it was a clementine, small and saccharine
like the cheeks of a child.
my fingers weren’t quite sure how to go about it,
and so my nails slowly chipped away at its flesh,
thumb dragging a surgical incision through the skin
and tearing the edges away to reveal
a ragged window to the insides.
with the trepidation of a bird
on the palm of a stranger,
i plucked out three slices —
good things
come in threes,
or so i’m told —
and, juice
dripping down
my knuckles,
set my eyes upon
the snarled stem tethering
what remained:
two slices inside
staring me down,
the glistening mirror
of a pair
of lungs.
like recognizes like,
and so my breath
caught in my own,
and i thought:
this is humanity,
messy and sweet and
a tangle of nerves
beneath it all,
and perhaps —
just perhaps —
everything in the world
is joined by this common thread.
WHUMPTOBER is a month-long, prompt-based creation CHALLENGE (think: Inktober, but whumpier). There are four prompts for each day of the month, giving 124 for you to play with! There is also a list of 18 alternative prompts that can be subbed in for any day to give participants as much creative freedom as possible.
All prompts are meant to serve as inspiration without being taken literally (e.g. you don’t have to include the exact wording of prompts into your work). Feel free to run rampant on interpretation. For example, if the prompt is “flame", you could create something with reference to a candle/campfire, your character could have suffered a burn, or the flame could be a reference to an ‘old flame’ - an old relationship. It’s truly down to you!
You can produce work in any media you choose, including but not limited to: writing, visual artwork, photo/video/audio edits, paper crafts and elaborate recommendation lists (not just a list of links). You can participate as much or as little as you want (i.e. you don’t have to do ALL the prompts if you don’t want to) and prompts can be used in any order. They are also free to use even after the event ends.
Please make sure to read the Event Info and FAQ carefully, as most of your questions will be answered there already. For everything else, you are welcome to come to our ask box or ask questions in our Discord server here.
Information on how to TAG is here.
This year’s AO3 Collection can be found here.
This year’s playlist can be found here.
The ‘Anatomy of a Whumptober Prompt’ post can be found here.
And our 'Resources for Writing Sensitive Topics’ post is here.
We’re very excited to see the community come together for yet another year of Whumptober! Go ham with the prompts, and support your fellow creators - we wish you all the best of luck, but most importantly: HAVE FUN!
Happy whumping,
Mods Vanne, Yenn, Kitty and Surro
Text versions of the prompts, including a google doc format, are posted below the cut!
A Google Doc of the prompts can be found here for easy copy-and-pasting!
Whumptober 2025 Prompt List
No. 1: “Please don’t cry”
Lamb to Slaughter | Ceremony | Beg for Forgiveness
No. 2: “You’ve got a lot of nerve to dredge up all my fears.”
Prophecy | Sewer | Taking Accountability
No. 3: “I look in people’s windows, transfixed by rose golden glows.”
Isolation | Candlelight | Found Family
No. 4: “Don’t be scared, I’ve done this before.”
Non-Human Whumper | Iron Rod | Loss of Powers
No. 5: “My panic’s at the ceiling, but I’m face down on the carpet.”
Quivering | Dream Journal | Phobia
No. 6: “No grave can hold my body down.”
Caught in a Net | Medical Restraints | Pinned to the Wall
No. 7: “Tell me that you’re okay, and I’m fine.”
Trapped with the Enemy | Elevator | Pushed Beyond Breaking Point
No. 8: “Oh horror, oh horror, what did you see?”
Self-Inflicted Injury | Held at Gunpoint | Dissociation
No. 9: “We’ll make it alright to come undone.”
Touch | Flashbacks | Scalding
No. 10: “There’s nothing you can ever say, nothing you can ever do.”
Without Consent | Secrets | Lips Sewn Shut
No. 11: “Can you get through all the pain inside you?”
Hidden Injury | Laceration | Forced Reveal
No. 12: “It’ll be for nothing.”
Cardiac Arrest | Sacred Place | Withholding Medical Treatment
No. 13: “How dull is it to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished.”
Never Enough | Insignia | Forced Retirement
No. 14: “In the end, it’s worthwhile.”
Ignoring an Illness | Body Bag | Wounded Caretaker
No. 15: “You can take a break, if you just tell me that it hurts.”
Failed Rescue Attempt | Body Part in the Mail | Live-Streamed Torture
No. 16: “I’ve had the rug pulled beneath my feet.”
Repressed Trauma | Permanent Marker | Disorientation
No. 17: “Tell me there’s a hope for me.”
