#writing rules

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You don’t have to force it.

• If you want to write — write.

If you can’t — step away.

• Sometimes it’s enough

to simply read what you’ve already written,

to stay close to the story.

• If writing starts to feel tense —

if you catch yourself getting frustrated or restless — stop.

• Words pulled out by force

don’t carry the same weight.

They don’t feel like yours.

• You write because you love it.

You've heard it in English class, in podcasts, on writer tip listicles and TikToks and YouTube videos promising to tell you how to write like a pro: avoid using adverbs if at all possible! Adverbs make you look like a dork who doesn't know how to write!

So what do you do? You find every damn adverb in your story and you rifle through a thesaurus or dictionary to find the most appropriate verb. Let's use an example—the dreaded "ran quickly."

How about the sentence:

James runs quickly through the glen to get to grandma's house.

So you get your thesaurus and you run your finger down the list of verbs:

Hurried

Rushed

Sprinted

Dashed

Bolted

Darted

Raced

Sped

Fled

Charged

Tore

Barreled

Lunged

Took off

Bounded

Scrambled

Careened

Hurtled

Jogged

Galloped

Scampered

Scurried

Hustled

Blazed

Streaked

Flew

Zoomed

Zipped

Whizzed

Shot

Rocketed

Pelted

Wow! So many! You just pick one, right? And you all said along with me: No, of course not. You pick the one that means what you want.

So let's figure out what fits. Let's start with the generic runs quickly. I'm going to write that my character James is running through the glen to get to grandma's house. He's not in a hurry, he just likes to go places fast. Kind of like a video game character—his default is run. If most people run at around… 5 mph (8 kmh), then James runs at 8 mph (~13 kmh).

So our sentence:

James runs quickly through the glen to get to grandma's house.

What does this tell the reader? James is running through a glen, going to grandma's house, and he's running quickly. Perfect, exactly what I mean to say. But oh no! We're using an adverb!

So let's try on some of those specialized verbs. I'm not going to go through all of them in this post, because that's a lot, but feel free to try the ones we don't go through for yourself. Now, on to the experimentation!

James hurries through the glen to get to grandma's house.

Let's do the same thing—what does this tell the reader? He's going through a glen—he's no longer running, you see, since "hurry" does not always mean run—he's going to grandma's house, and he's in a hurry. Besides the fact he's no longer running, you've added something with the word "hurry." There's now some external motivator there. Is he late? Is there a time crunch? Why's he hurrying?

You've just added a different connotation. That's the thing about words—they don't just come with a dictionary meaning. They have a secondary, subconscious meaning, something culturally embedded in the language.

And our James? Not in a hurry. So cross hurry off the list.

Let's try a few more. Let's pick ten, and just go down the list.

James rushes through the glen to get to grandma's house.

Similar to hurry, in that this one doesn't necessarily mean run—just moving quickly. This one does seem a bit faster, though. Still, our James isn't rushing. He's just leisurely running quickly.

James sprints through the glen to get to grandma's house.

Woah woah woah. Don't get crazy now. That's a little intense. Okay, he's running now, but he's not sprinting—that's a whole other level of running. He's just running at an average quickness. A casual 8 mph run.

James dashes through the glen to get to grandma's house.

Okay, cool, he's still running—we don't have the issue of hurry or rush here—but dashes implies some sort of urgency, or speed above just "running."

James races through the glen to get to grandma's house.

Races has either an implied competition, or going at full speed, trying to get somewhere. It implies urgency. It's directional. You race toward something. He is running to grandma's house, but is he going at full speed? Is there urgency?

James flees through the glen to get to grandma's house.

Is he being chased by feral hogs?

James charges through the glen to get to grandma's house.

Calm down buddy, you're gonna give grandma a heart attack.

James hurtles through the glen to get to grandma's house.

He's certainly not hurtling—hurtles implies wild and uncontrolled. His run is quite controlled.

James scurries through the glen to get to grandma's house.

What is he, a mouse?

James scrambles through the glen to get to grandma's house.

