the writing grindstone

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[luna-azzurra]

Thoughts Your Villain Refuses to Acknowledge!!

⊹ What if I'm not the hero of this story after all?

⊹ Do I actually believe in this cause, or am I just too deep to turn back now?

⊹ How many people have to suffer before I admit I was wrong from the start?

⊹ What if the person trying to stop me is right?

⊹ What if they've been right the whole time?

⊹ Am I doing this for the greater good, or because I need to prove something to someone who's already dead?

⊹ When did I become the thing I used to fight against?

⊹ Do my followers actually believe in me, or are they just as scared and desperate as I was when I started?

⊹ What if power didn't fix me like I thought it would? What if nothing will?

⊹ How much of my past self is left, and would they be horrified by what I've become?

⊹ Is this strength, or have I just gotten better at justifying cruelty?

⊹ What happens when I finally win? Will the emptiness disappear, or will it just get louder?

⊹ Did I choose this path, or did I just refuse every exit until this was all that remained?

⊹ What if mercy isn't weakness like I've been telling myself for years?

⊹ Am I building a legacy or just a monument to my own pain?

⊹ How many innocent people is my vision worth? And who decided I get to make that calculation?

⊹ What if I pushed away the one person who could have saved me because I needed them to be wrong about me?

⊹ Do I even remember what I'm fighting for anymore, or am I just going through the motions?

⊹What if destroying them won't make me whole again?

⊹ When I look in the mirror, do I see who I wanted to be, or who I settled for becoming?

⊹ Am I the monster they made me, or did I choose this and blame them for it?

⊹ What if my tragic backstory is just an excuse I've been hiding behind?

⊹ How long can I pretend this rage is righteous before I have to admit it's just rage?

⊹ What happens if I win and I'm still empty? Still broken? Still me?

⊹ Did I corrupt my cause, or was it always going to end this way?

[thewritinggrindstone]

tell me your favorite part of the writing process!

I'll start: I love rereading what I've already written for a WIP and experiencing intense moments of satisfaction and pleasure when I only need to tweak a tiny bit of information to make an already excellent sentence sing.

[ariesrin]

Writing Tip: Basics of Grief

Grief is inconsistent. It's not logical. It doesn't follow rules and the one thing about grief is that everyone processes it differently.

You can grieve the living, and you can grieve the dead. You might grieve an unrequited love that was never meant to be, or you might be grieving the death of a loved one.

People react in ways that might not make sense to others. Your character might cry over a misplaced object. They might feel 'fine' one moment, and then completely overwhelmed in the next moment. Small, unexpected things can trigger this. Your character is in public and briefly hears lyrics of their loved one's favourite song? This could easily trigger a meltdown.

Mundane things can become emotional. This means cooking meals or seeing a certain snack in the shop. Reaching for their phone and opening a specific conversation as if to text that one person by pure habit.

It shows up in behaviour. These are the physical affects that someone would see. Perhaps something a close friend or family member would only notice. Maybe the character looks more tired than normal, or has far more nightmares. Forgetfulness, withdrawal, or conversely, getting more attached to others. Does your character throw themselves into work to stay busy, or pick up random hobbies they thought they'd enjoy, but actually hate? Might they take up risky habits just to feel some other emotion again?

People around them act differently. Friends avoiding topics, people either trying to get closer to help, or even withdrawing from the relationship altogether.

There isn't a timeline. The event might not be something that your character gets over. It sticks with them. It builds or breaks their character. Setbacks and obstacles: This event might change the shape of their future completely. Do they get over it quickly? Do they seek help to process it? Do they power through and take this grief with them their entire life, or do they fall to the intensity?

Think about a time in any media you've consumed (webcomics, TV series, anime, films, books, etc...) where someone has lost something. This could be a lost love, a lost life, or even lost someone they thought they hated.

Grief doesn't have to apply to death.

[wordshaveteeth]

Language was unwieldy at the beginning: I had to learn to marshal it, to make it do my bidding. And when I had the language leashed, the characters were suddenly beyond my control. They were crazy! The things they said and did. The wild joy I felt. The rightness of it all.

- Donal Ryan, heart, be at peace

[writingwithfolklore]

Backstory is Revealed When You Need It, Not Before

                Recently I shared my first 30 pages with my writing mentor, and now I'm sharing her advice with all of you (This is part 2! Find part 1 here). She told me my beginning read very slowly because I was giving backstory before it was relevant in the story, rather than intertwining it with the action.

