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minim-calibre
https://minim-calibre.tumblr.com/post/713172815135850496/it-is-wild-to-me-how-completely-different-this-is
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duckprintspress
https://duckprintspress.tumblr.com/post/665118396233498624/due-to-being-busy-i-wasnt-able-to-do-a-duck
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unforth
https://unforth.tumblr.com/post/664307465943482368/theres-always-been-several-things-about-the-you
:
There’s always been several things about the “you should write because you
love it/want to/for yourself, not for
popularity/readers/kudos/comments/attention/praise/whatever!” talk that
bothered me. It’s not solely that it creates this weird implication that
people who write with the intention of sharing it, and who want to share
their work and interact with readers, are somehow “doing it wrong,” though
that’s definitely one ridiculous element of it. However, I was never able
to put my finger on what, exactly, struck me as so incredibly off.
And then it came to me, out of the blue, last week, as a flash of insight,
and I can’t believe I never realized it before.
“Creating a story” and “writing a story” are not the same activity, and
the “you should write for yourself ~uwu~!” proselytizers in no way
recognize that these two things are completely different.
Look, here’s how it goes. I’m lying in bed, trying and failing to fall
asleep, and I’m starting to get anxious about falling asleep, and the more
anxious I get, the less likely I am to actually manage to sleep, so I have
to come up with a way to distract myself pronto. When this first started
happening to me 30+ years ago, I was at a loss, but now it’s old hat, I
know exactly what to do: envision a favorite character. They might be an
OC. They might be from a table top RPG or LARP I’ve played. They might be
from a favorite book, movie, show, etc. And, once I’ve picked that
character, I think - okay, this is who I’m in the mood to think about right
now. What kind of story do I want to tell? For me, I usually want an
adventure with some romance, and I usually want queer, and I usually want
some smut, and, and, and. The precise details depend on my mood, and how
tired I am, and how long I’m lying there, and what my hormones are doing,
and how my depression is, and who knows what else. Brains are fucking
weird, I’m just along for the ride (and hoping I’ll eventually maybe
actually fall asleep).
Sometimes, I’ll fall asleep before I come up with anything I really want to
explore.
Sometimes, I’ll fall asleep every night for a week before I come up with
anything I really want to explore.
And then, when it comes, the pieces will fall together all at once, and
I’ll start to craft a story.
I’ll imagine how the characters meet, what the conflict is, what brings
them together, what tears them apart. I’ll play out entire dialogs word for
word with description and all. I’ll imagine them falling in love, and
falling apart, and falling and falling and falling until they finally rise,
triumphant.
Sometimes, I can tell the entire story in one night. Sometimes, it takes me
days, or weeks. The ones I like best I revisit months and years later,
whenever I remember them and go, “oh yeah, I loved that one.” I’ll retell
them over and over again, until I could recite to you the entire course of
events.
I create a story.
And that activity? Is absolutely one I do solely for myself. It’s epic, and
it’s empowering, and it makes me happy, and it helps me sleep, and it
allows me to explore my emotions and picture other worlds and to tell a
tale that’s exactly what I want. All the best parts, with the happy ending
close at hand.
You know what doing this isn’t? It’s not even close to writing a story.
Let’s go to the next step of this process: I’ve got an idea and I really
love it and I decide, “I want to write this down.” I have absolutely no
reason to do this just for myself. The story is already created. If I
didn’t want to share it, I literally never have to write it down. It’s
already in my head. It’s already mine. Writing it down is done solely
to share it with others - and it’s an arduous, incredibly difficult slog.
The story I can tell in a night or two or ten will take days, weeks,
months, years to codify into elegant words suitable for consumption that
communicate the images, ideas, emotions, and story that I’ve already
created for myself. By the time I finish a novel or long fic, I’ve usually
told the story to myself so many times that I’m fucking sick of it. The
reason I never write codas and timestamps, even when I’ve said I would, is
that seriously by the time I write “the end” I am so fucking over this
garbage that I don’t want to think of it again. Because my brain has told
that story, to myself, and now to everyone else, and it took so flippin’
long to tell it to someone else that I want to tell a new story. Heck,
usually by the time I finish a long fic, I HAVE created stories, multiple
stories, for myself, because I’m bored of the one I’m writing, so
instead/as well, I craft a dozen others to keep myself entertained, ones
I’ll never write down and never share - stories that are just for me.
I truly think the vast majority of the people who are the hugest proponents
of “write for YOU!” have never tried to write something long - something
that takes months and months (how long that is, word count-wise, will be
different for different people, of course).
I want to, and DO, create stories for myself. All the time. Constantly.
Multiple times a day.
But turning the fantasy in my head into something readable? That’s work,
and it’s work that I never have to do if the goal is just to “tell the
stories I want to tell.” I do that silently 24/7.
Putting it into words? That’s about sharing.
And THAT is why “write for you, don’t worry about readers!” has never
spoken to me. And I can’t believe I’ve been writing for almost 30 years and
only JUST figured this out.
Due to being busy, I wasn’t able to do a Duck Prints Press-specific blog
post last Sunday, but I did write this blog post about writing for my
personal blog, so. Enjoy? Hopefully it speaks to some of y'all. <3
It is wild to me how completely different this is to how my story brain
works. Part of it’s the same (the creation/craft aspect is very similar
between the OP and me), but then, if it’s there long enough, or burns hot
enough, or whatever, I have to bleed it out onto a page. Like, I’ve
written an entire story on the back of a shopping bag while sitting in
traffic in the passenger seat of a car because I had a visceral need to
translate the story in my head to paper and couldn’t wait until I got home.
(At least the paper bag incident occurred when I mostly wrote things that
were short. As opposed to now, where apparently, I’m physically incapable
of brevity. Though I have a smartphone now, which I didn’t 21 years ago, so
I suppose if I had to write out that many words in a hurry with no computer
or paper handy, I would just pull up Notes or something, which is what I do
with random snippets as they come to me.)
Man, I love how differently different people approach storytelling and
writing. The human brain is a wonderland.
oh i write like OP
i started writing them down pretty early but I have always used that as a
method to fall asleep. Every major story beat of every story I’ve written,
I first plotted out in bed.
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