Have created a new novel-writing approach for myself that I am calling Very Gentle Writing. Very Gentle Writing is an approach for people who live nearly every waking second in self-castigation and actually need peaceful slowness to unleash their creativity. 

Very Gentle Writing does not set staggering word count goals and then feel bad about it. No! Very Gentle Writing for me sets an extremely low word count and then feels magnificently productive when the low bar is exceeded (which is easy…it’s a low bar, I mean really low). 

Very Gentle Writing is about saying hey yo maybe I just want to listen to a chill playlist for a while and feel one sentence spill out. Go me! 

Very Gentle Writing is kind of about realizing I have a really limited amount of time to write in between work, and adulting, and taking care of a thousand life responsibilities, and trying to heal&deal from trauma in 2020. So I want that writing time to be….just…..nice. 

Very Gentle Writing means I have a goal of enjoying every single time I sit down to write. Really. I use all the fun words first. 

Very Gentle Writing came to me as an idea when I started to think about how as someone actively trying to recover from a lot of lifelong trauma, the usual word harder!! Work harder!! mantras in the world of “people doing hard things” didn’t motivate me at all, they only hurt me. I truly need a voice saying work less hard, personally.

Came up with a term… which is probably not original and maybe someone has already thought about that, but anyway. Low-effort writing. Sit down, open your word document (or any other comfortable app/site for you) and type anything that comes to mind. Word vomit. The concept is not new, but when you specifically frame it as low-effort you know exactly what to expect from it. There is some effort applied, but it’s really not that much. Just enough for it to be a text and not a bunch of random words.

I find it a very helpful exercise for when you’re stuck or when you need to write something small for a prompt on tumblr, for example, just to warm up.

(submitted by @rein-hearts)

Pros of writing gay relationships: 

- gay

Cons of writing gay relationships:

- they both have THE SAME FCKIN PRONOUNS SO I CONSTANTLY HAVE TO NAME BOTH CHARACTERS BECAUSE OTHERWISE IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL WHO’S DOING WHAT OR WHO’S SPEAKING WHO WILL SAVE ME FROM THIS HELL

I CAN’T BELIEVE THERE’S A POST ABOUT THIS. THE STRUGGLE IS REAL.

Worst way to deal with this: use epithets (the taller man, the blonde) DO NOT

Best way to deal with this: Use the pronouns a teensy bit more than you maybe feel is sufficient. Leave the fic for two days before editing (i.e. allow yourself to forget it a little). Come back and re-read. If at any point YOU can’t tell who’s doing what to whom, put names in. Leave the rest of the pronouns.

Also, for dialogue: use characterization instead of names. Let it be clear by the things that are said, the way they are said, who is saying them.

Readers are smart, let them infer sometimes. :)

So many people have asked me about this when writing same-sex relationships. I’ve been looking for this post for so long, I hope it helps, darlings! 

For all of you slash and femslash writers!

writing tip #2201:

defeat writers block by asking “what would shakespeare do?” and add in a dick joke

If you have writer’s block because of a certain idea or passage in your story, one thing I suggest is to work with a second document for discards. Every substantial story I write is written across at least 2 documents - one “main” story, and one for notes. 

The notes document contains everything not in the main document. That’s where I throw things like deleted passages, even if it’s just half a sentence because I may figure out later that I actually said it better the first time. I also put notes or even whole scenes for later plot points there, basically ideas as they come to my head that I might want to add. It takes the pressure off the main document to know nothing gets permanently thrown away. 

It’s also a place where I can free-write if I haven’t quite come up with the right wording for something, and then I can take out the best parts and put them in the main doc. It’s a document that allows me to make mistakes without wasting my effort or time, or permanently altering the pristine “real” manuscript with a random idea that ends up not really working out.

This is pretty common writing advice but I thought I’d throw it out there for anyone who feels stuck.

this shit works i do it all the time now; btds has a notes document with my outline and deleted snippets and links to picture references and then the actual fic is in another document, 10/10 would recommend

Amazing advice!!

