tokkibean

[tokkibean]

this guy on YouTube basically cured my issues with internal conflict like holy fucking shit???? all the answers were right fucking there???? i had them the entire time????? i just didnt know it???? or emphasize them properly??????

the angst material i have now is literally insane actually like....... like......... how tf am i supposed to squeeze a happy ending into this..... like???? tf????? this is so. so intense.

to those of you brave enough to click on the link.

not done with the video yet but i have????? my plot is so strong now holy shit. i had all the materials right there. they were all in my head. they were all in my plan. in my draft. in my plot. i just had to use them the right way.

[tokkibean]

progress is when you don't really like what you wrote yesterday but instead of lamenting that your writing skill is decreasing and moping and not touching your doc for days and waiting for a 'good day' to write etc etc, you're just like 'mneh i'll js edit it later' and keep writing

essentially today i realised that to write, you need to procrastinate writing

which sounds rly funny

[tokkibean]

there is nothing quite like being interrupted while absolutely immersed in whatever you're writing. i think this must be how fish feel when they're snatched out of the water by a bird of prey

[tokkibean]

[tokkibean]

IM SO HAPPY i finally got over that one paragraph that i always never change no matter how many times i rewrite because i like it too much, and its always been tripping me up, but i finally just changed it and today's not even an exceptional day but the words are word-ing! attention this is not a drill THE WORDS ARE WORD-ING:)

[tokkibean]

they told me to “do what i love” but forgot to mention that writing wouldn’t pay rent

[tokkibean]

since im suddenly spouting (false??) wisdom, i js randomly thought of something else: don't treat your writing like its gold.

okay that sounds rly funny when i put it down on paper or screen, but like - another reason for my perfectionism, especially during rewrites, was because i loved my writing so much. the rhythm of certain lines. the wordplay. the repetition. so even though i knew that for the benefit of the whole story, this part should be edited a little, or even just changed completely, i didn't want to. because i liked them too much to just copy paste them into the document where i hoard all my pretty-but-useless lines, and i thought it was a waste of a genius moment.

and even when rewriting, i just kept adding those lines, which is kinda super, like, ineffective, because those lines are the ones causing me the problem. so i was just rewriting and rewriting the parts that are mostly fine, and that kinda made my interest in my own story run a little low.

and yeah obviously i grin like a proud maniac when i read back what i wrote and find gold, but like, i think its important to not value that gold too highly. like, let yourself accept that this line needs to go sometimes, and that you might have to change what you think is your 'best' writing, because its not, yk? like you may not always be able to stick to a certain style or write in a certain way the whole time, but you're still gna improve if you keep writing, and thats gna be hard to see because its like, improving in a different font yk.

okay thank you for listening to my ted talk anyway hope that wasnt too bad

im realising today that ACTUALLY ACTUALLY being non-perfectionistic and reclaiming my 12-year-old self to genuinely just write for the sake of nothing but having fun is so. much. better and easier than perfectionism.

the quality of my writing doesnt degrade either in fact i think it got better in terms of zoomed-out out flow, smoothness etc etc - i was kinda super busy and only wrote for like 35 minutes-ish today, but its definitely one of the best writing sessions i've had in like, weeks.

SO! moral of the story: perfectionism only makes writing harder. write because you love it, and you wouldn't be writing if you didn't. there's always a second draft anyway. i swear the words come out so much faster and nicer

[tokkibean]

inarizaki's motto may be we don't need memories, but they end up being the team who has the most recorded material of their high school life, if only because suna's camera is running whenever he can reasonably have his phone in hand

and sure a lot of it is the twins fighting or being stupid, but that's far from all it is

suna has plenty of instances of aran trying to tell a joke, and kita or oomimi just kind of stare blankly at him because they didn't get the reference (you can always hear at least one twin laughing in the background tho)

suna also likes to commentate like it's a nature documentary. he speculates on the reasons why akagi is falling asleep in the weirdest places. makes fun of riseki for failing his serves because he's trying way too hard to be like atsumu. he'll warn for the consequences of being too silly as ginjima is getting scolded by kita, and then has to place his phone on the ground as he's also getting dragged into the lecture.

but a lot of the time it's also just... nothing special. nothing funny. just moments of the team on break, drinking water and talking about the drills they did. or some of them play while suna isn't, and he'll film a couple rallies just because.

his phone storage is full before long, and he should probably delete some of them, but he just transfers them somewhere with more storage and keeps on filming, every day, for no particular reason other than maybe to get lucky and catch the moment someone gets hit in the head with a volleyball

but then high school is over, and he's away from his team, and he has to get used to a new one and a new place and figure out how to be an adult

and so he watches them all. the funny moments and the ordinary ones. and he thinks man that meme we all kept repeating for months was so cringe and huh atsumu's serve always looked powerful but now it seems kinda shit compared to last time I played him and how the fuck did I have this much free time during practice

and maybe, just maybe, he thinks it's not so bad to have these memories, even if he'd never thought he needed them. and maybe just knowing they exist makes it a little easier to go to practice the next day and laugh with his new teammates and point his phone at them even if it gets harder to find the time for that, and none of them make him laugh quite the way inarizaki did

[tokkibean]

updating my tumblr consists of spamming like 3 posts in the span of 2 minutes when i should be sleeping, and doing that every day

[tokkibean]

real-world referencing when writing always trips me up because i can't ever tell if the general consensus towards it is mostly :D or :c

[tokkibean]

im realising today that ACTUALLY ACTUALLY being non-perfectionistic and reclaiming my 12-year-old self to genuinely just write for the sake of nothing but having fun is so. much. better and easier than perfectionism.

the quality of my writing doesnt degrade either in fact i think it got better in terms of zoomed-out out flow, smoothness etc etc - i was kinda super busy and only wrote for like 35 minutes-ish today, but its definitely one of the best writing sessions i've had in like, weeks.

SO! moral of the story: perfectionism only makes writing harder. write because you love it, and you wouldn't be writing if you didn't. there's always a second draft anyway. i swear the words come out so much faster and nicer

[tokkibean]

Some days writing a single sentence feels like squeezing toothpaste out of an almost empty tube

[tokkibean]

who wants to be writing partners and like...hold my actual live beating heart in their hands?

[tokkibean]

1.5k words is so wildly different depending on the context

like, for a writing competition or a school assignment, no sir i will be hitting 2k and then mentally spiral because how the flip am i supposed to trim 500 words 1.5k is way to short

and on the other hand im writing my own project. i think ive written about like, a million words give or take. i check the word count and somehow it hasn't even hit 1k

it would be very nice if it worked the other way around :,)

[tokkibean]

stay earnest, be crazy, study study study, flirt with philosophy, cry at 2am then ace the test, fall in love with sentences, question everything, romanticize gray weather, seek truth like its art, read freud for fun, argue like you’re defending a dissertation, quote camus in casual texts, fear nothing but mediocrity

[tokkibean]

You wanna know the real difference between someone who just talks about writing and someone who actually is a writer? Well, it’s not talent, nor some magical lightning bolt of inspiration from the heavens. It’s just sitting your ass down and doing the damn writing. Consistently. That’s the whole big, unsexy secret.

[tokkibean]

i like to believe that opening your doc, realising that you should probably rewrite the entirety of what you have so far - which is a depressingly low word count - and then stressing about it, trying to write it, and then giving up to read ao3 to refill your inspo tank is also counted as writing