Wild, chaotic, uncontrolled—that's how I get dressed in the morning when I'm late for work. It's certainly not how James, an expert runner, runs through the glen.

James flies through the glen to get to grandma's house.

This one implies he's running so fast he barely hits the ground. He is certainly not flying through the glen.

Okay. We could keep going—I could make you read through every single possible replacement for 'runs quickly' and my commentary, but I won't, because I think I've illustrated my point.

Are the non-adverbial verbs more evocative? Yes. They add emotion. They add connotation.

The advice to never use adverbs isn't to avoid adverbs for adverbs' sake. There's nothing inherently wrong with adverbs. They're a perfectly normal and useful part of language.

What the advice is getting at is that you should choose your verbs according to what you're trying to get across.

You cannot simply look at dictionary definitions or a thesaurus—what is the precise meaning you are attempting to convey? If James is late, perhaps he hurries, or rushes, or races. If he's being chased by a feral hog, perhaps he sprints or he flees. If James is a mouse, perhaps he scurries or scampers.

But my James simply moves around his world like a video game character—always on run-mode—so what is the most precise choice for me?

It's runs quickly. It's the adverb one. It's the rule-breaking one.

My advice to you is to write with intuition and to not worry so much about word choices in the moment. If "speeds" seems right as you write it, go ahead. If you can't think of the perfect word, write "runs quickly" and come back to it in editing.

Then ask yourself, what's the external/internal motivation? What's the context? Choose your verb—with or without an adverb—according to that. But don't just pick a word to avoid an adverb.

Write with intuition, edit with intention. Use adverbs if they're the best fit for what you want to say, and if you get feedback from someone to not use an adverb—even though you've gone through the other verbs and decided an adverb is the best choice—you are free to disregard that feedback.

You know what you mean. Make sure your words match it, to the best of your ability. But don't get caught up in trying to pick the best word in the writing process. It's a trap. Do it in editing.

FANDOMS / MEDIUMS

I write for ASSASSIN'S CREED, LORD OF THE RINGS, THE HOBBIT, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, and OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH. I'm a bit picky for who exactly do I write about in those mediums, simply as I'm either not familiar enough with, or struggle to write, the characters not mentioned. Do know that the list I do write for below is subject to change.

ASSASSIN'S CREED

𝐈 : Altaïr Ibn-La'had, Malik Al-Sayf, Desmond Miles

𝐈𝐈 : Ezio Auditore de la Firenze, Claudia Auditore

𝐈𝐈𝐈 : Ratohnhaké:ton / Connor Kenway, Haytham Kenway

𝐈𝐕 𝐁𝐋𝐀𝐂𝐊 𝐅𝐋𝐀𝐆 : Edward Kenway

𝐑𝐎𝐆𝐔𝐄 : Shay Cormac, George Munro

𝐔𝐍𝐈𝐓𝐘 : Arno Dorian, Elise de La Serre

𝐒𝐘𝐍𝐃𝐈𝐂𝐀𝐓𝐄 : Jacob Frye, Evie Frye

𝐕𝐀𝐋𝐇𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐀 : Eivor Varinsson/Varinsdottir

TOLKIEN

𝐋𝐎𝐑𝐃 𝐎𝐅 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒 : Frodo Baggins; Samwise Gamgee; Peregrine "Pippin" Took; Meriadoc "Merry" Brandybuck; Aragorn II Elessar; Arwen; Elrond; Legolas Thranduillon; Boromir; Faramir; Eomer; Eowyn

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐇𝐎𝐁𝐁𝐈𝐓 : Bilbo Baggins; Thorin Oakenshield; Fili Durin; Kili Durin; Thranduil; Elrond; Lindir; Tauriel; Bard

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN

Jack Sparrow

James Norrington ( please do specify whenever you mean the Commodore or his raggedy pirate version )

William Turner Jr.

