An unusual and finely tailored tobacco-coloured wool coat

c. 1911

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Roberto Cavalli | Fall/Winter 2025

That state of being Creatively Inspired but Mentally Mushy is a special kind of frustrating

Zakynthos, Greece (by Julian)

I hate I when I get an idea for a novel. Like oh no here starts the slow sad slip n’ slide to dissapointment again.

You ever been 30,000 words and hundreds of research hours into a project when you realize hey wait a minute. I don’t like this. This is bad.

Ok adding to this though that even though it is extremely relatable, this is a KNOWN thing with professional writing. 10k is often referred to as "having a pot boiling" or "having a stew" - it's the point where you often see an idea coming together and it's exciting! But THEN... 30k-50k is the point where that fun has to start coming together. In theatre, it's usually week 3 of a 5 week rehearsal period where you have to stop talking about the play and really get it all up on its feet and cohesive. In art, it's committing to what are going to be the final visible layers of colour and texture, in sculpture the moment where you're truly at the point of no return with carving out the shape.

It usually feels really bad. Because this is the point it becomes real craft. It's so, so difficult to really be able to identify if it's truly not going to be anything or you're just in the hardest part of the process, and really the only way to know is to... write through it. Write it badly. Or, if you really can't, put it in a drawer and come back to it after a few months of breathing space. Remember, you can fix so much in the edit, but you can't fix nothing!

(I say, fully looking at my latest draft of my book and considering throwing it in the bin. But my editor said exactly this to me, so I'm passing it along.)

this is 100% true. I've written 6 complete novels at this point and every single time around the 40k mark I feel lost in the woods. Nothing seems to be working. I feel awful; I can't sleep. I keep going even though I'm convinced I'm going to fail. And then... It's like leaving a tunnel and getting back out in the sunshine. Stuff starts coalescing. Things that weren't working have obvious fixes. I "can write" again, except I was writing the whole time. It just felt hopeless in the moment. It's not. You just gotta get out of the woods.

Ah yes the Slough of Desponds. Professional author with 13 books, and this is normal for me as well. (Checking for tension issues usually helps!)

Talking with writers online

Their stories: Amazing grammar, soaring vocabulary, beautiful imagery and prose which flows like a river.

In chats: no capitalisation or punctuation, swears like a sailor, misspellings everywhere, acronyms and abbreviations every five words, idek

#listen #listen do u know how much braining it takes to make the words go? #it is a lot #it’s like wearing fancy clothes all day #and then when you’re at home and comfy #u just put on ur pj’s ( @feynites)

I have never related to a statement more than “do you know how much braining it takes to make words go?”

still amazed that like. 7 years later. this post is still going. it gets like 5-12 notes a day

it’s a heritage post, is what it is.

Ok but genuinely it DOES take a lot of braining to make words go! Your brain is a very energy-hungry organ and creative work like writing takes a lot out of your brain. If you find yourself extra hungry or especially craving sugar after a session of art/writing/etc, you probably need the glucose hit after your brain used it up with thinking. Go have a good meal or a sugary donut or something. You need it.

i don’t care what anyone says, the “multiple floating weapons controlled by telepathy/whatever” is, has been, and always will be cool as shit

so important to not only write it bad but write it problematic. kill the twitter user that lives in your mind. you are not beholden to the potential criticisms of an imaginary audience.

SOPHIE NÉLISSE Carolina Herrera Fall RTW 2025 Show | February 10, 2025

I hate when I’m writing and I can hear people’s incredibly predictable complaints about what I’m writing while I’m writing it.

I can hear an editor in my head going “why does he need to have two sisters? Can’t you just condense them into one character?”

Shut up, brain editor. Shut up shut up shut up I’m writing the sort of character that has two sisters

The brain editor also periodically asks “So when are the main characters going to kiss? The people want romance.” and then I get sad because he’s not real and I can’t throw him off a bridge.

He’s wearing an annoying little turtleneck and sunglasses and clearly has barely read my work before he started commenting on it. I hate the brain editor and yet he refuses to leave. He just keeps saying stuff like “What if they got mugged in an alleyway?” when that does nothing for the story. I hate him so much.

Yeah, I hate that guy so much. He’s the worst of the worst.