Internal Bleeding | Coma | Redemption
No. 18: “As the world caves in.”
Dystopia | Ruins | Environmental Whump
No. 19: “You’re on your own, lost in the wild.”
Dehumanisation | Living Weapon | On Patrol
e.g. they're told that this kind of creature has some kind of psychic or pheromone-based "mate bond" that cannot be broken; but it turns out that's a popular myth that has never been scientifically substantiated, and is basically used to keep people in bad relationships (basically the equivalent of "human women are biologically submissive")
"lore" is imo too often treated like information that the author is giving the reader, and it just happens to be using the medium of diagetic (that is, 'in-story') exposition.
it's so much more interesting and dynamic to treat "lore" as information that is generated and disseminated in-story. who is telling the protagonist this information? under what historical and social circumstances was this idea formed? what political motives are there for trying to get people to believe this information? which characters would disagree with it? would the protagonist believe it, or be sceptical? does the plot bear it out, or cast doubt on it?
Small fantasy worldbuilding elements you might want to think about:
A currency that isn’t gold-standard/having gold be as valuable as tin
A currency that runs entirely on a perishable resource, like cocoa beans
A clock that isn’t 24-hours
More or less than four seasons/seasons other than the ones we know
Fantastical weather patterns like irregular cloud formations, iridescent rain
Multiple moons/no moon
Planetary rings
A northern lights effect, but near the equator
Roads that aren’t brown or grey/black, like San Juan’s blue bricks
Jewelry beyond precious gems and metals
Marriage signifiers other than wedding bands
The husband taking the wife's name / newlyweds inventing a new surname upon marriage
No concept of virginity or bastardry
More than 2 genders/no concept of gender
Monotheism, but not creationism
Gods that don’t look like people
Domesticated pets that aren’t re-skinned dogs and cats
Some normalized supernatural element that has nothing to do with the plot
Magical communication that isn’t Fantasy Zoom
“Books” that aren’t bound or scrolls
A nonverbal means of communicating, like sign language
A race of people who are obligate carnivores/ vegetarians/ vegans/ pescatarians (not religious, biological imperative)
I’ve done about half of these myself in one WIP or another and a little detail here or there goes a long way in reminding the audience that this isn’t Kansas anymore.
How to create a character for an online or tabletop RPG (also a good guide on creating characters in general)
Royalty/nobility TV Tropes page
Basic character profile
OC masterpost
Random character generators - (1), (2), (3), (4)
D&D Character Building Tool
Character Design Ideas:
How clothing affects a character’s personality
Character Design Inspiration blog
Concept art, fan art, cool art to be inspired by
Character design references and inspiration
Sources for POC character design ideas and models
Create your own character model using HeroForge
For horned characters
Body and hair types guide
Random outfit generator
Naming Help:
Amazing site with an endless amount of naming resources
General advice on avoiding naming appropriation
Hispanic Surnames
Gothic Victorian names
Huge master list for character things in general
Masterlist of names of all types - including but not limited to ancient/old world names, Celtic, African, Northern European, Southern and Central American Native names, Japanese, Chinese, Mongolian, Polynesian, and more
Another name masterlist
How to pick a character name guide
Yet another names masterlist
Creating Background/backstory:
Character Sheet/Development Sheet
Another character development list
In-depth character personality, motivations and traits sheet
320 talents and passions for characters
On writing likes and dislikes that aren’t frivolous
Why you should write non-human characters non-conforming to the gender binary
Stereotypes, tropes, and archetypes
Random backstory generator
Assassin and thief character tropes to avoid
Character Interactions and putting your character into your world/story:
Comparing character height/height references
Characters who are scientists and writing about them doing science
Describing what different voices sound like
Describing skin tones
Writing friendship interactions that are platonic
Why having one character knock their friend unconscious to prevent them from doing something is a bad idea
Advice on shipping OCs with canon characters and what to avoid doing
Sweet Polly Oliver and Sweet on Polly Oliver situations (think of Disney’s Mulan for an example)
How to write multiple viewpoints/juggling a main cast of more than 4 to 6 characters
How to make readers care about your morally gray hero/anti-hero
On platonic OC and canon character relationships
How to avoid Godmodding in RPs
When it’s cheap to kill off a character
Writing dialogue
Things you shouldn’t do to canon characters
Avoiding purple prose in writing and RPs
Slang resources
Dialogue tips
Websites to chart your story/plot/character relationships
i have just stumbled upon the most beautiful public document i have ever laid eyes on. this also goes for anyone whose pastimes include any sort of character creation. may i present, the HOLY GRAIL:
this wonderful 88-page piece has step by step breakdowns of how names work in different cultures! i needed to know how to name a Muslim character it has already helped me SO MUCH and i’ve known about it for all of 15 minutes!! i am thoroughly amazed and i just needed to share with you guys
Cheek: a round dull pain that clocks your entire head in a different direction. It’s painful and throbs but the main effect of a punch to the cheek is how jarring it is. You feel it in your mouth, your teeth. And no matter how you position that punch the knuckles will always hit the jaw and cheek bones adding a frame of sharp pain in which the redness will be painted.
