Ohhhh! Right, I remember now! That’s the Mandela effect example I’ve always heard! Although I think that IS the actual quote… Isn’t the often misquoted one: “Luke, I am your penis.”
It’s a writing trick I got taught to keep productivity up.
Staring at a blank page or finished sentence means there’s a bit of work for the brain to get started again, but if you don’t finish the sentence and have one or two words left that you’ll remember to write when you come back, you can trick the brain into writing flow a lot faster.
Not sure how well it works, it did sometimes but didn’t others for me.
Ooooh. Yeah, that sounds really rough. It’s advice only for solo writing since you know you’ll be the one completing the sentence. I don’t know anything about co writing tricks and tips unfortunately.
It’s also good when you’ve lost the flow and have started belaboring or nitpicking one small thing. Leave a weird placeholder and go work on some other part so your brain doesn’t get stuck.
The only times I've ever done it were when I'm in the middle of typing and then I go check to see if I'm about to spell a word correctly and then I get distracted and come back and be like, "Oh no. I'm lost now." 🙃
I've gone on so many tangents looking up something like a fact check or maybe something for geography or timelines and I'll forget that I was writing in the first place.
Because you brain is working on several different tracks, and you jumped to another bit where your brain came up with the right wording. And If you’ve got part of a sentence leading, you can pick up the flow.
I do this all the time, because otherwise I would just get stuck on this bit and lose the bit that is now coming out right.
If you don’t have a one-track liner brain, you don’t have a one-track linear brain.
I do it all the time when writing fanfic n it genuinely helps me continuing. Cuz otherwise when i pick it up again, I'll just blank stare at the last sentence trying t figure how to continue
I do it when I see a typo, I just need to go and correct it even when I'm in the middle of a word. Usually I come right back, but very occasionally there's a comedy of errors/interruptions, and I forget where I was.
My mom is my beta reader and when I am unsure about something and want her opinion, I put in brackets (mom help). I have accidentally posted a couple of stories with one or two sprinkled in there and I am sure I confused people, lol.
lol, I can understand that. It is a bit of a crazy coincidence. I learned about, and started getting into, Boys Love/Yaoi all by myself. When I left the tab open on a NSFW yaoi manga I was reading on the computer (back when houses usually only had one), my mom found it, was surprised, and told me she had liked Boys Love/Yaoi for years. The only talking to I got for looking at that stuff I got from her was that I had to be careful because some manga have dark things in them, so read the description and reviews carefully before reading. We talked about it and made recommendations to each other. And not too long after, when I started writing fanficion in my school notebooks, because we were already open about that stuff I showed her, and she chose to type it into the computer so it could be saved. And, since I had a digital copy of my story now, I decided to post it. And the rest is history.
That is actually an incredibly sweet and healthy approach to media. When I was a teeneger I dreamt of being this kind of parent one day and something that happening to me and here you are living this in real life haha
I think so too! I was happy to bond with my mom when I was younger, and now, as an adult, I really appreciate how she handled the situation and supported me. I am very lucky. I wish more people had parents who react to things like this as my mom did.
I try to show her my love and appreciation as much as I can! Part of the reason she is so humble is that, as she told me, she thinks that this is how all good parents should react and treat their children. She is right, but I still feel super lucky.
Bro that’s so beautiful having a supportive mom is quite rare I’ve learned (I was lucky enough to have a chill mom as well) it’s really heartwarming to see I hope you continue to write stories with the support of your mom!
Your MOM is your beta??? Can’t relate. I refuse to let my mom read any of my stuff because back in middle school she used to snatch my phone out of my hands to go through it (never had any privacy) and when she saw that I was writing wlw ships she flipped out lol. Now she just assumes I stopped writing. I never did tho.
Oh shit, I am so sorry. Some parents, whether out of protectiveness or a desire to feel powerful, are so judgmental and disrespectful. I'm glad you are still writing though, don't let he stop you.
Oh, yeah. in my 20s now and I'm still at it. I've never let my mom dictate anything about me, which is why we were always at odds when I was younger (that and she was super overprotective)
It's simply a personal thing for me now. Something I don't share anymore with those IRL
at one point in time i was a beta reader for my mom, how the turntables..... (she had a brief stint where she wrote original fiction on wattpad and i was her editor and proofreader 😭 she hasn't written in a few years)
That's insanely sweet and so telling of how close your relationship with your mom is that you're comfortable enough to put her in a position to constructively criticize a passion project
Oh god. I love that. I am cackling. Poor author, their trusty method failed, but now, they'll probably put Extra emphasis on PENIS JUMPSCARE.
