We are designers not liers

[dyedviolet]

I don't really reblog much on this blog (that's what @dyedvioletreblogs) is for. Unless I do. In which case it was either a mistake that i'm not fixing or i did it on purpose. 💜

[dead-dove-ble]

Actually you SHOULD make problematic content. You SHOULD explore dark or taboo topics. You SHOULD have a space where you can cope with your traumas or explore sensitive topics in a way that doesn't hurt anyone.

[shiptillyoudie]

Also you should make problematic content for funsies. You don't need to have had trauma or need to be coping in order to explore dark creativity. You can just be a human who wants to explore dark and taboo topics because you want to. That's completely normal, btw.

Every single person on this planet thinks about dark and taboo things. It's literally the most normal thing in the world.

Go draw the horror porn and be free.

[tackypies]

we should all be more like david cronenberg and write fucked up stuff. For Funsies

[clusterbuck]

started a new book and immediately realised i was expecting something very different to what i was getting so. question

if a book is labelled literary fiction, do you expect the prose to be good?*

yes

no

secret third thing

Voting ended onJun 26

*define ‘good’ however you want, i guess. i can’t really define it either, but in my mind litfic prose should be good, and also there’s something about it generally that reads differently to genre fiction**

**this is not a value judgement and i’m not saying genre fiction prose can’t be good. please do not piss on the poor

[materassassino]

Well yes, otherwise what's the point? It's not like there's worldbuilding or plot to fall back on.

[headspace-hotel]

depends on if it's "expect" as in "it SHOULD be" or "expect" as in "it WILL be" cause those are very different

[dyedviolet]

The question confuses me because I kinda expect all books to have good prose. Or at least that they should be aiming for good prose, by whatever metric suits its goals as a story.

Lyrical prose with long sentences that pull out highly specific adjectives, and terse prose with tight economy of language can both be good prose. "Good prose" as a value metric is highly contextual to what book is being written. Any quality you can ascribe to prose, if put in the hands of a skilled writer and used for the right story, can make the prose good.

My expectation for literary fiction is that it explores something more than the surface level of the human condition. It's a story about normal life, so it better be a damn good slice of human life for it to be worth my time to read it. I want it to be rich, I want it to be meaningful, and I want something that I can't help but keep thinking about well after I'm done with the last page.

I even have a good example from a recent read—"Come and Get It" by Kiley Reid. The prose would make for incredibly boring pull quotes, but there were still lines that stopped me in my tracks while reading. It's about the context in which the line of prose exists, and the effectiveness derived from what came before. The prose is not good outside the context of the story.

I will drop books of any genre for bad prose. In that sense, I'd define bad prose as writing which impedes the telling of the story. Writing that focuses on character description over characterization (i can wait a few pages to find out she's blonde, I wanna know her personality first!). Writing that keeps telling me what's going on, what is about to happen, and not first making me care about any of that. I say "make" instead of "tell" here specifically—my preference is for writers that can be forceful with steering an audience along.

Force me into your world. Force me to sympathize with your characters. Force me to be invested with the stakes. Stop worrying about what I want, I already picked up the book. Show me a force of personality that can take me somewhere.

The prose can be "good" later, but it very quickly needs to be effective. Horror has hooks with the atmosphere, romance has character chemistry, fantasy and sci-fi can both lean on intriguing world building. Literary fiction's appeal is just the story. If you cannot tell the story well, there isn't much point to sticking around.

[dyedviolet]

Just came up with a REALLY funny book series concept that's not actually that funny unless i tell you the inspiration. Please look forward to that in like 15 years.

[tenderwatches]

sometimes you need dialogue tags and don't want to use the same four

[senikas-blog]

Look... I'm gonna save this but I'm gonna forget about it the next second lol

[top-cheese]

i do genuinely believe that the best thing that can happen to a person Creatively is to just get obsessed with some random-ass guy

[dyedviolet]

I think there's something in the average age of adventure story protagonists. The danger, the wonder, the trials—they tend to skew a bit young.

I think to make it make sense, they have to be a little too young to fully grasp the full severity of what they're putting at stake. Not naive, not infantile, just young. Green. Maybe unscarred is the better word. People who haven't yet been taught how badly the world can hurt them.

Not knowing how much there is to fear is a great aid in becoming a brave hero, after all.

[dyedviolet]

The good part of being at the last 10% of writing my book: I've spent so much time with these characters and exploring their dynamics that I have a much better idea of who they are as people.

The bad part: I gotta go back with structural edits to add in all that juicy characterization. Nature of the beast. Sighs.

[dyedviolet]

"This was the first time x thing happened"

Scrolls down to my running list of things to check in revisions.

Adds "make sure x thing didn't happen before y point."

[ladillados]

[kontrollsysteme]

we’ve gone from the yee haw agenda to the ye olde thot programme

[lloerwyn-deactivated20201104]

Ah yes, those slutty slutty Landsknecht shorts:

[petermorwood]

The bare-legged / hot-pants look was fairly common, since the whole point about being a Landsknecht (or Reislaufer, their Swiss equivalent) was to look outrageous.

Most period illustrations of Landsknechts are black-and-white woodcuts…

…though in 1905 a book called „Geschichte des Kostüms“ - History of Costume - assembled a bunch of black-and-whites and added colour.

If they look excessively gaudy, they’re not, because these next prints were coloured in-period by an artist called Erhard Schön, and it’s fair to assume he was representing what he saw.

