#but if i can outline it and fill in the blanks of structure with the plot of the season then it's not bad writing it's bad interpretation

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Some Tips & Advice for Writing Fiction

"Since advice is usually ignored and rules are routinely broken, I refer to these little pearls as merely 'suggestions.'....There’s nothing binding here. All suggestions can be ignored when necessary." —John Grisham

Love your story. Many writers create their best work when they’re deeply invested in their characters and plot.

Withhold information from your readers. When writing fiction, only give readers the information they need to know in the moment. Ernest Hemingway’s iceberg theory in writing is to show your readers just the tip of the iceberg. The supporting details—like backstory—should remain unseen, just like the mass of an iceberg under the water’s surface. This prevents readers from getting overwhelmed with information and lets them use their imagination to fill in the blanks.

Write simple sentences. Think of Shakespeare’s line, “To be or not to be?” famous for its brevity and the way it quickly describes a character’s toiling over their own life. There is a time and place for bigger words and denser text, but you can get story points across in simple sentences and language. Try using succinct language when writing, so that every word and sentence has a clear purpose.

Mix up your writing. To become a better writer, try different types of writing. If you’re a novelist, take a stab at a short story. If you’re writing fiction, try writing nonfiction. Try a more casual writing style by blogging. Each piece of writing has a different point of view and different style rules that will help your overall writing skills.

Write every day. Great writers have a regular writing habit. That means dedicating time every day to the craft of writing. Some writers assign themselves a daily word count; Stephen King writes 2,000 words a day. You might also join a writing group; being accountable to other people is a great motivator. Don’t worry if what you jot down is technically bad writing or you struggle to get something onto a blank page. Some days will be more productive than others. The more you write the easier it gets.

Set milestones. The average word count for a book is 75,000 words. That can make novel writing intimidating. If you’re working on your first novel, stay motivated by setting milestones. This will help you break the book down mentally so it is easier to manage and easier to stick with.

Understand basic story structure. Professional writers are well-versed in the framework most stories follow, from exposition and rising action through to the climax and falling action. Create an outline to map your main plot and subplots on paper before you get started.

Don't write the first scene until you know the last. This necessitates the use of a dreaded device commonly called an outline. Virtually all writers hate that word. Plotting takes careful planning. Writers waste years pursuing stories that eventually don’t work.

Learn strong character development techniques. There are effective ways to create a character arc in literature. Learn what character information to reveal to increase tension in your story. Your main characters should have a backstory that informs their actions, motivations, and goals. Determine what point of view (POV)—first person or third person—complements the character’s interpretation of events.

Use the active voice. Your goal as an author is to write a page-turner—a book that keeps readers engaged from start to finish. Use the active voice in your stories. Sentences should generally follow the basic structure of noun-verb-object. While passive voice isn’t always a bad thing, limit it in your fiction writing.

Take breaks when you need them. Writer's block gets the best of every writer. Step away from your desk and get some exercise. Getting your blood flowing and being in a different environment can ignite ideas. Continue writing later that day or even the next.

Kill your darlings. An important piece of advice for writers is to know when words, paragraphs, chapters, or even characters, are unnecessary to the story. Being a good writer means having the ability to edit out excess information. If the material you cut is still a great piece of writing, see if you can build a short story around it.

Don't introduce 20 characters in the first chapter. A rookie mistake. Your readers are eager to get started. Don’t bombard them with a barrage of names from four generations of the same family. Five names are enough to get started.

Read other writers. Reading great writing can help you find your own voice and hone your writing skills. Read a variety of genres. It also helps to read the same genre as your novel. If you’re writing a thriller, then read other thrillers that show how to build tension, create plot points, and how to do the big reveal at the climax of the story.

Read beyond what you like. Dutch writer Thomas Heerma van Voss says: "Read as much and as widely as possible. See how other writers construct their scenes, tease the reader, build tension. Don’t be afraid, especially when starting out, to steal or imitate – all arts begins with imitation. One of the Netherlands’ most famous writers began his writing career by copying out stories by Ivan Turgenev in an effort to master his rhythm and way of writing."

Read writers who do not write like you. Trinidadian-British poet Vahni Capildeo says: “Make friends with writers who do not write like you. Swap books. Show each other work. Take the long view and the wide view. Writing adds your lifetime to the lifetime of everyone else who has written or read, or who will read or write, including non-‘literary’ folk. All sorts of people work carefully or lovingly or effectively with words. You may find inspiration in a law report (ancient or contemporary) or a tide chart, or in an ‘unplayable’ play…"

Research. Critically acclaimed novelist Guinevere Glasfurd says: “Writers are often exhorted to ‘write what they know’. But what if your protagonist is a fourteenth-century nun? Or a drag queen from Kentucky (and supposing you, the writer, are not)? Start by reminding yourself why you want to tell the story. Research can be frustrating; sometimes the archive is silent, the answers are not there. There’s a reason for that and that should spark other questions. Research can also be enormously rewarding. It can, and likely will, reveal something unexpected. It is important to remain alert to that, to be attentive and open to surprise. Research is an iterative process. Research a bit, write a bit, research a bit more. Allow your writing to remain fluid at this point, open to question, encouraging of further enquiry.”

Write to sell. To make a living doing what they love, fiction writers need to think like editors and publishers. In other words, approach your story with a marketing sensibility as well as a creative one to sell your book.

Write now, edit later. Young writers and aspiring writers might be tempted to spend a lot of time editing and rewriting as they type. Resist that temptation. Practice freewriting—a creative writing technique that encourages writers to let their ideas flow uninterrupted. Set a specific time to edit.

Get feedback. It can be hard to critique your own writing. When you have finished a piece of writing or a first draft, give it to someone to read. Ask for honest and specific feedback. This is a good way to learn what works and what doesn’t.

Think about publishing. Few authors write just for themselves. Envision where you want your story to be published. If you have a short story, think about submitting it to literary magazines. If you have a novel, you can send it to literary agents and publishing houses. You might also consider self-publishing if you really want to see your book in print.

Ignore writing advice that doesn't resonate with you. Not every writer works the same. You have to figure out what works for you in the long run. If working off of bullet-point outlines gives you hives, then don't do it. If you work best writing scenes out of order, then write those scenes out of order.

Sources: 1 2 3 4

[dduane]

I came across your article about the ten-ten outlining process today, and am intending to try it out on a few different writing projects I have planned in the near future. I am wondering, though, if it’s possible to use it on the writing projects that I already have in progress? I tend to be more of a pantser than not, but am increasingly realizing how difficult it actually is and am currently stuck for what to write due to lack of not having thought up beyond the next chapter(s).

Give it a shot: you may find it helpful. As always, everybody's mileage can be expected to vary. But writers' needs and methods do tend to change over time. You grow out of old ones, and (ideally) into new, increasingly effective ones, inevitably, as a tree adds rings. And sometimes you need a shift—or just the option of something to shift to: a different set of modalities to try when a previous one doesn't seem to be working so well any more.

...I also frankly can't resist quoting the ex-RAF writer upstairs. What pilots (who invented it) say about "seat of the pants" operation is that it's a fairly unsafe and ineffective style of flying—guaranteed to leave you unsure about where you're going until you discover you've just passed it at Mach 0.5. Fliers who intend to ply their craft successfully, or for very long, use maps and flight plans... which are analagous to outlines. :)

Anyway, try out the shopping list paradigm and see how it works for you. And sure, there's no reason you can't step back a little from something you're already working on, build a shopping list / road map around it, and then slot what you've already written into it, leaving blank spots to fill in later and interconnect with the larger structure. The whole purpose of this approach, after all, is to leave you more space to engage with the nuts and bolts (and pleasure!) of the actual writing, while relieving you of the constant low-level tension that comes of being unsure about where you're going to be headed next. ...And of worrying about whether you're going to have to throw out stuff you've just done because all the while it turns out you were heading in the wrong narrative direction. Incorrectly spent time and effort is such a pain: avoiding that is way preferable. Life's too short, y'know?

