Writeblr ~ Les Contes de Rhéio

Staring at the ceiling, unable to move, unable to think, unable to do anything.

Crying and screaming, not being able to deal with it anymore, but also not being able to get away from it.

Breathing through it and feeling some relief. Okay. I can do this. I'm still in control. I can still handle this. Just breathe. Just focus on your breathing.

Breathing through it and feeling no relief at all. Slowly losing your grip on your coping mechanisms. Decending into panic and desperation. Hyperventilating.

Doing okay with the pain until one small extra thing suddenly completely sends you over the edge.

Rocking back and forth. Trying to sooth yourself and distract yourself. Fidgeting. Biting your lip. Bitting your nails.

Pulling on your hair to create new pain to distract you from the existing one.

Getting dizzy and nauseous just from the pain.

Drifting in and out of consciousness. Welcoming the softening edges of the pain as you're slowly drifting off.

Constant chronic pain that might not be that severe but becomes completely overwhelming to your mind simply because its always there.

Sharp unexpected blunt pain that suprises you and makes you yell out, all of your brain consumed by the sudden wave of agony as adrenaline rushes through your system and you're awareness completely shrinks to the sensation or the injury.

start / begin ➙ they either do or don't do an action, even if it is interrupted

somehow ➙ find a way to describe it or, if it matters that they don't know how something happened, make it its own sentence. somehow is very lackluster

that ➙ if the sentence makes sense after you remove it, do it

useless modifiers (really, very, certainly, probably, actually, quite, ...) ➙ emphasis on useless: many can be helpful, but many are not

dialogue tags ➙ don't cut them always, but you can leave them out or replace them with action tags for more variety

down / up ➙ often times they are not needed (I sat down vs. I sat)

wonder, think, realize, understand, feel ➙ especially in narration, these are signs of telling, not showing. Instead of "I wondered where he was." you can write "Where was he?"

"There is/was..." ➙ very formulaic and getting rid of as many as possible will make for more variety in sentence structures

Find your own! Every writer will have individual habits, so when you are proofreading your stuff, try to notice your own patterns. Feel free to add onto this post :)

Disclaimer: these words definitely can be very useful when they are used intentionally, especially if they are not overused. When I say to "cut" these words, I mean to question whether they are strengthening or weakening the sentence in every instance.

[ survey.gendercensus.com ]

The 13th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th August 2026.

It’s short and easy, for most participants it takes 5 minutes or less.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful!

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]

PS: You can see some regularly-updated statistics about incoming data here, with lots of demography and graphs to peruse!

people who write things other than fanfics (as in OCs)

how do you like...get started

i have concepts i have my barebones characters but aside from that i'm like howwww do i start where do i pull the first thread from

Sometimes I have a certain scene in mind when I get started, so I'll build around that scene. I'll start by writing it, then consider how the story got to that point in time, and what happens after it. Sometimes that helps me a lot, too.

If you have a general vibe for the story, maybe consider the different themes or topics you think would best fit the idea you have in your head, and build stories from there.

And, of course, if you have characters but no idea what to do with them, one of the more fun ways to get some ideas is to listen to songs that remind you of your characters and see if you can't glean some inspiration from them whether in regards to further developing your characters or their stories.

My starting point is always a scene, and generally I try to develop what happened before and/or after. As characters add up, I develop them by having them talk to each other, to themselves and little by little I get an understanding of who they are.

While I’ve never fully analysed the beginning of my process, it’s pretty obvious I’m systematically answering certain questions. How did we get to that point? Where do we go now? How their past impacts my characters current lives and helps to connect or on the contrary hinders their relationships? I also seek points of tension and conflicts between the various characters/factions. Why do they agree? Why can’t they agree? Where does their inability to understand each other come from?

I used to use Google docs, but the white mode only was really annoying me (tires my eyes), so I swapped to Ellipsus (which I genuinely love and recommend), but it was bothering me a bit that I need wifi in order to use it, so now I switched to LibreOffice Writer, which I do like.

It very much has a Microsoft Word feel, but is open source and you need no accounts to use it. It's local on your device, so no AI can scan it, and no wifi is needed.

