#havina

archive moodboards: @havina

@deviliiissms

i know that harvy & sabrina are cute and they was first love to each other, and they are adolescents everything is sooooo intense. i can’t and i won’t believe that they are endgame, seriously? harvey in first chance he had traded it to her best friend, i know to a mortal is hard to believe and damons and witches and all of this but if she really really loved her, he should support her above all. 

harvey just love mortal sabrina

while nicholas love mortal sabrina and witch sabrina. both of them.

Mitä helvettiä, kyl ammattilaisil pitäis olla iha kunnon tiedot muistaki ku heteroist ja homoist

havina replied to your post: puhuin tänään mun terapeutin kanssa se...

kauheeta D: ehkä johtuu kulttuurin ja yhteiskunnan yliseksualisoinnista, että ne joita ei kiinnosta nähdään viallisina. ammattilaisia pitäis valistaa enemmän seksuaalisuus- ja sukupuoliasioista, kun niitä väistämättä tulee terapeutin työssä vastaan.

the-stoic replied to your post: puhuin tänään mun terapeutin kanssa se...

Oon huomannut saman, on niin helvetin turhauttavaa yrittää selittää ammattilaiselle jotain itselle ihan normaalia asiaa ja silti näyttää sen silmissä vaan entistä sekopäisemmältä. Kaikki terapeutit tarvitsee päivittäviä lisäluentoja asap… 

The Perks and Pits of Self-Insert Characters

Basing a Character on Real Life Experiences/Personality

Turning Real Life into Fiction

8 Tips for Turning Real Life into Fiction

This is a great question! I honestly don’t remember if this exact question has been asked before, but even if it has, I have different experiences now than I did whenever I answered it before (I assume), so it’s totally fine either way. :)

I have a LOT to say about writing novels. Prepare yourself for overkill.

As I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog, my first attempt at writing a novel came in my freshman year of high school. I was 14 years old and had done quite a bit of writing before that, but I hadn’t committed to any big projects like a novel at that point.

Because I wanted to be able to work on it at school, I decided to write it by hand, and the first big idea came just before one of my classes started for the day. So I just went for it. One of the friends I made in that class (I don’t know exactly what it was called, but it was mostly typing and learning how to use computers in a business context) was also working on a big project. So it was a great opportunity to write and talk to another writer.

We ended up developing a really great friendship, to the point where we learned the sign-language alphabet and communicated with that (yes, spelling out words because we were dorks) when we didn’t want anyone to know what we were talking about. We haven’t talked in ages, but I still love her to bits.

For me, that was an important positive experience for me as a young writer. I needed to have somebody else in it with me. We were both shooting for book-length works, and they both involved magic and other cool stuff. It was perfect.

Because of that, I felt compelled to continue to work on it throughout the rest of my high-school career.

But it never hit the shelves for a bunch of really big reasons. (Wow, that sounds really dramatic.)

The first big reason is that when you type up something you’ve written by hand, your work suddenly shrinks. A lot. There is nothing like typing up your introductory chapter and realizing that it’s basically just a paragraph.

That was really off-putting for me, so I went back to writing by hand.

That’s the second reason: when you write by hand, it feels non-permanent. I was writing in pencil! And some of it was being written in the margins of my notes during class. I eventually graduated to keeping the book stuff just underneath my notes so I could switch back and forth more easily.

The fact that I was mostly writing it during school hours made it a much smaller project than I’d ever imagined it would be. In my mind, I had this large-scale epic story. But on paper, it was just a bunch of loose-leaf pages that were mostly rip-offs of other stuff that I liked.

Keeping a project during school hours only makes it seem like you’re doing much more than you actually are. By the time I graduated high school, the whole thing was 42 handwritten pages. Just 42. It felt like a lot at the time, but I knew that it was probably very short when typed up. So I didn’t.

I guess I was never as committed to it as I liked to think I was. After all, I was working on it for about four years. But in reality, if it mattered that much, I would have made more time for it and figured out how to make it less … tiny.

The third reason is that once I finished high school, I realized how small it was. And I dumped it. I never wrote another word of it. I graduated high school in 2008.

Commitment is hard when you don’t have a concept of how big or small your project really is.

