Writing Process - Tumblr Posts
the way im listening to Blue Summer by ATEEZ writing happy death day TT the vibes dont fit at all for torture
How to improve your writing style : a 5-steps guide.
Intro : I love the 5-steps format, don’t mind me. Again, this essay is based on my personal experience.
Read in different genres. Ok, I know you’ve probably heard this advice more than you can count but did you ask yourself why it is so important ? You probably wonder ‘‘How reading some historical fiction will help me writing my sci-fi novel ?’’ For that simple reason my friend : they meet different purposes. You don’t know how to describe a castle ? It’s okay, historical fiction got your back. Because it aims at something more realistic and accurate, it would tend to be more specific and detailed when it comes to describing clothes, furniture, places and so on. Why ? Because, most of the time, THEY ACTUALLY EXISTED. Take a closer look at how it is done and draw your inspiration from it (but please avoid plagiarism it’s bad - and illegal)
Take notes and CLASSIFY them. To make reading somehow useful, you have to actually make it concious, which means you have to write things down to remember them. When I come across a description I like, I tend to takes notes of the figures of speech that are used and class them, so when I have to write a similar scene, I have an idea of what have been already used, and weither or not it achieved its goal. I am NOT talking about COPY another author’s style !!!! It’s about finding inspiration and new approaches. I also tend to take notes of the new words I wish to incoporate into my writing. The thesaurus is my new bestie.
Rewrite the same scene from different POVs. First of all, it’s fun. And it’s a really good way to spot quirky formulations. For instance, if you describe a ship, the captain’s POV should be different from that of a simple observer. The first one would be naming each part princisely whereas the other would only be admiring the surface without knowing anything. If the caption is the same for both POVs, maybe you should consider write your passage again (or have a good reason, like a strong amateurism for the mere observer). It’s go hand in hand with coherence - but it would be an essay for another time (maybe).
Read your text aloud. I put major emphasis on that one because it’s as underated as reading books for various genres. You have no idea how much we DON’T speak the way we write. Even dialogues are crafted in our stories - so make sure to give them proper attention. (i even read my email aloud but-). I KNOW how cringey it might be as I am doing it MYSELF but the benefits are worth the 35-minutes shame I endure from my own mess. Before you can shine, you have to polish (shout out to the one who said that first if it’s not me).
Take a step back. I strongly advice you to let some time pass before reading your text again and profreading it. It will cast a new light upon your work and with fresh eyes you’d be more likely able to spot what needs to be erased or rephrased.
That’s all for me today. Since I would be entering my proofreading phase for my writing contest, the next essay would probably about proofreading (with examples from my own novel ?). Unless someone wants me to write on a specific subject first.
Gentle reminder that I’m still French and not a native so please forgive my dubious grammar and outrageous mispellings.
05.26.21 - 12:01 PM
Please be very proud of me. I am doing the thing I am most afraid of an asking an actual trusted friend to read what I’m working on and give me constructive criticism. I want to get better at taking it and it will help me grow as a writer if I get it, but I need it to come from someone who I trust and who I know wants the best for me.
I just need to scream about it a little bit first.
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Thank you. That is all.
okay. confession. part of the reason i haven't updated anything in so long is because:
a. i had no energy for a while
b. i regained energy, but by that point it had been long enough that i got the itchy feeling of needing to edit/revise all my wips before continuing them. i know that's silly. i don't know if anyone else does that. if i spend too long between updates, i have to go back and edit all the older stuff before i can even think of writing new stuff. in the past, this has been bad as "the gap was too long between chapter 5 and chapter 6, so i have to edit chapters 1-4. oops, the gap was too long between chapters 2 and 3 and now i have to edit 1 and 2 again before i edit 3-6 before i write 7. something is wrong with me!
c. this i think is actual writing advice that i got from Somewhere. or maybe there's another thing wrong with me. either way: the way i edit is by retyping the whole thing and figuring out things i want to change/spotting mistakes as i go, rather than reading it over, where i skim and skip over things.
d. i have generally had less time to write than i did before.
if you've ever gone back and reread a fic i wrote, you might have noticed stuff changing (it's never anything major. usually it's a paragraph or two being cut, added, or replaced. what i'm about to share is probably the biggest edit i've done in a bit.
anyway, rn im rewriting the opening scene of "like the strength of an army", and my weird process wound up with a change that i really do like.
