my verbs are jacked and unbelievably swole

dana, aus, 27, she/her. a writing blog. i follow from neitherearthnoratom. I encourage tag games

[romanceyourdemons]

so much love for characters who are desperately unsure whether they’re a good person, a redeemable person, a person worth saving, but are absolutely certain that they’re a grade a hottie

[kazliin]

[saddest-girl-in-the-whole-world]

I will NEVER not fuck with women using a traditionally masculine title. Tell me more about that girl that's also a prince.

[ayzrules]

@danieandflars me when king nera 😌

[danafaithwriting]

Yay king nera!

[specialagentartemis]

“Be curious about what you’re writing about” is not stock Common Writing Advice but it really, really should be. There are a lot of written works that fail due to the authors just being obviously incurious about what they are writing about.

[specialagentartemis]

If you want to write a non-capitalist society, you should be curious: how have people tried to do so in the past, and what pitfalls did they run into? If you want to write someone fishing for subsistence, you should be curious: what do people who fish actually do? If you want to write a character who embodies all the opposite traits of your protag for the sake of being a narrative foil, you should be curious: why are they like that, and what impact does that have on their life? If you want to write a story set in a place you’ve visited once for a week or only seen on tv, you should be curious: what is it like to live there? If you want to write a scene where one character explains asexuality to another character, you should be curious: how would this individual approach this conversation, and why are they doing it now, and is this in keeping with how they’ve acted and spoken before, and would the other one listen to them? (If this is a fantasy or sci-fi or historical setting, do they have the same concept of identity and attraction as you do? How would they conceptualize and express it?) If you want to write a character of a different race, religion, nationality, etc. from you, you should be curious: what is life like for people of that experience? How do they experience the world?

When the author has not actually asked themself these questions, either because they think they already know or can already deduce everything there is to know about it or it didn’t occur to them that this was something worth being curious about at all… you can very, very often tell.

[sinsinewave]

this is true, although also don't do what i keep doing and falling into Worldbuilding Valley; where you examine things a little too thoroughly and end up with an entire wiki to document the world of a story where 90% of those things are actually irrelevant

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like for example, if you write about a character who originates from an empire of space fascists and is escaping her past (which is what i'm writing a thing about kinda), you really don't need to go in-depth into the exact history of the empire down to specific years, just an outline of its standards and practices to guide you into writing a believable character

in that example i partly avoided Worldbuilding Valley and for example don't cover the specific rulers of the empire or what cities exist where or even what specific planets are under their control, because the relevant parts for writing my main character are the general layout of imperial society and the overall values therein, and how they might affect her worldview

i don't need to know details like whether a random moon of Jupiter is in imperial space or hell even what the capital is called

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all that is to say through example, be curious, but learn to target your curiosity; if you aim it too broadly you get a wiki's worth of worldbuilding and no actual writing

[specialagentartemis]

This is a common way people have been taking my post—“you need to meticulously Research Every Single Thing”—and that’s not what I meant and not what I said. Which is why it doesn’t focus on research or even “write what you know,” it focuses on being curious.

Curiosity doesn’t mean you have to know exactly what year doorknobs were invented or are required to work out the orbital dynamics of the planet your fantasy kingdom is on. If you find that fun (I often do!) more power to you. If you don’t, I’m not gonna get on your ass about unrealistic placement of tectonic plates. But my point was that you should wonder how it would affect the world and the story you’re telling.

I make fun of tropes like “this fantasy empire has lasted 10,000 years” not because ~ oh that’s impossible~, but because the dynamics of it as presented usually make it clear the author has not actually sat back and thought about how long 10,000 years is or how much will inevitably change in that amount of time. This is the FIRST time a succession crisis has ever come up? Really? This not only strains credulity, it makes the fantasy world seem flimsy—for 10,000 years nothing happened, now everything is happening at once. That’s the kind of worldbuilding I’m criticizing. If you wrote an empire that lasted 10,000 years, you don’t have to write down every single king and what they did and the whole history of every ethnic group in the empire and build a proto-language for a set of conlangs that have shifted into non-mutually-intelligible languages in different parts of the empire—but it should occur to you that there must have been some of that happening, and that would affect the empire as it exists now and the lives of the people in it.

I’m not saying you need to write a comprehensive history textbook of your fascist space empire—I’m saying you should be curious about how fascist empires actually maintain control of disparate places and how that would affect how it operates and how people live in those places now, if you’re going to be setting a book there. Otherwise, you end up repeating stale tropes about what you vaguely think fascism is and empires do.

