“But it didn’t break me. Nothing can break me unless I let it.” - Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl (via the-book-diaries)
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YOU ARE THE REASON
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH

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@juicyrea
“But it didn’t break me. Nothing can break me unless I let it.” - Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl (via the-book-diaries)
Can't it
I can't be me. i can't do right. I can't tell you how I feel. I can't want you to be here at night. I can't ask you to love me how is like to be loved. I can't make it better. I can't get a answer. I can't press the issue. I can't make you love me. I can't make you glad to be with me. I can't break from you. I can't change this. Lord knows I'm trying. I just can't seem to do it.
I'm sitting in the middle of my karma... oh well
“I will prove myself strong when they think I am sick. I will prove myself brave when they think I am weak.” - E. Lockhart, We Were Liars (via the-book-diaries)
Tonight i am so tired of being me. Like i wanna escape so bad. I know i made mistakes and i wish i could do better but sometimes it feels like no matter how hard i try, i am right where i started. it feels like im not allowed to be faulty. Like my accomplishments will never be enough. Like i am just bad. Period. And im so tired of this cycle.
“What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?”
— Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (via the-book-diaries)
“I want a soulmate who can sit me down, shut me up, tell me ten things I don’t already know, and make me laugh. I don’t care what you look like, just turn me on. And if you can do that, I will follow you on bloody stumps through the snow….I will do your windows. I will care about your feelings. Just have something in there.”
— Henry Rollins
A list of cliche things I’ve learned from writing the first draft of my novel:
- Don’t expect perfection. I spent about six months writing and rewriting the first chapter so I could make it ‘perfect.’ Eventually, I moved on. The first chapter didn’t even matter, because now I have to rewrite it. I learned more from finishing the book than wasting time on trying to perfect the hook sentence.
- The novel will go through changes, even as you write. So, I expected my story to be about people getting lost in the woods under mysterious circumstances. I had a better idea halfway through. It was more dynamic and it impacted my characters on a deeper level. So, what I thought was going to be the plot of my novel, became just a plot thread. It’s okay, be loose. You’re probably going to rewrite the whole thing anyway.
- Dedication is key, but don’t burn yourself out. I wrote every day, with the goal of writing 500 words a day on average over a month. Rather than setting a daily goal, I chose to average out my goal, just in case life got in the way. I found it super helpful considering I was working and going through school.
- Love thy characters. You’re going to be spending a lot of time with them. Make them interesting, make them flawed, make them real. Love them… But love their pain more.
- Finishing may not feel so great. I spent months with these characters. I helped them along their journey, and writing gave me a sense of purpose. It was something I looked forward to every day, the only thing I could think about. One day, it was over. I didn’t know what to do with myself. But there is a silver lining…
- It’s not over. Writing is rewriting. I finally got to read my novel, after letting it sit for a few weeks. It’s terrible and I love it. All I could think about is rewriting it. Today is the day.
Good luck on your writing journey.
The director of cybersecurity from the Electronic Freedom Foundation is offering to help women who have been threatened with compromise of their devices.
I better see EVERYBODY reblogging this
“Pain changes people. It makes them trust less, overthink more, and shut people out.”
— Unknown
“Deep inside, she knew who she was, and that person was smart and kind and often even funny, but somehow her personality always got lost somewhere between her heart and her mouth, and she found herself saying the wrong thing or, more often, nothing at all.”
— Julia Quinn
I'm too use to saying is okay when it's not okay to me...
Also! As you're studying creative and professional writing: do you have any writing advice? Anything you picked up along the way that's incredibly helpful with your original fiction and fanfic?
alright, i’m gonna try and culminate the last three years of my degree into the most helpful advice i received that i can remember and it might be completely useless to you all but who cares:
adverbs are the enemy. if you can say she smiled prettily you can sure as hell take another four words to describe what was pretty about her smile instead. (if you gotta keep 1 or 2 adverbs in, fine, but purge the rest.)
kill your darlings is usually relevant but only because that one sentence you love so much is usually only loved because it doesn’t actually fit in with everything else. if your darling fits and works, don’t go killing it - raise everything surrounding it to that standard.
when posting articles/content online (especially on websites like medium), post towards the back end of the week, in the second half of the day. wednesday and thursday are the best ones for it. the algorithms of medium and other websites will make sure the article ends up trickling into friday, when bored employees go online during their breaks, and if enough of them read it, it’ll be especially popular over the weekend. (case in point, i did exactly this for this essay on depression.)
be warned though, popularity can be down to your tagging system, your title, any featured image and subtitle. just because you post at the exact right time doesn’t mean you’ll get the reads. here’s a masterlist of free stock images you can use, just because i’m nice.
read everything you can
read where we came from as much as new books. i don’t like classics but even i have to admit that reading ray bradbury can provide important and helpful tips and tricks, as much as reading the hunger games can.
