Straight ToThe Heart Of The Story

Source: pinterest.com/The Slow Living Teacher

— J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

I get asks like this every now and then, and they always contain the same problem.

Your writing is not shitty. It is not worthless.

Bloggers using these terms to describe early writing are often being either glib or depressing. Ignore their advice if it is making you feel bad.

Do you write for pleasure or for praise/accomplishment? If the latter, then you are simply in the practice stage. Practice is inherently worthwhile and no effort in this regard is a waste.

If you write for pleasure, then everything you create fulfills its purpose by being entertaining to create. A small child does not drop the crayon when it realizes its drawing will never be in the MoMA, does it? No, they don't care they just like drawing stuff. Adopt that mindset. Just write to get words on the page and ideas developed because you want to.

My advice for the insecure writer:

Stop re-reading your own work; you're a very biased critic right now and that in itself is holding you back.

All improvements are for later drafts. Trust me, you'll have whole new ideas by draft three so put off the nitpicking and focus.

Avoid outside opinions, writing advice, and blogs like mine for a while; we tend to inadvertently make you feel like you've done everything wrong and need to start over.

Stop starting over. Stop deleting your early drafts. Save all of it (this was the best advice I ever received).

Read and watch books and movies for motivation, and to analyze their strengths and weaknesses.

Do. Not. Compare. Yourself. To Other. Writers—your art is about you and what concerns you, other creators have nothing to do with it.

Remind yourself dumber people are doing it wrong confidently. Copy their confidence.

When you feel self-doubt creeping in again, tell it to take a hike, you've got a story to write.

Whatever you write, no matter the quality, take pride in being a writer at all. Lazy suckers just use AI.

There's nothing wrong with making a mess. How are you supposed to learn from constant perfection? Scratch out dumb sentences, leave afterthoughts in the margins, and side tangents in brackets. If the writing isn't going well, write ROUGH DRAFT in big letters at the top to remind yourself it's just a sketch of what you had in mind, not the finished product.

"...i’m worried it can never get better" I have great news for you! This fear will only be realized if you quit. Since you feel the pull to write there's clearly no point in quitting, your brain already knows writing is the answer. Ideas don't like to wait, and life will keep trying to interrupt you with bigger things, so there's really no time like the present. Go write!

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Please review my pinned Ask Policy before sending in your ask. Thank you.

When I am working in Oxford's Bodleian Library I sometimes take a break just to admire the views 📚!

"The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second."

"Strength and success – they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it."

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."

"Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts, perhaps fear of a loss of power."

"No one wants advice – only corroboration."

"A question is a trap and an answer is your foot in it."

"If you’re in trouble or hurt or need – go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones."

"All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal."

"It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone."

"In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."

Multi-Mini Monday!

(Okay, posted on a Tuesday, but, whatever)

Let me just start this by saying that the absolute joy that I felt from holding an actual handful of miniature books is unparalleled.

These are dollhouse books! There are 26 books, and the coolest part is that they are all readable! Sometimes when miniature books are made for dollhouses, they are blank books with decorated covers. These books were created by a wide variety of people and publishers, and I think that it shows how wide ranging the world of miniature book creation is!

Each book is unique, and they range in size from 18 to 25 mm. Some of them are gilt, some are illustrated, and some are quite plain. The bookcase itself is 11 x 9 x 4 cm. It is a beautiful wooden case that is decorated with gilt embellishments, orange silk, and golden ribbon trim.

More often than not, the miniatures in our collection are housed individually. It was very cool to see these items in a context that they originally could've been in. You can imagine playing with and reading these books and putting them back on their shelf as one would a standard sized book. It is so fun!

-- Hailee M.

The National Library of France is the most important library in the country and one of the oldest in the world.

A decree from 1537 requires the BnF to keep a copy of every work published in France. Currently, it houses more than 13,000,000 books and 350,000 bound volumes of manuscripts, as well as collections of maps, coins, documents, prints, and sound recordings.