#to help you mitigate your experience on this hellsite

[arcielee]

Hi Archie I like your story but don't use the word okay in them because it's too modern

Okay's etymology begins in the 1600s, stemming from Scottish "och aye" and Irish "ough aye" that translates to a literal "oh yes." It was more utilized after an article that was published in the 1800s as an acronym for "oll korrect" and has since grown in popularity.

I definitely understand having if you have trigger words (I myself have a laundry list) but instead of sending anons, I usually just unfollow:

Or another valid option, instead of sending passive aggressive anons, would be to:

I hope this helps.

[imaginarydragonling]

💞 🕯️ 🧿

💞what's the most important part of a story for you? the plot, the characters, the worldbuilding, the technical stuff (grammar etc), the figurative language

I'm not sure how to call it, but the "history of the characters" or the "character backstory" I guess? It's sort of the reasons and motivations for a character to do certain things or to behave and be a certain way.

It's not something I actively prioritize to do. I just find myself constantly questioning why a character is Like That or trying to answer what a character would do or say next. I think it's just that I like things to Make Sense 😅 and if things Don't Make Sense, I can't move on or put it down on paper. This has the happy effect of many wonderful hours of worldbuilding and imagining backstories in my head, and hopefully a good portrayal of In Character characterization, but it does mean that I find it extremely difficult to write Porn-Without-Plot and crack type fics 😅

🕯️-> 🔥was there a fic that was really hard on you to write, or took you to a place you didn't think it would take you?

A few, but I am going to point to Watch Me Catch the Sky for this ask /)_(\ This is an unfinished (if we're going to be honest here) YOI Fantasy AU fic with dragons and magic and prophecies. I wrote it for a Big Bang (my first big bang in any fandom) and while I am proud that I finished it to where it was, this is maybe the fic I've agonized over and rewritten the most.

To be fair, I think a lot of my feelings about this fic are coloured by my experience with the event community, which was...not great. The YOI fandom was a whole other level of drama tbf, but just how much reality fell short of my expectations was quite the learning experience and really made me think about my writing process and what what works for me personally.

Also, in reference to my answer about my writing style in your previous ask, I was constantly worried that my prose was not flowery enough for high fantasy so that didn't help in terms of stress 🙃

🧿what steps do you take to not take things personally if a fic doesn't do well, or if your writing/posting/sharing experience isn't going how you'd like it to?

Hmm. I respond quite differently to the writing experience not going how I'd like it vs the posting/sharing experience not going how I'd like it.

For the latter, in the best way possible, I'm pretty used to being ignored so not getting enough attention isn't too big of an issue for me?😅 But, some things I've done to mitigate the disappointment of a fic not being received as well as I would like after posting are:

So having fewer hits/kudos/comments on a fic on Ao3 isn't too much of an issue for me anymore (tumblr has trained me well, you're the only one who really interacts with me on this hellsite lol) BSome things I've done to mitigate the disappointment of a fic not doing as well as I hoped after posting are:

Write for the sake of writing, not for the reception. I do gain enjoyment from simply writing like I appreciate the mental break from work/real life; I like the sense of accomplishment I have when I manage to create something and bring it into existence; I like the effort it takes to order my thoughts in order to put them down into words (it makes me feel sane and makes things Make Sense eheheh).

I get feedback while writing and cheerreaders to spur me on! This means that the itch/need to be Validated TM is already partially/mostly scratched, so when I do post, the need is lessened.

Ultimately, I recognize and acknowledge that how other people receive my work is something out of my control. So I try not to overanalyze the stats on my posted fics (I do enough of that for a living and also having zero interaction on a post is nothing new. Tumblr has trained me well lol).

However, when the writing experience doesn't go how I like it, I tend to:

Cry

Scream

Beg my fic to write itself

Complain to friends

Do something mindless like wash the dishes so that I can think through whatever is blocking me from writing

Change up my writing process like write on paper

Just copy over a WIP into a new doc (it just gets me typing and editing and is surprisingly effective in kickstarting a writing session)

Accept that my draft is going to be shit but who cares it's a draft

Make a blood offering to the writing gods

Disclaimer: Some of the things I listed above are jokes and I don't actually do but you can decide for yourself which ones :)

Let’s Get ((REAL)) fic writer asks

[whentherewerebicycles]

Hi! Not the anon from before but I also really appreciate your posts about self-teaching. I'm in uni right now but I feel like I just rush from assignment to assignment, and never really deeply think on a topic. I feel like my schooling did a lot to crush my natural curiosity and ability to really learn, and though I now want to make space in my life for active learning and reflection outside a syllabus, I have no real idea where to start. All your thoughts on this are so helpful!!

omg i swear 2 god i posted a response to this and then ithink tumblr ate it… yet somehow the ask is still in my inbox? LUCKILY, I KNOWALL THIS HELLSITE’S GODDAMN TRICKS so i had copied it over into word beforehitting post. here’s my response – sorry if it posts twice!

