Gowanii

24, writer, reader, eldritch horror Writing advice, book reviews, literary analysis

[vine-and-verse]

🌿 welcome to vine & verse 🌿

a space for craft, devotion, and the dissolution of boundaries between the two

who's here 🖤

Name: Gowanii

Age: 24

Pronouns: He/They/It

Identity: Transmasc non-binary | Cupioromantic Bisexual | mixed race (afro-indigenous & white, white-passing)

Practice: Hellenist. Devotee of Dionysus. Writer for seventeen years.

My main is @moonsand79. My proship blog is @proship-gowanii. This is the writing blog—the craft blog, the theory blog, the place where I think out loud about what stories are and what they do to us.

on Dionysus, and why it matters here 🍇

My patron is Dionysus, and I don't think that's incidental to how I write. I think it's everything.

Dionysus is not just the god of wine—he is the god of ἔκστασις, ecstasy in its original sense: the standing outside of oneself. He is the god of theater, of masks, of transformation, of the boundary dissolving between self and other. He is the god of what happens when you stop being entirely yourself and become, briefly, something else. And that is what writing is. Every character is a mask I put on. Every story is a ritual act of becoming. When the words are flowing and I've lost track of time and the boundary between writer and character goes thin—that is not a metaphor for devotion. That is devotion. That's my practice.

I started writing at seven years old on a farm in West Virginia with limited internet access and a lot of empty space to fill. I didn't have the language for it then, but I understand now what I was doing: I was practicing ekstasis before I knew the word. Stepping outside myself into other lives, other voices, other worlds. I've been doing it for seventeen years. I don't know how to stop.

Writing, for me, is inseparable from spirituality—not in a vague, abstract way, but in a very concrete one. Dionysus is the god of theater because the Greeks understood drama as a religious act. To embody a character is a Dionysian act. To let yourself be overtaken by a story is a Dionysian act. This blog exists inside that framework. Craft and devotion are not two different things here. They are the same thing, approached from different angles.

Ευοι.

on fanfiction and original work 📖

I write both, and I refuse to treat them as different categories of legitimacy.

Fanfiction taught me how to write. It taught me structure, pacing, characterization, how to work within constraints, how to receive feedback, how to finish things. It taught me that writing is communal—that stories exist in conversation with the stories that came before them, that transformation and remix are not lesser acts of creation but sacred ones. The idea that fanfiction is somehow less serious than original work is a capitalist notion that measures the value of art by its monetizability. I reject it completely.

Transformation is Dionysian. Remix is sacred. Every story ever told is in conversation with every story that came before it, whether it acknowledges that or not. Homer was working from oral tradition. Shakespeare lifted plots wholesale. The entire history of literature is an act of collaborative transformation across time. Fanfiction just makes that process visible and honest.

I write primarily M/M and M/F romance, though I've written across the spectrum. My work centers trans and POC protagonists because these are the stories I want to exist in the world, and because representation is not a nice-to-have—it is a structural necessity, and its absence has real consequences for real people.

All fic is on AO3 at moonsand79.

what you'll find here 📌

Writing guides, craft theory, book reviews, writing advice, fanfic and writing discourse, prompts, personal excerpts, and the occasional long post about what storytelling actually is and why it matters. Practical and theoretical in equal measure. I am interested in writing as both technical skill and ecstatic practice, and this blog reflects that.

a note on craft 🕯️

I believe in taking writing seriously without taking yourself too seriously. I believe in finishing things even when they're imperfect. I believe that reading widely and voraciously is non-negotiable, that the best writing advice is almost always "go read more," and that the worst thing you can do to a developing writer is convince them their instincts are wrong before they've had the chance to find out what those instincts actually are.

Fanfic writers are real writers. Genre fiction is real fiction. The most important question you can ask about any piece of writing is not "is this good?" but "what is it doing, and does it do that thing well?"

I've been writing for seventeen years. I'm still learning. I expect to be still learning for the rest of my life. That's not a caveat—that's the point.

get fucked 🚫

Antis of any variety

Pro-contacts

Radqueers

Xenosatanists

Truscum

Racists & Xenophobes

Transphobes & TERFs

Homophobes & Biphobes

Acephobes & Arophobes

Zionists

People who use TME/TMA (reducing transness to a binary of "trans women and non-trans women" erases trans men, transmascs, and nonbinary people. we exist.)

Bigots of any flavor, variety, or artisanal small-batch craft

“Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.”