Whatever: let me know how this works out. :)

[cards-of-rose]

study tip!! how i write essays

going from a long, intensive classical education to my current history major, i've had to write a lot of papers. at this point, i can write a 5 page paper in a few hours, and just a couple weeks ago i wrote a 20 page paper in a single day. i graduated valedictorian with this method (current cGPA of 4.0!) so i thought i'd share how i write them! grab some coffee and settle in - it'll be a long post, but i promise it'll be worth it. :)

first, the topic. if you don't have an assigned topic, pick something that fascinates you, something that you could write pages and pages about. you will. if your topic is assigned, find something in it that you find fascinating. even if you find your topic completely boring, there's always something interesting to glean from it! once you find this, you'll gain motivation, and that's half the battle.

write down a basic outline. when i say basic, i mean barebones. just a vague, 3-point general idea of what you think you might write your paper about. this will guide you in your research! you don't need to worry about writing your full outline just yet.

sources. after you have a basic list of points, it's time to find sources! if they're already assigned, you can skip this step. most of the time they aren't, though. this is the most important part of your paper. you can go to google scholar to find really good academic journals and studies!

generally, the number of sources you have depends on the length of your paper! a good guide is that your amount of sources should number half the length of your paper. so if you have a 5 page paper, 2-3 is a good way to go. if you have a 20 page paper, you'll want around 10.

evidence. skim over your sources and categorize each one under the point you made earlier. this will mean you have a quick reference guide when you're writing, so you don't have to go through a big list of sources when you're looking for evidence! under each source, put a few bullet points talking about the info that you can use for your paper.

outline. this part may seem daunting. i promise, though, it's one of the easiest parts of the paper! you may feel tempted to skip it, but having an outline makes your paper sound better and makes it easier and quicker to write. use the sources and bullet point info you used earlier to fill out your outline. start broad and general, then add details as you do your research! your outline should be about half the length of your paper. don't worry about making it super scholarly - this is just for you, so make it as informal and easy to understand as you want! be stupid, throw in memes, whatever gets it written!

every outline should include an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. i can go over the structure of an outline in another post, but remember the 3 points you thought up earlier? these will form your entire outline, and eventually your essay!

finally, write! open a blank google doc and view it side by side with your outline. once you get started, it's a lot easier to finish than you'd think, especially if you took the time to outline! this is when you can make your dumb outline into something that would make the ancient philosophers proud. don't worry about perfection. just write it as you go. you can edit it later!

quotes/evidence. once you've finished your rough draft, it's time to add the evidence! some profs want quotes, others want you to paraphrase. either way, go through your paper and put in the evidence you researched earlier. don't worry about citations just yet - just put in the link in a comment on your rough draft. it won't be hard to fix it up later.

edit!! please, please don't finish your rough draft and be done with it. you can save so many points by going over it again instead of submitting it in a rushed 3am haze. fix spelling and grammar, add citations and a reference page, edit for clarity, anything you need to make it sound like the best paper you can write! if you're proud of it by the end, you know you've done something right.

congrats, you did it!! make sure you start your paper early and don't wait till the night before - your grade will thank you <3

[vertumnanaturalis]

The Exocolonists of Vertumna (tumblr edition) Part 1: The starborn children of the Stratospheric

Sooo this is something I've been wanting to work on making for awhile, a tumblr text post addon for the big chunky npc list I've had for over a year. There's a lot of data I've accumulated over time that just doesn't fit in a google sheet in a decent way, and so I've been wanting to make some text posts to cover ideas that don't fit in my sheets, or might be an easier read for people who find my documents confusing.

I try to pull from canon as much as possible, and use speculation taken from a long hyperfixation on the concept of generation ships or bunkers and love for sci-fi media about it. The idea behind this list has always been to provide people with both an accessable set of easily usable/chuckable/maimable/fuckable/killable/ect names and ideas to fluff out the background of your own stories and with an illusion of consistancy, and to offer insight into my own headcanons that I've developed, so that people can take any bits and pieces they want and re-examine or reuse or recycle how they want. As always, I'll still try to mark which info is explicitly canon, but theres a lot of blanks to be filled in and my take on how things could be explained is far from the only one.

This one is gonna be an overview of the 54 people born on the Stratospheric and some approximate either in-universe or out-of-universe explanations for why things are structured the way they are. Future ones will cover specific sub-sections of those shipborn Stratos, overviews and department-specific pages about the adults of the Stratospheric, matching pages for people of the Heliopause, the children born during the final two years of the game, and even data for the kids possibly born beyond that.

In the earliest stages of drafting the ships population, the founders had planned to have exactly 100 people on the Stratospheric when it left Earth, primarily composed of their brightest and most promising between ages 10 and 25 (in local Earth years), and that 35 children would be born in five groups of seven during its 21(e)/20 (local Vertumna years) year journey, the maximum they could have fit in that ideal situation. On launch day in reality, the ship left with only 86 out of it's planned 100. Several of their important specialists were intercepted en-route to the launch pad, and a handful of their volunteer teenagers backed out in the final days and hours, while the reserve choices they had on hand were children chosen for their genetic diversity rather than skills or potential, with Utopia being an especially young outlier at just shy of 3(e). Outside of her and their sole member of generation one, Captain Eudicot, the ships population ran from original Chief Administrator Chiffon at 33(e) down to little Jubilation at 6-and-a-half(e). In one of the final documents outlined by the Earth colony's leaders in the hours before liftoff, the plans for the third generation were expanded from 35 to 50, adjusted for the younger leaning launch population and all the changes it entailed.

Similar to the founders original plan, spacer kids were still divided into five age groups (A, B, C, D, and E), with at least a year between the youngest person in one group and the eldest of the next. Half of this was to give the ship's lone acting physician a break period where there were no fresh infants or pregnancies to worry about, and the other half was to give the ship's administration time to carefully plan out the next set of children; How many children would be in this group, who was going to gestate the pregnancies, who their social parents would be (if any), what augments Instance would give them, and, most importantly, keeping an eye on the current genetic and social diversity of the third generation, so that they did not reach a genetic or social bottleneck too quickly (ie incest in a social setting, even if the two individuals are not genetically related). All of the embryos that would become the next group of children were created in the same few month period of time and cryofrozen until they were due to be implanted in the person chosen to gestate them. There were a number of extra rules that the Vertumna Group had written out that ultimately Eudicot and the council decided to abandon to at some point in the trip, all for various reasons, and not all by unanimous vote;

That there would be no need for drastic changes in the current groups' plans once the planning stage was over.

That every pregnancy would only include one fetus, with post-implantation embryo splits being selectively reduced.

None of the children born on the Stratospheric would have any genetic relationship with one another, and parents having more than one child would be discouraged, and that in cases where siblings did occur, either each sibling would only take genes from one parent (in family units with 2+ parents) or only the eldest child would have genetic relation to their parent and any following child would be purely from donated dna (for family units with only one parent).

That, at minimum, a quarter of every group should be set asside to for children with no dedicated family attachments, both to better. adhere to the group's original idea of having no parents, but also to give the young colony a bit more padding against the looming threat of everyone being second or third cousins in only a few generations.

Another rule that, while not completely abandoned, was less and less considered as the years went on was one that mandated how many embryos of each cluster were planned to develop with a genetically likely physiology that could get pregnant, a physiology that could get others pregnant, or anything in the vast array of historically normal and genetech introduced non-reproductive physiologies. This was never intended to determine the gender of the resulting children and any gene therapy they want or require in the future, or guarentee that the embryo would fully develop in the "intended" (solely in regards to their future reproductive capibilities, without further gene therepy involvement) way, but rather an attempt to gamble that at a decent number of the third generation would be able to continue the human species in the event their genetech was lost prematurely. For the original plan with 5 groups of 7, each group was to have a minimum of 3 embryos with an expected physeology that would be able to carry a pregnancy, 3 that could sire a pregnancy, and the 7th wouldn't have any requirements. The 3/3/1 ratio was followed exactly only during the first group, while following groups would only roughly follow this plan. In total, 54 children were born between leaving Earth and arriving at the wormhole; 30 out of them having siblings of some kind, with 10 of those children being born in sets of multiples (with two sets of twins and two sets of triplets) - with only one accidental post-implanation embryotic split resulting in two of those children - with 16 of the children have some genetic relationship with one another (though, with the exception of the identical sisters, none closer than genetic half siblings); and ultimately, only 9 children were explicitly born to be raised in the creche without parentage.

The 54 children of the Stratospheric:

Group A: The oldest spacer kids, they'd be adults at landing by Helio standards but they're still minors by the culture of the Vertumna group, coddled and babied more at landing than Sol when they reach the same age down the road, even if they still have adult jobs and responsabilities.

Cosmozoa "Cosmo" - he/him - 18

Lilium "Lili" - she/her - 18

Sorrel - he/him - 18 - A canon name and job, rest of info is fanmade

Benevolence "Bena" - she/her - 18

Edamame "Ed" - he/him - 17

Malagma "Mal" - they/them - 17

Absinthe "Abby" - any pronouns, feminine formal terms - 16* (17th birthday shortly after New Year day but before landing on Vertumna)

Group B: Kom's age group, with him as the oldest of the bracket, still young enough to be discovering themselves but old enough that the adults are rapidly giving them more responsibilities than their upperclassmen were at the same age. A series of unlikely and specific events led to the existance of the ships first set of multiples, and their existance provides in-universe backstory and reasoning for why some of the following children exist.

Kombucha "Kom" - he/him - 15

Quinine "Quinni" - they/them, later + he/him - 15 - same deal as Sorrel, even being named in the same event

Thicket - Any, masculine familiar terms - 14** (15th birthday after arriving on Vertumna but before Sol wakes up in medbay)

Opulence "Opal" - she/her - 14

Vertex "Tex" he/him - 14

Tempest "Pem" - she/her + They/them - 13* (same as Abby)

Chrysocolla "Chrys" - they/them - 13

Triplets Coriander "Cory" (he/him) , Scallopini "Pina" (she/her) , and Amaretto "Ame" (she/her) - 13 - Pina and Ame are the identical sisters mentioned above, while their fraternal brother Cory is genetically unrelated to them

Falchion "Kion" - he/him - 13

Group C: Sol's age bracket, most of these kids are canon and need no explanation

Arroyo "Ary" - he/him - 11

Aspartame "Tammy" - she/her - 11

Recalcitrance "Cal" - he/him - 11

Simplicity "Plic" - she/her - 11

Peregrine "Penny" - she/her - 10

Evanescence "Evan" - he/him - 10

Philosophy "Sully" - they/them - 10

Marzipan "Marz" - she/her - 10

Solanaceae* "Sol*" - they/them* - 9** name varies by timeline, but all of my documents will refer to our player character as Sol, and primarily but not exclusively with they/them pronouns; their 10th birthday is very notibly after they land on Vertumna shortly into the new year

Anemone "Annie/Nem/Nemmie/[Determined by player choice]" - she/her - 9

Twins Dysthymia "Dys" (he/him) and Tangent "Tang" (she/her) - 9 - in all of my headcanon documents, including this one, I am going with the idea that they are planned fraternal twins with seperate sperm donors; I know the take that they were idetical twins is a common one, but it isn't actually a canon one; nothing in the game actively states this, the idea that they were identical is simply a common and very reasonable take on the information the game gives us, but it was never something I got from playing the game myself. If you're curious about all the exact reasons for this you can send an ask and I'll elaborate.

