the thing is your writing session might not be fun or easy or fruitful, but it is always successful. every time you write, you are making progress. you’re thinking about your story, you’re thinking about your writing, and most importantly: you’re writing. just remember that, even if you don’t reach your goals, your writing session will be a success.
Tag: writing tips
If you are in the middle of writing your first shitty draft and you’re feeling awful about it, like, consumed with waves of fear and self-doubt and questioning everything, DON’T stop to pick it apart. Just keep moving. Let the critical voices in your head babble on and just keep moving, one foot in front of the other, one word in front of the other, until the end. If you never finish your shitty first draft, you won’t have anything to work with and make better.
Lauren Sapala
Writing With Mental Illness: How to Keep Creativity Up During Low Times
About a week ago, I got this ask about how to stay creative when you have mental illness and fall into periods of low energy. I gave a short answer then, but some time has passed and I wanted to dedicate some more attention to the issue.
If you’ve followed my blog for a while, you’ll know I have depression and anxiety. I’ve gotten a lot better and both are at a manageable state now, but I still suffer from periods of low energy…but I’m also a writer, so how does that work out?
These are some of the tips and tricks that work for me. They might not work for you. That’s okay. Everyone’s mental health and personal work style are different.
1. Take Some Time Off
I know. It sounds counterproductive to take time off from writing, but really, you call off work/school when you’re sick. Writing is the one job you have where you are self-employed and your own boss. If your brain is too sick one day to get any writing done, just take the day off. You’re allowed to do that.
That “real writers write everyday” mantra is a lie. Everyone takes time off. If you don’t feel well, the quality of your writing isn’t going to be to your regular standard and that might end up making you feel worse. Not to mention that trying to force an already exhausted brain to do more work when you can be giving it a break could just make matters worse. So take a deep breath and walk away for a little bit.
2. Are You Taking Care Of Yourself?
I know this is a ridiculous question, but honestly, have you been taking care of yourself? Are you making sure to take your medicines and vitamins? Going to therapy? Are you getting enough sleep? Eating well? Exercising? Look at some of the things in your life from the past week and see if maybe something small like that could be negatively affecting you now. If you realize that maybe you’ve been eating too much junk food or going to bed at irregular hours, try eating in and regulating your sleep schedule. I know that sounds like lame NT advice, but small things like that can really trigger mental health episodes. Take care of yourself before your OCs, yeah?
3. Work On Something Else
Maybe your main WIP is just too much right now. Find something to distract yourself with. Maybe you want to do more art instead of writing. Maybe you want to try a silly AU or do some prompts. Do you like to write music? Go write some music. Play with your cat. Build a birdhouse. Bake some delicious cookies. Just take a step away and do something that makes you happy. You can return to your WIP once you’ve given your brain a little break.
4. Ease Back Into It
Maybe you’ve done everything above already and you feel better but you’ve gotten out of the habit of writing and you’re frustrated. Don’t be. You can’t go from writing 2k words a day to zero and back to 2k. That’s like a marathon runner taking a month off from running and trying to run a marathon again. It won’t work. You have to ease back into it. So start off with a few hundred words and work your way back up. I know it’s annoying not to be at where you before you lost your energy, but you’ll build yourself up faster this way and you won’t feel as frustrated with yourself.
I hope some of this helped. If there are points you want clarified or if you have tricks that work for you, send me an ask! Take care of yourselves, writeblr.
Saying it louder for the people too broken at the moment to process.
This needs to be framed on my wall!
Some real advice. Thanks for letting me know I’m on the right track, Neil!
look…………….. write as much shitty fic as you want. nobody can stop you. you’re learning constantly and it’s better to write hackneyed implausible ridiculousness than it is to not write at all out of fear of fucking up. you’re good
There was an experiment a professor did. I think it was pottery students. He did an experiment of “quality” vs “quantity”. One half of the class he told; you have to make as many pots as possible. Good pots, bad pots, shitty pots, whatever. The more pots you make, the higher your grade.
The other half of the class were told, “you can make only one pot”. But that pot had to be perfect. The quality had to be high; the highest quality pot would get the best mark.
But when it came to the grading, they noticed something weird.
All the best quality pots were in the ‘quantity’ group.
The guys who were literally churning out pots, trying to make as many as possible, not concentrating on the quality. But every pot they made, made them better at making pots. By the end of the month (I think it was a month) – they had some pretty awesome pots coming out, because they enjoying finding all the ways and all the things they could do to make all their pots. Where as the ‘quality’ guys had spent their time reading up on pots, and technique, and researching and planning; which was all great but they’d had no further practice at actually making pots.