—William Faulkner

🌿 craft is devotion. devotion is practice. practice is the whole thing. 🌿

[luna-azzurra]

The thing you keep not writing is the thing you should probably be writing. you know what it is. it's the one you circle around. you write something adjacent to it and feel briefly relieved and then empty because you went near it but not into it.

There's something protecting you from it, some story you've told yourself about why it's not ready or why it would hurt someone or why it's too self-indulgent or too obvious or too small. but it keeps coming back. keeps sitting there. some people carry the same unwritten thing for their whole lives and you can feel it in everything they make, this absence with a specific shape.

The writing you're most afraid of is almost always the writing that would mean the most to the one person who needed to read it. and that person might be you.

[vine-and-verse]

The Dialogue Post

What Your Dialogue Is Actually Doing

There's a piece of advice that gets passed around a lot: dialogue should do double duty. Reveal character and advance plot. Two birds, one stone. It sounds elegant in theory, and the writers who say it aren't wrong exactly—but it understates what good dialogue actually has to carry, and it understates how often writers get dialogue wrong because they're only thinking about those two things.

Dialogue, when it's working, is doing about six things at once. When it's not working, it's usually because it's been reduced to a delivery mechanism—for information, for character beats, for plot—and it's forgotten to be a conversation between people who exist in bodies and have histories and are, crucially, not fully listening to each other.

Let me break down what I mean.

The Exposition Problem

The most common dialogue failure is what I call the information delivery scene. You've read it. You've probably written it. It's the scene where two characters discuss something they both already know because the writer needs the reader to know it.

"As you know, Marcus, the council hasn't met since the war ended five years ago."

Nobody talks like this. Nobody tells someone else something they already know in this way. When writers do this, they're using dialogue as a vehicle for narration, and the seams show immediately. The dialogue stops feeling like a conversation and starts feeling like a press release.

The fix isn't to cut the exposition—you might genuinely need to convey that information. The fix is to find a reason for it to be new to at least one person in the scene, or to let the characters have a reaction to the information rather than just transmitting it. Two people who both know the council hasn't met aren't going to recap that fact to each other. But one of them might say: 'Five years, Marcus. Five years and they still won't meet.' Now you have the same information, and you also have bitterness, and history, and someone who's been waiting.

People Don't Answer the Question That Was Asked

Real conversation is oblique. People dodge, deflect, answer the question they wish they'd been asked, or respond to the emotional subtext rather than the literal words. Written dialogue often fails because it's too direct—question asked, question answered, question asked, question answered—which produces something that reads like a deposition rather than a scene.

Think about what happens when you ask someone a question they don't want to answer. They change the subject. They answer a different question. They get defensive and bring up something unrelated. They go quiet. They make a joke. That gap between what's asked and what's answered is where character lives, and where subtext lives, and it's one of the most powerful tools you have.

Consider:

"Did you talk to her?"

"I made coffee. Do you want some?"

This tells you more than any direct answer could—that they did talk to her, that it didn't go well, that they don't want to discuss it. And it didn't require the writer to explain any of that.

Voices Must Be Distinct, But Not Theatrical

Every character having a distinct voice is real advice, but it gets misapplied constantly. Writers trying to differentiate their characters often end up with caricatures—the one who always speaks in formal complete sentences, the one who uses slang in every single line, the one whose every statement is a philosophical observation. Real people are more internally inconsistent than that. They code-switch. They're different in different company. They talk differently when they're exhausted than when they're caffeinated and nervous.

What makes voices feel distinct isn't necessarily vocabulary or speech patterns, though those help. It's what a character notices and chooses to comment on. It's their preoccupations. What they keep coming back to. What they're evasive about. Two people can use similar vocabulary and still feel completely different on the page if they're paying attention to different things and reacting to the world from different emotional positions.

The Action Beat Isn't Just Stage Direction

There's a tendency to treat action beats in dialogue as purely functional—a way to avoid writing "he said" over and over, a way to anchor the conversation in physical space. They are those things. They're also much more.

The action beat you choose tells us where your character's attention is. It tells us what they're doing while they're speaking, which often tells us what they're not saying. A character who starts making tea while having a difficult conversation is doing something with their hands because they can't stand still. A character who keeps rearranging the same objects on a desk is not listening as carefully as they're pretending to. These aren't just physical tics—they're windows.

