#writetube

[lavenderhummingbird]

going to post my youtube links now, not sorry for bombarding you actually be glad

[sandramiksaauthor]

writing every day, for the rest of my life.

[magnus-sm-writes]

My Writing Journey: Early Adulthood!

I could title spring of 2020 “A Spring and a Miss”, because it was. My only high school class, band, was online, and it was honestly a disaster. I ended up skipping most of it to work at Subway (because I am a responsible adult like that). I was used to the online college classes; that was what I started out on.

What I did not expect was how this would impact my writing.

In February, I had rewritten Hamish and gotten some of the “dark academic” vibes I was shooting for. (In reality, it was always meant to be a gothic horror, but I did not know that yet.) I was so excited to write something else in my Shakespeare universe. My choice was Midway Through Summer’s Bullshit, a rewriting of the beloved A Midsummer’s Night Dream.

However, when the world shut down in March, I realized that I was too incredibly lonely writing a book with so much socialization in it. It depressed me. So I switched things up, for my own health. I rewrote Lessons in Humanity as a way to mentally prepare myself for university. It really felt like I was going places with it. I even had my wonderful, amazing friend Alex beta read it for me. (And even drew fan art for me like how fucking sweet are they?)

I was tired of rewrites, though, and I wanted to write something new. Something fresh. So I decided to write something that has both haunted and intrigued me since: Stuck Together.

Stuck Together is my historical fiction crackfic where William Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe a.) live in modern times, b.) are writeblr/writetube/writestagram famous authors, and c.) get stuck together in Edgar’s apartment during the COVID pandemic. 

It is a ridiculous novel, which I wholeheartedly acknowledge. I have never rewritten it, and I reread it once a year. I am not kidding when I say I love and hate this stupid novel in equal parts. It is so ridiculous, so utterly stupid, that I am unable to form a coherent thought on it. I cringe when I think of it; I adore it; I want to burn all traces of it from the internet; I want to fix it. 

(Someone please give me your thoughts on this because this shit is ridiculous and I love it.)

Then I went to my dream university for Creative Writing. It really was a dream come true; Ohio Northern’s campus is a magical place in the autumn. My professors were all incredible, and I have nothing but praise for ONU’s English department. I’m still in contact with several of my professors four years later!

I was at a weird place, creatively. I wanted to rewrite Jeez Take the Wheel, but things just… weren’t meshing. Nothing was working for me. I wondered if something was wrong. (I also broke my foot, but honestly, that should have given me more time to write.)

This was also the time I discovered I’m trans! It was October of 2020 when Morgan was no more, and Magnus came into being. I’d never felt more like myself than then, even though my writing was still not where I wanted it to be. As I settled into my identity, though, I became more confident in myself, and my writing also began to come easier.

There was also the matter of my senior capstone. You see, with all my community college credits, I was actually in my junior year of university. I had to come up with something to write next year for my Advanced Fiction Writing class (which would be the class I would do my capstone for). It had to be around 20,000 words at most, and a finished story. None of my projects could fit that. 

I decided to try a resurrection story. Something about my own transness, identity, and disconnection from the world. I began to brainstorm a story about a man who came back from the dead without his memories and was expected to pick back up where he left off.

This story became Body, my novelette. Body is to me now what Lessons in Humanity was in my teenage years. It is a marker of a huge shift in my writing. I went from someone who turned my nose up at fantasy to someone who was now writing within the realms of fantasy. Technically, Body falls beneath the speculative fiction umbrella. I’d place it in the Weird genre, personally, but it doesn’t really matter. It is more speculative than literary fiction, which was huge for me. 

With Body, I was taking a chance to really write something my own. I wrote in second person (my favorite tense ever). It was a braided narrative, weaving past and present together. It was a story about grief, and love, and hope, all at once. It was what I needed. When I think of Body, I think of how much of my soul I poured into it. Body is an incredibly special work to me because of that. It helped me understand myself in a time where I was just starting to be me.

This is going to sound like a sidebar, but it’s not. I promise.

My professor Dr. Pullen kept telling me in her critiques of my stories that it seemed like I was meant to be a fantasy writer, but was holding back. I, being the snob I was, refused to do anything more than give the barest hint of fantasy in anything I wrote. There was no way I was a fantasy writer; I was a man of literary fiction and contemporary settings.

