Beyond the Kudos

At the end of every chapter of the stories I posted online on Archives of Our Own (Ao3), is a short message I leave to the reader: “Always remember to smile”. Originally it was just a small little thing I came up with to avoid an abrupt ending to my long author’s notes in every chapter. I also thought it would make me unique, something the many readers of the internet would know me by. Branding, if you will. Little did I know just how much this phrase would mean to me the more I continued to write. 

My writing journey began out of sheer boredom. It was the middle of the COVID-19 Lockdown 5 years ago, and despite not being the most extroverted of people, I missed going to school. Face to face classes meant lunch time hangouts, the intrigue of the school’s gossip mills, and just a sense of mystery, not knowing what was going to happen that day. The quarantine removed all of that and replaced it with a boring monotony that I quickly grew sick and tired of. 

The days began to bleed into one another, a blurred montage of eating, sleeping, and chores. It was a cycle that didn't just feel repetitive—it felt corrosive, slowly gnawing at my sanity. I tried to drown the monotony in video games, but even that escape was rationed by my technology. My computer at the time was a relic, wheezing under the weight of anything created after 2015. I had an infinite amount of free time and a machine that couldn't keep up with it.

When my computer failed me, I turned to the screen for a different kind of companionship, consuming movies and anime at a rate that only a lockdown schedule could permit. It was during this binge that I finally finished the My Hero Academia (MHA) anime, but the end of the episodes didn't satisfy my restlessness. I needed more, so I transitioned to the manga, devouring the source material to see where the story was headed. Yet, even the official panels couldn't contain my growing imagination.

It was around this time I learned about and got curious about fanfiction. Now caught up with MHA’s story, I wanted to see more of the world I’ve grown to love. A world of superpowers and heroes. So I began diving into its fanfiction, fascinated by how other writers took the bones of the original story and rebuilt them into something entirely new. It felt familiar, echoing the way I used to play with toys as a child—taking the established figures in my hand and inventing my own rules, my own conflicts, and my own endings. I wasn't just a spectator anymore. I was watching a workshop in progress, seeing firsthand how a single character could be a thousand different people depending on who held the pen.

Eventually, being the quick reader that I am, I ran out of fanfiction stories that I liked. I’ve read through all the “What ifs?” I wanted to see, short snippets that you could see happening in the canon story, and the chaotic, nonsensical 'crack fics'—stories that threw logic out the window for the sake of humor and absurd character interactions. The boredom returned, and it was even more frustrating now. But in the midst of that boredom, an idea was formed: “If no one is writing what you want to read, why not do it yourself?”.

And so in one night, I wrote and posted the first chapter of my very first story on Ao3. It was a simple power fantasy piece and a crossover between MHA and my favorite video game. There was nothing special to it. Just pure amateurish writing that 14 year old me managed to conjure up with his basic understanding of creative writing and experience in journalism. I went to sleep that night, content with simply trying something new. 

The next morning, I woke up to something I never expected. More than ten users commented their praises on my fic, and many more leaving a like or “Kudos” as Ao3 called it. This made me continue writing, and pump out chapter after chapter. In a span of a week, I went from nothing to almost a hundred kudos, and hundreds more hits, unique users that read my story. 

I can still remember the day this experiment of mine solidified itself as my hobby. I was so excited for the next chapter of my own story that one day I woke up at 3:00 AM, booted up my computer and started drafting. Planning plot lines, constructing character arcs, and  building the story’s world.“This is really fun,” I realized with a tired smile, “I want to do this until I physically can’t.”

My amateurish writing slowly improved as I took in feedback from commenters and doubled my consumption of media. Japanese stories like Hyouka and My Teen Romantic Comedy served as major sources of inspiration. Through them themes like identity, human connection, self discovery and self improvement became cornerstones of my writing. It was through my research and growth as a writer that I realized something: stories shouldn’t just be an entertaining series of events, they should have meaning, they should tell a message to the reader. 

Even the simplest of stories have a message; Rocky is a boxing movie that tells you in your face to never give up while some need a more delicate touch to uncover like The Little Prince telling you that what's important in life is invisible to our eyes. For a while I struggled with this aspect of my writing. I had my plots, my themes but what am I trying to say? What should my reader get from my stories beyond entertainment? 

The answer, I eventually realized, had been hiding in plain sight at the bottom of every chapter I had ever posted. My sign-off, "Always remember to smile," was more than just branding or a polite way to end a note. It was a core philosophy I hadn't yet learned to articulate. It represented optimism in the face of overwhelming adversity—a lesson deeply rooted in the DNA of My Hero Academia. In that world, a hero’s smile isn't just a facial expression, it is a shield for the people and a way to trick the mind into courage. I realized that my writing was an extension of that act. I was writing to find light in the monotony of lockdown, and I wanted my readers to find that same light in my words. I wanted to create stories that brought a smile to people’s faces. 

