Highly Un-Classified

Short Stories, Inspirational Quotes, Unpopular Opinions, & Snarky Comments

[samantha-evergreen]

[leanne-on-me]

HERE ARE SOME SEVENTEEN WRITERS NO ONE SHOULD SLEEP/MISS OUT ON.

Putting out your work out there for the world to see is hard enough. But the silence that you get when the world doesn’t seem to see the gems you have put out. is. harder.

Hello, loves! This is a very sleepy Leanne disturbing your dashboards loool! Please reblog this not-so-complete list of SVT writers that no one should be sleeping on! I originally thought of making this list so I would have an easier way of finding which blogs to read fics from, but when I visited some blogs and saw the talent that weren’t getting the feedback they deserved (because some are really good but would only have 1 note; imagine: 1 note for a fic that you wrote so painstakingly?), my heart truly broke into pieces.

So please, if you are a writer, reblog this so your followers could see these people; and if you are a reader, then you and I are the same: we have a lot to read up on! 

I separated this list into four groups, to show you guys how I got to know them. And if you know more writers that are not included on this list, please tag them as well!

Keep reading

[beingcassyrose]

Hi! I’m a new writer here. I just found your blog, and I really like your writing style! How long have you been writing?

I have been writing for as long as I can remember. Mostly journaling and short stories, but I have always had a passion to put the pen to paper.

For new writers, I always suggest writing down all your ideas. Whether it is on a sticky note, napkin, random scrap paper, or your notebook or phone.

As for writing style, my writing comes from my experiences. Things I have gone through and relate to.

So my advice is to create as many new experiences you can and write about them. Give your characters challenges and hobbies and odd quirks.

Write what you would want to read.

Thanks for the question :)

[the-wanna-be-writer]

[starfragmrnts]

how i read books

• open book

• close book

• open tumblr

• turn on music

• open book

• get distracted by 182837272284 things

OR

• binge read an entire series for 3 days straight without leaving my room

[beingcassyrose]

TRUTH

[beingcassyrose]

[weaver-z]

Divergent is a bad book, but its accidental brilliance is that it completely mauled the YA dystopian genre by stripping it down to its barest bones for maximum marketability, utterly destroying the chances of YA dystopian literature’s long-term survival 

[thatbassistbitch]

please elaborate

[weaver-z]

Sure. Imagine that you need to make a book, and this book needs to be successful. This book needs to be the perfect Marketable YA Dystopian.

So you build your protagonist. She has no personality traits beyond being decently strong-willed, so that her quirks and interesting traits absolutely can’t get in the way of the audience’s projection onto her. She is dainty, birdlike, beautiful despite her protestations that she is ugly–yet she can still hold her own against significantly taller and stronger combatants. She is the perfect mask for the bashful, insecure tweens you are marketing to to wear while they read.

You think, as you draft your novel, that you need to add something that appeals to the basest nature of teenagers, something this government does that will be perversely appealing to them. The Hunger Games’ titular games were the main draw of the books, despite the hatred its characters hold for the event. So the government forces everyone into Harry Potter houses. 

So the government makes everyone choose their faction, their single personality trait. Teenagers and tweens are basic–they likely identify by one distinct personality trait or career aspiration, and they’ll thus be enchanted by this system. For years, Tumblr and Twitter bios will include Erudite or Dauntless alongside Aquarius and Ravenclaw and INTJ. Congratulations, you just made having more than one personality trait anathema to your worldbuilding. 

Your readers and thus your protagonist are naturally drawn to the faction that you have made RIDICULOUSLY cooler and better than the others: Dauntless. The faction where they play dangerous games of Capture the Flag and don’t work and act remarkably like teenagers with a budget. You add an attractive, tall man to help and hinder the protagonist. He is brooding and handsome; he doesn’t need to be anything else. 

The villains appear soon afterward. They are your tried and true dystopian government: polished, sleek, intelligent, headed by a woman for some reason. They fight the protagonists, they carry out their evil, Machiavellian, stupid plan. You finish the novel with duct tape and fanservice, action sequences and skin and just enough glue and spit to seal the terrible, hollow world you have made shut just long enough to put it on the shelf. 

And you have just destroyed YA dystopian literature. Because you have boiled it down to its bare essentials. A sleek, futuristic government borrowing its aesthetic from modern minimalism and wealth forces the population to participate in a perversely cool-to-read-about system like the Hunger Games or the factions, and one brave, slender, pretty, hollow main character is the only one brave–no, special enough to stand against it. 

And by making this bare-bones world, crafted for maximum marketability, you expose yourself and every other YA dystopian writer as a lazy worldbuilder driven too far by the “rule of cool” and the formulas of other, better dystopian books before yours. In the following five years, you watch in real time as the dystopian genre crumbles under your feet, as the movies made based on your successful (but later widely-panned and mocked) books slowly regress to video-only releases, as fewer and fewer releases try to do what you did. And maybe you realize what you’ve done.

