I'm May (she/her), a writer from the north of England currently working on a series of mystery books set in the fantasy world of Ildafir. Here you'll find relatable writerly content, advice, and analysis of some of my favourite things about fiction. Currently on semi-hiatus.
i must say, i am a huge fan of when a book is in the middle of a very exciting plot containing many interesting problems when out of nowhere for a few pages it's like, "hey by the way, real quick, here's a detailed explanation of the city's water filtration system! i'm telling you this for a reason and you should worry about it. anyway! haha okay back to the plot" and you just get to be Scared for a while
Things I’ve noticed are essential in plotting and would probably have saved me a lot of time if I had considered it earlier
The START of your story - how fucked up flawed is your premise/character at the start? what do they have to change? why are they HERE?
The END of your story - How do you want your main character/theme/universe to change after your story? Does it get better or worse? THIS SETS UP THE TONE DRASTICALLY.
What you want to happen IN BETWEEN - the MEAT of it. What made you start writing this WIP in the first place. Don't be ashamed to indulge, it's where the BRAIN JUICE comes from. You want a deep dive into worldbuilding and complex systems? Then your start and end should be rooted in some fundamental, unique rule of your universe (what made you obsess over it?). Want to write unabashed ship content? Make sure your start and end are so compelling you'll never run out of smut scenarios to shove in between scenes (what relationship dynamics made you ship it in the first place?).
The ANTE - the GRAVITY of your story. How high are the stakes? Writing a blurb or interaction? start with a small day-in-the-life so you can focus on shorter timelines and hourly minutiae that can easily get overlooked in more complicated epics. Or you can go ham on it and plot out your whole universe's timeline from conception to demise. Remember: the larger the scale, the less attached your story may get. How quickly time flies in your story typically correlates with the ante (not a hard rule, ofc, but most epics span years of time within a few pages, while a romance novel usually charts out the events of a few months over a whole manuscript.)
One small thing I think people intuit without realizing is that part of the "He would not say that" is that, beyond the big-picture concerns (where you really mean, "he would not be expressing that sentiment" or "he would not be saying that to that person's face" or "he would not be saying that thing out loud"), there's the close-up concern of vocabulary used.
Sometimes where writing, particularly dialogue, can feel funky is the problem of voice, of that just doesn't sound like him, which can come down to individual words used. What's really interesting is this sense can ping even for characters you don't know at all, NPCs and background characters, not just the big main canon favorites that everyone knows intimately.
For example, I was writing a fic recently where I had typed out a character saying
"He was lucky he wasn't more seriously hurt."
And immediately had to backtrack because the word lucky felt wrong. I knew exactly what needed to go there instead without really thinking about it, but let's break it down a minute first.
Okay, so imagine you're me and lucky feels off, so what do you do? You turn to the thesaurus. This is what you get:
[alt text added to image; should pull through]
These aren't... wrong. (Well, some of them are.) Most of them are synonyms of lucky in various contexts, but they're not one-to-one by any means. So first you have to know that, in this spoken context of describing a person who avoided a potential negative outcome, only some of these will work, because it needs to be an adjective that has to address a moment of good luck (as opposed to a pattern or a lifetime) and avoiding that potential negative outcome by chance. Most of the time, you can sort these out by saying them out loud in your chosen sentence.
"He was lucky he wasn't more seriously hurt"
✅ Original sentence, construction works.
"He was serendipitous he wasn't more seriously hurt"?
🚫 No. That doesn't make sense at all.
"He was blessed he wasn't more seriously hurt."
✅ Yeah, that works, in a vacuum, too.
Of the above, in the sentence of dialogue I created, the following work:
Blessed
Fortunate
Lucky
Only three. (If I changed the sentence structure to "It was ___ he wasn't more seriously hurt," I could try out a few more, maybe, like fortuitous and providential, but I'm not going to.)
Even with only three options, especially in dialogue, you have to be able to parse out what kind of person would use which. That was why lucky pinged as off to me, even though it works perfectly well in this context in a vacuum.
In my scenario, the person speaking was a highly educated, upper socioeconomic middle-aged man of authority for whom American English is a first language speaking to another man with whom he has only a professional relationship, a reason to worry about his standing within the state of said relationship, and a vested interest in maintaining a healthy level of respect and trust.
That is not a man who is going to say lucky.
I knew immediately and instinctively that he would say
"He was fortunate that he wasn't more seriously hurt."
He wouldn't say blessed unless I wanted to imply something about his religious and/or spiritual background and beliefs, which I did not. Lucky has a more common feel to it, a little more casual, and just wouldn't be the word of use for this kind of character in this situation. Reaching for the three-syllable word instead of the two, the one that echoes with a tiny bit more pomp.
You'll notice, too, that a that appeared as well, because a man like the character I described would be more particular about the formalities of grammar, even in cases where his meaning is clear without them.
A different character, someone of a lower socioeconomic status and/or in a much more casual situation might even say
"He got lucky he wasn't more seriously hurt."