try as many genres as you can, but if you know what genre you want to write in, focus your energy on that. a teacher of mine once said that he regrets dividing his energy between literary fiction and horror. he reads and writes both, but because he spent his time split, he never mastered either of them. if he had focused on one over the other, his talents with it would be much more than they are. (though, note, if you want to focus on multiple genres, do it anyway. i can’t decide between sci fi and fantasy, so i’m willing to master neither so i can enjoy them both.)
write everyday if possible. my teachers all recommend morning pages - you write a page in the morning before you get up and leave. do it during breakfast or when you’re still in bed. it can be about anything - word association, prose, poetry, whatever. it also does not have to be good. here’s a good book we were recommended on the subject if you want help with this.
for fan fic specifically: write in third person. unless you’ve got something super Artsy and Forward Thinking going on, your readers will only find themselves uncomfortable with first person, as we’re already trained to consider these characters as outside ourselves. putting first person in makes us the same person as the character, and whether readers are aware of it or not, that’s not the experience they came to fan fic for.
try to observe the trends of fan fiction when you can. i did this when i wrote for the 100 (i noticed that more people wrote during the hiatus between seasons, but more people were reading during the season airing and immediately after it finished) - you’ll find you’ll get more reads than you expect.
on tagging, just because it’s relevant to me: tag however you want on ao3, but tumblr only pays attention to the first 5, so make them the most important ones that are most likely to be read. from 6 onwards, tumblr won’t put your post in that listing when searched, so don’t bother.
don’t make the same mistakes i did with the prose around dialogue. it’s not:
“Hey there,” Jackson said. Emily smiled.
“Hey!”
as soon as your prose stops relating to the dialogue and jackson, you gotta start a new paragraph. even if you’re going into exposition or description - it doesn’t belong on the same line as the dialogue and it’ll start confusing the reader. especially when you stop saying things like “jackson said” and the reader starts attributing the dialogue to incorrect characters. try:
“Hey there,” Jackson said.
Emily smiled. “Hey!”
be as economical in your writing as possible. seriously. i love purple prose but we don’t need it everywhere. sometimes the reader just needs the facts and not three paragraphs of adjacent information. (sometimes, however, the reader wants that information, so it’s about being economical with how often you’re economical.)
for correct formatting for scripts, use the BBC writer’s room. they also have contests and open submissions. very occasionally, the people who submit can get hired to the BBC.
let yourself be shit at writing. it’s nothing to be ashamed of.
Reading List:
here’s the best books i can offer you for writing. some may be helpful, some not so much for you - but these are the books my teachers recommended and i connected with.
The Writer’s Journey, Christopher Vogler is a staple, okay? it was the first book we were told to buy, because it breaks apart a story into so many pieces and shows you how they’re to be employed. it’s not an enjoyable read, but it’s a really good place to be starting from.
The Elements of Style, Strunk and White. Another staple. Very short and apparently, very important.
if you want help with novel writing, Thomas Emson’s How To Write a Novel in Six Months is my go-to. he came in and delivered a lecture, the book takes only 40 minutes to read, and it comes with a lot of great advice you can pick and choose from. i reference him every time y’all ask for writing advice and it’s because the things i took from his book are the most helpful to my process.
Stephen King’s On Writing is pretty good. I was bored as heck through the first half, where he writes his life story, but the second half is all writing advice and super helpful.
as mentioned in the morning pages point: The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron.
The Definitive Guide to Screenwriting, Syd Field.
The Ode Less Travelled, Stephen Fry. if you’re interested in writing poetry, this is a very good one to use.
On Writing Well, William Zinsser. if you want to write non-fiction, this is the one for you. get the most recent edition you can, the edits are worth it. (for example, zinsser originally wrote ‘he’ when talking of the writer, and eventually changed to ‘they’ and ‘he or she’, because he learned feminism lmao.)
my playwriting teacher recommends The Art of Writing Drama, Michelene Wandor which i haven’t actually read yet but i plan to.
Heussner, Tobias, et al. The Game Narrative Toolbox is good (though a lil expensive) for when it comes to writing for games.
so is Rusch, Doris C. Making Deep Games: Designing Games with Meaning and Purpose, but again, recommended for games.
sources: i’m a third year creative and professional writing undergrad, consistently top of my class, taught by professional writers in fiction, experimental literature, poetry, non-fiction, playwriting, young adult and children’s literature and game design.
“you > universe”
— 3:27 (via ignorance)
"Life's a fucking mess. It's gone to shit and I am every bit apart of it. I may have started it."
Jhene Aiko - Nobody
“I just feel so alone right now and I don’t know if you care or not.”
— (via coral)
“You’re worth a handwritten letter, a random trip at night to the beach, a painting that says more than a thousand words.”
— Scottie Waves