Emily cleared her throat. "Hey, Reid?" "Hm?" He didn't look up from his new file. "Lunch is in twenty." This did get his attention. He raised his head and glanced at his watch, eyebrows shooting up. Hm. Reid usually had a clock running in his head. For him to have lost track of the time... "Oh. Uh, okay." He blinked and went back to the file, apparently not catching the invitation in the statement. Of course. Silly her. Reid would never believe that anyone would like him enough to voluntarily spend time with him. He needed to be smacked in the face with a social cue if he was to notice it. "You. Me. Indian food. Twenty minutes." That should do it.
I realised as I was rewriting that I didn't like the original exchange that was in place of the last two paragraphs. it read as being too long because it had five lines of dialogue, interrupted the flow, and served mostly as a reference to a line from canon i think is funny. that's not a good enough reason to exist at the expense of the pacing! so. that'll change...within the next few days. i'm sorry, i flipflop what i'm revising/working on from day to day. because there's something wrong with me.
maybe feel slightly comforted to know that i'm restraining myself from starting another wip until SOMETHING is marked as complete.
lmao nobody is reading this. i'm yelling into the void about my incredibly strange writing/revising process that makes me take eons to update. thank you for listening, void.
the new wip is not coming together actually it's falling apart BUT it's falling into place
(feat. elusive criminal, two liberal arts professors with questionable backgrounds, common college student problems & more)
Sometimes, even if it's not PERFECT, it's good enough.
Don't back out. You're doin great!
scheduled everything so i wouldn't chicken out and hold the ending off by saying shit like, "actually i gotta rewrite and edit EVERYTHING"
i know i'll chicken out so i'm already deciding for my future self
you can't back out cari
by the time december rolls around you're too busy wrapping up year end reports
sucks to be you YOUR SEPTEMBER 20 SELF HAS MADE THE EXECUTIVE DECISION TO FUCK YOUR FREE WILL!!!!
The holy texts
MASTERPOST (PT. 2)
If you like my blog, buy me a coffee☕ and find me on instagram! 📸
For romance writing prompts, plotting tips & more, check out: MASTERPOST PT. 1
⭐Dialogue
Writing Dialogue 101
Crying-Yelling Dialogue Prompts
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⛰️Words to Use Instead Of...
Synonyms for "Walk"
Synonyms for “feeling like”
Words To Use Instead of "Look"
Words to Use Instead Of...(beautiful, interesting, good, awesome, cute, shy)
Said is dead
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🔠Vocab Lists
Nervous Tension Vocab
Kiss Scene Vocab
Fight Scene Vocab
Haunted House Inspo & Vocab
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👁️🗨️Setting & Description
Common Scenery Description Tips
2012 School Setting Vibes - follower question
Describing Food in Writing
Describing Cuts, Bruises and Scrapes
Using Description and Setting Meaningfully
How Different Types of Death Feel
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🗡️Weapons & Fighting Series:
Writing Swords
Writing knives and daggers
Writing Weapons (3): Staffs, Spears and Polearms
Writing Weapons (4): Clubs, Maces, Axes, Slings and Arrows
Writing Weapons (5): Improvised Weapons
Writing Weapons (6): Magical Weapons and Warfare
Writing Weapons (7): Unarmed Combat
Writing Female Fighters
Writing Male Fighters
Writing Armour
Writing Group Fights
Writing Battles At Sea
Erotic Tension in Fight Scenes
Pacing for Fight Scenes
Writing a Siege Warfare
Different Genres, Different Fight Scenes.
Making Fight Scenes Sound Nicer
Fight Scenes For Disabled Characters
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🌎Worldbuilding
Constructing a Fictional Economy
Homosexuality in Historical Fiction
Writing Nine Circles of Hell
Writing Seven Levels of Heaven
Master List of Superpowers
Magic System Ideas
A Guide to Writing Cozy Fantasy
Dark Fantasy How-To
Dark Fantasy Writing Prompts
Dark, Twisted Fairytale Prompts
Fantasy World Cultural Quirks
Fantasy Nobel Ranks: A List
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🌠Symbolism in Writing
Plant Symbolisms
Weather Symbolisms
Symbols of Death
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🪄Writing Magic
Writing Magicians - the basics
Writing Magic Systems
Magical Training Options for Your Characters
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📋Other!
List of Fantasy Subgenres
Beauty is Terror: A List
The Pirate's Glossary
Storyediting Questions to Ask
Writing Multiple WIPs Simultaneously
Idea Generation Exercises for the Writer
Book Title Ideas
Picking the Right Story For You
What If God Dies in Your Story
International Slang, Slang, Slang!
10 Great Love Opening Lines
How to Insult Like Shakespeare
Serial Killer Escape Manual
Best Picrew Character Generators for Your Characters!
How to Write Faster
sorry I missed STS, but for, uhhh, The TProcess Tuesday: what's your early drafting like? Do you use bullet points and placeholder symbols, or do you try to create a full-fledged draft from the get-go?