Group D - The younger kids, like Anemone's triplet brothers, half of them have their holopalms installed but still spend a lot of time in the creche when they land. All but the eldest three are kids Sol and Tammy babysit, and 100% of them are kids Sol can later tutor in school

Hawthorn "Hawth" - they/them - 7

Hyaline "Lin" - any - 7

Sepia - she/her - 7

Triplets Cirrus, Stratus, and Cumulus (all he/him) - 6** (same as Thicket) - we never get their exact age, but they're listed as being 7 years old when the game starts in an only mostly correct game file character sheet, the triplets ended up being technically 6 at the start because of an early whoopsie daisy during early npc documentation

Mistletoe "Misu-Misu" - she/her - 6

Kelvin - he/him - 6

Effervesence - he/him, later + they/them - 5

Vendetta "Detta" - she/her, later + they/them - 5

Necterine "Nena" - she/her - 5

Group E - The youngest of the generation, all toddlers and babies on arrival, space born in technicality, but children of Vertumna in every other way. The largest of the groups with 13 children included, and the group with the most imaginative and most untested augments.

Nougat - she/her - 3

Nimbus - he/him - 3 - similar to the cloud triplets, we never get his age beyond that he's "little Nimbus", but he's old enough to be in school when Sol first unlocks the tutoring job so I put him at Nougat's age

Panache "Pan" - he/him - 2

Maraschino "Chino" - he/him & she/her - 2 -while Chino does appear in game with only the he/him pronouns used, "Marachino "Chino" with the pronouns he/him"'s age is never directly given in-game, a "Marachino "Mara" with the pronouns she/her" and an age of 2 is listed in the same file that gives the cloud triplet's their approximate age and listed as a child encountered during babysitting, so I went with a middle ground of having this character use both pronouns and later both nicknames

Tessera "Tess" - she/her - 2

Macaroni "Mac" - she/her & he/him - 1 - the child with the no pain augment is refered to with he/him pronouns in-game, but I went with a similar deal to Chino for variety

Contrivance "Connie" - he/him - 1 - the child with the shark teeth augment is also refered to with he/him pronouns

Ketamine "Ket" - they/them - 1

Maxilla "Max" - he/him - 0

Twins Whimsy and Praline (both she/her) - 0 - while one of Dys's late game/high skill events has him talking about how at one point he and Tangent were "The Twins" prior to their relationship crumbling apart, I thought it would be narratively fitting to have a younger set of twins being planned/conceived/born at the same time as their relationship falls apart as Tangent gets further into genetics (where said twins were being made), making him and Tang lose their status as being "The Twins" in multiple ways

Benzodiazepine "Benji" - he/him - 0

Enigma "Ena" - she/her - 0 - the youngest child from the Strato's third gen and last one to be born in space is refered to with she/her pronouns as a baby, opted to keep those pronouns as she grows older

In total, the shipborn children and teenagers account for roughly 40% of it's landing population (39.7% when arriving at the wormhole, and 42.2% after the canonly unavoidable loss of life during it's landing). This number combined with the chaos of living on a new planet and the very likely scenario of the ship's brown dirt being lost would be a good starting explanation for some of the glaring failures in child wellfair and safety during the 10 years we see during the game, but definately not an excuse. The next post is going to be either a quick overlook of the gen 2 Strato characters or a more detailed post for one of the specific gen 3 groups, detailing things like birthdays and augments, with posts detailing the adult npcs and all the Helios and planetborn children coming later.

Also, as there was no decent way to include this higher up the list, here are the sibling sets discussed earlier;

Sorrel, Thicket, and Misu [only Sorrel shares any dna with their mother, Thicket and Misu are both entirely from donor dna]

Kom, Anemone, Cirrus, Stratus, Cumulus, and Nimbus [Kom and Anemone are genetic half siblings with 50% of their genes from Anne, while the following boys only have between 15 and 35% coming from Anne, with the rest from multiple donors]

Opal and Ves [Opal only shares her mother's dna, while Ves only shares his father's]

Tex and Ary [only Tex has his father's dna, with Arroyo's embryo coming from Earth]

Cory, Pina, and Ame [None of the trio have their mother's dna, and the embryo that became Cory shared no dna with the embryo that split into Pina and Ame]

Kion, Penny, and Sepia [One of the three is only genetically related to one of their two parents, another is only genetically related to the second parent, and the third is entirely from donor dna or an Earth embryo, but only Instance knows which of the three is which, as all three were created (or selected) at the same time for this exact scenario]

Sully and Ket [occupy a unique space as sorta step-siblings, as they both have single parents who begin a romantic relationship after landing]

Dys and Tang [explained above]

Kelvin and Pan [occupy another unique space as social half-siblings, with Kelvin being born to a single father who entered a relationship after he was born, but his father's partner is very explicitly not his mom genetically or socially]

Detta and Connie [a similar deal to Opal and Ves, but I haven't mapped out which parent is which yet]

Nena and Chino [genetic half siblings, with both taking dna from their mother and Nena taking dna from one of their fathers and Chino taking it from the other]

Whimsy and Praline [they don't share any genetic material with one another or their mom, and an in-universe rumored reason for it is that their mom had been the egg donor for one of the older children]

Also, the creche children who were born at the behest of the colony without any specific designated parents in mind

Bena

Mal

Chrys

Plic

Hawth

Lin

Nougat

Tess

Max

Side note: Canonically, Anemone's brother Kom is the oldest shipborn child we see, and while I believe Lindsay intended for Kom to be the oldest member of gen 3 after Utopia, this is never actually stated in the game, and I was surprised to see that it was the intent as it never came across to me that way during my initial playthroughs. Nothing in here explicitly ignores or goes against anything said or mentioned in the game proper, but I know that having any of the kids be older than Kom is probably the not the most canon way to construct the generations layout. One of the canonly used names in the game, "Sorrel", has been given to one of these teens, but there is neither anything for or against Sorrel being this age, as the only information we get beyond a name is a manner of death and a place of work.

[witchofthesouls]

You know what I need?

I need Optimus’s (doesn’t matter which one) Witch! Or Other lineage! S/O, who has witnessed her beloveds constant breakdowns and heavy burden after heavy burden forced upon him, to use some of her voodoo and hoodoo powers and verbal SHRED the original twelve primes along with some of the other members of the prime lineage how contributed to Optimus’s pain and trauma into fucking oblivion for what shit they did (and possibly continue to do) to Optimus, the Thirteenth and unknown prime, the one cursed to be reincarnated other and other again through the ‘wishes’ of Primus and his siblings.

Witch! S/O: You fucking pieces of shit! Look what you did to him, your own fucking brother! You fucking selfish monsters rebuild him and have him torn apart over and over and over again, and for what!? He doesn’t deserve this! No one fucking deserves that fate! Do you know he losses a piece of himself each time he’s reincarnated!? That he looses a piece of his mind and soul each time he comes back!? Did you know and simply not care!? He’s not a martyr! He’s not a goddamn lamb raised for the slaughter! He’s a good person who deserves all the peace and happiness in the universe! so leave him the fuck alone or I’ll fucking make you!!!”

Ehhh, I'm in the camp that the Thirteen are actual deities, so-

✨️ Celestial Horror ✨️ 

The Realms of the Primes aren't what you expected. It's nothing what Optimus could be coaxed into revealing: you’re not a phantom gripped in a disjointed, piecemeal memory flux of a departed Prime, no incoherent whispering in the corners that flutter like pages, no dream logic in a place that’s bizarre, yet familiar…

You’re standing. The floor is definitely solid beneath your feet. Light blinds you completely, all-consuming in its intensity. Even with your eyes closed, palms pressed tight to your lids, it's searing.

Your face is wet and you can't tell if it's blood or tears in this new hellish landscape where you can see a tower in the distance, haloed in a rainbow shimmer to stand out in the endless blank slate of blue-white, through your boiling eyes and cooking flesh and charring bones.

The tower shifts, and your stomach drops at its attention-

Before you realize it, a hook drags into your navel and pulls you down, down, down into a rendered hole that eats you.

The tower stares from above and its heavy gaze upon you even as you fall so down it disappears from your sight as distant sun.

You're dragged so far down that air no longer whips around, and you make no sound as water takes you completely.

Weightless as your hair flows up and air bubbles escape your lips. There’s no way you can hold your breath for this long eternity, so you don’t.

You drown.

Darkness consumes you with strange bioluminescent flickers of stranger creatures dancing all around. Gossamer filaments and electric scales. Flashes and flickers of indescribable hues before disappearing.