I also have a “character bible” document where I put information about characters and setting that I don’t want to forget

I keep these in a separate part of the same story file, as it’s easier for me to scroll up or down than to switch to a new window (at the end, lines that didn’t fit in the story or had to be cut get pasted into my giant ‘Rolling WIPs’ file for recycling in a new piece). Different strokes for different folks. But it is really helpful to have methods that take the pressure of permanency off your writing.  

I write my first drafts by hand, on one sided notebook pages. The backs of the pages are where this sort of thing goes, and when I want to lift something from the back of a page into the “real” story, I circle it and mark where the insertion goes.

As some of you may know I’ve been studying Professional and Creative Writing for three years now, and I’m heading into a fourth year of study for Honours, and one thing that has really stuck out for me over the past few years is how much pressure people put on you to write a story with some kind of important meaning.

This needs to stop.

There’s nothing wrong with writing a story with purpose and meaning, but when you limit yourself to writing a story around those morals, then you restrict what you can write.

Write what you want to write. 

Write stories for fun. 

Write stories with no moral messages and see what meaning other people read into it.

Write a story by focusing on the characters, the plot, the narrative, whatever; just write the story you want to tell, becasue if you limit yourself to writing around that moral message then you lose the possibility to open your text up and create depth to it by having multiple meanings and moral messages, contradictions and ideologies that your readers will hold onto and literature students will gush over.

Write what you want to write.

Fanfiction is easier to write than original because the world is already established. If you’re someone who’s giving up on their dream of writing original fiction because it’s not flowing like the former, remember that, please? Write shit. Write freely and terribly. Write a first draft that’s everywhere and nowhere. Because once it’s done and you’re left with a mess, you’ve also established yourself a world. And the second and third drafts will follow with much more ease. Let yourself be messy in creating your own worlds.

This is exactly what I needed to hear. Thank you.

As a published author, I can say this advice is LEGIT. Get the first draft down. Don’t stress about it. Let it be messy. But get it down. You can always fix it later.

The best piece of advice i ever got was, you can edit a terrible first draft. You can’t edit a blank page.

Don’t think about it as a first draft.  Think about it as Draft Zero.

Either explain it or don’t.

When authors include things that don’t fit within the real world–magic, time travel, anachronisms–there is an impulse to explain how it works. Which can be fantastic for worldbuilding, but if you don’t know what you’re talking about, it can make more problems than it solves.

Stephenie Meyer tried to explain some bizarre thing about chromosomes, and it made the biology of vampires and werewolves make no sense. Suspending disbelief worked better in that case before she tried to ground it in the real world.

Lemony Snicket, on the other hand, just has random anachronisms that are never explained, but because there’s nothing even close to resembling an attempt at an explanation, we can just shrug and go, okay, that’s how it works. The magic in Harry Potter seems to basically not be grounded in anything, but we can believe it within the context of the story because she doesn’t try to ground it in anything.

In Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera, on the other hand, he goes into a lot of magic theory, and it gives us a strong feeling of worldbuilding. There’s enough logically coherent explanation for it to feel grounded within itself.

It is possible to go too far (see: Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide and Children of the Mind) where the plot ends up so tied in the reader understanding intricately detailed scientific and pseudo-scientific minutiae that the story is incomprehensible without it.

Generally, though, if you’re going to make something up, either say it exists and leave it at that, or entirely figure out how it works. Halfway is always less believable than nothing at all.

Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler actually made it a point about the weird setting, when asked about it. He told everyone it takes place during the year of the rat. Meanwhile, you got your Tolkiens and Martins who crank out massive encyclopedias for their world.

Writing agent Jonny Geller gives advice to young writers. 

