Have repeated thoughts or images about many different things, such as fear of germs, dirt, or intruders; acts of violence; hurting loved ones; sexual acts (frequently homosexual); conflicts with religious beliefs; or being overly tidy.
Do the same rituals over and over such as washing hands, locking and unlocking doors, counting, keeping unneeded items, or repeating the same steps again and again. Those rituals may be mental as well and may include different things, such as repeating certain words in order to stop the obsessions, avoiding eventual triggers or praying.
Can’t control the unwanted thoughts and behaviors.
Don’t get pleasure when performing the behaviors or rituals, but get brief relief from the anxiety the thoughts cause.
Spend at least 1 hour a day on the thoughts and rituals, which cause distress and get in the way of daily life.
While browsing the feed on Pinterest, I accidentally stumbled upon my work, only now repainted, and with a smeared watermark, without indicating the source. When I went to his profile, I noticed stolen works and other artists with the same problem. When I tried to write him in messages, he did not answer, a day passed, I do not intend to wait. Please send a complaint to the account of this person, or to his pins. I only demand from him to remove these images, and so that this does not happen again here is the link to his Pinterest account: https://www.pinterest.ru/Coff_e/_saved/
oh no… i hate Pinterest…
nor the app, but the user is just good at being a jerk. idk why they are so many ridiculous people who edit other people’s pictures without having time to make themselves a better person.
my other fandom’s arts has my signature removed although i warned don’t repost in my bio, in my article title and even in my arts, and they commented in my post, harassed, made me mentally breakdown… ugh. bad experience. i was so angry that almost detele all the social accounts but thankfully I didn’t.
it just bad…
i couldn’t do anything… so i just ignore it because i think what they want to do is attract attention and perhaps drive us crazy.
so please don’t let this stay in your heart for too long, arasanka. thinking too much about it will only make you sadder…we will do everything we can, hope they will think about it.
if they listen to us, great. but if they really are a bunch of trash, then just ignore them. Don’t let their bad smell bother you.
You know, the guidebooks all tell you that Pisa is only a day trip. It’s somewhere you quickly pop over to while you’re in Florence just so you can take photos trying to high-five the Leaning Tower. It only has the one thing. You don’t need to be there for more than a few hours.
“wow you blocked me just cuz i disagreed with you???”
yes. yes, exactly. this is a social media site. i come here to look at pictures of birds and shitpost with my friends. this is not a town hall meeting; i am not your elected official. i do not owe you my energy, my space, or my time. you and i are strangers that use the same website. i can block you for literally any reason and that’s okay. take a deep breath. block me too. you’ll feel better.
normalise low blocking thresholds… blocking someone arguing with you is not weak or over-reacting or whatever.
I get asked all of the time “why don’t I have my fire for writing anymore?”
It’s because you’ve 1. put so much pressure on yourself TO write 2. you’ve spent so much time putting down your writing and 3. you’ve made yourself feel inadequate anytime you couldn’t write
So now you’re over here, in this cycle of unhealthy mannerisms and thought processes about your writing when you should be having fun with it.
Ultimately, something about writing seemed fun to you when you started, right? Otherwise, why would you have started? Whether it was the idea of reading a story that didn’t exist yet, whether you thought the act of writing or worldbuilding or character creation was fun, something about writing seemed fun and enjoyable to you.
But you twisted it and twisted it until it became a pretzel of self-sabotaging insults and pressure until now you’ve popped and all of that expanding air of excitement and joy you used to get from writing has released from your brain and now you’re just mentally exhausted.
Take time to relax and to repair your bubble so that you can begin to expand and blow it up again.
You need rest after you’ve put yourself through so much. It’s okay to take a step back for a bit, revitalize your brain, your creativity… it’s okay. Take a little time away from writing.
You don’t have to be writing 24/7 to be valid or good or even great.
You simply being is enough. Allow your brain rest sometimes.
How do you deal with hecklers? Do you ignore them, do you take their advice?
Brandon Sanderson: So, it depends. Hecklers, I ignore. Criticism, I don’t. I am lucky in that I have a team, and I, these days, have my team watch. Like, “You read the one-star reviews. Tell me if there are things popping up that I need to pay attention to,” and things like that.
Reading one-star reviews is generally a bad experience, but reading three-star reviews is usually a really handy experience for you to do. That’s what you’re looking for, those three-stars, the people that could have loved the book– and if you give it three stars, you liked it, but there were things that bugged you.
