inspo blog @burn-your-burdens - Tumblr Blog

jayvik pose studies

painbattery-deactivated20251001

someone should make one of those PSA style posts about "not adopting trendy pets that you can't commit to taking care of and eventually throwing them away" but about entering relationships with love-starved trans girls

#ethan #bp

emotionaleating

pls don’t flirt with me i want to be nonchalant so bad but i unfortunately crave connection so intensely that i will give you my entire soul and forgive you over and over until i’ve lost myself completely and feel like i’m drowning

#boyplay #ethan

qcboeifzzz

#that one rude real friend

#wftwte

aidaughter

unusualshrimp

[Image description: Text on a white background that reads: "Age: a lot", "gender: malware". /End description]

#xavier #ap

phantomrose96

I made a helpful infographic to explain

#writing

#angel project #moodboard #log22 #sh

coffeebeanwriting

The Consequence of Magic

Some magic systems become more realistic if there is a consequence brought onto it’s user. Sometimes this can be as simple as balance— if you heal a life, another life must be given. Here are some ideas to get your mind churning on what consequences your magic could cause to its user.

1) Pain. If the magic is brute and aggressive (fire, lightning, mind control in a negative manner) the user feels all of that same pain they exerted onto someone else.

2) Emotional disconnection. The more the user plays with their power, the less emotion they can feel. Eventually, this could lead to complete disconnection from everyone they love and a decay into pure evilness.

3) Headaches. If the user has a mind-related power, giving them headaches could be a simple yet effective consequence. The headaches could make their power unstable, chaotic and truly dangerous.

4) Years off their life. Every time they use their ability, it slowly takes days, months and years away from their life. If they’re immortal, they risk mortality.

5) Slip into madness. The power either gets to their head or it has an evil origin thus causing them to become mad and insane overtime.

6) Freedom. The power is actually an entity of its own and while the user thinks they have control over this awesome ability— it’s really controlling them. Over time, it forces them into doing things or hurting people and one day they just become a soulless puppet. (Makes me think of a parasite 🤢)

7) Increased aging. The speed at which you age is increased, but the user doesn’t realize it until they start seeing grey hairs or wrinkles.

8) Blood loss. The magic draws upon the users blood and they have to wait for it to restore before using their abilities— if they don’t, or use a large surge of their ability, it can drain them of blood.

9) Memory loss. The wear and tear on the users mind causes them to slowly forget their lives until they have nothing left to remember. Alternatively, maybe the power needs to use these memories as source of energy.

10) Decay. The users body slowly begins to wither. Nails rotting, skin peeling, eyes drooping, knees weak… mama’s spaghetti.

11) Extreme exhaustion or tiredness. The power keeps them up at night and takes a ton of energy to use. This renders the user constantly exhausted which can lead to death either from exhaustion, or from making fatal mistakes because they’re so tired.

12) Sacrifices. The power requires some sort of sacrifice to the gods or else they take their power back. An animal, a conjuring of different herbs and items, blood… a life.

13) Addiction. Similar to foods or drugs, magic can become addictive and deadly at high dosages.

14) Bad luck. The magic brings upon bad luck. The more magic you use, the worse luck you’ll receive.

Some interesting power + consequence combinations (from the top of my head and from literature/movies):

The healer who is constantly bleeding internally.

The rebelled servant who has finally gained his freedom but becomes slave to the magic itself.

A magical ring that brings someone back from the dead. Every time this person comes back from the dead, they lose their compassion and humanity bit by bit. (The Vampire Diaries)

A witch brings someone back from the dead and as a consequence, the person begins to see dead people and can interact with them. (The Vampire Diaries)

The power induces OCD— after using their power they feel a compulsion to do something. Sometimes it’s as small as drinking a beer and other times it’s as intense as breaking their own bones. (Darker than Black)

Magic gained from a celestial source (the moon, a star, etc) causes earth to become painful to the magic users. In extreme cases, they are pulled towards that celestial body and need to weigh themselves down/tether themselves to something or else they will drift upwards. (The Anubis Gates)

Pt. 2 — Coming Soon! Because it’s really fun to just sit here and brainstorm and research magical consequences! I feel like the possibilities are endless!

