This is the sixth 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’ve done so much research that you call out other stories for being inaccurate
- you decide to refine a parody into a unique piece of art
- You watch what people do before they speak to better frame your dialogue
- You prune your flowery prose and leave the weeds
- Your screen didn’t seem bright when you started in the morning
- You’re always looking for ways to see yourself in 3rd person omniscient
- You hit a brick wall every time you have to name a new character
- You wait too long to edit and find your story covered in overgrowth
- You show mercy to your darlings, you may have a use for them later
- You have redundant backups
- You don’t forget your nightmares, you stock up on them
- You put the skeletons in your closet out on display
- Daydreams are your day job
- You can daydream at night
- You know the fall is nature giving you an excuse to stay in and hone your craft
- Your daydreams take over your waking life
- Halloween comes all year round
- You see Halloween as a celebration of good storytelling
- You can type without editing along the way
- you can’t simply tell a therapist what’s on your mind, you have to tell them a story
- your shift doesn’t end at sunset
- You can convince people that a house you know nothing about is haunted
- You let your characters go behind the scenes, just to freak them out
- You can turn rattling pipes into your readers’ worst nightmare
- You try to shoehorn your problems into your protagonist’s life
- you wish you had a panic room, just for when the world get’s too noisy
- You think you can reinvent the medicine cabinet jump scare
- The motivation of the ghost behind the shower curtain matters to you
- You have to write your ideas down before they turn into pumpkins
- You wish you had a Thesaurus for day to day conversations
- You find new ideas growing on top of old ones
- You hear lyrics over instrumental songs
- You’re always looking for fresh ways to describe a menacing grin
- You don’t hunt ghosts. You put them there
- your dictation software screws up and you prefer the mistake
- You discover that something you thought you’d made up has a basis in reality
- You’ve struggled with the idea of inserting yourself into the story just to explain what’s going on
- You feel like you’re cheating on all your other media
- you search for new ways to describe looking disheveled only to walk past yourself in the mirror & find an answer
- the prose pour out of you, but you find yourself stricken with “Twitter Block”
- you put your own private peculiarities into your character & someone compliments you on writing a believable freak
- you keep asking yourself, “How did I do this yesterday?”
- you aspire to write something that people refer to in hushed whispers like the Necronomicon
- half way through your work in progress you decide the best way to get rid of cellphones is to make your story a period piece
- you come up with such a good title there’s no way your story could live up to it
- you try to write your way out of writers’ block by writing about writers’ block
- you go decades without upgrading your computer
- your personal space broadens or shrinks depending on how comfortable you are with your story
- you can write about writers’ block with authority