And if you start seeing themes like that pop up, try to address them.
But also understand that art is about taste. Every type of art. And you are going to write things that are the right piece of art, but that somebody doesn’t like. Just like some people don’t like my favorite food. Some people hate it. I like mac and cheese, other people hate it. I have a friend who hates ice cream. I’m like, “What? Who hates ice cream?” But he hates ice cream. It’s okay.
So, learn to separate taste from things that are actually skill level problems. And as you’re a new writer, in particular, focusing on craft, just practicing, is more important than the feedback, often, on your first few books. ‘Cause you’ll know. You’ll figure it out. Your first couple books, you’ll be like, “They don’t have to tell me; I know what parts are not working.” But you can’t get better at that until you write them.
Things I wish I could tell my younger writer self…
Step away from the thesaurus. Put down that list of SAT words. Yes, those are all great words to know, I agree, but maybe they don’t ALL need to go in one story?
Because the perfect word isn’t always the right word. Sometimes the perfect word is exactly the wrong word and, actually, several not-quite right words can come together and create a better whole than that one perfect word ever could.
“It was like a conflagration lit in his chest, swallowing his heart. ”
“It was like a fire lit in his chest; one tiny spark that jumped to a bush, to a tree, to a second tree, to a third, and soon there was an entire goddamn forest fire blazing inside him, swallowing his heart.”
Writearound the perfect word. Look it up, figure out the etymology, the specifics, the nuance, and then write that into the story. Think of the perfect word, by all means, but then strap it down, slice it open, and show us its guts. Expose to the air and sunlight the places where it’s joined, where it’s been comfortable, where it’s been safe, and teasethat apart to your reader. (See? Instead of “dissect” which would have been perfect but it wouldn’t have been vivid or impactful or right)
SO, I LOVE fanfiction, it is my main source of entertainment and joy in life, especially in these troubled times.
And I read a variety of fandoms and pairings
I also WRITE fanfiction; usually inspired by an episode/part of the book/movie not going the way I would like it to (usually in respect of my OTP of choice)
Now, I don’t write for every fandom I read, but I have written something in most of the fandoms I have become invested in.
HOWEVER, whenever I start to write something that is getting lengthier, something I am really starting to feel proud of, its like I run out of steam. I, along with my readers, am DESPERATE to know what happens next (or sometimes, I have the end all mapped out but am stuck between here and there). BUT I AM TOTALLY BLOCKED AND HAVE NO WAY TO GET THERE!
Way back when, LJ used to be the place I would go to beg for assistance from the relevant community, but its so desolate and forgotten now. And although I LIVE on AO3, there is no facility on there (that I am aware of) to ask for assistance beyond maybe leaving a Note on the story itself (which I have done on some)
Currently, I have about a dozen fics of varying lengths in a variety of fandoms; some of which I don’t even read anymore, but I CAN’T bring myself t orphan or abandon the fics because I am proud of them and I really want to see them finished; I just need a little help and/or inspiration.
I am begging for assistance/guidance/ANYTHING. If anyone is interested in helping or has any ideas where I could/should go for help, please PLEASE let me know.
First of all: Deep breath. Most writers who work at longer lengths (here suggesting 40K+ as a general starter/target length) have been where you are right now. It’s not an inescapable dead end. At worst it’s like being a Roomba banging repeatedly head-first into a corner.
What needs to happen for you here is for you to get yourself un-cornered at least once, so that you’ll know by experience that it’s possible. After that you’ll be able to carry that certainty along with you to free up other stuck works.
So let’s take this step by step.
(1) First of all: assess the spread of works that you’re most desperate to get going on. Identify the one that you’re most desperate about; the one for the sake of which you’d gladly murder someone to get it going again and completed.
(2)Put that one aside. There’s too much energy bound up in it, and if the tactics to follow don’t work for you, you might lose heart.
(3) Pick the one that came up second to that work as the one you’re most desperate to complete. This is the one you’re going to operate on. I use the term both advisedly and with intent to indicate what’s going to happen.
(4) Identify, in advance, a period during which you’ll have a quiet… afternoon? (or similar period, judging by what you know to be a comfortable reading speed) to read through what you’ve got of that work in prose form (not your notes, but the actual written work). The pieces do not have to be connected.
(5) On the day you’ve chosen, take the work out and read it top to bottom. No rewriting. You can take notes if anything useful occurs to you, but otherwise, leave it alone.
(6) Now put it away for a week. NO PEEKING. Go do something else, be something else, read something else. Anything else. Lots of anything else but not,underanycircumstances,that.
(7) After a week, take it out again. Your dealings with the work in this pass are going to be strictly diagnostic. You have three questions to ask yourself about this work, and answer. If you can’t find answers to them all within a day or two, put the work aside and come back a week later and have at it again. The questions are these:
(a)What is this story about? (Boil it down to the most prominent trope. “Love will find a way.” “Sometimes you have to suffer.” “Your first choice could be wrong: don’t be afraid to change your mind.” Etc.)
(b) Regarding the overall arc of what story you’ve got: Who does it hurt? (Meaning: who is the person, and what is the situation, to or from whom/which most of the pain [and therefore the drama] in this story flows?
(9) Now comes the stage where so often the magic happens if you know what question(s) to ask next. …My experience with stoppages of this kind in the past has shown me that routinely there is a motivational element or plot problem that you haven’t sufficiently thought through. Most often of all, like 85% of the time or better, this takes the form of character business that hasn’t been sufficiently resolved. Once you get it resolved, the stoppage routinely comes undone.
So you need to find a couple of chairs. One of them is for you. One of them is for one of your characters. Because routinely there will be an important character who needs to have a conversation with you – one who has something important to share with you about why this isn’t working.
You get to “sit” that character down in that chair and say to them, “What do you have to tell me that you haven’t told me before?”
And then you wait.
You may not get anything back right away. This is normal, because this technique routinely freaks everybody out (including experienced psychiatric professionals, like yours truly). Keep your butt in the hot seat and keep theirs there too. Wait for an answer.
Routinely you’ll get something back within an hour or so. It may take longer. The exigencies of life do often impinge and you may have to get up and go do something else. But every day, you need to sit in the chair and sit them down and ask them again, “What have you got to tell me?”
The answer will routinely surprise you. It may turn up in the middle of the night. It may come to you in a dream. It may come up in conversation with someone real. But it will arrive.
When it does: (a) write it down, FFS. And then (b), consider what to do with it. But again, routinely, a way forward will suddenly appear. May indeed seem obvious. Resist the urge to bang your head against the wall.
Then start writing again.
So: give that a shot and see how it works for you. If you need more assistance, you know where to find me.
You don’t have to “raise the stakes” by perpetually making every villain supposedly Bigger and Badder and Stronger than the one before, you can raise the stakes just by steadily giving your hero more to potentially lose.
If your hero is a loner fighting a bad guy in order to stay alive or to protect innocents, those are good starting stakes! If your hero is fighting a villain of roughly the same caliber five years later, but now they have a spouse and a home and fire-forged friends who are ALSO involved and thus at risk from the conflict–then you have HIGHER STAKES.
Like, they don’t have to be objectively higher–the villain could be trying to kill a hundred people in both cases–but if we go from “one character and 99 strangers” to “a dozen characters who love each other and 88 people they more or less know,” those are NARRATIVELY higher stakes.
(Please also note that you do NOT have to keep up a certain consistent rate of loss in order to keep suspense. In fact, any formulaic rate of loss risks cutting off audience investment, because if they know someone is going to die every finale they’re not going to get attached.
But also, you can keep up a LOT of audience suspense without actual loss as long as you can make loss feel narratively plausible–look at the MP100 and Gravity Falls fandoms around their respective finales, for instance! People were freaking out because they loved these characters and could imagine narratively fitting endings where someone died, even though–looking at the medium–a main character is unlikely to die in something like a Disney cartoon.)
Hyper-specific advice because I don’t see enough of this!
make your characters have inaccurate perceptions of themselves. your character might think they’re selfish but at every opportunity they act selfless. we all have blind spots so give these to your characters too! (this works best with first person pov but I’m sure you can do it in third.)
make a character’s personality trait helpful sometimes and harmful other times. impulsivity that makes them act quickly in high-stress situations which is great but it also sometimes results in the wrongchoices.
make an excel/google sheets doc for your outline. for mine i have the chapter number, the date, the character pov (since mine is first person and switches between 5 characters), a summary column, and a continuity column. my story takes place in one setting but most stories have multiple locations, so you could include a column for that, the time of day, even the moon phase (one of my wips is from the perspective of animals so that is super important for that story).
