daydreaming about writing: 🥰😍🥹❤️😊🌺✨😘

the act of actually writing: 😭😰😵‍💫😭😰😭☹️😖

note to myself OUT LOUD:  DO NOT BE AFRAID TO WRITE LIKE YOU HAVE NOT WRITTEN BEFORE. LEAVE IT BEHIND. DO NOT RUSH. ONLY PULL WRITING FROM THE SOUL. FORGET YOUR OLD SELVES. ISN’T THAT WHAT THIS NEXT THING IS ALL ABOUT? WHAT FEELS ROTTEN TO WRITE, TOSS. IF YOU DO NOT NEED TO SAY IT, DON’T SAY IT. FIND YOUR TRUTHS. CHALLENGE YOURSELF. LISTEN TO LIFE. RESPOND TO LIFE. WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED? GET. BACK. TO. YOUR. SOUL. 

“…you already write how you are going to write. Stop trying to correct yourself”

what charaxter archetypes do you keep writing into your characters that surely say nothing about your mental state. i keep making little guys who have trouble viewing themselves as a full person and instead just fixate on the role they expect others to expect them to play.

— Hélène Cixous, from Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing.

musings on writing

buy me a coffee

marie howe, in an interview with krista tippett of on being

dear writers who are slower/take more time with their writing or writers who are on hiatus or writers who are trying to find their voice again, i see you and i love you and you are valid

not writing, not not writing, but a secret third thing

letting my stories spin around my head like a microwave

mary maclane, the story of mary maclane / pierre bonnard - jeune femme écrivant, 1908 / louise fitzhugh, harriet the spy / phil grey - two photos from will self’s writing room: a 360 degree view in 71 photos, 2007 / tom astor - susie boyt’s notebooks, 2018 / stephen king, on writing / jill krementz - stephen king at his home office with his corgi marlowe, 1995 / joan didion - “on keeping a notebook” / wayne miller - author and poet maya angelou, 1974 / photo of sylvia plath from the everett collection / anne carson in a 2016 interview with NPR / octavia butler’s motivational notes to self / jim carroll, the basketball diaries / benjamin garcia - writing painting, 2012 / wayne pascal - writer’s block, 2019 / louisa may alcott, little women / little women (2019) / mary shelley (2017) / dickinson (2019) / anne lamott, bird by bird

on writing

this should be a tweet but I don’t want to deal with people on Twitter. everyone stop having every character in your fiction talk like their goal is to get an A in therapy. 

I love cathartic conversations too and that is why I am begging you: stop hunting them to extinction by making them constant, characterless, and corny as hell

YES

Here is what you do:

1. Find the thing the character wants to say, their deepest and most fundamental truth.

2. Congratulations! That’s the one thing they cannot, under any circumstances, say. Imagine they’re under a fairy curse if you have to.

3. But they want to. They want to so bad. So it’s going to bleed into everything they do say, everything they do. What would you do for someone if you couldn’t say you loved them? That you hated them? That you love them but the things they do remind you of their father?

WHY YOU SHOULD WRITE HORRIBLY:

1. You’ll never write anything if you don’t

Masterpost: How to write a story?

Compilation of writing advice for some aspects of the writing process.

More specific scenarios

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When Writing Fiction Hurts the People You Love: Abigail DeWitt on Translating Real-life Trauma into Fiction

when emily brontë said on her diary entries “I have a good many books on hands but I am sorry to say that, as usual, I make small progress with any” i felt that

— Arthur Rimbaud, from Selected Poems & Prose; “The Impossible,” (via violentwavesofemotion)