#so hopefully this is helpful and not me just repeating platitudes lol

[rollercoasterwords]

hi! no pressure at all, this is just my curiosity getting the best of me, but I was wondering if you’re planning to eventually write more in the atyd another perspective series? It’s feeding my soul hahah. also if you have any writing advice for people just starting out? thank you sm and I absolutely love all your work, the hand that feeds is consuming me atm!

hi thank u so much i'm so glad u enjoyed sirius's pov + that ur enjoying the hand that feeds!! 💖

i do still have a few oneshots that i eventually want to get to in the atyd another perspective series, but i honestly have no idea when i'm going to get around to writing them just bc there are other projects holding my focus rn, so i'm basically just considering it on hold indefinitely :)

and i've already talked a little about writing advice in this post, but i feel like i got very rambly over there so i'm gonna try and be more concise here:

(first - a disclaimer: i’ve never really studied english and am by no means a creative writing expert, so i’m not the best person to give advice about like...technical aspects of writing. the advice that i do have to offer has more to do with mindset!)

1 - no writing is bad writing! writing is just like any other creative pursuit -- playing an instrument, painting, drawing, etc. the more you practice, the better you’ll get. especially if you’re just starting out, try not to beat yourself up if your stories don’t come out the way you want them to. any piece of writing you create -- no matter how cliche or full of grammatical errors or boring or incoherent it might be -- is you practicing + learning + growing as a writer. focus on having fun with the process and try not to beat yourself up if you aren’t reaching, like, ~writing perfection~ (bc perfection in writing doesn’t exist anyway!)

2 - you’re not selling a product, you’re sitting around a campfire. i genuinely feel like that’s the best way i can summarize this point lmao

what i’m trying to say here is that i think it’s really easy to get into this capitalist-brainwashing-induced mindset that anything you create is a product for consumption. this leads to a lot of pressure to not only create at an unsustainably fast pace, but it means that if your audience doesn’t like the product, or if there’s not a large audience coming to consume the product, it’s easy to feel like a failure.

but that’s not what writing is about!! writing is about storytelling and the communities it can build and the joy of imagination!! good writing is messy and stupid and fun and driven by emotion, not capital gain (at least, in my opinion)! if there is even one person who wants to sit around the proverbial campfire with you and listen to your story, that’s so exciting!! if you’re at the campfire by yourself looking up the stars and hanging out with a bunch of funky little characters in your head, that’s so much fun!! this mindset shift has been the most helpful thing for me personally when it comes to writing, because in the past i really felt like writing wasn’t really worth the time unless i was working towards the ultimate goal of publication. now that i’m writing purely for the fun of it, and writing stories that i enjoy, regardless of whether i think they’ll appeal to a broad audience, it’s like the floodgates have been opened and suddenly writing isn’t a chore or a burden but just something that i truly, truly love -- and also something that has helped me plug into a community of other people who write for the joy of writing, and i truly think that is so special and unique in this day and age <3