mistressofmuses (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mistressofmuses) wrote2025-01-25 07:48 pm
mistressofmuses) wrote2025-01-25 07:48 pm
Never Say You Can't Survive: Chapters 1 - 4
Earlier this week, I started reading Never Say You Can't Survive. This is a writing advice book that has come very highly recommended by several people I know on here, and I've seen recs for it elsewhere as well! It seems specifically geared toward finding the will to write when everything else sucks real bad. Considering how much everything else sucks real bad right now, it feels like a good time to be reading it!
(This is very specifically a feeling that I struggle with... the idea that writing my silly little fics is at all worthwhile when the world is burning down.)
I'm reading one chapter per day, so it'll take me just under a month to read it. I don't often read a lot of non-fiction, and I feel like reading it more slowly is a good chance for me to try and think about each of the chapters/essays individually, rather than allowing the whole thing to blur together.
So... here are my thoughts on the individual chapters! These are very much just like... personal thoughts and what it made me think of in relation to my own writing. Not really any critique of the book itself.
Chapter 1 is about "creating your imaginary friends", and how to make sure the characters you're writing about are interesting.
I do think this is a weakness of mine (though I'm also a little afraid that I'm about to say that about all the chapters!)
I think this is somewhere that I'm carrying some ~baggage~ that I've struggled to free myself of. I actually talked about it a fair bit just recently in one of the Snowflake posts, where I talked about my changing feelings toward the concept of "Mary Sues."
While my feelings have changed now, I still remember spending hours on the "Mary Sue Litmus Test," putting in the characters I'd created and endlessly tweaking them to make them less. Less special, unique, powerful, attractive, important, etc., etc., etc., because according to all I'd heard and believed, that was the only way to make them "good."
In practice, I wound up with boring, flat characters that fail utterly to propel their stories.
Years later, when I was sort of just starting to consider really trying to write again, I'd been working on unlearning a bunch of those earlier bad attitudes I'd had. At the time, I started following a bunch of writing pages and advice blogs. Some of the advice they shared was great, some was just fine, some was probably useful in a more narrow set of circumstances than presented, and some of it was *bad*.
When it came to character creation, there was a lot of different advice that boiled down to the necessity of knowing every. single. possible. detail. about your characters before you could even think about writing them into something. That advice stalled me out. I don't know their most impactful third grade memory! Favorite birthday gift! Why they left their first job! Preferred brand of toothpaste! (Two of those questions I couldn't answer about myself!) Sometimes weird little facts could come up and be relevant, or inform something about your character and make them feel really fleshed-out, but in a lot of cases things titled "350 Questions You Must Be Able To Answer" just sent my brain to bluescreen.
This was also when I started to encounter The Discourse. Not dissimilar to the Mary Sue situation, there is a lot of bad-faith criticism out there. This criticism is for all aspects of writing, including plot, style, tropes, the author themself, etc... but a lot of it is for characters.
I'm queer, and I write mostly queer (of some variety) characters. It feels like you cannot take a single step without tripping over debates about "representation" and whether a character is good or harmful as an example of their particular demographic. And of course, as with most bad-faith criticism (and sometimes simply poor attempts at good-faith crit; I know some people really do seem to think they're trying to help), there is no winning. Any possible flaw or conflict means that you're making some sort of real-world accusation about what this demographic is like in real life. Of course, perfection is equally bad! People have talked about this plenty, so I feel like it'd be silly to go into too many examples of the contradictory attitudes, but... basically every possible trait feels like a minefield.
I internalized all of that for way too long. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes completely subconsciously, I tried to sand off all of the edges from my characters, trying to predict and pre-empt any possible future criticism. (Both despite and because of the fact I kept seeing some of the canons I most adored being absolutely shredded and attacked over the very things that made me like those stories and characters!)
Much like teenage me trying to rid my characters of anything that made them "too much," these attempts to sand away any possible "problematic" attributes left me with characters that are bland blobs of mush, incapable of doing much of anything to impact their own stories.
