#hrarbywritingdiaries

[onwriting-hrarby]

on writing, 22.09

august was such a productive month novel-wise! but september has come with a lot of work, so i've not been able to let my head roam that much. i have stopped writing my novel at 119 pages (45k words) and now i'm focusing myself on doing the second draft of the chapters i've written.

i know my novel now, and i know what i want to say, so i think it's easier for me if i go back these pages and edit them to leave them prepared for the new chapters to come.

while i'm doing that, and because i have a lot of work and my mind needs to write the most when i'm very busy, i'm writing a eremika oneshot that right now has 5k words (and we haven't even made it to the middle of the story) and i'm wondering whether i should upload it in two chapters or just one.

i hope you're all fine!

#hrarbywritingdiaries #eremika #writerblr #writing inspiration #writing #writers on tumblr #creative writing #writers #writeblr #writing advice #writing community #writing exercise #writing tips #writerscommunity #writerslife #writersociety #writer problems #aspiring author #author #writers of tumblr #writing life

[onwriting-hrarby]

on writing, august recap

august has been one of the most productive times for me. i think it's because i just got back from vacation, and so i wasn't tired or with a lot of stress and i had time to delve into writing.

it is, at times, exhausting. i really do wonder if this is the novel, or it's not, if it's good enough and compelling enough to win the heart of the publishers. who knows. but, for the first time in a while, i've felt like i truly have a story to explain and this motivates me enough to keep on going!

this first draft makes absolutely no sense though, hehe. i've written more than 20k this month! so i'm happy!

anyway i hope your days have been going well!

a little recap of the projects i'm working on:

a short story which will need a beta in english (if anyone wants to read...)

the novel! (if you're curious, ask away)

for you chapter 2 (it's not going well)

a rivamika oneshot (it's going.. well)

#hrarbywritingdiaries #writerblr #writing inspiration #writing #writers on tumblr #creative writing #writers #writeblr #writing advice #writing community #writing exercise #writing tips #writerscommunity #writerslife #writersociety #writer problems #aspiring author #author #writers of tumblr #writing life

[onwriting-hrarby]

on writing, 18-06

i haven't been able to write that much this past few months because i have been swamped at work and also getting everything ready for my vacations (i am so nervous i can't barely sleep). not only work has been damaging to my creative side, but also having a lot of meets. i often say this: i love my friends and having time with them, but i also need my alone time a lot (which is what allows me to rest and be creative), so i'm very excited to go on a long trip just with my bf to recharge in that sense, too. i want to get bored! i want to stare at the nothingness. yesterday i went to my mum's new house and i painted a wardrobe for 4hours in silence and god, i felt good.

so, with this in sight, i haven't been able to write neither "liquid confidence" nor "for you". i wrote two or three lines for this last one, and i'm also finishing liquid confidence, but because i have been writing just because i had to, i really don't like how the chapter and the english prose is turning out, so it will need a lot of editing. if it didn't, i could probably upload before going on my trip, but... i think i will resume both stories when i come back on mid july.

but on a personal note, i'm revising (yet) another novel, so i'm also prioritizing this, i guess!

anyways, probably my last update before mid july. maybe i'll make a promo post for my stories before going!

have a nice summer,

-hera

#hrarby musings #hrarbywritingdiaries

[onwriting-hrarby]

On inspiration

Quite often, I get questions on how to craft a story. "I want to write, but I don't know what to tell", they tell me. I try not to roll my eyes, and don't seem judgemental, because sometimes we don't have a story, but we have the urge to write anyway. I tell people to start writing a diary, because they'll find their topics. Sometimes, though, people don't want topics, just to write a story.

But, to write a good story, it's inevitable to think about the topic.

Topics—what is ours, what is not

I have this romantic view of writing as something that is innate to us. The need and habit to tell stories to others are millenary and it reaches even before we knew how to talk or even have an alphabet to do so. Even without writing it on paper, people learnt the stories by heart and sang them to the public to entertain. Not only entertain, also to show something, learn something from it.

So, I get the urge to write. But if you're writing without a topic, I feel that you're writing without a message.

There's nothing easier than finding a topic around you craft you story, I believe. It can be the simplest thing—the particular smell of coffee in the morning—or the abstracts that we know about—hate, love. But what I normally tell is that topics shouldn't be hard to find. Because, one: topics are within yourself. You're naturally drawn to some topics when you read or watch films, the same way your eyes are draw to specific things when you try to draw, or you enjoy the cadence of classical music instead of the up-beat of the pop. Along our years, we've crafted preferences—that's why I, too, think it's difficult to be a great writer if you're not aged.

But, despite this last affirmation, topics age very slowly. We can be drawn to the same things at 15 and at 45. Our optics about the topic might have changed, and we might have expanded our vision while tackling it, but normally, topics that interest us are as old as we have knowledge to say what a "topic" is.

