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Please reblog stuff, leave comments, and/or send asks!! Most active projects kept above the readmore. Ask to be tagged for anything!! Ao3 account here for those interested

Prompts: a collection of writing prompts, most of them with a whumpy edge

The Royal Three: Three siblings struggle to lead their country through occupation

The Jokan Prince: A softhearted prince is captured by mercenaries and disguised as a slave

Magic’s Wake: a mother who recently had her child taken finds a foreign boy wandering on his own and takes him in.

#mars writes #whump writing #original writing #original work #royal whump #whump prompts

so-many-ocs

hey, don't cry. fictional character in dire & perilous situations. ok?

luna-azzurra

Writers cannot watch a movie normally. we are sitting there going "oh that's the inciting incident" and "they introduced that object too early it's obviously coming back" and "this dialogue is doing three things at once good for them" while everyone else is just. watching the movie. having a normal experience. feeling feelings without labelling them. i envy that so much and i would never give it up.

valtsv

really love a corruption arc where the character is trying way too hard to make it work but they're in over their head and it's uncomfortable and embarrassing and they're swallowing their own puke every time they do something awful and damp with sweat and trembling but insistent that they can do this, they want it, they're not a child, but it's like they're playing dressup in clothes that are too big for them and trying to convince their own reflection in the mirror that they fit and it's just no fun to watch at all

valtsv

R U A Proshipper

i think this mentality of treating child and/or sexual abuse as a uniquely evil and hideous perversion of human nature as opposed to a social issue enabled and even encouraged by many of the structures of power that our society upholds is extremely unhelpful to actually preventing it or supporting survivors

#THERE it is

guiltfactory-moved

the "my favorite character did nothing wrong" mindset is completely unappealing to me because i love thinking about all the things my favorite characters did wrong

snowstories

My biggest tip for fanfic writers is this: if you get a character's mannerisms and speech pattern down, you can make them do pretty much whatever you want and it'll feel in character.

Logic: Characters, just like real people, are mallable. There is typically very little that's so truly, heinously out of character that you absolutely cannot make it work under any circumstance. In addition, most fans are also willing to accept characterization stretches if it makes the fic work. Yeah, we all know the villain and the hero wouldn't cuddle for warmth in canon. But if they did do that, how would they do it?

What counts is often not so much 'would the character do this?' and more 'if the character did do this, how would they do it?' If you get 'how' part right, your readers will probably be willing to buy the rest, because it will still feel like their favourite character. But if it doesn't feel like the character anymore, why are they even reading the fic?

Worry less about whether a character would do something, and more about how they'd sound while doing it.

mossbear-minese

I don't remember where I saw this piece of advice so I can't credit it, unfortunately

But it was along the lines of "instead of asking whether something is out of character, ask 'what would it take for this character to do this'"

Which I think fits really nicely with this advice of making the actual action itself also feel in character

bunniboiz

"it's ok to show (x) in fiction as long as the bad guy gets punished!" the bad guy doesn't have to get punished. in fact the bad guy can win altogether. the bad guy can entirely get away with it. hope this helps

bunniboiz

and this part might make some people's head explode but: characters can be written to forgive things you personally wouldn't ever forgive. not everything is written as what you'd perceive to be the right choice. not everything is a self-insert & protagonists don't have to be relatable.

damazcuz

Squeezing oc like a stress ball. Throwing oc at the wall like a tennis ball. Dribbling oc on the ground like a basket ball. Whacking oc with a club like golf ball. AND OTHER SUCH ACTIVIES THAT YOU CAN IMAGINE.

moonlitorchestrator

no righteousness + no might = a worm

righteousness + no might = a fool

no righteousness + might = a beast

righteousness + might = a hero of justice

fineiguessimintowhump

good old "finding out how the other army treats their men" except it's through being a spy, not a prisoner.

one spy coming back like "the good news and the bad news is that we're fighting traumatised people who would probably fold at the sight of proper nutrition"

one who can't bring themselves to go back bc life is so good on the other side and the longer they wait the worse it'll be for them. one who 'loses' contact with command after a while.

(good) side being able to recognise the 183828 spies the other side is sending because duh. look at them they have big scared eyes and shake at the sight of a commanding officer. they eat like starving dogs. they can't walk past the infirmary without tearing up a little.

kinkykatdomme

Please, roll your eyes again. You’ll look so pretty with my handprint across your face.

a-driftamongopenstars

the horror of being "god's favourite princess". literally one of my favourite horror themes. the god loves you and it's so scary.

it will always choose you. you cannot die. you'll always come back because it loves you so much. you are its right and left hand, its eternal weapon. it will drown you in its light. light as horror. darkness as horror. what if it thinks you are its best friend.

you are god's favourite princess and it's terrifying.

werewolf-transgenderism

basically my favorite thing to do is imagine The Character in some sort of situation of terrible emotional turmoil. it’s like enrichment for me

silver-bunnyspell

Do you ever want to just practice anatomy and get carried away? I certainly do The character is my oc Isidore Toller from my fanfiction What You Deserve!

