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no STS this week because I'm depressed and have no energy/motivation/spoons whatsoever to come up with good asks or answer them. hopefully will participate next week
I've gotten to the end of the current draft of FrankensteinWIP and man... I just really don't like how anything in the part 2 is written. The prose is so boring and flat and the scenes feel like they add nothing to the story. The plot is progressing technically but I'm not engaged in it at all. It is so weird how the quality just drops dramatically between part 1 and part 2 but I'm not surprised at all because most of part 2 I wrote while recovering from severe autistic burnout. So yeah. I get why it's bad.
Now the good news is that I know how to fix the content, I already made a bunch of editing notes for myself. The bad news is that reading part 2 killed all the enthusiasm I've generated after reading part 1. I do not feel confident in my writing ability and any time I try to write anything new, I just get stuck because I expect it to be shit. It's like I've forgotten how to produce good prose. I hope it is a temporary thing, considering I can still feel the effects of burnout, but damn is it demotivating.
I don't know if to ignore the bad bits and keep drafting until the end or go back and re-write them now. I doubt I can edit them effectively without a rewrite because it would require fiddling with every single sentence basically and I feel like at that point it's just easier to do it from scratch. Worse than that, I have zero confidence in my ability to rewrite it in the way I will be happy with. I could just keep going, like I haven't lost the ability to produce text, it's just that what I am able to produce sucks. And I don't want to write out of some sort of obligation just to get it done or have the word count go up. I want to actually enjoy the writing and re-reading the bits I wrote.
So I'm stuck now. I know this novel has the potential to be amazing and I still like my outline/plot, but the actual text I am able to make is not up to my standards and I don't know what to do to fix that...
If anyone has any advice, please share, because I feel awful and I want to delete the whole document. I won't do it, but I want to.
I went through something similar. I wrote my part 2 before part 1 because I got bored of outlining around the midpoint and wanted to just jump into drafting. The problem was, I didn’t have my writing style figured out back then at all, so most of what I wrote I ended up not liking. After I went back and got through part 1, I ended up rewriting most of my part 2. I salvaged a few lines here and there, but 90% of it got rewritten from scratch.
It took some time, but the benefit was I had already been through those chapters once before, so I had a lot of extra ideas for what to do differently the second time around, and I ended up liking the rewritten version much better. There are times when just editing what’s already on the page is the best option, but sometimes it can be freeing to rewrite something from scratch without the version you’re unhappy with hanging over your head.
(I suggest keeping all previous versions in a separate document though just in case, you never know what you might want to go back and reference/reuse. I’m a big believer in never permanently deleting anything even if not everything makes it into the final draft.)
Yeah, I will probably end up rewriting those chapters from scratch, which sucks because I've been working on this novel for a very long time and I'm still nowhere near done with even the first draft. But I would rather take even longer and actually enjoy the process than rush to the finish line and end up with a book I hate.
I've gotten to the end of the current draft of FrankensteinWIP and man... I just really don't like how anything in the part 2 is written. The prose is so boring and flat and the scenes feel like they add nothing to the story. The plot is progressing technically but I'm not engaged in it at all. It is so weird how the quality just drops dramatically between part 1 and part 2 but I'm not surprised at all because most of part 2 I wrote while recovering from severe autistic burnout. So yeah. I get why it's bad.
Now the good news is that I know how to fix the content, I already made a bunch of editing notes for myself. The bad news is that reading part 2 killed all the enthusiasm I've generated after reading part 1. I do not feel confident in my writing ability and any time I try to write anything new, I just get stuck because I expect it to be shit. It's like I've forgotten how to produce good prose. I hope it is a temporary thing, considering I can still feel the effects of burnout, but damn is it demotivating.
I don't know if to ignore the bad bits and keep drafting until the end or go back and re-write them now. I doubt I can edit them effectively without a rewrite because it would require fiddling with every single sentence basically and I feel like at that point it's just easier to do it from scratch. Worse than that, I have zero confidence in my ability to rewrite it in the way I will be happy with. I could just keep going, like I haven't lost the ability to produce text, it's just that what I am able to produce sucks. And I don't want to write out of some sort of obligation just to get it done or have the word count go up. I want to actually enjoy the writing and re-reading the bits I wrote.
So I'm stuck now. I know this novel has the potential to be amazing and I still like my outline/plot, but the actual text I am able to make is not up to my standards and I don't know what to do to fix that...
If anyone has any advice, please share, because I feel awful and I want to delete the whole document. I won't do it, but I want to.
