#onwriting
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GUYS the writing doesn’t even have to be good. I’m so dead serious. Tell the story. Stop giving a shit about how the prose flows or how many times you reuse the same phrases or whether your vocabulary is descriptive enough. Tell the story. Let the plot and characters carry and the elegance will come.
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on writing, 15-11
i am feeling a little bit down with writing lately. the progress of my novel is going well, and i'm happy that i'm writing everyday, but i'm somehow feeling out of loop. like, i want to expose myself and interact with other writers and fandoms, and at the same time i just want to curl into a blanket and read books and not do anything at all. writing and publishing fics doesn't do it for me anymore (i had fun writing the ploy, but not uploading it... and it has been a little bit of radio silence, which doesn't help with the nervousness it triggers) but at the same time i feel like if i don't have a fandom, i don't have a safe space to go to when i'm feeling down.
so for now i'm re reading kono oto tomare in french.
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I have been writing and posting chapters of something or the other on the regular for years now.
But ever since I finished with Latchkey Hero, something had gone missing in the process and I think I figured it out today: the Chapter Finished High.
Always, without fail, I’d get this happy chemicals boost whenever I finished writing (not posting, just writing) a chapter of my Dying Light fic.
I didn’t get it with Shielding Thing after that. Or with Hiraeth. Or any ficlet I might have written in-between. I don’t even get them with Aphelion, and I love that story and the character immensely.
But. Hey. They are back now.
Every chapter of Monsters, We. that I finish has me all giddy again. Like right now, you know? Cause I just finished one?
*distant delighted Taff noises*
It’s nice.
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I haven't felt the urge to write in a month.
I'm sorry to hear that. The fog is hard to see through sometimes. Try small steps like:
Making a map
Just outlining a scene
Talking about your work with another writer
Reading (I find audiobooks very helpful when the fog comes on)
It's important to take breaks. I'm sure the thought has crossed your mind that you might never return to the work and that can be frightening, but if you try to force yourself to go back to it that will almost surely happen.
Don't worry about taking breaks from your work. It'll be okay.
#writerconfessions#writblr#writing#writblr community#just writer things#writing problems#writblr memes#writing meme#writing memes#kidlit writer confessions#kidlitauthor#kidlitwriter#yawriter#yaauthor#writerthings#writer stuff#writerstuff#authorlife#on writing#onwriting#writer thoughts#writerthoughts#writer problems#writerproblems#writers#writingproblems
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PEZZI DI TUTTO Incarto pensieri in sacchetti monouso cercando di riporli in angoli nascosti ma me li ritrovo sempre sparsi per la stanza. Certi giorni sembrano voler mettere ordine in tutto quello che ordine non ha mai avuto. Forse ho un rullino fotografico al posto della mente, una pellicola che registra tutto e poi si incastra sempre sulle stesse scene che mi si ripropongono a ripetizione. Maledetto vizio quello di ricordare, quello di voler dare un senso a tutto anche quando il prima e il dopo camminano su binari differenti. Questa mia abitudine a complicare le cose semplici, perché le cose semplici non mi sono mai piaciute, o forse mi sono piaciute talmente tanto che lo ho volute vedere complicate. Un riflesso incondizionato quello di cercare quel velo di malinconia anche quando per lei non c’è posto, perché senza malinconia sembra manchi la poesia. E mentre guardo domani che potrebbe splendere di luce propria mi immagino come sarà capace di distruggerlo e di farne schegge di vetro che mi si infileranno dappertutto, nei giorni di pioggia naturalmente, perché in quelli di sole mi dimentico sempre di essere triste. Ho una memoria selettiva, che seleziona emozioni secondo le condizioni meteorologiche… che poi ci sono stati giorni di pioggia che mi sono piaciuti talmente tanto da sentire il cuore scricchiolare di gioia al punto che avevo paura franasse. Ho imparato a essere felice in maniera controllata ora, per le piccole cose come i raggi di sole clandestini tra le nuvole, certo è che la felicità incontrollata sotto il temporale… beh quella era un’altra cosa, il problema è che non ricordo più come si leva il freno a mano, deve essersi incastrato come la pellicola che s’incastra sempre nello stesso punto e io rivedo pezzi di ieri sempre in tutti i miei possibili domani. Pezzi di tutto, ho pezzi di pensieri, pezzi di sogni, pezzi di speranze, pezzi di cuore e pezzi di anima, ho tagliato tutto a pezzi perché era troppa roba e intera non ci stava più dentro. Testo by #karenlojelo #instawriters #ioscrivo #onwriting #karenlojeloquotes (presso Somewhere...) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cg3g_DeM3Sm/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
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Being a Writer is Lonesome
When I was a kid, I wasn’t the type of writer who was shy about sharing their stories. In fact, I frequently annoyed people with my stories. I wrote with a pen on a pad of paper. I wrote on anything I could find really. If I left my pad at home and was out with my parents at a restaurant, I would start writing the next scene on my napkin.
