Have your feet on the ground as much as your head in the clouds

Thoughts about writing in English and Portuguese • She/Her

[fiddlystuff]

Ongoing list of tags

#writing resources

#worlbuilding resources

#outlining tips

#cool concepts

#character development

#good writing habits

#historical references

#writing action scenes

#writing romance

#writing disabled characters

#writing characters of color

#writing child characters

#writing queer characters

#just for fun

#fiddly em português - Todos os posts em português

[luna-azzurra]

Something I had to unlearn: giving your character a tragic backstory is not the same as giving them a wound. A backstory is just information. A wound is the thing that makes them flinch at something totally unrelated fifteen chapters later and the reader goes "oh." If the backstory doesn't leave a nerve ending somewhere in the present-day plot, cut it. Nobody needs the trauma. They need the flinch.

[luna-azzurra]

Something neuroscience-y that helps with prose: attention is selective. A character will not notice everything in a room. They will notice what matters to their goal, fear, desire, training, wound, or obsession. A jealous character notices hands. a hungry character notices food. A soldier notices exits. A lonely character notices pairs. Description becomes character when attention has a bias.

[vampantheon]

on the topic of disabled characters, though, i think a LOT of artists give characters mobility aids that their character wouldn't actually benefit from using.

i'm sort of having a mild brain fog moment rn so i can't fully articulate what i'm on about, but i think a lot of able-bodied artists view things like canes and crutches as interchangeable. and they often don't know enough about the wide range of mobility aids to make an informed decision about what their character might actually use based on their disability

i also think that aids like walkers and rollators are sort of viewed as "cringe" on some level, and many people view them to be "just for old people," so many artists will opt for giving a character who has full-body pain and fatigue a cane (which, in many cases, can potentially WORSEN full-body pain) instead. and a lot of people don't realize that most wheelchair users are able to walk, so they don't consider it an option for characters with chronic pain

[vampantheon]

idk it's kind of frustrating. i've genuinely never, ever seen a character that uses a rollator before. not once. i cannot name a single one. i know of multiple ocs who are described to have full-body pain, dizziness, and fatigue that are drawn as cane users and are never shown with wheelchairs or walkers, though

[vampantheon]

it's also sort of sad? i've been diagnosed since i was twelve years old, and i only heard of rollators LAST YEAR. and that was only because i saw one irl and immediately asked what it was. i wonder how many disabled people out there don't even know it's an option solely because they're completely underrepresented online and in media

[vampantheon]

if you're a creative with a disabled oc, PLEASEEE check out this link. it's a very nice and detailed guide for telling which mobility aids suit someone's needs best. it's incredibly important to make the right choice for your character! mobility aids tell you a LOT about someone's lived experience. picking the right one will communicate to your audience #1 what your character goes through #2 that you UNDERSTAND what your character goes through!

[the-punforgiven]

I'm just saying, if you're going to worldbuild magic being a "raw, primal force, akin to and interweaving with nature itself" you gotta explain to me why animals don't use it

[the-punforgiven]

I know the normal answer is "they just aren't smart enough for it" but idk I've seen enough media where a character uses a spell in a moment of brain-off panic ilI feel like animals could probably stumble into a spell or two like, accidentally

[the-punforgiven]

Also how funny would it be to see a completely normal regular bear cast magic missile outta nowhere

[the-punforgiven]

Also there is no way ravens wouldn't figure out spells, tbh

They're smart fuckin birds, I believe in them

Either through observing or just figuring shit out ravens could 100% learn how to cast spells I'm sure of it

[the-punforgiven]

Dogs can also cast Magic Missile but every time they do the projectile is shaped like a bone or a stick and they chase after it

[prokopetz]

Fantasy setting where every species of animal has One Fucked Up Trick exactly like in medieval bestiaries (e.g., panthers hypnotising their prey with sweet breath, pelicans reviving the dead with their willingly shed blood, etc.), except these are actually learned magic spells passed down from parent to offspring, so different populations of the same animal in different regions might have a different spell.