Instagram: coffeebeanwriting

📖 ☕ Official Blog: www.byzoemay.com

vandijkwrites

Please only use most of these if you are willing to say “I am going to be writing about disability and plan to do the work in order to do it properly and intentionally” because I’m kind of sick of people doing shitty disability rep and pretending it isn’t actually disability rep because it’s just part of the magic system.

#inspo #magic #fantasy

2soulscollide

WEBSITES FOR WRITERS {masterpost}

E.A. Deverell - FREE worksheets (characters, world building, narrator, etc.) and paid courses;

Hiveword - Helps to research any topic to write about (has other resources, too);

BetaBooks - Share your draft with your beta reader (can be more than one), and see where they stopped reading, their comments, etc.;

Charlotte Dillon - Research links;

Writing realistic injuries - The title is pretty self-explanatory: while writing about an injury, take a look at this useful website;

One Stop for Writers - You guys… this website has literally everything we need: a) Description thesaurus collection, b) Character builder, c) Story maps, d) Scene maps & timelines, e) World building surveys, f) Worksheets, f) Tutorials, and much more! Although it has a paid plan ($90/year | $50/6 months | $9/month), you can still get a 2-week FREE trial;

One Stop for Writers Roadmap - It has many tips for you, divided into three different topics: a) How to plan a story, b) How to write a story, c) How to revise a story. The best thing about this? It’s FREE!

Story Structure Database - The Story Structure Database is an archive of books and movies, recording all their major plot points;

National Centre for Writing - FREE worksheets and writing courses. Has also paid courses;

Penguin Random House - Has some writing contests and great opportunities;

Crime Reads - Get inspired before writing a crime scene;

The Creative Academy for Writers - “Writers helping writers along every step of the path to publication.” It’s FREE and has ZOOM writing rooms;

Reedsy - “A trusted place to learn how to successfully publish your book” It has many tips, and tools (generators), contests, prompts lists, etc. FREE;

QueryTracker - Find agents for your books (personally, I’ve never used this before, but I thought I should feature it here);

Pacemaker - Track your goals (example: Write 50K words - then, everytime you write, you track the number of the words, and it will make a graphic for you with your progress). It’s FREE but has a paid plan;

Save the Cat! - The blog of the most known storytelling method. You can find posts, sheets, a software (student discount - 70%), and other things;

I hope this is helpful for you!

(Also, check my blog if you want to!)

#craft #resources

maskedfangirl

"Narrative distance"? Do tell!

Explain it in text? Without emphatic arm gestures or wine? Oh god. Okay. I’ll try.

All right, so narrative distance is all about the proximity between you the reader and the POV character in a story you’re reading. You might sometimes also hear it called “psychic distance.” It puts you right up close to that character or pulls you away, and the narrative distance an author chooses greatly affects how their story turns out, because it can drastically change the focus.

Here’s an illustration of narrative distance from far to close, from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction (a book I yelled at a lot, because Gardner is a pretentious bastard, but he does say very smart things about craft):

It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.

Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.

Henry hated snowstorms.

God how he hated these damn snowstorms.

Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul

It feels a bit like zooming in with a camera, doesn’t it?

I always hate making decisions about narrative distance, because I usually get it wrong on the first try and have to fix it in revision. When I was writing Lost Causes, the first thing I had to do in revision was go through and zoom in a little on the narrative distance, because it felt like it was sitting right on top of Bruce’s prickly skin and it needed to be underneath where the little biting comments and intrusive thoughts lived.

Narrative distance is probably the simplest form of distance in POV, and there is where if I had two glasses of wine in me you would hit a vein of pure yelling. There are SO MANY forms of distance in POV. There’s the distance between the intended reader and the POV character, the distance between the POV character and the narrator (even if it’s 1st person!), the distance between the narrator and the author. There’s emotional distance, intellectual distance, psychological distance, experiential distance. If you look closely at a 3rd person POV story, you can tell things about the narrator as a person (and the narrator is an entity independent of the author) - like, for starters, you can tell if they’re sympathetic to the POV character by how they talk about their actions. Word choice and sentence structure can tell you a narrator’s level of education and where they’re from; you can sometimes even tell a narrator’s gender, class, and other less obvious identifying factors if you look closely enough. To find these details, ask: What does the narrator (or POV character, or author) understand?

