A moment @isamenot - Tumblr Blog

What I would wish the third title was named…

So, before they start to (potentially) drop the official subtitle for part three, I just want to quickly throw my personal favourite out there. (Though, I don’t think that this will actually be the real title.)

Please be aware, that there might be spoilers up ahead for those who do not know the original game.

#final fantasy 7 #final fantasy vii #final fantasy vii re trilogy #final fantasy vii part 3 #final fantasy 7 part 3 #final fantasy 7 remake 3

alex-wrtng

Dialogue tips that actually work:

You are not writing a movie (ignore this if you are). The reader doesn't need to know every word the characters say for the duration of the story. Less is more.

Dialogue can happen within the prose. "And they awkwardky discussed the weather for five minutes" is way better than actually writing five pages of dialogue about the weather.

Balance your dialogues. Surprise yourself with a monosyllabic answe to a dialogue that's ten sentences long. Don't be afraid of letting your character use half a page for a reply or nothing at all!

Don't write accents phonetically, use slang and colloquialisms if needed.

Comma before "said" and no caps after "!?" unless it's an action tag. Study dialogue punctuation.

Learn the difference between action tags and dialogue tags. Then, use them interchangeably (or none at all).

Don't be afraid to use said. Use said if characters are just saying things, use another word if not. Simple. There's no need to use fancy synonyms unless absolutely necessary.

Not everyone talks the same way so it makes sense for your characters to use certain words more often than others. Think of someone who says "like" to start every sentence or someone who talks really slow. Be creative.

Use prose to slow down the pace during a conversation.

Skip prose to speed up the pace during a conversation.

petermorwood

(a) Dialogue is spoken word, so even if not writing a movie, try putting it in screenplay format. This will immediately show if any one character is talking too much without a break for action, description or other-character comment.

A monosyllabic comment at this point can also suggest In-Story that others think the chatterbox is going on too long.

Even if that one character is using half a page, don't (IMO) put the speech in a single unbroken paragraph. A Wall Of Text has no rest for eyes or pauses for mental breath.

(b) Dialogue is spoken word, so try speaking it - not just reading, think Voice Actor - into whatever recording app or device you have available.

Nothing sounds as much like spoken word as words being spoken, and using different voices can help in choosing distinctive rhythm and vocabulary for that character's dialogue.

#writing advice

over-sleep

ラッピングリボン　　(´▽｀*) ﾜﾊｰ Holiday craft!

（countervail247365さんのImgur）

over-sleep

繕い　　(；ﾟДﾟ) ﾅﾝﾄｫ Mending a sweater

（Reddit:r/oddlysatisfying u/thegupeeman）

strangesequitur

I fully understand everything that is going on here and could probably do it but it would take me like three hours and as such I’m calling Witchcraft.

odonata523

Male Scifi and Fantasy writers: Look at this !Strong! female character! She can fight and solve puzzles, and ends up with the sidekick not the hero! Isn’t she a great character?

Everyone: No, she’s one-dimensional and still only exists to please the hero’s ego

Male scifi and fantasy writers: You’re never happy! This is how characters are written! Besides, it’s much harder for us to write women because we are men!

Terry Pratchett: *creates a female character who is literally the embodyment of a dog, sets her up to be the love interest of Protagonist Hero Man.* *writes her as clever, emotionally tortured, lonely and powerful* *uses her to explore difficulties of bisexuality and masculine dominated workforces*

Terry Pratchett: *Creates a pair of old witches, one of whom is a virgin and the other who has slept with lots of men.* *makes them best friends, never dismisses one lifestyle of the other, explains lifestyle choices based on characters history and personality, uses this to develop each character as the books progress*

Terry Pratchett: *Writes Sybil Rankin* *makes the powerful rich lady heavy set but beautiful, never plays her by her looks, develops her as she ages, acknowledges the way society views such people and then spits on their attitudes* *does it again with Agnes*

Terry Pratchett: *Writes a book about an entire army secretly being women, creates complex female relationships, introduces same sex relationships completely naturally*

