#I've sketched out the rough draft of seven pages

[numberfiveisback]

Pfft y'all what if...

what if.

[bambiraptorx]

14, 23, 29, 70

14: what’s your worst writing habit?

Currently it's starting a bunch of wips before I've finished any of the old ones lol. I have five (maybe six or seven?) works in progress at the moment, and it's a little hard to make satisfactory progress on any of them.

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23: how do you deal with writers block?

For me personally, writer's block tends to come from being tired, stressed, burnt out, or some combo thereof. It doesn't come out of nowhere. Usually, it helps to leave a project alone to sit for a while before coming back to it.

On a related note, I personally tend to cycle between what I call Art Brain and Writing Brain, where my motivation just is pulled more to a different form of creation. What might look like writer's block could simply be a need to switch to a different artform for a bit.

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29: give us a spoiler for one of your stories.

For Minor Interference: Leo gets stuck in a tree. And possibly goes grocery shopping. Not necessarily in that order.

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70: are you very critical of your own writing? how much do you find yourself editing (either during the writing or after the fact)?

This is a bit tricky because I wouldn't call myself all that critical of my writing, but I do also do quite a lot of editing once I have my first draft done. Generally, my process is just to word vomit as much as possible for the first draft, and if there's anything that I think I'll want to improve later, I highlight it. This is so that a) I actually remember what I want to fix and b) I don't get stuck trying to make something perfect when it doesn't need to be. My first draft isn't about making it good--it's about getting words on the page so I have an idea of what I'm doing, kind of like doing a rough sketch that you go in and polish later.

After that I'll do several rounds of editing, usually looking for different things. I start with a read through to see what the areas I highlighted before were, if there's any other ideas I want to highlight to come back to, and if there's anything that I want to fix right away. Sometimes fixes are easy, like restructuring a sentence or finding a good synonym so I don't use the same word three times in one paragraph. Sometimes it takes several read throughs for me to even begin to figure out how to fix something.

All that said, I definitely don't expect my writing to be perfect lol. That's not to say I don't enjoy making it good, but sometimes you just have to say "this is good enough for the purpose it serves and I don't want to spend the time or effort making it closer to a nebulous idea of better". Otherwise known as saying "fuck it."

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