Dream to write, Write your dreams

Another guy trying to get his name and work drafts somewhere. Don't expect a lot of posts, but I'll come up with something eventually.

[thepeacefulgarden]

[romanyeva]

Just had to talk a friend down from a two cakes crisis. Her cakes - meaning her fic - are absolutely fine, but she felt a little down and checked out the rest of the dessert table. She got caught up in the whole comparison thing. "Oh man, this fic is way better than mine 😞."

And hoo boy, have I ever been there. When I was writing prolifically, I just wouldn't read. I couldn't because I knew I'd go into that fic measuring mindset and declare myself the loser, have to step away from the keyboard and stare out the window a while. And if I had an exchange deadline? Absolute worst timing.

Not everyone goes through that of course, but it's more common than you think, even with so-called established writers. I've seen people delete wips or even their whole account over that burden of doubt. So here are some possible tips to crawl out from under that burden:

Table it. You're done for the day. You've been staring at that cursor for too long. You have no perspective on your work anymore. Go do something else: play with your dog/cat/fish, go for a walk, eat something, go to bed if it's late.

Re-engage with the source material. Watch an episode, read a chapter, listen to that podcast, whatever it is. Find that voice in your head that sings in harmony with the source.

Read positive comments left on your previous work. Trust what they've told you. Because the liar here is your doubt, not your readers.

Hit up that friend you trust and ask them to tell you your strengths. Even if you don't believe it right now, you have strengths as a writer. Maybe it's worldbuilding, maybe it's dialogue; your friend will give you concrete examples. You don't need a beta right now, that will come later.

You're not alone. This is a community. Even if it's a rarepair or gen fic in a niche fandom - and especially then! - someone will be so happy that you brought that cake to the table.

[littleredborb]

magic user doodles

[primsycoldbottles]

um . warning now that tumblr is allowing gif pfps . PLEASE dont use gifs with flashing or eyestraining colours <3 since the gifs Cannot be turned off it WILL negatively affect photosensitive people

[aye-write]

[500-moths-in-a-trenchcoat]

ok since i don't think i've seen any semi-comprehensive lists of the tumblr holidays for the reddit refugees, here it is.

IT JUST HAPPENS

DAY 15 GIVE IT UP FOR DAY 15

Thursday the 20th

The Fifth of Wednesday

Sometime in June: That One Halloween Post Starts Circulating

Sometime in July: Dancing Pumpkin Man Video/Gif

WEEKLY EVENTS

Every Monday: El Muchacho Monday

Every Tuesday: Tuesday Again? No Problem...

Every Wednesday: Wet Beast Wednesday

Every Thursday: Out of Touch Thursday

Every Friday: Flat Fuck Friday

Every Saturday: Don't @ Me, I'm Chilling/Caturday

Every Sunday: Fingers In His Ass Sunday

YEARLY EVENTS

January 16: Appreciate a Dragon Day

January 29: Threshold Day

All of February: Funguary

February 14: Aromantic/Asexual Day

March 9: Miku Day

March 10: Mario Day

March 14: Pi Day

March 15: Ides of March

March 23: Ever Given Got Stuck Today

April 1: Mishapocalypse

April 2: Dashcon Announcement Anniversary

April 3: Dannypocalypse

April 8: Rex Manning Day

ALSO April 8: MARGARET THATCHER IS DEAD

April 13: Neil Banging Out The Tunes

ALSO April 13: Homestuck Day

April 20: haha 420 blaze it

April 25: The Perfect Date

April 28: Ed Balls Day

April 30: It's Gonna Be May

All of May: Mermay

May 3: Beginning of Dracula Daily

May 4: May the 4th Be With You

May 5: Revenge of the Fifth

May 25: The Glorious 25th of May

All of June: Pride Month

ALSO All of June: IT'S HALLOWEEN TIME TO GET SPOOKY

June 5: Barricade Day

June 16: Let Papyrus Say Fuck

July 20: Moon Landing

September 8: The Queen Is Dead and Sans Undertale Killed Her

September 21: DO YOU REMEMBER-

All of October: SKELETON WAR

ALSO All of October: Inktober

October 3: Mean Girls Day

ALSO October 3: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood Day

October 20: Unnecessary Feelings Day

October 31: HALLOWEEN

November 5: honestly what didn't happen that day

November 19: Goncharov

All of December: Will the Gävle Goat Get Destroyed Again?

