RES: Writing

The first trick is to detach yourself from your idea. You don’t have just one novel inside you, and it’s not a big deal if you don’t finish this novel.
She was skeptical of the common advice “just write!!1!” - she talked about how long ideas for her most popular novels were marinating inside her before she properly wrote them
As a continuation of that, she was a big believer in knowing what you want to write before you write it. Not what you’re going to write, what you want to write.
The first thing she decides about a novel is what the mood is going to be, and this informs every other decision (e.g. the mood for Shiver was bittersweet)
Ideas should be personal, specific, exciting and they should exclude secondary sources. A personal idea isn’t necessarily autobiographical (which should be avoided), but it speaks to your emotional truth.
She said she had been read Ronsey fanfiction and she couldn’t view her car in the same way since.
Story is the thing that seems most important to reader but is most changeable to the author - story is subservient to your mood and your message. Change what you like in the plot as long as your book retains its sense of self.
Story is conflict, exploration and change. A good story has active tension -the characters want something, instead of just wanting something not to happen (e.g. wanting to kill an enemy instead of simply defending a stronghold against an enemy)
A story needs to have a concrete end, something to be done.
Satisfaction is important - deliver what you promise to the reader. The other shoe has to drop. Ronan Lynch doesn’t ever talk about his feelings, so its rewarding when he does.
Earn your emotional moments (she threw shade at Fantastic Beasts lmao)
Forcing a character to be passive is dissatisfying to the reader.
Characters are products of their environments, consistent/predictable, nuanced and specific, moving the plot, and subservient to other story elements.
She always starts with tropes for ensemble casts like sitcoms. Helpful for building good character dynamics.
Write scenes with characters saying explicitly what they’re thinking and then go back and make them talk like real people in the edit.
An action can also prove what they’re thinking, instead of making them say it or another character guess it (e.g. Ronan punching a wall).
Move the reader’s emotional furniture around without them noticing.
All her books follow the three act structure. Established normal -> inciting incident -> character makes an Active Decision -> fun and games -> escalation -> darkest moment -> climax.
Promise what you’re going to do in the first five pages.
Read your book out loud. Record yourself reading it.
If you have writer’s block, it’s because you’ve stopped writing the book you want to write. She likes to delete everything she’s written until she gets back to a point where she knew she was writing what she wanted to write, and then carrying on from there.

Relationships aren’t permanent and they should never be all-consuming. All-consuming relationships are a recipe for losing oneself. Relationships are fragile after all. How quickly you can go from being someone’s everything to their nothing. It’s far better to remember no one person can ever be our everything, which means losing someone doesn’t mean we return to nothing.
The romance myth tells us we should hold onto love because there is nobody else in the world who will love us again. This isn’t true. Remember what it was like to love and be loved, even if it was only for a few minutes. Remember that just because something is over doesn’t mean it was any less real. And remember that even a ring doesn’t make anything less broken.

People aren’t homes. You can’t buy them or own them. You can’t renovate them to be whatever you want or need according to your changing desire or expectations. You can’t dump your shit all over their interior. You can’t expect them to wait around to comfort your each and every insecurity. People aren’t backup plans or getaways…they exist in the present. They exist and serve many roles and purposes besides being a supporting character in our stories. And we exist outside of playing a supportive character in theirs

Man I have never known straight dude writers to shy away from putting out stuff like ‘my thinly-veiled self-insert goes on a mediocre adventure but more importantly ends up in a love quadrangle with these four female characters who are all incredibly hot to me’, but most of the lady writers I know get nervous if they write one (1) love story where gasp two whole dudes compete for the same lady’s love!

So listen.

Listen.

Go out and give your warrior witch lady a magic talking panther that flies and five hot elf boyfriends (or girlfriends, or datemates, whatever) who all happily share her. Or fight over her. Whichever. Make each of them as smoking hot as you please. Indulge yourself. Live.

And this goes absolutely double for WoC and trans ladies and queer ladies and everyone else who has extra troubles with being shamed for your indulgence.

