Writing advice
For all this blog is, ostensibly, a writing blog, I haven’t written much about how to actually write. For the most part, this has been by design. I’m not a teacher and I’m not a professional writer. I can write about my own work and my relationship to it, but actually giving advice or pretending I can teach you how to write a novel or a novel-length fanfiction is just… not something I am qualified to do. I often give my own very personalized thoughts and opinions on the process of writing, which you are welcome to apply to whatever part of your creative process makes sense for you.
However, what works for me may not (probably won’t) work for you. In fact, much of what works for me may be considered actively terrible advice, so, buyer beware. Beyond the barest, most generic bones of “how to write good” advice, I’m not convinced writing (a story) is even something that can be taught. Writing isn’t the scientific method. There aren’t exactly best practice guidelines to writing, or, if there are, I certainly don’t follow them. In fact, my best piece of writing advice is not to take anyone else’s.
Here’s some anyway:
Don’t have a life
Sounds like I’m being glib, but I’m not. You need a lot of free time to write. Barring everything else that goes along with it (planning, plotting, editing, character work, world building, etc) the actual physical act of typing out 50k+ words takes time. I don’t care how fast you can type. It still takes time. When you’re writing for fun, that usually means you’re writing around a full time job/class/family/social schedule, whereas the writers whose actual job title is “author” have an 8 hour workday of just writing and the business and busywork that comes along with it. If your job title is not “author”, you can’t compete with that.
That being said, if writing is your hobby, then I encourage you to carve out time for it in your schedule like you would anything else you like to do. Oh, you have pottery on Tuesdays? That’s fine. Still six days in the week. You have bowling practice on Friday evenings? Well, firstly, how does it feel to be the coolest person ever? Secondly, no problem. I bet you still find time during the other five days to do other things you enjoy, even if nothing can compare to the ecstasy of bowling. Just like you find time for pottery and bowling and shopping and watching tv and hiking and whatever else you like to do, I know you can find time to write. In my fandom days, I saw women with careers and partners and kids somehow banging out novel-length fics over the course of a few months. I am not those women. I do not know their secrets. But they did do it.
If you ever look out my output and you’re like, “where does she find the time?” Well, now you know. It’s not like I pluck it out of a hat. It’s more the unintended consequence of being a misanthropic loser with no social obligations.
Also, for what it’s worth, I often go weeks at a time without writing anything more extensive than a grocery list.
Resign yourself to a fandom of one
Get excited about your own work. And I don’t mean in an “if you can’t get excited about it, why should anyone else?” way when you’re trying to market your stuff. I mean while you’re writing whatever you’re writing, you need to be invested in it. This will be a bit different if you write fanfiction or original work, but I am speaking strictly about original work here. While writing your own original work, especially if you’re just some rando like me who has no credibility in the mainstream publishing world, you are on your own, my friend. And it’s hard. Especially coming from fandom world where even if you aren’t a well known fanfiction writer, you still have people around you who are super excited about the IP you’re writing about. There’s some emotional padding there. There’s some amount of guidance and support there, even if it’s all through osmosis.
Writing your own original work is an entirely different beast. No one else cares about what you’re up to, unless you already have a built-in audience. Hell, even that’s not a guarantee— I was relatively well-known in Supernatural fandom, less so in MDZS fandom, and still, the numbers on my ao3 speak for themselves. No one’s on ao3 to read your original lesbian erotica/novel/baring of the soul.
How do you combat this? You gotta get excited. You gotta care about your work. I have no idea what real authors do, but my approach so far has been to “fandomize” my original work by constantly daydreaming about my current project. As I mentioned in the previous point, I don’t have a lot going on in my life, so this is fairly easy. Just like I did in ye olden days in fandom, now when I disappear into my head, it’s to consider and play around with and poke and prod at my original fiction.
When I was writing Don’t Worry About It, that’s what was on my mind, almost all the time. Same with Rat on a Horse. Same with Come this here July. Same with my second novel. Even when what I’m thinking about isn’t “canon” or doesn’t end up being the right fit for the story, immersing/waterboarding myself in the narrative is necessary, for me and my process. Good for my non-existent social life? Not so much. But very good for my productivity.
Avoid distractions
Open your current project and start writing. Doesn’t have to be good. Go on, do it. Just write. Word, Docs, typewriter, notepad, doesn’t matter. And don’t spoil yourself by reading the next line until you’re done.