A topic is not only ours—because humankind has been writing for ages—but the approach can be. And that's why writing, I feel, is such a vulnerable state of ours. Because we choose a topic that is universal, but we pour our understanding of that topic onto the page.

What precedes us and the repetition

Some people say that topics come to rise when we're children. Maybe. Certainly, what we experience as children follows us our whole life.

Once, when I was 23 and already writing my first novel (not my first: my first "serious" novel, as I had been writing novels since I was 16) I went on a walking trip with my boyfriend. With 8 hours of walking ahead of us, it was only natural that we ended up rambling about writing. I was telling him about my new exciting idea for the novel. I kept on repeating "new" like it was a mantra. He gazed at me and told me that he was sorry, but he thought I had only three topics, and I circled around them.

I was dumbfounded, but we went through them: mental health, gender, and oppression. My novels so far included a schizophrenic professor who had been in love with a Jewish girl during WWII and tried to find her again; a woman who had been silenced and invisibilized in favour of his husband who had Alzheimer; a dystopia about two clans, one oppressed by the government and forced to exile; and multiple stories about girls, women, etc, oppressed by the system.

So, of course, I was bound to repetition. When I realized this—when I suddenly thought about what my topics were—I felt relieved. It felt so natural that I shall be writing about this, and realized that all my topics and all my novels could be threaded into my childhood and my personal life somehow, without making it personal.

Of course, my personal life is changing, and over the years, I realize I don't look up to one topic anymore in favour of the other, or vice versa. I can't no longer tackle a novel that I wrote in 2020 because the weight of the topic has changed in me, or because I changed the optics.

On inspiration

So, does inspiration truly exist? I wonder that sometimes. There's the myth that you need to be working to be struck by inspiration (cue Picasso). But we have all experience that burst of sudden revelation in the middle of the street, hitting us with the idea.

I dare say, though, that inspiration only happens because you know your topics. Suddenly, you find something, even if subconscious, that triggers your interest of that topic and boom, you get the idea.

Once, I came across an ice cream place that was empty. Not only empty—the vendor was outside of the shop, looking from side to side, wondering if someone would come. My question was immediate: How much time is he spending outside? Does he have a clientele? Can he make it? I was really sad. I went down my sadness: I was sad because the old man reminded me of my grandmother—who suffered a mental illness—and because my city is disappearing as I know it—full of tourists—and because we cannot change this capitalist system that is changing my city.

I could have easily wrote a story about the man, or make it one of my characters. I didn't because I can't write everything I get ideas for, and so I left the idea to simmer, maybe another me will pick it up soon.

While watching the man, I might have not seen the mother and the baby on the other side of the street, or the stray cat next to the garbage can, or the teenagers snogging. My eyes were somehow trained to pick what I just wanted to see—what interested me the most—and so my mind went to that.

Introspection

So yes, for me, inspiration happens, but it does because we've done introspection as writers. We allow ourselves to go with the flow but we know, too, what we want to talk about. Doing a story per se it's not sufficient, because if the topic doesn't interest us, we won't make it further to page 50. We are, after all, our first readers.

I know I am too rational, maybe. I love sitting and thinking and maybe not letting myself feel. But, at first, when I was 12 and didn't rationalize a lot, I did let myself feel, and surprisingly, the topics have remained for the most part.

Just as we are children of experiences, we're children of topics, and without a topic, we won't have an idea, much less a story, I fear.

Good news is: we only have to look within ourselves. Turns out, our topics were hidden inside of us all along.

#hrarbycraft #hrarbywritingdiaries #writerblr #writing inspiration #writing #writers on tumblr #creative writing #writers #writeblr #writing advice #writing community #writing exercise #writing tips #writerscommunity #writerslife #writersociety #writer problems #aspiring author #author #writers of tumblr #writing life #writers community

[onwriting-hrarby]

On writing advice

Countless blogs. Countless articles. Books by great authors, books by mediocre authors, books by bad authors. Physical courses and online courses and tweets and Tumblrs all dedicated to: make you write better.

As if writing was a sole thing, a sole notion, a commonplace and designation for everyone in the world, the same. As if writing was a natural thing where all humans converge—immovable, static.

How restricting—how incredibly boring.

Their advice

I've been seeing a lot of Tumblrs and blogs creating masterlists about "How to write a scene between a villain and a hero", "How to write a kiss", "How to write an angry character". All of their tips sound as if there was something so exact about writing. They make us believe there's a sole way to do this, and this is how you should do it (disclaimer: I do believe in the reader's criticism, and I acknowledge these tips might be helpful for a lot of people, so if they are for you, it's all good! But bear in me for a little longer).

