have confidence in your book. talk about your worldbuilding like you have readers who study it. talk about your characters like people know who they are. get hyped about your projects because excitement is contagious. if you’re excited about them, other people will be, too.
characters whose eyes change color due to some event in the course of their story. magical trauma? deal with the devil? moral corruption? fucked up a spell that one time and now their left eye is permanently baby blue? just… let their eyes change color!
I love when you’re reading multiple fics by the same author and you start to spot all the phrases and adjectives they like to use
I ghostwrote these tags my god
image one: tags. #it’s one of those things that is charming and wonderful to notice in other ppl but terminally annoying to notice in your own work #like……reading a fic and just hearing the writer’s voice and it feels SO!! like Them?? is so cozy delicious tasty #seeing how they maneuver their sentence structure and the way they phrase things #I??? LOVE!!!!! #but then ur rereading ur own work sittin there like?????? when????? will this bitch ??? write anything else???? not like this??? WHEN????
image two: tweet. “People hate their own art because it looks like they made it. They think if they get better, it will stop looking like they made it. A better person made it. But there’s no level of skill beyond which you stop being you. You hate the most valuable thing about your art.”
Was wishing there was a positivity post for original fiction writers since I see so many about how fanfic writers are doing so much for their communities even when they’re not actively writing, and then I thought:
Be the change you want to see in the world.
So this is a positivity post for the writers out here who are working very hard on stories with no established community. Who can’t talk about their blorbos and plot lines and brainstorming to anyone and expect them to know what any of it means. Who don’t have much to share publicly, but are hoping they will one day.
You’re doing a lot of hard work, and I recognize and appreciate what you’re putting into the world, even when you’re resting.
Reblogging for all of my Original Fiction mutuals. I see you. I love your works. You’re working hard, and I RESPECT you 👏👏👏
Zoom In, Don’t Glaze Over: How to Describe Appearance Without Losing the Plot
You’ve met her before. The girl with “flowing ebony hair,” “emerald eyes,” and “lips like rose petals.” Or him, with “chiseled jawlines,” “stormy gray eyes,” and “shoulders like a Greek statue.”
We don’t know them.
We’ve just met their tropes.
Describing physical appearance is one of the trickiest — and most overdone — parts of character writing. It’s tempting to reach for shorthand: hair color, eye color, maybe a quick body scan. But if we want a reader to see someone — to feel the charge in the air when they enter a room — we need to stop writing mannequins and start writing people.
So let’s get granular. Here’s how to write physical appearance in a way that’s textured, meaningful, and deeply character-driven.
1. Hair: It’s About Story, Texture, and Care
Hair says a lot — not just about genetics, but about choices. Does your character tame it? Let it run wild? Is it dyed, greying, braided, buzzed, or piled on top of her head in a hurry?
Good hair description considers:
Texture (fine, coiled, wiry, limp, soft)
Context (windblown, sweat-damp, scorched by bleach)
Emotion (does she twist it when nervous? Is he ashamed of losing it?)
Flat: “Her long brown hair framed her face.”
Better: “Her ponytail was too tight, the kind that whispered of control issues and caffeine-fueled 4 a.m. library shifts.”
You don’t need to romanticise it. You need to make it feel real.
2. Eyes: Less Color, More Connection
We get it: her eyes are violet. Cool. But that doesn’t tell us much.
Instead of focusing solely on eye color, think about:
What the eyes do (do they dart, linger, harden?)
What others feel under them (seen, judged, safe?)
The surrounding features (dark circles, crow’s feet, smudged mascara)
Flat: “His piercing blue eyes locked on hers.”
Better: “His gaze was the kind that looked through you — like it had already weighed your worth and moved on.”
You’re not describing a passport photo. You’re describing what it feels like to be seen by them.
3. Facial Features: Use Contrast and Texture
Faces are not symmetrical ovals with random features. They’re full of tension, softness, age, emotion, and life.
Things to look for:
Asymmetry and character (a crooked nose, a scar)
Expression patterns (smiling without the eyes, habitual frowns)
Evidence of lifestyle (laugh lines, sun spots, stress acne)
Flat: “She had a delicate face.”
Better: “There was something unfinished about her face — as if her cheekbones hadn’t quite agreed on where to settle, and her mouth always seemed on the verge of disagreement.”
Let the face be a map of experience.
4. Bodies: Movement > Measurement
Forget dress sizes and six packs. Think about how bodies occupy space. How do they move? What are they hiding or showing? How do they wear their clothes — or how do the clothes wear them?
Ask:
What do others notice first? (a presence, a posture, a sound?)
How does their body express emotion? (do they go rigid, fold inwards, puff up?)
Flat: “He was tall and muscular.”
Better: “He had the kind of height that made ceilings nervous — but he moved like he was trying not to take up too much space.”
Describing someone’s body isn’t about cataloguing. It’s about showing how they exist in the world.
5. Let Emotion Tint the Lens
Who’s doing the describing? A lover? An enemy? A tired narrator? The emotional lens will shape what’s noticed and how it’s described.
In love: The chipped tooth becomes charming.