But I also DO use Notepad too hahaha - Notepad is beautiful and I will hear no slander! sometimes you just gotta have the simple expedient of not wanting your fic to end up being network traffic away from home, and a little perfectly un-cloud-linked, simple monospace font is exactly what you need.

In gdocs do all my initial edits in a serif font, then switch to a sans-serif font for another several edit passes, then reach out to my beta. Lastly I add all my formatting html myself, and then put the draft into AO3's plaintext editor and I read it through again on both my phone and on a desktop to see if I like the way everything is situated.

Unfortunately, wishful thinking aside, google docs simply does not yet have a competitor that can match it in portability (or USABILITY) across devices, and I write on my phone, my home laptop, my tablet outdoors, and workstations at my university.

Ellipsus is a project that started out very promising and has quickly turned into something concerning, unfortunately.

The choice to use markdown is... odd. I’m not really sure why they’ve gone that route for something that is geared towards creative writing, but... yeah. The interest in markdown that the internet currently has cannot go away fast enough for me.

And it definitely still feels like a project in beta. The UI is so fucking awkward. There’s the floating top header that shows the word count and has the focus mode and timer buttons, but it comes and goes with how you scroll and it’s so fucking annoying. And you can’t change its behavior! >:\

On desktop, you end up with this weird amount of space being used that doesn’t need to be. The bottom of the page has a floating widget for formatting that hovers way too high above the very bottom of the page, leading to your writing getting covered up by it and eventually going down past it — just, what in the fuckity? And why do I need this if I have the sidebar buttons to format via and vice versa? Why can I collapse the sidebar, which has things other than the formatting stuff, and not do anything about that stupid floating footer???

I hate this! The desktop UI genuinely has kept me from using Ellipsus more than I had wanted to in the past. The rolling out of monetization when they’re clearly too small to properly support it has left a bad taste in my mouth, too.

And now there’s hush hush speak about how some of their investors are AI companies. This is really curious given Ellipsus’ stance on AI and scraping.

An example of how this has helped me was in this section here; the first photo is the first draft and the second is the final version of this scene. I mostly used The Emotion Thesaurus for this; the emotion being conveyed here is relief and relaxing after suppressing stress for a long time, but S himself isn’t really aware of his own emotional state here and I could not use those words to describe what he was feeling inwardly. So instead I used what he feels in his body and his surface rationalization, and it just reads so nicely this way imo.

See, the first time I grew parsnips, I fucked it up good. I hadn't seen parsnips sprouting before, right, and in my eagerness I was keeping a close eye on the row. And every time I saw some intruding grass coming up, I twitched it right out, and went back to anticipating the germination of my parsnips.

But it turns out parsnips take a bit longer than anything else I'd ever grown to distinguish themselves visually. It's just the two little split leaves, almost identical to a newly seeded bit of kentucky bluegrass when they first come up, and they take a good bit to establish themselves and spread out flat before the main stem with its first distinctive scallopy leaf gets going.

I didn't get any parsnips, not that year, because I'd weeded them all out as soon as they showed their faces, with my 'ugh no that's grass' twitchy horticulture finger.

The next year, having in retrospect come to suspect what had happened, I left the row alone and didn't weed anything until all the sprouts coming up had all had a bit to set in and show their colors, and I've grown lots of parsnips since. They're kind of a slow crop, not a huge return, but I like them and watching them grow and digging them up, and their papery little seeds in the second year, if you don't harvest one either on purpose or because you misjudged the frost, so it's worth it.

My issue is that I can’t figure out a good equivalent to that kind of practice with writing ? Like idk. Do I do a bunch of object descriptions ? Do I do a scene with a restricted vocab ?? I don’t knowwwww

Grinding would be word sprints. NaNoWriMo was killer for this before their whole operation went to shit, but the good thing about that is that they never had copyright over the concept of writing fast. The numbers you go for can be a little arbitrary at first as you figure out what specifically works for you, but 15 minutes is usually the average from what I've seen? Maybe you can get 500 words in 15 minutes. Maybe you can only get 200. Either way, you're exercising the muscles that get ideas from your brain out onto paper.

