the author's barely disguised longing to be a real person
the author's barely disguised longing to not be a real person

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@skirir
the author's barely disguised longing to be a real person
the author's barely disguised longing to not be a real person
the character
i fear the situation is dire
I have no outline tho, just vibes
Trying to do research for writing is so dumb I’m literally on the Wikipedia page for rabbit
when the scene was great in your head but now you see it on the page…
editing your own work is like reading a text you sent at 2am and realizing you were possessed by a deeply embarrassing version of yourself
When you're just casually writing, far enough along that you're not encountering any major issues, and then you come across the kind of plot hole where you have to close the doc and stare at a wall as you rework the entire plot
Love the word "also". I have more things to say
hot take possibly? but i actually think it’s okay for things to be marketed for adults. it’s literally okay if things aren’t suitable for children. i feel like we are losing the plot
You ever flip through your backlog of writing notes to yourself (I'm partial to having a disconcerting Hell-pile of Post-it notes on my desk), and realize you have absolutely no idea what you were even trying to get at with your own notes, to yourself? Because I sure do.
Reminder that it's totally normal to have a bad first, second, third, fourth and fifth draft.
After that it’s unforgivable and you’re a failure as a writer
Yeah after that they euthanize you
Appreciation post for all the beginner artists who work hard despite the AI looming over us. You are fabulous. You are precious. Keep up the hard work, you are needed.
Do you think authors sometimes don't realize how their, uh, interests creep into their writing? I'm talking about stuff like Robert Jordan's obvious femdom kink, or Anne Rice's preoccupation with inc*st and p*dophilia. Did their editors ever gently ask them if they've ever actually read what they've written?
Firstly, a reminder: This is not tiktok and we just say the words incest and pedophilia here.
Secondly, I don't know if I would call them 'interests' so much as fixations or even concerns. There are monstrous things that people think about, and I think writing is a place to engage with those monstrous things. It doesn't bother me that people engage with those things. I exist somewhere within the whump scale, and I would hope no one would think less of me just because sooner or later I like to rough a good character up a bit, you know? It's fun to torture characters, as a treat!
But, anyway, assuming this question isn't, "Do writers know they're gross when I think they are gross" which I'm going to take the kind road and assume it isn't, but is instead, "Do you think authors are aware of the things they constantly come back to?"
Sometimes. It can be jarring to read your own writing and realize that there are things you CLEARLY are preoccupied with. (mm, I like that word more than concerns). There are things you think about over and over, your run your mind over them and they keep working their way back in. I think this is true of most authors, when you read enough of them. Where you almost want to ask, "So...what's up with that?" or sometimes I read enough of someone's work that I have a PRETTY good idea what's up with that.
I've never read Robert Jordan and I don't intend to start (I think it would bore me this is not a moral stance) and I've really never read Rice's erotica. In erotica especially I think you have all the right in the world to get fucking weird about it! But so, when I was young I read the whole Vampire Chronicles series. I don't remember it perfectly, but there's plenty in it to reveal VERY plainly that Anne Rice has issues with God but deeply believes in God, and Anne Rice has a preoccupation with the idea of what should stay dead, and what it means to become. So, when i found out her daughter died at the age of six, before Rice wrote all of this, and she grew up very very Catholic' I said, 'yeah, that fucking checks out'.
Was Rice herself aware of how those things formed her writing? I think at a certain point probably yes. The character of Claudia is in every way too on the nose for her not to have SOME idea unless she was REAL REAL dense about her own inner workings. But, sometimes I know where something I write about comes from, that doesn't mean I'm interested in sharing it with the class. I would never ever fucking say, 'The reasons I seem to write so much of x as y is that z happened to me years ago' ahaha FUCK THAT NOISE. NYET. RIDE ON, COWBOY.
But I've known some people in fandom works who clearly have something going on and don't seem to realize it. Or they're very good at hiding it. Based on the people I'm talking about I would say it's more a lack of self-knowledge, and I don't even mean that unkindly. I have, in many ways, taken myself down to the studs and rebuilt it all, so I unfortunately am very aware of why I do and write the things I do most of the time. It's extremely annoying not to be able to blame something. I imagine it must be very freeing. But it ain't me, babe.
Anyway, a lot of words to say: Maybe! But that might not stop them from writing it, it might be a useful thing for them to engage with, and you can always just not read it.
Also, we don't censor words here.
Props to OP for answering so gracefully, but I'm not going to answer gracefully. It is more important than ever to call out fascism whenever you see it -- especially the quiet, soft, poisonously insidious kind that Anon is practicing here.
Anon ostensibly wants to know: "Do authors realize that they're writing about things that some people might find disturbing, horrific, upsetting, repulsive, or simply just TMI?" (Yes, obviously they know. Authors are not stupid; that's usually a requirement of the job (not always. But usually).)
But what Anon is actually asking is, "Why don't authors stop themselves from doing a Bad Thing? Why doesn't anyone else stop them?" The assumption underlying that question is: "Surely if they realized that they were doing something disgusting, they would stop immediately." Even more covertly implied: "I think writing about certain things automatically taints you with moral degeneracy--that is, it marks you as a possible or potential criminal."