I would openly wave my papers in front of friends and classmates saying, “Hey do you want to read this fanfic I wrote about Yoshi saving Princess Peach? It’s really funny. At least, I think it’s funny. Tell me what you think!”
Some classmates would try to get me to shut up by tearing apart my papers. I would then painstakingly rewrite the story word-by-word on new pages. If they tore that up too, I just kept rewriting. . . and I kept asking them to read my stories. I had to piece together lots of pages with Scotch tape, and I still have them stored away in my drawers. They are ancient artifacts by now. You have to be very gentle when you hold them.
I think I was too innocent back then to recognize that I was being bullied. Even today I think about it like, “Was I bullied? I don’t actually know.” Can you say you were bullied if you were never aware that you were being bullied? For the sake of avoiding a long philosophical argument, probably. Yes. But that behavior flew over my head at the time because I had a one-track mind. It was to create. If someone destroyed my creation then I had to recreate it. No ifs ands or butts about it. It HAD to come alive again. I just retorted with, “You’re fucking dumb” and rewrote the story. I’d then have the audacity (or stupidity, either way) to ask them again to read it.
Learning how to write was no easy task. I had the very bad luck of being assigned very bad English teachers throughout my schooling. Very bad. Extremely bad. My middle school English teacher ruled with an iron fist, and we did what we could just to evade her wrath, not so much to genuinely learn. My closest friends from that time will never forget the traumatic experience we had reading the book Johnny Tremain as a class. Just thinking about that book makes me shudder. We were survivors of a long, bitter war. Then in high school, each year was like another Defense Against the Dark Arts situation. The English teacher would be relatively new, not very good, and didn’t last very long.
My English teacher in sophomore year was more like a surfer dude than an English teacher. You would take one look at this guy and “English teacher” was the last guess on your list. Oh, I’m sure he knew his stuff. He had the enthusiasm. He had the knowledge. He just had absolutely no control over the classroom. That happens with really young teachers. Most of my memories of that class are of my classmates just yelling and laughing and doing whatever they wanted. I have this image ingrained in my memory of him zoning out with the most dejected look on his face after failing to get us to care about The Catcher in the Rye. The only other memory I have about what we read in that class was Nathanial Hawthorne’s The Minister’s Black Veil. That was a pain for us to go through - a short story but a long haul. Not long after we graduated, he got kicked out of the school after the administration discovered a picture of him smoking pot on Facebook.
I joined the sci-fi/fantasy club right away as a freshman in high school. I joined at the right time because they were considering making their very first literary magazine. I think around my junior year was when they got serious about it and I submitted a story to be published. It was then that I realized how bad my writing was. The moderator loved my story but, with a straight face, he looked at me and asked, “Is English your second-language? The writing is very bad.” Up until then, I had never felt so embarrassed in an academic setting in my entire life. He legit thought I must have been from another country because my grammar was all over the place. But the honest truth was that I just had really bad English teachers.