If you’re going to worry about stuff in your story it should be things like ‘is that trope racist?’ or ‘how do I fix this plot hole?’, not ‘am I putting in too many elements that I personally enjoy?’

put the most important information at the end of the sentence! consider:

I confessed my love for him at the end of the semester.

not bad, right? but it could be so much better! try this instead:

At the end of the semester, I confessed my love for him.

oh, the drama! don’t you want to know more? try this in your current WIP—you’ll be surprised what a difference it makes!

The little moments of Love, Simon that mean more to LGBTQ+ people than straight people realize:

• Not being able to say you’re gay out loud right away, even to yourself

• Coming out in a car. Why do we all do this?!?

• That deep breath and inability to look someone in the eye the first time you say it

• The awkwardness after coming out, even to a completely supportive family. Things aren’t bad, they’re just weird for awhile

• Having a crush on literally anyone who looks at you longer than three seconds or who gives any inclination that they may be gay

• Spending literally all day thinking about the fact that you’re gay

• Trying out ‘dressing gay’

• Coming out to someone who knows you less before you come out to the Important People in your life

• Being completely oblivious to straight people hitting on you, cause you’re just not looking for it

• Not knowing how to talk about people being attractive, not because you don’t want to, but because you’ve never done it before

Character agency is, to me, a demonstration of the character’s ability to make decisions and affect the story. This character has motivations all her own. She is active more than she is reactive. She pushes on the plot more than the plot pushes on her. Even better, the plot exists as a direct result of the character’s actions.

Describe the setting after… This is one exercise that helps you write with emotion in a way that goes beyond what the protagonist may be able to directly express. Examples of this might include, describe a living room after an argument. Or describe a bride’s bedroom the morning before her wedding. These exercises force you to think of how emotion can shape the world of your novel beyond just the protagonist’s experiences.

Six months. With every sunrise her bones ached a little more.

She was not unhappy. Her grandchildren brought her wildflowers and bread from the bakery she could not walk to on her own anymore, and every Sunday her daughter came with the cart and drove her to the cemetery so she could visit his grave. There was pain, but she could manage it. She made her own tonics with the herbs he had grown in the back garden, now running wild and uncontained in the brilliant heat and sunlight of the living season.

It had been a good, long life. She learned the secret early on: you had to live the whole year round. Too many people only ever learned how to live for one season. They grew accustomed to the wild risks and carefree extravagance of summer and forgot they were no longer invincible when winter came; or they spent all the winter slinking about watching every step, so fearful of their vulnerability that even when summer came they tiptoed through their days as though they would shatter like glass.

But she knew how to live for the full year, and had never let the changing of seasons change how she lived. Until now.

He had died on the very eave of the new year, the last day of winter before the days grew longer, and now she had to wait for him.

She knew the story as well as anyone, and better than most; how many children and grandchildren had she told it to over the years? How the world had once been cold and dark, ruled by long winter, and everything in it had trembled under the shadow of death.

But the goddess of life, a frail and fragile thing in that hard world, had for long ages stood and watched and pined, for the pitiful transience of her domain, for the short sad lives that always flickered out faster than she could create them, for her own loneliness in a terribly lonely world. And so one day she left her hidden country and went forth to seduce Death himself, and took his hand and led him away.

In Death’s absence the world began to wake and grow, and what was once sickly now thrived and thrived and thrived. Too much: the world became overgrown, choked with life that now had no restraining hand, could not stop, could only keep growing until the overabundance became as much a misery as the lack had been. Then all the world cried out for aid, and the gods heard their pleas and demanded of the goddess that she return her captive.

She dared not stand against all her kin aligned against her. But she was a sly one, Life, who knew how to coax victories out of the greatest devastations. She whispered sweet words to Death, and tricked him into drinking from the spring that fed her garden. Having partaken of the waters of Life he became bound to her realm, and though she opened the gates and let him return, he could not stay away forever. So it was that, ever after, there would be a dark season, when the wind blew cold and Death stalked the earth and took what was his; but in time he would always be drawn back to Life’s fair gardens at the end of the world, and the light season came again.