Burnout is fucking rough, I'm in this with you right now and learning how to crawl out is taking everything I've got. My advice is maybe more of a question to think about: you say you still like your outline, but the text you're producing doesn't get you excited anymore.
So: Are you really chasing your joy with what you write? Can you somehow make this more self indulgent, weirder, less oriented around reader expectations and genre conventions or even conventional storytelling ones? Getting out of burnout means really examining all the invisible rules we have in our heads about how things ought to be and all the expectations for ourselves that are draining our energy.
Also, burnout care means a complete rethinking of your day to day. Do you have non-productive hobbies outside of writing? It's frustrating, because most people with burnout are usually work horses, but what you might actually need to get back into enjoying your writing might be to just write less.
Stop forcing yourself. Spend time dozing on the couch and playing low-intensity, no-brainer video games. Spend time being social with loved ones and making nothing. That's what's recommend and what I'm trying right now, to try and free myself from the thing that causes burnout in the first place, which are huge expectations for ourselves, and the conviction that we somehow always need to push through.
I hesitated posting this, because it's such a rough read, but this article has been slowly rewiring the way that I think about my burnout, and I can't recommend reading this all the way through enough.
A highlight:
But burnout is one of the body’s final defenses against unrelenting, unsustainable demand, and it is only by reevaluating those demands and abandoning a huge number of them that we can actually begin to heal — and heal as the people we are, not the hyper-reliable workhorses we long to be.
Thank you for the reblog and for the advice, it's really appreciated.
I've read that essay and it was devastating on first read because it hurts to think that I might never recover to the extent I want to. It's been a year of me being in and out of burnout (as well as dealing with physical and mental health issues on a scale I've never experienced before) and I don't know if I can ever go back to the life I've had a few years ago. I used to be able to put in like, 70+ hours of work a week in grad school and still have time and energy to write on the side. I used to be able to write a whole novel in under six months. All gone now.
I am getting rest and taking care of myself, but it sucks to not be able to engage with writing as much as I want to. I've been writing since I was a tiny child, it has always been The Thing I was passionate about - I used to write thousands upon thousands of words purely for myself, not even for posting or publishing, but because I enjoyed it so much. And now I can force myself to write and sometimes even produce text that I am happy with, but it doesn't bring the same joy. I don't know if it's me being overly critical of myself or if I really broke the part of my brain that was capable of producing writing I could be proud of.
I'm thinking about how to make this project even more self-indulgent but I fear the main issue is the actual sentence-by-sentence prose. I just don't know what to do to make the actual process of putting words on the page fun again. I don't know how to get my brain to be able to put sentences together and find words the way it used to. Probably the only way out is to just keep trying, keep rewriting until I am happy with it again. But it sucks because I've been working on this project for god knows how long and I'm not making much progress.
Anyway, this got way too long. In conclusion, I wish things were easier. But I'm not gonna give up, I'll just keep trying.
This line is a taste from my piece for this week's Flash Fiction Friday prompt!
But their approaches maintained their rhythm. Swoop, slash, and soar. The fruits of their labour bloodied and bountiful, a blessing before departure.
While the group held victory in one set of talons, Claudia held feathers in the other.
Sending tags to @buffythevampirelover @bootstrapparadoxed @sodaliteskull @marrowwife @oh-no-another-idea @bardic-tales @motifenjoyer and an open tag for anyone to jump on :D
I haven't written for A While but here's the last bit I have from FrankensteinWIP:
-
“We close down the lab upstairs,” he said, still hugging me, “and declare that we are now in the data analysis phase. I can even keep it going on the side, on the evenings, maybe. Keep going to seminars, keep appearances. And in the meantime, we plan a new experiment, and we carry it out here. Deal?”
I sighed again. Something was still not sitting right with me, but I ran out of ways to argue.
“Deal,” I said, almost a whisper.
He let go of me, a smile on his lips.
“I suggest we start with the experimental design,” he said. “We can come back to the apartment and start. Now.”
-
Tagging anyone who wants to do this because my brain is fried and I can't focus,,, (I need to make a list at some point)
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I always immediately forget who my writing buds are :/ @thebadphilosopher @grimgoregrimoire @bleep-bloop-boo @bisexual-bat @jaydove-writes @solaristawrites
Thank you for the tag @urnumber1star <3 I'm desperate to find out what that spoiler means ha
For Starstruck:
Gift
@the-letterbox-archives @darkangel319 @kaylinalexanderbooks @eccaiia @finickyfelix (this is such a long thread I feel like y'all might have been tagged already... If so just consider this a friendly wave)
Treat! I'm gonna share a random two paragraph bit from Up the Entropic Hill that I'm quite fond of:
"An old and respected tradition among Alexandrian physicists was to entertain the idea that no one in the field of quantum physics truly understood quantum physics. An even older tradition among everyone else on Alexandria was to say ‘those spaceships, no one really knows how they work!’. Thankfully, none of those statements were accurate; quantum physics experts were real experts and spaceships weren’t being built by people who thought of them as mysterious flying beasties.