Which is all to say... this chapter did serve as a reminder right off the bat of a thing I'm already aware I need to work at. I'm just still struggling to kill that overly critical cop in my head.
(Though some of this is purely a skill issue. I need to practice making my characterization stronger, driving how the characters react and what then happens, rather than passive characters venturing through plot points.)
Chapter 2 is about impostor syndrome.
The chapter itself was nice to read. I haven't ever thought that impostor syndrome was much of an issue for me, at least partially because I'm not really involved with any community aspects of writing. There's no one around to think me an impostor!
I'm pretty content to ramble quietly to myself or in my journal here about writing, and then to toss completed works into the void that is AO3. Writing has always been a solitary pursuit for me, for better or worse.
Of course, the other main point of this chapter was... the importance of finding and having a supportive community around you.
Whoops.
Now, this is something I'm tentatively trying to improve. I'm a member of multiple writing comms here,![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
getyourwordsout, inkingitout, writethisfanfic, and I'm trying to be at least a smidge more participatory.
Most of these comms do have periodic "share an excerpt" posts, and like... I have a visceral "no!" reaction. Mine is bad! There aren't any short segments I'd be proud of! No good turns of phrase or particularly riveting dialogue. I'm perfectly happy that other people are sharing, and it's fun to see what they're working on, but there's nothing in my WIP worth sharing. (Similarly, I cannot imagine getting up and reading something of mine to an in-person group. I'd rather gnaw my own arm off!)
...Perhaps impostor syndrome isn't as much of a non-issue for me as I thought.
Chapter 3 was a quick one, about an elementary school teacher who helped the author greatly as a child, when she was struggling with writing.
Not personally terribly applicable to me, but did make me think about how really fortunate it is and how much of a difference it makes for a student to have a teacher like that. It also strikes me as horribly sad how rare it can be for a struggling student to get that sort of one-on-one, personalized attention that helps them to ultimately excel. (Rarer and rarer as class sizes go up and up...)
I relate to struggling in ways I didn't understand (what with the probable-ADHD), but because I did well academically, I don't think anyone realized how difficult it sometimes was. Because I could do well, whenever I was struggling or falling behind or frustrated to the point of tears, I got a lot of "you're better than this, why aren't you trying harder?" So I tried harder and didn't tell anyone when I was having a hard time.
I had one teacher in 9th grade who suggested that her students experiment with the best environment for them to do homework or studying in - is a quiet room better? Do you prefer music? Is having the TV on helpful to your focus? This wasn't phrased in terms of any sort of neurodivergence, just "different learning styles", but that advice is very common for people with ADHD. It did help me, so I started sitting on the couch with the TV on to do my homework... and it infuriated my mother.
I think "I would hate it if your [sibling] turned out anything like you" is the most hurtful thing she ever said to me, and she said it because I insisted that doing my homework with the TV on made it easier for me not to get sidetracked, and tried to tell her that it was one of my teachers who suggested it. (I was a teenager! Doing my homework! And that was still somehow the worst thing imaginable!)
Despite the conflict at the time, that "permission" to let myself do my work in a way that made it easier for me really did help a lot for the rest of my time in high school and in college.
Chapter 4 hit on a few more ideas. It was about "embracing messiness," and how to handle uncertainty within your story and what you intend to do with it.
This was a helpful section to read, just in terms of it making me feel a little less alone! Something I've had a hard time with when it comes to several newer projects is just... running into a wall before I even get started, because I realize there are some critical details that I just can't decide on. Sometimes it's things as basic and important as "what gender is my protagonist?"
Other times it's not big things like that, so much as little to medium tweaks as I'm going. In my current WIP I just... got rid of a character entirely, realizing he was sort of superfluous and that trying to give him a fair amount of interaction with the MC was dragging the story down. In this same WIP, I realized that I really need to basically completely redo a good chunk of the scenes I wrote recently, because it'd be better to have an absent character be present. I've been frustrated at these sorts of things that send me minorly off-outline, but it does at least make me feel better that this isn't a unique struggle.
