#sometimes i forget i dont need dialogue. descriptions can do my job for me.

[buwheal]

We can't hear it Spam, but it's real to you. I get auditory hallucinations a lot, and usually what helps me is a distraction. Maybe... name 5 things you can see? Or make paper airplanes with old messages, or draw some pictures. Otherwise, I'm sure someone has a crossword or story they can send you to help you out!

[pynkhues]

I love brio and I've read almost every fic on ao3. I've made little notes here and there of some fics that I would like to write, but I've never wrote anything like fan fiction. I can think up scenes in my head, but I just can't seem to get it out on paper. What are some tips you can give me to help? Because I would really love to write, i just dont even know where to start?

Hi, anon! And how cool! Welcome to the wonderful world of writing. :-) 

My advice on how to start – as wishy-washy as it sounds – is always just to start. Pick up a pen, or open a word document, and just start throwing words together. See what comes out, and try not to edit or self-police as you write, particularly when you’re just starting out. It’ll cripple you creatively – gosh, it still does sometimes for me, and I’ve been writing for over 15 years.

A good way to try this out is to set a timer for fifteen minutes or half an hour, and just free-write – so just write, and don’t let yourself re-read any of it until the timer bings. Give yourself the space to write words – some will be good, a lot probably terrible, but you can always make bad words better. 

You can’t make nothing better. 

And look, I’m going to maintain that that’s the most important piece of advice here, haha, but I get that that sort of advice can also be sometimes frustrating to people who are looking for more structure, so hey!

Here’s some more meat-and-potatoes advice too.

(Put behind a cut to not eat your feeds!)

Plotting a story in three questions

Building a plot really comes down to asking three questions: 

1. What does your character want? 

2. What’s standing in their way stopping them from getting what they want? 

3. How will they overcome this to get what they want? 

It might sound basic, but it forms really the backbone of every story. Take the Harry Potter series for instance, for which these questions are crucial. 

1. What does your character want? 

Harry wants a family.

2. What’s standing in their way stopping them from getting what they want? 

Voldemort is a direct threat to the new family Harry’s found. A threat he feels acutely because Voldemort murdered his original family.

3. How will they overcome this to get what they want? 

Harry will do anything to save this new, found family – the stakes of which escalates with every book. 

Of course, stories are more than this too – they’re themes and settings and arcs and dialogue, and character motivation tangles up in those things which means that the story world appears to expand well beyond those three questions I listed above. After all, Voldemort’s never just a threat to Harry’s family, he is for the whole world, right? But the thing is the threat to the world is never what drives Harry through the story, and therefore isn’t what drives the story overall. 

The plot is always the threat to Hogwarts and the life and family Harry’s found there.

Good Girls is exactly the same. 

1. What does your character want?

Beth, Ruby and Annie want to provide for their children. 

2. What’s standing in their way stopping them from getting what they want?

All three of them are in dire financial situations because Dean’s lost everything, Sara needs a transplant and expensive medication, and Annie can’t pay for her son’s needs. 

3. How will they overcome this to get what they want?

They’re going to get into crime and make enough money to save themselves and their children. 

The answers to these questions can change and evolve too – after all, the ‘what’ has certainly grown more complicated for Beth, Ruby and Annie across the show’s run, but those changes should evolve out of plot progression aka cause and effect. 

Beth’s original want was for financial stability for her children, and she still wants that, but she wants more than that now too – something that has been explored through the instability of her circumstances, and her growing attraction to power after having lived a powerless life.

So let’s talk about cause and effect a little more.

Cause and Effect

With those questions in mind, it’s important to remember that the way a story takes shape should be a sort of domino effect of cause and effect. Scenes aren’t placed together in a haphazard order. They’re not stacked on top of each other like three children in a trenchcoat! One scene should always cause the next, and that scene should lead onto the next, and so on, and so on. 

The enemy of good storytelling is ‘and then’. 

So when you write a scene, don’t think ‘now what happens?’

Look at what you’ve written and say ‘okay, what does what I’ve written here mean? What is the fallout of this? What is going to happen to these characters and this story now given what I’ve just written?’

This is also a good way to reverse engineer a story (and something I often do!) If you have a scene in your head, but you know it’s a middle scene, or an ending to something, ask yourself what happened that made that scene happen. 

