7 (More) Things I Wish I'd Known as a Beginning Writer

Last time I shared seven things I wish I'd known as a beginning writer. Unsurprisingly, that wasn't an exhaustive list, and I've been thinking about it some more. So, I present to you, seven more things I wish I'd known as a beginning writer. . . .

1. The Central Relationship Needs an Arc and an Actual Plot

Many of us have been told we need a relationship plotline in our stories, but few of us have received any guidance on how to actually do that (unless, of course, you are writing romance).

And in my first novel attempt, back in the day, the central relationship was not romantic. I had an idea for what the relationship was like, but partway through the story, it wasn't working. And it was becoming super annoying.

What I didn't realize was that it was annoying because it was mostly static. Nothing was changing. The characters weren't growing closer together or further apart. Instead of the relationship plotline having "peaks" and "valleys," it was mostly just a straight line.

Of course, I knew it was going to change at the end.

But what I didn't understand was that it still needed a plot through the middle. 🤦‍♀️ Which means it still needed the basics of plot: goal, antagonist, conflict, consequences.

Not just interesting interactions and conversations. Not just banter and pastimes.

In my last post, I mentioned the three basic types of goals: obtain, avoid, maintain.

Well, in relationship plots, this translates into these three basic goals: grow closer to the person (obtain), push further away from the person (avoid), maintain the relationship as is (maintain).

The antagonistic force is whatever gets in the way of that. If your protagonist wants to draw closer to this person, then an antagonistic force should be pushing him away. If he wants to be apart from this person, then the antagonistic force should be pushing him closer. If he wants to maintain the relationship as is, then the antagonistic force is what disrupts that. This creates conflicts and should lead to consequences. 

If you have a relationship plotline, it needs an actual plot.

2. Choose a Tentative Theme Early, to Better Shape and Evaluate Your Story

If you've been following me for a while, you probably know I consider these three things to be the triarchy (formerly known as "trinity") of storytelling: character, plot, and theme. 

Each of these elements comes out of and influences the others.

This also means you can use each of these to help shape and evaluate the quality of the others.

It's much easier to write a solid story when you understand all three.

If you have only one or two pieces, it's harder to discern which ideas are just okay and which ideas are great. It's harder to discern what does or does not belong in your story.

The best ideas for your story are going to come from and touch each of those three things.

Most beginners are familiar with concepts of characters and plot.

Few know anything about theme.

And fewer still have the desire to learn anything about theme. It's often seen as unimportant or something that "just happens." Okay, sure, it could just happen. Maybe. 

But writing your story will (in the long run) be much easier if you at least understand some basics about theme.

I have so much to say on theme, it could probably fill up a book (and maybe someday it will), but for now, if you want more information on it . . . I'd recommend starting with this article: The Secret Ingredients for Writing Theme. It breaks down the key elements of theme, which can give you a good foundation.

Even if your theme ends up changing a bit, starting with an idea in mind will help keep your story on track.

3. Your Story Needs a Counterargument

Remember when I was talking about theme, and implied I wasn't going to go into it that much more? Well . . . I guess I'm going to go into it a little more.

The thematic statement is the argument the story is making about life.

But it's not really an argument if no one is disagreeing.

This means your story needs a counterargument (I call this the "anti-theme").

This counterargument will often manifest within the protagonist (as a "flaw" or misbelief or something the character needs to cast off or overcome) and/or within the main antagonistic force. 

It can technically show up in other places and in other ways, but let's keep this basic.

So if your story ultimately shows the audience that it's best to be merciful, then a counterargument for that could be that it's best to enforce justice (Les Mis).

If your story ultimately shows the audience that it's best to ask for, give, and receive help, then a counterargument for that could be that it's best to avoid, withhold, and refuse help and do everything yourself (A Man Called Otto).

If your story ultimately shows the audience that it's best to rely on faith, then a counterargument for that could be that it's best to rely on technology (Star Wars IV: A New Hope).

