Kill Off Your Main Characters. Please. Not As A Cheap Ending, Or Right At The Beginning For Shock Value.

Kill off your main characters. Please. Not as a cheap ending, or right at the beginning for shock value. Kill them in the middle, and do it well. Leave every character reeling and unable to comprehend what happens next. Leave your antagonists without a solid enemy, wondering if they've gone too far.

When you shatter the heart of a story, a thousand tiny shards will spilt away and grow. Focus on the side characters; the supporting cast, the love interest. Think about how they would change, break and reform. Think about the growth, the quiet moments of reflection and depth.

You don't have to do it, but think about it.

If your story stops with a single character, your story is weak.

Kill the protagonist.

“It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

rewarding yourself has kind of become a silly joke like everything is "a little treat" but you really have to reward your accomplishments, lack of gratification can become a serious problem, gratification crisis is a serious problem please do better <3

Random linguistic worldbuilding: A language with six sets of pronouns, which are set by one's current state of existence. There's a separate pronoun for people who are alive, people who are dead, and potential future people who are yet to be born, and the ambiguous ones of "may or may not be alive or aleady dead", "may or may not have even been born yet", and the ultimate general/ambiguous all-covering one that covers all ambiguous states.

The culture has a specific defined term for that tragic span of time when a widow keeps accidentally referring to their spouse with living pronouns. New parents-to-be dropping the happy surprise news of a pregnancy by referring to their future child with the "is yet to be born" pronoun instead of a more ambiguous one and waiting for the "wait what did you just say?" reactions.

Someone jokingly referring to themselves with the dead person pronouns just to highlight how horrible their current hangover is. A notorious aspiring ladies' man who keeps trying to pursue women in their 20s despite of approaching middle age fails to notice the insult when someone asks him when he's planning to get married, and uses the pronoun that implies that his ideal future bride may not even be born yet.

A mother whose young adult child just moved away from home for the first time, who continues to dramatically refer to their child with "may or may not be already dead" until the aforementioned child replies to her on facebook like "ma stop telling people I'm dead" and having her respond with "well how could I possibly know that when you don't even write to us? >:,C"

Your writing will always feel awkward to you, because you wrote it.

Your plot twists will always feel predictable, because you created them.

Your stories will always feel a bit boring to you, because you read them a million times.

They won't feel like that for your reader.

Let writers ramble to you about their stories and they will forever love you.