That is, until Dungeons & Dragons changed everything.

My D&D group would meet anywhere from twice to four times a week. I am not kidding; that is how obsessed we were. I was obsessed. My best friend Jenny, our DM, was also obsessed. I joined another D&D group, as well, where I met some really amazing frat guys who accepted me as a man (!!!). I kept making backup characters just in case. Eventually, all these backup characters began to pile up. I needed something to do with them.

I’m stubborn. I can admit this. But I finally, finally decided to start writing fantasy once I finished Body, in part so I could get my character Hiprax’s character arc out of my head.

It quickly snowballed from there.

I also began to get a lot more serious about poetry. I read every single online copy of Warsan Shire’s poems I could get my hands on, consuming her words like I was starving. Poetry was how I dealt with my trauma, and dare I say, I dealt with it well. So well that I actually ended up in Polaris, my university’s literary magazine, with my poem “Mince Meat Pie”. I was elated. I was finally a published author!

Not only that, but Dr. Pullen made us submit work to literary magazines for class. (Other than Polaris, of course, but she encouraged us to submit to it as well.) I was rejected from all others. It wasn’t really the point for me, though; the point was that I did the damn thing. I did what scared me so badly I almost got sick the first time I submitted something. And I was accepted. 

I couldn’t even dream of doing this in 2020. It was nuts!

I also took a class on witches (taught by Dr. Pullen, duh), wherein my final project was actually a snippet of a vampire novel involving blood magic that I call Night Bite. The worldbuilding I began in that novel was actually the basis for my fantasy world Uuve. 

Once I left university, my writing just kept getting weirder and weirder.

[squarebracket-trickster]

Hi buddy! Its Athena, I'm sending this out to all my mutuals - what got you into writing, what inspires you, who inspires you and what music inspires you to write? what do you love about writing?

Hi Athena, thanks so much!!

Getting into writing was like joining a cult. One day I just looked up from my computer and went, oh.

I played a lot on my own as a kid (symptom of being an only child in a neighbourhood with no other kids) and I just? never stopped? I remember being 10 and thinking, everyone else has outgrown playing pretend. When will I? So I started calling it story-telling rather than playing. I mostly used it as coping mechanism for my anxiety and as a way to ADHD stim; even still, the only time I ever feel like I am truly not masking is when telling stories. It is also the only time I don't feel anxious.

I started calling it writing shortly after that because it felt like the only way to justify spending my free time alone in a room imagining things was to write them down. I barely actually wrote anything. That's just what I told people, at least until I was around 15. Then, the YouTube algorithm decided I needed to watch film critiques and the film critique to WriteTube pipeline is real. I think I kept watching them because I was looking for ways to make my daydreams more immersive.

The next thing I knew I had written a bunch of snippets from my daydreams. Then I started getting actual novel plot ideas. It was not until I was 40k into a novel that I started to seriously consider myself a writer, rather than someone who daydreams and calls it writing. It's funny how spending 4 hours a day writing is a hobby but 4 hours daydreaming is maladaptive and requires an intervention.

As for what inspires me? Mostly I consume other media and think, woah, I want to write like that! I want to write a series that ambitious and a character arc that emotional. I also tend write about hope and what it means to be a good person because those topics are dear to my heart. My characters are born by exploring the parts of my personality I don't get a chance to be in real life. Sometimes I make my friends characters too.

The thing I love most about writing is that I can finally, wholly, be myself when I write. I can say what I want, as much as I want, in the way I want. I can indulge my hyperfixations, and be argumentative, cynical, romantic, emotional, dramatic, and funny. I get to pick the colours and the imagery. I get to tell the stories I enjoy reading. I get to get it all out before someone changes the topic. It is something I can tweak until I am perfectly happy with it.

[jovialstarfishsweets]

#1

October 1, 2024 – 10:30pm PST

You know, making my way through writetube on YouTube and writeblr on Tumblr has made me realize how much the process of sharing WIPs has changed since I stopped writing in 2018—that’s six (6) years ago. Six years ago, I was 22 years old struggling with a bad case of writer’s block and undiagnosed ADHD which had me stop writing altogether.

I’m over my writer’s block, I’m diagnosed with ADHD but it’s unchecked (aka unmedicated). Returning to social media has very much made me take a seat. Six years doesn’t really feel like a long time, considering we lost two goods years to COVID, which feels like it’s only been 4 years and two years of a fucking fever dream, but I have to say: the kids know how to get down.