There was really only one genuinely good English class I had, and that was AP English Language and Composition in my senior year of high school. I finally learned how to “really” write, with flavor and wit. The road to get there though was really rocky, and the teacher gave us some very difficult assignments. The worst assignment I ever wrote was also my second most embarrassing moment as a writer. The paper required us to nitpick George Orwell’s choice of words in an essay he wrote. We had to somehow dish out a 10-paged paper on why Orwell chose the words he did in his essay. It was the weirdest and most obscure paper I ever wrote. I fucking bombed that essay, and everyone else did too, so the teacher gave us all the chance to rewrite it. I still have that paper in my drawer with my teacher’s glaring comment in red ink that reads, “Your thesis borders on sarcasm.” It stung when I read that for the first time. But I think it took that one terrible awful paper to get me to finally learn how to write a paper. I learned so much in that class. That teacher was direct, no-nonsense, and told you exactly what you needed to do. People were afraid of him, but I thought, “Damn, I wish you were always my English teacher.”
Before graduating, I gave my favorite teachers a copy of my story at the time on CD (that’s how long ago this was). I never heard back from any of them. I didn’t really expect them to. They were teachers after all, and teachers are very busy. Looking back now I cringe at the story I gave them, because what I thought was a masterpiece back then was really very rough and unpolished.
My parents learned English as a second-language and were on a different wavelength about things. I was excited to show them my story called “The Drifters”, a sci-fi adventure that I was maturing since 8th grade that involved political satire about the current state of affairs. They immediately rejected it, fearing that I would draw ire from people and the government. I saw where they were coming from though. They hailed from countries that suffered years of political turmoil. Being that I was becoming a writer in the time of the Patriot Act, they firmly told me not to write about “those things”.
I felt very uncomfortable showing them anything else after that. With little direction or motivation at school and an elephant in the room at home, I did what any artist does in the modern age - I retreated to the Internet. There, I learned more about writing than I ever did in school, and learned how to critique a work of fiction and discuss with writers.
Of course, as the Internet grew, so did all the bad things that came with it. You can get lost in many arguments that spiral out of control. Someone’s critique can border more on shaming you than genuine constructive criticism. You try to retaliate. They pick at something dumb you said, so now you look like the bigger idiot. It all goes to shit.
The third and last most embarrassing moment I ever had as a writer happened online. I used to be part of Young Writers Online (YWO). The site is now defunct and scrubbed, but man there were some embarrassing posts from me.
There was a period of time where I was paranoid about my ideas being stolen, or that I had wasted so much time that other people out there would publish a similar idea before I could. I imagined that when my story would finally be published, readers would compare me to someone else, when in reality I developed my ideas years earlier. It was my worst fear as a writer. Any time a major Hollywood movie or TV show had a similar idea to something I wrote, I panicked. I always posted about these feelings on the writing forum. A certain someone on the writing forum clashed heads with me whenever I expressed my anxiety. He was my most fervent critic.
I once read an issue of Science Fiction & Fantasy. I bought their issues at the time to really get a feel for what kind of stories get accepted into magazines. I had already submitted stories that got rejected. One of them was called “Janus in Space”, which was set in my fictional world of “Space Hotel”. I then came across a sci-fi story in the magazine called “Mars Hotel” that was eerily similar to my story “Janus in Space”, which I had also posted online in YWO.
The parallels were staggering. Topps was the name of my hotel’s maid, and she was written off at the time as a young android who was a bit of an airhead, and she hummed a lot because of a mechanical error. The maid in Mars Hotel was also a young android and also had a mechanical error that caused her to say things incorrectly. Both hotels had a creaky pulley elevator that everyone complained about and wondered why they had it if turbolifts existed. Both had clerks who hated their job and an absent-minded boss. The tone was also humorous and witty and used modern curse words, much like my world of “Space Hotel”. This freaked the fuck out of me. So, I went out of my way to contact the magazine and show my evidence.
