Looking at my masterlist of fics and just wow, I’ve written so much. I’m in genuine shock at how long this list as grown, do y'all remember when it was only IOTNBO? I’ve come so far and there are still so many kdramas to come and muses that’ll inspire me to write more.
Making OCs and watching them develop (without your fucking permission, mind you) over the years is funny because sometimes they start out as a John Doe and become the most intricately made character ever and sometimes they start as a clown and then remain a clown but with different attributes
Writing is not about ‘telling an epic story’ or 'making something that will outlive you’. Writing is about going “You know what would be fucking awesome?” and then committing word crimes
You know what, fuck people who force writers to reveal their trauma in order to justify the stories they write. No consumer is owed an explanation for the content a creator creates, and no creator should feel obligated to draw from or admit to pain that may or may not be in their life in order to craft a work of fiction.
“I had an idea for a story” is all the justification you need to write one, and all anyone needs to let it be.
the best part about comparing notes with fic writing friends for how you go about doing the fic writing? definitely realizing that you are horrified to your very core over how they go about doing it.
really solidifies the fact that everyone is different and that it doesn’t matter how you do the thing as long as that process works for you
every time i talk to other writers about their writing processes it’s always the little things that blow me away.
and by blow me away, i mean completely fucking horrify me because holy shit what is going on with y'all.
like, what do you mean you have to take an hour before you start in on a new work to perfectly craft a spotify playlist which simultaneously functions as your outline before you go spend the next however many weeks camped out on your bed with FUCKING CANDLES LIT, typing away without getting any back problems despite sitting on your bed or being distracted by having fucking lyrics or having to switch songs regularly?? And you don’t need some kind of drink to functionally write?? And you can just…work while there are other people in the room???
AND YOU’RE WRITING THAT BACKWARDS HALF THE TIME AND SKIPPING AROUND THE OTHER HALF???
anyways what’s y'alls favorite ways to write?
I want to feel fear.
I start off with a semi-crack premise that I can think of a punny title for. Then I open up the AO3 New Post form and fill out that title, the fandom, the ship(s), main characters, and whatever additional tags I think will probably apply. I write the semi-crack premise into a 1-2 sentence summary and then I think “what’s a good conversation to start this whole thing off with” and go from there.
I tend to get 1-2K off the bat with an idea or two of what I could write in chapter two but once I have that much, I hit submit. Then I see the error where I forgot to select my language, go back up and select English and then scroll back down to hit submit again. Success.
If I’m really on top of things, I’ll read it through again now that it’s posted and correct the typos I notice.
(sometimes when I use this “process” I end up losing my chapter before I’m able to submit it, in which case I just retype what I remember and rewrite what I don’t and then continue on as I was)
edited to add: oh yeah, and all of the above is interrupted by watching youtube or old episodes of Poirot or by playing cell phone games, or writing replies to my RP partner in Discord. Unless the idea is really lighting my brain on fire, in which case the whole thing takes ~30 minutes start to finish
I write on my phone, mostly. That alone seems to have terrified most of my writer friends :p
in all seriousness my usual modus operandi is to rotate a concept in my brain until i Have to get it in a google doc or i shall Die. then i open a google doc on my phone and start writing. usually i have some preexisting spotify playlist going, and that can be anything from Hozier to my sexy villain playlist. sometimes i write on my chromebook but that happens more out of necessity than desire tbh. there’s this one fic that demands to be written on my chromebook tho. nothing comes out right on my phone. i do the majority of my tagging on my chromebook but the meat of the pre-posting work is phone stuff.
the nice thing about writing on my phone is that i can do it anytime, anyplace, conveniently. which helps when my brain is a dumpster fire that occasionally spits godly lines at me in the hallway between classes.
I think when writing something really long, all authors should be allowed one “this chapter has been left as an exercise to the reader” chapter. You know. Figure it out. Fill in the gaps. Really unreasonable to expect the author to do all of it.
The amount of effort ficwriter does in order to write a fic. “nah the story doesn’t need to be that accurate it’s just a fic I’m not getting any money out of it” and then as they keep writing and posting their browse history is something like “moon calendar in 1981”
What if we’re shouting into the void … and no one’s listening?
Creating art in a vacuum can be hard. In this week’s episode of Conversations with the Void, we’re gonna get real about how to create when it feels like no one else cares.
(Spoilers: They care more than you think. But that doesn’t necessarily make things easier.)
Whole-heartedly BEGGING writers to unlearn everything schools taught you about how long a paragraph is. If theres a new subject, INCLUDING ACTIONS, theres a new paragraph. A paragraph can be a single word too btw stop making things unreadable
Ok So I’m getting more notes than I thought quicker than I expected! So I’m gonna elaborate bc I want to.
I get it, when you’re someone who writes a lot and talks a lot, it’s hard to keep things readable, but it’s not as much about cutting out the fat(that can be a problem) so much as a formatting issue.
You are also actively NERFING yourself by not formatting it correctly, it can make impactful scenes feel so, so much better. Compare this,
To THIS.
Easier to read, and hits harder.
No more over-saturated paragraphs. Space things out.
@s1ld3n4f1l WAIT WAIT WAIT SO TRUE LITERALLY LITERALLY
Leaving readers off on a cliffhanger is honestly so satisfying. Like, you don’t know what’s gonna happen but I do and I could tell you, but I’m not gonna, because I’m mean and enjoy watching you suffer until the update. There’s zero pressing reason for a cliffhanger. It is literally just there to cause chaos and make you yell at me in the comments.
“If you are a private poet, then your vocabulary is limited by your obsessions. It doesn’t bother me that the word ‘stone’ appears more than thirty times in my third book, or that ‘wind’ and ‘gray’ appear over and over in my poems to the disdain of some reviewers. If I didn’t use them that often I’d be lying about my feelings, and I consider that unforgivable. In fact, most poets write the same poem over and over.”
Sometimes I wonder if people are only kind because they are told that being kind leads to good karma and good things; so doesn’t that mean people are only kind because it benefits them? But then I remember a stranger running after me in the rain because I dropped some money, a cashier going the extra mile to help me with my things, a store manager helping when I didn’t have enough money on me and I think that kindness is a choice that we make but mostly it is a choice we make unconsciously; no ulterior motives whatsoever and most of the time our actions strive for good.
