archive for writing

If you are working on the story you most want to write out of anything in the world, and you’ve figured out the length, and you know the ending, and you’re putting all your energy into writing it instead of talking with your friends, there comes a point when you pick up momentum and all you have to do is spend time in front of the keyboard and eventually the story will be finished. 

There’s nothing magically about finishing a story. It’s nice to get to post it, but posting a fic usually brings some combination of:

I’m done! I did it! Yay, I get to post.

I wish more people wanted to read this.

So what am I going to write next?

A story can be finished, but writing’s never done. The point isn’t to quantify metrics of productivity. Writing is fun! Writing in fandom where we get to do whatever we want, there are no deadlines, and the only objective is to share something with your friends… that’s as fun as it gets. We get to write about characters we love doing whatever insane thing we imagine. 

There is a joy in getting to write. In spending time chewing on your idea, imagining all the different ways it could go, ultimately crafting the narrative and getting to experience it through the act of writing. You get to do whatever you want. You get to write the story you’d most like to read. You can tailor every single thing exactly the way you like it.

We never “have” to write. There is no consequence to leaving a WIP unfinished. There are millions of unfinished stories on AO3 and I can’t even imagine how many more in people’s docs.

And there’s no moral goodness in writing. Writing isn’t better than reading. Writing isn’t better than going outside or hanging out with friends or cooking a meal from scratch. It’s just one way we can choose to spend our time.

If you don’t want to write, don’t write. It’s okay not to finish your story. 

But if you have the time and energy and inspiration to write, then enjoy getting to spend time with the story. It’s not just about finishing it. Most of the joy comes in the act of writing. Often the best part of writing is when you’re near the end. That point when you’ve figured out the plot, solved the problems, made the decisions, and now all that’s left is putting down the words.

The story becomes this place you’re excited to go, because you want to spend time there. Out of every story in the world, it’s the one you’re the most interested in writing... what could be better? 

If you just keep hanging out in the document, eventually the story will be done.

Congrats!

You need to write the story that you are the most drawn to, the most obsessed with, the most excited about out of everything else in the world.

We have limited time. That’s why AI written stories are so offensive to the fandom ecosystem. AI can produce endless “stories”, humans cannot. Therefore, with our limited time, we need to focus on the thing that we are the most obsessed with. If you can truly tap into your Id and there’s an unhinged and self indulgent story that you really wish you could write… you owe it to yourself to write it. (Don’t forget: the argument for writing weird porn.) You owe it to yourself to make writing as much fun as you possibly can. You owe it to yourself to spend your time writing the things that most compel you.

And you owe it to your readers. If you don’t really feel like writing something, or you’re forcing yourself to fill up the wordcount, readers aren’t going to have fun reading it. 

If you come up with a new idea that you vastly prefer, but aren’t letting yourself write it because you’re trying to finish the story you already started, you can end up stuck. The choice may not be between finishing the story you’ve already started and working on something new. 

If the choice is between not writing at all and writing the thing you actually want to write, you need to write the thing you actually want to write. 

Sometimes once you get that story out of your system, it’ll be more appealing to go back to the previous one. Sometimes when you’re working on something long, you need to just pop off a short little one shot to get that satisfaction of having completed something. It can feel like a break for your brain to focus on something quick and easy for a little while. 

Sometimes you put a story aside and you don’t really know why and then something insane happens in canon and you realize you needed to let real life catch up with what you were writing; the new canon development is exactly the catalyst you need to finish your fic. 

But if you’re not finishing the story because you don’t actually want to write it anymore, you just have to acknowledge it’s not a finishing problem. Alas the spark has been lost. If you keep thinking of new stories that you’d rather write, write those! It’s okay. You don’t have to finish everything you start.