In rivalry: The smirk becomes smug.
In mourning: The face becomes blurred with memory.
Same person. Different lens. Different description.
6. Specificity is Your Superpower
Generic description = generic character. One well-chosen detail creates intimacy. Let us feel the scratch of their scarf, the clink of her earrings, the smudge of ink on their fingertips.
Examples:
“He had a habit of adjusting his collar when he lied — always clockwise, always twice.”
“Her nail polish was always chipped, but never accidentally.”
Make the reader feel like they’re the only one close enough to notice.
Describing appearance isn’t just about what your character looks like. It’s about what their appearance says — about how they move through the world, how others see them, and how they see themselves.
Zoom in on the details that matter. Skip the clichés. Let each description carry weight, story, and emotion. Because you’re not building paper dolls. You’re building people.
What are some chronic illnesses that can only occur in a fantasy setting?
Partial transformation - mummy rot is slowly turning you to sand, a near miss from a medusa left you with partially stoned body parts, etc.
Hypnotic suggestions from being mind controlled persist after the controller’s death, causing the victim to occasionally take actions to support the cause of a mind flayer cult that no longer exists.
Repeated demonic possession has left the patient with permanent gaps in their soul’s defenses, causing them to immediately get re-possessed if they go outside a consecrated area.
Post-resurrection trauma as the revived soul remembers an unpleasant afterlife.
Magical healing can get very weird if something is stuck in the wound. It’ll get you back on your feet, but you can get outcomes like “there’s a chunk of wood fused into your chest because the magic couldn’t figure out how to get the arrow out of your chest and just healed it in place,” and this can cause mobility issues or infection vectors down the line.
SHealth tied to something else - the health of a tree, the amount of frost on the ground, the inverse of another person’s, the political power of whoever cursed you
Curse of bad luck - makes any small illness or injury potentially fatal if not treated with anti-curse in addition to anti-infection procedures
Magical reliance on a magical or nonmagical substance - can have any number of side effects
Repeatedly being drunk by vampires can cause an increase in blood production and therefore high blood pressure and related ailments. Can be treated by blood letting.
There’s a lot of hybridization happening in a lot of fantasy settings, and that’s just asking for a lot of people with weird half-dragon genetic disorders. Works out fine for some people, not so much for others.
Parasitized by (insert creature here). If you don’t take the correct precautions to keep it dormant it will continue to spread and eventually hatch out/transform you.
Repeated contact with the undead has left you open to their influence - leading to hearing or seeing things that other mortals can’t, which can distort or distract from more mundane concerns.
Alternately to being more vulnerable to intrusion, one’s soul can form a scar that makes helpful magic more difficult to take in.
Sleep disorders that make one fall into an impenetrable sleep at a specific trigger, or to do so for years at a time.
Out of phase with 4D space, one’s body not connected to itself or anchored in place/time in the usual way. There could be a consistent two hour gap between the things you hear and what has happened, you might clip into the floor as if it was in a different place for you, or you might slide through the material plane in cross section.
Intermittent intangibility.
Split into two people, each with only half your traits.
Stuck in a mirror.
Sensitivity to ambient magic - like the thing where peoples’ joints ache before a storm but for being near ley lines or people with a lot of magic built up or other magic reservoirs. - The potential for magic, but where the magic has not yet begun.
Heal spell dependency: years of repeated serious injuries being healed by magic causes the body to stop healing naturally. seen often in professional fighters and those with a long career in hazardous occupations.
the forgotten dread: memory modification magic has caused the subject’s conscious mind to forget some past trauma, but their subconscious still remembers, causing them emotions that they cannot explain or justify ranging from mild discomfort to blind panic when presented with triggers related to the aforementioned trauma. often encountered in cases where the subject has paid an unscrupulous mage to make them forget their past as an ill-advised alternative to therapy.
Psychically Transmitted Memories: the subject’s mind has been linked to another person’s and, although the bond has since been severed, they have retained memories or thought patterns from the other person that are difficult to distinguish from their own.
Negative Life Syndrome (previously “False Life Syndrome”): seen most often in cases when the subject is exposed to dark magic while in the womb, Negative Life Syndrome leaves the subject’s life energies tainted by undeath without making them truly undead. common symptoms include intolerance of radiant magic, aversion to sunlight, and the inability to set foot on hallowed ground; rare symptoms include healing from negative energies, sudden necrosis, and the desire to eat flesh or drink blood of living beings.
lycanthropy
Early Life Possessions: the subject was possessed by a spirit or demon during early childhood or infancy, and the possessing presence was in control of them when they learned important milestones, such as how to walk or speak. The subject is now dependant upon the possessing presence to help them perform these tasks or, in cases where the presence has since been exorcised, performs the relevant tasks at a level appropriate for an infant or small child.