I can’t put a name on the narrator of the Harry Potter books, but I can tell you he understands British culture intimately, what it’s like to be a teen boy with a crush, to not have money, to be lonely and abused, and to find and connect with people. There’s a lot he doesn’t understand (he doesn’t pick out little flags of queerness like I do, so he’s probably straight, for example), but he sympathizes with Harry and supports him. I like that narrator. I’m supposed to sympathize with him, and I do.

POV is made up of these little distances - countless small questions of proximity that, when stacked together, decide whether we’re going to root for or against a character, or whether we’ll put down a book 20 pages in, or whether a story will punch you in just the right place at just the right amount to make you bawl your eyes out.

There are so many different possible configurations of distance in this arena that there are literally infinite POVs. Fiction is magical and also intimidating as fuck.

grimogretricks

*stares blankly with a look of sudden realisation*

I.. have been writing on and off all my life (though not professionally), and I’ve never actually put a name to thinking about this specific issue. Interesting! I think sometimes I struggle with keeping narrative distance consistent in what I write- tending to go into close focus on a character’s feelings and thoughts at the start more than later on, and more often when they’re feeling emotions like fear and anger than when they’re just.. thinking. Now I know that ‘narrative distance’ is a thing helps me better be on the lookout for that. Not that I’m saying consistency is necessarily best, but.. it would pay for me to be more conscious of what I’m doing.

animatedamerican

We got this very quote about psychic distance in a story-writing course I took in college. Gardner goes on to say that it’s very jarring when the narration goes from one level of psychic distance to another that isn’t immediately beside it. Going from 2 to 3 is fine, but if you go from 4 to 2 without passing through 3 on the way, you don’t have a smooth narrative voice. (There was an example given that I can’t recall exactly, but it was something along the lines of “Ms. Jane Smythe had always disliked cicadas. Lord, she thought, they’ll drive me crazy! The young woman had never personally encountered any cicadas, but she knew what they were like.”)

OP makes some excellent points about other kinds of psychic distance, and now I want to think about how they apply to Steven King’s increasingly present narrator-voice over the course of the Dark Tower series.

#writing #craft

luthienne

Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

#genevieve #ap #quotes

orpheuslament

Herakles, Euripides (tr. Tom Sleigh)

#ap #xavier #alexander #quotes

sakurafacts

does violence have to be the last resort. cant it be like third

#alexander #ap

dancefevers

guy who ends his prayers with “or whatever.” instead of amen

#seth #hmr #ap

homunculus-argument

Hey btw, if you're doing worldbuilding on something, and you're scared of writing ~unrealistic~ things into it out of fear that it'll sound lazy and ripped-out-of-your-ass, but you also don't want to do all the back-breaking research on coming up with depressingly boring, but practical and ~realistic~ solutions, have a rule:

Just give the thing two layers of explanation. One to explain the specific problem, and another one explaining the explanation. Have an example:

Plot hole 1: If the vampires can't stand daylight, why couldn't they just move around underground?

Solution 1: They can't go underground, the sewer system of the city is full of giant alligators who would eat them.

Well, that's a very quick and simple explanation, which sure opens up additional questions.

Plot hole 2: How and why the fuck are there alligators in the sewers? How do they survive, what do they eat down there when there's no vampires?

Solution 2: The nuns of the Underground Monastery feed and take care of them as a part of their sacred duties.

It takes exactly two layers to create an illusion that every question has an answer - that it's just turtles all the way down. And if you're lucky, you might even find that the second question's answer loops right back into the first one, filling up the plot hole entirely:

Plot hole 3: Who the fuck are the sewer nuns and what's their point and purpose?

Solution 3: The sewer nuns live underground in order to feed the alligators, in order to make sure that the vampires don't try to move around via the sewer system.

When you're just making things up, you don't need to have an answer for everything - just two layers is enough to create the illusion of infinite depth. Answer the question that looms behind the answer of the first question, and a normal reader won't bother to dig around for a 3rd question.