Temple: getting hit on the temple pushes your head to the side rather than turning it. It’s disorienting because it leaves you very off balance. It essentially feels like a bad pressure headache, like when you have a sinus infection on a plane, but in one spot and on the outside. It’s sharp in the middle and radiates outward and even after the initial impact it pulses like an earthquake epicenter. It easily causes long lasting headaches and is the most likely of these examples to cause a concussion.
Eye: this is a weird one. The fist doesn’t fit within the eye socket so either the knuckles on the brow and cheeks bones protect the actual eye or they don’t. The former option gives a full spreading pain below the eye which results in the classic black eye look and a sharp pain on your brow similar to hitting your shin on the couch. The latter option, well bad things can happen when a hard fast object makes direct contact with your eye but for the sake of this it feels like a vacuum bc the concave shape is being covered and pressurized. The eye feels pushed back and pulled forward all at once. It doesn’t necessarily hurt that bad for that long unless the punch was meant to do damage. I’m fortunate to say I don’t know what it would feel like then.
Nose: remember that prank kids used to pull where they’d line up their hands with their nose, push them in one direction and crack a knuckle at the same time to pretend to break their nose? Yeah that’s what it looks like when someone punches you from the side in the nose, except it’s someone else’s hand and your nose makes the sound instead of their knuckle. It’s just like breaking any bone where you hear it and feel the action if it being done but that moment of shock blankets you for a split second until all the pain comes rushing back. It’s sharp and needlelike and can give you black eyes just to add insult to injury. If you get hit in the nose from the front it’s like the uncomfortableness of when you have to sneeze but can’t. Except that feeling took all the steroids and is now using your face as a punching bag to express its roid rage. It crackles outward like static electricity under your skin, your eyesight gets fuzzy and you can’t tell if it’s because you’re tearing up, it’s hard to open your eyes, or you’re momentarily stunned and blinded. Just know it’s all three. I find that this one knocks the wind out of you the most. Gotta remind yourself to breathe just don’t try to do it through your nose.
If you really want to know what this feels like I’d suggest joining a mixed martial arts because they’ll teach you correct form and power distribution and you can spar with pads and actually hit each other.
I’d also recommend learning what it feels like to punch someone in the face. It’s much more fun and pretty damn cathartic when they deserve it.
Drafting: Four Methods For Highly Anxious Individuals
(This is a revised version of an old post you might have seen elsewhere.)
Is writing really fucking painful for you? Do you finish a draft of a story maybe once every forty years? Is your computer littered with outlines and abandoned beginnings? Maybe you’ve been told to “write a shitty first draft” but have no idea how to do that because writing takes so much out of you that you can’t do it without at least trying to make it good…but when you do, you inevitably give up and hate yourself.
Chances are, you’re drafting in a way that doesn’t respect the way your mind works. You’re either 1) forcing yourself to deal with too many things at once, or 2) you’re stifling the free, imaginative, playful part of your mind with premature critical evaluation. Or, most likely, both. But you can’t just make yourself stop doing this spontaneously. You need a method of writing that interferes with those habits. Think of it as mental ergonomics. If your back is sore and your neck is stiff, you need a different chair. Similarly, if writing is agonizingly painful, you need a different drafting method.
Here are four methods you can try—or adapt, experiment with, and combine. (Nobody practices a pure version of any method.) For simplicity’s sake, I’ll talk as if you’re faced with drafting a single scene:
1) The Pitch Meeting Method
Don’t write the scene in the actual narrative voice of the story. Instead, write as if you’re describing what happens to somebody you know, somebody who’d be interested and excited about it. You could, in fact, actually address it to someone. Or write as if you’re writing a really long headcanon post.
Write the way you talk. Use your usual slang and vocal rhythms, and get all of your enthusiasm in there, everything you envision, everything you want for this scene. You could even do this out loud and record it, if that’s easier.
