I'm writting a book y'all. @aprilwritesabook - Tumblr Blog

When it feels like writing is impossible but you really really want to write anyway, just skip the bits that don't inspire. Write 15 openings of scenes and nothing else. Write that one emotional conversation with only the dialogue like a script. Write that one emotional conversation with none of the dialogue.

Be so self-indulgent you almost feel over-indulged by the end.

Sometimes you're torn between wanting to write but not having the spoons to actually do writing proper. So don't do it properly.

kataraqui

I'm done with modesty and low self-esteem. If Elon Musk is allowed the dystopic levels of cognitive dissonance necessary to believe in himself as a businessman, I'm allowed to think my gay little books about witches and werewolves having a hard time are hot shit.

Like, for YEARS I followed that nanowrimo doctrine of never editing before finishing a draft 'cause common wisdom states your inner-editor is a massive meanie, and the only way to finish a book is to push that editor off a cliff, but I have a clearance sale super power that allows me to forget instantly everything I've written, plus my current mood colours my perception of things. Which means if I'm in a bad mood, I believe it's because everything I wrote previously is irredeemable, steaming garbage, and I don't remember what I wrote so I have no objective evidence to the contrary.

Until I reread it and I'm like 'heeheee, i made funny joke' and also 'ohhh i really want these buttheads to kiss and i'm the god of this world so they're gonna.' I'm tired of it being taboo to like your own work. Boast. Love yourself an insufferable amount. Suck your own dick. It's all free and there's a cost of living crisis.

creekfiend

Ok so the thing about reading like books which are "predictable" is that I, a story enjoyer, go completely bonkers about it bc its like Enrichment in my Enclosure. A scene parallels another earlier scene between different characters thus serving to highlight the differences in their views and priorities???? A line makes me think "hmmm I bet that's gonna be relevant later" ends up being relevant later????? I am a tiger chewing ice cubes out of a pumpkin. I'm so so happy. Please foreshadow more things. Throw the completely anticipateable plot beats at me like catnip mousies!!!!!

gallusrostromegalus

I love playing author tag, as both a reader and a writer. I love hooting like a gibbon when I see the author doing Thematic Parallels or Blatant Foreshadowing. I love writing that shit. I love reading someone in the comments of my work going "ITS THE THIIIIIING!!" I go feral "YES ITS THE THING!! THANK YOU FOR SEEING THAT!!! I WORKED VERY HARD ON IT!!"

It's the writing version of picking up on how a movie special effect was done and going Oooooh because it still works, and if anything it works even more and looks even cooler now that you know its Playtex and wires. Its Playtex and wires AND a dinosaur! It's a flagrant waving around of a prop we will use later, and a suspense builder! It's good!!!

@sketchy-panda

I made this callout meme for me and me specifically

poorquentyn

It puzzles me when people cite LOTR as the standard of “simple” or “predictable” or “black and white” fantasy. Because in my copy, the hero fails. Frodo chooses the Ring, and it’s only Gollum’s own desperation for it that inadvertently saves the day. The fate of the world, this whole blood-soaked war, all the millennia-old machinations of elves and gods, comes down to two addicts squabbling over their Precious, and that is precisely and powerfully Tolkien’s point.

And then the hero goes home, and finds home a smoking desolation, his neighbors turned on one another, that secondary villain no one finished off having destroyed Frodo’s last oasis not even out of evil so much as spite, and then that villain dies pointlessly, and then his killer dies pointlessly. The hero is left not with a cathartic homecoming, the story come full circle in another party; he is left to pick up the pieces of what was and what shall never be again.

And it’s not enough. The hero cannot heal, and so departs for the fabled western shores in what remains a blunt and bracing metaphor for death (especially given his aged companions). When Sam tells his family, “Well, I’m back” at the very end, it is an earned triumph, but the very fact that someone making it back qualifies as a triumph tells you what kind of story this is: one that is too honest to allow its characters to claim a clean victory over entropy, let alone evil.

“I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I’m naked in the dark. There’s nothing–no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I can see him with my waking eyes.”