                What I mean by that is, I was giving a lot of exposition on my world just through my character noting it to herself. I worried that if I didn’t lay down the basics right away, when I did mention it later it would come as a bad shock to readers.

While that might have a logic to it, it's very slow to read just exposition on the world. To get these details through naturally and when they're relevant, while still conveying them in the beginning, we needed to create a conflict for my main character to react to right away.

This way, I could spend the first couple pages revealing the essentials of my world and main character without halting the pacing to a stop.

                Okay, consider these two examples:

Character A avoided the alleyways as they travelled to the store. The city was overrun by gangs who liked to lurk in their dark corners, jumping out at unaware passerby’s for coin or favours.

                Vs.

The back of Character A’s neck prickled as they passed an alleyway that swallowed all light. They were steps away when they heard a raspy voice, “don’t you know you gotta pay the fee to pass through our turf?”

                How this character resolves this conflict will betray who they are as a person. Do they cower? Do they fight back? Do they reveal they have connections to another gang, or the police?

                This little conflict, as well as establishing a vital part of your world and character, should in some small way connect to the bigger conflict up ahead, aka the inciting incident.

                In this example, this specific gang would probably be where the main antagonist is from—or the consequences of how they deal with this follow them into the inciting incident in some way.

                Backstory only when it’s most relevant, not to anticipate when it will be important later.

                Good luck!

[adhdwannabewriter]

Writers, which software do you use?

Google docs

Microsoft word

Ellipsus

Libre office - writer

Notepad (the fuck is wrong with you lol)

Pages

Other (comment, please, esp if you recommend it)

Checking results

Remaining time: 19 hours 26 minutes

I used to use Google docs, but the white mode only was really annoying me (tires my eyes), so I swapped to Ellipsus (which I genuinely love and recommend), but it was bothering me a bit that I need wifi in order to use it, so now I switched to LibreOffice Writer, which I do like.

It very much has a Microsoft Word feel, but is open source and you need no accounts to use it. It's local on your device, so no AI can scan it, and no wifi is needed.

I still wish it had the Google Docs cards, because, bitch, that thing is so good for easy organizing.

[notpotable]

I primarily use google docs, where I find that with a serif font and forest green font color, eye strain is much reduced for me.

But I also DO use Notepad too hahaha - Notepad is beautiful and I will hear no slander! sometimes you just gotta have the simple expedient of not wanting your fic to end up being network traffic away from home, and a little perfectly un-cloud-linked, simple monospace font is exactly what you need.

In gdocs do all my initial edits in a serif font, then switch to a sans-serif font for another several edit passes, then reach out to my beta. Lastly I add all my formatting html myself, and then put the draft into AO3's plaintext editor and I read it through again on both my phone and on a desktop to see if I like the way everything is situated.

Unfortunately, wishful thinking aside, google docs simply does not yet have a competitor that can match it in portability (or USABILITY) across devices, and I write on my phone, my home laptop, my tablet outdoors, and workstations at my university.

And no, ellipsus is not gonna match any of that. I tried ellipsus. I bought into the hype. Ugh. I found it not portable at all across devices because of the limits of their flawed design choices in mobile web view (owing to misuse of small screen real estate and layout shifts), and I found it poorly useablefor my needs overall on ANY device because of the limits of their flawed design choices for text editor and user interface both (using markdown for the editor (fukkin markdown, I shit you not. /spit), yet hiding real, utilitarian text formatting options under five nested layers of menu clicks), with a team too small to offer support for their beta product, yet already rolling out paid sub options. for their beta product. ellipsus is a complete mess, and I got bamboozled into wasting weeks there trying to get it to function for my personal use cases. but they have 37 different color options... so you can change theme every four and a half hours I guess? wowza.

[terriyakiblack]

Ha, Google Docs’ foothold is pretty annoying, innit? But unfortunately, their service does just sort of work as you’ve put it.

Ellipsus is a project that started out very promising and has quickly turned into something concerning, unfortunately.

The choice to use markdown is... odd. I’m not really sure why they’ve gone that route for something that is geared towards creative writing, but... yeah. The interest in markdown that the internet currently has cannot go away fast enough for me.