What you want to avoid is the action beat as pure filler. She nodded. He smiled. She looked away. These aren't wrong exactly, but they're doing the minimum possible work. Ask yourself: what is this character doing, and why, and what does it tell us about where they are emotionally? A character who laughs at something that isn't funny, a character who stops what they're doing entirely to listen—these beats carry weight. A nod is just a nod.

Silence Is Dialogue

This is the thing most writers underuse: the pause, the silence, the thing that doesn't get said. A character trailing off mid-sentence. A response that takes too long to come. A question nobody answers. These are dialogue moves too, and they're often the most effective ones you have.

When you write "He didn't answer," you're writing dialogue. When you write "She started to say something, then stopped," you're writing dialogue. The absence of words is still a communicative act, and it can carry more weight than any words would. Readers are very good at understanding what a silence means. Trust them.

Final Thoughts

Good dialogue isn't about cleverness. It isn't about giving your characters quotable lines or witty exchanges (though those can be delightful when they emerge organically). It's about two or more people who want different things, who have histories they're not fully sharing, who are paying imperfect attention to each other, trying to navigate a moment together.

When dialogue feels flat, the question to ask isn't "is this realistic?" but "what does each person in this scene want, and are they getting it, and at what cost?" Tension in dialogue doesn't come from dramatic subject matter—it comes from competing wants, from what's unsaid, from the gap between what characters mean and what they say.

Read your dialogue out loud if you have to. Read it to someone. If it sounds like a memo, revise it. If everyone is answering the question that was asked, make someone dodge. If your characters are being too honest with each other, ask yourself why a real person in this situation might not be.

The conversation is always about something other than what it's about. That's the thing to keep in mind.

Ευοι!

[boilingheart-archive]

Y’all little writers go on and have fun now

[ramblinggriffin]

I agree with the defense of first person prose and I think we should take it a step further and defend second person prose with the same energy. second person prose is NOT always casting you, the reader, as the character or narrator in a literal sense.

the pov has many potential functions, such as inviting you to empathize with a character to a greater degree, to obscure something about a character, to create a sense of unease or unreality, or to invite you to embody a character in a creative excercise. when the pov DOES consider the character to be 'you' it typically does so for the purpose of having you interact with the prose directly, as in a choice based narrative.

it's completely understandable why you may not like it, but you also understand that it is a stylistic choice with many different reasonings and applications, and is therefore as valid as any other. Don't you?

[brainstreams]

HOW TO SHOW FEVER / NAUSEA IN WRITING

“They felt sick.” — Vague. “They threw up.” — Sometimes, but not always.

Illness isn’t a switch you flip. Fever and nausea creep, spike, ebb, lie to you, then come back worse. They live in the body first, and that’s where your writing should live too.

Below, I've written a lil' cheat sheet for you. Reblog so you can come back later.

THE BODY LANGUAGE OF FEVER & NAUSEA

Skin & Temperature

Skin alternates between clammy and burning

Deep internal warmth

Sudden chills while sweating

Clothes feel wrong, either too heavy, too tight, too warm, not warm enough, etc.

Goosebumps even in a warm room

Face flushed, ears hot, neck damp

Head & Senses

Head feels pressurized or stuffed with cotton

Eyes ache when moving

Nose stuffed (on either one side, or both)

Ears ringing or deaf on one side

Lights are too bright/sharp

Sounds blur together

Food smells gross

Room feels tilted or surreal

Focus slips mid-thought

Food/water has an aftertaste

Stomach & Core

Nausea that comes in waves

Swallowing feels deliberate, effortful

Dry swallowing, dry throat—dry everything

Saliva thickens or pools suddenly

Abdomen tightens

Hunger exists but is nauseating at the same time

Body curls inward without thinking

Mouth & Throat

Tongue feels coated

Taste turns metallic, bitter, or flat

Lips dry; licking them doesn’t help

Gag reflex hair-trigger sensitive

Breathing through the mouth makes it worse

Movement & Posture

Barely any movement

Sitting becomes slouching, then curling

Standing too fast triggers instant nausea/dizziness

Hands brace on thighs, counters, walls

Feet shuffle; balance checked constantly

Body seeks cold surfaces or firm pressure

Voice & Speech

Voice dulls or drops in volume (due to plugged nose and raspy throat)

Words come slower

Sentences trail off unfinished

Irritation spikes easily (even if people are being nice)

Delayed responses

Apologies come out automatically (“Sorry. Sorry.”)