December 10: Please, It's Christmas

December 24: ALMOST CHRISTMAS MEANS IT WASN'T CHRISTMAS

[so-many-ocs]

:(

[daisy-mooon]

You know what? I believe that you can finish your writing project. I believe you can update your fic. I believe you can work on your WIP. I don't care if you think it's cringy or bad. I don't care if we've never met or interacted in our whole lives. I believe in you. Keep going - you've got this.

[roughwaterwriting]

Write one sentence. Let it lead to another. It comes in waves. 

[deepwaterfiction]

the fact that these continue to go around in the good year 2022 absolutely astounds me. i drew the original in 2015. i was nineteen years old. anyway you all get encouragement octopus instead of prompts today because i had my biannual go through the notes and cry appointment

oh and happy nano or whatever

- L

[iusedtobecharming-deactivated20]

Do we have a franz kafka diary entry for july 1st, i want to know what he thinks!!!

[rehearsing]

happy too tired July everyone

[lhazaar]

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

[darkandstormyslash]

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.

[vhsvulpes]

AMEN this goes for anything too!!! drawing, painting, sewing, knitting you name it. Its so much better to just do the thing your working on, shitty or not it takes less of a toll on you to just finish a thing than to worry about fucking it up first time.

[clansocreations]

Fuck yeah! And even making something that has nothing to do with pots will help you make your pots. Because lots of different expiriences doing different stuffs will also help you make better stuff if that makes sense

[teitpp]

Taking Care of Yourself is Part of Writing.

My Whole Writing Process looks something like this:

I was talking to a writer friend the other night who was asking me how was I was able to make myself write and enjoy it and look forward to it enough to make the ideas grow and to put them down on the page.

I think I threw him for a loop when I said I do it by giving myself permission not to write. I do have a schedule where I block out time in a week to try write... but that time block isn't always putting words on the page. some of those hours are research, outlining, workshopping, or editing... but a lot of the time I use those hours to relax. I read a fic. I take an obnoxiously long bath. I eat a pie I baked, or better, one I didnt have to bake. I play a video game or watch a show or something else that recharges my batteries. In an average week, I have about 12 hours tentatively blocked off for "Writing" but theres some weeks where none of those hours put words on the page.

We writers like to pass around that self-depricating joke with the pie chart about how we spend 5% of our time writing and 95% of the time doing absolutely anything else: editing (10%), sleeping (15%), tumblr shit posting (20%), research rabbit hole (30%), Crying (25%) You all know the joke I'm talking about. I think what gets lost is... you don't need to write more than 5% of the time. The pie chart really isn't a pie chart. It's an iceberg: The whole process is important. The 5% where you're making the words is just the most visible part.

I hit walls some times where I forget I'm allowed not to write. The guilt feedback loop is vicious. It goes like: "I should be writing > but I'm not writing > I don't feel like it > how can I call myself a writer and not write > I'm a bad writer," and turns into "I don't deserve to write > I'm not worthy of my own art > looking at my draft has become bad for my mental health > I physically can't write". And then the whole cycle feeds on itself again. This is worse once you've had a project the stars aligned for that went really really well and became your measuring stick for how well other projects should go. If you hit a rut, well the instinct is that it's your fault as the writer. "Shame shame for not writing..."

It's okay not to write. It's okay if only 1% of your iceberg is writing and the other 99% is taking care of yourself. If your writing stalled because of a physical tool: lack of wifi or a broken computer or an exploded pen or rain-soaked notebook, you would attribute the delay to the tool and repair the tool. And yet, when the essential tool that needs routine maintenance is your body / brain, writers fail to attribute the cause to that - if you need to maintain your computer because it is slow, you wouldn't call yourself a bad writer... so why are you a bad writer if the tool you need to maintain is yourself?