No need to apologize for missing STS, getting asks is amazing any day of the week! Thanks for the question, @ashen-crest!
My early drafting process is, well, as crazy and messy as it gets I guess, though it has a few specific stages. Most of the time, before I actually begin the true drafting process, I spend a while just working on a huge braindump document, which is by far the messiest part. There, I write everything that I know is going to happen in the story, while also developing the characters, their backstories, and everything else, even writing some disconnected scenes to get the feel of how they would interact.
Then, I move on to my more-or-less organized basic outline (starting from the premise, working out the main internal and external conflicts, and deciding the romantic relationships) which can sometimes devolve into another braindump document, or turn into a well-organized one. I also make a very vague "three-act outline" which mostly consists of the beginning, middle, and end of the story, but with no more details. When that's ready, I make a succinct chapter-by-chapter outline of the basic events/main events that happen within each main chapter.
I also make some character profiles and character-focused documents along the plotting process, as well as make a lot of mood boards and playlists to get myself inspired and get a view of the overall vibe a certain WIP is going to have.
When all this is done, I start actually drafting, which is something I struggle a lot in the beginning stages due to my unceasing perfectionism, though I've learned to let go and just let the story flow into a first draft, after all, even if it means it has to be rewritten later the first draft is meant just to make the story exist. It's less messy than my plotting process, though sometimes I'll use bullet points to skip a scene when I'm not entirely sure what should happen within it. I don't really use placeholder names for characters, as I usually develop them beforehand - otherwise, I have a hard time envisioning them in the scene - but I do sometimes use placeholder names for settings and objects that need to have cool, catchy names later.
My writing process:
Brush my teeth ➡️ Look in the mirror ➡️ Realize I’m hot and be inspired by my aesthetic ➡️ Spend 2 hours coming up with half a dozen characters for a story that doesn’t have a plot
Novel Moodboards 📚
Allow me to guide you into my character's worlds, one image at a time.
🔖Edge of Being - YA Realistic Fiction, Coming of Age, LGBTQ+ Romance. (Standalone Novella)
🔖Cloaked in Dusk - Fantasy, Romance with LGBTQ+ Rep. (Standalone)
🔖Lies Beyond the Bluff - Urban Fantasy/Paranormal, Mystery, elements of Platonic Romance. (Standalone)
🔖Exiled Sanctum - Japan-inspired Cyberpunk, Sci-Fi Fantasy, Dystopian, LGBTQ+ Romance implied but not the primary focus. (Duology possible)
I hope you enjoyed the peak into my inspirations for them! Let me know of which ones caught your eye the most!
let me cry of happiness because i actually wrote a chapter. fuck you writer block, i'm back again with my fictional babies.
there's nothing better than listening to music, feeling like writing, but just daydreaming.
last night i was thinking about what a hug from my characters would be like. and i think it's a good way to explore them.
Reblog the writers’ fortune cookie for luck!
I just love my ocs relationship
I mean, I'm always down for enemies to lovers but whatever profound hatred and honest disdain they have for each other's very being that will eventually turn to the sweetest, most kind type of love Amalie and Khaos have going on?
That shit is making me go FERAL
This is such a generous and thoughtful answer, and I'm going to be thinking about all of this for a long while yet. Thank you so much!
Your reply about Parmak reminded me that I wanted to say thank you. An interview you recorded a little while back about the Last Best Hope (iirc) provided something of a lightbulb moment for me: you spoke about the fact that you don't visualise things when you write, and in particular how that affects the way you approach descriptive prose. I'd never heard anyone else express that before; it sounded so similar to how I experience writing, and it really helped me to understand a part of my own process I hadn't fully thought about before. Hearing someone whose work I admire articulating something like that was so helpful and freeing, so - thank you! And obviously I'd be absolutely fascinated if you had any other thoughts on non-visual imagination and writing you felt able to share, if I haven't already taken up enough of your day with this essay.
I have absolutely LOADS of thoughts on non-visual imagination. I first started thinking about this when I was writing Tolkien fanfiction. There's a fantastic writer called Dwimordene, who has a very descriptive style (as well as great psychological acuity and is an all round amazing writer). I was blown away by Dwim's writing and how descriptive it was, but Dwim was always saying things like, "I wish I had your pared down style!"
We were discussing our writing processes one time, and Dwim explained how they pictured everything in detail, like a film rolling before them, and I thought, "I don't do that. I don't picture things at all." But whenever I said this to people, they would say, "But your descriptions are so vivid! I could absolutely picture [for example] the room and the shadows on the wall and the curtain blowing about in the breeze!" And I would think, "Well, that's more than I did!"