But writing is not something universal—rather, the universality of writing stems from its specificity of it. Writing pours out of our own experience, vision and caleidoscope of ideology, experiences and semantics, and reducing everything to simple tips feels, at least, misleading.

First, we can differ in characters. Why? Because everyone has had their fair share of experiences with people. If I want to write a villain that is nuanced, I should be able to do that; but if someone wants to write a villain that is plain "villainous", it doesn't mean that they are not doing it correctly.

We feel the appeal of literature because it shapes our world—and it does because we're shaping literature in return, too.

It doesn't make sense that everything should be written the same, because not everyone experiences the same, in the same parts of the world, with the same ideology. How I, the daughter of an ex-dictatorship country, might depict a dictator, might differ completely from the depiction of someone who hasn't lived in a dictatorship. Expecting everyone to write the same is not also reductive and unfreeing, but also completely privileged and biased.

Why writing advice is often privileged

I believe that those who write this advice come from the same place. And I do, myself, when I give advice on planning. We come from higher education, or access to literature, or even access to a computer. We come from places we can turn on our TV and watch series and learn about pacing, or watch some tropes, or feel some way or another about daily topics.

But literature is not only writing, and writing (as it often happens) is not always literature. To write literature, there must be something else (I'll refer to it as truth, and speak about it largely after). Sure, everyone can put down a thousand well-written words, making sense, even with metaphors, and dialogues. But is this really literature—if we regard literature as something that transcends the writing and shapes us?

Because, if we do regard writing as literature, what do we do about the people who have so much to tell, but not the privilege to tell their stories?

When we tell someone about "writing power dynamics", are we all understanding the same? What about a kid who has been raised in a household with power dynamics, but can't rebel, or society doesn't allow him to see that? What about people who, for example, are not taught that their story matters?

This is the problem of a single story, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains. And while I think we're progressing in this sense (more and more new, unheard voices in literature and the book publishing sector), I am still baffled by how we keep normalizing certain writing advice on how to write certain scenes, and certain tropes, as something you should regard in terms of writing. Because not all experience is the same, and therefore, the advice that some people claim as universal might differ.

Because everything is your own tradition

Everything is a fashion, and everything is tradition. My literary tradition might not be your tradition. When someone tells me that "stories can be told in a consecutive way, in media res or from the end", or any other advice on how to plot, this feels so simplistic to me. There is just not one way—there are hundreds of ways to begin a story and tell it.

You can begin my merging voices of the beginning, the in media res or the end of the story. You can put different adventures in the middle of the main plot—coming back to what happened, but not in a chronological way (the way The Odyssey does). You can begin in the middle of the action and never address what happened before (Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin; The Transformation by Franz Kafka)—so that the "story" that was "worth" being told is not the "story" that is actually being told.

Pacing: "be sure not to use a lot of commas. Use full stops when you want to speed things up", etc. How about you get the help of the music, as if writing was writing a partiture (the way Thomas Bernhard did)?

The three acts of writing: What about you do five, or four, or basically, concentrate your whole plot in just an event? You can focus your story in just a day (Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Ulysses by James Joyce)—not caring about the plot altogether.

You can write characters that are already "evolved" by the beginning of the story (Humbert Humbert in Lolita), that will never evolve (Werther in The pains and sorrows of young Werther). And so on.

This is the great joy—and obvious mess—about writing.

The infinite possibilities allow us to explain a story that is completely ours. Even if what we are telling is similar to another person's, the scope of the story might change completely depending on the words you pick, the way you use dialogue—every single little decision.

Cover the basics

Of course, it doesn't mean that you should not cover the basics. Orthography, grammar, syntaxis, vocabulary—this all comes in handy. It is handy, especially for non-English native writing in English (aka me) to have posts that signal you the use of "" for dialogues, and how punctuation goes.

But don't let the rules constrict you, it's all I'm saying. People that gives this kind of advice are well read, and have really studied this, and maybe have even gone to grad school for that—but what they normally fail to mention is that maybe rules are there to be learnt, then bended when we need.

You just need to be mindful of how you're writing.

Of course you should learn how to write in in media res, because if you don't, maybe you won't know when or if you're doing it and the plotting might be a whole mess. And you can't pretend to write a character evolving without having learnt that characters evolve.

Just like how we are taught verb inflection in a language, but then when we're fluid, we totally miss it and bend it to adequate it to the talk in the streets—writing is finding your best channel to portray what you want. Maybe the writing advice doesn't work. It doesn't mean that you're not doing it right.

But what writing advice fails to say

And this is the thing that angers me the most—maybe the reason why I've decided to write all of this—is that they never tell you to read.

It infuriates me: read all my writing advice, but forbid you to read a book. Maybe it's the kind of thing that's happening everywhere—we gobble easy content, and it's undoubtedly easier to read a short article on writing than reading a novel of 500 pages.

