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Today's Document
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Cosimo Galluzzi
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
ellievsbear
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Peter Solarz
Monterey Bay Aquarium
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Discoholic 🪩
JBB: An Artblog!
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Stranger Things
Xuebing Du
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@letswritetoday
the big three questions of media analysis: what the author wanted to say, what they actually said, and what they didn’t know they were saying
for the last one i don’t just mean oh the author inadvertently wrote in gay subtext or whatever i’m talking about media as a cultural artifact which can reveal a ton about societal norms, biases, ideals, etc. it’s all about positionality and an unexamined positionality is often the most revealing of all
Once again recommending that writers, especially newer writers, start ‘rubber ducking’
When you’re stumped and you don’t know what’s not working for your writing, or you don’t know where to go next, take out a rubber duck (or any equivalent friend/inanimate object, I like to use my dogs) and start explaining every single detail as if the rubber duck knows nothing about writing or about your story. Explain out loud what’s going on, what part you’re up to, why you’re stumped, and what you know you need to get to when you figure out how to get there
Somewhere along the line of putting it into words and externalising the thought process, it’s likely something will slot into place
just saw your recent reblog and I wanted to ask for your best advice for people who haven't experienced things like csa and assault should go about implementing it/the experience within their stories
the thing i was getting at is there is no right way. experiences of sexual violence are so incredibly diverse, the specifics so important, and are experienced by such a range of individuals, that those experiences and reactions to them are going vary very widely. i have encountered depictions of sexual violence by other survivors or that speak deeply to other survivors which i find offensive or poorly done, politically or aesthetically; i also have texts i treasure for their depictions of sexual violence and which speak to my own reality that other survivors find unrealistic, crass, or tasteless. i think the framework of “good representation” breaks down in a lot of areas, and especially this one. it is never the one i use, when i critique depictions of sexual violence. however, a hallmark of many treatments that personally rankle me is a sensation that the writer in question has not truly mentally or emotionally sat with csa or sexual assault as a real experience. that their writing comes from a place of received cliche and reactive disgust rather than the real imaginative engagement that is the prerequisite to depicting any lived experience well. that is my main advice: really live with it for a while, imaginatively, in some way.
read widely, not only fiction but non-fiction and memoir. think about the specifics of what occurs, not in generalities. how would this happen, for this character, in these circumstances? what is the shape of the relation in which violation is occurring? what are is specific bodily reality of the acts inflicted upon the victim, how do they feel, how is that experienced from the inside? how would this individual character react - not some poster child victim, not a list of signs or symptoms, but this individual person, according to their culture, worldview, emotional and relational landscape? what sense do they make of it? what frameworks do they use to comprehend it, sustain themselves within it? what emotional resources do they use to survive? stay with it, enter into it, go with this fictional person there, even if the answers are distressing or uncomfortable. greet the answers as human and comprehensible, rather than inspiration for condescension or pity. there is no set of answers you will arrive on that will make any one depiction unoffensive to everyone; i would say the hallmark of an actually meaningful engagement would be it probably will offend someone, somewhere, that this in fact means a representation has escaped platitude and entered into the real messiness of such complex and difficult and alienating experience. but care about it. this is what fiction is for, this kind of imaginative connection. use it to the fullest, for yourself and your own imaginative empathetic capacity if nothing else. think of it that way, a relation between you and what you wish to grapple with, rather than between the work and a projected audience.
The devastating difference between how much time it takes to write something vs how fast people read it lol
you're falling in the trap!! it will be read by many people, many times, and it will live on in their memories. and maybe no single other human will match you in time spent dedicated to your story, but as a collective we will outlast you. acts of creation only grow when they are shared
This. Writing is not like dinner. It can be consumed many times
you write it once so it can be read forever
When I was in college, my Creative Nonfiction professor would regularly have us do something she called "hotspotting" (she didn't know that this was already a term tbc) with our rough drafts. Basically, hotspotting is when you look at your draft and pick out your favorite sentence, or one of your favorite sentences--one that you're really proud of--and write it down in a blank sheet in a notebook. Not a new document, a physical notebook. (You are not allowed to use technology for hotspotting.) And then you set a timer for however long--like maybe ten to twenty minutes--and you elaborate. You treat that one sentence as if it's the opening sentence to a new draft, and you write from there, until the timer is up.
