I Sat With A Crying Second Grader Today. (The Age Range Is Outside My Wheelhouse But I Was The Most Convenient

I sat with a crying second grader today. (The age range is outside my wheelhouse but I was the most convenient adult.) He was crying, the other adults said, because his brother took a phone he was playing on. “Phone addicted,” everybody said. “If he would get up and play games with the other kids he wouldn’t be crying.”

He told me everyone lets his brother take things from him because his brother is younger, and doesn’t know better. He told me he doesn’t want to play because he’s tired, he has too many extracurriculars this summer and can’t get good sleep because “everyone in my camper is so loud when I’m trying to sleep.” He’s exhausted and only eight. His mom’s an acquaintance and told me she and the kid’s father are going through a separation — mom and four kids left the house to stay in a camper.

But people will seriously not listen to kids crying over seemingly minor things because on the surface it looks like a tantrum. If kids are given the space to articulate themselves they often will.

I am having the worst day. Please send pictures of your pets. Thanks.

Literally cannot emphasize enough that my #1 writing advice is to stop being afraid. Stop being afraid of sounding too cringe, or too stupid, or too horrifying, or too horny, or too weird, or too much, or too little, or too you. You need to put your entire pussy into your art. Sure, it won't be to everyone's tastes, but if you keep yourself to the blandest tamest safest roads possible you will be of no one's tastes, not even yours.

One trap that All the Time Daydreamers, Sometimes Writers, fall into is this idea that writing is transcribing the daydream.

It's not. The daydream is a fuzzy thing. There are gaps that you don't need to fill in a daydream, because you already get the emotional point. A lot of it is emotion. And because it makes you feel like a complete story would, your brain is tricked into thinking that's what you have.

Then you sit down to actually write the thing and you realize you're trying to write a Space Opera without actually inventing any planets or space ships. You don't even know if the characters start out on the same planet. If they're on a planet at all. You didn't bother to check.

Now you will vaguely reference this in first-second person in any writing guide you make up for the rest of time.

When you write, you're building something. It's not a pale imitation of what you have in your head- what you have in your head can't exist on the outside. This is a whole new beast. It's going to ultimately look different and this is a good thing.

Also the internal critic is dumb.

I'm not even trying to be nice to your writing specifically here. The internal critic is looking for a completed story and you don't have one yet. So anything it has to say flat out does not apply.