She/her. I am a writer, an avid reader, and a Greyhound lover. I would love to go back to Paris someday. I post pretty things, quotes, bookish things, feminism, LGBTQ rights, writer things, hockey, and whatever else catches my eye.
‘Cause karma is my boyfriend Karma is a god Karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend Karma’s a relaxing thought Aren’t you envious that for you it’s not?
One trap that All the Time Daydreamers, Sometimes Writers, fall into is this idea that writing is transcribing the daydream.
It’s not. The daydream is a fuzzy thing. There are gaps that you don’t need to fill in a daydream, because you already get the emotional point. A lot of it is emotion. And because it makes you feel like a complete story would, your brain is tricked into thinking that’s what you have.
Then you sit down to actually write the thing and you realize you’re trying to write a Space Opera without actually inventing any planets or space ships. You don’t even know if the characters start out on the same planet. If they’re on a planet at all. You didn’t bother to check.
Now you will vaguely reference this in first-second person in any writing guide you make up for the rest of time.
When you write, you’re building something. It’s not a pale imitation of what you have in your head- what you have in your head can’t exist on the outside. This is a whole new beast. It’s going to ultimately look different and this is a good thing.
Also the internal critic is dumb.
I’m not even trying to be nice to your writing specifically here. The internal critic is looking for a completed story and you don’t have one yet. So anything it has to say flat out does not apply.
This is so relatable that I’ve considered making this post many times.
The idea in your head is wonderful because it gives you all the emotions and ideas without pesky things like concrete details and logic getting in the way. Trying to write it down forces you to decide those things, which makes it a different story from the one that exists as a pure cloud of imagination. Story ideas can have multiple conflicting ideas happen at once–you just know the general gist and it doesn’t matter what order things happen in or which exact words are said. When you write it down, that cloud of possibilities collapses into a single reality–if Character says this line first, that means they can’t say it later; if they say Funny Line A, they can’t also say Funny Line B at that same spot in the conversation; if they go left that means they can’t also go right at that moment. Infinite possibility becomes reality, and those choice can be hard. And that’s not even getting into the fact that the moment you try to nail down a concrete timeline, issues like, “No one would react this way” or “That actually makes no sense” or “What is the mystery they’re trying to solve?” pop up and wreck the beautiful little thing in your imagination.
Any act of writing is an act of translation. You’re adapting it into a new medium. Which makes it not the thing in your head, but which does make it something you can share with your sadly non-telepathic audience. If you can figure out how to write it.
Just looked at my history page on ao3 and I have 588 pages of history lmao
alright ladies theydies and gents let’s play a game called reblog this with the number of pages your ao3 history has in the tags so i know whether I need 2 seek help:-)
To any fic writers who worry they are wasting their time… I read a fic for a relatively small and inactive fandom about three years ago. And there was one specific scene where a character watched another dancing like an idiot to a beyonce song and it was so sweet and loving that even now years later I have that song on one of my spotify playlist so every once in a while it will play and remind me of that fic, and every time it does I smile and feel a little happier.
The stats on a fic will never really tell you if your writing touched someone. There’s no numerical way to show you what impact you made. Maybe you are wasting time, or maybe you are writing something that someone will remember for a long time, something that will never fail to make them smile.