When she told the story, on rainy afternoons or long nights warmed by a fire in the hearth, the children never understood why the people of the world had begged for Death’s return. He was to them a terrible figure, dark and foreboding, vilified in the festivals and ceremonies that accompanied the changing of the seasons.

But she had always thought that Life must have seen something beautiful in him, that she had turned to him in her despairing solitude.

She had seen something beautiful in him. He was her shadow, her other self, with his dark eyes and deft hands and his quietness. All their married life people commented on how different they were, how lively and bright she was, how still and steady he was. He grew the garden while she drew customers to sell their tonics, and when her fair hair turned to white, his dark turned to iron gray.

It had been a good life.

But he had gone on ahead, and while the bright season shone on and on in all its glory, she could not follow.

The pain was not so terrible, nor even the stiffness and seizing that limited her first to the homestead, then to the house, then to her bed more days than not. It was not even the ache of his absence, as keenly as she felt it. But as the days wore on the sense grew in her, beyond all convincing otherwise, that she was not meant for the world any longer. She prepared no tonic, saw no doctor, made no effort to avoid it or stave off the end; when the dark season came her time would be up, and there was no arguing it, even if she had had the inclination to.

All there was left to do was wait out the months. Soon enough, Death would return from his tarrying in Life’s gardens. Soon enough, he would come back for her, and take her hand, and lead her away.

villains who switch sides due to personal convictions and not because they fell in love with a hero

villains who fall in love with a hero but refuse to switch sides due to personal convictions

villains who have feelings for heroes but aren’t willing to just ditch their life and everything they’ve worked for

sympathetic villains with goals and motivations other than heroic bonkybits

There is one thing that happens sometimes when people talk about fiction, and, hell, I’ve probably even been guilty of it, but it’s… kind of a problem. It’s the assumption that people who have a different opinion about a piece of fiction or a character or a storyline or the like are having that opinion willfully. As if they know the right opinion and are just having a different opinion to be contrary. Rather than that they just see it differently and so have a different opinion.

There was a post I saw once, by two people who were friends and had wildly different opinions about a piece of media (it was something about hockey…a web comic, maybe?). Despite having similar backgrounds, one of them found it a wonderful thing and the other found it a terrible thing. I sort of feel like that post needs to be papered all over everything. Because one of them wasn’t right and one of them wrong, they were both right. For themselves.

And that’s how it is with fiction. Hell, sometimes that’s how it is with reality. I remember once coming across an article written by someone who’d gone to a college I went to at the same time that I was there and their experience was so vastly different from mine it felt like I’d somehow fallen into a different reality or something. But, again, it wasn’t a case of right and wrong, it was a case of two people can have vastly different experiences even while being in the same place at the same time.

So of course different people can come to the same piece of media and have vastly different reactions to it. One person’s great character growth is another’s tired and badly done trope. One person’s best romance ever is another’s icky creepy gross story about a stalker and a stalkee. One person’s relatable villain is another person’s unforgivable monster. One person’s amusing scene is another person’s unforgivable moment. That doesn’t make one person wrong and the other person right. They’re just different people.

(Note: I’m talking about things like in my last paragraph, not things like a woman pointing out that something’s a sexist stereotype and being met with “no it’s not” from a man. That’s a whole different ball of wax. (But two equally feminist women could look at the exact same work of fiction and one find it sexist and the other not. Because these things are not always clear cut. But it’s the people affected who should be having the discussion there.))

In my first draft, I write terrible, on the nose dialog. Characters say exactly what they are thinking and the purpose of the conversation is incredibly clear. In real life, of course, it never happens that way, but if I don’t start out there, especially with high stakes conversations (i.e. fights over the tops of Volvos), I write myself around in circles trying to figure out what I actually need out of the conversation.

So instead I begin with what I need from the conversation, and when I circle back around on the next round of edits, I use observed speech patterns to fragment and color it. I often write down interesting or specific turns of the phrase when I hear them, and I always read my dialog out loud in the final rounds.

If we’re in a character’s POV (first or third person), you can almost always cut verbs that occur above the shoulders: see, think, feel, smell, notice, and so on.
“The streets of London stank like rotten fish” is much stronger writing than “Will noticed that the streets of London stank like rotten fish.”