Let your desires run wild, even if you don’t yet know how you’re going to fulfill those desires. Say stuff like “and this part is really emotional!” without worrying about how you’re going to make it emotional.
When you’re done, go back and find parts you can elaborate on. Make the description as detailed as you can.
Once you’re happy with this description of what you’re going to write, start writing it. Translate your “sounds like you” prose into a voice more appropriate to the story. But don’t change it too much. Don’t kill the energy your own voice adds.
2) The Expanding Outline Method
This one’s similar, but it works better for folks who like to think structurally.
Make an outline of the scene. Maybe it starts with only a couple of items: two very general things that happen in the scene.
Now take one item and break it down into several items. Then break those items down into several items. Zoom in closer and closer to the action, breaking actions and events down into their constituent parts.
You can include non-event, non-external items like “Character feels [x].” You can even include things like “The reader feels [x].” But go back later and add detail to those where you can. Just keep making your outline more and more specific.
Now, following your outline, draft a prose version of the scene.
3) The Anatomy Textbook Method
For this one, you start with the scene itself, not with a plan for the scene. But don’t try to write the entire scene fully fleshed out in one go. Rather, start with a single element you’re most comfortable with. The dialogue, for instance. Or a description of the action in a bare-bones, stage-directions sort of way. Lay down a skeleton of the scene, and don’t worry if it looks a little…sparse.
Now go over it and add another element on top of that skeleton. Description, maybe. Or more details that flesh out your bare-bones description.
Keep doing this until you have a complete scene.
If you think you tend to leave a certain element out, dedicate a “layer” to that. I’m often quite sparing with characters’ emotional reactions, for instance. So I might go over the scene and do nothing but add in my character’s internal reactions to what’s happening.
You can divide the scene up however you like. The point is, each time you go over it, only focus on one element at a time.
4) The Sourdough Starter Method
This is probably the weirdest, and it might sound like the hardest, but it’s quicker and easier than it sounds. You just have to get comfortable with making a mess.
Start writing the scene, in all its nonsensical, inarticulate glory. Feel free to hate both the form and the content; just keep your head in the scene, walking your mind carefully through what happens, even if you think what happens is stupid. Don’t worry if what you write is boring or wrong or irrelevant, because you’re not actually going to use most of this.
Now read through what you’ve got. It may help to print it out. Go through what you’ve written and mark anything you kind of like or that seems promising. And if rereading what happens has given you new ideas about what should happen instead, write those ideas down too.
Review the promising bits and the new ideas. There might not be much, but that’s okay. Now, start the scene over. Wipe the slate clean and write it all again from scratch. But this time, include those good bits you discovered in the previous version.
You’re not revising that version. You’re using it as a petri dish to grow ideas for the scene. And then you completely rewrite the scene, this time with a little more focus and a better sense of what will work.
You might only do this once, but some people do it several times. It sounds labor-intensive, I know. But remember, each time you write the scene, you’re just barfing it onto the page without much critical scrutiny. And that scrutiny is mostly what makes writing feel so hard.
So those are four methods you can try. I’m sure many more exist. If you’ve tried or know about any, please send them to me!
Google Ambient Chaos if you ever need background noises for writing! It's a customizable soundscape website.
Anon, when I first saw this ask, I thought it was going to be one of those mixers of nice, traditional sounds, like rain or a coffeeshop. And it is! And there's lofi hiphop, my favorite sound to write to! Which means this is legitimately an excellent tool for writers, and I love you for introducing it to me.
But I also want to say. There are some choices here. That I need to point out. Because they're either fantastic or questionable, and I can't decide.
Things like . . .
Couple arguing.
Medieval battle.
Beehive, where you can write to a fuckton of bees.
Crime scene.
And actually the perfect soundscape for NaNoWriMo.
Somebody found this last week and reminded me it existed, so I'mma bring it back to this blog because it's about ten days until some of you will need that last one. :D
it was a clementine, small and saccharine
like the cheeks of a child.
my fingers weren’t quite sure how to go about it,
and so my nails slowly chipped away at its flesh,
thumb dragging a surgical incision through the skin
and tearing the edges away to reveal
a ragged window to the insides.
with the trepidation of a bird
on the palm of a stranger,
i plucked out three slices —
good things
come in threes,
or so i’m told —
and, juice
dripping down
my knuckles,
set my eyes upon
the snarled stem tethering
what remained:
two slices inside
staring me down,
the glistening mirror
of a pair
of lungs.
like recognizes like,
and so my breath
caught in my own,
and i thought:
this is humanity,
messy and sweet and
a tangle of nerves
beneath it all,
and perhaps —
just perhaps —
everything in the world
is joined by this common thread.
