I tell my students that the odds of their getting published and of it bringing them financial security, peace of mind, and even joy are probably not that great. Ruin, hysteria, bad skin, unsightly tics, ugly financial problems, maybe; but probably not peace of mind. I tell them that I think they ought to write anyway.
(But, one might wonder, why? Lamott answers beautifully:)
My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.
But I also tell [my students] that sometimes when my writer friends are working, they feel better and more alive than they do at any other time. And sometimes when they are writing well, they feel that they are living up to something. It is as if the right words, the true words, are already inside them, and they just want to help them get out. Writing this way is a little like milking a cow: the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is so glad you did it.“
(For her, the essence of writing is about something simple, something immutable about being human.)
Some advice for when you’re writing and find yourself stuck in the middle of a scene:
- kill someone
- ask this question: “What could go wrong?” and write exactly how it goes wrong
- switch the POV from your current character to another – a minor character, the antagonist, anyone
- stop writing whatever scene you’re struggling with and skip to the next one you want to write
- write the ending
- use a scene prompt
- use sentence starters
- read someone else’s writing
Never delete. Never read what you’ve already written. Pass Go, collect your $200, and keep going.
This is the literal best writing advice I have ever read. Period.
Kill someone.
did they mean a character or
Mmmhmm. That’s a dangerous point to be vague about.
If she starts cleaning up imaginary lint from the sofa, one sort of person is suggested. If she spills her scotch and lets it sink into her skirt without seeming to care, that suggests another. Something prosaic like sitting down and reading the newspaper does not tell the readers much. But if she turns at once to the medical column, that might tell us something. The actions you give your characters should be densely informative.
Jerome Stern, Making Shapely Fiction (via the-right-writing)
Sorry to bother you – I was wondering if you had any advice for writing romantic characters? I have a bad habit of writing all my characters aromantic/not-in-a-relationship and I have a creative writing test on Tuesday and my character for that needs to be in a relationship and flirt… And you’re a writer. A good one. So I was wondering if you had any tips on writing romance and flirting? Yeah. Sorry.
I hope it’s okay I answer this public? And thank you for the compliment.
Maybe I have a small advantage of being married 16 years. Or I just like Jack Harkness, a lot. I would say the big thing is the small things.If you want to be in a relationship, you notice the small things. You know what they like in their tea or coffee. You laugh at their jokes. If you’ve been a relationship for a while you have your inside jokes and shared experiences. If you’re just meeting someone, take a tip from Jack Harkness, smile, meet their eyes and introduce yourself. It’s a fine line between being creepy and being warm, but it’s about paying attention to the other person, and making sure they know you’re the center of their attention.
It’s also about being patient. That’s how I tend to write/think of Mystrade. Greg is warm and friendly, Mycroft is standofish and aloof. But he melts the ice simply by being there and letting Mycroft know he is willing to take as much time as he needs. John and Sherlock can have a similar dynamic, depending on how you’re writing them.
Like I said, in a more long term relationship, it’s about getting to know the other person. You get to know their lines, what jokes go too far, what things from the past you shouldn’t bring up if you want to keep you head attached to your shoulders. Real relationships have ups and downs, fights and moments of love. It can be as simple as holding hands. It can be as complicated as watching the sunrise together.
writing passive romantic interest is fun and tricky too 🙂 if your characters are into each other, make sure the reader knows it. give us little sentences telling us how they’re feeling, or what they think of their person. all the things Merinda mentioned are super correct but especially if you’re going for as-yet-unresolved romantic tension – the audience needs a window into at least one of the character’s heads.
when your characters shift from passive (interest) to active (flirting), you can’t lose this! the biggest difference between friendly flirty banter and creepy hitting-on is intent, which shows in the body language and tiny variations in tone. your narration, with a careful (not necessarily overly fancy, just… careful) selection of words works magic here.
it’s possibly a dumb obvious thing to say, but draw on yourself and your own feelings – or your friends. i’m not overly similar to john or sherlock (or greg or mycroft or newt or hermann) but if i think about my conflict of wanting to protect my friends and simultaneously feeling directionless, i can write john. if i think about pretending to ignore things that might hurt me for so long that i’m unsure how to respond to things when they almost definitely won’t hurt, i can write sherlock. (exasperated fondness for my sister/coworkers? greg. writing mycroft is like what you think you want when everything is a goddamn mess, and you have no resources to control it. “oh god did my mouth just make those words” = newt. herms is me as an older sibling desperate not to be outshone, with a dash of sherlock’s emotional avoidance) that’s a big simplification, of course, but a start. i can say “when i felt/feel like this, how would i react?” i then have a starting point i can then modify depending on the character’s situation.
