just cause i was talking about this w a friend but if you're a writer and you've got questions like:
what happens in all those meetings a driver does on the weekend?
what's the structure of a race weekend? when's curfew? what does that mean? when do team members get there? what do they do all of the days? where is my driver at any given moment?
what's the shape of the paddock? how is it set up? what's the difference between a europe and a flyaway race for setup? why is monaco terrible to work in?
what's the difference between a race engineer and a performance engineer?
what's the canteen like at the factory? what is the food like at each hospitality on track? when is it served? who gets it?
who gets to go to a podium celebration? how do they know?
travel to the weekend, team logistics around who is where when
when my driver goes to the factory, what are they doing?
Bernie Collins covers these in her book. She breaks down a race from months out and does lots of day-by-day details.
May Pang speaking about George Harrison’s confrontation with John Lennon during the Dark Horse tour. This would’ve been on 14 Dec. 1974. From May’s autobiography, Loving John. This story has been posted in the past, but it was without the ending, which I’ve not seen included before.
oscar piastri/james vowles & oscar piastri/mark webber
7.2k words, rated m
post-silverstone 2026; oscar & alex bodyswap
blurb:
"Mate, look. Lily and I have already got our flight booked to Monaco for tomorrow morning. Can you wait 'til then to fix it?"
Carefully, Oscar says, "I could."
"Right. Good." There's a pause on the other end of the line. "The thing is, I have a meeting today, and I really can't be missed."
liking a ship but disliking the distinct set of stock fanon that they have been assigned is like one of those punishments dante came up with when he wrote the worldbuilding for hell in inferno
hello helenish - i wanted to ask if you've already made/might consider a post talking briefly about your writing process - how you approach editing and maybe just how in the world you get your pacing so deft and perfect in particular - i've been writing fic for about a decade now but i think your skill is of the sort that takes another few decades of hard and thoughtful work to get to. so i'm curious, i guess, how the sausage is made, how you edit to the point where your sentences sound so perfectly timed and pitched. it seems so effortless though of course it's anything but
short answer is: I rewrite and edit a lot. More than other people? I don't know.
Here are some other exciting details about my PROCESS. [This feels a little personal, but not in an invasive way, more like when I'm alone at my house eating blue cheese sandwiches paired with spoonfuls of jam straight from the jar while revisiting Michelle Branch's entire discography, just drawing back the curtain on some private behaviors, that's all.]
How to Start
I have lots of little bits and pieces around - little scenes, random ideas - that I sort of rotate through poking at until I get traction on one, and then I generally work away on that until it's done.* I don't have a lot of access to long blocks of time for writing (and I fritter those away foolishly ANYWAY) so I'm usually working at it in little fits and starts, the fifteen minutes before I fall asleep at night, etc.
[*except for stress breaks where I'm like I'm stuck/this is too hard and then I go write on something else for a while - the best thing is to fully take the pressure off by writing something really silly and soapy, like my go-to stress break is this story where Leon is trying to keep his pitiful kingdom together and has agreed to marry a terrifying demon from the northern kingdom (CONNOR) who has just arrived on foot ahead of the moon so that they can complete the (BARBARIC) ritual he's going to subject Leon to, which is all scary and primitive (SEXUAL) demon nonsense to which Leon must bravely submit.]
[Sometimes the stress breaks turn into real stories, like I wrote Nothing Special in the document for Obligations because I was just stuck and wanted to write about Leon being JELLUS]
okay but how to start:
Dialogue usually comes first, and I write that by dramatically acting it out on my commute.
Sidebar: I bicycle commute and it's become such a big part of the writing process for me that sometimes when I can't figure out a part of a story I GO on a bike ride to figure it out, or I think "well, I'll just figure that out next time I ride." Writing this out sounds bonkers but it works. I'll sometimes take notes at lights if I come up with something particularly useful, but I have also found that even if I forget what I was thinking about, it'll come back to me the next time I get on a bike. Here are a couple examples of what a piece of a story looks like early on:
When I'm really in the thick of a story, I write a lot of notes/emails to myself with 1-2 sentences that I plug in later. Sometimes I'll get to work with a whole scene in mind and be able to quickly get those down too.
I Never Outline Except When I Do
I write in chunks/scenes that I patch together and I NEVER outline because the one time I tried it it killed the story outright. I usually have a general foggy idea of the VIBE, but I just write my way out of the fog, one scene at a time. I can't even imagine knowing what happens in a story in advance enough TO outline it.
