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When you’re writing and your sentences begin to blur together:

When you look at the word count and it’s barely 100 words:

When you re-read and realize it’s utter nonsense:

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Me, throwing em dashes, semicolons, commas, and ellipses into a jumbo-sized trash bag and then shaking it vigorously: hang on I gotta season my fic before I upload it

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“For The Plot,” I whisper, deleting a rad detail that no longer works as tears fall from my eyes

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author’s note on fanfic ch4: i’ll probably have it updated by the end of this week!

author’s note on fanfic ch5: so i know it’s been two years but i can explain

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The fact that the unpublished book series that only exists in my head doesn't have a fandom yet may be one of the greatest crimes in literary history.

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me: wow that movie was awful

me: *daydreams about my own, improved version of it*

me:

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yall haven’t written the next chapter of ur fanfic and it really shows

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Me @ writers: you just make that shit up from your brain???

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Set It Up (2018) dir. Claire Scanlon

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Either explain it or don’t.

When authors include things that don’t fit within the real world–magic, time travel, anachronisms–there is an impulse to explain how it works. Which can be fantastic for worldbuilding, but if you don’t know what you’re talking about, it can make more problems than it solves.

Stephenie Meyer tried to explain some bizarre thing about chromosomes, and it made the biology of vampires and werewolves make no sense. Suspending disbelief worked better in that case before she tried to ground it in the real world.

Lemony Snicket, on the other hand, just has random anachronisms that are never explained, but because there’s nothing even close to resembling an attempt at an explanation, we can just shrug and go, okay, that’s how it works. The magic in Harry Potter seems to basically not be grounded in anything, but we can believe it within the context of the story because she doesn’t try to ground it in anything.

In Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera, on the other hand, he goes into a lot of magic theory, and it gives us a strong feeling of worldbuilding. There’s enough logically coherent explanation for it to feel grounded within itself.

It is possible to go too far (see: Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide and Children of the Mind) where the plot ends up so tied in the reader understanding intricately detailed scientific and pseudo-scientific minutiae that the story is incomprehensible without it.

Generally, though, if you’re going to make something up, either say it exists and leave it at that, or entirely figure out how it works. Halfway is always less believable than nothing at all.

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sometimes you just gotta accept that trashy novels are valid,,, sometimes you just gotta go “you know what, i want something fun” and get something you know will make you feel good. the biggest problem i’ve had getting into books lately is thinking that every book has to be the best book i’ve ever read, and realistically that’s not going to be the case. you have to allow yourself to just enjoy things without justification and say “you know what, it’s not going to win any awards, but damn was that entertaining”. so to all y’all in a book slump out there: read that cheesy YA urban fantasy from 2013, pick up that historical romance you’ve been too embarrassed to read, just have fun because in the end, thats what reading is about.

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My favorite writing debate is the infamous Said Is Dead vs. Said Is Invisible Please Quit Using Elaborate Tags. 

look, ‘said’ is clean. it relies on the content of the dialogue to tell you how the character is feeling or thinking or even speaking and that is super fucking cool. 

and you know what, a tag like ‘muttered’ is descriptive. it can express a sound and an emotion. 

sometimes, you can use ‘said’ too much. maybe you’re putting in dialogue tags where you don’t even need them. 

and sometimes, an alternative tag can be redundant or even leans on the author spelling out information that might be more illustrative if it’s woven in with actions or physical descriptions.

You can go hard on either one of these rules or marry the two. It’s gonna be fine.

Just. Write. What. You. Want. And. Someone. Will. Love. It.

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in 👏 2019 👏 we 👏 finish👏 our 👏 WIPs 👏

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me: im writing a fic but its not alpha-d

friend: you mean not beta-d?

me: no i mean i havent written anything yet

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so remember that worldbuilding website, notebook.ai, that was goin around and everyone was so excited, but it turned out you had to pay a (frankly outrageous) subscription to access any of the best tools? 

well i have exciting news: World Anvil. 

here’s what you get for free: 

yeah. all of them. double what notebook.ai offers for pay. yeah baby.

i’ve only been using this site for like half an hour, but i am in LOVE. please check it out and consider supporting the creators if you can! 

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