NOT ALL “SICK” FEELS THE SAME

Fever (infection-based):

Comes with chills + heat

Mental fog, slowed reaction time

Body aches feel deep, joint-based

Thirst increases, appetite drops

Sleep is restless, sweaty, unrefreshing

Colds / Flu:

More head pressure, sinus heaviness

Heavy cough, sore throat

Heavy fatigue

Fever may be mild or absent (especially colds)

Chronic Illness Flares:

Pain is familiar but still intense

Less panic, more resigned

Symptoms stack (fatigue + nausea + pain)

Character may ration movement and speech

Recovery expectations are lower

Menstrual Cramps:

Pain pulses rhythmically

Heat helps

Nausea tied to motion and smell

Sensitive emotions (more prone to snapping, saying things they regret)

Body feels heavy

Stress-Induced Nausea:

No fever, no chills

Jaw tension, shallow breathing

Nausea spikes during stillness

Relief when distracted or moving

These differences matter. They change how a character reacts, not just how they feel.

So yeah, hope that helps. You don't need vomiting on the page every time. Sometimes being sick is feeling off-key, or sometimes it's quiet recovery. It varies. The symptoms are one part of your story, the rest is up to characterization and plot. Why is illness relevant to your story? Why is this character sick, and how is it different from another character? You can have a lot of fun with this.

Written by a human with a headache and too much experience lying very still, hoping it passes. If you liked this post, buy me a coffee... or cough medicine. 😔

[ariesrin]

Relationship Dynamics Writing Cheat Sheet

For romance, rivalry, found family and other relationships in your writing.

Dynamic / Type (Pick 1)

Friends to lovers

Strangers to allies

Rivals to reluctant partners

Enemies to lovers

Mentor / student

Protector / protected

One-sided devotion or unrequited love

Found family

Ex-lovers

Codependent

Toxic

Captor / Captive

Power Balance (Pick 1)

Equal

Unequal (status, strength, knowledge)

Shifting (changes with circumstance)

Hidden (one holds unseen leverage)

Illusory (seems equal, isn’t, may involve gaslighting)

Reversed over time

Source of Tension (Pick 1-2)

Miscommunication

Secrets

Fear of loss

Fear of change

Timing

Outside pressure (family, duty, war, society)

Moral disagreement

Unequal commitment

Physical conflict

How They Fight (Pick as many)

Silence

Arguments that never finish

Avoidance

Explosive confrontations

Passive aggression

One apologises, the other refuses

Violence and/or misdirected anger

What Makes Them Change (Optional)

A choice

A sacrifice

A betrayal

A confession

A loss

Being forced to rely on each other

Nearly losing the other

[tokkibean]

writing is so fun until you run out of pre-planned plot and you stand at the precipice and slowly realise that you never really had a plot in the first place

[selenophyyy]

Writing Resources for Vocabulary and Dialogue Tags

Vocabulary

01. Word hippo

02. One look

03. Power thesaurus

04. Visual thesaurus

Dialogue tags

01. 300 words to use instead of said

02. 550+ alternative words for said

03. 200+ other words for said

(These pictures are not mine. Let me know if you know OP!)

⚲ Visit Creative Writing Library 🕮

[vine-and-verse]

Growing up cats weren't pets—they were vermin control. My parents would shoo them to the wadi behind our home, where they belonged: hunting mice in the dry scrub, not lounging on furniture. Owning two incredibly spoiled British cats wasn't part of my plan, yet here I am, stumbling out of bed in nothing but my pants at the arse crack of dawn because McCartney, my orange cat, is screaming. Not meowing. Screaming. She stands on her hind legs, paws scrabbling for purchase against the laminated wood of the cupboard I keep their food in. Lennon, the tuxedo, joins her in screaming, circling my ankles as I do my best not to trip over the furry bastard.

"Christ," I say, "You're not dying."

I nudge McCartney away from the cupboard, swinging it open to retrieve two tins of the expensive pâté John used to buy. I'm not wearing my glasses so the label's a blur, but it doesn't matter. I know from the colours that one is chicken & duck and the other is mackerel with squid. The food comes in this fancy subscription tailored to them and their needs—saves me the pain of deciding what to get them from the local Tesco. I've never been good at making decisions, you see, so it was nice of John to do it for me before he died.

God I miss him.

I pop the lids on both tins, scraping the pâté into their bowls—the blue one for McCartney and the green one for Lennon. John used to insist they knew their colours, though I'm fairly certain he was full of shit on that front. Still, I keep to the system. Six months on and I can't bring myself to break any of his little rules. The cats descend on their breakfast like they haven't eaten in days, though I fed them just twelve hours ago.

