Just Write, Dude

This post contains reference to spoilers for Sylvestus Vol II: The Rise. Spoilers will be clearly marked above and below in bolded text so the rest of the post should be safe to read.

 

People don't tend to ask me for "writing tips", as such, but they do ask me how I managed to finish a novel, let alone five of them, and how I stuck with one story for so long and got through all of the writers block and plot canyons, and to be honest I think that any "tip" that deals with any part of writing other than Just Doing It is rubbish, because everyone's process is going to be different. You can learn grammar and the theory of story structure and good practice for character development, but at the end of the day, that stuff can be edited and adjusted. Experiment and try stuff out - you might find that plot diagrams and timelines and character profiles help you, but they hinder me personally - but don't feel like you're failing because you don't follow the advice of Neil Gaiman or Stephen King. Just look at how different every major writer's advice is from the others.

But actually writing that first draft? That's the most important thing. And as mind-numbing as proof-reading and formatting and editing can be, I think writers united can agree that it's that first draft that juuust knocks you down most of the time.

That's where my only bit of writing advice comes in. It's not the only trick I have, but it's the only one I'd even pretend is helpful to anyone else. And I'm not promising it's universal, but whenever someone protests it, I do kinda wanna just be like... yeah. I know. I have been exactly where you are. And only sticking to my core tenet got me through it.

You probably guessed from the title of this post what it's going to be, and to be honest, it does kind of make me wince to look at it, because... condescending, much? It kind of feels like when you're sat at a desk surrounded by study materials staring off into space for three hours and then when they see your grades someone is like, "just study more", or when the executive dysfunction and depression kick in and you're laying in bed half an hour after your alarm staring at the clock watching the time until you're late tick steadily closer and chanting in your head "just get up, just get up, just get up", and you want to get up and you need to get up and it's not even like you're tired or don't want to go to work, every part of your brain is screaming to just do it, but your body won't f*cking move-

And yet, here I am, bein' all "just write dude idk", so like... yeah, it isn't as simple as that. I know. I don't mean that you should or will be able to just sit down at any time and pound out 5000 words. That's not what I mean.

More... change your expectations about what "writing" means.

We all know how it goes. You have a great idea, you get very excited, you pound out the first three chapters in the space of two days, you infodump to all your friends about the super great plot points that are going to happen right at the end, you make character playlists and consider commissioning character portraits from your cool artist friends, and then... it's gone. You try to write chapter four, and you just have no idea where this story is going or how to get from this boring-ass introduction into the real stuff, and then you've lost the momentum and you tell yourself you'll come back to it in a few weeks and maybe you get excited again sometimes and re-write those first three chapters, but four years later it's buried under a pile of other, equally-abandoned WIPs.

So you want to turn that into a novel? You want to stick with this one, because you know it's going to be the winner?

Just. Write. Something.

Write one sentence today. Even if it doesn't make sense and it's boring as hell. Write two sentences tomorrow. Write one sentence the day after. And in two weeks, you're suddenly at that exciting bit again, and with the boring stuff written and the renewed excitement for it, the words will flow out of you. And in a few days, you'll finish that exciting bit and they'll be gone again.

So write one paragraph. Write one sentence.

Here's the priority, the secret, the thing they don't tell ya in Year Eight English: it doesn't have to be good, bro.

I felt this in Sylvestus more than anything I've written before. Huge chunks of both of those books, the first draft was just... not very good at all. The sentence structure was repetitive, the language was boring, the plot was absent and full of holes, the characters had inconsistencies in name spelling and eye colour, and reading over it again would make me miserable because it would be like, man if I find this boring how the hell am I supposed to sell it to a reader in good faith?

But uh... no-one's gonna read that version, bro. It's okay.

 

Your characters are stuck in the cave and there's a deep emotional conversation you're excited to write to have outside the cave but f*ck the words just won't come today y'know? And suddenly you've lost all the momentum and you don't touch it for months because you just got stuck on how they leave the damn cave.

So today, write:

"They left the cave."

And tomorrow, write the scene outside you're excited about. And maybe when you come back in a few months or years, you'll have the experience and energy to turn that into a whole 'nother exciting chapter about the adventure as they left the cave. Or maybe you'll still not want to do it, and you can turn it into:

"It took some scrapes and a little effort, but in a few hours, they had escaped the cave. "I hate bats," Character shuddered."