Generally, I think worldbuilding energy is best spent 20% on how it happened, and 80% on how it affects the characters. If you have your Exotic Fantasy-Middle-Eastern Market Bazaar, you can justify why that evolved, culturally, in your world, but much more important is actually learning about the social context of what people actually do there and how it shapes daily life (and in the process you will likely make it less stereotypical and insulting). If you want to write a fascist space empire, you can write a history of how it expanded and what planets it controls, but more important is wondering about why it’s an expansionist empire, what resources this planet-setting has that it wants and why it wants them, and what life under imperial rule is like in the core vs. the periphery and how that will affect the life and experiences and opportunities and worldview of your characters.

There’s a reason half of the examples I gave in the post were about characterization choices, not worldbuilding research! Curiosity means thinking beyond a surface level about what you’re writing, asking yourself why you’re writing what you’re writing and if it grows out of what you actually wrote or if you’re just unthinkingly repeating tropes or making assumptions that makes your story weaker because you’re defaulting to surface level clichés rather than thinking about if these characters in this setting with these experiences would do or think or say that. It’s about characters who are gung-ho anti-imperialists when it’s unclear what in their background would lead them to think this way other than that they’re the Good Guys so Of Course They Do. It’s about a scene where a fisherman lets a fish suffocate in the air without the author ever wondering if that’s actually how you kill a fish you caught. It’s about characters who stop the story dead in its tracks to have a conversation about asexuality when their characterization so far has led me to think that the ghost that stole their memories and the government hunting them down for a murder they don’t know if they committed would be a much, much more pressing concern for them right now. It’s about this post about Kendra from Buffy. It’s less about research—although frequently the conclusion will in fact be “I need to do more research about this”—it’s about critical thinking and asking yourself questions about what you’re actually writing.

[bizarrebazaar13]

what if your doppelgänger wasn’t evil it was just a person. what if your doppelgänger wasn’t trying to replace you it was just trying to learn to be a person and you were the best model it had. what if your doppelgänger looked at you with your eyes and said with your voice that it just wanted to be loved. what then.

[i-will-write]

writing isnt even like a hobby to me anymore its just that theres images trapped in my head and if i dont get them out fast enough they start rotting in there and stinking up the place

[annabelle--cane]

[mumblesplash]

my ‘unreliable narrator’ tshirt has people asking a lot of questions i can’t be trusted to answer correctly

[averyterrible]

stuck in an indie horror game. trying to figure out if it's an escape the monster game or if it's an uncover why i'm a bad person game

[averyterrible]

i'm collecting pages, which looks like an escape the monster set up, but those pages have pictures of my dead wife on them with vaguely accusatory text in a handwriting font, so it's still up in the air.

[chilipepperconverse]

surprised this hadn't been made yet

[goldfinchwrites]

Screaming: when we say writers should read we aren’t saying we need to swear off movies, tv, games or that it’s forbidden to take inspiration from those. What it’s important is that you are consuming art in the same format you are making it, whatever that is. The story matters but what also is necessary is how you use the format to its best potential. Watching films and tv isn’t going to tell you how best to utilise written language, which isn’t to say nothing useful or inspiring can be gleaned from them, but they are running on different rules than novels, particularly on the finer details, and it’s those finer details that can’t be overlooked.

[boringangel]

Sotce

[demonzoro]

love a character that's like. i survived (<- not a brag) (<- this is a curse that weighs on me every waking hour)

[mallalada]

get yourself a main character whos two primary emotions are "little cunt" and "catatonic with grief"

[msshadowqueen]

I stand by my canceled wife (complex fictional female character who is treated like shit by the fandom)

[moondust-bard]

Your protagonist is attending a college in our world.

What degree do they pursue?

Performing Arts

Engineering

Psychology

Chemistry

Fashion Design

Nursing

Astronomy

Journalism

Political Science

Criminal Justice

Business

English Lit

Voting ended onNov 16, 2024

[rimonoroni]

three person poly relationship made up of two people who are already dating trying to coax someone with horrific self worth issues into a loving relationship. stray cat style

[rimonoroni]

they’re all laying together in bed and the couple are both thinking to themselves like good, he stayed the night to cuddle and talk when we offered, he should know that we genuinely care for him and want this to be more then a handful of one night stands. and the stray cat guy is like wow this sure is nice i think i’m falling in love with them. it’s really too bad that they don’t actually give a fuck and hate me and probably want to kill me with hammers for no reason

[rimonoroni]

it has been like. two days

[scribefindegil]

being a writer leads to a genuinely helpful but also very stupid kind of mindfulness where you'll be having a sobbing breakdown or the worst anxiety attack of your life and think "okay, I really need to pay attention to how this feels. so I can incorporate it into my fanfiction."