I posted about this in YWO too. That same critic once again lambasted me saying it was my imagination and I was making a fool of myself. Then one day, the writer of “Mars Hotel” created an account to respond to my comment. They explained the situation and assured me that they never came across my story on YWO, that it was an original idea, and wished me well.
I had reached peak embarrassment as a writer.
“It doesn’t matter who is original. What matters is who does it best.”
That was what my most fervent critic told me, and kept driving it into me.
Alright.
I learned to live with it.
A couple years later, that same critic posted on YWO complaining about how Interstellar had a similar idea he was working on, and he didn’t feel like he could write his story anymore.
Well...
#
I think as I got older I learned more and more not to share much with anyone. There’s no real use to it. You’ll only complicate things. They say that the biggest regret people have on their deathbed is not having had the courage to say what they wanted to say. I did that for most of my youth and it only got myself into trouble and awkward situations. I don’t recommend it. When I die, I will say that I wish I had kept the peace.
Also, people don’t have the time to read your work anyway. Every writer knows this.
“Hey, I can read your story!”
“Oh cool! Let me know what you think in like a month if that’s okay?”
“Yeah sure!”
And that’s the end of that there.
You never hear from them ever again.
Not your friends, not even your significant others or your spouse.
Everybody’s got something they need to do nowadays, even you.
You get stuck in a dead-end job doing your writing. You tell yourself you’re going to make it big one day, but every other day you have to do something else. Obligations, emergencies, the struggle to keep it together in the Middle Class. You try really hard to find time to write but someone out there gets mad that you’re not focusing on them, like your friend or your significant other. The second you have time to sit and write, something happens. Something always happens. There’s always a thing you have to do or a thing you have to attend. Then there’s money that you need to make in order to fucking live. Every week you find yourself thinking, “This week was crazy but the next week should be clear. I should get back on track next week. Yeah.”
And then the moment you express an ounce of needing alone time suddenly you’re the bad guy. Suddenly it’s, “Well, Eddie, think of all the other people who have had it worse” or my favorite is “You just need to budget your time better” - coming from some guy on YouTube who went to Harvard and whose parents paid everything off and who is now telling you how you can do anything by simply blocking your time differently.
As if you have nothing else in life to do that is currently on fire.
I have come full circle as a writer.
The happy giddy kid has long disappeared, and I have embraced the stoic and reclusive hermit.
Being a writer is lonesome because it’s something so introspective that I don’t think your friends or family will really understand it. You can have your deepest, darkest secrets laid out in a mosaic across your entire story and those closest to you won’t even blink an eye. Other times you don’t want to write a metaphor about anything, and you just have a cool idea you need to dish out. Then that’s when those same people are convinced that THIS is the story that means something to you when it doesn’t. They’d be like, “Oh my God, are you okay? Wait is this character me? Does that mean you hate me?” NO. It’s literally just a story about a talking donkey wearing a hat. If you ask me that again I swear I will call the police.
Being a writer is lonesome because it’s all in your head, even when you show people your words. Why do we do it anyway when it gets adapted into a Netflix show before you can even finish the series? Why do we do it when there are so many artists and animators now?
The thing I find unique about being a writer is that nobody will really know or “see” how you imagine the story the way you do. You may have your tale adapted on screen or illustrated, but when you die that world truly dies with you. You can never translate something 100%. Nobody else will ever fully experience how your characters walk, talk, and exist. Nobody else will know its secrets that you consider canon but dare not tell anyone. Nobody else will fully understand how the buildings in your towns and cities look, their exact angles and shapes. Nobody else will fully imagine the sounds everyone and everything makes. And the vibe. Nobody will get the vibe like you do.
Even when I finish a draft and one day publish it and consider it “finished”, it will never fully convey how I saw the story in my head. Every person who will read it will have their own vision. I think that is why we write. One story becomes a thousand different tales, a thousand different interpretations. We discuss the intended and the unintended. And that’s really just art in general.