Also, I don’t know if you know that visualizing one’s internal critic and making it into “the nasty, clever little character that it is” is one of the first things The Artist’s Way advises readers to do. So, like, actually it might be helpful to remind yourself of how stupid he looks in the turtleneck and glasses. [Palpatine voice] Focus on your hate.

so here's the thing. abandoning fics is good actually.

if you're a writer and you hate writing a thing? you can just stop. slap THE END? on the last chapter if you want to pretend like it's really finished, but mostly just free yourself from the prison of your own guilt. you're spending your valuable free time and mental space beating yourself up about a thing that was your choice to start writing in the first place. you decided to start making the thing, and you can also decide to give it up.

this also applies if you're a reader! starting a fic doesn't mean that you have to finish it. maybe the tags looked good. maybe the summary was intriguing. maybe you even liked the first couple of chapters. But if the story starts going in a direction that you don't like, if the author writes your favourite character in a way that doesn't vibe with you, if you just get bored with the premise and want something new, you're allowed to stop reading. Just because you sit down at the table with a whole entire cake doesn't mean you have to eat the whole thing. Sometimes you just want a little sliver, and that's just fine.

loving a story for a couple of chapters is still a lovely way to spend your time. get your enjoyment out of however much time you want to spend with it, and when that time stops being enjoyable allow yourself to move on.

falling out of love with something doesn't mean the love was never there. the love was there in the beginning, and it mattered, and it stays a part of you - even when it's not still there anymore.

I got this tattoo from Kati Green at Blue Ox tattoo yesterday.

It is a list, so that the notes I’m always writing on my arm are organized and pretty.

It is also a ruler. The lines are spaced at 1/2 inch, with the dots on the right showing 1/4 in and the ones on the left showing 1 cm. The compass rose is an angle finder.

The flowers are my favorite ones from my grandma’s garden when I was growing up. Gravenstein apple blossoms, marigolds, and wisteria.

I love it and am so excited for when it is heal enough to safely use.

Update on this guy.

It healed great and I use it daily to keep important stuff straight. Sometimes high level tasks and sometimes my grocery list :)

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

Do you have any suggestions for letting go and improving WITH your weird shit? I'm in university for Creative Writing and I haven't been taught SHIT other than how to engage with a text and how to continue to write at my highschool base-line level. No teaching, no instruction, only critiques of mine and my peers work that doesn't inform us of much in the long run.

I'm desperate for help, if you have Anything it's much appreciated. I'm asking because I felt seen in this post

1. READ. Read widely, read deeply, read slowly when a text demands time. Seek out work that seems strange or challenging. If/when you need to pick up something that's deep in your comfort zone, read consciously. If a passage hits you as dense and difficult, ask yourself why: word choice? complex nesting of concepts? are you distracted, or did you misinterpret something a few lines back? If a passage feels easy and fun, ask yourself why: satisfying rhythm? clear set-up and follow-through? Look for experimental texts, read more poetry even if you don't want to write poetry. The more experienced you are with the vast flexibility of the written word, the more confident and natural your own experimentation will get.

2. Try things out. You don't have to show them to anyone. Sometimes a stylistic idea will get stuck in my head and I just have to write freeform for a couple of thousand words to see how it feels on the page. One time in college I was possessed by the urge to write the vilest, foulest, most unsympathetic and filthy first-person narrative just to figure out how it would actually read, so I scribbled out a couple of pages until it was out of my system. I never did anything with those passages, but they're in my repertoire now, I know how that material hits. I'm always comparing writing to chefing - not everything you cook is a restaurant meal. You can experiment with flavours in your own kitchen, where you are free to make something completely unpalatable and then toss it right out with a better understanding of the process.

3. Be less scared. This isn't just directed at you, it's directed at everyone, and at me. Someone I know once brought a personal piece of writing to a writer's group, about the way her mother's death affected her. Someone in the group was absolutely scathing about it, because they felt that the way she reacted to and wrote about the bereavement was inappropriate. What a horrible experience! What an awful, unhelpful critique. But it didn't shake her, because she knew what she had felt and was steadfast in her right to express it. Sometimes (often, even) criticism will come from angles that are literally just not relevant to what we've set out to do. Like I said in the original post, a lot of readers are kind of ambivalent or hostile to weirdness at the moment. But if weirdness is your goal, those people are simply not your audience. It's a lot easier said than done, but have faith in your own intentions and your own taste. Listen to criticism, but always ask yourself 'will this help me accomplish what I want this piece to accomplish?' It is not the end of the world to be temporarily misunderstood.

I'm in that phase of writing my stupid book where all I want to talk about is my stupid book and all I want to do is write my stupid book and every piece of music I listen to is somehow the soundtrack to my stupid book but no one else cares about my stupid book so it's just on a loop inside my stupid brain

*in tears* shoutout to characters who make promises as kids and grow up to realize they cant keep those promises