The two arguments are locked in a "battle" of sorts, similar to how the protagonist and antagonist are, because they are in opposition to one another (see #5 in previous article).

The arguments need to be "shown" more than "told." And the counterargument should be given fair weight, because doing so will actually make the whole theme (and plot and characters) stronger.

Here are some examples to think about:

4. Writing More isn't Enough to Take Your Work to a Professional Level

We are often told that if we want to be great writers, we need to write more. And this is true. To an extent. 

I've worked with writers who had been writing for decades, but were still at a beginner level.

I have known writers who bent over backward to meet word count goals, only to end up with a pile of slush they couldn't see their way out of.

I myself have spent enormous amounts of time and words trying to write something brilliant.

But for the vast majority of people, putting in the time and word count isn't enough.

Saving for later when I have more brain cells.

I’m not sure if I just came out in my user bio? Did people know? I think I’ve mentioned it in passing elsewhere a couple of times; I am not fully out IRL (red state). Just out here trying to be a gentle woodland wlw creature, mostly.

I Figured Some Things Out very late in life. Like, I don’t think I knew until 2014-2015ish, so I would have been about 36 then (I’m about to turn 44. Am I old enough to be your mom? Maybe?). I remember spending about a year seriously questioning what I thought I knew about myself and then really knowing it, being glad about it, shortly before the Obergefell decision dropped: marriage equality in the US.

And I’ll tell you—why am I telling you this? Why now? I don’t know. Because of what happened in Colorado yesterday? Because a big family gathering with people who don’t know who I am, who might say ignorant shit, will happen in a few days? I don’t know. There’s a lot I don’t know.

I know more than I knew ten years ago. I spent my whole life feeling like there was something terribly wrong with me. Then I came to realize I was bisexual (and also on the spectrum, but that’s a story for another time) and I felt so much peace? Just so much peace. There wasn’t anything wrong with me at all; not knowing myself was what was wrong.

This is a lot to say and I’m not sure why I’m saying it.

Actually Tumblr helped me figure that, oddly enough. Maybe that’s why I want to say it, if I’m coming back to post here, because it—you—helped me so much. (I’ll go find some of the posts, they’re probably buried in Pocket somewhere.) The reason I would want to talk about it, really, is to be a middle-aged woman saying that sometimes it takes this long. It’s okay to not figure things out for a long time, to not be sure, to take as long as you need, and for the balance of your attractions, your loves, to shift back and forth. I’ve always been bi—we can talk about youthful impressions of romance novel covers some other time—but I only had in-person crushes on boys for much of my life. (Or did I? What about the kind, pretty cheerleader I grew up with but was too shy to say much to? I feel like being neurodivergent is partly why it was hard to figure out.) And now it’s like, women, enbies and Hozier. It’s confusing. You wouldn’t think sexuality be like that, but it do.

(Bi? Pan? See, this is why I like “wlw,” women loving women. Does what it says on the tin. The embracing inclusive “queer.” But I know that word has painful baggage for some people. I feel like it’s a word that brings me peace—it has room for me to change and grow—but it doesn’t for everyone.)

I feel like I missed out on a lot, the connections I could have made in the years I didn’t know, but I don’t regret knowing now. Watching (and voting in) the midterm elections, seeing what happened yesterday at a place that was supposed to be safe—it makes me want to live queer as hell. I don’t know if I can do that offline yet. And I think that’s okay too, to do what you can, be who you can, in the places you can, and protect yourself everywhere else. Especially now.

I don’t know. I meant to write like three sentences about this. Is it sappy to say that I’m thankful? I can’t tell everyone—just, uh, the internet—but I know, and that means the world to me.