Do you see how those four ways of saying the exact same thing sound and feel different?
"He was lucky he wasn't more seriously hurt."
"He was fortunate that he wasn't more seriously hurt."
"He was blessed he wasn't more seriously hurt."
"He got lucky he wasn't more seriously hurt."
The exact same sentiment, just tweaked to match the speaker.
The more you start to notice vibes like this, the more nuanced and "right" feeling your writing will be. And the more you notice and start to pick apart these choices while writing, the better you'll be at it, because you'll be able to articulate the whys and why-nots and can figure out where you went wrong (and how to go right instead.)
Ok adding to this though that even though it is extremely relatable, this is a KNOWN thing with professional writing. 10k is often referred to as "having a pot boiling" or "having a stew" - it's the point where you often see an idea coming together and it's exciting! But THEN... 30k-50k is the point where that fun has to start coming together. In theatre, it's usually week 3 of a 5 week rehearsal period where you have to stop talking about the play and really get it all up on its feet and cohesive. In art, it's committing to what are going to be the final visible layers of colour and texture, in sculpture the moment where you're truly at the point of no return with carving out the shape.
It usually feels really bad. Because this is the point it becomes real craft. It's so, so difficult to really be able to identify if it's truly not going to be anything or you're just in the hardest part of the process, and really the only way to know is to... write through it. Write it badly. Or, if you really can't, put it in a drawer and come back to it after a few months of breathing space. Remember, you can fix so much in the edit, but you can't fix nothing!
(I say, fully looking at my latest draft of my book and considering throwing it in the bin. But my editor said exactly this to me, so I'm passing it along.)
this is 100% true. I've written 6 complete novels at this point and every single time around the 40k mark I feel lost in the woods. Nothing seems to be working. I feel awful; I can't sleep. I keep going even though I'm convinced I'm going to fail. And then... It's like leaving a tunnel and getting back out in the sunshine. Stuff starts coalescing. Things that weren't working have obvious fixes. I "can write" again, except I was writing the whole time. It just felt hopeless in the moment. It's not. You just gotta get out of the woods.
Second of all, I realised as a writing weakness of mine as I never really thought about it but how do you naturally mention physical features in a way that isn’t jarring? Sorry if you have been asked this a lot T~T
Love ur work btw its some of my fav pieces of writing 🖤🖤
Oh, it was purposeful. I was there that Christmas eve. I remember.
As for writing physical features...take my advice with a pinch of salt. You might notice I spend a lot of time writing characters who are not described in detail online, thus letting the reader fill in whatever gaps they would like.
Anyway. Caveat out of the way.
When is description jarring?
When it's not woven into a scene. (E.g. description dump at the beginning, never mentioned the rest of the scene.)
When it's a tonal/mood shift. (E.g. grim metaphor in a comedy).
When it's not something your POV/narrator would think or notice.
Basically, if you can figure out why it's jarring, you can normally reverse engineer the solution to the problem when editing.
Thoughts and tips (short version, long under the cut)
Focus on key details. We need a sense of the character, at first, we don't need everything about them.
Use situational context. What is relevant to what is happening at that moment in the novel?
Use your protagonist. How do they filter the world? What is important to them to notice?
Compare and contrast to illuminate two characters at once.
Avoid long-descriptions in a mirror (some exceptions, if plot relevant).
Don't be afraid of imagery/metaphor/simile, but don't feel like you have to use them if it doesn't fit.
Long version
Focus on key details. Vibe. You don't have to describe everything in a character, a reader likely won't remember a laundry list of physical descripters anyway. If you were looking at the character, what would you notice about them first? We might notice terrible scars before eye-colour, or a hand on a weapon and thus the rings on that finger.
Leading to...
Use your protagonist and the situational context. What would they notice? What does that tell us about the protagonist? What do they find attractive?
In a fight, a character might notice who is graceful or who has better arm-reach with a sword. In the dark, a character might notice a scent, if someone is warm or cold, something non-visual. If your protagonist/narrator is really into fashion, do they always notice someone's clothes and if they fit and if they're nice first?
Don't be afraid to use metaphor/imagery/descriptive language that is coloured by your protagonist's feelings about someone. We describe people we hate differently to people we like.
But also don't feel like you have to be really flowery and descriptive if it doesn't suit your style/character/tastes. E.g. descriptive language is one of many tools in a writer's toolbox. So long as we know enough to know what's going on, up to you what you do.
If you introduce a set/pair of characters at once, can you use the details of one to highlight the other? There's a reason that cliches like 'he was the sun and she was the moon' or fire/ice or whatever use contrasts to paint a picture of both characters by the way they oppose. It's an effective short-hand that lets you convey detail quickly, which can in turn make a description seem less jarring because it's not an info dump.
Leading to...
Contrast and compare.
So if your protagonist is short, do they notice when someone looms? I'm very short so I certainly notice when someone is my height for once. If a character always wished they could disappear in a room, do they notice when someone else manages to do that? If the protagonist is insecure about their looks, do they then obsess over the appearance and beauty of others?
