— David Lynch (via funeral)

Encouragment for writers that I know seems discouraging at first but I promise it’s motivational-

• Those emotional scenes you’ve planned will never be as good on page as they are in your head. To YOU. Your audience, however, is eating it up. Just because you can’t articulate the emotion of a scene to your satisfaction doesn’t mean it’s not impacting the reader. 

• Sometimes a sentence, a paragraph, or even a whole scene will not be salvagable. Either it wasn’t necessary to the story to begin with, or you can put it to the side and re-write it later, but for now it’s gotta go. It doesn’t make you a bad writer to have to trim, it makes you a good writer to know to trim.

• There are several stories just like yours. And that’s okay, there’s no story in existence of completely original concepts. What makes your story “original” is that it’s yours. No one else can write your story the way you can.

• You have writing weaknesses. Everyone does. But don’t accept your writing weaknesses as unchanging facts about yourself. Don’t be content with being crap at description, dialogue, world building, etc. Writers that are comfortable being crap at things won’t improve, and that’s not you. It’s going to burn, but work that muscle. I promise you’ll like the outcome.

For any writers that need encouragement

I teach writing at a college level. This is all good advice.

Full offense and pun fully intended, but I genuinely think the very existence of "dead dove, do not eat" was a fucking canary in the mines, and no one really paid attention.

Because the tag itself was created as a response to a fandom-wide tendency to disregard warnings and assume tagging was exaggerated. And then the same fucking idiots reading those tags describing things they found upsetting or disturbing or just not to their taste would STILL click into the stories and give the writer's grief about it.

And as a response writers began using the tag to signal "no, really, I MEAN the tags!"

But like.

If you really think about it, that's a solution to a different problem. The solution to "I know you tagged your story appropriately but I chose to disregard the tags and warnings by reading it anyway, even though I knew it would upset me, so now I'm upset and making it your problem" is frankly a block, a ban and wide-spread blacklisting. But fandom as a whole is fucking awful at handling bad faith, insidious arguments that appeal to community inclusion and weaponize the fact most people participating in fandom want to share the space with others, as opposed to hurting people.

So instead of upfront ridiculing this kind of maladaptive attempt to foster one's own emotional self-regulation onto random strangers on the internet, fandom compromised and came up with a redundant tag in a good faith attempt to address an imaginary nuance.

There is no nuance to this.

A writer's job is to tag their work correctly. It's not to tag it exhaustively. It's not even to tag it extensively. A writer's sole obligation, as far as AO3 and arguably fandom spaces are concerned, is to make damn sure that the tags they put on their story actually match whatever is going on in that story.

That's it.

That's all.

"But what if I don't want to read X?" Well, you don't read fic that's tagged X.

"But what if I read something that wasn't tagged X?" Well, that's very unfortunate for you, but if it is genuinely that upsetting, you have a responsibility to yourself to only browse things explicitly tagged to not include X.

"But that's not a lot of fic!" Hi, you must be new here, yes, welcome to fandom. Most of our spaces are built explicitly as a reaction to There's Not Enough Of The Thing I Want, both in canon and fandom.

"But there are things on the internet that I don't like!" Yeah, and they are also out there, offline. And, here's the thing, things existing even though we personally dislike or even hate or even flat out find offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable existing is the price we pay to secure our right to exist as individuals and creators, regardless of who finds US personally unpleasant, hateful or flat out offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable.

"But what about [illegal thing]?!" So the thing itself is illegal, because the thing itself has been deemed harmful. But your goddamn cop-poisoned authoritarian little heart needs to learn that sometimes things are illegal that aren't harmful, and defaulting to "but illegal!" is a surefire way to end up on the wrong side of the fascism pop quiz. You're not a figure of authority and the more you demand to control and exercise authority by command, rather than leadership, the less impressive you seem. You know how you make actual, genuine change in a community? You center harm and argue in good faith to find accommodations and spread awareness of real, actual problems.

But let's play your game. Let's pretend we're all brainwashed cop-abiding little cogs that do not own a single working brain cell to exercise critical thinking with. 99% of the time, when you cry about any given thing "being illegal!!!" you're correct only so far as the THING itself being illegal. The act or object is illegal. Depiction of it is not. You know why, dipshit? Because if depiction of the thing were illegal, you wouldn't be able to talk about it. You wouldn't be able to educate about it. You wouldn't be able to reexamine and discuss and understand the thing, how and why and where it happens and how to prevent it. And yeah, depiction being legal opens the door for people to make depictions that are in bad taste or probably not appropriate. Sure. But that's the price we pay, creating tools to demystify some of the most horrific things in the world and support the people who've survived them. The net good of those tools existing outweighs the harm of people misusing them.