To that I say: My friend, writing is just thoughts copied onto paper, and thinking is not a crime. Only actual actions can be crimes. What does it matter what other people think about? Literally so what? Why do you want people to be stopped from thinking about those things ("did their editors ever gently ask them...")? Why do you care? Do you feel that an author should provide a list of justifications and excuses before it's permissible for them to write about something? Why? And who do you think should be in charge of that? The government???? YOU???????
To any person reading this post: If the above questions are personally upsetting to you, if you find yourself huffily thinking something like, "Well, I care because it could normalize--", NOPE, STOP RIGHT THERE. 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩 This is a big red flag: You (much like the Anon) are exhibiting some early warning signs of Fascism, and that is not something to take lightly in the current political climate. There are some drugs you shouldn't experiment with even once, and fascism is one of them. Repeat as often as needed: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THOUGHTCRIME. WE DO NOT LIVE IN GEORGE ORWELL'S 1984.
But we already talk about thoughtcrimes now and then, don't we? I can't remember seeing someone talking about crimestop (also from Orwell's 1984):
In the Newspeak vocabulary, the word crimestop denotes the citizen's instinctive desire to rid himself of unwanted, incorrect thoughts (personal and political), the discovery of which, by the Thinkpol [Thought Police], would lead to detection and arrest, transport to and interrogation at Miniluv (Ministry of Love). The protagonist, Winston Smith, describes crimestop as a conscious process of self-imposed cognitive dissonance: The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak. . . . He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with propositions—'the Party says the Earth is flat', 'the Party says that ice is heavier than water'—and trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them. Moreover, from the perspective of Oceania's principal enemy of the state, in the history book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, Emmanuel Goldstein said that: Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.
Read that twice, and then reread the Anon's question. Translate it through that lens: "Why," says the Anon, delicately disgusted, "are these authors not practicing better crimestop? I practice it all the time. Why aren't they?"
Great question, Anon. Why AREN'T they? Turn off your crimestop and give it some real thought.
(Hint: If the answer you come up with is "Because they are moral degenerates" or anything in that neighborhood, you are unfortunately still doing fascism. Try again. If you have tried several times and the only answer you can manage to come up with is a still a synonym of "moral degeneracy" then this is above my paygrade and I would recommend talking to a trusted grownup, a therapist, a spiritual leader, or possibly your least-online friend.)
I also think it's somewhat reductive to be like "X keeps showing up in a writer's work, therefore they must be obsessed with X". Maybe they are, especially if they keep shoehorning in something really specific, but often it's also just... the simplest and most direct way that they know of to explore something. Fantasy is saturated with depictions of killing and violence; is every fantasy writer obsessed with killing? No. Violence is a very direct and simple way to include conflict with high stakes that you can fill with tension and excitement. Fantasy is also chock full of slavery. Are fantasy writers super into slavery? No. Stories are about power and power differences. Putting a protagonist in chains or giving them an enslaved bodyguard or tangling them up in a slave revolution is a very direct and simple way to explore that dynamic. Authors will usually repeat the tricks that they're used to, and that work. So fucking many of my stories hook the reader with a random inexplicable corpse. So many of my climaxes are like "actually that super special power/big conspiracy/grand prophecy that this entire quest has been about? Fake. Whole thing was a lie this entire time and what's actually going on is something completely different. You've got half a chapter to adjust."
Maybe a writer keeps writing about incest because he actually likes to explore romantic relationships between close family members. Or maybe he keeps writing about incest because he wants to frame the situation as disgusting, and he knows that incest disgusted most of his audience the last three times he wrote it.
And even if he did want to explore those relationships through writing, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Somebody once commented on a post when reblogging from me, and I'm paraphrasing, "Nobody assumes that I really must want to put wasps in people's eyes bc I'm a horror writer, but as soon as character genitals get involved, I must be revealing my secret desires."
I think about that a lot.
I also want to add that it's dangerous to assume somebody likes or fetishizes something just because they write about it a lot. Agatha Christie wrote a lot of murders, but that doesn't mean she had a snuff kink. Writing can be used to explore things beyond the vail of normalcy for many reasons such as trying to understand why people do things, or to warn other people of things, or to work through one's own past. It can be an outlet for intrusive thoughts. It can be purely for the sake of the story, for shock or drama. It can even just be "This is what people want to see, so I am going to write it because I like money."
Making assumptions of someone's character based only on the stories they tell is not wise and can lead to damaging rumors about people who don't deserve it.
And also yeah, thought-police = fascism. Don't do that.
did you know you can create a whole fictional world and nobody can stop you and its not illegal
I’m sure we’ve all been there.
How many writing projects do you have?
(If anything, I don't just mean ideas, I mean full-blown projects-when you already have a plot, have characters, and just need to finalize the details and write the whole thing.)
I'll go first. I have 22 projects at the moment, one of which I'm very actively working on.
I've got 9 and more than half of them are series. 29+ novels planned in total and I've only written the first drafts of 2 of them (almost 3). Plan is to finish 2 more first drafts next month and then edit for the rest of the year while I keep looking for a publisher for my first novel.