They're out of the cave, the reader still gets a little insight into that something happened in the cave, and you probably didn't need those extra eight pages anyway.

Or maybe the whole plot is going to change, and they never got into the cave in the first place, and aren't you glad you didn't waste six months of your life frustrated about that one chapter that you ended up cutting?

The transition from A to B can be frustrating and disheartening and uninspiring, but as long as it happens, it doesn't have to be great first time. It just has to happen. So often we get bogged down and lost over one line of dialogue or detail or sentence, and it's so freeing to just be able to take the pressure off, lower your expectations, and write.

 

Major spoiler for Sylvestus Vol II: The Rise in the following paragraph.

 

It's not just those transitional boring bits that can bog us down. Sometimes we have such high expectations for a chapter - the conversation, the kiss, the betrayal, the battle, the death - that it's that part we struggle on. And that can be heartbreaking because this was the bit we were so excited about from the beginning and was motivating us to do all the boring bits and now it's sh*t and it's all ruined.

Yeahh you know what I'm going to say. Just do your best. No matter how good it seems, what you write now won't be the final draft of a part so important - which takes the pressure off to make it that good this time!

Lavi's death in Vol II was a huuuge example of this for me. Technically, it was very difficult to write (the fast action versus making it clear what's happening versus Sylv's disassociation versus all of the emotions versus reality conflicting with delusion), and it also has the huge pressure of being a controversial and upsetting plot-point. So, it went through more re-writes than any part of any book I've written so far. I have entire documents on my old Sta.sh of drafts of it, when normally for me a re-write means literally writing over the original in a No Going Back determination. I originally wrote it in 2016 or so, and it annoyed me a lot because it just wasn't right. Each re-write I did approached it from a different angle - focusing on the fast action or the clarity or the disassociation or the emotions or the reality or the delusion - and none of them were good enough. This amazing character and the very serious and traumatic nature of her story deserved more than I could give.

Because I just wasn't a skilled enough writer then. It bogged me down and annoyed me and made me feel like I could never do her justice.

And maybe I'll look back in a few years and realise that I didn't anyway - in fact, I hope I do, because it means I'm still getting better - but I definitely learned and grew and became a lot more skilled of a writer the second (or uh, eighteenth) time around. In the new first draft of Vol II, I just wrote it one clumsy bold go, rather than getting caught up and delayed in expectation and hesitation. I got over myself and wrote something that wasn't very good, and then I finished the novel, and then I left it alone in a proverbial drawer for a few months, and then I went back and re-wrote and re-wrote and edited and edited and crafted and crafted until I had something that I could truly and confidently say lived up to the standard Lavi - and the story and the reader - deserved.

The same could be said of the reveal of Sylv's history to Lavi in the silver pool a few chapters before that, but that's a conversation for another post.

End of spoilers.

 

There's other stuff alongside that.

You really, genuinely cannot figure out what happens next? Make that one sentence something buck-wild or unexpected or random or inconsequential.

"Lavi was upside-down." There's one. I wrote that one day, and the next day I wrote:

""Lavi, why are you upside-down?" asked Sylv."

And the next day I wrote three sentences about Lavi being upside-down, and the next day I wrote the rest of the conversation they were having, and the next day I wrote the rest of the chapter, and I like it quite a bit.

Kill a character. Bring a new one in. Have someone walk in and say "what the f*ck?" and figure out what made them say it later.

 

You're completely jammed into a corner and hate where your characters are and the whole thing? Do something drastic. Delete the entire chapter where they got into the cave in the first place. Send them to a shop or a lake instead. Sometimes they need the change of scene.

And so, to be fair, do you. Get up, walk around, stretch, make a cup of coffee, then sit down and write that one damn sentence and then let yourself off the hook for the rest of the day.

 

If you set a daily goal of 1000 words and you're never hitting it and hate trying, make the daily goal 100 words. Sh*t, make it ten words. Achieve something every day, and realise that what you have done is still an achievement.

