Excuse Me While I Pretend I Can Write

This is a writing blog. I post mostly resources, affirmations, and beleaguered text posts about writers block, with occasional original fiction to convince myself that I'm Legit™. Curious about stories I haven't touched in years? Explore the links that I'm too lazy to change. ask.

[pillowspace]

It feels like this every time I write a fic

[writing-question-mark]

Reading The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells has reminded me the power of not explaining magical elements in fantasy stories

There are floating islands in the Three Worlds and the protagonist Moon offers no explanation for this. He doesn’t question the floating islands, only what’s on them. There might be artifacts, artwork, books, clues to his own origins or the inhabitants’ disappearance, but he never speculates on the mechanism for the island’s flight, and honestly that is really working for me. Not only does it keep the story moving, it helps me suspend my disbelief. I can’t find fault in an explanation that isn’t given.

Plus I don’t go around looking at plants thinking about why they’re all green. There is a reason, something something the wavelength of sunlight reflects less of certain colors something something efficiency of energy capture, something chlorophyll, yes fine. It’s not a big mystery of the world I inhabit so much as a gap in my knowledge, so the ubiquity of green-colored plants isn’t noteworthy, but that’s not an approach I see many writers take toward fantasy or scifi elements

[lenialenient]

i need to start employing some sort of sniper to sit behind me while i write and fire a warning short every time i drop the words "sort of" into yet another sentence

[lenialenient]

folks, youre not gonna believe what i realized 2 seconds after i hit post

[digitalkiddo]

If you're writing anything involving cons, scams, heists, or morally questionable characters who are very good at lying, here are some free resources I've been using for research. Saving you the "why is this in my search history" anxiety.

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

Reblog to save for later. Your WIP will thank you.

[dragonologist-phd]

the thing about heavy handed symbolism is that sometimes. it's fun.

[beardedmrbean]

[writing-question-mark]

Been seeing a lot of hate for “therapy speak” lately. Me, I like a conflict that can’t be solved with common sense and basic decency. There’s a place for idiot plot (and its cousin, the asshole plot) but some stories benefit from showing that certain problems can’t be talked away

[hyrude]

the author’s barely disguised job they worked in their early 20s

[the-reblog-squad-deactivated202]

Reblog if you don't use Generative AI to write fanfics/original fics or to create fanart/original art.

[geneticdriftwood]

honestly? abandoned/on indefinite hiatus/very slow to update fics, even and especially AUs and longfics, are often some of my absolute favorites. and people who refuse to read them are missing out!

for one, stories don’t have to be finished to be enjoyable and worth reading. but also? an unfinished fic is a whole little universe that just keeps on existing in my head! their world stays alive for me in a way that doesn’t always happen with fics I binge read and finish, and i love it. i don’t know how their story ends, so it just keeps going! and even when those stories DO update and finish years later, they’ve been in my head for so long that they stick around like old friends.

so to any author with unfinished works: thank you SO much for sharing what you had without waiting to finish it first. you’re just giving me the gift of getting to spend more time with your story and your idea. if you do update again someday, i’ll be delighted to jump back in! but if you don’t, just know a little piece of your world still lives on in a beloved tiny terrarium in my brain. i promise i’m taking good care of it :)

i don’t normally ask this, but if this resonates with you please reblog it, so it can reach the authors who need to hear it <3

[nifrequerne]

I often wonder what happened to authors of unfinished fanfictions.

[everyoneinspaceisgay]

I hope they’re having a nice life

[ts-virgil-angst]

we absolutely are not and that unfinished fic haunts us to this day

[sensiblereblogifposts]

Reblog if that unfinished fic haunts you to this day

[prophetic-writer]

I'm sorry but I have one draft that I never finished but I laugh every time I see it

[hellsquills]

Writing Tip

Neither do i

[eviliens]

Unreliable everyone

[ethereousdelirious]

Yeah yeah "graphic design is my passion 🐸" I was trying to make a tool to explain how I have problem deciding where a fic should fall on this arbitrary "sense of danger scale" and I think I accidentally defined some words in a way that will be useful for me in the future.

So I think that a whumpy fic can be defined by its ratio of hurt to comfort, but that doesn't mean that a whump fic contains 0 comfort. If someone has been disemboweled in the mountains with no communication and no medical supplies, their friend can be rocking them and singing to them and wiping their damp forehead, but the ratio of hurt to comfort is still going to be greatly skewed because that's a mortal or near-mortal wound.

Likewise, a fic where a character gets a papercut can still enter into "whumpy/whump-lite territory" if it's really bothering them and no one cares, because the comfort level of 0 skews the ratio.

There's also a matter of delving. A high-ratio (which is to say, fluffy) fic can still be a satisfying sickfic if the author delves into the symptoms (which imho is usually what differentiates a satisfying vanilla fic from a disappointing one)

ANYWAY

All that to say, when I don't have a fic idea beamed into my head by the gods, I tend to to struggle with where to put it on the scale. Because I generally tend to prefer lower ratio fic, but I know at a certain point it can get off-putting for people, so I end up torn between two sort of lukewarm desires: the desire to write a fic with slightly more appeal to me vs the desire to write a fic with slightly more appeal to other people

[coldexposure]

I like it, but hear me out on this…

What if we plot along two axes?

We can assign each scenario a “hurt” value and a “comfort” value on a scale of 1-5, plot it on the graph, and then categorize it into one of four quadrants:

Low Hurt/Low Comfort

Low Hurt/High Comfort

High Hurt/High Comfort

High Hurt/Low Comfort

This solves the ratio-skewing issue.

Example plots:

[ethereousdelirious]

THIS IS ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE!!!!!

[gr8writingtips]

writing tip #4126:

chatgpt CAN be useful! for example, if you mention it during a writing group, you'll find out immediately which of the other writers to laugh out of the room

[soup-mother]

Hello welcome to my world building project. We've got painstakingly accurate pseudo polish-lithuanian commonwealth between exactly 1612-1650, and then to the south we have polynesiarribbean, where people have boats and do trade and stuff.

[elancholia]

[nondelphic]

writing isn’t hard. i just have to extract 80,000 words from my brain using sheer psychic force

[nondelphic]

writing isn’t hard it’s just emotionally devastating and time-consuming and requires full body possession by an idea