However, if you’re the kind of person who is starting a new document every day, and your drive is full of hundreds of unfinished drafts, your issue may be that you enjoy thinking of ideas and not stories. There’s a difference between an idea and a story. A story has to have setting, plot, characterization, conflict, and resolution. An idea can just have one or two of those things. An idea can be a delicious little flight of fancy, vignette, or moment that has no further significance beyond being important for what it is. Learn to separate ideas from stories to save yourself the headache later on. If all you’ve got is an idea, it might be more fun to just talk about it with a friend or to post it on Tumblr or to write about it in the tags that post that inspired you. Spend time thinking through if something has all the components needed to make it a story before you start, to lighten your ever-growing list of WIPs. Don't hop from idea to idea.

But! If there’s another story you’d prefer to write over the one you’re currently toiling over, write that instead.

There are going to be days (or weeks, or months) where you sit down to write and feel... disconnected. From your voice, from your characters, from your ideas. Like the person who used to write your stories just packed up and left.

They didn't. They're just tired. Here's how to keep writing anyway:

Lower the bar (Until it's on the floor) You are not here to write something brilliant. You are here to write something. A paragraph. A sentence. A single line of dialogue. Movement matters way more than quality.

Write around the story Don't force it. If you can't write the scene, try: ⋆ A character ramble / journal entry ⋆ A conversation that won't be included in the final draft ⋆ A list of things the character would never admit out loud ⋆ A messy summary of what should happen Engage with the story from a different angle.

Borrow a voice until yours comes back No, not with AI. Read something that feels close to what you want to write, or watch a scene that captures the tone, then write immediately after. Not to copy, to reignite your instincts.

Write the emotion, not the plot. What is your character feeling in this moment? What are they afraid of? What do they want but won't say? What's being kept from them? The emotion leads, the plot catches up later.

Stop trying to "feel like a writer" first. You don't write when you feel like a writer. You feel like a writer because you write.

Writing comes out of the desire to communicate. While it's helpful and normal to want to run story ideas by friends, if you spend more time talking about a story than writing, you'll never get it finished.

Explaining your idea over and over again to different people satisfies the need to be communicate. But writing comes from being unsatisfied.

If you want to finish your story, the need to communicate can't be met through conversation with friends, it has to occur within the document.

Tell your group chat and then one other friend your idea when you’re starting out. Get that energy and excitement of knowing that if you put words to a page there people who will read them. And then put all the rest of your communication energy into writing.

When you find yourself wanting to talk more about your story, think about what you’re actually doing. Do you want to write or do you want to yap? If you want to yap, don’t talk about your story. Talk about your pet plot bunnies that you’ve been nourishing over the years and have no intention of ever writing. Go on tumblr and make a post about characterization, or add a bunch of stuff to your queue and fill up the tags. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to yap, but you can’t replace writing with yapping. So just yap about something else.

Lovingly describing your idea and vision is different from working through revisions. If someone has betaed for you and now you’re discussing changes, the arcs in need of revision, the areas where you’re stuck... this helps work towards an end. Sometimes you need other people's perspectives, and workshopping is a beautiful part of the working process. But there's a difference between communicating for the sake of communicating and discussing to solve a problem. For one thing, you have to have a mostly complete draft in order to be able to workshop.

If you spend more time talking about writing than actually writing, you're engaging with the idea of writing. It's fun to think about writing. It's fun to think of the stories that might be, to get to imagine them existing without going the labour of putting words to the page.

There is a short, medium and long version of every story. Just because you can imagine the full 100k words doesn’t mean that you have the interest in writing them.

If you’re stalled out, think about what version of the story you’re trying to write. 

Are you trying to force yourself to write a long story just because you like the idea of it being long? Do you have enough plot to justify the word count? Or, are you trying to force yourself to wrap things up early when the story does need that extra length to explore everything?

Imagine a story where two rival thieves after the same diamond finally hook up after years of smouldering tension…. 

In the 3k word version, they're already trapped in a safe. They immediately have chemistry. History is implied. We see none of the buildup, we just understand where they are and what’s about to happen. They hook up. Story ends. They’re still stuck in the safe. Delicious.

In the 10k word version, we see the planning for the heist. We meet a few of the protagonist’s team members. We start to understand the context, learn about the history between the rival thieves. We see the heist on the page… they break into the bank, disable the alarms, sneak around the security guards. Our protagonist gets into the safe. Their rival is there. They hook up and we understand the context more fully, instead of just having it implied. They escape the safe. We can infer what might come next.