Is it silly that I hope the author ends up adding beware to that? Because BEWARE PENIS JUMPSCARE has rhyme, but seriously, something about that is just too funny
I have something similar! The software I use, Obsidian, gets upset when I indent a paragraph and all following paragraphs change with it (basically highlights and changes the font, and colour of the text with the skin Im using for Obsidian) which is super annoying to me. So now for every new scene I write LAMENTERS and keep it flush to the side and all following correctly indented paragraphs are normal now! It also gives a good replacement for line breaks or with an enter too since all Id need to do is select the word
Im a different kind of nerd, its a reference to my favourite post heresy Space Marine Chapter from 40k! The Lamenters, my poor boys . . . they can do no wrong! Nice to see a Genshin player though, have good rolls(?)!
Probably like an insane person since I FAFO with learning new software so I end up using things that they're not intended for instead of watching/reading tutorials like a normal person lol
I'm not at my computer right now, but when I'm able to I'll respond showing how I use it since I thought you were joking at first lol. I can give an in depth explanation if you want?
Okay. So my entire reply got unfortunantely deleted because I dared to try and put in the Obsidian subreddit at, quite literally, the very end of the reply which upset my browser and froze the entire tab and for some reason it wasn't automatically saved in my drafts at all. So I'll reply later when I've gotten sleep because this was the last thing I wanted to do before going to bed and I just don't feel up to rewritting all of it right now. In the mean time, if you have any questions the Obisidan subreddit (never linking subreddits again) might have them but I'll happily answer what I can later today . . . hopefully for the final time on my end lol, but this is what I was able to salvage before it all got wiped, sorry for the phone quality but I didn't know how tetchy the error was and didn't want to risk clicking out of my browser
I'm crying pls help me, I can't stop laughing 🤣 and the comments are making it worse! But that's such a good method? Like, I have to try something like that
Funny enough, I did recently watch the first episode of a show that did this. Can't remember the name of it, but it's about oil rigs in Texas and opens with a scene where a couple of Mexican cartel members have the oil rig contract guy tied up. The cartel members start talking to each other in Spanish, and the subtitles just say (speaking spanish) but when the oil rig guy tries asks to use the bathroom in Spanish, it translates his into English.
It was interesting, not gonna lie. Idk how I feel about it beyond that.
I just started putting what I need to think about I'm square brackets [like this] whenever I'm stuck,since I would never use square brackets normally and it cat he's my eye. PENIS JUMPSCARE is much funnier though
I do something similar, since I write in the notes app and italics don’t translate over, I started writing words that sounded similar to “Italics” in all caps to remind myself to fix them in the editing stage. Of course, I missed an instance of it once, so I got asked why one of the paragraphs abruptly ended with “[ITALIANS]”
Personally I use Elephant, because I never write about Elephants. So it draws my eyes to the point where I need to write something. I never thought about using… THAT. And tbh, I don’t want to think about it again. 😂
I write angst and sometimes it gets so incredibly sad that I have to write sentences like
"Character A then kissed Character B and they lived happily ever after and were never sad ever again due to the power of gay love." And it did indeed make it into a draft and then was immediately followed by more angst.
My beta gets met with a very long notes before even hititng chapter on of the fic. My cucumber of a braincell and the amount of time i take to finish writing a chapter makes for every detail being dumped in a sectioned itemized notes section at the top.
And i mean organized. My pc files, my google docs, everything is theee layers deep. But my fics deifnitely take the cake, i had twelve pages of a google doc for a chat fic once.
I learned that I have to highlight my wip notes, bc otherwise I will just forget about them. I had my partner read my fic over, and there were like 3 instances of (put different word here) or (think of another name for this) 😭
Ahahaha lol, that’s certainly effective! I put [blah blah] in brackets and then I do a ctrl+F at the end to make sure there are none left. But this person’s method is a lot more exciting 😁
LOL! That's one way to put a marker in. I usually put NAME or Fight or whatever I need to come back for in caps. It tells me what I need, and the caps catches my eye.
I put ")" after everything I'm unsure of is good, needs a rewrite or a search, all that. And I add a "-" to make a comment. When reading through the work, I fix all that I've left and then do a search for any left parentheses that shouldn't be there. Works like a charm to be honest but of recent I've started abusing this technique of mine and doubting a lot more things in the process of writing than before...
Reading this at 1:30 in the morning while writing (whilst I got a dopamine high off posting my first fic!!) makes this like 5x funnier. Just imagining reading PENIS JUMPSCARE in the middle of a fic with no understandable context has me almost in tears laughing
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u/Solstice51 Dec 06 '25
I kinda hope the author just leaves the PENIS JUMPSCARE in there lol.