Maybe just don't write this novel at all for a while. Write a self-indulgent few chapters of something unrelated that you're more excited about. If it becomes a chore, you're not going to want to do it, and the more resentment and anxiety you build up around not being able to write well, the less you're going to want (or be able) to go back to it when you do have the inspiration again.

I read a thing by Terry Crews a while ago where someone asked him for gym routines and tips, and what he said always stuck with me. His advice wasn't to work until it hurts or to have body goals or to stick with discipline and all of those parts of the diet and fitness industries that normalise exercise as self-harm.

His advice was just to enjoy going to the gym.

He said he sometimes just takes a magazine and sits in the changing room for half an hour; he doesn't work out if he doesn't feel like it. He uses the machines that make him feel good, he goes because he enjoys it. When you have the pressure of hating your body and comparing yourself to other people and wanting to lose weight or get buff or any of that sh*t, you aren't living for what your brain and your soul need: you're making it a chore.

I've tried to run, I've tried to use ellipticals and do yoga and push-ups and punches, I've tried to force myself to enjoy it because everyone promised that the dopamine hit would override the pain eventually. It never did, I was just hurting myself and hating myself because people told me I should and it was another way to self-harm without visible scars (and one that was praised by people around me, no less), and like writing without love, I stopped as soon as I skipped one session because of a bad brain day or an inevitable injury. People say that you should write every day as discipline, like you should work out regularly as discipline, but that's not true. You don't need discipline if you love it.

I love swimming, I can bring myself to get up an hour earlier in the morning when normally I can barely drag myself to the bus on time if I know I have a session booked before work. I go four times a week now, and if I wake up in the morning and don't want to go... I don't go.

I don't swim to lose weight or build muscle - I love my body as it is and have no desire to change it in those ways and won't let anyone try to convince me it should be changed - I just do it because it makes me happy.

And that seems to confuse people. The idea that if I didn't want to go one day, I just wouldn't. That I'm not doing it to keep fit or slim or even to "exercise the depression away". People have such a hard time living for the joy of life, I think.

Similarly, I don't write to be famous, or to spread a message, or for discipline or therapy. I write because I love it, because the stories bubble up inside and want to be shown to the world, because the characters push their way out and I love giving them the stage.

Go to the gym to read a magazine. Draw a small frog in ten minutes and then put the art stuff away. Write one sentence.

Just write, dude. Not for discipline or because you have to. Because you love it, and you want to see where this story goes, and because even if it's a sh*t sentence, at least it exists now, out there in the world, and you can make it a better sentence later.

See? You made a thing! You tangibly impacted this world! That's amazing, bro. Take the afternoon off for all that good work. You get to write one more sentence tomorrow.

[Image ID: a digital painting of a small dark green frog wearing a hat. The painting was clearly done in less than ten minutes. The frog is smiling benignly and has big eyes staring blankly off past the viewer. There are clearly no thoughts in its head. The hat is a purple party hat with gold spots that is secured around the frog's head with string. End ID]

Leap Before You Think

I was obsessed with the game Okami for a significant chunk of my childhood. It had everything: wolves; mythology but not Greek or Egyptian; dry humour; beautiful stylised art; gameplay that was challenging but accessible to an eight year-old; women with huge badonkahoongas who turn into murderous foxes; being on the Wii so I could actually play it; a story that made me cry; wolves; women who no, seriously, really gave me a challenge for my sexuality at eight years old...

I was. Obsessed. With it. I played it again a few years ago on the PS4 remaster, and it fully withstood the test of time. It was equally as fun then as eight, ten, twelve years before. And thinking about it, my obsession then opened up so many doors to what would come in my life later. Before Okami, my internet usage was limited to Webkinz, Club Penguin, and Neopets. My desperation to consume more of the game than the game itself had to offer led to googling pictures from the game, which led to looking at fanart of the game, which led to deviantART, which I joined (with parent permission, to be fair) at the tender age of ten.

The internet was a much more lawless place then; before five big media corporations owned every website and it was all about social media, forums and small home-grown websites grew their own jungles. The other huge impact on my internet usage was Warrior Cats (much the same story, except it led to writing RP forums rather than dA), but specifically I was thinking about it earlier, and. Well. Maybe I'd have made my way there on my own eventually, but I joined dA well before the existence (or at least, the spread in my age group) of Tumblr or Facebook, and connected with millions of people and hundreds of communities, for ah, good and ill. I was exposed to things I shouldn't have been, but eh, that builds character. I knew enough to keep myself mostly safe and when to click off things I didn't like. Nothing had content warnings or age barriers or tags in those days, y'know.