I shuffle to the bathroom. The shower helps, marginally, and by the time I'm dressed—an old Eela Craig t-shirt, my favourite jeans—it's nearly eight. I grab my glasses from the arm of the sofa. Strange. I don't remember sitting there last night, but there's an empty mug beside them, coffee gone cold with a skin on top. The telly's still on, muted, cycling through some morning programme I definitely didn't put on.

Right. That happened again.

I run a brush through my curls, pulling them back into a half-updo, and check my reflection. Human enough. Good. That's better for opening the shop. McCartney and Lennon are already waiting by the door, tails high. They know the routine. The flat sits above the shop, so it's just a matter of herding them down the back stairs without anyone making a break for the street.

"Come on then," I say, scooping up McCartney before she can bolt. Lennon trots after us, dignified as always, like he's doing me a favour.

John's shop. John's cats. John's flat.

All mine now, though his children looked at me like I'd stolen it all when the will was read. Like I hadn't been there at the end, sleeping in that horrible chair by his hospital bed whilst they couldn't be arsed to visit. John was the one who'd listened when I came out, didn't flinch, just nodded and asked if I wanted a cuppa. Who'd shown me his collection of Stax 45s and explained how a shop could be a studio could be a family, all at once.

The door at the bottom of the stairs—John's addition, knocked through the demising wall so he wouldn't have to go round front every morning—opens directly into the side corridor by the studio. Music bleeds through the control room door, left ajar: Sebastian's voice curling through some melody I don't recognise. Must be working on new material for The Prismatic Hour. He's been practically living in there since the label started sniffing around.

I should probably tell him the shop opens in twenty minutes, but honestly, I'm not ready to talk to anyone yet.

Not even Sebastian.

Especially not Sebastian, who'll take one look at me and know I've lost another night to the grey space between sitting down and waking up.

Still, he'd notice if I ignore him, so I push into the studio anyway, letting McCartney jump out of my arms and chase Lennon through the shop. Sebastian is indeed sitting at the mixing desk, fingers on the faders. He's dressed in crushed velvet—a waistcoat the colour of overripe plums over a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows—and his silver hair is pulled back in a neat ponytail that shows off the bone structure that made him a heartthrob back in the seventies. He still looks good, the bastard.

Distinguished. Like he stepped out of a wine advert. Ivy's perched on the edge of the mixing desk beside him, one leg crossed over the other, her locs falling past her shoulders in thick ropes threaded with silver and grey. She's wearing what she always wears: loose linen trousers, a flowing top in burnt orange, and enough bracelets on her wrists to make a symphony when she moves. Her skin is warm brown, lighter than mine, and she's got this way of looking at you that makes you feel like she can see straight through your skull to whatever mess you're trying to hide.

"Morning, love," she says, not looking away from the console. Her voice is soft, melodic, the kind that could talk you down from a ledge or convince you to eat something when you've forgotten meals exist. Sebastian glances up, one eyebrow raised. "You look like shit, Masha."

"Cheers for that."

"I mean it." He leans back in his chair, studying me the way he studies a mix—looking for what's off, what needs adjusting. "When's the last time you slept properly?"

"Slept fine," I lie.

Ivy hums, unconvinced, and slides off the desk with a grace that makes me feel like a shambling corpse by comparison. She moves towards me, bracelets chiming, and I know what's coming before she even reaches out to tilt my chin up with two fingers. Her touch is gentle, maternal almost, and I find myself leaning into it despite myself, eyes fluttering closed whilst she inspects me like I'm one of her house plants that's started to wilt.

"You've been dissociating again." She says, pursing her lips. "Have you told your therapist about this?"

"Ivy..."

"Have you?" She repeats, releasing my chin.

"I stopped seeing her." I admit. "I'm on a waiting list for a new one, but she just... wasn't it."

"Mashal..." Sebastian says, "You need the help."

"I know... it's just..." I trail off, not wanting to get into it.

"It's alright, love." Ivy says, patting my arm. "We just worry. You've been running yourself ragged since John passed."

"I'm fine."

"So you've said." Sebastian says, his tone a little too dry for my liking. "Ivy, could you give us a minute?"

"Of course." She says, turning to me. "Remember what we talked about, alright? Your wellbeing is more important than a few late shipments."

"I know."