Elizabeth Swann

OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH

Stede Bonnet

Edward “Blackbeard” Teach

Israel “Izzy” Hands

Jim Jimenez

WHAT I WRITE

𝐅𝐎𝐑𝐌𝐀𝐓 : headcanons, oneshots, series, minifics. there may also be other miscellaneous formats should the chance happen, or mix of anything that I mentioned.

𝐏𝐀𝐈𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒 :

- character x reader,

- character x oc (please be specific with oc lore though),

- character x character (except I'm struggling to think of good plots for this one 😅)

- gender neutral, female, male reader

𝐆𝐄𝐍𝐑𝐄 : crack, fluff, dark content, historical, fantasy

𝐃𝐀𝐑𝐊 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐓 : violence, gore, alcoholism, drugs, yandere

WHAT I WON'T WRITE

𝐒𝐄𝐗 : no smut, rape, sexual assault, or incest. the furthest will be SUGGESTIVE, which technically isn't the same

𝐀𝐍𝐆𝐒𝐓 : I'm bad at intentionally invoking sadness within writing; also I am a crybaby 100%, what I deem sad may not be so for the general audience

ADDITIONAL NOTES

𝐈 : I won't tell that a certain age isn't allowed on my blog, as my writing of choice is prone to attracting older audiences anyway, and there will always be younger audiences too determined to keep prying despite being told not to interact. But please, be mindful of all the warnings I'm putting in the pretext (overview, pairing, beware, notes) and the tags of any story I'm posting.

𝐈𝐈 : I am an International Baccalaureate student, and overall in an academically rigorous setting. It does and will take up my time.

𝐈𝐈𝐈 : Because of that same setting there may be times I have no desire to write in the first place. It might make the time needed to write something longer than usual

King is one of the most successful speculative fiction authors of all time, and among other honors won the National Book Award in 2003.

His memoir / writing manual, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, offers a wonderful look inside his writing process. Here are 20 rules for writing success gleaned from the book:

1. First write for yourself, and then worry about the audience. “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story. Your stuff starts out being just for you, but then it goes out.”

2. Don’t use passive voice. “Timid writers like passive verbs for the same reason that timid people like passive partners. The passive voice is safe. The timid fellow writes, 'The meeting will be held at seven o’clock,' because that somehow says to them, ‘Put it this way and people will believe you really know.' Purge this quisling thought! Throw back your shoulders, stick out your chin, and put that meeting in charge! Write, ‘The meeting’s at seven.’ There, don’t you feel better?” [note: something like "We meet at seven" is even more active.]

3. Avoid adverbs. “The adverb is not your friend. Consider the sentence, 'He closed the door firmly.' It’s by no means a terrible sentence, but ask yourself if ‘firmly’ really has to be there. What about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before ‘He closed the door firmly’? Shouldn’t this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, then isn’t ‘firmly’ an extra word? Isn’t it redundant?”

4. Avoid adverbs, especially after “he said” and “she said.” “While to write adverbs is human, to write ‘he said’ or ‘she said’ is divine.”

5. But don’t obsess over perfect grammar. “Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story… to make them forget, whenever possible, that they are reading a story at all."

6. The magic is in you. “I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him.”

7. Read, read, read. “You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

8. Don’t worry about making other people happy. “Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second to least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”

9. Turn off the TV. “Most exercise facilities are now equipped with TVs, but TV—while working out or anywhere else—really is about the last thing an aspiring writer needs. If you feel you must have the news analyst blowhard on while you exercise, or the stock market blowhards, or the sports blowhards, it’s time for you to question how serious you really are about becoming a writer. You must be prepared to do some serious turning inward toward the life of the imagination, and that means, I’m afraid, that [the talking heads] must go. Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.”

10. You have three months. “The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.”

11. There are two secrets to success. “When I’m asked for ‘the secret of my success’ (an absurd idea, that, but impossible to get away from), I sometimes say there are two: I stayed physically healthy, and I stayed married. It’s a good answer because it makes the question go away, and because there is an element of truth in it. The combination of a healthy body and a stable relationship with a self reliant woman who takes zero shit from me or anyone else has made the continuity of my working life possible. And I believe the converse is also true: that my writing and the pleasure I take in it has contributed to the stability of my health and my home life.”