Are you back? That was probably quick. How long did you last before you were not-writing? How long did it take you to grab your phone, or get up for a drink, or Google something real quick? Or check a social media account? Ten minutes? Five? Half of one? If this sounds like I’m being drill sergeant-y, don’t worry, it’s mostly directed at myself. It is so hard to stay on track. It is so fucking difficult to just sit down and do a task for an extended period of time that requires actual brainpower, or even none at all. The endless scroll made us dumb. Maybe I sound like a boomer, but I sound like a boomer who’s right. I can’t even sit down and watch a movie without distractions unless I’m in a movie theater and it’s forced on me. The thing is, our attention is worth money, and the world around us has figured out how to exploit that attention, and now no one can go thirty seconds without checking the little hand computer in our pocket because we might still have a dollar in there we haven’t yet parted ways with.
Fighting against the distraction impulse is difficult. I lose to it all the time. My writing sessions can be extremely short. I’m talking a few sentences in Word and then I bounce, either because I’m not in the mood and writing is hard (common occurrence) or because I’d rather mouthbreath in front of a screen and scroll short form content for a while, blazing new and awful neural pathways with every flick of my finger (also common).
I’m telling you to fight against it. As in, actively fight against it. If you find yourself reaching for your phone: stop! Better yet, don’t have your phone near you when you write. Make sure you have water, you’ve taken your washroom break, you’re comfortable, the room is the right temperature, and whatever else you need to keep yourself on task. Set a timer if you think it will help. The most important thing is that for whatever duration you set, you’re actually writing/staring at your writing and figuring out what comes next the entire time. There are no 911 Google emergencies when you’re writing, no matter what lies you tell yourself. You can always look it up later, even if it’s “necessary”. Unless you are literally experiencing a medical emergency, or your pet is making those tell-tale hurks over the rug, keep writing-and-nothing-else.
This is going to be uncomfortable, by the way. Forcing yourself to do something—anything, not just writing—without a phone distraction can cause literal physical discomfort, or, heaven help me, half an utterly stultifying second of boredom. At least for me, anyway, the hand motion of going to grab my phone is apparently just imprinted on me now. The non-thinking grab-n-unlock. And yes, thank you so much for asking, I feel dead inside every time I allow myself to acknowledge that it just happened.
Maybe I’m alone in this and my obsessive nature in general primes me to fall prey to this kind of insidious business. On the other hand, we touch our phones over 2500 times a day. And that data is from 2016, which was, christ almighty, nine years ago. So maybe I’m actually exactly correct.
Anyway, I try to use my phone less, and rarely succeed. But when I have been able to shuck it, I do notice an increase in my productivity and enjoyment and focus in almost all areas of my life, including writing.
Writing is hard; suck it up
I said in my previous point that sometimes I don’t write because it’s hard. Guess what? That’s a lame excuse. If it were easy, everyone would do it. If it didn’t require practice and dedication to hone your craft, everyone would be a master wordsmith.
When you’re supposed to be writing and you’re not and your only excuse is, “I don’t want to” that’s a lame excuse. Git gud. Sorry, but if it helps, this point really extra applies to me. If I took all the hours I spend complaining about writing and actually spent that time writing, I’d be like, three books further ahead.
It’s hard to create stories. I probably hate writing as much as I love it. It’s a frustrating, exhausting, emotional process. Unless you are literally an author (and if you are, is your agent accepting new clients?), you don’t need to do it if you don’t love it. Seems obvious, but it can be a surprisingly thin line between “this hobby I love sometimes frustrates me, which makes the completed project all the more rewarding” and “this hobby I think I love is actually just weighing me down and making me miserable”.
If my writing feels too easy, it’s probably because I’m not giving it my all. Or because I’m goofing off, or writing something silly, you know? Which has it’s place, but I am talking about “real” writing in this post. I’m talking about creating a piece of art. It’s like the opposite of what you want in a steak. You need to saw and chew your way through it. It should be hard to swallow. That’s how you know it’s good.
Embrace the puzzle
Though it might not always seem like it when you’re reading a well-constructed story, every narrative is subject to the slop of writing. Moving events around, fixing the timeline, fudging the timeline, ignoring the timeline, tightening the seams, ripping them out, patching plot holes, realizing your climax actually isn’t a climax and you need to come up with a whole other one in its stead, standardizing or un-standardizing tone, chapter/section breaks, adjusting dialogue, switching out personality traits, inconsistent worldbuilding, subplots that don’t go anywhere, unexpected detours, unexpected reactions, unexpected plot developments, unforgivable insults, messed up tenses, not-quite-right word choices, on the nose motifs, motifs that are too subtle, crowbarred-in payoffs, reverse engineered themes, and on, and on, and on…
Writing isn’t just one sentence after another. Being good at writing prose is almost an entirely different skillset than writing a whole lot of sentences that somehow tell a cohesive story. It’s an endless puzzle where you’re making up the picture as you go and also the picture is constantly changing, and so are the size of the pieces. Endlessly customizable, endlessly frustrating, there’s technically an end, but also, in a way, you’re never truly done, because you can always try something a different way, and maybe that will be better, or worse, or kind of the same, and no one else will ever know, but YOU will know, and it matters, and you could fuss over it forever and ever and ever and ever... you get it.