Your body fills with water, but you don’t die. Your chest is heavy, and your stomach hurts, but you don't burst from the immense pressure. In some ways, you're numb. A massive ghost-like jellyfish brushes over your face, and you feel nothing, even when you can see the outline of stingers and glittering hooks -

You're forcibly stopped, slamming hard onto the floor, and it isn't packed sand that cradles you, it's something else: jagged and hard as rock and so cold it steals the heat from your burns. You shudder, freezing, trying to make sense, and you can only see the steaming vent of the volcano deep down here.

A massive body rises from it. Not from within, but the entire structure moves. It contorts to shape the room itself. You stand upon its lap, magma veins oozing throughout its body, eerie symbols carved deep into the metal and rock of the floor and walls, and you fall into the hypnotic trance as those glyphs flow and ebb and spiral into patternless patterns that break and form again and again and -

< You’re very lucky that I caught you in time. My twin has forgotten mortal shells and their constraints. > A deep, masculine voice enemates from nowhere and everywhere at once, and you're ground zero to the massive eruption of the talking volcano. You stumble under its power, trance broken, and it shifts to catch you, jutting out parts of itself. Patient as it watches you with smoldering eyes to bring yourself back into your own head.

Some gods disliked subservience more than they disliked impudence. Optimus is far more… mortal for the lack of a better word, and it made you… forget what he will one day become.

There is only one Prime that claimed to be Prima's twin.

< Hail > your mouth knows the words, throat rippling in a way that’s definitely unknown in human physiology, it isn't just your vocal cords shifting, even your trachea twists, pulling knowledge from elsewhere, bloody air bubbles flow off your tongue -a part distant and underused after so long as you strike something in-between. < The Shadow of the Thirteen. >

< And here I thought my brother burnt out your tongue as well, little spark. > Your bones rattle at the sound, mind trying to translate the crescendo of shifting tectonic plates, icebergs falling into the sea, lightning striking the mountain, and the roar of thermal vents bursting in the abyss. His next words gentled down into a rumble of a river rushing into a harbor, the tide breaking upon the shore, and the languid decay happening beneath a forest’s watchful gaze. < You traveled so far away from a champion’s side. >

The way he says “little spark” is fond with the underlying layering of ‘potential’ and ‘firefly.’ A strange twine of ‘seed lighting,’ ‘kindling,’ and ‘fragment of what was once whole.’

“This is speculation,” Optimus once told you in the privacy of isolation by the virtue of being in the wilderness and away from anyone else. “But based on stricken records and Alpha Trion’s thoughts on its translation, the Fallen may have been, in your terms, the true father of my race.”

The Fallen, the Prime of Chaos and emerged from Prima’s own shadow, had taken Solus, Prime of Creation, who was crafted from the dirt of an awake Primus in his planetary mode. He had taken her upon victory, and from their union came the new generation.

The Fallen of Prima, who was of Primus, and Solus of Primus, so still fits the modern narrative from Ratchet that they descended from the Well of Cybertron as the Well was Solus’ final parting gift. The divine ouroboros of life and death interwoven and continuous by one being eating and rebirthing itself in new shapes…

You’re getting way too sidetracked.

< I’ve come seeking guidance on the behalf of Optimus Prime. The last of your kin. And a way to repair Cybertron. >

He stares and you can't falter here. Not when so much is at stake.

The Fallen slowly blinks, embers stubborn to remain burning and exhaustion is carved deep in the crevices of his face. Metal worn down from time and the raw elements, pitted and warped, but enduring all the same.

Finally, he speaks again.

< An ancient evil stirs again. > The mountainous mech intoned as his face warps, mouth pulling down as it forms a chasm, the glyphs burning to livelier shapes to form a multitude of pathways, crossing and uncrossing as they bend into impossible roads with no clear end, eyes burning brighter as sulphuric gas steams out, the helm crests becoming jagged peaks. < Once forced to sleep, it stirs with the presence of a new champion ordained by my twin and the surging usage of its dark blood by a usurper. >

Goosebumps break over your entire body as you try to will away the ice in your veins that isn’t from the coldness of the Fallen’s realm. Your heart races as you divine the truth in his words.

You wait because your questions go unanswered. Megatronus was known for his madness and titanic, brutal power, not for lies.

< I was not still after all this time. Much like my originator, I carved myself into pieces and etched into the blood and bones of this planet. All fall under my hand, for I am one with all, and all are one with me. >

You shudder at the familiar phrasing: 'Til all are one.

How fittingly ironic that Megatronus Prime had achieved what Prima and his Guiding Hand failed at.

< Are you able to aid us then? >

Because Unicron, diminished as he is, still outmatches them all. And there’s no way none of them are prepared to face a force of the universe as they are: stranded, starving, and so alone. Optimus is a single mortal that's half-way ascended, and Unicron had battled the Thirteen many times.

< Not as I am, little fragment. I've anchored nearly all of my strength into containing the Chaos-Bringer. > You feel him move to sit back, chunks of his frame crumbling down, and the chasm of a mouth sighs < Did the newest champion not question why our ancient foe simply did not crush him by shifting its plates? Why did he use clones instead of breaking open this planet, spilling out like a rotten corpse with too much buildup? Not even question how the artifacts of my > there's no direct translation, a mix of 'home' and 'heart' and 'forge' < -came to be here along with Energon roots well developed? >

Fuck, you didn’t even think about that either. You chucked it as space material mostly claimed by the beings of Elsewhere, not fucking divine intervention and the remains of a Primodial deity sealing away something far more terrible and great.

It’s almost hysterically funny in a morbid way: Earth and Cybertron are distant blood cousins that should have been drenched in their own war. Instead, a child of Earth is dating the last of the Primes.

< And Cybertron? >

You croak because Earth may disappear in the upcoming, end-of-the-world battle between forces, but you came for answers about reviving a dying planet. And to perhaps scream at the Eldest, but you lost your chance against that bastard.

The entire space rumbles at his slow chuckles.

< All according to my > that strange word again < calculations. All shall be well. >

You should feel relieved. Should, is the keyword, but foretelling the future has always been a murky subject. There are too many uncertainties and are always in motion. In some ways, it's truth and history, and it's difficult to divine, which is which.

And when it comes to older forces, there's a blood price to pay.

< There is more than meets the eye to this champion. > The god says cryptically as jagged stalactites of teeth break off and disappear. < Perhaps he may remember himself. Perhaps not. >

< And what can be done to jog that memory? >

The Fallen, once known as Megatronus Prime, laughs, and you're swept away by the new current, rolling and tumbling, unable to sink or swim. < There are many paths one can take. > He cradles you. Even at his most gentle, he's forceful. Inescapable in a terrifying moment. < My little brother must find himself again. Not as champion of Prima or Orion Pax of Alpha Trion, but what he truly was, is, and will be. >

You're carried away, going up and up until-

You wake up, jolted back into your body, and you flail hard enough to roll over. Just in time to retch out seawater, sand, and colorful bits of precious metal. Sludge dribbles down your mouth and your stomach spasms, chest burning, lungs heavy, and limbs uncooperative.

You’re vaguely aware of someone by your side, and they catch you before you tumble into your own mess. You shiver violently, pins and needles deep in your limbs, and frozen as if you were rescued from Arctic waters. You struggle to breathe. Gasping. Struggling to remain conscious.

'Your gods are dicks.' is what you want to say, but your mouth and lungs remain uncooperative as Optimus quietly warms up his servos to reheat your body. You're encased in his palms and you can't help but think at Optimus' own gentleness versus his forebearers' attempts: non existent or overwhelming.

Stranger, impossible things must happen to him to remain calm with someone almost drowning in the desert.

[ectogeo-rebubbles]

I have kind of a niche Garashir fic idea I want to write but I’ve never posted anything publicly before, so I am nervous. But I can’t seem to get over the idea? You’re one of my favorite fic writers, any advice? 💕🥺

Ooooh, you gotta try to write it!!! I always love to indulge my new ideas that are driving me insane as soon as I can hehe (because part of writing often has to be done after the initial idea no longer excites you quite the same way).

I like that you said it’s a niche idea, too! I do enjoy most of the common fanon tropes and worldbuilding, but it’s always so refreshing when people add something brand new to the Garashir body of literature. And the nicher and stranger the better, in my opinion!! One thing about writing something niche is that maybe it won’t get the same amount of attention as quickly as something that has broader appeal, HOWEVER... I can tell you from experience that when your niche stuff does find its audience (which may take patience and persistence) that audience will likely go absolutely WILD for it. And I always find that very rewarding <3

Is the reason you haven't started yet because you don't quite know how to start? If that's the case, I would recommend writing an outline first. I even sometimes will outline really short oneshots lol, not because I think I really need to, but because that way i at least have a good record of my idea and ALSO because sometimes I can trick myself into just starting to write by taking notes on in outline format until I get to the part I'm REALLY excited about, at which point I realize I'm just writing full sentences instead of notes and I just let it flow from there and go back to fix the beginning later. XD You could also just try to summarize the plot for a friend, that often reveals to me where any structural issues are tripping me up, and identifies what I need to think about more before I set words down on the page.