This does the double duty of letting you tell your reader about another character, your protagonist, and your protagonist's internal way of seeing the world/themselves at the same time.
You actually cannot skip to being good at a creative endeavour that you haven't put much practice into. You cannot trick your way out of the 'knows that your work is not what you want it to be but don't know how to improve it' stage by planning or reading or talking about it really really hard. At some point you just have to craft through it until your brain finds it's own unique way back to the 'everything I make slaps' stage and be prepared to start the cycle all over again. You just have to make that project you're excited about slightly less good than you want it to be. (Says this standing in a pool of blood and covered in blood and also coughing up a little blood)
(None of this advice really applies to dialogue. If it’s in your character’s voice, they can use whatever words they like!)
Suddenly
This one usually makes people’s list for things to cut. “Suddenly, the door opened.” Turns into, “The door slammed open.”
As always, we want to make the readers think wow that was sudden! Instead of just telling them so.
Saw/Heard + Felt
I already explained this in my post here!
Seemed
There’s a use for seemed in writing when your character is surprised, assuming, or guessing at something. “It seemed impossible.” “The noise seemed to travel for miles.” Etc.
However, when guessing at someone’s emotions—or a group of people—it’s better to just describe what those people look like. So “He seemed happy” turns into, “he grinned, bouncing on his feet.”
Really/Very
Instead of “The really big house” try, “the huge house.” Or “His hair was very dark.” Turns into “His hair was inky black.”
That
If you can take ‘that’ out of a sentence, it usually is stronger than if you don’t. “It was the best cake that she’d ever had!” turns into “It was the best cake she’d ever had!” It reads a bit less clunky.
Then
Then can be used sometimes, but it’s one of those words that’s easy to overuse. To cut out a lot of your ‘thens’ you can replace them with “and” such as, “He left the house, then got into the car.” Turns into, “He left the house and got into the car.”
Down/Up
“He sat down” is redundant. “He sat” means the same thing. Same with “She stood up.”
I chose the ones I find the most important, but there’s tons of other words that can be unnecessary or bog down your prose. Let me know which ones I missed! Good luck!
This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.
e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.
I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.
This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.
And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.
Do you have any suggestions for letting go and improving WITH your weird shit? I'm in university for Creative Writing and I haven't been taught SHIT other than how to engage with a text and how to continue to write at my highschool base-line level. No teaching, no instruction, only critiques of mine and my peers work that doesn't inform us of much in the long run.
I'm desperate for help, if you have Anything it's much appreciated. I'm asking because I felt seen in this post
1. READ. Read widely, read deeply, read slowly when a text demands time. Seek out work that seems strange or challenging. If/when you need to pick up something that's deep in your comfort zone, read consciously. If a passage hits you as dense and difficult, ask yourself why: word choice? complex nesting of concepts? are you distracted, or did you misinterpret something a few lines back? If a passage feels easy and fun, ask yourself why: satisfying rhythm? clear set-up and follow-through? Look for experimental texts, read more poetry even if you don't want to write poetry. The more experienced you are with the vast flexibility of the written word, the more confident and natural your own experimentation will get.
2. Try things out. You don't have to show them to anyone. Sometimes a stylistic idea will get stuck in my head and I just have to write freeform for a couple of thousand words to see how it feels on the page. One time in college I was possessed by the urge to write the vilest, foulest, most unsympathetic and filthy first-person narrative just to figure out how it would actually read, so I scribbled out a couple of pages until it was out of my system. I never did anything with those passages, but they're in my repertoire now, I know how that material hits. I'm always comparing writing to chefing - not everything you cook is a restaurant meal. You can experiment with flavours in your own kitchen, where you are free to make something completely unpalatable and then toss it right out with a better understanding of the process.
3. Be less scared. This isn't just directed at you, it's directed at everyone, and at me. Someone I know once brought a personal piece of writing to a writer's group, about the way her mother's death affected her. Someone in the group was absolutely scathing about it, because they felt that the way she reacted to and wrote about the bereavement was inappropriate. What a horrible experience! What an awful, unhelpful critique. But it didn't shake her, because she knew what she had felt and was steadfast in her right to express it. Sometimes (often, even) criticism will come from angles that are literally just not relevant to what we've set out to do. Like I said in the original post, a lot of readers are kind of ambivalent or hostile to weirdness at the moment. But if weirdness is your goal, those people are simply not your audience. It's a lot easier said than done, but have faith in your own intentions and your own taste. Listen to criticism, but always ask yourself 'will this help me accomplish what I want this piece to accomplish?' It is not the end of the world to be temporarily misunderstood.
Dealing with Healing and Disability in fantasy: Writing Disability
[ID: An image of the main character from Eragon, a white teenage boy with blond hair in silver armour as he sits, with his hand outstretched. On his hand is a glowing blue mark. He is visibly straining as he attempts to heal a large creature in front of him. /End ID]
I'm a massive fan of the fantasy genre, which is why it's so incredibly frustrating when I see so much resistance to adding disability representation to fantasy works. People's go-to reason for leaving us out is usually something to the effect of "But my setting has magic so disability wouldn't exist, it can just be healed!" so let's talk about magic, specifically healing magic, in these settings, and how you can use it without erasing disability from your story.