And it definitely still feels like a project in beta. The UI is so fucking awkward. There’s the floating top header that shows the word count and has the focus mode and timer buttons, but it comes and goes with how you scroll and it’s so fucking annoying. And you can’t change its behavior! >:\

On desktop, you end up with this weird amount of space being used that doesn’t need to be. The bottom of the page has a floating widget for formatting that hovers way too high above the very bottom of the page, leading to your writing getting covered up by it and eventually going down past it — just, what in the fuckity? And why do I need this if I have the sidebar buttons to format via and vice versa? Why can I collapse the sidebar, which has things other than the formatting stuff, and not do anything about that stupid floating footer???

I hate this! The desktop UI genuinely has kept me from using Ellipsus more than I had wanted to in the past. The rolling out of monetization when they’re clearly too small to properly support it has left a bad taste in my mouth, too.

And now there’s hush hush speak about how some of their investors are AI companies. This is really curious given Ellipsus’ stance on AI and scraping.

I dunno. I think a lot of Ellipsus’ success so far is it playing into the AO3/fanfic writers area of the Internet and taking advantage of NaNo’s crazy suicide.

[thewritinggrindstone]

crazy that scrivener isn't on the poll considering that fifteen years ago it was all the writing community was talking about. but I digress.

in the past I've used ywriter, ms word, scrivener, and focuswriter as my primary programs. I still use ms word to proofread everything. for actual drafting, I currently use writemonkey 3, which is lightweight and has the ability to sync across devices by way of some kind of file-synching software (I use syncthing). it also has the opportunity to be super super pretty, which is a key part of my process. some details found here!

[whitakerscross]

My Scene Outline Checklist (as a discovery writer/pantser)

Nothing fancy, but as someone who doesn't outline extensively, I still want each scene to be effective as a piece of the story. So, this is my devised "outline" for every scene I write. Sometimes, there's a sentence to each one, sometimes paragraphs. I thought I would share if it helps any fellow pantsers.

SCENE OUTLINE

Longline (one sentence synopsis):

Purpose:

Action (everything that happens):

Conflict:

Stakes:

Choice(s):

Revelations:

Change or turning point:

Larger implications:

That's all I've got for now. Ta!

[brainstreams]

Dialogue Structure Examples

• Simple dialogue “I’m leaving.”

• Dialogue with a tag after “I’m leaving,” she said.

• Dialogue with a tag before She said, “I’m leaving.”

• Dialogue with an action beat after “I’m leaving.” She grabbed her jacket.

• Dialogue with an action beat before She grabbed her jacket. “I’m leaving.”

• Dialogue split by a tag “I’m leaving,” she said, “and I’m not coming back.”

• Dialogue split by action “I’m leaving.” She hesitated. “Don’t try to stop me.”

• Dialogue followed by description “I’m leaving,” she said, staring at the door.

• Dialogue with interruption “I thought you said—” “I changed my mind.”

• Dialogue trailing off “I just thought maybe…”

• Dialogue with a question “Where are you going?”

• Dialogue with multiple sentences “I’m leaving. Don’t follow me.”

• Dialogue with a question tag “You’re coming with me, right?”

• Dialogue followed by internal thought “I’m fine,” he said. I’m definitely not fine.

• Dialogue embedded in action She leaned closer. “You didn’t tell them, did you?”

• Dialogue that continues after narration “I told you,” she said. “This was a bad idea.”

• Dialogue that begins mid-action Opening the door, she said, “You shouldn’t be here.”

• Dialogue with an em dash interruption “I was going to tell you but—” “But you didn’t.”

• Dialogue with ellipses inside “I thought… maybe you knew.”

• Dialogue across multiple paragraphs (same speaker) “I tried to warn you.

“But you never listen.”

• Dialogue with emphasis “I said leave.”

• Dialogue with a beat replacing a tag “I’m not scared.” He folded his arms.

• Dialogue embedded within narration He looked at her and said, “We’re out of time.”

• Dialogue with a tag in the middle of action “I’m leaving,” she said, pulling the door open.

[thewritinggrindstone]

also!

• Dialogue split by a simultaneous action but no dialogue tag “I’m leaving”—she scooped her jacket off the chair—“and I’m not coming back.”