Idk if you haven't written before or if you just haven't posted any of it, but I want you to know that a few years ago, when I was easing myself back into writing, I worked on writing like 3 or 4 different garashir fic ideas privately before I actually figured out which idea I wanted to write all the way to the end and actually post. Most of those first wips never got posted (and my wip graveyard is still massive and always growing lol) and that's for the best bc I either got bored of the idea or could not yet achieve the story in the way I wanted to. Which is NOT to tell you that this is inevitable or that you should let your inner editor shut you down, but I just want you to know that it's perfectly okay and normal to, like, have to noodle around a bit before you've written something you're happy with.

Speaking of your inner editor, you gotta tune them out while writing a first draft. Don't even worry if the sentence makes sense, just get the words out, and then get the next words out, and then the next... If there is something stopping you from writing the next sentence (a name you need to make up, or something you need to research, or uncertainty about what a character would be doing, or even if you are just blanking on a word) and you are trying to maintain a flow of writing, then write a note for yourself (e.g, "[insert title of a Cardassian novel here]" or "[Julian makes some kind of expression. Surprise? Anger? idk]" or "[synonym for sinister, bc I've used sinister three times this fic already]") and then MOVE ON. You can go back in and fill in those blanks later.

Also, I really really really really like the writing advice of thinking of your first draft as your worst draft or stupidest draft. It's so true and it helps take the pressure off. One related amazing thing about writing star trek fanfic is that if ever you begin to doubt yourself, you can just fondly think about a beloved episode of Star Trek where something very silly or buckwild happens in a very contrived way, and then remind yourself that people LOVE that episode anyway. This is a genuine way that I have reminded myself not to be so harsh on my own writing lmao.

I really working with beta readers, but I know that's not something everyone enjoys and it's def not required. Still, a beta reader can give feedback on your writing to make it clearer, and they'll likely become invested in your fic and will cheer you on, and if it’s longer than a oneshot you can have someone to talk it through with during the writing process. But it might be hard to find someone you work well with and everyone’s beta reading style is a lil different, so I recommend always being very clear about what kind of feedback you want from them (grammar/typos, plot structure, clarity, brainstorming ideas for how to fix this plothole, does this one specific line of dialogue work, etc! whatever aspects you are uncertain about and want help with for that specific fic). And you should know that it’s okay to not take someone's recommendations too, it’s ultimately your fic, so anyone giving you feedback should just be trying to help you achieve your own vision. Still, even in those cases where you don't go along exactly with their idea for what to change, knowing what parts confused them can help you figure out how to get your vision across more clearly.

If you think concrit might actually be demotivational and intimidating (totally get that, back in high school I actually solicited concrit on my fics publicly, as was the custom back then, and received some critiques from some truly well-meaning friends, and the experience STILL rattled me so bad that it turned me off writing for awhile), or if the process of finding someone to beta read sounds overwhelming, I’d recommend that you instead just find a trusted friend who is willing to read over the completed draft, with the understanding that they must simply give you a sanity check and then tell you yep that’s good! Cannot stress enough the power of encouragement and support and having someone hype you up. ^_^

If you are too nervous to post it under your own name, you can post it to the Anonymous collection on ao3. This is a reversible process, so if you want to reattach your username to your fic later then you can!

Anyway, feel free to send follow up questions about any of this or let me know if there's an aspect of writing I didn't mention that is what you're actually stuck on. I hope this helps and good luck and HAVE FUN! Have fun is actually the most important writing advice haha.

(P.S., anon, if you want me to beta read a draft of a oneshot or at least look over a chapter or two if it's multichapter, I am down to do so, just DM me. If not that's fine too, I'm just so so flattered that you reached out to me and I want to encourage you in any way I can! <3)

[tarjapearce]

hey there! how are you? i adore your writing and all your work and i was wondering if you had any advice/pointers for those who want to start writing stories on this app? ❤️

Hello dear nonny! I'm just good, thanks for asking ❤️.

Thank you for the compliment ☺️.

Now, as for the tips (Mind you I am no professional writer) but I've learned from a couple of blogs around here is:

1. Always back up your works. Either in Google docs, or any other cloud storage site you use.

2. Don't expect success to come overnight and be upset about it. I know we all want to create amazing, beautiful and jaw breaking stories, but it takes time to shape and polish your craft.

3. Unavoidable as it is, try to not compare yourself with other authors. It'll leave you exhausted and so demotivated. Plus it won't be good for your mental health. Each writer is unique and so is their journey in writing.

4. Your first works will be bad. But that is absolutely normal! We're learning. The more you practice, the easier will be for you to know structures, your characters and your own story!

5. If possible, do an outline of your story. It helps connect and avoids leaving plot holes or you stressing on what to do next. (This helped me so damn much cause it gets easier to fill up the blanks.)

6. Don't be afraid to chop off things. Even if they are amazing, sometimes little chopped off things fit better in other scenes. (I have a doc full of them, cause I either recycle the ideas to use them for later, or new ideas are born out of them c:)

7. This is what really was the hardest to assimilate. The number of hits, reblogs, comments and the like DOES NOT determine the quality of a work. So don't be bummed out about them.

I know it sounds harsh and kinda hypocritical, because c'mon, mostly if not everyone want their stories to be the top notch of things, and feedback is key for such thing. But it's all relative. Don't let the numbers get to you.

In fact, don't do it for the numbers. Do it cause you need to create. Do it cause you wanna say or convey something ♥️. And most importantly, do it cause you wanna write it.

8. Read alot and listen ~ Poetry helps tremendously if you want to poet the f out of a fic or any piece you wanna write. But be mindful that it can be a double edged weapon. Try to not over embellish it, or else it'll be exhausting for the reader (And yourself) to keep up.

9. There is absolutely nothing wrong with taking breaks. They are a must! They help prevent burnout (And this applies to so many things)

10. There is plenty of useful blogs around here that provide punctual writing tips. Follow them. Seize your resources! Cause trust me, you do learn from them ☺️. And Have fun!

Hops this helps! ♥️

[0ctobre]

hey! big fan of Drift! can i ask how much of it you had planned out when you started?

Hi! Sorry, I didn't see this until now.

I wrote the first three chapters years ago, then hit a wall when I tried to continue. I had a couple ideas with big chunks of meat missing in between, and I had trouble actually filling in the blanks and figuring out what happened next, so I ended up shelving it.

Fast-forward a couple years, and I discovered beat sheets and story structure templates, and the idea that you don't need to outline in a linear manner. It was a game changer. I used the three acts story structure to outline my first two novels, and it worked like a charm. After completing the first draft of the second novel, I was looking for something to work on as a palate-cleanser before doing a second draft, and I fished it out of my idea folder.

With the three acts story structure, it was a lot easier to fill in the blanks and figure out what needed to happen. I already had the beginning, I knew that the confrontation with the Nine would be the game-changing midpoint in terms of Taylor's relationship with the other Wards, and I knew the ending. I knew a couple of other scenes, like the fight with the Travelers and subsequent infiltration of the PRT HQ, a couple of interactions with the Wards, and how things would go down with Coil.

I actually used a wall and post-its to put my ideas in order and identify the story beats. From there, I was able to flesh out my outline, add subplots and character arcs and so on. My final outline had about 7k words. A couple things changed while I was writing and editing, but I'd say about 90% of that outline made it into the first draft.

[topazadine]

"How Do I Start Writing?" (Or; A Psychoanalysis of Newbie Writer Questions)

This is for my aspiring writers here, who have never done much more than write essays for school.

If you go onto the r/writing subreddit and type in this exact question, you will get pages and pages of posts going back years, most of which have about 15ish comments. And most of those comments will be something like:

Or, this super bitchy response:

And yes, "just write!" is helpful in some way, I guess. But it doesn't actually get to the root of the matter. It doesn't acknowledge why someone would ask this question in the first place.

It's also kind of insulting, because the people asking for advice about writing already know they need to write. They know that writing actually involves doing the writing.

So why do newbie writers keep asking this?

This Question Probably Isn’t About Concrete Advice

Stay with me here. Stay! Good.

These fine individuals are on the internet. They have likely used Google at least once, perhaps to look up a recipe for an apple crumble or to spoil a book they didn’t feel like finishing.

Or, like me, they’re searching things like “does my dog love me” while their dog is literally curled up in their lap. (I just want a second opinion, you know.)

My obsessive Googling to psychoanalyze my dog’s every move is exactly what is happening with said posters, too. They want external validation that they can write. That they have permission to write. That they are capable of writing.

This may not be true of everyone that posts this question, but I like to believe that the majority have the wherewithal to seek information on their own. After all, it takes more effort to make a Reddit post and type out a short message about your backstory than it does to put a single keyword into a search engine. They probably know there are thousands of good writing guides out there.

So it’s not laziness, or absolute befuddlement about the concept of writing; said inquisitors clearly do know how to read and write, or we’d never know of their plight.

No, this is about validation: “See me! Hear me! Tell me it’s okay! Assure me I won’t fail!”

And that is fine. It is fine to need those things. We all need comfort sometimes, and I’d never shame someone for wanting some support.

They want someone to tell them, personally, how to write. And to tell them that they can.

But why ask for support that way, then? Because it’s less vulnerable and painful to simply say “how do I write” than to admit what you might really feel deep down:

“I’m scared that I’m going to mess up. I’m so overwhelmed, and I’m thinking of all the times that I got dinged for not including something in an essay, and it’s stifling my desire to write. I have all these good ideas in my head; I imagine how fascinating they’d be to explore. But I get to that GDoc, and I panic, and my brain goes as blank as the screen.”