So where’s this silly shallow hippie fever-dream I’ve heard so much about? It sounds like a much lesser story than the one that actually exists.

sophiamcdougall

+1 You know how Frodo leaves Sam with the legacy of the quest - the job of bearing witness to what happened - and the duty to finish and protect his writings? Tolkien lost all but one of his friends in WW1. He was founder member of a literary club at school - the TCBS. There was a larger group and a core of four. They all stayed friends, they kept writing and sharing their work with each other. And they were almost all killed. One of them, Geoffrey Smith, wrote this to Tolkien in 1916. My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight – I am off on duty in a few minutes – there will still be left a member of the great T.C.B.S. to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon. […] May God bless you my dear John Ronald and may you say things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them if such be my lot. And that was his last letter. There’s something eerie about the way he seems to have pegged Tolkien as an eventual survivor. Sam’s survival (and his emergence as the true hero of the book) are beautiful because they’re suffused with loss, because they’re not the grand conquering heroic narrative that on some level was “supposed” to happen.

vulgarweed

Tolkien possibly only survived because he got trench fever - a particularly nasty disease carried by lice - and got sent home because he was desperately ill. Considering how the rest of his unit fared, it probably saved his life. Unpleasant and unglamorous, but if not for that, we wouldn’t have LOTR. I’m sure survivor’s guilt was a factor - as was a sickening sense of dread when “The War to End All Wars” didn’t, and his son went off to WWII.

TLOTR has some of the type of valorization of war that you find in the Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature that JRRT loved and studied and taught because he loved that style and it’s deeply fitting for cultures like the Rohirrim, but it’s also full of the slog of war, the waste and tragedy, and the irrevocable damage that even victorious survivors carry for the rest of their lives. Frodo’s symbolic “death” is also resonant for survivors of what was called “shell-shock” then and PTSD now.

I mean, it’s not Game of Thrones. It’s not gritty in the same way. But the protagonist of LOTR was minor gentry from a backwater nobody’d heard of, and the REAL hero who saved the world by saving him was his gardener. All the great kings and queens and lords and ladies in the story are background characters compared to the story of the little people. Literally little people, but symbolically too.

gayharoldfinch

“I mean, it’s not Game of Thrones. It’s not gritty in the same way”

well thank fuck for that

feynites

People are confused by the fact that the villains are unquestionably villainous.

What’s happened is that they’ve mistaken a specific brand of subversive storytelling for the only way to tell a morally complex story. The fact that subversion is relative to what you’re talking about has gotten muddied, because people have gone and labelled a certain plot type (which is actually a new fantasy staple in and of itself) as the ‘grey’ or ‘morally complex’ storyline.

This type of storyline is, of course, the one where the distinctions between heroes and villains are deliberately blurred. While there is definitely room to do things like ‘question the accuracy of the heroes’ perception of orcs’ in LotR, it’s also very clear that the canon narrative isn’t aiming for that. We know who the heroes are and we know who the villains are, and apart from some stray moments of self-reflection or betrayal, this is never really brought into question.

People have grown accustomed to seeing only one kind of thing as ‘complex’, which has, ironically, over-simplified a lot of narrative approaches in speculative fiction and fantasy. The prevailing attitude right now is that you can’t call your story nuanced if you know who your bad guys are.

association-of-freed-people

Tolkien set the standard for high fantasy which still resonates a century after he began working on his cosmology. He infused the foundation with distilled truths of the human experience, Western spiritualism, and values that arise from this convergence.

Anyone who has read LOTR, the volumes of correspondence Tolkien wrote on his world, or any of the work curated by Christopher, will come to find depth and completeness that is unmatched in fiction as far as I’m concerned.

Far from being a simple “good vs evil” fairy story, LOTR takes place in the ruins of a fallen civilization. For some reason this is lost on casual fans even though it looms over the entire story.

The chronology of Middle-Earth is comprised of a long defeat with glimpses of sobering victory at great cost and sorrow for what was lost.

The nature of the principal antagonists in Melkor and Sauron, and how they relate to the Creator is fascinating. In instances they’re relatable and almost sympathetic. Its those moments when you find yourself understanding Morgoth/Melkor or Sauron that grant insight into the nature of our world and the ostensible motivations of evil.

Tolkien provides evil a purpose beyond itself, and this is what makes his fiction transcendent.

The story of the War of The Ring is a small victory in a war that’s raged since the dawn of time. It’s the end of an epoch and the world is further irreparably scarred. We see in the people who survive these tumults the wear and weight of the events upon them, they will never be the same.

And yet these trials endured by our protagonists provide the revelation.

They open a vista of deep love, hope, and the fall, without which the experience of redemption would be impossible.

Far from being a basic good guy bad guy story with magic rings, monsters and wizards, Tolkien is informing us that without traversing the darkest valley we may not experience fully the majesty of the summit.