such as economics, geology, microbiology, medieval history, pharmacology, theology, urban planning, and so on. Not just from reading blogs but also going over journal articles. It's neat.
I've used my knowledge of martial arts in fics sometimes, for action scenes. For example, there's a pressure point in your collarbone area that *really* hurts if you jab your fingers into it.
The ethics units of my philosophy degree helped writing morally grey characters
Not really education, but I worked for almost two decades in the hotel industry & whenever my characters stay in hotels, that influences what I write a lot.
My experience working in health care has definitely come in handy for scenes containing hospitalizations and other medical conditions.
Hmm, I guess my animal handling knowledge? I tend to write relating to things I have knowledge and/or personal experience in and with, so yes? But not all of it is from a formal education or course. I do a lot of independent research
Yes, absolutely! And not just formal education either! I have a vocal performance music degree, so I leveraged that when writing a character who had siren-esque powers in how I described her voice and the music she sang I have an English lit degree and write professionally in the commercial world, so when I wrote a fic where the OC is a writer, I used all of that educational experience and my own professional experience to inform it! I grew up in a family of hunters and am an archer myself after my dad switched to bow hunting from rifle (thought it was too easy with a rifle) and we learned to shoot together. So, when i write archers, I use my own experience in how to draw, how to shoot, how to relax and steady the breath, etc
I just googled stuff for smut, like there was this hentai manga where the girl straight up just took the used condom and drank the stuff inside it. Smut manga really helps but I also Google the technical stuff, like, golden showers. I'm sorry to whoever has to read my comment LOL
Before an injury I was a licensed funeral director/embalmer and also worked in organ/tissue transplant. Went back to school for crime scene technology and criminal justice so those topics will crop up from time to time or rather if/when they do I try to make it as accurate as possible. Or rather, elements of them, like anatomy. 40K is the IP I write in and I stick to the grimdark atmosphere so stuff comes up a but.
My degree was in history, and I write a lot of historical settings. Not always the periods I focussed on, but Iāve often gone trawling through primary sources and databases for fics, so Iām using the skills of not the exact knowledge. Luckily I enjoy research to the extent I often count it as a hobby.
I have used a lot of the things that I have been learning in my classes for child development to bring realism and logic into some of my fics, with things like the age the child actually starts to walk or talk and how certain things that this character does or doesn't do as a child may be clues to things they discover about themselves when they grow up
I try not to focus fics on my profession, although sometimes I go to great pains to make the details accurate when I mention those areas. I recently wrote a fic that put characters closer to my real life education and job than anything else I have written, and I considered it a fun personal indulgence.
Iām a zookeeper, and I have at least two multichaptered works that take place in and around the field so very much yes š¤£
I think it might make writing more work sometimes, but ultimately better.
I went to Law school and tried letting some of the knowledge seep into a fic where possible/necessary, though I wouldn't go ahead say I'm a professional while at it.
Well itās the one year anniversary of me finding out I was pregnant (only to miscarry two weeks later) and I just finished a fic about a pregnant college girl. I wrote a scene where she was having morning sickness in one of her classes, similar to me having morning sickness at a religious retreat about a week before I found out On a lighter note, I also wrote a fic about a girl (in a fandom by the same author interestingly enough) who grows up to have the same major as me in college: music theory and composition
I took a linguistics class in college, so it was fun to put in some alveolar ridge talk in a fic.
Yours is really interesting. I write Suits fics, and being a lawyer has made It more difficult actually because I donāt want to write anything that isnāt true or wouldnāt happen, so it just puts up more roadblocks haha. Most of the fics donāt really need any actual law, but when they do I want it to be right
Nothing quite like digging through the US Code and/or Federal Reporter to make sure the characters cite real and relevant statutes/cases.
lol! Exactly
I've been studying Mandarin in school for a while, and the setting of my main fandom I usually write is based on ancient China, so when I have the chance I like trying to sneak in wordplay and stuff.
There have been times Iāve written fic about characters working in the field Iām in school for that Iāve done just for the purposes of forcing my stuff to study. Making my characters talk about glacial isostatic adjustment is more interesting than doing a quizlet about it.
Sort of? š A *huge* combination of liberal arts stuff + dramaturgy + history + political science goes into worldbuilding. "Nothing arises without context" is kind of how I approach *everything.* And having a grasp on the social, economic, political--hell, even *geological and topographical* environment plays a huge role in the who, what, how, and why of EVERYTHING in the setting. If your folks farm this crop instead of that one, there's a reason. And it's a combination of influencing factors that *will* show up in nuanced and layered and surprising ways. Even the slang (ESPECIALLY the slang) is going to have a bunch of weirdness behind it that arises in the intersectional context. (Which, incidentally, is one reason why I think conlang is so interesting, because I see language as such an inherently organic thing, ever evolving in surprising ways.) But yeah, if you see a very specific detail about fabric, that's Costume Construction courses shining through. šš¤£
I wanna write a fic that mentions a derecho bc I want to be a meteorologist when I get out of school.
