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Updated 19th October 2025 More writing tips, review tips & writing description notes

Dialogue Tags

Facial Expressions

Masking Emotions

Smiles/Smirks/Grins

Eye Contact/Eye Movements

Blushing

Voice/Tone

Body Language/Idle Movement

Thoughts/Thinking/Focusing/Distracted

Silence

Memories

Happy/Content/Comforted

Love/Romance

Sadness/Crying/Hurt

Confidence/Determination/Hopeful

Surprised/Shocked

Guilt/Regret

Disgusted/Jealous

Uncertain/Doubtful/Worried

Anger/Rage

Laughter

Confused

Speechless/Tongue Tied

Fear/Terrified

Mental Pain

Physical Pain

Tired/Drowsy/Exhausted

Eating

Drinking

Warm/Hot

1. Slow down at emotionally important moments.

Big emotions need space to land. If a scene feels rushed, pause the plot briefly to show how the moment affects the character.

2. Add reactions, not explanations.

Instead of explaining what a character feels, show it through physical responses, hesitation, or small actions that reveal emotion naturally.

3. Ground every scene in the senses.

If a scene feels thin, add one or two sensory details—sound, texture, smell, or temperature—to make the moment feel lived-in.

4. Let thoughts interrupt action.

A line of internal thought can deepen a scene without slowing it too much. Thoughts show stakes, fear, longing, or conflict beneath the action.

5. Expand consequences, not events.

You don’t need more things to happen—you need to show what matters. Focus on how events change relationships, decisions, or self-perception.

6. Strengthen setting where emotion peaks.

The environment should echo or contrast the emotion of the scene. Setting is not decoration—it’s emotional reinforcement.

7. Add specific details instead of general ones.

Underwriting often relies on vague language. Swap “they argued” for one sharp line of dialogue or a specific breaking point.

8. Let dialogue breathe.

Short dialogue exchanges without pauses can feel flat. Add beats—silence, gestures, interruptions—to give the conversation weight.

9. Show transitions between scenes.

If scenes jump too quickly, readers feel disoriented. A brief transition helps establish time, mood, and emotional continuity.

10. Clarify stakes early in the scene.

If readers don’t know what can be lost, scenes feel empty. Make sure the character wants something specific and fears losing it.

11. Use the “what are they feeling right now?” check.

After each major beat, ask what emotion is dominant in that moment. If it’s missing on the page, the scene is likely underwritten.

12. Expand scenes that feel “too clean.”

why yes you absolutely can!!

19. can i get a pep talk for writing my current wips?

for writer's block: i'm going to say it. it's the worst thing in the world. i'm so sorry that i'm saying this. i genuinely wish i wasn't going to. but the only way to get past writer's block is to write anyways.

eugh. i'm fighting my own gag reflex bc i do not want that to be true!! i want writer's block to be fixable by cuddling kittens or eating ice cream or setting up an altar in your closet! it's going to be painful, it's going to suck, and you will have to force yourself through it all anyways because writing is the only way to the other side.

the best way i have found to force myself to write is by sprinting, especially with someone else, but even alone it can do wonders; all you do is set a timer (20 minutes is my preference but i do 15 too) and within that time, the ONLY thing you are allowed to do is write. no research. no onelook thesaurus (onelook thesaurus my beloved). no editing!! you write and you only write. it might take a second to get yourself going - don't stress about that. i'll do 3-4 sprints in a row and only find my flow in minute 14 of the first one. that's okay! AND it's okay if you don't get into a good rhythm at all! sprints are about getting words on. that. page. it doesn't matter if you write 1 word or 100: what matters is that you're further than you were yesterday.

for impostor syndrome: i know the usual line is "write for yourself!" or something like it and i don't necessarily think that's bad advice - it's probably a really good idea to reframe your thinking like that. but honestly? the only way i've ever gotten past impostor syndrome is to not even bother arguing with it. if there's a voice in my head saying "your writing is bad and nobody likes it!", it doesn't do me, personally, any good to try and go "i don't care if they do or don't!". because... i do care lol! i can't help but care! so the only way past "your writing is bad and nobody likes it!" for me is basically going "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU". i just literally don't let myself think about it. umm i hope that's not catastrophically unhelpful?

"Oh."

