why do we tell stories?

prev bookjoyworm, i go by Joy :) multifandom (and extremely unorganized about it) lotta critical role these days, She/They, Bisexual, I'm also over on Ao3 as bookjoyworm (previously crazyreader12), sometimes I knit stuff

[bardicindignation]

Final Chapter of But The Fighter Still Remains BE UPON YE

Holy shit y'all! We've got acrobatics, we've got sleep deprivation, we've got

And! We've got EARTH SHATTERING PERSONAL REVELATIONS!

the biggest shoutout to @cobaltsoulsearcher for being the best beta a person could ask for <3

[hockeyfinches]

i love Not to jump the gun here but with rozanov’s permission…? i think shane in that scene was feeling fiercely protective over another person for the first time in his life. so bowled over by the intensity of his own emotions that he stumbled back to his hotel room in a daze and immediately jerked off in the shower about it. “what if rozanov got arrested and i had to use my immense hockey wealth to bail him out of jail and it was winter in boston. so he had hypothermia. and he had to live with me while we sorted out the legal situation and i yelled at journalists for him and helped him with his paperwork and hired the best lawyer in the world and nursed him back to health and he was like “hollander……..you saved my life 🥺” and he fucked me soooo hard every night for stress relief (obviously he couldn’t fuck other people. due to the lawsuit) and we fell asleep in each other’s arms afterwards. because there’s only one bed in my apartment and he’s too tall for the couch” stuff like that. normal fantasies

[hockeyfinches]

top ten shane hollander shower fantasies:

• holding ilya’s hand while they cross a busy street full of hazards (potholes, roadworks, etc)

• rescuing ilya from kidnappers (he kicks down the door)

• rescuing ilya from a burning building (bridal carry)

• fighting in a gladiatorial ice hockey arena for ilya’s hand in marriage

• massaging ilya’s bad knee and ilya says with wonderment “wowww wow. shane you’re so good at this… you are better than every physical therapist on earth probably”

• saying “he asked for no pickles” to the mcdonalds cashier

• carrying ilya’s bags

• washing ilya’s hair

• applying o’keefes working hands cream to ilya’s calluses

• fuck or die

[hockeyfinches]

[nyxelestia]

For their fifth anniversary, they decide to do a vow renewal which is really just an excuse to have a crazy bachelor party since they didn't really get to do that for their actual wedding. The Centaurs "kidnap" Ilya and Shane has to 'fight' in a gladiatorial ice hockey arena made up of his friends and teammates in order to rescue his husband/win his husband's hand in vow-renewal. The real question is whether Ilya goes ham on his old clubbing closet for a damsel in distress outfit or if he just busts out the old gladiator costume again. I'm honestly on the fence about that one.

[bardicindignation]

...gladiator costume but he figures out how to Captain Kirk it so he can be on theme, slutty, and In Distress?

[lgbt-tiktoks]

Description: [A video of a woman riding a galloping horse bareback while holding a large rainbow flag.]

[nattousan]

i felt like these tags really added to the experience, thanks @cynderxdustypaws for your knowledge

[strike-another-match]

heartbreaking: well intentioned person who needs detailed instructions to function is giving extremely detailed instructions to person who gets overwhelmed with large volumes of information

[strike-another-match]

heartbreaking: well intentioned person who gets overwhelmed with large volumes of information is telling person who needs detailed instructions to function to just wing it

[audible301]

Gorgug Thistlespring I KNOW you have a very specific question for this man

[writers-solace]

I don't think Tolkien is a good fantasy writer because he scored the highest at some objective Best Fantasy Book Test that every fantasy writer has to take, I think he's a good fantasy writer because he created a world based on things that he was interested in. I feel like a lot of fantasy writers think that they need to create a whole language for their world because Tolkien did and obviously his books are the best so they have to emulate him, but Tolkien did that because he was a linguistics nerd. I think the lesson to be learned from him is not that you have to include elves and deep history and new languages, but that you have to write endlessly about the things you are a huge nerd about and use those things to create your fantasy world

[beacon-lamp]

hello beloveds ☺️

[iceslushii]

made an alternate version for the mutuals ive never spoken to

[thetreeofliberty]

You are appreciated

[spin-the-wheel-polls]

you have this superpower! BUT you have this side-effect

is it worth it?

yes!!