But it will never be the same.

Because what you can get from reading (or even better, a re-reading) is your own interpretation of the literature you've been given, and there's nothing more powerful to understand yourself—therefore, to understand your motives, your aspirations, your topics as a writer—than seeing how you, as a reader, react to structures, plot, dialogue, character ideology.

Use all the writing advice you want, but your writing will lack truth if you don't read.

Because few people have this spark—this truth about them that makes a reading special. And trust me: I read a lot of manuscripts, very good written, decent in plot. But this is not all. There is something, and I can't quite explain it—a soul, a spark, maybe. It is the moment when you read something and go: "Ah". It's like sighing of relief, having your heart clenched, being absorbed by something—plot, style, whatever. It's that word that the author has used that is so unique in that context, like you feel that no one has ever used that before.

Some people have the craft and the truth but, to me, they are extremely rare. And it's always much better to have the truth than the craft—the craft, you need to learn, and that's more or less easy (you'll find a ton of articles, haven't we said?). But the truth takes years, even a lifetime, because we are in constant development—after all, never forget that even if we apply the best advice to our writing, we're still human: inherently flawed.

#writing #writing advice #mywriting #thoughts #literature #books #books & libraries #bookworld #article #journalism #on writing #sometimes i give advice #hrarbywritingdiaries #hrarbycraft

[onwriting-hrarby]

on writing, 21-10

i've been kinda missing, lately, but i've been writing a lot. some wins:

i've kept rewriting the draft 2 of the novel, and the good news is that even though i haven't been doing it everyday, i don't feel guilty.

i've arrived to scene 5 (out of 10) of the ploy, my new eremika fic. i like how it's going, but i need to revise a lot scene 1 and 2 to make it coherent with where the story is going. it's pure fluff, with occasional pining, and i'm loving writing armin and historia as a couple too (can two people be more intuitive than these?). i am now heading towards a scene called "the professor", in which mikasa reunites with her favourite teacher in high school... bets on who is that?

i've begun reading annie ernaux "l'écriture comme un couteau", where she talks about her writing with another writer. i love reading how writers explain writing to themselves.

#an update #hrarby #on writing #hrarbywritingdiaries

[onwriting-hrarby]

On writing — My nano recap

On deciding the Nanowrimo—Or how I gave up

When I started November, I knew I wanted to create my own goal of writing. Nano has never been my thing: I don't write well under pressure or words or chapters or pages. I write under hours, or time, and a little bit every day. This persistence only stays with writing—I don't study with that energy anymore, and I tend to live other things for the last minute.

The last times I had ever tried Nano, I ended up losing motivation right at the end. It didn't felt right, that I was neglecting my brain when it said, that's it, you've had enough for today. I felt like I was being pushed, and I decided I didn't want my creative flow to feel overwhelmed. I am a very pragmatic, rational person—I follow structure and timetables and routines.

But this October was a mess, creatively. I abandoned my novel, which I had been working on for 5 years, at just 30 pages of revision. I was feeling very down with Rotten Judgement and wanted to focus on other things. I felt detached from fandom, people in fandom, and literature in general—I barely read.

So, I took November as "a vacation": I promised myself I would not push myself to write certain something or work on some pages. I would not get up at 6 AM to write before work. I would just enjoy that writing is available to me, in all forms—computer, notebook, schemes and head.

The tracker

I downloaded a wordcount that allowed me to change how many words I wrote. I duplicated the sheets in different projects: Rotten Judgement, Novel, Other projects and Final word count. On this last one, I made all the words per day sum each other to determine how many words I had written (in all projects).

True, I still set myself some word goals that I knew I was not going to make: 40K for RJ, 20K for other projects.

I didn't look at the word counter every day. I had no interest in knowing if I was on the right word path with some of the projects or not. Admittedly, that made it difficult to track the words written because sometimes I would have to go back several days and count on Word (or by hand if I had used the notebook) :')

But this allowed me not to be pressured, and, what's better: to know if I was writing because of compromise, or if I was writing because I wanted to.

The results

In all of November, I wrote 28.192 words. I wrote those in a total of 21 days, because I didn't write anything for 9 days (almost all Thursdays and Fridays).

I wrote Rotten Judgement only 8 days in November, amounting to 8753 words (and I believe they were all used in Chapter 17).

I only wrote my new novel 4 days, which says a lot: I need to plan, I need to let it simmer a little more until it is boiling. I wrote 4382 words for it.

I wrote 15057 words for other projects, mainly my #rivamika shot "A dreadful night", which tells me that I was in the right and I indeed needed some vacations for the novel and the fic to focus on other endeavours for a while.

