Tag: writing

It’s a feature, not a bug!

I remind myself how my wily mind is not something I need to be afraid of, not something I need to contain, not something to fight off or feel betrayed by. It isn’t an enemy, and it is not a threat.

I got lost on my way to this post. I got lost at least thrice — first, into the forest of lost passwords and bloated phone drives to transfer larger video files out of my old Huawei P30 Pro and to my laptop. Then again, picking my way through the sticky, thick new growth of video reels, the sleek new technology that make production faster, easier, shorter. And then again, for the last time, across the vast but familiar galaxy of image hosting sites. I used to upload folders of images, the entire first and second stomach of our thumb drives and memory sticks, from a former life on the now-defunct subscription site Photobucket, when image hosting (instead of galleries, curations, portfolios, and edits) was more common. After I found out there was an easier way to export files from my phone directly — this, after years of backing up through cloud services. After downloading new software and creating a bad first draft, after figuring out how to clip and trim videos, how to enhance them with a simple filter. After finding FileGarden, signing up for an account, figuring out how to keep it on my main phone for future uploads. After doing everything else in preparation – up to the actual thing that I should have been doing.

After.


After gathering enough fragments of my attention. After running out of excuses. After I feel myself split in two: a first, stubborn version fiddling with a room of stuff. And another, on their knees, begging for attention to go back to writing this story. A knot of coercion enforced by, and against, my own self.

External deadlines, grading structures, seem better able to lift me out of this similar gridlock, helped to straighten the path into a single thing that was easy to understand because all I had to do was follow. When I last confronted the draft for Full of Grace, there were too many ideas I wanted to get right, and no place on a story structure to put it all – ideas coming on too quickly for me to organize, let alone write. Before coming to this place, I had to go back there. I have been trying to relearn how I put ideas together. For short stories, I was used to following an idea to a terminus that I deciphered along the way, but for what Full of Graceis still becoming, and to complement the way my brain seemed to work best, I needed a framework and a guide, a map. I was forcing myself to chip away at a shape or a figure – but the longer the process took, the more I recognized that I was prone to decision fatigue, on one hand, and misplacing details altogether.

I thought that could be an outline, but as I worked on one outline – a skeleton of a thing – but the form wept and sagged with the amount of stuff I had no place to put in. There were references I couldn’t make, definitions and decisions I was making about the characters or the plot that kept getting lost. That was when I started on a supplementary worlding-wiki where I put definitions, characters, relationships.

Sample Notion page with various page properties, like POV, timeline, and duration of the chapter action.
The chapter-wiki with the list-view of details from Full of Grace.

The women in the world ofFull of Grace gathered helpfully into this liminal space, instead of crowding my mind. I couldn’t rely on simply long lists with endlessly nested subsets of ideas, not anymore. In the chapter-wiki, I put each chapter into its own notebook. When I think about writing within a system and a story, I crave some limit against my endless tinkering. I read that there was no roadmap to writing a novel, or any longer form of fiction, but what I found was that my mind tended to write scenes across different chapters, and the connective tissue was the hardest part of figuring out how the story could go. Forcing my brain to go through something from top to bottom makes the thinking through and the tinkering less pleasurable.

I still need help to figure out how my persnickety brain can work on a bigger chunk of writing without feeling like the effort was going nowhere. I still need help to figure out how to write about the process without the overwhelming feeling of being watched, and being scorned. I still need help to understand how I can put more of myself into my work, and more of myself out in the world – not for consumption, but to remove myself from being unknown, as a way to be known and still held.

Letting pleasure lead me

To follow pleasure instead of shame. To feel the fear, to do it anyway.

I wrote this as part of my commitments to 2025, and it has been an echo and a tether running across my writing, across the various projects and ideas and strings of thought. This past week, I’ve been courting the pleasure again as I wrote through Leatherbound Hands. I’m at a point in the story where, finally, Éomer encounters more of Lothiriel’s writing, and finds out that the woman he had been corresponding with has certain special abilities that he could not have anticipated. I was stalled when it came to writing his meeting with Astoreth — an original character I dreamt up to be Lothiriel’s kinswoman and friend, who rode to Minas Tirith to bring her husband, Dirhael, home to Dol Amroth. I hadn’t written her since a previous chapter, so stepping back into her character was akin to figuring out how an outfit fit on my body, where the armholes were, if I enjoyed the texture of the fabric. This retrial was something I encountered as I began to write Imrahil again — I had to remember how I wrote him, what was important to him, and why, in this story, he proposed Lothiriel’s marriage with Éomer in the first place.

Full of Grace is harder to find. In all my past imaginings, the story had become hollowed out somewhat and full of arbitrary rules. As I went back to outlining, I went back to consciously simplify: what do I want to write about? What is pleasurable and pleasing for me to think about, like a puzzle? In writing two longer, sustained works together, I realize that my way of working through a story enlarges it from the inside out and so the ideas I set out to explore, the characters, the setting — these become wider and more complicated the longer I write them out for myself. It is part creative, part exploration of a thing that is nascent, not quite there but somehow already following rules of its own. Full of Grace is/will be about women: how we talk to each other, how we support each other, how lonely we feel. And what gives me pleasure to think about is survival. How do we survive with each other?

This untethered, wandering mind

While I spent a lot of in the last two weeks continuing to outline Full of Grace, and trying to get the main ideas of that world properly set up, my imagination strained at the sustained exercise. I ran into giant, blank sand dunes and raw empty beaches, where my imagining faltered, sputtered, stopped. It’s easy to disbelieve yourself and make yourself feel unsettled, unworthy. Meanwhile, the world of it crept up on me, and is always behind my eyes, like a shadow or a shade

Within the last few days, I found it was easier to revisit Leatherbound Hands, the novel-length fic I’ve been writing steadily. I had stalled at around 7,000 words on Chapter 6, at a place where I couldn’t write or imagine the next conversation, or the next emotion. I left it for a while as I outlined, and when I came back, the writing was easier. The break let me not think of the story, and regain my bearings outside of that world. It was like breathing — the imagination contracting to concentrate, and then relaxing again. When I opened up the file and reconsidered my place in the writing, what needed to happen next seemed obvious, and easy.

I’ve come from a week away from writing — a minor consequence of having a day job that occasionally requires days and nights away. In the interim, I talk a little about my projects with my friends — and I try to untangle for them and for myself how writing both original fiction and fanfiction reside at the core of me, silent and still and heavy, and really are the only real contributions I feel I can offer as a way, not to preserve my existence, but to prove that I lived, that I thought things, that I felt things this way and thought them through. It’s caught up with feelings of shame and pride and pressure and identity, but the spine that runs through it all is joy. Joy that I am able to write what I write, and the fear that no one will understand why any of this mattered to me.