Body requires nutrients not found in human food, and you must eat rocks, or gems, or some other alternative. You may or may not have the ability to actually digest these without magical assistance
Awareness of too many dimensions makes it difficult to interact with just this one - either to keep track of conversations, or walk to specific locations without ending up on another planet instead
Telekinetic psychosis - delusions tend to physically affect those around you (but HIGH chance for ableism in this one!)
you have flare-ups where your skin tends to slough off and be replaced by some other substance
After sharing life energy with a dying loved one, you’re now both trying to survive off one person’s supply. Like chronic fatigue, but if your loved one gets too big of a bruise you won’t have the energy to get up until it heals
living in reverse
stuck at a certain age
supersenses lead to constant overstimulation
you’re a changeling, and if you don’t have someone who loves you close by, you’ll turn back into sticks and mud
One that I like is the idea that paladins (and anybody else with supernatural immunity to disease) have their own “disease” in the form of severe allergies. If you’re magically insulated from ever catching any disease, ever, your immune system isn’t getting any kind of natural use. So it overreacts to everything. Being immune to being sick makes them “sick.”
Mages that have complications of their own magic, such as Pyromancers overheating if they don’t let off a fireball now and then, or conversely, being prone to hypothermia and needing their fire magic in order to stay warm.
em dash is so fucking sexy. puts her in a paragraph 8 times.
People in the notes are telling me the opinions of Twitter and Reddit users. Let me make myself clear: redditors and Twitter users are not people to me. I do not value their opinions on my hot wife, the em dash. Puts her in a paragraph 20 times.
I was at a romance novel convention last week and one of the big takeaways that I think we should talk about more is how pretty much all authors have low self-esteem? And we should all be working on that?
Like, I was meeting authors whose work I really admire, who are doing cool stuff in this genre, and they were like, “oh but you’re a REAL author, not like me, who is nothing.” And as incorrect as I thought that was I would turn around and be faced with a really REALLY important-to-me author and go “well, they’re a real author, unlike me, a loser” and this has got to stop.
From now on I am a KING. I am the ruler of my small but mighty backlist and I am greeting the other leaders with hearty guffaws and backslaps. We are metaphorically wearing ermine-trimmed cloaks and quaffing mead from goblets. Look at my fellow champions of art and magic!! We make books!!!!
COSIGNED SO HARD. And I completely agree, and I’ve both done that myself and seen it from others. Open your eyes and look around! Look at how many people like your work! Look at how much YOU like your work! Presumably! (And if you don’t like your work, that’s something to think about – what would you change that would help you love it as much as you deserve to love it??)
i feel like something that’s missing from some people’s understanding of kink fiction and fantasy is, like… in fiction and fantasy, everything is in-scene.
when real people do kink in real life, you gotta do all that good out-of-scene stuff like discuss boundaries, set limits and expectations, check in with each other, do aftercare, et cetera et cetera et cetera… but in fiction, everything can be in-scene!
the people in that fanfic don’t exist any more than, like, the make-believe sexy football star and make-believe sexy cheerleader in a couple’s roleplay exist. that couple doesn’t need to get into character and then pretend to be a sexy football star having an important consent conversation with a sexy cheerleader, because that’s a conversation that’s already happened out-of-scene and out-of-character. (i mean, if you’re into in-character negotiations, chase your bliss.) when they’re in that scene, they can just pretend to be a sexy football star having sex with a sexy cheerleader. that’s okay.
so like. when fiction does kink in a way that would be unsafe or harmful irl… just keep in mind that you’re not watching actual people neglecting check-ins or ignoring their set contract or genuinely harming each other. you’re watching a scene without the behind-the-scenes bits, and that’s okay.
this has gotten a couple replies along the lines of “yeah, you can just assume the characters worked all the important consent stuff out when you weren’t looking!” which is true in some cases, but not the point i was trying to make, so please bear with me while i try to rephrase myself.
when i say in fiction, everything is in-scene, i mean that the fiction IS the scene.
if someone went up to their partner and said “hey, wouldn’t it be sexy if we pretended you were manipulating and controlling me in an unethical way for sex reasons?”, and then they talked through all the good and necessary consent and risk-awareness things, and then they played that scene out - that’s a made-up scenario where pretend bad things happen, but no real-world people come to real-world harm, right?
now, if someone writes a story where one character manipulates and controls another in an unethical way for sex reasons… that, too, is a made-up scenario where pretend bad things happen, but no real-world people come to real-world harm.
kink fiction doesn’t have to be about characters consciously and conscientiously Doing Kink. kink fiction can be stories where the kinky things people fantasize about or roleplay (but wouldn’t want to happen in real life) do happen in the universe of that story. because the story is a scene.
i think eventually we’re all just gonna have to come to terms with the fact that it’s impossible to tell a story with any degree of subtlety or nuance without risking a portion of the audience taking the “wrong message”, and that’s ok. art isn’t meant to be strictly a teaching tool, and if you’re goal is just to convince people or critique an idea, just write an essay or a polemic
people taking the “wrong message” from a story isn’t a failure of that story, it’s a function of art itself
editing is so funny because it’s like “damn, i wrote ‘before’ two times within three paragraphs. they are going to stone me in the town square for this”
the Writer Mood™ when you’ve got the shadow of a concept of a scene and a couple lines of dialogue bouncing around in your head like a screensaver and you have to be like buddy, come back when you’re something coherent. i can’t do anything with this.