(If a species is domesticated you can teach it any spell you want, as long as you start 'em young enough; every breed of dog has a different "standard" spell, and knowing the "wrong" one is considered both a grave departure from breed standards and a potential violation of animal husbandry ethics.)

[luna-azzurra]

The most interesting question you can ask about any character is not what do they want. it's what do they believe they deserve. because those two things are almost never the same and the gap between them is where your entire story lives. a person can want love completely and believe they don't deserve it and that belief will destroy every good thing that comes toward them in ways they won't even notice they're doing. write the gap. the gap is the character.

[periodicallypurple]

Thought this might help others who struggle when writing. I know I get in my head too much.

[aristotels]

i think that, if youre usamerican and any time someone calls out your lack of knowledge on global geography you start talking about how bad the usa education is and how its actually not your fault that you dont know what continent nigeria is on because you cant look at the google maps bc donald trump will personally shoot you, youre very annoying

[aristotels]

literally nobody is asking you to point them all on a blank map or know their capitals or count at least 3 major cities but there was someone in the notes who thought egypt was in eastern europe and someone who thought canada was on a separate continent from the usa. knowing sort-of where myanmar or bosnia or montenegro or somalia or laos are is literally the basic minimum and you cant even do that. if you think your knowledge of the georaphy is lacking instead of telling everyone on this site about how "they just didnt teach me that in school!" you can literally open the wikipedia list of countries and look at them. there are blank maps of continents online which you can use to practice. you can google "learn all the countries ever" and youll find a free flash game or some shit. "they didnt teach me that in school" jesus fucking christ

[boogerwookiesugarcookie]

some fun games to build up your knowledge:

Seterra quizzes - lots of 'click where on the map [place] is' games

Worldle - guess a country by the shape of its outline, with the distance/direction if you get it wrong. You can also guess capital, neighbours, population, flag, currencies, major cities, and size

Globle - enter the name of a country and get a warmer-cooler colour for how close the target country is

Globle capitals - similar, but with capital cities

Flaggle - a flag divided into sixths, and each guess reveals another portion along with distance/direction as a hint

Wheretaken - guess which country a photo comes from, then guess the capital, capital's location, a landmark, the landmark's name, and which city another photo comes from (this one can be tricky: pictures come from wikimedia commons so sometimes it's like... a gutter)

Geoguessr - drops you somewhere in the world on google street view and you can navigate around trying to to guess what street in the world your drop point was

I started playing these daily a couple of years ago, and now I can point to almost any country on a map (South Pacific is still a little tricky). Along with trivia like flags and capitals, I've picked up a lot about different places' architecture, languages, and foliage. Often when you play these you'll become curious: why does a Spanish-speaking country have a French-sounding capital? Why is there a really long edge on that border? What does the bird on that flag represent? Where is that beautiful temple in the picture?

You might feel stupid at first, but it's really exciting to realise you're improving.

[seraphimnoted]

What’s the capital of Nebraska, Ohio, and Montana? Without google. Point to them on an unlabeled map of the USA please. European “countries” have as much land and population as American states.

[aristotels]

turns out that not only do they not teach geography in the usa schools they also dont teach basic reading skills

[what-even-is-thiss]

Religion in fantasy worlds: Everyone believes the exact same things about Green Nature Goddess and has official rituals for her that are the same everywhere

Religion irl: Technically it’s heresy for me to worship this skeleton but my spiritual advisor said that it’s legit so I’m gonna keep giving it offerings of yogurt

[what-even-is-thiss]

Religion in fantasy worlds: We’ve gotta pour water over this statue or else the god will get angry

Religion irl: We’ve gotta pour water over this statue? Why? Idk man that’s just what you do. Just do it alright.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Religion in fantasy worlds: These are the rules. The rules are law. Nobody can break the rules.

