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You should only write in present tense with extreme caution.

not because it's bad or anything but because if you do it even once you're going to be editing the bits where you shifted tenses out of your writing for the rest of your life

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The Secret Garden (1993)

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I changed my OC, Luna’s, surname because I recycled the other name from an old OC I had as a teen and it was bothering me because the only similarity is their name. Like, sometimes I can recycle old OCs to a certain extent and be fine with it but not this time, I guess.

Her previous surname was McGowan and it’s now Caruso. I already went back and changed the tags on any tagged posts.

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Creating OCs makes me feel like I’m Oprah sometimes.

“You get trauma! You get trauma! EVERYBODY GETS TRAUMA!”

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MOOD!

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Tips from a Beta Reading Writer

This one's for the scenes with multiple characters, and you're not sure how to keep everyone involved.

Writing group scenes is chaos. Someone’s talking, someone’s interrupting, someone’s zoning out thinking about breadsticks. And if you’re not careful, half your cast fades into the background like NPCs in a video game. I used to struggle with this so much—my characters would just exist in the scene without actually affecting it. But here’s what I've learned and have started implementing:

✨ Give everyone a job in the scene ✨

Not their literal job—like, not everyone needs to be solving a crime or casting spells. I mean: Why are they in this moment? What’s their role in the conversation?

My favourite examples are:

The Driver: Moves the convo forward. They have an agenda, they’re pushing the action.

The Instigator: Pokes the bear. Asks the messy questions. Stirring the pot like a chef on a mission.

The Voice of Reason: "Guys, maybe we don’t commit arson today?"

The Distracted One: Completely in their own world. Tuning out, doodling on a napkin, thinking about their ex.

The Observer: Not saying much, but noticing everything. (Quiet characters still have presence!)

The Wild Card: Who knows what they’ll do? Certainly not them. Probably about to make things worse.

If a character has no function, they’ll disappear. Give them something—even if it’s just a side comment, a reaction, or stealing fries off someone’s plate. Keep them interesting, and your readers will stay interested too.

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Happy STS! How do you find inspiration and continue writing when you get stuck?

I’ve yet to find a sure fire way to do this. It’s part of the reason I never finish writing anything.

But here’s some things I’ve tried:

Making mood boards/aesthetic boards and playlists associated with my projects, centered around characters, settings, relationships, etc.

Engaging in the media that inspired the project in the first place or media with similarities to the project

Taking a break

Going out

Researching stuff, sometimes related to my project, sometimes completely unrelated

Watching documentaries, both ones related to my project and ones completely unrelated

Going through my old writing/notes

Going through old photos and videos on my phone

Talking to my cat

Talking to my stuffed animals

Talking to myself

Going outside and yelling at the sky

Crying

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Storyteller Saturday

Hello, friends! I've been working really hard on my original story this week, so I'm excited to share and talk about writing with you guys today (or later in the week when I get a chance to answer asks haha).

Reblog this post for an ask about your writing!

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What they don't tell you about writing is that as you write, you discover scenes and entire plots that you hadn't accounted for that need to be written. So you can spend two hours writing and editing only to realise you're further away from the finish line than you thought you were when you started

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hello writers.

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Tarot prompt #10! I used a prompt from Tarot for Writers by Corrine Kenner for this one. I’ll be taking a break from the tarot writing prompts for a bit after this because I’m feeling a little burnt out on them.

The draft was written over a few days, then edited and revised over another few days, then beta’d by @celestialwiccan-blogs

I’m not going to do the tarot prompts again, at least for a while, since I’m kind of getting bored of them. I’m not sure if I’ll come back to them or not.

I made a masterlist of my previous prompts and relevant posts.

Constructive feedback or words of encouragement are always welcome!

Deck used: Joseph Vargo's The Gothic

Tarot Card: 5 of Wands

Prompt from Tarot for Writers by Corrine Kenner: An Argument

Word Count: 1064

Alice and Gareth arrived at a small ranch style home. The place reeked of manure, leather, and clove tobacco. Alice felt soothed by the sound of branches nearby trees swooshing in the wind and the creak of the rocking chair on the front porch. Gareth led the way along a dusty gravel trail, lined with cattle guards and wooden fencing, that led around back to the stables. As they got closer to the stables, they could hear a creaking cattle gate and two gravelly voices.

