ASK ME ABOUT MY WORLD BUILDING

I'm not nearly as active as I used to be

[harbinger-of-silly]

All gays will go to hellsite

[king-of-oreo]

What if in hellsite but not gay

[punky-beaver-offical]

[king-of-oreo]

NO!

[avhira]

[hellsitegenetics]

String identified: A ga g t t at t t t ga T tag g a Ag agag Acctac ! T tag g a Ag agag Acctac

Closest match: Psylliodes chrysocephala genome assembly, chromosome: 4 Common name: Cabbage Stem Flea Beetle

(image source)

[graveexcitement]

[kebbopulos]

[bootpoot]

rose and kanaya… past and present

[weeeeps]

cowgirl cupid

[parabiota]

STOP SCROLLING

Your life ends in the wasteland.

[professionalchaoticdumbass]

there’s a japanese radish just below this post but you can’t reach it

[gon-iii]

収穫祭

2015年、長屋門公園。

立派な大根がリアカーに積まれていた。ここで育てたものだろうか。

[jame7t]

dead tired today so I grabbed a coffee from the gas station & the guy greeted me by trying to say “is that everything “ but fumbled and said “e ga thebythin” and me trying to say “yeah” or “yup” just went “YIP!” in response. No survivors

[lichtenbug]

[threeture]

[wizardshark]

Really average day in Ireland

[fuckkrat]

THIS POST LOOKS AWFUL, FORGIVE ME.

BUNCH OF EXTRAS:

[dirt-secret]

A wolf and her gay little truck

[estrogen-induced-girl]

She forgot to tuck

[rqbossman]

What makes a story a story?

I have been mulling something over for a while and have decided to share. As part of my job, I read a lot of fiction that's still in development. After a while, you start to see the same errors, misunderstandings and shortcuts crop up repeatedly with different creators and it gets me thinking what is the most elegant way possible I could explain the issues to someone wanting to improve? The one that comes up the most often and is the hardest to explain is: "Why don't people care about my characters and/or story". It's always a thorny problem and I think I have a workable answer that applies in most cases: A story is a series of revelations regarding compounding, unintentional consequences to character decisions. The further you stray from this, the less people care. It translates to: 1) characters have to make decisions otherwise there is no drama 2) Those decisions have to matter otherwise there are no stakes 2) The consequences have to interact with one another. A affects or causes B affects or causes C etc. otherwise there is no progression 3) There must be some unintended consequences otherwise there is no conflict 4) The consequences have to be revealed (even at least implied) otherwise there is no conclusion This works at the micro scale in terms of dialogue: The specific word/tone/movement a character uses affects how another character reacts in an unexpected or interesting way which in turn causes another reaction and these layer onto one another until a decision is reached and a consequence implied thereby completing the scene. It also works at the macro scale in terms of plot: The decisions characters made in a scene prompts/affects the characters and context of the scene that follows (even if we don't know it at first) and by the end those layered interactions have been revealed to us and we see the unexpected or interesting result.

In my anecdotal experience, most times people don't care about a work of fiction is not because of a technical issue with the execution but because the writer has subtly misunderstood what makes a story a story. Their main character doesn't make any decisions, the decisions don't seem to matter, it feels disjointed because consequences aren't layering, there's no conflict because there are no misunderstandings etc. There countless technical aspects which affect the quality of a piece of fiction but most times when someone asks me to help them make people care about their story they first need to realise they have misunderstood what actually makes a story at a fundamental level and they need to recognise that before things can improve. I dunno if this helps anyone. I hope it does. Sorry if it doesn't. If anyone wants to use this to assess their own work let me know what you discover, I'm genuinely curious.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

knowing that the past tense of "hang" is "hanged" when it's a method of execution can be very entertaining because you'll be watching a horror movie and someone goes "local legend says a woman was hung in these woods" and you're like "👀 good for her I guess"

[queen-zigzag]

[batailles]

[nebu3llasmemedump]

[falloutnewnobody]

donating my heavily annotated copy of house of leaves to the local library so that the person reading it gets a 5th layer of narrative to be confused by

[poppetsisters]

The Talmud

[daftpatience]

everyone say hi woad we love you woad