#anyway though you should read my tags on all the posts i've reblogged i'm HILARIOUS (you should not take my word on this)
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was sitting here like: man i am SO funny tonight what is up with me i'm on a roll!!! ... i'm just a bit drunk
#cytherea.txt#i like never drink so it always hits me like a truck and i never am prepared for the consequences fjdlsfjkds#anyway though you should read my tags on all the posts i've reblogged i'm HILARIOUS (you should not take my word on this)#but also i really do need to highlight and underline that 'ciri and triss as trans women clocking one another' post bc iykyk#and also when i'm a bit more compus mentus i would actually maybe like to expand on that#ciri is suuuch an interesting character gender wise#she's almost like link where i think someone could say that she is any sexuality and gender combo and i would nod along
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Do you have a tip for a newbie writer that's not mentioned everywhere all the time, but still very important? It seems to me that most people repeat the same 10 tips everywhere & I've started wondering more about the importance of mindset and life experience & less about phrasing, grammar etc.
Hello there!
I should start by repeating the best writing advice I ever got:
ignore like 90% of all writing advice
which 90% is entirely up to you, though. your 90% is probably different than my 90%. Like, I ignore everything about "stick to a schedule!" and "make time every single day to write or else you'll fail!" and pretty much anything that says "follow this one neat trick or you're bound to fail!"
No piece of writing advice works for everyone, and that's fine. Try stuff out, see what works for you. Even when it comes to grammar and phrasing stuff.
Like, obviously grammar and phrasing is important to understand as a baseline, but that doesn't help you have a unique voice. It'll really help you construct a cogent business letter, but if you are listening to everything grammarly tells you to do, you're gonna sound like a robot writing fiction.
There's some pretty solid writing advice, like "only use epithets sparingly, and only when it's for a specific reason like for a character who hasn't been introduced by name yet," and "please just use 'said' and not those ridiculous lists of words that are not actually synonyms for said."
And as for getting help from something like grammarly (or even that little red squiggle of doom that sometimes suggests bizarre alternatives to the actually correct word you typed-- this happens WAY more than I'm comfortable with lol), PLEASE double check that what it's telling you to correct your word/phrase to is ACTUALLY what you are trying to say. Because a lot of the time, it really isn't.
And yes, like anything else you learn to do, experience and practice works. The whole "make many bad pots instead of struggling to make one perfect pot" thing is really true. (It crossed my dash again the other day, and I didn't reblog it, but it was on page 17 of my "writing is hard" tag, where I stick writing advice if you're interested in reading a lot of it, after I suggested ignoring most of it... >.> anyway this post explains the shitty pots concept of creating anything really)
And read what you write, too. Like let it sit for a while (like weeks if necessary) and then go back and reread it. What would you change? Read it out loud. Do the character voices sound authentic? Is the exposition clonky or plodding? Does it race in spots and drag in others?
Would you write it differently if you sat down now and tried to write it again? How? Why? This is not just an exercise in editing, it's an exercise in finding your writing voice and understanding how YOU write. Not from an objective outsider perspective, or a judgmental "is this good or bad" perspective. But from a place of understanding your own writing.
And then write something else, and repeat the whole process, probably until you die lololol.
that is not intended to sound grim, it's intended to sound hilarious... I couldn't stop writing at this point if I tried.
my writing: i'm not stuck in here with you, you're stuck in here with me
Life experience does help sometimes. The older you are, the more you've experienced, the more... let's call it spice you have available to you to season your writing with. But more than that, just the practice of writing poorly, assessing your own work, writing something else a little better next time.
I think I got a good spice metaphor. Someone could've lived such a rich life assembling flavorings and spices and have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER how to mix them all palatably and cook them into a delicious meal. If you never bothered trying to cook until you had a full spice cupboard and don't even know the basics of like... how to fry an egg, can you imagine the atrocities such a person could produce?
meanwhile someone might only have a handful of different spices but out of necessity and laborious toil in making the most of what they have so far has learned to prepare AMAZING dishes and can crank out a dinner that would blow your mind with everything perfectly prepared and seasoned-- even if the seasoning is limited in flavor, they know how to make the most of it because they practiced until they succeeded.
So yeah, basically the only writing advice I ever listened to was practice, write a lot even if it's awful, reread all your old stuff once in a while both for the hilarity factor but also to see how far you've come, and to really think about how you'd write it differently now, and WHY. What changed? How has your understanding of your own writing evolved?
Yeah, I think that's all I got (in addition to the 40-something pages in my writing tag lololol)
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