It also didn’t help that I didn’t know the term “novella.” I think that if I had known what a novella was, then I would have been fine with that and finished it.

But I didn’t know that there was any bridge between short stories and books. So I quit working on it.

Once I started college, I learned about NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. It’s exactly what it sounds like. You try to write a novel in a month. If you write 1,667 words every day in November, you get about 50,000 words, which is the average length for a novel.

Sounds crazy, right? How could anyone write a novel in one month? Well, I tried it anyway. And I let myself get caught up in school and ended up just doing really horribly. It’s not like the content mattered. But I couldn’t generate enough content to form a full-length book. It was terrible.

So I tried again the next year. Similar situation, but I made it a little further that time.

The next year is when everything changed. I met a very important person in 2010. And he had some amazing ideas. But he couldn’t write worth a crap. I mean, he tried, but his dyslexia made things really difficult for him. He couldn’t even keep the verb tenses consistent in his previous work. So I offered to work on it with him.

And we’re still working together, and I think I will still be working on these books when I am old.

For me, I couldn’t sustain the length. I didn’t believe in my own creativity enough to make something the length of a book.

But meeting someone with infinite ideas made all the difference. All he had to do was talk out loud while I made a bullet-point list of some events. We talked about the far-reaching possibilities–after all, he’d been working on these characters and plots since he was little. He had put more effort into world-building and character development than I ever had.

And because I know him really well, I was able to get his vision onto the page with little difficulty. For me, having a road-map has been the best thing. While I ran out of steam because I didn’t know what to do next, this person knew exactly where things were going, even if there weren’t some specific details of how they got there.

The bullet point that made me realize myself as a creative individual was something along the lines of “they get into the town somehow.”

I’ve never been so angry at a bullet point in my entire life. When he was first telling me the important pieces of the story, I just was running with it and typing as quickly as I could.

Things were fine until I got to that stupid bullet point.

“What do you mean by ‘somehow’?” I asked.

“I don’t know how they get in. They just do. It’s up to you how they do it.”

For some reason, this made me really angry. Up to this point, I had been able to fill in the blanks between bullet points pretty seamlessly. But none of them had included a “somehow.”

The town is blocked by big walls and has two guards stationed at the entrance. How do a couple of dudes walking through the forest get into this town?

I. Didn’t. Know.

This drove me up the wall. But what do creative people do when they’re backed into a hopeless corner? They come up with a way out of it.

I created a new character and her lackeys, and they, being nobility, could get the two main characters into the town.

I created this character to solve a problem, to fill the void of “somehow.”

I even had her come back later just because I thought it would be funny if they kept running into each other.

And then one day, my co-author told me he had an idea. And he proposed that we adjust the big-bad-wolves (so to speak) so that this gag character could become one of them.

After that, things escalated pretty strongly, and she’s become one of the core members of the mythology surrounding the main characters. She’s huge. And she was a total accident. She was just supposed to get the two main characters into a town and create someone to flirt with and provide a breath of fresh air from the testosterone that comes with writing about two men.

She became completely integrated into the overall idea of the story. She is as important as any of the other important characters that my co-author created years and years ago.

Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say. And I think that is one of the best things about writing a novel. I invented a solution, and that solution became a bigger and bigger idea as time went on.

No matter how small and stupid your ideas may seem to you, everything you create as a writer is important. Doing those terrible years of NaNoWriMo and that terrible handwritten story and everything else I wrote allowed me to see what is and isn’t the way for me to write. Everyone is different. So just keep writing until you find what works for you.

But it also requires dedication. I have a new book-length project that I am beginning this summer. I have no idea if I will be able to sustain it on my own, but I do think it will be important to make my own bullet points. Creating my own plot points hasn’t worked out too well in the past because my stories change a lot from the start to the finish. I’m hoping that I can get a better idea of where things would go than I used to. I’m not sure how capable I am of this, but I feel really strongly about this project and am willing to try for it.

I have been working on this series with my co-author since 2010, and it is wonderful. It’s absolutely wonderful. Getting feedback and help can be a really difficult part of having a co-author, and I don’t really recommend it to most people. It can damage friendships and stuff. For us, for a time, I was doing all the work completely on my own because he was tired of reading the same book over and over again. But I feel like I can do a significant amount of work before shoving it back in his face, and things are moving much more steadily now.

