On Writing

I'm actually using the too many beds & academic rival teachers tropes already but that fake amnesia one sounds cool (although it sorta reminds me of Alvar Vacker...)

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@space-australians Feels like this would kinda fit your blog, specially for writers who want to make up weird human space shenanigans involving a ship and alien crew and what not.  Maybe someone can write about how a person fixed a specific part in the dumbest way possible using the right words XD

Guys, NASA is cool.

If you scroll to the bottom of the page, they have a whole list of articles and pages to help sci-fi writers. NASA is the best! 

characters will literally get a headache or nosebleed out of nowhere and be like "huh. weird. well it's probably nothing." girl, look around you. you're in a story. it's relevant to the plot.

one of my favorite story elements is "character way past their prime can still absolutely wreck you, leaving you to wonder just how powerful they used to be"

This is your friendly reminder that the last few years have been hard, and if your writing has taken a toll as a result, that doesn’t make you any less of a writer. Maybe you went on hiatus. Maybe you got burnout. Maybe life gave you shit and other things took priority. It doesn’t matter. Writing is hard, so when life is hard, you might end up slacking in the writing department. And that’s okay. There’s no rule that says you have to write even when life is shitting on you. You’re allowed to take a break, and you can start writing again when you feel ready.

Best trick I ever picked up. Seriously.

This is seriously the best advice, and it really helps put it into perspective that the first draft is just that- a draft. There’s no reason to agonize over a particularly tricky bit of writing when you could just leave it in brackets and skip to the good parts, the parts you’ve visualized. I also use brackets for [fact-check this], [use a stronger verb], [is this in character?] and other notes as I write, just so I don’t forget what I want to work on when I go back and edit. 

This works for academic writing too. If you know where you’re going just leave yourself notes to fill in later. I do this all the time,

“my characters deserve a break” I say as I make things even worse for them

creative writing’s just like yeah sure i can deal with my issues i just need to cover them in several layers of metaphors first

touch depression? with my bare hands? no hang on *invents a character* this will be my gloves

Girl, are you okay, you haven't even tortured your little fictional characters today