It's Strange Re-watching Dead Like Me After 20 Years. There Were So Many Lessons About Life And Growing

I really like this trend of posting videos of art while jn progress. I'm sure it's to prove that the artist didn't use AI, but as a beginner it helps me understand people's processes and it makes me feel better to see that even talented people sometimes scribble out their mistakes to start over.

The problem with not having writer friends or friends who read books is that when I'm really excited, I have no one to share it with.

My BFF is an artist and they can show me drawings that they've been working on for days. I LOVE to see the sketches and evolution from the beginning to the finished product. We don't have the same visual process for writing. Instead, I end up holding my BFF hostage and sound like a nerdy loon while they desperately try to make sense of my rantings. I could work for an hour on a sentence and it looks about the same as when I started to an outsider! >.<

For all the writer's tips and tricks I've read advising not to head hop, it's very irritating to read a bestseller novelist do it. Here I was thinking that I'd imagined it or misunderstood as a child, but here it is!

Clearly, the lesson here is to do what you want!

I was looking at D&D spells today and I realized how much of a menace I'd be if I get isekai'd and returned. Fireball has limited uses in the Real World. Otto's Irresistible Dance? The possibilities are endless.

It me.

Me to myself: no, you can't write something new, you're supposed to be working on WIP! *gestures to sad WIP in the corner*

Also me: okay, fine, I won't write something new. *starts scrolling on social media* Happy?

Sometimes, writing is just editing. Editing is sometimes acknowledging that something doesn't belong in the work no matter how good it is. And that really hurts.

(Don't discard the material though. Save it in a separate file for later. Maybe you'll reuse it or maybe it'll remind you on a rainy day how good you are.)

To be fair, his mentor did the same thing (from inside a pit no less) with ease. I'm sure he grew up hearing the story.

one of my buddies is occupying a fortified position on high ground. i'm going to kick his ass with ease

I used to feel bad about writing paragraphs on completely different pages and trying to show where they are supposed to go, but I will never feel bad about the legibility of my drafts ever again!

you don't need to have cute handwriting girl, Dostoevsky's manuscript drafts looked like this

left- draft of Demons. right- draft of The Brothers Karamazov

I wish more people would critique books this way. I'm tired of blurbs being "a tour de force" and "next great American novel". I want to know if it's worth reading for *me*, not some vague audience. I'm glad authors can get praise like that and they deserve it (if it's real), but it tells me nothing as a potential reader.

I used to work for a trade book reviewer where I got paid to review people's books, and one of the rules of that review company is one that I think is just super useful to media analysis as a whole, and that is, we were told never to critique media for what it didn't do but only for what it did.

So, for instance, I couldn't say "this book didn't give its characters strong agency or goals". I instead had to say, "the characters in this book acted in ways that often felt misaligned with their characterization as if they were being pulled by the plot."

I think this is really important because a lot of "critiques" people give, if subverted to address what the book does instead of what it doesn't do, actually read pretty nonsensical. For instance, "none of the characters were unique" becomes "all of the characters read like other characters that exist in other media", which like... okay? That's not really a critique. It's just how fiction works. Or "none of the characters were likeable" becomes "all of the characters, at some point or another, did things that I found disagreeable or annoying" which is literally how every book works?

It also keeps you from holding a book to a standard it never sought to meet. "The world building in this book simply wasn't complex enough" becomes "The world building in this book was very simple", which, yes, good, that can actually be a good thing. Many books aspire to this. It's not actually a negative critique. Or "The stakes weren't very high and the climax didn't really offer any major plot twists or turns" becomes "The stakes were low and and the ending was quite predictable", which, if this is a cute romcom is exactly what I'm looking for.

Not to mention, I think this really helps to deconstruct a lot of the biases we carry into fiction. Characters not having strong agency isn't inherently bad. Characters who react to their surroundings can make a good story, so saying "the characters didn't have enough agency" is kind of weak, but when you flip it to say "the characters acted misaligned from their characterization" we can now see that the *real* problem here isn't that they lacked agency but that this lack of agency is inconsistent with the type of character that they are. a character this strong-willed *should* have more agency even if a weak-willed character might not.

So it's just a really simple way of framing the way I critique books that I think has really helped to show the difference between "this book is bad" and "this book didn't meet my personal preferences", but also, as someone talking about books, I think it helps give other people a clearer idea of what the book actually looks like so they can decide for themselves if it's worth their time.

Update: This is literally just a thought exercise to help you be more intentional with how you critique media. I'm not enforcing this as some divine rule that must be followed any time you have an opinion on fiction, and I'm definitely not saying that you have to structure every single sentence in a review to contain zero negative phrases. I'm just saying that I repurposed a rule we had at that specific reviewer to be a helpful tool to check myself when writing critiques now. If you don't want to use the tool, literally no one (especially not me) can or wants to force you to use it. As with all advice, it is a totally reasonable and normal thing to not have use for every piece of it that exists from random strangers on the internet. Use it to whatever extent it helps you or not at all.

Sometimes I look at my writing journey and it looks like I've gone nowhere. I have no audience. I don't know what I'm doing. I have terrible ideas. Worse yet, sometimes it feels like I've gone backward because I read less than I used to when I first started.

Then there are other times that I realize how far I've come. I realized that I'm a plotter, not a pantser, and that's helped me prevent problems before they occur. I don't try to make my first (and only) draft perfect; I realize that I need to get my ideas on paper before I can develop and hone them. I evaluate if a scene needs to be written or if the story needs to change instead of clinging to what I'd originally planned.

For about five years, I didn't write anything, and then when I returned to writing, I only wrote characters in roleplay. Neither helped me improve my writing. (If anything, RP stunted it, even if it did help me develop skills to create realistic characters.)

Now I have so many ideas floating around and very little time. It feels like I'm trying to make up for those lost years, and I'm hoping to start a MFA in Creative Writing.

I guess what I'm trying to say is keep writing. You never know when your self-doubt will pass.