#and youll lose all 200 pages of your gay cheetah love story :(

[graffitibible]

how do churn out fics so quickly? i feel like every month there's a new 35k word chapter out, meanwhile i've written 3 words on an empty doc 🤣 do you spend like 5 hours per day writing or are you just super fast?

OKAY REAL ANSWER 

basically, writing is very baked into my everyday schedule at this point lol. it was admittedly way easier before all this quarantine business started - my work gives me an hour long lunch and it takes me like 5 minutes to eat it and with virtually nothing else to do i just started bringing my laptop to work and banging out words there. now that my work hours have been drastically reduced, it’s harder for me to stay on task - i can bang out 3k words one day and only edit a stray sentence on another with no consistency whatsoever. 

i’m BIG on routine, so working writing into my daily routine more or less “tricks” me into being hyper-productive on it. there are certain periods in the day when im more productive, like the aforementioned long-ass lunch hour, but also like, when im making dinner or something. ive got to sit near the stove for like 30 minutes while im cooking some shit up to eat so thats thirty minutes to do some plot outlining or dialogue threading or editing or plain old writing. its not a whole lot of time but like when im working in my lunch hour, it works for me because its this window where i can trick myself into a burst of productivity in a condensed time frame without browbeating myself for not fulfilling a nonexistent standard. the amount of stuff i get done in those timeframes will honestly vary - sometimes its a paragraph and sometimes its a page. 

it also helps me personally to keep all my writing in textedit instead of a document that has an accessible wordcount or page count, so that way im not stressing about the length of the thing. this is also how i end up with like. 70k words crammed in one chapter and my pacing is SHIT because of it so thats not a sure thing by any means.

some people do daily wordcounts, which is a trick i do to keep myself working on my original fiction (i make myself write 200 words of original fiction per day, minimum. 200 shitty words isnt very much, and even if its not great, its some progress that i can go back to later.) but i dont apply the same tactic to fic, in part because i dont want my daily wordcount to feel overwhelming. 200 words is a simple, accessible goal for me even on days when im feeling like shit, and if i fall behind a day or two, its not an insurmountable barrier to overcome. its a good trick to kinda spur your brain into productivity. the downside to this is that youre basically playing a long con with yourself and theres a big chance that youll burn out on the project if youre stuck too long on it - ive been doing “200 words a day” for years at this point and ive written A Lot Of Stuff but not a lot of it is very refined because its a lot of words i have to go back and edit down.

wrt fic, i basically have multiple word docs open at all times so that they’re there and i can always turn things over in my head. this can sometimes feel like a big fucking “YOURE NOT DOING ENOUGH YOURE NOT BEING PRODUCTIVE” sword of damocles so that can be a double-edged thing that aint always so great. it usually works for me because its a good way to kickstart spontaneous bursts of creativity. ill always have these windows open, idly click into one, and go “oh hey thats a good sentence that ties in with this sentence” and then im writing again before im doing much active thought about it. if i spend too much time hyping myself up about “god i gotta get this done i have to do this now” then i start to dread the task so i try to eliminate that window whenever i can. 

LONG ANSWER IM SORRY. it comes down to me knowing my habits and my brain quirks and figuring out how to work with them as best as i can. im a routine-based person, so i built writing into my routine. i have memory issues, so if i get ideas at an inconvenient time i write em down to go back to em later. when executive dysfunction makes just starting to write feel insurmountable, i go back to what i wrote earlier and do editing instead. when im grappling with self-esteem and self-worth and i feel like my writing is flagging, i circle back to works i enjoy, both fanfic and published fiction, and study the writing styles of writers i admire for inspiration.

this is stuff that works for me personally! obviously every person is different and what works for some people aint gonna work for everybody. motivation issues are no fucking joke. its super tempting to like compare your pace of productivity to other peoples but honestly thatll just get you down. especially given current global events like, im lucky ive managed to be relatively productive during a Fucking Pandemic but some people wont be and that is COMPLETELY UNDERSTANDABLE, GIVEN THINGS. even then im certainly no stephen king. though i am also no george rr martin. in fact i think we can all take comfort in the fact that we are not george rr martin.