Ok, let's start with why you would even want to avoid erasing disability from a setting in the first place. I talked about this in a lot more detail in my post on The Miracle Cure. this line of thinking is another version of this trope, but applied to a whole setting (or at least, to the majority of people in the setting) instead of an individual, so it's going to run into the same issues I discussed there. To summarise the points that are relevant to this particular version of the trope though:
Not every disabled person wants or needs a cure - many of us see our disability as a part of our identity. Do difficulties come with being disabled? absolutely! It's literally part of the definition, but for some people in the disabled community, if you took our disabilities away, we would be entirely different people. While it is far from universal, there is a significant number of us who, if given a magical cure with no strings attached, would not take it. Saying no one in your setting would be disabled because these healing spells exists ignores this part of the community.
It messes with the stakes of your story - Just like how resurrecting characters or showing that this is something that is indeed possible in the setting can leave your audience feeling cheated or like they don't have to worry about a character *actually* ever dying. healing a character's disability, or establishing that disability doesn't exist in your setting because "magic" runs into the same problem. It will leave your readers or viewers feeling like they don't have to worry about your characters getting seriously hurt because it will only be temporary, which means your hero's actions carry significantly less risk, which in turn, lowers the stakes and tension if not handled very, very carefully.
It's an over-used trope - quite plainly and simply, this trope shows up a lot in the fantasy genre, to the point where I'd say it's just overused and kind of boring.
So with the "why should you avoid it" covered, let's look at how you can actually handle the topic.
Limited Access and Expensive Costs
One of the most common ways to deal with healing and disability in a fantasy setting, is to make the healing magic available, but inaccessible to most of the population. The most popular way to do that is by making the services of a magical healer capable of curing a disability really expensive to the point that most people just can't afford it. If this is the approach you're going to use, you also typically have to make that type of magic quite rare. To use D&D terms, if every first level sorcerer, bard, cleric and druid can heal a spinal injury, it's going to result in a lot of people who are able to undercut those massive prices and the expense will drop as demand goes down.
If that last sentence didn't give you a hint, this is really popular method in stories that are critiquing capitalistic mindsets and ideologies, and is most commonly used by authors from the USA and other countries with a similar medical system, since it mirrors a lot of the difficulties faced by disabled Americans. If done right, this approach can be very effective, but it does need to be thought through more carefully than I think people tend to do. Mainly because a lot of fantasy stories end with the main character becoming rich and/or powerful, and so these prohibitively expensive cure become attainable by the story's end, which a lot of authors and writer's just never address.
Of course, another approach is to make the availability of the magic itself the barrier. Maybe there just aren't that many people around who know the magic required for that kind of healing, so even without a prohibitive price tag, it's just not something that's an option for most people. If we're looking at a D&D-type setting, maybe you need to be an exceptionally high level to cast the more powerful healing spell, or maybe the spell requires some rare or lost material component. I'd personally advise people to be careful using this approach, since it often leads to stories centred around finding a miracle cure, which then just falls back into that trope more often than not.
Just outright state that some characters don't want/need it
Another, admittedly more direct approach, is to make it that these "cures" exist and are easily attainable, but to just make it that your character or others they encounter don't want or need it. This approach works best for characters who are born with their disabilities or who already had them for a long time before a cure was made available to them. Even within those groups though, this method works better with some types of characters than others depending on many other traits (personality, cultural beliefs, etc), and isn't really a one-size-fits-all solution, but to be fair, that's kind of the point. Some people will want a cure for their disabilities, others are content with their body's the way they are.
There's a few caveats I have with this kind of approach though:
you want to make sure you, as the author, understand why some people in real life don't want a cure, and not just in a "yeah I know these people exist but I don't really get it" kind of way. I'm not saying you have to have a deep, personal understanding or anything, but some degree of understanding is required unless you want to sound like one of those "inspirational" body positivity posts that used to show up on Instagram back in the day.
Be wary when using cultural beliefs as a reasoning. It can work, but when media uses cultural beliefs as a reason for turning down some kind of cure, it's often intending to critique extreme beliefs about medicine, such as the ones seen in some New Age Spirituality groups and particularly intense Christian churches. As a general rule of thumb, it's probably not a good idea to connect these kinds of beliefs to disabled people just being happy in their bodies. Alternatively, you also need to be mindful of the "stuck in time" trope - a trope about indigenous people who are depicted as primitive or, as the name suggests, stuck in an earlier time, for "spurning the ways of the white man" which usually includes medicine or the setting's equivalent magic. I'm not the best person to advise you on how to avoid this specific trope, but my partner (who's Taino) has informed me of how often it shows up in fantasy specifically and we both thought it was worth including a warning at least so creators who are interested in this method know to do some further research.
