it’s okay to stray from your story. go write that short fic you can’t take your mind off of! give you—and your characters—a break.
you! won’t! always! make! your! word! count! – you don’t need to keep stretching sentences because the scene you finally got right is a hundred words too short. sometimes it’s better that way.
the “rules” and “tips” are just ~guidelines~ (especially for people who like to swear by them) – writing has no laws. especially first drafts. scrap the grammar, scrap the emotional tips, write it because it feels right, not because someone else says so.
every writer procrastinates. it’s not easy being a writer.
take time off for yourself. the only thing harder than writing a story is to keep pushing it when you need a break the most. come back to it later. I promise there will be no dumpster fires when you’re gone.
all writing is “real” writing. I don’t think there’s an explanation here?? fiction writers are writers. nonfiction writers are writers. fanfic writers are writers. (like how all reading is real reading!! in every format, too!)
it doesn’t need to be perfect. honestly, it might never be. but it can be really close to it. if you’re not satisfied with it, move on and come back when you’re ready.
you are just as skilled as any bestselling author. remember that everything you read has been heavily edited by teams of people! their first draft could not even be as good as yours is now.
not using clichés is cliché. you will find one in any story. no one can bring you down for liking a certain trope. just because it’s common doesn’t mean it’s bad!
no writer is fully well-rounded. dialogue will be easier to write for some, and description for others.
and, finally, no one knows what they’re doing. trust me. we’re all stumbling around blind here.
I saw a post talking about how Terry Pratchett only wrote 400 words a day, how that goal helped him write literally dozens of books before he died. So I reduced my own daily word goal. I went down from 1,000 to 200. With that 800-word wall taken down, I’ve been writing more. “I won’t get on tumblr/watch TV/draw/read until I hit my word goal” used to be something I said as self-restraint. And when I inevitably couldn’t cough up four pages in one sitting, I felt like garbage, and the pleasurable hobbies I had planned on felt like I was cheating myself when I just gave up. Now it’s something I say because I just have to finish this scene, just have to round out this conversation, can’t stop now, because I’m enjoying myself, I’m having an amazing time writing. Something that hasn’t been true of my original works since middle school.
And sometimes I think, “Well, two hundred is technically less than four hundred.” And I have to stop myself, because – I am writing half as much as Terry Pratchett. Terry fucking Pratchett, who not only published regularly up until his death, but published books that were consistently good.
And this has also been an immense help as a writer with ADHD, because I don’t feel bad when I take a break from writing – two hundred words works up quick, after all. If I take a break at 150, I have a whole day to write 50 more words, and I’ve rarely written less than 200 words and not felt the need to keep writing because I need to tie up a loose end anyways.
Yes, sometimes, I do not produce a single thing worth keeping in those two hundred words. But it’s much easier to edit two hundred words of bad writing than it is to edit no writing at all.
This is the second time this post passes on my dash and it’s the best advice I ever got. I can’t write consistently in one go, it’s always about 50 words and then I get distracted and just have to do something else for a while. Do the math quickly: trying to write 2000 words a day takes a looooong time that way. So there were many days where I just didn’t even start writing, cause I wouldn’t reach my goal anyways and feel like a failure. Then I stumbled upon this post and I thought: hey, let’s give this a try. And it works! I set my goal between 200-400 words a day and that’s perfectly doable. Some days I get into the flow and I write a whole lot more. On other days, I struggle to get those 200 out but hey, at least I wrote 200 words and reached my goal. Whatever the outcome, t makes me feel good and accomplished.
Writing takes practice, so even if it’s only 100 words a day, it’s better than nothing. If it worked for Terry Pratchett and me, than it can work for you too!
“I think the biggest obstacle for people with their creativity is that they feel they have to sit down and create this finished, polished product. Especially nowadays, it’s so easy to have a library of two thousand CDs, books and records. So many things. We’re used to having all of these finished works of art in our life that seem to arise out of nothing. I think that so much of the creative process is a fragmentary one, and then it’s about just allowing your intuition to put it together for you. It’s funny how you create something and you think you’re going in a million different directions, and then the thing you end up with is the thing that you wanted to create your whole life, but you’re just as surprised by it as anybody else.”
Wow, I’ve never seen it articulated before, but this is so true of me. I mean, I definitely remember spending hundreds of hours on Four Corners, and all the novels I have in my drawer, but with Four Corners in particular I still go ‘Hey, wait, where did that come from??’
AUTHOR | HISTORIAN | ARTIST 