Here's some other ideas I came up with for more specific exercises:

Wordsketching for Settings

Go outside (or stay inside?), practically anywhere. Sit down and angle yourself in a way that lets you get a good view of where you're at, and then pick the first things that jump out to you about the place you're in and describe them in 2-3 sentences. Then, figure out what you're drawn to next and write sentences about that. Make sure you add what you feel in that moment (Is the atmosphere uncomfortable? Is the place hot or cold? Humid?), what the place sounds like (People talking, or cars, or animal noises...), so on and so forth. This is very similar to the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique, so you can even work off of that structure if you'd like, but this is specifically to help you get better at describing settings.

As far as fanfic is concerned, I think the genre as a whole skimps on atmosphere and setting a SHIT TON. If you want to elevate yourself, let the pacing of your work slow down for a second and dedicate some time to really orienting your blorbos in a specific space. It does a lot for the tone of the work, and... if you want to play ball with the big boys you need to start thinking about things like tone and atmosphere when writing.

Transcription for Dialogue

This can entail you writing down what your family says at the dinner table like a creepy weirdo, or transcribing movie dialogue or anything of that nature. The purpose would be to get used to how conversation naturally flows between two or more people (turn-taking, interruption etc.), and furthermore getting a sense of how human beings naturally talk to each other. I've written down things I've heard people say in public before for no better reason than thinking "Oh! I could totally see [X Character] saying that!". Whatever hangups you may have over this sick linguivouyeristic perversion are much less important than the tragedy of filling your work with Incorrect Quotes -style unreadable garbage. It's like eating your vegetables.

Wiktionary Challenges for Word Choice

Just spamming the "random word" button on Wiktionary will give you instances in every language Wiktionary has in its database, so this one requires a little more work to be helpful, but in lieu of that you can look through stuff like Categories or Thesaurus Entries!

Let's gather a few fun words to demonstrate.

Okay, this should be more than enough for some sentences describing a setting out in nature! Blunket is making me think this takes place at twilight... And I like alliterating, so let's mash it to make the semi-redundant phrase "blunket-blue" just for some flair.

The copse laid still. On the bank of the meandering creek, the rabbit flattened herself out against the soft grass, her luculent eyes darting back and forth over her surroundings. What she could see of the copse looked mostly the same: Twisting shrubs the color of ash, blunket-blue grasses, an invisible wind brushing over all that stillness and pressing flat everything it could. Her nose twitched. Until the last blushes of rose drained from the evening sky, the rabbit would keep herself fixed in that spot on the riverbank and wait.

Unlike with art, there isn't an organized consensus about them and accepted practice excercises. I've consumed a lot of writing theory and advice content in my life, so I'll do my best to try and make a list of possible excercises based on stuff I learned as well as my own judgement for useful skills.

The most important thing to remember is that writing is the art of communicating your intent. A lot of writing is just figuring out ways to get across the experience you want to create, and so a lot of the excercises are about learning to do that in different ways.

Descriptions

Start out with picking random things and describing them in writing. This is mostly to get used to translating sensory experiences into verbal descriptions. Try describing experiences or things that aren't visual too.

Pick an object. Describe it three different times. Each time you're not allowed to use any of the previous descriptions.

Pick an object. Describe it three different times. Each time create a different connotation for it (an easy trio to start with is good/bad/neutral).

Go people watching. Pick something that's happening in front of you and describe it three different ways. Each time in a different genre.

Play taboo. Describe an object, action or an emotion without naming it or using closely associated words.

Exposition

Play storytelling Mao. Write a scene where the world and characters act according to a weird and arbitrary rule but never explain it directly or indirectly. Try to communicate the rule with only the character's actions, dialogue and environmental storytelling.

Write a scene with conflict and a twist, then analyze it to figure out what information the audience must know in order to to understand what's going on. Rewrite the scene as a mystery, each time omitting one of those pieces of information and framing it as the answer to the scene. This is mostly to practice awareness of what information you're giving the audience and how its presence or lack of it changes things.

