RIVER THE WORD WITCH @riverthewordwitch - Tumblr Blog

goathouse

“it’s a 6k slowburn” i say

“oh only six thousand words?” says some poor ignorant soul, “that’s not that lo-”

“no, six thousand years,” i say, staring off into a distance. “they’ve been pining for six thousand fucking years.”

academic-vampire

𝔞𝔱 𝔞 𝔪𝔬𝔪𝔢𝔫𝔱’𝔰 𝔫𝔬𝔱𝔦𝔠𝔢

ladyignatius4

Mentally making a cup of tea and giving a gentle forehead kiss to every struggling writer on my dash right now.

Your story matters, your ideas are good, and someone out there is going to fall in love with your world.

daily-prompts

Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

― Ray Bradbury

saint-rouge

Third edition of Les Misérables with antique postcards and letters written by Victor Hugo and Victor-François Hugo to Hugo’s Italian Editor

cranberrywren

wool coats and creaky floorboards

professor-winter

ꜱᴏᴏɴ ꜰᴇᴇʟꜱ ʟɪᴋᴇ ꜰᴏʀᴇᴠᴇʀ

sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog

"true joy in writing" feels like a hard-won declaration and I am thrilled to see it come to pass for you again. Congratulations!!!

Thanks for the kind words and deep empathy. It was hard, yeah. I mean, the identity of Being a Fiction Writer had been important to me since I was literally seven or eight years old. And then I just couldn't do it anymore. I felt like a total failure. I felt like I was failing my publishers and my readers and my family and everybody else, and that the people who called me a hack had always been right and et cetera literally ad nauseum.

Of course, I know I've had tremendous success in my career, and that a lot of people have found my stories useful, but I just felt like I couldn't write stories anymore that mattered to anyone.

And I still don't know if I can of course. I have no idea how people will respond to this book, and that's scary. But writing this book has mattered to me. Until now, I always thought fiction writing was exclusively about the reader. But I have learned in the last nine years that it can also be valuable and instructive and engrossing for the author. It can also help me to visit rooms in my mind I have no other way of finding.

So I (really really) hope you like it. But I also take some stock in the fact that I have enjoyed writing it.

juliaxyn

Current mission: focus and grow.

ariaiscursed

- burned cedar and sandalwood

literallymechanical

Lots of writing advice on tumblr. It's been years since I've written fiction in a serious way, but I did write a couple of (bad) novels in my early 20's, a bunch of short stories, and also a few hundred thousand words of LARP writing, and I do have a bacherlor's of science in creative writing (lol).

From what I can tell, there are only three universally applicable pieces of writing advice:

Read a lot (mandatory)

Show your writing to people (mandatory)

Have something wrong with you in a way that is impossible to articulate except by writing a novel (optional)