[achillesinhighheels]

[rowanisawriter]

imo the pov character should be lying to themselves and concealing shit from themselves constantly

[rowanisawriter]

interrupting others who might say something revealing or important, thinking around things, using words like “didn’t” or “doesn’t” or “imagines” to describe actions not taken or half taken, dreaming things and never talking about them or thinking about them during waking hours, lying to people, hiding true feelings, sitting in shadow or low light to keep any accidental flicker of emotion hidden, writing in obtuse ways that doesn’t let the reader know what they’re thinking or planning, avoiding adverbs in tense moments, describing actions in straightforward and almost clinical ways sometimes, hiding the truth from the character and the reader even though you both know or suspect but there is just enough space there to fill with doubt

[quasi-normalcy]

The rookie mistake in fiction writing is assuming that short stories will be easier to write than novels because they're smaller. No. This is the equivalent to thinking that it's easier to make a pocket watch than grandfather clock. Short stories are complex engineering problems.

[quasi-normalcy]

You need to find a way to pack all of the things that a story needs into a tiny like box without it overheating.

[lesbianwithchainsaws]

Advice to writers on how to make your story better:

add more lesbians

[lost-in-eriador]

in 2026, remember how GOOD writing feels. remember how satsfying it is to get your characters to the point you have been dying to get to, where they will experience the love, fear, relief or whatever the feeling you want to bring to life may be. let this year be the year of writing, prgress and of satisfactory endings.

[livingincolorsagain]

one day i will write

[flashnerves]

gonna be honest. i still dont really know when to separate my paragraphs

[flashnerves]

i hate how slow i write. like why is it actually taking me literal days to write 2000 words. GET IT TOGETHER

[despin-convert-deactivated20250]

surely there’s more examples that i’m just not aware of but afaik the closest you’ll get to a n vietnamese perspective on the war is viet thanh nguyen’s the sympathizer (fiction and actually mostly takes place in america) and ken burn’s vietnam documentary series which actually interviewed pavn & vietcong soldiers for the first time maybe ever in american retrospectives of the war. i’m sure there’s more out there but it really is insane that it’s such a drop in the bucket compared to american-centered stories about how actually it really fucked me up to napalm your kids

[despin-convert-deactivated20250]

Viet Thanh Nguyen interview for Fresh Air, 2024

[cleaningouttherooms]

just finished harpman's I who have never known men and I will say it did not exactly do wonders for my mood but it's also really unlike anything I've ever read before. I think I'm just genuinely impressed by fiction that asks you to imagine a crazy unexplainable scenario and then proceeds to give you absolutely zero answers without apologizing for it. what if forty women were kept alive fed and warm in a cage for no reason on an empty planet that looks a lot like earth but maybe isn't but maybe is. like yeah what if

[loveydive]

the problem with song of achilles is that miller yaoified patrochilles, when she shouldve yurified them

[loveydive]

the main criticism i have for the song of achilles is the depiction of the relationship between achilles and patroclus.

i dont mind a coming of age love story between the boys; its just that throughout the book it is EXTREMELY static. sure there are a few bumps along the way but they eventually sort themselves out fairly quickly (too quickly imo). like yes, i get it. they love each other so much but they cant be tgt bc of fate - oh how tragic. but the story is only tragic in that they both die. its not actually a tragedy in itself, because the ending isnt actually tragic at all - they meet each other in the underworld again afterall.

but this is the reason why i think the depiction of their doomed but unbreakable love is one of the weaknesses of the story. it fails to connect with or explore the themes in the illiad - the real themes which actually made it a tragedy. achilles was consumed by his pride and let hundreds of men die, he was no longer himself and what? patroclus still loved him wholeheartedly after that? i just couldnt bring myself to believe that. after all of that how could patroclus be so single-minded in loving him? it wouldve made for a better story if patroclus had intended to go out to the walls of troy as a kind of suicide mission. if he knew that hector killing him would be the only way to break achilles and finally end the war. the same events could happen but patroclus' motivations would be different. this wouldve given him so much more agency and add more complexity in their relationship. that at the end of the day achilles didnt love him enough to fight in the war. he loved his immortality more than he loved patroclus.

and wouldnt that have made a better tragedy? this is why patroclus' betrayal to achilles when he saved briseis was so emotionally compelling. his love for achilles was no longer simple, it was no longer a boy's love. bc in his mind, the achilles that he loved died a long time ago. the war has changed him and it wont bring the old one back. IS THAT NOT MORE TRAGIC? AND MORE THEMATICALLY COMPELLING?

i just felt that miller tried SO hard to justify their romance that she didnt want to risk putting in any complexity at all otherwise their 'lovers' status would be threatened. but i really think it was to the detriment to the book. it wasnt bad, it was actually pretty alright - it just wasnt a masterpiece