It sounds like a gimmick, but honestly, some of my best writing in that class came from hotspotting. Usually, the sentence you consider the "best" is the one that really gets to the heart of something you're trying to convey. In a rough draft, it tends to be that you're fumbling around a bit before you really hit on the heart of things. So with hotspotting, you're starting from a less fumbly place, which means you're able to dig into your subject in a much deeper and more precise way. It makes you feel like a surgeon, a little bit.
So I do recommend trying it, even just for fun, even if you think the rough draft you have is already good. You might surprise yourself with what you come up with! :)
How to Fix Underwriting
1. Slow down at emotionally important moments.
Big emotions need space to land. If a scene feels rushed, pause the plot briefly to show how the moment affects the character.
2. Add reactions, not explanations.
Instead of explaining what a character feels, show it through physical responses, hesitation, or small actions that reveal emotion naturally.
3. Ground every scene in the senses.
If a scene feels thin, add one or two sensory details—sound, texture, smell, or temperature—to make the moment feel lived-in.
4. Let thoughts interrupt action.
A line of internal thought can deepen a scene without slowing it too much. Thoughts show stakes, fear, longing, or conflict beneath the action.
5. Expand consequences, not events.
You don’t need more things to happen—you need to show what matters. Focus on how events change relationships, decisions, or self-perception.
6. Strengthen setting where emotion peaks.
The environment should echo or contrast the emotion of the scene. Setting is not decoration—it’s emotional reinforcement.
7. Add specific details instead of general ones.
Underwriting often relies on vague language. Swap “they argued” for one sharp line of dialogue or a specific breaking point.
8. Let dialogue breathe.
Short dialogue exchanges without pauses can feel flat. Add beats—silence, gestures, interruptions—to give the conversation weight.
9. Show transitions between scenes.
If scenes jump too quickly, readers feel disoriented. A brief transition helps establish time, mood, and emotional continuity.
10. Clarify stakes early in the scene.
If readers don’t know what can be lost, scenes feel empty. Make sure the character wants something specific and fears losing it.
11. Use the “what are they feeling right now?” check.
After each major beat, ask what emotion is dominant in that moment. If it’s missing on the page, the scene is likely underwritten.
12. Expand scenes that feel “too clean.”
If a scene resolves too neatly or quickly, it probably needs more tension. Messy emotions and unresolved feelings add depth.
If you see this post, back up your writing
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
There's this legal theory (bear with me here!!) that says, basically, that you can make a general moral principal connect to pretty much any argumentative position you want. So, for example, you can start with "modesty is a core virtue for women" as a moral principal, and that can lead you to 1) "so women should not go out in public because being in public is immodest", 2) "so it's neutral for women to go out in public because being in public is not immodest", 3) "so women should go out in public to demonstrate their modesty and spread that virtue," etc etc. It all depends on the reasoning and evidence you choose.
In the legal field, this is how you get lawyers on opposing sides of a case both citing freedom, or public safety, or justice, as the value at the basis of their argument: they both think that that value is important or particularly compelling for the decision-maker they're appealing to, so they have to find reasoning and evidence that allows their opposite arguments to both lay claim to it. (A lot of the time that reasoning and evidence is incoherent "transcendental nonsense," as one of the originators of this theory Felix Cohen called it. But that's a subject for a different rant.)
In writing fiction, as OP demonstrates so elegantly, this theory can help draw the connection between the values of a character's culture and upbringing, and the decisions and stances the author has them take. Rarely, people's core values are different from the prevailing ones of their society. But much more often, they're working from the same value, and reaching a different conclusion than the people around them/their past self/the antagonists, etc. What kinds of life experiences and personality characteristics have led to that difference? That's where you get a really solid character arc imo.
my high school english teacher would often critique our literature analysis work by pointing out: "you're treating these characters like they're real people. They're not. They're characters". And it took me a long time to understand what he meant by that. Because I always thought "isn't that the point? That writers want to write characters to be so three dimensional that they act and feel like real people?" but that's not it.
Characters are tools a writer uses in service of a story. Of course characters can be written with depth to the point they feel real to us, but they exist in service of their narrative. Something real people aren't beholden to at all. When discussing characters, I think it's easy to accidentally see these characters as "real people" and not extensions of the author's beliefs. Tools for a narrative. Means of storytelling.
my high school english teacher would often critique our literature analysis work by pointing out: "you're treating these characters like they're real people. They're not. They're characters". And it took me a long time to understand what he meant by that. Because I always thought "isn't that the point? That writers want to write characters to be so three dimensional that they act and feel like real people?" but that's not it.