I knew that I had a knack for voice - that I found it extremely easy to capture not just dialogue between characters, but internal monologue. I found first-person narrative very easy to write. So I started to explore a difference between what I called visual imagination and auditory imagination, and whether some people leaned in one direction, and some in another. I brought it up with my creative writing students, and we discussed things like whether we found description or dialogue more easily; third person or first person and free indirect. And whether it suggested areas in your writing that needed attention to make your writing more effective.
As I explored this more, I discovered a phenomenon called aphantasia, which is a tendency not to able to form visual images in your mind: you don't have a mind's eye. It seems to be closely connected to the functioning of memory. I have an excellent memory for facts, but remember very little of events. My other half frequently has to remind me that, yes, we have been to certain places, and had memorable things happen, etc. etc. (I don't see this as a "condition", by the way; just the way my brain operates. It seems to have worked out broadly okay.)
But what puzzled me was that people were often praising my descriptive ability, and how they could picture the scenes I was writing. Well, partly this is because the nature of TV tie-in writing is that the visual setting is already established, so that work is done for me (no wonder I was drawn to this particular genre!). But then I realised that something else was going on.
What I'm actually very good at doing is remembering (or, perhaps more accurately, imagining) deeply experienced feelings, connecting them to quite general images, and then communicating the combination of that intense feeling and sketched image. What happens next is the alchemy of reading. The reader seems to be able to connect their own feelings, and plug in visuals that they already have. They "see" the place I'm "describing", because they're recalling the emotions they once had in a particular place.
One example of this that people might have read is from my Picard novel The Last Best Hope (this might be the example I used in the podcast?). At the end of the section where Picard evacuates Vani and her community from their planet, we are left with a view out over an emptied landscape:
"The river ran on. The leaves drifted. And, in the valley, the wind chimes sang a song that would never be heard again."
There's practically no description here: the nouns are very concrete and there are no adjectives. It moves from this to something quite abstract. But what I have tried to do is fill those words (primarily through sentence structure) with a feeling of loss and melancholy, and hope that you connect that to an image that is already in your mind.
I'm still exploring the ramifications of this for my own creative practice (I'm very taken by the idea of writing a memoir when I have pretty scant memories). I know it's one reason that I can't listen to music while I write (because writing happens in an auditory space for me), and why I am so stimulated to creativity by visual material (because it's supplying what I can't). Lots going on here, but that's some thoughts on visual and auditory imagination, and how they might relate to creative practice.
I swear this is what the inside of my brain looks like.
i need to show you guys what the crazy difference in branching looks like between these two WIPs.
:')
(for those of you who don't know twine, each colored dot represents a different passage in the story. i use vertical separation for chronological ordering like 1-2-3 and horizonal separation for different branches in the narrative like 4a-4b-4c)
also peep the passage count. i've hardly even started writing TID and it also has less UI/coding passages (the clusters in the top left of each) than AFHMB yet it has. that many overall already. help.
Things I have Googled while writing fiction recently: * History of foot orthotics * When were wrist watches invented * Do lesbians hate beards * Puffin symbolism * Fancy word for sucking up * Boring historical subjects * Slutty dandy fashion * Can crows eat pizza
Working on a fic about G'raha and Alisaie falling in lust with each other after G'raha's return from the First, and am amused by where a chain of logic took me. First, my headcanon is that G'raha is trans, as is Alisaie, because if NO ONE is explicitly gay or trans, then anyone can be. No I will not take questions on this point. Second. Transition would have been pretty easy at the Studium. None of the professors give a fuck about your gender as long as your assignments are on time and your research is sourced correctly. So G'raha transitions quickly and seamlessly after arriving in Sharlyan because less time lost to dysphoria = more time for books.
Third. For most trans mascs, T horniness is A Fucking Thing[1]. Unlike Alisaie, who who sucked lots of dick[2] because she liked it, G'raha would have seen this horniness as an imposition. He transitioned so he'd have more time to read, after all.
Fourth. because he's far from the only nerd whose sexuality is "books" at the Studium, G'raha would have ended up with a circle of acquaintances who were willing to discreetly give each other "relief" in the library so they didn't have to interrupt their research.
CONCLUSION. Because G'raha is both a massive overachiever AND a people-pleaser AND a messy bottom, he got really good at letting people fuck his throat.
- - -
[1] I mean, I'm 95% asexual and the T horniness is hitting HARD, which is why I've spent all my time for the past week thinking about G'raha and Alisaie sucking my WoL's dick.
[2] See previous fic: "Shut up and let me suck your dick, already"