her-solitary-war

too many people seem to think certain ships would officially start going out and put a label on their relationship and sometimes even go so far as to get married. but most of the time said ships would really just be freaks and fuck weirdstyle without addressing the elephant in the room that is the mutual romantic attraction

fairy-anon-godmother

Casually asks ‘who domesticated grain in your fantasy world?’ but while ripping her shirt off with a WWE stage and a roaring crowd just behind and slightly to the left.

fairy-anon-godmother

So the thing about this is that, the grain is a metaphor*. Like, the grain is very much a metaphor. I don’t need a fantasy author to look me in the eye and say it was a guy named Tim. But the everything around food usually forms an enormous part of a society’s structure and culture. What are your fantasy world/kingdom/culture’s food sources? What internal myths do they have around the production of food? Customs? How do people share meals? What’s the etiquette? What are the differences between regions, ethnic groups, or social classes? Who spends their time making meals, and how much time is it? How many people can the food sources you create support? If someone breaks bread with a stranger, is that stranger now their friend? Who disagrees? What does your protagonist think? Why does your protagonist think?

An author doesn’t have to info dump all of this in the first chapter. But there’s a helluva difference between a small agrarian village one bad harvest away from starvation, and Picard ordering ‘Earl Gray, Hot’. (Although the local blacksmith and the annoyed personnel in Engineering being asked to fix another replicator after an irate captain kicked it may share a certain common spirit lol.)

And again, the grain is a metaphor. Except for when you very much should figure out the design of your fictional country. I find designing societies from their food source up interesting. Others won’t. But there should be something that a writer finds interesting about their fantasy that they want to explore. Find your grain.

Terry Pratchett read an interesting fact about clowns and eggs once, and decided to make that everyone’s problem. He famously read constantly, always looking for interesting things to put in his books and in some cases build his plots around. Your writing would benefit from the same mentality. The reader doesn’t need an entire encyclopedia thrown at them. But you should put thought into your setting and how it interacts with your culture, history, and society. If you don’t, or even worse if you aren’t sure how all of these interact, then it doesn’t matter how interesting you make your characters or plot. Readers will identify situations in your story where the characters and plot are in conflict with the setting you didn’t pay attention to.

It’s not that you need to fill out a hundred page questionnaire on your worldbuilding. It’s that your intellectual curiosity and eagerness to explore how things work will enrich your story for the reader. GRRM is absurdly good at the things he’s good at, a list that includes great character arcs, deftly controlling the reader’s sympathy, and intricate plots. His worldbuilding though is abysmal.** In contrast, elements of Anne Mccaffrey’s writing didn’t age well. Her first published book looks like a debut novel, her prose and characterization could have been improved on, and the pacing has issues. But she thought about how her world worked in ways that GRRM simply never bothered to. The effort she put into designing a society that would incorporate dragons into it’s structure, and the consideration she put into the needs of these dragons and their riders and how those would put stress on the social and political systems, is phenomenal. I do genuinely enjoy GRRM’s books lol. But if you wanted to read a novel that had dragons as a feature then Anne Mccaffrey’s Dragonflight is what I’ll recommend every time. Her characters actively use the clues given in how their society is designed to figure out their response to the overall plot, in a way that’s so much more rewarding then having GRRM pencil in years-long winter and then just ignore the implications.

Absolutely get invested in your characters and your plot! The reader will enjoy them all the more for the passion you bring. But your writing will always benefit from your curiosity in how the world you design works, and in how the characters and plot are actively informed by the setting. That’s the larger point. Cultivate that curiosity and willingness to explore and experiment, because that’s what will keep your plot, characters and setting from coming into conflict with each other.

*No it’s not, figure this out lol. Get Tim’s number. Has he figured out grain can be fermented yet. Is he free on Saturday.

**For more, the blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry is fantastic reading!

prismatic-bell

Did you know the Inca never invented the wheel?

Okay, that’s not entirely true. They did have wheeled toys for their children, like tiny little oxen you could roll along the floor. But they never invented the wheel as a means of transport.

You might think this is odd. The Inca were a very advanced people with cities, elaborate art, temples, and a “writing” system that actually involved using knotted cords and has changed our entire definition of “recorded language.”

But now I’m gonna show you something, and ask…

Does it make a little more sense now why they never bothered with the wheel?

If you were writing a book about people who lived in steep, inhospitable mountains, would it have occurred to you that “a series of terraces, via which things can be manually lowered or raised” would make more sense than wheels?

Who invented your grain?

mierac

this post is a lot of pressure but also useful

earlgraytay

Here’s another example.

The Romans, technically, had steam power, in the form of a little gadget called the aeliopile. It was basically a party trick to demonstrate the laws of physics, for them– as far as I know, no one made a serious effort to use it to power locomotion.

This was partly because The Tech Just Wasn’t There Yet ™– even in the early days of steam power, boilers tended to explode, because it takes a huge amount of metalworking knowhow to make a boiler that can hold enough steam for thousands of tons of metal.