the side effect is bad but ITS WORTH IT

meh it's okay

the side effect makes it unusable/not worth it

Results/option I didn't think of

Voting ended onMay 20

[spin-the-wheel-polls]

you have this superpower! BUT you have this side-effect

is it worth it?

yes!!

the side effect is bad but ITS WORTH IT

meh it's okay

the side effect makes it unusable/not worth it

Results/option I didn't think of

Voting ended onMay 20

[concerningwolves]

favourite things about first drafts:

square brackets with notes to self mid-line like [does this make sense with worldbuilding?]

ah yes, Main Character and their closest friends, Unnamed Character A and Unnamed Character B.

bullshitting your way through something that you probably definitely need to research later

also square brackets to link up scenes. [scene transition idk] my beloved

the total freedom of word vomits

"I'll fix that later"

the moment when the world and characters start to gain a life of their own

pieces falling into place as you write that you were uncertain about before you started

the accomplishment of Made A Thing

[concerningwolves]

Not only is this allowed but it's something i encourage all writers of any kind to play with! :D

The idea that all writers know what to say all the time and just splash fully-formed drafts out one word after the other is false. There are some who can do it, but i think most of us... can't. Which is why we need tricks like square bracket notes! They're not cheats or lazy writing or some other flavour of Not Allowed, but instead really really important tools that we should use as much as we need to.

Some of the most helpful tricks I've collected over the years are:

make some notes in square brackets – e.g., I had to write a scene on a sailboat, but I know nothing about sailing so i literally just had notes like [boat part] and [how to do X thing?]. If you use square brackets as punctuation anyway, use something else like [[double square brackets]] or a unique letter combination like XY at the start of the note; the point is to pick something you can search for easily later on.

(You can also style inline comments in a different font/colour. Scrivener has an inline annotation feature; if you use Word, you can make a specific Style to make notes stand out at a glance, etc.)

bullet-point your way through any tricky parts – this can be pure stream-of-consciousness vague ideas. it only needs to make sense to me later. much more helpful than just leaving big blank gaps that Future Me has to work out how to fill, but also better than dwelling on a piece of writing forever.

use comment tools – mostly do this if I have ideas for alternate events and/or phrasing, or if I want to check something for continuity purposes.

write out of order – Best advice i ever got for academic writing is to know or even write your conclusion first and your introduction last, which your main argument in between. Similar principles apply in fiction, or any kind of creative writing. If there's a part of the essay that I can visualise clearly or a part of the story that is particularly exciting or important, I might write that first, then figure out how it fits/how everything fits around it.

keep a loose scenes and/or "outtakes" folder – anything that i write out of order goes here, along with any notes for how I think I want to incorporate it into the full text. In the same vein, if I delete something but don't know for sure it will never be relevent ever again, it gets cut and pasted into an outtakes folder.

Basic rule though is that you do not have to get your writing perfect on the first try. This is where drafts come in. The way I see it is to treat each draft as a fresh start – I create/open a new document (well, new Scrivener file) and start over as if from scratch. Each draft gets a narrower focus than the last. This is my process, as an example:

first draft is the word vomit. You do whatever you need to do to get it onto the page, and it can be terrible. In fact, it probably should be terrible. You can fix everything later. it's fine.

The second draft is a half-hearted cleanup attempt. I'll re-type everything because everything is subject to change, from the characters' personalities to the pacing to the order of events. It's all primordial goop, basically. i'm just poking and prodding and making a few adjustments, but mostly trying to create a more stable version of the first draft. All shortcut tricks continue to be my best friend.

By draft three I'll let myself copy-paste between documents if I'm particularly happy with a passage, but try not to get hung up on anything specific. I'll still make liberal use of square brackets etc. as I need to, but try to address as many from the previous draft as I can. This is where I get more brutal with making decisions and trying to fix parts of the story in place.

Draft four is usually my final draft, but there's literally no rules about how many drafts you're allowed to write. It's at this point that I try to keep square brackets etc. to a minimum (unless i've diverged significantly from the plot of a previous draft and having to rewrite large chunks), and make sure to address all the notes and problems encountered in previous drafts.

This is when I move on to revisions. Revisions are the "final do-overs", for me. I start them when I'm satisfied with all the large-scale aspects: plot and chronology; characters' personalities, motivations and arcs; large-scale pacing (so the over-arcing pace, rather than the pacing in individual scenes); backstories; and worldbuilding. I'll copy the last draft's document instead of starting with a blank one. First I run through those large scale things one more time and tweak until I'm happy, not just satisfied. Then I shrink my focus to in-scene pacing, dialogue, and the quality of the writing itself.

