Honestly? My main piece of advice for writing well-rounded characters is to make them a little bit lame. No real living person is 100% cool and suave 100% of the time. Everyone's a little awkward sometimes, or gets too excited about something goofy, or has a silly fear, or laughs about stupid things. Being a bit of a loser is an incurable part of the human condition. Utilize that in your writing.

It never ends

excerpt from alison bechdel’s FUN HOME

"Here are your tortured poets. All from Mahmoud Darwish to Dr. Refat Alareer to Khaled Juma, these are tortured poets. Tortured by longing for a home they can never return to, tortured by the world they were born to for BEING BORN. Palestine, home to the tortured poets department." [@/folkoftheshelf on X. April 20th, 2024.]

I hope every writer who sees this writes LOADS the next few months. Like freetime opens up, no writers block, the ability to focus, etc etc you're able to write loads & make lots of progress <3

the tension between me and the wip that refuses to write itself

Reblog if you didn’t write My Immortal

We’re going to find the author by process of elimination.

"AO3 doesn't need a "dislike" button"

Um, actually, it already has one. Depending on your specs, it might look a little different but over all it looks kinda like this:

You can find it at the corner of your screen, which corner is dependent on your layout.

Anyway, if you dislike a fic, you can hit this Dislike Button until the fic goes away. It really is pretty amazing actually.

The devastating difference between how much time it takes to write something vs how fast people read it lol

Nayyirah Waheed, from Nejma

[Text ID: “what am i to do. / my neck barely carries / my head.”]

Funniest thing in the world when people write an AU extremely different from canon, but they’re not willing to give up on the character building it created for their blorbos. Girlies out there fighting for their life recreating a relationship formed on a doomed arctic exploration in 1848 by replicating that same dynamic in a Great British Bake Off AU.

to the young who want to die by Gwendolyn Brooks

I'm searching for a phrase that will release everything that's pent up in me.

Henry Miller · Letter to Anaïs Nin, August 23, 1933. A Literate Passion (1987)

Sometimes fanfiction is a love letter to canon, and sometimes fanfiction is pounding on canon's door and yelling for it to get out here so you can kick its ass.