She leaves, and I'm left alone with Sebastian and the heavy silence that descends when he gets serious. I busy myself with straightening a stack of CDs on a nearby shelf, trying to look busy and normal, but my hands are shaking and I knock a few over. They scatter across the floor with a series of clattering thuds.

"Leave them." Sebastian says, and I do, my shoulders slumping.

"Sorry."

"Don't apologise for dropping CDs, Masha. Apologise for lying to me."

"Sorry."

"Right." He says, gesturing to the empty stool next to him. "Sit."

I sit. The vinyl on the stool is cool against my jeans, and I'm suddenly aware of how loose they've become, the waistband gapping slightly at my back. I've been skipping the gym more than I should—haven't been in weeks, actually—and it shows. My t-shirt hangs differently now, less fitted across the chest and shoulders. The muscle I'd built up during my service, maintained religiously after, is starting to soften. Not that anyone would notice under clothes, but I notice. The slight softness at my belly that I'd always had despite the gym routine feels more pronounced now, like it's the only thing left of me.

"You're running the shop, the studio, the archive, and trying to keep up with your family." He says, and it's not a question. He knows. He's always known. He's been here since the beginning, since John hired me at sixteen. "You're not sleeping. You're dissociating. You stopped therapy. You're a walking disaster, son."

"I know. Believe me, I know." I say, crossing my arms over my chest.

"You've lost weight. Have you been eating? Been to the gym?"

"Haven't had time for the gym," I say, and it's true but also not. I've had the time. I just can't seem to make myself go. Can't seem to do much of anything lately except show up here and go through the motions. "And I'm eating. Just... not hungry much."

"That's not how it works and you know it."

Sebastian's voice is sharp now. "You served. You know what happens when you stop taking care of yourself. Your body doesn't just bounce back like it did when you were twenty."

"I'm twenty-six, not ancient."

"Old enough to know better." He leans forward, placing a hand on my shoulder. It's a rare gesture from him. Sebastian's not one for casual touch. He's all about the music, about the craft, about the soul of it. But this is different. This is real. "You need to take care of yourself. Or I'll have to take care of you. And believe me, you don't want that."

"I'm going to Bean There Done That, you want anything?"

Sebastian chuckles, leaning back in his chair. "Deflecting, I see."

"I don't want to talk about this right now." I say, shifting in my seat. I avoid his gaze—or rather his eyebrows, I've never been good at the whole eye contact thing. "I need caffeine."

— Built For Sin, Chapter One

[bunnie-tells-stories]

If you’re having writers block…READ!!!! CONSUME MEDIA

I feel like I don’t hear that given enough as advice for writers block..just read? Watch tv? Movies? Find inspiration in media.

Writers block is a lack of inspiration, so go collect more.

[podcastwizard]

i do NOT write for myself i write for the eleven year old girl walking circles on the playground making up stories in her head and muttering the dialogue out loud. i see you girl. that stick you found DOES look like a cool dagger.

[somezambiandude]

🙂 See? Nothing to worry about. At all.

[seth-whumps]

takes you by the hand. please please please if you're stuck on your WIP or you can't figure out how to progress the scene PLEASE skip ahead. skip a few lines ahead. skip until the next Thing you can think of happens. skip to it skip to it skip to it. you may uncover what you were missing in the midst of your next scenes and you may discover that just transitioning straight to Next Part works flawlessly. skip it. don't sink. skip.

[seth-whumps]

if you're stuck writing something, it's a good practice to ask "okay, why am I stuck? what am I stuck on?" because sometimes the answer is "i don't know what happens next", to which you choose a direction and commit to the bit, and sometimes the answer is "i don't want to write the beginning", to which the answer is even simpler: don't write the beginning

[teaboot]

no lie this is how I’ve written the best and longest fics. Went from painful jagged 1k chapters to blinking and finding myself 5k deep on something *I THE WRITER* enjoy reading later. Get stuck? Skip ahead. Write the next bit. Fill it in on the next read. Or don’t! Who the fuck cares!!!!

[frederickchiltonsdivacup]

Insane writing techniques that help me every time

writing

writing my words

thinking of words and writing them on paper

putting words on paper

putting them out there, words and all

typing on the keys and everything

filling up the document & shit

writing

Hope this helps !!!

[sourdough-seal]

can't tell if im a writer because i want to be or because there genuinely just is not another choice. like once you realize that you are capable of scribbling nonsense about anyone and any place and any scenario that has ever happened or ever will it's kind of over 

[veronicaleighauthor]