The best way to get really good at something, the only way to be really good at something, is to make lots of shitty attempts at that thing several of which will fail. If all you create are perfect things then you won’t improve, because how can you improve on perfect?
tl:dr MAKE YOUR SHITTY POTS.
Attention: Writers who hate themselves and their writing
For a long time, I wrote like I was pulling a con. If I spun my story just right, my readers would never have to know how dumb and shitty I was. I would never have to know how dumb and shitty I was.
You may think you-as-you-are has no business writing. You might prefer never to write again than to let you-as-you-are write anything with your name on it. But you have to. I rarely say you “have to” do anything on this blog, but I am telling you now: you cannot move forward if you do not let that ugly, pathetic, shameful, secret version of yourself out onto the page. You cannot write anything good if you hide the person you dread you are.
You’ve gotta leave the house without your intellectual makeup on. Otherwise, you’ll believe forever that you’re hideous without it.
I can hear you objecting: you are special, which is to say especially bad, and if I knew you, the real you, I’d admit that yes, you should hide the real you. Well, guess what – your fear and self-disgust and belief that the real you has nothing to offer is not unique. Thousands, millions have preceded you, and all of them probably thought their awfulness was unique in the history of mankind too. If you’d be willing to tell them it’s okay to write without changing who they are, then you have to let yourself do the same.
I’m telling you that now. It’s okay. And it’s necessary if you’re going to write at all, to say nothing of writing well. This is the paradox: to write well, you have to hand the reins over to the version of yourself you believe is least capable of writing well.
It’s wild, actually. When you take off the mask, your writing gets more powerful. Less pretty, maybe, but more real. We are all worms crawling on the surface of a rock. When you let yourself speak as the worm, truth comes out. Writing is like love: you can’t do it if you pretend to be someone else. Even if you believe the real you is unlovable.
This isn’t about “write a shitty first draft and improve it later.” This is about letting go of shame. Do you sit in front of your computer, afraid to touch the keyboard lest the worst shit imaginable spill out and the whole world (and you) learn how stupid and talentless you are? Good. Let that shit out. Let the worst-case scenario come to pass. That is the most heroic thing you can do. If you do this – if you write the boring, stupid, hacky shit you’ve always feared you’d write – you’ve achieved something. If you can’t bring yourself to do it, tell yourself, “Well, Wrex told me to do it, so I have to.” You have my permission – nay, my command – to write the bad story you secretly believe is the only story you can write.
But Wrex, you say, I’m already doing that. Yeah, maybe, but right now, you think that’s a bad thing. You’re not doing it intentionally, and you’re doing it despite tremendous effort to do otherwise. I’m telling you to do it intentionally and to celebrate it. To be proud of it. To do it without shame. Don’t labor, don’t try, don’t think, just let that uncensored filth spill out. Then you will know that the worst can happen and you’ll still be alive.
No matter how much you may hate what you wrote, you have acted with incredible dignity simply by being honest with yourself. Very few writers can say that – writers you might think are really talented. Sure, they can write words that entertain and dazzle people, but if you have faced what you hated most about yourself and let it out into the light, you have done something they were too afraid to do. And if you gave these allegedly shit-smeared pages to me, I could point out the value in what just looks like garbage to you.
Do it. Whatever happens, it’ll be better than where you’re at now.
Hi, I wrote an angsty story lately and received a comment saying that they cried reading it. I know it was meant as a compliment (that they felt for the characters and the story) but i still feel bad. Like, I didn’t write the story to make someone to have a bad day. :,( Now I’m kind of worried about writing angst in the future. Sorry about my rambling and thanks for running this blog. I’ve been following it for a while and find it very helpful! Thanks
What makes you think that crying means they had a bad day? If a fic made me cry that would be an extremely good day for me.
Don’t worry about moving people. That’s literally the reason that people read angst. They want to be moved, and if it’s to tears, more’s the better.
And so glad you’re finding the blog helpful! Thank you.
–Mod M
A while ago I had an idea for a fic I wanted to write. I asked on Tumblr if anyone would be interested in the idea and if I should write it. I got a big response of very excited yes from a lot of people so I set out to write it. It’s a big story and it’s taken a lot of planning and time from me. I would post updates and everyone was super excited. I have finally started posting and the response is almost nothing now. I don’t understand and now I don’t really want to write it. What do I do?
I think the thing is—especially with long fics—people want to see it build a little before they jump on the bandwagon. They want to see the rise of the story and also see that it will be updated regularly.
Once they see that stuff happening, readers will get on board. Some of my long fics honestly didn’t get much in the way of feedback until ten or more chapters in.