In the 100k word version, we not only meet, but also come understand the different wants and needs of the sixth other thieves in the protagonist’s crew. We see the full the hook up heist, and other heists as well, in detail. We see one that works, and one that goes wrong, building up the tension, introducing law enforcement as another point of conflict. We see the different interactions building across time as the rival spies betray each other, but we also see them save each other that one time. The hook up in the vault is a midway point. We come to understand that one of the spies wants to leave the life. But one of them doesn’t. The police are closing in. Someone they stole form in the past has kidnapped one of the other crew members. They need to return the diamonds, but they’ve already been sold. Threat of being caught becomes real, something has to give. The end of the story gives us closure. We see the escape from the life, the betrayal... the double betrayal when what we thought was a betrayal turns out to to be an escape plan. Yay. We understand the fullness of their happy ending.

Just because you can imagine the full 100,000 word story doesn’t mean that you’re interested in writing it. 

If you have no interest in crafting heist scenarios, or in developing a number of different characters and giving them all their own wants and needs, or in writing action, or doing the plot work to get the double, triple cross.... though you may have imagined the fullness of the epuic version of the story, it’s not the one that you’ll find most joyful to write.

Are you caught in the drudgery of trying to finish a much longer story when you've already written the part that captured your heart? It’s extremely valid to have a larger story in your head, but to carve out the portion of it that you want to write.

Or, inversely, are you trying to force an ending on the shorter story when what you really want is to stay with the characters for another year and craft that 100k word epic?

Don't get stuck on what it could be. It's very common to know more of the story than what you actually write. It helps a world feel lived in. It allows you to decide what details to include. Ideas are wonderful, but they're different from stories; you don't always have to turn the fullness of your idea into a story.

i see so many posts on tumblr about people not being able to finish their stories, so i'm going to make some posts about how to get that thing done.

firstly, do you actually know the end of your story? or did you only think up the premise? a premise asks "wouldn't it be cool if..." and ending says "this was the point of it all."

what is the main theme, what is the story trying to say, what am i trying to show the main character learned? what was the protagonists' core need or goal or objective throughout the story, and did they meet, achieve, or succeed in that?

sometimes the struggle with putting words on the page is that you haven't yet figured out what those words need to be. i know some people prefer to write chronologically and don't want to think ahead about what is going to happen, but if you can't bring the story to the finish line maybe you need to spend some time considering the ending. last scene, last paragraph, last line. there's something extremely motivating about knowing where you want to end. it keeps you propelled through the middle.

knowing the ending means you've sketched out the bounds of the story - you know how long it's going to go on for, so if you start daydreaming about something too far in the future, beyond the scope of that particular story, you can just enjoy those thoughts without putting words to the page. knowing the ending makes it easier to gauge how much more you have to write to get to that point. what scenes will the story need to make that ending resonate? what still has to happen?

knowing the ending turns the story into an enclosed moment in time, and makes it easier to reflect on what matters.

to find the ending, it might be helpful to think about:

how did the story begin? what is the same or different since that point?

what insight has the story conveyed? what has the reader learned?

did the character achieve their goal or get what they wanted? has the character moved or gone stagnant? through the character's actions (or lack of actions) have things got better or worse?

is there any remaining dramatic tension or irony between what the reader knows and what the character understands? is the character being left with clear eyes and a full heart, or will the reader assume that, alas, they actually can lose?

what is the implied future beyond the ending moment? is there a little wink between the author and the reader because we can all infer what's going to happen next?

are there any remaining questions that haven't been answered in the story? is the reader being ask to reflect on the ambiguity?

what was the main theme(s) of the story? how does the ending honour that?

what was the impact of the character's journey? how might the reader have been impacted?

paranoia

control freakism

sense of self-worth so low that it loops back around into being totally dismissive of everyone else

a warm-hearted kind center beneath 200 protective walls of bitterness that doesn't actually make the bitterness better in any way at all even a little bit

bisexuality

crushing feelings of responsibility

zero understanding of own bodily autonomy that bleeds out and affects how they treat others

a lil petty vindictive sadism they maybe don't wanna look at too hard or acknowledge

full self-awareness of all their most negative traits without working to fix those traits at all

internalized misogyny

a mysterious undefinable hunger that cannot / should not / must not ever be sated

It's the inverse of Chekov's Gun ("If there's a gun on the table in act 1, it should go off in act 3" or someone like that). Asimov's Tail is like saying "If a gun goes off in act 3, it should be on the table in act 1."

