Why You Should ‘Make Yourself’ Write (And How To Do It)

Why Originality in Writing Isn't Always Possible

I was writing for years before I encountered a problem with writing as a whole—that most ideas have already been published.

When someone first told me that though, they said it like, "You'll never think of something that hasn't already been written."

The phrasing makes it sound like all story ideas are a waste of your time. I began spiraling. I researched every short story I'd ever written. I looked up books similar or identical to other books I loved.

Turns out, that person was right.

Sort of.

New Ideas Are Old News

Think about how long humanity has existed. Think about the many experiences that generations have shared—love, loss, happiness, adventure, self-growth, your coming-of-age years.

Story ideas inspired by whatever you go through in life have likely already been lived or thought of, given the trillions of people who have walked this planet and interacted with each other.

BUT

Originality Doesn't Only Come From Ideas

This is what I wish someone had told me back when I was spiraling.

I'll say it again for those in the back—

Originality Doesn't Only Come From Ideas

It also comes from your voice and your perspective!

Voice can feel tricky to grasp when you're starting out as a writer. Everyone can throw a few words on a page. How do you know what your voice sounds like and if readers will respond well to it?

Imagine two friends going on a trip. They do everything together. They sit on the beach, they eat lunch at a restaurant, and watch a movie before heading home. Then they each journal about their day in notebooks.

Those entries would look nothing alike! One friend might relax on the beach and feel so at peace that they take a nap, while another gets sunburned easily and hides under their umbrella with a scowl. Both ultimately enjoyed their day for different reasons. The beach lover got time by the ocean and the other friend who liked the beach much less fell in love with a new dish at the restaurant because they're a foodie.

You'll also frame your stories differently than any other writer. Like accents change the way every person speaks out loud, writers structure sentences and describe things/events/emotions very differently.

These may seem like insignificant details that set stories apart, but they make all the difference.

Think about Homer’s Odyssey. Circe is a minor character in the long tale and basically gets about a minute of the reader's time before Odysseus moves on to the next phase of his journey home. In Madeline Miller's Circe, the goddess becomes the main character and the ultimate portrayal of fear, rage, hurt and healing that are universally experienced but are especially true to the female experience.

Both stories follow the same timeline, so readers don't pick them up to necessarily get surprised by something Brand New to Literature™. Instead, they read direct retellings to learn from the characters in new ways, live momentarily through someone else's eyes, and bond over another aspect of the human experience.

Circe is an incredible work of art. Your idea—whether it's a direct retelling, indirect retelling, or full of literary devices from previous works—can be incredible too.

How Do You Know Which Ideas Are Worth Writing?

If a story idea doesn't immediately make you jump for your computer or a pen/paper, is it worth writing? My best advice is to sit with it.

Some of my best work has come from stories that got to marinate. I put them in the back of my mind and thought about the characters or themes or plot when something sparked another idea. By the time I started typing, the story was more vivid than when I first though of it.

But also, I have probably twenty failed ideas for every story I've written.

Give yourself time to get to know your ideas. If they're worth your time, they'll sit with you too.

sorry for romanticising the mundane. i have little else

i love the secret history so much. francis and henry are out there admitting they’ve murdered someone and i’m here giggling at how bitchy and mean girl-like they sound when talking about bunny

henry’s LITERALLY like: well richard the thing is we murdered some farmer or whatever while having a sex ritual and bunny found out about it so he got into my apartment to wait until we got back. which is fine because who cares right i mean we were pretty busy since we had so much cleaning up to do but that BITCH also ate my ice cream and let it melt all over my oriental rug and now it is ruined forever UGH can you believe him

HOW DO I STUDY FOR _____________

So I think this might be the question I get asked the MOST often. People are always asking me how do I study for this or that class. So I thought I would just make a master post I could link you all to. :)

All classes

Watch my video on how to study. This applies to almost everything you have to study. 

See below for additions to doing everything listed in that video. 

Math

Do problems. Do all the problems. Do them again. 

Do all the problems in your book.

Get another book and repeat step 2 

Trust me 99.9% of all math classes is pattern recognition. If you can learn how to solve the problem you can ace any set of variables they throw at you. 

Physics

See math–because physics is JUST applied math. You have to learn how to read the questions and pull out the information you need–the only way to do that is to do dozens of questions!

Micro Bio/ID

Flow charts–break things up by group to understand them. You have to group things to remember what’s gram positive or gram negative 

Don’t blow off the actual micro part of micro. If you understand the virulence factors you’re more likely to understand the sx/tx

I had to use a lot of silly sayings to remember all the little pieces of micro. So I would remind myself about the diseases of haemophilus influenzae by saying haEMOPhilus (epiglotitus, meningitis, otitis media, pnuemonia). It was silly but it worked for me. 

O Chem

Do all the problems. Do them again. 

Get another book and repeat step 1 

Flashcard the reactions you don’t understand–put the reactants on one side and the products on the back. Practice these backward and forward. 

Draw out every step of reactions you don’t understand

Circle your electrons or mark whatever it is you lose track of

Count–count where everything went at the end to make sure you didn’t screw up. 

Categorize. Do all members of this group react this way?? It’s easier to learn the rules and the exceptions than force memorize every individual compound’s reaction.

Gen Chem

See math

Understand real world examples. I related all of the stuff about heat to a cup of coffee. It worked for me 

Talk through it! I had to read chemistry out loud or try to repeat it out loud in my own words to have any idea what was going on. 

YouTube videos are absolutely perfect for gen chem!! (There’s even a whole CrashCourse series on Gen Chem that’s appropriate especially for high school level chem). 