A great Twitter thread on character-driven stories, character arcs, and agency by Naomi Hughes

(The link she referenced is this article)

I think a big part of why I read way more fanfiction than books is that there’s just a hell of a lot less exposition

the first 10 pages of most books are always “these are the main characters and here’s some background on each of them and this is the setting etc etc” and it’s such a fucking hassle getting to the plot sometimes

fanfic is just like “fuck it you know all of this already let’s go”

That’s a really good point.

Same here but there’s actually a point here of well written exposition. Take AUs for example. Even in the most complicated, as-far-removed-from-canon settings we get at most a single paragraph before the actual fic where the author gives us a quick rundown of the rules for that universe. The rest we are left to figure out on our own and it works. We’re not spoon fed every trivial detail when all we want is to get to the plot. Everything that’s important is said at the moment it is important, not sooner not later. Especially in long fics characters often take on such a unique characterisation that you get to know them all over again but the readers do so organically, in the situations that define those characters as they happen. Same with looks. The fic author generally assumes the readers know what the characters look like and don’t spend paragraphs describing them, and only bring it up when it fits the plot. I’ve read a few fanfics from fandoms I’ve never been in and surprisingly it still worked out. I had generally a good idea of who these people were, what they did where and why and how they worked together.  Point is, if you’re a writer writing original fiction, pretend it’s fanfic and everyone knows your setting and characters already. That way you’ll only have to add a few details if and when your beta readers mention needing more information and chances are they won’t need a lot. 

Q: When Breaking Bad ended and the hype from the final episode subsided, did you suffer from depression? A - Gilligan: “Not as much as I thought I would, and that’s because I went straight into working on Better Call Saul. It’s a funny old expression, but you got to get back up on the horse that throws you, and Breaking Bad threw me. Success, when you’re not used to it, can feel like being thrown off a horse, so what we did was finish up the last mix of Breaking Bad on a Friday and started day one of Better Call Saul on that following Monday. My friends asked if I was going to take some kind of a vacation because I’m actually not a workaholic—I’m kind of lazy—but I knew I better get onto this new thing, or I’m going to be petrified, artistically speaking.”

You’ve said you didn’t learn from making Breaking Bad because it was a success and that you greet failure like an old friend because it’s an education. What has been your greatest lesson in failing? I’ve gained so many lessons from failing. I truly do believe that we only learn from failure. One thing it’s taught me is to go with my gut; it’s not always right, but to anyone reading this, if you are on some sort of creative endeavor and you have an idea that keeps you up at night with excitement, go with it. People will tell you it will never work, but they don’t know any more than you. Over the years, I was constantly told my ideas wouldn’t work, and I would bend over backward adapting scripts to the conventional wisdom of agents and producers. Then lo and behold, they never got made. There’s a fine line, but take on constructive criticism and ultimately follow your gut.

– from Vince Gilligan Talks About His ‘X-Files’ Past and New Show About Jim Jones by Courtney Dewitt, Vice

in addition to that post about letting your characters fuck up, i cannot stress how fun it is to have a character that is a straight-up coward. a straight chicken with no excuses. like, as a trope it’s just got so much potential for displaying character growth, to build them to the point where they’re willing to do away with all their tricks and evasion, and care about something enough to step into the line of fire for it

Are These Filter Words Weakening Your Story?

After putting my writing on hold for several weeks, I decided to jump back in. I expected to find all sorts of problems with my story–inconsistencies in the plot, lack of transitions, poor characterization–the works. But what began to stick out to me was something to which I’d given little thought in writing.

Filter words.

What are Filter Words?

Actually, I didn’t even know these insidious creatures had a name until I started combing the internet for info.

Filter words are those that unnecessarily filter the reader’s experience through a character’s point of view. Dark Angel’s Blog says:

In terms of example, you should watch out for:

I’m being honest when I say my manuscript is filled with these words, and the majority of them need to be edited out.

What do Filter Words Look Like?

Let’s imagine a character in your novel is walking down a street during peak hour.

You might, for example, write:

Eliminating the bolded words removes the filters that distances us, the readers, from this character’s experience:

Are Filter Words Ever Acceptable?