Religion irl: Okay you say that there are “rules” but how exactly are we defining “rules” here? Like is a suggestion a rule? How are we defining suggestion? No come back. Listen. Are we going by nuance in the original language or are translations fine or-

[what-even-is-thiss]

High control religions/cults recruiting in fantasy worlds: Join us! For we shall all eat the moon! This is a legitimate position to have!

High control religions/cults recruiting irl: We have free snacks. That shirt looks sooo cute on you btw. What, you heard that we wanna eat the moon? The media is always telling lies about us you know. We may have some unorthodox opinions about the moon but, tell you what. Come get some snacks, make some new friends, maybe chat about the moon a bit. See what you think. We’ve got pizza.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Religions in fantasy worlds: We must make a sacrifice to appease the gods! *draws up a sacrifice circle and completely destroys the sacrifice*

Religions irl: We must make a sacrifice to appease the gods! *has a communal barbecue*

[divorcedwife]

people are always slandering historians for saying reasonable things like "some things that seem romantic to us were platonic in the context of the times", when there's so many evil historians you actually have to look out for. number 1 : the closet royalist

[specialagentartemis]

my petty gripe about anachronism in historical/fantasy/spec-fic worlds is attraction language.

We’ve all heard the “should you use modern queer labels or not” argument but honestly even when people go “true, they wouldn’t use the labels ‘aromantic’ or ‘asexual,’” so often the characters describe their experiences as “I never felt romantic attraction” or “I don’t feel attracted to anyone” in ways that makes me go. You are stilllllll thinking about this in an extraordinarily modern online way. That 19th century steampunk detective man will NOT be angsting about having never felt romantic attraction, he would be angsting about being unable to feel moved by the beauty or charm of a woman, or something. And I do think that “attractiveness” language is different from the identity-level idea of experiencing attraction—Sherlock Holmes does not talk about not experiencing attraction, but when Watson says “What a very attractive woman!” Holmes responds “Is she? I did not observe.” (And then Watson calls him an inhuman automaton and calculating-machine and Holmes calls Watson’s judgement biased). Never swayed by the attractiveness of a man or woman, never desirous of marriage, never charmed by the delights of love, all of these feel like some of the variety of ways that someone in this milieu might describe an ace- or aro-spectrum identity more than “never felt attraction” does. Mostly because, like the terms for aromantic and asexual themselves, nailing down an exclusively attraction-based definition of a-spec identities is a relatively new and extremely post-AVEN thing. And yet in fiction everybody knows to articulate their experience as feeling sexual/romantic attraction. And I always want to go nooo how would THIS character think about it?? Not how you think this character SHOULD think about it, how would THIS person in THIS context articulate their feelings?

[specialagentartemis]

So what do you believe to be the antidote to cozy colonialism in fiction?

Being aware of what you’re actually saying with what you write, mostly. The cases I see usually strike me as the author just, did not think about the implications of what they were writing at all.

I think the problem is the clash between the lighthearted, nice, friendly expectations of cozy SFF, and the weight that certain SFF tropes and themes have behind them. So be deliberate about your themes and your tone, be open minded and curious about how the things you’re writing about actually impact people and how people in real life respond to them, and consider intentionally what it’s doing for your narrative. I’m not opposed to cozy SFF in principle, I’m not opposed to addressing colonial topics in SFF, but if you’re going to do both, you have to to think very seriously and carefully about how you do them.

[shinesurge]

gentle psa to new comic artists about a problem i also suffered from: slow quiet pacing is totally fine BUT if that's not what you're deliberately going for, you CAN fit more Story Progression on the page. no, more than that. more than that even. i promise if you don't want it to a single action doesn't need to take a whole page to illustrate each of its steps, a lot of connecting magic happens in the gutters i /promise/ if you draw someone pulling up in a car then skip to them walking in the door with groceries we will Understand that they unloaded the car and unlocked the house you feel me

[shinesurge]