12. Write one word at a time. “A radio talk-show host asked me how I wrote. My reply—’One word at a time’—seemingly left him without a reply. I think he was trying to decide whether or not I was joking. I wasn’t. In the end, it’s always that simple. Whether it’s a vignette of a single page or an epic trilogy like The Lord Of The Rings, the work is always accomplished one word at a time.”

13. Eliminate distraction. “There should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with.”

14. Stick to your own style. “One cannot imitate a writer’s approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what the writer is doing may seem. You can’t aim a book like a cruise missile, in other words. People who decide to make a fortune writing like John Grisham or Tom Clancy produce nothing but pale imitations, by and large, because vocabulary is not the same thing as feeling and plot is light years from the truth as it is understood by the mind and the heart.”

15. Dig. “When, during the course of an interview for The New Yorker, I told the interviewer that I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said that he didn’t believe me. I replied that that was fine, as long as he believed that I believe it. And I do. Stories aren’t souvenir T-shirts or Game Boys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered, pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in their toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small, a seashell. Sometimes it’s enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all the gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same.”

16. Take a break. “If you’ve never done it before, you’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. It’s yours, you’ll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited. It’s always easier to kill someone else’s darlings that it is to kill your own.”

17. Leave out the boring parts and kill your darlings. “Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, even when it breaks your ecgocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.)”

18. The research shouldn’t overshadow the story. “If you do need to do research because parts of your story deal with things about which you know little or nothing, remember that word back. That’s where research belongs: as far in the background and the back story as you can get it. You may be entranced with what you’re learning about the flesh-eating bacteria, the sewer system of New York, or the I.Q. potential of collie pups, but your readers are probably going to care a lot more about your characters and your story.”

19. You become a writer simply by reading and writing. “You don’t need writing classes or degrees any more than you need this or any other book on writing. Faulkner learned his trade while working in the Oxford, Mississippi post office. Other writers have learned the basics while serving in the Navy, working in steel mills or doing time in America’s finer crossbar hotels. I learned the most valuable (and commercial) part of my life’s work while washing motel sheets and restaurant tablecloths at the New Franklin Laundry in Bangor. You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”

1. Putting punctuation outside of quotation marks when something spoken ends a sentence (e.g. "It's a nice day".) It looks incredibly unnatural, and I trust that readers can understand when one sentence ends and another begins without needing to do that

2. Anyone saying the ocford comma isn't needed when listing three or more things (e.g. This, this, and that) Why adding a comma before the "and" at the end of a list is considered special is beyond me. It makes way more sense and just flows better in my eyes.

3. Not being allowed to start a sentence with words like and. Why was this something we were taught not to do in school? Why are some words deemed "wrong" to start a sentence with? It makes zero sense.

in wip

𝐃𝐎'𝐒 :

fem/gn reader

smut / nsfw

fluff / sfw

romantic

platonic

traumaic flashbacks

comfort sh/traumatic past

𝐖𝐎𝐍𝐓'𝐒 :

male reader

trans! reader

angst ( not good at writing it )

any p1ss/sh1t kinks

underage x reader ( pedo )

character x character

r@pe/f3tish

ocs

chapters

heavy angst ( no comfort )

𝑩𝑬𝑭𝑶𝑹𝑬 𝒀𝑶𝑼 𝑹𝑬𝑸𝑼𝑬𝑺𝑻 : in wip im lazy

i have every right to deny your request, even if it does follow my rules! there should be no argument there.

unless stated otherwise, i will write fem reader !

i never brought this up because i was a tad bit nervous i would get attacked ― please, please PLEASE try to keep your requests minimum!! (?) please don't send me what looks like a full essay, i will NOT BE WRITING ALLTHAT!! my mental health cannot bear it any longer! i really hope that makes sense! ( im fine with a paragraph or two )

i don't write for trans! reader ( mtf-mtf.) im pretty much only a fem/gn reader blog!