That "just write" advice that practically everyone seems to swear by? Yeah, never worked for me, either. At least not for fiction. It's worked great for essays that I did twelve hours before the due date, but those are essays and I can bullshit my way through those. I can't bullshit through my fanfiction or originals without feeling like it's a cop-out. Although I must say, I started off chapter three of "My Sins" with a random line Marth says at the end of the game (in his talk with Nyna) and then I went through the scene from the end to the beginning (I never work in order it seems). But that's different than writing a text-block of crap. I do that every year--it's called NaNoWriMo. I don't need to do that all the time, you know?
Besides, my inner perfectionist is up my arse until I make it not suck, and sometimes it's just really hard to salvage something from a really bad draft. (My first draft is usually almost always complete rubbish--it's just to get down my ideas in a somewhat coherent manner and that's it. My second draft is where it's at.)
Besides half of the time I just can't think of anything to jot down, and then next thing I know I am finding patterns in Word's background from staring at it so hard.
The thing I usually do when something just isn't working with one fic is I just go on to something else. I have been slowly cranking out that Marth/Merric fic, but whilst I was agonising over chapter three? I finished 90 percent of the fic. I guess it's a form of procrastination, but I have to admit, it helps get the juices flowing.
Squirrels are evil rodents. They're cute and fuzzy to deceive you, and meanwhile they are secretly plotting to kill everything. Back when I used to garden, they liked to, uh, eat everything. That's when I started getting friendly with the local stray cats. That was a particularly smart investment. (There was a squirrel population problem in my hometown anyway due to the huge amount of trees. They were EVEYWHERE, and for every tree there were like twenty squirrels. There were at least fifty trees on my block. ...Yeah.)
Also they somehow got into the walls of our house, so when our hamster went out on an adventure, chewed a hole into the wall, and went exploring? My brother was going to kill every last squirrel if they ate her. (We found her safe and sound, but he still wanted to kill the squirrels, because they liked to try to burrow through the walls and into the living quarters.)
Also I read 'canna lilies' as 'canas lilies' on first readthrough, which was an interesting mental image, to say the least.
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Besides, my inner perfectionist is up my arse until I make it not suck, and sometimes it's just really hard to salvage something from a really bad draft. (My first draft is usually almost always complete rubbish--it's just to get down my ideas in a somewhat coherent manner and that's it. My second draft is where it's at.)
Besides half of the time I just can't think of anything to jot down, and then next thing I know I am finding patterns in Word's background from staring at it so hard.
The thing I usually do when something just isn't working with one fic is I just go on to something else. I have been slowly cranking out that Marth/Merric fic, but whilst I was agonising over chapter three? I finished 90 percent of the fic. I guess it's a form of procrastination, but I have to admit, it helps get the juices flowing.
Squirrels are evil rodents. They're cute and fuzzy to deceive you, and meanwhile they are secretly plotting to kill everything. Back when I used to garden, they liked to, uh, eat everything. That's when I started getting friendly with the local stray cats. That was a particularly smart investment. (There was a squirrel population problem in my hometown anyway due to the huge amount of trees. They were EVEYWHERE, and for every tree there were like twenty squirrels. There were at least fifty trees on my block. ...Yeah.)
Also they somehow got into the walls of our house, so when our hamster went out on an adventure, chewed a hole into the wall, and went exploring? My brother was going to kill every last squirrel if they ate her. (We found her safe and sound, but he still wanted to kill the squirrels, because they liked to try to burrow through the walls and into the living quarters.)
Also I read 'canna lilies' as 'canas lilies' on first readthrough, which was an interesting mental image, to say the least.