The subatomic particles, on the other hand, did not have the faintest idea of what in the observable universe they were doing. It wasn’t uncommon for a boson to temporarily forget what its function was and go around the place pretending to be a lepton, or an up quark of some sort. And neutrinos, they were the worst. Every now and then, one of them would go ‘might as well’ and decide to randomly interact with some throwaway particle, following which all hell would break loose. And the scientists would be the ones to blame for inaccurate predictions."
Feel free to answer this when you have the time and energy 🫂
Which OC or OC's are your favorite and what about them makes you feel that way, Is it the way they interact with the world or is it something unique to them?
I love all of my characters and I hate picking favorites, but for right now, I think it's still Amber from Up the Entropic Hill.
She is just such a force of nature - she completely took over the book and changed a lot of the things I was originally planning to do, including the ending. She has such a strong presence and the character arc she gets is fantastic. I love that she has opinions about everything but does not let other people's opinions of her change who she is. And it was very fun to watch her make a lot of bad decisions and then deal with the consequences of those decisions. I love that she can be annoying and incredibly rude and kind of selfish, but she is hiding how much she cares about the world and just wants to be accepted. So yeah, again, I love all my characters, but for now Amber is my top pick.
Happy STS- what are you most proud of with your writing?
That's a difficult question tbh... recently I don't feel good about anything that I'm writing so it's hard to focus on the positives.
I think my strongest point in writing is dialogue, but I don't know if that is what I'm the most proud of. Maybe it depends on the work? In the first novel I've ever finished (that did not get published and probably never will, unless I rewrite it from scratch), I was really happy with the characters and their dynamics and relationships. In Up the Entropic Hill, I love the character arc that Amber goes through, and the way the revelation at the end of the book is set up and executed. In One Septendecillion Brass Doorknobs, my Dirk Gently season 3 fanfic, I was really proud of the plot and the mystery I managed to put together. With FrankensteinWIP, I don't know yet. I hope it will be characters again, but we'll see.
Hello! I'm not sure if you want to receive STS asks, but if you do, I have a nice one! Is there a location (eg. a castle, a meadow, a restaurant etc.) you really like writing about? Is there a sense you usually try to include while writing descriptions?
Well I'm currently writing a novel that takes place in the same city that I live in so I'm having a blast describing places I've actually been to and frequently visit! I'm usually not very good at writing descriptions, I feel like it is one of the weakest aspects of my writing, but I'm working on it. In previous novels, I've really enjoyed writing space ships - the isolation of outer space, the little quirks and details of the space ships, the sensory aspects of traveling through space (the sounds of the engine, the effects of hyperspace jumps, the views from the windows, etc).
In general, with writing descriptions, I try to imagine what would stand out to me the most if I was actually in that place, and create a similar feeling to what I would experience. It's not always easy to do (especially trying to pick what aspects to describe and what to ignore) but so far it has worked for me.
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Happy STS! What part of your story has been your favourite to write, or what part are you looking forward to most? (feel free to share a snippet 👀) - @trixierosewrites
I'm gonna answer for FrankensteinWIP because I think I answered a similar question about Up the Entropic Hill at some point (but I am to lazy to find that ask,,, maybe I'll do it later).
So far my favorite part to write was a long conversation that Kristian and Leith have at one point in the story because it is basically the moment Kristian falls in love. He doesn't know that in the scene, and he probably wouldn't be able to point to that conversation as that moment in retrospect either, but that is how I see it. And the scene has some fantastic dialogue in it, in my opinion at least. I'll include a small bit at the end.
And the part I'm looking forward to writing the most is the actual horror! There's going to be some very disturbing and unsettling scenes in this book and I want to get to them so bad. The story takes a while to get there because I am spending thousands of words to set up the relationship properly but I hope it will be worth it in the end.
Snippet under the cut:
By the time we were both too sore to keep walking up and down the shore, the streets were rapidly emptying of visitors. I glanced at the lock screen of my phone; it was fairly close to midnight.
“Don’t you need to go home?” I asked, once we picked a bench to rest on. “Get some sleep?”
