caffeinewitchcraft:

maramahan:

I see a lot of writing tips and I post a lot of writing tips but I feel like I’ve been forgetting the most important one: you’ve gotta learn to trust yourself.

And I don’t mean that in sort of “uwu have faith in yourself! You can do it!!” kind of way. I’m not here to repeat empty affirmations–I’m saying you’ve consumed a lot of media over the years. You know what you like and what you don’t like. You have good taste. 

But if you’re like me, all that certainty goes out the window when you’re writing your own stuff. “Will the readers like that?” you think. “This is too weird. It’s unrelatable. Nobody else’s story looks like this–I must be doing something wrong.”

“This is silly,” you tell yourself. “Why do I even bother?”

And when you start doubting yourself like that, that’s the moment you stop creating. You get blocked and stressed and it gets all too easy to fall back on cliches and stereotypes. You start stripping away the things that make the story uniquely yours in order to make it look more like everyone else’s. 

Which is infinitely sad. 

You’ve lived a life no one else has seen, and you have ideas that nobody else in the world could think of. Even if the story has been ‘done’ before, there’s nobody else who can tell it like you. You can start with the most ‘cliche’ idea ever, but if you come at it with any measure of emotional honesty, it’ll still be new–because it’s being told by you. 

I just finished a draft of a book that’s probably the most painful thing I’ve written so far. It’s way out of my comfort zone, and I had to explore aspects of myself I prefer not to think about. I did a lot of second guessing, and a good bit of whimpering facedown on the floor because writing is scary and hard. 

And rereading the draft now, the absolute best parts are the bits where I gave up on convention and I wrote what I wanted exactly the way I wanted to write it. Yeah, it’s kinda silly and kinda dumb and kinda just a big load on nonsense–but it’s MY nonsense. If people like it, great. Wonderful. If they don’t like it, well–reading is a subjective experience, and maybe my work just isn’t for them. That’s okay. 

Be you. Be honestly, genuinely you. It’s a scary, vulnerable position to put yourself in, but… Even if you’re one in a million, there are 7,000 people just like you–and that’s 7,000 people who will read your work and go “this writer gets me.”

Write it for them. Write it for you. Create shamelessly. Learning to write is only half learning the craft–the other half is learning to trust in the value of the things you have to say.

All of this and

Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite reading experiences, suggested you write for one person.

Don’t write for everyone, write your story like you’re telling it tone person who wants to hear it.

cowgirluli:

“She did not know if her gift had come from the lord of light or of darkness, and now, finally finding that she did not care which, she was overcome with an almost indescribable relief, as if a huge weight, long carried, had slipped from her shoulders.”

— Stephen King, Carrie