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polarisbibliotheque · 1 year

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Writing Advice - Answering an Ask part 1

Hey everyone!! I recently got a super cute, beautiful and heartwarming ask requesting writing advices/how to beat writers block.

I wrote the answer on a doc and it has 3 pages, so I'm gonna be posting it in different parts - do forgive and AMAZING ANON WHO ASKED ME I HOPE YOU SEE THIS, IT'S PART OF YOUR ANSWER xD

Seriously, I've been sitting on this answer for a week now thinking how I'm gonna make it shorter >.<

So, without further ado, for the first part of the answer, I wanna tell a little bit about my writing journey - how I got from "not writing at all" to where I am now.

Because people think that you have a gift and words just flow like ambrosia in the cups of the gods - but I've actually started writing some pretty cringe stuff when I was 10 years old to get to a more poetic sort-of writing during my 29s currently.

THEREFORE, a little bit on how I got from cringy to still cringy but sometimes good writing ;)

I started by telling made-up stories to my sister when she couldn’t sleep and to my cousins during sleepovers because, I don’t know, they seemed to like my stupid little stories when I was 7 years old – or even younger. Sometimes I wrote some things, sometimes I didn't. But I was telling stories!

When I was 13, I discovered the magic world of fanfiction, and I wrote and published a HORRID thing on a fanfic website in my country, based on the band McFly that me and my sister adored back then (the gods have graced me with the power of deleting it and I thank immensely to that).

It was the first time I wrote AND published something to an audience outside of my friends/family.

After that, I kept on writing, and I moved to creating my own stories. When I was 14, I wrote a fanfic with the same band, but really the main theme was that I was an archeologist living in Egypt who researched on Atlantis and ended up finding the lost city. Somehow, I was allowed to climb the pyramids as well - because, you know, I ADORE Tomb Raider, and if Lara Croft could do it, so could I.

Told ya there would be some pretty cringy stuff in here, huh? xD

When I turned 15, I was bullied non-stop at school and so creating stories became my way to escape reality and have some fun with the people I wanted to meet in my life. I started carrying a notebook everywhere with me – it was my writing notebook. I had so many stories, and I never finished any of them (and good heavens, they are THE MOST cringy stuff, I’m glad they will NEVER see the light of day).

But I use the writing notebook thing to this day - whenever I'm travelling and internet isn't granted, I have somewhere to write.

I finished my FIRST novel when I was 16!! I was SO HAPPY about it!! It took me a year and a half writing it: a young adult book, kinda like Twilight (it was THE thing back then), with a secret society based on Arthurian Legend because I was a sucker for everything King Arthur (still am).

I can’t BEAR to read the first page of it nowadays, because c’mon. It was 15-year-old depressive me being bitter about everything and post-Twilight frenzy. The universe and worldbuilding has one HELL of a potential, but oh LORDS, it IS painful to read. I was a teen after all… But I finished a novel! If I haven’t done it, I wouldn’t be writing the way I’m writing today!

When I got into Law School, things got a little slow. I couldn't focus too much on writing and my social life improved a lot. I started tweaking my Arthurian story, but nothing too defined - I kept on writing lots of WIPs, though.

Around my 20’s, while I was close to graduating Law School, I started writing again… Supernatural fanfiction. With the SOLE PURPOSE of self-indulging, because I couldn’t find A SINGLE fanfiction that I could self-insert and love Dean Winchester while kicking some demon ass (sorry, I couldn’t resist the Nico inside me).

That led me to writing a 4-part Supernatural fanfiction that, honestly, for the next 6 years, it was the thing that made my heart soar while I was slaving away at a job I hated.

While I was overworking my ass off, I started writing (brace yourselves...) BTS fanfiction. I got into the band and some people from the website I wrote my Supernatural fanfic embraced me and kinda put me in the group and into the BTS world.

I was on the path of a burnout, so that became my escape - the girls from the website were so nice and we had many MANY writing projects of short stories. Throughout the years, I think I wrote around 25 or 30 stories, 40 pages max, to publish on this website and just have fun.

It started nice, but as time went by and I started moving out of the rom-com clichés (which are nice, don't get me wrong, we all love 'em) and became more existential and philosophic with a lot of metaphorical things while writing - and people stopped reading my work. I started to think I was bad, no one wanted to read because I lacked quality in my writing, or just my stories weren't so appealing as I thought. So I lost my will to write and slowly went back to my personal original stories.

When I hit 25 years old, I got fired and had a full burnout. I got really sick and my life literally stopped for the last 5 years - it has been hard, but that gave me time to sit back on my computer and recover ALL the books and stories I never finished writing.