When I die, so will all my worlds and all my characters. Thousands of worlds and millions of characters, lost in time. Entire cultures and histories. They will never be realized like how I realized them. It sounds lonely and sad but there’s also solace in it. It’s sacred. Everything will die with me in private.
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The Neverending Reading List: Book V
On Writing and Worldbuilding: Volume I
by Timothy Hickson
Exclusive Content
How I Plan a Novel: The Backwards Planning Method
On Writing
Prologues
The First Chapter
The Exposition Problem
Foreshadowing
Villain Motivation
Hero-Villain Relationships
Final Battles
The Chosen One
Hard Magic System
Soft Magic Systems
Magic Systems and Storytelling
On Worldbuilding
Polytheistic Religions
Hidden Magical Worlds
How Empires Rise
How Empires Work
How Empires Fall
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Interested? Snag the book real quick by clicking here!
For the purpose of the series, click here!
See the original post on Instagram!
Watch WGS on Twitch and YouTube!
#timothyhickson#onwritingandworldbuilding#volumeone#neverendingreadinglist#exclusive#exclusivecontent#onwriting#onworldbuilding#writing#worldbuilding#onwritingwell#novelplanning#planningmethod#plananovel#should#readinglist#neverending#bookcollection#booklist#readerproblems#booksarelife#bookobsession#booklover#educationalpost#educationalposts#learnsomethingneweveryday#becomesmartereveryday#monriatitans#affiliatelink#bookshoporg
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“While to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
#writersofinstagram#bookquotes#literature#tumblr writers#dark academia#quoteoftheday#spilled ink#desi writers#tumblr writing society#quotes from books#stephenking#onwriting
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Mistakes Were Made
Mistakes were made.
I’ve seen so many of these baking sheet tartlets that I was fully confident I could make one with no recipe. This is how I go into any new endeavor. Headfirst, full of confidence from past experiences of doing other things well, and directly plant my face into a wall.
Do I think I’m a failure as a novice baker because these tartlets didn’t come out as expected? Not at all.…
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(via Stephen King Teaches Us How To Write Well)
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Paris, Sunday: On Writing
I've been reading, for the first time, Stephen King's "On Writing." I'm figuring, if this move from NYC to Paris is a chance to reinvent myself a little bit, y'know, become someone a little more than who I am, then let's go back and fill in some gaps in my education.
"On Writing" is a very simple book. King was always a conversational-style writer -- even though I've heard maybe a handful of interviews with him in all my years, you read the text and you can hear him saying this stuff to you across a diner table -- so if you're looking for something more formal, you're guaranteed to not like it. He cusses. He worships at the altar of Strunk & White, but he specifically tells you that it's okay to break their rules when it serves your narrative, especially once you know what you're doing.
"Do everything right, and then do one thing wrong."
So I'm finally reading a book about writing that I should have read, god, 40 years ago (I know, it was published in 2000) (also, yeah, I turned 55 this week, sorry), and as I'm going through it, I'm realizing I was doing a lot of things right, even as I was getting no encouragement from my friends or peers.
(Getting encouragement from friends and peers is something he mentions in passing, and were I to write such a book, I'd move that much further up the priority list. Man, having people around you who respect the thing you like doing is such a huge help. Like, every day, even when you're not doing it, even when you're just doing other life things. The sun shines a little brighter, and so do you.)
Write what you know, even when you're writing about space colonies or tiny fish or whatever.
There s no good writing without tons of reading. When you don't read, you can't write.
Feel free to copy styles. You won't learn without trying on things for size. Trust in your skills as a shitty mimic.
Don't be afraid to read shitty writing. Great work can inspire you, and show you what's possible. Shit writing can also inspire you, by showing you what mistakes look like without you having to take the trouble to make them yourself.
I followed these rules religiously as a songwriter for 15 years, and I do truly believe I managed to squeeze every ounce of potential out of myself in a field, for the first time in my life.