I have a lot of feels about this. A lot of similar feels. Thanks for sharing this, cleo. <3 

fanfic really is. like. it really is about the community. it's about the comments. it's about the story you rip directly for your heart and bleed out on your keyboard. it's about the i loved it when you... and the i screamed when you wrote... and the keyboard smashes and the i can't believe you did that!!!! and the i'm suing you for damages like it. this is community. fanfic is literally. an act of community. the greatest act of community in fandom because it comes with such raw, overwhelming vulnerability. whether you're writing kink fic or 100k words of trauma exploration, you're just like. hi hello this is my soul please embrace it and people do. oh my gosh

do you want to do something weird?

[Image description: four gifs. The top left gif shows Blackbeard on The Revenge, wearing Stede’s clothes. He walks across the deck. The top right gif shows Danny Zuko from Grease at the fair, walking through a crowd. He’s wearing his track sweater.

The bottom left gif shows the camera panning up Sandy, dressed in greaser clothes and bringing a cigarette to her lips. The gif on the right shows Stede grinning in the doorway to his quarters, wearing Blackbeard’s black leather outfit. End description.]

 Lou + Posture

I don’t think Ed puts his arms around Stede to pull him back from the lantern, actually. He flings his arms around him and hisses Yes! We fucking did it! And then Ed ducks back from the lamp because it almost clocked him. But Stede’s nowhere near it. I think Ed just needed to hold him. The very first night. (And fall asleep right there talking to him, and wake up to him and the breakfast he brought him, and ask to stay.)

(Is that the only time they’ve ever hugged?)

@irisversicolor I feel that.

Also it is the only time they ever hug. So. Even more than an s2 kiss, I need another one of these. And next time I need Stede to be able to hold him, too.

I wonder when the last time was someone hugged Stede like that? Has anyone ever?

There’s a reason they picked the ‘Be a Lighthouse’ scene to announce Season Two JUST SAYING. The music kills me. The lighting kills me. The emotion kills me. THE CREW CELEBRATING KILLS ME.

These two kill me. So yes I need more hugs please! Immediately.

SAME REASON IT’S THE LIGHTHOUSE PAINTING HE’S WEEPING OVER AT THE END. He was remembering THIS. The moment of recognition, the suddenly-the-world-is-kind moment.

I LOVE THEM SO MUCH

I didn’t even remember til just now, and now it’s bedtime, and I didn’t even CELEBRATE! (What I would have done, I don’t know, but....)

OFMD + disability

(note: I did not include injuries that could potentially cause disabilities such as Roach’s shoulder because it’s not shown that there’s any clear lasting issues. Also, I included Black Pete because even though it’s never acknowledged in the show, I think it’s important to note that his actor, Matthew Maher has talked about his cleft lip and palate and said about the scar and his speech impediment: “I always think of it as a challenge—an impediment/challenge to my acting career…If you have anything that sort of makes you aggressively different than everybody else, you have to sort of wrestle with it. I had speech therapy. Part of committing to being an actor was finding a good speech therapist to make me just a little bit more comprehensible. But even still, she didn’t eliminate the lisp and there’s still the scars. It’s been one of the biggest things that’s slowed me down, but it’s also been paradoxically the thing that distinguished me the most.” So even though it’s not addressed in canon, the fact that it isn’t and he’s able to just be as he is on screen is so nice to see.

Traces of coca and nicotine found in Egyptian mummies - WTF fun facts

well DUH. a lot of historians are still trying to process the fact that ancient egyptians knew how to build boats, which is ridiculous. why would they not be seafarers and explorers?

this is not new or surprising information at all. it pretty much day one of any african-american studies course.

the egyptians knew that if they put their boats in front of the summer storm winds it’d blow them right across the sea to the Americas and they shared that with the greeks.

It’s really hard for people to understand that everyone had boats, exploration, and trade interactions without the same level of murder, colonization, and violence that the Europeans did. It’s really hard for people to get that.

Well, no people find hard to understand that one of the earliest civilizations could build a boat sturdy enough and reliable enough to cross a 8,766 mile stretch that gave people thousands of years of technological progress later great difficulty.

The notion that technology is a steady upward climb of “progress” is, itself, part of a Eurocentric historical narrative revolving around the tacit teleological assertion that Western European civilisation represents the culmination and endpoint of history.