You don't need that for guns because we all know what guns are. A character in a modern setting pulling out a gun to win a fight on page 120 isn't going to bother the reader. But a tail is unexpected: You need the reader to buy in to and expect the tail before it becomes plot-relevant, or it'll read like a deus ex machina.

(Another comparison is Chekov was talking about the stage, and Asimov is talking about books. Asimov's Tail may not be as applicable to the stage, where the audience can all clearly see the character's tail in his costume.)

⊳ "I've never heard that one before." / "That's a first." (In response to a compliment or even insult.) ⊳ "Oh yeah, I used to be really __." (Ugly. Fat. Short. Unpopular. Any negative adjective.)

⊳ "It's not the first time this happened. I'll be okay." (In response to a painful event.)

⊳ "I... didn't think it'd hurt like this."

⊳ "Dang, I wish I was __ like you." (Smart. Pretty. Funny. Any positive adjective.)

⊳ "I'll do better next time, I swear."

⊳ "Hey, uh. Do you think I'm (too) __ ?" (Annoying. Overbearing. Any negative adjective)

⊳ "Are... you going to leave?"

⊳ "Why me? I don't understand what you see in me."

⊳ "Aren't you going to get some food?" "No, it's okay. I need to eat less anyway."

⊳ "No, it's my fault. I just need to work harder, somehow." (In response to a failure or mistake.)

⊳ "You really think I can do this?"

⊳ "Do your __ (parents, friends, etc.) also tell you __?" ('You're too loud', 'you're too lazy', etc.)

⊳ "Oh, no, it's okay. Let them be. I hear this all the time." (In response to an insult.)

⊳ "I don't think you should've chosen me."

⊳ "Haha, I'm not actually that __ (smart, talented, etc.). You should look at __ (name), though."

These subtle cries for help are subtle because they're often spoken lightly--almost like a joke. A passing comment that flew by too fast to analyze. They're honest but not dramatic and often don't focus on themselves--the character speaking. These lines are fantastic for foreshadowing and revealing deeper, more sensitive parts of the character.

In real life, we don't always directly ask for help. We don't directly rant about our more personal and lasting issues, but we'll make comments with deeper meanings, and you can absolutely demonstrate this in your writing.

Happy writing~

1.) Don't actually delete content from your WIP unless it is minor editing - instead cut it and put it in a secondary document. If you're omitting paragraphs of content, dialog, a whole scene you might find a better place for it later and having it readily available can really save time. Sometimes your idea was fantastic, but it just wasn't in the right spot.

2.) Stuck with wording the action? Just write the dialog then revisit it later.

3.) Stuck on the whole scene? Skip it and write the next one.

4.) Write on literally any other color than a white background. It just works. (I use black)

5.) If you have a beta, while they are beta-ing have them read your fic out loud. Yes, I know a lot of betas/writers do not have the luxury of face-timing or have the opportunity to do this due to time constraints etc but reading your fic out loud can catch some very awkward phrasing that otherwise might be missed. If you don't have a beta, you read it out loud to yourself. Throw some passion into your dialog, you might find a better way to word it if it sounds stuffy or weird.

6.) The moment you have an idea, write it down. If you don't have paper or a pen, EMAIL it to yourself or put it in a draft etc etc. I have sent myself dozens of ideas while laying down before sleep that I 10/10 forgot the next morning but had emailed them to myself and got to implement them.

