espresso_addict asked about my writing process.

Since the alternative is actually writing, here it is: ( Way more than you wanted to know. )

...and all of that is really misleading because it's not so much my writing process as what I know my writing process should be.

My actual writing process more often than not is "flail, whine to friends that writing is impossible, post unrelated tl;dr meta on DW accompanied by a disclaimer that I should be writing, screw around on Tumblr. Words? No, no words. No more words ever. *wordvomit something that I can pretend is a complete story that makes sense in the two hours before the deadline*."

..It is always changing, though. I can actively feel myself getting better at writing longer and more complicated stuff now. Note to self:It would be interesting to do this again in five or ten years and see how utterly different it is.

There was a really interesting conversation on Tumblr recently about how to practice writing as a craft (read the reblog comments too, they're all interesting), especially compared to other creative arts like music and visual art, and it was full of interesting thinky bits and any of you who are trying to be better writers should read it.

Anyway, I didn't speak up there because a) still refuse to discuss anything with any depth via tumblr sorry, and b) what I had to say is sort of orthogonal to the fascinating points they were making. But I have had "post about the stuff you do as writing exercise/practice/warmup" on my list for awhile, and I am fresh off a triumphant tenth massive failure at NaNo, so here is a list of five things I do as a writer that I do sort of think of as the equivalent of an artist doing drawing exercises or a musician doing scales or a boxer jumping rope, and that I think address, at least a little bit, the question from the tumblr thread of how you divide "write a thing" up into individual, simpler skills that can be practiced without having do everything at once.

Though first I should say that every brain works differently and every writer has a different way of working with words, so probably most of these will make no sense to most of you. Also, the first and always advice for being a better writer is the same advice for anybody trying to be better at any skill of any kind - do it a lot, do it with discipline, keep doing it. And read what other people are doing, too, read constantly.

The below are just things I have worked out as semi-effective substitutes for being disciplined and diligent, that I can do when I make time or in-betweens, because let's face it, disciplined and diligent is just not happening anytime soon for some of us, and they're things that work for me, more-or-less, or at least they feel like they work. But also, I think there's a tendency with beginning writers to steer them away from these kinds of exercises, because it is easy to fall into doing "writing exercises" instead of actually writing things. All the same, though, I think some of them can be very useful, as long as you keep in mind that they aren't a substitute for actually writing, so it seemed like they were worth sharing.

Also someone recently asked me how I managed to sit down two nights before an exchange fic was due with a blank page and end up with 7000 words of passable fiction by the deadline. My best answer was something like "Well, didn't write anything down until then, but I'd been working on writing it for months..." This is sort of the expanded version of that answer.

( Write without writing anything down )

( Sketch from life )

( Do Stupid Language Tricks )

( Pastiche Things )

( Do stuff. Try things. )