"You're defending the indefensible!" No, you're clumsily stumbling into a conversation that's been going on for centuries, with your elementary school understanding of morality and your bone-deep police state rot filtering your perception of reality, and insisting you figured it out and everyone else at the table is an idiot for not agreeing with you. Shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down and read a goddamn book.

relevant everywhere tbh

He was as tall as he was tall, and his eyes were the color they were. To describe his hair one would say that he had some. His face had all the features you'd expect, and none of the ones you wouldn't. "There he is," people would often say of him, but only when he was there. And they were right.

I do have a piece of writing advice, actually.

See, the first time I grew parsnips, I fucked it up good. I hadn't seen parsnips sprouting before, right, and in my eagerness I was keeping a close eye on the row. And every time I saw some intruding grass coming up, I twitched it right out, and went back to anticipating the germination of my parsnips.

But it turns out parsnips take a bit longer than anything else I'd ever grown to distinguish themselves visually. It's just the two little split leaves, almost identical to a newly seeded bit of kentucky bluegrass when they first come up, and they take a good bit to establish themselves and spread out flat before the main stem with its first distinctive scallopy leaf gets going.

I didn't get any parsnips, not that year, because I'd weeded them all out as soon as they showed their faces, with my 'ugh no that's grass' twitchy horticulture finger.

The next year, having in retrospect come to suspect what had happened, I left the row alone and didn't weed anything until all the sprouts coming up had all had a bit to set in and show their colors, and I've grown lots of parsnips since. They're kind of a slow crop, not a huge return, but I like them and watching them grow and digging them up, and their papery little seeds in the second year, if you don't harvest one either on purpose or because you misjudged the frost, so it's worth it.

Anyway, whenever I see someone stuck and struggling with their writing who's gotten into that frustration loop of typing a few words, rejecting them, backspacing, and starting again, I find myself thinking, you gotta stop weeding your parsnips, man.

reading this post be like

imagination (1963) - harold ordway rugg

"chekhovs cat / schrödingers razor / occams gun"

Chekov's Cat: if you see a cat in the first act, it will probably be relevant later. (example: Alien)

Shrodinger's razor: an unopened box may or may not contain the solution to the story; there's no way to know without opening it. (example: Monk)

Occam's gun: the simplest way to kill off a character is to shoot them. (example: Bambi)

i have been cracking up at this for the past 3 minutes

Chekov's Box: If there is a container introduced in the opening act, it will be opened later.

Schrodinger's Gun: Treat every gun as if it's loaded unless you've checked it yourself.

Occam's Cat: If you hear strange noises at night, it's probably a cat.

i do write for attention, actually, because that's a normal reason to create art

did you hear about that actor performing a play in front of a crowd? clearly only doing it for attention

im trying to say something and im not gonna say it in an empty room

“But let me give you the dark side of writing groups. One really dark side of writing groups is, particularly newer writers, don’t know how to workshop.

“And one of the things they’ll try to do is they’ll try to make your story into the story they would write, instead of a better version of the story you want to write.

“And that is the single worst thing that can happen in feedback, is someone who is not appreciating the story you want to make, and they want to turn it into something else.

“New workshoppers are really bad at doing this. In other words, they’re really good at doing a bad thing, and they’re doing it from the goodness of their heart. They want you to be a better writer. They want to help you. The only way they know is to tell you how they would do it, which can be completely wrong for your story.”

—Brandon Sanderson, Lecture #1 Introduction, Writing Science Fiction And Fantasy

And this is why many writers (including me) don’t ask for concrit on their published  stories - they’ve told the story they want to tell. 

If that’s not the story you want to read,  you are welcome to write your own version. 😉

He goes on to say that to give good feedback, tell them how the writing made you feel. Don’t say, “instead of that you should do this.” Tell them, “this part confused me.” Or, “my attention drifted during this scene.” Your job isn’t to tell them how to fix it or even that it needs fixed. Your job is let them know what impact their story had on you, the reader. Then they can determine if it’s accomplishing what they want it to and if not, they know which parts need attention.

It isn’t just young writers who do this! Until last fall, this is what I did because this is what my teachers taught me to do. And I hated writing workshops. I kept going to them because I needed to learn how to be a better writer, but…did I actually learn? Mostly what happened was that my work got picked apart and I became depressed and left the story behind because I no longer thought it was any good. My teachers were operating with the best intentions in the world too, but with their help, I ended up with the world’s worst case of writer’s block and a chronic lack of belief in myself.