that part about schooling crushing people’s naturalcuriosity and ability to learn rings so true. i think it’s partly because thefurther along you get in the educational system, the more pressure there is tobe serious and career-focused. in high school and in college (depending on yourdiscipline), there tend to be fewer and fewer opportunities to engage inexploration and imaginative play, which are so crucial to fostering a lifelonglove of learning. also, as you get older, you are under so many other internaland external pressures. many of the students at my university are working oneor more jobs off campus, helping support family (or trying to avoid being afinancial burden on family), and taking the maximum number of credits eachsemester so they can graduate early and save money on fees. i don’t know whatyour college experience has been like but i feel like college as a socialenvironment can also put a lot of stress on our minds/bodies (bc of drinking,erratic sleep schedules, academic panic, identity crises, etc.). those kinds ofphysical and emotional stresses can dampen our natural curiosity and make usless receptive or less able to fully engage with what we’re being taught.

but! one thing i have learned – or am in the process oflearning – is that our innate human capacity to experience curiosity and wonderin learning is very resilient. humans are naturally curious animals and we’rehardwired to get a lot of pleasure out of learning and exploration. i thinkit’s wholly possible to rekindle those feelings, although it takes patience(and often a change of environment, or at least the mitigation of some of thoseenvironmental stresses) to do so.

one of the most important ways i’ve reconnected with my ownlove of learning is by exploring and reflecting on what learning means to me,or what learning is for for me. i didn’t have any intention of becominga teacher when i started my phd program – i saw it as something i had to do tofund my research. but teaching was a totally transformative experience for me,one that completely altered my relationship to learning. it woke up this newpart of myself, and it helped me realize that while i get a lot of satisfactionout of acquiring knowledge for knowledge’s sake, my learning experiences areimmeasurably richer when i am sharing them with other people, or when i am ableto use my knowledge to create environments and opportunities for people toexplore, imagine, and discover new things. teaching gave me renewed purpose anddirection as a learner – something i had gradually lost through years ofmemorizing seemingly isolated facts for final exams or writing academic termspaper to impress my professors. it also gave me a new framework forsynthesizing my existing interests and growing new interests. 

i am going to put some longer thoughts behind the cut –i don’t know if they will be helpful to you, but they are an example of how iuse reflection and synthesis to foster a more intentional & joyful love oflearning. at the very end i will also include some prompts for how to do asimilar thought/writing exercise for yourself.

let me start by saying: i make a lot of mindmaps, and thatis partly because mindmaps are the closest visual representation i can get tothe way i think about my own mind / my own modes of learning. when i imaginehow i learn, i think of a three-dimensional mindmap of sorts: an intricate,interconnected network of experiences, interests, and areas of knowledge thatbranch out in all directions, with new connections sparking into life all thetime. whenever i learn something new or discover an interest in a new subject,i imagine little tendrils of new thoughts or ideas beginning to unfurl, some ofthem fusing with old ideas and some of them curling outwards in new directions,making the network itself simultaneously denser and more expansive. (i ampretty sure this image is basically just how scientists describe the formationof neural connections in the brain, but it is really useful to me to have somekind of mental picture of what learning looks like for me.)

it is hard to describe how that network expands in writing,because writing flattens it out and imposes a linear order when really it’smore of a dense tangle of thoughts and feelings. but i will try below to zoomin one little section of the network and describe what that unfurling of newtendrils of thought looks like in my own history as a reader/learner.

in undergrad/early grad school i became interested in thesubject of literature and empathy (for a lot of reasons – but we’ll just usethat as a starting point instead of tracing it further back!). this indirectlyfueled an interest in understanding how reading affects social behavior – whichbranched out into an interest in reading as a social practice or as a form ofsocial bonding/connectedness – which connected back to my longstanding interestin fandoms as literary communities and formed a new connection to my growinginterest in classrooms as communities. thinking about practicalchallenges i was encountering in the social space of the classroom sparked aninterest in learning more about exercises that can strengthen community bondsand give people tools to communicate more effectively with each other, whichsparked an interest in social and relationship psychology, which led me to reada lot of books about listening + couples/family counseling (also indirectlyrelated to my own relationship troubles at the time).

that cluster of interests has branched off in a fewdifferent directions, connecting with other ‘nodes’ in the network of myinterests. my interest in how childhood attachments affect our adult attachmentstyles has sparked my current interest in exploring different approaches tohealing trauma. around the same time i became very interested in animalpsychology after adopting a puppy, and i began to see how much of theliterature on dog training was fundamentally concerned with learning, withnonlinguistic forms of communication, and with helping people and animals formsecure attachments – all of which was obviously so interrelated to all of thethings i was learning about trust and communication in the classroom!!!