General Biology–Genetics/Immunology/Cell Biologyetc

You really need to watch my video 

Cross relate–you have to integrate all your biology together to keep all that information in your head. 

Flashcard only the stuff that can’t be understood. (Like cell markers, etc) 

Charts! Biology is all about categorization and understanding the similarities between different groups of things. If you can simply remember the characteristics of a group it’s easy to know everything you need to about all the members of that group. 

Pathology

Pathoma

Look at the pictures until you feel sick. 

Make flashcards of the pictures so you can at least do immediate identification of what you’re looking at even if you don’t know exactly what the pathology is. 

Integrate! How does the physiology relate to exactly what is going on with the pathology? How does the pathology predict treatment? 

Learn some latin and greek root words. Even if you have no idea what the word means you might be able to figure it out from there. :) I’ve gotten more than one question right by just figuring out what the word meant. 

Pharmacology

Understand the mechanism of the drug–it will really predict how it is used or what its toxicities are for

Flashcard the bare minimum or anything bizarre you can’t remember any other way. 

Figure out the similarities in the names. If it sounds the same, it probably belongs in the same class. 

Don’t learn in isolation. It’s hard to study pharmacology on its own–instead study it integrated with physiology and pathology whenever possible for the best understanding. 

Study as case studies!! What diuretics would you give to a patient with CHF? With ESLD? 

Biochemistry

Charts–get poster boards or tape together a ton of sheets of paper and try to write out every pathway you can to see how it all is integrated. 

Always track the flow of energy!! Where is your NAD/ATP/etc?

Group pathways by the “point”. Are you destroying carbohydrates or building fats? How does this compare to other pathways that do the same thing?

Try to rewrite the pathways from memory then see what you missed. 

Anatomy

Spend a bunch of time with the specimens if you have access to them. 

DRAW even if you suck at drawing

Learn the clinical correlations–why do you care

Thing about everything in relationship to one another! 

Do questions!! Grey’s has a student question book I recommend.

I’ll probably add more to this list as I go and as more of you ask for specific subject advice, but here you go!! 

When in doubt, always ask yourself “how would this be asked on a test?”. If you could write a test question about it, you should definitely know it! 

And always remember that you should study for understanding and not just for a grade–always be learning and not memorizing. It’s more important you understand the material than you get the A!!

Happy studying!  

recently learned about the concept of a commonplace book and I am obsessed with it. a notebook where I keep all of the information I've gathered that I want to remember? when my shitty little brain can't remember what I read 5 minutes ago? perfect. yes. good.

Hey, so i'm working on my first WIP, and i wanted to ask about drafting. When can one consider their first draft done? Does it have to have the goal word count (ie; 100K), or would being about halfway there be considered a good enough first draft, that i can move on to the second and start editing?

Concluding each stage of the writing process

It's difficult to know when a phase of a writing project has concluded and you're ready to focus on a new objective as it's developing. I tend to approach my writing projects with a clear and uniform trajectory, regardless of how diverse my projects can be. This approach allows me to remain focused, thorough, and reassured that I am covering all my bases in an organized fashion. However, it also maintains space for me to be explorative and intuitive when necessary. In regards to word count, I don't think it's entirely relevant unless you're determined to adhere to strict genre conventions. Give your story the space it needs and not an extra inch.

(Optional) Zero Draft

In this phase, you're telling yourself the story. You're doing it quickly, messily, intuitively, and forgivingly. Explore every idea that glows in the dark for you, don't throw anything away or discount any possibility. Exhaust your imagination in this phase so that when you reach the first draft, you know you're making informed decisions.

First Draft

You're crafting the structure and core elements of the story. This is often the phase of discovery. You're becoming acquainted with your characters and how they interact, you're beginning to feel at home in the world and settings you've built, and you're seeing all sides of the conflict as it evolves. The goal here is settle on a beginning, middle, and end point, and by the end of this process you want to know your characters' motivations and relationships inside and out.

Second Draft

Go back quickly through the first draft and address any points where you got stuck, where you compromised for the sake of carrying on to the end, and fill in any apparent blanks. The first time you really iron something out, there will always be a few pesky creases. This is the time to find and flatten them.

Third Draft

This is where you question everything. Identify and scrutinize your decisions, dive into the "curtains are blue" discussions with yourself, and begin to tidy up things like grammar, clumsy dialogue, over-poured descriptions, and dubious vocabulary. Comb through each paragraph and be brutal, prioritizing clarity and intentionality of how you've told the story.

The Read Through

This is the point where I recommend doing three things:

Letting it rest away from you for 1-3 months so that you can return to it with a bit of unfamiliarity and new perspective.

Hand it off to a couple of trusted readers and give them ample time to read, digest, and craft some feedback

Reread the project once all the way through making no changes (although annotations are acceptable)

Fourth Draft

Finishing touches. Vigorously and meticulously scrub and scrape between the lines and imagine giving it to your worst enemy. If you can imagine any mean (but valid) things they could conceive of to say about it, this is the time to grapple with or fix those details.

Additional Resources

Guide to Drafting

Word Count/Productivity Tracker Spreadsheet

Balancing Detail & Development

Writing The First Chapter

Writing The Middle of Your Story

Powering Through The Zero-Draft Phase

Writing The Last Chapter

Chapter Length

Happy drafting,

x Kate

Your story doesn't "have a message;" your story IS a message. The narrative and characters and setting and dialogue are just determining whether or not you delivered that message well.

Republicans deliberately use coded language to trick people to vote for them and radicalize their group. Many don't even realize they're radicalized or what they're saying is even racist. This is why they think the Left is "over reacting" because the either know they're using coded language and don't care, or they don't know anything at all.