“I can’t believe you left the gate open, again!”

“It wasn’t me, it was you!”

As Alice and Gareth rounded the corner of the home, two horned skeletal specters, or wraiths, as Alice had heard them called, came into view. One had a mullet and the other wore a studded cowboy hat and had a gauged septum piercing.

“It was not!” The pierced one shouted. “You always leave the gate open! Now look at what's happened! The unicorns got out again!”

“Oh, they’ll be fine!” The one with the mullet replied. “They always come back!”

Gareth cleared his throat to draw attention to his and Alice’s presence and the two wraiths turned their attention to their unexpected but very welcome guests. “Lose the herd again?” The gargoyle asked.

“Wretch left the stable gate open last night.” The one with the piercing said, pointing a slender, clawed finger at the one with the mullet.

“No, Wricket did!” Wretch insisted, pointing back.

“You really oughtta get one of the witches to set up a barrier for you.” Gareth said. “Or at least put tracking spells on them.”

“That’s what I keep saying but this idiot won’t go see Astrid about it!” Wricket said, gesturing to Wretch once again.

“I keep forgetting! Why don’t you go see her?” Wretch snapped back.

Gareth interrupted. “Alice is new around here and wanted to see some unicorns up close, so we’ll help you find them. Then we’ll go ask Astrid for the spells.”

Alice smiled softly as she was introduced and gave a small wave. “Hi.” She said in a small, soft voice.

“Well, hello there, Alice!” Wretch said in a warm, welcoming voice that greatly contrasted with his aggressive tone from just a few seconds before. “I’m Wretch, and this is my useless twin brother, Wricket.”

“Hey, I’m not useless!” Wricket interjected, pouting.

Alice had to stifle a giggle, finding the bickering between the two silly.

“We better get searching before your herd wanders too far.” Gareth said.

They all went off into the forest to search for the unicorns, Wretch and Gareth went in one direction and Alice and Wricket went in another.

The weathered trees creaked and groaned as the branches swayed in the gentle breeze and created flickering shadows. The faint hum of the fairy’s music could just barely be heard. The terrain was uneven, so Alice had to hold on to the trees, occasionally scraping her hands on the rough ridges of the ebony bark while Wricket simply floated along the trails.

“What kind of trees are these?” Alice asked, looking up at the cascading branches and bioluminescent star-shaped flowers.

“Prisumbra Willows.” Wricket answered.

“They’re pretty.”

“Yeah, well, gawk at them some other time. We gotta find the unicorns my brother let out.” The wraith said with an annoyed tone.

Alice went quiet and didn’t say much from that point forward, not wanting to upset Wricket by getting too distracted. Twigs snapped underneath Alice’s boots, heels sinking into the mud and moisture seeping into the suede with every step.

 After some time, when the peach sun started to set and the skies began to turn indigo, Alice and Wricket heard whinnying and the clop of hooves on the ground. They followed the sound and came to a meadow where the unicorns were grazing among the same flowers and perennials that Alice saw while on the train.

Wricket rose straight up, high above the trees and shouted. “Wretch! Gareth! We found the herd!”

Wretch shot up into the air and jetted towards Wricket while Gareth glided from tree to tree, causing the branches to tremble and sometimes snap with each leap. Wricket reached the meadow about two or three minutes before Gareth did.

In the moments that they waited, Alice had spotted a powder blue unicorn with lavender swirl markings. The unicorn’s long, curly, mint green main, beard, and tail gently waved in the breeze and his lavender horn was spotless, unlike the ones on the feral unicorns that Alice saw earlier on the train. The unicorn’s mauve colored eyes met Alice’s blue-grey eyes and then he started moving towards her at a slow trot. Alice gasped and took a few steps back, feeling slightly intimidated by the unicorn’s large size. The unicorn stopped a few inches away from her and Alice could now see the mauve feathering on the unicorn’s lower legs. The unicorn snorted and began nuzzling Alice’s face, causing her to giggle,

“That’s Snuzzle.” Wretch said. “He’s a sweetheart.”

