An Obstinate, Headstrong Girl @ginfueledwritings - Tumblr Blog

Have you ever thought about losing your brother?

me vs. making webweaves on dying and family. really this was just an excuse to think about killing flies.

soracities

“Accept this love I ask for. Accept the part of me that is you.”

Alejandra Pizarnik, from ‘On Your Anniversary’

“I am in your words, I know, as you are in all of mine.”

Edmond Jabés, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm A Tiny Book

“What I am giving you is nothing that belongs to me […] It is just yourself, you running through me throwing off sparks, your eyes blazing with fear, blazing with hope, I am giving you your own fire. All I do is breathe very gently on your night embers and handfuls of stars fly out.”

Hélène Cixous, The Book of Promethea

“losing through you what seemed myself, i find selves unimaginably mine”

e.e. cummings, ‘silently if,out of not knowable’

“He is more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. If all else perished and he remained, I should still continue to be, and if all else remained, and we were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. He’s always, always in my mind; not as a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

“When you seem to be listening to my words, they seem to be your words, with me listening.”

Antonio Porchia, Voices

“No, Hans, my love, I am not as generous as you think nor do I give myself to you freely–whatever you take from me you have already given me […] When I think of you, when I give myself to you, I feel I am going to meet myself, and this makes me stronger and more serene.. what a selfish kind of generosity!”

Andres Neuman, Traveller of the Century

“I meant that you should discover me so, by my faint indirections, And I, when I meet you, mean to discover you by the like in you

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“I met myself in you.”

Adonis, ‘Transormations of the Lover’

soracities

Edmond Jabès from "Drawn Curtains" (Return to the Book), excerpted in From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabès Reader [transcript in ALT]

sailermoon

Aeschylus, The Oresteia / Anne Carson, H of H Playbook / Hadestown, Road to Hell (Reprise) / John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van / Richard Siken, The Worm King’s Lullaby

stlowens

Mary Oliver, from “Lead.” [ID in alt text]

septemberkisses

To be loved is to be known; to be seen.

Excerpts Sources:

Is it okay to say this? - Trista Masteer // Blasted - Sarah Kane // Reassurances to Hades - Kristina Haynes // The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - T.J. Reid // My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man - Georges Bataille //"The Last Poem in the Book," These Days (Alfred A. Knopf, 1989); Over and over again - Frederick Seidel // My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man - Georges Bataille // Adult Children of Emotionaly Immature Parents - Lindsay C. Gibson // She Satisfies A Fear with the Rhetoric of Tears - Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz // My Life Is Pathetic! - Heather Havrilesky

soracities

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (trans. Michael Henry Heim)

virgin-martyr

“The female body was particularly absorbent when it came to shame. If you wrung out any woman’s body, you would discover it was soaked in shame.”

— Heather O’Neill, excerpt from When We Lost Our Heads

talestalesof

“You cannot tell the audience everything you know about love in every line of love you speak. Step aside and they will know what you know because they know it already.”

— Leonard Cohen, How to Speak Poetry

geryone

For Your Own Good, Leah Horlick

howelljenkins

having to come to terms with the fact that love is not an everlasting performance in which you attempt to retain the attention of your significant other but rather a release of control and putting faith into them and trusting them to choose to stay with you no matter what you have to offer

howelljenkins

to love and be loved is to rest

theglowpt2-deactivated20200101

novitiate2017-deactivated202002

oumaimas

a-quiet-green-agreement

I think of you often. I think of you often, and I remember.

– Ahdaf Soueif, from “I Think of You,” I Think of You: Stories (Anchor Books, 2007)

on-poetry

Well, here it was, then: longing, missing. The most useless kind of love.

—Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

librarysilverfish

Ok but before you go throwing random stuff into your story to spice it up or get it un-stuck, consider doing the following:

Grab a few events (minor or major doesn’t matter) from earlier or later in the story and trace out the causal chains. What caused it and what did it cause? Can the domino effect lead to a new event?

Trace out the “story” of the main cast’s motivation. How does the motivation interact with the story and how does the motivation change over time?

Go hunt for story elements you put in earlier that could be escalated into subplots.

Take a few characters who have different levels of information (or are more or less close to antagonists) and go through the story from their perspective. Perhaps you don’t know what should come next for your main character, but it might be obvious what comes next for a different character.

When you throw in new characters, first try to repurpose old characters. This makes them feel less cheap and gives them a better chance at developing depth. And when you do want to use a totally new one, consider someone who’s related to an existing character or a causal chain. The reader might already be wondering where X character’s parents are, after all.

Point is, the deeper the connections between your story elements, the more satisfying the read. You don’t have to view those connections as a constraint. They can tell you what needs to happen next.