#noodlenumber

Absolute trans + bi king who falls for anyone who looks like they could kick his ass (or at least acts like it)

YOUR TORSO’S LACK OF STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY IS AS FASCINATING AS IT IS CONCERNING. I’M PRESCRIBING YOU AMMONIUM SULFATE.

I wouldn’t worry. I don’t feel any different from the usual... despite having my spine exposed like that. You, on the other side, have something that I don’t know if it’s guts or tubes spilling out. That can’t be good.

Good question!! I consider myself to be an amateur or at best untrained writer; literature and story writing are very different from my day-to-day vocation and what I studied.  So I can’t really give any technical or academic advice about writing, but I can talk about the things I personally do that I think are helpful to my experiments in writing:

I utilize very detailed outlines. My individual chapter outlines usually average 1500 words but often wind up higher. I take continual notes the moment I get an idea - if a piece of dialogue comes into my head, or an interesting metaphor, I write it down to use later. I have an individual document for each chapter’s outline that I will throw these ideas into. Sometimes things get shuffled around as I go. My outlines often include descriptions of specific words, movements, and imagery, and I just expand on these in my initial draft.

The most important thing I plan out is an ending. After I know my beginning, the ending is the next thing I set in stone. Many fic writers (and I have been guilty of this in the past) are often just winging it without much of a plan, and sometimes that works out amazingly, but all too often it leads to burn-out, or writer’s block. Don’t box yourself in like this, because when you realize that the time to wrap your plot up is coming, you’re going to panic! You should know what you’re working towards. That ending should influence the tone of the entire story. Your readers should be able to finish your fic once, and then, on a second read-through, be like, “Oh my god, chapter 2 ALREADY had foreshadowing for the ending and I didn’t even know!” This is how you really engage readers.

I read a lot. Fiction, non-fiction, articles, essays, poetry. I read anything and everything. When you’re learning a new language, the fastest way to learn it is by talking with people who are fluent in it. I think the same goes for writing. If you’re immersed in reading, you’ll always be learning something new.

I don’t constrain my prose. I utilize sentence fragments, contractions, interjections, I start sentences with conjunctions etc liberally, because they are natural parts of conversational language, and as our use of language changes, so does the inner voice ‘reading’ things to us. Because I write mostly in present tense, I try my best to avoid rigid narration that might pull the reader out of the scene. Ideally, I want my prose to flow naturally, the way it might if it were spoken aloud. At the same time, I try to avoid making it too conversational- I don’t address the reader or anything. 

I’m not shy about using a thesaurus. The thesaurus gets a bad rap because it’s not typically used in the best way. You shouldn’t be pulling open a thesaurus just to swap words out to make sentences sound more interesting; you should be utilizing a thesaurus to refresh your own vocabulary, to remind you of the alternate ways you can take and mold language. A thesaurus should help you restructure a sentence and make the imagery more vivid, not just awkwardly reword it.  If you’re going to swap a word out, revise the entire sentence. Revise the entire paragraph. It will all sound much better. Any descriptive word you choose should feel appropriate for what it’s describing. If it doesn’t sound natural, it’s not working, and it needs to change.

I place myself in the story. If I’m having trouble describing something, I think to myself, ‘Well, if I was doing/seeing/experiencing this in real life, how would I react? What would I think? What would it look like?’ and usually that helps a lot. You’re not your characters, but you should be putting yourself in their shoes and thinking, ‘What are the ways I can describe this? How would I describe it to myself?’

Such specific flattery! It doesn’t get much better than this.

Thank you!!! Hoping to get a new chapter up this weekend. This really means a lot, thanks for letting me know. I hope you get your ass back though...... I FEEL BAD