building a whole existence outside the story helps greatly. this is where fanfic is a huge help/crutch, because it’s easy to think/talk about headcanons and AUs and how the characters would act/react in new situations. if you’re writing original fiction with an ensemble cast, i think my biggest pitfall was having one fleshed-out character and one-dimensional supporting cast. if you’re writing just about a couple of people, i think it’s important to avoid making them either too polar-opposites or too perfectly-matched.
and finally, find someone who can give you some tough love support. someone who likes how you write but isn’t afraid to tell you where you need to pick up the slack. if i can moan about fanfic for a second, there is a lot, seriously so much, great writing, and also truckloads of pretty good writing, but it’s jumbled in with a lot of stuff that’s… you know, mediocre or sub-par, and it makes me despair a little when they only get praise without critique? like, yeah, harsh truths hurt, but if you refuse them, you’re really doing yourself a disservice. (i guess that’s some life advice that applies to more than just writing.)
i need to stop saying stuff. the most important thing is to enjoy yourself. #platitude
Do you think there’s any point in writing fanfiction if no one really reads it?
Absolutely. I write some pairs that I know very few people will read or care about, but I still write it because it makes me (and maybe one or two other people) happy. I write fics sometimes just for me that I end up not posting at all.
If writing makes you happy, do it. It doesn’t matter fuckall what other people think. It doesn’t matter if one person or 5 or 10,000 people read it. Write because you want to. Write what you want to write because you want to.
I know sometimes it can be discouraging to think no one is reading what you put out there, but people will come. And you’l find those that support you through it. Heck if you need to, my ask is always open.
I strongly support writing, any writing. Don’t let anyone tell you that what you write is worth less then anyone else’s just because it’s fanfiction, or something they aren’t interested in. Write it anyway.
My lovely Merinda, I hope you don’t mind if I happen to hijack the shit out of this post.
Dearest, Darlingest Nonny,
It is of utmost importance that if you feel like you want to write, that you write.
On my blog, if you search the term “fic rec”, you’ll find 152 pages, with 15 posts per page of fics that I have read and rec’ed. Currently, I have three browser windows open, one with 18 tabs of fics, one with 56 tabs of fics, and another with 19 tabs of fics. I have more than 550 drafts saved and over half of that is fics. I rec at least two fics every day, and I have dedicated Fridays for the saving of all the NSFW fics that I have found to post then in honor of Penis Fridays. I am planning for this coming Friday to hit my post limit by rec’ing my favorite authors for the one year anniversary of this particular tradition. I asked people what they wanted to read, and I have hopefully found fics for them that they can enjoy.
There’s going to be someone out there who will read what you’ve written. Maybe you’re not sure about where to post? Make a friend with someone on Ao3 and get an invite. If that doesn’t work, there’s always livejournal and FF.net. If you’re not sure you want your name attached to your work, there are kinkmemes galore out there. And just because it has ‘kink’ in the title, doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily all crazy wild sex all the time.
Have you ever looked at some of the stats on ao3? If you check them out, you can see that there are nearly 56,000 fics having to do with Sherlock Holmes in some way, shape or form. Doctor Who has about 30,000 fics, Supernatural has around 66,000 fics. And this is just on the ao3. I remember when I first started reading fics, on FF.net, there were tens of thousands of fics for the fandoms in which I happened to read.
Maybe you’re not sure about your grammar or other such technicalities? There are betas who volunteer their love and kindness to help both aspiring and well-established authors along the way. As someone who used to beta heavily (about ten years ago), it’s kind of thrilling to get to watch a fic evolve in many ways, shapes and forms.
I know enough people in fandom that answer my calls for fics. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had wonderful people drop links in my inbox. People tel me, “hey, I saw this fic and thought you’d like it”. And you know what? OMG it’s the best thing ever. I’m actually stockpiling fics of 10K+ right now on my iPad because in July I’m going to South Africa and the flying time is going to be about 28 hours each way. I’m going to need something to keep me entertained. I’ve got over 250 fics saved up. I’m pretty pumped.
Since I got home tonight at 7:30, I’ve already read and decided to rec 10 fics. I’ve obviously read more than ten tonight, but so far only these ones have caught my eye.
Did you know that there are tumblr blogs that have been set up that are ao3 feeds? There’s a blog that makes a post for each and every johnlock fic that is posted to ao3. I follow it. That’s how I find most of my johnlock fics. There are SPN feeds. Accidentally, I was following the SPN master feed, which makes a post for each and every fic in the SPN fandom, while simultaneously following the destiel and wincest feeds. Suffice to say, I was overloaded with a lot of fic repeats.