"Oh, I didn't mean, like, ok..."

"Nothing happened here, right?"

"So, that almost happened..."

"You were really about to kiss me, weren't you?"

"...Were we just about to do something stupid?"

"Why did you stop?"

"Tell me you felt that too."

"Okay, wow. That was close."

"You leaned in first."

"I panicked, alright?"

"I thought you were going to kiss me."

"I wanted to."

"Don't look at me like that."

"So we're just going to pretend that didn't happen?"

"Right. Cool. Totally normal."

"My heart is beating ridiculously fast right now."

"If someone walked in right then, we would've had some explaining to do."

"You hesitated."

"We need to stop having moments like this."

"If I kissed you, I don't think I'd be able to stop."

"I almost ruined our friendship just now." (or made it better...)

"Can we talk about what just happened?"

"Can we never talk about what just happened?"

"You know, for a second there, I thought you were finally going to do it."

More: Reactions to… Masterpost

I am actually actively rocking two kinds of birth control, one in pill form, one in the form of a fucking plastic stick they had to shoot into my arm with a plastic gun so I am extremely not the best source on kidfic.

Honestly kids are both way simpler and more complex than we credit. There's the basic guidance of looking up developmental milestones to make sure you're not making a 6 month old run across a room or saying that a 4 year old isn't yet verbal, unless it's intentional. In terms of convincingly writing kids, mostly when I've had them in stories, I use the north star of having them be dumber than expected while also smarter than expected, while always, always, always being more inconvenient than anybody could have possibly imagined. Based on interactions with people in real life who have children and appear to love them -- or who are faking it extremely convincingly -- that seems to be the general gist of things. They are all also always covered in something sticky of unknown provenance.

Here are some movies I think really get kids right in a textured and thoughtful way, and that might be good references:

Little Miss Sunshine The Secret Garden Stand By Me

And here are some books I think really get kids, too:

Matilda My Side of the Mountain Holes Baby by Patricia MacLachlan The Midwife's Apprentice (actually just go read everything Karen Cushman ever wrote I would die on a battlefield for her)

Firstly, to write 50K of good PWP is actually high fucking art and probably the hardest (hah) 50K you could ever write, so let's go ahead and establish that.

Secondly, I think this is where you need to interrogate the purpose of the smut in your writing. (I know, I know.)

We've all experienced writing where the pornography feels intrusive, and since we're all at this devil's sacrament together, I know it's because we're not prudes. But even in a story that's really sexually charged and intended to be erotic, that fucking has to be there for a reason. It still needs to do things and make you feel things -- every single thing thing you write in your story should be advancing that story somehow, whether it be via plot, character development, or helping to establish or expand on the setting and context. Even in a 200 page novel, each sentence should in some way be propelling the reader forward. So in this hypothetical 50K story with a lot of sex in it: does the sex do anything? is it moving the plot forward? is it growing your characters? is it revealing something? is it adding to the atmosphere? is it ratcheting up the tension? Or is this sex there as a creative writing exercise? Because people for some reason still believe that stories marked "explicit" are better received than something well-written but PG-13 or less? Does it need to be there at all?

This is the best advice anybody can give you, but it's not fun and it's shitty to execute: the only way to get better at writing is to write a lot.

I'm not going to say that there aren't people who have a better intuitive capability at writing than others, but no matter how much innate talent someone may have, nothing will ever take the place of the journeyman grind of writing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages. From the first story I ever wrote to the last one I churned out, the difference is immense -- and while yes, I've grown in experience, vocabulary, literary reference and maturity, the only way I was able to deploy those new tools and refinements was by continuously throwing myself bloody against the brick wall of writing yet another story.

The best way to be a good writer is to be a bad writer for a very long time, in essence, and to be able to grit your teeth through that process. That last part, the endurance sport of it, that's the thing a lot of people can't do; even once you're a quote-unquote good writer, writing doesn't get much easier, because you hold yourself to a higher standard, and chipping blood out of the rock of your frontal lobe so your story can have a climax is the same agonizing process it's ever been -- regardless of how you avoid thesaurus abuse these days.

Re: the realism and atmosphere, I regret to send you to Elon Musk's twitter, but I wrote a long thread about my process there years ago, which now I'm thinking I should probably transcribe into Tumblr at some point.

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.