A particular part that definitely struck a chord was the bit about how the things you put down in the story are promises both to your reader and to yourself as the writer. When you lay the groundwork for something, it's because that should pay off in some way later. (And you can always go back and change things, should you decide you don't want that particular groundwork after all, etc.) But as a reader, that's a thing that matters a lot to me. It frustrates me when a story doesn't actually follow through on the promises it made. (I don't think it was mentioned in the book, but for me it feels important to note that this is different than like... subverting expectation and such; that's still following through even if it's not in the way expected.)
In the first ongoing fic that I wrote and shared after coming back from years away from writing, I very nearly made a really frustrating mistake along those lines. I caught it early and fixed the problem, but it would have been a huge disservice to the story and undercut the most basic themes. (A lot of the story was about the protagonist claiming agency that she'd largely been denied up until that point... and then the heroic final battle sort of had her on the sidelines while other characters did the bulk of the important things. It was tonally weird, and I don't even know why I first thought of the scene that way, but it was bad! It would have absolutely not been delivering on the promises made, and would have denied her arc a satisfying conclusion.)
I will do my best to embrace that uncertainty and treat it as a positive or an opportunity... even when I find it frustrating when I can't just decide on a course and stick to it.
(This is very specifically a feeling that I struggle with... the idea that writing my silly little fics is at all worthwhile when the world is burning down.)
I'm reading one chapter per day, so it'll take me just under a month to read it. I don't often read a lot of non-fiction, and I feel like reading it more slowly is a good chance for me to try and think about each of the chapters/essays individually, rather than allowing the whole thing to blur together.
So... here are my thoughts on the individual chapters! These are very much just like... personal thoughts and what it made me think of in relation to my own writing. Not really any critique of the book itself.
Chapter 1 is about "creating your imaginary friends", and how to make sure the characters you're writing about are interesting.
On characters:
I do think this is a weakness of mine (though I'm also a little afraid that I'm about to say that about all the chapters!)
I think this is somewhere that I'm carrying some ~baggage~ that I've struggled to free myself of. I actually talked about it a fair bit just recently in one of the Snowflake posts, where I talked about my changing feelings toward the concept of "Mary Sues."
While my feelings have changed now, I still remember spending hours on the "Mary Sue Litmus Test," putting in the characters I'd created and endlessly tweaking them to make them less. Less special, unique, powerful, attractive, important, etc., etc., etc., because according to all I'd heard and believed, that was the only way to make them "good."
In practice, I wound up with boring, flat characters that fail utterly to propel their stories.
Years later, when I was sort of just starting to consider really trying to write again, I'd been working on unlearning a bunch of those earlier bad attitudes I'd had. At the time, I started following a bunch of writing pages and advice blogs. Some of the advice they shared was great, some was just fine, some was probably useful in a more narrow set of circumstances than presented, and some of it was *bad*.
When it came to character creation, there was a lot of different advice that boiled down to the necessity of knowing every. single. possible. detail. about your characters before you could even think about writing them into something. That advice stalled me out. I don't know their most impactful third grade memory! Favorite birthday gift! Why they left their first job! Preferred brand of toothpaste! (Two of those questions I couldn't answer about myself!) Sometimes weird little facts could come up and be relevant, or inform something about your character and make them feel really fleshed-out, but in a lot of cases things titled "350 Questions You Must Be Able To Answer" just sent my brain to bluescreen.
This was also when I started to encounter The Discourse. Not dissimilar to the Mary Sue situation, there is a lot of bad-faith criticism out there. This criticism is for all aspects of writing, including plot, style, tropes, the author themself, etc... but a lot of it is for characters.