#I am not a comic artist#but I had a similar problem when I was in film school#I call it “the door problem”#in my thesis film I had written that two characters walk out the back of the club into the alley behind the club#and my club location did not have a back alley but did have a side room that we used as the door#but that door opened in#and the location I used for the alley had a back door but that door opened outwards#and I knew it looked weird#I struggled framing the shots#and blocking the actors#and I got really really caught in my own head about how to make this door work#because to me it was really important that you saw every step from club to outside#because even though we had learned in school that you could transition it didn't feel right because it didn't feel like a new scene to me#(this being one of the struggles with a short film. It can all feel like one scene if your script is short!)#AND THEN#when we got into the editing room we just...cut the door transition entirely#initially not on purpose#what happened was that we decided to tighten up the timing by cutting non-linearly to the custom music I had commissioned#which made it much more experimental especially in comparison to my fellow classmates#however it showed me that the story still absolutely worked without needing to show how they got into the alley#the audience can infer the door#so now anytime I can feel myself getting stuck on something when I'm filming I think#“Is this a Door Problem?”#as a storyteller it's always a question of what is the absolute bare minimum you need to convey what you're trying to say#and sometimes that means you just need to already be outside the club

(via @currentlycreating )

Exactly! Film and comics are VERY similar mediums in this way, I love this. We should always be considering Door Problems

[goldcrescent]

I also think that the strength gap is at least partially manufactured women would in fact be stronger overall if little girls were encouraged to do physically taxing games and activities and eat their fill while they’re growing vs having to constantly diet and be sedentary indoors (or god forbid do intense cardio while under-eating). The amount of adult women honestly afraid to lift weights bc they think they’ll get bulky as though bulking isn’t a full time job that athletes have to spend all their time on and anyone on earth gets shredded from just using their adult muscles for their intended purpose, girl your bone density 🥀

[goldcrescent]

if you say women are intentionally nerfed from birth in 2026 people look at you like you’re insane and start condescendingly telling you about how women are just better at different things (but not during their periods haha) but this was a completely basic feminist talking point I grew up with like “girls can do it too! [shot of little girls climbing and running with boys]” nickelodeon commercial tier base level I hate it how is everyone suddenly dumber than the average 7 year old

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

me, whispering: portraying nonavian dinosaurs as living/thriving in tropical rainforest environments like those of today is just straight up racism other people: what me, still whispering: modern tropical rainforests are one of the most recently evolved ecosystems, only truly appearing in the early Paleogene, after all nonavian dinosaurs went extinct. They did not live in them, and if they were brought back into the modern day, they would not thrive in them. the only reason we associate tropical rainforests with primitiveness is because POC live there, and the associated narratives around jungles and savagery. that's it. that's the whole thing.

[quark-nova-deactivated20260116]

Also this makes me wonder if even the association between "tropical" and "rainforest" today might be due to that trope! There are many temperate rainforests (for example in Cascadia), but rainforests are associated with these narratives as a whole and are turned into this stereotype of a tropical primitive land.

Temperate rainforests in Cascadia and the Appalachians, Wikimedia Commons (1 2 3 4)

[headspace-hotel]

The plant communities that non-avian dinosaurs inhabited were just. So crazy different than the ones we have now. Like, flowering plants didn't even exist at all at the beginning of "dinosaur times" and even into the cretaceous they were nowhere NEAR as dominant as they were today.

Like, in general a lot of contemporary biomes are really new. Grasslands are extremely new because up until pretty recently geologically speaking, there was no such thing as grass, and it was even more recently that grass-dominated ecosystems became a thing.

[aadamantine]

posts made by that botanist lady from jurassic park

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

I'm a nonbinary paleoecologist but I could not be more honored by the comparison

[lykegenia]

Ok but how much of this argument leans on a gap in the fossil record for both plants and animals from the tropics because the combo of high temperatures and rainfall associated with those environments are really bad at preserving tissue

They wouldn't look like modern tropical forests in terms of species, sure, but what would tropical environments in the mesozoic look like if not forests of some kind? Honest question

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

They’d look like forests, but utterly different ones. Not only would the plants be more spread out because Sauropods, but they’d be dominated by conifers, tree ferns, and cycads. Not a flowering plant in sight until the late Cretaceous. And that has a huge impact - modern tropical rainforests are dominated by angiosperms.

