I Love My Fellow Disabled Americans So Much I Love You If You’re On SSDI I Love You If You’re Unemployed

reblog if you have skilled writer friends and you're damn proud of them

"Why didn't they just communicate?? They're so stupid!" Have you considered that communicating with someone you love and value and don't want to hurt is scary and that vulnerability takes practice and that perfect characters with perfect words make the most boring stories of all

Every writer has that one story that they don't even intend to write down anymore, but that is forever stuck in their brain.

Writer wants to write, but writer’s depression doesn’t care. Writer isn’t blocked, so much as they are drained. Countless words and ideas on the top of their tongue and they can’t speak. Their pen rests on their desk, useless. If writer does not write, are they useless? Was writer wrong to allow depression to be a thief, to steal their love, their job, and their joy? Should writer try to fight, reclaim their humanity, even if it’s just to finish a sentence, or should they concede?

So right now I have 9 wips (well, and 2 other ideas that I’ll come back to eventually).

4 of the wips are fanfiction. Because I don’t always finish things, I haven’t posted them yet, but one is close to posting level, probably in the next few weeks if I have time.

3 of the other wips are all different books in the same series that I know for sure I want to publish one day. (I’m just taking my time with it because I need to sort my life out before I’m able to dedicate time, money, and energy into publication)

1 wip I barely ever touch. It will be a series as well and I’ll get to it after the other series.

The last wip is one I’ve had mixed feelings about since I had the idea.

But today I had another idea, that would involve getting rid of the last wip to use the world building and one of the characters.

My life is still a mess, so publishing won’t happen any time soon, but there’s a part of me that wants to abandon my fanfics and just write original stories. I’ll just have to be okay knowing nobody will read them anytime soon.

Things I’ve noticed are essential in plotting and would probably have saved me a lot of time if I had considered it earlier

The START of your story - how fucked up flawed is your premise/character at the start? what do they have to change? why are they HERE?

The END of your story - How do you want your main character/theme/universe to change after your story? Does it get better or worse? THIS SETS UP THE TONE DRASTICALLY.

What you want to happen IN BETWEEN - the MEAT of it. What made you start writing this WIP in the first place. Don't be ashamed to indulge, it's where the BRAIN JUICE comes from. You want a deep dive into worldbuilding and complex systems? Then your start and end should be rooted in some fundamental, unique rule of your universe (what made you obsess over it?). Want to write unabashed ship content? Make sure your start and end are so compelling you'll never run out of smut scenarios to shove in between scenes (what relationship dynamics made you ship it in the first place?).

The ANTE - the GRAVITY of your story. How high are the stakes? Writing a blurb or interaction? start with a small day-in-the-life so you can focus on shorter timelines and hourly minutiae that can easily get overlooked in more complicated epics. Or you can go ham on it and plot out your whole universe's timeline from conception to demise. Remember: the larger the scale, the less attached your story may get. How quickly time flies in your story typically correlates with the ante (not a hard rule, ofc, but most epics span years of time within a few pages, while a romance novel usually charts out the events of a few months over a whole manuscript.)

Everything else follows….?

shipping isn’t about what the writers or actors say is or isn’t romantic. shipping isn’t even about romance a good percentage of the time. shipping is about seeing The Dynamic and going absolutely hog wild in your mind and your friends dms about it.

Nothing frustrates more than the realization that the world behind your eyes will never look back at you like a mirror from the page. But the frustration dissipates when you realize that if you fill the entire page so airtight with your world, then there would be no room for the reader.

Don’t let creativity slip through your fingers.

If you have an idea, write it down. And don’t be afraid to explore the weird, the obscure, or the downright silly.

Even the most outlandish ideas can lead to something truly great and amazingly creative, so don’t hesitate to play around in the sandbox of your mind. You never know when a random idea will be the seed of something great.