Characters are tools a writer uses in service of a story. Of course characters can be written with depth to the point they feel real to us, but they exist in service of their narrative. Something real people aren't beholden to at all. When discussing characters, I think it's easy to accidentally see these characters as "real people" and not extensions of the author's beliefs. Tools for a narrative. Means of storytelling.
Actually I keep complaining about operational worldbuilding, so here are some recommendations for it:
Ask yourself "what is this organization accomplishing" and "would this organization, as written, accomplish that thing?" For example, magic academies/schools/universities for adults: what are they training their students for? Is it more like a vocational school or a university? Are students being trained for specific jobs? Is it a training for government? Is it primarily a place to foist the idle rich off to to get them out of the way? For a military training, is the goal primarily training or a weeding out process? Is it basic training or specialized training? If someone fails out of the training, do they end up in the regular forces or do they fail out of the military entirely?
Ask yourself "how did this practice come to be?" For example, a trial or competition system: why was this system established? Do the requirements for the trial/competition match what the end result is (e.g., fighting competition to win a fighting position)? If not (e.g., scavenger heart to become the consort), why is that the competition that is used? Do the potential outcomes of the trial (e.g., death) merit the rewards for it?
Ask yourself "if this system is horrible, why do people put up with it?" For example, a school or organization where people are allowed to attack and/or kill each other: why is it allowed to continue? Why do people send their children or voluntarily join it? If it is mandatory, do people fight against it, and if not, why not?
Just as a side note, this isn't saying you have to have organizations that perfectly answer these criteria. Think about how things are in the real world - very rarely do things make logical sense, and when that happens, there are people who bring attention to it.
Maybe there's a protest group complaining about how magic school doesn't prepare them for society? Maybe there's people looking to cheat the trials? Maybe murder school is training its students to kill protesters who want to shut it down?
Look hard enough, and you can find a story just about anywhere!
Just to clarify, these are questions, not criteria. Specifically, these are questions that you (the author) should be asking yourself when you are writing.
You don't need to write a good organization, or even a functional one, but it really does help to know the answer to things like "what is the purpose of this organization?" and "does this organization accomplish that purpose?"
The answer to the latter question can be no. But you (the author) should make it no on purpose.
If an organization is stupid or pointless or ineffective or counterproductive, or a practice is awful or useless or cruel or being subverted, you (the author) should know that it is, and why.
If your plot feels flat, STUDY it! Your story might be lacking...
Stakes - What would happen if the protagonist failed? Would it really be such a bad thing if it happened?
Thematic relevance - Do the events of the story speak to a greater emotional or moral message? Is the conflict resolved in a way that befits the theme?
Urgency - How much time does the protagonist have to complete their goal? Are there multiple factors complicating the situation?
Drive - What motivates the protagonist? Are they an active player in the story, or are they repeatedly getting pushed around by external forces? Could you swap them out for a different character with no impact on the plot? On the flip side, do the other characters have sensible motivations of their own?
Yield - Is there foreshadowing? Do the protagonist's choices have unforeseen consequences down the road? Do they use knowledge or clues from the beginning, to help them in the end? Do they learn things about the other characters that weren't immediately obvious?
Thank you so much for this!
For the last goddamn time...
"Kill your darlings" means "if something is holding you back, get rid of it, even if it sounds pretty."
That's it! That's all it means! It means if you're stuck and stalled out on your story and you could fix the whole block by removing something but you're avoiding removing that thing because it's good, you remove that thing. That's the darling.
It does NOT mean
That you have to get rid of your self-indulgent writing
That you should delete something just because you like it (?wtf?)
That you need to kill off characters (??? what)
That you have to pare your story down to the absolute bare bones
That you have to delete anything whatsoever if you don't want to
The POINT is that you STOP FEELING GUILTY for throwing out good writing that isn't SERVING THE STORY.
The POINT is that you don't get so HUNG UP on the details that you lose sight of the BIG PICTURE.
Good grief....
Also, you don't have to like, delete it from existence. Keep a second document full of the Darlings. You never know when you'll need it later.
yes, your killed darlings are ripe for rebirth
I have a section of my notes document called "The Cutting Room", based off of old film editing, where I put everything I need to cut but was good. And let me tell you something, it is SO much easier to move something to the cutting room than to delete it, which has served me very well for getting things that need to leave out of the story. Plus, if I find a spot for it later, it still exists.