“Can I ride him?” Alice asked, still giggling 

“Sure! He’s pretty docile, so he’s good for beginners.”

Gareth helped Alice up onto Snuzzle’s back and Alice held on tight to the unicorn’s neck. There was no saddle or bridle and she’d never even ridden a horse before so she was nervous and beginning to second guess her decision.

“Don’t worry, he won’t let you fall.” Wretch reassured her.

Snuzzle began trotting and Alice’s heart raced. Once she got used to the feeling of riding a live animal, she began to calm down. Since Wretch seemed more pleasant than Wricket, she decided to ask a few questions.

“How long have you owned unicorns?”

“Our whole lives. We come from a long line of unicorn ranchers. Our family was one of the first to domesticate them.”

Alice’s face lit up. “Wow!” She whispered, excitedly. “How do you take care of them?”

“Well, they need about 40 lbs of raw meat and sugar a day, grooming 3-4 times a week, and about 5-7 hours of exercise a day.” Wretch said. “Today is grooming day. If you got time to stick around, I’ll show you how it’s done.”

Alice looked over at Gareth who was on the other side of her. “Can we?” She asked, hopefully.

Gareth sighed. “Sure, kid. Why not?”

After a few more minutes, they arrived back at the stables.

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“how did you get into writing” girl nobody gets into writing. writing shows up one day at your door and gets into you

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I think I need someone to bounce ideas off of and brainstorm with. I kinda feel like I’d have an easier time planning/plotting and might actually finish a project if I had someone to help me a bit? But I have no idea how to find someone like that because I suck at socializing. Even online, I find it difficult to make friends and such.

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I keep running into these sort of blockages when it comes to writing where I can only come up with pieces of a story but never a fully fleshed out story.

Sometimes it’s a plot that I’m usually not invested in enough to write about or I burn myself out doing outlines to the point where I never want to look at anything to do with the WIP ever again. (This is what happened with my Metal Lords Fanfic)

Sometimes it’ll be a character that I don’t know what to do with, (Most of my OCs), or just a vague character concept (most of my non-human characters)

Sometimes it’s just like, aesthetic and vibes. (My tarot writing prompts)

Sometimes it’s just like “Something like these 3-5 pieces of media that have something in common but I’m not sure what.” (This leads me to just… Dissecting and analyzing the media and taking a bunch of notes that won’t make any sense to me later and then sometimes I’ll come out of that with a definitive aesthetic/vibe, if I’m lucky.)

Sometimes I can come up with scenes or like, lore.

Sometimes I’ll have like, a combination of these but I never feel like I have enough information to start drafting or sometimes I don’t have enough to even start outlining.

I’ve tried seeing if maybe I can combine some of my ideas but I haven’t really been successful with that.

I want to write something so badly and work on an actual story with a plot instead of just writing scenes and snippets and stuff like that and I’m having so much trouble filling in the blanks enough to do that.

I’ve been like this for years and it’s so frustrating because I do all this brainstorming and take all these notes and they just sit in a mess on my laptop or in Google Drive, or in Obsidian, or on the notes app on my phone and I also never use folders except to create “untitled folder 360” to throw a bunch of stuff from the past couple months into, and only some of those files have actual names because I don’t know how to do anything the easy way.

This is why I can’t get anything done. Lmao.

My brain is a mess and my note taking/keeping system (or lack there of) is too.

This was supposed to just be a rant about how I’m frustrated I can’t fully flesh anything out and I kinda went off topic but oh well.

Anyways, words of encouragement would be much appreciated.

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I think I have a cool idea for a story (by idea I mean setting and vibes, mainly), but I’d have to do research which I don’t really mind because I love learning stuff and it’s a subject I’m interested in anyways, but I suck at like, picking out important information and actually applying it to my writing? Even with essays in school I had trouble with this and like, I genuinely don’t remember how I made it through. Lol.

I also think I have a tendency to like, overload myself with information sometimes…

Anyone have any research tips? Like, I can find sources but that’s where my skills kinda stop.