Write a scene with an unreliable narrator. The narrator's perception of what's happening is completely mistaken, but the audience must still be able to understand the truth of what's actually going on.

Atmosphere

Write a story with a beginning, middle and end without any dialogue or actions. Use only descriptions to create environmental storytelling.

Pick an object. Describe it three different times. Each time try to evoke a different emotion.

Dialogue

Write a scene with only dialogue.

Write a conversation where the characters never state what they actually mean.

Pick an emotion. Write as many one line dialogues as you can that convey the character is feeling that emotion.

Character voice

Write a scene with multiple people using only dialogue. You can't state any of the characters' names, yet each speaker should be distinct.

Write a piece of exposition for a character to deliver and have a few different characters say it. Analyze how the character's backstory, culture, status, worldview and personality would change the delivery. What parts would they emphasize and what would get downplayed? How would they frame the information? What's their opinion on it? Would they deliver it factually or insert their opinion? How would their mood change the way they deliver the exposition?

Prose

Write poetry (and look up excercises for those as unfortunately I'm not familiar enough to give any).

Write a 1k story. Then rewrite it to be less than 500 words while still telling the same story.

Write a two sentence story. Write a three sentence story. Write a five sentence story. Compare them and analyze the things the extra length allowed you to do.

Pacing

Look up story structures. Pick a story and try to map it to said story structures. (A good place to start is Snyder's save the cat structure and hollywood movies. Most of them use that structure as template).

Write a story using only sentences with 3-4 words. Then do it with 6-7 words, and then with 10-11 words. Read those stories aloud and analyze the differences between how they sound and feel.

Plotting

Go people watching. Pick something that's happening in front of you and describe it in three different ways. Each time add a different twist in the end. What different setup did each twist need?

Write the same story in five sentences, then in three, then in two. What had to remain in order for the story to be the same? What was lost? In what ways did it change the resulting story?

Pick a story and read/watch it all the way through. Then go back and analyze each scene seperately. In what way did the scene contribute to the story?

Use a random word generator. Pick one word for theme, two words for plot and three words for characters. Figure out a way to write a coherent story that includes all of them. This one can be changed with any number of words for any category. The important thing is that there would be enough words you need to use that it acts as a constraint rather than a freeform prompt

Write a scene. Then rewrite it so that it starts as late as you can make it and ends as early as it can.

Character

Look up character arc structures. Pick a story and try to map it to a fitting character arc.

Practice debate. Pick a topic and write as many different viewpoints on it as you can. Try to give each viewpoint strong arguments to support it.

Pick a character. Figure out what plot would challenge them the most and what antagonist would cause them the most trouble.

Pick a character and decide on one trait of theirs. Write a foil character to highlight said trait.

Metaphor and subtext

Pick a couple of characters and have them argue. The argument can't be stated directly in any way and instead must be communicated through metaphor.

Je teste cet exercice d'écriture qui consiste à copier à la main un texte pour mieux voir comment les phrases sont tournées, les descriptions, et le reste de la tambouille. J'ai choisi Pratchett, un des Discworld. Ou Disque-Monde, du coup.

Leçon n°1: C'est plus dur que prévu d'écrire les mots au complet et résister aux raccourcis que j'utilise depuis le lycée.

Leçon n°2: La vache, je dois rajouter plus de lectures en Français dans mes habitudes.

Leçon n°3: Y'a pas de virgule d'Oxford, et ça fait bizarre.

The latest was a farmer. He had braved the journey through the Testing Woods and arrived with his convictions mostly intact. He now sat on a tree stump by the Witch’s thornbush cottage, drinking a cup of bitter tea, and asking for a fairly standard boon.

"Oh yes," said the Witch, "I can make you a spell for a bountiful harvest, but what will you give me in return?"

The farmer gulped. "My firstborn child?"

"By the dick-shattered sky.” The Witch exclaimed. “What?"

"Oh. You don't take firstborn children?"

"I am a witch of ancient promises, timeless dreams, and fresh blood.” The Witch announced. “Of course I take firstborn children. It's just a bit weird that it was your first offer."

Equiping an armor tutorial