Terry Pratchett: *takes old joke about female dwarves and uses it to explore gender identity without making it seem forced or unnatural, carefully discusses some of the issues and complextities whilst still making funny and witty observasions and maintaining genuine fantasy tropes*

Terry Pratchett: *DOES THIS ALL OVER AND OVER AGAIN, DEVELOPING CHARACTERS AS HIS VEIW OF THE WORLD DEVELOPS AND CAREFULLY APOLOGIZES FOR EARLY MISTAKES*

odonata523

Excellent note by @spiderleggedhorse

dduane

Terry’s writer superpower was always Thinking Things Through. All the way through.

jaubaius

Ancient lock mechanism

theoutcastrogue

Oh that’s great! There are many pictures of this type of lock around, but when it comes to locks, you need a video/gif to illustrate how it works, right?

This is ye olde pin tumbler lock, an Egyptian (c.2000 BCE) improvement of an older Assyrian (c.4000 BCE) design:

It spread out from Egypt and it was used for thousands of years. The modern ubiquitous Yale lock is also called a pin tumbler, since it’s an elaborate (and tubular) version of the same basic concept.

heroineimages

Cool!

bogleech

I’d seen the last gif, but I get it so much better after seeing the simpler larger and older version first.

#reference

et-in-arkadia

this is such incredible advice for creating any kind of art i have to put it over here to remind myself

dduane

And this goes for writing too.

There are stories that only you are qualified to tell best: that only you are able to tell. You are uniquely positioned in spacetime to do this job because of your life detail, your upbringing, your reading, your thinking. No one else can tell your stories just the way you do, no matter how good a writer they might be.

And inside you somewhere are characters desperate for your attention; desperate for your intention and your work to breathe life into them. They need your voice raised to tell their stories. No one else can do it. You are their only hope.

Waste no more time worrying about whether your take on their stories will be good enough. You have more important things to be thinking about. So go get on with it. :)

#advice

916gawd-deactivated20190411

Reblog if you think public libraries are important and should be maintained.

fluffygif

Physical painting impact ❤️

miatsai

writing and craft and stuff

"Mia do you have any writing advice pet peeves"

why, yes i do. presented without too much comment:

it's a scam because you need to use both things to tell a story effectively. if it's all show, your novel is going to be over 200k words and half of it will probably be a travelogue. if it's all tell, we'll have a hard time getting into the characters' thoughts and feelings. show, don't tell exists to help newer writers explore what's going in their characters' minds. it's not a hard and fast rule once you've learned how to characterize and give context. so please, do some telling. do some beautiful telling.

tkingfisher

The opening chapter of Spindle’s End by Robin McKinley is, in fact, an info dump. But it is so gorgeously told that you don’t CARE. In less-skilled hands, it would be one of those grim backstory slogs where they tell you all about the kingdom and how magic works, but it it beautiful, it sparkles on the page, and there is a great deal of telling well-told.

brehaaorgana

I don't think it's actually a scam, actually.

I think instead that:

A) many people just don't get this explained beyond the pithy quote, which means that

B) many people don't realize the earliest references we have to this concept of show don't tell are from playwrights and dramatists, which definitely impacts why this would be so important! I cannot stress that part enough!

Of course it matters that a play should avoid simply telling you everything! It's a play!

Mark Swan, who kept "Show, Not Tell," above his writing desk, in his 1927 primer "You can Write Plays":

Events that have happened in the past, which cannot possibly be acted in the present, must be 'told about.' The telling of them is the only narrative or description that should be in a play. Make the 'telling' as brief and crisp as possible, without being too obvious. See if the facts can be told in a scene, or scenes, which give the actors a chance for emotional work, thus getting an emotional response from the audience while it is absorbing facts - in other words sugar-coat the pill." [...] "In the planting of characterization, motivation and relationship: don't 'talk it,' ' show it.' Express these things in acted scenes, not in narrative or description."

Don't talk it. Show it.

This is literally just Wikipedia but like, surely it's obvious that scripts should account for actors acting, yes?

The Craft of Fiction (1921), British essayist Percy Lubbock writes of picture vs drama

It is a question, I said, of the reader's relation to the writer; in one case the reader faces towards the story-teller and listens to him, in the other he turns towards the story and watches it. In the drama of the stage, in the acted play, the spectator evidently has no direct concern with the author at all, while the action is proceeding. The author places their parts in the mouths of the players, leaves them to make their own impression, leaves us, the audience, to make what we can of it. The motion of life is before us, the recording, registering mind of the author is eliminated. That is drama; and when we think of the story-teller as opposed to the dramatist, it is obvious that in the full sense of the word there is no such thing as drama in a novel. The novelist may give the very words that were spoken by his characters, the dialogue, but of course he must interpose on his own account to let us know how the people appeared, and where they were, and what they were doing. If he offers nothing but the bare dialogue, he is writing a kind of play; just as a dramatist, amplifying his play with 'stage-directions' and putting it forth to be read in a book, has really written a kind of novel.

The novelist must be a story-teller sometimes, because they need to tell us things. The dramatist, however, CAN show us things.

It's great writing advice. It can be borrowed sometimes for prose writing too! But it cannot be followed completely in prose writing because it's advice which accounts for a literal visual medium that relays the writing.

colleendoran

No, Sir Galahad is not in the Bible, and I never said he was.

OK, so in my series of posts and lectures about my work on Neil Gaiman's Chivalry, I pointed out that Sir Galahad's first appearance in Arthurian fiction was in the Vulgate, and that his name was originally spelled Galaad. Therefore the spelling in Neil Gaiman's Chivalry is correct, and Galahad is a later variant spelling.

Someone recently took me to task for saying this meant that I claimed Sir Galahad was in the Bible, and yet Sir Galahad appears nowhere in the Bible.

I never said Sir Galahad was in the Bible.

I said he was in the Vulgate.

Vulgate means "common version" in Latin.

The confusion here stems from the word "vulgate" which often refers to the 4th century Latin translation of the Bible commonly known as the Vulgate Bible.

But "vulgate" is also a term used to refer to The Lancelot-Grail Cycle, a 13th century French Arthurian cycle which is also known as the Vulgate or Vulgate Cycle -i.e. common version. Later translations of this work are known as Post-Vulgate.

Specifically, Galahad or Galaad appears in the Vulgate Queste del Saint Graal.

Happy to help.

Chivalry is available wherever fine books are sold, and you can come see me at the San Diego Comic Con Museum on October 4 where I will be signing and lecturing and showing art. Thanks.

tlirsgender

You ever think about how crows are acting not unlike how early humans probably did and you're just like. Oh ok

tlirsgender

I saw a Thing one time about how the earliest sign of civilization is a healed femur because that shows that we were taking care of each other because if we Didn't a broken leg would mean you Die because you can't. Do things

And I was thinking about this and I remembered also seeing an article about this one mated pair of crows where one of them broke its beak and thus couldn't properly feed itself on its own. So the other one helps

So basically I have connected the two dots ("you didn't connect shit") I've connected them

And also they not only use tools but teach each other how to construct them, so uh

Really makes you think

tlirsgender

Realistically I know immortality would kinda suck but I'd love to see where crows are going with this

findersfeeders

Fun fact, there is little info on crows (as far as species of interest go) because they're so good at evading human tactics for collection and observation. I had a friend who studied them in grad school. Not only do they describe humans to each other (so crows you've never seen before will avoid you), they also learn the precise distance of net cannons (for trapping and tagging) after 1 encounter and then stand at that distance the entire time (making naive researchers think maybe they can juuuust caych em). So basically you need to befriend them (a common strategy), or find a murder that's never seen you before (researchers wear presidents masks to throw them off, but then they remember and describe the cars). In this case, you have one chance to collect enough in the group to get good data. Whatever crow you catch once, you probably will never catch again, ruling out biosensing devices (like they use with other birds and turtles n junk).

The latest big finding about crows is that they have a grasp of knowledge breadth, meaning they "know what they know" meaning they are conscious (self aware), have subjective experiences and can reflect on their knowledge. (Source) This also implies they have an understanding of the unknown.

Look up Andreas Nieder and Jon Marzluff's work if you want the deep skinny.