But I didn't stop writing. I always came back, and I never went with a week without writing. It might be small, but to me, it's big. And I don't even feel it as an accomplishment: it's just natural.

I am part of this, and this is part of me. I am indivisible from my projects and my works.

#hrarbywritingdiaries #hrarbycraft #on writing #nanowrimo #women writing #writerblr #writing inspiration #writing #writers on tumblr #creative writing #writers #writeblr #writing advice #writing community #writing exercise #writing tips #writerscommunity #writerslife #writersociety #writer problems #aspiring author #author #writers of tumblr #writing life #writers community

[onwriting-hrarby]

on writing, 5-03

long time no see. how have you been? i hope you're all fine. i decided to take a break to finish rotten judgement, but i'm still not done with it (although i have been progressing a lot), so maybe i won't be as around as i was! i am also writing this in a mild fever: i don't know why i've been catching all the flus lately...

on rotten judgement: well, this is ending, my friends. thanks god i managed to edit and correct chapter 19 in the beginning of the week when i was feeling alright, because i don't think i could have done so in my state right now. i am liking how the chapters are coming together, specially the last chapter, although it's been a mess: i have had to change scenes and do macro editing in a way i hadn't done from chapter 7! i've had a hard time deciding where the action needed to go, i've changed the plot i had in my head and the tone of the chapters, completely obliterated the planning i had in my head... i'm not proud at all of how i've managed the writing for these last chapters, but little by little i think i'm finding my footing. i hope it's worth it.

on hate: one of the last posts i shared is one comment on "die for you". although i didn't respond to it, two weeks later the anon has come back and has begun a hate streak that now means that i everyday receive not one, but maybe two, three, or four hateful comments onn all of my stories, telling me that i'm boring and so thankfully today i've received a bunch of positive commenters who, somehow, had seen the hate on the comments and decided to leave nice things. i am very, very thankful for them. i had talked about it a lot with my boyfriend, and he said that this fandom has brought me more pain than good things (aside from writing, which i may have done independently of the fandom): i agree, but receiving positive comments change my perspective of things, too. i don't know how to tell the anon hate that i already made my mind on stopping writing eremika on april the 7th, 2022... they won't gain anything from leaving hate to me, honestly, but i think it's still a shame that i'm being hated for what i write. for the hours they comment, i am thinking they are from the us... and i'm temped to send them links on the censorship in Tennesee, the banning of books in their libraries, the burning of books in communities. Anyways.

on the latest episode of aot: i have lived it with my boyfriend, waiting for the right time, no spoilers, no discourse on twitter: just the calmness that i knew before joining the fandom on twitter and tumblr. i loved it: it was a masterpiece of pacing, animation, music, and tension-building. i would have waited for months to see the two parts together as a film...

#hrarbywritingdiaries

[onwriting-hrarby]

Engraved — Writing workshop week I

I needed to get off my novel for a while, so this exercise helped me a lot in imagining other things! It is quite long, but I don't think I have ever uploaded any og fiction inn here...

This is part of the Writing workshop by @books and @bettsfic!

Engraved

The wife later swore under oath it had been an impetuous reaction—lights on her face and the moustache man holding a clickety pen in front of her—but the truth is that she had seen it from the first instant she had entered the kitchen.

Her legs felt stiff and wobbly, that day. They carried her body like a strange weight, even though the scale had shown her that she needed to eat more. All bones, all bones, her man had sighed while lunch, gnawing at his steak. She would later think that the effort in which she walked was telling her that she should have stayed quiet. To never enter the kitchen. Never lay her eyes next to the stove. Never begin cooking. Never saying to her husband that she would begin cooking. Never hearing him exclaim, Finally, for fuck’s sake. Never thinking she was not a worthy woman, never feeling so angry, so ready to burst up, so—never never. But she did carry herself to the room, and her eyes did focus next to the stove, where it had been years she hadn’t seen it, the cutting knife her mother had gifted her on her wedding day.

It came along with a lot of fine china. They had shoved them away in the living room, where they couldn’t be seen and wouldn’t get dirt on them. She had said to her husband, “What a pity, those are very expensive”. He had hummed, had kept on putting thin ceramic plates and golden-rimmed teacups into the wooden cabinets, and had barely thrown her a glance as she inwardly apologized for the ingratitude. When she found the knife in the box and took it in her hands, it weighed. She felt it into her fingers for some seconds. The steel was cold and polished. It reflected the orange light of the living room, the way the snow was pouring outside, and shone in a myriad of decisions not taken and secrets better kept. The wife faintly heard his husband say, That will come out handy. She had glanced at him, held the knife sturdier against her palm. 

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a fine blade”, he had answered. “It will cut meat just great.”