In reality, technologies are frequently discovered, lost and rediscovered, often multiple times, and frequently in parallel. A Dark Age in one region may be a time of rapid technological development in another region, and it’s not uncommon to encounter evidence of ancient civlisations using technologies a thousand years out of whack with the “proper” order of discovery… where “proper” is defined in terms of the order in which those technologies were discovered in Western Europe - there’s that Eurocentrism again.

I mean, just to give you an idea of how flexible the order in which technologies are developed can be and how ultimately wrong-headed the notion of linear technological progress is, there are Central American civilisations that had indoor plumbing, central heating and hot and cold running water before inventing the wheel. Some of the First Nations in what is now Eastern Canada had sophisticated climate models and reliable weather prediction - including functioning barometers and other simple meteorological instruments - before they figured out metallurgy.

So no, it’s not particularly incredible that the ancient Egyptians had boats far more advanced than they “should” have given their overall level of technology. That stuff happens all the time.

People invent the technology they need. They can even invent a technology, then not use it.

The Inca are often accused of “not knowing about wheels.”

Except, they did have wheels. They just didn’t use wheels for long distance transportation. They had a huge road system. On which everything was moved by pack animals and people. The Inca road is an incredible feat of engineering.

So, why didn’t they use wheels?

Because their land was so freaking mountainous that the road would repeatedly turn into this:

Tell me what earthly use a wheel is when your road keeps having to have steps and narrow bridges because you live on top of a mountain.

But that image shows us what they did have.

That’s a suspension bridge. Europeans didn’t invent those until centuries after the Inca did.

Because when the most efficient route through your home hits chasms, guess what?

You get real good at making bridges!

And when the best way to move goods through your desert homeland is a big river?

You get real good at making boats.

The technology a culture develops and uses is the technology they need. In Europe that was one suite of technology, and because white folk are so dang arrogant, we think that’s the superior means of development. It’s not, it’s just how technology develops in Europe.

The Minoan civilisation in Greece, around 2,500 BCE, developed huge technological advancements, including fully operational water and sewage systems, complete with flushing toilets. This would be around 3,000 years before one was invented in England.

Minoan Greece was also a sea power. They had huge fleets of ships, which meant they did a lot of exploration. They also built one of the biggest trade networks in the world, reaching as far as Egypt, Cyprus, Canaan, Syria,  the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Spain and Portugal), the Levantine coast, Anatolia and Mesopotamia (modern-day Turkey, Israel and Iraq).

A volcano eruption on a nearby island, which caused a tsunami, possibly destroyed their sea power and left them vulnerable, which is why most of their technology was lost.

The Late Bronze Age Collapse a few centuries later led to the simultaneous destruction of advanced civilisations in Greece, Egypt, the Near East, Asia Minor, North Africa, Caucasus, Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean. This caused a dark age across two continents which created isolated village cultures, and is the reason most of their advancements were lost.

The notion that technology can only advance is some white nonsense.

That too.

(Minoan Crete may have been part of the inspiration for Atlantis).

This is also why Egyptians didn’t bother with the wheel* for like three thousand years. What fucking good are wheels when EVERYTHING IS SAND?

But on the flip side…they came up with a way to use water to basically hydroplane those giant stone blocks in their buildings across the desert. Which is a hell of a lot more useful in an unpaved sandy region.

