Some ways to unstick your writing

Whether you’re someone who pre-plans heavily, or someone who makes everything up as you go, we all occasionally come to a point in the story where the scene just stops.

Maybe you don’t know how a character should reply to something, or how they should react to an event. Maybe you don’t know whether an action they’re taking should be successful or fail. Or maybe you just don’t know what happens next at all.

Here are some ways to break through that wall.

📝 Have someone you trust write the next line for you. Then you can jump off of that, or if you don’t like what they’ve written, knowing why and correcting it can get your writing flowing again.

📝 Roll the dice. Think of some possible outcomes of the event or things for your character to say next, and then roll dice and proceed with whichever it lands on. If you don’t like the outcome, knowing why and correcting it can get your writing flowing again.

📝 Skip to the next part you know happens. Yes skip it. Just skip the scene that’s giving you trouble. You have permission. You can come back and write it later if the scene needs to be there.

📝 Write the next part deliberately badly. Just go nuts, ham it up. Have the proverbial ninjas burst through the door. You don’t have to keep whatever you end up writing in the story, but just getting writing again can help you figure out where to go next.

📝 Delete a little bit that you’ve written, and start writing again from that point. Okay don’t literally delete it, copy it into another document in case you decide you need it later. But maybe the reason you’re stuck is because the last couple of sentences or paragraphs led you to a dead end and you need a fresh start.

📝 Explain the scene or even the whole story to someone willing to listen. In programming this is called ‘rubber duck debugging’. Often when you’re stuck on a problem just the act of explaining it to a person– or an inanimate rubber duck– will lead to a breakthrough of what that problem is.

chiisana-sukima:

mob-zombie:

Apparently not typing this is costing me sleep because I can’t stand people being this aggressively wrong on the internet and actively harming other people’s treatment because they’re a fuck wit who thinks their feelings are more true than medical research and other people’s personal experiences.

1. I’m going to upfront state if someone’s re-traumatising themselves using dark fiction they are DOING IT WRONG.

This is why the variety of warnings exist. This is why tags exist. We’ve created a space in which the viewing experience can be more informed than that of the average book or tv show explicitly to protect people and allow them to inform their viewing experience. Hell we even broke down rape and sexual assault tags to cover multiple varieties of these things to make sure people were as safe as they could get.

While objectively rape, non-con and dub-con  are all rape tags, it’s not about softening that it’s rape, it’s about classifying the type of rape or grade of content so someone can inform their viewing experience. Can you senseless fucks please stop insisting it’s claiming these things aren’t rape. Two seconds of googling the tags would tell you up front they’re all rape, they’re just differentiating the variety of rape so people can inform their viewing experience and not be triggered.

For people who claim to be fighting for victims you sure fucking love actively removing things victims have to protect themselves.

2. Shipping to cope isn’t just exposure therapy. God there’s a million fucking ways people can use fiction in recovery and only like two of those are forms of exposure therapy.

The more common usages are:

• ‘using fiction to break down the events that happened to you into a manageable set up’ because post abuse for a lot of people the thoughts, memories and understanding of the experience are a big old noodly jumble that gets tangled up and eventually fucks with the ability to move past it. By reading or writing about the experience the feelings and thoughts can be de-tangled and ideally turned into something manageable to process.
• ‘creating a fictional version of events of how you wish things happened’ which is simply a variety of wish fulfilment that can make the experience in the past less painful or otherwise lessen the effects of the trauma sustained.
•  Seeing a character you love experience what you went through and come out the other side of it possibly recovering or working towards recovery can help enable seeing yourself eventually doing the same. if you can’t conceptualise recovery or surviving, it’s very difficult to move forward, sometimes seeing a character you love doing it is the push needed to think ‘I could do this.’
• Alternatively, simply seeing a character experience the same thing can just make you feel less alone.
• Sometimes fictionalising the experience helps separate the experience from you.
• Sometimes sexualising the experience makes the event less threatening to reduce the fear of future victimisation or take control of existing experiences. This doesn’t diminish the seriousness of the original event, it’s simply how the person chooses to handle this.
• If you’re unable to express what personally happened to you, sometimes putting those experiences on a character and vicariously experiencing sympathy through the audience or the story can help.
• And there’s so many more, this is just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. The fact is everyone recovers differently and there’s as many ways of utilising fiction in the process as there are people who’ve experienced some form of sexual assault. As long as they’re not hurting themselves (re-traumatisation), tagging correctly (preventing others from accidentally being triggered), and listening to tags on the fics they read (again preventing re-traumatisation) AND thus not hurting anybody else, it’s legal, it’s safe and it isn’t your business.

