The key to writing engaging plots is the key to writing all genre stories:
Write characters who want things, and then make them work for those things against increasing pressure.
As long as you have a character trying to accomplish a goal that’s difficult for them to reach, and you make them face harder challenges and grow more as a person the closer they come to reaching that goal, you can make any idea interesting.
let’s pour one out for the fics that you had perfectly planned in your head, those ones where you knew what was going to happen scene by scene and you had specific lines already written and you just daydreamed ‘em on repeat for days on end and you never wrote anything down because there’s no way you would forget that detail or that line but then you didn’t have the time to write it or the energy or the push and then a few months later you remember only the vaguest idea no matter how hard you think about it and you know there was more but its gone forever now…
you ever start rereading your WIP to get in the mood and write more and you get so caught up that when you get to the end you’re like “bitch? where’s the rest?” and you realize you’re the bitch and you have to write it
Well, unless you are going to only write stories in which nice things happen to nice people, you are going to write stories in which people who do not believe what you believe show up, just like they do in the world. And in which bad things happen, just as they do in the world. And that’s hard.
And if you are going to write awful people, you are going to have to put yourself into their shoes and into their head, just as you do when you write the ones who believe what you believe. Which is also hard.
I think that knowing what you believe, writing fiction informed by what you believe, and knowing that your fiction has a moral grounding (if it does) is the best thing for an author. And not worrying about what readers think of you, any more than you’d worry about what your parents or lovers might think if they read your fiction.
It’s something that I thought a lot about a long time ago, when one young man killed his lover, and then killed himself, and tried to frame Sandman (and me) for it. And the conclusion I came to was that you have to be good in your heart with what you’ve written. And beyond that, you cannot worry.
it’s in the AR trivia book LMAO i read it on the podcast a while back I was crying laughing. it said her fav snack whle she writes is brie & macadamias and i’m just like I MEAN IF THAT ISN’T THE SNACK OF A PERSON WHO’S WRITING THE VAMPIRE CHRONICLES IDEK
I knew I’d heard of it from someone on here! now I have this image of her just hoovering down nuts and brie… that’d give me a natural high of a sort, for sure. MAYBE I SHOULD TRY IT FOR FANFIC… hmmmm….
Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.
past me: canon is sacred I must carefully fact-check everything to make sure it is canon-compliant
present me: canon is a box of scraps in a cave I’m gonna tear that shit apart throw away 90% of it and out of the good bits build something absolutely beautiful and amazing
I-want-my-IWTV 