10 Writing Things That Have Saved My Creative Soul (and Sanity)
↳ If your character’s arc isn’t making you slightly emotional or existential, it’s probably not finished. If they start and end the story the same person, that’s not a character arc—it’s a flatline. Make them squirm, learn, lose, grow. Bonus points if they make you question your own moral compass in the process.
↳ Worldbuilding is not a license to drown your reader in lore like it’s Game of Thrones on steroids. If you have to write a wiki page to understand your own plot, fine...but that doesn’t mean your reader has to read it. Give us breadcrumbs, not a 12-course feast on page one.
↳ If the theme of your story can’t be summed up in one slightly aggressive sticky note, you’re probably overcomplicating it.
(“This book is about choosing yourself even when no one else does”—boom, theme. Now go make your characters suffer for it.)
↳ You will hate your manuscript somewhere between 30k and 50k words. That’s your cue to keep going, not quit. It’s like the literary version of hitting mile 18 in a marathon. Everything hurts, but that means you're doing it right.
↳ That “genius idea” you had at 2 a.m.? Save it. Write it down. But don’t drop everything for it. New ideas are seductive chaos demons. Your current project deserves monogamy… at least until the second draft.
↳ A character’s greatest fear is a shortcut to their heart. Forget favorite color or coffee order...what keeps them up at night? What would destroy them if it came true?
↳ If you don’t know how to end your story, figure out what question it’s been asking the whole time. Once you know the question, the ending becomes the answer. Maybe not a happy answer, but a satisfying one.
↳ No one’s going to write your weird little story the way you will.
That’s your superpower. So go ahead and write the morally gray necromancer love triangle in space. Your people are out there. And they’re hungry for it.
↳ You are allowed to be a slow writer. You are allowed to be a fast writer. You are not allowed to be a cruel writer—to yourself. The world will criticize your art for free. Don’t do their job for them inside your own head.
↳ Some stories just aren’t meant to be novels. And that’s okay.
Maybe it's a short story. A play. A fever dream disguised as a poem. The shape doesn’t matter. The story does. Let it tell you what it wants to be.
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