Likewise let’s not forget the Aztecs, who came up with a farming system so efficient (chinampas) that parts of it are still used today and really ought to be revived on a wider scale as part of sustainable farming. And also Native Americans, and I’m using that term BECAUSE it’s so broad: look at tribes across the country and you’ll see something interesting. Iroquois, living in a cold, well-forested, and often icy land, built immovable longhouses—which would survive the bitter northeastern winters. Plains tribes developed the tipi/teepee—while they also faced long, even dangerous winters, they also lived in a place where travel was far easier and the worst of winter could be weathered by heading south. Or down where I live, the Sinagua (later assimilated into the Hopi) built their homes IN CLIFFS. And by that I mean “off the ground, built into the cliff face with adobe.” Aka, some of the best pre-refrigeration insulation against the heat that you could possibly hope for. We still don’t know how they did it, incidentally. “With ladders, dumbass” is an obvious answer in some of their dwellings, but in others it’s not clear how they just….hung over a sinkhole, a quarter of a mile or so above the water, and chipped out the front doors so they had a place to sit while they made the rest. Scaffolds? Very well-balanced rope ladders? Smaller cliffs they chipped off afterward to prevent enemy incursion? We don’t know, but we do know they found a way to make the extreme heat survivable and even sort of a nonissue. They never bothered with stuff like modern central AC because they found a way to let the stone and clay do the job for them.

Technology isn’t always a race. Sometimes it’s just an evolution.

*nominally. We have extant toys from this period that have wheels to make them move.

“umm arts not a real job ://“ show me a stock. put a stock. into my hands. you cannot do that can you? but you know what i can do? i can draw you giant furry boobs and place that gentley into your palms. who of us is the truer man. who of us provides at the end of the day. look me in the eyes

Richard Gere’s character in Pretty Woman, “We don’t BUILD things!” 

I always hire my guests to help me with ‘chores’ (if they’re willing!), the kind of task that’s fun at first but less fun when you have to keep going for hours (burning all the broom bushes in the pasture, picking many kg of berries to make syrup, carrying a mountain of logs into the wood shed and building stable log piles so they don’t come cascading down later…) And every time I’m amazed by the way humans can make the most tedious tasks genuinely fun through… group dynamics? just the way people start interacting and bonding with each other when everyone is focused on the same repetitive physical activity. It’s hard to find examples because it’s always so specific to each situation; but I mean things like

I always tell people to help only if they feel like it and we can stop anytime and I’ll finish later by myself, but what usually happens instead is that they want to come back at the same time next year to do this exact chore again because of how they’ve made it theirs in just a few days (or in one afternoon!) Give a group of humans a banal task and while they’re at it they will come up with a whole new inside slang, a few work songs and a handful of founding texts and myths, until it feels special and important. I love seeing the way these miniature folklores just emanate from people doing things together.

i love the writing for Stede because he's an excellent example of how a person can be marginalized in some ways and privileged in others, which is, in general, the way the world actually works. its rare for there to exist a person with absolutely no privilege and only marginalizations, but people generally don't think of the ways that we're privileged, especially when we're suffering from the ways that we're marginalized

and that's why stede is a great example, and his writing does an excellent job of digging into the topic. because stede experiences a lot of marginalization as a gay man, from childhood bullying and abuse from his father right up to being pressured into marrying a woman and having children - but he's also immensely privileged by virtue of being rich, white, and a man, with each of those things insulating him from the realities of the world that other people, including the people around him, suffer through.

like, with mary - stede's marriage to mary as viewed by stede is one where they're both miserable in monotony, but when you look at the show in reality, stede checked out of his marriage because he didn't want to be there. mary didn't either, but she tried to make it work, because she doesn't have any other options in her society - she would be disgraced and without support, monetarily, or familial in most cases, if she left her husband, and she wouldn't be allowed to divorce him. she has to make it work because this is her only option.

but stede has options. stede can check out. stede can leave his wife to do the hard work of raising the kids while mary has to be the one to ask them to stop running around the house, and initiate conversations with them at the dinner table, and nurture and care for them. stede is the fun dad playmate, and its why when he decides that he wants to leave his monotonous life, where he's uncomfortable in a married state, that he leaves the children behind with her.

and with the crew - stede is a terrible captain in terms of actually knowing how to sail a ship or do anything that a ship needs doing. we all know this. the characters know this. there's a reason oluwande agrees that stede is going to get them all killed, and jim calls him the worst pirate captain ever - when stede sets out to be a captain, he genuinely sucks at this. he's terrible at it, because he didn't have to learn anything about doing any of it, he just needed to be rich to achieve everything he ever wanted, and then rely on the labor of poorer white men and poorer men of color to make it all work out for him.