If you want people to read what you write, put it out there for it to be read. Ask people to read it and see what you think. As you can tell, I’ll pretty much read just about anything. I’ll pass along my recommendations for just about any fic, as long as it doesn’t have too many errors and has a general sort of coherence. If you’re an author I like, I’ll pretty much rec every fic you write. Because you’re just that damn awesome.
Not everyone can write, you know. Not everyone can make gifsets. Not everyone can draw. There are those of us who are mostly just consumers of fandom. I know that I’ll never have photoshop talent, but that doesn’t stop me from reblogging awesome manips and tagging them and gushing over them. I know that I’ll probably never write for fandom again, but that doesn’t stop me from reading voraciously within my tastes, and occasionally stepping outside my normal reading parameters.
Writing doesn’t come easily for everyone. Sometimes you’ll think you’ve got a picture perfect idea in your head and when you sit down to bust it out on your computer, you find that you hopped on the struggle bus and you’re riding it all the way downtown. There are support groups within fandoms, like Sunday Six, where you post six sentences of a fic you’re writing. Six sentences, you may be thinking, isn’t a lot, but when those sentences are your blood, sweat and tears on the screen, it’s something of which you can be really proud. It might motivate you to not just stop at only six sentences.
There’s NaNoWriMo too, which happens in November. There are tons of prompts going around different fandoms at different times. About a month ago, I saw a list of cute prompts that had been collected on tumblr of like, alternate meetings. It had about six different ideas, and then about fifty bajillion reblogs underneath it saying something along the lines of “omg i have to read this fic right fucking now omg write it yesterday”.
There is an appetite for fics. It’s not a weak appetite. It’s strong and healthy. Some fandoms, obviously, lend themselves more easily to the written word. Some fandoms are bigger than others. But fandom is inspirational. Look at Sherlock Holmes in general. There’re the original writings by ACD, but if we look around, we see creations such as Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd century, BBC’s Sherlock, House MD, The Great Mouse Detective, the Guy Ritchie Films, the Granada Holmes series, just to name a few. ACD wrote in the late 1800’s, and we’re still obsessing over it today.
We can also look around many many fandoms and see how so many authors who write fanfiction also are published authors. And you don’t have to be just a regular person to be a fan of something. SE Hinton, the author of The Outsiders and Rumble Fish is a huge SPN fan.
Nonnie, there are safe spaces for you if you want to write. Fanfiction is a very large presence of many fandoms. It’s how fans deal. Two years of hiatus in the BBC Sherlock fandom is slowly becoming the norm. How many fics are ‘fix-its’? There was that one glorious moment this last year, when all the shows were on Winter hiatus when suddenly we had 10 days of Sherlock that came and went. The post-airing fics were the best parts of the fandom. As a reader, I want to see what a writer can do with what’s been given to us by TPTB. I can and will read 475 different fics of the same two characters meeting in slightly different ways. The AU is one of the most precious things given to fans. The ability to say, “Merlin and Arthur are so totally going to work for Torchwood because you know what, I want to see what Arthur would have to say to Captain Jack Harkness”.
Your creativity is a precious and valued thing. I want to know how you imagined “the pizza man and the babysitter” idea really played out in the middle of season 6. I want to see how many more adventures Donna and Ten went on. Hell, I think River and Nine would have made for smashing friends. I’d read the daylights out of that.
There are people around who are waiting for your creativity. Do what you want with it.
Best,
-Cinco xoxo
How do you get over being over-critical of your own writing? I try, but sometimes I can’t even put out a paragraph it’s so bad.
I remind myself that no one day of writing matters all that much. A story is built somewhat like a stalactite – one little drip of mud and grit at a time.
I remind myself that the first few drafts are just for me. That gives me permission to let it be an ungodly mess, full of shit sentences and crap ideas, whipped into a creamy froth with the occasional bits that do work. Later I’ll winnow out the stuff that was no good. What remains will be (I hope) fun, economical, and lively.
It helps (me) to write longhand. I know no one is ever going to see my longhand draft but me. That’s a free pass to suck.
Also, though, I try and work small. If I think a scene blows dead rats, I’ll stop thinking about the big picture, and just think about the next sentence. If I can get down one sentence that really excites me, sometimes it will throw a spark powerful enough to bring a dying moment back to life.
WHAT HE SAID.
I think that may need more emphasis.
Ahem.
WHAT HE FUCKING SAID.
There.
