Clarissa Janeen @clarissajaneen - Tumblr Blog

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My favorite local indie bookstore recently celebrated its 33rd birthday by throwing a hobbit birthday bash. My trivia team won first place for which I’d like to credit to Tumblr for the knowledge of which book resulted from a series of events beginning with a man witnessing 9/11 and starting a band.

#indie bookstore #tolkien #hobbit #lotr #twilight

Mermay 2026

Sketch below the cut:

#mermay 2026 #mermay #mermaid #fantasy illustration #illustration #fantasy #digital arwork #digital painting #digital illustration

chronicallyonline101

I know this is a silly question but I literally don't know anything about describing environments in writing as in weather or surroundings etc. When do you think it is most relevant to mention them?

I'm asking this as someone who has HARDLY EVER written anything before

HELLOOO!!! THIS ISNT A SILLY QUESTION AT ALL this actually one of the first things my lecturer taught us when i started my uni course!

Describing environments, weather and outfits is one of the trickiest things in a novel/fic because if done at the wrong moment it can take the reader out of the story and break the flow that a paragraph has, SO HERE ARE MY TIPS FOR WRITING SCENERY:

One of the most important things to think about when writing is that a reader is going to be entering a story with pre-conceived ideas and images of everything that will be mentioned inside it. E.g., if the author writes about a 'house' and its innards, the reader will often put in its place an image of a house from their own memories, because of this when an author goes out of their way to describe anything inside that house it will break the flow and immersion that the reader had.

To stop this, you want to describe as little as possible while retaining as much of your concept as you can. What this means, is you need to describe the "vibe" of a room and any important objects inside it.

Examples of this: "The room was cold, damp where rotten wallpaper sagged astray from each wall." Here, we know that the room has been abandoned/is in a state of disrepair, but the readers imagination is not hindered - they are still able to insert their own furniture and layout. The exception to this rule is as I mentioned previously, when an important object lies within the room.

Let's say that a messy room is important to a characters personality, or, that a character needs to pick up an item from a table, or interact with any kind of furniture (as most characters do.) Continue to use this rule, but add to it.

Example: "The room was cold, damp where rotten wallpaper sagged astray from each wall. It's contents, a sofa and a small coffee table, lay rotten with disuse; littered with scraps of old trash and food wrappings. 'Character-A' took a small, cautionary step forward and grabbed at a half melted piece of chocolate from atop of a couch cushion, a grimace settling across her face." Instead of bombarding the reader with a full paragraph description of the room at once, you are slowly feeding objects to them and telling them how they are supposed to feel about the environment. Without hindering the readers imagination too much, you guide them into seeing the version of the room that you want them to.

A key thing to note is that you should always mention how light or dark a room is, as it sets the tone for an entire scene.

When it comes to outdoor environments, there is a lot more freedom to describe and explore your surroundings. Since being outdoors means a character is going to be in a much larger space with less semantic connotations, a reader is going to have a harder time inserting their own images into this environment.

There are two approaches you can take to describing an outdoor environment: The worldbuilding approach or the pathetic fallacy approach:

Example of worldbuilding: "I took a sharp breath, a cloud of condensation forming before my face. A crisp chill filled the air, carried along by dry, orange leaves that rattled across the pavement and stuck to the wet concrete." This scene suggests the story takes place in late autumn/fall or perhaps early winter, it has no relation to the main characters emotion and merely serves as an environmental tool to help the reader understand the time and place in which the story takes place.

Example of pathetic fallacy: "My nostrils flared as I let out a sharp breath, the air before my face fanning out into a sodden cloud. A crisp chill filled the air and sunk itself deep into my bones, it bit at the swollen skin beneath my eyes; delicate from tears freshly shed, and carried along with it dry, brown leaves that rattled across the pavement and stuck to the wet concrete." By connecting the weather to the main character, there is an inherent connection between it and their emotions. Pathetic fallacy uses the weather as a tool to set the mood for the main character. E.g., if it is storming then the reader will understand the main character is upset, if it is sunny the reader will understand that the main character is happy.