And the reason, I believe (though I may of course be wrong), is that you want a list of rules like you’ve always gotten before.

Asking “How to Write” Reveals a Need for Structure

You are desperately hoping someone will give you a prompt, a list of things to check off, because that’s what you have been taught that you need when you write.

If you have never really written for fun, you might be intimidated by that blank page that only you get to choose what to do with. There’s no fill-in outline, no list of resources … there’s nothing but limitless white space that belongs only to you.

Depending on how you look at it, such a concept is either the most exciting thing you can imagine or the most horrible thing in the world.

But, dear writer, we can’t do that for you. We can’t give you an outline for your book, and we can’t just promise you that if you do X, Y, and Z, everything will be okay.

We can give advice based on what works for us, whether that is hyper-specific things like our plotting format or the ways we develop characters, but there’s no guarantee that it will work for you personally. Maybe we can direct you to good writing guides, but those may not always be super helpful anyway.

Creative writing is far more individualized than academic writing, which is “include X amount of resources, answer Y question, and provide it in Z fashion.”

Or, we could snark at you and go "just write!" as if that helps you. Which it does not.

No, here's what you need to realize, internalize, and chew on before you start writing.

You’re the Boss Now

Most of the people I see who ask this question are younger, either in high school or college. At that stage of life, you have never really been in control; you may have responsibilities and stresses, but someone else has always given you a pathway to success.

You are told when to get up, when to arrive somewhere, what to bring, what to complete and at what time. At least one person is always there to check in with you, to grade your work, to give you specific guidance on what to do next, and to give very clear pass/fail feedback telling you whether you did well or horribly.

With creative writing, you take that role instead. You check in with yourself. You assess your own work. You find the guidance and identify the problems.

And you, of course, decide whether you’re happy with it or not.

This is not to say that other writers can’t be of help: certainly having a mentor or two is invaluable, because they can see the issues you might not see yourself and help you troubleshoot ways that will work for your story (that you are the boss of).

People can give you advice on specific issues you have, but they cannot give you a list of things to follow. If they do, you might as well be ChatGPT, and that’s no fun.

There is no secret recipe to success in writing, because every piece of creative writing is its own beast.

There Are Just Two Firm Rules of Writing

Just two. I am genuinely serious here. Anyone else who says there are dozens and dozens of rules is bullshitting you.

So, get out your notebook. Prepare your highlighters. Preemptively put your hand up to ask questions. Listen carefully. Here are the rules.

Writing consists of words placed in a logical order that is meant to communicate something to someone (maybe you, maybe many others).

This is what makes writing a book different from writing a shopping list.

Generally, "logical order" means that you will have a capital letter at the beginning of the sentence, and then there will be more words until you come to a period, question mark, or exclamation point. You will then continue doing this same process for a whole paragraph, and then another, until you no longer have any words left to put anywhere.

After that, you’ll probably have to remove a few. Or maybe add them. Shuffle them around a little. Shuffle whole sentences and paragraphs, even.

There are subrules to this one that consist of things like grammar, punctuation, syntax, and so on, but they all fall under the heading of “communicating in a way that other people will understand.”

That’s all grammatical rules are, anyway: the literary social contract. We get mad at people for breaking them because it makes the rest of us look bad.

... And You Have to Keep Doing It if You Want to Be a "Writer"

I remember meeting someone once who proudly proclaimed herself an “authoress,” but she had never published anything, and she admitted, without an ounce of shame, that she had not written anything in seven years. This was when I was like 21ish and she was the about the same age, so … being generous, she had not written anything since age 14.

Seven years is a long time. Her last writing creation would be in first grade, eating snacks and falling off the monkey bars.

Yeah, I would not consider that an “authoress.” That would be someone who wrote something once and then just basked in the glory of it without doing any of the work.

Think about it like this. Most people in licensed professions need to get their licensed renewed every two years-ish, right? And they have to take continuing education courses during that time.

If a nurse lets their license lapse, they either get in big trouble for operating without a license, or they become a former nurse. They cannot just skate through life being a nurse without continuing to sharpen their skills and proving they are still capable of doing the job.

Writing is the same way. I’m not saying you have to write every single day or you’re not a writer. Even the most skilled professionals need some time off.

But, like a nurse, you need to continue working at it. You need to keep learning, and you need to practice.

It can be as simple as a ten-minute freewrite before work, or committing to 500 words in the evening. Maybe you take one day a week to review your work and outline. If your life is very hectic, perhaps you schedule one hour three days a week to just do something with your writing.

And, as you will see everywhere, reading is a part of writing too. All kinds of reading, whether that is:

The news

Nonfiction books

Blog posts about writing

Beta reading someone else’s work

Literary novels (preferred option of course)

So, with a mix of actually doing the writing and reading about the writing, you can consider yourself a writer.

But you have to do it regularly. Consistently. Incessantly. Until you die.

Doesn’t that sound wonderful? It sure does to me. Not the dying part, but the rest of it.

And, Dear Writer, You Will Fail.

All writers fail. We fail hard and we fail often. We write awful stories, we get ripped apart. Someone tells us that we might as well pack it in and be a rodeo clown instead.

But that is part of the process. That is what makes you a writer: failing a lot, then failing a little less, until you’re mostly not failing (only sometimes).

You need to accept that you will suck at first.

Everyone does whenever they’re learning something. This is especially true if they are taking a skill they already knew (putting words in front of each other) and doing it differently.

Transitioning from plain-jane Five Paragraph Format writing for schoolwork feels uncomfortable because you’ve had certain rules jammed into you, berated at every turn if you don’t execute them perfectly.

All those papers bleeding red ink because you didn’t start with a topic sentence make you internally flinch when you think of not doing exactly what is asked of you.

This, I believe, is part of the reason that many new writers get so much comfort from the rigid prescriptivism of things like “show don’t tell” – because that’s familiar.

It’s daunting to realize how limitless fiction writing is: how you could give five writers the same prompt and they would turn out something totally different until you can barely tell that they began at the same starting point. So new writers retreat into their rule barricade and grow snappish if anyone points out that those are training wheel tools, not meant to be clutched at forever.

Because they’re scared of failing. They think that if they stick to the rules, then it’ll all be okay. Maybe that’s true, but something else is more true (is that possible?).

Failure is not a bad thing. Giving up is.

If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not learning anything because you sprung from the godhead as the lovechild of Shakespeare and Sappho. It’s great to fail as a writer! Welcome it! Because every time you fail, it means you tried at all, and it means you have an opportunity to do better.

The only thing you cannot do is give up. If you do that, you have not just failed on one story or one submission or one whatever, you are a failed writer.

Believe In Yourself

Even if no one else believes in you, you need to believe in you.

Believe you can do it. Know it will pay off.

Make it a habit to reread your old work and compare it to your current work. You’ll see an amazing amount of growth after a while, and it will only make you more excited to keep going.

And you know what? Even if you don’t believe in yourself yet, that’s ok. Because I know you can do this. I believe in you already.

Now that you're revved up and ready to go, maybe you'll consider purchasing my book, 9 Years Yearning?

9 Years Yearning follows two young men (those guys up there actually) as they study at the War Academy, future protectors of a country perpetually besieged by their neighbors. In between Codes of Valor and Military Tactics classes, Uileac finds himself growing intrigued by Orrinir, a boy who is rough around the edges but deeply sweet inside. They fight, they support one another, they ... act like total fucking idiots who can't bear to share their feelings. And there are horses, too.

If you do decide to purchase my book, don't forget to leave a review!

They are crucial for visibility on Amazon, which uses all reviews (good and bad) to determine whether a book is worth anyone's time.

Also, I've been told that if you leave nice reviews on indie books, you'll never drop your PB&J sandwich jam side down ever again. Isn't that wonderful? Give it a shot.

[asimplearchivist]

What’s your preferred way to write? On a PC, laptop, phone, in a hardcover notebook? Something else entirely?

Also, how do you organize worldbuilding, references, outlines, and other stuff for your projects?

Don’t mind me, just taking notes… 📝 👀

Hi, Sofie!😊Thank you for popping into my inbox!

I almost exclusively write on laptop/PC/iPad/even my phone when I get the chance. (When I was a waitress I was in my Dragon Age kick and would write on my tickets front and back so I wouldn’t “be on my phone” the whole time. I have the majority of the future scenes of The Smallest of Deeds transposed from those tickets, and I still have them in an envelope tucked away.) Otherwise I’m a tech/cloud enthusiast haha. I have enough blank notebooks that I want so very badly to get into the habit of actually using them, though…one day!🙏🏻

As far as my notes…they’re usually chaos lol. Most of the time they end up just being billeted lists at the start of my documents. Plot points and twists, character details, etc, all lined up so I can check them easily. I add them as I think of new things, like snippets of dialogue or scene ideas and the like.

I am currently in the process of transferring all of my Docs to a platform called Dabble, which is also cloud compatible, since Google decided to allow AI to delve into that space. I need to save a bunch of my old college/uni assignments into my Word Documents, but my PC is still out of commission for the time being so that process has been on hold for a while, unfortunately.

