I just think people write out of obligation too often.

"How do I motivate myself to write through the boring part of my story?"

"How do I make this boring scene not boring?"

Don't write it.

Don't write boring things just because you think the structure of the story demands it. I promise it doesn't need to be there.

If your characters need to have gone shopping for a later part of the story to make sense you can just have a sentence about how they went shopping and move on.

You are not obligated to write the boring parts. No matter what those parts are.

You are not obligated to make the parts of your story that you're not excited to write interesting somehow.

You can just write the fun and interesting parts and gloss over and summarize boring things.

Your audience will thank you and you will thank yourself.

my writing life got so much better once I realized that if Tolkien himself was allowed to have his viewpoint character knocked unconscious so he could skip writing a battle scene, I could, too.

ON the subject of undernegotiated kink in fanfiction. i think we should talk more about how the concept of "not talking about it" is just as much wish fulfillment for some people as "in-depth, therapy-speak conversations where everyone is clear and understood" is for others

like yes, in reality the antidote to shame is open honest conversation with someone who will validate your feelings and wants blah blah blah but SOMETIMES what i want out of my fanfic is characters being understood without having to expose themselves in that way. SOMETIMES it's fun to not dismantle the shame and repression all the way and to instead treat that understanding-despite-not-being-clear as the fantasy

The temptation, when adapting a really iconic detective, is to delve into his personal backstory. That's the devil talking.

A proper detective should be like a force of nature; like an avenging angel conjured into existence in a puff of eccentricities to unravel the crime and right the wrong. Their backstory is irrelevant.

Why are they always vacationing in the idyllic seaside village when a murder happens? Because fate wills it. Because the moral arc of the universe insists that they *have* to be on hand when a murder is committed.

Death is paying court to them and providing enrichment in their mortal enclosure.

oh i never know how to explain this properly but i looooooooooooooooove when a story just absolutely TELLS you something and it’s so obvious it goes right by you. like the equivalent of hiding in plain sight. i’m thinking in the original cut(?) of alien where they showed the full xenomorph, crouched and ready to pounce, but because we’ve never seen it before, we can’t tell what it is and interpret it as part of the spaceship. or it’s a detail that seems so out of place or wildly insane that you automatically ignore it and assume you misinterpreted until that exact detail comes back in a big way? (like when noah the raven boy flat out tells everyone he’s a ghost and they take it as a joke, so the reader does too) is there a tvtropes name for this i’m obsessed with it

I think that this is known as “delayed decoding” in literary analysis. The term was coined by Ian Watt in the ‘70s, don’t remember the exact year, to describe a technique used by Joseph Conrad in Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, but a lot of writers picked it up. It’s basically what you described: you present a detailed image but don’t make its moral and psychological relevance obvious. You give facts but not their meaning, not until later, and the revelation can come directly from the characters who suddenly realize what they have observed or it can also be left in the text, to be understood by the reader. You can see why Modernists loved it!

reasons to write fanfiction (I'll start):

-Melissa Febos, “Mind Fuck: Writing Better Sex”

fan fic authors be like yes i know this will flop however i simply have too much love for this character and my very niche headcanons for them. and i think that is so fuckin sexy of us

an ask meme for when you are stuck on a writing project

90% of my writing experience is doing this

you’re doing better than you think. keep going, writer!

The problem w writing fiction is that you'll be like tee-hee I'm going to write a story about a fucked up little scenario that's got nothing to do with anything in real life, just some pure messed up nonsense, and then you finish it and take a step back and go aw rats I made a metaphor again

Oops it me

Made this for u 💝

Don't hide this in the tags @voluptatiscausa

Wrapping a nice and compact trauma processing pill in a sheet of slutty slutty cheese.

The moment when you forgot that you wrote something and you read it again and it's actually so good. Like, wow, that person who wrote this is a good writer.

Ref Recs for Whump Writers

Violence: A Writer’s Guide:  This is not about writing technique. It is an introduction to the world of violence. To the parts that people don’t understand. The parts that books and movies get wrong. Not just the mechanics, but how people who live in a violent world think and feel about what they do and what they see done.

Hurting Your Characters: HURTING YOUR CHARACTERS discusses the immediate effect of trauma on the body, its physiologic response, including the types of nerve fibers and the sensations they convey, and how injuries feel to the character. This book also presents a simplified overview of the expected recovery times for the injuries discussed in young, otherwise healthy individuals.

Body Trauma: A writer’s guide to wounds and injuries. Body Trauma explains what happens to body organs and bones maimed by accident or intent and the small window of opportunity for emergency treatment. Research what happens in a hospital operating room and the personnel who initiate treatment. Use these facts to bring added realism to your stories and novels.

10 B.S. Medical Tropes that Need to Die TODAY…and What to Do Instead: Written by a paramedic and writer with a decade of experience, 10 BS Medical Tropes covers exactly that: clichéd and inaccurate tropes that not only ruin books, they have the potential to hurt real people in the real world. 

Maim Your Characters: How Injuries Work in Fiction: Increase Realism. Raise the Stakes. Tell Better Stories. Maim Your Characters is the definitive guide to using wounds and injuries to their greatest effect in your story. Learn not only the six critical parts of an injury plot, but more importantly, how to make sure that the injury you’re inflicting matters. 

Blood on the Page: This handy resource is a must-have guide for writers whose characters live on the edge of danger. If you like easy-to-follow tools, expert opinions from someone with firsthand knowledge, and you don’t mind a bit of fictional bodily harm, then you’ll love Samantha Keel’s invaluable handbook