[luna-azzurra]

Quick Tips for Writing Time Skips

°˖➴ SHOW THE EVIDENCE, not the time!! don't say "three months later" and have everything exactly the same. Show the evidence: the houseplant is dead now, there's a new coffee shop, their hair is longer, the season changed, the relationship shifted

°˖➴ People don't pause their lives!! during your time skip, other characters didn't freeze. They got new jobs, started dating someone, developed opinions, had experiences. When we come back, there should be GAPS in what your POV character knows

°˖➴ Anchor it with a CONCRETE detail!! "The last time she'd been in this room, there'd been snow on the ground. Now the garden outside was screaming with roses." Give the reader something tangible to mark the passage

°˖➴ What DIDN'T happen is interesting!! "Six weeks and still no word from him" or "Another year of birthday candles she didn't make wishes on" sometimes the time skip is defined by absence and waiting

°˖➴ Compress boring stuff, expand important stuff!! "The trial took three months" can be one sentence. But the five minutes after the verdict? That might be three pages. TIME IS ELASTIC in fiction, use it!!!

°˖➴ Characters should FEEL differently about the skip !! time passing changes perspective. Something that felt devastating last year might feel trivial now. Or vice versa. What seemed certain became a mistake. SHOW THE SHIFT

[livelaughwriteit]

Advice on Endings

I hate ending my stories. I will drag a story on long after it should have ended even though I know it should be done with. If anyone else struggles as well, here is a list of the different types of endings that are common.

Full Circle – Mirror the beginning of the story, show how the tone has shifted from start to end

Bittersweet – Character wins at the cost of something else, creates emotional depth

Emotional resolution – Focuses more on the growth of the characters than the events of the story

Twist – reveal something that changes the readers perspective or understanding

Open – doesn’t answer all the questions or solve all the conflicts of the story, leaving room for interpretation

Quiet – Subtle, reflective ending rather than a dramatic event

Sacrifice – The character has to give something up to achieve a greater goal

Hopeful – Despite the events of the story, there is a distinct sense that everything will be okay

Consequence – Shows how the characters choices throughout the story impact the world or their relationship

Character choice – centers on a decision that defines who the character has become through the story

[fixyourwritinghabits]

Hi there, longtime follower whose loved your tips. I have an issue: Every attempt so far of mine to pen down one of my larger story ideas (ie lots of worldbuilding) has stranded at the first few chapters. By the time I come back to the draft, I've already changed my mind about so many things again that the draft isn't usable anymore. I start over again and the cycle repeats - it's been like this for years now. Do you have any tips or resources to lock my story down properly and stop tweaking it? I've tried writing a story bible but even that effort failed halfway through.

I'm likely going to say some stuff that you've heard before, so forgive me if it comes off as condescending, but it sounds like you're diving deep into the really fun world-building aspect without having a guideline on how to turn that into a story.

First, you need an outline. I've no doubt you've heard this before, but an outline is the perfect place to figure out why you keep petering out after a few chapters. If you put it in an outline, you can easily see why one plot point won't carry through over another one.

It doesn't really matter how you outline. Could be on flashcards, could be in an Excel file, could be following The Hero's Journey, Freytag's Pyramid, the Save The Cat Beat Sheet, or your basic Three Act Structure. The point is you want to outline with a beginning, middle, and end as your goals, and any method that gets you there is grand.

The second reason I want you to do an outline first is to follow a piece of excellent advice I picked up in a screenwriting class, which is to make a choice, stick with it, and move onto the next one.

Let's say you're at an story wall. Your characters can drop everything they're doing and a) pursue an alleged murderer, b) stick around and try to solve the murder, or c) shrug their shoulders and move on toward defeating the wizard. None of these choices are bad, but one may work better to move your story forward better than the others. In an outline, you can commit to choice A and carry it forward until it's very clear that's not what is suited for your story. Then you can go back to where your plot went off the rails and find a better path forward. A couple of pages of discarded outline is way better than cutting five chapters, and those tweaks you want to make will be easier to do to your outline.

Second, and this is the hard part, you need to finish the first draft. Many authors end up with something vastly different than their first draft. I just attended a book signing with Martha Wells where she said that she often writes 10k words before finding the story she really wants to write. There are no wasted words, but you must finish the thing before you can make it into the story you want.

If you have a complete outline, and you're in the middle of the draft and suddenly get a great idea to do things completely differently, don't spin off and rewrite the first few chapters over and over. Outline those other ideas, or find ways to incorporate those ideas into your current outline. You can absolutely leave yourself a note that says "instead of a blond guy from London he's now a shapechanging fae with a tragic past" in the middle of the story and then continue to write to the end of the story with that change in mind. You can and will go back to fix those changes in post. What you can't do is fix something that isn't written.