3. Not everyone is coping with victimisation. Specifically generalised anxiety disorders and OCD which is also an anxiety disorder are two obvious examples of mental illness that can be treated through fiction.

The biggest thing with an anxiety disorder is that they love to jam random intrusive thoughts into your brain, and it really isn’t as simple as just ignoring them or pretending a douche bag is telling you to do something.

In an anxiety disorder, trying to ignore it will make it worse. Worrying about it will make it worse. Trying not to worry about it, guess what? makes it worse.

Sometimes the only way to ditch a thought is to address it directly.

People who’ve experienced intrusive thoughts about how if they don’t perform the rituals they’ll murder their family, therapists have them write out plans about killing their family to prove that despite what the brain is telling them, they aren’t going to do it. Therapists have handed people knives to prove they can be trusted not to murder people.

With the use of fiction an intrusive thought can be assigned to a characters actions. Fiction can be used as a way to think about an intrusive thought without becoming anxious you might turn the thought into action and by having directly addressed the intrusive thought you can get rid of it.

If you’re anxious about an event, you can write about a character experriencing the worst case scenario to reassure yourself that the thing your scared of is fictional. Or you could write about what you’re worried about going well as supporting evidence you’ll be fine.

Again these are just examples, there are many many more ways people manage mental and physical illness with fiction just as fiction can be used and mental health upkeep after a traumatic event.

And hell, even if you’re not mentally ill and haven’t experienced a traumatic event, if you want to write about a dark scenario, you should. Because not everyone going through these things can write or draw and rely on others to provide content to manage these things.

Additional positive attributes of darkfic:

• Seeing characters we love undergo bad experiences and us still loving them afterwards helps us to see that we are still lovable too.
• Hurt/comfort fics or whump fics with comfort at the end allow us to vicariously experience comfort when our hurt is too big for our real friends and family to handle.
• Hurt/no comfort fics can help with processing the hard truth that sometimes we *don’t* get what we need, but we have dignity, and still deserve comfort (just like the hurt hero does) even when it’s not there.
• Seeing characters make a variety of choices in traumatic circumstances and not thinking they are bad because of the choices they made helps us to see that we aren’t bad either, even if we didn’t react according to some arbitrary standard of perfection during the original event.
• Curtain fics/recovery fics/permanent injury or mental illness aftermath fics help us visualize a life in which we are still valuable and have elements of peace and happiness even though we may struggling.
• Fics with dark versions of characters (evil!character X) can help with processing the fact that people are complicated messes and may have loved and harmed us both.
• Fics with dark versions of characters can also help us deal with and process dark feeling we may be having too. Assault isn’t pretty, and most of us aren’t saints. We may have aspects of our post-trauma personality that emulate the perpetrator, long for inappropriately severe revenge, are self-destructive, or that we otherwise don’t feel comfortable with and need to process in a way that doesn’t harm ourselves or others.
• Art is about examining the human experience in all it’s beauty, horror,
  and variety. War, death, illness, pain, sacrifice, and so on are all
  common topics of art. Sexual assault is a (sadly) common part of the
  human experience too. Seeing it depicted in art dignifies survivors as people, and helps us understand that even though we underwent a painful experience, we’re
  still normal human beings who are part of the human family.