A Question To All The Writers Out There

a question to all the writers out there

How do you know when to stop writing (a piece, a scene, an exchange)?

Often times, I find myself rambling incessantly over the vivid details of a scene that abuse the storage of my mind and haphazardly call those rambles purple prose.

It's a weird conundrum to phase, this tension between there never being enough words in the English language to paint the picture in your head, and the way the perspective grows increasingly blurry the more words you add.

It feels so criminal to cut out pieces you carefully articulated, though it is often necessary for the sake of the pace and the word-count. I guess the issue originates from a deeply rooted desire for control - that has less to do with writing, more to do with the psychologically imbalanced battle-field that is my brain.

I should detach from the piece and allow the reader the liberty to perceive what is written as their individual lens is capable, rather than forcing my exact vision onto foreign eyes. Sure, this may lend itself to reader's loving my characters far less than I do (since I bear all the highly-detailed lore behind them); just as commonly, though, one could argue, that the readers will weave their own imagination and memories with the characters, using them as scaffolds, and creating (in co-creation with the author) something that by far exceeds the original vision.

-penned by j. m. medna (2024)

i'm a delicate mixture of mood writer and hoarder

I feel like I’m falling. Not in the occasional positional vertigo way. The room and everything around me is steady, save for me. It’s like a rug has been pulled from beneath my heart, and I can feel it descend into an abyss. Like the epicenter of gravity resides within my chest and pulls me down from within. the way land feels when it caves in. like i can’t breath because my lungs have collapsed under the gravitational pull of the pole of magnetism that impales me. like the butterflies meant to reside my belly have escaped and fluttered into my chest. it’s not dizzying. it’s not dizzy. it’s a feeling of caving in, imploding quietly while everything around me remains, and everyone watches unbeknownst. like i could shrivel and compress into a single dimensional plane, thin as a sheet of paper, and no one would grieve my disappearance.

-penned by j. m. medna (2024)

i literally just got my first kudos (ever) on my ao3 account and i'm in tears hahahaha

my e-mails inbox and smooth brain are graveyards to my writing ideas

Which one is your favourite? @thoughtstherapy