Fucking AI to create their characters?! I don’t even know where to go to do that or how it even works. I love writeblr because a lot of the writers are teenagers getting carpal tunnel to type their stories, but damn, why am I so out of touch?

What happened to the manips? What happened to making YouTube videos related to what you were writing about??? (I used to watch One Direction and EXO edits on YouTube for popular fanfic I was reading). Why are we using all this AI?? I can tell when something is AI, but man, does it throw me for a curve.

I started watching this YouTuber called Ana Neu, hoping I can learn something from her—I mean, her tags in her videos are #teenwriter #teen author and she has a large following, if anyone may be up to date on how to get things done in modern times, it could be her but sincerely...I think I’ve spaced out 2 minutes into her videos.

I can’t do this y’all, I don’t even recognize Tumblr either, how do I log out?! I need a nap. Someone get my walker, take me to bed please. Tuck me in for the love of god.

Anyway, let’s see how my writing goes. Maybe I’ll finish a book this time.

[squarebracket-trickster]

#and also ur one of the most well educated people i know about writing so uk i love hearing ur thoughts

my precious morbo, I uhhh..... should probably inform you that I have literally never taken a creative writing course in my life. (unless you count high school Writing 12 (which I skipped like half of anyways) and those online lectures by Brandon Sanderson). I am just a former AP English kid who accidentally fell down a WriteTube rabbit hole (shout out to Shaelin Writes and Hello Future Me) and have been making that everyone else's problem ever since.

I have like next to no formal writing education but I am thrilled to know I have fooled you all.

pro tip ignore most writing advice for ur first draft. show don't tell? well you just thought of it like, a second ago, so show it now and tell it in another draft.

also kill your darlings doesn't mean get rid of everything you like in ur wip WAIT NO WRITING THINGS YOU ENJOY IS NOT A SIGN YOU SHOULD GET RID OF THEM COME BACK!!!

[adventurebeneaththewords]

Good writing advice video I came across from a small YouTube channel. Worth checking out and giving your support to! ☺️

[barbarawicherautorka]

@swiat.wedlug.pisarek to projekt w którym 12 autorek, w tym i ja, łączy siły do działania. Ruszył już nasz profil Instagram a teraz uruchamiamy kanał YouTube. Na początek możecie nas wszystkie zobaczyć w króciutkim filmiku (link w bio) z symbolem pracy pisarskiej w roli głównej! Domyślacie się, jaki to symbol? Gęsie pióro? Nie. Blisko tylko odrobinę nowocześniej. Ale i nie ostatni krzyk technologicznej mody... Więc co? Kto już wie? #youtube #youtuber #youtubechannel #writetube #booktube #booktuber #pisarka #autor #książkidladzieci #dzieciczytają #kochamksiążki #piszędladzieci #piszęksiążki #opisarzach #polskaautorka #polscypisarze #narzedziepracy #wspolneczytanie #wspolnedzialanie #swiatwedlugpisarek #dlarodziców #oksiążkach #opisarzach #pracatwórcza https://www.instagram.com/p/CIx5RzlBjPa/?igshid=zb0rjq881321

[kiramartinauthor]

Putting together a vlog for you guys!

[cheyenneraphaelwrites]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiqxxkL8r8E)

[sandramiksaauthor]

end of year vlog ❄️ wrapping gifts, writing & cottage home

[livvyabigail]

if you're a small, artsy youtuber, leave your username and ill check your channel out, looking for some new people to watch and be inspired by!!! 

[yana125]

I may be at home coughing my lungs out (thank gnome it’s not covid), but I haven’t felt this productive in a long while. I’ve written 10k words in like two days already and I’m far from finishing it :D

[cheyanneauthor]

 Arena fight stories are nothing new. These storylines are common in martial arts movies, cartoons, and early every superhero comic has some sort of arena fight arc. The basics of an arena plot are simple; people are put into a fight against each other in front of an audience and there can only be one winner(or occasionally one…

[whataspookyurl]

I made a new video over on my yt channel talking about writing, it would mean a lot if you could check it out! ❤️

[mrjennifer]

Hi there. I read some old writing from an old writing project. So embarrassing. So cringe. Validate me plz :P