November, November - a dark whisper, strewn in unimaginable gloom.

~ Helaena C Moon

i was going to learn 12 languages, read 250 books and learn 75 new skills this year what happened

wishing it was cold and october and spooky and storming and cozy 🎃🍂

there is no such thing as being "behind in life" but it's okay to recognise that you missed out on some things whilst you were busy surviving

“The great pain of creative work is that once the thing is done, it’s dead to you. I mean, execution is literally like an execution.”

— Austin Kleon

Reminders for the Anxious/Depressed Creatives

• You’re more than what you make.
• Your productivity does not determine your value.
• It’s okay to do nothing sometimes.
• Not everything you do has to result in a product.
• Not everything you make has to be important, significant, or even good.
• You can make things just for yourself.
• You can keep secrets for yourself, whether it’s not posting some of your projects or not sharing your techniques.
• You’re allowed to say no.
• You’re allowed to rest.

2023 Updates:

• Inspiration doesn’t cure burnout. Rest cures burnout.
• People will wait for you; take your time and come back when you are ready.
• It’s okay to scrap projects that no longer excite you, even if other people like them.
• It’s delightful and excellent to be openly proud of your work.
• Afford yourself the same gentleness that you would afford another creative - negative self-talk is counterproductive and frankly cruel.
• Self-indulgent creations are satisfying to others as well; don’t apologize for your own pleasure.
• Actually, don’t apologize for your work at all.

People will wait for

you; take your time and come back

when you are ready.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

“One man’s cringe is another man’s epic” and “a flawed story is still a thousand times better than a story never told” are two pieces of advice that a lot of people aspiring to be writers really need to take to heart. Stop tearing yourself up over getting every little insignificant thing right.

I've noticed that people take writing advice way too literally and then get really mad about it, so here's a quick guide of what the typical "bad' writing advice is actually trying to tell you.

[Note: you don't have to take literally any piece of advice. It's just there for your consideration. If you hate it, leave it and do things the way you want. But the reason all of this advice is regurgitated so often is because it has helped a lot of people, so it's okay if it's not for you, but it may still be life changing for someone else.]

1. Write Every Day

"Write every day" is NOT supposed to be a prescriptivist, unbreakable rule that dictates anyone who doesn't write literally every day isn't a real writer. It's supposed to be a shorthand way of saying "establish a writing routine. Get used to writing at certain times or in certain places or in certain patterns, both so that you can trick yourself into writing even when you don't feel like it by recreating certain conditions, but also because if you only write "when you're in the mood", you may never get around to finishing a project and you likely won't be able to meet publishing deadlines if you decide to pursue publication."

The point of this advice is basically just to get used to seeing writing as part of your daily routine, something that you do regularly. But if you decide you can't write on Tuesdays or weekdays or any day when you have certain other activities, that's literally fine. Just try to make it a habit if you can.

2. Show Don't Tell

"Show don't tell" DOES NOT AND HAS NEVER meant "never state anything plainly and explicitly in the text". Again, "show don't tell" is a shorthand, and its intended message is "things tend to feel a lot more satisfying when your reader is able to come to that conclusion on their own rather than having the information given to them and being told they just have to accept it." It's about giving your reader the pieces to put the puzzle of your book together on their own rather than handing them a finished puzzle and saying "there. take it."

So if you have a character who's very short-tempered, it's typically more satisfying that you "show" them losing their cool a few times so that the reader can draw the conclusion on their own that this character is short-tempered rather than just saying "He was short-tempered". Oftentimes, readers don't want to take what you tell them at face value, so if you just state these sorts of details, readers will push back against that information. People are significantly more likely to believe literally any information they are able to draw conclusions on without being told what to believe, so that's where this advice comes in.

3. In Medias Res

This one is so often misunderstood. "In medias res" or "start in the middle", DOES NOT MEAN to literally start halfway through your plot. It also DOES NOT MEAN that you should start in the middle of an action packed scene. It just means that when you start your story, it should feel like the world and the characters already existed before we started following them. It shouldn't feel like everything was on pause and the world and characters only started acting the moment the story begins.

This is why starting with a character waking up or something similar can feel jarring and slow. We want to feel instantly compelled by your character, and the most efficient way to do that is [typically] to have them already doing something, but that something can be anything from taking a shower to commuting to school to chopping off a dragon head. We just want to feel like the story is already moving by the time we enter.

4. Shitty First Drafts

The idea that you should let your first draft suck and not revise it as you go is a tip presented to combat the struggle a lot of people have with not being able to finish a draft. If you find you've been working on the same first draft for five years and barely gotten anywhere, you might want to try this advice. The point is to just focus on getting to the ending because finishing a draft can give you renewed energy to work on the book and also makes it easier to get feedback from readers and friends.

That said, if your story is flowing fine even as you go back and make edits, then don't worry about this. This is advice specifically designed to target a problem. Likewise, this doesn't mean that you can't clean up typoes when you see them or even make minor edits if you want to. It just means not to let yourself get completely bogged down by making changes that you never move forward.

A "shitty first draft" also doesn't mean that your story has to be completely illegible. It just means that you shouldn't let perfectionism stop you yet. I see a lot of people say "well, I can't keep going until this first part makes sense", and that's totally reasonable! Again, the point of this advice is just to get you out of that rut that keeps you from making progress, but if you spend a couple weeks editing and then move on or you find the book is still making forward strides while you edit, then you're fine. You don't need this.

5. Adverbs

The idea that you "shouldn't use adverbs" DOES NOT MEAN that any time you use an adverb, you're ruining your story. It just means that you shouldn't *rely* on adverbs to carry your story, namely in places where stronger verbs or nouns would do a lot more heavy lifting.

For instance, you can write "she spoke quietly", but generally speaking, that "quietly" there is a lot weaker than just subbing out this clause for "she whispered". You probably have the word "spoke" all over your draft, so subbing out one instance of it here for a stronger verb in place of the same verb + an adverb makes for stronger prose. This doesn't mean that you'll never want to use the phrase "spoke quietly" over the word "whispered". For instance, if I write, "When she finally spoke, she spoke quietly, like that was all the volume her weakened lungs could muster." In this case, I'm using "spoke quietly" specifically *because* it echoes the previous spoke earlier in the sentence, and it evokes a certain level of emotion to have that repetition there. I also used it because she's not actually "whispering", but trying to speak at full volume only to come off sounding quiet.

So when people tell you to cut adverbs, they're saying this because people often use adverbs as a crutch to avoid having to seek out stronger verbs. If you're using your adverbs intentionally, having considered stronger verbs but ultimately deciding that this adverb is what does the job properly, then there's nothing wrong with using them. This is just a trick to help you spot one common weakness in prose that a lot of authors don't even realize they have.

6. Write What You Know

This is potentially the single worst-underestood piece of writing advice. "Write what you know" DOES NOT MEAN to write only what you know or that you have to put all of your life's knowledge on the page. It just means that drawing from your own experiences and already there knowledge will help you craft a better story.

So, for instance, being an eye doctor doesn't mean you have to write a story about an eye doctor. It doesn't even mean you need to write a story that directly deals with any eye knowledge. It just means that there are likely things you've experience as an eye doctor that can help inspire or inform your story. Maybe you remember a patient who always wore the same yellow shoes, and so you include a character who does exactly that. Maybe you spent a lot of hours dealing with insurance so you decide to write about insurance agents. Maybe your practice was located next to a grocery store so you decide to write a zombie apocalypse story that takes place in a location inspired by that shopping center.

The point is that, as people, our lived experiences allow us to relate to other people and craft more believable worlds. So don't limit yourself to your lived or experience or feel obligated to only write the things you've done, but when you find yourself wondering what to write about next or how to give a character more depth or how to describe this random location, pull things from your life and let what you already know bring a certain level of unique you-ness to your writing.

And the MOST important advice I can give you is to stop looking at writing advice as some holy, unbreakable rules passed down by the gods that you cannot ever deviate from. And if a piece of advice sounds totally bonkers, do some research on it. There's a good chance that whoever's passing it to you has no idea what they're talking about. But even if every other writer swears by a certain piece of advice, you absolutely do not need to take it. Try it on if you want, and throw it away if you don't, but stop making yourselves miserable by letting random internet people dictate your life. Most people giving advice on the internet aren't where you want to be anyway, so don't expect them to be able to guide you somewhere they've never been.

Everything's made up, and nothing matters. Write what you want.

This guy knows what he’s talking about. He’s one of the lead writers for Leverage and if you ever watch the series on DVD, do yourself a favor and listen to him talk about how the scripts got written. Some of the advice he has is stuff I use all the time:
1. Don’t introduce an important plot person or thing after the first half of the story.
2. Always tie up loose ends.
3. Introduce important things in the middle of unimportant things.
4. If you have to infodump, find an emotion to tie it to and it will seem less like infodump and more like a motive rant.

Seriously this guy knows how to write.

I used to work for a trade book reviewer where I got paid to review people's books, and one of the rules of that review company is one that I think is just super useful to media analysis as a whole, and that is, we were told never to critique media for what it didn't do but only for what it did.