In one of my most recent standalone fics, Drive You Mad (wear me out), I actually started with two scenes in my head – one where Beth and Rio were soaking wet for a mystery reason I didn’t know yet, haha, and the fact that it lead to them having sex in his car, and I had a vague idea that I wanted it to be  related to a crime job. 

Similarly with the pornstar!AU! I just wanted Beth and Rio to make a porno, haha, but I wanted it to feel like a genuine choice for these characters, so I needed to think of authentic reasons that would put them in that room, opposite each other, about to throw it all to the wind and bone on camera. 

I reverse engineered  both these stories by just asking myself ‘but why did this happen?’ What choices did these characters make to get them here? How did Beth and Rio end up soaking wet? Why would they have sex in that car? What would get somebody like Beth to shoot porn? What would make somebody like Beth connect emotionally with somebody like Rio in this AU (and y’know what? It was the exact same thing as in canon – a combination of parenthood and validation).

In other words, your story should never say this happened and then this happened, it should always say this happened and so this happened. 

Agency

Every character in your story should make choices. Good choices, bad choices, choices they think are not choices at all (because never forget - you always choose to do nothing. Nothing is never thrust upon you). 

Your characters are what drive your story forwards, and they drive your story forwards by making choices, not by standing still and waiting for the story to come to them. And look, it’s great if they make the right one, but it’s so much more fun (and opens up so many and so possibilities!) when they make the wrong one.

Grounding Your Story

Grounding stories in a place or a space is something I think a lot of new and emerging writers struggle with, and it was something I was really, really bad at when I started writing and worked really hard to get better at. Characters should never be interacting in vacuums. We don’t exist in them after all. 

Stories come alive when characters are engaging with spaces, or when those spaces are utilised effectively. Horror does this especially well, but a lot of other stories do too (again, Harry Potter is actually a great example of this!)

This is something Good Girls pretty consistently does fabulously too – think of any of their heists for starters, but particularly the one in 1.01. Settings can open up and close and add conflict and provide release. Use them! Think about them! I can guarantee you’ll become a better writer for it.

When I was really struggling with this area, I got some incredible advice that I still use to this day from Kim Wilkins, a gothic fantasy and horror author from my home town. She told me that when I start writing a new scene, go through the five senses - what can your character see, smell, taste, touch, hear. Write all of it. Then pick the best two descriptions, and dump the rest. 

Then think about the function of those descriptions. Okay, so the character’s in a park and can hear the metal whine of a rusty swingset. Does the chain link snap? Harming their child? Or maybe they can hear thunder in the distance while they’ve been trying to have a romantic anniversary picnic! Do they make it to the car in time? How does that affect their dynamic? Does it lead to a passionate make out in the rain? Or a furious fight in it? (Notice how this is all cause and effect too?)

These descriptions don’t always have to lead to a plot point – sometimes they can be reflective of an emotional state – an oncoming storm can foreshadow an oncoming fight between characters as much as it can lead to those characters getting caught in it after all – and sometimes it can just be for atmosphere too! 

All of this serves though to build your story into something evocative and grounded for the reader, plus it can be really fun to play around with. 

Love it or have fun! Try for both, but never have neither. 

Sometimes writing is a slog. 

Sometimes you sit down for a session and want to pluck your own eyelashes out because the story’s not working or the words aren’t flowing or you know your characterisation is falling flat, but there’s a difference between not enjoying a writing session, and not enjoying writing overall.

Writing can be really hard work sometimes, and when it is, you either need to love it, and love the story you’re trying to tell, or you need to move on to something else. 

That can be your silly, fun crack fic that evades all logic and you just straight up enjoy writing, or it can be something that isn’t writing at all. 

You’ve got to make it work for you – and if you don’t love it, and you aren’t having fun? It’s not worth it. 

You can take a break and come back to it, or you can take a break and never come back to it. Just do what’s right for you. 

Don’t get turned off by The Gap

Ira Glass describes this perfectly in this interview, and it’s something I always recommend to people starting out. Writing is, like practically everything else, a trade. It’s something you grow and develop and should never stop growing and developing and learning about. 

Writing though I think is also something that’s really easy to give up when you feel like you aren’t immediately good at it, and, well - - 

I think he says it better than I ever could: