betts’ writing advice masterdoc

home | about me | publications | services 

dear reader,

welcome to my masterdoc of writing advice posts, where i’ve pasted and, to the best of my ability, catalogued all of my craft-related tumblr posts from 2017 to present. i intend to update this doc every month with the previous month’s posts, if any. you’re welcome to check back in, or you can sign up for my newsletter, which will include a monthly roundup.

i’m not fond of the phrase “writing advice.” i use it here because that’s the tag i’ve always used on tumblr and have linked everywhere, and to change it now would be a pain. ultimately, what’s here isn’t advice. advice to me sounds prescriptive and demanding. instead, i hope to offer different approaches you can take to different situations you may encounter. art isn’t about doing things “right.” it’s about honoring your interests and ideals, while better utilizing the tools at your disposal. that’s all i want these posts to do: show you what the tools can do, not how you should use them.

i started receiving writing advice asks on tumblr sometime in 2014. my answers back then were probably obnoxious and awful, and i have no intention of going back to confirm that. answering them never seemed like much, just an hour or two a week maybe, with many weeks where i didn’t receive any. but when i began pasting them into the doc, i realized it was a lot more than i initially thought. as of right now, this document is over 200 pages and nearly 100k words. like any reference book, i don’t think sitting down to read it start to finish is the best use of anyone’s time. however, having read it start to finish myself, there are a few themes that stand out. so here are the top 5 things you can take away from this doc so you don’t have to read the whole damn thing:

5. write about writing

writing all these posts taught me the practice of writing about writing, which helped me in ways i probably still don’t fully understand. when you write about writing, you engage in metacognition, and it helps you sharpen and define the abstract practice of artmaking. this is not to say you should make rules for yourself, but instead carve a space where you can list observations, and be honest with yourself about the things you’re proud of and where you struggled. keep a notebook, a blog, a process journal. jot down just a sentence or two a day about what you wrote or thought about writing, and how you felt about it. when you make time to reflect on yourself and your practices, it becomes much easier to replicate what’s working and grow from what isn’t.

4. read selfishly

that is to say, read as a writer. with everything you read, ask yourself, what can i take for my own writing? what do i want to avoid? maybe you admire the way a character arc develops, the way a story moves between scenes. maybe a particular line or passage made you want to throw your iPad out a window. as a writer, it’s important to pay attention to when your brain goes “!!!” or when you encounter something that speaks to you. stop for a moment and figure out why you had that reaction. deconstruct that element of the story and put it back together again. play around with applying it to your own work.

reading selfishly also means reading widely and shamelessly. if something isn’t interesting enough, put it down and go to the next thing in your tbr pile. skim and skip around. look up wikipedia summaries or sparknotes when you’re confused. read the mediums best suited to you regardless of what other people think of them. never read out of guilt or false obligation. chase after the things you enjoy, and follow your curiosity so you can discover new things.

3. write ugly

as i mention many, many times in this document, i am a believer in the Shitty First Draft. i live and die by the process outlined in anne lamott’s essay: get the idea down, clean it up, check every tooth. i always believed that gaining an expertise in writing meant that you literally got better at writing. as in, your sentences became more beautiful and flowed more easily.

no, getting better at writing means getting worse at writing. it means developing a comfort with your ugliest work, because you know you’ll revise it into something better. you never get “better” at writing; you only get more patient with it.

to me, writing ugly was also my very first “aesthetic ideal” although i didn’t have that phrase at the time. it was the first major Work i wanted my writing to do. i wanted to write in order to interrogate my natural assumptions of beauty, my hard-learned rules of “good” writing. i wanted to put words together in ways that were unpleasant and unexpected. i had spent my whole life trying to be easy and beautiful and good. in writing, i wanted to be the opposite of that. at first, my only goal was to write badly.

and i did! i wrote so badly for so long that i got very good at writing badly. and it turns out, when you get really good at writing badly, it just becomes good writing. so, you can either struggle to write beautifully, or strive toward what you think is “good writing.” or you can rub your little gremlin hands together and go “haha this is gonna SUCK” and have a really good time breaking all the rules you thought you knew. when you break those rules over and over, you develop style, voice, your personal aesthetic. you may not become a “good writer,” but you’ll become the writer you need to be.

2. lean in

lean in to everything! all your instincts! every whim, every interest, every question, every impulse. to become a writer, you need to build positive neural pathways in the practice of writing. you need to make it euphorically pleasurable for yourself, or you’ll never do it. that means you have to say yes to every idea that excites you. sometimes that means starting 8000 wips and never finishing any of them. sometimes it means turning your grimdark horror story into a rom-com halfway through. art isn’t something you get better at by denial and shame; you get better at it by indulgence and pride. listen closely to that voice inside you that tells you to create. follow it like a fae beckoning you into a forest, where you’ll remain trapped for decades, and return having found you were only gone for minutes. that analogy got away from me, but that’s because i leaned in.

the opposing force to leaning in is the ever-present “this didn’t come out the way i wanted it to.” so what? stop having expectations of your writing and just write. write with curiosity, with joy, with love. write to discover something. write to feel something. lean in to what you want.

1. take risks

leaning in isn’t necessarily about making things easy. it also means finding the good kind of creative challenge, the things that are difficult but important to you. growing as a writer means figuring out the things you’re most afraid of, and tasking yourself with facing them. in my creative writing class, students have one major project: write your biggest risk. for some writers, that may be form — writing poetry instead of prose, cnf instead of fiction, novels instead of short form. for others, it might be content — addressing the ways your parents failed you, conveying your darkest fantasy, writing plainly about the worst thing that has ever happened to you. if you shove yourself into a box, you’re locked in. you can’t grow. art is meant to push at boundaries. maybe not painfully crash through them, but wander over to them, look at them, gently nudge them. widen your creative space. look at yourself dead-on. your best work will often terrify you.

in closing, i’ll leave you, not with advice, but a question: what are you most afraid to write?

best,

betts

about this doc

navigation

craft

about the elements of writing

fanfiction & discourse

about fandom and fandom-related topics

feedback

about giving and receiving critique

feelings

about the complicated emotional fallout of writing

pedagogy

about teaching writing

process

about how to literally, actually write stuff

reading

about the thing we did prolifically growing up but no longer have the attention span for

the writing life

about the ups, downs, struggles, and successes of living “a chosen life”

how to recover from workshop

15 OCT 2020

Hi Betts. I just went through my first real writers’ workshop today in class and it was brutal. My essay was torn to shreds which is the point, this was a first draft and it was going to happen. Constructive feedback is good and it shouldn’t be taken personally. I get that. But even then, it’s hard to separate yourself from your writing. Any tips on how to *recover* and move forward after a particularly harsh workshop session? My self esteem as a writer is at an all time low at the moment 😅

i’m so sorry to hear that. the first workshop is always hard. after my first workshop i dissociated for 3 days.

the good news is, the feeling you’re having now, it’ll never be this bad again (probably). once you’ve gotten through this, it gets better.

the bad news is, you have to feel how you’re feeling. you have to pay attention to it, and think about it, and maybe cry and eat a lot of pasta. maybe cry while eating pasta.

once you’ve faced those ugly feelings and let them run their course, go look at the feedback you got and all your notes, and find the things that hurt you most. they probably hurt because they were either wildly off-base, or addressed something you’re self-conscious about, or something you hadn’t seen before in your own work.

then, you should open a blank doc and write a new piece where you do all of the things everyone criticized you for, intentionally and spitefully.

maybe you’ll end up workshopping that piece. and you’ll notice, probably, that you’ll get some of the same criticisms, but this time they won’t hurt, because you did all of those things purposefully. or, you’ll notice you don’t get the same criticisms, because readers can now see that you’ve made these decisions purposefully. it’s a good exercise in learning that most feedback is bullshit.

i don’t know what kind of workshop this is, but if it’s an undergrad workshop, i want you to know that no one will ever be that mean again. undergrad workshops are notoriously brutal. if you’re in a graduate or non-university-affiliated workshop, probably your workshop mates really do care about you and your work and want the best for you. but also, most of them are probably learning how to give feedback themselves, and maybe they’re way outside your wheelhouse. find the one or two people whose work resonates with you and whose feedback indicates they understand what you’re doing. listen to what those people have to say. ignore the rest.

it’s important to only listen to a fraction of the feedback given to you. you can hear all of the feedback, chew on it a while, but ultimately you’ll only ever use about 10% of it.

feel free to stop back and let me know how your next workshop goes!

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to analyze style and learn from writing that (you think) is better than yours

12 OCT 2020

Hi Betts. I've just discovered a new (to me) fic writer and fallen in love with their style. I know it's stupid but my own writing has now stalled. I find myself deleting every sentence because I keep comparing it to this other writer and feel like my writing is garbage compared to them. Or I can't write anything - I think maybe I am trying to write in their style but... well, I can't! Because I am not them, of course. Any advice on how to be inspired in a healthy and productive way? Thank you!

this is the ask that has finally convinced me i need to centralize/organize my writing advice asks, because i know i answered a similar question at some point but i couldn’t remember what i had tagged it.

anyway it took a while but i found it! on getting discouraged when other people’s writing is better than yours.

to address your question specifically, i think you absolutely can write in their style. first, copy and paste a page worth of their writing into a doc. highlight every sentence that conjures a concrete description or image. how has the author created that image? in a different color, highlight every expository sentence; that is, a sentence that directly explains something. and in a third color, highlight every sentence of internality; that is, descriptions of cognition or the senses (see, hear, think, etc). finally, go through and underline every sentence that breaks a convention or rule of english.

next, do that with your own writing. put the docs side by side and look at them. if the two docs are starkly different, you’ll get a good visual on what to work on. for example, if the other writer’s work is filled with images, and yours is filled with exposition, you know that you should work on imagery.

if you can’t tell a difference, then it’s possible your writing is just as good as theirs, but it feels different because you’re reading it rather than writing it.

ultimately, beautiful prose is just a series of effective rhetorical choices. all of those rhetorical choices have names. every part of a sentence also has a name. every rule has a name and every way to break that rule also has a name. style may seem totally mysterious and out of reach but it isn’t. i remember i worked with this author who is known as one of the greatest prose writers of our time, and i remember being so in awe of the way he crafted sentences. moreover, i was in awe of the way he taught the craft of sentences. he seemed to know everything about the english language.

then a couple years later i looked at the notes i had taken in his class and saw all the vocab he used to describe style. i started googling stuff and doing research. i read books on rhetoric and syntax. and suddenly style started to look so different to me. it took all the mystery away. (it also took some of the fun and awe away too, but that’s inevitable when you learn stuff.) now i can closely read a text, like extremely closely read a text, and figure out how it’s put together, like taking apart a puzzle.

there are of course other things that are harder to take apart. i’m still in awe of writers who exhibit patience in their writing, who can research effectively and weave that research into their narration, who can balance humor and heart and intellect effectively. but i also know that my writing has things about it that other people admire that i’m probably totally unaware of.

getting disheartened by good writing is part of the process, and i think the healthiest and most productive thing you can do is to let yourself sit in that discomfort a while. that feeling is the boss battle of writing, and it means you’re about to level up.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to pare down your wip (work in progress) list

8 OCT 2020

soooo, I have an issue. I was checking the lastest comments on my fics and there are some people (more than a few if I'm being honest) afraid of starting a multi-chapter I just published because I have a certain... track record... with... not finishing them. Which I know I shouldn't feel guilty about with me doing it for free and all, but I do, I have the outline of everything but I just can't get myself to write it. Should I just release that and put ppl out of their misery?

oh anon i’m so sorry to hear that. i can’t exactly tell whether you mean you’ve already abandoned this wip people are commenting on, or if you want to abandon it because of their comments?

if you’ve already abandoned the work, i think it would be a courtesy to post your outline or a summary of how it would have ended, so your readers have closure. i did that with one wip i abandoned and received many comments along the lines of “wow glad u didn’t finish it” because they didn’t like the ending (which, in retrospect, is maybe why i abandoned it).

if you want to abandon it because of the comments then, yk, live and learn i guess. the most recent wip i abandoned was because of the comments i received. if i get enough mean, tactless, or entitled comments, i lose interest in a work and can’t continue it. so i personally always try to complete a fic before i begin posting, since its reception can affect my perception of the story.

abandoning stories is a natural part of writing, and fic just happens to be this special genre where a story can be published before it’s even finished. so it’s a tough road to navigate, and i hope you have better luck with your projects in the future.

9 OCT 2020 (same anon)

the thing is that I don't want to abandon them, it's just that can't sit down and write, my brain is mush w/o ADHD meds, I can barely keep my grammar proper without a beta reader. It's been years with some works and struggling with them became part of my weekly routine, but if ppl r starting to notice, maybe I should just give my babies up? Not as 'revenge' or anything hahah I just don't want to keep ppl waiting and having a reputation doesn't feel good. I wrote this entire intricate murder mystery story that is secretly a choose your own adventure type of deal (the story is set, the options just change the character’s personal outcome if that makes sense), but the reception has been overall negative because no one wants to ‘get hurt again’, so now I’m stumped and wondering whether or not I should just marie kondo my files and retire those stories. I guess I might have a real hoarding problem? Why am I using u as a diary? You can skip the two previous lowkey freakouts if you want hahah I guess my question is: how can you tell it’s time to give up? How do you know you have nothing else to offer to a story? If I do publish the outline, do you think it’ll just kill the odds of me ever finishing it? How do you stop treating your stories as living, breathing individuals that can and WILL be hurt if you delete some of their files?

well first of all, i would never delete anything i write. i put old stuff into folders labeled “x abandoned” (so they show up at the bottom) or “delayed” if i’ve put them down but think i’ll come back to them eventually.

it doesn’t bother me to abandon stuff anymore, because i always set things down for a reason, even if i’m not aware of it. i got 40k into a novel and put it down, and it took me over a year to realize it was structurally all wrong, and that i need to completely rewrite it with the new structure.

i have a fic that’s maybe 10k, and it really just needs a polish before it’s postable, but i haven’t done that and it’s been over 2 years. it’s a post-canon fic for a show that isn’t over, and the next season comes out in 2022 or something like that, so i might pick it up again after next season and see if it’s worth salvaging.

i think what might be helpful is to go through your WIPs and see, not which ones you like most, but which are the most viable to complete. make a spreadsheet with all the titles of your wips in one column and the status of those wips in another. when you do this, you’ll probably see that a lot of things were good ideas but are not totally viable to complete, and those are the ones you can put in your delayed/abandoned folder. of what remains, you’ll find that you have your fics that were maybe too ambitious, and your investment in them is not higher than the labor it would take to complete them. those can go in the folder too.

what’s left will be the stories you’ve put a lot of work into probably and that you care the most about. order those fics by closest to completion, and do an estimate of how long it would take you to complete them. 20 hours? 40? 80? and really think about if you want to put that work in. if yes, schedule time in advance to do it. one hour every morning on the wip that means the most to you. you may also consider capping the workload – anything that would take you over 20 hours to complete, you should set aside.

i know adhd is working against you in this regard, and that might make tasks like this more difficult than they would otherwise be. i hope you’re able to get treatment, because that’ll make tasks like the ones i’ve described above a lot less arduous. what might help is to hang out with a friend (in person or online even) who can anchor you while you work and with whom you can talk while you make these decisions, and they can give you feedback on the things you should keep working on or set aside.

your goal is to narrow your list to 1 to 3 wips with a max workload of 40 estimated hours.

this is very prescriptive advice, but i know a lot of writers with mile-long wip lists and this is the process i take them through to narrow them down. do not feel bad about setting things aside or abandoning them – one day, your interest in them might return, and they’ll be there waiting for you. or, you’ll use what you learn from one abandoned project to sow seeds for a different project. you may take language, images, conflicts, and characterizations from an abandoned work to give life to a new work. i promise, nothing you make is ever wasted.

i hope this helps. feel free to keep me posted!

↑ return to navigation ↑

defining the genre of fanfiction

5 OCT 2020

This is kinda random but I just felt compelled to ask since I saw this idea floating about. Someone said that not all transformative works are fanfiction (a distinction I can get behind) but then explicitly went on to say characters railing each other is like the distinctive factor which I mean.... Come on. But marinating on the idea I couldn't really pinpoint a distinct qualifier to separate it (medium aside).

So I guess my question is, are all narrative transformative works fanfiction and if not, what is the line between them? And what would you call the "others".

apologies for sitting on this so long. it took me a long time to think about. it’s something i’ve been dwelling on since i first started writing fic, and i think i only now can answer it.

this really comes down to being an issue of genre, and the purpose and function of genre as a craft concept rather than a marketing tool. very often a work’s paratext primes us for what we’re about to engage with. paratext is all the information around a given work. for example, the cover of a book gives you an impression of what’s inside the book. finding a book in the general fiction section of a book store gives you a different impression of a text than what you would find in the cookbook aisle. all of these paratextual details set your expectations for what you’re about to read.

so what happens when you have no paratext? how would you know what genre to place something into? you’d have to use the text itself. but sometimes, the text is not so clear.

for example, one of the first pieces i teach every semester is Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl.” and the first discussion question i ask is, “what genre is this?” (it’s a short piece, and i recommend taking a look at it if you haven’t read it before.)

a lot of writers don’t like the idea of genre because they find it confining, and obviously i agree. art isn’t meant to be boxed in, and if a piece can securely fit anywhere, it probably isn’t very good or interesting.

however, if we consider genre as a lens instead of a box, we get a far more useful tool for inspecting work.

would you read “Girl” differently if i had told you before you read it that it was a poem? perhaps you would have entered into it with all your existing understanding of poetry. perhaps you would have paid more attention to the way it’s been laid out on the page, and the punctuation, and the order of the words. maybe you would have noticed it doesn’t look like the common understanding of a poem, so maybe you would have wondered, is it really a poem?

and if i told you it was a fictional story? maybe you would have entered into it with your understanding of a story. you would have paid attention to the characters and conflict. but, like a poem, it doesn’t exactly fit our common understanding of a story, either. there’s no inciting incident or rising action or climax. we’re not in a concrete time or space. and maybe you would have wondered, is it really a story?

“Girl” is actually a lyric essay. how would you have read it if you knew that? if you had never read a lyric essay, or didn’t know what a lyric essay was, this piece would then define that genre for you, and you would read future lyric essays thinking back to “Girl” and framing your impression from there.

this, of course, begs the question: what happens to our reading experience when we enter into works with an existing impression of what they are, and therefore what they should be?

we all engage with art bringing with us all our existing perspectives and preferences, and those shape our perspective of quality. some people believe that all melodrama is bad. by “melodrama” i mean, conflicts and emotional reactions that are over the top. however there are many genres that employ melodrama as a function of that genre. if you watched a soap opera without melodrama, for example, you’d think it was a pretty shitty soap opera.

this brings me to the idea of genre not as a categorizing device, but a means of affordance and constraint. melodrama is an affordance of a soap opera. soap operas are allowed to be melodramatic. length, by contrast, is a constraint of a soap opera. a soap opera is not allowed to be over X minutes long.

when we bring affordance/constraints to fanfiction, i think we can all agree that explicit sexual content is an affordance. it’s not the definition of fanfic, but it is something that is both common and in some cases expected. when we talk about fanfiction as a genre of idealizing and indulgence, we’re talking about the affordances of fanfic. yes, many fics concern themselves with emotional catharsis, but not all of them. many fics contain shipping, but not all of them. many fics employ tropes, but not all of them. many fics are written by hobbyist writers working in fan communities, but not all of them. and yet all of these things are so common that when we enter into a fic, they’re expected. they’re allowed. but they are not necessary in order for a piece of writing to exist in the genre of fic.

conversely, fanfic has very few constraints. in fact this is the question that took me so long to answer this ask. and i realized, the single constraint i could think of is that fanfiction always knows and acknowledges (in the paratext) that it is fanfiction.

if you file off the serial numbers? not fanfiction. if you write a creative response to an existing canon but then publish it without acknowledgement of that canon? also not fanfiction. if you get inspiration from another work and acknowledge or cite that work somewhere in the text, but are not actively transforming the canon text or naming it as fanfiction? not fanfiction.

these types of works may have the community spirit of fanfiction, and the work they do may overlap with fanfiction, and they may begin as fanfiction, but they are not and cannot be fanfiction.

when you write fanfiction, you always know it is fanfiction, because fanfiction is something that happens with intention. you might start writing a story that you intend to be fantasy but after 40k you go “oh damn this is actually horror.” but you can never get 40k into a story and go “oh fuck this is accidentally fanfic.” (although you may think, “this shares many affordances of fanfiction” which, go you.)

so finally, after actual years of thinking about this, i have a definition of the genre of fanfiction:

to write fanfiction is to openly and intentionally respond to an existing text, and to acknowledge the original source material in the paratext of the work.

↑ return to navigation ↑

is it worth it to write something if no one will read it?

5 OCT 2020

I haven’t published a fic since high school. I have a plot for one that I’ve outlined and am excited about... but will anyone read it? Should I even do it if I care so much about that? I used to love writing, and now as an adult, I have much more real world experiences to draw from. I have things I really want to say, but I'm battling pretty significant anxiety. If it’s a fanfic, like I really want to do, I won’t be able to share it with my family to celebrate the accomplishment. Not even my friends; none of them are into this fandom. But I have so much more motivation to get started on this work than any of my original fiction ideas. Do you have any advice?

this is kind of the eternal question. to me, art is both the exploration and communication of ideas that otherwise cannot be spoken. to that end, art begs to be witnessed and interpreted. but that reception isn’t always guaranteed. and sometimes, it’s good enough to enter into an artistic negotiation simply as a means of discovery.

which is a fancy way of saying, sometimes you have to write stuff without the promise of being read simply to satisfy your own drives and curiosity.

i won’t say “write for yourself!” because i think that adage is far easier said than done, but i do think the heart of it is necessary to maintain the integrity of your work. when you write with the consideration of audience, you shape it to that audience’s desires. in many cases this can’t be helped, and it’s also not necessarily bad. all writing is rhetorical, and therefore there’s no way to avoid the dichotomy of message/audience that all writing falls into. however, you can certainly constrain that audience to yourself, a hypothetical other, the one person you know will read it, or a fanfic audience at large.

that’s what your question seems to come down to – your choice of audience. and it sounds like, for now, your choice of audience should be yourself. what is the story you would want to read? what is the story that hasn’t been told that needs to be told, and that only you can tell?

my advice is to write your story, but treat it as though you’re exploring an unknown, and that way, even if no one reads it, it exists to answer a question that had before been unanswerable.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to stop feeling like a fraud

27 SEP 2020

I consider reading and writing two of my favorite things to do, but because of my killer adhd and depression combo, I’ve barely read a handful of books this year and I only write rarely, and poorly. I can’t help but feel like a fraud when I say these are two of my fave hobbies. I try to talk to my other reader/writer friends about it who happen to be neurotypical and they can’t help but sound condescending when they “reassure”. Am I a fraud or how do I stop feeling like it

whenever i think about being a fraud, i think about a tattoo i got when i was 22. my first tattoo in fact. it’s two lines from hamlet on my arm. when i got it, i hadn’t read much shakespeare at all. i wasn’t an actor. i wasn’t a writer. at that point i wasn’t even much of a reader. i liked one production of one play, and i went and got a piece of it tattooed on my body. later, my sister accused me of being too rash. i’d never expressed interest in shakespeare before. my interest in it was shallow and fleeting, and two weeks later, i’d be interested in something else. and i couldn’t tattoo every passing interest on my body. i bought into that idea, and i felt bad about myself for a long time.

what i didn’t see was that what i thought of as a passing interest in shakespeare was actually sowing the seeds for a much larger garden. i was ignoring the bigger reason i had developed an interest in hamlet – i found it beautiful and important. i admired it. and that admiration for shakespeare grew and changed and developed, and now i have a much greater idea of literature at large, but that initial interest is still there. it hasn’t changed. what i loved about hamlet in 2012 is what i still love about it today.

that’s a roundabout way of saying quantity is irrelevant to authenticity. some of my favorite movies i’ve only seen once; nearly all of my favorite books i’ve only read once. that doesn’t make me less of a fan of them, and it doesn’t make me a fake fan.

 

own your passions. be shameless about the things you love.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to finish the things you start

10 AUG 2020

I'm never able to finish writing anything...I always lose steam and can't stick the landing, no matter what the length of the story I'm writing is. Not only that, but often when I am writing, I start getting more and more ideas and the story gets more complicated and longer than I had initially anticipated. Do you have any advice on how I can finish anything? I'm so frustrated with myself. Thank you so much for sharing your writing knowledge, you are amazing!

there are two reasons why you might not be able to finish projects:

  1. you’re afraid of writing a bad ending and not honoring the story you set out to tell, or
  2. you’re improving so rapidly you learn what you need to learn from a story before you reach the end, and you’re ready to move on

if you have the first problem, the trick is to isolate the fear and resolve it conceptually. in the paraphrased words of mary ruefle, the answer to fear is procedure. in many cases, writers are afraid to write badly because they do not yet have the skills of revision. i’m comfortable writing flaming garbage first drafts because i know i’ll just be rewriting it. i’m comfortable writing mediocre second drafts because i know i’ll just be revising it. and i’m comfortable writing pretty decent third drafts because by that point, i either know exactly how to fix my problems, or the problems i’m having aren’t worth fixing.

however, if you have the second problem, the solution is just…not to finish things. it’s okay to quit a story and move onto the next if you’ve gotten everything you can get out of it. it’s okay to abandon wips and follow your creative attention wherever it decides to take you.

eventually, without trying, you will finish a story. but sometimes getting to that point means giving up on a lot of other stories, so you know which ones deserve the most of your attention.

as for your other problem, getting ideas and making the story more complicated, i’m going to paraphrase yet another author (i don’t remember her name, it was a Q&A at a workshop), who said that expertise in writing means knowing which ideas to ignore.

the more effort you put into the rising action of a story, the harder it is to conclude. every thread that opens will need to be closed. so, for each new complication or idea you have, ask yourself, “how will i resolve this conflict?” and if the answer is “i don’t know” stick it in an idea notebook and revisit it for a future story. the rejected fruits of one project end up becoming seeds for another.

on a more practical note, here are some quick tips to experiment with:

hope this helps!

↑ return to navigation ↑

why fandom seems less interactive than it used to be

7 AUG 2020

I know you are a lone ranger, but I thought I'd ask anyway. I'm in a fandom that's slowly tapering off. I feel that the main problem is the consumption culture that's been created in the world overall: where people ‘like’ but don't re-blog or ‘kudo’ but don't comment. I feel psychotic trying to keep it alive against what feels like a tide of indifference. I feel old for not understanding this culture shift. We have to support each other if we want more content!! Any idea at all in what to do?

i would look for spaces more conducive to interaction over consumption. join active discord servers, participate in fandom events, find a good beta group. in some ways i feel like tumblr and twitter only exist to find your people and then group together in private spaces to support one another. the social media we have now is not built for community but for rapid-fire creation and consumption.

moreover, i think people are terrified they might misstep on a public platform like tumblr that doesn’t have cleanly separated communities, and they’ll get flooded with antis in their inboxes telling them to kill themselves. the only way not to incur that wrath is to erase all evidence that you consumed or enjoyed content that someone might consider problematic. if you like a post, unless you have that feature turned on, no one will see it. if you reblog a post, it’s on your blog forever unless you delete it. if you create your own content, just one person has to reblog it and you lose all ability to control that post. you can edit the original post on your own blog, but not the version the other person reblogged. and so we have a culture of fear-based lurking rather than interaction and support.

there’s a major aversion to permanence too that i think is only new this past decade. when i was a teenager on the internet, there wasn’t a single social media site that could stick around more than a year or two. xanga, myspace, livejournal – all rose and fell in a matter of years. but now we have facebook, twitter, tumblr, and instagram, behemoths of content that are going to exist for the foreseeable future. i didn’t give a fuck what i posted on xanga at 15 because i had no idea of the eventual permanence of the internet. it was all fairly new. but now, if you’re 16 and you have an instagram account, what you see as your cringe content has the potential to follow you around forever, even if you delete it. anything can be unearthed if you look hard enough – an ao3 comment on a ~problematic fic, the nudes you sent to somebody you liked, that year you got really into an actor who later turned out to be a sexual predator.

no wonder young fans use features that are invisible (like likes and kudos) or impermanent (like stories and snapchat). every day we all leave a glaring paper trail of what might one day be cancel-worthy content.

↑ return to navigation ↑

why some people value redemption in romance

5 AUG 2020

hi betts! I don't mean to drag you back into a ship or headspace you don't wanna be in, but could you talk a little about what makes the romance as redemption/"bad guy turns good out of love" trope appealing? I'm trying to explain it to a friend but I can't seem to articulate it all very well—she's convinced that redemptive romances are harbingers of misogynistic doom and can only ever be written poorly.

yikes @ your friend. sounds like she’s been drinking the fanpol koolaid.

i think any time someone makes sweeping judgments of a general narrative concept rather than the specific execution of that concept, they’re just flat-out wrong. personally i tend to hate depictions of betrayal, not because they’re morally wrong but because it often disengages me from a story. but in the old guard, for example, booker’s betrayal is done out of a misguided sense of loyalty, and it provides a lovely complication of not only the story but the entire premise of the universe.

a less kool-aid way of presenting your friend’s opinion is, “i find most redemption arcs unearned therefore mitigating the catharsis i would have received from the resolution.” or maybe even, “forgiveness is not a narrative conceit i prioritize and so i find redemption unfulfilling.” or perhaps, “revenge, bitch.”

i remember the very first redemption i ever wrote was back when commenting on ao3 was still the default interaction of fic, and morality policing was still in a pleasant lull. i was trying to redeem john winchester, who was widely reviled in fandom, and i remember being so viscerally upset about that, because at the time i was still taking other people’s innocuous opinions as a personal slight against me. to me, i translated “john winchester is an abuser who can’t be redeemed and dean should never forgive him” into “your father was abusive and he died before you could forgive him, therefore you will have to live with your rage and resentment toward him for the rest of your life.”

thankfully, therapy and an influx of bad internet opinions knocked that mentality out of my brain.

in those early days, john winchester’s redemption was a way for me to process my father’s death, which was still very new. i was fascinated by the comments i received on my fic – they were firmly divided between people saying they appreciated the depiction of forgiveness between dean and john, and harsh judgments of john from people who didn’t believe he ever deserved forgiveness. i felt very confused by the latter opinion, and realized there are just a lot of people in this world who have profoundly firm boundaries, who struggle with compassion, or have fearful-avoidant attachment styles in their relationships.  

it really comes down to a preference between people who are more fulfilled by stories in which a character does something bad and therefore they deserve to be punished; or a character who does something bad and they deserve to earn forgiveness. both preferences are fine, as all preferences are, but believing that the former is more morally pure than the latter is a freezing cold take, and people who find themselves engaging in that train of thought need to take a long hard look at themselves.

but you asked specifically about romance. i’ve had the experience where partners have wronged me so badly that i stopped loving them. but i’ve also had some partners who have wronged me and i kept loving them. the dude who broke up with me and proceeded to fuck every single one of my friends (one of them right in front of me!!) presumably to mess with my head, and then had the audacity to ask for me back? i told him i was never going to speak to him again and blocked him in every way i could. there’s literally nothing that guy can do, even now, ten years later, to redeem himself to me. the guy who groomed and manipulated me at 14 (he was 18), but years later realized the horrible things he had done and devoted his life to being the best and most loyal friend i could possibly have? it took a long time, but i forgave him. he had changed. he grew. he learned how to learn. he never asked me for anything more than friendship, and he loves me for who i am.

without that experience, that someone could love me enough to step up and take accountability for his actions, apologize earnestly, and earn my trust again, i wouldn’t believe in redemption, and i probably would have less interest in writing and reading it. but i know what it looks like in reality now, and i’m drawn to writing stories that depict the process of growth and forgiveness, from both the betrayer and the forgiver. not only do i find those narratives personally satisfying, but i want to show other people what redemption really looks like, so they can navigate the extremely fraught and confusing question, “should i let this person into my life again?”

sadly, i think that’s why so many people can’t conceive of a realistic redemption – no one who has hurt them has ever stepped up, and perhaps they haven’t forgiven themselves or even acknowledged the ways they’ve hurt others.

maybe that’s what you should ask your friend. what would it take for her to forgive someone who had hurt her? and when she answers, if she can answer, ask, “don’t you think that’s a story worth telling?”

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to deal with harsh/hurtful feedback

4 AUG 2020

Hi Betts, I have been trying to engage with others in my fandom to find a beta/cheerleader because I am feeling quite lonely toiling away with no one to bounce ideas off or beta. I haven't been successful with that so I shared some extracts I was especially happy with, with an IRL friend who has experience of writing professionally. He was nice and seemed to love it and that gave me confidence to send him a couple of chapters. He offered to edit it and I accepted. And, boy, he has really gone to town on it. He hasn’t finished yet but I have been watching his edits in the gdoc. So maybe I shouldn’t worry yet (esp cause I think my writing got better in the 2nd chapter) but some comments are a bit hurtful and I am generally good at taking constructive crit. I’m sure that having such a brutal (and non-fanfic) editor will make it stronger. But I kinda feel like I don’t want to write now. I see other writers in my fandom who have these lovely supportive relationships and help each other with their fics and I really wish I could have that. I want criticism but I also want someone to get excited about stuff with. Sorry if I sound pathetic. I am feeling pretty fragile right now. I don’t really know what this ask is asking for! But, oh man, I am just feeling shitty right now. This was my first time writing and I was *loving* it so so much and now I am… not.

i’m sorry to hear that your friend’s feedback was hurtful. sometimes the harshest feedback isn’t indicative of the quality of the work itself, but that the person giving you feedback is simply not the right audience for your work. more specifically i’m saying that non-fandom people giving feedback on fanfic is an upsetting experience, because fanfic is almost impossible to understand without a significant time capital investment into the genre. that means the lens with which he’s reading your work is just what he deems quality writing out of the limited arsenal of his personal taste.

sometimes when feedback hurts, it means you’re forced to acknowledge an unknown, a blind spot, and that’s almost always an uncomfortable space to inhabit. but it also means that listening to feedback widens your perspective, even if you don’t end up implementing it.

another reason feedback hurts is that it’s hard to disengage self from creation at first, so sometimes criticism of your writing feels like criticism of you. growing away from that just takes practice and time. you may eventually grow so distant from your work that the work itself suffers, and you have to find your way back. but by then the hurt of feedback won’t really bother you anymore.

i hope you find a good reader or two who can support you and embody your ideal audience. until then, please keep writing, and don’t let yourself be discouraged by one person’s opinion of your work.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to deal with not getting into grad school

25 JUL 2020

Hi betts, I'm writing bc I'm waiting to hear from a grad program--they're sending out interview invitations next week, so if I don't get anything by August 1st I am kaput. A lot of my self-worth stems from academic success and constantly achieving more, and I'm not sure how to deal with failure without breaking down. I also have no access to therapy in the country where I am rn. Any advice?

i’m not a particularly ambitious person so the idea of being driven to achieve more isn’t one i’m great at understanding, however as someone who has been through the academic ringer, i can promise you, getting rejected from grad school says absolutely nothing about you, your intelligence, or your work. a rejection from a grad program does not mean “you’re not good enough.” it means “you would have been miserable here.”

when i finished my undergrad in psychology, i wanted to do grad school asap, even though all of my professors and advisors told me i wasn’t “grad school material.” i graduated with a 3.9 GPA. i had no idea what they were talking about – i was smart, disciplined, and got good grades – so their perspective absolutely crushed me. but they were right, as much as it hurt to hear at the time. i wasn’t a good student; i was only exceptionally obedient. grad school is about agency, and i had none.

i had been a bank teller through college, though, and got a promotion to business banking when i graduated, so i stayed in commercial finance for five years, until i was finally read to do grad school for what was, for me, the right reasons: learning something i was passionate about, instead blindly stepping forward on a path someone else carved for me.

there’s no such thing as failure. if you go to a store and try on a pair of jeans that don’t fit you, it doesn’t mean you failed at jeans shopping, and it doesn’t say anything about the size or shape of your body. it just means you need to keep looking until you find something that’s right for you. there are a million other clothing racks in a million other stores to choose from. something, somewhere will fit you.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on excessive adverb use

25 JUL 2020

I feel like I (massively, unpromptedly) overuse adverbs. Should I stop depending on them so desperately? How to let go???

personally i really like adverbs, but i definitely think it depends on the voice you’ve established. adverbs are great in comedy because you can use them for a quick in-line joke. for example, “she shook parmesan onto her pizza violently.” comedy is all about pairing together unexpected things, in this case an innocuous but extremely specific activity like shaking parmesan onto pizza paired with violence, which creates a sense of hyperbole.

since most adverbs end in -ly, they’re very conducive to creative iambs, and iambs create musicality in prose. they make sentences beautiful that would otherwise sound dull, simply because they’re likely to have that rhythmic double beat we associate with our heart.

adverbs are also great in hypotactic prose – or what some people consider purple prose – because they help elevate and saturate sentences.

i certainly don’t think you should shy away from adverbs. instead, develop a voice that makes them shine.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to give feedback on something that is not your cup of tea

24 JUL 2020

Please feel free to ignore this if it’s not something you would normally answer. My friend asked me to read and provide feedback on her friend’s story on Wattpad. The story is not my cup of tea, but I’m struggling with providing useful feedback. The last thing I want to do is scare this woman away from writing, but I do want to help her improve. Do you have any advice?

this is a tough situation, definitely. the good news is, the best feedback often isn’t critical in nature, and in this situation i don’t think you have to worry about it. this is a friend of a friend; you read it as a favor it sounds like, and it’s not your thing. moreover, it’s posted to wattpad already which tells me that to the writer’s eyes, it’s published.

the most useful feedback you can offer is simply being another pair of eyes. even if it’s not your thing, what are things you enjoyed or appreciated about the work? if not content-wise, at the line level – any clever turns of phrase or beautiful description? any particular images that remained in your mind when you were done reading? positive feedback tells a writer “i did that right, i can do it again.”

next, consider asking questions. the better i get at asking questions, i’ve noticed, the better my feedback tends to become (and the better teacher i’ve become. who knew teaching was all about asking rather than answering?). ultimately, critical feedback always comes from a place of “here is how *i* view the work” and therefore only takes into account the breadth of the reader’s personal taste, and not the writers’ intentions. if you (general you) were in the writer’s mind, you would Get what they were trying to do, and probably enjoy the piece a lot more. so the best feedback comes from seeking to understand the writer’s intentions, and you can only do that through asking good questions.

lastly, you can try neutral observations. whenever i have a critical thought, i try to turn it into a neutral thought. more or less, i go from “this isn’t right/i don’t like this” to “this is something i’ve noticed.” that’s the key to neutrality: noticing. offering a close, discerning but not critical view of the work. in fact you can use that as a framing device for your comments: “i noticed…” and you can go on to describe patterns in the narrative, something that captured your attention, a change in pacing, a growth or development in character, and so on.

i hope this helps. i’ve found it’s best to assume no one wants or needs my critical feedback; they want another brain observing their work and noticing things they haven’t, so they can see those things more concretely, and do them more deliberately, in the future. which is *victorious trumpet sounds* how you get better at writing.

↑ return to navigation ↑

the differences in teaching scholarly vs. creative writing

23 JUL 2020

Do you think there are differences between teaching creative writing and academic (humanities) writing? I.e. so much academic writing is bad, for a lot of reasons, and could use STYLE, but it might also be somewhat necessary to teach fairly rigid conventions first? I don't know!

the field you’re talking about is english composition, which was developed in i want to say the 50s at harvard as a way to get all incoming students writing at the college level. comp is a class taught at nearly every university and the pedagogy thereof has had major changes over the decades, the most noteworthy to me being the shift from product pedagogy to process pedagogy (not what to do, but how to do it).

style is a topic that’s pretty thoroughly explored in comp and i want to say controversial, except all of my mentors have been pretty firmly on the rhetorical side of the divide, and so believe that all texts should be shaped to their audiences. (which is fine for comp, but in cw that’s a whole other deal that i think about All The Time.)

an essay i like to teach on this topic is “should writers use they own english?” which gives good insight into how we use stylistic conventions to “standardize” english often for the worse. the rules of language are meant to be broken; otherwise it will never grow.

however, i recognize that certain standards exist in terms of research and citation, and without those standards, the sanctity of information weakens (how can you know anything if you don’t have a breadcrumb trail of where that information comes from?), and when that happens, when you can’t read something and follow it back to its initial source, society crumbles under the weight of false information. in order to maintain that standard of research, the existing methods of that writing have to be taught. citation – both how to punctuate as well as integrate – is style.

i’ve taught composition for 4 years now and i have a lot of criticisms of it on a foundational level (such as, why do i have to teach a class of 20+ students who are all in different majors how to write a paper for a major they’re not in? how should i be expected to give each of my 70 students thorough feedback on 3 drafts of 5 papers across 1 semester when i’m only paid a little above minimum wage to teach for 28 hours a week?). as a creative writer i tend to rail against the idea of any kind of “correctness” in language because very often, incorrectness makes (rhetorical and stylistic choices which make) art, but i recognize both as a scholar of writing and a teacher of composition that it’s a constant balancing act.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on the damage of bad creative writing classes

22 JUL 2020

thebibliosphere:

Maybe this is just my experience, but a huge chunk of my editing legwork with first time authors is helping them to find confidence in their own style, and that largely entails undoing a lot of damage done in creative writing classes.

And the thing is, creative writing classes can and are hugely helpful in helping people explore fiction. (The advice I see folks like @bettsfic give is often fantastic and very useful in helping people unravel what exactly they’re trying to achieve) But you can always tell when someone had an absolute bastard of a teacher who insisted that deviation from his personal taste in style and content was viewed as personal failure and a testament to the universal mediocrity of humanity. And I hate those fuckers.

i think there’s a major misconception that one of the hardest first lessons to learn about writing is accepting feedback, but i’ve very rarely encountered this. unless you’re dealing with an arrogant jerkwad (which, yk, sometimes that happens, but they’re the exception not the rule), most people are eager to learn and improve, and they know that won’t happen without other people chiming in on their work.

really, the hardest lesson is knowing when to reject feedback. and the only way to learn to reject feedback is by valuing and upholding your own tastes and aesthetic ideals. that becomes easier when you continue to pursue your interests, both as a reader/viewer and as a writer. it’s a lot easier to have confidence in your work when you can trace the lineage of your taste and point to the authors whose work you admire.

that is all to say, i also hate those fuckers, and as a cw teacher, i’m deeply sorry to anyone who has had a bad experience in a creative writing classroom.

if you’ve had a shitty writing experience, either with a teacher or receiving feedback, and it discouraged you or made you doubt yourself, you can always send me an ask about it and i can maybe help undo, as joy says, some of that damage.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to read shakespeare

13 JUL 2020

Hi Betts, hoping for your guidance if you have the time. No pressure really. But my course will be focusing quite a bit on Shakespeare for the rest of this year. Do you have any advice for someone who isn’t really a writer on how to understand Shakespeare better? Have you read much of it? How did you tackle understanding the language? Is it just reading a lot more of it and looking up words? I struggle getting through one play, but is it just pushing through it? Resources you found helpful?

i feel like i’ve been waiting my whole life for this question.

i’m feral for shakespeare. i have a hamlet tattoo. i have an unfortunate number of monologues memorized on the off-chance someone at some point goes “hey does anyone know any good monologues?” and i can be all “TO BE OR FUCKING NOT TO BE, BITCHES” or “ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH DEAR FRIENDS, ONCE FUCKING MORE.” i have an actual literal lecture on how richard ii is a greedy glamazon bitch, and an outline for an article on how lady macbeth can teach us everything we need to know about sympathy in fiction.

like many people, high school made me despise shakespeare. i can’t tell if it was the simple coercion of being forced to read things, period, or that we were made to treat everything so seriously, and expected to understand the use of language as if it were like anything else we were reading.

then when i was 23ish, i got obsessed with doctor who, which led me to david tennant’s filmography, and david tennant happens to have done really a lot of shakespeare. when i geared up to watch his hamlet, however, i thought, i want to read this first, so i can see how different it is from my perception of it.

cue me surreptitiously scrolling through the wikisource version of hamlet while pretending to listen to conference calls at work. i think that helped, making it something i wasn’t allowed to do. it made reading feel like an indulgence.

free of the constraints of “i’m going to have to write a five-paragraph essay about this when i’m done,” i began to read very casually, only trying to understand what was going on and not trying to find any profound meaning in it.

in doing that, i realized i was actually doing it correctly. these are plays, meant to be performed on a stage, to entertain, immerse, and evoke feeling. you’re supposed to be sad at the end of tragedies and happy at the end of comedies. however, reading the plays is a far different experience than watching them, and in many ways more of a challenge.

you can’t read a play, especially a shakespeare play, like a book. prose and poetry both lend themselves to crafting intentional images. the entire thing exists to be and only be read. but plays and scripts are just one piece of a much larger puzzle, involving directors and actors and costume designers and set designers. bringing a play to life is a team effort. when you’re reading, you’re only seeing the skeleton of the story. it’s like reading a guidebook for a vacation destination. you can get the gist of it but only truly know a place by going there.

you can’t read shakespeare as a reader. you have to read as a director. you have to envision each actor, and after every line, decide where they are standing on stage, how they deliver their line, and what happens between each line. shakespeare gives almost no stage direction, so you have a lot of creative license in interpretation.

another thing to remember is that shakespeare is first and foremost a rhetorician. he wanted his words to be memorable and beautiful, to persuade and delight. if he wanted to be understood simply, he would have written simply. but instead, he uses 17 lines where 1 would have sufficed. it’s helpful, after every line, to consciously ask yourself, “what has just been said?” and very often the answer is simple. a yes or a no, i agree or disagree, or even sometimes banal statements.

consider hamlet’s “to be or not to be.” he goes on and on and on, but he’s really just being the “guess i’ll just die” meme. in the comedies, shakespeare often uses this effect as a joke. one character will go on and on, and another character gives a simple and curt and blunt reply, and depending on the delivery, it’s hilarious.

you’re not supposed to love hamlet, or richard ii, or macbeth, or any other character. the tragedies are train wrecks that make you go “i get why you’re doing this but you need to Stop.” the comedies are similar, in that the characters sometimes make you go “you are being so fucking stupid.” it’s the sense of irony, the “i know what’s right in this situation but you don’t” that creates a huge amount of engagement. we’re always bracing ourselves for what comes next.

so here’s how i recommend reading shakespeare:

shakespeare takes a lot of energy, but it’s worth it. once you get a feel for the strings he pulls and how he pulls them, it’s like opening a door to a whole other world. you see clips of phrases from this play or that, understand subtle references, and see how his influence exists in nearly everything. you can use his characters and plots and dynamics in all your own work. you can reach backward to see his own influences in greek plays, and forward to see his influences throughout all of literature. it’s amazing, not just who he was, but how his plays are still both so beautiful and so human.

i’ve skipped over rhetoric, craft, the sonnets, and a few other things that i really enjoy about shakespeare, but those are probably topics for another time. if you’re looking for somewhere to start, i highly recommend much ado about nothing, particularly the wyndham 2009 production with david tennant and catherine tate which is genuinely one of the funniest things i’ve ever watched. it’s fun to compare it to the 1994 kenneth branaugh film and then rage against whedon’s 2013 travesty.

best of luck in your shakespearean pursuit!

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to write imagery and description

11 JUL 2020

Hello! Can I have a piece of advice regarding descriptions when it comes to writing? I think my paragraphs seem bland and lack powerful descriptions that pull the readers in. I can’t seem to describe well a certain place or figure since I’m having a hard time in incorporating the five senses when writing.

i’m sorry to say, anon, this is the eternal problem. (unless you are a poet writing prose, and then description is probably the only thing that isn’t a problem.)

here are some tips that are not necessarily “here’s how you should do it” but “here’s some stuff you could try.”

save it for another draft/layer it in

i almost never put imagery into my first two drafts. description gets woven in over time. think of it the way an artist begins a painting. usually they sketch it out on canvas before they begin painting. then, the first layer of paint is bold shapes, and after layer upon layer, you begin to see the finer details.

if you force yourself to think about description AND conflict AND character AND dialogue AND pacing AND voice AND style all at once, you’re going to exhaust yourself. when writing, you can only do so much at once. having a whole draft where the goal is to spot places to add exposition is very helpful in minimizing the pressure early on.

consider both relevance and familiarity

the sad difference between consciousness and prose, as much as consciousness sometimes wants to be prose and vice versa, is that consciousness is not linear, and only a single translation from Environment to Brain needs to occur.

prose, however, must be linear. you can only read one letter of one sentence at a time. moreover, it’s translated twice: Environment to Brain, then Brain to Squiggly Black Lines On A Page. it is an astronomical effort to turn consciousness into prose, and we do it all the time. i’m doing it right now.

i have a whole 2-hour Brief Intro to Semiotics (and how it relates to prose) lecture that i’ll skip in order to reach the conclusion: when you are writing, description can be narrowed down into 1) relevance and 2) unfamiliarity.

by relevance i mean, what does the POV character notice and attend to? what is necessary to know in order to move the plot forward?

by unfamiliarity i mean, it’s a waste of word count to have your character go into the bathroom and point out that there is a toilet. when you write “bathroom” (or lavatory, loo, washroom, etc.) your reader, regardless of who or where they are, will know a toilet is in that room.

however, let’s say it’s the very first scene in your story. your character goes into the bathroom, hands shaking as they topple a bottle of pills into their palm. describing the bathroom goes a long way in setting the scene. is the place dirty? small? does it smell? stalls or no? is the lock broken?

if you describe an opulent bathroom complete with velvet couch, underpaid attendant, and sensor-based faucets, that tells me a lot about the potential circumstance of this character. rich maybe? at a party? a banquet?

if you describe a dingy small gas station bathroom with graffiti on the walls, that tells me the character is traveling, maybe. or desperate somehow. what would lead somebody to take drugs in a gas station bathroom? it’s unexpected. unfamiliar. it leads to the conflict.

describe things using movement and active verbs

a narrative always exists in space and time, and possesses some kind of movement. stories always start somewhere and end somewhere. so it stands to reason that your description should move with the action. and to make description move, you often need to employ effective verbs.

“there was a green chair” is a still-life. nothing is really happening. it’s just a fact. “she sat in the green chair” gives us the image of an action. a character is sitting in a chair which is green. is it important the chair is green? i hope so. maybe there is also a red chair, and these colors are symbolic of something or whatever.

also consider the stacking of adjectives: “there was a green, plastic, small, wobbly chair” could maybe be “the green plastic chair wobbled as she sat. it was too small for her, and the sides dug uncomfortably into her ample backside.” that’s terrible, but you get my point. hopefully. you See far more in the latter than the former, in part because the description is moving along with the story.

make stuff move, or make people move stuff. let verbs do your heavy lifting.

read poetry

a lot of poetry is just images stacked on top of one another. poets are masters of description. if you want to learn how to craft an image with words, read poetry until your eyes bleed. whenever you read a line or stanza and it conjures a specific picture in your brain that your brain would otherwise not have conjured, take a closer look and figure out how they did that. teach yourself how the strings are pulled.

you probably need less description than you think you do

ever since a mentor once looked me dead in the eye and said of my work, “it’s pretty but i don’t see anything,” i’ve been busting my ass to drench all my prose with beautiful and loving imagery. (in his defense, the assignment he had given me was, in fact, to write a story full of description. i did not, because it turns out i could not.)

i’ve had mixed results. mostly i end up with a bloated word count and a lot of ways to envision sunlight falling onto a bed through half-closed blinds. i’m not proud.

in my most recent project, however, i finally (FINALLY) made a main character who doesn’t notice jack shit. as an observant and perceptive person, i find this abhorrent, but she is not me. she is an angry teenage girl who doesn’t give a fuck about anything that is not an immediate threat or prize.

so after years desperately flooding my narration with description, i leaned the opposite direction. i’m good at voice and style. i prioritized voice and style. and here’s what happened:

nothing.

i say my story is set in the suburbs, you don’t then need a whole extra paragraph about uniform houses and checker-cut lawns. you already know what a suburb looks like. if i say 70s style kitchen, you don’t need me to tell you the oven is burnt orange. you either made that leap yourself, or it doesn’t matter enough to know. if i say my characters are having a conversation in a diner, you can already see the vinyl booths and shit on the walls and tacky laminated menu. if i say my characters have landed on Omicron Persei 8, i might need to roll up my sleeves and tell you what that place is like.

the thing is, even if i didn’t, you’d still think up something.

the only reason i would describe something is if it’s particularly special to my narrator, insofar that she would go against her god-given right to be a total dumbass in order to Notice Something. does that make the story more difficult to read? no, it just means the reader either makes their own image, or uses no image at all. because that’s what description does: it specifies. absent of specifics, the human mind supplies.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to choose point of view (and how it affects conflict)

6 JUL 2020

Hi Betts, I wondered if you'd mind sharing some advice on POV. I am writing in third person present tense. I have two main characters and I want to work from both points of view but I can't seem to make it work. Should I stick to one POV in a paragraph? Or in a chapter? There are some small moments where I really want the reader to understand each character's thoughts. BTW this is the first thing I've ever tried to write so I would be grateful for any advice at all. Thank you!

first of all, congratulations on starting your first story! this is a really important question to be asking, but the answer is a complicated one.

generally, the rule of thumb is that you stick to being in one character’s head per scene (scenes are usually broken up by white space or an asterisk or something like that) or chapter. in many cases, stories are only written in one point of view at all. but there are also plenty of stories that are written in multiple points of view, that head hop, or that remain outside of the characters’ minds entirely.

i think what would be most helpful is explaining how point of view affects conflict.

you can think of point of view as access. whose mind do we have access to? how much of their thoughts and feelings? and then how true are those thoughts and feelings in relation to the external events that are happening? how true are those thoughts and feelings to the narration itself, or is the narrator lying to us, or themselves? these are all things that can be specifically chosen in order to better command a story’s tension.

let’s say you choose an omniscient pov where we have total access to every character’s accurate thoughts and feelings. you then run into a hard decision: how and why would you hide anything from the reader? in what order do you unveil information (reactions, emotions, the external events themselves)? with omniscience, it’s very difficult to hide anything from the reader, unless the character is specifically hiding it from themselves.

conversely, if you have a limited pov, the thoughts and feelings of all the other characters are hidden, and that not knowing can create a lot of narrative tension. it’s important for you, the writer, to know what every character is thinking or feeling, but sometimes it’s more engaging for the reader not to know everything, to see the situation solely through the eyes of one character and have all the events colored by a singular, potentially faulty, perspective.

i think a good challenge for a first story would be to limit yourself to one point of view, and observe how an absence of access to the other characters affects the conflict. do the stakes become higher when we don’t know for sure what character B is thinking or feeling?

what happens when you play around with zooming in on a character’s pov, so that the narration mirrors their actual thoughts, or their inner monologue is greater than the external events that are happening? conversely, what happens when you zoom out, and limit the narration’s access to your character’s internality? what happens when you factor in unreliability and doubt into the point of view?

tl;dr if you’re ever in doubt of how to frame pov, ask yourself: how much access should a reader have to the characters, and how does that level of access impact the conflict?

↑ return to navigation ↑

on starting multi-chapter fics

4 JUL 2020

do you have any advice on writing chapter fics? i've been a one-shot writer for a long while now, but i'm feeling ready to branch out! i've found a great outline template, but i'm struggling. i've always written with minimal notes and figured the story out as i went. how do i make this outline tight enough to write and post on a schedule? what sorts of things should i be asking myself as i'm planning it all out?

the two most important things to consider when starting a long fic are:

  1. if it will keep your interest, and
  2. if it is within your means to complete

and by that i mean, finding the range of your ability. i can’t tell you how many times i began big projects that were either not interesting enough to pursue, or too complicated for my discipline and skill level. even now, i have projects i know i won’t be able to tackle for another five or ten years because they require patience and perspective i don’t yet have, and several outlines for projects where the stakes are not yet high enough, and a central element of the conflict is still missing (and i won’t be able to start until i figure out what it is; sometimes this takes years to figure out). i don’t mean this to be discouraging; if you have an idea that compels you, the goal is to plan it out in such a way that it can be completed. that said, the only way i’ve learned anything i’ve learned is by failing, in some way, at nearly everything i’ve attempted.

conflict is key with long fics, namely building one that cannot be solved in a single chapter, and which is conducive to multiple obstacles and increasing tension. i like to think of a good conflict as one which has both an internal and external component, as in, a character wants something external, and through that journey achieves internal growth. if you’re writing a romance, the external conflict will usually be achieving HEA or HFN, while the internal one is getting to a place where each character is emotionally ready to begin a long-term relationship.

before i begin a long project, i usually have to tell myself the story over and over and over again until i’m ready to write it, which means i start with a rough list of Things That Have to Happen, then put them in some semblance of 3-act-play order (inciting incident, locking in, rising tension, breaking point, everything goes wrong, everything continues to go wrong, climax, resolution). then i write a narrative outline which breaks the beats into chapters, then a more detailed outline where i break those chapters into scenes. then i break a scene out into what i call a skeleton draft (the bare bones of what needs to happen), then rewrite it as a spaghetti draft (chucking spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks), then the up draft (cleaning up the spaghetti).

if i’m writing fic, i’d want a spaghetti draft of the entire thing before i begin posting, so i only have to clean up chapter by chapter to post. i say this having made the mistake of not having enough written before posting and then losing motivation.

ALSO (i can’t believe i almost forgot this), definitely keep an exit strategy in mind before you start writing. if you don’t have an ending, you don’t have anything to work toward. it doesn’t have to be like a specific scene idea, but you should know whether you’re planning to end on HEA or HFN, or some other sort of ending.

one question that’s important to ask yourself (not just in writing but any creative pursuit and tbh life itself) is “what don’t i know?” it’s always helpful for me to make a list of the things i don’t know and tackle them one by one than constantly aiming for solutions to problems i haven’t articulated. focusing what’s not yet there, for me, is way more helpful than staring at what is there.

as for posting on a schedule, i recommend giving yourself way, way, way more time than you think you’ll need. if you intend to post on wednesdays, make sure your chapter is ready to go by the thursday before, so you’ll have enough time for random ideas and solutions to pop into your head, and get some space for the chapter before your final read-through.

lastly, don’t set yourself up for failure, but also don’t be afraid to fail. i know that seems contradictory and also impossible, but opening myself up to “this is not working” has helped me to find creative solutions that i wouldn’t have found if i’d mindlessly barreled ahead. in some cases, i’ve only been able to finish projects when i’d conceded on certain goals i’d set for myself. i’ve only been able to find what works for me by figuring out what doesn’t. i’ve only learned how to assess my skill by overshooting my ambition.

tl;dr keep an open mind to your process. set up a conflict with stakes high enough to lend themselves to a long-paced resolution. know your ending before you start writing. when stuck, ask yourself what you don’t know.

best of luck to you!

↑ return to navigation ↑

what a gauge is and how to write one

10 JUN 2020

what's a gauge and how do you write one? more to the point, how do you write two? (that aren't just sort of copies of each other)?)

in knitting, a gauge is when you knit a small square to make sure your thread and needles are the size you need to get the correct measurements of the finished project. if the size of your needles is off by one, or your yarn is too thick or thin even by a little bit, if you’re trying to knit a sweater, it won’t fit, and you’ll have to unravel the whole thing and start over.

so i came up with something i call a vocal gauge, which is when i write a scene or a chapter with the person, tense, tone, pace, and style i intend to use through the entire project. it tells me if it’s sustainable for the breadth of the project i’m attempting.

most of the time, my first gauge is way off. i’ll think it sounds cool, maybe, but it would be hard to keep up for 80k words and multiple revisions. maybe it’s too overwrought and i know i’ll get worn down by description, and a project that i want to be 60k will end up 200k. maybe it’s too internal or too external. maybe it’s in present tense when it should be past, or third person when it should be first.

so i write another one, same scene, with a few tweaks. usually i get it right by the second try but sometimes not. so you just keep writing the same scene over and over again, changing this or that until you go “this is fire.” and then that’s the voice you write the story in.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on my process i

10 JUN 2020

Hey! I was just wondering if you would soapbox a little about your creative process. I absolutely adore your writing advice but was wondering a bit more about how your ideas form and how you choose which to pursue and do finished products look like you want them to? What's a bad habit you're trying to break? No obligation to answer, especially cause an anon is like tell me your secrets! But thank you for all you've written, you are so helpful and kind

thanks for the great question anon! i wrote a bit about my drafting process here but that doesn’t encompass the idea building side of things (also i’ve made some changes to the process so i was thinking about writing a more cohesive, updated version at some point).

i tend to think of project ideas as piles of aesthetic, and usually i only begin writing once the pile has toppled over and i can’t not write it. that’ll make more sense in a moment.

i’ll walk through an example of my idea generating process, from how it started to where it is now.

Vandal is a novel i’m working on that i really have a lot of hope for. i’m about 60k words in right now and 75% finished. it’s about a teenage girl (sierra) who casts a spell on her hot, helpful neighbor (frank) to bind them together. the spell ends up working but backfiring when he becomes her foster father. then, in his custody, sierra gets jealous and casts a spell on his girlfriend (jenny) to break them up, but that backfires too: sierra gets taken out of frank’s custody and placed with a manipulative and abusive foster brother (leo). frank more or less kidnaps sierra and they have to Run From The Law. throughout the novel, sierra is inwardly battling Vandal, an immortal archangel that has possessed her and is trying to get her to kill herself so he can break free of the prison of her body.  

the idea for that story has a looooong breadcrumb trail and a huge aesthetic pile. since i couldn’t manage to get Baby traditionally published, i had a lot of that dynamic i could adopt into something else. i wrote at length about where that idea came from but i can no longer find that post (UPDATE: here it is). it’s somewhere in my training wheels tag. in short, i spent an entire summer watching/reading age gap stories and the male perspective in them bothered me a lot, so i wanted to write a story from the younger party’s perspective, and do the reality of those situations justice. i wrote that story, though, so i didn’t want to rewrite it.

then, in december 2019, for reasons i don’t remember, i started reading snape/hermione fics. i really liked the dynamic, but it was a little too angsty for me, and none of the fics gave me the catharsis i was looking for, which was basically Grouchy Soft Boy Takes Care Of PTSD Weary Girl. being unable to find anything that fit the exact no-conflict, angstless dynamic i was looking for, i decided to write it myself using an A/B/O reylo idea i’d been kicking around for about 8 months but i could never land on, because i didn’t know if i wanted ben or ren. that fic turned out to be Reclaimed.  

to answer one of your questions, Reclaimed didn’t turn out the way i wanted it to at all, and i’m still kind of shocked by the traffic it has. i felt bad about writing it, because i was setting down so many other things to work on it, and it was a struggle from start to finish. at the time (and this is a major theme of my process), i thought it was a waste of energy.

but it opened a very important thematic concept to me, which is the idea of voicelessness and trauma, and recovery through finding one’s voice.

fast-forward to february, i’m headcanoning with @star-sky-earth just days before i have to head to nebraska for a writing residency. she and i are talking about a certain male celebrity who shall not be named, flirting with his younger female costar who shall not be named, and i said something along the lines of, “wouldn’t it suck to get a crush on a dude like him, only to find out he likes you back, and then you realize he’s actually kind of shallow and boring?”

i remember distinctly saying, out loud, “god fucking dammit,” because, right then, an aesthetic pile had toppled over, and an entire novel unfolded itself in my brain. i pound out an outline. it’s garbage. i play around with a vocal gauge. it’s not quite right. then, two days later, i write an opening scene that i don’t think is great but i send it to some people and they’re like, oh this is fire.

the aesthetic pile looks like this:

i proceed to spend the next two days driving across the country brain-writing. by the time i reach nebraska, i hit the ground running, and write for basically 30-40 hours a week for 5 weeks. then, because pandemic, i decide to stay 2 more weeks, but i hit a snag. i write about 14k of really boring drivel and realize my outline has failed me. i toss the 14k and re-outline and try again. then, my attention is rattled by a crush on a composer who has no interest in me.

i go home and fall into my annual summer depression and i lose focus. so, that’s where i’m at. i really miss vandal but it’s gotten super dark and i’m finding it difficult to manage darkness with everything going on. which brings me to my next aesthetic pile that has recently toppled over.

which brings me to another question you asked, which is, what bad habits do i want to break? i always, always slow down at the halfway mark. sometimes i even give up. i have no idea why. no matter how much preparation i do, no matter how solid my endgame is, at the halfway mark i either slow to a crawl or set the whole project down and pick up something new. i do this with reading books, too. i can only ever read the first half of books. then i either skip to the end or put them down forever. it’s definitely something i have to figure out because at this rate i’ll never finish anything.

okay this took way longer than i thought it would to write but i hope it answers your question. tl;dr i follow aesthetic and thematic interests until they lead me to a point where i can’t not write the stories that develop from them.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on writers’ block i

6 JUN 2020

I am trying to write for half a year now and this writer block won't go away. Any tips? I am trying to write fanfiction, i know it can be a really good way to write about characters that i love but i am afraid they will be OOC

i think you answered your own question, anon. writers’ block is almost always the result of fear, and it sounds like you’re afraid of being OOC. once you tackle that fear i think you’ll be able to make some progress.

the good news about fanfic is that you’re allowed to be OOC! fanfiction is transformative art, which means you can change any and all elements of a canon that you want, including the characters. i think it’s more important to make a character what you want them to be, in order to serve the aims of your own interests.

set a timer for 2 minutes and type constantly without hitting backspace. the key is to keep typing and do not hit backspace. it’s easier to revise something that’s there than to write something new. don’t focus on whether it’s good, coherent, or IC. focus on just typing, with intention, for 2 minutes. you may have many things like “i don’t know what to write” followed by “and there’s a door and Character walks through it.” that’s all fine. just type. no backspace. take a break, then do it again for 3 minutes. work your way up to 5 minutes and then see what you’ve got.

if you can’t do that, try making a playlist for the fic you want to work on, or the canon itself, and go on a walk while listening to it. task yourself with thinking of the fic you want to write while you walk. do that every day if you can. eventually you’ll associate the music with the fic, and when you sit down to write, if you get stuck, you can start playing one of the songs to cue some ideas.

the trick with fear-based writers block is not to write through it, but around it, by tasking yourself with activities whose goals are not necessarily a clean, finished product. start small, write messy, take breaks. best of luck to you!

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to write characters with ptsd

6 JUN 2020

Hello! Betty, I read your new fic and I love it and I was wondering if you have any advice when it comes to writing a character with PTSD?

well first i think it’s important to figure out whether your character has PTSD or C-PTSD which may seem similar but have some major symptomatic differences. with PTSD, a character’s trauma can be pinpointed to one (or several) major events. with C-PTSD, the trauma is/was longstanding.

for example (and this is a very reductive example for a very complicated thing), if you survive a shooting and have post-traumatic stress after that, you may become hypervigilant in public spaces, and avoid keeping your back to a room. you might be triggered by the sound of popping. you might avoid places with large crowds, or similar places to wherever the shooting occurred. you might develop trust issues. overall, an individual trespass occurred that reshaped your understanding of reality. that’s PTSD.

but let’s say you were in an abusive relationship for five years. every time you spoke up, you were screamed down. maybe you were hit. maybe you were gaslit. that situation is a long-term, ongoing trespass to your understanding of yourself and reality. it turns the ground beneath your feet into sand.

once, my emdr therapist asked me to focus on my “moment of trauma” as if there were only one and i would be able to recall it. and i had to explain to her that i couldn’t do that, it was just all bad. there was no one thing to point out. that’s what sucks about C-PTSD – it’s not in the DSM yet (afaik) and the treatment for it is the same as PTSD even though it’s completely different. (the year of your story, btw, is really important, because PTSD was only put in the DSM in the 70s, and as i mentioned, C-PTSD still doesn’t technically exist from a diagnostic standpoint. so if your character seeks treatment, the year is important to consider).

emdr is a super effective therapeutic tool that helped me a lot, but it only helped with one single moment of my life, and didn’t touch on any of the rest. that’s another thing about trauma: it’s not relative. what gives me post-traumatic stress might not affect somebody else at all. it might just roll off them. conversely, what someone else might be hurt by may not bother me in the slightest. for example, my ex-bf pulled a knife on me once. other than thinking about that moment probably more than i should, it didn’t really alter my perception of myself or reality. he was an asshole, i knew he was an asshole, and he was acting in a way that was congruent with the person i knew him to be. moreover, by that point i had way unchecked C-PTSD so my perspective of Good and Bad was totally warped. to me, it made sense that he would hurt me. men hurting me was in line with my beliefs of reality. that’s a situation where earlier PTSD affects the perception of trespasses later on.

but my next boyfriend who never laid a hand on me eventually cheated on me, and that was like a kick in the teeth. it pushed me down and kept me down. i lost all of my confidence, i believed i wasn’t worthy of love, that i was disgusting and worthless. and i think it hurt so much because i had worked so hard to become who he wanted me to be and make him happy (we had a very unhealthy codependent relationship, and i thought it was my duty to conform to his needs in any way i could), and i saw our breakup as a personal failing. more importantly, i never thought he would do something like that. it was a total betrayal of everything i thought he was, and it made me hesitant to trust other people.

that was the memory i chose in one of my emdr sessions, and it helped a lot. it was a single moment i could lock down and attribute to many of my negative self-beliefs. and it was kind of amazing, that i walked into that office still, years later, painfully in love with this dude, and i walked out not caring about him at all.

in another emdr session, i focused on my dad dying. it didn’t help at all, because i certainly didn’t blame myself for his death. what i was struggling with was how much i loved him while feeling guilty for being relieved that he was finally gone. and in a more complicated way, i was also angry at him that he died before he could realize how horrible he treated my mom, sister, and i, and he never managed to apologize. emdr couldn’t begin to touch that knot of confusion. and so, to this day, i’m still trying to work it out.

anyway, back to writing.

the point i’m trying to get at is that to write a character with PTSD, you have to Know them. who they were before the trespass and how it shaped the person they became. if they were abused their entire lives, their development will be completely distorted. they may have trouble understanding right from wrong, especially in regards to themselves (which is why villain origin stories have a lot to do with a major trespass; it can alter your ability to morally reason). they may not know how to love without hurting themselves or someone else. they may believe that love looks like pain. they may have such insidious negative self-beliefs that compliments just slide right off of them. they are probably not self-pitying (although they could be). rather, their incorrect beliefs about the world are simply unshakeable. they might be afraid of everything, afraid of nothing, or afraid of weird things. they might be triggered by something clearly relating to their trauma, or triggered by something so strange and obscure and complicated it’s hard to see it as a trigger. they might fly off the handle when triggered, or they might dissociate for days on end, or both. they might be extremely performative and obsessed with how other people perceive them. they might be constantly attuned to their own body. they might see themselves from outside of themselves, through multiple lenses, in order to craft the image of themselves they want to be seen. they might do this as a safety measure, so as to be agreeable and pleasant and potentially stave off any harm that might come to them. they might be a people-pleaser. they may not have any access to their own emotions and have to find them through alternate means. they may be more prone to hurting themselves and other people, and not realize that doing so is wrong, because to them, pain might be a totally neutral thing. similarly, they may not be sad when people die, because they’ve always seen death as a peaceful escape. they might have drastic mood swings. they might not have moods at all. they might be impulsive and risk-taking. they might be prone to bouts of psychosis, depression, anxiety. they might have had hundreds of hours of therapy and still have not begun to chip through the surface of their trauma. they might not know their own trauma, or they might be acutely aware of it, and regardless, it will affect them the same. they might fixate on their trauma, or they might not be able to remember it. they may have a complicated relationship with memory. they may not have a strong grip on reality, or they may doubt their perception of it. they may easily fall into relationships with narcissists and sociopaths. they might constantly set other people’s needs over their own. conversely, they may be selfish and self-serving when it comes to very specific things. they may not be able to accept good love and affection, and they may sabotage their own health and happiness. they may not see this as a problem.

ultimately, to learn how to write a character with PTSD, you should be watching/reading everything whose characters you admire through the lens of trauma. ask yourself: how have the ways they’ve been hurt shape the person they’ve become? how is their worldview and self-perspective distorted by the negative events that define them? who would they be if those events had not occurred?

hope this helps. thanks for the great question!

↑ return to navigation ↑

is it possible to be a good writer while having a boring life?

28 MAY 2020

do you think it's possible to be a good writer while also having, like, a boring life? ive been reading a lot of memoirs lately and i'm like wow there are all these human experiences i want to write about but i also lead maybe the most conventional bland life ever. which i am happy about for myself! but sometimes i'm like do i need to drop everything and backpack across the country to make good art

all lives, by virtue of being lives, are inherently interesting. i’ve had students and clients who have lived the most interesting lives i’ve ever heard, and they still believe their lives are boring. if you think your life is boring it’s because you’re looking at it through the wrong lens. to write cnf you can’t look at your life as if you were yourself, because like, of course you’re going to find your own life boring, you’ve already lived it. you have to look at your life as if you were your ideal audience. who is the kind of person who would want to know everything about you? and how would you tell them about yourself?

i’ve backpacked across a country before. hitchhiked, even. it was fun, and interesting while it happened, and dangerous sometimes, but i don’t have an essay about that, and i probably never will. what i do have is a 10k essay about writing harry potter fanfic. i also have an essay series called “solstice” in which i chronicle, in extremely rich and detailed narration, everything that happens on june 21st of every year.

a good writer can write a story about a trip to the grocery store and make it the most riveting thing you’ve ever read; a bad writer can make a life or death scenario utterly dull. interesting stories are made from the stakes of the conflict itself, not the objective stakes of the situation.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to start a new scene when you’re stuck

23 MAY 2020

Hi betts! I’m trying to break back into writing after barely writing for a number of years. Once I get going I’m usually okay, but I’ve been having trouble starting a new scene or switching to a new character perspective. Do you have any tips for getting into that new headspace in order to write the new, unfamiliar thing?

whenever i’m struggling with something like that, it’s usually because i’m trying to leap too far. i try to make everything into very small and simple steps forward. here are some things i do to break down what’s blocking me:

hope this helps!

↑ return to navigation ↑

on writing to feel stuff

23 MAY 2020

Why should you write about things that make you happy? Why not pick another emotion to tap into when writing?

this is difficult to answer because the phrasing is such that it implies people write to make themselves feel something, and that is not always, or even mostly, the case. i would say there’s no default reason why anyone creates anything, other than a general drive to somehow accurately externalize an internal perspective.

emotions felt while writing i think are a side-effect of something greater. in my personal case as a writer, yes i absolutely write to make myself feel things that i otherwise can’t feel, because ptsd and having no access to my emotions. and so sometimes i know i need to feel something, and i can’t unless i dispatch it. and if i don’t figure out how to make myself feel the thing i’m trying to feel, it just kind of withers and dies in me, and eventually crystallizes into something awful.

on a surface level, however, there’s certainly nothing wrong with writing to make yourself happy. but there’s also nothing wrong with using art to make you feel all sorts of things in a safe, contained space where emotions can’t be weaponized against you or other people. emotions aren’t good or bad; they’re fundamentally neutral, and moreover, necessary. you need to feel things to learn who you are, and to accept yourself and others.

↑ return to navigation ↑

why some authors omit quotation marks from dialogue

4 MAY 2020

do you know why some authors choose to omit quotation marks from dialogue? i know that i register a difference when i’m reading punctuated, quotation’d dialogue vs not, but i can’t pinpoint what exactly it is or if there’s a specific stylistic purpose for it haha. thanks!

it depends on the author, really. faulkner thought all the “ on the page made it ugly. kent haruf, similarly, thought too many of them might annoy the reader. garth greenwell once told me that writing dialogue made him feel awkward.

i found an article citing cormac mccarthy’s reasoning:

Perhaps the most famous shunner of quotation marks is the novelist Cormac McCarthy, who told Oprah Winfrey that he preferred not to “block the page up with weird little marks. If you write properly, you shouldn’t have to punctuate.”

(this article is super prescriptive and annoying; i do not recommend reading it. basically the author is saying they find a lack of quotations pretentious and it makes a novel difficult to read. i, personally, support every writer’s right to define their style, even if i don’t like it. other writers’ styles aren’t about me. moreover, i don’t believe it’s a writer’s obligation to make their work easy to read.)

the way i see it, if you’re speaking aloud, it’s the difference between saying “and then she said” versus “and then she was like.” the former implies a (more) direct quotation; the later implies paraphrasing the speaker.

so when you omit quotations from dialogue, you’re removing the necessity to recite in the actual voice of your characters, and can maintain the voice of the narration.

great question! thanks for asking!

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to cultivate the courage to write honestly about fraught subjects

17 APR 2020

I have read only a little of your work but I'm so impressed by both the technical excellence and incredible vulnerability of your writing. Do you have advice on how to cultivate the courage necessary to write honestly about fraught subjects? (Context: I have been reading a lot of fiction by ace authors. I am ace and I write, and I feel drawn to write about that. But it seems far too intimidating to put those experiences into words, even though the lens of fiction.)

i don’t know if this helps, but i feel that it is the prerogative of ace writers to write about (a)sexuality. personally i write default allo experiences because part of me wishes i could feel physical attraction – or at least feel it more often, and reciprocated – and the only way i can connect to that experience is by writing it in fiction.

it took a long time for me to not only realize i was ace (because i wanted to want, and i thought that was the same as wanting) but also to begin the arduous process of figuring out how exactly my experiences differ from that of allos. i still don’t have all the answers, or even a few of them probably, but i do know that it is less courage guiding me to write about these things and more curiosity. i feel like i can’t know something until i narrate it, and then read it and teach it back to myself.

the fear, maybe, is that when you do read it back to yourself, you’ll see things you don’t want to see, or maybe that you don’t want others to see. and that’s definitely hard, because people are so quick to minimize and marginalize the ace experience. and aces can sometimes deny their own experiences because it’s extremely difficult to be ace in a world where physical attraction and desire is presented as the default identity.

i’m fueled by the people who read what i have to say about asexuality and go “that’s not at all my experience but now i can understand yours a little better” or “this isn’t my experience but it’s very close, and here are the ways it’s different” or “this is absolutely my experience and i can’t believe you put it into words.”

english frames sex and romance with allo vocabulary; it’s difficult to compare experiences when all the words you have for those experiences possess the context of a completely different identity. the more we’re able to pinpoint, articulate, make concrete that which can’t otherwise be understood, the more easily we’ll be able to see and accept the strange shapes in ourselves that tell us how we love.

so maybe it would help for you to see writing about asexuality as part of the work you’re meant to do, not only to understand it in yourself, but to help others understand it too.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on writing application essays

15 APR 2020

Is anyone *good* at writing scholarship/funding/program application essays? Is there a way to write it that sounds good and not corny? Like, if you can accept momentarily the premise that there's good fanfic and bad fanfic--and not like Good(tm) and Bad(tm), but like, there are different ways to write a fuck-or-die sex pollen story and it doesn't always have to be porn-y and overwrought--is there an analogue of that is application essay writing? Or do they all sound that way?

yeah they’re all bad.

i try to think of it this way: cover letters, application essays, etc. are a way to bring a narrative to otherwise contextless information. it’s the space where you get to establish that you’re aware of the conventions of the genre you’re working within, and also make any important connections found in your CV/application/resume.

for example, i have a fuckton of philanthropy on my CV/resume. you can look at my list of volunteer gigs and assume “hm, maybe philanthropy is important to her” but it makes way more sense when you move over to my cover letter, wherein i explain my investment in community development, which then leads me to discuss things like, maybe, taking initiative or education. an admission essay/cover letter is a way to provide connective tissue between bullet points.

it’s also important to remember that for jobs and grad school, hiring managers and admissions committees are looking for people who are cool to work with. these are people who are going to be spending 40+ hours a week with you for maybe years. they want to make sure you’re chill, work well in group environments, don’t stir up shit or cause drama, and are generally a person who is easy to make conversation with when passing in the hallway.

so i def think you should use letters to your advantage whenever possible to spell out clearly and succinctly why you, specifically and for these extremely important reasons, are perfect for X position/funding/scholarship.

good luck with the application process!

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to write good dialogue

2 APR 2020

Hi Betts! I was wondering if you had any advice on writing dialogue that's both in character and also get across the necessary points of the conversation. I feel like a lot of the time I'm either letting my characters wander off on tangents or they sound like robots expositing or saying weird quips to get plot points across

dialogue is certainly tough. one time i asked one of my favorite writers why none of his novels have any dialogue (every time a character speaks it’s embedded in the narration), and he, a man who can articulate all of his craft choices using fancy words i have to look up every time i’m done talking to him, said simply that dialogue made him feel awkward. which goes to show that everyone struggles with it at least a little.

here are my quick tips for good dialogue:

pare it down by (at least) half

if a character says 8 words, cut 4 of them. if a character says 100 words, get it down to 10. with dialogue, less is always more. sometimes you have to over-write in order to find out what a conversation is really doing. and once you figure it out, get it down to almost nothing.

i hate to break out the whole “writing is re-writing” but you have to get it wrong in order to get it right. and when it comes to dialogue, sometimes you need to write 200 lines to drill it down to the handful that matter.

every interaction is a transaction

which is to say, every character wants something out of an interaction. as the writer, it’s your job to figure out who wants what and how they’re going to get it. ask yourself: what is being transacted here?

let dialogue stand on its own

if you write the line, “get back here!” you do not then need “he shouted loudly.” you probably don’t even need “he shouted” because the exclamation point is doing all that work for you.

your characters’ voice should be strong and distinct enough that you can cut almost all clarifying dialogue tags unless 1) the way they are saying something changes the meaning of what they are saying (ex: “i want to die,” he said cheerily), or 2) you need to straight-up state who is doing the talking.

utilize concise punctuation

if you listen to the way people actually talk, they pause and start and stop and use fragments. maybe you don’t need to do the “i-i-i-” stammer (unless your character has a stutter?) but you could do something like, “i, i just wanted to tell you, i have feelings for you.” or, “look, i just. i don’t know. i have feelings for you, okay.” see how the commas and periods are placed at natural pauses rather than clunky punctuation like ellipses and em-dashes*?

*i do use a lot of em-dashes in dialogue, but usually when someone hard-stops mid-sentence or is interrupted. note also that if you have an interruption, you usually need to go two or so words beyond where you want them to be interrupted.

(ps problematic opinion but i love the word “like.” i use “like” all the time, both in speaking and in dialogue. some people rely on “like” to get their point across. if it’s right for the character, it’s right for the dialogue.)

pay attention to cadence and patterns

people speak in rhythms determined by things like their upbringing, the shape of their mouths, their given audience. we usually say things in short bursts. almost no one monologues, and when they do, it’s mostly only to tell a story. even the most verbose of us only speak a handful of words at a time.

i used to date a guy who had this bizarre rhythm to everything he said. it was like, “xyz, whatever.” three quick things in a row, followed by “whatever.” that was the first time i really noticed cadence.

my grandma does this thing where everything she says sounds like she’s spilling the tea. she repeats phrases to emphasize all her points. “they said this should all be done by april, and i say it’s not realistic. it’s not realistic!” or “milk was two-forty-nine, can you believe it? two-forty-nine!”

watch your go-to bodily markers

he bit his lip. he bit his cheek. he licked his lips. he fidgeted. he ran his hand down his face. he pinched the bridge of his nose. he scratched the back of his neck. or god forbid, he SMIRKED (if i never read the word “smirk” again it would be too fucking soon).

you may need to write these out for your own sake; we write as the process of thought, so sometimes we reach for these descriptions while we are thinking about what we need the character to say. later, almost all of them can be cut. the ones that can’t be cut are the ones that are not in line with what a character is saying and therefore add additional meaning or complexity to the dialogue.

if your character is nervously rambling, for example, we do not then need 17 physical descriptions of the nervousness. however, if your character is pretending to be nervous, then we might need a hint or two that they’re putting on some kind of performance, and what they’re saying is not matching up with their body language.

read out loud

sorry to parrot hemingway right now but this is the realest real. if you read your dialogue out loud and you cringe to yourself and think, no one would ever say this? that’s a good sign you need to keep tweaking it until it sounds more natural.

of course, to caveat all of this, you are not obligated to make dialogue realistic. you always get to choose the aesthetic aims and style of your work. if you want your story to sound like an aaron sorkin screenplay, then that’s your vision and you should go for it. all writing is valid and important, and all interests are valid and important.

i hope this helps! thanks for the great question.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on leaning in

29 MAR 2020

Hi, Betts! I remember reading your episode (I have problems with watching podcasts since I can't understand English very well, but I can read well in this language), and it made me feel inspired to keep writing, but I always have the nagging feel like I should devote myself to other characters of mine, but the interest in that one OC just, doesn't go, and it's making me anxious bc I really enjoy writing him in any universe/fandom bc he's deep and rlly complex and I wonder if this is a bad thing? The problem isnt really that the rest aren’t interesting enough, bc I really like them. The ideas behind them are good, but only for a certain story, not like that OC I have. His struggles for agency are universal in my stories, and it’s something that he represents well,, so IDK, how do I avoid that bad feeling that I should stop writing him?

i know i say this all the time but: lean in. follow anything that gives you inspiration. it is not your obligation to doubt it or question it. it’s only your obligation to remain open to it. if this character speaks to you, listen.

i can’t tell you how to avoid that bad feeling because i’m not sure where it’s coming from. if it’s something like, you’re worried your audience won’t like it, well. there’s nothing to be done about that. you don’t have to write to make other people happy or comfortable, or to be liked or lauded. you don’t even have to write for the sake of creating a finished product that can be consumed. you can let yourself write for exploration, and find joy in the process.

↑ return to navigation ↑

writing exercises for developing characters

24 MAR 2020

Hi, betts!! I always love reading your writing. Do you have any favorite writing exercises for developing consistent, interesting characters?

in terms of writing exercises, my go-to, as i’ve mentioned a few times before, is actor interviews. i watch interviews with famous people all the time. i’m addicted to the “personal life” section of every wikipedia page. instagram stories from my faves are my absolute kryptonite. i’ve always hated how i obsess over celebrities, but it’s become a major creative drive for me.

i build characters based on private traits of people i know, and public traits of people i don’t know, and i allow the narrative to fill in the gaps, so that i’m learning about a character as i’m writing them. it keeps me curious and invested in the story i’m telling.

i’m writing this one character right now, and he’s kind of based on a certain actor who is known for his, uh, physique (as actors tend to be). and part of the inspiration for this character is that i thought – what if you had a crush on this guy, and found out how much work and focus it actually takes to look like that? and how his identity has maybe formed around his appearance in this way? and then i thought, okay well what if he’s not an actor, and doesn’t really have an occupational reason to keep up that kind of appearance? what if he’s just some dude in ohio? why would a dude in suburbia have a drive to maintain that over-the-top physique? and what would it be like to have fallen in love with him from afar, only to find out he spends his life eating boiled chicken, working out, and playing world of warcraft?

forcing something impossible into something real is always an inspiration to me. if i can put an unattainable ideal, in this case male beauty, into this gritty real space of 2010 southwest ohio, i now have a framework to make this character more complicated. so, completely by accident, i’ve given him my dad’s bad spending habits and now he’s $20k in credit card debt, forced under the thumb of his rich fiance, who will not marry him until he pays it down. more conflict.

i don’t care much about intelligence in characters, but i care about what they think of their own intelligence. in this guy’s case, he thinks he’s stupid. he’s not, really, but his self-perception is a key to something deeper. why does he think he’s stupid? what led him to develop this belief? his foster daughter, the main character, wants him to homeschool her. previously, he has given her everything, but his self-esteem problems regarding his intelligence overrides his desire to appease her. she is not used to him denying her, or moreover asserting boundaries. more conflict.

he may not be stupid, but he is extremely impressionable, which leads me to his major flaw: he does not have opinions. his perspective of reality is so broken that he does not allow himself to stand firmly on any ground, which will eventually lead him into undesirable, cult-like places, particularly becoming a disciple of his foster daughter, who believes she is possessed by an all-powerful archangel. yet more conflict.

and that made me wonder – what kind of environment shaped a guy like this? a guy who seems hypermasculine and strong but is actually a soft marshmallow who kinda hates himself? obviously, a bad one. so then i developed his parents. the house he grew up in (hoarders). his siblings (2nd of 4). his upbringing (abuse). i go back further and further, until i know him as well as i know my best friends. now all my heavy lifting is done. he guides his own actions on the page. i no longer have to ask myself what should happen, but really, what would this specific character do in this specific situation? that’s all i do – i ask questions.

and of course, since nothing is written in a vacuum, and moreover i am at an artist residency where i have to sound fancy whenever i talk about stuff, i’m interested in how this character can be a commentary on something. this novel is very openly a lolita reversal, road trip americana and everything. i’m entering the story with the question – what would lolita be like if dolores haze had all the power? if she had the wit, intellect, and lack of narrative reliability as humbert humbert? how might a teenage girl completely overpower a grown man? who would that girl have to be?

i know that’s a lot about my process, but i don’t tend to do a lot of discrete exercises. developing good characters is a practice in allowing yourself to observe people neutrally and without judgment, isolate certain traits, plunk them into fictional beasts, and shove them into tense situations to see who they become. you have to stay curious and open, ask hard questions and follow the answers where they lead you. keep a log of interesting things people say and do. pinpoint what you love most about your best friend and hated most about your ex. consider how you would get along with your parents if you were the same age as them. try to see people in as many different lights as you can.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on being too old to start writing

21 FEB 2020

do you have any advice for someone who's scared of writing? depression has stolen years of my life but i'm slowly getting better tnx to therapy. but sometimes i think i'm too old to start writing now? ppl always say they knew they wanted to be writers since they were young and i just feel like a fraud who's more in love with the idea of writer's life than w/ writing itself, yet i still feel like i really want to do it but am petrified. can't help feeling like that's sth only The Greats do tho

writing is one of the few things that is better to start when you’re older. that’s not to say it’s bad to start young, but if you come to any art when you’re older, you tend to have more patience with yourself, more discipline and focus, and very simply, you have more experiences to draw from. writing will always be there for you, no matter what age you pick it up or set it down.

the writer’s life is very compelling, and i can see how you might fall in love with it. honestly, you can live the writing life without really writing much at all. write a short piece and polish it as best you can, get it published, come up with a project proposal, and start applying to places. workshops, residencies, an MFA. a lot of people who are afraid to write can sometimes flourish in academic settings because you have structure and deadlines and community.

if the writing life is something you’re interested in, it’s absolutely available to you. it’s expensive, and you probably won’t make much money, and if you’re in the US you probably won’t have healthcare unless you have a spouse to cover you, but it’s the cost of living a chosen life.

i can promise you, there are no Greats. greatness is something given to writers by publishers to sell more books. there is no writer who is better at writing than you are, and no one who is worse. there is only difference and diligence, writers who are farther down their respective paths. writers who have social privilege and luck, who have found the right agents and editors and judges who jive with their work and can use their existing platform to support them. it’s chasing down opportunities, and facing failure and rejection, and pretty much constant struggling, but it’s also, for me anyway, the only reason to live. it’s the work that i’m here to do.

my best advice to you is to seek out other writers and build a community or partnership in writing. it is really hard to deny yourself the writing life when you’re around people who take it as seriously as you do. moreover, it’ll lend you courage and support and hopefully a sense of belonging.

and if you’re looking for something specific to write, maybe start with nonfiction. an essay about something you’re afraid to talk about, a story you’ve never told about yourself. write it as a letter to someone you want to be seen by, show your whole self to. then, when it’s finished, if you’re uncomfortable with something so true and vulnerable existing, you can rewrite it as fiction if you have to. either way, you’ll have a short piece to submit for publications and programs. you only need one thing to get started.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to figure out what happens next in a story

21 FEB 2020

hello! i'm newish to writing and while i have ideas i think are interesting and which i'd like to pursue (for both fannish and original projects), often i don't know what to decide happens next in the story, so i just stop. i just can't pin down where/how to proceed. i worry this means i'm not cut out for writing fiction, but that's ... not useful. does this happen to other writers/you? is there some system folks use to sift through potential ways forward in this situation? please advise, ty!!!

yeah it happens to me sometimes. at first it was just because i had no idea how to develop conflict. nowadays when it happens, it’s usually just because an idea isn’t ready, and i have to let it sit for a long time until something comes to me. i came up with the idea of the novel i’m working on in 2016, but it was only a conceit, a character dynamic, an aesthetic to be explored. there was no path through it, no story attached that might lend itself to a compelling work. so i just made a space for it, gave the basic idea a name, and any time i saw something that reminded me of it – a setting, a book, a movie – i would toss it on the pile, until eventually i had scene ideas and character names, a voice, motivation and movement. it was only in late 2018 that i came up with a general conflict, spring 2019 i drafted an outline, and summer 2019 i started writing. for me, it’s worth it to be patient with good ideas. sometimes things don’t come to you all at once.

but “just wait around for inspiration to strike” isn’t great advice. generally you can craft conflict by giving your POV character something to want, and a reason they can’t have it. in a romance, character A wants their affections to be requited by character B. A can’t be with B, though, because B is in a relationship, or they’re coworkers, or they’re too old/young, or some other reason that makes their plight seem impossible. the harder the obstacle, the longer the story.

not all conflicts pivot around your main character wanting something, but it is the easiest place to start. a conflict is the change in any status quo. that’s very broad, but it might help you conceive things that Happen. ask yourself: what exists already, and what has changed? a moment of change is generally where a story begins.

then, once you have a conflict, you make a list called THINGS THAT HAVE TO HAPPEN to help your character reach their goal, or however else you’ve set up your story. and you write a bullet-point list, out of order, of everything that has to happen, and everything you want to happen. this isn’t an outline, just a list. then, when you have as many bullet points as you can think of, you start a clean page and write THINGS THAT HAVE TO HAPPEN (IN ORDER). at the top you put the first thing that happens, and at the bottom you put the last thing. then you start filling in the space between, figuring out the cause and effect of each bullet point leading to the next.

it doesn’t have to be perfect or even complete, but it’ll give you a place to start, and show you where major beats are missing. my method following this might not work for everyone, but i take my list and then write what i call a narrative outline, which is a high-level overview of the story told in my own voice, as if i were explaining the story to someone else. every natural paragraph break is generally a chapter break.

and then i just start writing. i generally don’t stick to the narrative outline very closely, and sometimes i have to rewrite it multiple times, telling myself my own story until it becomes like a legend in my own mind.

i hope this helps. best of luck to you!

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to develop non-pov characters

19 FEB 2020

after writing mostly fan iction for a long time, I'm trying to write more original fiction. one issue I keep running into is, whenever I go to write an interaction b/t 2 original characters, the non-pov character always feels super undeveloped and hard to define, which makes it hard to write. do you have any tips for developing non-pov characters in original fiction, where you don't have an already existing character to work off of?

so, this is the big difference between ofic and fanfic: context. even in modern aus, there are certain assumptions you can make of characters, shortcuts and whatnot. fanfic is like coloring in a coloring book. the lines are all there but you have the choice to color inside or outside of them, or maybe make it into something totally different. with ofic. you’re starting with a blank square and you’ve got to make the whole picture. one is not necessarily harder or better than the other, both have equal benefits and drawbacks (fanfic: constraint, like no matter how much you want to change it, you’ve still got existing lines on the page, and you have to do something with them; ofic: decision fatigue, wtf do you put on a blank page? and how?)

i think if you’re a fanfic writer moving to ofic, the best advice i can give is to start with as many existing things as you possibly can in order to minimize the number of creative decisions you have to make. and in subsequent drafts, slowly veer further away from the original source material. take names, characters, settings, tropes, and then as you rewrite and revise, those will start to shift closer toward “originality.”

all writing is a response to something else, even if it’s not fanfic proper. no creativity happens in a vacuum. all writers draw inspiration from something, and no writer should be expected to begin a story totally anew, with nothing borrowed from anyone else. if you want to write ofic and you have a really solid POV OC talking to a big question mark of a character, turn that character into someone you’re already familiar writing, who has a rich history and voice in your head already. if that means you have to write Kylo Ren into your pastoral eighteenth century historical drama, then that’s what you have to do. and then when you rewrite it, you give him a new name maybe. you change his appearance a little. you twist his history bit by bit, until he’s someone completely different.

in writing, it’s better to make a lot of really tiny steps over a long span of time than it is to make a few giant leaps. by that i mean, make everything easy on yourself all the time. grab the quickest, most cliche turn of phrase. if a character is driving a car, make it your car. if you need a place, pick the house where you grew up. borrow, steal, whatever you have to do to avoid decision fatigue and therefore writers block. what you put down may not be correct or good, but if you get it down fast and accept that you’ll have several drafts, things start to move a lot more smoothly.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how not to get discouraged when you read good writing

17 FEB 2020

Do you ever find yourself discouraged when you read something really, really good? Like, you ask yourself "why do I even bother, whatever I write will never be as good as this."? If so, how do you find a way around it?

the short answer is, i used to.

sadly, you can’t find a way around it, only through it. here’s the thing about reading stuff by writers who are better than you: they are giving you a lesson in writing. when i find writing that’s so good my envy sirens go off, i’m thrilled. i devour it. i study it and figure out how they’re doing what they do. i criticize it. i see the faults. i ask myself how i could make their work better, and how i can use their work to make my work better. same with things i think are bad: how did this fail? what kinds of things should i avoid in my own work?

eventually as you grow with your writing and become more chosen in your style, when you see writing that is “better” than yours, really it’s just different. there are some writers who are deeply textured, floral, and verbose. i value that style of writing. i enjoy reading it, and i learn from it as much as i can, but my style tends to be more economical and straight-forward. some writers can do well-researched historical dramas. research is one of my major weaknesses, but maybe one day i’ll have the patience to do research for a major project, so for now, all i can do is admire the writers who already have that patience, and learn from them as best i can.

last night i looked at some really beautiful paintings, and i thought, i’ll never be able to do that. and then i thought, wait, but i’m not a painter?? i can read a good mystery or sci fi story and think the same thing, and remind myself – i don’t write mystery or sci fi. i have very specific aesthetic intentions. i know the work i’m doing, and i’m confident in its value and importance, because i find value and importance in all other writers’ work. but all other writers are on different paths than i am, and if i am lucky enough to find one whose path is close to mine but who is much farther ahead, i can’t be jealous of their progress. i can only learn from them to make my journey clearer.

the key is to look at the strings that pull your favorite stories. it’s cheesy, but after i watch or read pretty much anything, i ask myself, what can i take away for my own writing? i learned so much about writing from the good place, and gbbo, and recently i rewatched the matrix trilogy and learned so much based on what the wachowskis did wrong. as i mentioned, i just finished reading white oleander, and when i first picked that up, i was bummed out, because it seemed to be so beautifully written and within my thematic wheelhouse, like no wonder i can’t get an agent for my book, somebody else already wrote it. but as i became more comfortable with the text and less defensive, i started to see the flaws, or at least, things i wouldn’t want for my own work. there are so many similes, redundant exposition, senseless plot points, and the ending is awful. the rest of the book is gorgeous, but it is not without fault, and by dissecting a story’s strengths and weaknesses, it becomes just another tool rather than something to envy.

so next time you feel that “why do i even bother” feeling, cherish it. savor it. as you become a better writer, it’ll happen less and less. find that author’s other works and read all of them. figure out why their worst piece failed and why their best piece succeeded. take notes while you read. highlight your favorite passages. make a bullet point list of things any given story does right and what it does wrong. if you have to, write a report about what you’ve learned. and if they’re a fanfic writer, reach out to them!! you might make a friend, and then you’ll be able to help each other.

there is no writer alive who wants you to feel bad about yourself. i’m not going to sit here and say “you can’t compare yourself to others” because it’s a useless adage. you should be comparing your work to others, but you shouldn’t be attributing a value judgment to it. you’re not bad just because somebody else is good. you’re both good in different ways, and exist at different mile markers on separate paths.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on writing your biggest risk

10 FEB 2020

What do you mean by "write your biggest risk"?

this was a prompt i got in a workshop once, and led to one of the best things i’ve ever written, and a complete rearrangement of the way i viewed both my own writing and how i approached teaching writing.

what i mean is, write the thing you’re most afraid to write, that would potentially offer you the greatest internal reward to put on a page.

this might be structural in nature:

when i first tried this prompt, i asked my professor what she thought my biggest risk was. she told me that i was very steeped in narrative (true) and that i would benefit from writing lyric poetry. what she didn’t know was that i write lyric poetry all the time. i just never show it to anyone. so i turned in a poem and i guess the risk was in showing it to someone else, but otherwise i didn’t get much from it.

a risk might also be thematic in nature: what is the story you want to write but have never written? in what ways can you write it that would terrify you?

in the same class, i took up this prompt again. i really thought about it. i asked myself, over and over, what was the thing i was most afraid of? the answer was surprisingly simple: i was afraid of writing about my relationship to fanfiction bluntly, without defending myself, glossing over details, or contextualizing why fanfic exists. it is hard to write essays about fanfiction to a nonfandom audience when you first have to be like “transformative works are…” and that ends up being what the essay is about. but i wanted to skip that part.

in short, i wrote an essay about the time in my life i wrote a specific fic, and why i wrote it. that was the second major risk i took: i didn’t explain fanfiction, but i explained my motivations for writing this specific one, bluntly and overtly, without pulling any punches. and that involved admitting a lot of uncomfortable things about myself i’d never verbalized before.

and then i gave it to workshop. it was the first time in two years i’d been afraid of the reception of something. i can’t tell you how much i got from that exercise – understanding the feeling i get when i’m pushing past boundaries and constraints i didn’t know i had (so that i know when i’m growing and getting better), strength to say things i mean to say without being coy or evasive, courage to face other parts of myself and my imagination i had never encountered before.

there are lots of ways to become a better writer. getting constant and effective feedback from a patient mentor is probably the best one, but it’s also the most impractical. it’s like exercising with a personal trainer. but if you don’t have that, you have to find alternate methods for improvement. assessing, facing, enacting your risks, the things you’re terrified to write, pretty much takes a machete to an overgrown path of your development. you may not be able to afford a personal trainer, but if you pick up something really heavy over and over, eventually you’ll get stronger.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to write realistic minor characters

9 FEB 2020

Your episode of fansplaining gave me the impetuous to finish a fic I was ignoring for months but when I went back I remembered why I abandoned it. While the main character is a canon character, the rest are OCs. While they only really exist to prompt character growth from the main character, I want them to feel like they exist outside of their function in the story. Do you have an advice/resources for writing realistic minor characters, child characters in particular? Thank you!!

i’m so glad you’re taking a look at an old wip! i’ve definitely boxed myself into difficult OC corners in fic before. i usually have the urge to sweep them to the side in equal measure to developing them.

i think the best advice i’ve ever gotten on how to describe minor characters is to give them each three quick descriptions: 2 expected details to establish the kind of person they are, and 1 that deviates from that expectation. for example:

he held a vape between his index and forefinger and had ratty blonde hair. he was walking down the sidewalk whistling “A Whole New World” from Aladdin.

the first two things give you a general sense of the kind of person he is, pins him into a stereotype of a youngish, sloppy stoner. but then he’s whistling disney showtunes which tells you there’s more than meets the eye, without explaining any other part of him.

here’s another example:

the server tops off his coffee. her name tag says Brenda. she has laugh lines etched deeply into her cheeks but she’s not smiling, and her hand trembles while she pours.

an old female server named brenda is expected. laugh lines are pretty neutral. trembling is always unexpected, because it’s indicative usually of a greater issue in a person’s life that, in this case, doesn’t require an explanation. without having to state it, you can assume this is a restaurant, probably a diner, that serves breakfast and the POV character is a customer sitting at a table.

you could add another sentence like:

peacock green eye shadow is smeared over her eyelids and her eyelashes are clumped into black triangles.

and maybe:

when he tells her he needs another minute to look over the menu, she hacks wetly into her fist in lieu of a response.

your job is to acknowledge, in very few words, that every person is the protagonist of a different story, and the world your main character exists in is reflective in some way of a diverse population. (this is true even for fantasy settings, but less so if your character is isolated in a dystopic hellscape)

we know so much about brenda with so little information. what type of person wears that much makeup? people who prioritize beauty. who are the people who have the deepest laugh lines? people who have lived long lives. who trembles? alcoholics, people with parkinson’s, people on certain medications, people with anxiety. who hacks wetly into their fist instead of answering somebody? people who give 0 fucks. brenda is living an entire world without you. i don’t know much about her, but if you invite her to sit down i’m sure she’d tell you a lot about herself.

you can use this 2 + 1 method to describe settings, too. i had one mentor who told me the best way to describe a setting is to invoke something familiar and then distort it somehow. an abandoned taco bell, a train station that smells like cookies for some reason, the hot dog vendor over there is crying.

it takes practice to be able to conjure these kinds of details quickly and not get bogged down or creatively exhausted by them. they make all the difference in the world in your writing; they show that the work has a larger awareness of itself than the characters within it, which imo is important in establishing trust and engagement with a reader. it’s the difference between setting a book down because it has nothing new or interesting to show you about the state of mere being, and not being able to put it down even if it has no plot at all. i highly recommend keeping an observation journal, and writing down everything you notice in a day. i promise, you’ll start to see the world through a completely different lens. everything around you will exist to inspire.

in terms of other resources, i highly recommend donald barthelme’s “not-knowing” which discusses this process in relation to semiotics. it’s a dense read but unparalleled in its discussion of creating somethingness out of nothingness. it’s also a metanym, in that the style is kind of sarcastically mimicking the thing he’s describing.

i hope this helps! good luck with your wip!

↑ return to navigation ↑

on pushing boundaries in your writing

7 FEB 2020

is it normal to see someone talking about their limits and hard boundaries in the kind of fic they read/write and feel an impulse to push that boundary in your own writing? not because you want them to read it or see it or anything, but because the statement "Character A can never be/should never be X" makes you want to write "Character A is X." also, can you accept that you feel hurt even though you know the reason you feel hurt is Wrong/would be shitty if you acted on it?

to answer your first question, yes it is normal. i would say even that it’s the definition of creativity. somebody tells you that you can’t or shouldn’t do something, and you want to figure out how to do it.

like whenever somebody says “[villain of your choice] is irredeemable” i always think, but what would that redemption look like? how long would it take? what exactly would they have to do or say to fully repent? what would the corresponding forgiveness look like?

to the second question, emotions need to be felt regardless of whether feeling them is right or wrong. when you police your emotions, you silence them, and when you try to silence them for long enough, eventually they become very very loud. so you can definitely feel (wrongly) hurt while also not acting on it. they may seem like opposing states but they are not. you have to feel your feelings to get them to run their course and let go of them, and there are healthy ways to do that, even if you believe that emotion is unfounded.

↑ return to navigation ↑

some writing exercises based on my lesson plans

5 FEB 2020

You described on Fansplaining how in the beginning you wrote stories each focused on one aspect of writing as practice. Can you say more about that? Was it systematic? Do you now have a recommended set of prompts/exercises for your students? I'd love to steal your method, if you don't mind. Loved the interview & that it brought me here!

sorry to take so long to reply! honestly i was too lazy to log into my teaching gdrive account and look at the structure of my class.

so when i went about trying to teach myself how to write, i only had a basic understanding of the elements of craft. i knew stories were made up of conflicts and characters. i knew about voice, person, tense, tone, setting, imagery, and things like that. so it was systematic in that i was only trying one thing at a time with the fics i was writing, but it was also a meandering path of trial and error. mostly error.

i set up my intro cw class very similarly to how i learned. each week is a craft lesson where i give a few readings, we have a discussion, and then i provide a writing prompt. the prompt for the big class assignment is “write your biggest risk” which students work on throughout the semester. i introduce it the first day and everything we do builds to the end game of writing the thing they are most afraid to write.

i can’t go over my entire class because most of my lesson plans involve group activities, but i can offer a few of my lesson plans with the readings and corresponding prompts. i can’t link to the readings but most of them are very googleable.

beliefs & techniques

narrators

urgency, stakes, & conflict

form & fairy tale

imageimageimage

i have about a dozen other lesson plans but they are all far more complicated and interactive, but hopefully you can get a few ideas from this!

↑ return to navigation ↑

on being the bad kind of darkfic shipper

5 FEB 2020

feel free to ignore. i think i might be the bad kind of darkfic shipper, the one who isn't an empath or just curious or a survivor, the one who writes it as an outlet for anger and depression and hurt and generalized mild annoyance at humanity. sometimes it feels like the only difference between me the shallow white boy with worrying interests who wants to be a filmmaker is my gender. and i that don't study film.

idk man, you don’t have to explain yourself to me or anybody else. to me there’s no such thing as a “bad” darkfic shipper because 1) people (and that means everyone, including shallow white boys with worrying interests who want to be filmmakers) can read or write whatever the hell they want for whatever reason they want, and 2) it’s fiction.

if you become a filmmaker who nearly drowns your actors to get a good shot a la james cameron, maybe there’s reason to pause. if you become so entitled that you begin creating big budget mass media that buys into hegemony, maybe also reason to pause. but none of us will ever be any of that, and if we are lucky enough to get these sorts of opportunities, i am sure we possess the self-awareness and greater understanding of artistic merit not to buy into existing patriarchal bullshit. but for now, we’re reading and writing fanfiction for each other for fun. there’s no reason to be ashamed of ourselves for that.

↑ return to navigation ↑

the skills to write short form versus long form

4 FEB 2020

what do you think are the differences between the skills you need to write short stories (or fic oneshots) vs the skills needed to write, like, a novel? i'm trying to make the transition to longer works and finding myself struggling a bit with knowing if im somehow just accidentally writing something that feels like a really long short story rather than a Novel. if that makes sense

i have So Many thoughts on short stories vs. novels, particularly the Work of novels. i have read a great many lauded novels that feel like long short stories to me, and i don’t think the genres should necessarily be separated by word count but by major beats. but anyway. that’s not what you asked, and that’s probably a conversation for another time.

the shorter the piece, the more you need to inspect and question every single word. that requires a lot of patience and a somewhat myopic lens. every letter, every punctuation, every space and paragraph break needs to be carrying its weight, and if it’s not, it needs to go. this also requires the ability to know what a piece is doing and how exactly to shape your words to make it happen. it’s about intention and control. writing a short story is like carving a tiny figurine; it takes precision.

regardless of length, you’ll be engaging with pace and movement in different ways. in short works, you value brevity; you allow readers to make assumptions. you prioritize summary sometimes over scene. you choose description carefully and have no room for redundancy. pacing is chosen based on container. for example, flannery o’connor’s “a stroke of good fortune” is told in the span of a woman climbing a single staircase. it takes something small and expands it to fit the form. conversely, carmen maria machado’s “the husband stitch” is an entire life told in roughly the same number of words. there’s no room for the kind of detail good fortune has. a short story is like a pint glass – you can never have more than the glass can hold.

the pacing of a novel, however, is different. if a short story is a pint glass, the novel is a plate – you can keep piling stuff onto it like a jenga tower. it’s a near-infinite container. pacing is still chosen, but under varying constraints. you have to have to know when to zoom in and write in-scene versus fly above and summarize. how immersive do you want your story to be, how detailed? which details should you reiterate and when? there is far more freedom in the pacing of a novel, but it comes with the burden of a constant choice. and as i’ve mentioned a few times, decision fatigue is a major factor in writers’ block. for every benefit of constraint vs. freedom, there’s a drawback.

the main skills you need to write a novel are discipline, endurance, and a certain nameless expertise that tells you whether or not your idea is ready to pursue. you can write a short story that just doesn’t work, shove it in a drawer, and never look at it again, and it’s not a huge loss. but with a novel, if you’re going to spend months or years on it, it should be something worthy enough to pursue (and of course by “worthy” i mean worthy to you based on your creative and aesthetic interests). there are lots of ideas that i’ve had that i really enjoy on a conceptual level, but something about them either isn’t working yet or it just doesn’t interest me enough to dive into it.

more than anything else, i think that’s what it means to become a good writer. you never really get better at putting words on blank pages. but you do get better at manifesting the things that are happening in your brain; deciding what containers they should fall into (short or long, poetry or fiction or essay); determining when your ideas are strong enough to begin writing, or when you should set them down and think on them a little longer; when a story is complete and ready to publish because it has finally reached the shape you initially perceived it to be; when you need feedback and when you don’t, and which feedback to listen to or throw away. all of these things are just instincts that are cultivated and sharpened over time as you get to know yourself as a writer and the work you do as an artist, and grow confident in the creative paths you choose to take.

but you definitely can’t learn any of that until you start out writing a few short stories that turn into long stories that turn into novels, and then maybe you revise them back into short stories. when you give up on something you love (for the time being!) because you realize you are not where you need to be to write it yet (i have many, many things that i want to write that i can’t write yet because i am not ready to write them). when you get 30k into a novel that you realize isn’t worth your time but then years later you end up taking pieces of that aesthetic and folding it into something else. when you get 200k into a novel that you realize doesn’t work and you put it in a drawer forever. it’s all stuff that gets better and easier and smaller-seeming over time.

what i’m saying is, it’s okay not to be ready to write a novel yet, or ever. a novel is not the end-all, be-all of the written word. i firmly believe you should lean into your strengths, and if that’s short form, then write so much short form you get sick of it. eventually you may find an idea that spirals you into a longer work. or maybe try some connected short stories and see what major plot threads come out of it, then revise it into a novel. in my experience, most first novels are entirely accidental. my advice to you is not to box yourself into containers. let narratives lead you where they need to go and figure the rest out later.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to improve characterization in fanfiction

27 JAN 2020

When rewatching or rereading canon, what sorts of things would you recommend to watch out for if I want to improve characterization in my fic writing (both in terms of character voice and who the character is)? I hope that's not too vague!

it took me a while to answer this because i was thinking on it so hard. it’s a really great question, and hopefully i’ve come up with a decent answer.

  1. reaction shots. you know when the camera cuts away when someone else is talking and lands on the face of another character so we can see their reaction and therefore better shape our understanding of what the first character is saying? that’s very telling. you can get a lot from that. is a character saying something morally ambiguous but somewhat believable, and is the reaction character nodding along? or are they doubtful? should they be expressing emotion but refusing? what are they doing with their face and body at any given moment when they’re not the one speaking?
  2. vocal cadence. this is probably the thing hardest to nail. how does the character shape sentences? are they hyperverbal with a lot of interjections, slow or doubtful, or clipped and quiet? a lot of hero-ish male characters tend to speak very short sentences, and so writing them involves what you want them to say and then cutting out as many syllables as you possibly can. adam driver, for example, has a distressingly unique vocal cadence that he brings to kylo ren, which involves many short sentences in a row, with the most emphatic/important words at the beginning, and slowly tapering off. ren (not adam) speaks monotonously and so he chooses words that best fit that monotony. i think one of the best exercises you can do as a writer is to transcribe actor interviews. it helps a lot with building voice.
  3. motivations and choices. pay attention to every major choice a character makes, write it down, and then write out what their motivation was for that choice. eventually you’ll begin to see patterns that you can then implement into your own fics. if you have a character who is well-written and -performed, it’s a lot easier to understand their choices. but in tv shows that have been around a lot of seasons, with so many different writers, and more concern for plot than characterization, sometimes you have to pick and choose which motivations to take from what season/episode. personally i like using character alignment charts to help me better understand and develop motivation.
  4. priorities. all characters have priorities that lead them to develop the aforementioned motivation and make the choices they need to make. it’s especially important to pick this up when writing AUs, because priorities are the thing most easily transferred between canon and AU. a person who prioritizes family in a dystopian world is also probably one who will prioritize it in a modern fake dating fic. (of course, you’re not obligated to keep any canon characterization if you don’t want, but i do think it’s helpful to notice these things to better make the decisions of what you want to keep and toss).
  5. how characters change based on their audience. the shorter version of this is: who are they soft for and what about that person makes them that way? i’m thinking ep6 of the witcher, when geralt says to yennefer, “every time i’m near you, i say more in five minutes than i have in weeks. and i always regret it.” that says so much about their interaction, or the way i interpret it, and what he loves about her. he wants to show her who he is. he’s eager to communicate with her. so #2 above would be distorted in a fic in which geralt is interacting with yen – he would be inclined to distort his regular vocal cadence and open up to her more often (but he’d probably be conflicted about it in some way because it’s going against his own self-perception). the point is, we all change a little based on who we’re talking to or the space we’re in, so it’s good to identify the way a character’s identity shifts in various company.

my last piece of advice is to take notes while you watch stuff. take notes always. it’s something i’ve done for as long as i can remember. i take notes all the time, about everything. i think it’s a good practice to keep an observation notebook or something to that effect (i use google keep), and you’ll always have little details handy for your fiction, and you’ll begin to see the world in a different way. other than my witcher notes, the last entry in my observation notebook is “hardback 90s haircut books at cheap salons.” that’s a detail i’ll use for something some day. it helps me remember my life a little bit more clearly, and makes me consider the way i render reality in fiction.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to brainstorm

26 JAN 2020

Hello Beth! I've got a few hours set aside for brainstorming scenes to go in my outline. This is probably a bit of a silly question, but what do you think works best for brainstorming, like, lying down, sitting at a desk, walking around the living room,... Nothing quite seems to fit and I'm not sure how other people do it?

great question, anon! for my bigger/more complicated ideas, i tend to let them stew for years at a time. like i’ll have an idea, and my brain just unconsciously processes it for however long, and then it goes ping! like a microwave and i sit down and write it.

but it’s not always like that. sometimes i can’t/don’t want to wait around for years, so i have to speed the process along. for me, the best brainstorming method is talking it out with a friend. usually i don’t even need their input, just someone nodding and smiling (even virtually). i think, putting myself in a position where i have to explain my story to someone else makes me realize i know more about it than i think i do. and if no one is around to talk it out, if i know the person well enough, i pretend i’m talking through it with them by imagining what they’d say in response. it’s surprisingly effective.

most of the time i’m on the other side of these brainstorming conversations. i’m a lot better at helping other people brainstorm than i am brainstorming myself. honestly it’s the thing i’m probably best at, like. as a person. some things i do to help people brainstorm (and what you can ask your brainstorming partner to do for you):

when i’m stuck on specific scenes, i take a nap and usually that helps dislodge my ideas (see: unconscious processing). sometimes i take a walk. mostly the nap thing though. naps are great. really grateful to have a dumb narcoleptic brain that shuts off in one area while still hustling in another.

if you have your ending planned already, then your list of scenes won’t necessarily be “things that happen” but “things that MUST happen” which will help keep your WIP tightly wound around the conflict. otherwise a story is just stuff happening. so what MUST happen to get your character(s) logically from A to B?

muses are strange and fickle creatures. what works for one project may not work for another, what works one day may not work the next. sometimes you have to force things out the wrong way before you can get them right. sometimes what you put in your outline or scene list doesn’t end up going on the page at all. sometimes you have to set projects down for a while and pick them up later. sometimes you’ll be in the potato chip aisle of the grocery store debating buying cheesy poofs (you should always buy the cheesy poofs) and your WIP will come back and hit you like a truck, and suddenly you know exactly what needs to be done.

26 JAN 2020 (related ask)

@ the anon who asked about brainstorming: apparently tapping into your parasympathetic nervous system helps! my (eccentric, but extremely creative) boss swears by: peeing, showering, and swimming. I have not personally looked into the science behind it all, but those are her methods to find inspiration/brainstorm

ah, how could i forget the parasympathetic nervous system trick!

i can’t swim, but i get a lot of good brain writing done while i run or drive somewhere. also hard agree showering is good, although usually by the time i’m done, i’ve forgotten all the things i’ve thought of. my mom bought me one of those waterproof pencil/paper things but i always forget to use it.

thanks for the addition!

↑ return to navigation ↑

elaborating on conflict

18 JAN 2020

Hi Betty! I'm writing a story where my protagonist's goal is to avoid a new relationship (because he's still getting over a failed marriage), but the love interest keeps trying to connect with him. I'm worried that this kind of negative goal makes my protagonist too passive and reactive. I read and LOVED your whole writing advice tag, and you mentioned before that a story with a passive protagonist could still work. Do you have any advice for me? Thank you!!

there are some writers who believe that a good story is one in which a character is actively chasing a goal or desire. and maybe that’s good for some stories, but i definitely don’t prescribe it for all stories. in your case, anon, it sounds like your main character’s conflict is internal – he doesn’t want a new relationship, and yet one has presented itself. and even if he’s telling himself he doesn’t want it, clearly part of him does, or else there would be no story, yeah?  

my favorite definition of conflict is “establishing a status quo and upending it.” here’s an example:

the cat sat on the mat.

there is no conflict in this sentence. an action is happening, but there is no overturning it. sometimes when we deem stories boring it’s because there’s a status quo presented but no change has occurred. (and sometimes stories are boring because there are no consequences or stakes to the overturned status quo, but that’s another topic.)

all you have to do is add one word.

the cat sat on the dog’s mat.

now you have a status quo: the mat belongs to the dog. and you have a change: the cat has sat on it. this invites the next sentence. how does the dog react? how does this situation get resolved? there are stakes here too – a sense of propriety over the mat, the audience’s knowledge that cats and dogs may not always get along, the idea that animals might hurt each other, our natural compulsion toward empathy. we can side with the cat: it is nice to sit on mats. and we can side with the dog: i would not want a cat to sit on my mat, either. and while this is a simplistic example, it concisely describes both the line-level and structural level of the greater work of conflict and plot. if you create conflict in every single sentence (a difficult task, but one that the best stories tend to have, an establishing and deviation of expectations over and over and over again), no one will ever be able to put down your work.

 

you might see your character as passive, but i think a better way to think about it is that they are actively seeking harmony, a return to their status quo. they want the cat off their mat. in your character’s case, he is seeking harmony in the wrong place: avoiding a new relationship. and maybe he might find harmony there, but you have another character saying, look over here at this harmony i could offer you. and now he is tasked with a choice: give up on love or give in to it. and what a compelling conflict that is. what amazing things you could say about the nature of love and relationships and healing and comfort with that promise of change you’ve introduced.

so conflict is not always about an active pursuit. it may not be about succeeding in a goal. the only thing that makes a story a story, that makes it different from a series of actions or a description of images, is the concept of change.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to keep from posting a fic until it’s ready

16 JAN 2020

How do you make yourself hold off posting fic until it is truly ready? I write a lot of fic and I love it, the comments, the kudos, tumblr comments. But my problem is, I think I often post fic a tad undercooked because I'm so keen to get feedback. I post things that could really use another edit, a bit more thought, a couple more close final reads. How do I raise my standards here?

it’s definitely something i struggled with for a long time, especially in terms of original fiction. i thought i’d never be able to write a novel because without the enthusiasm in posting multichap fics, i kept losing interest and focus on my projects. there is nothing more fun for me than posting a multi-chap fic and having an invested readership base. it’s what drew me into writing fanfic and it’s what’s kept me here even when part of me wants to move on.

at a Q&A panel at a workshop i went to, an author (sorry, i forget her name) said that [sic] expertise in writing didn’t have to do with writing “well” as much as understanding when and how to follow through on good ideas, vs when an idea is not worth pursuing. on that front, expertise also involves knowing when a story is complete.

early on in writing, for some writers anyway, all ideas might seem equal and worthy of attention. you might have a hundred ideas and hop around in multiple wips, set something down for a while and pick it up later or not at all. it seems like your focus is everywhere. eventually with time and enough finished works, you’ll begin to get a feel not only for which ideas are worth pursuing, but when something feels good and final. in posting early, you’re reaching out to ask “is this a good idea? have i executed it well?” but that eagerness to share and receive feedback begins to dwindle – eventually you’ll be able to give yourself that validation. you’ll be able to trust that what is on the page is true to your tastes and intentions for it.

what helped me stop jumping the gun was sending out chapters to a few friends to get their comments early on in the drafting process. this helps in a lot of ways – it eases the itch for validation, potentially offers critical feedback to improve the story, and also makes any potential fallout when you post the chapter hurt a lot less. i don’t know about you, but i get at least one shitty/mean/tactless comment per fic. they used to really devastate me. not anymore, though, because the people whose opinions i care about have already read the piece and given me their thoughts on it, and moreover, i trust my opinion on the work more than anyone else’s.

for me, i don’t necessarily complete a fic before i start posting, but i try to make sure i have enough written that if i get a bunch of mean/annoying comments, i won’t abandon the story. that’s happened to me several times – i’ll post the first few chapters of a wip, and commenters start nitpicking and complaining and begging and criticizing, and it doesn’t hurt my feelings or anything, but it makes me lose interest in the project and turns writing into a chore. so for the sake of readers who are kind and patient and leave good comments and are invested (who usually far outweigh the other kind), i try to stay patient and not post until i’ve reached the point of no return.

also, it really helps me hold off when i realize how many people are about to get notified that i’ve written something. i’m definitely not a perfectionist, but when i imagine however many people glancing at their phones when i hit Post, i think, i’m just going to read this one more time. (i recognize some people have the opposite problem: they’re afraid to post until something is perfect. if you are one of those people, please disregard this completely, and do whatever you need to do to post.)

lastly, you can always write a really really really shitty first draft, one that’s so bad you’d be ashamed to post it. that way, you have the whole thing written, and then you can post once you begin revisions and have a solid idea about the scope of the project.

↑ return to navigation ↑

forcing yourself to write versus waiting for inspiration to strike

16 JAN 2020

Saying out loud to the universe: I am going to start writing regularly, rather than waiting for inspiration. I guess I'm afraid that if I start forcing myself to just put words one in front of the other when I'm not "feeling it", then I'm somehow going to stop "feeling it" altogether. Like if I stop waiting for inspiration, it's never going to come back. Sorry, I interrupted my announcement with a moment of discovery? I don't know. I'll write back in the morning.

that’s like saying, if you move in with someone you love and start seeing them all the time instead of only hanging out with them when you feel like it, you’ll love them less. and depending on the person and relationship, you might get annoyed with them, or you might need some time alone, or you might have disagreements, but ultimately if you love them, you love them, no matter what kind of proximity you’re in. you may even love them more because you get to express that love and receive it more consistently.

i definitely know the feeling, though. i used to deny myself any creative outlet because i thought creativity was an optional thing that was a waste of time unless it led to monetary gain (i was a young, brainwashed banker at the time). and what would happen was, i would start feeling this kind of physical discomfort bordering on pain, like if i didn’t do something i would break, and i would grab a piece of paper and write nonsense all over it. absolute nonsense. it hurt to write it and was overall an unpleasant experience. but i would feel better instantly.

it still happens sometimes. if i deny myself a consistent creativity, there’s something that builds up in me and eventually explodes, and when it does, nothing good really comes of it. i get fixated on what i’m working on and let everything else (like managing my finances, and keeping my spaces clean, and feeding myself properly) slip away.

obviously all writers are different and you have to find what works for you. i value a consistent daily writing practice, but not so far that i have word count goals or self-imposed deadlines or anything like that. i just write what i feel like writing in a day, for as long as i feel like writing it, and i take breaks when i need to. if i skip a day or two, it’s not a big deal. daily writing is definitely not something i ascribe to other writers, and it’s not for everyone, but it’s what works for me, and if you think it’ll work for you, it’s definitely worth trying. just don’t be hard on yourself if it doesn’t work out – there are many, many writers who don’t write every day.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to choose tense i

15 JAN 2020

Asking because I greatly admire your writing and your shared insights on it. Do you think it matters if I don't write in present tense? Fics in my main fandom are almost exclusively written in it. I've tried, but my present tense work lacks depth and reads like I'm writing a list most of the time. I'm writing something in past tense for a gift exchange, and it's just... SO much better, it's made me feel confident to post again.

i think present tense is prevalent in fanfiction because of its immediacy, the way it naturally prioritizes scene, and, in some cases, levity in narrative voice. if you’re writing a fic that does not concern itself with those things, or if you find it difficult or unwieldy to write in, you shouldn’t. conformity is poison to creativity. the moment you tell yourself something “should” be a certain way is the moment you sacrifice your investment in a creative project.

it’s good to try new things, but i also believe that constantly leaning into your strengths will naturally lead you where you need to go. eventually you may have written so much in past tense that you’re eager to try present tense, or a different kind of structure or voice. or maybe not. there are plenty of writers who spend their entire careers writing different stories in the same tense and voice. nabokov’s pnin reads just like lolita, but nothing like pale fire. pick up any paragraph in any henry james and you couldn’t tell one book from the next. richard papen from the secret history is virtually the same character as theo decker in the goldfinch, even if they’re wildly different stories. you’re allowed to have your own style – your aesthetic, your wheelhouse – and know what works for you.

also, i promise, like 94.7% of readers don’t even notice things like tense. some don’t even notice person. they’re the invisible strings that writers have to focus on but which no one else can see unless they’re looking for them.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to realistically write characters who hurt each other

12 JAN 2020

hi betts! one of the things I appreciate about many of your stories is the way your characters are capable both of hurting the people they love and of loving people who hurt them. so often these days tumblr seems ready to paint those kinds of dynamics with a broad "abuse" brush and cancel/censor them rather than tell or appreciate an interesting story. do you have any advice for writing characters who hurt each other? how do you make it feel so truthful, and not at all preachy?

i’ve been sitting on this question for a long time because i want to give it the answer it deserves, but i don’t think i can do that without writing an entire book on the subject (which i intend to do someday, and if i do the phd it will very likely be my dissertation subject). it might be my favorite question i’ve ever received.

i came up with a list of “ways people hurt each other (and why you might still love the people who hurt you)” that i may save for another post. i simultaneously want to write my personal story of abuse – the ways in which i’ve been hurt and have also hurt others – but i don’t think that’s an effective response either.

the simplest answer i can come up with is this:

the reality of abuse is terrifying. people are not always inclined to look frightening things in the face, especially if they’re really looking into a mirror. to render cruelty as it really is means you have to empathize with atrocity. to empathize with atrocity, you have to accept that with the right circumstances, you are just as capable of hurting others as anyone else. you might have different reasons, you might have different means, but as a writer, you are tasked with staring into your darkest self and loving the thing that resides there.

cruelty is a matter of priority. if you make a list of mean things anyone has ever done to you, you will see a pattern emerge. each time, someone has prioritized something else over your comfort or happiness. very often, this pattern is self-serving. when someone cuts you off in traffic, they’re prioritizing their gain over etiquette and safety. when someone breaks into your house and steals all your stuff, they’re prioritizing their desire for your stuff over your ownership and sense of security. when someone you love cheats on you, they’re prioritizing their relationship with someone else over their relationship to you. when someone hits you, they’re prioritizing they’re desire for power and control over your safety and agency.

humans are not naturally drawn to malice without personal benefit. despite what comic book movies will have you believe, the drive to cause pain for the sake of chaos is an extreme rarity. it’s easy to other and objectify that experience because it’s so difficult for most people to understand. what is harder to accept is that “normal” people are capable of horrible deeds, and that you might be capable of loving them. serial killers and mass murderers are driven by control, prejudice, toxic rhetoric, and a distortion of identity which makes them believe it is part of who they are to do these awful things. as a writer, you are allowed to – and should – empathize with and have compassion for your cruelest characters. just because you can understand them and sympathize with them doesn’t put you on the same level as them. you’re allowed to find compassion for sex offenders, pedophiles, rapists, murderers, bigots, or trump. you certainly don’t have to, but for some of us it’s much harder to hate people than it is to love them. maybe part of the work of our life is to navigate the difficult divide between compassion for the self and for the other. if i allow an abusive partner into my life, i am not practicing self-compassion, and so i have to prioritize my love for myself over their love for me. and that may hurt them, but that’s okay. hurting people and being hurt by them is an inevitable part of being human. the only thing we can control is the path of our compassion.

there is no such thing as good or bad people, only people who choose to prioritize certain things over others. you are never a bad person for wanting to explore those priorities in art, or to introspect on your own priorities. it’s okay to ask yourself what you’re willing to do to survive. could you kill someone? rape someone? torture someone? if the answer is “no” – how are you sure? and if you’re not sure, if there’s even a sliver of a potential for “yes,” how can you still love yourself? it’s okay to look on your past and admit to the ways you’ve hurt people, and forgive yourself. it’s okay to see the ways people have hurt you, and choose to forgive them, even if they haven’t apologized, even if they don’t “deserve” it. these are all difficult and fearful things to think about and accept in yourself, but it’s a worthy task, and art is an effective method of confronting the terrifying truths of life.

as a writer, i believe it is more important for a story to pose difficult questions than it is to answer them. you can use fiction as a way to make peace with the cruelty you find in yourself and others. you don’t have to have solutions. you don’t have to admit you know the answers to unanswerable questions. but you can write stories that present problems, and you can use narrative to navigate difficult terrain. next time you sit down to write something, consider: how might you love monsters? how can you better love yourself?

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to choose tense ii

29 DEC 2019

This might be a very basic question, but what factors go into determining whether you write something in present or past tense?

i wish it were a basic question.

some of it has to do with genre. fanfiction is the only genre i know that is written mostly in present tense. the standard for all other genres (that i’m aware of) is past. which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t play around with tense. you have to figure out what works for you in what scenarios.

present tense is more immediate. think about when you’re telling someone a story about something interesting that happened to you, and the moment you move to present tense (”so i tell the guy, i’m like…”) it’s usually when the story becomes urgent. so present tense is good for stories in which you want to remain mostly in-scene, focused on the action and movement of the story rather than summarizing. you can think of present tense as being “zoomed in” on the story itself, because it offers far less room for reflection.

you might also consider structure with tense. if you have a story that has a present timeline but dips frequently into flashbacks or backstory, then you might want to consider present tense to more easily differentiate between “now” and “then” so as to avoid the past perfect.

to me, present tense veers more toward colloquial writing. when you write be verbs you have the opportunity to make conjunctions of them. “she is running” vs “she’s running.” in past tense, you’re forced into “she was running.” sometimes i like this choice, because i get to choose what sounds more conventional to me (conjunctions) or go against that and make a conscious decision in style.

(that’s all this is, when it comes down to it. style. how do you want your story to sound?)

past tense or “literary past” gives more freedom in exposition and reflection. because of that, for me, past tense stories always end up being longer and more slowly paced than they would in present tense, but the prose tends to be stronger. i mostly default to past tense now. moving through time can be easier in past tense because it’s all “then” and none of it is “now,” in the same way that actively living life takes way longer than looking back on individual memories.

the only time tense played a major factor in a story was with the ofic novel i’m currently writing. the story starts when my character is 12 years old. it’s written in first person. i wrote the first chapter in present tense. it was a challenge, because my character had no access to future events, and i was beholden to her present biases, emotions, and perceptions. and in a story filled with secrets and lies, that was really, really difficult.

i rewrote the story in past tense, with my narrator reflecting from a specific point in time and writing to a specific person in the story. she now has access to the entire picture, everything that happened after, and can differentiate her incorrect perceptions at the time to what she knows to be true now (this is called having a surrogate narrator). the benefit of this also is that she’s acknowledging her memory is flawed, and she is also a liar, so she can embellish and skip over as much as she wants.

the choice of tense has far more consequences in first person than it does in third. in third person, no one asks from when the narrator is writing, and no one wonders why the story is being narrated in the first place. third person is somewhat invisible in that regard, though you’re still tasked with the decision of distance from your characters. but i think that’s a different topic.

you should take all of this with a grain of salt. everything i wrote here made me cringe a little because i kept thinking of exceptions. there’s no hard and fast rule to choosing a tense to write in. for me, fluffy or comedic stories are easier to write in present tense, and more serious or dramatic ones are easier in past. and as much as i want to advise you to make stylistic decisions consciously, i’d also be a hypocrite, because i usually just start writing and stick with what comes out.

definitely experiment, though. i know i’ve offered this idea before, but when you start a story, make a gauge. write a couple thousand words in one voice, and then rewrite them in a different one. play with tense, point of view, person, and pace. zoom in on the story and out. fiddle with it until you’re like “damn this is good.”

i imagine this confuses things more than clarifies them, but i hope it helps regardless.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to write badly, and why you should

27 DEC 2019

betts, i'm having trouble with letting myself "write badly" (and with coming up with ideas, but mostly the former). how do you do it, how do you teach yourself?

first of all, major props to you for trying the shitty first draft. this past semester it was the #1 thing i wanted my students to take from the class. for those who do not yet know the power of the SFD, i have made a very helpful visual aid:

let’s say you read anne lamott’s “shitty first drafts” (and you absolutely must read anne lamott’s “shitty first drafts”), and you come out of it believing in the three draft method:

but you think, potentially, the better your down draft is, the better your up draft will be, and the easier your dental draft will be. perhaps you think, the shittier your first draft, the shittier your final draft, or maybe, the more you’ll have to revise.

NAY.

i’d like you to turn your attention to my gorgeous and professional graphic which took me a whole 30 seconds to make. i’ve drawn two spectrums which indicate the quality of writing, from :( (awful) to :) (most excellent) based on your own definitions of good/bad writing.

let’s say the top line represents a writer who has written a very decent first draft. the absolute best they can do. they’ve put their all into it. they revise it once and it’s a little bit better. they revise it again, but at this point it’s mostly fixing a typo here and there. they have checked every tooth. but it’s still not great.

the bottom line represents a writer who projectile vomited onto a piece of paper (metaphorically) and then cried for an hour (literally). their first draft is written partially in wingdings for reasons they don’t know. they forgot the word for “wrist” so they wrote “hand ankle.” objectively speaking in the grand history of the universe, according to god, it is in the top 1% of worst things ever written.

then this writer cleans it up a bit. now, it’s about where it would be if the writer had tried to write a clean first draft. it’s something they might be willing to show an extremely tactful friend, or someone with very low standards.

and now, magic happens. they revise again, and the draft is infinitely better than what they knew they could write. i don’t know why this happens! but it does. it’s happened to me. it’s happened to every student who has had the terrible fortune of stepping into my classroom. i promise you it works.

writing badly is not just about getting your ideas down in a somewhat messy way. it’s about writing intentionally badly. it’s about aiming for the absolute worst of what you’re capable of. to write badly means to identify and define what you think is good writing, because you’re aiming for the opposite. maybe you hate stories that have run-on sentences, or which seem to lack self-awareness. that means your first draft is going to be FULL of run-ons and have no idea what it’s trying to be. but run-ons can be tidied up to create beautiful prose. and mindless nonsense that relies on tropes and cliches can be organized and added upon to be meaningful. but you need to get it down before you even know what the thing you’re writing is. we write as the process of thought, not the product of it.

which brings me to my next point: *commentator voice*

THE UNKNOWN

i’ve written before on the interaction between fear, the unknown, and writer’s block. one day i’ll write a big fancy craft essay on it that i’ll try lamely to publish, but for now i’ll be very blunt:

all writer’s block is fear. all fear is the unknown. to resolve fear, you must make something known. to make something known, you enact a procedure.

this is true of almost everything in life. everything you hesitate to do, everything you procrastinate or put off. every bad attitude you have. it’s all the unknown. if you open yourself to the process of knowing, everything in life becomes less scary.

how do surgeons perform life-saving surgeries? how do pilots keep a plane from crashing? how did i go to work as a bank teller in a bad part of town, day after day, knowing i would eventually get robbed? we have procedures. if this happens, you do this, this, and this.

as mary ruefle puts it in her essay “on fear” – what is the poet’s procedure?

this is, of course, a rhetorical question, but i’ve taught this essay many times, and read it many more, and i am obsessed with the idea of a writer’s procedure. combined with donald barthleme’s essay “not-knowing” which is also about the making things known, we have a foundation for which to understand the process of knowing.

so what is the process?

i have my own process which might work for you, which i adapt from project to project, but you’ll have to make your own. and when you do, you have to trust it. writing badly is easier when you know, like me, you have at least 8 more drafts to do no matter what. no matter how good i think it is, i will do every step of the procedure, every time. i have faith in my process. there is no point where an element of the story is so unknown to me that i am afraid to continue. i know that by the end of the process, i have done my best work, and there’s not much more i can do without the help of the people who have accepted it to be published.

recently i’ve decided i want to start drawing. it’s a daunting endeavor – i used to draw a lot when i was a teenager, but like many of us, certain creative interests we had when we were younger get shoved to the side for one reason or another. for me, i never got the hang of shading, and i couldn’t handle ruining my lovely line drawings with my hideous attempts at making things look three-dimensional.

now, i’ve tasked myself with picking it up again, but i’m afraid. i ask myself why i’m afraid. it’s because i don’t know anything about drawing anymore. i don’t know what to draw. i don’t know where to draw. i don’t know what to use to draw. i don’t know when to draw.

but now, just by acknowledging what i don’t know, i have a list of things i need to make known, one small thing at a time.

when it comes time to draw, the only unknown thing is where to place the first line. there is no risk in it, no fear – i do it with pencil. it can be erased. there is no way to be wrong. once the first line is down, i move to the next and the next, making the drawing known one line at a time.

the first step in the process of knowing is naming what you don’t know.

so my advice to you is this: make a list of questions you have for your narrative. if they’re too broad, break them up. make them tiny. then ask yourself, not what are the answers, but “how do i make these things known to me?”

the response is usually “i don’t fucking know” followed potentially by “well i’ll have to try doing this thing that i know is wrong.” it might be wrong, but it’s known. and so you have to write it down, then trust that it will eventually be right.

↑ return to navigation ↑

a quick english comp primer

30 OCT 2019

I'm teaching a writing "workshop" (that's not the right word--not a workshop proper. It's going to be two hours and we're covering a few different topics with a mix of lecture/questions/practice--in dance, that's what a workshop is) this weekend for the students in my freshman intro class. I'm going over common comp things that make writing harder to read, what they are and how they work. I’m doing passive voice, independent and dependent clauses, where the subject and the main predicate are in a sentence and how far apart they are, intro/conclusion structure, using a long quote, when to give all the details of a point and when to just briefly summarize, or some mix of the above. The course as a whole is for entering freshman students to get into College Life, with a theme of basic mathematical proofs and writing. It’s cataloged in such a way that this might be one of the only writing courses many of them take, and I want to go over simple, beyond technically correct grammar, composition stuff that I think they really should have at least the opportunity to learn. Any advice?

while i definitely think somebody should teach students grammatical stuff, i also believe that at the college level, if they’re still struggling, they need to utilize alternate resources like one-on-one tutoring in order to get up to speed. at my school there’s a writing center where they can drop in and someone will go over their entire paper with them. i try to veer away from teaching anecdotal information (with the exception of MLA format, which is a pain to teach because for the life of me i can’t make it fun) and stick instead to focusing on how to develop critical thinking so they have the ability to pinpoint the things that aren’t working and the skills to find the answers. they know how to use google, but they don’t yet know how to figure out what they don’t know.

i focus on teaching writing as rhetoric, which strips away the entire concept of Correct Grammar. all writing is dependent on audience and any rules that might exist change for the genre of each text. you email your professors in a different voice than you text your friends. if you have mistakes or use shorthand or slang in a text to your friends, that’s not wrong at all, in fact it’s totally correct writing for the genre. there’s no such thing as incorrect language, only an inability to adapt your voice to your audience.

in my class, i have students across all majors. some of them are going on to take a handful of humanities courses or seminars that have 15-page literary analysis assignments. others will go on to write dozens of lab reports. and yet others will have to write cold hard scientific research papers. all of those are different genres and require different writing skills. if i focus on the expectations of one field, the students who are in the others won’t be prepared to go to their future writing-intensive courses. so i aim instead to teach them how to throw and change their voice as necessary in any given medium, and moreover, how to face the blank page without fear.

here are some important texts that might generate good discussion on language and how they’ve approached writing in the past versus how they might approach it in college:

lastly, in any writing class i think it’s important to talk as little as possible so students have room to speak. they’re better at teaching each other (and listen more to each other) than i am, and more importantly, a good teacher is one who guides students to conclusions rather than offering them answers. 90% of what i do when i teach is ask questions, and as students offer responses, i write them on the board. together we look at the notes we took and come to conclusions about whatever topic we’re discussing. socratic method, babey.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on writing residencies

20 OCT 2019

glad to hear things are looking up for you! super interested to hear more about writer's residencies—have you ever done one before? and what was the application process like? what are the rules for how you're meant to use your time once there?

i haven’t done a residency before, but i’ve done workshops which are similar, except there’s no proper classroom/pedagogy element.

the application process was truly terrible. the single worst application process i’ve ever been through, and i’ve applied to grad school twice. with nearly all other aspects of the writing life, there’s some manner of standardization. publishing in mags is narrowed down mostly to duotrope and submittable. the book querying process is decently streamlined. grad school and job applications are status quo.

but residencies are so chaotic that there are multiple meanings to the word “residency” and multiple words for what i currently mean by “residency.” other like terms include: fellowship, workshop, conference, retreat, and professorship. all of these have only the barest degrees of separation. moreover “residency” should not be confused with “writer-in-residence” which is a completely different (albeit virtually the same) thing.

a “residency” (or fellowship, or conference, or retreat, ad nauseum) lasts anywhere from 1 week to 2 years. they can be anywhere – universities, farms, writers’ colonies, a random set of loft apartments, whatever. they’re spaces usually where artists go to work on a specific project in a peaceful and supportive environment. they’re not usually restricted to writers, but performers and visual artists and musicians too. when applying, there’s often a box for “please tell us your needs” and you tell them you need a studio space or whatever. obvs i left that box blank because i basically only need a bed.

there are hundreds upon hundreds of residencies. there is no singular website that archives them all. you have to google and google and google, and ask around, and google some more. their sites are generally sketchy looking and some of them haven’t been updated since 2009. in one of the residencies i got accepted to, the application process involved filling out a printed form by hand, scanning it, and emailing it to the lady who owns the place.

moreover, applying for residencies is expensive. i had no idea how expensive it would be. i spent $500 last year applying to 3 graduate schools. this year i spent $250 applying to 9 residencies and i still have a few more to go. each of them has a $25-$40 application fee, even the ones you have to pay to attend.

speaking of money, the weirdest fucking thing about residencies is that some of them offer you a $50k stipend with full benefits for a year, and some of them you have to pay $2000 for one week. some of them have no cost to them at all, but you have to pay for your own travel and incidentals. the good ones offer a modest stipend of a few hundred a week. the whole operation sometimes feels like a ponzi scheme.

the deadlines are truly mind-boggling. some of them have no deadlines at all so you just apply whenever. some of them accept applications twice a year. some, once. some of them accept rotating years of fiction and poetry writers, so you only have one application period every other year, unless you happen to write both fiction and poetry. some of them say they accept “emerging writers” but actually only accept established writers who have 3 NYT bestsellers, and to figure that out you have to get halfway through the application process, where they ask “list your published novels” and it’s a required question.

and then there’s the application itself. all of the applications required a project proposal and a writing sample. some of them required that i have a summary of my writing sample. some of them wanted an exact plan of what i intended to do at the residency. some of them asked for community service proposals in addition to project proposals. some of them wanted a CV and some of them only wanted a list of publications and awards. some of them didn’t want any publications. and the worst part, some of them wanted up to THREE letters of recommendation, which is ABSURD. i had to ask 3 of my beloved mentors to write me a recommendation letter for what amounts to a 2-week vacation i can put on my CV. ridiculous.

as for expectations when you arrive, from what i’ve heard, they don’t care. they want the clout of saying you, who may one day be exceptionally famous and go down in the history of literature, stayed at their place. and you want their CV line.

so unless you want the networking and CV boost of residencies, your better bet is to rent a cabin in the woods and chill out for a while.

↑ return to navigation ↑

some stories about teaching

5 OCT 2019

We spend a lot of time appreciating you as an amazing writer, but even just from online interactions, it's obvious that you're also a great teacher. If you feel like sharing: any good teaching stories that made you feel great about undergraduate teaching / reminded you of why your work is important?

at the end of my first semester, a student, i’ll call her jessica, sent me an email saying how much she enjoyed the class and how she was planning to be a teacher some day, and she wanted to be a teacher like me. i printed the email out and put it in my journal. it was the first kind email a student had sent me, and i read it over and over.

a couple months later, at the beginning of the next semester, just an hour before i met my new students, i found out that jessica had died over break. it was alcohol and drugs, a party where she left and no one followed her back to her dorm to make sure she was okay. she was nineteen. i looked at her instagram, where her final post was a selfie with two friends, and the caption read, “i love college!”

it’s hard to say exactly how her death affected me, but i think about her all the time. i think about how fragile life is, and about the toxicity of college culture, and all the pressures and expectations put on students, and how they’ll graduate with mounds of debt that will take decades to pay off. i think about how hard and hopeless it is to be a young person today. i think about the surprised, grateful faces i get when i show students the smallest shred of kindness or empathy.

this is my fourth year teaching and i’ve now had around 300 students. i have yet to meet a bad one. i’ve met students who have been pushed to their limits, who are exhausted, who are in the wrong place and have no idea, who have unchecked trauma, who are utterly terrified, who are lonely, sad, overworked, or just plain overwhelmed.

once, i did a Q&A for a practicum of new creative writing teachers. i’d given them my syllabus prior to the class. they were surprised to read my lax policies, and one of them asked what i do when a student does the bare minimum, or maybe even less. creative writing is an “easy” class. inevitably you get the “lazy” students who sit in the back and work on homework for other classes, and hand in five dr. seuss sounding poems at the end of the semester.

to that i said, any student who doesn’t want to write is either overworked, afraid, or both. being overworked can’t be helped. college students are working to master their time management skills in an environment that doesn’t allow them to fail. but fear can be faced and conquered. i base my entire class around fear. they have one major assignment: write your biggest risk. i firmly believe your biggest creative risk ends up being your greatest reward. sometimes students aren’t up to the task, but if you build an environment in which they’re eager to show you the dark, ugly parts of themselves because they know you will receive them eagerly and openly, they tend to make amazing things.

i start each semester with probably over half my students utterly apathetic or even flat-out disgusted by the idea of creative writing, and i end the semester with a stack of self-assessments and evaluations talking about how much the class helped them not only see their own creative potential, but also to be less afraid to take creative risks in other environments.

i had a student, we’ll call him alex, in my composition course last year. admittedly i put less effort into comp than creative writing, mostly because it’s not my curriculum or my primary field of study. alex sat at the back of class the entire semester, asleep, on his laptop, or talking to the people nearest him. he did not participate. he did not do the reading. he did not turn in his homework. he didn’t even know my name. on the second to last day of the semester, he turned in several assignments at once, and came to me before class started saying he’d done most the work, and could he come to office hours so i could get him caught up on the rest?

no, i said. i was too busy working with students who had been seeking my help throughout the semester. he took it well, and said thanks anyway, and in the end scraped by with a B-, mostly due to my lack of a late policy. if i’d had one, he would have failed.

i was surprised the next semester to see him on my roster for creative writing. it was clear he didn’t like or appreciate my comp class. on the first day of spring semester, he came to class high. at the end of class, i have all of my students fill out a notecard with their name and other pertinent information, and on the back i have them draw a picture. when alex turned in his card, he had only scrawled his name across the front, and on the back he drew a bird smoking a giant blunt.

the next class, i announced that anyone who came to class drunk or high would be asked to leave and they would lose their attendance for the day. i didn’t want to call him out directly. honestly, i didn’t know how to handle the situation. my mentor told me to deal with it head-on, but i didn’t heed her advice, and i wish i had.

alex kept coming to class high. he didn’t do the reading. he didn’t participate in small or large group discussion. he didn’t do the prompt-fills or turn in any assignments. when he’d behaved this way in comp, i wasn’t bothered by it. nobody really likes comp. but this was creative writing, a class i put 200% of myself into and which i expected students to appreciate in kind (and for the most part they really do).

midway through the semester, i ask students to schedule a one-on-one conference with me. it’s required. they get a grade for showing up, and another for doing a write-up of what we talked about. alex, like the prior semester, did not show up for his conference, or even write a risk draft for me to comment on. he sent me an email an hour later apologizing and asking if we could reschedule. the kicker: he began the email “liz.” i ask my students to call me by first name. i tell them at the beginning of the semester and again in week 5 when they inevitably forget. so alex had now been through 4 of my “the name you need to call me” lectures. and he still called me liz. and he had the audacity not to show up for his conference with no notice, wasting a half hour of my time, and then ask to reschedule.

my mentor was right. i should have dealt with it sooner. i shouldn’t have let myself get as angry as i did. but i replied to his email with a laundry list of things he’d done wrong, and i told him he was out of chances. i wasn’t rude, but i was very firm, and expected him to forward the email to his parents and the department and try to get me fired.

instead, a couple hours later when i arrived in class, he was sitting in the back of the room with his hood over his head. i was surprised to see him. it was the last day to drop classes and i expected him to be gone. he approached me as i was getting set up, and he was weeping. like blubbery, snot-nosed weeping. my first thought was that he was manipulating me somehow. boys who don’t get their way do desperate things sometimes. he told me he turned in all the assignments, and did the reading, and he’d do better from them on, he promised, and could he come to office hours? would i give him one more chance, please?

i told him to see me after class. during discussion, to my surprise, he raised his hand for every question. he was extremely off-base on most of his comments but i appreciated the courage it took not only to show up to class a weepy, tear-filled wreck, but to actually participate through it. after class, he apologized for having lost his shit earlier. he asked how he could make everything up. i told him i’d give partial credit for what he’d turned in, but he needed to come to a conference.

a couple days later he showed up at my office. i asked if he had a rough draft for me to look at and he said he didn’t, not because he didn’t try but because he didn’t know what his biggest risk was. i asked him to write an essay about how he’s struggling in college, and to use it as an opportunity for self-reflection.

up to this point, alex had been a bad bullshitter. before, when i’d confronted him about not doing the reading, he said he couldn’t because he hurt his knee. i asked what a knee injury had to do with reading, and he blubbered through an answer. he even feigned a limp, but later that day i saw him walking normally to another class. he had ridiculous excuses for everything. so when he sent me his essay, i was expecting more of the same.

what he wrote was not bullshit, but a blunt and honest account of all the problems he was having, sans whining or pity-seeking. the boldest statement he made was that he was extremely lonely. i searched between the lines for ways he was trying to manipulate my sympathy but found none. he was flat-out admitting the truth: he felt like college wasn’t right for him, he was far away from home, he thought he would make friends but he hadn’t made any, and his girlfriend was still a senior in high school and he missed her a lot.

“it feels weird not having a happy ending,” he told me. “i kept wanting to find a positive note to end on.”

“sometimes things just suck. an essay doesn’t have to answer the questions it poses,” i said.

suddenly i got a different picture of alex’s life: he was depressed and alone, self-medicating with weed and who knew what else, and slipping through the cracks of all his other classes, where he had professors who, like me the prior semester, paid no attention to him.

he told me he really liked the class, and liked me as a teacher, and he would spend the rest of the semester trying to be better. i’d had students say similar things just to placate me and then didn’t follow through, but alex did for the most part. he still struggled with due dates, but he kept an open line of communication with me, and owned up to his failures. he did all the reading and participated in every class. by the end of the semester, he was a different person. he told me his girlfriend had gotten into our school and that she was coming to visit him soon. he revised his essay several times, got an A in the class, and gave me a hug at the end of the semester and thanked me for my patience and understanding.

i think this story stuck with me so much because it’s about my own failure. i do my best to reach out to struggling students, but most of the time if you lend a hand, they don’t take it, and there’s not much you can do. i should have tried to help alex sooner, or be more firm with him earlier on like he apparently needed. i need to learn to be more comfortable with confrontation and own my authority in the classroom. but mostly it reaffirmed my belief that everyone is hurting, and “bad behavior” is nearly always the result of a bigger picture that sometimes we can’t see.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to write specific kinks

23 AUG 2019

hi, betts! do you have any advice for how to successfully write specific kinks? I'm attempting a piece that involves a size kink, but as an ace who hasn't dabbled in anything but the most vague and vanilla smut, I'm kind of at a loss for how to approach it.

all kinks are obsessions, and all obsessions are narrative candy. desire is an innate conflict. i would go so far as to say it’s the only conflict that matters. so when you break apart writing hard kink, it’s all about understanding the underlying desire there, and moreover the cathartic element driving it. it’s all about internality, not physicality.

for example, foot fetishism isn’t as much about the aesthetic appeal of a foot as it is about vulnerability and depravity. our feet are things we covet, that transport us, and that, given their function, are attributed to filth. to see someone barefoot when they shouldn’t be is to see them exposed in a certain way. to affiliate a foot with sex when by all means it shouldn’t be is an indulgence in a minor wrongness.

but also, i’m not into feet, so i’m just making all that up. that’s kind of the point i’m trying to make – smut isn’t about reality but fantasy. when you’re writing kink, you’re a liaison to an audience either trying to understand something new, or finding acceptance for something well-established in themselves. most people don’t read smut for the allure of bodies moving in space doing things to each other. if they wanted that, they could watch porn. they read it for the natural conflict of intimate moments, and the internality presented in prose.

the cathartic element of size kink is a feeling of fullness. there are a lot of kinks that play on fullness in different ways, and all kinks are a manifestation of the pressing of boundaries and expectations. fullness is a literal pressing of boundaries. “how can this giant cock fit inside this tiny hole??” is the question that guides all size kink stories. the goal is to play on that fixation of fullness and stretching and pushing boundaries. it’s painful, pleasurable, absurd, grotesque, too much while also needing more. “yes i want that thing in me” but “no there’s no way that can happen” makes for a compelling narrative conflict and some hot hot smut.

tl;dr hone in on the underlying dopamine hit of a given kink, find the boundary it’s pushing or the conflict it presents, and pivot your story around it

↑ return to navigation ↑

on not feeling accomplished

14 AUG 2019

I'll be 30 on August. But I'm still struggling with the idea... Mainly because I thought I'd be more put together and be more accomplished. I guess... Any advice?

so i have this friend from high school. she was student body president, most popular girl in school. tall, gorgeous. about five years after we graduated, i added her on facebook and we started talking, and one thing led to another and she moved in with me (it’s a much more interesting story than that but that’s not the point rn). i absolutely adored this girl, but we didn’t really jive as roommates. i had this other friend from high school who had moved to LA to work for disney, and i found out through both of them separately that they’d had crushes on each other but never did anything about it (LA friend and i were deeply unpopular). so next time he comes home for the holidays, i invite him over and he and my roommate really hit it off. (sort of……it’s a long story but that’s also not the point so i’ll skip over the rocky bits)

roommate decides to move to LA for TOTALLY UNRELATED REASONS but they start dating anyway. six years pass. they’re married now. they travel all over the world. he makes bank living his dream and supervising art for disney movies. she taught high school biology in a low income area for a while, and was so moved by the experience that she went back to grad school and now is about to get her phd in epidemiology in hopes to reform public education from the inside. also, she’s having a baby.

last week, she came home to visit her family and we met for coffee. even though i too would like to be married, gorgeous, having a baby, and saving the world, i was somehow not jealous of her, probably because i love her and i am glad things are going well for her.

but i was still acutely aware that i’ve been single for 8 years, am overweight, only work part time, gave up a stable job to become a writer, have unchecked mental health issues with no health insurance, and get all my medication from Turkey.

so we get to talking, and she tells me about some health issues she’s having, about how she can’t lie down without having a panic attack, because apparently her septum is stabbing her brain?? i probably misunderstood because i was trying not to pass out from her graphic descriptions. but the point is, she needs some serious reconstructive surgery and no one will operate on her because she’s pregnant, so she’s spending the next however many months in constant pain and anxiety.

moreover, she was lowkey jealous of me. she wished she still lived in our small town, or a small town, somewhere not LA. she was impressed that i finally quit the bank and was selling the house and got published. she couldn’t fathom the amount i wrote in a year, or that i had a following online, and got a masters degree without the help of a spouse’s income. it really puts things in perspective – we’re all envious of each other in different ways. we all have something other people want and vice versa.

so my advice is this:

everyone says don’t compare yourself to other people, but you totally can, as long as you acknowledge that everyone is struggling with something. everyone moves at different paces, and is affected in different ways by privilege, and has successes and set-backs like you do. no one can think about the big picture every minute of every day. i bet even obama has TV days, you know? and no matter where you live, we’re in a nightmare world right now, and the expectations you grew up believing of what adulthood could be are no longer realistic or attainable. so you do what you can with the 24 hours you’re given, and hope for the best.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on low-residency mfas

22 JUL 2019

betts, what is your opinion on low-residency mfas? obviously they are ridiculously expensive, but what do you think of how they prepare writers to write? did you have any experience of what the low-res program at your school was like? (you can answer this publicly)

i think low-res MFAs are great for extremely rich, extremely bored people – people for whom a two-year, five-figure program isn’t a risk, people who don’t have to take out loans and won’t miss the money. i did a lot of research on them when i was looking for MFAs and decided they were really only a cash cow to help fund english departments. i later found out, as a full-res student, that in the same way low-res exploits tuition dollars, full-res exploits grad labor. so on that front, there’s no winning. academia is a machine.

there’s really nothing you can get from a low-res MFA that you couldn’t get from any good writers’ group. as for “preparing writers to write” my hot take is that no MFA prepares writers to write. writers should already be writing, and the purpose of the MFA is to allow time and space for it, which is another reason i don’t like low-res programs. they boast that you can keep your day job or whatever, not upend your life to write, but that eliminates the sanctuary of funded full-res MFAs. for example, as a full-res student, i got an optional summer stipend of $1500 because i took a summer class. that summer class was called “reading hours” which are credit hours you pick up just for existing. so the school made sure i was funded over summer so i wouldn’t have to get a job and sacrifice my writing time.

a good program should believe in you enough to pay you to write. they pay you, you write good stuff, you get a lot of publications and awards, and you bring their program clout, so other promising writers will want to attend their school. they’re investing in you. in low-res programs, they don’t really need you at all, they only need your money. sadly, i’ve never met any writers who have done a low-res and gone on to have a solid publication record. most people who get MFAs, even in full-res programs, don’t continue writing after graduation. they need the structure of a workshop in order to write.

my recommendation if you’re considering a low-res because you’re not ready to commit to the full-res, is to go to workshops instead. they’re cheaper, more fun, and you get a lot out of a little. you also meet great people and eventually you can form your own writers’ group so you won’t need the MFA at all. it’s like writing camp.

the one’s i’ve gone to are the tin house summer workshop (1 week), and the new york state summer writers institute (4 weeks). i’ve also applied but didn’t get into the lambda workshop. other workshops i know are good are kenyon, yale, and breadloaf (which has a rich history and is really highly respected in the writing world but i don’t like how they run things so i’ve never gone).

you can also apply for residencies, which are similar to workshops but tend to be in cooler places, and without a mandatory workshop element. the sense of community is still there though. i also recommend going to AWP every year.

if you go to a few workshops/residencies/conferences and still don’t get what you’re looking for, then you’re not going to get it from a low-res program, either.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on literary porn

1 JUL 2019

betts, you've always given amazing writing advice in the past, so I'm coming to you with a question that legitimately keeps me up at night. I really want to write literary fiction. the only issue is - whenever I start writing that kind stuff, it immediately starts turning into porn? like, obviously, there is plot and stuff but it feels like ultimately all I want to write is people fucking and all the fall out that comes with it. is there a way to make this more ~literary? or is it just erotica?

i actually have a real, serious answer to this!!

so, before the MFA, all i’d written was porn. it was all i knew how to write. i got to the MFA, and my first semester i decided to workshop candy tongue. bad idea. i was so comfortable writing for my fandom audience that i wasn’t aware of the stodgy nature of non-fandom audiences. my cohort was fine reading the incest stuff and the gratuitous sex, but they had trouble giving me feedback because they didn’t understand the point of it. and truly, there was none. i made maggie a gold-star submissive because i wanted to, even though it had no real function in the story. i wrote like 4 graphic sex scenes into a 25k novella, and i workshopped it, and made everyone, myself included, deeply uncomfortable.

i decided i could not write porn in my MFA. i was allowed and even encouraged by my thesis advisor, but ultimately i didn’t want the stress of it hanging over my head. so i started writing about money, and picking through my resentment toward my decade spent in finance. in fact the working title of my thesis was Sex & Money. i workshopped each story without being nervous at all, and realized i was taking no risks. by the end of my MFA, i really thought i was pulling my punches.

and let me share the results of this sex/money content divide – i’ve sent five stories out for publication. the two that haven’t picked up are the ones about money. the three that have been picked up are about sex. in one, a middle-aged woman buys her first dildo. that one won an award. in another, a 22 year old woman pursues her middle-aged boss. that one got nominated for a PEN. and in my most recent publication, an asexual masochist falls in love with his professional sadist. (update: that one got nominated for a pushcart!)

what i’m saying is, sex and stories about it are important. i’ve since separated my thesis collection into two – zucchini, which is about (a)sexual exploration told through realism/absurdism (and a hudson prize finalist!), and dotted lines, which is a collection of fabulist stories about commodification and regulation. will they ever be published? probably not. will they ever even be finished? who knows! i’m a novelist, not a short storyist.

the resolution to your problem isn’t in how to avoid porn. rather you should ask, why do you write porn in the first place? and that answer is most likely: it’s the easiest conflict to write, and it exposes the characters’ true colors and intentions most easily. it’s a tool to uncover the story you are trying to tell. when you write two characters banging it out, you are resolving their conflict of desire in a tangible way. moreover, it’s an extremely high stake. when characters have sex, they’re at their most vulnerable, their most exposed. they’re literally laid bare for you, the writer, to see. if you think about the highest possible stakes in a story, it boils down to creation and destruction, sex and death. writing about death is a fucking bummer, so you’re left with sex to figure out who your characters really are.

with porn, so many of your decisions – like what and why, you know, conflict and motive – are made for you, and you can focus on the important stuff, like pacing and voice and character. i firmly believe that when you begin any major project, you can’t make all your decisions at once. you can only make a few at a time, draft over draft, until eventually you’ve created an entire world. if all character A wants is to bang character B, you can get him across that distance without figuring out the make and model of the car he drives, or how often he calls his grandmother. those are decisions that can be made later, after your characters boink.

i have accepted that nearly everything i write will have what i call a “prime draft” in polite company but which is actually a porn draft. this isn’t even a first draft, it’s the 0th draft, where anything goes, and my id can run wild. the entire purpose of the porn draft can be frivolous nonsense with no depth or complexity. completely pressure-free and all for funsies. but i have to tell the story the fun way, the story i want to tell, to figure out what the story even is, what work it’s doing, and what i maybe want it to become later. in the porn draft, i’m allowing myself to focus on certain decisions, and sacrifice others for future drafts.

when i sit down and think of a novel i want to write, and that novel is Real and Important and tackling Difficult Topics, my boner flags. that’s not fun. i’m not inspired by seriousness or profound meaning. i may have all these important things i want to say in my writing, but in terms of the actual act, i mostly want to entertain and engage myself. and call me shallow, but the fastest way to do that is by giving me a hot character who is pining over another hot character, and they fuck a lot.

once i’ve written the porn draft, i can go through and uncover the ~literary work i’m trying to do and the messages i’m trying to convey. usually i’ve figured out the major beats of the story, the voice, setting, motivations, etc. – all things that are hard for me to figure out on the front end – and i rework it into something more palatable for major audiences, that actually is Real and Important and tackling Difficult Topics.

the thing is, often the work i’m trying to do is about sex and sexual exploration, identity and its discovery, so usually i can’t take out all the porn. but i can make sure each scene is focused not on the pleasure or arousal i intended in the porn draft, but what i mean to uncover in my characters and plot by having it occur. that’s the difference between literary fiction and erotica – in erotica, you’re trying to arouse your audience’s body; in literature, you’re trying to arouse their heart :’)

sex is allowed to and should exist in literature. some of my favorite literary works have tons of sex in them. it is not something to be shied away from or self-censored. if you want to write about sex, you should. but let the story tell you its underlying intentions, and in future drafts, pull those discoveries to the forefront of the story.

i wrote training wheels solely for the detention scene in chapter 8. everything that happened up to that point was leading to that scene that i desperately wanted to write. and now, in the original fiction version, it doesn’t exist. it was scaffolding, an illusion i was chasing to lower the pressure on myself and convince myself i didn’t have to take anything seriously. but once the story was built and i saw what it really was, i could remove that scaffolding because the piece stands stronger without it. now, on the fourth draft, it’s no longer the story i originally intended it to be. it’s its own beast. there’s still a ton of sex in it, but it’s more subtle now, less over the top and gratuitous. it still ends in overt bdsm. i didn’t sacrifice any of that, because that was the work of the story. what i did sacrifice was descriptions of enormous throbbing cocks and characters coming 5 times in a row.

same goes for some of my km prompts like coping skills and shut up and kill me – stories that have way too much sex in them right now but have literary merit yet to be uncovered. coping skills might currently be a noncon pissplay fic, but it’s also a world in which character A has given blanket consent to character B, and B takes advantage of it, and beneath all that, they still somehow love each other. it’s an interesting space to explore, ripe for a story in which maybe nobody pees on anybody else, or maybe they do and it’s described in a different way. whatever might happen in that space, i needed the porn draft to even see those characters in that world with that conflict. and now i have it, and i can build something else with it.  

↑ return to navigation ↑

twists versus reveals

27 JUN 2019

Can you have a twist that's not emotionally manipulative to the reader? What's the difference between a "it was x all along" that makes you, the reader, feel manipulated vs one that like reminds you that you can still be surprised. Alternatively, is it possible to write a linear (no frame sorry) fic about Gaslighting entirely from the victim's POV without doing the power-trip thing to your readers? Is it just tagging?

i prefer to think of “twists” as “reveals.” i think a twist implies a major change in the story, but a reveal is just that – an illuminated truth previously in the dark. a good reveal will make a reader go “oh shit i can’t believe i didn’t think of that!” a bad twist will make a reader go, “what the fuck? where did that come from?”

think of a reveal like a magic trick. a magician doesn’t work in real magic, but the illusion of magic. a story with a reveal poses an illusion for a certain amount of time, until the truth of the illusion is revealed. and once the truth is revealed, the reader can now look back on the story with new eyes. if you’re being manipulative or writing without integrity, the twist will be more like an abrupt change – a character gets into a car crash, somebody has a heart attack. something no one can see coming, and so the twist is shallow and exists for dramatic effect. it’s absolutely real that people do have heart attacks and get into car accidents, but in terms of narrative meat, a twist like that is a weak device.

for your second question, yes, you can write a gaslighting story from the pov of the victim, and i think you’ve already skirted the potential for power tripping because you know what gaslighting is at all, and well enough to write a story about it. one of my writing mentors told me that characters may not be aware of the greater context of their actions, but the story needs to be aware of it, and provide evidence that it knows what it’s doing. and this isn’t something i think you need to even try – you’re already aware, so the text is as well.

that said, you should definitely also tag it.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on the structure of tragedies

27 JUN 2019

Hi betts! I've been reading through the stuff you posted about plot/story structure and I have a question. The concept of a cycle (leave the familiar--go through unfamiliar--return to familiar) seems to underlie all of them. How does this work in tragedies where the character doesn't get to return to the familiar in any literal sense? i.e. traveler who never makes it home. Especially in stories that end with the main character's death (thereby eliminating the chance for a return to status quo)? Is the cyclical structure still present in those types of stories, just less literal (instead of physical places or circumstance, psychological ones)? Or is this an instance where trying to adhere to this structure gets in the way of the story you’re trying to tell? I guess more generally thoughts on tragic/unhappy endings?

great question!

before i answer, i’d like to caveat that this explanation is an oversimplification of structure and moreover, extremely prescriptive. whatever you’re writing doesn’t need to follow these conventions, and if you have stories already written that are nothing like this, they’re not bad or wrong.

i use traditional story structure to help me set the pace, center the conflict, and figure out when to raise and lower the stakes, but if it doesn’t suit the story, i scrap it. the most important thing is figuring out what’s best for your story, not how the story best fits into an existing structure. it’s an optional guideline, not a rule.

that said, i’ve been thinking a lot about tragedies lately – what’s the structural difference between hamlet and game of thrones? why does one succeed but the other fail? how do i get so much catharsis from song of achilles and so little from avengers: endgame?

i firmly believe that if you’re reading a tragedy, you should know it’s a tragedy. i think the deepest cathartic effect on readers happens when they understand that doom is coming, and ready themselves for it. having a protagonist fight for pages upon pages, scenes upon scenes, to root for them endlessly, only to have them fail – what’s the fucking point? it’s writing without integrity. it’s an authorial power trip. it’s saying “i have the power to make you feel things, and i’m going to hurt you.”

a bad tragedy is one that leaves you feeling empty and hurt, maybe angry. a good tragedy is one that fills you with sadness, the good kind of sadness, the reason we watch or read tragedies at all. sometimes it feels good to be sad, to let stories affect us deeply, to run us through an emotional gamut where day to day life can often leave us complacent.

but as a writer, how do you know if you’re pulling a game of thrones? how do you know if you’re writing a fulfilling tragedy or an empty one?

to answer, i’ve made a (beautiful!!) graph not unlike kurt vonnegut’s shape of a story.

image

before i explain the graph, i’m going to do a quick run-down of a three-act play, which is the general structure of all films and classic novels.

what differentiates a comedy from a tragedy is the way action rises and falls. if you don’t read any other part of my overwrought explanation, read this: the midpoint of a story will likely parallel its ending. if the dead center of a story is sad, the resolution will be sad, and vice versa.

comedy structure (happy ending)

romances often have happy endings. if you’re writing a romance, the rising and falling action will match the closeness and distance of your two protagonists. the midway point is their initial coming-together, and the beginning of act iii will involve angst.

in an adventure story, the rising and falling action will involve the closeness and distance from the antagonist. the midpoint will be a face-off with something that will lead your protagonist to the big bad. your climax will be a failure at the antagonist’s hand, and your resolution will be the final success.

tragedy structure (sad ending)

there is a difference between a tragic hero and a redeemed protagonist. a tragic hero is one who is blind to his hubris and eventually falls prey to it. a redeemed protagonist is one who is made aware of their hubris, works to counteract it, and sacrifices themselves in a final act of redemption.

i cannot emphasize enough: this is a gross oversimplification, and your story does not have to adhere to this in order to be good. likely you will have several protagonists all on different paths and a story much more complicated than this, but generally speaking, this the major difference between happy and sad endings: the middle point mirrors the end point. the rising and falling action is opposed. a tragic protagonist has hubris. a comedic protagonist has hope.

↑ return to navigation ↑

my organizational system

30 JUN 2019

''an amazing daily organizational method that has been helping me keep my shit together and has imminently lowered my stress levels.'' can u share? :o

god i feel like this is going to seem so obvious and stupid to some people, but it was revelatory to me.

so my problem is that i dissociate a lot and forget things seconds after i think them, which means my daily reality looks like swiss cheese, or that last episode of futurama where the universe resets. and it’s great for writing! because when i’m spaced out i’m usually maladaptively daydreaming and get a lot of mental writing done. but it’s awful for things like renewing my license plates and writing letters of recommendation for my students and generally living life. the sad thing is, i wasn’t always like this. up until 2014 or so i was very organized without even trying, and had no social anxiety over things like phone calls or making appointments and stuff. i mean i bought a house when i was 22. even through my first year of grad school, i stayed mostly on top of things. like i could just remember all the stuff i had to do, and i did it. but then i had a psychotic break and i think it permanently fucked with my executive function abilities.

okay so back to the system. at the job i just quit, they didn’t do timesheets because the job was salaried. instead, they kept shared calendars. i’ve never gotten into the habit of electronic calendars. i’ve always kept a physical calendar, until my executive function abilities went to hell, and then i stopped, and i haven’t been able to pick up the habit again since, in part because i don’t carry a purse so i never have it on me, and also because i don’t have enough engagements to warrant the use of a calendar. i’d always used calendars to write down events and obligations.

but my job used it for everything. every minute of every day had to be filled in with something, even if it was “answering emails.” so this worked twofold: you would plan out what you thought your week would look like, and then at the end of each day, modify the day to reflect what you’d really done.

i’m a slut for google suite, like my entire life exists in docs, so implementing gcal into my personal life was pretty easy. they have all these goal setting options now, and integration with tasks (which i live by) and google fit. and i’ve also learned about me that i will stick with anything if it has a color coding system. i’ve kept a personal timesheet for over a year because of color coding.

image

(this is what my toggl looks like this week)

gcal also has colors, so i could implement a system to reflect how i’ve been using toggl for the past year.

image

every day, i have a half hour set aside in the evenings to plan the next day, so all i have to do when i wake up the next day is follow the schedule i made for myself. then i modify it as the day goes on and things change. sometimes i spend more time answering asks than i intend, or i need to take a nap or something, and so a colored event will turn into a grey event that says “nap” or “dicked around on the internet” or something. sometimes i choose to write instead of read, or i end up exercising an hour later than i initially scheduled.

so i’m not like a productivity machine or anything, but carving out time to exercise and read and go to the grocery store and reply to emails has made the stress of those things a lot less. i know i have to go to the store, but i also know i’ve scheduled two hours for it on monday afternoon, so i don’t have to feel guilty being on tumblr right now, because all my schedule says is “coffee.” instead of “i should be doing this, this, and this instead of this” i just put that stuff on a task list i have called “executive function” and i know to put it on my calendar for the following day.

sorry if this is like painfully obvious to more organized people, but i just think it’s neat.jpg.

one day i’ll share my project tracking boards and drafting process.

↑ return to navigation ↑

a quick rundown of my drafting process

21 AUG 2019

hey betts! can you give us any insight into your new drafting process (the one you mentioned on Twitter?) those results have me green with envy

sure! this is going to be a fairly quick run-down because i have to start planning my classes here soon.

(anon is referring to this tweet)

recommended reading

tools

pre-writing

so first you need an idea. whenever i have an idea, even if there’s 0 chance i’ll end up writing it, i add it to my airtable, plus any notes or details i come up with. i also copy and paste any text convos i have about the fic, like if i headcanon something with a friend. (i used trello for this until recently; it works just fine and is a bit easier to use. airtable also has a kanban function though, along with other formats, so it’s a bit more flexible)

airtable is a project management spreadsheet software. i’m sure there are others out there, but i started fiddling with this one and haven’t looked back. it takes a little while to figure out, and you might have to google some things you want it to do that aren’t terribly intuitive.

my fanfic table, filtered by ideas, looks like this:

image

(you may have to expand to look at it, also note that the pretty colors are a Pro feature of the app and i’m still on my trial)

the idea here is to have space to store my ideas. let’s say i hang out with a friend and we started talking about fic, and i bring up i have an idea for a endgame coda but i’m not really sure where to take it, so we start headcanoning back and forth, and now i have a few scene ideas. i made my endgame coda card already right after i saw the movie, so all i have to do is open the app and jot down the main points of my headcanoning. now when i go home and start working on it, i can easily pull up our brainstorming session.

narrative outlining

i have never been an outliner or a planner. i’ve always been a pantser. i have a premise and i run with it, and that worked for me for a long time. pantsing has a lot of benefits: your story always surprises you! you can get really immersed! it’s certainly the more whimsical writing process.

but what i found was that i would often write myself into a corner, or lose steam once i realized what should have been a 10k fic was actually going to be 80k and i didn’t like the story enough to sit with it for 80k. i also spent a long time thinking about future scenes and writing them down but losing them later, or forgetting about them.

so i started doing narrative outlines, which are just me going “and then THIS happens” repeatedly and sometimes inputting “and something causes this other thing” until eventually i have the whole story written out. the goal of the narrative outline is pacing. all you have to do is get the major beats down. it doesn’t have to be good. no one is going to see it (unless you want them to).

ideally my paragraphs will be all around the same size. those are going to become my chapters. if a paragraph is significantly shorter than another, it’s likely that i don’t have that beat fleshed out yet. i call chapters “beats” because to me, each one should have its own arc, and end at a high or low point in the story.

in my fanfic airtable, i have a table for chapters. all chapters of all multi-chap wips go here, and i can filter out ones that are complete later.

image

the beauty of the chapters table is that it can connect to your ideas/wip table and vice versa so everything is kept together. i had 7 paragraphs in my narrative outline so i made 7 rows.

notice i also gave myself a due date. i don’t really like due dates, but i’m trying them on for now and seeing how it goes.

i copy and paste the chapter paragraph as i go into the “summary” field. then, as scene or line ideas come to me, i toss them in the “scenes/lines” field. I was in a car for 8 hours and coming up with scenes all over the place, and i needed somewhere to put them. if i didn’t know where they went, i put them in my idea table instead, and filed them later.

you’re still idea-ing, you’re still outlining, but now it’s time to write.

gauge

i make a folder for the fic and open a doc and label it ch1. then i copy and paste the narrative outline paragraph into the doc and separate it out by scene with an asterisk between each one.

here’s where the timesheet and calendar come in. i have a reminder on my calendar to schedule the following day, and on that schedule i put my writing time. when it’s time to write, i start the toggl clock. at the end of each week, i put in my time in my personal timesheet.

the first chapter or 10% of anything i’m writing tends to take longer than the rest, because i need to get into the story, and choose the voice and tense and tone and things like that. so i take however long i take to make what i call a gauge. in knitting, a gauge is the thing that determines the size of the piece. if you’re knitting a sweater, you knit a little square to make sure the sweater comes out the size you need it to be.

so i write the gauge and it takes however long it takes. sometimes i rewrite it a few times, test out POVs and tenses and description and whatever else. what i like best, what seems the most sustainable, is what i choose. i wrote 3 chapters of a novel in present tense and a childish tone before i decided it needed to be first person reflective and i rewrote the whole thing.

don’t get frustrated with yourself if your gauge doesn’t work. that’s what the gauge is for. you’ll know you’ve chosen the right voice if, by the end of your gauge, you’re really eager to keep writing.

down draft & punch list

so now you’ve got a pretty gauge to follow, and the rest is going to be an absolute mess. the down draft is exactly what it sounds like – you get the idea down. i personally believe you need to tell the story to yourself a few times in order to get good at telling the story, or to know what the story is. you’ve told yourself the story once in outline form, and now you’re just breaking out the scenes a little bit more.

the key to the down draft is not to self-edit. i’m not talking about going back and tweaking typos and shit, that’s fine, whatever. i mean doubting yourself structurally. like, oh shit, you forgot to mention that they took off their clothes and now they’re naked.

here’s where the punch list comes in, which is yet another table. (i’ve also used google tasks for this, because it pops up in a side window. either works!) a punch list is a to do list. instead of fixing things, you put the thing on your punch list and save it for the next draft. a down draft is all about speed and figuring out where all the pieces go. revising during the down draft only slows you down.

the punch list is my solution to the contrived advice “you can fix it later!” to which i always say, “BUT I WON’T REMEMBER TO FIX IT LATER I HAVE TO FIX IT NOW.” as soon as you think of something to fix, put it on the table. it may seem like it’s faster to fix things as you go. it is not. i promise.

image

this is all my punch list notes for all fics, which i then connect to my other tables/filter as needed. put everything in your punch list. it’s better to make a punch list item that you don’t end up implementing than forget an important revision note. if you end up putting the project down for a while, you’ll want to know what you’d intended.

up draft

in the up draft, you clean up the down draft. here, i take each document in a new window, put it on the right half of the screen, and open a new document to put on the left.

image

then i rewrite the whole fucking thing. i pull up my punch list and fix all the things as i go, to the best of my ability. here’s where the writing gets pretty and fleshed out. but still, it doesn’t need to be perfect. you have more revisions to go. it’s important to remember during this entire process that everything can be changed. nothing is permanent. you’re not writing in stone. there’s no cost to words or documents, so you can revise as much as you want.

it’s also worth noting that the longer your project, the more sectioned out your story will be. sometimes you’ll have a chapter on a down draft and another chapter on an up draft. sometimes you might down draft out of order just to make sure you get your ideas down when they occur. whatever works for you. the idea is that you’re constantly building spaces in which to put your stuff that can be easily found and implemented. the creative process is messy, so you need to make clean spaces to put the mess in.

while you’re up-drafting, you’re still idea-ing and outlining and down-drafting and punch-listing. maybe you don’t have the answer to a problem yet, but you might later. decision fatigue in the creative process is real. this process is designed to mitigate decision fatigue. there are only ever so many decisions to make at once when you expand out your process like this one.

and sometimes, sadly, the solution to a problem never happen. that’s okay. what you write might be flawed. in fact it should be flawed. flaws are what make things beautiful. all you can do is the best you can do, and if it’s not good enough for your tastes, you can learn from your mistakes and try again.

beta

sometimes i have a beta and sometimes i don’t, depending on how confident i am about the work. when i have a beta, this is the stage i send them my stuff. sometimes i tell them specific things i’m looking for, like just line edits, or cheerleading, or whatever else. sometimes i have questions about whether or not something is working. i tell them what date i intend to post and when i would like edits to be done by, and if they don’t get around to it, that’s okay. i can just hustle a little harder in the next revision.

dental draft

here’s where, per anne lamott, you check every tooth. i implement my remaining punch list items and beta feedback, fix pacing issues, typos, unclear sentences, etc. sometimes i do the side-by-side window thing for chapters that are particularly messy, and sometimes i just fix the existing doc. by now your story should be looking pretty good, or the best you can get it.

final read-through :) or additional revisions :(

for fic, this is the point where i hit it and hope. i copy and paste the chapter/fic into an ao3 shell with the tags and summary i’ve kept in my airtable, and do a final readthrough. i don’t do it in the original doc because seeing it in a new font and format usually makes me notice things i’d missed before.

for ofic, here’s where you might need more feedback and more revising if your piece isn’t working yet, or if you’ve submitted it a couple dozen places and haven’t had it accepted. while this process is thorough, sometimes pieces still aren’t working for whatever reason. don’t throw anything away, though. keep it, file it, log it in your airtable, and maybe one day while you’re driving an idea will pop into your head and you’ll be able to come back to it.

this was a really really quick run-down of an extremely long and complicated process, but it works for me! i probably wouldn’t have been able to do this even a year ago. it’s taken me a long time to cultivate this kind of discipline, and i’m still a work in progress. so if it’s too much or too structured for you, that’s fine. maybe you can take one or two things for yourself and try them out.

↑ return to navigation ↑

resources for plot

2 APR 2019

Hello. Apologies for the vague ask, but are there any resources—books, links, whatever—you’d recommend for learning how to plot? I can write vignettes and craft reasonably “pretty” sentences, but I’m flying blind when it comes to structure/how to build a longer piece, whether we’re talking novella or novel-length. ANY advice you have would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for all you do. You make a difference with your words and your time.

lucky for you, i have a plot tag on pinboard:

i think the best advice i can give on plot is that it doesn’t exist. no one cares about plot. no one. everyone cares about character. so you make a character, and you make them want something, and you create a reason they can’t have the thing they want. that’s a basic conflict.

 

conflict is establishing a status quo, and something comes along and upends that status quo. here’s an example i stole from somewhere:

but we can add one word and create conflict:

i hope this helps a little. i taught myself plot with adapting shakespeare stories, which was like a really complicated way of doing something very simple but the end result was effective.

my laptop died but i have MORE:

craft books i really enjoy:

i know i wrote a few articles on conflict and plot and organizing a story but they’re buried somewhere in my writing advice tag. if i find them i’ll reblog them.

ALSO as fancy as all of this is, i am going to tell you my secret to plotting everything i’ve basically ever written in the past two years:

  1. write the inciting incident
  2. stop abruptly
  3. go, “well shit wtf happens next”
  4. get out a piece of paper and label it THINGS THAT HAVE TO HAPPEN
  5. write a list of scene ideas completely out of order
  6. make a second list called THINGS THAT HAVE TO HAPPEN, IN ORDER
  7. put the items on the first list onto the second list, but in order
  8. it doesn’t have to be the whole story, just as much as you have
  9. continue adding to the first list and reorganizing the second as ideas come to you

here is an example from albus potter and the elixir of erised:

image

image

hope this helps a bit more. i’m gonna go look for the other stuff i’ve written about plot.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on writing bad fanfic

26 MAY 2019

I want to write reallllyyy bad, but I have no idea how not to make it seem like a bad fanfic

i don’t know why you wouldn’t want to write bad fanfic. that’s the point of it – it’s allowed to be bad. readers expect a certain level of badness. tongues battling for dominance, hot characters smirking at each other every other line, melodramatic love confessions. that’s why we’re here. to be bad, to be the kind of writers everyone tells us we’re not allowed to be, and own it.

i went into my first fic thinking, “i want this to be terrible. i want it to be the worst thing i’ve ever read.” it was so, so liberating. “this is bad!” my magna cum laude self kept screaming. “it’s supposed to be!!” my fanfic goblin self replied. i found “rules” of writing i was supposed to follow and i would break them solely to be worse than i already was. i wanted to take everything i knew of beauty and shatter it to find the mean ugly words underneath.

 

i wrote so badly for so long that i got really good at writing badly. and it turns out, when you’re good at writing badly, no one can tell the difference.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on ao3 collections

18 MAY 2019

Hey Betts, someone asked me to have my work be part of their collection in ao3? Since you have been in ao3 for a while, I thought it would be okay to ask you what that means?

sure! great question. collections are an under-utilized feature of ao3, which is why i think they’re kind of a mysterious beast.

ao3 is a unique archival platform, in that the archive work is done by users and a team of moderators, rather than administrators who either archive the work themselves (which would be a nightmare) or restricting the archiving options (like if we only had a few hundred tags to choose from), which is to say, when you post a fic to ao3, you tag it yourself.

this has a lot of upsides (obvs, since the archive is so successful and effective), but one of the downsides is that a content creator may suck at archiving their fic. most writers abide by fanfic etiquette, but some don’t, and the ToS is pretty hands-off in that regard (the ToS say you need an archive warning, basically, and that warning needs to be accurate if it’s not CNTW. you don’t have to rate it or tag the ship or anything else. you’re even allowed to tag the wrong ship and wrong fandom, and the abuse team won’t take it down or fix your tags).

so if the writer doesn’t properly tag the fic, and the abuse team/tag wranglers won’t properly archive fic based on the content (but they will wrangle your tags and uphold the ToS), that leaves readers.

ao3 built in features so that users could archive fic properly, so it can be found more easily, namely via collections and bookmarks, both of which are woefully undervalued as resources, and i wish, along with a few other features, they were more prevalent, because i think they’re brilliant.

collections have multiple functions. first, part of the work of the OTW is to import fics from other, older archives to the ao3. collections allow a central hub for those archives. one example is the Master Apprentice collection, which was an old archive for Obi-Wan Kenobi/Qui-Gon Jinn fics. this is also why you sometimes see fics dated earlier than 2008, when the archive was built.

another use of collections is to host prompt-fill memes (like kinkmemes), big bangs, or gift exchanges (like yuletide). this way, all the fics written for a certain event are located in a central space, and therefore easier to browse and find what you’re looking to read.

finally, getting to your question, a user can make their own collection and put fics into it so that other readers can find fics of a certain type more easily, especially if those fics are notoriously poorly tagged (codas) and/or for whatever reason the archive’s structure obscures the ability to find them. take, for example, Jaime/Cersei fics. in most fics, if J/C is tagged, it’s a secondary or background pairing, and there’s no way to separate “this fic’s primary pairing is J/C” from “this fic has J/C in it.” so a user can create a collection of primary-pairing J/C fics so that other shippers have easier access to them, instead of scrolling through hundreds or even thousands of fics in which J/C is used as a warning tag rather than a content tag.

other popular collection themes are good smut, fix-its and codas (which are poorly tagged because many writers don’t look up the episode tagging style conventions, which is “Episode: sXX eXX Episode Title”), and fic subgenres like recovery bucky fics.

the way the archive manages this feature is by allowing readers to automatically place fics in collections, and the author can remove their fic from the collection by going back in and editing the fic. so if, for whatever reason, you do NOT want your 30k fluff fest fic in a collection of “my favorite porn,” you can click Edit and remove the collection from the list. if you choose to keep your fic in the collection, the collection will be listed on the fic, so readers can find other, similar fics.

the only collection i’ve ever seen that i did not want my fic to be part of was one whose description used grossly pretentious rhetoric that seemed completely antithetical to the spirit of fic. also, someone “accidentally” added one of my fics to the Anonymous collection, which as you might know, anonymizes the fic entirely.

in the same vein as collections (i know you didn’t ask, but at this point i’m just begging people to use these features), users can “fix” poorly or under-tagged fics via bookmark. let’s say you’ve read a fic that’s 100k+ and has a billion kinks in it, and the author chose not to tag every single kink (which, fair). you, the reader, are maybe invested in archiving clothes sharing fics. you can bookmark the fic and tag it “clothes sharing” and a user can then search bookmark tags to find this specific subgenre of fic that isn’t often tagged because of how ubiquitous it is, or sometimes not even seen as a kink or trope.

you might be thinking, but why would i search bookmark tags? nobody uses bookmark tags. BUT LET ME TELL YOU, if people did bookmark more thoroughly, like back in ye olden days when we used del.icio.us, the archive would be that much more functional and efficient.

so please, fic readers, i know you are constantly begged for comments and reblogs and all that, but if you have time or energy, or find interacting with authors anxiety inducing and want to help out in some other way, you can do other things to help out and preserve our genre. make collections. bookmark thoroughly. use the amazing features so lovingly offered to us.

(one thing i didn’t mention is that i wish users would fill out their profiles more thoroughly, because author history preservation is just as important as fic preservation, but that’s maybe a rant for another time.)

↑ return to navigation ↑

on preserving fan creator biographical data

18 MAY 2019

image

i wrote earlier on utilizing collections and bookmarks to boost the archival power of ao3, and in that post mentioned how i wish authors would fill out their bios so we can preserve fanauthor information as well as we preserve the fics themselves. so, here is my rant about WHY WE ARE SO IMPORTANT.

for my masters thesis i wrote about the layered pseudonymity of fanfiction authors, and after doing a ton of research, i find myself still thinking of the pseudonymous/anonymous divide as it pertains to fic. we have authors we consider “famous” and ones whose followings eclipse that of traditionally published authors, but unlike traditionally published authors, we don’t put a handy bio at the end of our fics. in fact, if you want to find out about the author, you have to hope they’ve linked somewhere to their tumblr or twitter or dreamwidth, or they have consistent pseuds across platforms. and from there, you have to hope they have an ‘about me.’ but most, myself included, don’t.

unlike traditional publication – where amazon and goodreads and even the back of the book contains biographical info – and even unlike the rest of fandom archival etiquette – which, despite having virtually no committed rules still maintains its organizational structure – there is no standard etiquette on fanauthor biographical data.

i speculate the reasons fanauthors are hesitant to write their own biographies is very complicated:

  1. there is no “ask” for it or existing standard. when i publish stories under my real name, i’m required to provide my bio, which contains my accomplishments, where i got my degree, where else i’m published, and my website. all literary author bios follow this formula, so they’re pretty easy to write. other than this post, i have never seen a request for fanauthor bios. so without an editor demanding it, and without a standard formula or platform to draw from, a total lack of information becomes the norm, and almost any info other than the standard “name. age. pronouns. ao3 name. list of fandoms and/or pithy one-liner” of tumblr or occasional ask game is seen as a deviation from the norm. even ask games get a bad rep sometimes, and they’re transitory, a post you see as you’re scrolling through to somewhere else, not static, like a dedicated profile page.
  2. pseudonymity veers too close to anonymity. an anonymous author cannot have a biography. a pseudonymous author can, but biographies may be seen as defeating the purpose of writing under a pseudonym, or multiple pseuds. a sock account is a sock for a reason – you don’t want it associated with your main. moreover, i believe fandom creates an environment in which to acknowledge your accomplishments and promote your own content is seen as narcissistic. fanfiction can sometimes be seen as a genre of selflessness, donating time and energy into a community centered around a shared canon, not personal gain. to acknowledge the self publicly is to invite attention, and attention is contradictory to anonymity.
  3. shame and humility. the more information you have on the internet, the easier you are to find. very few fanauthors use their real names, or feel comfortable connecting their fan identity to their real one. i hear pretty constantly how often fanauthors hide their fannishness from their coworkers and loved ones, how only the people closest to them know they write/read fanfic. moreover, you might think “my most popular fic only has 10 kudos and 1 comment, nobody wants to know about me” (which is so not true, but i’ll get to that in a minute).

fandom is constantly changing. with a central archive for fanfiction in place, it’s easier now to be in multiple fandoms at once than it ever has been. if you want to read all sugar daddy fics, there’s a tag for that, and if you’re not picky about canon, you have an entire buffet of fandoms to choose from. communities are growing and shifting and changing shape. i move fandoms, and i keep my friends and readers from previous fandoms. i get dragged to new fandoms frequently. my interests and inspirations change, but i don’t erase my history or identity every time i move, i only add to it. i am always betts whether i’m in star wars or the 100 or game of thrones. but if you only read my fic, you don’t know the stories behind it. many people don’t know i entered fandom in the brony convention community in 2012, or that i was sadrobots before i was betty days before i was betts, or how fandom changed my life and led me through a path of personal trauma recovery, or that i co-founded wayward daughters, or ran the fanauthor workshop, or all these other things about fanfic that is not fanfic itself.

if you are a fan creator, your fannish personal narrative matters. telling your story helps preserve the metatextual history of our genre.

i think constantly about what our genre will look like in 30 or 50 years, if it will be like other genres that began as subversions of the mainstream: comic books, beat literature, science fiction. genres that, at the time involved groups of friends creating stories for each other, bouncing ideas off of one another, experimenting with or distorting other genres, and which became, over time, well-regarded forms with rich histories.

maybe one day, like the MCU, we’ll have a dedicated production company that churns out adaptations of longform coffee shop aus written between 2009 and 2015. maybe “BNFs” will be read in high school literature curriculums. maybe our work will end up on the real or virtual shelves of our great grandchildren. and if that happens, if fanfic goes entirely mainstream, how will fanfic authorship be perceived? how will fanpeople in 2080, if humanity is still around by then, interact with the lexicon we’ve created and preserved? what would you do if you found out Jane Austen wrote under five different sock accounts across three platforms over the span of twenty years? how would you, a fan of Pride & Prejudice, even begin to find all of her work?

we have so many social constraints pushing against us. there’s purity culture, which encourages further division of identity – fanauthors may write fluff on their main and have various sock accounts for underage/noncon fics. if you’re a scarecrow, you’re much harder for a mob to attack. there’s misogyny, which dictates women/queer ppl shouldn’t be writing about or indulging in or exploring their sexuality at all. there’s intellectual property and a history of DMCAs, which, although kept at bay by the OTW, may still have influence on the “illegal” mentality of our work. with social armies against us, it’s easier to exist in the shadows, on the fringe. we change URLs based on our moving interests, and split our identities a million different ways, and keep sarcastic “me” tags full of self-deprecating text posts. we are difficult beasts to catch, because we have not been allowed to exist.

i spent a lot of time today googling the word for “pseudonymous biography” and came up empty-handed (if someone knows of an existing word, pls let me know. “pseudography” is apparently a fancy word for a typo; “pseudobiography” is a fake biography), so for lack of anything better, i’ve come up with the term “socknography” because 1) it’s funny and doesn’t sound intimidating, and 2) it encapsulates the sensitive and complicated way fanauthor identifying conventions work. and also i think “fanauthor biography,” “bibliography,” and “profile” just doesn’t cut it for the actual work of these pieces. they don’t necessarily include IRL biographical data, they include more historical/community context than a bibliography, and the words “profile” and “about me” don’t really inspire interaction, or acknowledge the archival importance of this work.

astolat’s fanlore page is my go-to example. astolat writes under multiple pseuds and has major influence in the history of fandom. she’s also a traditionally published author, but you notice, her ofic novels are not mentioned, nor any other real-life identifying information. fanlore has a really good policy on this in place, for those concerned about doxxing.

(moreover, i am not suggesting you centralize your socks. they’re socks for a reason. but most everyone has a main, and that main identity has a story.)

there are 2 existing spaces to preserve socknographies.

  1. fanlore, a wiki owned by the OTW, you can make an account and create a user page (which is different than a “person” page) using a user profile template
  2. ao3′s “profile” page, which is a big blank box in which anything goes

(i’m not including tumblr on this list because i don’t think it’s a stable platform.)

fanlore’s template is straight to the point and minimal, which doesn’t really invite narrative the same way a literary bio would. ao3′s big blank box leaves us with the question – wtf do i say about myself? how do i say it? how much is too much? and because of that, most profiles are either blank or only include a policy on translations/podfic/fanart, and maybe links to tumblr and twitter. but let me tell you, if i have read your fic and taken the time to move over to your profile, you better believe i am a fan. and as a fan, i want to Know Things.

here are the things i want to know, or a potential template:

  1. introduction (name/alias, age, location, pronouns, occupation)
  2. accomplishments (degrees, personal history)
  3. fan history (fandoms you’ve been in, timeline as a fan, how you were introduced to fandom/fanfiction, what does fandom mean to you – this is where your fan narrative goes)
  4. fandom participation (popular fics/posts, involvement in fan events/communities, side blogs, interviews, etc. 3 & 4 might be one and the same for you)
  5. spotlight (which of your fics are most important to you/would you like others to read and why? what are the stories behind your favorite fics you’ve written?)
  6. find me elsewhere* (links to tumblr, twitter, insta, etc.)
  7. policies on fanart, fanfic of fic, podfics, and translations

*you cannot link to ko-fi, paypal, patreon, or amazon on ao3/fanlore per the non-commercial terms of service

i’ll be working on filling this out for my own profile as an example, but you can also see how my @fanauthorworkshop participants filled out their fanauthor spotlights, and the information they provided. obviously, you should only share that which you feel comfortable sharing, and as your fandom life changes, your narrative will change too. it’s not much different than updating a CV or resume.

tl;dr the goal is to provide a self-narrative of your fan life/identity for posterity. who are you and why are you a fanperson? why do you create fan content? what are you proud of and what do you want to highlight to others? who are you in this space?

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to control the length of stories

15 MAY 2019

I have a quick writing question for you, if you're in the mood to answer one. how do you control the length of your stories? I keep coming up with plot ideas that I think are good for short stories but then I get 4k in and am still setting up the premise. is there a trick to cutting down your plot so it can be resolved in ~5k words? or is it trial and error? thx!

this is such a mood. did you know training wheels was supposed to be 10k? it capped out at 125k.

personally length is something i really struggle with because it’s also a function of interest. if i start writing anything that i know in advance will be over 10k, i get intimidated and set it aside. so, for me, it’s almost a necessity to disillusion myself into believing “it’s almost done!!” because otherwise i’d never write anything at all.

sometimes you can’t know how long something will be, and if you’re a pantser like me, you have to let stories drag you along until they let you go. it’s part of the joy of writing. but sometimes you’ve got to know how long something will be, or control it to be the length you need it to be, for the sake of your own sanity.

because length is a number, i see it in very mathy terms

length = style x conflict

style is the way in which a piece is written. if you have thick, textured prose, or you’re in a character’s mind who has elaborate internality, it may take 20k just to take a single sip of coffee. flannery o’connor’s “a stroke of good fortune” is a long short story in which all that happens is a woman climbs a set of stairs. james joyce, virginia woolf, henry james, donna tartt – these authors are all known for slow prose styles.

conversely, you can have entire kingdoms rise and fall in the span of a handful of words, if you’re concise enough. if you want to practice brevity, write poetry. practice condensing major themes in lines and phrases and images one after another.

by style i also mean reality. if all of your characters are real, rational people functioning in real, rational worlds, it’s going to take a lot longer to, say, get character A, who is shy and lacks self-confidence, into bed with character B, who has been recently broken-hearted. if your story does not concern itself with reality, then you can speed the process along. maybe B decides A is the love of their life and they live happily ever after. you can do that; it’s your story.

which brings me to conflict.

if you can decide the

ahead of time (which, sometimes you can’t and that’s okay), and you know your writing style and your relationship to reality, then you can figure out how long a work will be in advance. i’ll give you an example.

a couple summers ago, i was having this exact problem. i’d dipped into my summer depression, which meant i wanted to write, needed to write, but i lacked the attention and motivation to finish anything i started, which was more frustrating than not writing anything at all. so i did the opposite of what i normally do – instead of coming up with a story idea and writing it out, i decided very firmly i wanted to write a story under 20 pages. i needed a good story under 20 pages to send in as a writing sample to future programs, to get published in a good mag. because i knew i could make it to good magazines, but my stories were all too long and it’s a big risk for lit mags to take on long stories when they can promote 2 new authors with shorter stories instead.

so i asked myself, “what can i get done in 20 pages?”

and then, naturally, because i’m an asshole, my brain replied, “i can make a woman come.”

SURELY, i thought, surely the goal of a woman in search of an orgasm would not take more than 20 pages.

i was wrong, at first. the first draft was 22 pages, and subsequent drafts got it down to 16. i started the story in a sex shop because i liked the image of a middle-aged woman buying a dildo for the first time because she’d never had an orgasm. then i slowly started building the world around this woman – she had two sons, she was a comic book collector, her husband was mysteriously missing from the present narrative – and unveiled this greater world. that’s where style comes in. my writing style is minimal in exposition but packed in character details and internal narration. my curiosity always gets the best of me in that regard. i need to know everything about my characters, and i learn it by letting them show their lives to me, which is why my stuff always runs long.

many times, my fatal error is that i only come up with an initial scene to start a story, and with only that in mind, things get away from me. but if i hold off on that initial scene and force myself to consider “what is the culminating moment?” or “what ground do i intend to cover?” then i can keep things reasonably short.

here are some additional tips/tricks:

scaffolding

sometimes you have to write it all out first to learn the story yourself, and you can go back and gut it. i call this scaffolding because you have to build all this extra stuff to find the information you need, and then you take it down. this happens because, despite popular belief, we write to think, not as the result of thought. so sometimes you’ve got to write things down to see the truth of them, but it’s not integral for your readers to know. maybe, to you, it’s very important that you know that your main character was once in a devastating car accident, but your reader has no need or want to know that fact. every story has some scaffolding in the first draft. skill in writing involves finding the scaffolding and deleting it without feeling bad.

structure

if your story is ambitious in terms of the ground it needs to cover, you can alter the structure to be more conducive to your length goals. consider vignettes, non-chronological timelines, starting the story later in the narrative, ending it earlier, zooming in/out in your narration. sometimes the shortest works travel the farthest because the narrative style sounds like an oral story, something told over a beer, and the longest works are such because they are so deeply embedded in the mind.

think like a poet

one thing i admire about poets is their ability to understand the placement and purpose of every word in a poem. once, someone defined poetry to me as “a piece of writing in which every single element adds to the meaning.” conversely, prose can be in any font with any margins and spacing and it doesn’t usually impact the story. but with poetry, a poet has to go through every word and figure out its purpose, if it should be there, if there’s a better way to say what they’re trying to say, if it belongs somewhere else. the white space around poems add just as much meaning to a poem as the words themselves. that patience is extremely valuable to apply to prose, the constant question of “does this need to be here? is there a better, more concise way i can say this?”

read authors in your opposite length camp

if you write long, read short. if you write short, read long. as a long-form writer, i am always amazed at the distance some extremely short stories can travel. the first things that come to mind for me are my friend kyle’s “the serial shitter” and barthelme’s “some of us had been threatening our friend colby.” tons of lit mags publish flash fiction now (hobart, linked above, is my favorite), so i highly recommend seeking them out. conversely, if you write short, pick up a novel that resembles a brick. in both, consider the style the work is written in, and how much ground the story covers.

tl;dr length is a process of understanding and controlling your narrative style, and knowing the height of your stakes/conflict before you get started.

↑ return to navigation ↑

Probably need to edit this one

5 MAY 2020

Writing question! 1st person and 3rd-person-from-someone's-POV--what other narrator choices are there? Thoughts on 2nd person? Is there such a thing as cinematic narration--inside no one's head but shown all of the things a movie would show to get a sense of what people are thinking? Basically, what are your thoughts on perspective and narration?

what a great question! i have a whole powerpoint presentation on this!! i will copy and paste/add some info (it’s for a lecture).

First person

Singular

I coughed up a bunch of chicken bones earlier.

Plural

We watch the sad man eat all those chicken bones.

Second person

Second POV is difficult because some of these are not actual second POV; I just didn’t know where else to put them. The way I refer to them here isn’t anything fancy or official, just how I personally refer to them.

True second

You stand on the side of the road, complacent, wondering how many chicken bones you ate.

Imperative

Direct address

I implore you, dear reader, please avoid the chicken bones.

Or

I miss you, Nancy, and your goblinesque gnawing of chicken bones.

Epistolary

Dear Karen, go choke on a chicken bone. Love, Helen

Third person

Limited

She thinks about buying a bucket of chicken.

Omniscient

He stares for a long moment at the fried chicken menu, then flits through his wallet.

Either the narrator has no insights into the minds of characters (cinematic), or all insights into the minds of characters (head-hopping)

This answers one of your questions – yes, you can write in third person without a specific narrator and without being inside the mind of any character, but it is (for me anyway) extremely difficult

Ex: (cinematic) Plainsong by Kent Haruf (novel, not full text)

Ex: (head-hopping) “A Romantic Weekend” by Mary Gaitskill and “The Hunter’s Wife” by Anthony Doerr

Narrator

He buys the chicken! They fall in love! How romantic.

The narrator has its own persona/voice but isn’t a character within the story

Often found in fairy tales, comedies, and frame stories

Ex: A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket (not full text)

Ex: “Tiger Palace” by Kirsty Logan

to my knowledge, this is every possible POV you can have. i’ve provided examples of fiction, but all of these can be considered for poetry and nonfiction also. note that POV is different than tense, form, and style, which are close cousins of POV (although i have provided some examples that toe the line).

how to choose a POV that is right for your piece is another task entirely. my advice is to choose what excites you most, and experiment as often as you can. if you feel overly limited by one POV over another, then go with the one you find more freeing. if you really can’t decide, write one scene in your gut instinct, then rewrite it in a different POV and see which you like better.

all voices are created equal. there is no one voice that is worse than another, only ones that work with the piece you’re writing.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on romanticizing problematic things

20 MAR 2019

Good afternoon! Feel free to not answer this if it doesn't feels appropriate, but I'm trying to write a fanfiction about a boy who wakes up after sleeping with his best friend (also a guy) while he was wasted. But I don't want to romanticize it or make people think I am in fact saying that because they slept together (in a situation where it's also rape) then I am "shipping" them together. Any advice on this please? Thank you for your time!

first i’d like to say that i am deeply saddened we live in a climate where this is even a concern. you should be able to write whatever you want however you want without fear of the notion of “romanticizing” something problematic (a term that i think is, at best, misused, and at worst, not even a real thing), and moreover potential ridicule for these choices. your writing is not only not beholden to moral perfection, it’s not a reflection of you and your beliefs. and lastly, fanfiction is not a how-to guide for correct behavior.

that said, the solution is to write the story that needs to be told, exactly how it needs to be told.

if your story concerns itself with reality and realistic consequences, then it is not something you have to worry about. all you have to do is honor the reality of the situation and the characters you’ve developed. if you exist in the lens of a character who is realistically horrified by sleeping with his best friend while drunk, then that’s what has to happen. if he wakes up and he’s like “oh god finally, what a relief the sexual tension is broken” then that’s what has to happen. drunk sex is not always rape. it’s always dubiously consensual, but it may not always been nonconsensual. (unless in this situation, it is rape, one party preying on the other and taking advantage of them, in which case, then realistic consequences are still your friend.)

for example, you can have a rom com that starts with two people who get drunk and hook up, and one wakes up late for their first day of work only to find the person they hooked up with is their new boss. that’s not romanticizing rape, and the consequences are realistic (although an elevated reality, because rom com) based on the characters and genre you’ve developed. if you’re writing melodrama, then the emotional stakes would be extremely high and have devastating consequences.

it’s not your responsibility as a writer to make ethical decisions for the reader. your only responsibility is to develop a compelling narrative based on the genre and story constraints you’ve offered yourself. you can be afraid of what people will think, or if they’ll misunderstand your intentions, but that’s the thing – stories are meant to be interpreted in multiple ways, and potentially misunderstood. there’s no way to write something to make for absolute certain your hands are morally clean. what readers think of you is not your business.

tl;dr you have your conflict. all you have to do is write what happens next, and ignore everything else.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to manage prompts

9 MAR 2019

hi betts! I'm relatively new to my current fandom but I have a decent number of followers. the other day I decided to open up prompts and got a whopping 23 of them, plus a bunch of headcanon asks about my favorite ships! I am LIVING but also lowkey worried I won't be able to get all these done in a timely fashion (so far i've completed 2.) any advice? (you don't have to advise me you can just celebrate with me if you'd prefer)

aw congrats!! whenever i open up for prompts i usually deeply regret it for similar reasons, and also no matter how many times i say “prompts closed” it takes days for people to stop sending them, and then i feel like an asshole.

my advice is to group together as many prompts as you can, and focus on a handful of your favorite ones. if your followers are like mine, some of the prompts are on the extremes of too vague (”bellarke + sun”), or too specific (”bellamy is a soldier in WWII. clarke is a medic who saves his life. years pass. they meet again in 1955…”), or too weird (”bellamy blake enters the universe of space jam and gets into a kinky love triangle with michael jordan and bugs bunny. bugs is a hit man assigned to kill bellamy for ~nefarious reasons…”) so those are the ones that can be skipped. imo it’s better to spend more time and energy on the ones that inspire you rather than challenge yourself to make something of all of them.

↑ return to navigation ↑

quick editing tips

22 FEB 2019

odd question, but do you have any quick and dirty advice for editing? (context: a friend is self-publishing a fantasy series and i'm the editor, and i feel like i'm doing an OK job, but i want... to do better lmao.) <3

it depends on what level of editing you’re doing and what draft your friend is on, and whether you’re offering major edits or line edits. i don’t know much about self-publishing except that i am extremely wary of it. so take this with a grain of salt.

i think the biggest misconception of editing is that an editor is a reader who goes in with their personal taste and a wealth of information at their disposal. the best editors are the ones who forget everything they know and allow the piece to teach them how to read it. good feedback is often descriptive rather than prescriptive, which is to say, an account of how you read the work and not so much suggestions for revision.

it’s important to be of two minds whenever you’re editing: the writer’s mind, and the ideal reader’s mind. ask yourself, what is the writer’s intention? and, who is the ideal reader of this work and what would they think of it? without picturing an ideal reader, all major edits are just opinions. and sometimes opinions are good, like if you and the writer are more often on the same page than not, but most of the time opinions are annoying and useless. when editing, the best thing you can do for the work is to set down your own ego.

in early drafts, i tend to interrogate the text. most of my feedback consists of questions and reactions as i read, so the writer can see their work through a reader’s eyes and figure out what’s missing. in later drafts, i offer big-picture structural suggestions. and in a final draft, i do line editing.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to write things you’re afraid to write

11 FEB 2019

hey betty! you don't have to answer this, but were you ever afraid to write something and if so, what did you learn from it? how did you write it? how much did audience matter? hope you have a good day :)

sorry it took me a couple days to answer this. i could not in good conscience respond to it when i was actively wimping out on a short story i needed to revise. more on that in a minute.

i’ve never been afraid to write something in terms of topic. there’s no thought my mind can devise that i would be afraid to put to paper. but i am consistently afraid of veering onto the wrong path in a story, and connected to that, i’m afraid of the giant abyss of not knowing how to fix something that isn’t working.

the first fear is pretty easy to face. it just sucks. what happens is, i’m trucking along in a story and i come to two or more diverging paths. generally they are: what i want to have happen, and what should happen. what i want to have happen tends to involve melodrama and smut, and what should happen is practical and concise and therefore more boring to me. for example, i stalled out on Baby for a while because i wrote 1500 words of a scene that had no purpose whatsoever except i wanted it to happen. i had to put it down for a few weeks, face the reality that i had to kill my darling. once i hacked it to bits with a machete, moving forward again was easy.

i usually let myself go down the wrong path as far as i can get until realizing deep down in my heart it is a useless endeavor, then start back at the diverging paths, and go down the right one.

if there is no right path, though, i just have to keep going down the wrong one, knowing i can always fix it later. the more confident you are in your ability to revise, the less fear you have in drafting. which brings me to my second fear: sometimes i do not know how to fix something. i can write an entire story, know there’s something wrong with it, and get a ton of feedback, but still none of it really clicks. often i know exactly what’s wrong, but no idea how to go about resolving the problem. when that happens, i have to set it down for a while until a solution comes to me. it’s an exercise in patience. i currently have 3 short stories that are completed yet broken, that i’ve received ample feedback on, and they’re gathering dust because i just don’t know how to go about fixing them.

audience matters a lot in terms of the wrong and right path. when i’m writing original fiction, for example, i know there are certain things i can’t get away with. i can’t shoehorn BDSM into everything i write. i can’t insert meaningless surprise porn or incest. of course i could do all these things if that’s what the story is about but i tend to compulsively add them as side details for shock value, when they don’t really add to the work at large. when i’m writing fic, i’m more connected to the audience, and the stakes are much lower. worst case scenario with a fic is a low kudos:hits ratio. so with fic, i’m usually on one clear, wide, confident path, and so i have no fears.

i was afraid of the revision i was working on today because it was a completely new experience for me, but now that i’ve faced it, i won’t be scared next time. i got a story published, my third, and this time, unlike the first two, the editor asked for some structural revisions that made me have to sit down with this story i hadn’t looked at in two years and grapple with big picture things like theme and intention, and what i was willing to give up versus what i needed to fight for. i’d never had a professional editor’s feedback before, not for a publication anyway, so i was battling “do whatever she tells you” versus “but it’s *my* story and i know what’s best for it.” she advised me to cut an entire paragraph involving shibari, because the story is not about shibari, but i felt it was important in allowing the main character to open up, so i kept it and explained why in my email to her. jury is out on whether she’ll accept my reasoning.

in the end, i tried most of her suggestions. two of them did not work for me, so i experimented a bit by moving things around, and found what i hope is a good negotiation between our visions for the piece. it took four hours to fix one scene, but i’m happier with the piece now than i was before, and i’m glad it’s found a good home.

if you’re interested in reading more on writing and fear, i highly recommend mary ruefle’s essay “on fear” in which she asserts one of my favorite definitions of being a writer: a writer is someone who sits alone with fear.

12 FEB 2019

evening, betts. I just read On Fear—thanks for recommending it! it's given me a lot to think about. do you have a favorite passage/thing about the piece in general?

i’m very fond of this anecdote:

I asked a doctor about fear. The doctor said, “The only way to overcome fear is to do what you are trained to do. Fear is overcome by procedure. For example, if I don’t successfully insert an emergency trach—a hole in the throat—someone will die from lack of oxygen. So I mechanically do what I have been trained to do. Someone is there, periodically calling out the oxygen saturation—95, 90, 88, 83, 79—and the lower it gets the more of an emergency it becomes. And the funny thing is, I ask for the count. It is part of the procedure, but I work as if I am not listening—procedural concentration is all.”

I asked a pilot about fear. The pilot said, “The only way to overcome fear is to do what you are trained to do. Fear is overcome by procedure. For example, I was flying a test jet alone at thirty thousand feet and there was a leak in my oxygen mask I didn’t know about. I temporarily lost consciousness, and when I came to I was at fifteen thousand feet heading straight for the ground, nose down, completely out of control—and I was still groggy, still fighting for consciousness. Cut the throttle and punch the dive brakes. Cut the throttle and punch the dive brakes. Cut the throttle and punch the dive brakes. Those were the only thoughts I had, and I continued to have them until I leveled out at five thousand feet.” Then the doctor and the pilot, who were in the same room with me, looked at me and said, “So, have you ever had any poetry emergencies?”

and the conclusion:

…I want to say the poet is never afraid because he is unceasingly afraid, and therefore cannot become that which he already is, though of course, Mr. Kierkegaard reminds us, he must; you might say fear is the poet’s procedure, that which he has been trained to concentrate on.

and my favorite definition, that a writer is someone who has “locked themselves alone in a room with fear.”

mary ruefle is one of my absolute favorite writers. i’ve been lucky enough to attend 3 of her lectures/readings and each one has stuck with me. she’s a phenomenal person.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to focus on one project at a time

11 FEB 2019

hi betts! any tips for how to focus on one project at a time? I always seem to have trouble making progress on one WIP because I keep skipping around to others.

i feel this deep in my bones, anon. until recently one of my biggest fears was that i’d never be able to finish a long-form project to the level of quality i wanted, because i’d always fall in love with new ideas and get bored with the old ones before i could finish them.

i don’t think it’s an issue of focus, when it comes down to it. i think it has more to do with building up stamina over time, and learning when to jump ship when something isn’t working. not every writing project needs finished. sometimes you get what you need out of a project before it’s complete, and it’s better for you to move on. especially if you’re a beginning writer, and you’re not ready for publication, finishing your work comes second to learning whatever a given project needs to teach you. (unless that lesson is endings or revision, then yeah you need to finish.)

if you’re writing fic and posting one chapter at a time and have a readership base, it’s maybe a good idea to finish that too, but also, if you know you have a habit of abandoning wips, you might try writing the whole thing before posting. the irony there is, for me anyway, i need the validation of commenters to stay interested in anything i’m working on. so i get as absolutely far on a multi-chapter fic as i can without wanting to explode, until i have a decent idea where the story is headed and how it’ll end, and then i let myself post.

this is all to say that i could not write a novel until i mastered the short story. i had the vision for novels but i lacked the stamina and patience not only to complete them, but revise them. i think i realized it a couple years ago, that i had to buckle down and learn how to constrain my ideas into their given space on the page before i could ever tackle an entire novel. i had to learn what it felt like to have an idea, bring it to fruition in 30 pages or less, revise it, revise it again, and feel the completely indescribable feeling of knowing you have a truly completed work in your hands. until you have that feeling, you never know what you’re chasing. the first story i ever wrote that gave me that feeling was my second publication. my first publication still doesn’t feel right to me, and if i ever publish it in a collection, i plan to revise it again.

 

i have 11 original novels started, with a total word count of around 250k. i needed to write all 11 of them to get to the 12th, which will be finished and (god help me) published. i needed to fail those 11 stories to learn what didn’t work, so that i would know how it felt when it did work. the only way i’ve gotten as far as i have in my current project is by telling myself i’m almost done. i now know a new thing about myself as a writer: i can never let myself look at the entire roadmap of a project. i can only ever focus as far as my headlights will let me see.

i believe stories have more control over us than we have over them. stories take us over and let us go when they’re done. when your attention moves away from an unfinished project and never returns, that story has let you go and you know you shouldn’t feel bad for giving up. it’s the stories that follow us around tugging our shirttails that we should pay attention to, even if we’re ignoring them because we’re afraid of failing them. those are the ones that we need to pick up again when we’re ready.

i went to a reading by Russell Banks this past summer, who read a chapter from a novel he said he had started in 1966, one of his very first novel ideas, and finished in 2016. it took him 50 years to write this novel. in the interim, he published 12 novels, 5 short story collections, and 3 memoirs. this novel he read from, whose name i now forget, he said will be his last.

i guess what i’m saying is, let go. trust yourself and your instincts. if a story is flooding your mind, write it. if it falls silent, move on. if something else captures your attention, follow it. it’s all writing. it’s all good.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to gain followers/readers

11 FEB 2019

Hi! I'm a new fanfic writer for t100 (among other things) and quite frankly still a little new to Tumblr (Only been here since Jan.2018). I was just wondering how to gain followers to in turn gain readers or vice versa. I have Twitter but, I don't have that many followers. Any advice?

welcome to the fandom!! i’m relatively new to the fandom also, but i’ve been around tumblr since ye olden days of the free nipple. i move fandoms a lot, which means i need to build an almost completely new readership every year or so. here are the things i do:

gaining followers is really hard, more so on twitter than tumblr, but tumblr is also an absolute trainwreck. obvs you’re welcome to PM me if you’d like. i can’t guarantee i’ll have time to read your fic but i’m happy to promo if you send me the link to a post!

hope this helps. i’m so glad you’re with us!

↑ return to navigation ↑

“why would anyone write that?”: taboo fanfiction as an exercise in empathizing with the monstrous

5 FEB 2019

glorify, romanticize, fetishize. these are words i see thrown around constantly in relation to fanfiction, without regard to their actual meaning or context, for the purpose of censoring taboo content. by taboo, i mean stories which include sex/relationships that are underage, incestuous, abusive, and dubious or non-consensual.

here are their actual meanings:

these 3 words have negative connotations. they all involve portraying a given theme/dynamic/identity/character in a way that does not properly reflect reality. more specifically, in a way that doesn’t reflect “correct” non-relative morality.

i’ve seen several posts going around about authors and readers who use taboo fanfic to cope with trauma. i’ve seen posts about how fic authors/readers should not have to indulge said trauma to their audience for their work to be seen as worthy of existing. but i also have many friends who have no trauma, and who write the filthiest shit i have ever read. when we strip the notion of trauma out of the taboo, what’s left? how can someone who has experienced no trauma still invest themselves in abjection?

we are taught that a gifted person is one with higher intelligence, but a person can be gifted in many ways. one of the most underrepresented ways to be gifted is in empathy. many empathetically gifted and sensitive people find their way to fanfiction, which offers a kind of freedom no other genre possesses: there is no editorial gatekeeping, no monetary compensation, and all fic is a response to an existing text. for those who tend to be more reactive than active, canon texts offer a platform to respond to, and fandom offers a community of people similarly invested. creativity, community, validation, a distinct lack of rejection. fanfic is an empath’s dream come true.

i have occupied myself these past several years reading the most abject fanfic i can find on ao3, the extremely underage incest noncon, the things that maybe not long ago might have terrified me to look at, made me shut my ipad off and throw it across the room, triggered me or sent me existentially spiraling. three years ago, reading noncon ruined my entire week. i thought, how could someone make such things? what mind could be so awful to devise such horrible conceits? why can’t everyone just kiss and be happy? i was never an anti, i didn’t occupy myself chasing these people away or believing their work shouldn’t exist. i simply did not understand, with no value judgment made on the author, and left it at that.

but for me, the only force stronger than fear is curiosity, and curiosity is what kept me clicking on the non-con archive warning. more than i dislike being afraid and uncomfortable, i hate not understanding. i recognized that this was a thing i’d never seen in any other genre, (mostly) queer women writing profane things they’d experienced, or been afraid they might one day experience, not just to grasp it but also use as fap fodder. women masturbate to these atrocious fictional images. this is a thing that does not exist anywhere else, in any other genre, in the entire history of literature. i had so many questions.

the more taboo fic i read, the more comfortable i became with it. i was not ashamed of reading it, or coming to enjoy it, or even jerking off to it, because the more i read, the more i settled in the unwavering belief that i was not capable of the things i was reading. i had found a profound self-trust by reading the darkest parts of my fellow fic authors’ minds and knowing deep in my gut i was not attracted to children or my family, nor was i capable of rape or abuse. when i started writing it myself, i became even more confident in this knowledge.

with that confidence in place, i began to seek out these writers who were as invested in the taboo as i was, to befriend them and learn who they are out in the real world. what i found was that we all had one thing in common: we are all empathetically gifted, and many of us hold caregiving occupations. we are social workers, non-profit employees, educators, doctors, volunteers, mothers. we concern ourselves with the well-being of others. we define ourselves by our altruism.

and then, at the end of a long day, we come home and read or write our favorite characters getting violently dicked down by their brothers.

what do other kinds of gifted people do when they have a surplus of energy? highly intelligent people solve puzzles or problems. physically gifted people like athletes, fighters, and dancers exercise or train or go outside and play.

the empathetically gifted devise conceits wherein our empathy is tested. we challenge ourselves to love monsters and understand the profane. we dive deeper and deeper and darker and darker, seeking some limit to our greater understanding of the Other, and in doing, make our greatest gift even stronger.

we flex our empathy muscles and watch them grow. we learn to love and understand the things no one else can love, the things that are dangerous to love in our real lives, by distorting that reality, by glorifying, romanticizing, and fetishizing. we place mirrors in front of ourselves, look into the darkest parts of our minds, and think, how far can i go? is there anything i am not willing to understand? how big is my heart?

we tell ourselves stories to find those answers.

“but you shouldn’t empathize with monsters! you shouldn’t glorify, romanticize, or fetishize abuse!”

in reality, we don’t. but in fiction, we’re able to carve a new reality in which we can experiment, test, and play with new forms of empathy that reality does not allow us. an engineer plays sudoku. a dancer runs a marathon. an empath creates monsters.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how i decided to become a writer

13 JAN 2019

Betty how did you know writing was it for you? I've never had anything I was passionate enough about to make a career out of and it feels like you were able to aim your arrow at what you wanted and make it happen. Was there any questions you asked yourself that made it obvious?

great question, anon. i feel like there’s a lot of pressure to know what your passion is, and your purpose in life, and what brings you joy, etc, and the reality isn’t like that. at least, it wasn’t for me. i have a cousin who has wanted to be a bassist since he was ten years old. he eats, sleeps, and breathes bass. he’s 23 now and the most popular bassist in our city, and he’s happy and thriving.

but like. that doesn’t happen a lot.

for me, i had boxed myself into a corner. i was 25, and i enjoyed writing, but i didn’t think i could make a career out of it (i still believe that). i was working at the bank, and i’d been invited to a company retreat in cleveland, where i spent 3 days training on a new system. during that time, a woman who had my same job was retiring, and we had a party for her. she’d worked at the bank, in the same position i was in, for 46 years. she closed commercial mortgages for 46 years.

that was when i knew i had to do something. i didn’t know what yet, but i had to force myself out of the stability and comfort i’d found, and into anything else. i knew if i didn’t move, i’d die at the bank. i’d live an easy, comfortable, boring life, and the bank would never fire me, and they’d certainly never promote me, and i’d blink and suddenly 46 years would pass and i too would be retiring. i found success and security, and i lived an easy life, which is the exact opposite of the millennial ethos, and i had to set it down and walk away, because it wasn’t right for me.

i never made a conscious decision to “pursue writing.” i only made a decision to move from the place i was. i knew i wanted to go back to school, so when i started researching grad schools, i looked at counseling, education, i/o psych, epidemiology, law school, med school – i cast a very wide net. i chose the mfa because it didn’t give me extreme anxiety when i read over the course descriptions. in fact it sounded fun. i’d get to teach, and write, and take what i already enjoyed doing seriously. and i thought, okay, even if this isn’t a career, i’ve been miserable at the bank for ten years. don’t i deserve two years of fun?

so that’s all it was for me. i promised myself i’d dedicate 2 years of my life to a hobby i enjoyed, so i would be actually good at something. i’d never been good at anything before.  

it was while i was there that i realized it was absolutely a right place for me to be. not the right place, but a right place. i recognize i could get just as much emotional satisfaction out of a really good counseling program, or just as much creative exercise with an education program. but an mfa is what i was the most qualified for, so i went for it. even now, having applied for phds, i’m facing the question: do i really want to stay in academia (as a student) for four more years? i might love writing, but writing has multiple branches of Work (academia, publishing, etc), and that’s where i hesitate. even writing, as much as i love it, becomes a chore when you attribute money to it. i love teaching too, but even then, i question – do i want to be doing this *forever*?? the answer is: no, and i don’t have to commit to that anyway. more on that in a sec.

what made me realize that writing was My Thing is the idea that i would do it regardless of success. i need to write. not-writing has never been an option for me. if i take away novel writing, i would write essays. take away essays, and i’d write poems. take away poems, and i’d write journal entries. i don’t need the promise of publication to want to write. i don’t even need read. i could spend my entire life writing for myself. that writing would look different than if i wrote for an audience, and i wouldn’t be as happy as i am sharing my work with others, but it’s still my baseline existence. when i don’t have anything to do, i write. it gives me energy, and makes me feel good, and it’s fun. i know i’m the exception to the rule – most writers i know drag their feet. they see writing as work, a depleting force. it’s never been like that for me.

writing was also the thing i assumed everyone wanted to do. like it was so much a part of me that i thought it was a part of everyone else too, the same way, if you’re a wlw, you can grow up assuming that everyone is attracted to girls, because who wouldn’t be? and you realize shit i’m gay. so for me being a writer was like, goddammit i’m never getting rid of this am i.

i guess i also want to say, as a sidebar – there’s no such thing as a career. a career is a flawed concept that lays the mental foundation for staying stagnant in a workforce for 46 years, and allows you to make an identity out of labor. you do not have to choose a career. your only obligation is to feed yourself – find the things that give you life. and if the things that give you life don’t also bring you money, then you have to balance that with a job. you do not have to find what you love and commit to it. you don’t have to see the big picture of who you are and the grand work you’re doing on this planet. you don’t owe anyone your greatness. your only goal is to find what thrills you and play with it, let it take you to the next destination. your only job is to keep moving, exploring, asking questions of yourself and the world at large. otherwise, you’ll retire at the bank after closing mortgages for 46 years. careers objectify the human experience. they turn us into machinery. do not let them.  

hobbies, passions, jobs, disciplines – they don’t have to be the same thing. life doesn’t have to be one long, straight road with no stops or turns, barreling forward as fast as you can go. you can take your time, and have fun, and detour and get lost and go back to the start. your goal doesn’t have to be success, and you never have to decide on a single path. take what you’re into right now and roll with it.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on writing your one million words

12 JAN 2019

Hi betts! In some of your posts about writing advice and your MFA program, you mention "writing your million words." As in, you said somewhere that unlike fanfic authors, many people going into an MFA "haven't written their million words yet." I was wondering where the significance of writing a million words is. If I want to improve as a writer and I set a goal to write a million words over four years, is just writing them enough? Have you found that a lot of writing is just have done it over and over and over again, like learning to play the guitar? Or do I also need to make a goal to review and revise my million words? As in, the goal is not just a million words written, but a million words written and revised. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

sadly, the million words thing is from *cringes @ self* stephen king’s “on writing” which i hate on principal because it’s garbage, and it’s outdated, and stephen king is not at all a model writer. his strongest writing is still, on a line level, incredibly weak, which is an opinion i’ve held since i was thirteen. (same with neil gaiman, but that’s another story. good storytellers sometimes = bad writers.)

the idea of a million words, for me, was literal. but for a lot of writers it’s more metaphorical. by “writing your million words” i mean mostly that you have a consistent practice of writing and it’s part of your life. for poets and screenwriters, they’re not going to aim for a million words, so really it’s about coming to the acceptance that you’re a writer, and you have work you want to be doing.

when i say some people come into the mfa without their million words, i mean that a lot of them enjoy writing and consider it a passion, but it’s not yet a discipline for them. they have the ideas, and the talent, and the aspirations, but not the ass-in-seat mentality that i think is necessary for successful writing. many, many writers who get mfas go on to do things other than writing. they thrive in structure, deadlines and workshop and being told what to do, but when that structure is gone, they can’t maintain it on their own. one of my mentors once told me that the difference between a successful writer and an unsuccessful one is simply the drive to continue writing after the mfa. i’ve been out of the program for a year, and i only know one member of my cohort who is still writing.

that said, on a very basic level, i think the fundamental necessity in learning to write is simply writing a lot. no, at first you don’t need feedback. you need to write so much that you know and recognize your own voice, and that you’ve set a path for yourself to follow. sometimes i get pieces of writing that show tons of promise, and i give feedback on it, but ultimately it comes down to “keep writing.” you can write a 4k story and revise it fifteen times, and it won’t be as effective in improving your writing as just pounding out fifteen brand new stories. it’s only in writing a lot – i mean, a lot a lot – that you open a real dialogue with yourself, and you see your unconscious mind on the page, and start to understand why you’re compelled to write at all.

and then, when you find that you’re no longer surprising yourself with the new things you’re writing and the ways you’re challenging yourself, when you’ve reached the end of the path you’ve set for yourself, and can’t see any further ahead, that’s when you’ve written your million words, and that’s when you start really needing feedback and mentorship. that’s when you start working on projects that get more revision time than drafting time. that’s when you feel intuitively when something is working and when it isn’t, and when you know you’ve hit it out of the park, or it still needs some work.

everyone’s million words look different. it might be three screenplays, a thousand prompt-fills, five novels, a dozen short stories, a notebook full of poems. but the key is the work, and the willingness to put (as my dad would say) the blood, sweat, and tears into your craft.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on writing smut without real-life experience

6 JAN 2019

I am about to be 33 in less than a week and i am a virgin. I have never been in a relationship, never had anyone be interested in me and definitely no love experience. But i like to write smut. How do i make sex realistic in my stories?

i don’t think smut is really beholden to reality. if it were, there would be a lot more queefing and vaginismus and and pulled muscles and position changes and boredom. on that front, i think smut is somewhere between porn and realty. i think your best bet is to watch amateur porn between real couples; imo, it most closely reflects the way smut is written – pretty and voyeuristic with an emotional element. there’s a ton of it on porn tube sites. it’s a very popular genre.

also, it’s how i taught myself how to write smut, because even with the experiences i’ve had, they weren’t particularly helpful when writing. after all i’ve always been in my own body, and not on the outside directing the whole thing, yk? so porn is way better than personal experience when it comes to writing. the key to good smut is usually in the pattern of action, reaction, visual detail, over and over again. a good practice is to find a short amateur couple video, and try to turn it into a narrative. as in, just write out what happens in it.

i hope this helps!

↑ return to navigation ↑

on deciding something is worth writing

22 DEC 2018

so I’ve been thinking lately about writing short stories about things that have happened in my life and they wouldn’t necessarily be for anyone but myself but the thing is like.... I don’t know if I can justify that use of my time as valuable? Like I think it would be a cathartic experience for me but if it’s a) not going to be seen by me and b) probably going to be melodramatic and b a d is it even worth putting my time into?? (ps. this is mostly just me venting my thoughts sorry)

ngl, anon, i’m seeing some self-sabotaging logic here. let’s try to rescript some of this.

here’s what i’m hearing:

“I don’t know if I can justify that use of my time as valuable” + “it would be a cathartic experience for me” = my mental health isn’t worth my attention.

“not going to be seen by anyone” + “melodramatic” + “bad” = i’m putting unreasonable expectations on myself to conform to an established standard of work so that what i create can exist to be consumed, and if it’s not consumed and therefore validated, then it’s not worth creating.

you can spin your wheels like this for eternity and never go anywhere. let’s take the sabotage out of this logic and see what comes out:

but what i’m also sensing between the lines is maybe you would want to share them, but are afraid to, because of the idea of badness and melodrama, and feel, perhaps, like your experiences are not worth being read about.

here are my thoughts on that, just in case you need to hear it: your experiences are worth being written, and they are worth being read, as widely as you want them to be read.

that said, even if you maintain the intention to keep these stories to yourself, which is also fine, the point is to just start writing them, writing for yourself is a very difficult practice to start, when you’re already grounded in the belief they aren’t worth writing. you’re not the ideal audience for yourself here.

which means you have to make an audience. you can do that by writing to someone, even if they don’t read it. for example, if you want to write about your relationship with a sibling, you can write an essay or a story in the form of a letter to that sibling, and never give it to them. i had an idea for an essay once that was a very long letter to john mayer, that of course would not go to john mayer, but i wanted to use epistolary format to go through all these stories of my teen years. or you can write, maybe, to your past self, or your future self, or some alternate self. some other self than the self you are now, because the self you are now is telling you not to write these things, so you’re not going to find the encouragement you need to write them.

i would also lower the commitment. you said “stories” which immediately raises the bar. it might help to lower it a bit, and say that you’ll write about this one single experience, get it down on the page, and never look at it again. that way, you have a very contained and reasonable goal. then, if you feel like writing more, you can always pick it up again.

lastly, not only do i think you should write them, i’m asking you to. will you please write a story about your life? and will you come back and tell me how it went?  

there. now you can do it as a favor to me. i’m looking forward to your update. <3

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to approach writing a novel

29 NOV 2018

betts i have made a PACT with some friends to write a NOVEL next year and this seemed like a great lark over the summer but now next year is RAPIDLY APPROACHING and i am WILDLY UNPREPARED, how does one write a) original fiction and b) anything of serious length, oh god

ughhhhh i feel this in my bones. The Struggle™

i have spent a lot of time dwelling on the differences between fanfic and ofic, and i think from a genre perspective, they do different Work, but purely from a craft perspective, like writing down one word after the other, the only real difference is context.

a fanfic author will presumably go into a fic with knowledge of the canon, or at the very least knowledge that there is a canon from which the story is drawing, and that the fic exists in response to that canon. ofic stands on its own. the reader goes in with no guaranteed established context, so all of that stuff needs built into the text itself. moreover, readers of fic go into a story with existing beliefs about the characters and/or world, and adapt their beliefs according to the conflict of the fic (the fic reader therefore does a lot of unique work in parsing out their own feelings about a character when approaching a fic, but that’s an essay for another time). with ofic, your characters are total strangers to the reader, and everything they do and think and say will help shape their opinion.

which means, horribly, so much extra work needs done so that you’re conveying with the character what you intend to convey. it’s the difference between playing on a playground and playing in a sandbox. with fic, you can run up to a playground with nothing and start swinging and whatever else. the sandbox can be just as fun, but you need to bring your own tools with you, and anything goes.

as far as writing long stuff, everybody’s different. some people can only move forward if they know everything that’ll happen. i can only move forward if i have a vague path ahead of me and i know what direction i’m headed. as soon as i solve the puzzle i get bored, so i have to keep stringing myself along.

also for me it helps to get immersed in the world you’re building and the characters you’re writing, and let them keep talking to you and telling you their story. the louder they talk, the longer your story.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to overcome the belief that writing is for other people

25 NOV 2018

How do i get over the notion writing is for 'other people' ? I always feel too poor, uneducated and unworthy to write. In high school I loved writing essays / homework / emails and was told I was good at it and then life happened and everything is about money and life and creativity has been on the back burner for so long the pan twice boiled over and all is left is a smoking pa(i)n.

spite.

like i want to say something super deep and inspirational here, but seriously. spite is the only way out. sheer, unwavering, feel-it-in-your-bones rage.

when you’ve had the absolute core of who you are ripped out of you by circumstance, there’s no taking the high road. there’s no greater understanding or wisdom i can offer. be sixteen years old again, and when your parents tell you not to go out, sneak out anyway. be six, and when your mom tells you not to touch stuff in the store, go around touching everything. be a toddler and scream when you don’t get what you want. creativity is not a practice of the higher mind. it’s a practice of play, and to reach it, you need to let yourself be young again.

when it comes to writing, you have to be selfish. be greedy. be the absolute worst version of yourself, the one that wants and wants and takes and takes. be a narcissist. be an egoist. be a hedonist. humility, rationality, moderation – it’s all a farce. you can’t be creative and still conform to expectations. you have to choose. and once you’ve chosen, all that stuff, money and life, it’s all in the background. it’s stuff that needs done, it’s an obligation to make sure you eat and keep a roof over your head, but everything else, every other second of the day, you can be creative. you can choose that life for yourself, and you never have to look back.

so, writing is not for other people. it’s for you. it’s yours. it’s the shiny expensive toy on the shelf, and you might not be able to afford it, so that means you have to steal it.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to approach a redemption arc

10 OCT 2018

Hey, Betts! I am pondering writing a fix-it-fic or more so a redemption fic for a character and was wondering if you had any advice for me?

first and foremost and absolutely most importantly, don’t listen to anybody’s shit.

we live in a time that is anti redemption and anti moral reasoning. some people take personal affront to redemption, which is fine for them, but that doesn’t reflect on your fic. it took me a long time to understand the bullshit i get on my fics has nothing to do with me or the work.

i think with redemption is epiphanic. that is to say, a character redeeming themself requires a (or a series of) “o shit i fucked up” moments. an epiphany is an internal realization brought about by an external stimuli, so a redemption arc is a story made up of enough external stimuli to generate self-actualization.

consider it a widening of perspective. a character who commits evil deeds does so for selfish or short-sighted reasons. so one who becomes better is one whose world view is expanded. they may not possess empathy at the beginning, but they can learn it. and they may not learn to have empathy for everyone, but they can start to have empathy for someone.

that empathy could look like a lot of things – destructive, selfish love turned altruistic, or “i would kill for you” vs “i would die for you.” it could be the realization that “oh god i don’t want to live without you.” it could be “i was broken but now i want to learn to heal.”

i think it’s important to ask yourself, how is this character suffering? then, in what way can they recover? what do they look like fully realized? the answer to each of those questions will give you a clear plot arc from which to work.

hope this helps! let me know how it goes!

↑ return to navigation ↑

on purity discourse

22 AUG 2018

Wow, you answered that question about types of relationships so well. It seems to me that being in tune with fandom in this way, you're very in tune with the relationship vibes of stories and what fans are getting out of them. It's a bummer that BDSM is out of style! I'm only dimly aware of the purity thing going on right now. Will that create repressed desires that cause BDSM/power dynamic stuff to hit an upsurge in a few years? Like a cycle?

repressed desires, no. i think more writers are making sock accounts and fewer readers are seeking out BDSM so fewer writers are writing it and so the epic longform BDSM fics of 2008 - 2014 are dying out. i meant to do a statistical analysis of this to make sure it’s not just the fact i’ve hopped fandoms about 15 times in the past five years, but i haven’t gotten around to it yet. i just know the last good D/s fics i read were in johnlock, destiel, and the very early days of kylux, but then kylux too fell into the hands of the moral purity police so i left.

i do hope it’s a cycle though. i think the best writers are ones who are comfortable facing the fear and darkness of the taboo, both in fanfic and beyond, and to silence those people is to say that the exploration of darkness to better what it is to be human, what it is to empathize with and understand atrocity, is not a worthy pursuit, when in fact, to me, it’s one of the only worthy pursuits. to understand a mind of depravity without practicing it in reality is an ability very few people possess, and i believe those people should be listened to because they’re the ones who can offer us a wider understanding of reality.

but i also understand where the drive for purity comes from – fear, mostly. the constant state of powerlessness. the drive to clean and polish the only spaces we have any control over. the rampant objectification and sexualization of children that has steadily worsened over time, and the fear and rage it induces. a strong pull away from the toxicity of modern conservativism, so strong we lean back against puritanical ideals and its subsequent rhetoric which actually only perpetuates the very toxicity we supposedly condemn.

so, it’s sad and frustrating, but i really hope you’re right, and that maybe the tides will change again when less is at stake in the world.

22 AUG 2018

The paragraph you wrote about the drive for purity was poetic. We live in such intense times, politics ripping down every fabric of our lives, interfering in our personal lives -- politicians invading not just our living rooms, but our very psyches, threatening our sense of justice in the world. It's scared us down to our very bones, which is perhaps this drive for purity, even in fandom spaces, making people afraid to indulge their dark sides for fear the fear it will take over.

i think it also comes down to a fear of the self. a lack of acceptance in others reflects a constant judgment and policing of the self, and when we live in a world of incessant atrocity it leaves little room for trust – of self or others.

but i’m also using the royal “we” here as if we’re all some kind of hive mind affected the exact same way by fandom and the greater world and we’re not.

the purity discourse is frustrating. i try to understand it so i don’t get angry about it. i’ve written dozens of posts about it that i always delete because i don’t even want to acknowledge the issue by participating in it, and i don’t want to further dichotomize a problem that is already startlingly reduced in nuance.

at the writers’ conference i went to, there was a panel on “offensiveness in art” and everyone on it was over the age of 60, and had lived through the mccarthy era, and had the exact same opinion: in art, anything goes, and by the way fuck trigger warnings. all art has the exact same value and we shouldn’t think of things like racism or sexism and we should always, always separate the art from the artist.

and on the internet, there are hordes of young people who genuinely believe that all “problematic” art deserves not to exist at all, and should always be taken down always, and maybe never even made, and the people who make “problematic” art should be judged for it and punished because it is a reflection of who they are, and who they are is not welcome in society. all for the sake of Protecting the Children or whatever.

the extremes of both sides are just………absolutely fucking ridiculous to me. on one side there’s a total lack of empathy and understanding of marginalization and inequality. on the other, a lack of understanding consent, agency, and the separation of fiction and reality. and i feel like i’m on this third side saying, yk, readers should take agency over their own experience, writers should write and explore whatever compels them, and maybe we should stop paying so much attention to all the shit we don’t like and seek out and offer our attention to what we do like.

idk man. i think everybody needs to take a break and go read a book.

↑ return to navigation ↑

sentence-level perspective & navigating the show-tell divide

10 SEP 2018

writing advice: sentence-level perspective & navigating the Show-Tell divide

right now i’m working on a lesson plan on narration for my CW class and i thought i’d share a portion of what i’m planning to go over with my students.

one of the the biggest overall weaknesses i see in writing happens at the sentence level, as in, i see many writers struggle putting “strong” sentences onto the page. conversely, the sentence-level advice i’ve seen that tries to counteract this weakness is often prescriptive. that is to say, it tells you what you should and shouldn’t do without any regard to context.

one such prescriptive piece of advice is Show Don’t Tell. for the uninitiated, Show Don’t Tell means that you should render an experience on the page rather than explain it. Show Don’t Tell is perceived as a dichotomy: you’re either showing, or you’re telling. Showing is always good and Telling is always bad. Showing is strong, Telling is weak.

but that’s not true on any level. first, there are many circumstances where you could choose to Tell and it is absolutely the right choice for the sentence. conversely, sometimes Showing is exhausting and potentially boring to read, and negates important internality (and voice!) of your narrator. i recently had a student who used Show to such a degree that i never had any idea what was going on, because he never Told a single detail, even to provide necessary information for the events that were happening. his writing was overall very strong, but i was lost. i told him it felt a little like walking into a grocery store without a cart, and having to balance all these items, these Show details, with nothing to put them in. you need Tell (a cart) just as much as you need Show (stuff to put in it).

second, Show Don’t Tell is a spectrum entirely reliant on perspective, which is where we get into the very difficult art of crafting a single sentence.

i was working on a story earlier today that i’m writing in very close third person. that means my POV character is She and the reader has complete access to the thoughts and feelings she has toward her environment. i came to an emotional high point between two characters, and wrote this sentence:

She can feel his heart pounding under her palm.

i erased it. i invoked a few prescriptive Rules i’d learned: Show Don’t Tell; Active > Passive Verbs; and When the Action is Hot, Write Cool. all of these come down to the same thing: in high-stake moments, create a wider distance between the reader and narrator. step further outside the mind rather than closer to it.

so i typed:

His heart pounds under her palm.

both of these sentences are solidly on the Show end of the Show-Tell divide, and in fact traditional writing advice would dictate that by all means, the second sentence is “stronger” than the first. but i disagree.

before i get into why, let’s take a step further back. let’s say i wanted to move closer to Tell. i have a lot of options. there are so many reasons someone’s heart might be pounding, and someone might have their hand against that heart. to Tell is to strip the reader of their interpretation. on one hand, as a writer sliding back and forth on the Show-Tell divide, you might not want any room for interpretation, and therefore the potential for misinterpretation. on the other hand, maybe you’ve developed the context of the moment so thoroughly that you’re comfortable allowing the reader their interpretation, and you’re confident it will reflect your intention for the scene.

in this case, i’ll whittle it down to the exact meaning of the sentence:

He’s nervous.

there are a few reasons i wouldn’t choose this sentence over one of the above. first, it doesn’t reflect the point of view. we have no idea who the narrator of this sentence is, and more importantly, we have no idea how she knows this information. does she think it? is it mere speculation, or is she absolutely certain? if the latter, what’s happening, or what is he doing, to convince her of it?

so, we’ll nix that sentence and move a little further down the divide.

She can tell he’s nervous.

now we have a little more context. we are solidly in the mind of one person, she, and we know that because she is having a thought/feeling. despite all writing tips and tricks you’ve ever read that tell you this is a “weak” sentence (because it Tells), i have no problems with it. i think it’s a fine sentence. here’s why:

it possesses internal voice and implies speculation and unreliability.

it has a conflict in it, which is to say it is a sentence that establishes a status quo and upends that which it establishes. the status quo is non-nervousness, non-speculation. we’re upending it by introducing nervousness and the speculation thereof. it innately encourages us to move to the next sentence.

sometimes there are no physical cues to Show nervousness. sometimes you can just feel it. maybe my narrator is highly intuitive. maybe she’s so close to him she just knows when he’s nervous. or maybe she’s completely wrong.

or it could be that after this sentence i’ll clarify what that looks like. maybe i’ll combine Tell and Show together so the reader has both a cart and a few items to put in it.

She can tell he’s nervous. He fidgets and plucks at a hangnail.

in a different scene, i would have nothing against opting for this Tell sentence and its corresponding Show detail. but in the scene i’m writing, where he is not actually fidgeting and plucking at a hangnail, i want to push further down to Show.

here was the sentence at my cursor:

His heart pounds under her palm.

by all means it’s a decent sentence. it implies POV, though a little ambiguously, because it’s her palm and she is actively feeling his heart beneath it. it has a visual, active verb: Pound. not Flutters. not Beats Steadily. not Thrums. you can see this happening, her hand on his chest, feeling his heartbeat. it possesses conflict: the word Pounds establishes the status quo (a normal hearbeat) and upends it (now his heart is beating faster).

the focus of this sentence, though, is not on her. it’s on him. context, voice, and POV all play a major role in deciding which sentence to choose. if i wanted a greater, more objective distance between my reader and our narrator (or in this case Writing Cool if we’re going by Gwartney’s Action Hot, Write Cool rule), and a closer distance between my reader and the action of the present moment itself, i would choose this sentence.

but i don’t want that. i erased the sentence above and went back to my original.

She can feel his heart pounding under her palm.

the emphasis of this sentence is no longer on him, nor the action of his heart. it’s on her, and the fact that she can feel it. i’m choosing to keep us closer to the narrator’s perspective and further from the action. i’ve decided that it’s more important to wrap the action of this moment up in her perspective – to put this detail in a cart, if you will. i’ve chosen the “weaker” sentence in order to convey narration, to keep us closer to her mind rather than his body, to show this action through a window rather than straight-on, because that is how i choose to render this particular experience on the page.

none of these sentences are, by themselves, better or worse, stronger or weaker, than others. these sentences illustrate a choice you the writer have to make over and over again, sentence by sentence, in order to support and develop the voice, tone, and conflicts you’ve established, regardless of the prescriptive advice you might believe.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how do you know if you have something interesting to say?

19 AUG 2018

I read an article about MFA programs written by a teacher. It was the first article in google search results. He said that most of his students never have anything interesting to say. How do you as a writer know if you have something interesting to say? (I love your writing btw, Honeycomb was amazing)

you know you have something to say when you can’t not say it. it’s when not writing feels like self-destruction.

but the “interesting” part is bullshit. you can dump that.

(a caveat – “interesting” is a fraught word because it implies a standard by which things are boring and not boring, when in fact it’s all just personal preference. that said, when you unpack the intention of the word “interesting” you do get to a seed of truth, which is this: writing which exposes the reality of being rather than shrouding it in things like plot or panache tend to be more “interesting.” people are always looking for perspectives which show vulnerability and honesty. when MFA people say something is uninteresting, what they often mean is that it’s narrow in terms of its own awareness.)

a quick story:

i had no interest in writing until my dad died when i was 21. it felt like there was no room in my body for all my grief, so i started journaling to release it all. i didn’t journal frequently, though. i would wait until my entire body would physically ache with some unknown need and then i would puke out pages of utter nonsense and feel better. but it was something i was deeply ashamed of, the need to write, the inability to contain my thoughts and feelings inside myself where they belonged.

for me, i only found i had something to say when a very bad thing happened to me, and what i had to say was basically this: I AM VERY SAD.

but underneath I AM VERY SAD were a lot of other things that took years and millions of words to uncover: confusion toward that sadness, that i could grieve over someone who had mistreated me, and posthumous forgiveness for that mistreatment. then i turned the lens on myself and wondered why i felt so much shame about writing, and uncovered the cause of my apathy and passivity, which connected back to childhood emotional neglect.

is any of this interesting or revelatory to anyone but me? probably not. but all i have is my experience and an unrelenting drive to share that experience with others in hopes to feel connected. sometimes i don’t have something interesting to say, but maybe an interesting question to ask, and i use narratives to pose that question without necessarily seeking any answers. sometimes i don’t have something interesting to say but an interesting picture in my head, something i think is pretty and that needs to exist in order to appease my aesthetic interests. sometimes i just have a very uninteresting feeling in me, anger or exhaustion or loneliness, and i need to speak it because otherwise i’ll be consumed by it.

you should always try to say the things that you can’t not say, and say them very loudly. take the stories you tell over and over again when you meet new people and inspect what about them you’re clinging to. find what roots have sunk in you and where they lead. seek out the truths you would die for. those are the interesting things you have to say.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on workshop structure

7 AUG 2018

Hello! I recently read Guy in your MFA (and loved it, despite not knowing at all what the 100 is), and I was wondering if you could do a post on writing workshop structure. I want to put together a semi-formal writing workshop with some sort of structure/guidance and from the way you wrote about it in the fic, it sounds like there's a set process. Could you elaborate? what's the "agenda" of sorts? other things to consider?

great question!! the bad news is that there are a number of different workshop styles, and you might have to play around with what works best for you. i’ll give you the broadest method.

so for a fiction workshop, everyone needs the stories/pieces in advance. if you’re reading an excerpt of a novel, usually the author offers a synopsis or something, unless it’s the very beginning. i wouldn’t ask anyone to submit more than 30 pages.

you give everyone a week to read the piece (or pieces, if you’re workshopping multiple people). ask them to offer marginal comments to give the author. i also prefer participants write a crit letter, but i’ve had workshops where that was optional, but i wrote one anyway.

fastforward to the actual workshop. status quo, the author doesn’t speak until the end so as to not compulsively defend the work. they are in a Cone of Silence. then:

now for the caveats:

hope this helps! let me know if you want more clarification on anything.

↑ return to navigation ↑

is an mfa worth it?

3 AUG 2018

What is your opinion on MFA Creative Writing programs? Worth it? Worthless?

you can absolutely become a successful writer without an MFA. i firmly believe that an MFA doesn’t teach you how to write, it just gives you time and focus to write, and also introduces you to a community of writers who will be your go-to readers for the long-haul of your career. you can obviously get all of these things outside of an MFA.

possibly the biggest pull is the idea that, if you’re completely outside of a creative sphere, an MFA is a place where you will be around successful writers for two years. you’ll have mentors who will teach you the ins and outs of publishing, and who will give you meaningful feedback on your work and future career. many programs will also ask that you teach, so you get pedagogical training to boot.

that said, i would not pay for an MFA. it will sink you into debt that you won’t be able to pay for by working in the field of study in which you got your degree. if you decide to do one, go fully funded or bust, that way you’ll get your tuition paid for and a living stipend. you get paid basically to be a writer and editor and teacher for a few years, and for me anyway, it was absolutely worth it. hands down the best decision i’ve ever made.

hope this helps!

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to approach “slice of life” stories

26 JUN 2018

Hello! So, you are one of my favorite writers on AO3 and I think your characterizations/attention to detail is the best there is, so I'd like so ask your advice: I'm a sucker for Slice of Life/Character Studies but I'm terrified of writing. What are your tips for these kind of stories?

sorry for the delay on this! honestly i’ve been thinking about it a lot, and also my life has become a clusterfuck.

i tend to call this kind of writing “textured” or “myopic” rather than slice of life, because good slice of life has some manner of conflict which then doesn’t separate it from any other kind of writing, but i definitely know what you’re talking about. my favorite writing renders the smallest details in sharp relief. it’s the tiniest moments of life that are most interesting to me.

i guess my first and most important tip is to stick close to your intuition and learn to shut off the thinky portion of your brain and drive with your feely brain. your thinky brain is going to tell you, plot! conflict! things need to happen! but your feely brain will be all, nooo just let them take a nap.

that said, good textured writing is about two things: voice and perspective.

voice is like – have you ever read writing that was so good it didn’t matter what happened in it, you were just happy to read each sentence? that’s voice. the key to developing a strong voice is experimentation. play around with sentence structure and paragraph structure. write grammatically incorrect sentences and see how they fare. play with show over tell vs tell over show. find a writing style you really love and emulate it. write with an accent in your head. when a person with a really interesting vocal cadence speaks to you, write down everything they say exactly the way they say it. that’s voice.

perspective is what adds meaning to the details. the greatest slice of life writing offers a new lens with which to view life. that’s not to say you should explain anything, but you should render reality with…something special. i don’t know how else to say it. this is actually kind of a useless tip because it’s not really something you can craft by sheer will alone. but i do encourage you to be earnest. just be radically sincere and vulnerable in everything you write and you’ll have perspective covered.

lastly, neutrality. it was my habit for a long time to place a value judgment on every detail. the character was glad to see an open door. the character didn’t like the woman’s curly hair. and that’s…kind of exhausting to read. so when you’re practicing textured writing it’s important to allow the details to exist on their own, sans anyone having emotional responses or judgments about said details (unless it’s relevant). also avoid justifying/apologizing for your writing within the text. i notice beginning writers do this a lot – explaining why they’re writing a thing before they write the thing. if you’re writing a story about a door, you don’t have to intro with “THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT DOOR.” you can let a door just be a door and let the reader assume that because you’re writing about it, it’s important. sometimes writing justifications are necessary in drafting but then they can be taken out in revision.

i hope this helps! happy writing!!

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to find motivation to write original stories

23 JUN 2018

Hey, sorry to bother, I have a question! I've been worried about this a lot, lately. As a young, aspiring writer, I do have some original ideas for possible, original stories. However. I find myself mostly writing fanfictions. I just ... Don't have the motivation to write those original stories? And I have no idea why, because I DO want to write them. Seeing as you are very educated on the subject of writing, I was wondering if you could help me out. Thanks in advance!

this is what i call the Forever Problem. right now, as we speak, i am writing a fic when i should be working on a novel. and actually i shouldn’t even be working on the novel, i should be revising my short story collection. and i shouldn’t even be doing that, i should be finishing my book proposal. and actually, i lied, i’m really writing some experimental nonfiction.

i remember being in your exact spot, a major desire to move in a different direction because i was beginning to see all the ways in which fanfiction can be stifling. the genre has absolutely no gatekeeping, which is freeing, but there are still topics and narrative threads and other things that i know won’t get the traffic i want, when i think other kinds of audiences might appreciate it better. in other words, there are plenty of stories to tell where the fanfic audience isn’t the right audience. and that has nothing to do with fic itself.

despite the constraints i still think fanfic is more liberating than original fics. no matter what i write, i know when it’s done, it will, guaranteed, have a place to go, because i can put it there. fanfiction always has a home. original fiction doesn’t. you might write an original story and pitch it to a hundred places and get rejected. or maybe you only pitch it to twenty and it gets picked up, but in order to even do that you have to familiarize yourself with twenty publications, and the publication process in general. what i’m saying is that to write fanfic you have to join the ofic fandom.

there’s also the question of: what is my work in conversation with? is more ambiguous in original fiction. with fanfic, stories are always in conversation with canon, no matter how divergent. they’re always in conversation with other fics. with original work, you have to go out and find authors who are doing what you’re doing and see where they publish. you have to find your canon.

lastly, you write what you read. that is to say, if you’re reading more fanfic than ofic, you’re going to be more invested in writing fanfic than writing ofic. i think this is because we always, consciously or not, respond to the things we read. it’s that element of conversation again. you read something and go “oh, i have something to say about that” and it inspires a new story, or piece of a story, or a tiny thread that leads you down the path of what you write next. stories make stories make stories.

allllllll this said, the answer is to Find Your People in the world of original fiction. i’m not talking about stories you like or even ones you admire, but ones you read and go, “oh god, this is me.” that’s the work that’s in conversation with you. for me, that was Mary Gaitskill and Flannery O’Connor and Lorrie Moore. “daring women” my thesis advisor told me. look for works that when you read them, you don’t wish you were reading fanfiction instead.

on a practical level, that also means ditching absolutely everything that doesn’t immediately ignite something in you. i’ve implemented a 10% rule. i’ll read 10% of something and if it doesn’t engage me, i drop it and pick up something else. there’s too much to read to force yourself to consume things that don’t make you eager to turn the page.

after a while, if you don’t want to start writing ofic, then the problem is something entirely different and i welcome you to hop back in my inbox and give me an update. we’ll figure it out. hope this helps!

this is a little rushed because my life has turned into a tire fire, but i hope it helps! good luck and godspeed.

↑ return to navigation ↑

reading advice (for writers)

2 AUG 2018

you know those posts that are like, “remember when we used to read books and now we all have no attention span because of the internet.” then there’s the very contrived advice that’s like, “if you want to be a writer you have to read”??

well i think they’re completely true but they also really suck, and we of the youngish adult writers of 2018 have it pretty hard, especially those of us in fandom who enjoy reading fanfic more than original fic because it’s mostly tagged properly and possesses the emotional catharsis we’re looking for, pretty much guaranteed.

that said, i think it’s really important – whether you write fanfic, ofic, or both – to read traditionally published work, in part because it can help better inform your fanfic, but also because it will help develop your writing overall. and if you’re interested in ofic, it’s pretty much a necessity to read.

so, i just graduated from an MFA program in creative writing, and contrary to popular opinion, the MFA does not actually teach you how to write. it gives you space to write, and mostly, it teaches you how to read as a writer.

so here is everything i’ve learned about reading as a writer over the past two years:

you do not have to read anything you don’t want to read

part of the problem with “read everything you can!” advice is that there is a lot of stuff out there, and a ton of it doesn’t jive with your interests. moreover, there’s a kind of pressure to read the Classics just to say you’ve read them when in fact a lot of them are boring, irrelevant, and dare i say overrated. so here is me giving you permission: you don’t have to pick up Hemingway or Faulkner or whoever else to be a good writer. life is too short to force yourself to read dead white dudes.

if a book doesn’t grab you by the first 10%, put it down

this is what has helped me more than anything else as a reader, because i found i would commit myself to a boring book and then never want to read it, so i would stop reading for months at a time. so, when you pick out a book, go to the last page and check the number. promise yourself you’ll read 10% of the book. 400 pages? read to page 40 and ask yourself, “do i really want to turn the page? if i put this book down, would i want to pick it back up again later?” if the answer is no, return it to the library or wherever you got it. try the next book in your pile. your TBR list is long; be merciless.

but if you want to make it look like you read the book…

commit to 25%. then go to the wikipedia article, read the plot summary, and fast forward to the last 10-15 pages. bam. you’ve more or less read the book. bonus points if you watch the movie, too. so if you’re really committed to reading Ulysses or whatever but you don’t want to slog through it, you can digest enough to be able to hold a conversation about it in a few hours and move on with your life. you can even pretend you enjoyed it and found it a formative reading experience that helped shape your understanding of the work of fiction, really, absolutely groundbreaking, etc etc. this is especially helpful if you find yourself anywhere in the literary sphere because other writers will expect you to be familiar with the canon.

read selfishly and take tools from everything you read

when you read anything, even the stuff you don’t like, ask yourself, “what tools can i take for my own writing?” let’s say you really love the plot structure – write it down somewhere so you remember to try it out for your own story. if you love the lyricism of the sentences, find a few sentences you really like and jot them down by hand, inspect what about them makes you love them so much. steal aspects of characters you admire, pacing, conflict, stakes. steal as much as you can without stealing the words themselves. you can even use this for things you don’t like by rephrasing the question: “what is it about this story i would like to avoid in my own work?” pivot every single thing you read to be about you and your writing. take notes. mark up and highlight your book if you have to. reading as a writer is not a passive activity but an active one. you’re not being entertained, you’re learning. so let published works teach you.

carve time out of your day to read

at 7pm every day, i put my phone down and pick up an actual physical book. this is my personal preference – i have no beef at all with ebooks, but honestly, i get so tired of staring at lit screens all day, and paper books without the distraction of my phone is such a nostalgic feeling for me, back when i was 14 and the library was my second home and if someone wanted my attention they had to call me on a landline. if you had the same upbringing, dedicating some time to read a physical book will do you wonders. if ebooks are your thing, it’s still important to schedule reading time for yourself, not as an obligation to uphold, but as something to do that’s good for you and that you enjoy.

write letters to your favorite authors!!

seriously. if you love a book, let the author know. they will not be annoyed or upset. they will be thrilled. it’s a good way to network with other writers, and it’s a great practice of literary citizenship.

when someone recommends a book to you, ask why

this is something i’ve only recently learned to do, as someone who gets book recommendations pretty much constantly. if the person knows you decently, i don’t think it’s out of line to ask, “what would i specifically like about this?” because then that will tell if you if the person is only recommending it because they like it, not because they think you’ll like it. if the person knows your writing, it’s fair to ask, “how is this book in conversation with my work?” so you have a head start in the kinds of tools you’ll want to take from it.

follow your aesthetic instincts

as a writer, honing your aesthetic will always be one of your highest aims, which means constantly seeking out writers whose aesthetics you admire and analyzing what it is you admire about it. “aesthetic” is kind of a vague term, but it refers to your overall vibe – the things you write about and why you write about them. my aesthetic is more or less “midwestern class warfare meets sexual identity crises with a lot of dark humor,” so i tend to look for other writers who share facets of that aesthetic and i inspect what’s working for them, where they publish, what their influences are, etc. i try to read both within my aesthetic but also far outside of it too. for example, i love historical fiction but i know i’ll never, ever write it. but i appreciate the aesthetic, and i can take tools from it like dedication to detail, internal conflicts, etc.

read short fiction (please)

this is my personal plea. short stories are a great way to find authors whose work is in conversation with yours, so that you can then go check out their novels with a good idea already of what you like about them. short stories are all over the internet via literary and genre mags. they’re a much smaller commitment than novels and tend to have just as much emotional impact (if done well) as novels. more importantly you’ll always have recs for your friends, and it’s a lot easier getting someone to read a 6k story you enjoyed than a 60k novel.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on posting original work online

2 JUN 2018

Hello!! A writing question for you. How do you feel about people posting their original works online, whether on their blogs or sites such as AO3? Do you think it could adversely affect a persons chances of getting published if they wish to submit it someday, or is getting published already so difficult that it's a moot point?

what a great question, and one i remember having before i started submitting my stories out.

if you have a short story you do want to formally publish, then posting it to your blog or personal site is a bad idea, because many (not all) publications require that you haven’t posted the work anywhere prior to submitting to their journal. novels are a different beast – you might be okay posting to your personal blog as long as you take it down prior to publication. it might even help you get it published, if you can build an audience for it.

that said, posting stories on your blog is a great way to cultivate an audience, so if you’re not ready to publish, that’s a good option to consider, and also a way to potentially get feedback.

lastly, it’s not difficult to get published! it’s just a long process is all. if you’re a fanfic reader, you might remember the confusion you had when you first started reading fic – why is everyone using weird acronyms, why does this shitty fic have so much traffic and this amazing one have so little, why are all the characters smirking and using nutella as lube?

publishing feels a lot like navigating fanfic for the first time. there are things you pick up on after a while, and some things people have to tell you outright and that you’d never figure out on your own, and some things that are just ridiculous (like the cover letter, which everyone requires and nobody reads). and mostly, it takes time. a lot of time – time to become familiar with magazines, journals, and publishing houses. time to receive rejections. time to edit and revise. time to submit for the third or fourth round.

but it’s also okay not to be ready to publish. it’s okay to write something original with no intention to publish it. it’s okay to send something out and get a dozen rejections and hope that one of them has some insight into why it got rejected. whatever works for you is the right thing to do.

↑ return to navigation ↑

can anyone write a novel?

24 MAR 2018

Hey! So firstly congrats on the writing program! Secondly, thanks for always sharing interesting writing advice. And thirdly, this: I know most people feel like if they just put their mind to it, they surely have a novel in them somewhere. Do you agree? Do you think more people should just try writing and see what happens, or do you think that studying and training is a better route to take before getting any big ideas?

thanks so much! this is a hell of a question, and my answer is a bit meander-y because i think differently about this in different roles – my teacher self sees it differently than my writing self sees it differently than my editor self.

my favorite quote about this comes from Flannery O’Connor’s “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” in which she says

Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.

i like this quote not because i agree with it, but because it articulates an alternative perspective with which i can pivot my own thoughts.

i believe that creative expression is a necessity of mental health, and in improving the ability of expression – that is to say, the accuracy of putting what’s in our minds to some external space – we strengthen a fundamental means of achieving happiness.

writing builds roads that can deliver what’s inside our minds to the outside world. there, our stories can be read, understood, and accepted, and therefore our experiences and ourselves validated. in this way, writing is no different than painting or dancing or making music – art is the transference of internal to external. it is one of the most important means of communication we possess. this is why artists and writers are so often affiliated with depression and inner turmoil: we’re the ones who most crave understanding.

if you meet someone who feels misunderstood and they are not an artist, they haven’t found their art yet.

so the simple answer is yes, anyone can write a novel.  

that said, here’s where things get complicated.

as someone who will soon have an MFA, a million words of fiction written, and only 8k of them published, i do get frustrated at people who think anyone can write a novel, even when i just agreed they could. in part, it means they don’t value (or even know) the amount of work and dedication a novel takes, therefore they take my work for granted.  

a novel isn’t just 80k of random thoughts puked onto a page, it’s years of failing, notebooks of outlining, wormholes of useless research, and a truly agonizing amount of rejection. it’s tenacity and stubbornness. it’s facing your own worthlessness every day and constantly reminding yourself your stories and perspectives are worthy of witness.

but i also know that it takes audacity to be a writer, and part of that audacity is believing you’re already good at something you’re actually not good at, just so you can cheer yourself on and keep going.

the only way to write a novel is to start writing a novel, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing. fly blind and slap words on a page until you improve enough that you go, oh shit, this sucks, i need to start over. so you read a few books, realize you really suck, but maybe not that much, and maybe you were on the right track after all, so you open a new doc and start over. maybe you get a bit further this time, but then you realize it’s all way harder than you expected and maybe you need to step back for a bit and try something else, get good at short stories or whatever. so you write a few short stories and maybe start reading a few short story writers consistently, Raymond Carver and George Saunders and whoever else, and realize you suck at both endings and voice respectively, so you write some things that are clearly very derivative but hey, you’re just practicing, right? your novel has been tabled indefinitely and you’ve met 10 writers who are all way better than you so you feel like a total fraud (they feel like frauds too) and read 100 writers who are everything you ever want to be (also frauds), and it doesn’t seem like you’re on a path at all, you’re just swinging punches and hitting air, you haven’t worked on your novel in months but god, this story in your head just needs to get on paper and then maybe you’ll go back to the novel, and now you have hundreds and hundreds of pages of not-novel and teetering stacks of literary journals and short story collections and other people’s novels you’ll probably never read, and fuck. fuck. you’re stuck. you’ve gone as far as you can go and it’s not far enough because you can see it now, the kind of quality you want to write but you’re not there yet. the only way you’ll get better is by getting a mentor maybe. getting an MFA. applying for a residency or fellowship or workshop. getting more eyes on your work. so you do all that and send your stuff out for publication and while you’re waiting for your rejections you go back to your novel, which is actually way shittier than you remember but oh, that’s a good line, you’ll keep that one, and shit, that was actually a really creative character trait, you weren’t as bad as you thought. this is salvageable, you can work with this. and so you keep writing, knowing you’re going to put it down again when you get another idea, when you need to drift away to learn something new, and come back to it eventually.

tl;dr you do not become a writer to write a novel. you write a novel to become a writer.

↑ return to navigation ↑

why your voice matters

4 MAY 2018

hey betty! one thing i hear a lot in Writing Advice is ‘have faith in your story’ and 'your voice matters!!’ and while i do wholeheartedly agree, i just. idk, do you have any Words of Wisdom on /why/ your specific, individual voice matters? (especially when you’re a teenage girl writing fanfic, and everything seems kind of- frivolous? Not Good Enough? idk man. i know most of that rhetoric is misogynistic bs, but some days it just feels pointless.) hope you’re having a good day!

this took me forever to respond to in part because i’ve been thinking a lot about how best to answer. this is definitely one of the most challenging writing asks i’ve ever gotten.

i keep coming back to Audre Lorde’s “the transformation of silence into language and action.” specifically the line:

Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.

your voice matters because silence is not the default state of being. you have to speak, and more importantly, you have to be heard. it is a fundamental tenet of existence.

we are sad lonely humans trapped in cages of our singular sentience, and the only means of connecting our brains is to share our experience through language. so saying your voice feels frivolous and not good enough is the machine grinding you into dust. if you find meaning in something, YA or fanfic or sitcoms, other people will too. and if someone else doesn’t like it, or looks down on it, well, it wasn’t written for them. it was written for people who are invested in your perspective. who share and find truth, meaning, relief, and joy in your voice. and would you really want to deprive them of that?

some days, the bad ones, i let the machine grind me into dust. i make myself smaller and smaller until i don’t take up any space at all. i think, though, there is some freedom in non-space. if i am so small that no one can hear me, i’m free to scream without recourse. it is when i am small that i write my biggest risks, my largest truths, because i believe no one could, should, or will ever read it, and then later, when i start to take up space again, i have a piece of writing that is daring and weird and that no one else could have made. and to me, that’s when it feels like my voice matters most.

on all the other days, though, i practice self-aggrandizement. generally we assume our own averageness; we take our success in school and jobs and relationships, lift it up to compare with others, and go, “i guess i’m just like everybody else. if i were exceptional, i’d know by now.”

but what if that’s not true?

what if you’re truly exceptional, one of the best writers in the entire world – in all history, even – but you’re just not there yet? what if you only need to get down a million more words of practice to write the book that inspires an entire generation of writers that come after you?

“that doesn’t seem likely,” you might say.

no, it’s not likely. but we’re not talking about averages and probability and likelihood. we’re thinking in terms of exceptions. and you can only write exceptional work if you believe you have exceptional things to say. if you believe you have a perspective to offer that no one else could write the way that you would write it. you have a truth to show the world that no one else knows.

octavia butler wrote her affirmations on the back of a notebook:

image

this is a good practice to get into. you don’t need to believe the words in order to write them, but you do need to write them, if for no other reason than to see what you want staring back at you, to make your potential real.

you cannot sabotage that potential because you believe you’re the rule rather than the exception. your future self deserves better than your present doubt. you might think you need to be humble about your skill and realistic about your chances. this is not true. practice telling yourself, “i am the exception.”

another voice might come back with, “what if i’m not?”

and you should answer, “i should give myself the opportunity to find out.”

↑ return to navigation ↑

methods to work through scenes you don’t want to write

26 MAR 2018

Ok so I've got this issue and wanted to see what you might think. I truly and seriously love not only yr voice and fiction but I love your take on writing in general. Here's the issue. What do you do when you hit that part you don't want to write? Not meaning here like emotionally difficult or tense just like in between. Something happened, something else is coming and there's just this - empty spot. When is it acceptable to just "skip that part"?

this took me a while to consider because my gut instinct is to say, “don’t write anything you don’t want to write.”

but then i started thinking of all these caveats, because there are so many different reasons for not wanting to write something, and if you’re asking whether you should skip it, it’s probably because you shouldn’t.

what you’re specifically talking about is like the long haul between two major plot points. generally in longer works, this is where you’d thread back whatever subplot you’d established. but sometimes fanfic doesn’t have subplots, and shorter works definitely wouldn’t have them.

so rather than writing everything that happens between A and B in scene, which might drag down the plot and slow your pacing, try switching up the structure. here are some ideas:

a montage

this is what i had to do for EoE, because it came down to the Falling In Love part, which in movies is almost always told in montage. i rewrote this paragraph about a dozen times, but here’s what it ended up looking like:

He would not fuck Albus Potter. He would not.

Even though he made it a habit to kneel by Draco’s chair after Griselda had gone to bed, his head resting on Draco’s thigh, Draco playing with his hair while reading through case files. Even though he bit his bottom lip whenever Draco made the mistake of looking at him too long. Even though he came to Draco with questions from his textbooks, asking for clarification on some obscure topic he happened to know quite a lot about, and listened intently until they both realized, stunned, that hours had passed. Even though Draco found evidence every time he left the Manor that Albus had gone into his bedroom. Even though Draco could smell him on his sheets at night, or just the illusion of it, taunting him, making him imagine what kind of awful things he’d done to himself in his bed. Even though a blizzard overtook the grounds and they went outside for a walk but proceeded to chuck snowballs at one another, tumbling into a wrestling match that Draco too easily won. Even though he pinned Albus in a valley of soft snow, gloved fingers intertwined in his own, flakes in their eyelashes and faces ruddy red and numb with cold. Even though he asked over cocoa later that evening, his legs across Draco’s lap, “You have the plea written. What are we waiting for?” to which Draco wanted to say, I can’t risk losing you, but actually said, “My caseload is too heavy right now.”

what i was aiming for here was one paragraph that would show the passage of time through specific images, which is still veering closer to show over tell. rather than “and then THIS happened” i slotted it within some internal monologue.

vignettes

somewhat same idea as above, but a little longer. a vignette is a short, self-contained image, like a snapshot. imagine the passage of time as flipping through a series of pictures, and each vignette is a description of a picture. no movement. just one single image that encapsulates the scene you’re trying to write without writing the entire scene.

a frame

which is to say, move out of chronological order. go directly from A to B, but once you’ve set the scene for B, backtrack and describe in reflection what happened between the two points.

for example, if i’m skipping ahead a year between scenes to, say, a major battle, i might go straight from entering boot camp (which i don’t want to describe) to the battle. once there, the character is in the trenches, clutching his rifle, debris falling all around him – he’s in the thick of conflict, so i can take my time now and weave in whatever i need to.

then i go back and describe, in summary, his experience in boot camp and how he got to where he is. this way, i don’t need to waste words on elaborating too much on boot camp when what happened there might not be relevant to the plot.

zoom out

i think learning how to zoom in and out on a scene is integral to understanding pacing. when you get to a part you don’t want to write, practice zooming out. pass five years in a paragraph. zoom back in and spend a page on just one day. toss a lifetime in a single sentence.

conversely, zoom in on a scene until your writing becomes so textured it feels like a painting. describe every detail of everything you can see in your mind.

do not zoom in so far you get trapped in a character’s head – this exercise is for imagery, detail, and action, not internal monologue.

once you master the lens with which you write and how closely or distantly it perceives the action of your story, it’s a lot easier to grasp pacing and gives you more tools to deal with scenes you’re not sure how to tackle.

thanks so much for the great question! hope this helps!

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to write an admissions essay

14 JAN 2018

Hi! I'm new to your blog, and I like it! Been reading your writing notes and they're lovely, thank you! I'm not sure you do this sort of thing,but I figured I'd ask - I totally understand if not. Would you give us some notes on writing admission essays? I'm going to have to do that next year for my PHD in the US (hopefully), and I'm so lost. I keep reading guides and examples and getting more lost.

i’m sorry this took me so long to answer. every time i tried i kept thinking “i don’t actually know anything about this” but i kind of do, so here’s everything i’ve learned about grad school admissions letters/personal statements, which admittedly still isn’t much.

try to think about it from the perspective of the admissions faculty. in any grad program, they’re going to be thumbing through hundreds of applications and whittling it down to maybe a dozen. what kinds of things would they be looking for?

this stuff can be modified for cover letters for jobs, too. it’s all the same basic principles: how will this place help you, how can you help it, and what makes you good to work with? for all forms of applications, if you stick to these three things, you’re golden. remember, you’re not pandering or pleading, you’re transacting. they have equal value to you that you have to them. all you have to do is explain how.

my dad always used to tell me, “the way to get any job is to tell them point-blank you’re the best choice, not because you have the most experience, but because you have the strongest drive and the highest potential. convince them you’ll do whatever it takes to ensure they made the right choice in hiring you.”

again, i’m really sorry this took so long to reply to, and i wish you the best of luck in your applications. let me know if you get accepted!

↑ return to navigation ↑

creative writing pedagogy basics

13 JAN 2018

hey betty! 1. ily + hope you're having a great day! 2. i'm working on starting a creative writing after school thing in my school, which is going to be focused mainly on the writing but will have some discussion based things. apart from concrit/beta reading+feedback n guidelines (in which i'm gonna refer to dow16, actually!!), what do you think would be good topics to discuss? you have Experience and i have a metric ton of ???¿¿¿ have a wonderful day! <3

this is a fabulous question!! creative writing pedagogy is my absolute favorite topic.

if you want a one-stop answer, the triedest and truest method of discussion is the Admired Prose assignment. the way it works is that one person brings in a piece of work they really enjoy, something short or an excerpt of something longer, and you read it together, and then discuss it.

once you’ve all read the piece, the person who brought in the work can discuss what they like about it, and you can go from there.

if you’re stumped on how to keep the conversation going, you can always resort to some of these questions:

of course, there’s a bit of homework involved, in that everyone has to be willing to bring in a piece of writing on their assigned day. obviously this assignment can be adapted to fit poetry and experimental/hybrid forms also.

when you’re discussing craft, i think it’s always best to use a story as a foundation for the discussion, otherwise the conversation is easy to spiral either out of control or hopping around saying “well what i do in my writing is…” which can be helpful but maybe not always the purpose of discussion. here are some other craft topics to consider:

here are some meta topics to consider, which is to say, you don’t necessarily need a piece of prose in front of you to discuss them:

i also highly recommend reading Audre Lorde’s “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” and using that as a launching point into developing a writing identity, which is to say: what is the work you’re doing as a writer?

this can really be anything. beginning writers might say, “i want to become a better writer,” which is always good work to be doing, and hopefully through discussion and practice that desire can be narrowed down a bit more concretely, as in, i want to be read, i want to be published, i want to learn more about who i am, i have questions about my life and experience i want to find the answers to, i want to express and share myself with others. or maybe it’s something very specific like, i’m interested in diverse representation in YA fantasy. i’m exploring empathy through villainy.

some people think you don’t have to know the work you’re doing, and to an extent i agree, but writing – and sharing that writing – is a means of participation in a greater discussion of the human experience, so to me anyway, it’s important to know what you’re saying.

i hope this helps. i could go on and on and on based on what level of skill you’re working at, but these are the fundamentals that i think can help writers across the board.

also i have to say, i think it is so super cool you’re starting this after school thing, and i really hope you keep me posted on it. i’d love to hear how it goes. of course i’m also happy to discuss/answer more questions if you have them.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to power through when you think your writing is garbage

24 MAR 2018

hey betty! two things: first, congrats on the writing program- seriously, well done!!! and second, i was just wondering if you have any tips on how to Power Through when you feel like your writing is garbage? hope you're having a great day :)

thank you so much! and great question –

so, first, i do not believe in Powering Through. to me it feels like breaking a leg and continuing to walk on it solely because you need to get from A to B. the real solution is seeking help, setting it, and getting rest. in order to get back on your feet, you need to slow down a bit and take some time for yourself.

when you feel like your writing is garbage, there might be a few things going on:

here are some ways to counter these things:

do an experiment

when i can’t write, i play around with something technical. for example, i’ve been having a heck of a time with a story i’m working on, and one of my profs gave our class a prompt to write a braided essay. when i narrowed my focus to the braided essay only, it offered me the freedom to finally get words on a page. i wrote 10k in two days.

so try something new. if you always write in third, try first. if you always write chronologically, write non-chronologically. if you always write prose, try poetry. if fiction, try nonfiction.

which reminds me, i wanted to make a post of craft-based (rather than content-based) prompts. hopefully i’ll do that next.

read stuff for a while

specifically, read stuff you admire. read new stuff. read stuff you don’t normally read. read stuff that makes you go “oh shit i wanna write like this.” or maybe “this is cool, maybe i’ll try it.”

i highly recommend reading short stories and personal essays. it takes you out of the world of fanfic, which can sometimes feel confining, without forcing the commitment of a novel or longer work. moreover, you can find fucktons of them for free all over the internet. maybe i’ll make a post of reading recs too.

do not read things that bore you. you are on a hunt for inspiration, and boredom is the villain of inspiration. if you get 1-2k in and you don’t have Kill Bill sirens in your head, dump it and move on.

when you finish reading the thing, ask yourself, “what tools do i want to take from this for my own writing?”

 

can you borrow the structure? the voice? the conflict or conceit? a character dynamic? a tone or cadence? narrow your focus down to what exactly you liked about it and then try it in your own writing.

get feedback

the best way to break through a ceiling is to let someone to call you out on your bullshit. specifically, you need an extra set of eyes to tell you what’s working and what’s not, either in a work in progress or with a piece you think is really polished.

i had a workshop once where i submitted a chapter of something i had revised three times. i thought it was great, it absolutely did not need any more revisions. i had also hit a writing ceiling at that point, and found i was trapped in my own wheelhouse, spinning the same writing style and the same kinds of stories, never taking any risks. there was no experimentation anymore, no fun.

obviously, the workshop shredded my chapter. we spent about two minutes going over what worked and then forty or so just tearing it apart. i loved it. all of my blind spots were being shown to me and i could finally see a broader picture of my own work. i definitely broke through the ceiling and my writing is better for it. sometimes you just need someone better than you (and by that i mean, who possesses a wider understanding of writing) telling you what to do.

write about writing

i am a firm believer that we write to think, not as the product of thought. so when you’re stuck, or bored, or uninspired, or down on yourself, writing about writing or talking about writing can really help move things along, like a verbal Ex-Lax.

talk with a friend about your story idea and use their interest to fuel your own. write a journal entry about your WIP and what about it isn’t working for you. vent your writing frustrations somehow.

sometimes the act of meta-analyzing yourself as a writer can offer a new perspective. i feel like we’re discouraged from this because the focus should always be on the work and not the creator, but you as the creator are just as worthy of your own literary inspection as anything else. so try to shift the lens toward yourself and see what happens. what happens when you become the focus of your own work?

thanks so much for the great question, and i hope this offers you some guidance.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to make a sex scene sexy

10 DEC 2017

Sex scene advice. How in hell do you make it sexy?

at the point you get to a sex scene, your characters will be doing most of the work. the hotness of the situation has a lot to do with the build-up it took to get there and the tension that will be increased or dissipated as a result of it.

that said, it’s hard to nail down on a line by line level what makes something sexy, because everyone is into different things. i think, though, there are certain patterns that are always golden:

have the non-POV character lead the action. most of the time, your lens character is going to be the one having stuff done to them rather than the other way around. doing this evokes not only the feeling of being wanted but also increases tension – you’re not in the head of the person leading the show, so you don’t know what’s going to happen. (i’ve read plenty of good smut from the POV of the more dominant character, but decidedly less of it than the other way around, and i think it’s more difficult to pull off.)

a light touch goes a long way. the best sex scenes are the ones that are seamlessly integrated into the story itself – no tonal shifts from blunt to lofty and romantic, no toeing around difficult language (it’s not a “love canal,” it’s just an asshole), no switching positions unnecessarily 300 times to elongate the scene, no run-on sentences to convey the rushed thoughts of being in the throes of orgasm. dwell in the build-up (or foreplay) as long as you can, but once it’s going, get in, make them come, and move on.

stay focused. on a craft level, this is about pacing and conflict. writing an orgasm is like any other narrative arc – if your character wants to save the world, you don’t describe every step involved in making a cup of tea. if your character really wants a cup of fucking tea, then yeah, that’s what you would describe. in sex scenes, you don’t have to write out every button undone or every hip-thrust, but it’s important to establish what a character wants (an orgasm, generally, but you can complicate this as needed – a spanking, praise, to get fucked into yesterday) and what actions are being done to get there.

realism is not your friend. in reality, you get pubes in your mouth and have to pull them out, but that doesn’t mean we have to deal with that in fiction too. sometimes realism can be cute – a character struggling taking a shirt off out of eagerness to get going, sure. otherwise, the rule of thumb is that if you don’t see it happen in porn, you probably don’t want to write it into your sex scene.

emphasize imagery over monologue (or “show don’t tell” i guess). saying “he wanted her” is less evocative than “he dug his fingers into his knee to keep himself from reaching out to her.” a good pattern to practice is this:

you’ll want to play around with this, but generally what makes a good sex scene is being able to both see and feel everything that’s happening by utilizing the above pattern.

tension, tension, tension. and i don’t just mean in terms of the overall story, but even in the scene itself. the stronger the desire, the higher the stakes, the deeper the urgency. reduce your main character into (in the words of Vita Sackville-West) a thing that wants. saturate your prose with imagery depicting their arousal. think anatomically: for humans with vaginas, you’ve got red, swollen, wet lips and a hard clit. for humans with penises, you’ve got hardness, precome, etc etc. and remember: things being wet are almost always hot. the wetter the better. i don’t make the rules.

challenge yourself to veer away from expectation. if you’re writing a sex scene, it’s probably in part because you’ve read a million sex scenes, which means you’ve read a million sex scene tropes and cliches. it’s easy to fall into the rhythm of our sexual expectations, “the tall man pressed his finger into the blonde man’s ass. he pushed in the rest of the way, then added a second finger and scissored him open. he crooked his fingers upward and saw stars, etc.” what is a way you can complicate, twist, or deviate from the prose you’ve read dozens of times already? in what way can you write that your reader will get to that paragraph and go, “oh, that’s new. i’ve never read that before.”

this is a tall order because creativity is the most challenging part of writing; it requires balance and finesse and an understanding of what’s familiar in order to play around with the unfamiliar. on one hand you want to avoid “and he saw stars” but on the other you can’t just be like, “HE FUCKED HIS BRO TO THE GODDAMN MOON.” which brings me to my last piece of advice…

take note of the scenes you find hot. inspect them line by line. figure out exactly what you find sexy about the way something is written. is it the structure of the sentences themselves, the urgency and tension of the scene, or where that scene exists in the overall narrative? you’re not going to be able to turn everyone on who reads your work, but you know what you like, so you can use yourself as a baseline and go from there.

i hope this helps! thanks for the great question!

↑ return to navigation ↑

resources for becoming a slush reader

9 DEC 2017

hey! I’m interested in being a (volunteer?) slush reader but don’t really know where to start, and you wrote a post abt doing that, do you have any resources? (Thanks!!)

unfortunately there’s no like, (free) open call for slush readers. the best way to get into it is to start reading lit mags and follow the ones whose aesthetics really jive with you. then look around and see if there’s an opening to read (usually in Contacts or Volunteer or something). if not, be sure to sign up for their newsletter/mailing list for updates.

you’ll want to avoid ones affiliated with universities – the slush readers for those are usually grad students.

some resources that might be helpful:

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to stay motivated when you don’t think your writing is good

5 SEP 2017

Lately, I've been stuck in a vicious cycle of write fic-->post fic-->forget about fic-->re-read fic months later-->hate fic and feel embarrassed by how badly written it is. My writing doesn't get much attention, so I've always tried to write the stories I want to read, but now even that doesn't make me happy anymore. How do I motivate myself to keep writing when I know I'll hate my own work in a few months' time?

i absolutely know the feeling. sometimes i get (wonderful, much appreciated) comments on some of my older work and i cringe to think that’s the initial perception they’re getting of my writing, and secretly hoping they look at something more recent.

but i also recognize that cringeworthiness is also a really good indicator that i’m becoming a more critical reader. if i can read something i wrote and go, “damn, this really sucks,” it also means i can ask myself, “but why does it suck?” then once i answer that, it’s so much easier to implement that critical awareness into my current work.

so disliking your old work may mean that you’re just constantly and rapidly improving. it’s also possible you don’t see it or notice it, because you’re busy trucking on, doing your thing. in which case, the best way to mark your improvement is to write about writing. that is to say, read something you wrote months ago and which you think is badly written, and write out what exactly about it is bad. making a habit of this will solidify your progress as a writer. it’s a big portion of why i write a lot of my writing advice posts.

as far as motivation, it’s all about falling in love with the project you’re working on. it’s okay if your stories have a shelf life. you can orphan them or put them into “old stuff” folders on your drive. you’ll always have more ideas to work on, so there’s no need to dwell on past work except to say, “wow i’m a lot better now,” and, “thanks past self for writing this so i can keep improving.” and whenever you finish a new story, “thanks future self for understanding that i’m doing my best work right now, and i have to keep going or else i won’t get better.”

i think even neil gaiman said that some of his most loved novels are ones that he no longer likes. so it’s natural to look back on our old work and think it’s bad, but it’s important to remember that alone is a sign of progress. and the fact it only takes a few months to recognize that in your own work is actually super promising.

tl;dr appreciate the work you’re doing now, write about writing, thank your past self for getting you to the present, thank your future self for forgiving the errors of your current project, keep moving forward, and don’t look back.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to make your words feel like magic

22 AUG 2017

hi! i was going to ask a kind of long, rambling question, but it comes down to this: how do you make your words feel like magic? (happy slightly belated birthday, by the way!)

sorry for the delay in answering – this one really stumped me. i think i know what you mean by magic, but it’s so hard to nail down. i find myself asking, magic for the reader to read or the writer to write?

and either way, it’s a hard thing to control. you have no way to know how your writing will touch a given reader. and it’s not like you can do some kind of blood sacrifice to summon your muse. they come and go as they please.

but, having more of a science background than arts, i think: so these are the uncontrolled variables, so what are the controlled ones? that is to say, what does magic feel like to me while i write it, and what parts of that practice are active and consistent?

i remember when i started writing, nothing felt magic because i was too focused on putting one word after the next in a logical sequence. it’s a lot like picking up any new hobby – you struggle at first, and it feels clunky and awkward. then, with most things, over time (even without marked improvement), you build muscle memory just by doing a thing over and over. playing video games, your fingers learn the keys and motions and timing to control your character. competing in a sport, your limbs and muscles learn their necessary movements. at a new job, you have to learn where all the files go and how to use the systems and the timing of everything.

to get to the magic, you have to build that muscle memory. you have to know what a good sentence feels like to write (because you’ll want to read it over and over). you have to find a physical space in which to write where you’re comfortable and feel your best. you have to find your writing rhythm, your focus, your voice. the only way to do that, though, is to put words on a page, over and over and over. even if they’re totally illogical words and they don’t make sentences or any sense at all, the act of taking something from your brain onto paper is all that matters. you can learn how to play a piano by putting your fingers on the keys and listening to what sounds good. you can learn to run a marathon by putting one foot forward repeatedly without a destination. with writing, with everything, you have to build the muscle memory.

and even after you’ve done that, sometimes the magic still isn’t there. but here are some things that help me find it:

doing something you’ve never done before. writing in a voice or style you’ve never attempted. stealing someone else’s aesthetic. combining two authors’ aesthetic. changing up the structure of the piece from what you would naturally do. write on a different size sheet of paper. write sitting on the floor in a corner of your house you’ve never sat in. make a character you would never want to know in person and try to get into their mind to understand them. go somewhere you would never otherwise go just to put it in a story.

 

be uncomfortable. sometimes i think things don’t feel like magic because they bore us. and one way to not be bored is to write something you’re so unfamiliar with it makes you uncomfortable to even consider. i’m a very inquisitive person, and when i find something about the world i don’t understand, i want to find a way to understand it. sometimes that’s by research. sometimes it’s by writing. a habit i’ve learned is to embrace all things that make me want to gag, physically or morally, to constantly push my mental and emotional limits on the page, no matter how hard it is or how much it hurts.

make a puzzle for yourself. i’m halfway between being a planner and winging everything, which basically means i make very loose plot points. this turns writing into a game. i have to figure out how to get each character from point A to B. if i’m not curious about my story, i lose interest in it. so i have to make it interesting enough for me to want to answer all the questions i’ve posed.

focus on objects. when in doubt, empower an object. this seems like a totally bizarre thing to do but it really, really works. give a character a material thing that means so much to them, that symbolizes something great, and give that object some kind of power over the character. let your character externalize all their emotions into that object so they have significance. you don’t have to put magic into words, but you can always put it into objects.

give every character a goal and a reason they want to achieve it. this way, you have two directions to move in: forward, toward the goal, and outward, toward the reason they want to achieve it. if you care enough about your characters and their plight, you’ll be able to escape your own head and hop into theirs, and they’ll drive the rest of the story for you.

BE WEIRD. magic is a function of creativity, and creativity is a means of breaking rules and expectations. force your mind to go against your own expectations. do this not only in a big picture sense but in your prose too. try to put words together in a way you’ve never seen them put together before. don’t worry so much about making sense. learn how to follow the rules you’re given or constraints you put on yourself, and then learn now to break them, or better, bend them to achieve what you intend.

i hope this helps. thank you for the birthday wishes and for posing such a fun question.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to handle having too many ideas

6 JUL 2017

Do you ever deal with having too many ideas? I come up with a story, completely plot it out, outline it, establish my characters, and next thing I know I’m coming up with a completely different story line that I feel like I have to flesh out. I feel like I’m constantly hopping around, back and forth, between a million different stories and getting very little actually finished. Do you have any advice on maintaining focus?

god for real tho. i met with my thesis advisor a few weeks ago, and i had to sheepishly tell her how many projects i was tackling, to which she said, “well it’s better to have too many ideas than too few.”