But I knew this sort of message can’t be properly expressed through fanfiction. I needed to create my own worlds, my own stories from the ground up. I needed to properly learn how to write. Once I got to the Creative Writing program at University of the Philippines - Mindanao, I knew I had to learn as much as I possibly could if I wanted to accomplish my goal. It’s why I decided to not use my usual style and themes when doing my Creative Writing assignments. I wanted to experiment more while also focusing on improving at the basics. 

The first big assignment we got was the Food Essay which I found a bit tough initially. I’m not that much of a foodie and I couldn’t really think of a dish unique to Davao City that I had memories with. Thankfully we learned that the dish didn’t need to be unique, what was important was our experience with it and how we wrote it. 

The next challenge I had was the fact that it should be a creative essay. This was the more difficult part and where I had the most struggle. I’m extremely used to writing formal essays, the ones with a set introduction, body and conclusion across a minimum of three paragraphs. So for about a week I got stuck on the question of “How do you make an essay creative?”, and I found my answer through onomatopoeia. 

In Thud, Thud, Yum, I used onomatopoeia to give the piece this sense of rhythm. I found that simply describing the act of tenderizing meat was dull and boring to read through in my drafts. By separating sections of the essay with “Thud, thud, thud” and incorporating it into my narrative, I found that it gave my piece some color and was much more fun to read through. 

While I’ve done my revisions of my Food Essay, if I were to revise it even more, I would’ve liked to add more details about the dish, Pork Steak, itself. With my inexperience with cooking and food, I couldn’t properly give the subject of my essay the justice it deserved. There was also the fact that the recipe featured is a secret one that my dad learned from my great grandmother. Better descriptions would truly make that piece all the more better. 

We also had two grouped assignments, one for Playwright and another that involved writing an epilogue to the story Penmanship by Jose "Butch" Dalisay. To be completely honest, I didn’t do much in these two assignments. I let others take the lead, and I was content acting in a more supportive role. 

For the Penmanship assignment, my main contribution was editing our video presentation. I had a lot of prior experience with video editing so I didn’t have many issues with editing the video. My main problem manifested in my struggle to find the right clips. As a group we agreed on using the “Before” movie trilogy as the backdrop for the video. It was really tough getting a good flow going between the clips and making sure I didn’t accidentally reuse one. As for the Playwright, I had a minor role as the airplane pilot while at the same time managing the different special effects. 

Another of our individual assignments was the one for Fiction writing. Unexpectedly, this assignment was the one I had the most trouble with. Not only was the prompt an event that made you lose your childhood innocence, it was also realist fiction. My entire writing journey, I’ve only written speculative fiction so this was a pretty tough curveball I got served up with. 

My initial submission, Jump;Reload, a story about how devastated I felt when I couldn’t stop a game character’s suicide attempt, failed to satisfy the requirement of being a realist fiction. I either had to make it more realistic, or go back to the drawing board. I decided to go for the latter. 

My biggest obstacle with the Fiction assignment was how I wasn’t exactly the most innocent kid. Growing up, I watched a lot of World War 2 documentaries with my dad and watched movies that were rated for adults. So at an early age I was made aware of the potential for evil that humanity had. Thankfully, as time was running out, I remembered one instance in my childhood that really did shake me a bit. 

It was the story of how our old bedroom suddenly had a giant animal sticker on the wall. All I could remember was a fight between my parents but I couldn’t recall the reason as to why. So I really made my realist fiction, fiction, by making up around 60% of the details of the story. I didn’t remember what the animal sticker covering the damaged wall was so I made it an elephant, as a nod to the story’s theme of my parents acting like nothing was wrong and the title, The Elephant in the Room. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a workshop for revisions so I couldn’t get good feedback for this submission. 

Our last assignment for Poetry was done in pairs. I found this surprisingly easy despite poetry being my weakness in the field of creative writing. We originally wanted to do a poem about the current president, but decided to use a different controversial politician itself. My partner set up our Sonnetina amazingly with her first quintain, I just had to suggest some adjustments for her wording and it was easy work following it up. My only note for revision would be to have our lines be more poetic and use stronger language that still flows well. 

There’s still much to do, and much to learn until I’m confident enough to write my own, original novel. My poetic language needs a lot of work, and I found that I could still be quite inflexible with prompts. But I also realized that the sheer trial and error I used when writing fanfiction has served me well here. It’ll still be a while until I can achieve my goal of writing a story that brings a smile to people’s faces, but I won’t quit. All I have to do is smile and push on.