“WRITE IT BADLY. Write it badly, write it badly, write it badly, write it badly. Stop what you’re doing, open a Word document, put a pencil on some paper, just get the idea out of your head. Let it be good later. Write it down now. Otherwise it will die in there.”
— Brandon Sanderson on overcoming writer’s block to create a first draft as a professional author (via almost-always-eventually-right)
Me, throwing em dashes, semicolons, commas, and ellipses into a jumbo-sized trash bag and then shaking it vigorously: hang on I gotta season my fic before I upload it
Every writer on Tumblr: “I would combust out of love if someone ever drew fanart of my fic!!”
Me: “oh man I wanna draw this scene BUT THEY WOULD PROBABLY HATE IT AND HATE ME FOR THE NERVE”
Dear artists.
We, the writers, will accept any of your fan arts.
We don’t care if it looks like shit to you, or you think your art skills are not good enough.
We will love any fan art, because it’s the most beautiful way to say “I love what you write”.
^^^^^^^^^
My friends, you could present me with stick figures of a scene from something of mine you read and I’d want to hug you to death.
Prompt-based fandom events are when you really learn everyone’s colors like you’ll find the people who take the prompt “death” and come up with some smarmy ship-art of character A and character B walking over dead leaves while wearing scarves and drinking hot cider and then you’ll find the people who take the prompt “sunshine” and write how a bright glint of sunshine reflected off the barrel of a gun is the absolute last thing character A sees before taking a bullet to the chest
you can lead a content creator to water but you sure as fuck can’t make him drink
content creators, much like the elder gods, must not be given requests that can be left to interpretation, for the results bring madness upon the unwary
Hi there, anon! I can tell you how I’ve been going about it. I’ve taken two approaches: submitting to publishers directly and submitting to agents.
The process for both is pretty similar. Once you find one you want to submit to, go to their website and find their submissions page (there usually is one). That page will tell you what they’re looking for. Every one of them is different, but common things they ask for are a pitch or query letter (similar to a cover letter that “sells” your book), a bio, any history of publishing, a paragraph or more synopsis of your story, and often a section of your novel (this can be anywhere from the first five pages to the whole manuscript). Most accept submissions via email, but some use online forms.
As for finding publishers and agents, here’s what I’m doing. For agents, I used a website called Query Tracker. You can search for agents by what genres they accept. For instance, I found and contacted every one that said they accepted LGBT works. ***Be careful with agents, and never go with one that asks for money up front.
For publishers, I searched for articles about publishers that accept unsolicited manuscripts. Here’s one. I put them all in a word document and have been slowly applying to each one. Publishers’ requirements are often a bit more complex thanagents, so it’s been taking some time. ***Make sure to google the publishers to ensure that they’re a legitimate company.
Then, you have to wait. Some agents will get back to you very quickly, but many say it will take weeks or longer, and publishers often say it can take months to get a response.
The very best writing tip you will ever hear is this:
Analyze stories.
Don’t just listen to what other storytellers say you should do, figure out what you like about the stories you enjoy and learn to replicate that.
Want to learn about pacing? Examine stories you think flow fantastically. Want to learn about description? Study your favorite author’s descriptions. Want to learn about characterization? Critique your favorite characters. Want to learn about foreshadowing? Explore how it’s done in stories where the plot twist blew your mind.
Storytellers giving advice to other storytellers is fantastic and useful, but you will never know something as thoroughly as you know the things you figure out for yourself.
And by analyzing the stories you love instead of listening blindly to advice, you’ll never be swayed by the bias of other writers and you’ll never take in advice that’s suited for a story you wouldn’t enjoy writing.
So put on some thinking caps and go analyze those stories.
Mostly reblogs and random words 