Enjoy the fruits of your labour and embrace the fruitlessness of the writing process. It’s the best and worst kind of puzzle.
Ape
What do you like to read and what do you want to write? Are they the same thing? They aren’t for me. Maybe they are for you. Or not. Step one should be to figure out where you fall on this spectrum.
Step two? Sticky finger time. Take everything you like from wherever you like it and start smashing pieces together until they resemble something you like even more; visual art, TV, books, movies, music, comics, colours, that random picture you saw on Pinterest, the feeling in your chest when you watch clothes sway in the breeze on a clothesline, nonsensical and inane conversations overheard in public, that recurring dream you’ve been having since childhood, the singular way the sunlight slants during mid-morning in autumn…
If you come from a fandom background, this will be easy. Fandom primes you to take disparate elements and stick them together with gum and string. My only addendum is to source inspiration from more than one, uh, source. This is the creative part of writing. This is the fun part. What do you like? What themes are you drawn to? Do you like ghosts and magic and witches or do you like dreary post apocalypses or do you like slice of life real-world romantic comedies? Do you like humour in your prose? Or do your characters do all the heavy lifting in dialogue? Do you like tying everything together with a bow or leaving things open-ended? Do you prefer character-focused or setting-focused or plot-focused narratives? You can like anything, and you can like it in combination with anything else. Unless you are literally copying and pasting another writer’s work, I don’t really think plagiarism is a thing so long as you’re doing it in good faith. Though I’m not a court of law; I am speaking from a philosophical and artistic perspective, not a judge’s.
Steal what you like. You can’t do everything yourself. The good news about building an entirely new world in a story is that you have the one under your feet to inspire you. Don’t be shy. Use it! Observe it! Experience it!
Sensory details
Straying toward actually telling you what to write here, which is not really what this post is about, but bear with me. Grab a piece of your own writing. Grab a piece of writing you really love. Take a gander at a few pages. Note the sensory details on the page. Note the nods to sensory details on the page. Ea de parfume vs eau de toilette. Neither is actually wrong, I’m just using this as an example on the wide spectrum of sensory details that can be incorporated into your work. If you’re not into Ray Bradbury engulfing you in autumnal bliss every paragraph, that’s fine. You don’t have to french kiss fall to invoke the feeling of crunchy leaves underfoot. Often, less is more. Letting a reader’s imagination take center stage is more an art than a science. It’s amazing what you can achieve with the art of ‘just a tad’. A whisper. A kiss. Just a lil-itty-bitty inference.
Sight is easy mode. Touch, a little harder. Smell, hearing, and taste, though? Almost guaranteed you’re not taking advantage of them. You should! Excellent and evocative, all of them, when deployed well. Your reader probably is aware of the scent of freshly cut grass (fun fact: I hate the smell of freshly cut grass, especially when it’s wet), but there are other ways you can suggest it without directly saying it. I mean, you can directly say it, too. My point is, there are many ways to bring sensory details into your prose, and I would encourage exploring them.
Maybe you can even begin your journey in this blog post.
Music
I am not a music person. I like music, and have it playing almost constantly when I’m driving or out for a walk, but I am not a music person. I don’t love music for its musicality like I might love a novel for its prose; I love music for pleasant tunes in my ears, and not much more than that. Which is fine. You can’t love everything. Kind of defeats the purpose.
However, I also strongly associate music with writing. I can’t write with music (with audible lyrics) playing. However, during all the times I am not-writing but still thinking about what I am-writing, mainly driving or walking, you bet I use music to help me focus. I can be an obsessive listener, picking a number of songs to burn through in the course of a few months on repeat and then moving on to the next batch. This kind of perfectly works for my writing process; hard, intense, exhausting, annoying, overbearing, and then… onto the next.
The music doesn’t always have to match the tone of the novel exactly. Sometimes, a bit of dissonance is fun. Sometimes, song lyrics on their own sound like a neural net put them together so it doesn’t much matter either way. But sometimes they fit, too. I’m susceptible to all of these; so long as I have a mental association between a song and a piece of work, when I play that song, I think about that work. A lot of this process is not nose to the grindstone nitty gritty writing work, but I do often have breakthroughs while out on walks, listening to my Don’t Worry About It playlist for the 63rd time that week.