7.) Remember - hits/likes/kudos/comments are not reflective of the quality of your fic or your ability to write. Most people just don't comment - even if they say they do, they don't, even if they preach all day about commenting, they don't, even if they are a very popular blog that passionately reminds people to comment - they don't comment (I know this personally). Even if your fic brought tears to their eyes and it haunted them for weeks and they printed it out and sent it to their friends they just don't comment. You just have to accept it. That being said - comment on the fic you're reading now, just do it, if you're 'shy' and that's why you don't comment the more you comment the better you'll get at it. Just do it.

8.) Remove unrealistic daily word count goals from your routine. I've seen people stress 1500 - 2000 words a day and if they don't reach that they feel like a failure and they get discouraged. This is ridiculous. Write when you can, but remove absurd goals. My average is 500 words a day in combination with a 40 hour a week job and I have written over 200k words from 2022-2023.

9.) There are dozens of ways to do an outline from precise analytical deconstruction that goes scene by scene to the minimalist bullet point list - it doesn't matter which one you use just have some sort of direction. A partial outline is better than no outline.

please don't leave me.

please go away and never return.

please give me one more chance to prove myself.

please don't say that to me ever again.

please try harder next time.

please grab that for me.

please stay close to me.

please touch me.

please stay.

please do this for me.

please listen to what i say.

please go away.

please tell me what's really on your mind.

please tell me the truth.

please don't say things like that.

please don't look at me like that.

please stop judging me for my choices.

please try to see things from my perspective.

please say my name again.

please tell me what it is you need.

please don't ever leave me again.

please put that down.

please look at me while i'm talking to you.

please put down the gun.

please put down the sword.

please tell me everything you know.

please be honest with me.

please stop.

please listen.

please cut out the bullshit.

please tell me how you feel.

please get that for me.

please take a bite and tell me what you think.

please sit down.

please don't slouch.

please fix your shirt.

please wipe your face.

please call me later.

please don't make this harder than it needs to be.

please stop pretending you care about me.

please don't lie to my face.

please learn to accept me as i am.

please keep it down.

please stop smiling at me.

please get over yourself.

please stop taking all the credit.

please don't talk over me.

please shut the fuck up.

give them a variety of exes. give them relationships that shaped who they are but did not last. give them people they tried very hard to love but it didn't work out. give them situationships that taught them things. give them something deep that was real but could not endure. things that hurt. things that ended amicably. people with whom hot passion cooled to warm affection and became undying friendship.

it doesn’t have to be a “punch line” as in the end of a joke. It could be the part that punches you in the gut. The most exciting, juicy, shocking info goes at the end of the sentence. Two different examples that show the difference it makes:

doing it wrong:

She saw her brother’s dead body when she caught the smell of something rotting, thought it was coming from the fridge, and followed it into the kitchen.

doing it right:

Catching the smell of something rotten wafting from the kitchen—probably from the fridge, she thought—she followed the smell into the kitchen, and saw her brother’s dead body.

Periods are where you stop to process the sentence. Put the dead body at the start of the sentence and by the time you reach the end of the sentence, you’ve piled a whole kitchen and a weird fridge smell on top of it, and THEN you have to process the body, and it’s buried so much it barely has an impact. Put the dead body at the end, and it’s like an emotional exclamation point. Everything’s normal and then BAM, her brother’s dead.

This rule doesn’t just apply to sentences: structuring lists or paragraphs like this, by putting the important info at the end, increases their punch too. It’s why in tropes like Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking or Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick, the odd item out comes at the end of the list.

Subverting this rule can also be used to manipulate reader’s emotional reactions or tell them how shocking they SHOULD find a piece of information in the context of a story. For example, a more conventional sentence that follows this rule:

She opened the pantry door, looking for a jar of grape jelly, but the view of the shelves was blocked by a ghost.

Oh! There’s a ghost! That’s shocking! Probably the character in our sentence doesn’t even care about the jelly anymore because the spirit of a dead person has suddenly appeared inside her pantry, and that’s obviously a much higher priority. But, subvert the rule:

She opened the pantry door, found a ghost blocking her view of the shelves, and couldn’t see past it to where the grape jelly was supposed to be.