(I digress.) Dabble has character cast, plot grid, and worldbuilding notes features that help me to organize a lot more effectively, which is why I like using it so much. You can pull up your “notecards” within whatever chapter or scene you’re writing in at the time, and it’s enough of a blank slate that I don’t get overwhelmed with feeling like I have to fill everything out. (I swear I’m sponsored lol, but it really is nice if you can afford to pay its subscription fee. It just feels a lot more secure than Docs, runs more efficiently without lagging, and has features that allow for importation and exportation. It structures the document itself like a manuscript for easier transferral, and it has cloud syncing and allows for others to comment and access for beta reading and the like. I’d highly recommend checking it out!)

In the Morning Light (or, currently, That Poison, Reconciliation) is the first fic that I’ve really invested in organizing since I’ve had a bunch of different documents over the span of ten years keeping track of all my ideas. I’m exclusively writing it in Dabble rn.

Speaking of which…I’m a week late for an update, huh🥲I have some free time tonight, so I’ll try to work on the next chapter!

[uncleasad]

for that fic ask meme - 14, 26, 50, 53, 55

14. what’s your worst writing habit?

Oof! My entire writing process is one giant bad habit, so it’s hard to pick the worst part 😂

I know I just reblogged that post about ignoring the tyranny of the daily word count, but I’m going to say not trying to write a few words every day, or a sentence a week, or something like that…I let myself get into writing droughts that go on and on and on (and, yes, I’m busier than I was in 2020 and 2021, but I love writing and doing so always makes me feel good), so trying to stop those pauses before they become droughts is something I need to do to break a bad habit.

26. do you like to write one-shots or series, and why?

Both? I write what the idea I have calls for, I guess? (Almost all of my series are collections of one-shots; I have never thought of writing a series consisting of multi-chapter fics, but one kinda sneaked in there 😳)

I enjoy—and sometimes specifically choose an idea because it fits—writing one-shots because they’re a good way for me to get back into writing when I’ve been too busy with life or bogged down in one of my long WIPs. Last Christmas’s Mischief and Mistletoe is a great example of this: short, self-contained, and seasonally relevant 😏 I liken these sorts of fics to artists doing a doodle or quick sketch as a warm-up.

Sometimes while writing a one-shot I’ll think of something that will open the door to a sequel, sometimes there’ll be nothing specific but nothing to rule out more in the same vein (e.g. the Tales from the Salvatore Kitchen series), and sometimes readers will have a suggestion I hadn’t thought of that I love that will turn a one-shot into a series of one-shots.

It’s nice to have a series or two where you enjoy the world/setup, because it’s fun and easy to dip back in and write some more (so all the benefits of a one-shot) and you (I!) can develop ideas, characters, and events without feeling guilty about not updating (vs a single multi-chapter fic where readers have started reading and want more 😏); there’s less expectation.

(My true favorite things to write are the big, expansive, complex stories, but they’re simultaneously my least favorite for all those reasons 😂)

50. do you plan or do you write whatever comes to your mind? 53. when writing, do you have an outline? and do you stick to it?

These two are related, so I’ll tackle them together. I’ve linked to and written about George RR Martin’s post about gardening before, so there’s good background there and I’ll (try! to) make this the short version.

I mostly have a lightweight plan for what I write: a collection of scenes, or some important character beats or plot points, and often, but not always, an idea of what the ending is (sometimes my idea for the fic is “I want to write this scene that is probably somewhere in the middle of an actual fic 😂 but more often it instead is “this would be a fun situation to throw them into; let’s see what happens!”). That’s as close as I’ll get to an outline 😳

I’ll often also make a series of notes as I’m writing, again of the same types of things as in the “plan,” plus dialogue and details, as a sort of “living outline” for what’s next/coming up. But nothing formal or well-structured (which does make it harder to do those bigger stories, naturally). I have hated outlines since elementary school, so…

I’ll diverge from what I have “planned” any time I have an idea I really like or think will improve the story, although to my recollection it rarely happens, and when it does it’s more small changes. I’m much more likely to split “planned” chapters and make a fic 4x longer than I originally thought it would be 😂

So, needless to say, I mostly write what comes to mind. Sometimes that’s filling in the big blank spaces between things I know I want to include, and sometimes that’s deciding where the whole story itself will go. (My mind is wont to come up with crazy twists and tangents #this is the way my mind works 😂)

55. do you have any abandoned WIP’s? What made you abandon them?

I don’t think I have any WIPs that I’ve started writing that I never intend to come back to/finish. I have an entire laundry list of WIPs that I have not written on in months or years, though.

My story as a current fanfic author goes like this:

Started writing Have At Least One Totally Epic Love in spring 2020, ran out of steam/got stuck near the pivotal moments.

Had an idea for After Ten Long Years and started writing it to try to work through that block, but got stuck on it.

Had an idea for Old West Hosie; started writing it to work around that block, then got stuck on it, too.

Had an idea for Hosie Alternate Realities; started writing it to work around that block, then got stuck there, also 😳

[Cue Hope Mikaelson: “Love, Lose, Grieve, repeat”]

At some point in there, I wrote the first one-shot in the Tales from the Salvatore Kitchen series, You Complete Me, to break the cycle and publish something, which turned into 3 more seasonal one-shots (initially), and then I finally finished Have At Least One Totally Epic Love, almost exactly 1 year after I had left off. 2021 I think was a pretty good year, lots of shorter works finished, but also several more big works started where I once again ran out of steam/got stuck/got distracted by the shiny new idea 😂

(Also, after the experience with Have At Least One Totally Epic Love, I rarely actually write and publish things serially unless I have a really, really good idea of the scope of the fic and also know I’ll have decent amounts of writing time—so there’s nothing out there that readers would perceive of as abandoned. The biggest example of a fic I’ve written and published serially since HALOTEL is And I Will Always Love You, 8 chapters, 32K words, written from February to May.)

So approaching 200K words of incomplete WIPs now, but nothing I intend never to finish.

Thanks for asking! Lots of great choices 😀 Hopefully I didn’t bore you to sleep with the answers!

[wolfsbanesparks]

Idk if you answered a similar question but how do you plan your fics? Do you have the entire plot ready or some points that you connect while writing

Hi anon!

So confession time: I absolutely suck at planning stories out.

I'm what a lot of people refer to as a 'pantser' aka I fly by the seat of my pants as I write, filling in things as I go without a plan. I have literally never had an entire plot worked out before I started writing lol.

Typically I come into a fic with little more than a brief prompt or a single scene in my head and just start free writing a couple of scenes to see what happens. Often times the first scene I come up with is the very beginning/set up and then I give myself a goal to work towards and figure the rest out as I go along. For plot heavy things the goal is usually simply to fix the problem I've created (For example in Split my goal that I wrote towards was simply: merge Cap and Billy back together). Because that goal is the focus, I often have a scene or two near the end of the story that is fully fleshed out long before I get there that I'm writing towards (and then I tweak the scene to fit the details of how I got there) But everything in the middle? A complete blank until I get there.

When I outline, it is generally a painfully brief bullet point list of things like "character A talks to character B" or "fight scene" or "Batman POV?" that I add to or rearrange whenever I get a new idea. Since I often have multiple POVs, if there is a POV I know I want to include, I stick it into the list and figure out what to do with it later.

When I'm a bit further into a story I'll have a better idea of where things will go and have a handful of scenes I know have to happen so I just have to decide how best to get from point A to point B. I think this works for me because I don't feel stuck in an outline like this and can let certain side plots develop and resolve naturally so long as I am generally moving towards my main goal.

Now this is obviously a very loose, messy way to plan a story that probably doesn't work for most people. I have to be careful when editing to catch plot holes or double check facts/details but that's just part of the process for me too. I've done a lot of reading, writing, and studying of literature to the point that I have internalized a lot of the rules of how stories work/how they should be structured so I don't need to be quite as reliant on outlines a others might be.

This is probably not super helpful if you're looking for tips on planning out a story (and it definitely is a bit rambling) but that's how I do it.

Thanks for the ask!

[n7punk]

Okay sooo I’m fully aware the answer to this might just be ‘my brain just works that way’ lol buttt: you post as you write, but surely this must have kicked you in the arse at some point. Like have you ever written anything and then later on realised it’s put you in a sticky situation plot wise but can’t change it bc it’s already posted? Or do you like extensively plan before you start to avoid that? And do you keep notes as you write to make sure you remember key details? My brain cannot comprehend how you can write a story without knowing for sure how it’s gonna end without having the flexibility of changing a few things that happen earlier in the story lol your brain is so impressive.

Lol thank you. So the answer for this actually depends on the project. Usually I know like 3/4th of the story's overall structure and what an end goal would look like it by the time I finish the first chapter. I say the first chapter because a lot of changes or ideas can come from actually stepping into a story/world for the first time. That said, sometimes I just have a few scenes (The Scene™️s) and I fill in between them as I go. It's very common for the end to be a little hazy because I need to write the scenes that will effect it first to truly understand what it needs to be.

As far as writing myself into a corner goes: yeah, GUTT lol. Still don't know what to do about that one. But usually it's only in small ways. In CotC I figured out a scene that would have made the 13th fic work better, but said scene needed to be in the 11th fic and I had already posted up through the 12th, so I just had to let that better idea go. I also added the entire visit home/Winter Fest storyline to AMLAIT after I was like 3-4 chapters in (my initial plan for that fic ended up being 20% of what its total was, with a bunch of ideas coming in the middle), so I realized that hey, Catra's birthday should have been Right at the start of the fic, and then had to condense the timeline in one or two places to make it so her birthday had Just Passed, and then I edited in a single line referencing it into the beginning to make the timeline seem more cohesive to future rereads.