I'm queer, and I write mostly queer (of some variety) characters. It feels like you cannot take a single step without tripping over debates about "representation" and whether a character is good or harmful as an example of their particular demographic. And of course, as with most bad-faith criticism (and sometimes simply poor attempts at good-faith crit; I know some people really do seem to think they're trying to help), there is no winning. Any possible flaw or conflict means that you're making some sort of real-world accusation about what this demographic is like in real life. Of course, perfection is equally bad! People have talked about this plenty, so I feel like it'd be silly to go into too many examples of the contradictory attitudes, but... basically every possible trait feels like a minefield.
I internalized all of that for way too long. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes completely subconsciously, I tried to sand off all of the edges from my characters, trying to predict and pre-empt any possible future criticism. (Both despite and because of the fact I kept seeing some of the canons I most adored being absolutely shredded and attacked over the very things that made me like those stories and characters!)
Much like teenage me trying to rid my characters of anything that made them "too much," these attempts to sand away any possible "problematic" attributes left me with characters that are bland blobs of mush, incapable of doing much of anything to impact their own stories.
Which is all to say... this chapter did serve as a reminder right off the bat of a thing I'm already aware I need to work at. I'm just still struggling to kill that overly critical cop in my head.
(Though some of this is purely a skill issue. I need to practice making my characterization stronger, driving how the characters react and what then happens, rather than passive characters venturing through plot points.)
Chapter 2 is about impostor syndrome.
On impostor syndrome:
The chapter itself was nice to read. I haven't ever thought that impostor syndrome was much of an issue for me, at least partially because I'm not really involved with any community aspects of writing. There's no one around to think me an impostor!
I'm pretty content to ramble quietly to myself or in my journal here about writing, and then to toss completed works into the void that is AO3. Writing has always been a solitary pursuit for me, for better or worse.
Of course, the other main point of this chapter was... the importance of finding and having a supportive community around you.
Whoops.
Now, this is something I'm tentatively trying to improve. I'm a member of multiple writing comms here,
getyourwordsout, inkingitout, writethisfanfic, and I'm trying to be at least a smidge more participatory. Most of these comms do have periodic "share an excerpt" posts, and like... I have a visceral "no!" reaction. Mine is bad! There aren't any short segments I'd be proud of! No good turns of phrase or particularly riveting dialogue. I'm perfectly happy that other people are sharing, and it's fun to see what they're working on, but there's nothing in my WIP worth sharing. (Similarly, I cannot imagine getting up and reading something of mine to an in-person group. I'd rather gnaw my own arm off!)
...Perhaps impostor syndrome isn't as much of a non-issue for me as I thought.
Chapter 3 was a quick one, about an elementary school teacher who helped the author greatly as a child, when she was struggling with writing.
On teachers:
Not personally terribly applicable to me, but did make me think about how really fortunate it is and how much of a difference it makes for a student to have a teacher like that. It also strikes me as horribly sad how rare it can be for a struggling student to get that sort of one-on-one, personalized attention that helps them to ultimately excel. (Rarer and rarer as class sizes go up and up...)
I relate to struggling in ways I didn't understand (what with the probable-ADHD), but because I did well academically, I don't think anyone realized how difficult it sometimes was. Because I could do well, whenever I was struggling or falling behind or frustrated to the point of tears, I got a lot of "you're better than this, why aren't you trying harder?" So I tried harder and didn't tell anyone when I was having a hard time.
I had one teacher in 9th grade who suggested that her students experiment with the best environment for them to do homework or studying in - is a quiet room better? Do you prefer music? Is having the TV on helpful to your focus? This wasn't phrased in terms of any sort of neurodivergence, just "different learning styles", but that advice is very common for people with ADHD. It did help me, so I started sitting on the couch with the TV on to do my homework... and it infuriated my mother.
I think "I would hate it if your [sibling] turned out anything like you" is the most hurtful thing she ever said to me, and she said it because I insisted that doing my homework with the TV on made it easier for me not to get sidetracked, and tried to tell her that it was one of my teachers who suggested it. (I was a teenager! Doing my homework! And that was still somehow the worst thing imaginable!)
