concepts with their own notes:
maybe self-publishing is the way
โถ until you give up on institutional validation, you will never be free
tropes as fun + useful
โถ people end up struggling more with their writing because they cut out all the stuff they find fun in an attempt to not be โtropeyโ and like. idk. i think you shouldnt be so quick to remove a useful tool you might enjoy.
character-driven
โถ peopleโs investment in your characters > everything else about the story โ(from a video of alex hirsch at a con)
resonant/coherent
โย visakanv
finishing
โถ Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
on writing abhorrent characters
โถ I think there is no more comforting feeling than the notion your loved ones would still care for you, even at your very worst, that if a monster is worthy of love, then of course so are you.
make a small thing!
โถ โTake your 1000 page epic, your feature film, your thing that is going to take years to make and years of upskilling and make it the smallest thing you possibly can. A 12 page black and white minicomic, a short story, a poem. You can still do the big thing later.โ
โถ just do something small in the interim because it helps figure stuff out and get the satisfaction that comes from finishing something. itโs also a great proof of concept.
donโt autocomplete yourself
โถ A common reason for weak writing is that people get stuck in auto complete mode. They start a sentence and then the sentence sort of just finishes it self. I do this all the time. I read a draft and go, โNo, wait a minute, that is not actually what I did in that situation. I just wrote that because it was the logical way to end the sentence.โ It is cargo cult writing where you are imitating how sentences sound, instead of understanding the mental process that leads a good author to pick that specific sentence. You have to always go back to the real thing, the thought, the experience, and then wrestle with the sentence until it matches that thing. If you just go with the rhythm of the prose, you distort the thing you are trying to show, and the writing feels dead, sloppy, fake.
ai art
โถ A computer can never be spiteful or horny, therefore a computer must never make art