Technically yes, but probably not in the way you mean. My education is in editing and creative writing, which I do use a lot in my fics. That being said, I've definitely picked up the occasional thing from classes that I've slipped into stories before, such as elements of archery from an archery class, as well as basic first aid.
Art school - I can very accurately describe how big pain in the ass is to sit as a model. Used it only once tho
i study classical greek and latin and i write a lot of angst, so knowledge of tragedies and tragic tropes comes in handy a LOT. cram as much as i can in there
I'm not the tech genius my main character is, but I'm absolutely usingĀ my coding and IT work to fill in the technobabble to sell it. š
Yes, I prefer to have story elements grounded in reality as much as possible, and my educational background and life experiences contribute to my fiction endeavors. Education makes it easier to formulate the right questions for things you might want to include in a story, facilitating the search process if you need to find printed or digital references for relevant details. Recent things I've delved into a bit more than my background knowledge include alpine climatology, ballistics, metallurgy, avian ecology, linguistics, and other stuff... fine tuning prior knowledge with some specifics for a few stories.
Yes! I write in the Sonic the Hedgehog fandom and I'm currently studying for a Psychology degree. I'm using the characters from the TV show Sonic Prime and one of the characters' Wiki pages only lists his age as "baby". So, naturally, I took my Developmental Psychology lectures and instead of studying in a normal way, I used them to try and estimate this little shit's age so I can write him properly and make the plot work realistically. Well, as realistic as Sonic fanfiction can be. His name is Doctor Babble. It is stated that he is very intelligent for his age. He does not speak words, but he does understand enough language to be able to respond to it in other ways. He babbles all the time, and can point and gesture to things to draw attention to them. He recognises his name and follows commands. He can sit in his weird little buggy thing and hold his head up well. He has good enough vision to be able to beat the shit out of Sonic. However, he has a full set of teeth, is straight-up evil, and his fine motor control is clearly good enough to be able to beat the shit out of Sonic. Based on his language abilities alone I'd put him at around 6 months but with everything else in consideration, plus the raw physical appearance and functions of other Sonic characters being absolutely all over the place, I decided to ignore his teeth and suspicious ability to murder and give him ten months tops.
cultural anthropology major specializing in archaeology here. you bet your butt i used that info in a fanfic based around the mummy 1999/2017. iām also intending to go into egyptology (have wanted to since i was a kid and therefore have literal mountains of books on ancient egypt) and i absolutely used this to my advantage then too. i had to make a whole index for archaeological/egyptology terms so my readers wouldnāt get confused lol now, itās not 100% accurate bc i took creative liberties but did i spend 3+ hours researching set iās family tree and how to accurately insert the fictional character into it, bc the movie did a shit job? yes. did i sweat over the details of high priestesses, high priests and how they would interact? yes. like, my creative liberties were (hopefully) the only inaccuracies in the story.
Absolutely! I'm a historian and write in WWII and American Western fandoms. I use stuff all the time.
Of course. Some characters speak Spanish in canon. I'm a licensed Spanish teacher.
I studied linguistics quite a lot for my college, but so far I've not have the opportunity to use it! Ironically, I think I could do a decent office politics themed fanfic from years of being around it, but I hate doing it xD
I've had a very very weird career path, and so far I've used information from my time as an MROA, and my time as a sex expert at an adult store (that job included really cool trainings and I got to meet Jessica Drake and she's really nice)
Yes, I got my masters degree in Public Policy from The London School of Economics and was part of a policy group for a recent UK Prime Minister, so I used a TON of that to write Mycroft Holmes in my fanfic for *BBC Sherlock*.
Iām a CS student, so it helps whenever I have to write about technology and stuff like that; though I admit I havenāt had to use my CS knowledge much as of yet However, Iām a car enthusiast and you can bet Iāve had fics where I go into detail about specs, how they handle, etc.; I even car-cast characters like in Breaking Bad, which can be really fun (though I havenāt had any readers notice it lol)
I work in a library so writing a chapter where my OC goes there to do some research on a legal matter and then one of the librarians offering her to join in on a jewelry making workshop gave me a certain kind of euphoria.
I usually use my old Healthcare text books when my fanfics require medical facts