“This is my normal routine,” he responded. “I don’t sleep much.”
“You’re a night owl, too?”
He did not confirm nor deny that, gaze drifting away into the distance. I decided not to push it further.
My leg bounced on the ground while my eyes passively scanned my surroundings: the air after-rain fresh, the sky cloudy and starless. Occasionally some drunken British tourists would pass by our bench, their booming voices carried an impressive distance. Apart from us, the only living soul around was a lone figure of a fisherman, stood knee deep in water a hundred or so meters away. Having concluded most of our discussion threads, we landed in a silent interlude. The conversation, though exhilarating, wasn’t exactly easy. Leith and I agreed on very little, and constantly changed our minds when presented with compelling arguments. Increasingly, I felt like my head was full of warm scrambled eggs.
“So yes.” Leith said, after a solid few minutes of utter silence.
“Yeah,” I agreed. We both shared a moment of laughter. “That was… yeah.” Suddenly, I blushed. I felt like we had just hooked up in the supply closet at the institute and were hurriedly dressing each other, afraid of being busted by a cleaner or a curious undergrad.
“You don’t have much people to talk to,” he told me – a statement, not a question. “And you are so, so bored. Even in this program, even surrounded by scientists. You’re so bored, it must be excruciating.”
“I think I am lonely more than I am bored,” I suddenly confessed. Up until a few minutes ago, I did not know this about myself. Feelings were a rare occurrence, and it usually took me days if not weeks to identify them. “All my classmates graduated and moved, and I don’t get along with younger PhD students. I don’t… connect to people particularly well.”
“What about your family?” Leith leaned back in the bench, looking away from my face.
“I haven’t spoken to anyone in years,” I responded calmly. “They did not take well to me being queer.”
“Ah.”
“Not that I got along with them much before coming out. My dad is a recovering alcoholic who did not get his shit together until most of his family stopped associating with him. He’s yet to gain back their trust. My mother did not want to have me, I think; I spent my childhood listening to her lament on how terribly my basic needs interfered with her work. And my grandparents, who basically raised me, thought it would be kind to bully me for my weirdness before my classmates did. Being disowned felt almost like being released from the obligation to like them. Still, that was my entire financial safety net I lost.”
“Did you know that living alone has comparable health effects to smoking?” he asked, in a very matter-of-fact voice. “They say the same about breathing the air in Krakow, so I must be at death’s door by now. Even now that I quit the actual smoking.”
I blinked, unsure of how to react. The remark felt like a dagger to the back.
“Unfortunately I can’t quit either Krakow or being alone,” I muttered.
“Oh,” his voice changed in a split second, “I didn’t mean to say you made yourself lonely on purpose. Really. The opposite. Actually,” he gave a nervous chuckle, “it was a, well, an attempt of a…” he made brief eye contact with me, and I could have sworn he seemed almost panicked. “Never mind,” he waved his hand, dismissing the topic. “Let’s just pretend I did not say that.”
Happy Storyteller Saturday! Here’s a question for you as well. What is your favorite part about the world your WIP takes place in? (Worldbuilding, lore, history, geographical setting?) Is it a world you would realistically want to live in yourself, or is it more fun to think about as a purely fictional place?
So for FrankensteinWIP, there's not much to discuss really because the world it takes place in is basically our own. The only thing that's different is that the research institute the plot takes place in doesn't actually exist. So I'm gonna answer for my published novel, Up The Entropic Hill, because it actually has a developed world and lore, etc etc.
My favorite thing about that world is the fact that it is populated by many different intelligent species that have to co-exist in the same universe, and the social and political consequences of the vast power differences between them. I really liked exploring the idea of humans living in a kind of a cosmic zoo from which they are not allowed to escape (most of the time, at least). Especially because the alien race that is in control of humanity (and not just humanity) is, as far as they are concerned, motivated by purely good intentions - to preserve and protect rare species. You have these mighty, seemingly all-powerful alien overlords, and most of society won't do anything about it because of all the benefits it provides.
Meanwhile there's a whole universe out there filled with many different species who aren't so rare, and therefore don't get the same benefits - but also aren't under the same degree of control. It was really fun to consider how living in such a society could mess up a person. It creates a source for inner conflict that I won't get into detail about because it is kinda spoiler-y.
And I don't know if I would want to live in such a world myself. On one hand, it would be fantastic to get away from all the problems that our current society has, and just enjoy my life in peace. On the other, knowing what I know about the rest of that universe - I would probably feel guilty as hell. I wonder if I would also want to escape and try to help with fixing things on other worlds. Honestly, I've no idea. I like to think of myself as a good person, but would I sacrifice a perfect life for the sake of helping others? It's a tough choice to make. And it is very much explored in the novel.