For the curious, some examples of songs I will never be able to associate with anything BUT my own work, through nothing more than demented, obsessive persistence and a Spotify subscription:
Don’t Worry About It: Margaritaville by Jimmy Buffet, Solsbury Hill by Peter Gabriel, Loser by Beck
out in the garden, there’s things you hid away (MDZS fic): Choke by I DON’T KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME, Great Vacation by Dirt Poor Robins
Dean Winchester Beat Sheet (Supernatural fic): All the Pretty Girls by fun., I Want to Break Free by Queen
Come this here July: That’s Life by Frank Sinatra
Novel 2: Beyond the Sea by Bobby Darin, Forgotten Souls by Mother Mother, Build me up Buttercup by The Foundations, Motivation by Sum 41
One caveat here: much like I used to do when I was 12 and “writing a story for real this time” where my “writing session” would end with two sentences in 14 pt and spend the rest of the time determining which font to use, don’t lose the forest for the trees. Don’t spend more time on extras like formatting and playlists than actual writing. In fact, I encourage writing in the most dismally boring formatting you possibly can: body text, size 11 or 12, Times New Roman or Calibri, barely even indicate chapter or section breaks. Let the words speak for themselves first.
Physical movement
Body moving make brain moving. It just do. Note I didn’t say “exercise” (though I’ve had success with that in the past as well) but simply physically moving. Just a walk around the block is good. Headphones on, playlist up, fresh air, juices flowing. You are also moving in a car, so, that counts too, though I do think actually moving your limbs wins out.
I wouldn’t suggest super complex movement if you want to exert your brain power on thinking about your writing— no root-heavy hikes or anything involving counting reps. If I’m too focused on not losing my footing and falling off a cliff, then I’m not thinking about my themes or prose or plotting or how to twist the knife just a little more in my protagonist’s gut to really make an impact.
It’s also just good for you. Clear the cobwebs and get some vitamin D, your brain will literally never regret it. Unless you do end up falling off that cliff.
End
All of these items will take time to action. Some of them will be uncomfortable and annoying and inconvenient to action. I’m still working on all of them myself. It is wild that I can be writing and forcibly have to keep my hands on the keyboard so I don’t zombie out, grab my phone, and start going through the endless open-app-close-app-oh-my-god-existence-is-miserable-please-iphone-spare-a-crumb-of-joy rigmarole.
Working on a project/hobby that takes time and consideration and work without the promise of financial or social or artistic payoff (hey, they can’t all be winners, just look at literally all of my original stories) is… intimidating. And scary. And, if and when your stuff flops, or you flop in the making of it, incredibly defeating. You can always give up. You’re an adult. This is a hobby. No one’s making you do it. Don’t put undue pressure on yourself if writing isn’t for you. But, at the same time, remember that something being difficult is not the same thing as something being the wrong fit for you. Especially if you’re new to it. Especially if you live in the present day, which you do, because you’re reading this, where true craftswomanship is not really a thing anymore. The idea that we have to work at something to get better at it, outside of a gym, maybe, feels like a quaint notion from generations gone by. Why waste your time writing or creating anything when AI can do it for you? Why spend your time hunting down the perfect pair of comfortable shoes that will support you for the next twenty years when you can just buy a new pair for $10 on Temu, plus they have glitter? Why do anything at all, when doing nothing is easy?
Patience, passion, and persistence. Writing takes time. Writing takes care. Writing takes… a lot. And honestly? I’m not even sure it’s always worth it. As they say, the juice isn’t always worth the squeeze.
However, like nothing else in my life, I keep finding my way back to it. Maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome. Maybe it’s ego. Maybe it’s because I have nothing better to do. Actually, yeah, it’s definitely all three of those. But I also love it. It serves as a means of personal expression that I am incapable of achieving via any other avenue. Even when no one reads it or likes it or is moved by it. Even when I make typos and bad storytelling decisions and agents pass on my magnum opus. Even when I put off writing a real novel to write little shitty novellas for four months that don’t so much as move the needle as miss it entirely, with room to spare. Even when no one reads my blog. Even when 99.99% of people who read my work only do so because it’s about the fictional men they want to kiss.
Honestly, sometimes I become overwhelmed by how pitiable and even a bit pathetic my whole deal is. And not in a rude or spiteful way, but simply in the way that what I’ve achieved is so very, very far away from where I’d like to be, and where I’ll likely never be. And maybe those feelings coalesce into the least helpful, most grammatically upsetting, and most true piece of writing advice I can give here: I write anyway. I can’t not. AKA: