why-is-it-always-autumn:

why-is-it-always-autumn:

It’s good and cool to give your characters a single simple, straightforward, non-urgent, super-achievable goal that shouldn’t really cost anything or hurt anyone, make that the driving factor for most of their decisions, and then have the Plot do everything in its power to stop them.

Goals include but are not limited to:

• Wanting to go home
• Wanting people out of your house who shouldn’t be there
• Trying to find a reliable babysitter
• Trying to deliver a letter or package
• Trying to do a favor for someone
• Wanting to see a specific thing, place, or kind of animal
• Wanting to collect the money somebody owes you (the lower the debt the better)
• Trying to win a bet
• Wanting to punch a specific person in the face

shinesurge:

shinesurge:

Everybody has to start somewhere so I don’t usually like to put down resources that are clearly meant for beginners, but I do think if you’re seriously engaging with those Writer Tips Posts that say things like “HOW TO SHOW ANGER IN WRITING: they cross their arms” you do not need to be studying Writing Blogs you need to pay attention to other human beings more often.

Honestly being more intentional with your observation will fix a LOT of common problems with all kinds of different storytelling. A thing I see all the time in comics especially is an issue where it’s clear the writer learned to write dialogue by watching anime dubs rather than listening to real people conversing, or relying on iconic animation gestures rather than interpreting real life behavior. If you find yourself struggling literally just go hang out in different public spaces and watch what’s going on one or two days a week and I think it’ll help.

joy-and-whimsy-official:

faunawolf:

ir0n-angel:

lew-basnight:

sophie531896273240810891:

sophie531896273240810891:

sophie531896273240810891:

i spent $32 on this fucking bowl at the moma and at first i felt bad buying it bc it was so expensive but ive had a terrible day today and every time i look at my lil bowl im like :o) you know what. i can get through anything with this bowl by my side

i literally get what marie kondo was talking about now

bc everyone keeps requesting to see it filled :)

I don’t know how long I’ve been here. Time seems to pass differently. But the place is cozy and private so I have no complaints. And whenever I’m hungry, I go outside with my bowl and walk down the hill to the shore. Sometimes the lake is made of soup. Sometimes it’s huge pasta noodles the size of barges. Sometimes it’s breakfast cereal. Sometimes it’s dumplings the size of great whales. I dip my little bowl and take a portion and carry it back up to the house.

Today I found a new bowl! In its center is a little hill with a little house. I will carry it down to the shore and fill it up, and whomever lives in that little house can have a tiny portion of my meal. I hope they have a nice bowl to put it in..

Joy and whimsy! @joy-and-whimsy-official

Joy and whimsy detected! This post is joyful and whimsical!

derinthescarletpescatarian:

mistakenot4892:

books-bread-and-brigandage:

derinthescarletpescatarian:

derinthescarletpescatarian:

derinthescarletpescatarian:

derinthescarletpescatarian:

So one thing about writing about societies that are really different from your own is that you’re constantly having to reset your mind and filter natural ways of thinking and framing things for you, that would not be natural for your narrator. Most fantasy or scifi writers are familiar with The Cursing Problem (“how do I get across the simple energy of a good ‘fuck this’ or 'to hell with this’ without jarring your audience, in a society that doesn’t have a concept of an afterlife or heavy sexual taboos?”) but it crops up everywhere.

I’ve got my narrator who lives in a colony ship with a heavily planned economy and little to no use of personal currency. She’s explaining the differences between two types of elevators on the ship, one that just goes up a few (populated and pressurised) floors and one that has to travel to the middle of the big spinning ring they’re all on, so it’s a lot longer, much more difficult to maintain and upgrade, and things are much, much more dangerous if it breaks down. My automatic way to summarise the differences in difficulty between these was to call one “very expensive to maintain” and the other “much cheaper to maintain”. I’m just so used to abstracting materials, labour and maintenance frequency into terms of currency.

She Would Not Say That.

Writing scifi is a fucking landmine of this stuff. Every two paragraphs I’m ambushed by some completely innocuous-seeming sentence asking me “would I, this sentence, exist in this culture? If someone here said this, what would they actually be implying? Is it the same as what someone in the real world would be implying?”

#Sci fi is rife with this but also I am feeling this in Ice Age Story CONSTSNTLY#So many concepts have simply not been invented yet 30 thousand years ago

#OOOOO THATS RLY INTERESTING#you’re so right we’ve got all this. what curses would be in fantasy without the Christian god#or the concepts of heaven or hell and damning and like you said sexual taboo#but yeah scifi and prehistory too!!!!#it’s really really interesting#genuinely. as an outsider who doesn’t write. to see an inside into the process. and esp as someone who enjoys scifi a lot#thinking abt snow crash and seveneves n stuff. Neal Stephenson my beloved#writing ref

If it helps, most fantasy writers turn “oh, god” into “oh, gods” (polytheism is common in fantasy) and most scifi writers use something like “oh, stars”. But it’s always good to get a little more specific and personal, where appropriate.

#could also borrow from the Dutch who swear using diseases#a model that seems curiously rare in other languages I’ve learned#didn’t Aspen curse using the concept of root rot?

Most of Aspen’s curses were plant ecology related, Aspen was fun

Pern used “shards” as a curse becase dragon eggs were that precious.

Writing a pokemon fanfic from the perspective of a pokemon with a very foul mouth presented some interesting challenges. There’s no Hell in Pokemon and the closest analogue is like three full syllables, shit’s a mess.

I assume your pokemon’s internal narration is in English but I can’t stop thinking of the concept of “The pokemon says its own name again, but in a tone that makes it feel like it should be censored unlike all the other times it said its name..”.

preheville:

Do you think your identity as an older sister informs your tone as a writer?

Yeah, because you’re kind of always telling somebody what to do, or how to feel or how to react. Even my inner monologue is didactic, or sort of like someone’s along with me. I don’t think, “Okay, I’m going to walk down the street and turn left.” I think, “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to walk down the street, we’re going to turn left, and we’re going to have to wait at the cross light.” It’s always “we.” And I don’t know who the other person is yet. I think it’s everybody.

Jazmine Hughes, On learning to write professionally

preheville:

Instead of describing the theory in abstract form, we shall begin by considering some concrete examples. Take, for instance, the English word ‘weed’. One dictionary defines this word as 'wild herb springing where it is not wanted’, in short, an undesirable, unwanted herb. Now in the world of objective reality, that is, in the realm of nature, there is no such thing as an 'undesirable’ herb; such a thing can exist only in the sight of man, who looks at the infinite complexity of natural objects, puts them in order, and evaluates them in accordance with his various purposes. The concept of 'weed’ is the result of such a process of ordering, sorting out, evaluating, and categorizing. It embodies, in this sense, a particular point of view, a particular subjective attitude of the human mind.

The common-sense view simply and naively assumes the existence of a direct relationship between words and reality. Objects are therein the first place, then different names are attached to them as labels. In this view, the word 'table’ means directly this concrete thing which exists before our eyes. But the example of the word 'weed’ clearly shows that this is not the case; it shows that between the word and the thing there intervenes a peculiar process of subjective elaboration of reality. Our minds not only passively reflect the structure of reality, but more positively look at reality from a particular point of view, a particular angle; and it is this mental activity, which the Germans call Geist, that makes the thing really exist for us. There is a certain act of creativity, an elaboration of the given material in a certain direction, between reality and language. And that precisely is the proper domain of Meaning. In modern terminology, this may be expressed by saying that each word represents a particular linguistic categorization of nonlinguistic reality. But categorization necessarily implies the mental process of gathering many different things into a unity, and this is only possible on a certain principle. This principle is the particular angle from which man approaches reality, and it is conditioned culturally and historically.

Toshihiko Izutsu, Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qur'an

writing-is-a-martial-art:

happydivorce:

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flipocrite:

makomoriz:

arthoesunshine:

i like to pretend i already died and asked god to send me back to earth so i can swim in lakes again and see mountains and get my heart broken and love my friends and cry so hard in the bathroom and go grocery shopping 1,000 more times. and that i promised i would never forget the miracle of being here

Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, Amy Krouse Rosenthal

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bittersweetresilience:

one of my favorite things to do in limited perspective is write sentences about the things someone doesn’t do. he doesn’t open his eyes. he doesn’t reach out. i LOVE sentences like that. if it’s describing the narrator, it’s a reflection of their desires, something they’re holding themselves back from. there’s a tension between urge and action. it makes you ask why they wanted or felt compelled to do that, and also why they ultimately didn’t. and if it’s describing someone else, it tells you about the narrator’s expectations. how they perceive that other person or their relationship. what they thought the other person was going to do, or thought the other person should have done, but failed to. negative action sentences are everything.

preheville:

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new substack post … first in a million years!