But the knife had been left unused for almost all of the marriage, stuffed into the utensils drawer just like any other knife. Upon inspection the day of the china, she had found her initials engraved: M. A. The lettering was beautiful, adorning one of the tangs of the handler. The M was curvy, the ends pointy in riveting ribbons, and the A had a full stomach, protruding to the interior part. Years later, the wife realized the knife hadn’t lost the scale, nor the sharpness of the blade, but the letters had mysteriously given up their fullness and were starting to fade onto the metal.

Nevertheless, the knife was there after so long, so she thought, I better use it. She couldn’t imagine why her husband must have taken it out of the drawer and left it next to the stove. He had long given up seeing her cut with it, although it was true that no knife she had tried quite cut the meat like he wanted to. Always too thin, or too thick, or it couldn’t get through the veins, maybe couldn’t tear into the grease well enough.

She took the filet for supper out of the fridge. It had defrosted well, but some icy tears were still stuck to it. She brushed them off with her hand and they melted on her fingers. She brought her fingers inside the mouth and sucked. It tasted like watery iron. She put the meat on the cutting board, grabbed the engraved knife made an incision in the middle. He would complain that they had the same amount of meat. But then again, she could say, Wasn’t I all bones? As she cut the meat, the knife boiled in her hand. Strange, she thought. She felt a rush of dizziness overcome her, and as she closed her eyes, she could hear her mom’s voice—no, a scream, so loud she had to brace herself onto the marble counter, the knife hanging from her fingers nimbly.

She recomposed herself. The cut was perfect, though. She thought, a momentary anaemia. She was old after all, too many memories and too many years on her back.

The pan sizzled with some oil. It splattered all over the knife she still had in her hand. I can’t let go, she realized. Maybe I don’t want to. Her mom had died in a painful scream, her father had confessed. She had looked at him through the plastic glass and saw his eyes full of grief and guilt, and swore to herself not to be consumed by rage. “Some things run in one’s blood”, her dad had chuckled, “even though you hate me so”.

On the pan, the meat smelled like burnt.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck it”. She swore some more and then swore to herself she could never swear again. Her husband didn’t like it, and wasn’t she such a proper lady?

 She left the knife next to the stove and took the pan off the fire, but the meat was far off saving. The wife sighed, felt the tears coming to her eyes. They wet the rim of her eyelashes. She patted her free hand against them. She breathed out, invoked patience. He could hear him say, It’s not raw enough. I want to see the blood, see? I want to see it, for fuck’s sake. If it’s not raw, then—It tastes like a shoe! Have you ever tasted a shoe?, and she would say, no, I’ve never, and he would put the filet away, or maybe smash it against the wall, and the dish would crack, yes, she could evoke it because it had happened before, and the husband would say, You’re such of no use, why did I marry someone that useless, yes, you, I’m taking about you.

She heard the steps approaching the kitchen. Light as ever, but threatening. She knew the sound because she had to train herself to listen to it all of her life. He appeared on the door frame, watching at her with his mouth open in surprise, the canines hanging pointily, the tongue layered with yellow saliva onto it. His spit reached her face as he screamed:

“What the hell have you done?!”

And because she had seen it in the first instant she had entered the kitchen, the knife rested on her hand, with a weight of something unconfessed and the pride of something long foreseeable.

#tumblr writing workshop with betts #show don't tell #i don't think i did it right or i don't if i followed the prompt but #just the fact i wrote it ready to share it feels like a big step #so i'm sharing it anyways #writing #creative writing #writeblr #writing community #writing exercise #writerscommunity #writer problems #aspiring author #writers of tumblr #writing life #hrarbywritingdiaries

[onwriting-hrarby]

first semester

so, i was doing some wordcount on the first semester and i managed to write... 95,600 words!!!! hOW????? i have no fucking clue, because i thought i had not written that much this year. but, recounting what i had done, of course:

I finished the last three chapters of Rotten Judgement, which accounted for 35 k.

I wrote the whole Liquid Confidence, which accounted for 27 k.

I wrote the first chapter of For you, which accounted for 6k.

But I think what makes me the happiest is that, unbeknownst to me (because I write on a notebook, so I can't count the words until I put it into a computer) I've written 27 k on my novel!!!!

#writer on tumblr #hrarbywritingdiaries #novel #writing #how to write #number of words

[onwriting-hrarby]

ah, two days writing my novel! I feel both happy and relieved and liking it very much 🥵 it's been hard coming back, but i am slowly slowly pulling myself into the story again and writing something that wasn't scripted just for the sake of HAVING FUN! (hopefully it makes sense somehow, and gives the characters more background) I guess I had sold to myself that I should be making my novel short, but WHAT IF IT'S NOT!

also, I have been loving my readings lately 💖

Also, i activated twitter again, this time (for real) just to update any writings (in fact, i activated it and logged off immediately, since i don't have anything to share).

