One Thing Ive Learned About Writing Is Give Everything A Face. Its No Good To Write Passively That The

One thing I’ve learned about writing is ”give everything a face”. It’s no good to write passively that the nobility fled the city or that the toxic marshes were poisoning the animals beyond any ability to function. Make a protagonist see how a desperate woman in torn silks climbs onto a carriage and speeds off, or a two-headed deer wanders right into the camp and into the fire. Don’t just have an ambiguous flock of all-controlling oligarchy, name one or two representatives of it, and illustrate just how vile and greedy they are as people.

it’s bad to have characters who serve no purpose in the story, but giving something a face is a perfectly valid purpose.

Novel Writing Tools: The Draft Notebook

The best advice I can give for finishing a first draft is this: find the motivation to keep moving forward. Three easy ways to this are to give yourself a deadline, keep track of your daily word count, and save the editing for later. This means that the most useful tool you can arm yourself with to get through a first draft is a simple draft notebook. 

There are only two components to a draft notebook: the productivity tracker and the idea diary. 

The Productivity Tracker

In the first two page spread of your notebook, sketch a 4-week calendar. Depending on your personal deadline, you may want to use the next few spreads for additional months. A three-month timeline is a wonderful goal, if you have no NaNoWriMo plans. 

Give yourself a daily word count goal, based on the estimated length of your novel and your deadline. You can also mark out days where you know you won’t be writing, and adjust your daily wc goal accordingly. (Have super busy Saturdays? Plan on taking those days off from the start.)  

Write your daily goal somewhere to the side of your calendar, just so you have it. 

Make tracking your daily goals fun. 

Use stars to log your writing progress. (ex. One star equals 500 words, with a daily goal of 1500 words.) 

Fill in the squares of days you’ve reached your goal with pretty colors. 

Put scratch and sniff stickers on the days you’ve reached your goal. Whatever works for you. 

You can also use a bar-graph tracker, using your total word goal as the y-axis, the date as the x-axis, and your daily goal as a line to hit each day. 

If you want advice for sketching out your own calendar, check out bullet journal inspiration Tumblrs or scour Pinterest. Bullet journalists have that on a lock. 

The Idea Diary 

On the first blank page after your productivity tracker, write the date and everything you know about your new novel. This may be a four-page synopsis or a character’s name and age.

As you draft, update this section like a diary. Each day, write every new thing you discover about the story, everything you’re changing, you’re removing, you’re pondering. Write down all of the ideas that aren’t going into your draft that day. Keep it with you so you can jot down an idea that strikes you while you’re falling asleep at 1am or in the middle of cooking dinner. 

Use this to keep yourself from returning to an old chapter and editing everything. Let it give you solace that all of your brilliant ideas for the second draft are safely recorded. 

What happens once you finish the first draft?

Once you’re ready to start thinking about your next draft, you can read your diary section, and use all of those ideas to start planning your second draft. 

While working on your second draft, you can even keep adding to your notebook. Make a little “Draft Two” cover page, sketch a new calendar, and start a new diary section. 

The diary section will probably remain the same, with notes for future changes, except you might want to use your new first entry for a synopses, and a few main character profiles. The productivity tracker can be updated with goals for pages/chapters revised instead of words. 

If you need additional help making your way through a first draft, take a look at my other posts:

What to Do When You Can’t Write

How to Finish a Draft

options for when you no longer like a fic you wrote

Orphan it. By adding it to the orphan_account on AO3, you remove your name from the fic and from the comments (if you replied to them). The work is removed from your account and from your stats. You will not see future stats or comments or kudos on that work unless you click into the fic yourself to investigate. You can no longer edit or delete the work after you orphan it. You can not get the work back.

Add the fic to an anonymous collection. This will remove your username from the story and from the comments if you choose to reply, but you will retain ownership of the work and still be able to edit/delete/orphan it in future. You can also regain ownership at any time by removing it from the anonymous collection. 

Add a disclaimer or other author’s note to the top of the story explaining how you feel, or what’s changed since you wrote the fic. 

Edit the fic. Either make changes to the existing story on AO3 or create a new story and include something in the summary or an author’s note that says you are rewriting your own work. You can even link the two together in a series or with the inspired by function. 

Delete the fic. While this will sadden readers for whom it might be a favourite story, this is always an option. Your Archive is your own, and you can control which of your works remain on the internet.

Remember that you wrote that fic at a time in your life when you felt a certain way or had a certain skill level. There’s no shame in that. You had to start somewhere to get where you are today. ❤

Horse terms for writers

Gelding - An adult male horse (3 years or older) that’s been neutered.

Stallion - An adult male horse (3 years or older) that is not neutered.

Mare - An adult female horse (3 years or older), used interchangeable for both fixed and unfixed female horses.

Pony - A full grown horse under 14.2 hands.

Foal - A newborn horse.

Weanling - A colt or filly that is 6-12 months.

Yearling - A horse between 1-2 years old.

Colt - A male horse under 3 years old.

Filly - A female horse under 3 years old.

Hand - Measurement of how tall a horse is, one hand = four inches.

Tack - Riding equipment.

Halter - Headgear you put on a horse to lead them, can be made of leather or fabric. 

Gait - Speeds a horse can got.

Trot - Gait faster than a walk but slower than a canter.

Canter - Gait faster than a trot but slower than a gallop.

Gallop - Faster than a canter, basically the highest speed a horse can go.

Lunging - Exercising a horse by walking them in a circle, usually done with a halter and lunge rope.

Lunge Rope - A long rein/rope used when lunging a horse, typically 20-40 ft long. 

Colic - Pain in a horse’s stomach ranging from mild to severe, can be fetal if not treated.

Cribbing/Windsucking - Biting onto a fence post and sucking in air, horses do this when they’re extremely bored.

Farrier - Someone who dresses and trims a horse’s hooves.

Bridle - Headgear used to control and maneuver a horse.

Bit - The metal mouthpiece of the bridle.

Frog - The triangular part of the inside of the hoof.

Rain rot - A fungal infection horses can get on their backs, easily treatable with antibiotics.

Mucking - Cleaning out a stall.

Hot blooded - Extremely energetic, excitable horses. Hot blooded horses are used for more speed driven tasks.

Cold blooded - Very low temperament, very relaxed horses. Cold blooded horses are used for more labor driven tasks. 

Draft - Large, working horses.

Feathers - The long, fuzzy fur on a horse’s hooves, usually found in Draft breeds.

Sometimes you don’t make art that changes the world. 

Sometimes you make art that just makes someone’s shitty day a little bit easier to bear. 

And that? 

That’s damn good too.

Words