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🍮 writing blog! - they&them. doing my best. click me!

[zmwrites]

being a writer is smashing all of the media i’ve ever consumed on the ground and stealing pieces to make my own little mosaic in the corner

[wredundant-writer]

writer culture is Seriously Researching things that you have no personal interest/passion in, nor is it actually relevant for your life, for the sake of a story and becoming oddly knowledgeable about that subject, then when it comes up one day having Absolutely No Idea how to explain your knowledge

[tlirsgender]

You ever write too hard and you just gotta stare at your word doc thinking about Your own characters like

[heather--moors]

Dark Academia, Autumn 2019

[librarysilverfish]

 I really just collect tropes that spark joy and make them into a story, that’s it

[ashbur-deactivated20250915]

today’s vibe

[pastelparrotlet]

I hope in 2020 you get to write that thing you’ve been wanting to write, and you write it amazingly.

[grendelmenz-deactivated20200929]

Joan of Arc

[6thlovelanguage-deactivated2020]

Callista Buchen, “Taking Care”

[writerswritecompany]

[neptunefall]

last night I wrote about 570 words of this short story about an immortal girl who lives in a lighthouse and loves shiny little trinkets, faeries who whisk away the village children to their glittering courts, and a curse that has haunted the girl (and by extension, the village) for centuries ― and it was all flowing so well, I wrote it all in like 10 minutes, and BAM! I forgot the original idea and decided to go to sleep because my eyes hurt

and now I don't know what to do with this little piece of writing, but I do wanna continue it, but I have no idea how aarghhh

[neptunefall]

have a sneak-peek, y'all

[neil-gaiman]

What would you say if someone asked you “why are you telling this story?” Does a writer need a reason for a story to get told? Is “because I want to” a good enough reason? Does it help you when constructing the story if you have a “reason” in mind?

Because it won’t exist unless I do, is the main reason for me.

[ncvalentine-deactivated]

hayun & sage (GIN RUMMY) are famous and occasionally show up on magazine covers. milo tells sage “the reason you get so passively shit talked by the news is because youre a bitch to them on twitter” which is like. moderately true

[studyblr]

me, at 2 am: there’s no better time than the present. let’s immediately start learning 3 different languages, write a screenplay and several poems, finish all of my assignments, read 12 new books,

[concerningwolves]

some mini collections of tips for writers

(based on things that yours truly notices as a freelance editor. This list is in no way complete, and will probably be added to as I continue to find repeated mistakes) 

Dialogue

Use beats in your dialogue to break it up. Even “said” can make a very effective beat between lines. 

(No beats: “It’s not lethal. Just highly dangerous with a good chance of being mutilated.” // Beats: “It’s not lethal,” he said. “Just highly dangerous with a good chance of being mutilated.”)

Note how the break allows a bit of a pause for ~dramatic effect 

thinking of dialogue, use punctuation and distinct speech patterns! “Life, uh, finds a way.” is an iconic line anyway, but Jeff Goldblum’s signature verbal tic gives it character. 

It’s okay if characters stutter. Don’t let the condemnation of stuttering characters as “cringey” in fanfic put you off. (and on that note, fuck cringe culture. Seriously. It saps all the fun out of creativity and fun is important.)

Start! A! New! Line! Whenever! Someone! New! Speaks!!

DO NOT FEAR THE WORD “SAID” 

Setting & Blocking

 Use the landscape and settings around your character, and always, always remember a scene’s blocking. Where is everything in relation to your characters? Have you left someone holding a coffee cup for the last three scenes? Did you lose a character somewhere along the way? 

using the contents of a scene is also great for fight sequences. 

Similarly, large character casts are hard to keep track of so don’t be afraid to break them up. Sending someone off somewhere else can create some nifty little subplots. 

Keep a personal note of how time passes. Trust me, it’s incredibly helpful to you as a writer and also for future readers. 

Characters

Character growth does not have to be positive. Sometimes characters fail or suffer or get their motivations twisted up, and they finish the book as a villain rather than a hero. 

All that matters is that a character changes throughout the plot in a way that readers can see; the sort of change they go through is entirely up to you. 

scrap the idea that someone has to deserve a redemption arc. They probably don’t deserve it, which is the whole point. So don’t be afraid to make your villains seem completely irredeemable. 

and you don’t need to redeem your antagonists in order to make them complex, sympathetic villains, anyway. Sometimes people get so stuck in their beliefs that they can’t see another way and it goes too far. Not everyone comes back from that. 

Also, motivations and goals can absolutely change. That’s okay. You just need to have something that drives your character so that your readers are rooting for them. 

Protagonists don’t need to be heroic. How you define the protagonists and antagonists in your story is based entirely on the morality in your story-world, NOT the moral ideas in the real world. What counts as a complex protagonist in a world torn apart by biological warfare will be very different than one living in our world. 

Prose & Grammar

simple prose is just fine and you don’t need to fluff it up for pretty quotes.

Remember to vary your sentence structures and length. Start smaller and build it up, drawing your reader’s attention. 

“And” and “But” are very valid sentence starters that are great for communicating the tone of internal narrative. You’re allowed to tweak grammar if that’s helpful for telling the story, it just needs to be accessible. Test out what you’ve written on other people. 

Check that your tenses are consistent!! 

[faerisms-deactivated20200805]

true writing is knowing exactly how your wip starts and knowing exactly how how it ends but the middle is the equivalent of you standing stranded on highway 52 while your car burns in the background before a freeze frame zooms in on your face and a voice-over goes “yup that’s me. you might be wondering how i got here.” 

[thesearchforbluejello]

More like, “yup that’s me. Can you tell me how to get here? Because I don’t fucking know.”

[glittcrpeach]

some writeblr advice

(from someone who is too tired and too old to deal with the drama and emotional stress communities cause)

you don’t need to put a lot of energy into reacting to people’s works.  that is to say, you don’t need to put special comments on everything, or critique every excerpt, you don’t need to respond the day something is posted.  all that matters when it comes to interacting is that reblogs ‘help’ more than likes.  

it doesn’t matter if you make graphics or post screenshots of your wip or just copy paste the text with no fancy nonsense at all.  just share your writing however you enjoy to and don’t worry about the rest.

peer pressure is bullshit.  trends are ridiculous.  mimic people if you want, but not because they ‘get more attention’ or ‘feel like they’re better than you’ or anything else beyond ‘i find this inspiring and want to learn to write this way on my own.’

never follow writing advice for any of the reasons above either.  just because someone gets 50+ reactions to a post doesn’t mean their ‘how to write good’ advice will make any fucking sense for you.  

please remember above all that tumblr isn’t real and nothing here matters.  that is to say, just because you get a lot of reblogs or no interaction doesn’t mean your writing will be huge/be nothing in the real world.  don’t build your ego around the interaction writeblr gives you.  notes =/= worth.