SOME IMPORTANT THINGS TO NOTE:

It is always relevant to describe the characters surroundings. There should be a description every time they enter a new room; how in-depth this description is should be dependent on how important the room/environment is to the story - if the room only appears once, then it isn't necessary to give it too much thought, but if it is a room that the character will enter multiple times then you want to be as descriptive as possible so that they can remember it when the character returns.

With creative writing, there are no rules; what I've said in this post isn't definitive and does not need to be followed, if you believe that your work would be best understood if you offered your audience an in-depth description of the environment (something that should most commonly be done if the surroundings are not 'common', i.e., a fantasy world or something wildly specific) then you shouldn't stop yourself from doing that! Writing is all about experimenting and figuring out what works best for you.

Environments shift dependent on the perspective in which the fic is being written in, 1st POV often creates a biased narrative that follows the strict memories of the main character which allows an author to be more creative with the psychology of an environment (an example of this would be the 'Red Room' from Jane Eyre and how Jane's memories of the room paint it differently from how the room really is), while 3rd POV allows a more realistic and direct description.

I KNOW YOU ONLY ASKED about the relevance of describing environments but i lowk went off on one... I JUST LOVE TALKING ABOUT LITERARY TECHNIQUES i get excited, i hope this helps! if you plan on writing anything, you should share it with me i would love to read 👀

writingdose

nondelphic

writing isn’t hard. i just have to extract 80,000 words from my brain using sheer psychic force

whatagrump

Apparently a lot of people get dialogue punctuation wrong despite having an otherwise solid grasp of grammar, possibly because they’re used to writing essays rather than prose. I don’t wanna be the asshole who complains about writing errors and then doesn’t offer to help, so here are the basics summarized as simply as I could manage on my phone (“dialogue tag” just refers to phrases like “he said,” “she whispered,” “they asked”):

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

“There’s no dialogue tag after this sentence, so end it with a period rather than a comma.” She frowned, suddenly concerned that the entire post was as unasked for as it was sanctimonious.

thewritinggrindstone

And!

“If you’re breaking dialogue up with an action tag”—she waves her hands back and forth—”the dashes go outside the quotation marks.”

writing-is-a-martial-art

Reblog to save a writer’s life.

jaydove-writes

Thank you

localcanadiancryptid22

Oh my god thank you. No wonder grammarly keeps complaining about my punctuation when I boot my writing up into word counter

sourdough-seal

“how did you get into writing” girl nobody gets into writing. writing shows up one day at your door and gets into you

orbitalmirror

"how did you get into writing" girl i've been tormented by the visions since i was eight years old

teddyrocker

best feeling in the world is when you draw something and you’re so proud of it you have to stop and stare at it every few minutes to remind yourself of its beauty like narcissus with his reflection in the pond

fangirlinginleatherboots

just so yall know

art block is your brain telling you to do studies.

draw a still life. practice some poses. sketch some naked people. do a color study. try out a different technique on a basic shape.

art block doesnt stop you from drawing, it stops you from making your drawings look the way you want them to. and thats because you need to push your skills to the next level so you can preform at that standard

think of it as level grinding for your next work.

gallusrostromegalus

As a scientific illustrator- this is 100% true and going to review your basics will fix it every goddamn time. Not only does it keep your skills sharp, when you’re not emotionally invested in the final product of a piece, you relax and your brain makes more/better art juice for you. So, when you get back to that big/important piece? You’ll know what to do and how to do it.

Nothing in nature blooms all year round. Rest, and take care of yourself.

strawbebbynya

i want someone to put this into writer’s blocks now

404computerhamstersnotfound

Writer’s block means you need to relearn the whole alphabet. idiot.

redwingedwhump

For writers block- same thing. Do Studies.