You can still be a writer and not have shared a single piece of writing. You can be a writer even when you're not writing. It's not your fault if you got writers block and/or your brain or body need some essential maintenance. If it is the only unreserved time in your week, use your writing time to give yourself those things you need to feel healthy and good! Just because it doesn't look like words on a page doesnt mean it isn't part of writing!

[digitexts]

[traineraino]

Morning walk with a pet Furret

[bulbagarden]

Furret!!

[party-gilmore]

It's come to my attention that a good portion of the younger generation has not been made aware of one of the greatest and most hated PILLARS of millennial society.

So I apologize, but I must take on this task. A new hand must touch the beacon. The knowledge must be passed on. The chain can not be broken.

So.

The Game.

The following are the rules of The Game:

there is no winning The Game

once you know of The Game, you are always playing the game

the point of The Game is to not think about The Game

if you think about The Game, you have lost The Game, and must announce this to those around you - causing them to also lose The Game

A "reset period" of roughly an hour or two before loss announcements is common in colloquial rules to allow yourself and those around you to properly temporarily "forget" about The Game, however that is not an official rule.

Go forth, you next generation, and I am sorry.

[hartsnkises]

What have you done

[f1rstperson]

Randomly skim reading posts like this and then seeing

The Game

does actually give me an entire rush of aggression and anger tho.

[dragontamer22]

Hey everyone I lost the game

[nudityandnerdery]

I like thinking that OP loses The Game every time they get a notification for this post.

[amilkyway]

fireflies lighting up a rural Pennsylvania field at dusk

[spaghettinatural]

As a european i sometimes forget furefkied are actually real and not american folklore/cryptids. Like you’ve got friendly little bugs that glow in the dark….. b r uh

[likeadevils]

so i have a mildly popular “reblog and put in in the tags” post going around and its. very clear how many people don’t know how to interact with a tumblr post

so, first of all, tumblr’s culture has changed a lot in the past couple years. there’s a genuine community effort to not start any drama, and ironically a lot of the current hostility is an effort to keep things calm. there’s also a change in how people interact with posts, so if you haven’t been here in a while please skip down to the tags/replies/reblog with text section.

for newcomers: you should be reblogging posts about as liberally as you would like something on twitter. if you only like stuff, people will think you are rude/a bot. you’ve probably heard people talk about “cultivating your dash,” and thats because this platform is 100% centered around your dashboard. trending matters less, unfollowing and blocking in order to shape your dash into it’s best form is widely accepted, the majority of the content you’ll find and interact with will be because of your dash, and the only way to put things on your dash is to reblog them. tumblr users are deeply distrustful of algorithms and have largely turned off the “see posts your friends have liked” function (i recommend you also turn of the various algorithms in settings → general settings → dashboard preferences).

so, once you’ve reblogged a post, there’s three ways to add content to it. the tags, replies, and reblogging with text. all of them have different connotations

the tags: an inside voice. originally they were meant for organizing your blog (and they’re still used for this), but they’ve also morphed into a way to share thoughts that aren’t funny/insightful enough for non-followers to be interested in. when in doubt, put your comment in the tags

replies: basically talking to your friends in class. your followers have no way of finding your replies (they don’t pop up on the dash, nobody gets notified except for the original poster) so chances are, only the person who made the post is gonna see your comment. it’s for quick one-offs that you’re okay with other people overhearing, but really is only made for one person. they’re like a public dm

reblog with text: an outside voice. you’re getting up on a stage in town square and entertaining people. make sure it’s funny or insightful— bottom line, add something new to the conversation. you should use this the least

general rules of thumb: 

when in doubt, reblog. people will judge you if your blog is only personal posts and you only interact with other content by liking it.  

the only things people will judge you for reblogging are personal vent posts. leave a like to give a little virtual hug

if a post is asking about your personality/opinions (i.e: tell me what’s the last tv show you watched, that kind of thing) put it in the tags 

also if you see a nice edit, gifset, or art, reblog and say something nice in the tags! it’s that nice sweet spot of common enough that no one will notice but uncommon enough to make the artist’s day