#writer gothic

[thenalexica]

Gothic Romance approach to love

Ancient curses activate Haunted manor meetings Ghostly lost lovers Dark family secrets Inheritance reveals fate Storm-swept confessions Poisoned bloodlines mix Cemetery rendezvous Cursed portrait love Moonlit ritual bonds Gothic architecture burns Deadly past returns Ancestral spirit match Blood oath bindings Memory mansion trap

[faireladypenumbra]

Writer’s Gothic

"Wow, this is so good. Who wrote this?" she says, rereading her own work for the thousandth time after spending days lamenting her latest bout of writer's block. She was a horrible writer, so who wrote this?

It is she.

She wrote this.

She sometimes writes good things, but those good things came from a lot of hard work and do not appear in the first draft.

She will forget this again once she begins another novel.

[caffeinewitchcraft]

Writer Gothic

-You discover a new document in your “completed” folder. It’s 20k words of fantasy and adventure. You have no memory of writing it.

- You take a sip of your coffee and set it down to type. After a moment, you take another sip only to find the cup empty. You have written ten words.

- You go to take a shower and discover writing on your skin. Dialogue, character description, tips for edits. You don’t remember bringing pen to flesh.

- The cursor blinks at you. You blink back. Time stretches as you blink, back and forth, back and forth until, at last, you both stop blinking entirely. Nothing gets written.

- The same word appears three times in the same paragraph. You edit them out, only to find them, again, three paragraphs down. You close your laptop and decide to go shopping. You stare at the word flashing by on the way to the store. You feel followed.

- Your pen carves vicious corrections onto a printed copy of your story. Later, you will not remember the way you grit your teeth while editing or why calling a character effervescent is “superfluous.”

- There are words scrawled on receipts, on post its, on torn out scraps of paper all over your room. You recognize your handwriting on most of them and choose to ignore those bits in handwriting you do not.

- Your mom asks about your day. You do not know how to explain the exhaustion in your bones or the way your neck aches with the weight of eyes you’d tried to leave on the page  or the way your fingers are still typing phantom words against your thighs. You tell her nothing happened.

- Your roommates are concerned. You have not spoken in days. You wonder who it was you were whispering to last night as you scratched out another outline at the kitchen table.

- Your computer screen goes dark while you stare at your last sentence, trying to think of where to go next. You did not know that your lips could curl like that or your eyes could look so black.

[s-graves-writes]

Writer Gothic

You have ten versions of the same document. You try to find the original. Each one is slightly shorter than the last. You have one hundred versions of the same document. One only has a single word. That word is “run.”

You find a thousand words you didn’t write. You wrote them while you were asleep- they’re better then the words you write awake. You start taking sleeping pills.

You find a scene you don’t remember writing, with characters whose names you don’t remember. They are the shadows of ideas you never wrote. They don’t speak, they only stare through the pages and into your soul.

“Shouldn’t you be writing?” Asks your roommate. You ignore her. “Shouldn’t you be writing?” Asks your characters. “Shouldn’t you be writing?” Asks your cat. Death knocks on the door to your room. “Shouldn’t you be wri-

You kill off a character. It isn’t enough. You kill off another. Another. Everyone is dead. The pages are red with blood. It is not enough. He is still not happy.

Your pen name makes her own website. She’s more famous than you are, and you just came up with her two weeks ago. She writes her own novels. They’re published by the end of the year. You read them. They’re your novels, printed backwards.

The ink spills out of your manuscript and out of your computer screen. “Computer screens don’t have ink,” you say. You’re right, computer screens don’t have ink. The ink doesn’t care. It keeps flowing.

[waytoomuchanalysis]

You name your book character knowing full well that that isn't their name. You don't know what their name is, but it isn't that. There's a name somewhere that fits, but you haven't unlocked that information yet. Maybe you knew once. Maybe you never will. Your character has the wrong name.

[whicheverwarrior]

A writer gothic: you hear a song you’ve never heard before on the radio that reminds you of your WIP. You open Spotify and find it to add it to your WIP playlist. A notification tells you this song is already on that playlist.

[avi-why]

I’m so confused, you guys

I just spent about a week adding in scenes with romantic tension in the WIP but I reread it today and they’re all just... gone. It’s so surreal. I checked the word count and it’s the same number of words. entire paragraphs are missing. I know I wrote them. What the hell.

[catsbythegreat]

Writer Gothic

You open up a word document. Ten more pop up. There’s also three different scrivener projects open, and maybe a final draft script somewhere in there. None of them are finished. When you look away, they seem to multiply. 

Where do ideas come from? You don’t know. You haven’t had an idea in years. Every single idea you thought you had turned out not to be an idea. You swear you wrote them down, but they’re gone now, along with the rest of your creativity. 

You write the most beautiful sentences, and then you get to a word you can’t remember how to spell. You swore you could spell it a second ago. But now you’re not sure you can spell anything at all. You stop writing. The sentence falls apart, and so do you. 

“What’s the name of your story?” they ask. “Untitled,” you say. All of your stories are Untitled. 

You write in the coffee shop. You don’t ever leave the coffee shop. You and the other regulars stare at each other over your laptops and wonder why none of you have left, where all the outlets are, why the wifi is so spotty, and whether or not you can afford a second cup of coffee. None of you have written a word. 

You wake up in the middle of the night with a brilliant story that just needs to be written down right now. You write it down, fall back asleep. In the morning you wake up and there are ink stains on your pillow and something written in an ancient, unreadable script in your notepad. You don’t remember writing it. Maybe the brilliant story was just a dream. 

When people ask what you do for a living, you tell them, “I’m a writer.” You tell them with ink stains on your hands, a notebook in your pocket. You tell them while smashing your laptop’s keyboard to bits. You shout it at them through tears. You write it in the blood formed of paper cuts from the manuscripts you’ve drafted and redrafted and redrafted. You’ve made a pact with a dark spirit to be a writer, and now it won’t let you go, so you must declare, “I’m a writer.” 

Your characters don’t want to do what you want them to do. Your characters have become self-aware. Your characters are no longer satisfied with you as their god, and now they will do everything in their power to hurt you. You start a new project, hoping they won’t find you there, hoping that this time, you will remain in control.