[roach-works]

one quibble: hunger games was intense and sincere and the writer had worked for tv and knew exactly what she was talking about when she wrote how media machines create golden idols out of abused kids and then leave the actual people inside their glamorous shells to rot. hunger games had a genuine core of righteous anger that resonated with a lot of people. the hunger games was genuinely angry about shit that is genuinely wrong. 

but divergent was clumsy make-believe the whole way through. it aped the forms and functions of dystopian lit but the writer didn’t actually have any real, passionate, sincere anger to put on the page. she didn’t know what it was talking about, so she didn’t have anything worth listening to.

there’s a difference between anti-authoritarianism as a disaffected, cynical pose and anti-authoritarianism as a rallying cry by people who believe in a bitter world. and the former is something corporations and industries and publishing houses are so much more comfortable with. so divergent and the flood of books published and marketed alongide and after it showed how the dystopian genre was no longer truly revolutionary, no longer a sincere condemnation of corporate oligarchies. the mass-market dystopian genre was now nothing more than an insincere playspace for people who were writing dystopia as a safely distant, abstract make-believe stage for their pretty girl heroes, rather than a direct allegory for everything that needs to be torn down in this world today. 

[jackawful]

This is the second branch of this post I’ve reblogged and like the fourth I’ve seen and I’m just thinking about how the Uglies series, a pre-Hunger Games forerunner of the YA Dystopia boom, had significantly less staying power than it could have specifically because…with the toxic beauty standards forced on teenagers being a Big Theme, studios couldn’t figure out how to make a profitable movie out of it. The book got optioned multiple times, but a film version made in Hollywood was destined to fall apart at casting & makeup - their marketing methods relied on exactly what the series was criticizing, which is…part of what made it so popular with teenage girls to begin with.

You contrast that with how the marketing for the Hunger Games films directly contradicts the messaging of the text, and how Divergent seems ready-made for the big screen, and it becomes really apparent why the genre folded in on itself. Capitalism tried to recuperate dystopian fiction criticizing capitalism, and in doing so, butchered the genre.

There’s also something rattling around my brain about a correlation between how made-for-screen a dystopian book is and how much it Doesn’t Understand Dystopia, with the culmination being Ready Player One, a piece set in a dystopia that somehow still actively glorifies capitalism & that was literally optioned for film before the book was published, but I don’t…know how to expand on that point.

[beingcassyrose]

[beingcassyrose]

[relatablepoetryandquotes]

“I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it.” - Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

[beingcassyrose]

Facing Trauma & Trying To Survive After

For many years I have kept busy. Working one to two full time jobs, completing my Associates degree, then my Bachelors, and now my Masters. Becoming a mother and being a full time parent on top of work and schooling. Being a wife and taking care of my family. Picking up hobbies, and pursuing art and advocacy programs and working with individuals from young children to senior citizens. 

Doing all of these things, and yet, I still feel like I am only surviving. 

It has been a challenge to come to terms with my losses, my grief, my mental health. 

Facing trauma in life can be a roller coaster effect. One day you can be completely fine and ready to take on the world and the next... Well, the next day you can feel hollow and relive every moment of pain, torture, abuse, negative thoughts, and ultimately the gut wrenching, heart sinking, chest tightening feeling you get when your mind will not allow you to move on. 

What do you do when you feel so alone and afraid to talk about the events that still haunt your nightmares begin to bombard your waking thoughts when you are not actively keeping your mind busy?

Today was one of those days. 

I am someone that people look at and do not expect the experiences I tell to have happened to them. You will rarely find a picture of me without a smile, I am kind to most people, and I work hard to accomplish my dreams. People do not see my scars, physical or emotional, and I do not go about sharing my tales of woe. 

I look like anybody else. Everybody has gone through difficult times, but no one expects a list of ongoing horror’s that I have come to being accustomed to waking me up in the middle of the night in cold sweats from the events of my past. 

I guess I am scared. I don’t want people to pity me. I don’t want people to question me extensively about what happened if I do open up, to cross-examine me looking for loop-holes in my story. I don’t believe people mean to do these things, but in my experience, people tend to be skeptical when told of happenings of abuse, stalking, rape, torture, neglect, and so on. It is almost like we are programmed to believe these types of things can only happen in horror films and not to real people, not in “real life”, and not to those we know. 

Is it because it hits too close to home?

Is it because it makes us uncomfortable when we do not know how to relate?

Or is it because we truly wish to believe the world could never be that cruel?

I don’t know. What I do know, is that I am tired of being scared. Tired of of the days my body is wracked with anxiety from experiences of the past. I am tired of hiding from what has happened, not only from others, but from myself. And most importantly, I am tired of hiding behind a smile and pretending I am okay so that other people are comfortable. 

It is more than time for me, and others, to speak up. To be heard,and to normalize that these things happen to people we know, people we pass on the street, and to ourselves, whether we want to face it or not. 

It is time to stop surviving past the trauma, and to start living past the trauma. 

It is time to heal. 

[beingcassyrose]

[andallshallbewell]