My Fundamentals of Writing (part one)

Your characters are more important than your story.  

So, really take your time fleshing them out because the better you know them, the more they will help you out with the story!  

When you know your characters, you don't have to assume how they'll react to stuff they just will.  

Use it to propel your story so you don't have to do all the heavy lifting.  

Fuck your word count!  

"Focus on your word count,” "Write 2,500 words a day,’ "Real writers set monthly word goals.”  

Your word count doesn't matter, and you're just stressing yourself out.  

Do your best to ignore it because it just doesn't matter if you write one word today or 10,000! At least you wrote something! Focus on that.  

Quality and sanity of quantity.  

All that shit you don't want people to know. Write it.  

There are a lot of topics people don't like to talk about, right? Whether its stuff society has taught us to not talk about, like sex, or stuff that's just personal, that we'd like to keep to ourselves. That's totally fine, but you shouldn't keep that shit bottled up.  

No, I’m not saying publish all your family’s dirty laundry, all I’m saying is writing is art and art is therapy. 

A great writing and mental health exercise is to explore that by writing it.  

For example, I've never liked to think about or talk about death. So, I dove right in and decided to write a very short story about the processes of death in a way that was more palatable to me.  

It was a great way to confront “the big scary” on my own terms, and while I don't feel completely exorcized of the anxiety, it's great to get something of it out.  

You could even take this one step further and burn it or rip it to shreds as a physical and philosophical way of destroying all of it.