[loveydive]

thinking about that ocean vuong quote ‘Because that’s what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else’ and the rest of the paragraph is little dog telling his mother that he hates her and that she is a monster only to take it back when she isnt there anymore, that he didnt mean it. mothers, especially immigrant mothers, belong to their children first. they dedicate their whole lives to them, quashing their own potential and personhood at times to do so.

and i was just thinking about how the ending of everything everywhere all at once was the complete opposite of that. how at first when joy asks evelyn to let her go, she does what she wants - she lets her go. ‘because that’s what mothers do’ and it feels like she’s doing the right thing, by letting her daughter go to get rid of the pain that she’s feeling. but it is an passive act of love - one that immigrant mothers are too familiar with. to raise and love your children through sacrifice (so much sacrifice) while neglecting what they themselves want.

joy tells evelyn to let go, not because she actually wanted her to let go but because it was a challenge, almost a test, for her mother. like when little dog tells his mother that he hates her and that she is a monster, they both dont mean it. its a test. they want to see to what extent their mothers can love them. would you love me even if you thought i hated you? if i called you a monster? would you love me if i asked you to let me go? even if i told you that being with you hurts us both? and joy gets her answer. evelyn refuses to let her go because she loves her. without a doubt.

she holds onto joy and doesn’t let go. she tells her that she ‘will always always want to be here with’ her. even when there are other universes where she doesnt make all those sacrifices and is more successful - she chooses joy (metaphorically and literally). and its just. i keep thinking about that other tumblr post where they talk about how evelyn wanted to feel that she was worth loving and not letting go of with her dad. and she does that with joy!! she doesn’t let her go because she loves her. evelyn in the movie shatters the mother’s instinct of ‘standing still until their children belong to someone else’. she is no longer a bystander in her own daughter’s life but someone who actively chooses to be with her. love doesn’t just sit there, it is made!! and i just love it so much.

[loveydive]

giovanni’s room IS giovanni. it is him and his past and his emotions and his grief and his humanity. when david describes his room as having been organised by punishment and grief, he is describing giovanni as a grief stricken man who punishes himself for it. when giovanni is chipping away at the wall to try to make a new bookcase, he is changing himself to try to get david to stay - to make the room bigger (his life better) than it actually is so that he doesnt leave. when david calls the room hideous, he is calling giovanni hideous. when he leaves the room for the final time, he is leaving giovanni for good.

when david loves hella, he describes her as a walled city. giovanni is just a room. he couldnt make himself a city for david as much as he wanted to. the room is a cage, it is a safehaven, it is a cage and a safehaven from and of society.

giovanni is his room; the room is him.

[loveydive]

i just finished reading giovanni’s room and i am curious about the immense amount of ‘room’ imagery in the novel. i mean duh, a novel called ‘giovanni’s room’ is going to use that analogy. but ive seen people interpret giovanni’s room as soooo many things but none of them felt satisfying enough for me.

Keep reading

[metamatar-deactivated20250401]

to be someone who's actually interested in reading english literature and genre fiction or tbh any kind of cultural production. you kind of accept that racism and misogyny and so on usually brackets all the cool worldbuilding and beautiful prose and the clever ideas? it doesn't really dull my enjoyment exactly, i honestly have fun mapping out the exact contours of the type of racism. i enjoy fanwork that thumbs at that. but the denial of its existence actually really really does annoys me. i emotionally have a worse long term response to the denial of racism than actual racism. (this has absolutely nothing to do with the real world.)

[flashnerves]

having just finished i who have never known men i do think that sophies afterword was a bit too much of an optimistic take on the novel. obviously i understand that the sense of despair that we read during the womens' years of living as a village was more likely due to the child being an unreliable narrator. but it was clear that even in her nearing death, the child was unsatisfied with her life.

im pretty sure that the novel is a tragedy and is meant to be written as a tragedy and it is only understanding why it is tragic that we get why sophie might think that it offers the message that 'no life is without hope'.

throughout the novel the child frequently insists that she is different from the other women and that she is an outcast. even during antheas final moments, she insists this and says that this difference is what will ensure that the country will be hers.

but its only after the death of the rest of the women that she finally admits to herself that she had loved and that she had loved anthea and she did indeed seek companionship - just as the other women did. but she realises this too late.

so in her final moments she writes a journal of her life in the vain attempt that perhaps someone might read the pages and think of her. because at the core of what it means to be human is the intrinsic longing to be known, and to exist. and being known and existing can only be achieved by and through and with others. by virtue of existing, you are ensuring that others exist.

that is what makes every life hopeful