learning more about how dogs are highly social animals whoare extremely attuned to human emotional/behavioral cues made me think a lotabout how we communicate our emotions with our faces and bodies, oftenunconsciously. i also learned a lot about how dogs’ senses of smell make themmore attuned to physiological changes in humans – so that they pick up on, andrespond to, the stress hormones we secrete when we’re angry or afraid ordistressed about something. and partly because i wanted to create a sense ofsafety and security for this animal in my life, i started to be more mindful ofmy own internal emotional state and would do things like breathe deeply or goon a walk or engage in silly fun play activities to restore my sense ofequilibrium and calm.

all of this has been hugely helpful for teaching – of coursemy (human) students aren’t as attuned to those subtle shifts, but learning howto settle and ground myself (instead of just emotionally reacting ortrying to suppress my negative feelings) has proven so useful in defusingtension in the classroom or in student meetings. it also changed the way iteach, in that i began incorporating movement, social contact, positivereinforcement, deep breathing, and various “settling” exercises into dailylessons, to help students develop their own emotional self-regulation skills. andwhile a lot of that came out of thinking about teaching animals, it is sointerconnected with the reading i’ve been doing about attachment, emotionalequilibrium, trauma-attuned teaching practices, etc. and part of what i’m doingright now is attempting to fuse these interests to another node of the network– specifically, a longstanding interest in how people talk to each other online(esp in leftist/progressive communities) and how those modes of communicationregister/play out in our bodies. those concerns are interwoven with myinterest in how stress affects the body, as well as my more teaching-orientedinterest in the kinds of environments that best facilitate learning.

SORRY-- i am still learning how to write shorter, more to-the-point responses! but isketch all of this out because i think/hope it illustrates several things thati think make for active, engaged, curious learning. namely:

over the years, i’ve sought to actively connect new material i am learning with things i already knew about or understood. i looked for ways to make what i was learning relevant to something i already found relevant, instead of coming to new material cold expecting it to reveal its utility to me.  (books have no inherent or innate utility -- they become useful to us only through the process of engaging with them and taking from them what we can use.)

when i read or learn something new, i read with a sense of purpose -- i am looking for answers to questions or challenges i’m encountering, whether it’s in the classroom or in my online life or in grappling with some aspect of my personal history. your sense of purpose will be unique to you -- not everyone cares about or is invested in teaching, because it may not be relevant in their personal or professional lives. no one can tell you what your sense of purpose is, but you can develop a sense of it by activelyreflecting, by asking yourself and answering over and over again: why do icare about this? how does this fit into my sense of who i am and what i’m doing? what purpose might this serve for me?

through that process of reflection, i look not just for answers, but for new andinteresting questions. as i ask myself: how might all of this stuff i’m     learning about dog training be useful to teaching humans?, i begin to     generate all kinds of questions i hadn’t thought about before, like:    

 how different are humans and dogs in their ability to pick up on nonverbal cues? do humans need to feel secure and safe in the same way that dogs do to learn? how are the ways we create secure learning environments for dogs different from, or similar to, the structures of a traditional classroom? what might “positive reinforcement training” look like in terms of the verbal and written feedback i give to students? how might “shaping” a behavior in a dog be similar to the way students gradually learn to perform increasingly sophisticated versions of a complex skill?  

and so on. those are kind of weird questions to ask, but they’re also super fascinating to me! and kind of silly and fun and provocative to think about! they spark lots of questions that give me lots of further directions to read, and they also bring me a sense of delight – how weird it is to ask these questions! how exciting and fascinating to explore the answers! how fun to think of something that maybe not all that many people have thought about at length before!

even though i’m reading with a sense of purpose, i’m not reading to reach a specific endpoint. i try to adopt an exploratory, curious approach to learning, to see the process of learning (ie the process of growing that network of connections) as open-ended and ongoing. that means that i am always open to following tangents or letting those tendrils of interest unfurl in whatever direction they lead me. i’m not reading to a set program, or trying to achieve mastery of a specific body of knowledge; i’m engaging in what virginia woolf calls “rambling reading,” a serious-minded but imaginative, playful, wandering mode of learning. to some people that kind of learning is not fun! it is stressful! they want a more orderly, organized, internally consistent mode of learning, or they want a mode of learning that is more pragmatic & directly tied to real life. but for me zigzagging between ideas and looking for weird unexpected sparks of connection is what makes learning so exciting and fun. that’s part of why it’s valuable to reflect on how your own brain, or your own preferred mode of learning, works (like i did at the beginning of this long section). knowing that about yourself can help you organize the way you read, so that you can maximize the kind of pleasure/reward you get out of learning. 

i was going to close by giving you some ideas & promptsto jumpstart some of this reflection for yourself, but i feel like i have spentenough time rambling at you (IN MY DEFENSE, YOU DID SAY THOSE FATAL WORDS: “allof your thoughts on this are so helpful”). my love language is talking withpeople about their processes of writing/thinking/learning, so if you havethoughts you’d like to share or if you wanna tell me about some of the thingsyou’re interested in, i am always excited to hear it. i hope that if nothingelse this post has convinced you that ALL TEACHERS SHOULD BE REQUIRED TO RAISEA PUPPY (a pedagogical hill i am willing to die on).