you know what doesn’t get talked about enough in writing circles
completed story grief
That feeling you are left with when you have finished a long project - whether it is long because it contains a lot of words, or long because it took you a long time to write, or long because it took you a long time to start writing it - when you’re happy because you finished it but empty because it is finished. You took out all of the words that were inside of you, at least all of the ones that pertain to that story, and the relief that follows such an action can be devastatingly exhausting.
On top of just the empty feeling, there follows that bittersweet sense of understanding that this thing which has for so long been your companion is no longer just your companion, and that you have in some ways severed the ties with it, because you will not be writing it anymore. You might write other stories related to it. You might write stories in the same world. Or stories with the same characters. But THAT story is finished. That story has been taken out of you and put where it can be a part of everyone that reads it. That is unimaginably happy and sad at the same time.
So I just want to say, I guess, be nice to yourself after you finish a story. Yes it’s happy, yes it feels good. But if you also feel a little like you’ve just lost something, give yourself some time to process that, because in a way you did. It’s a happy loss, the sort of loss wildlife rescuers feel when an animal they saved is able to go back and be wild again. It’s a good, happy thing, but it’s also okay to take a little time to be sad and take care of yourself.
In Uzbek we have this concept of the divine dark, the darkness from which all things came. So there’s this idea that shows up in a lot of our literature that when the world was first made it was like a gentle night, peaceful, quiet and pitch-black. The night is when creation started and the night is when you’re closest to glimpsing what it was like at the very start of the world.
ohwow that’s gorgeous.
I’ve always loved the gentle darkness motif. It’s quiet and doesn’t judge; it’s benevolently neutral in that respect.
Is there any more disconcerting experience as a writer than changing your mind about how a story is going to go, throwing in a massive plot twist that isn’t even in the neighbourhood of what you were planning when you started, going back to the early chapters in order to revise them and make sure the new direction is adequately foreshadowed… only to discover that somehow, the necessary foreshadowing is inexplicably already present?
When y’all are writing is there ever a point when you’re like “if someone does not lose their mind over this specificbitright here then what am I even doing?”
Writers!! Describe your current WIP(s) in the most boring way possible. I want to see this skdjfkdfhk
every single thing people have said has been amazing, I’m dying laughing here
The world will probably end soon I mean there’s this angel and a dude who rides dragons trying to get a sullen demon teenager to help make it stop but idk there were prophecies, you know.
When y’all are writing is there ever a point when you’re like “if someone does not lose their mind over this specificbitright here then what am I even doing?”
Yeah, the radio silence makes me cheer for it myself.
When your story out grows your scene and now you need to write ANOTHER one to fit the scene in it’s basically the writing equivalent of a sourdough starter.
me:I think I’m going to write sandwich heatfic AU? Aymeric:(clears his throat) hello, allow me to assist you, me: ok but I wonder. has Sam ever experienced it before? Aymeric:wait Estinien: what’s happening Sam POV: IT WAS A NIGHT IN MOR DHONA, LONG AGO,,, me:NO G'raha, crashing through the wall like the kool-aid man:YOU RANG
