THE MIGHTY NEIN, COMING TO AMAZON PRIME VIDEO!

Yes

I’m noticing an increase in new fic writers on AO3 who…uh…mayy not know how to format their fics correctly..so here is a quick and VERY important tip

Using a random fic of mine as example..

The left example: ✅✅✅

The right example: ❌❌❌

Idk how many times I’ve read a good fic summary and been so excited to read before clicking on it and being met with an ugly wall of text. When I see a huge text brick with zero full line breaks my eyes blur and I just siiiigh bc either I click out immediately or I grin and bear it…it’s insufferable!

If a new character speaks, you need a line break. If you notice a paragraph is becoming too large, go ahead and make a line break and/or maybe reconfigure the paragraph to flow better. I’m not a pro writer or even a huge fic writer but…please…ty…

when in writers block (bc me too)

yes i realize this isn’t 100% foolproof and doesn’t work for everyone but it sure as hell helps me (at least a bit) when i don’t know where to start. good luck writing and may words flow from you faster than water in the largest waterfall ever <3

reread your old writing

revisit unfinished discarded projects

just write. everything. search up prompts and write your characters into them even if you’re not feeling it — which i know is easier said than done but we as writers need to realize that sometimes we gotta do what we don’t want to do

start a new book (ignore the pile of unfinished wips ok??!?!?!!!)

browse apps ((like pinterest) sounds anti productive but actually helps)

inspiration is literally everywhere and in everything u just need to know where to look, whether that be online or in person where you’re observing relationships w people and how humans act

on the opposite end of the spectrum: close that google doc… and just take a break. most ideas come when you’re not trying to force them out like ur life depends on it

ask a friend to read some writing and give their prediction of what will happen next… then use it !

just don’t give up!!!!!!! think about how an incredible book could be written and we wouldn’t even know because writers block kicked in & u gave up </3

Earth has no idea why humans think global warming hurts her. In fact she is excited! Its been a while since the last extinction. She was already starting to get tired of mammals.

Types Of Writer’s Block (And How To Fix Them)

1. High inspiration, low motivation. You have so many ideas to write, but you just don’t have the motivation to actually get them down, and even if you can make yourself start writing it you’ll often find yourself getting distracted or disengaged in favour of imagining everything playing out

Try just bullet pointing the ideas you have instead of writing them properly, especially if you won’t remember it afterwards if you don’t. At least you’ll have the ideas ready to use when you have the motivation later on

2. Low inspiration, high motivation. You’re all prepared, you’re so pumped to write, you open your document aaaaand… three hours later, that cursor is still blinking at the top of a blank page

RIP pantsers but this is where plotting wins out; refer back to your plans and figure out where to go from here. You can also use your bullet points from the last point if this is applicable

3. No inspiration, no motivation. You don’t have any ideas, you don’t feel like writing, all in all everything is just sucky when you think about it

Make a deal with yourself; usually when I’m feeling this way I can tell myself “Okay, just write anyway for ten minutes and after that, if you really want to stop, you can stop” and then once my ten minutes is up I’ve often found my flow. Just remember that, if you still don’t want to keep writing after your ten minutes is up, don’t keep writing anyway and break your deal - it’ll be harder to make deals with yourself in future if your brain knows you don’t honour them

4. Can’t bridge the gap. When you’re stuck on this one sentence/paragraph that you just don’t know how to progress through. Until you figure it out, productivity has slowed to a halt

Mark it up, bullet point what you want to happen here, then move on. A lot of people don’t know how to keep writing after skipping a part because they don’t know exactly what happened to lead up to this moment - but you have a general idea just like you do for everything else you’re writing, and that’s enough. Just keep it generic and know you can go back to edit later, at the same time as when you’re filling in the blank. It’ll give editing you a clear purpose, if nothing else

5. Perfectionism and self-doubt. You don’t think your writing is perfect first time, so you struggle to accept that it’s anything better than a total failure. Whether or not you’re aware of the fact that this is an unrealistic standard makes no difference

Perfection is stagnant. If you write the perfect story, which would require you to turn a good story into something objective rather than subjective, then after that you’d never write again, because nothing will ever meet that standard again. That or you would only ever write the same kind of stories over and over, never growing or developing as a writer. If you’re looking back on your writing and saying “This is so bad, I hate it”, that’s generally a good thing; it means you’ve grown and improved. Maybe your current writing isn’t bad, if just matched your skill level at the time, and since then you’re able to maintain a higher standard since you’ve learned more about your craft as time went on

19 points

Writer Bingo

What’s your final score? 👀

being a writer leads to a genuinely helpful but also very stupid kind of mindfulness where you'll be having a sobbing breakdown or the worst anxiety attack of your life and think "okay, I really need to pay attention to how this feels. so I can incorporate it into my fanfiction."

You know, even apart from the intricate worldbuilding about the talking rodents and what their deal is, the part of The Secret of NIMH that's like "working single mom trying to obtain medical treatment for her sick child discovers that her late husband was basically a high-level Dungeons & Dragons character and never told her about any of it, and she keeps tripping over elements of his unreasonably complicated backstory whose context and significance are never fully explained to the audience because the particulars aren't relevant to her journey" is a really fun premise all on its own.

Does this story need to be written down? Is it not enough to have it simply live in my head?