maybe self-publishing is the way
✶ until you give up on institutional validation, you will never be free
tropes as fun + useful
✶ people end up struggling more with their writing because they cut out all the stuff they find fun in an attempt to not be “tropey” and like. idk. i think you shouldnt be so quick to remove a useful tool you might enjoy.
character-driven
✶ people’s investment in your characters > everything else about the story –(from a video of alex hirsch at a con)
resonant/coherent
– visakanv
don’t write for everyone
✶ when I write as if I am broadcasting, the people I attract are a lot less interesting to me
- you want to bore those who find your thoughts boring, it is a filter
- when you make a effort to select and get rejected that’s a win — you successfully filtered out who you wanted to filter out
- everything you do in dating has a selection effect, it filters out some partners and encourages others
- every behavior rule you have is also a selection rule
- if you’re not letting conscious preferences guide you, you may be very surprised about who you’re actually selecting for
– not from here, but similar, and i think by the same writer
✶ “I deliberately made it tedious and inaccessible - anti-clickbait. Not so much to deter other people but to deter myself from pandering to other people”
– visa, in a twitter thread i cannot find
✶ “writing framed stories not only answered all those troubling questions about the narrator’s audience, but also neatly integrated the answers into the narrative itself. i knew not only who was speaking, but who was being spoken to.”
- 🌷 TL;DR get the voice of your writing right by choosing an audience
✶ Don’t dumb down: Always write for your top five percent of readers.
✶ Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
finishing
✶ Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
on writing abhorrent characters
✶ I think there is no more comforting feeling than the notion your loved ones would still care for you, even at your very worst, that if a monster is worthy of love, then of course so are you.
make a small thing!
✶ “Take your 1000 page epic, your feature film, your thing that is going to take years to make and years of upskilling and make it the smallest thing you possibly can. A 12 page black and white minicomic, a short story, a poem. You can still do the big thing later.”
✶ just do something small in the interim because it helps figure stuff out and get the satisfaction that comes from finishing something. it’s also a great proof of concept.
don’t autocomplete yourself
✶ A common reason for weak writing is that people get stuck in auto complete mode. They start a sentence and then the sentence sort of just finishes it self. I do this all the time. I read a draft and go, “No, wait a minute, that is not actually what I did in that situation. I just wrote that because it was the logical way to end the sentence.” It is cargo cult writing where you are imitating how sentences sound, instead of understanding the mental process that leads a good author to pick that specific sentence. You have to always go back to the real thing, the thought, the experience, and then wrestle with the sentence until it matches that thing. If you just go with the rhythm of the prose, you distort the thing you are trying to show, and the writing feels dead, sloppy, fake.
ai art
✶ A computer can never be spiteful or horny, therefore a computer must never make art