(and then at the end of the meeting, she told me to send her everything i had so far, and i was like, “you mean short stories,” and she said, “no, everything.” i told her that would be about 300 pages, and she insisted that was fine.)

and wow, that made me feel so much better. in my head it’s like. something to be ashamed of, writing too much and too quickly and having too many ideas and scattered attention. but in the grand scheme of things, we’re in the minority. a lot of writers have trouble getting anything down. a lot of writers only get a good idea once in a long time. so i try to be grateful of the constant buzz of ideas, because there might come a day when it stops.

i read something yesterday that was a reminder of the old adage, the only way to become a writer is to treat it like a job. ass in chair, two hours a day or more.

and oh boy, thinking about writing the same way i think about my bullshit 9 to 5 really brings the muses out!! tbh i think the idea of Forcing Yourself to Write Things is very much a privileged notion and a skewed perspective. the people who are saying this are already successful, and they want to portray their work as if it were some immense burdensome struggle, like you too can have all this if you make yourself suffer.

moreover, i just? don’t? want? to see? writing? that way? as some kind of productive output, like i’m a machine. like my creativity is a factory for churning out media to be consumed en masse. so i think the idea of focus and diligence is all bullshit. writing is absolutely a discipline, but it is not factory labor. you do not have to clock in, work on your designated project, and clock out. maybe that works for some people, but it doesn’t for me.

that said, not being able to finish things is totally frustrating and disheartening, because it feels like you have no control at all, jesus-take-the-wheel style. so i’ve tricked myself into a few workarounds so that i get shit accomplished.

i let myself write whatever is in my head. i do not deny myself anything. if a scene or piece of dialogue comes up, i stop what i’m doing and write it down, because ignoring it feels like being given a gift that you decline. it feels rude. but here’s the crux: if this happens, i don’t force myself to finish whatever story that scene belonged in. sometimes it’s ok to just write the scene and do something else. sometimes it’s ok to let that one scene take you to the next and let the story consume you, and put everything else to the side for a bit. but the point is: write it down. no matter what. give in to the ideas that come to you.

don’t feel bad about giving up on a story. a lack of focus is a consequence of expectations, and i think most expectations–for yourself and for others–are stupid. they put people in unasked for boxes and lead to disappointment. so i don’t feel bad about myself for giving up on a story just because i expect myself to complete shit. sometimes the story just isn’t good enough, or it’s not ready to be written yet. giving up on stories that lose my attention without beating myself up makes focusing on the more worthwhile projects that much easier. this may seem counterintuitive, but i swear, the second i took the pressure off myself to follow through, the easier it became to follow through. it took the obligation out of it. i could say to the story, “i could give up on you if i wanted, you know. you’d gather dust in this folder for eternity, unfinished.” and sometimes the story would be like, “yea ok,” but sometimes it goes, “NOOOO just one more scene. one more scene pls.” and i end up finishing it, because i give myself permission to quit.

i limit the scope of the project. i try to write the first scene of every story idea i have, and sometimes i write more, sometimes i finish the story, and sometimes i give up on it. but i need to write the first scene to figure out how long the thing is going to realistically be. if i think it’s a short story, but i come up with enough content that it’s going to be a novel, i either:

table it for a time when i have the patience and focus to work on a longer project

ask myself, “how can i reel this in?” and pare down the plot until it’s a totally manageable length and something i can get finished in a week or two. because once a short story is down, you have a completed work, and if you want to expand it later when you have time, it’s still there for potential revision.

practice writing short stories over allowing them to greedily take up more space than you intend. this really helps with focus. it’s like building muscle. keep things concise and short and finish them quickly and move on, and then you learn how your writing pace really feels when it’s in check. you know how it feels when something is complete. you know how it feels when something isn’t worth pursuing. you learn how much effort to put into it. your stories may ask for a lot of attention from you, they might beg you to expand and become complicated and overlong, but you don’t have to give in to them. it is better to complete a short story and move on so you have a completed draft to work from later than it is to start a novel and abandon it.

notecards! buy some notecards and write all your scene ideas down in summary on them, then organize by project and keep in a little box. you might neglect some, you might pick up others later, but the point is that all your ideas are put in a readily accessible place.

and lastly, prioritize using the snowball method. make a list of all the stuff you’re working on and order it by whatever will take the least amount of work to complete first. finish that item, and then go to the next, until your To Be Written list is pared down and you can re-focus your efforts. if you get to an item and think “this isn’t worth finishing” move on to the next.

thanks for the question! hope this helps!!

↑ return to navigation ↑

on self-sabotage

5 JUL 2017

hey, i'm working on the first draft of a fanfic now and slowly losing motivation- i know i can edit + make it better later, but it's becoming harder to convince myself it's worth it. i don't even know what i want to ask so have a ton of question marks: ????????????? (hope you're having a lovely day btw)

i see your question marks and raise you a discussion on self-sabotage.

tbh this is my biggest challenge right now. i haven’t been able to write much because i’ll start something and think, where does this belong? if it has a place, will it be well-received? is there something ~better i should be working on?

and so i do what i’ve always done ever since i started writing: put about 60% effort into it, throw it into the wind, and see if it’s Good Enough. and if it fails, either by getting rejected a hundred times or no traffic on ao3, well, i didn’t put that much work into it anyway, so it doesn’t matter. and if it succeeds, then i feel bad because i know i could have done it better.

or, conversely, i determine it’s not even worth my 60% and give up on it because i’ll never have the time or energy or devotion or patience to get it where it needs to be in order to be something worth anyone else’s money or time.

i have this novella right now that’s complete, but i hate it because it deserves to be a novel. it’s 20k words and it ought to be around 50k to do the story justice, but i read it and think, this isn’t even sellable. no one would read this. i have better things to be working on, more relevant things with deadlines and whatnot, things that are more fun and less stylized and therefore less risky.

and i have this short story that has now spiraled into something longer and i think it would be better as a script. but i open final draft and the blinking cursor with this big scary medium i’m not as familiar with as prose is daunting to me. so i think, well i can write it in prose and then make a script out of it. and then it seems like too much work, because what are the chances anyone is going to buy a script? it’s even slimmer than selling a novel.

god, and the fanfic ideas. i have a million of them i’ve never written because they’re longform rare pairs, or the premises are too offensive and i don’t want to wade into a steaming pile of anon hate, or the fandom is dead. so i know not only will it not get any traffic, i would lose a ton of followers/subscribers and feel shitty about myself.

so i’ve tried to frame the situation a different way. i’ve been asking myself, what does the story look like that would embolden you to give it 100%? there are two things:

sometimes, that second one takes time to realize. it’s an idea that sticks in your head for months or years after you’ve give up on the story, and you think, “that cold be really good if i gave it the time and attention it deserves.” sometimes it’s good to put it down to see if a concept will withstand the test of time – which is difficult with fanfic, because some fandoms die out after just a few months, or certain tropes may have a timer on them.

so tl;dr here’s what i’ve got for you:

i am a firm believer it’s ok to give up on stories that don’t inspire you, and that you shouldn’t force yourself to do the things you do for fun when they are no longer fun. but it’s also important to consider that quitting is a symptom of fear, and depending on the situation, it might be better to face that fear and barrel forward in spite of it.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on pursuing your best life

21 JUN 2017

Hi Betts, this is a long ask, so thank you in advance for bearing with me. I've been a lurker of your blog and have seen it as a lifeline in the past year or so, and I'm so grateful that you have offered it as a space for advice, storytelling, and collaborative thought. I'm a woc of indeterminate queerness from a largely lower-class background who has just graduated from college, and i had initially planned to rest and recover from school before thinking about the next step. I'm still insisting on doing so, but recent events in my life have reminded me that my home situation (I just moved back in with my parents) has always been incredibly unstable, emotionally damaging, and at times unsafe. This realization has given an urgency toward considering if graduate school–specifically applying for an MFA–is the next step in my life I should be working toward. I identify strongly with a lot of your previous reasons you stated in regards to why you wanted to get your MFA, I feel like I have just gotten started in pursuing my academic and creative work, and I have been encouraged by multiple faculty members at my previous institution to consider continuing into graduate school. Yet I suffer from a lot of self-doubt and self-depreciation that makes it difficult to see myself the way others see me, and not someone who is too young (as a person and a writer) to be considering this option and is really just kidding themselves anyway. My home life has made it so that an MFA seems like an escape from a bad situation, but I don’t know how much I should consider this feeling as a legitimate factor in my decision. Add to that my pre-existing doubts and my mind cannot handle considering the future for too long without going down the same spiral of negativity and uncertainty with no resolution. Thoughts?

my thoughts are this:

doubt will kill you if you let it.

you have a fundamental right to pursue your best life, and any thoughts that impede you achieving your best life do not deserve to be listened to. i’m hearing two things here: you think you’re too young, and you think grad school is just an escape. i’ll tackle those individually.

the great thing about writing is that age is totally irrelevant all the time. you can publish your first book at 13 or 92. your age will always have an effect on your writing, but it will never determine the quality of it, and it will never dictate your worthiness to tell a story. your voice is eternal.

moreover, an MFA is just writing training, like an apprenticeship. you get an MFA to learn three skills: writing, reading, and teaching. you can learn these skills from a lot of different places, but it sounds like you’re interested in academia, so an MFA would probably be your best option. there’s nothing wrong with going from undergrad to grad school, in fact i know a lot of people who have done that and they just consider it being “traditionally taught.” i also know a lot of people who took a gap year or two. and then there are people like me who had no background in writing whatsoever and just kind of flung ourselves into the fray.

of my friends who are going into an MFA at 22-24 years old, yeah, they do have some unique struggles. they have more doubt than those of us who are coming in at 28-32. they have fewer personal experiences to draw from, but in fiction, imagination is just as important as experience anyway. conversely, they have the benefit of hitting the ground running. they know what they want to do and they’re given the tools early on to accomplish their dreams. they didn’t have to meander around in a 9-to-5 soulless office gig for however many years before launching into their passion. and as much as i needed my 5 years of administrative assisting, i recognize i only needed that because i grew up in an environment where i never learned to ask myself what i wanted because i didn’t believe happiness was actually an option for me. if i could go back and tell my past self anything, it would be (after forcing my dad to get a cancer screening when he turned 50) “you don’t have to be miserable, and your sadness does not define you.”

that’s where this self-doubt is coming from i think. you have the gift of having a passion already, but accompanied by the self-sabotaging mentality that you don’t deserve to achieve it yet. especially in creative work, i think we’re inclined to believe our suffering gives us the best impetus for writing, but that doesn’t have to be true. you don’t have to wait around at 22 struggling to survive just so you have a story to tell at 31.

as far as using grad school as an escape, hey, if you can get into a fully funded program doing something you love, that’s the best possible escape i can imagine. think of it in terms of risk/reward. what exactly is the risk? what’s the worst case scenario? an MFA is just two or three years, hopefully paid, doing work you enjoy and meeting like-minded people. it’s hard, yeah, but any job is. any life change is. learning any discipline is.

i think there’s a big spectrum of “escape.” there’s running away from your problems, and there’s digging ourselves out of a bad situation. i know a lot of people who run away. they get too far into something and then they break free and start over. they do this compulsively. it doesn’t sound like you’re one of those people, though, because they hide it about themselves. they don’t come into askboxes questioning the notion of escape. to them, it’s the most natural thing in the world.

but if you’re born into a bad situation and you can work your way out? do it. because that’s not escape, that’s growth.

i’m sorry you’re in this position. ideally you could make this decision in a vacuum, from a place of safety and comfort, and be confident in your future. but unfortunately that’s never our reality, so we have to work with what we’ve got. it’s okay to be afraid, and it’s okay to have doubt, but you have to do whatever it takes to move forward in spite of these things.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to choose an mfa program

20 JUN 2017

Hello! I've been spending all afternoon reading your writing advice posts and finding them really helpful. I'm considering an MFA program myself, and I'm wondering how you decided which programs to apply to?

honestly i went about the process all wrong out of necessity. for me it was all about money and location, but ideally you should choose an MFA based on writers you want to work with. if i had gone in with that mentality, i would have applied to Vanderbilt to work with Lorrie Moore probably.

when i started, i just kinda took notes and bookmarked links, and then after getting an idea of what the MFA was all about, decided to make tiers of priority.

PRIORITY 1: funding

i knew if i had to pay for school, it was a dealbreaker for me. i wanted a masters degree, but not at the expense of going into more debt i couldn’t afford to pay. so i eliminated every school that didn’t have full funding, which preferably included a teaching assistantship so i could get pedagogical experience. there aren’t a whole lot of fully funded creative writing MFAs in the US, so that narrowed down my search significantly.

PRIORITY 2: location

of the handful of fully funded MFAs, i knew i preferred not to move, because i own a house and it would be an agonizing endeavor to try and sell it, and moreover due to the current mortgage market, i knew i would end up losing money in the deal. BUT i’ve always wanted an excuse to move south anyway, preferably california. so i applied to some additional schools in the south, figuring selling my house was Future Betts’ Problem. thankfully it didn’t come to that.

there were three fully funded MFA programs within driving distance of me, and by that i mean a significant commute but not unmanageable, as long as i only had to go to campus 2 or 3 times a week. i ended up applying to 2 of the 3 MFAs in driving distance because the third required a higher GRE score than i had, and i didn’t want to retake the GRE.

i also applied to 2 schools in louisiana and 1 in california. of the 5 schools i applied to, i got accepted to 1, which happened to be the one closest to where i lived and also, coincidentally, where i already had friends, so it wasn’t nearly the massive life change i had psyched myself out to be.

what i did wrong

i was so convinced i was wasting my time applying to grad school that i sabotaged myself by not doing my best work (i didn’t think i would get in). this is something i do a lot. what i mean is, i should have researched the faculty of each of the schools i applied to, read their work, and personalized my cover letters more thoroughly. if i had done that, i would have known that i was a shoe-in for the school i got accepted to, because the faculty is a bunch of experimentalists who value transgression.

but then again, i didn’t really know what experimentalist or transgressive fiction even was at the time, so i’m not sure i would have been able to pair my work at the time with the faculty’s.

and that’s another thing i did wrong: i went in without having any clue what i actually wanted to write or why i wanted to write it. i think that’s totally ok, by the way, you don’t have to know. but it would have helped the application process if i had spent a little bit of time and did more research on authors i admire.

i hope this helps! let me know if you have more questions!

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to shake negative thoughts

10 JUN 2017

I started writing again after not posting for 3 years. I'm running into the same problem I did last time where I saw the views and kudos to mean if I was a good writer or not. I also don't have many followers. I'm telling myself it doesn't matter, that I want to use fanfic to practice so I can publish one day soon. But it's difficult to shake the negative thoughts. I'm wondering if this is normal for someone just starting out? And do you have any other advice for someone in my position?

yes, it’s absolutely normal. it’s devastating to not get the desired traffic on work you put so much time and effort into, and i don’t think any writer can fully separate the quality of the work itself from the traffic it receives. and when it comes to ofic, even if you know rejections don’t mean anything, you can’t help but see the causal pattern of: it wasn’t good enough, therefore it got rejected. it’s just how we’re trained to think.

i’m going through my rolodex of advice on this topic, things other people have told me about it, but what it comes down to is: you can’t let it stop you. you can’t let anything stop you. low traffic, negative thoughts, future rejections when you start to publish. you have to dig your heels in the sand and tell yourself, it doesn’t matter who reads it, it doesn’t matter who likes it, it doesn’t matter how successful i am, i’m going to keep writing and nothing can stop me.

i remember once when i got 3 rejections in one day, one of which was a workshop i really wanted to go to, and i was feeling just terrible about myself, convinced i wasn’t going to write anymore and because it was worthless, it was all worthless, there was no way i could handle this anymore. so i wrote about it in my journal, this worthlessness, and i ended my page-long rant with the question, but what if i kept writing?

that’s all it took for me to quiet all the negative voices telling me to quit. just, yeah, sure, be as mean as you want, brain, but i’ve got this story idea and i’m curious to see where it goes.

so that’s enough for me most days, even though i’ve gotten 12 rejections in the past couple months alone. even though the story i’m working on probably doesn’t have any audience at all. it’s my work, and i’m going to do it whether people like it or not.

find value in craft itself. have faith in yourself that one day you’ll get to where you want to be. acknowledge it will probably take longer than you expect. know you will face rejection and criticism and doubt and heartache constantly. keep writing anyway.

↑ return to navigation ↑

maladaptive daydreaming vs. creativity

10 JUN 2017

I saw you posted abt maladaptive daydreaming and i've been struggling to differentiate the line between MD and just being creative. i looked up symptoms and i feel like i have A LOT of them but i can't tell if i'm a MD who just so happens to write their fantasies down, so they've become normalized as a part of the writing process, or just a really creative person? since you are a writer and MD, i was wondering how you were able to tell?

this is a really good question and one i struggle with a lot. it’s nearly impossible to differentiate what facets of behavior are disordered and which are just part of who you are and the way you function. that said, to determine whether or not something you do is considered disordered behavior, you can align it to the expectations of your environment and figure out if it is impeding or otherwise putting a strain on your daily activity.

(which brings up a second point: in what ways would you behave if you were in an ideal environment? what would your ideal environment look like? how much of any disorder are only due to inappropriate environments? and of course this leads to discussions of capitalism and patriarchy’s effects on the individual, etc. but that’s a discussion for another time.)

what i mean is, i consider daydreaming maladaptive only when it causes me frustration and i feel like i’ve lost control of it. if MD feels more like intrusive thoughts and keeps me from tasks that i need to accomplish in order to survive – say, eating, bathing, getting work done at my job, interacting with loved ones – then it becomes disordered behavior rather than creativity. i’m leaning on MD as a mechanism to avoid reality.

if i’m in a low-stress environment with nothing too heavy on my plate, like when i’m driving maybe, and then i get my work done for the day and take time to write it down, then i consider it creativity. it’s still a priority in my life, but i’m not sacrificing my heath or stability for it.

so tl;dr when you put creativity above necessity, it becomes maladaptive.

↑ return to navigation ↑

why bother writing?

8 JUN 2017

No pressure to answer this but do you ever feel discouraged by comparing yourself to others, and start wondering "what's the point?" I feel like I have no imagination even though I put a lot of work into my writing, esp. original work; but then I think about how it's probably never good enough to make it, there's no point to it, etc, and it feels crappy, like I want to give up. How do you deal with this kind of thing, if it ever happens to you? Thanks!!

yes. yes it absolutely does happen to me. i think it happens to most creative people, and it has happened all over, all across the span of time and applied to all skills. it’s called comparative thinking, and it can be just as helpful as it can be detrimental.

there’s a proverb that goes, “I wept because I had no shoes, then I saw a man who had no feet,” which describes the dichotomous perspective of comparative mentality (despite the ableist implication of the proverb). in studies, researchers found this line of thinking worked like a light switch for many people. instead of being sad in what they lacked (in one case, that they had won $3 in a lottery instead of $5 that other people had won), they changed their mentality to be happy they had $3 they didn’t otherwise have.

but not everyone can switch like this in regard to creative pursuits, because (imo) this skill is one that is affected by privilege. if you’re a queer writer or a writer of color or a female writer (or a young writer! this especially applies to young writers), you’ve been trained your entire life to switch comparative thinking negatively when it comes to expressions of the self.

i put this occurrence of negative comparative thinking in the greater context of why it happens to not only me, but people like me, and i think, cishet abled white men don’t have to deal with this as much as i do. and then i get mad, and i tell myself, if they’re allowed to write without fear of rejection, if they’re allowed to love their work, if they’re allowed to scream their normative stories to the masses and get paid for it, well fuck, i can too.

writing then becomes so much bigger than just the stories i want to tell, and negative comparative thinking turns into a social issue. i refuse to let myself silence my work before i even put it out there. in some cases before i even write it. then it becomes my duty to write.

maybe this context will help you, or maybe it would help if you did some research into your own life, into why you’re experiencing this problem. because it’s not about the work. it’s never about the work. it’s about you and your opinions of yourself and your aspirations.

write out all your thoughts on it. ask yourself the tough questions and pound out words on a page when you come up with their answers. then read what you’ve written and hear how it sounds. put another voice to it if you have to, pretend i wrote it to you. what would you tell me if i told you i thought i lacked imagination, and i didn’t think anything i wrote was good enough?

sometimes the hardest part of writing isn’t putting words on a page or telling a good story. sometimes it’s the conflict of creating something new, and finding value in the things your hands can make. it’s turning the camera toward yourself and having to stare all the ugly stuff inside you dead-on, work through the tangle of your own experiences and transform them into something beautiful. you’ve just gotta believe that work is always worth doing, no matter what the outcome, no matter who you think has done it better, no matter how mundane it might seem to you. your stories are always worth being told.

↑ return to navigation ↑

for fanfic authors considering a creative writing graduate degree

5 JUN 2017

i’ve had a few people PM me about the grad program i’m in, and i thought maybe i would share some information i’ve learned about creative writing graduate degrees plus all the stuff i wish someone had told me before i started applying.

to give you some context: i own a house (that i purchased, i didn’t inherit) and i support myself completely. i’m not married or in a relationship and i don’t have kids yet. my undergraduate degree is in psychology. i came from a lower-class upbringing. i had never written an original work of fiction before applying; i had only written fanfic. i worked in finance for ten years at a dead-end job before i decided to go back to school. i applied to six schools and got accepted into one.

basic info

usually a creative writing graduate degree is called an MFA, or a Master of Fine Arts. it’s considered a terminal degree, that is to say, it’s the highest degree you can attain in the field of creative writing.

however, some programs are also MAs, and usually those are combined with literature or pedagogy. there are also a number of creative writing PhDs, which are less about the craft of writing and more about teaching and research.

MAs are generally two years, MFAs are anywhere from two to three years, and PhDs are around four. most schools offer the MFA, so going forward that’s the type of degree i’ll be discussing. the MA doesn’t stray far from the MFA, and the PhD is a whole other beast.

you’ll need to choose a focus for your degree. most MFAs offer fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. some offer scriptwriting or experimental/hybrid forms. some expect you to play around with multiple genres.

MFA classwork revolves around the creative writing workshop. a workshop is a class where you meet with your peers once a week to discuss the work you’ve read the prior week. you take turns submitting a story, poem, or excerpt, and while you’re the one being workshopped, you take notes while everyone talks. when you workshop your peers, you offer a letter of critique and participate in the discussion. workshop is also the place where you can ask about craft, publishing, or anything else you have questions about. workshops are run by a leader, usually a professor, someone who has a significant publishing history and experience teaching.

other classwork for MFAs include literature seminars, where you read already published work and discuss it with your peers while applying it to established theory.

an MFA thesis is generally a book-length work of your given genre, due at the end of your studies to grant your degree. it may also include some research component, like a craft essay or reading list, and an oral examination. you work with an advising committee throughout your degree to hone and revise your thesis, and generally use workshop to get peer feedback on early drafts.

MFA extracurriculars include working on your school’s literary magazine, doing readings of your work, and participating in your English department’s student organizations. there are usually additional opportunities that pop up throughout each semester, including meeting with established visiting writers (and hopefully these are writers of the super famous variety, which makes for great networking).

applying to an MFA involves a writing sample (the most important piece of the application), undergraduate transcripts, letters of recommendation, and a letter of intent. some also require the GRE. many have a $50-100 fee, but sometimes you can request a waiver.

assumptions debunked

here are some misconceptions i’ve come across and some i had when i began researching.

expectation: i can’t afford it

reality: that’s possible, but consider that many programs are fully funded, that is to say, the school will pay you to go there. no tuition, no loans, just a stipend that you’ll receive in monthly disbursements. it’s not a lot, but usually enough to get by.

the way it works is that in exchange for grad classes, you teach undergraduate english. this is usually a class called english composition, and many schools make it mandatory for all incoming freshman, which is how the english department gets funded, and they can return those funds to you, the grad student.

personally, teaching has become one of my favorite things i’ve ever done. i want to continue teaching when i graduate because it’s just really fun and incredibly rewarding. i highly recommend this route for an MFA because you won’t end up in debt afterward and you’ll gain a marketable skill (pedagogy) if your writing career doesn’t take off immediately.

expectation: i can’t quit my job

reality: there are a growing number of what are called low-residency MFAs. the above fully funded scenario are programs called full-residency, where you have to be on campus a few days a week, but low-res programs are mostly online, with 1-2 weeks per year spent on campus.

the downside to this is that there is usually minimal funding for these programs, which means you’re paying for them out of pocket or with loans. the people who go into low-res programs are usually people firmly established in their lives with some disposable income and a desire to improve their work. this is a great option if you’re currently working full time and can’t move to be near a fully funded program.

expectation: but my undergrad degree isn’t in english or CW

reality: GOOD. that’s what’s so great about writing as an academic discipline – when we get nothing but formally trained writers, we get too many stories about the formally trained life.

your background, your work history, and your life experiences are all enormously valuable to a writing program. the weirder and more diverse you are, the more intrigued admissions people will be. they want people who can bring new perspectives to workshop, who see the world in different ways than those who have been trapped in academia for ages.

it’s definitely valuable to have an english undergrad degree, but it’s equally valuable to have life experience.

expectation: i’m just a fanfic writer

reality: GOOD. do you know how amazing fanfic is? of course you do, you write it. now imagine the sense of community and purpose and drive you have while writing fanfic, and put that in a physical place, and you basically have grad school. so if you like fanfic for all those things – community, purpose, drive – you’re going to love getting an MFA.

from a skill perspective, fanfic authors have something major that non-established ofic writers are missing: an audience. if you write fanfic to post on tumblr or ao3, you’re writing it with a specific audience in mind. you are probably acutely aware of how that audience will react, how to entertain them, and most importantly, HOW TO DEVELOP CHARACTERS.

i really thought i would get into an MFA and turn into some kind of holier-than-thou snob about fanfic, like suddenly my eyes would open and i would gain such an appreciation for, idk, Hemingway or some shit that i would completely forget about my fanfic roots.

N O P E. i’ve found a lot of published authors i like, sure, but i like them because their writing reminds me of my favorite things about fanfic. you will not have to sacrifice your love of fanfiction* to pursue an MFA, and you won’t have to change the things you love writing. people may think what you write is weird, but fuck ‘em. write what you want to write.

*you won’t be able to write actual fanfic in grad school, but there’s nothing stopping you from filing off the serial numbers. if str8 white men can do it over the entire span of civilization, so can you.

expectation: i don’t need an MFA to be a writer

reality: god, so true. if you write fanfic, you probably already have all the skill necessary to begin the publishing game if you want to go that route, and potentially all the feedback you need to keep improving. which begs the question, why would you even want an MFA?

i can only tell you why i applied:

expectation: i only write genre fiction, not “literature”

reality: you can write whatever the hell you want for whatever reason you want. you’re going to get feedback regardless, and your peers are going to care about the things you care about, and if they’re worth a damn, they’ll give you crit on their perception of your priorities, not what they think is important to the field of literature.

in the past year, i’ve read workshop submissions ranging from the onion style satire, to children’s literature, to hard sci fi. the point of an MFA is that you’re there to explore the work that interests you. you don’t have to conform for anyone for any reason. you are there to do your work, and the program is there to guide you and offer you support.

expectation: i’m not qualified because don’t have any publications

reality: you don’t need to be published to apply for an MFA. most people aren’t even published by the time they graduate. what you do need is evidence of your commitment to writing and the discipline thereof, that is to say, you write consistently, you’re passionate about writing, and that your writing sample shows both a command of writing as well as promise of improvement.

expectation: i don’t have what it takes to pursue a graduate degree

reality: i promise you do. the reason i’m writing this is because the fanfic community has some of the most humble individuals i’ve ever met, who are compulsively shy about their craft, and who have no concept how good they actually are. i see so much self-defeated mentality, so much impostor syndrome. but please believe me when i say

LITERATURE NEEDS YOU

literature needs the way you see humanity, your compassion, your interest in telling stories without want of profit, your eye for character, your drive, your commitment, your voice.

you are so much better than most of what’s out there. you may not see it now but it’s true.

expectation: i won’t be able to get a job with an MFA

reality: ehhhh kinda true, but if that’s the only thing stopping you, ignore it. a (full-res) MFA trains you for three things: writing, editing, and teaching. all of these are lucrative careers that are no more difficult to establish yourself in than most other fields. the graduate chemist has the same concerns about the job market as the graduate writer. it’s all gatekeeping rhetoric steeped in a terrible economy. you just have to trust you’ll be ok.

expectation: i don’t know what i would write about

reality: you can figure it out when you get there. no one else knows what they’re doing either.

i’m happy to answer more questions if you have them! i hope this helps some of you who are curious about how MFAs work. i’m sharing this because i never thought i would be able to do a graduate degree, and now that i’m here, even though it was a huge risk, it’s the best decision i’ve ever made.

↑ return to navigation ↑

stuff i’ve learned about writing after 1 year in an MFA program

7 MAY 2017

my post “stuff i’ve learned about writing after 10 weeks in an MFA program” was a big hit, so i thought i’d write an updated one after two full semesters in my program, which is halfway through. one more year to go!

i have a whole writing advice tag if you want to check out my other stuff, and a collection of my writing advice posts from 2016. and always feel free to shoot me an ask if you have any writing-related questions.

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to handle rejection

20 APR 2017

how do you handle rejection? i submitted a story to a contest for the first time and it didn't place and even though i know its common to get rejected and even though i expected it, its still hurtin :<

i’m sorry you got a rejection :( i wish i could say it gets easier but it doesn’t. the only thing that has helped me is learning the other side of things. that is to say, i’m editor-in-chief for a literary magazine so being the one to make calls on what gets published and what doesn’t taught me that it’s all *hand wavy gesture* random.

from a publishing perspective, it is all about the editor or judge’s personal taste and desired aesthetic for the publication. and many times, the desired aesthetic *is* the editor’s personal taste. which is why it’s important to read magazines before you pitch to them, so you know if your writing matches what they tend to go for.

but even if you’ve done all that, and found a publication you’re sure your writing fits into, you still have to face the slush readers, which is even more ambiguous, because they’re reading based on what they think the editor or judge is going to want to look at, through a lens of their own concept of personal taste.

and personal taste is nothing. you might get a slush reader whose favorite author is bret easton ellis or some shit, so if you’re writing whimsical fabulism about a teen girl, that slush reader is going to give you a thumbs-down, even if it’s the best whimsical fabulism ever written. i know a successful poet who will turn down anything with even an ounce of sentiment in it. so if a story or poem has feelings? nope, no way, it’s drivel. we all know that emotional affect can be very powerful, but that’s his personal taste and he’s developed the prominence in his career to be a gatekeeper of certain publications developed around his aesthetic. but, by contrast, for my publication, when i receive something with well-done sentiment? i greenlight that shit and fight for it when we talk about what goes in the mag, because that’s my personal taste, and i want to see the things i like presented in the publication i work for.

so your whimsical fabulism or sentimental poetry are not bad because they’ve been rejected by the gatekeepers of publishing. they’ve just been given to the wrong audience. every piece of writing has an audience, and one of the hardest parts of writing is finding where it fits.

tl;dr people believe writing is a discipline of quality but it’s really all about quantity. how do you get good at writing? you write a million words. how do you get published? you submit to a hundred places. so keep going. keep writing, keep asking for feedback, keep polishing and revising, keep submitting. buy yourself some ice cream when you get rejected and remember the dude who rejected you is probably just an asshole who only reads faulkner.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on writers’ block ii

bettsfic:

i cannot believe how well this worked. so i was at awp last month, and sitting in on a panel about…something, i can’t remember what, and a panelist (i can’t remember who, so sorry) said:

“writers’ block happens because you’re afraid to write something. so unblocking yourself is a means of finding what you’re afraid of and writing it.”

but i was skeptical, because like. sometimes i can’t write shit just because there’s nothing in my head. so i thought, ok, next time i’m stuck, i’m going to ask myself what i’m afraid of and see if that helps.

fast-forward to this afternoon. i’m 80% of the way finished with a story i’m working on, i know how it’s going to end, but i just can’t fucking write it and i don’t know why. i’ve been stuck for a week on these last couple scenes.

and then i asked myself, “what am i afraid to write?”

fuck. it was so easy. my brain immediately supplied, “i’m afraid if i take this where i want to take it, it’s going to get too long and sentimental and i’ll lose control of the story.”

and at that point, it was a simple process of deconstructing that fear. i promised myself i could write the mushy emotional stuff in another piece, so i could keep this one short and clear. i found the paragraph that started that train of thought, cut it, pasted it in a new document like a seed to sprout another story, and kept writing.

so yeah, next time you get stuck, ask yourself, “what am i afraid to write?” and see where it gets you.

Ok…what if you feel like your writing isn’t good enough?

then it might go something like: “what am i afraid to write?”

“something bad.”

now you have something to deconstruct. you can define what, exactly, you believe bad writing is. you can think about audience (who would think this is bad? why would they think this?). you can consider why you’re afraid to write badly, what forces in your life taught you that you had to be good at things in order to practice them.

moreover, you can write badly just for the hell of it, just to face your fear.

i used to be afraid my writing wasn’t good enough too at first, so i started writing intentionally badly, leaning into what i thought “bad writing” was, so that i wasn’t even aiming for “good enough.” and it made writing fun, and i never wanted to stop writing badly, and i guess i really haven’t (it turns out if you write intentionally badly long enough, you get pretty good at writing).

writing badly meant i never had to mold my words into anything other than exactly what i needed them to do to tell the story i wanted to tell, and they weren’t pretty, but they got my point across. and it turns out, for most people that’s what good writing is.

↑ return to navigation ↑

things i’ve learned as a slush reader

5 FEB 2017

in the past month, i’ve read over 200 submissions for the literary organizations i volunteer with, and i want to share some of the stuff i’ve learned about writing as a slush reader.

(a slush reader is someone who reads submissions, and either declines them or pushes them through for editors/judges to make a final decision on whether or not a story will be published.)

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to stop self-editing

19 JAN 2017

Any ideas on stopping self editing before a single word gets out? So far it's a constant game of "I don't care if you think it sounds stupid, you can fuck right off there, brain." I spend just as much time arguing with myself as I do writing.

eliminating constant self-editing isn’t a process of training yourself out of it, rather realigning your thinking. self-editing is a means of conformity – you’re saying to yourself, “this needs to be good in order for it to have value.”

but value is meaningless to art, and “good writing” in itself is a gut-punch to creativity. it’s a normative ideal that we have to break apart in order to work beyond it. we’ve been raised in a society where we conflate efficiency, quality, and productivity with happiness and fulfillment. self-editing is the voice of our internal foremen saying, “you need to work more effectively to create a better product so that it may be consumed most easily by the masses.”

but writing is not factory work, and you are not a machine generating it. the foreman’s voice is one that has been taught to us and one that we can silence by deconstructing our perspectives of work and art. art is a different kind of work, so it makes sense that you would need to develop a new perspective of process in order to do it.

here are some ways you can (re)develop that process:

lean into all of your instincts. you know how sometimes you’re driving in the middle of nowhere, and you get this weird intrusive thought to just chuck your phone or other random object out your window? you know you won’t do it, because it’s wrong but the thought is still there for some reason. whenever you have one of those intrusive thoughts while writing, go with it. take a back seat to your ego and let your id run free for a while. this is enormously difficult to do at first, but the way i started was by stream-of-consciousness writing. maybe you could set aside ten minutes every day to write stream-of-consciousness – no goal or product or topic in mind, just write down whatever floats into your head. eventually this will become a skill you can hone into craft.

write about writing. and by that i mean, every time you sit down to write, afterward write a brief description of how it went. what did you argue with yourself about? did it go well? did you write anything you particularly loved? how do you feel? thinking about and analyzing your own processes might help unveil some of your hang-ups about writing and help you work through them faster. maybe you could blog about it, or just keep a document or notebook for it.

hand write scenes on small pieces of paper. in the same way that a lot of us use tags to say what we want to say as opposed to adding to a post, the psychological process of “whispering” thoughts in small spaces can sometimes be very freeing. sometimes the computer screen or an 8.5x11 piece of paper is just too big. i used to date a guy who would only write on the back of gas station receipts. and i keep a field notes notebook on me at all times to jot down ideas as they come. sometimes our most authentic voices come out in the smallest spaces.

↑ return to navigation ↑

on facing the fear of bad writing

13 JAN 2017

Everyone says that writing anything is better than nothing. But we've all read bad stories. I know I'd only get better at writing if I wrote more. But Im so afraid of creating something shitty that I just sit there, paralyzed with fear. :'( :'( :'(

we’ve all read bad stories – yes, we have. what makes a bad story though? i think we should all challenge ourselves when we read bad stories to break them apart and figure out what exactly isn’t working about them. to do that we need to see the good, too. what is working in this piece? what can you commend it for that is exceptional about it?

when you start to do that with everything you read, good and bad, i’d like to think the scales start to even out a little bit. good writing is an illusion; it just means it has found its place.

bad writing is just a draft precluding better writing. when you deconstruct everything you read, you realize all writing has flaws and all writing has something to offer. no matter how bad you think your writing is, there will always be something good about it.

recognize that the train of thought “it’s not worth doing if it’s not good” is steeped in philosophy designed to keep you from self-fulfillment. you do not have to be good at something in order to pursue it. you are allowed to do things without the approval and appraisal of others. you are allowed to create things that have no worth or purpose other than your own expression and curiosity. you are not a machine and you do not exist to churn out a product that is of use or value to others. please understand that this line of thinking has been taught to you based on capitalistic and neoliberal ideals that benefit from fear of failure. if nothing else, i hope you begin writing just to give these sociological paradigms a big fuck-you.

i know thinking logically through the emotion of fear only helps mitigate part of the problem. sometimes fear and anxiety can’t be shoved away with analysis and introspection. but i do believe fear can be mitigated with practice. so here are some ideas of activities to maybe consider:

i wish you the best in your writing endeavors. <3

↑ return to navigation ↑

how to plot

13 JAN 2017

good evening/day, from one writer to another, do you have any advice on figuring out a plot that is barely there? in my current story i keep blurring in between the 3 different arc its goig to have and i wanted to make some sort of script for it but have no idea where to start

plot is SO HARD. here are a few tricks i thought of that might help:

deconstruct plot into its elements: conflict, desire, and drive. sometimes to do this i make what i call a Want Chart, where i list every character and pair them with their primary objective. instead of figuring out What Happens, maybe focus just on the raw conflict itself: what do your characters want and what is stopping them from getting it? since it sounds like you have multiple threads going on, maybe it would be best to focus on one until you get it where you want it to be, and mold the others to fit it.

try the note card method. i forget where i found this, but it works like this: write out every scene in your head that you can think of, each one on its own notecard. color them or notate them however you need to, by character pov, or which act it falls in, etc. then lay them all out and try to put them in logical order. see where there are gaps that need filled. when you’re done and you have them all in order, pull out a notecard and write the scene. here’s a really good video about how it works. it’s for scriptwriting, but novel plotting isn’t too different.

take the pressure off. you’re not going to get the plot right on the first try. a lot of times i get stuck when i take what i’m working on too seriously. sometimes i tell my plot holes that they’re future-me’s problem and i just resolve the conflict on the first go-round as effortlessly and anti-climactically as i can, just so i can say i have a first draft done and i can move on to the next one.

list three bullet points. sometimes when i’m totally overwhelmed, i make a list of Three Things That Happen. that’s literally all it is. just pick three things that happen. put them in order. focus on how to logically get to the first one. once you make it there, figure out how to get to the second, and so on. then make three more bullet points.

talk it out with someone. sometimes when i’m not sure what to do, i either talk to a friend about it and ask them to ask me questions as i tell them the story, or i’ll write them a letter. while writing it i can usually pick out where the plot gets thin and where the problems are. this is also really helpful because you know where all of your *throws hands up* I DON’T KNOW, OKs are. sometimes i just stream of consciousness the plot so far in a document. and i do it over and over and over again until it makes sense.

sorry this took so long to post. i’ve been kind of brain dead recently. happy writing!

↑ return to navigation ↑

on gatekeep-y writing advice

2 JAN 2017

i'm so interested in drunk on writing I cant wait to read it! I am curious though what do you mean by writing advice using gatekeeping rhetoric, etc. I'm not challenging the idea but I'm struggling to remember where I've seen that before or how it's manifested. Do you talk about it in the book at all or is that something you think you can discuss here?

i’d love to discuss it! thanks for asking.

gatekeeping is the opposite of accessibility. it’s the process of denying – either overtly or subtly – access to something. in the case of gatekeeping writing advice, i consider it to be anything that makes a writer believe, as i like to say, there is no room at the lunch table for you. or, you have to do this, this, and this to be a Real Writer. or, you have to conform to my definition of who you should be in order to succeed.

think of it like the movie Legally Blonde, when everyone told Elle she couldn’t get into Harvard Law because she didn’t fit the mold of a Harvard Law student. that’s gatekeeping: you are fundamentally Not Good Enough to be the thing you want to be.

here’s another example. i googled writing advice just now, and the second article that came up was this:

second result, line one:

but having an artistic temperament doth not make one an artist.

off the bat, we have gatekeeping rhetoric. a beginning writer googling “writing advice” immediately sees discouragement. this is basically saying: you need to be Strong Enough to be a writer, and if you’re not, you’re going to fail! or you could read it as: just because you’re artistic doesn’t mean you have what it takes!

a lot of advice is saying: in order to be successful, you have to follow these rules. which doesn’t make any sense when you think about it. creativity is about breaking rules and thinking outside established structures; working within them is just churning content for the sake of a sale. when you read advice telling you to do or do not do [long list of random bullshit], they are illustrating a fundamental misunderstanding of art, and distracting you by telling you you’re doing it wrong anyway. they’re micromanaging your craft, implying that writing is like factory work – generating a product at the end of some assembly line, and not a means of personal/artistic expression.    

we’re so used to seeing things like this that we think they’re normal. they reaffirm the idea that we have to develop thick skins and be tough in order to be successful, when art is often borne of vulnerability and sensitivity. i am a firm believer that toughness is not better or more valuable than sensitivity, and i don’t believe everyone’s goal in life needs to be “get tougher.” you would think anyone taking the time to offer advice, which seems like a kindness, would say, “keep writing! you can do it!” and not, “you should only do it if you meet the following random criteria i came up with to generate traffic on my blog.”

it’s important to be able to point out discouraging writing advice so you can dissuade your attention to it. it’s alluring, buying into the idea of people saying you can’t do something or you’re not good enough or you don’t belong here unless you conform – but you can’t let yourself believe it.

here are some questions you can ask to determine if a piece of advice you receive is gatekeeping you:

i just want to be good at writing and teach other people to write; i believe that if everyone possessed the skill of self-expression in their own creative medium, if they were confident in divulging their perspectives and vulnerabilities, the world would be a better place. maybe everything i think about writing is too lofty and naive. maybe i’m too green to be jaded. maybe i don’t know enough about publishing yet. but god, if i ever turn into a gatekeeper, i hope i can look back on this post in however many years and remember that these are my fundamental beliefs on writing, and that no matter where i end up, i started by encouraging others to write.

↑ return to navigation ↑