In short - or in shorts - those reenactor costumes are spot on. :->

[brightwanderer]

Something mentioned nowhere in this post that I have just learned from googling: these guys were not Ye Olde Medieval Dandies. They were 15th-16th century mercenaries. Pretty hardcore, too. They were exempt from sumptuary laws (ie the rules that said you couldn’t wear certain colours or cloth or styles) and apparently their response to that was technicolour thotpants.

[tuulikki]

I was complaining earlier about costuming in both “historical” settings and in fantasy/scifi. This is exactly what I mean when I say a knowledge of actual history would enrich the conceptual creative palette for things like “hardcore mercenary outfits.”

[fellshish]

The devastating difference between how much time it takes to write something vs how fast people read it lol

[rebornofstars-deactivated202510]

you're falling in the trap!! it will be read by many people, many times, and it will live on in their memories. and maybe no single other human will match you in time spent dedicated to your story, but as a collective we will outlast you. acts of creation only grow when they are shared

[galadriel1010]

This. Writing is not like dinner. It can be consumed many times

[sapphia]

you write it once so it can be read forever

[lux-scriptum]

No, you see, I wish to be an author. Not in marketing. Or an influencer. I wish to tell my stories, be told I did a fantastic job, and then go back to my hovel to scribble some more. I am delicate of constitution and awkward in crowds.

[fallenstarworkshop]

@derinthescarletpescatarian, @thebibliosphere

[elle-thereafter]

These are important things I have learned about writing fiction. I know these things, but sometimes I need a reminder. So I am writing them here, both as a reminder for myself, and as a reminder for all those who, like me, sometimes forget.

Characters must make choices.

Characters should often make bad choices before they make good choices.

Character choices should drive the vast majority of the plot. Characters reacting to having random stuff thrown at them is far less interesting than characters reacting to the stuff they've thrown after it's ricocheted around and comes bouncing back toward them.

If a character refuses to make a choice, there better be consequences for that too, and you better have a damn clear way of showing those consequences to the reader and the character.

Nearly every time I'm struggling with writing something, taking a step back and thinking about these 4 things usually helps get me unstuck.

[bellisima-writes]

Reblogging for my fandom crew as well.

[thirdity]

“You write the beginning and then you go back and rewrite the beginning, and you never got off page one. It’s kind of a syndrome, and I have a rash piece of advice which is — Go on, page two, page three, and never look back. Get something finished, no matter how lousy it is. […] Perfectionists cannot get going unless they kind of do violence to their own instincts, and just blast ahead.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Last Interview and Other Conversations

[arsonarena]

reblog if you like to see your own characters tortured

[galileosballs]

This interview with Ncuti Gatwa crossed my dash again, and I was reminded of how much I like it. Because it makes the rare Third Argument for representation in fiction, the argument I think is the best, and I'm always happy to see it. I quote:

At times, Gatwa’s casting in those projects has been dismissed as an exercise in ‘box-ticking’. Gatwa scoffs. ‘First of all, you don’t know anything about me. Secondly, tick fcking boxes! People need to be fcking seen. What are you going to do, tell the same stories? Have the same people fronting things for all of eternity? Representation and inclusivity and branching out… it enriches us all. How embarrassing. You people with your tiny mindsets – open a book, look out the window and then f*ck off.’ (source)

What do I mean by the Third Argument? Well, I'm not sure I've ever made a post about this directly, but as far as I can see it, there are three main arguments for greater diversity in popular media. The first two are the most common, and they go like this:

It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see people like them on screen. That is, the beneficiaries are marginalized people.

It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see and learn about people who are not like them through art. That is, the beneficiaries are non-marginalized people, who then (hopefully) pass on the benefit by treating marginalized people better.

These two arguments are the source of a lot of debate here on ye olde tumblr. Despite both being arguments for representation, they pull in different directions. What counts as 'good' representation for the purposes of Argument 1 often would not be good for the purposes of Argument 2, and vice versa. Authentic versus sympathetic. Ugly or over-sanitized. You see this debate play out constantly. It's really hard for a piece of - say - queer media to do both at once.

But these debates tend to leave out Argument 3, the one that Gatwa is making above. And that argument cuts through a lot of this debate.

3. It is good for media to be diverse because art needs variety. The beneficiary of representation is art itself, absent any social effects that may or may not be present.

For this argument, diverse stories are intrinsically good. It is good to make art that's not just the same thing you've seen a hundred times before. Putting the kinds of people who don't often make it into mainstream media into your art is an extremely efficient way to make that happen. It's not the only method, but it's a really good method.

For representation to be 'good representation' according to Argument 3, all it needs to be is interesting. A story you haven't heard before, at least not in that medium. That which counts as 'bad representation' by the lights of this argument are stock characters, like the Eternally Patient Mother, the Gay Best Friend, the Wise Black Advisor. Perhaps there was a time in which these characters were new, but that time has long passed. There's no art in pulling a bog-standard character trope off the shelf. Show us a new kind of guy. The world is infinitely diverse. You're not going to run out. Telling the same stories with the same voices for all eternity, as Gatwa says, is boring. Even if there was nothing else wrong with it, this would be. Art isn't supposed to be boring.

And that's why Argument 3 is my favourite. I do want the world to be a better place, of course, and I think art is a part of that. But the main job of art is to be good as art. And diversity in all aspects of the production of art makes art better.

[dyedviolet]

CiniCross: P—Please, won't you try a new starting kit??

Me beginning floor 12 of my infinite timer run: No, I don't think I will