[agnesmontague]

you can kinda tell when a writer has spent a lot of time around kids bc they avoid most of the pitfalls that come with writing children. namely, not giving them a too cutesy or twee voice but making them sound more like extremely weird little adults. kids playing pretend will almost never cutely slot into some romantic scenario for the adults' benefit bc the adults are usually too busy cleaning up or wondering what the fuck is wrong with their child. kids also have surprisingly stringent hangups ranging from very petty grievances to downright chauvinist gender roles, more often than not the result of a tragic education but sometimes far surpassing what they were taught in intensity. what im saying is there's nothing inherently wrong with treating fictional kids as stock characters but it's always quite nice to see when they aren't

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

It's extremely common for very young children to suddenly say something extremely cogent and articulate, that's jarringly inconsistent with their normal speech. This is usually something that they heard an adult say recently. A kid will spend ten minutes telling you a story about how they fought a wolf yesterday using simple sentences of fifty cent words, then nibble a snack, wrinkle their nose and say something like "I feel like Mum was overenthusiastic with the salt today, and not for the first time either" before going back to their clumsy story. (They do understand what they're saying when they do this. Kids' communication is usually held back by their vocabulary and pronunciation, not their understanding.)

Young kids are also a lot more socially aware than people give them credit for. Young children are perfectly aware that adults don't take them seriously. They know when their parents don't actually like them. They listen and remember when adults talk about them while they're in the room. Kids will develop basic abilities to charm etc. from babyhood and will begin experimenting with social norms and concepts of deception, appropriate information, and acceptable language and attitudes in toddlerhood. By the time a kid is five or six, they have solid social strategies for relating to adults and separate ones fr relating to their peers, that they'll continue to refine for the rest of their lives. They will also say completely off the wall shit because they don't have the context to know what is and isn't considered super fucked up yet.

By the time a kid is eight or nine, their main difference from adults is in experience, interests, and ability for long-term focus. An eight year old can think as intelligently and coherently as a thirty year old, they just have less experience and information to draw from, and are likely interested in very different things. They're also likely still slightly hamstrung by vocabulary and literacy, though much less so than a younger kid.

Teens will behave like adults who have little power (a teen is often at the mercy of their parents and the state and rarely taken seriously, which is extremely frustrating) and who are high stress and mid-crisis, because they're going through a transitory period where their bodies and moods are changing and are having to constantly learn and adjust; a fourteen year old in a stable situation will act pretty much like a thirty year old with an oppressive boss who's just left a tumultuous relationship.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#oh is *that* why i feel 14 again after my fiance broke things off with me and i had to move halfway across the continent back in with my ma?

Yeah that's just what humans feel and act like when they're unmoored and powerless and unpredictably changing. Teenagers are pretty much constantly unmoored and powerless and unpredictably changing, and react reasonably to those circumstances.

[zisurru]

something i think would make a lot of historical romance more accurate & interesting is the realization that people are less likely to totally disparage the ethical & social values of their time than they are to use those values to defend whatever it is they want to do

a woman is less likely to go "it's stupid that women are expected to be modest" than she is to go "there is nothing immodest about a woman going out without a chaperone" or even "i can go out without a chaperone because i am so modest"

people also seem less likely to see someone's shitty behavior as reflecting a shitty society than they are to view that behavior as being out of accordance with that society - e.g. a father who's excessively controlling of his daughters' marriage prospects isn't, in her mind, acting that way because he lives in a repressive patriarchal culture, but is actually outdated in his values - his cruelty is unmodern, ungentlemanly, stuck in the past, barbaric. we might think he's upholding the values of his culture perfectly, but the people around him who took issue with his behavior probably wouldn't see it that way