So, for instance, I couldn't say "this book didn't give its characters strong agency or goals". I instead had to say, "the characters in this book acted in ways that often felt misaligned with their characterization as if they were being pulled by the plot."

I think this is really important because a lot of "critiques" people give, if subverted to address what the book does instead of what it doesn't do, actually read pretty nonsensical. For instance, "none of the characters were unique" becomes "all of the characters read like other characters that exist in other media", which like... okay? That's not really a critique. It's just how fiction works. Or "none of the characters were likeable" becomes "all of the characters, at some point or another, did things that I found disagreeable or annoying" which is literally how every book works?

It also keeps you from holding a book to a standard it never sought to meet. "The world building in this book simply wasn't complex enough" becomes "The world building in this book was very simple", which, yes, good, that can actually be a good thing. Many books aspire to this. It's not actually a negative critique. Or "The stakes weren't very high and the climax didn't really offer any major plot twists or turns" becomes "The stakes were low and and the ending was quite predictable", which, if this is a cute romcom is exactly what I'm looking for.

Not to mention, I think this really helps to deconstruct a lot of the biases we carry into fiction. Characters not having strong agency isn't inherently bad. Characters who react to their surroundings can make a good story, so saying "the characters didn't have enough agency" is kind of weak, but when you flip it to say "the characters acted misaligned from their characterization" we can now see that the *real* problem here isn't that they lacked agency but that this lack of agency is inconsistent with the type of character that they are. a character this strong-willed *should* have more agency even if a weak-willed character might not.

So it's just a really simple way of framing the way I critique books that I think has really helped to show the difference between "this book is bad" and "this book didn't meet my personal preferences", but also, as someone talking about books, I think it helps give other people a clearer idea of what the book actually looks like so they can decide for themselves if it's worth their time.

Update: This is literally just a thought exercise to help you be more intentional with how you critique media. I'm not enforcing this as some divine rule that must be followed any time you have an opinion on fiction, and I'm definitely not saying that you have to structure every single sentence in a review to contain zero negative phrases. I'm just saying that I repurposed a rule we had at that specific reviewer to be a helpful tool to check myself when writing critiques now. If you don't want to use the tool, literally no one (especially not me) can or wants to force you to use it. As with all advice, it is a totally reasonable and normal thing to not have use for every piece of it that exists from random strangers on the internet. Use it to whatever extent it helps you or not at all.

I think this post and advice is more for fanfiction betas or people helping other people edit and refine their stories before publishing.

Posting on this blog because most of the followers on the blog are writers and this may be useful to you if you read/beta for other writers.

Why would you think that? This is perfectly reasonable advice for analyzing a completed work too.

Personal style. When I've read a fic and am filling out the comment box on AO3, I tend to be in the mindset of thanking the author for writing and posting and want to scream about the good bits with them because that's what gave me joy and all those good feelings. Share the love with a fellow fan, y'know? I do not tend to be analytical about what I've just read because I read fanfiction for fun and for leisure and analyzing a piece of writing is work to me.

I am much more in the mindframe of giving critique when I am reviewing a work as a beta. That's why I said this post is more for betas/editors/people in OP's situation where they are being paid to do a book review. But hey, if OP's post helps you leave comments on fanfic then great! Glad it works for you ❤️

If someone says something that you only partially understand:

DON’T ask for clarification with a generic “What?” or “I’m sorry?” (In my experience, people will repeat the phrase the exact same way without helping you to understand).

Example:
Them: “Hey, do you like pahganabasa?”
Autistic Person: “What?”
Them: “Do you like pahganabasa?”
Autistic Person: “I’m sorry, what?”
Them (annoyed): “Do you like pahganabasa?”

Instead, DO repeat the part that you did understand, and substitute a “What?” for the unintelligable part.

Example:
Them: “Hey, do you like pahganabasa?”
Autistic Person: “Do I like what?”
Them: “Pineapple pizza?”
Autistic Person: (Understands the words!)

I’ve also had successes with “I’m sorry, I only heard the first half of that sentence,” or actually verbalizing my interpretation of the part I heard incorrectly as a question: “Pahgana… basa?”.

Sometimes that makes the speaker think that they might be mumbling, or verbalizing in a way that makes them difficult to understand (because there are times it’s really not your brain–it’s their mouth).

This is also a lifesaver if you have Auditory Processing Disorder. It stopped the amount of annoyed sighs because ppl thought I was deliberately ignoring them or them saying the same thing but louder (which does not help when volume isn’t the problem)

April Fool’s Day is in a few days, and I just wanted to make this clear. This blog is safe, and I can promise you no screamers, nothing emotionally abusive, no fake posts, and nothing to intentionally trigger dissociation. You are safe here.