& she wrote.

Firstly, sorry it took me such a long time to answer this ask. Secondly, I’m so flattered that you’d like my advice on this topic - though, to be clear, I am very much an amateur writer and am no authority on the craft! But I do think a lot about the rhythm of my stories and I can happily share my own thought process here, in the hope that it might be useful to you too. And for what it’s worth, writing so much fiction and trying to improve as a creative writer is the best thing I’ve ever done to improve my academic writing as well. So the ideas are absolutely transferable!

For me, the most important thing is to read everything aloud. It gives you a different perspective on the sound of the sentences and I can always tell when there’s a clause that needs to be cut or when a word is missing. Pay attention to when your mouth wants to end the sentence (and when it’s hanging there, because it needs more). I’d also recommend reading your work aloud several times: if you keep tripping over the same phrase or section, then that’s a good sign that the flow’s not right. 

Following that, read other work aloud! Great books and poetry almost always have perfect rhythm (that’s why they’re so pleasing to read and listen to!). Often reading your own work aloud only alerts you that something’s wrong; it doesn’t tell you what to do about it. That comes from reading work with excellent rhythm and slowly learning what that sounds like to the ear. Overall, I do think reading aloud is the most important thing: in John Gardner’s book The Art of Fiction, he writes at length about the specific details and techniques of writing with various metres, but then says that a good writer will do this all by ear. Only in dire circumstances do you need to mark the stresses on a sentence!

Vary your sentence structure. Gary Provost said this better than I ever could: 

“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. 

Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important. 

So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.” 

This is an important thing for me to keep in mind, because I love a long sentence!

Sometimes you need an extra word or clause just to make the rhythm work. Mostly, I try to cut out the ‘just’s and the ‘now’s, because they’re filler words and are lazy on my part. But sometimes you need that extra beat or two to make the rest of the sentence sound right.

Match the rhythm with the mood and character. This might be less relevant for academic writing, but in fiction, the rhythm you choose for a scene (or paragraph) is an integral part of the overall mood. If a character’s feeling relaxed, lazy; daydreaming by a river in summer, you might use long, drowsy sentences to capture the atmosphere. If a character’s struggling to think straight or is under immense stress, you might use sentence fragments. Short, regular sentences might work well for a character who is very logical and orderly, while longer, meandering prose might make sense for someone dreamier whose mind is often floating off on tangents. You get the idea. 

And lastly: get the rhythm of the final sentence right. That last sentence is the part of your work that readers are left with, and it’s so important that it leaves them feeling like the story is finished. If you get the rhythm wrong, you’ll leave your reader with a sense that there’s more to say but they’re not privy to it. Don’t do it! Make that last part perfect. 

every hopper painting is about stillness. it is found in every brushstroke; at dusk in automat, at dawn in morning sun, at noon in office in a small city, at night in nighthawks.

i have a friend who orbits ideas of power, another who delights in the prosaic and the plain. one weaves around systems and structures, another returns always to wonder at the sea.

Finding your form is like finding a mate. You really have to search, and you can’t compromise—unless you can compromise, in which case your misery will be of a different variety. But just as there are probably only one or two people to whom you could commit yourself, there are probably only a few things you can write about, and only one genre, or maybe two, in which you might excel. It’s no coincidence that most authors’ bodies of work hover over two or three basic themes or take a single basic shape. Think of the novels of Trollope, Austen, Dickens, or Hardy; think of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. They each revisited the same themes, settings, and conflicts over the course of their writing lives. The James Joyces of the world, those who can move from short story to novel to epic, are rare, but then again, few writers master each form the first time out of the gate.

Even though most writers have a limited literary arsenal, readers find infinite pleasure in watching those gestures change and deepen over time. But if you aren’t yet sure what your themes are or what category you should be writing in, you need to take a full accounting of all the reading and all thewriting you have ever done or wanted to do. If you are one of the many people who dream of writing but have never successfully finished or, perhaps, even started a piece, I suggest you compile a list of everything you’ve read over the past six months or year and try to determine if there is a pattern or common denominator. If you read only literary novels, that should tell you something. If you’ve always kept a diary noting the natural world in all its variety, you might want to try writing nature essays.

It never fails to surprise me, in conversations with writers who seek my advice as to what they should write, how many fail to see before their very eyes the hay that might be gold. Instead of honoring the subjects and forms that invade their dreams and diaries, they concoct some ideas about what’s selling or what agents and editors are looking for as they try to fit their odd-shaped pegs into someone else’s hole. There is nothing more refreshing for an editor than to meet a writer or read a query letter that takes him completely by surprise, that brings him into a world he didn’t know existed or awakens him to a notion that had been there all along but that he had nevermuch noticed.

Some of the most striking and successful books in recent history were clearly born of a writer’s obsession and complete disregard for what, supposedly, sells. Few editors would have gone for a queer book about a little-known murder in Savannah that took its sweet time describing every other quirkof the city and its inhabitants before addressing the crime.Whatever John Berendt was thinking when he set out to write Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, it couldn’t have been the bestseller list, because almost anyone in the publishing industry would have told him that nobody would care about the story of a gay antiques dealer who languished in jail after shooting a cheap hustler. The book does, however, draw on what most certainly are Berendt’s strengths as a reporter, as a travel writer, and as a southerner with a gothic sensibility and taste for the macabre. Clearly, he was born to write this book, and he worked through whatever ambivalence and uncertainty he might have felt within himself or encountered from others.

emblem structure

concessional structure

retrospective-prospective structure 

elegy’s structures

dialectical argument structure

descriptive-meditative structure

mid-course turn

epiphanic structure

circular structure

cliche-and-critique structure

dejection-to-elation structure

dream-to-waking structure

list-with-a-twist structure

metaphor-to-meaning structure

question-and-answer structure

reductio ad absurdum

story-with-a-moral structure

the idea of setting systems rather than goals comes from james clear’s atomic habits. here’s a quote that sums it up: 

“Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.”

the basic idea is that the purpose of setting goals is to win the game, and the purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. as he says, “you do not rise to the level of your goals. you fall to the level of your systems.” 

how this applies: you cannot finish all of your projects on passion alone. you cannot finish it by saying ‘i’m going to finish it’. the most helpful strategies in finishing your wip are the systems you put in place. 

examples of systems: 

attaching writing to a time of day (i reserve time for it first thing in the morning. some people write at night. it’s up to your preference!)

committing to an average (i can’t write every day. i write frequently. committing myself to an average of 500 words a day means that some days i write 1000 words and the next day i write 0 words and that’s okay)

implementing the 2 day rule (don’t let more than 2 days in a row pass without writing at least something, be it worldbuilding ideas or outlining or writing actual prose)

acknowledging daydreaming as productive (it is!! it is!!! those hours you spend looking out the window thinking about your wip still counts as productive)

the above is not a list of commands. they are all suggestions of various systems that work. 

the real reason i’ve found a system-oriented approach to be more helpful is that i LOVE writing. i love it and i want to continue loving it. systems help take away the anxiety of attaching my value as a writer to finishing a project. writing doesn’t have to add stress and a sense of failure into your life. none of us need that. 

finishing a project does not make you worthy. the act of writing makes you worthy. 

Before smartphones and social media, authors were more attentive. That’s why their worlds and characters felt real, because they were watching the real world around them.

Authors—put your phone down. Sit still. Watch.

Watch the shadow of a bird sweep across a building as it flies past. The way a beam of light bends into perfect circles on the glass. The dried splatter of a drink on the floor.

(anon is referring to this post - edited to add i also posted about this later here to elaborate on how i personally tackle the “knowledge” point)

oh man ok thats bc it’s not actually called that, it’s just the quick way i refer to it. the theory is from this article called “how i went from writing 2k a day to 10k a day” by rachel aaron, & it is possibly the best writing advice i have ever read even tho i have not yet written 10k in a day myself*. it posits that in orders to boost ur general productivity u need 3 things: enough time/energy to write (& working at the right time of day), enthusiasm about what ur writing, & knowledge about where the story/scene is going

so when u have all 3 of these, you’re really gonna be vibing, but if you’re missing one or more, you’re gonna start getting stuck. usually when one complains of “writer’s block” (which i don’t actually believe in), it comes down to one of these things not working as it should, and if you work the problem from that angle the “block” will usually just disappear

the article explains the three points & how to get better at each one REALLY well, better than i would, and it’s pretty short so it’s always worth a read (or reread, anyone that’s followed me for awhile might’ve heard me sing these praises before). the points she makes about the “knowledge” part of this equation i think are particularly good - she has a method of pre-blocking scenes with dialogue and action beats that i sort of adapted for myself and it makes my first drafts come out WAY quicker and smoother. it’s rly good shit i think everyone who likes to write should read it

*ok so technically i did write 10k in 24h one time in like 2009 but it was because the first draft of my my big bang was due and they were all sleep-deprived filler words that weren’t meant to be real prose, just saying what was gonna happen so i wouldn’t get kicked. that doesn’t count!! my actual record is like 6400 or 6500 which i did the day i finished the rough draft of synchronicity - once i got that close to the end nothing in the world was gonna stop me. i’m gonna hit 10k someday tho i just know it

⟢ PICK THREE DETAILS MAXIMUM! your reader doesn't need to know every piece of furniture. Give them the broken clock on the mantle, the smell of cigarettes embedded in the couch, the water stain on the ceiling shaped like Italy. Their brain will fill in the rest. You're not writing an insurance inventory!!!

⟢ Use the senses people forget. Everyone does sight and sound, but what about: the metallic taste of fear, the way humidity makes your clothes stick, the phantom itch of being watched, that gross feeling when you touch something unexpectedly wet. GET WEIRD WITH IT

⟢ MOTION IN YOUR DESCRIPTIONS!! (Please?) don't just tell me the curtains are blue, tell me they're "shuddering in the AC blast" or "hanging limp like they've given up." Static description is a sleep aid. Make things MOVE

⟢ Your narrator's voice should COLOR everything! A depressed character won't describe the sunset as "beautiful mauve and amber streaking across the sky," they'll think "the sun's dying again, doing its whole performance art thing with the clouds"

⟢ Stop with the mirror descriptions! :( "She looked in the mirror and saw her auburn hair and green eyes" NO. Banned. Forbidden. Find literally any other way. Have another character notice. Show through action. Slip details in naturally. The mirror thing is lazy and we all know it

Edit: Some posts may be deleted

Character writing/development:

Character Arcs

Making Character Profiles

Character Development

Comic Relief Arc

Internal Conflict

Character Voices

Creating Distinct Characters

Creating Likeable Characters

Writing Strong Female Characters

Writing POC Characters

Building Tension

Writing Grumpy x Sunshine Tropes

Writing Sexuality & Gender

Writing Manipulative Characters

Writing Mature Young Characters

Writing Disoriented but Capable Characters

Plot devices/development:

Intrigue in Storytelling

Enemies to Lovers

Alternatives to Killing Characters

Worldbuilding

Misdirection

Things to Consider Before Killing Characters

Foreshadowing

Story Structure (+ Addition)

Killing Many Characters at Once

Narrative (+ how to write):

Emphasising the Stakes

Avoid Info-Dumping

Writing Without Dialogue

1st vs. 2nd vs. 3rd Perspective

Fight Scenes (+ More)

Transitions

Pacing

Writing Prologues

Dialogue Tips

Writing War

Writing Cheating

Writing Miscommunication

Writing Unrequited Love

Writing a Slow Burn Btwn Introverts

Writing Admiration Without Attraction

Writing Dual POVs

Writing Unreliable Narrators

Naturally Conveying Character Age

Avoiding Repetition of "I" in 1st Person

Worldbuilding:

Worldbuilding: Questions to Consider

Creating Laws/Rules in Fantasy Worlds

Book writing:

Connected vs. Stand-Alone Series

A & B Stories

Parts of a Book (Chapters, Scenes, Arcs, Story Beats)

Writer resources:

Writing YouTube Channels, Podcasts, & Blogs

Online Writing Resources

Outlining/Writing/Editing Software

Translation Software for Writing

Writer help:

Losing Passion/Burnout

Overcoming Writer's Block

Fantasy terms:

How To Name Fantasy Races (Step-by-Step)

Naming Elemental Races

Naming Fire-Related Races

How To Name Fantasy Places

Ask games:

Character Ask Game #1

Character Ask Game #2

Character Ask Game #3

Miscellaneous:

Writing Tips

Writing Fantasy

Miscommunication Prompts

Characters must make choices.

Characters should often make bad choices before they make good choices.

Character choices should drive the vast majority of the plot. Characters reacting to having random stuff thrown at them is far less interesting than characters reacting to the stuff they've thrown after it's ricocheted around and comes bouncing back toward them.

If a character refuses to make a choice, there better be consequences for that too, and you better have a damn clear way of showing those consequences to the reader and the character.

It sounds like a gimmick, but honestly, some of my best writing in that class came from hotspotting. Usually, the sentence you consider the "best" is the one that really gets to the heart of something you're trying to convey. In a rough draft, it tends to be that you're fumbling around a bit before you really hit on the heart of things. So with hotspotting, you're starting from a less fumbly place, which means you're able to dig into your subject in a much deeper and more precise way. It makes you feel like a surgeon, a little bit.

SPLITE - POLITICAL WORLDBUILDING GUIDE

About time, right? ^^ 

There are a lot of questions to use to analyze politics. Here are but a few general Qs that will hopefully help guide your worldbuilding process. Of course, you don’t need to answer them all, and there might be some Qs on there that are not relevant to your story. 

Given that politics is kind of my field, I’ve done my best to keep things simple and general, and not to go into too many technicalities in the questions above. However, if you have any questions please let me know! ^^

I hope these help! Coming up next, SPLITE - Locational! 

First, I write down very roughly what needs to happen in this scene.

For example, take an early scene from my wip. The main character’s mentor has just died in the previous scene. And what’s worse, he’s killed by the magical Library she loves so much. What needs to happen in this next scene?

She brings the terrible news of the mentor’s death and the Library’s betrayal to the mentor’s widow (who gives her a key to the Library, minor detail).

She brings the news to the major, who is responsible of anything concerning the Library and who is indirectly the reason the mentor went into the Library in the first place.

At the end of this scene, the second main character is briefly introduced.

Then I start asking myself as many questions as I can.

What does the Main Girl Character (MGC) feel after her mentor’s death?

What does the MGC do with the key she gets from the widow?

How and when does the widow give her the key?

What is the first thing the MGC does when the mentor dies?

What does the widow do when she sees the MGC and the mentor?

How does the widow react? What does she feel? Did she expect it to happen someday? Does she stay icy calm or does she scream? (pieta)

What does the widow look like?

What is the widow like, as a person?

How does the MGC know she has to go to the major? Is there some kind of police, or is he the mentor’s boss or something?

Does the MGC trust the major?

Can she trust the major?

What is the major like, as a person? Nice? Belittling?

What does the MGC tell the major? What does he want to know?

What kind of new information does the MGC get out of this conversation?

What does the office of the major look like? Where is it?

What kind of a person is the Main Boy Character (MBC)?

What is the MBC wearing?

What does the MBC say to the MGC?

What was his reaction when he heard the news? How did he feel?

How does the major react? How does he feel?

How far is it from the major to the MGC’s home? How much time does the MGC have to inform the MBC and how much time does the MBC have to react and to comfort the MGC? I just realise the MBC already knows (probably from her parents?) because otherwise he wouldn’t be waiting for her at the major’s office.

How did the MGC’s parents tell the MBC? Why would they tell him? Maybe he called her house or he came by because he knew she went to see the Library but he doesn’t know yet that it killed the mentor?

See, I’m already filling my page so that it doesn’t look that intimidatingly empty.

Next, it’s answers time. I go through all the questions and make up a satisfying answer. Sometimes I get it right straight away, sometimes I have to brainstorm for four pages before hitting the suitable solution. 

Since this is still preparation, I don’t have to worry about the quality of my writing style - I’m just thinking on paper. Often, this paradoxally means I write relaxed and I end up using whole bits of my preparation in my first draft.

After I have answered all the questions I want (often some become obsolete by answering other questions), I write out the scene again, in bullets or telegraph style, but with the detail and richness I have found in my answers. That usually takes me one page.

And only THEN I start writing my first draft. I see everything perfectly clear in my head and I even have bits of text I can use from my prep, so writing the first draft is way more chill than just writing it cold.

I do this before every scene, but you can also use this technique only when you get stuck or when you have to write a scene you’re dreading. You would think it’s inefficient and it takes too much time, but this technique keeps my thoughts focussed on my story (I’m a daydreamer) and it keeps the imposter syndrome at bay.

On average, my prep is 1,5 times the length of my written scene, but this process makes my writing so much richer. Not everything I make up in the Q&A phase ends up in my scene, especially questions like “what does the place look like”, “what is the character wearing” or “how long does it take them to walk from A to B”, but I find I can write the scene better if I know the answer, even if the reader doesn’t need to know.

