I Have None Yet So Far

(I cross mine from R to L, but Jake does his straight through)

I was watching a kdrama and they were tallying a vote and I was just like: 😍😍😍😍

Cus I’d never considered the cultural implications of tally marks. Lol, I just thought lines to five are lines to 5, ya know? Then I read the whole wiki page and now I want to learn more!

Stuck on Story Structure and Inciting Incident

It sounds like you’re struggling a bit with plot and story structure. Let me see if I can help! :) <3

First, some quick terminology:

Conflict - the protagonist’s struggle to reach their goal and the forces that drive them toward that goal. For example, if your character is fighting to survive a zombie apocalypse, the zombie apocalypse is the conflict and the force that’s driving that conflict is “man vs nature.”

Inciting Incident - the catalyst that kicks off the conflict and the events of the story, to which the protagonist must respond by formulating a goal.

Plot - the unified sequence of events that make up a story.

Subplot - the underlying side stories that run parallel to the main plot.

Story Structure - the overall layout of your story. There are different methods of story structure, but the standard layout is:

exposition - the setup of your story and characters

rising action - the events that follow the inciting incident

climax - the peak of tension and drama, the “big showdown”

falling action - the winding down and resolution of the story

denouement - the closing scenes

Figuring Out Your Plot

The first thing you need to do is look at these disparate plotlines you have and figure out which, if any of them, are the main plot. What is this story about? What is your protagonist trying to achieve? What is the conflict at the heart of this story?

Figuring Out an Inciting Incident

Start with where your character is before the story starts. What is their normal life like? What would an average day be like for them? Now, what sort of event could take place that would set your character off on the path you want them to be on? What incident could shake up their lives or even turn their life upside down, causing them to make a goal that would lead toward the climax?

If you’re still stuck after this point, spend some time reading through the posts on my Plot & Story Structure post master list, which go into greater detail as far as how it all works and how you can create a story from bits and pieces.

Best of luck to you!

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love yourself

have a fresh start

go back to school

recover

make new friends

fall in love

go to therapy

learn a skill

discover your passion

repair relationships

change the world

find a new hobby

be happy

We hear so much negative media about how are bodies should look, and how we should change them to look “better”. I don’t think there is a good or bad shape though. It’s hard to unlearn all the self-hate we’ve internalized over the years, but I hope you can try a little today. Your body is doing a good job and deserves love just the way it is. 🌵💕

Hey friends. I just wanted to throw this out there because I see a lot of posts from writers lamenting that they’re starting new WIPs without finishing the old ones. Some of this is in the form of memes and jokes, some of it is in the form of updates or confessionals, but there’s always this implication that writers are doing something wrong by starting something new before the old thing is finished, hopping from project to project, or working on multiple WIPs at once. So I just want to say this:

The writing process is not linear.

Bouncing between multiple WIPs is totally okay.

Abandoning old WIPs that you’re no longer interested in is totally okay.

Starting 10 or 20 or 30 stories for every 1 story that you finish is totally okay.

Only wanting to work on something that’s exciting to you (a new thing) and not something you’ve burned out on (an old thing) is totally okay.

I get that feeling like you’re always starting and never finishing anything is a big bummer. But it may help to remember that despite years of capitalist indoctrination, the creative process is not an assembly line.

Sometimes it takes writing 100 pages to realize that your idea is untenable, or that you’re not actually that interested in it, or that you want to take things in a completely different direction with a totally new story.

I’m a published writer and I average at least 10-15 WIPs for each one that I actually finish. It may take me two sentences to abandon it, or 200 pages. And sometimes I come back to them and finish them in the future. But after 20 years of writing my computer is full of barely-started stories that were destined, for whatever reason, to die.

Summer showers