As a reader, I can say that I’ve gotten really excited about fics before that sort of came to nothing when the authors stopped posting fairly early on. It’s an emotional investment with no payoff and it kinda hurts. So I, and I think a lot of readers, tend to be more cautious starting out reading long fics.
It’s really up to you if you can tough out that starting-up phase, but if you do, I feel certain that you’ll start to get more and more response as you go on. It’s just getting past that initial trust-barrier with readers. They want to get excited about your fic, but they’ve been burned so many times before.
If you write it, they will come. Keep writing, anon.
–Mod M
def agree! with the caveat that people express interest because it’s easy – a like, a reblog, an ask – but reading is a commitment, so you’ll only ever get a small portion of the people who express interest actually follow through. this is why i’ve stopped asking if people will be interested in xyz because the interest received never matches the interest shown.
that said, here are some ways to build an audience with a WIP:
- write as much of the fic as you can before you start posting. like get to the point where you are ready to burst if you don’t start posting.
- keep a consistent posting schedule that is beyond manageable for you and won’t stress you out.
- get a beta; make sure your writing is up to snuff.
- make a fic playlist and rebloggable aesthetic/photoset.
- play ask games, engage your readers.
- reply to your comments so your readers know you appreciate their engagement, which in turn encourages more engagement.
- keep in mind that most readers want to wait until a fic is finished and then binge it, so when you’re done posting, you’ll get a surge of traffic from the people who are waiting for it to be finished. be prepared for that surge, make sure at the end of the fic you encourage your readers to reblog your fic post, so more people will read it.
i get that the point of writing a WIP is to feel like you’re part of something, but it takes a long time to build that trust with readers. the more engaged your readers are, the more abandoned WIPs tend to hurt. once your audience trusts that you’re a writer who follows through, who posts consistently (not necessarily quickly), and who appreciates engagement and feedback, then you’ll have a steady and dedicated audience.
it really, really takes some work not only to build an audience in fandom but assure that audience you respect and appreciate their time and attention, as well as ensure that you are an author who is worth that time and attention. fic is free and near-infinite; sometimes it takes a lot to stand out.
Yes to all the above. As a reader, I’ve been burned by longfics in the past, where I’ve started reading, but the author abandoned it before the story really went anywhere, or it started with a really cool premise but the author ditched it & took the story in a different direction that I found way less interesting (obviously it’s the writer’s prerogative here, but I’d be lying if I said I’d never been disappointed in how a story has gone). It can be hard to judge in the first few chapters how things are gonna go & whether it’s a story you’re into, & people like to wait & see.
I’m actually in this postion at the moment, posting a long & much-stressed-over fic. The first few chapters got relatively few comments, & those were mostly ‘Seems cool – looking forward to more!’ cautious responses (not slamming those people though – just knowing anyone was reading & enjoying it was awesome enough & I squeed over every one!). But after the first few chapters, as I introduced more characters & revealed more of the story, I started getting more comments, with people discussing aspects of the story itself, like character portrayals, lines they liked, & speculation on where things might go next based on what had happened so far.
Keep going, Anon! Your readers will appreciate it & tell you so.
Making your angst hurt: the power of lighthearted scenes.
I’m incredibly disappointed with the trend in stories (especially ‘edgy’ YA novels) to bombard the reader with traumatic situations, angry characters, and relationship drama without ever first giving them a reason to root for a better future. As a reader…
- I might care that the main siblings are fighting if they had first been shown to have at least one happy, healthy conversation.
- I might cry and rage with the protagonist if I knew they actually had the capacity to laugh and smile and be happy.
- I might be hit by heavy and dark situations if there was some notion that it was possible for this world to have light and hope and joy to begin with.
Writers seem to forget that their reader’s eyes adjust to the dark. If you want to give your reader a truly bleak situation in a continually dim setting, you have to put them in pitch blackness. But if you just shine a light first, the sudden change makes the contrast appear substantial.
Show your readers what light means to your character before taking it away. Let the reader bond with the characters in their happy moments before (and in between) tearing them apart. Give readers a future to root for by putting sparks of that future into the past and the present. Make your character’s tears and anger mean something.
Not only will this give your dark and emotional scenes more impact, but it says something that we as humans desperately, desperately need to hear.
Books with light amidst the darkness tell us that while things are hard and hurt, that we’re still allowed to breathe and hope and live and even laugh within the darkness.
We as humans need to hear this more often, because acting it out is the only way we stop from suffocating long enough to make a difference.
So write angst, and darkness, and gritty, painful stories, full of treacherous morally grey characters if you want to. But don’t forget to turn the light on occasionally.
The Last Good Bar 
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