amewinterswriting

[amewinterswriting]

A rainy road

[amewinterswriting]

by Kyle Bonallo (ig: @kylebonallo)

[amewinterswriting]

Second drafts are worth the effort

You rewrite stories because they’re good and because you care about them, not because they’re inherently flawed.

A second draft is not admitting your first was bad. Only that it’s worth the time and effort to keep working on.

[amewinterswriting]

when you get an idea for a fic but you know you’re going to have to really take your time with it in order to properly capture all the little details and plot points and themes you want to convey, but also you’re an impatient bitch who wants to write out and read that fun story in your head right fuckin’ now

[amewinterswriting]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[amewinterswriting]

We all agree, right?

AI to write your novel is wrong

A bargain with a demon to write your novel is okay

[amewinterswriting]

[amewinterswriting]

27.06-24

More of this.

- Vivera Rossi

[amewinterswriting]

if your plot is a disaster right now, just think of it as “plot compost.” something beautiful will grow from this mess later

[amewinterswriting]

discovered something terrible today. if you change plot elements early on in the story. later plot elements will be affected

[amewinterswriting]

It's such an amazing feeling when someone picks up on something in your writing that you 100% intended but didn't think people would notice. Like, YES!! My writing properly conveyed the thing it was supposed to!!! You are so awesome for noticing that!!! I am so awesome for writing that!!! I feel so good about my story now!!!!

[amewinterswriting]

current mantra

[amewinterswriting]

me, writing: this sentence is way too long. I need to condense it in a way that makes it grammatically correct while still preserving the original meaning I’m trying to convey

the devil on my shoulder: or, you can add five more commas, a semi colon, three em dashes, fifty more words, and it’ll all come together in a way that’s technically grammatically correct but completely incomprehensible to anyone who reads it, even yourself!

me, writing faster: you’re a genius

[amewinterswriting]

[amewinterswriting]

by Gianluca Grisenti

[amewinterswriting]

I just reada really good fic but halfway through I realized "oh shit this is really familiar.... didn't I write something like this once?" And as I kept reading I kept predicting what happened next and the further I went the more convinced I was that they'd ripped off my story-

like, copied the ENTIRE plot and re-written it, just better than I had? The characters were more fleshed-out than mine were, and the POV was more interesting, and the pace made more sense- but it was MY STORY?

So close to the end I was like "holy shit.. do I message them? Ask if my story inspired theirs? Should I be angry? Flattered?" Cause their tags and description didn't mention me AT ALL, which, sure, it's fanfiction to begin with, but if you're using my work than at least credit me as inspo, right? Just to be courteous?

But I get to the end of the final chapter, and it's not finished, and I'm kind of disappointed cause I never finished my story and I was really immersed in their version now and had been looking forwards to seeing how they tied up my loose ends- so I scroll to the bottom to leave a comment, and.

It's MY URL.

IT WAS MY STORY THE WHOLE TIME.

THE ONE *I WROTE*.

In *2013*.

And FORGOT ABOUT

BECAUSE I WAS SO INSECURE ABOUT MY SLOPPY, SHALLOW, AMETEUR WRITING

And I'm just sitting here now staring into space thinking about every shitty story I've ever written now like

IT WAS ALL GOOD?

IT WAS GOOD THIS WHOLE DAMN TIME??

I'M A GOOD WRITER?????

[amewinterswriting]

"How do you brainstorm your ideas and stories?"

Listen, man, I've been using thinking about fictional characters and their problems to avoid thinking about The Horrors since I was single digits in age. I have no idea how to start. Nor do I know how to stop. The inside of my head is constant "what ifs". I just made them fun instead of horrifying.