But it was also partly because… it wasn’t necessary. During the Pax Romana, when communication between different parts of the empire was easiest and collaboration between scientists would be most possible, the best way to send things from point A to point B was by ship. Sailing was, by the standard of the day, easy, fast, and safe. Sure, sometimes you’d sail into a storm– but there were no pirates, because the Roman navy took care of them.

Steam power only made sense as a technology you’d even want in an age where the ocean was too dangerous to travel. No one ships goods overland, pre-steam, if they can avoid it– it’s a lot of danger and effort for not much benefit. But in the early 1800s, when the steam engine was invented? The oceans weren’t safe to travel anymore, and hadn’t been for centuries. Piracy was rampant, both from independent bandits and agents of various European countries. Wars were constantly breaking out between great naval powers. It would be easier, and safer, to transport goods overland, if there was a good way to do it.

So, who didn’t invent your wheel? Who didn’t invent your steam engine? Why didn’t they do it?

beatrice-otter

The other reason that the Romans didn’t turn steam engines to practical uses is that the other major early use for steam engines is in mining: engines to power pumps to get water out of mines, engines to power the lifts to lift ore (and miners) out of the mines, engines to haul ore from the mine to the nearest port. And the Romans didn’t need that because they were a slave state, that is, a civilization where a very high percentage of the population is enslaved and it is the foundation of the economy. Labor was cheap. The kind of metallurgical work needed to take the proto-engines and turn them into something reliable was expensive. Much cheaper to simply throw a lot of slaves at the problem and work them to death. This is generally the case: when labor is cheap (either through mass enslavement or strict caste/class barriers that keeps low-caste people desperately poor), technology stagnates. The people who would most benefit from labor-saving devices have neither the time nor the resources to develop them, and the people with the time and resources have no motivation because exploiting other humans is cheaper and easier. How does your economy and your class relations affect the technology?

whetstonefires

The other reason the Romans didn’t invent steam powered technology is a steam engine is literally not useful for any practical purpose on any fuel they were sourcing at the time. The input/output ratio does not work out in favor. You’re just expending more slave labor to keep the water boiling than you gain as force from the engine.

When the English got into steam power they had already developed a coal mining industry. And like beatrice says, one of the first things they did with the steam engine was pump water out of mines.

One of the subsequent was steam boats. Boat that goes regardless of the wind, without needing to be in range of an unobstructed mule-path with mules to drag it along like the old canal barges, and so forth.

Game-changer, but still following the existing concept of ‘boat’ and using mostly the existing navigational matrix of waterways and ports.

Trains are pretty far down the line! No one is going to jump directly from steam technology to a train system unless someone else did it first and laid out the conceptual track. Trains are very much something that are only obvious in retrospect.

No matter how Great and Powerful, things aren’t convenient unless the underlying conditions to make them useful exist before they’re adopted. Otherwise there is no extant need they can realistically fill.

A lot of states trying to modernize in the 20th century fucked themselves up real bad (or were fucked up by their colonizers but the number of self-owns is tragically high) by either trying to forcibly apply Great Modern Solutions to entirely the wrong problems, or to apply them without having done the underlying infrastructure development that would make them of any material use to anybody.

This kind of thing applies less to grain domestication as such because we a writers mostly have a decent intuitive grasp of what grain crops need and what they’re good for, but otoh it is as has been demonstrated very easy to create a ‘medieval’ city with no apparent access to the grain markets necessary to not instantly starve.

So, as with the wheel: what infrastructure does this worldbuilding element need to actually work the way you want it to, and why was that available?

kiragecko

It DOES apply to grain domestication! White people tend to assume grain production is necessary in a lot of contexts it REALLY isn’t.

When colonizing the Americas, many colonizers forced the indigenous peoples to adopt farming. Or, if they HAD farming, to switch to European style farming. And it turns out that European farming requires infrastructure that the cultures involved did NOT have!

In Canada, people were forced to settle and farm. They lost access to histories and stories that were tied to physical locations. They lost access to the variety of goods they were formerly able to access through migration. They were no longer self-reliant when it came to clothing or housing, because those resources were intertwined with food gathering.

In Paraguay, people were forced to switch from low-effort crops to high effort ones. The Guaraní had periods of rest and relaxation, balanced with periods of incredibly high group effort. But, when rest periods were lost, people stopped being willing to work together in the same ways. People got HUNGRIER, because the food they grew before was more nutritious. And dietary diversity was lost, because they had designed their society around moving every 5 years, and gathering changing resources from the former settlements as the jungle recovered.

Is your setting actually a good fit for grain?

If they live in a jungle, it might be better to have limited agriculture. Food is LITERALLY growing on trees, all around them, so they probably only want to grow (at most) a few staple crops that don’t take up a lot of space.

If they live in an area with a short growing season and low population density, grains are probably too much work for not enough reward. Herding or hunting is much more efficient.

In both these cases, they may still MANAGE the areas they are in. Planting berries on the sides of rivers. Pulling up competing plants so the fruit trees flourish. Dropping nuts in spots with the right light level to maximize their chance of growth.

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