Of course, there are usually exceptions to every rule.

Just because filter words tend to be weak doesn’t mean they never have a place in our writing. Sometimes they are helpful and even necessary.

Susan Dennard of Let The Words Flow writes that we should use filter words when they are critical to the meaning of the sentence.

If there’s no better way to phrase something than to use a filter word, then it’s probably okay to do so.

Want to know more?

Read these other helpful articles on filter words and more great writing tips:

On fatness in fic

Likely because my main fandoms – as with, you know, most of popular media – generally consist of characters who are both thin and beautiful or, if not beautiful, at least thin, I don’t see a lot of folks talking or writing about how to write fat characters in ways that aren’t dehumanizing in the same way I see a lot of good, thoughtful meta around race, gender, and sexuality on this here blue site. But I’d like to! 

Preface: I hard-closed out of an ostensibly happy fic today because it engaged in some casual fatphobia in ways I don’t think the author intended but that nonetheless served to dehumanize the character in question, absolve the character engaging in fatphobic behavior, and all-in-all treat fatness as something shameful. I don’t know if some of these issues were resolved later in the fic, because, as I said, hard-close even though I’d made it about halfway through. 

Preface the second: I’ve been fat all my life, but I’m still a smallfats with white middle class privilege. I’m not exactly writing here about my own experience as a fat woman, though, so much as my experience as a fat reader concerned with representation of lots of different kinds of fat people and bodies across the media I consume.

My unease isn’t exactly about that one fic. Because there are so few fat main characters in media in general, if we’re writing about fatness in fic it’s often taking a character who is thin and/or primarily muscular in canon and making them fat for some reason or another. I don’t, categorically, have a problem with this. But let’s maybe try to think a little more critically about the ways we do write fatness in fic?

Keep reading

I like this a lot.

And in my opinion it’s a good read for writers of original stuff, too. I have to say that I encounter just a horrifying amount of anti-fatness in contemporary literary fiction, which is what I primarily read/listen to. It’s like it’s (one of) the last unexamined bastion(s) of the Victorian-style equation of outward appearance with moral/mental/emotional shortcomings. Vanishingly infrequently is any character neutrally fat or incidentally fat, let alone positively fat; fatness is nearly always cast as a marker of mental/emotional weakness, pettiness, self-centeredness, social isolation, lack of discipline, etc. (Just off the top of my  head: Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies was awful in this regard though tremendously politically nuanced in other ways; it’s the entire horrible premise of Wally Lamb’s mysteriously acclaimed She’s Come Undone; and right now I’m encountering it incidentally in the otherwise weirdly wonderful Ladivine, by Marie Ndaiye.)  At the least blame-y, fatness is portrayed as the passive consequence, for children, of parental neglect or abuse (Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Kaitlyn Greenidge’s We Love You, Charlie Freeman—both excellent and nuanced novels, and yet). I don’t think I’ve ever seen poverty/structural oppression cast as a meaningful factor in fatness, even in novels that deal with food politics (I don’t read a ton of novels in this category, but I’m thinking in particular of Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation and My Year of Meats, and Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel, none of which, as far as I recall, really engage with fatness resulting from living in food deserts or related to health issues stemming from bad air quality, etc., even though that’s sort of the political bailiwick of those books). And almost never is fatness presented as something not in need of explanation; something that’s an integrated part of a character’s lived reality but not accorded undue narrative energy or presented as a problem to be fixed. It would strike modern readers as laughable to write a novel in which, say, a character’s lumpy skull indicated their murderous tendencies, but that is literally the level on which we’re still operating with regard to fatness like 95% of the time. When it’s even allowed to come up explicitly at all.

Anyway, hopefully this isn’t post-hijacking! It’s just something I’ve been thinking about recently as it continues to crop up in my reading material. 

(Also, if folks have counter-examples to rec which are also, y’know, books you think I’d enjoy overall, please pop into my ask box.)