That said, a new thing that I have started doing which I guess is sort of outline-adjacent is NAMING scenes, but only AFTER they are written, so I can keep track of the chunks. I rearrange scenes quite a bit; often I find putting scenes in a different order can kind of un-stick a story, or present a new solution when I've written myself into a dead end.
Naming the chunks helps me keep track of what is even going on once thing start getting longer and more complicated which- okay!! is an outline of sorts, but it's a post-writing organizational approach instead of pre-writing. I use the headings in google docs, which is also useful because you can easily jump around to different sections of the stories and nest them as needed. It is important to give them stupid names so I can trick myself into thinking this is just a silly thing I am doing for fun and it's Not Serious and does not need to be good at all. Here are a few examples that are...HUGE for reasons I don't understand:
All Killer No Filler
If I'm bored writing it, then who would ever be interested in reading it? (Obviously things I find interesting might not be interesting to readers, but that's not my problem.) I only write the parts of the story I want to read and I try to get to those parts as quickly as possible. I am impatient and don't want to waste a million years figuring out how to get a guy's clothes on and get him across town or whatever, I just go straight to the part that interests me.
Does that mean I never have to be like "then he drove home from the airport" or "He took off his shoes" - of course not (unfortunately, because sometimes getting everyone undressed is sooooo harrrrd, like oh my god) but it DOES mean that I try to be either interested in the details OR to get those scenes to do double duty, like maybe we are establishing some kind of important background information BUT ALSO having a juicy misunderstanding?
OR jump straight into the scene, like:
"What did you even mean by that?" says Leon, later.
THEN backtrack: He'd spent the whole afternoon chewing over it, trapped in tape review and then some mandatory [SOMETHING SOMETHING etc] the whole time, the words rattling around in his head, Connor's tight smile.
THEN jump back forward: "huh?" Connor says.
Keep it Rolling
About those SOMETHINGS: if I have a good idea of where a sentence/scene is going, I keep writing and throw in placeholders for anything I don't know yet/facts/story details. On the nights that I don't know how to write what happens next, that's a good time to go back and come up with details to fill in.
Same thing if I'm not sure about the wording, I just add every idea i have and then come back and choose what I want later. Here's a section from an early draft where I had several different ideas, but I didn't want to slow down and make a call about them yet, so I threw them all down and came back and decided what I wanted it to say later.
“If I were territorial,” Leon says, before he means to, “he’d have known better than to try it with you.”/I would have straightened him out if he tried it with you.”
Connor flushes, deep red. “Pretty sure of yourself,” he says.
“Yup,” Leon says.
“Good thing you’re not, then,”/Huh/Good for you” Connor says, evenly/irked but he's quiet/bitter??
Letting it Percolate vs. Brute Force:
If I'm stuck, I prefer to let things percolate and get back to them later because it works better than forcing myself through writing a scene that is just Not Good because I'm making myself do it. But sometimes you have to force it - you have to jam two parts together that don't go together or write some real transition paragraph that's boring and stupid. It's part of it.
Despair
This is terrible I'm never going to finish it how does it end ugh this one is just not good everyone's gonna hate it ANYHOW it is important not to get bogged down here and what works For Me is to belligerently be like "who cares if everyone hates it! I HOPE they do!!! Whatever!!! Good!!" while also being like "It's fine to write a story that is bad. I have written many other stories that are bad! This story is not special it's just bad like all the other ones."
Written out that looks really, uh, maladaptive, but if I sit down and try to write something GOOD the pressure is awful and it makes me sooooo self-conscious, whereas when I'm writing my bad stories I don't have to worry that the dialogue is weird or this part is all purple-prosey or pretentious or it's overwritten or underwritten or I overused the word "sharply" [EVERY TIME]. I just remind myself there is absolutely nothing to worry about because I am just working away on a story that is bad so those parts fit right in.
Renovations
So then when I finally get everything patched together and figure out the ending it is VERY thrilling!
Then I go back and start fixing everything up: adding adverbs and action in the dialogue bits and this usually is a time when I realize big pacing problems and end up adding scenes or breaking them up and moving them around. Sometimes this part is adding one word (...taking it out, adding it back in). Sometimes this is fully rewriting entire scenes - for example - here is a section from Scoring Effects where I was reworking a scene pretty substantially:
This is also the point where I take note of various little problems: overuse of words/phrases (how many times can one person use "a little"--SO MANY TIMES) and I write those down at the top of the document and then do a find-in-doc and go through and consider them one at a time - again, a great activity for a night when I'm feeling tired and uncreative.