Then, last fall, my very last semester of college, I took a class with a professor who told us that we were not going to use the classic workshop format. Instead of writing down everything that we thought our classmates should do, we were assigned to ask them questions. And as writers, we were assigned not to sit passively while feedback was fired at us, but to ask questions, to explain what we had been going for and ask if it worked, and if not to brainstorm together how we might make it work.

It was miraculous. Instead of shutting my mind down, this workshop process blew it wide open. Instead of going home after class dispirited, never wanting to touch my story again, I went home inspired, with a hundred new ideas.

So I am a big advocate for this method–and I think it is important to underscore that it isn’t just students who need to be taught it. Writing teachers need to learn it too.

This is so important! And it’s also the reason 90% of “concrit” sucks ass. I have been ignoring “concrit” cheerfully ever since 2003 when people were actually awkward enough to say things like “I’d like this story so much if there weren’t any slash (or het) in it!”

Telling people to write what you want to read isn’t concrit. It’s begging.

Speaking from a past life in journalism, that also counts for changes of style. Maybe you wrote a sentence and used the words you wanted, but an untrained editor might try to change the words they would use instead; to say the same thing but not in your style - or, as we say it, “calling six half a dozen.” Only suggest change of style if the sentence gramatically doesn’t make sense, as it’s often the case with non-native speakers (like me, but I’m blessed with the best friends and betas!)

speculative fiction writers i am going to give you a really urgent piece of advice: don't say numbers. don't give your readers any numbers. how heavy is the sword? lots. how old is that city? plenty. how big is the fort? massive. how fast is the spaceship? not very, it's secondhand.

the minute you say a number your readers can check your math and you cannot do math better than your most autistic critic. i guarantee. don't let your readers do any math. when did something happen? awhile ago. how many bullets can that gun fire? trick question, it shoots lasers, and it shoots em HARD.

you are lying to people for fun. if you let them do math at you the lie collapses and it's no fun anymore.

YOU GET IT

One of the best writing advice I have gotten in all the months I have been writing is "if you can't go anywhere from a sentence, the problem isn't in you, it's in the last sentence." and I'm mad because it works so well and barely anyone talks about it. If you're stuck at a line, go back. Backspace those last two lines and write it from another angle or take it to some other route. You're stuck because you thought up to that exact sentence and nothing after that. Well, delete that sentence, make your brain think because the dead end is gone. It has worked wonders for me for so long it's unreal

I don't remember where I heard this now, but I absorbed the advice, "if you're stuck, count ten sentences back and start again from there". It's not always ten sentences back, for me, but it does force me to look at the last handful of lines I've actually written on a sentence instead of a story level, and that is eminently helpful in unsticking myself most of the time.

I recently resolved a point where I'd been stuck for months not by changing anything in the scene I was currently writing, but by realizing I needed to add another scene before that one to establish key information I couldn't work into the current one

HEY WRITER MUTUALS COME GET YOUR WRITER JUICE

Death of the author: Treating the author’s stated interpretation of their own work as merely one opinion among many, rather than the authoritative Word of God.

Disappearance of the author: Treating the context and circumstances of the work’s authorship as entirely irrelevant with respect to its interpretation, as though the work had popped into existence fully formed just moments ago.

Taxidermy of the author: Working backwards from a particular interpretation of the work to draw conclusions about what the context and circumstances of its authorship must have been.

Undeath of the author: Holding the author personally responsible for every possible reading of their work, even ones they could not reasonably have anticipated at the time of its authorship.

Frankenstein’s Monster of the author: Drawing conclusions about authorial intent based on elements that are present only in subsequent adaptations by other authors.

Weekend at Bernie’s of the author: Insisting that the author would personally endorse your interpretation of the work if they happened to be present.

I thought this was going to be a joke, but these are all very real things you see people do.

I’m never more serious than when I’m joking.

it always sucks in romances when characters aren't active participants in their own relationship or attraction. when it's always "why do i feel this way" and they can't name a single reason they like the love interest i'm like idk man i think you should get out of there maybe.

at some point if you're going too hard on the Genuine Confusion and the character having no clue why they're doing anything they're doing or why they even like the other party it's like. I think you were cursed by a wizard. or an author, which is something similar. it becomes something akin to The Narrative Has Mandated That This is A Love Story and Therefore I Must Be In Love rather than like. a convincing romance between parties who care about each other