I honestly prefer writing this way because it makes you get more creative (and I hate redrafting lmao), but I do typically have some kind of outline (even if it's just in my head) going into the story. If you look at the fic notes for Superzero, I put the entirety of the written outline for that fic in the Original Outline section at the bottom and it... wasn't much lol.

By contrast, Roses & Thorns I outlined extensively because I was really excited about the idea and basically infodumped it all on my friend in Discord lmao. I will say, though, from the four chapters posted so far that outline included: like three sentences describing Catra's arrival, Adora hyperfocusing on her, and Catra being catty (every single scene up until the confrontation was written off-the-cuff when I sat down to do the fic). Then I had the confrontation with Catra and the discussion in the garden heavily outlined, and then... oh yeah nothing until like chapter six lmao. All that I filled in once I started working on the fic, and in fact I wrote a couple chapters and then went back and filled in scenes to give more depth to the story and world. If I had been posting from the start I would have been really screwed when it came to adding those scenes to chapter 2 (I added stuff to 2, 4, and 5 because I had just reached five when I went back), but I kind of knew I needed that extra time with it so I held off on posting.

As far as notes: also really varies! This is my notes for R&T

the main Roses & Thorns document is a copy-pasted version of the outline I wrote for my friend with a few additional notes added in where later ideas came. The Fic Notes doc contains... the fic notes I'll post later, which I write as I go (the sub-documents there are just blank stubs for fic references or extras since this is from a template), and then this fic has a "special" notes file to keep track of all the girls on the show. It's normal for a fic to have some kind of special notes file like that, like in CotC I had one comparing different endings I could do since I had a lot of ideas. For 'the long way down' I had a special note including how I had described Eternia in previous fics so it wouldn't contradict (even though it didn't matter since none of those fics were canon). Often there will also be a separate file for some kind of detailed outline in a specific scene up ahead, but in this one it's all just in the main one. And then the cut scenes document eeeeeeeevverrryyy fic ends up with. If I decide I want to rewrite a scene, I'll save the original version there so I can go back to it if I decide it's better than my rewrite - or sometimes scenes I think might be better off going completely but aren't sure go there temporarily. I always delete those stubs at the end of a fic (or during, like after I post the chapter said scene was from or am certain the new version is better).

In general, another thing that keeps me from "needing" more notes is the fact I reread a Lot. Like right now I'm working on chapter 9, and when I sit down in the morning it's not uncommon for my to skim from the chapter before, or all the way back to the first thing I haven't posted yet (in this case, chapter five). And when I do edit something to post it (say, chapter four two days ago), I usually then read/skim through what's between there and where I need to continue writing (in that case, chapter 8) before setting off again. It helps with the flow.

Now, I'm unusually ahead on this fic because I was a decent ways into it before I started posting (I took a week off), but one thing that helps with writing into a corner is that my usual rule is still to always be a chapter ahead of what I'm posting. So if I just finished drafting chapter 3, then I'm editing and posting chapter 2. This helps me make sure the flow together, and also just lets me give my writing breathing room. Instead of immediately editing and posting three, I can take a step back from it by working on chapter two instead, go draft chapter four, and then return to chapter three for editing only after that's done so I have fresh eyes on it. I don't have a beta and this is the only way I'm able to catch as many typos as I do with my dyslexia.

That was long a kinda rambly, but hopefully that answers your question! Every fic is a little different, but this is my general idea when it comes to each project.

[wiltking]

pray tell, what is this so called "swiss cheese" method you speak of?

it's a method that leaves giant holes in my working document like a delicately cut square of swiss cheese, but i swear by it. i work best when i write out of chronological order, jumping around the story / thing i'm writing as the ideas come rather than following a timeline (the chronology. the outline. what have you).

going a bit deeper - if i start getting stuck in the middle of a scene i often let myself skip ahead a little (or a lot):

or leave a basic note, either about what needs to happen next or a reminder about a character's mindset:

or if i'm in the middle of a dialogue and i know i want there to be a pause but don't know what I want to put there yet, i'll mark this little blank spot:

and if i'm skipping an entire section but at least have a rough idea of what i want the section to be i like to pin down these general paragraphs to flesh out later:

^ i do paragraphs like this one (from my first draft of fish bones) a lot. they are the structure that holds everything together. so - [ holes ]. lots of them. and yes, i'm always pulling out my hair, thrashing my past self for leaving all this work for me to do later but it's good, and i know its good, because i always have a better idea of how to fill these gaps once i know what surrounds them / what i need to write towards.

today i wrote out some key points for the ending section of my project, because i'd been stuck at the 3/4 point for a while. i feel much better about where the story stands after doing that, and more firm in what needs to happen in order to get there.

writing in swiss cheese also generally gives me better flow. it's a lot less stressful when i can allow my brain to function as it needs to instead of wrestling it into a structure that doesn't work. i can always make sense of the gaps in a later draft, as long as my bones are in order.

[xenonsdoodles]

17, 22, 26 !!!

talk about your writing and editing process

there's not much structure to it at all, really, but it's something like

I get possessed by an idea and hurriedly jot down whatever snippets and details grabbed my brain about it (fast, before I can forget why it appealed to me in the first place).

as soon as I have time, I write a rough outline, an opening scene, and then keep going as far as the momentum takes me. sometimes I end up going out of order or skipping in-between bits with a [...] or a [scene goes here] until I can figure out what goes there.

as I work I note issues that need to be fixed, details that need to be elaborated on, questions that need to be answered, and directions I want it to go that I haven't quite gone yet.

I go back and fill in the blanks as needed, which might take no time at all and might be a multi-day endeavor, there's really no telling.

for multi-chapter projects, I like to have at least an outline and a partial scene or two written for the next chapter before I publish the one I'm working on. helps me avoid writing myself into a corner.

I read over it until I can get through it from start to finish without wanting to change anything.

(for fic) title, tags, summary, close my eyes and hit post.

(for original work) let it sit there indefinitely I guess

do you ever worry about public reaction to what you’re writing? how do you get past that?

always!!!!! no matter how tame the subject is or how happy I am with the way it's turning out, there's always one little voice in my head saying "someone is going to read this and it will activate a dormant part of their brain that makes them literally explode and it will be all your fault" and another saying "this is the most boring uninspired poorly constructed waste of language anyone has ever written and people will lose respect for you knowing you created it." I know that's mostly bullshit, but that doesn't make it stop happening, so I just make a bunch of editing passes, agonize over tags, and eventually just throwing it out into the world like... you know what, who actually cares.

are you able to write with other people around?

usually, yes! my habitual writing/drawing spot is on the living room couch because the alternative is never leaving my room and losing my mind a lot faster than I already am. I don't have a problem writing with other people around as long as they're not trying to get my attention too often. I do prefer to have my back to a wall, though, because I'm super paranoid about people reading over my shoulder :') and if someone comes in and asks what I'm writing or tries to see it I might suddenly not be writing anymore

thank you :3 these were fun

[sepetajmikolikomehoces]

I’d love to hear more about your writing and drafting process!! Also ⭐️ for any fic of your choosing :)

My writing and drafting process? In short: unreliable.

Like, listen...... I love writing. But my life is such an absolute clusterfuck right now that I have an entirely unconscionably small amount of time to do it. I feel like I barely have time for the things I absolutely need to do. So while I may get struck with ideas that completely take over any and all higher brain functions, I inevitably have to set them down into some sort of draft or outline or just a sentence if I'm really pressed for time (or just tired).

If I can sit down long enough to properly outline, I try to divide into chapters or at least manageable sections so that I can get a structure going from the beginning. Sometimes the beginning and end is more clearly thought out than the middle and I just have to put in an estimated number of chapters and fill out or prune as the story develops.

I do enjoy having things written out as much as possible before posting when it comes to multichapter fics but that... kinda crashed and burned with camboy, honestly. I thought it'd be one chapter, then two chapters, then "fuck if I know"-chapters but at least I had an outline and then my life went kind of off the rails a little and I had to change writing from "a thing I usually have time for" to "a thing I will do if neither work, nor school, nor life in general takes absolute precedence". I am hopinghopinghoping that once I am done with my degree and only need to wrangle work and a very different kind of life compared to before, writing will again become a thing I can devote time to more consistently.

When I write, it's usually in short and intensive bursts, and I've found I often rally around a key scene, either vibing off it and seeing where it takes me, or I work towards it because it might be the last scene of the chapter and it's a nice carrot to make me fill in the blank space between where I am and where I want to be.

For a scene I have been dying to talk about... In sä saat mut, I mentioned at the end that there was an Easter egg in the fic, but no one has yet made a guess. I may have made it more obscure than anticipated. So here, have it:

It's Jere humming along to songs on the radio while they're driving and smiling like there is a private joke wrapped up in one of them.

The song that Jere smiles about is Kuumaa's "Ylivoimainen". During UMK23 when the artists got to listen to each others' songs, one of his more memorable reactions was that Kuumaa's song was something he'd listen to if he "ever took someone home on a night out". Which. Yes, Jere. You sure did.