My writing itself was heavily influenced by those forums that all came from Warrior Cats obsession, but I would never have progressed remotely as far as I did with my art or other parts of my writing if it weren't for deviantART. I'd never have written The Red Prince if it weren't for the art I did alongside it. I'd never have finished writing Seeking, the first novel I published, if it weren't for the small community of writers on dA that inspired me and gave constant feedback and encouragement, and I'd never have published it if not for them, and the same for Each Separate Dying Ember, and while I stopped posting my stories chapter-by-chapter online after that and left dA behind for good, I'd never have written or published Sylvestus without those.

And for me, it all goes back to typing Oki and Amaterasu into Google Images every single day, and following the link on one of the paintings there, and ending up in this mysterious world where people made art and other people looked at it and everything opened up ahead of me.

But there's another way Okami has stuck with me all these years, other than a general fondness and whatever latent effect childhood obsessions have on adult personality.

The wolf/sun goddess you play as, Amaterasu, has a very small companion, Issun, a wandering artist and moderate lecher, who provides all of the dialogue for the non-verbal Ammy (with his own twist, and sometimes in opposition to what she actually wants). One of his catchphrases was a surprising balm to a kid with severe anxiety: uttered on the several occasions where you are required to quite literally take a leap of faith into the next area (into the lair of Orochi the Eight-headed Serpent, or (after being shrunk down to Issun's size) into the throat of the sleeping emperor, or straight off a cliff into the ocean), he would spend a few moments airing his anxieties and bemoaning how he was too young and handsome to die, and then shrug and say:

"Like my momma always said... Leap before you think!"

It was a neat way of resolving his internal dilemmas of this mildly selfish yet equally reckless character, while also convincing kids playing the game that it was okay to mess up or jump off the edge of the map and just see what happens. The game also rewarded those leaps with beautiful graphics and a certain joyous flourish, an immediate reward for your courage: never a tough boss battle without some spectacular landscape and quick comedy first.

It's a simple mantra, and I still pull it out - I have since I first played the game too many years ago. I'm not at all that impulsive when it comes to the important things - I'm careful with money, I spend months or years planning and debating tattoos, I'm good at carefully planning a trip or a move or a big purchase - but equally I've learned to enjoy the spontaneity in things too. Get on the back of a motorbike with no helmet going 60 mph through Marrakech morning traffic, leap before you think! Make that scary phone call you've been putting off for three months right now with no script or planning, leap before you think! Drop everything and go and visit your friend who's in a bad mental place right now, leap before you think!

Some things you can build up and debate over for months, thinking and building ladders and establishing timelines and drafting plans. You can save money by booking early, you can avoid disappointment by preparing in advance, you can manage your expectations by doing research. But so many things in life will always, in the end, be a massive hole in the ground that leads straight down into the dark with noxious purple smoke pouring out of it. There's no other way into Orochi's lair. You can go around it a few times to be sure and stock up on health-restoring bones and equip your favourite weapon, but if you keep thinking about it, you're just going to be walking around the edge hesitating until he awakens and destroys the whole of Nippon.

Sometimes you have to shrug, kick off your shoes, and mutter, "Leap before you think," to yourself.

 

Join the art website that will change your life, giving you new skills, many years of anxiety and negative social interactions, and the motivation to follow your dreams and publish your books. Press the "finalise publication" button even though people might not like the book and it might get bad reviews and there might be typos you missed and once you do this you'll start losing Sylv again. Walk onto that stage and perform the poem that will officially excise you from the good graces of people who want you to keep your mouth shut about the things they did to you.

Make that phone call.

Are you standing at the edge of a new area today?

[Image ID: a screenshot of the original Okami game, showing a blurry gameplay screen of Amaterasu, a white wolf with red markings and a fiery shield on her back, looking over the edge of cliff. Below is a historical Japanese village and beyond it, the ocean. All of the artwork is in a traditional Japanese style as if painted with ink and brush. End ID]