[literaryvein-references]

When your Character...

Gets into: A Fight ⚜ ...Another Fight ⚜ ...Yet Another Fight

Hates Someone ⚜ Kisses Someone ⚜ Falls in Love

Calls Someone they Love ⚜ Dies / Cheats Death ⚜ Drowns

is...

A Ballerina ⚜ A Child ⚜ Interacting with a Child ⚜ A Cheerleader

A Cowboy ⚜ A Genius ⚜ A Lawyer ⚜ A Pirate ⚜ A Spy

A Wheelchair User ⚜ A Zombie ⚜ Beautiful ⚜ Dangerous ⚜ Drunk

Funny ⚜ In a Coma ⚜ In a Secret Society ⚜ Injured ⚜ Shy

needs...

A Magical Item ⚜ An Aphrodisiac ⚜ A Fictional Poison

A Coping Strategy ⚜ A Drink ⚜ A Medicinal Herb ⚜ A Mentor

Money ⚜ A Persuasion Tactic ⚜ A Quirk ⚜ To be Killed Off

To Become Likable ⚜ To Clean a Wound ⚜ To Self-Reflect

To Find the Right Word, but Can't ⚜ To Say No ⚜ To Swear

loves...

Astronomy ⚜ Baking ⚜ Cooking ⚜ Cocktails ⚜ Food ⚜ Oils

Dancing ⚜ Fashion ⚜ Gems ⚜ Herbal Remedies ⚜ Honey

Mushrooms ⚜ Mythology ⚜ Numbers ⚜ Perfumes

Roses ⚜ Sweets ⚜ To Argue ⚜ To Insult ⚜ To Kiss

To Make False Claims ⚜ Wine ⚜ Wine-Tasting ⚜ Yoga

has/experiences...

Allergies ⚜ Amnesia ⚜ Bereavement ⚜ Bites & Stings

Bruises ⚜ Caffeine ⚜ CO Poisoning ⚜ Color Blindness

Facial Hair ⚜ Fainting ⚜ Fevers ⚜ Food Allergies

Food Poisoning ⚜ Fractures ⚜ Frostbite ⚜ Hypothermia

Injuries ⚜ Jet Lag ⚜ Kidnapping ⚜ Manipulation ⚜ Mutism

Pain ⚜ Paranoia ⚜ Poisoning ⚜ More Pain & Violence

Scars ⚜ Trauma ⚜ Viruses ⚜ Wounds

[these are just quick references. more research may be needed to write your story...]

Writing Resources PDFs

[daily-prompts]

Put your character in a situation where getting what they want will cost them what they actually need.

[creatinghelen]

create! create! even if it’s been a while. even if you don’t know what to write or draw or sing. connect with what once brought you joy and you will remember how. create in a new way, knit or dance or crochet. try spoken word or painting. poetry or pottery. the freedom in creating… it’s liberating

[keepcalmandwritefiction]

Write like it matters, and it will.

– Libba Bray

[darkisrising]

Things I wish I could tell my younger writer self...

Step away from the thesaurus. Put down that list of SAT words. Yes, those are all great words to know, I agree, but maybe they don't ALL need to go in one story?

Because the perfect word isn't always the right word. Sometimes the perfect word is exactly the wrong word and, actually, several not-quite right words can come together and create a better whole than that one perfect word ever could.

"It was like a conflagration lit in his chest, swallowing his heart. "

"It was like a fire lit in his chest; one tiny spark that jumped to a bush, to a tree, to a second tree, to a third, and soon there was an entire goddamn forest fire blazing inside him, swallowing his heart."

Write around the perfect word. Look it up, figure out the etymology, the specifics, the nuance, and then write that into the story. Think of the perfect word, by all means, but then strap it down, slice it open, and show us its guts. Expose to the air and sunlight the places where it's joined, where it's been comfortable, where it's been safe, and tease that apart to your reader. (See? Instead of "dissect" which would have been perfect but it wouldn't have been vivid or impactful or right)

[atinycupofpositivitea]

Keep writing. Keep making art. Keep your hobbies and interests nurtured. Keep singing and dancing. Keep playing, riding and swimming.

One day, it will pay off. I promise.