Write a description of an object. write the weather today. Write a made up characterization of a random photo of an actor from the internet as to the character they are in that picture. Write a little story about your pet’s day. Write about spilling soup and make it super dramatic and tragic. Write about someone’s day being ruined and make it funny. Write a meetcute coffeeshop AU of two OCs you’d never put together- maybe from different stories. Write them breaking up.

Write a bunch of short stuff meant for no audience ever and super duper self indulgent.

blackaquokat

@sweetiepie08

accidental-spice

@kanerallels

catkin-morgs-kookaburralover

I found out relatively recently that it really helps if I write short fiction surrounding the novels I write. Like oh? I’m stuck for a bit? Ooh there was that section I wanted to explore but doesn’t fit in the plot really. There was that what-if that could never happen in the actual story but would be fun to explore. It keeps me in the characters’ headspace (tho that’s not always what I’m needing) but not right where they are exactly.

winterinhimring

Yes! I have gotten past writers’ block multiple times by writing drabble collections. Making something coherent happen in just 100 words is a very different challenge from writing a long story and it also lets me get past plot points that I don’t want to explore in-depth.

I am also going to have to start drawing studies now…

anarchistmemedistro

whitager

you have to read to your kids you have to read with your kids you have to read in front of your kids you have to take your kids to the library you have to talk about books with your kids you have to let your kids read books that are a little difficult or scary you have to teach your kids to love reading

jkottke

The Color Game. “Humans can’t reliably recall colors. This is a simple game to see how good (or bad) you are at it. We’ll show you five colors, then you’ll try and recreate them.” I scored 39/50 but got a perfect score on one color.

aroace-elgyem

I suck at this ;-; and I literally draw for fun

cygnus-is-tired

Considering how rarely I do digital art I’m surprised at how well I did

clarissajaneen

My brief career as a theater set painter who had to do a lot of color matching has finally paid off

prokopetz

I understand that you were aiming for a morally grey protagonist, but in practice what you've ended up with is more of a moral beige.

prokopetz

@ancient-tree-with-deathwish replied:

how do you distinguish grey from other colours beyond black and wite?

Distinguishing features of moral beige:

The protagonist is constantly agonising over Hard Choices; however, circumstances always conspire to prevent them from actually having to make those choices, so in practice they're just angsting over stuff they might have done.

The text exhibits a recurring pattern whereby the protagonist seems to to have made a Hard Choice, but new information is reliably revealed shortly thereafter which retroactively establishes that whatever they did was the morally upright course after all.

The protagonist's moral impulses are straightforwardly heroic, except in one specific context which lacks any clear real-world analogue; for example, being prejudiced against telepaths.

The protagonist's actions are consistently reasonable based on the information available to them – they're merely operating on bad information basically all the time due to a bizarre conspiracy and/or a series of increasingly implausible misunderstandings.

The protagonist always ends up doing the right thing (for some fuzzy value of "right"), but, like, they're really grumpy about it.

ellipsus-writes

If you haven't heard, the em dash has been getting a lot of attention lately…

Because it was trained on pirated work—including freely accessible online writing (like fanfic, academic texts)—ChatGPT picked up patterns and quirks native to human writing.

Including (sigh) the em dash.

There are other victims here (RIP tapestry and delve 🫠), but the appropriation of the em dash—a punctuation mark beloved by writers everywhere—feels especially personal.

A kind of low-grade panic is ensuing. Writers who once memed their own em dash overuse—the greatest punctuation mark ever to grace the control-freak’s lexicon, frankly—are suddenly backing away to avoid accusations.

No. More. We have centuries of dash-abusing writers behind us. We will not sit quietly while AI repurposes our beloved stilted aside—or the just-one-more clarification the sentence demands—or the dramatic pause your comma could never—etc.

You don’t write like AI—AI writes like you.

Defend the em dash.

(Feel free to download/share/stick it where it matters!)

luna-azzurra

If you’re stuck on a scene, stop forcing the “logical next step” and jump straight to the part you’re excited about. Yes, skip the boring stuff. Happiness counts as productivity. Write the joy first.