Co-sign all of this. I hate when people misapply "kill your darlings" to mean "cut anything fun or self-indulgent." Also, I have a whole rant about how sometimes you should just marry your darlings and kill everything else.
if you're subscribed to Microsoft word, you probably received an email recently saying they're upping their prices. Like, a lot. ($9.99/month instead of $6.99)
guess what though? you can log into your account, click Cancel Subscription, and get the option to continue your subscription at the same price WITHOUT their bullshit AI.
That's right, the new, higher price is actually a different subscription that includes AI that everyone is being opted into by force! What a cool and fun product that clearly everyone wants.
you can also choose to buy Word 2024 without AI for a single lump sum that will be yours in perpetuity, with no updates, for one computer.
Check your subscription if you need Word for work! Don't get duped into paying for something you might not even want
Also, reminder that Word 2007 still installs just fine on Windows 11 and can do damn near everything Word 2024 does.
Full Office 2007 installation media here.
With these added bonuses:
No frequent updates that prevent you from using the thing while it updates
No AI grammar/spell check (it's all local, baby!)
No nag screens about sharing everything with OneDrive
Runs screamingly fast on modern computers
Free to use, since Microsoft doesn't give a shit
The only downside I can recall is that working with PDF files is a bit frustrating and requires additional steps. But if all you need is DOC or DOCX it's great.
writing tip #3827:
start
This obviously needed its own post and here it is, a collection of blog posts and resources I have found and used for my own writing, I hope they help you too! Go forth and write that spice!
The Smut Writers Dictionary By @maybeeatspaghetti Seriously, how many different way are there to write cock? Does anyone else wonder if they've used the word 'lips' too many times? Well, this is a good place to start!
The Ultimate Guide to Writing Smut This is the first one I found and I go back to it frequently! There's also some great information about specific areas of sex that may not be common knowledge for first time writers!
How to Write Smut By @urfriendlywriter Another great source of information from different verbiage to use and a few tips to hel you along (giggity)
Smut Thesaurus By @prurientpuddlejumper just what it sounds like and you can never have too many words at your disposal.
6 Steps to Writing Better Sex By @chaoschaoswriting If you're at a loss or just want some more help this is antoher fantastic blog!
Writing Prompts NSFW By @seidenbros Need some dialogue? Or a story idea? Have a look!
#100 NSFW/Smut Dialogue Prompts By @a-cure-for-writers-block More? More. This is also a fantastic writing blog with lots to offer!
Intimate + Sexual Headcannon Questions By @petalsprompts Good questions to ask your characters to get to know them better and make more well rounded characters!
Smut & Mature (18+) Master List By @pendarling A great list dialogue prompts, scenarios, and helpful bits!
Poly NSFW Alphabet By @smaoineamhsalach Another great way to get to know your characters and maybe a handful of ideas for story ideas.
Kink Prompts Another from the previous blogger above and I didn't know what half of these are! I'll work on a kink dictionary next!
Writing Smut 101: Overcoming Smut Shame @slightlyrebelliouswriter23 There's a lot to be said for this particular subject! It's hard to write stuff like this, so how do you get over it? Start here!
How to Write a Kiss Scene By @youneedsomeprompts Yes!!! I still struggle with this one! There's a thousand ways to kiss, find your favorite!
Smut Oneliners By @deity-prompts you can never have enough one-liners!!
How to Write a (Great) Sex Scene Another great article for new smut writers
9 Tips for Writing Steamy Scenes More tips to help you wirte good steamy stuff!
How to Write Erotica and a Damn Fine Sex Scene A WEALTH if information on writing, structuring, and helpful tips!
@saradikahas a fantatic blog with graphics for you to use to add some fun to your posts. Things like MDNI Banners, 18+ Content Warnings, Support Your Favorite Writers and Reblog banners! They are free to use but she does ask that you reblog her stuff if you do! She's also a very talented writer and she writes some AMAZING Din Djarin stories!
Gay Sex Positions Guide This is a WONDERFUL adition and thank you so much @b7bubby for bringing this to my attention, I didn't have any resources for writing M/M fairings but this is a much needed addition to the spicy community! i've never written an M/M pairing and I feel like such an idiot for overlooking the need for a resource like this!
Writing the Perfect Kiss Scene provided by @writers-potiona fantastic little guide to writing better kisses!
If you find any other great smut writing resources feel free to tag me so I can add them to this list! Good luck with your writing! Now go write that story and LET THE SPICE FLOW!!!!