Despite the conflict at the time, that "permission" to let myself do my work in a way that made it easier for me really did help a lot for the rest of my time in high school and in college.
Chapter 4 hit on a few more ideas. It was about "embracing messiness," and how to handle uncertainty within your story and what you intend to do with it.
On uncertainty:
This was a helpful section to read, just in terms of it making me feel a little less alone! Something I've had a hard time with when it comes to several newer projects is just... running into a wall before I even get started, because I realize there are some critical details that I just can't decide on. Sometimes it's things as basic and important as "what gender is my protagonist?"
Other times it's not big things like that, so much as little to medium tweaks as I'm going. In my current WIP I just... got rid of a character entirely, realizing he was sort of superfluous and that trying to give him a fair amount of interaction with the MC was dragging the story down. In this same WIP, I realized that I really need to basically completely redo a good chunk of the scenes I wrote recently, because it'd be better to have an absent character be present. I've been frustrated at these sorts of things that send me minorly off-outline, but it does at least make me feel better that this isn't a unique struggle.
A particular part that definitely struck a chord was the bit about how the things you put down in the story are promises both to your reader and to yourself as the writer. When you lay the groundwork for something, it's because that should pay off in some way later. (And you can always go back and change things, should you decide you don't want that particular groundwork after all, etc.) But as a reader, that's a thing that matters a lot to me. It frustrates me when a story doesn't actually follow through on the promises it made. (I don't think it was mentioned in the book, but for me it feels important to note that this is different than like... subverting expectation and such; that's still following through even if it's not in the way expected.)
In the first ongoing fic that I wrote and shared after coming back from years away from writing, I very nearly made a really frustrating mistake along those lines. I caught it early and fixed the problem, but it would have been a huge disservice to the story and undercut the most basic themes. (A lot of the story was about the protagonist claiming agency that she'd largely been denied up until that point... and then the heroic final battle sort of had her on the sidelines while other characters did the bulk of the important things. It was tonally weird, and I don't even know why I first thought of the scene that way, but it was bad! It would have absolutely not been delivering on the promises made, and would have denied her arc a satisfying conclusion.)
I will do my best to embrace that uncertainty and treat it as a positive or an opportunity... even when I find it frustrating when I can't just decide on a course and stick to it.
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I like the way it's made me reflect on some stuff of my own! Either personal memories, or thinking about my own writing. It's nice when I can match a concept to an actual example - that always helps me to understand it better.
Those Mary Sue litmus tests were such a big deal for a while! Definitely in the 00s when I was first entering online fandom spaces.
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probably with marriage and children and off-screen missionary sex lest they be corrupted. (And don't DARE consider a mixed-gender poly ship - that's obviously disgusting personal wank material, and you should be ashamed!) Writing a non-white character? Well, if they're paired with a white character, that's automatically abusive or fetishizing again. If you paired them with another non-white character, then you're saying that white people can't find POC attractive. If you didn't pair them at all, you don't think that POC are capable of relationships? Wow, racist.But of course, as you said, you should be writing diversely, with non-straight, non-cis, non-white, non-male characters... except that every possible way of writing queer or non-white or female characters WILL BE WRONG. And of course, that's even worse than if you hadn't written them at all!
(Which is not to say that skill issues and gross attitudes never make it into writing! That absolutely does happen! But the preemtive idea that basically everything starts from a position of being bad and means the author is a bad person is super toxic.)
There are a lot of loud, demanding assholes who think that their preferred type of story should be the only kind allowed to exist. Some of them are pretending at that, while actually trying to discourage the "competition," by getting other writers to stop writing. Some are just chronically miserable and seem incapable of anything but the worst possible bad-faith reading of anything.
It's definitely a losing prospect to try and create things with them in mind.
