This is the third collection of my best Tweets under the hashtag #YouKnowYoureAWriterWhen. Click here to catch up on the first part. These were inspired by @KMWeiland. Her blog is an excellent resource for writers looking to become authors.

These come at the special request of Jessica West (@Wes1Jess on Twitter). Be sure to thank her if you get some amusement out of these.

• you see another zit and think, “Good thing, I’m not trying to be rock star.”
• you feel guilty because you spent most of your lunch break eating your lunch.
• you see life in screenplay format in your head
• you’ve changed chapter titles because you don’t like how they look beside the others in the table of contents.
• your morning routine starts with a staring contest with your cat

• you discover half finished chores around the house. Garbage bags tied still in the container. Carpets half vacuumed
• the sink spills over, because you left it running while you went to go jot something down.
• you set your alarm early to write. Then you continued to jot things down throughout your morning routine.
• you wake up from a nightmare, run to your keyboard & start describing like a witness talking to a sketch artist
• you take preemptive measures to prepare yourself for negative feedback, for each stage of your potential career

• you set out to humanize a cliched trope for the challenge of it.
• you misread a line of dialogue while revising and decide that the misread version is superior to the original
• you’ve fantasized about rewriting the endings for popular books & leaving at the library.
• you imagine how any references to current-gen tech is going to feel to people twenty years from now.
• the power goes out and you have to track down a dictionary.

• your characters work in artistic mediums that you’ve had to give up to pursue your writing
• you can let something embarrassing happen to your character without fear of someone thinking it happened to you
• you’re way past the point of over sharing your past. So much so that you’ve had to borrow events from your future
• you break your short story into chapters and start to realize what you’re in for.
• you get your past and your stories confused.

• you have an excuse to get out of awkward social situations, “I have a novel I really ought to be getting back to.”
• you can sneak in a paragraph during a bathroom break.
• a friend says, “I wonder what would happen if…” & you’re like, “You’re just now imagining that?”
• you realize someone might see themselves in your villain & you think, “Fine, let them incriminate themselves”
• you anticipate blowback from something you’ve written, when even you’re conflicted, but know it should be read

• a dragon crashes through the roof & you roll up your sleeves & say, “Stand back everyone. I got this. I’m a writer”
• you find yourself pacing in public, leaving your laptop unattended for long stretches of time.
• you do damage control every time you hear about a story that’s eerily similar to your own.
• you can predict the first crimes to be commit with an emerging technology
• you make your story about nightmares so you don’t feel bad for using a dream sequence to further the plot

• you wince at the phrase “there are 2 sides to every story” because the main POV should be clear at the beginning
• you don’t understand how characters who are writers on TV can be written so poorly.
• you workshop tattoo ideas in your writing.
• covering a hot button issue you’re not satisfied using real world examples, you have to create something far worse
• you get into arguments with your word processor’s grammar correction suggestions.

• you get stuck trying to come up with a better punchline for the “When life gives you lemons” setup
• this is the second time you’ve looked up the word “Hay” in wikipedia in less than a week
• you can’t make it through a movie without pausing it for half an hour to write.
• someone looks at your handwriting and says, “Aren’t you supposed to be a writer?”
• you realize there’s a storytelling style that you’ve never tried and it makes you feel incomplete.

• you can type in the dark, with no light on the keyboard.
• you overspend your favorite word and have to look for an alternative when you really need it.
• hyperboles come easy, but the simplest description eludes you.
• You look at last night’s words and think, “No idea where this was going, but I think I know where I’m going to take it.”
• you end every day on a cliffhanger.

• you find yourself defending plot holes in movies with beautifully plausible explanations that weren’t there
• you forget that you’ve only shaved half of your face when you rush back to finish the chapter.
• you have a different log line to play to the personality of whoever you happen to be pitching to
• you go pale working on something for people to do as they work on their tans.
• You’re not daydreaming. You’re subconsciously plotting

• you write something so dark that it makes you think, “I hope my mother doesn’t read this until it’s a critical hit”
• you go from being afraid of future employers discovering your writing online to hoping that they do
• you relish in discovering the profanity of other nationalities so that you can put it in your character’s mouths.
• you can watch a couple from a parking lot away and fill in what they’re arguing about
• you can tell a story without characters, just by describing a setting filled with evidence

• you wish you could retroactively remove a metaphor from an older story so you could use it in a newer one
• you’re painfully aware of how often your protagonist uses the word “I” & you try to hide it by saying, “me my & we”
• you find yourself asking, “Did I forget to eat dinner tonight?”
• you write through your writing break.
• You wish every segment of every object came marked with a description

• you get pulled over & ask the cop to answer some questions for a detective story you’re working on
• you find and replace a word you’ve been misusing in all of your documents
• you pitch real life anecdotes before you tell them
• you find yourself changing tenses in the middle of conversation and insist you start over again