I use onelook and thesaurus.com because also sometimes I just can't get the right word? What is a word for "contempt but not that bad" and so on. Help, are there other words for: smile, laugh, flush, help. Sometimes looking at other words helps. Sometimes I just decide it's better to keep it simple.
This is probably where I start to think about the rhythm of the paragraphs, which is, I suddenly realize, what this ask is actually about. The answer is: I read over the story in one go and leave comments as I go (so as not to stop and lose the thread of what I'm doing) about any section that feels like it's not flowing right. I do this more than once and yes, it is TEDIOUS as hell. I guess it's about the rhythm of the sentences too, but I don't think about it like that, only: this part sounds good/that part sounds wrong. Some of this is pacing, like: is this just too much dialogue and does it need to be broken up by some action? Ideally you want some nice big juicy expository-type paragraphs in there to break up the dialogue heavy scenes. But I try not to write JUST to write, you know? See above re: All Killer No Filler.
This type of revision - from here to the end - is my favorite part, because fine-tuning is fun and interesting. I often end up doing big overhauls of scenes (write in more detail, rearrange and rewrite dialogue) because now I know what actually happens in them or because I just have an idea I think is better while I'm rereading.
THIS is the time to let things percolate a little: the right adverb will come along fairly easily if I just get up and run an errand or something. Similarly, this is a fun place to sharpen up dialogue by acting out all the good parts and making sure everyone said THEEEEE most cutting version.
A Bad Thing I Do
When I'm pretty close I put it all in a draft on Ao3 and edit that. This is obviously a terrible idea since you might accidentally hit post AND there's no undo key, but for some reason seeing it in the Ao3 format just completely rewires my brain and makes me SEE it in new ways, and then if I need to really do a big edit I pull chunks back out and edit them in a word doc. For the last story I wrote (Obligations), when I did this, I realized several major timeline errors, came up with an idea for a whole new scene I wanted to add (Conor Garland aftermath), moved a section from one chapter to another, and a million other little edits, like here:
“I know,” Connor says. “Sorry. It’s, uh.” He squeezes his eyes closed. “Sometimes it’s kind of mixed signals,” he says. “But I know you didn’t mean—um.” He takes a long breath. “It doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have gotten mad like that.”
“Yesterday you were knocking boots with Walman,” Leon says, casually enough. He takes a sip of his coffee. “That’s not a mixed signal?”
In early drafts, Leon said "go to bed with Walman" (actually, it was Skinner at that point, THANK U EDM for trading for Walman, who was a million times better for this section) but then I had used "go to bed" later on in the story when Leon was talking to Connor about sleeping together, and I thought it fit that circumstance because in that scene he's a little shy and trying not to be crude. But in this scene, he's upset about Walman and pretending not to be so I tried "fucking" but that was TOO rude (not gentlemanly enough for a romantic lead), so I tried "knocking boots" but that seemed not quite right and does anyone even say that anymore, would Leon (native German speaker) even KNOW that phrase, so I tried "hooking up" but then ended up going back to "knocking boots" because I was looking for something that was crude but also more jokey/juvenile [and because I decided that that Leon would have an encyclopedic knowledge of euphemisms for fucking by now.]
So that's, like. How I do it. Micromanage about individual words but then also think about the big picture. Reread a lot. Rewrite because I know I won't be happy with it until it sounds better. Don't take it seriously at all it's just a dumb horny story but ALSO take it SO seriously because it's about the big questions, like What If Someone Really Knew You and Still Loved You Anyway or How Do We Find Courage To Go On in a Broken World? Try not to be impatient; let things sit for a week and see how they look on the other end. Go for a bike ride.
🇬🇧 03.07.2026 | F1 Grand Prix of Great Britain: Sprint Qualifying (P7)
NORTHAMPTON, ENGLAND - JULY 03: Oscar Piastri of Australia and McLaren in parc ferme during Sprint Qualifying ahead of the F1 Grand Prix of Great Britain at Silverstone Circuit on July 03, 2026 in Northampton, England. (Photo by Rudy Carezzevoli/Getty Images)