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You are by far not the only person I've heard talk about a fandom that's just "crying out for" more f/f fic... only to yeah, give utter crickets in response to what is out there!
It's almost like it's just something that some loud jerks want to use as an argument, without any actual interest in it.Lack of feedback is certainly a frustration all across the spectrum of fic writing, but if there are these supposed hordes of f/f fans that are simply starved for content by an uncaring fandom... then you'd think they'd be doing all they could to encourage the writers who are writing what they supposedly crave.
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There is a value in reading and writing outside one's comfort zone, but that is most fic for me. I am trying to find stuff in my comfort zone and when writing struggling to connect with and find valid what is in that space for me. I feel like for a lot of people, they are well catered to and don't get that yeah, some people are sick of other perspectives and are trying to find what they take for granted.
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Not just about characters, but the amount of time I spend trying to get bad writing advice out of my head is insane. In my case, it's also people I know people intense at me or like fandom spaces being intense about things, but yeah. Or, as you put in, Discourse. I swear a lot of fandom spaces I've been in equate not writing a certain way or not being aware enough of what other people have written with moral failings. Also, the sheer anxiety about writing being seen as 'immature' causing people to tie themselves into knots, etc.
Laying ground work for stuff is why I have a document titled Threads in my custom Scriv set up. I like to mention things as world building and not every single detail needs to be plot-relevant. I prefer stories that aren't so painfully tight that everything needs to be plot relevant, but if I mention something twice it needs a pay off. Or, if certain things are brought up at all, I think they need pay off. I try to be very careful with my stated world building to not create that frustrating lack of pay off that, yeah, I feel like I run into a lot. The reader experience of a story needs to be taken into account.
I may try to read that book again, maybe just skipping chapters. A lot of good stuff in there, though.
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And uuuugh, yes, the intensity that people have about certain things. There is SO MUCH equating of what you write (or what people take from your writing) with moral character... It's not enough that someone might dislike your preferences in fic, and it's not even enough for them to consider their preferences to somehow be objectively right and yours objectively wrong... it's that not matching their preference means you're a *bad person.*
Keeping track in a designated document is a great idea! I tend to try and make note of any sorts of subplots or mentions of things I intend to use later in a notes file... but that file is used for a lot of stuff, so gets a bit disorganized. Scriv will probably make it easier to sort that sort of thing out!
Agreed that things don't need to be SO tightly plotted that literally every object, comment, or mentioned character on the street needs to have plot significance. I also don't enjoy that as a reader, just because it feels so implausible. But yes, some sorts of things should have payoff if they're lingered on, or get a lot of development in the narrative. It drives me nuts as a reader when it feels like there was some interesting plot thread that just gets abandoned halfway, or some cool implication based on an early scene that never actually gets brought up.
So far I am really liking the book. I'm enjoying the ways it's making me think about bits of my writing and past experiences, even if I haven't *quite* hit the "this inspires me to write despite the state of the world" feeling yet.
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Having things be too tight is implausible, like you said, but it also it can feel like the world only exists as a metaphor, like it's got no grounding in reality or physics or sociology.
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That's exactly it. Things where every single object and character and offhand comment have to Mean Something Big tend to come off... almost more like fables. And that's fine... if you want to tell a fable. But for the most part, yeah, plotting things too tightly makes them *feel* like a story, or like you said, something that exists purely metaphorically and bears no real resemblance to reality.
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Too true about people deciding that's an inherently "deep" mode of storytelling. It's fine, if not my preference, but it's certainly not superior to something that feels more grounded in its own reality.
(I do really think the emphasis on "efficiency" as the most important thing for storytelling is a huge detriment. It's not that there should be NO consideration of it, but demanding that everything that isn't serving A Big Purpose be ruthlessly cut out just doesn't produce good work imo.)
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And yeah, good point re: stuff that goes on longer than it was meant to. The cracks can really start to show a lot more once you're poking at that worldbuilding/style/etc. from new angles.