Give the "cures" long-lasting side effects
Often in the real world, when a "cure" for a disability does exist, it's not a perfect solution and comes with a lot of side effects. For example, if you loose part of your arm in an accident, but you're able to get to a hospital quickly with said severed arm, it can sometimes be reattached, but doing so comes at a cost. Most people I know who had this done had a lot of issues with nerve damage, reduced strength, reduced fine-motor control and often a great deal of pain with no clear source. Two of the people I know who's limbs were saved ended up having them optionally re-amputated only a few years later. Likewise, I know many people who are paraplegics and quadriplegics via spinal injuries, who were able to regain the use of their arms and/or legs. However, the process was not an easy one, and involved years of intense physiotherapy and strength training. For some of them, they need to continue to do this work permanently just to maintain use of the effected limbs, so much so that it impacts their ability to do things like work a full-time job and engage in their hobbies regularly, and even then, none of them will be able bodied again. Even with all that work, they all still experience reduced strength and reduced control of the limbs. depending on the type, place and severity of the injury, some people are able to get back to "almost able bodied" again - such was the case for my childhood best friend's dad, but they often still have to deal with chronic pain from the injury or chronic fatigue.
Even though we are talking about magic in a fantasy setting, we can still look to real-life examples of "cures" to get ideas. Perhaps the magic used has a similar side effect. Yes, your paraplegic character can be "cured" enough to walk again, but the magic maintaining the spell needs a power source to keep it going, so it draws on the person's innate energy within their body, using the very energy the body needs to function and do things like move their limbs. They are cured, but constantly exhausted unless they're very careful, and if the spell is especially strong, the body might struggle to move at all, resulting in something that looks and functions similar to the nerve damage folks with spinal injuries sometimes deal with that causes that muscle weakness and motor control issues. Your amputee might be able to have their leg regrown, but it will always be slightly off. The regrown leg is weaker and causes them to walk with a limp, maybe even requiring them to use a cane or other mobility aid.
Some characters might decide these trade-offs are worth it, and while this cures their initial disability, it leaves them with another. Others might simply decide the initial disability is less trouble than these side effects, and choose to stay as they are.
Consider if these are actually cures
Speaking of looking to the real world for ideas, you might also want to consider whether these cures are doing what the people peddling them are claiming they do. Let's look at the so-called autism cures that spring up every couple of months as an example.
Without getting into the… hotly debated specifics, there are many therapies that are often labelled as "cures" for autism, but in reality, all they are doing is teaching autistic people how to make their autistic traits less noticeable to others. This is called masking, and it's a skill that often comes at great cost to an autistic person's mental health, especially when it's a behaviour that is forced on them. Many of these therapies give the appearance of being a cure, but the disability is still there, as are the needs and difficulties that come with it, they're just hidden away. From an outside perspective though, it often does look like a success, at least in the short-term.
Then there are the entirely fake cures with no basis in reality, the things you'll find from your classic snake-oil salesmen. Even in a fantasy setting where real magic exists, these kinds of scams and misleading treatments can still exist. In fact, I think it would make them even more common than they are in the real world, since there's less suspension of disbelief required for people to fall for them. "What do you mean this miracle tonic is a scam? Phil next door can conjure flames in his hand and make the plants grow with a snap of his fingers, why is it so hard to believe this tonic could regrow my missing limb?"
I think the only example of this approach I've seen, at least recently, is from The Owl House. The magic in this world can do incredible things, but it works in very specific and defined ways. Eda's curse (which can be viewed as an allegory for many disabilities and chronic illnesses) is seemingly an exception to this, and as such, nothing is able to cure it. Treat it, yes, but not cure it. Eda's mother doesn't accept this though, and seeks out a cure anyway and ends up falling for a scam who's "treatments" just make things worse.
In your own stories, you can either have these scams just not work, or kind of work, but in ways that are harmful and just not worth it, like worse versions of the examples in the previous point. Alternatively, like Eda, it's entirely reasonable that a character who's been the target of these scams before might just not want to bother anymore. Eda is a really good example of this approach handled in a way that doesn't make her sad and depressed about it either. She's tried her mum's methods, they didn't work, and now she's found her own way of dealing with it that she's happy with. She only gets upset when her boundaries are ignored by Luz and her mother.
Think about how the healing magic is actually working
If you have a magic system that leans more on the "hard magic" side of things, a great way to get around the issue of healing magic erasing disability is to stop and think about how your healing magic actually works.
My favourite way of doing this is to make healing magic work by accelerating the natural processes of your body. Your body will, given enough time (assuming it remains infection-free) close a slash from a sword and mend a broken bone, but it will never regrow it's own limbs. It will never heal damage to it's own spinal cord. It will never undo whatever causes autism or fix it's own irregularities. Not without help. Likewise, healing magic alone won't do any of these things either, it's just accelerating the existing process and usually, by extension making it safer, since a wound staying open for an hour before you get to a healer is much less likely to get infected than one that slowly and naturally heals over a few weeks.