in episode two, when stede finds his courage to go after the hostages and prove himself as a captain, he says "i am adequate", which is both played for comedy and empathy - comedy because its such an understatement for a positive affirmation, empathy because it's *such* an understatement and goes to outlining stede's overall low sense of worth, but i think it's also important to note that it's kind of right? at best, stede is adequate at that moment.

and throughout the show, we see stede take a lot of things to heart, but also, in many ways fail to take responsibility for things he does wrong - he overcompensates and makes them about his lack of worth, or he deflects and makes them not his fault, or he gets overly critical towards others so he doesn't have to accept any blame or fault - and it all stems from this mindset that's been built into him from youth, that he's worthless and terrible and pathetic.

and here's the thing: i'm not saying that stede's abusive father or the badmintons or anyone else who bullied and tormented stede were right. he's not a lily-livered little rich boy who's never going to be anything else. but they did impart a lot of learned helplessness into stede, at least as i see him, where because he has such low self-esteem, he genuinely seems to think that he can't possibly cause harm to other people. he feels guilty about abandoning his family, he feels guilty about leaving them behind, he feels that this makes him a bad person, but it's not until episode 9 and he learns that he's been reported dead that he seems to genuinely think about the ways that his family could have suffered without him.

after all, in keeping with the times, it's very possible that mary would have been educated on managing a household, but not finances or businesses, or the land that they run. it's very possible that other relatives could have come crawling from the woodwork for the fortune. it's possible that with the money being louis', not mary's, by right, that she could have been with very limited access to their funds.

a lot of bad things could have happened, even WITHOUT the emotional hurt that being abandoned by a husband/father would cause, but stede doesn't seem to have expected any of that. in episode 10, he's surprised and hurt that his children are angry and have forgotten him. he's angry that mary has found a person to be in love with. he's upset that he came back and coming back wasn't enough for anyone, because he didn't think he, stede bonnet, could hurt anyone.

and that's partially because he's always seen himself through the lens of victimization and the ways that others have hurt him, and not in the ways that he could hurt others. mary's life is better with stede gone not because of his inherent lack of worth as a person, but because he was a terrible husband, wrapped up in himself and his griefs and his hurts and his very real marginalizations, and in doing so completely failed to be compassionate or kind or even an active participant in his own domestic life.

by the end of the season, we see stede finally starting to own that. we see that he's recognized his part in the harm he caused, and that he's finally being active, not reactive, in his own life. he makes the decision to leave openly, he carefully removes himself from at least one of his privileges - his class, by abandoning his wealth fully, this time, no longer leaving himself a lifeline to the world of the wealthy elite, and setting out to be an equal to his crew and to ed.

and that's a GOOD way to show this kind of story. because we are often much more attuned to the ways that we experience marginalization than the ways we enjoy privilege. privilege functions near-invisibly for the privileged, because we don't see all the ways we benefit from a world that's purpose-built for us. it takes intentional thought and perspective to see that the world is not built equal, and that we don't all move through it in the same way. often times, we have to confront sources of our marginalization, like stede did in coming back home and dealing with the life he left behind, to acknowledge our privileges - like stede did again, facing his fellow disaffected rich peers and the wife and children he hurt - to begin being active participants in our lives.

i'm really glad for the way stede's journey is handled. it would have been SO easy for the show to say that stede has no fault in his actions, that he had no choices, that he was just reacting. instead the show shows us that stede had options all along, but he was so embedded within himself that he didn't see them, and straggled along, hurting people because he was too busy in that mindset, until finally he came out of it.

i'm excited to see season 2. i'm excited to see where stede grows next, now that he's finally actively shaping his life, not bowing to his learned helplessness, not looking away from the negative impacts of his choices.

Ooh, this is good.