I'll also rewrite my plot outline between each draft, too. The act of actually re-writing stuff is very helpful for making your brain think about it.

Drafting like this isn't for everyone, but realising that you can just bullshit your way through chunks of text was a massive game-changer for me. Some people will do a draft, then work on something else, then come back and do another draft, work on something else, etc. Some people's drafting process will look more like what I consider to be revisions. Do whatever works for you. Just remember that from the moment you first decide you Want to Write a Thing to the moment you hit "post" or "publish" or give your manuscript over to a publisher, you can keep making as many changes as you like in any way you like. (And if you go the querying to traditional publishing route, you'll probably get suggestions for, and have space/time to make, changes to the manuscript quite far into the process).

[laurenkmoody]

Yes!!

I don't believe I've ever met two writers who have exactly the same process. Every writer I've spoken to about the craft of writing has their own process, usually developed over years and years of practice and trying things out.

For example, I don't rewrite at all, that sounds horrendous, I just save-as to create a new draft. I also get the big structure stuff done in outlining, but I'm a weirdo who writes 20k word outlines. As mentioned above, I am one of those people who needs space between drafts--or at least, between rough draft and first revision. And I do my first revision on paper, always. The human brain processes screens and hardcopy differently! I write all over my printed rough draft, and then go back to the doc and apply those edits and anything else that occurs to me at the time, so my draft 2 is more sort of draft 2.5??

There's a lot more, obviously, and it's different between novels and short stories (I don't print short stories unless I'm really struggling). But I'm always experimenting with different ways to write, and sometimes they work and sometimes I get stranded and have to go back to the drawing board. Some people have a lot more hand writing in the prep stages, in notebooks or on index cards--I visited someone once whose dining room walls were covered in butcher paper and index cards with pushpins!

So if you're a newbie writer, experiment! Read about a bunch of different ways to get those words down! Try new things! Put notes and placeholders and such in your drafts, write by the seat of your pants, try out the whole in-depth outline thing, revise every paragraph before moving on to the next one, whatever works!!

Also please feel free to come talk to me about it! I love hearing about how people write.

[offonaherosjourney]

What no one warned me about when I got into Discworld is that Terry Pratchett would completely ruin all my future footnote experiences. Now, whenever I read a book (even if it is an academic text!!) and see a superscripted number, my monkey brain makes my eyes drop to the bottom of the page asap, expecting a funny, poignant, memorable, and potentially life-altering little treat, and instead I get hit every time with the soul-crushing disappointment of McFarthy, G. et al. (1997)

[cal-kestis]

happy april 30th!

[bey]

Don’t invite me anywhere last minute I enjoy doing nothing so I need to know ahead of time if my plan to do nothing needs to be changed

[bana05]

This is legit and people don’t realize it.

[noahwyles]

“hey what are you doing?” “nothing”  “oh great! so you are avaliab-” “no you don’t understand. I’m doing nothing.” 

[embyrr922]

I’m doing nothing. Actively. It’s important.

[heroofthreefaces]

This is essential nothing I’m doing.

[octophat]

[earendil-was-a-mariner]

Bilbo: wait I get it now. The dragon is a metaphor for greed and power. We need to ‘defeat’ it by being humble when we get the treasure.

Thorin: Bilbo, for the last time, it’s a real dragon and it has my gold

[the-august-one]

[doctorprofessorsong]

As an older queer, allow me to say: the walls of the closet are load-bearing. It is our job as a community to stand in front of that door and tell everyone who wants to peek inside to fuck off.

There are so many reasons a person may choose not to come out and there is no reason a person would owe the public or a stranger that information. Certainly it's not owed simply because someone is famous.

We have fought for decades to make it safer for people to be open and authentic about themselves, but we are not yet there. And even if we were, the closet would still be something we need to maintain for those who are not ready to reveal that part of themselves.

[alexsiple]

the YOU WHO SWALLOWED A FALLING STAR tapestry is here... open for preorders now. thank you

[phantomrose96]

If you are a PET trying to help your HUMAN just remember the acronym WAY

Are you in the Way?

Are you in the wAy?

Are you in the waY?

If the answer to all three is YES then you are HELPING 👏👏👏