In one of my own works, I take this even further by making it that the healing magic is only accelerating cell growth and repair, but the healer has to direct it. In order to actually heal, the healer needs to know the anatomy of what they're fixing to the finest detail. A spell can reconnect a torn muscle to a bone, but if you don't understand the structures that allow that to happen in the first place, you're likely going to make things worse. For this reason, you won't really see people using this kind of magic to, say, regrow limbs, even though it technically is possible. A limb is a complicated thing. The healer needs to be able to perfectly envision all the bones, the cartilage, the tendons and ligaments, the muscles (including the little ones, like those found in your skin that make your hair stand on end and give you goose bumps), the fat and skin tissues, all the nerves, all the blood vessels, all the structures within the bone that create your blood. Everything, and they need to know how it all connects, how it is supposed to move and be able to keep that clearly in their mind simultaneously while casting. Their mental image also has to match with the patient's internal "map" of the body and the lost limb, or they'll continue to experience phantom limb sensation even if the healing is successful. It's technically possible, but the chances they'll mess something up is too high, and so it's just not worth the risk to most people, including my main character.
Put Restrictions on the magic
This is mostly just the same advice as above, but for softer magic systems. put limits and restrictions on your healing magic. These can be innate (so things the magic itself is just incapable of doing) or external (things like laws that put limitations on certain types of magic and spells).
An example of internal restriction can be seen in how some people interpret D&D's higher level healing spells like regenerate (a 7th level spell-something most characters won't have access to for quite some time). The rules as written specify that disabilities like lost limbs can be healed using this spell, but some players take this to mean that if a character was born with the disability in question, say, born without a limb, regenerate would only heal them back to their body's natural state, which for them, is still disabled.
An external restriction would be that your setting has outlawed healing magic, perhaps because healing magic carries a lot of risks for some reason, eithe to the caster or the person being healed, or maybe because the healing magic here works by selectively reviving and altering the function of cells, which makes it a form of necromancy, just on a smaller scale. Of course, you can also use the tried and true, "all magic is outlawed" approach too. In either case, it's something that will prevent some people from being able to access it, despite it being technically possible. Other external restrictions could look like not being illegal, per say, but culturally frowned upon or taboo where your character is from.
But what if I don't want to do any of this?
Well you don't have to. These are just suggestions to get you thinking about how to make a world where healing magic and disability exist, but they aren't the only ways. Just the ones I thought of.
Of course, if you'd still rather make a setting where all disability is cured because magic and you just don't want to think about it any deeper, I can't stop you. I do however, want to ask you to at least consider where you are going to draw the line.
Disability, in essence, is what happens when the body stops (or never started) functioning "normally". Sometimes that happens because of an injury, sometimes it's just bad luck, but the boundary between disabled and not disabled is not as solid as I think a lot of people expect it to be, and we as a society have a lot of weird ideas about what is and isn't a disability that just, quite plainly and simply, aren't consistent. You have to remember, a magic system won't pick and choose the way we humans do, it will apply universally, regardless of our societal hang-ups about disability.
What do I mean about this?
Well, consider for a moment, what causes aging?
it's the result of our body not being able to repair itself as effectively as it used to. It's the body not being able to perform that function "normally". So in a setting where all disability is cured, there would be no aging. No elderly people. No death from old age. If you erase disability, you also erase natural processes like aging. magic won't pick and choose like that, not if you want it to be consistent.
Ok, ok, maybe that's too much of a stretch, so instead, let's look at our stereotypical buff hero covered in scars because he's a badass warrior. but in a world where you can heal anything, why would anything scar? Even if it did, could another healing spell not correct that too? Scars are part of the body's natural healing process, but if no natural healing occurred, why would a scar form? Scars are also considered disabling in and of themselves too, especially large ones, since they aren't as flexible or durable as normal skin and can even restrict growth and movement.
Even common things like needing glasses are, using this definition of disability at least, a disability. glasses are a socially accepted disability aid used to correct your eyes when they do not function "normally".
Now to be fair, in reality, there are several definitions of disability, most of which include something about the impact of society. For example, in Australia (according to the Disability Royal Commission), we define disability as "An evolving concept that results from the interaction between a person with impairment(s) and attitudinal and environmental barriers that hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others." - or in laymen's terms, the interaction between a person's impairment and societal barriers like people not making things accessible or holding misinformed beliefs about your impairment (e.g. people in wheelchairs are weaker than people who walk). Under a definition like this, things like scars and needing glasses aren't necessarily disabilities (most of the time) but that's because of how our modern society sees them. The problem with using a definition like this though to guide what your magic system will get rid of, is that something like a magic system won't differentiate between an "impairment" that has social impacts that and one that doesn't. It will still probably get rid of anything that is technically an example of your body functioning imperfectly, which all three of these things are. The society in your setting might apply these criteria indirectly, but really, why would they? Very few people like the side effects of aging on the body (and most people typically don't want to die), the issues that come with scars or glasses are annoying (speaking as someone with both) and I can see a lot of people getting rid of them when possible too. If they don't then it's just using the "not everyone wants it approach" I mentioned earlier. If there's some law or some kind of external pressure to push people away from fixing these more normalised issues, then it's using the "restrictions" method I mentioned earlier too.