It turned out I was good enough to be pretty good. I sold a few thousand albums, I toured across Canada a few times, I opened for some pretty big bands, I got laid a lot more than I could have reasonably expected, and right up until my last year in NYC, people would (very, very occasionally) come up to me and ask me if I used to be somebody before I got into trivia. "I was hunting around, and I found a torrent of this album, and -- is this you?"
Yeah, I used to be somebody. I got way more famous as a quizzer than I ever did as a musician, but yeah, I was a pop songwriter for most of the 1990s.
We can talk about how good I was, and what the hell I was doing, some other time. My point in bringing this all up isn't to brag, it's to say that I was following a better path toward becoming a decent writer than I thought at the time. It's nice to get confirmation about that after the fact, I guess.
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on writing, 8-01
such a long time i didn't do a post in my writing diaries, didn't i? i have transitioned to a journal in paper—in which i vent in my native language and also about life in general—and thinking about journaling for me (and only me) has been gratifying and slower. about this, i just read an article yesterday about the impasse of writing for one-self in the age of sharing everything (here).
i didn't set myself any goals for 2023, only to write more (and hopefully, better). before my hiatus (i don't know if i'm back yet 100%) i realized that i was working too much, seeing too many friends, and although all of that makes me terribly happy, at the same time i was losing myself in a twirl of busy life and not finding the structure that i wanted—and that is writing. without writing everyday, i feel completely lost, kind of dizzying. however, when i looked back at the counter of december, i realized i had written everyday. strange. was i too busy that i didn't even recall that? that i felt like i wasn't really writing?
so, as a goal of 2023 (more like a purpose) i want to write purposefully. i want to set little goals or tasks and actually accomplish them. i am also tired in seeing everyone i know thriving as an author, and not me. i want to try to be less afraid and less perfectionist.
this past week (still christmas in my country) has been freeing because even if i still have a lot of work, i've managed to write a lot. i should have been focusing on rotten judgement, but i've been writing my erejeankasa story (the first part of the triptych of hurt) and plotting my short story for a submission on a literary magazine.
today, in just an hour and a half, i'm joining a meetup group in my city that write every sunday. hopefully, i'll feel less alone in my room.
i hope i can share much more things with you this year.
thank you for being around!
—hera
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On Describing Writers
https://theweeklymancom.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/describewriters.pdf
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I'm afraid that even if I do get published that no one will like my work... and that my career will be over.
I think we all share this fear and I feel a deep level of camaraderie with you. But I think you know, if you let this fear stop you, your work will never be out there. You might be missing out on a huge opportunity because of it.
I know it's scary and that words don't often help with that, but you've got to, at least, try to get your work out there.
#writerconfessions#writblr#writing#writblr community#just writer things#writing problems#writblr memes#writing meme#writing memes#kidlit writer confessions#kidlitauthor#kidlitwriter#yawriter#yaauthor#writerthings#writer stuff#writerstuff#authorlife#on writing#onwriting#writer thoughts#writerthoughts#writer problems#writerproblems#writers#writingproblems
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Passaggi di vento Così la piazza vuota la piazza piena nessun rumore troppo frastuono passanti ridenti tristi sorrisi apparenti sinceri sfuggenti a volte persi corri corri qui davanti Dov’ero ieri… dove resterò domani? sto passando adesso ma arrivo in qualche posto poi o rimango solo dentro? Fa giorno fa notte profumo d’estate alle porte sembra bel tempo questa è un’onda questo è un passaggio dove sono domani? Dove tornerò ieri… ti guardo stai attento a non allontanarti ti osservo ma mi perdo chi c’era ieri… chi tornerà domani? Io sono sempre qui in un altro posto con lo stesso cuore non bussare è ancora aperto Sono una che ha di quei passi che non sanno andare via per sempre ricordo la strada anche in un’altra vita Cicale all’orecchio oggi niente vento passa tutto mentre resta dentro. #karenlojelo #poesia #poesiadistrada #onwriting (presso Every Where) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp4VMgMMBzZ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
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