#hrarby musings #hrarbywritingdiaries

[onwriting-hrarby]

on writing, 14-10

I wanted to do the post about inspiration and topics today, but i've had a bad afternoon and then i thought, who cares about what i have to say? when i created this tumblr it was to escape twitter and the discourse, but over the months i've been feeling more detached of interacting in general. it's like... i don't want to be a tumblr writer. i just want to WRITE. i am not a content creato either. why do i act like one, sometimes, and push myself to do things i don't want to?

i just want to write

that's it

(and get comments and interact with the comments, too!)

#hrarby musings #hrarbywritingdiaries

[onwriting-hrarby]

on writing and fandom, 22-04

hello, everyone.

diving into new works can be haunting and enticing both at the same time. i've been forgetting to come here (although i wouldn't say i've been very active on twitter, either) because i have been writing my novel, which is going good. today, i finished chapter 4, and now i want to dedicate this week to write it down on the computer and do a little editing on the pages i've written for now.

i have also found the fun in writing fanfiction again, if only barely. it's taken me months to do the click, and i've been feeling much more drawn to something lightweighted than pure angst: that's why i haven't been writing about rivamika a lot. but i have been preparing an eremika 3 chapter-fic, and i have the first chapter written (mainly because i only needed two lines to finish it: i wrote it in july). i am not very adamant to update it because i fear of the response BUT i still want to crush my fears.

anyways: i said that on twitter yesterday, but since i have been interacting with the fandom less and less (my interactions: writing about ships, maybe reading something sparsely) i have felt very free from pression and also free from toxicity. this is the way i used to interact as i was writing "i did not live unti today", but then i decided to shift into the whole "let me be a writer present on fandom twitter" and everything went to caca for some months. i think interacting like this it's been the way i feel comfortable the most. there's something quite special about just having your own headcanons and reading and writing whatever you want, without sharing all the time (just when i want to).

#hrarbywritingdiaries #on writing #fandom experience #on fanfiction

[onwriting-hrarby]

a writing year—in which i wanted to become famous but didn't

i like to go back to january and recap what i've been doing in a year. writing—writing achievements—is something i often don't want to talk about because i feel like i haven't done my best, i haven't been the most productive or i haven't really achieved anything. normally, because achieving something would be to get published, which i'm actively working on.

however, i feel like this year i could finally assess my skills without the productivity tag on them, and therapy finally allowed me to feel productive without maybe having been productive at all. last year, i was on the path of truly learning this, but it hadn't settled in. this year, though, i've approached my writing with the mindset that it is fine to fail, that i don't have to rush, that no one published their masterwerk at 28, and that i love doing this. i am, published or not, a writer. i am truly a writer, and sometimes, more of a writer than some people i've known who've published.

writing original novels: how to deal with myself (i still don't have an answer)

in january, i flew to rome and when i came back i got the flu. thinking it was covid, i stayed at home for some days and decided to finish my novel. it was an exhilarating feeling, but bittersweet—i knew i had to edit it to the extreme, and this was just the raw version. being an editor myself makes me not feel excited at all about finish a novel, since i know the hard work it still needs—and, probably, a few twitches until it fits my high demands.

i didn't touch the novel since april, when i printed it and began reading it and pinpointing what it needed—a lot of cutting, less description, more agility. i told myself i would get it to a literary prize in october, but i didn't begin the editing itself until september, so of course i couldn't submit it. and part of this tiredness and demotivation, i understood in the end, was that i really didn't want to work on it. i didn't like it.

i decided to abandon the novel i had been writing for 5 years.

so, hating myself for it, i decided to abandon the novel i had been writing for 5 years. and this is it. and here i am. i worked on a page last week, just for the sake of it, but i really don't know if i'm going to come back fully.

oh, also, a friend of mine told me to write a proposal novel in a month and a half. i wrote 2/3 halves of it and i abandoned it. i didn't like it—and he didn't either. maybe it would have been my breakthrough!

at the same time... i have a new idea... and it's been simmering in my head for two months, now. slowly, slowly, i'm getting the structure and the characters. i can't wait to begin writing. i think i talked more about this in one of the posts—i also talked about the language, since i will write in English.

i understood a lot of things about myself this year: 1) i don't work well under pressure. 2) if i don't love it, i will hate it. 3) i'm the best at raw, but i don't like editing my own work. 4) i'm way too harsh to myself!

and part of this tiredness and demotivation, i understood in the end, was that i really didn't want to work on it. i didn't like it.