Once again, you can do whatever you like with your fantasy setting, but it's something I think that would be worth thinking about at least.
Alright, Tumblr writers. Sit down. Drink some water. I’m back with more writing tips I learned the hard way, usually at 2am while questioning every life choice I’ve ever made. Take what helps. Leave what doesn’t. Argue with me in the comments if you must.
1. Your tone doesn’t have to stay consistent to be good.
You can be funny and devastating. Soft and brutal. Whiplash is sometimes the point. Life doesn’t stick to one genre — your writing doesn’t have to either.
2. Trauma shouldn’t only explain behaviour; complicate it.
If a backstory only makes a character quieter, sadder, or “stronger,” it’s underused. Trauma creates contradictions: wanting closeness but flinching from it, craving stability but sabotaging it. That tension is the point.
3. If you’re exhausted by your own story, take that seriously. Burnout while writing isn’t a sign that your story is bad — it’s usually a sign that something is off in the process. You might be editing while drafting, forcing the plot to go somewhere it doesn’t want to, or circling the same emotional beat without letting it change. Before you delete anything or decide you “hate” the story, step back. Distance fixes more drafts than starting over ever will.
4. If you suddenly lose all motivation halfway through a scene, don’t push — jump.
That drop usually happens right before an emotional beat you haven’t figured out yet. Instead of forcing filler, jump past it. Write the aftermath. Write the reaction. Once you know where the scene lands, going back to fill in the middle is way easier.
5. Don't be afraid to kill your darlings.
Sometimes, you write a line or a scene that you love, but it doesn't fit the story. It's okay to cut it. Maybe it can be used elsewhere, or maybe it just needed to be written to get you to the next part. Your story will be stronger for it. But make sure to save it somewhere else for later.
6. Let characters surprise you.
Sometimes, a character will do something unexpected. Don't fight it. Let them surprise you. Maybe they'll reveal a hidden side or take the story in a new direction. Trust your characters—they might know where they're going better than you do.
7. If your dialogue sounds stiff, check how the character answers.
Real people dodge, deflect, misunderstand, and answer questions with different questions. If one character asks something important and the other responds clearly and honestly on the first try, it can feel fake. Add friction. Let them avoid the point. That’s usually where the tension lives.
8. If you get a sudden burst of inspiration for a totally different scene, write it immediately.
Don’t worry about continuity. Don’t worry about spoilers. Don’t worry about “doing it out of order.” That excitement is your brain handing you something important. You can always stitch it in later — you can’t always get the feeling back.
9. If you ever catch yourself thinking, “I should probably explain this,” pause.
That urge usually shows up right after you’ve written something subtle and start worrying the reader won’t get it. Before you add explanation, ask: is the clue there? If the emotion, action, or detail already points in the right direction, trust it. Over-explaining often flattens moments that were already working.
10. If you don’t know how to start a scene, start a few seconds late.
Writers often open scenes too early — characters entering rooms, greeting each other, settling in. Skip that. Start where something is already happening: mid-conversation, mid-thought, mid-tension. Readers will catch up faster than you think. (A LOT of my writing starts like this, but lots of people like it... so it works I guess.)
11. If you write your main character as “normal,” don’t abandon that the second they're thrown in a difficult situation.
If you establish a character as ordinary — awkward, untrained, unsure — they shouldn’t suddenly start moving smoother, or reacting like a seasoned fighter the moment things get hard. Stress doesn’t usually make people cooler or more competent; it makes them messier. If you want them to survive a difficult situation, let it be through panic, luck, instinct, help from others, or small, clumsy decisions. The moment they act like a different person, they stop feeling real — and readers will notice.
12. If your redemption arc starts with instant forgiveness, it isn’t redemption.
Redemption requires effort, discomfort, and time. The character should change before they’re accepted again — not after. Forgiveness is a result, not a starting point. Saying the character did some bad things but the second they apologise everything is forgiven (or to an extent) not only sounds unrealistic, but simple too.
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Okay, that’s it. No more tips. I’ve run out of wisdom and it’s past the hour where good decisions are made.
If even one of these made you go, “oh. that explains a lot actually,” then this post did its job. You don’t have to use all of them. You don’t have to agree with me. Writing isn’t a checklist — it’s trial and error and accidentally discovering your best scenes while doing something “wrong.”
So write out of order. Let the tone shift. Let your characters be complicated and a little inconvenient. Skip the boring parts. Trust the moment before you explain it to death.
And if your draft feels messy or unfinished or emotionally confusing?
Good. That usually means you’re close.
Go write something that surprises you. Something that hurts a little. Something you’ll reread later and realise you were braver than you thought.
You’re not doing it wrong.