All in all, though, we were definitely meant to work on this together, and the times when we weren’t working together, it was nothing less than painful and aggravating. I have been blessed with immense patience (no, I had to work hard to become as patient as I am) and willpower, so I’ve trudged through the tough bits better than most people could have in the situations that I was presented with. There is a reason why most people write books on their own–it can get really complicated when other people are involved.

You honestly just have to be ready to sit down and do the hard work. The more you write, the easier it will be for you.

NaNoWriMo will either really help you or really discourage you. It is a really tough challenge, and it can be really disheartening if you get behind even by a few hundred words.

You have to steel yourself for grunt work and to read over the same things a thousand times over.

You have to be ready to cut your words down, to kill your characters, and to fix problems that you accidentally created for yourself.

It is long, hard work, and if you treat it like it I did when I was in high school, you’ll never finish anything.

If you don’t want to put in the hours of writing and re-writing and reading over it a million times, then it may not be for you, as awful as it may seem for me to say.

I could write another post just for the revision process–it’s just as important as the process of writing.

As far as the process of writing goes, you have to prepare yourself by knowing what you want to say.

What is this book about?Could you summarize it in a sentence?

What are the hopes and fears of the main characters, including the villains?

What should readers get out of reading your book?How should they feel when they finish reading it?What message does your book send?

It involves a lot of planning.

Some major points of planning:

who the characters are

what the characters want

how they feel about each other

what they do

why they do it

where they are going

why they are going there

whether they reach their destination (whether it is literal or figurative)

how they begin

how they change

how they end

what tone you want to end with

whether you want to do sequels

what the major plot points are

why those plot points are important

what small things lead up to the major plot points

how they are important to the plot

why each character and each location is necessary

who your audience is (age, level of education, etc.)

what the genre is (not always important)

why you are the one qualified to write this story

how it is different from the other stories you’ve read

why people need to read this story

You don’t have to know all of the answers to these right away, but you should start thinking about them as you begin to work on your project.

Every single answer will affect how you write this novel. All of them–mostly in ways that you wouldn’t expect.

The more answers you have for yourself, the better. There are millions of things to know about your characters and world, and your readers will only learn a portion of it. And that’s okay. But you need to know it, because it will affect how you write each character, each town, each whatever.

If you want to avoid a portion of re-writing, the best thing you can do is answer as many of those questions as you can. If you don’t realize your main character’s motivation until you’re halfway through the book, it is distinctly possible that you will have to re-write that first half of the book because it would change how your character will act. Re-writing sucks. Get your house in order before you take your tools out.

The more you have organized and answered for yourself, the better chance you have of knowing your story well enough to actually tell it.

I know this all seems overwhelming, and much of what I’ve written may seem unnecessary here, but for me, all of this has been crucial to my experience as a writer. This is honestly just a bit down from the surface–some of the major neural pathways. I could talk about writing novels forever and ever.

If you have more specific questions, I can go off on different tangents to answer them. :)

I hope this helps and that you take as much of this as you can to heart.

If you’re talking about a story based largely on real events from your life, with real people turned into fictional characters, the technical term is roman a clef, or novel with a key. [Hmmm, don’t know how to do the accent over the a.] The Wikipedia article is worth reading, as are some of the resources at the end. Small penis rule, indeed!

This type of writing goes back at least to the 17th century, and if you peruse the list of titles, contemporary examples range from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar to Carrie Fisher’s Postcards from the Edge.

We aren’t lawyers here, so if you’re going to be accusing people, fictional or not, of crimes and misbehavior that might be libelous, you’ll need to tread carefully and get professional advice if you plan to publish. 

You could potentially alienate friends and family even if you keep it light-hearted. Be aware of that, too, but don’t be afraid to be bold if that’s what is needed to tell the tale. 

Beyond the warnings, just follow the rules for creating a good story. You will probably have to bend circumstances, combine several real people into one character, skip incidents for the sake of brevity and make other adjustments to the facts. Spend some time in the tags to shore up your weak points.