writing fanfiction: the breakthrough that never came (how i changed the plot of my fic because i'm incapable of writing anything but angst)

okay, i'm going to get REALLY personal in here. when i started interacting in fandom twitter (january, instead they said was at chapter 8, i believe), all i wanted was my work to be known. like, i wanted to promote my work, maybe because it was the only way of pouring out what i was writing and not getting anywhere (like the og novel). that's when i took twitter like a promotional tool. it helped, really, in making instead they said more famous—i got promoted by emdailyfics, which were of real help, and i got more followers.

but—bad things came. karma, maybe. it showed me that twitter is not a safe space for fandom things, not for the way i write or think about fiction. but, before that, as i was finishing ITS, i began plotting RJ. it was supposed to be a romcom, sitcom, romantic, cute type of fiction. i thought about it that way because i wanted to have readers, and instead they said, even thought it was well-written and romantic and touched a lot of hearts, wasn't just the kind of fiction that maybe fanfic readers were looking for. easy, amiable, something to distract themselves. smut, too (which i could never write).

rotten judgement was conceived to be a peak in my popularity... for all the wrong reasons. and that's when the twitter cancellation happened: i almost deleted my account (i came back, but ended up deactivating in august back again and i never came back. my account doesn't exist anymore). i was included in another community which understood me, and help me a lot to navigate the hate and the disappointment in my fandom. at one point, i didn't even want to continue rotten judgement, which was at chapter 2 at the time and hadn't even taken off plotwise.

twitter is not a safe space for fandom things, not for the way i write or think about fiction.

and that's when i realized too—no, rotten judgement wasn't a romcom, a sitcom, a romantic comedy. writing something that readers craved wasn't what i did well. i don't do that well. i don't know how to plot short chapters that leave you hanging. i don't know how to write sexual tension to have good smut. what i was crafting in my mind was everything i lacked as a writer. i wasn't the type of writer that could have thousands of kudos or readers and discourse on twitter and asks and mentions and fanarts. i wish i could be—but i'm simply not. and that's okay. at first, i regarded it as a failure. but then, i realized that i might be doing my own thing... i don't want to be famous in the fanfic world. validation is very, very important to me, but not that extreme, and not in a fandom that insulted me and my critical capacity of thinking in twitter; a fandom that called me racist for writing a story about racism (?); a fandom that thought i couldn't twitch canon to my own liking in fanfiction.

rotten judgement was conceived to be a peak in my popularity... for all the wrong reasons.

yes, these were either all comments in rj or comments in twitter that i saw, clearly referencing my fic. it's alright that they think like this—but this is not how i think. therefore, i'm not writing for this people. i am writing for my readers who are still following my work even after so many months. i don't want—i realized—to be in the twitter discourse. i don't want to be idolized in twitter, to be one of those fanfic authors who deserve the praise more than they deserve the hate they get for, literally, being idolized in twitter. i want to lay low. i am not that brave, i can't put myself upfront that way.

so, rotten judgement ended up being even angstier than instead they said, converging in some of the topics of i did not live until today. i think it might be the most choral, incisive fanfiction i have ever written. i hope it will not disappoint. i hope people can catch up to it (if the low readership is about that, really, i don't know what is). it's what i didn't know i wanted to do, but exactly what i needed to write.

i just hope 2023 will bring me more good stuff. i will finish RJ, i will move on from EM and AOT, i feel... i hope i can keep on finding good stuff along the way that will motivate me to write.

i want to do some "thanks" for the ones who have been in my journey, but i will mention them when i finish RJ. till now, they know who they are, i believe <3

#2023 recap #fanfiction #in writing #hrarbycraft #hrarbywritingdiaries #in which i wanted to be fandom famous but i didn't get it

[onwriting-hrarby]

on writing, 21-03

wrote the first chapter of my novel today.

Also, I need to catch up with all the comments here and in ao3 and dms on Twitter, but thank you so much for the warm embrace to the ending. I'm still figuring out what I want to do in regards to my participation in the AOT fandom, but I've felt very seen and understood. 💖

#Hrarbywritingdiaries #Originalwriting #Hrarbynovel

[onwriting-hrarby]

on writing, 16-03

hello! I've been quite busy these last few days and I haven't been writing the last chapter of RJ at all. Part of me truly feels discouraged to do so, even though I love the last chapter and when I think of it I get literal goosebumps. However, I just want it to get over with it, and truly it's hard to find balance between wanting to do amazing and wanting to put out anything I have written. :')

I love, love this story to bits, and admittedly, I feel guilty that I have talked about the hate in my author's note because I've felt like I have brought in attention to it in detriment of the attention of the story. I think it's hard to navigate! I wish I could insert myself like the author in the author notes, but I just want people to care about the story, and at the same time, I want them to know about the hate. Boh.

Anyways, my personal novel is progressing a lot in my head, so I am excited to finish with fanfiction for a while and write!

#Hrarby #Hrarbywritingdiaries #rotten judgement fanfiction