you can also use excel/sheets for keeping track of your conlang. for my animal wip i have constructed a language called Vannro and I have 300 some-odd entries into my excel doc. i have columns for the Vannro word, the English translation, etymology and derived words (for some), the part of speech, and the subject. you can easily sort in alphabetical either in English or your conlang, and also sort by excluding all entries that aren’t under the subject “derogatory” or “places” etc. I always forget what my “be” verbs are so I sort through the part of speech column so I can find “is” “was” “are” etc.
use perspective to create tension for your reader. for example, in The Blackwater Anomaly in a chapter from Rainer’s pov, we experience his nightmare, however in a later chapter from Holly’s pov, when she asks him directly, he lies and says he hasn’t experienced any nightmares. Holly doesn’t know he is lying but the audience does. I also have characters who do notget chapters from their perspective, who may or may not be lying, and so both the audience and the characters experience that anxiety and uncertainty together.
consider using deep pov. you can read some articles about it but essentially you make the audience experience the story at the same time as the character and it makes your narration more active. this can also be done in third person. this has a lot to do with “show don’t tell” (although sometimes its better to just tell). remove some “telling” words like “thought/felt/saw” and just get directly into what’s happening. instead of “Ava saw a shadow fall across her shoulder” make it “a shadow fell across her shoulder”. your reader will know who you’re talking about. this even jumps into the unreliable narrator when you change “I felt like Isaiah was blowing me off” to “Isaiah blew me off.” the former has room for doubt and makes your character seem weaker. if she thinks she’s being blown off and she’s pissed about it, make her say that! you have to make the audience believe it’s true, it makes them more invested in the character’s experiences and emotions. and then if they later find out Isaiah wasn’t really blowing them off, there was an emergency or something, both the character and the audience can feel regretful together over misreading the situation and being pissed at Isaiah. if you leave room for doubt, then your reader will just feel unsurprised during the reveal and frustrated at your character for being stupid up until then.
you don’t have to “show” everything. sometimes there’s boring parts of a narrative that no one really cares about. you can either make a break in the text to show a time skip happened when your character was driving from point a to point b or you can give a paragraph or two about the drive, just telling what happened, even include an accident on the side of the road or an unexpected and frustrating road closure. its a very mundane and relatable aspect in our lives and we don’t need to be “shown” these, we can just be told. summarize the nonessential by telling or just skip it.
Reread your old writing. Especially those scenes you’re proud of
Write something silly. Doesn’t need to be logical, or included in your story. Write something dumb
Compare your old writing to your new writing. Seeing how much you’ve improved is a great way to get motivated
Explore different storylines. Those type of storylines that would never make it into your novel, but that you’d still like to explore
Choose one of your least favorite scenes, or a really old one, and rewrite it
Read old comments from people praising your work
Create a playlist of music that reminds you of your wip
Don’t push yourself to get back to what made you stop writing in the first place. Write something else
Write what you want to write, no matter how cliché it might be perceived as. It doesn’t matter. If you want to write it, write it.
Take a break and focus on another hobby of yours. Consume other pieces of media, or take a walk to clear your head
You don’t have to write in chronological order from the very beginning if it isn’t working for you! Sometimes a scene you aren’t interested in writing can become interesting after you’ve explored other scenes leading up to it/happening after it
Read one star reviews of “awful” books. As much as I hate to say it, you’ll unlock a newly appreciated view on your own writing
create a new storyline, or a new character. Anything that helps bring something fresh into your story. Could even be a completely new wip
Not writing everyday doesn’t make you a bad writer. If you feel you need a break, take one.
Remind yourself to have fun. Start writing and don’t focus all your attention on following every rule created for writing. You can get into the nitty-gritty when you’ve familiarized yourself with writing as an art. Or don’t. It’s fiction. You make your own rules.
Go to sleep, or take a nap. Sleep deprivation and writing does not go hand in hand (trust me)
Listen to music that reminds you of your characters/wip
Remember why you started. Know that you deserve to tell the story you want to tell regardless of the skill you possess
Writing should bring you joy. Start perceiving every writing session as an important meeting with your imagination. Stop overcomplicating the writing process, stop wondering whether you’re doing it correctly, whether it makes sense or not. You can always rewrite and edit it later. But in this moment, just allow yourself to feel the joy of writing.
Always demand a deadline. A deadline weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. It prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better.