You’re writing.
by writingwithoutconfidence (you all make me more confident <3)
1. Repeat an object or detail — not the meaning.
Don’t explain the symbolism. Let it build.
“Every room in the house had a clock with a crack down the middle.”
2. Tie symbols to emotion, not plot.
A raven doesn’t have to foreshadow death — maybe it shows up every time your character lies.
3. Pick something small and let it haunt the story.
Examples:
• matches that never light
• the sound of a kettle whistling too long
• a single glove always left behind
4. Reveal the meaning late — or not at all.
Readers love the “OHHH” moment, even if it comes chapters later.
5. Use symbolic opposites for character conflict.
Fire vs ice, silence vs noise, locked windows vs open roads.
Internal tug-of-war, external world.
Subtle romance tension without the cheesiness
If you don’t want cheesy YA romance, try these.
1. Let their emotions leak through contradictions.
“He refused to look at her — but passed her the warmer mug.”
2. Use body language like dialogue.
• brushing hands
• standing too close
• pretending not to notice
3. Create micro-moments of choice.
Do they reach for the door… or wait for the other person to catch up?
Do they touch their shoulder… or pull back?
4. Let silence do emotional heavy-lifting.
“She didn’t answer him. She didn’t have to. The way she held the blanket was enough.”
5. Play with pacing — slow burn, fast heart.
Long sentences for swelling emotion.
Short ones for impact.
“He swallowed. She noticed.”
Dialogue tricks because dialogue is 90% subtext
1. People rarely say what they mean.
Not:
“I’m scared you’ll leave.”
But:
“Are you going out again tonight?”
2. Cut hello/hi/bye unless the rhythm needs it.
Open in motion:
“You’re late.”
3. Let characters talk in their own ways.
Nervous: fragmented, apologetic.
Angry: clipped, sharp.
Tired: fewer words, softer ones.
4. Add quiet gestures between lines.
“Yeah, sure.”
He kept folding the same corner of the map.
This gives tone without telling.
5. Interruptions = realism + tension.
“I said I didn’t—”
“Didn’t what? Care?”
Little ways to build emotional weight without being overdramatic
Emotion doesn’t need violins!!
1. Show the aftermath, not the moment.
“The letter lay open. She hadn’t moved in ten minutes.”
2. Let small details break the reader.
“He set two plates out. Then put one back.”
3. Guilt speaks through habits.
“He checked the locks twice tonight.”
4. Don’t explain the emotion — show the fracture.
Instead of “She missed him”:
“She kept reaching for a second mug.”
5. Use long sentences for grief, short ones for pain.
Grief lingers. Pain hits.
Scene description that doesn't overwhelm
Description is seasoning, not the meal.
1. Pick two details that define the space.
“A crooked picture frame and a single, flickering bulb.”
2. Filter everything through the character’s mindset.
A paranoid character notices shadows.
A romantic notices warm colours.
3. Let the environment influence behaviour.
“The cold tiles made him fidget.”
4. Use description to hint at conflict.
“The chairs were too close together.”
5. Sprinkle details throughout — not all upfront.
Tension-building without action scenes
Tension isn’t violence — it’s expectation.
1. Give the character a secret the reader knows about.
Instant anxiety.
2. Break the rhythm.
One sentence too short.
One beat too long.
3. Make characters behave too normally.
“He smiled. Too easily.”
4. Use the wrong detail in the right moment.
“Why were the keys in the freezer?”
5. Let the setting react.
“The wind died as he stepped outside.”
#and I think because you are developing like 19 different skills simultaneously#but the ones that you're better at feel smooth and easy and therefore not noticeable#but the places where the pen drags metaphorically feel more significant#so it's like oof ouch the struggle (doesn't notice the 100 hundred things that would be very hard without practice & experience & skill)
[Text ID: I don't know who needs to hear this, but writing is hard because you care about it and you want it to be good, not because you're bad at it. /end ID]
Writers: You're not going to learn everything at once... and that's okay.
There's an absolute glut of technical writing advice out there. It can be tempting to try to gobble it all up, and overwhelming when no matter how much you've read, you're still spinning your wheels on your WIP.
But remember: Learning to write is a long game. No matter how much stuff you read, no matter how much good advice you get, you can't cram all the knowledge into your brain at once and then wake up the next day a perfect, brilliant writer.
You learn how to write by writing. And thinking about writing. Reading about writing. Reading other writers. Critiquing other writers. Writing again. Getting critiqued again. Writing some more. Reading a little tidbit of advice that clicks. Using that tidbit. Finding another tidbit...
It takes a while. Mechanical knowledge becomes second nature eventually, but it happens over years.
Hang in there. Enjoy the process. Let your banana peels and egg shells become compost (they will, I promise). You've got all the time in the world.
Okay so, definitely this is about not giving your protagonist a spontaneous murder tail, but more largely and it's about building a living breathing world where things fit and work together within an established framework, rather than just adding new mechanics and features in isolation and outside of the rules the reader expects the world to follow.