I am NOT joking, I just counted all of them, and I have 65 DIFFERENT unfinished stories sitting on my Word folder right now on my computer. I also have a txt file I keep some “ideas that might be interesting to work on” and those have around 12 different full ideas of stories I might never write as well.

Upon hitting 27, I went back to writing niche fanfiction I didn't think anyone would want to read, so I published it here. I thought no one would want to read Devil May Cry fanfiction written by a woman who clearly worries more about the internal turmoil of characters rather than if what I'm writing is cute/rom-com like.

I opted for a more adult approach - given Dante and Vergil are adult men with lots of traumas, and I thought "hey, I don't have to write teenage things anymore, I can actually write how two adults would have difficult conversations and relationships in this fucked up world of ours" and that made a HUGE difference to my writing.

and once again thank the gods I found my people who like to read this sort of stuff :)

For quite a while, I was worried if what I was writing was consumable - you know, if the romance was that kind of tacky romantic thing to sweep you of your feet with perfect characters who don't exist, if people only have good times and are always laughing and having fun, if people enjoy touching each other 24/7 and being romantic and all that sugar coated stuff, if what I'm writing is politically correct, if it hasn't any subjects that are triggering or "wrong" in any sort of capacity... And that stiffed me. I lost my will to write and I stopped enjoying it, because I couldn't get my ideas out anymore.

Being quite honest, I'm not a person who had an easy, beautiful life. I had many things happen to me that made me understand Vergil on a soul level (and I think that's why I'm so comfortable writing him, as much as I hate that man), because I'm wary of people and my trust issues make me keep everyone at bay. I can only put my feelings safely out on my writing and my music, and I wasn't being able to.

So I tossed everything out of the window and started writing unhinged stuff. And oh, that made me feel SO good! I always smile a lot when re-reading my Cyberpunk-style story and a character called Abby tattoos on the ass of a corporate man that he is hers bitch, and when a "fallen angel" from my vampiric story smiles creepily and tells everyone she's got the most unhinged vampire on a leash and tells him to just kill everyone in the room for sheer revenge.

Not the best, politically correct stuff. Very wrong, by the way. But I had so much fun writing them, and it has so much character building behind these actions, it makes me feel nice :)

Out of all the 65 WIPs on my computer, I have around 5 that I think are really worth it for a full novel and so. They are:

My Arthurian Legend based novels. I outlined a series, I made character sheets, I planned and planned and planned... Since I'm 15, I've been thinking about it. Someday, who knows, this story will see the light of day.

My Cyberpunk-style novel. Halfway through it and every time I go "oh this is too heavy, I can't write this" I just toss the thought out of the window and go for it. Quite unhinged, very existential and grim, everyone is depressed and traumatized, but I love it :)

The Angel-Vampire stuff. Or, as I call it sometimes, the trip of an angel-like being going through the 7 deadly sins until finally falling for good, all aided by the most unhinged vampire in town. It's more like a villain origin story than anything else.

The Tea Shop thing. Oh, this one has been on my mind since 2018 and only now I've found some plot I like for it. Creation (yes, humanized form of creation) runs a tea shop and everything is fine until a woman enters and she has no Universe inside her eyes - and that is something to be afraid of. Doesn't make sense? Oh, yes, indeed. I'm going crazy with the concepts on this one, thanks to Neil Gaiman and The Sandman.

The rockstar guardian angel one. That's it. It's literally what the premise says: a woman has a dead rockstar as a guardian angel - and they couldn't be more opposite of each other. It doesn't help she's investigating his death and can talk to ghosts.

And my original vampire story, which I just call Nathan and Kathleen. I started this one when I was 16 or 17, so the writing is VERY cringy. I had just seen The Witcher 2 gameplay and, by then, I had never seen anything like it. As it's expected, I'm re-writing the 150 pages of unfinished work I already have.

Will this stop me from writing the other WIPs whenever I want to? Nah. I’ll keep on writing. Even if they are bad or horribly cringy.

Why am I blabbering about ALL this???

Because the most important stuff you can do is write.

You see, I didn't start out writing the way I do today - and I have so many stories, with so many pages, that I like so much, but I read it nowadays and I see I need to re-work them. And that's how you evolve! That's how you get better! By refining your abilities!

This is something I learned with the rockstars I love so much. None of them started out by playing perfectly - most of them had to sit down, listen and learn their instruments on their own. They got a LOT of things wrong to start getting something very simple right. And the more they play, the more they train, the more they refine, the better they become.

The same goes to writing - so, keep on writing! Everything you can, as much as you can, don’t feel bad about starting something new and never finishing another one, and don’t feel like you need to put out a masterpiece every time you sit to write.

Sometimes you just need to… Write.

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