How I write
Subjective advice on wordsmithing
Over a period of 9-ish months, I wrote the manuscript for Inkvein, which is around 100k words (whilst I did layout, illustration, and playtesting). Before that, I was typically writing for a number of days every week for TTRPG endeavours.
I know the life of having to write a lot. But Inkvein has been my biggest writing endeavour and it forced me to figure out a way to write in large volumes regularly.
Folks have been asking me about how to write with regularity. I can’t say that this is a good approach, it’s just my approach. And it probably comes across as weird. But maybe it will help you if you are looking to put more words on the page, whether that be TTRPG stuff, blogging, fiction, or something else.
Daydream
Daydream as often as you can.
I daydream a lot. I probably spend at least 10 minutes of every hour (often much more) actively daydreaming in a fictional space. I intentionally explore ideas and fantastical spaces in my mind as often as I can.
I paint scenes in my head, I imagine what it’s like to stand in a world that isn’t our own, I think about what a tree might have seen in the hundreds of years it has stood. That kind of nonsense. Imagination is a muscle: if you train it every hour, creative writing is a lot easier.
Delve for strong feelings
Draw from what consistently moves you.
I’m a big believer that good writers fuel their work with strong emotions, and they often have an emotional language that defines their work.
I identify things that consistently move me, stuff where it feels like the only way I can make it settle is to do something with it creatively, and I dig deep into it. Things like:
Climate change
Human arrogance
Anti-intellectualism
Failures of empathy
The power of silence
The weight of emptiness and isolation
The beauty of nature and architecture
Exploitation of the powerless
The fragility of the human mind and the body
The psychology of desperation and greed
The horror of violence and war
How untrustworthy people are, especially those with power
Contrasts of scale
The burden of regret
Failure
It’s pretty clear my ‘palette’ tends to be about fear, disgust, scepticism, nature, and negative reflections on human behaviour. It’s about collecting the ugliness I see in the world like scrap metal and hammering into a weird word-sculpture.
These are better for me than explicit media references as a basis for writing projects. Feelings for reference material are fleeting, and references are sometimes too specific. I try to hold onto something that’s deep set within my head, that reaches far and wide.
Find what will always move you and channel it into words.
As a recent example, I visited a city (that shall rename nameless to protect its identity). I was reminded of how much cities make my skin crawl. I recalled of all the unpleasantness I see in them as I walk their streets, how they feel like a stomach digesting crowds of people without their knowing.
And I felt compelled to do something with that feeling in the future, to create something that conveys the way dense urban landscapes make me feel.
Those are the sorts of things I draw from. Bad stuff is always happening in the world, but it felt like a lot of things slid backwards in 2025 and 2026, or maybe I just became more aware of them. The way that made me feel was poured into Inkvein.
Doodle constantly (with words)
Always be writing (but use broken language freely).
You don’t have to write complete sentences to get started. Often, throughout the day, I will grab a notebook and scribble some words down.
Great bridges of metal. Rust falls like snow under the arches. It stings.
This isn’t about recording ideas. If the idea is strong enough, I will remember it. It’s about using those imagination muscles and committing the exercise to paper. Link this up with daydreaming and you’ll be in a background creative flow pretty much all day, even as you are busy with other stuff.
One of the first things I wrote regarding Inkvein was: “What would you give for a drop of Ink?” It makes no sense in isolation, but it captured an unsettling feeling that I knew would be the core of the work.
Dig a hole, dive in
Get so immersed you have to write.
I’ve identified strong feelings that aren’t leaving. I’m daydreaming and ‘doodling’. Which means I’m digging myself a deep fictional hole that I can jump into, a rich headspace that will, in a way, consume me.
I jump in. I let all my ideas and feelings on the themes and concepts that are spinning around my head coalesce.
The fictional headspace I’ve made feels so real that I need to do the closest thing to making it real and exploring it: writing about it (and painting/drawing it). It becomes a compulsion, rather than a choice. And that keeps me writing for multiple days a week for months on end.
That’s it. That’s how I write. No specific routine, no media reference searching, no set procedure.
See. Told ya it was weird.
It might be weird, but I think it is brilliant and fascinating. But I am strange and weird myself. Trying to find strange ways to invert what is known into some different and strange.