Happy STS! For your FrankensteinWIP, what is your favorite thing about the main characters' relationship? What gets you the most excited about writing them?
Oh boy, where do I even start lol
So basically the whole book is focused on just two people, the protagonist and his love interest (for lack of a better term - the novel is not a traditional romance in any way, but I'll use the romance terminology for this) - Kristian and Leith. There are other characters obviously but I'd say around 70-80% of the scenes in the book are just these two.
And the main thing I love about the two of them is how obsessed with each other they get. I wanted to write a story where two people's love for each other just progressively makes both of them worse and this is exactly what I'm doing in this book. I want to explore love as an affliction, as a bottomless void that just sucks you in and makes you disregard your previous interests, traits, moral principles, what have you. Love that is so blindly passionate, that it genuinely makes you ignore whatever terrible things the other person is doing.
I'm excited about trying to get this progression just right - from two people clinging to each other because they are lonely and isolated and desperate for human contact, and to a couple that is so lost in their mutual devotion that they are willing to enable each other in whatever impulse they get. And I hope I will get it right because this is one of my favorite tropes in fictional relationships. I wanna write a relationship that is so unhealthy that it will get its own fandom,,,
Happy STS! Did your OC ever have a favorite lullaby or bedtime story when they were a kid?
That's such a creative question!
For Up the Entropic Hill - knowing Amber, she was probably demanding her parents read her history textbooks from as early as she could speak. I think as a kid she would go for all the action-y and heroic stories, especially anything about space exploration. So if I could pick one for her, maybe it would be the stories of early space flights, like of the first humans to leave the Earth or of the moon landing. Alternatively - ancient mythology. She definitely had an ancient Egypt phase as a child.
For FrankensteinWIP - Kristian had a shitty childhood with not the most supportive parents (to put it mildly) so whatever favorite bedtime stories he could have, it was stuff he was reading on his own. I can imagine him with a book of Slavic fairytales, reading under the covers with a tiny lamp. Also maybe some old Soviet books for kids, whatever he would be able to get from a school library without asking his parents. But I think he would gravitate towards the moodier, scarier stuff, probably some books out of his age range as well, considering he is a horror fan as an adult. (I couldn't resist making a horror novel character be a horror fan,,,)
Thanks everyone for all of the asks, I will try to get to them all one by one, hopefully I won't run out of energy half way through! For those who interacted with my post and hadn't gotten asks yesterday - I was already asleep, I only saw them this morning, so I'll add you to the list for next week.
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Anyway, on a more positive note, I want to do Storyteller Saturday but I am shy and awkward so please interact with this post in any way if you want an ask! I'll prepare some questions and I will try to get back to everyone (assuming I will have energy).
(btw reminder that I follow/send asks from my main, @casual-eumetazoa)
I've gotten to the end of the current draft of FrankensteinWIP and man... I just really don't like how anything in the part 2 is written. The prose is so boring and flat and the scenes feel like they add nothing to the story. The plot is progressing technically but I'm not engaged in it at all. It is so weird how the quality just drops dramatically between part 1 and part 2 but I'm not surprised at all because most of part 2 I wrote while recovering from severe autistic burnout. So yeah. I get why it's bad.
Now the good news is that I know how to fix the content, I already made a bunch of editing notes for myself. The bad news is that reading part 2 killed all the enthusiasm I've generated after reading part 1. I do not feel confident in my writing ability and any time I try to write anything new, I just get stuck because I expect it to be shit. It's like I've forgotten how to produce good prose. I hope it is a temporary thing, considering I can still feel the effects of burnout, but damn is it demotivating.
I don't know if to ignore the bad bits and keep drafting until the end or go back and re-write them now. I doubt I can edit them effectively without a rewrite because it would require fiddling with every single sentence basically and I feel like at that point it's just easier to do it from scratch. Worse than that, I have zero confidence in my ability to rewrite it in the way I will be happy with. I could just keep going, like I haven't lost the ability to produce text, it's just that what I am able to produce sucks. And I don't want to write out of some sort of obligation just to get it done or have the word count go up. I want to actually enjoy the writing and re-reading the bits I wrote.
So I'm stuck now. I know this novel has the potential to be amazing and I still like my outline/plot, but the actual text I am able to make is not up to my standards and I don't know what to do to fix that...
If anyone has any advice, please share, because I feel awful and I want to delete the whole document. I won't do it, but I want to.
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