hi!! i'm new to writing, and i really look up to you in terms of fics and generally storytelling! my friend introduced me to your works last year, and i easily became a big fan.
if you don't mind, i just wanted to ask if you could give any tips regarding how to write? my main struggle is really just being demotivated to write. i have the scenes i want in my head, in fact i already planned them out in my draft, but i don't know how to write it perfectly, so i end up being too scared to actually make them come to life.
have you struggled with that before? how did you overcome it? thanks for answering if you ever do! 🐾
hi!! thank u so much for the ask and the kind words <3
this is an interesting question because i never really examined how i write and upon thinking about it, i realized i probably won’t be able to be much help because i kind of just. go.
say i get an idea. it’s probably vague, so i’ll write down the premise i thought of and if nothing else comes to me, that’s it. i wait until i’m struck with inspiration again. sometimes, as i’m writing down an idea or a line of dialogue i thought of at 3 AM, the story decides to reveal itself to me in a series of what i can only call incredibly dense daydreams, and i’m typing at mach speed trying to keep up with my brain.
i never try to force anything. if i’m not feeling it, i usually switch to a different creative project because i’ve got plenty of those. the ideas will come back to me when they are ready.
another thing i do if i’m stuck on something—usually for scenes where characters interact—i will act out the scene either in my head or out loud, essentially talking to myself. i put myself in my characters’ shoes, and try to feel what they are feeling in the moment. that way, i can continue my conversation with myself past the place i got stuck because at a certain point i become the characters. i think how they think, do what they might do, and say what they might say.
if two characters are having an argument because they possess two completely different worldviews, i will split myself in half, in which each half has one character’s point of view. kind of like in a debate if y’all ever did that in school wherein you get handed an argument and are instructed to defend it even if you don’t agree with it. then i let the argument play out.
music is also huge in my creative process. in my head, i assign a scene from my story to every song i listen to. it’s usually a song that captures the overall feeling of the characters and the mood its meant to instill in the reader, rather than fixating on accuracy to the lyrics. a lot of break-up songs are more about betrayal than romance, so i listen to them when i’m writing a scene between any two characters that once cared deeply about each other, but hit a roadblock that perhaps they couldn’t get past. that’s why i make character playlists. it helps me get in the headspace of the characters whose points of view i write from. anything that can get you in the minds of your characters is a powerful tool.
when it comes to actually writing the damn story, with grammar and sentence structure and all that nonsense, i start by throwing pretty much everything that isn’t absolutely necessary out the window.
don’t worry about perfect. worry about what’s most important to the story. if i don’t know how to write a transition, i’ll just leave a note to myself to figure it out later. the great part about writing is that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. you can come back and fix the word salad you whipped up while you were drunk after you sober up.
tl;dr: get the meat of your story in there. you can garnish it later. i mean, seriously, sometimes the extent of my “writing” for a night is something like:
[uhhh so character A is a huge idiot and i want him to like. fuck up crazy style before character B shows up just in time for A to figure his shit out. character B is completely oblivious to the prior nonsense and thinks A is a genius. this is funny because later after some stupid bantering i want character B to call A smart or something and character A (the idiot) thinks B is making fun of him lol. figure out some way to make A’s transition from cringefail to competent believable later]
in this vein, a lot of my dialogue scenes start as a series of sentences in quotation marks without anything like dialogue tags or character actions. that comes later, after i figure out how the conversation goes. because i don’t know that ahead of time.
i have the whole story in my head, of course, but that’s just the overview with none of the finer details. so when i put my hands on the keyboard and start typing, i have no clue where anything is going—usually a half-baked idea of how the scene begins, and maybe how it ends. it plays out as i write it.
sometimes i will write an overview or summary of the events i want to take place in a certain chapter, and more often than not, that gets tossed out by scene two. important events stay, but that fight i planned to end quickly? nah, wasn’t feeling it. it becomes three fights intertwined with chase sequences because that’s what felt natural to me while i was writing.
i do not write the story. the story possesses me and writes itself.
which is why i said i probably won’t be much help, because my process is less of a process and more of a cage match between me and the story where the story always wins.
my advice is to let the story guide you just as much as you guide it. and if something about your draft bothers you, listen to that instinct and figure out why you don’t like it. it takes experience to translate that “ughh this isn’t right” feeling into something constructive like, “oh my problem is [slow pacing, continuity errors, characters acting out of character, shit like that] and i will fix it by [rewriting, having someone else look over it, coming back later to reevaluate].” if you do this enough, it will become second nature to you. you’ll stop getting tripped up at every little thing.
to conclude this mess of a ramble, i will tell you to remember why you started writing and keep it close to your heart. that way you won’t lose track of yourself in your story or vice versa. do it because you love it. or because you hate it. but do it for yourself. that’s where authenticity comes from.
you may have to sell your soul to the literature gods to do it, but you will make that damn story exist. one word at a time.
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