Anyway, this is how I do it. Thanks for listening to my TED talk!

I’m gonna tag a few people who I admire, who I hope are interested. Feel free to ignore me if you aren’t.

square brackets with notes to self mid-line like [does this make sense with worldbuilding?]

ah yes, Main Character and their closest friends, Unnamed Character A and Unnamed Character B.

bullshitting your way through something that you probably definitely need to research later

also square brackets to link up scenes. [scene transition idk] my beloved

the total freedom of word vomits

"I'll fix that later"

the moment when the world and characters start to gain a life of their own

pieces falling into place as you write that you were uncertain about before you started

Not only is this allowed but it's something i encourage all writers of any kind to play with! :D

The idea that all writers know what to say all the time and just splash fully-formed drafts out one word after the other is false. There are some who can do it, but i think most of us... can't. Which is why we need tricks like square bracket notes! They're not cheats or lazy writing or some other flavour of Not Allowed, but instead really really important tools that we should use as much as we need to.

Some of the most helpful tricks I've collected over the years are:

make some notes in square brackets – e.g., I had to write a scene on a sailboat, but I know nothing about sailing so i literally just had notes like [boat part] and [how to do X thing?]. If you use square brackets as punctuation anyway, use something else like [[double square brackets]] or a unique letter combination like XY at the start of the note; the point is to pick something you can search for easily later on.

(You can also style inline comments in a different font/colour. Scrivener has an inline annotation feature; if you use Word, you can make a specific Style to make notes stand out at a glance, etc.)

bullet-point your way through any tricky parts – this can be pure stream-of-consciousness vague ideas. it only needs to make sense to me later. much more helpful than just leaving big blank gaps that Future Me has to work out how to fill, but also better than dwelling on a piece of writing forever.

use comment tools – mostly do this if I have ideas for alternate events and/or phrasing, or if I want to check something for continuity purposes.

write out of order – Best advice i ever got for academic writing is to know or even write your conclusion first and your introduction last, which your main argument in between. Similar principles apply in fiction, or any kind of creative writing. If there's a part of the essay that I can visualise clearly or a part of the story that is particularly exciting or important, I might write that first, then figure out how it fits/how everything fits around it.

keep a loose scenes and/or "outtakes" folder – anything that i write out of order goes here, along with any notes for how I think I want to incorporate it into the full text. In the same vein, if I delete something but don't know for sure it will never be relevent ever again, it gets cut and pasted into an outtakes folder.

Basic rule though is that you do not have to get your writing perfect on the first try. This is where drafts come in. The way I see it is to treat each draft as a fresh start – I create/open a new document (well, new Scrivener file) and start over as if from scratch. Each draft gets a narrower focus than the last. This is my process, as an example:

first draft is the word vomit. You do whatever you need to do to get it onto the page, and it can be terrible. In fact, it probably should be terrible. You can fix everything later. it's fine.

The second draft is a half-hearted cleanup attempt. I'll re-type everything because everything is subject to change, from the characters' personalities to the pacing to the order of events. It's all primordial goop, basically. i'm just poking and prodding and making a few adjustments, but mostly trying to create a more stable version of the first draft. All shortcut tricks continue to be my best friend.

By draft three I'll let myself copy-paste between documents if I'm particularly happy with a passage, but try not to get hung up on anything specific. I'll still make liberal use of square brackets etc. as I need to, but try to address as many from the previous draft as I can. This is where I get more brutal with making decisions and trying to fix parts of the story in place.

Draft four is usually my final draft, but there's literally no rules about how many drafts you're allowed to write. It's at this point that I try to keep square brackets etc. to a minimum (unless i've diverged significantly from the plot of a previous draft and having to rewrite large chunks), and make sure to address all the notes and problems encountered in previous drafts.

This is when I move on to revisions. Revisions are the "final do-overs", for me. I start them when I'm satisfied with all the large-scale aspects: plot and chronology; characters' personalities, motivations and arcs; large-scale pacing (so the over-arcing pace, rather than the pacing in individual scenes); backstories; and worldbuilding. I'll copy the last draft's document instead of starting with a blank one. First I run through those large scale things one more time and tweak until I'm happy, not just satisfied. Then I shrink my focus to in-scene pacing, dialogue, and the quality of the writing itself.

I'll also rewrite my plot outline between each draft, too. The act of actually re-writing stuff is very helpful for making your brain think about it.