Oh my gosh. I just found this website that walks you though creating a believable society. It breaks each facet down into individual questions and makes it so simple! It seems really helpful for worldbuilding!
Heads up that this is a very extensive questionnaire and might be daunting to a lot of writers (myself included). That being said, it is also an amazing questionnaire and I will definitely be using it (or at the very least, some of it).
Actually, can we talk about how Garbage a lot of ubiquitous writing advice in the late 2000's was?
Like "you have to begin in the middle of the action! your first line has to be a 'hook' that draws the reader further into the story!"
This is the bullshit responsible for the amount of books that begin in the middle of some sort of pointless fucking action scene that I care nothing about because I just got here.
Like I guess this makes books easier to "sell" or whatever on some level of the process, but it's garbage storytelling advice because setup and establishment of the Way Things Are is almost always necessary.
On some level I don't think it's actually possible to begin a story right on top of the "inciting incident" because...you don't have the raw materials to "incite" anything with. If you have to set up basic things about the characters and world after the "inciting incident," it's not really the inciting incident anymore, is it?
The event that "launches" a character into their plot line is something that follows from the character's established situation, desires, traits etc. It's a follow-up to a situation that makes a Story of some kind inevitable.
It is, by definition, an event that makes no sense and does not matter to the reader at all unless the "setup" already exists.
If you try to begin right in the middle of the event that "sparks" the plot, you're going to end up including a second, "real" event that actually does the job, because you can't do the job if the character, the stakes, the rules, etc. are not there yet.
Now the action scene you stuck to the beginning of your story is probably dead weight that is getting in the way of the setup.
I just realized that a lot of writing advice assumes the reader has no pre-existing knowledge of what a story is, and everything suddenly makes so much sense.
Good stories assume you know what a story is.You don't need something to explode or someone to get killed on page one to Make The Reader Pay Attention. That's stupid. Stop talking.
I used to read SO MANY articles, books etc. talking about beginning a story and how a good "hook" works, and all of them talked about, like, introducing something so weird or exciting sounding or inexplicable that the reader is curious about the rest, and it's so stupid thinking back on it that I want to cry, because literally none of them seemed to take into account that readers know that they're reading a story.
When you start reading a book you're automatically paying attention to specific things—interesting characters to connect with, hints of the kinds of things that might happen. You are not an idiot and you know that there is more book after the first page. You will be looking for stuff that looks like it will grow into something exciting, things that set up an interesting plot.
Your reader is already capable of projecting in their head the kinds of things that might happen in your story. It's actually kind of fundamental to being a reader. Start with the bomb, not the explosion!
No one is opening a book like "Hmm, there is no extraordinary, dramatic event happening in the first sentence...I think I can safely conclude that nothing exciting happens in the entire book!" Like. Readers know how plots work. Dumbass.
I've said before that good first lines are the ones that have that "sit down, I'm telling you a story" effect, and I haven't been able to explain it until now. A good beginning to a story is something that provides the "ingredients" for something cool.
Start with the bomb, not the explosion! READERS KNOW THAT BOMBS EXPLODE!
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
This is a very good beginning. Readers instinctively recognize that "they were perfectly normal" isn't, like, telling us the whole book is going to be boring. It's the bomb.
We get a feeling that something very not normal is about to happen to the Dursleys, and we're right.
That's it. That's what keeps a reader reading, or makes them set it down. IF the tone is going to be very action driven, then starting with an action scene sets the tone. One of my favorite series, The Hollows, starts with the MC arresting a Leprechaun. It still devotes a significant chunk of opening paragraphs to setting the scene- I'm an attractive redhead sitting at a bar, turning away free drinks cause I'm working, sitting where I can see the door and my mark, etc- and building tension. If it opened with Rachel slamming the leprechaun's head onto the table it would feel abrupt and jarring. Instead, once we get there at the end of ch 1, it's satisfying, because I'm on the side of the MC. The build up has told me 1) the tone is snarky action story: the MCs narration is full of sarcastic wit and danger assessment. 2) This is a magical modern setting: the MC is a witch bounty hunter going after a Leprechaun bar tender. 3) The MC is an underdog: this arrest does not go her way. Boom. I know what I'm in for and I'm interested.
You get your "hooks" in a reader by making them invested in the outcome. What works in a visual medium -cold opens, shock scenes, explosions - doesn't always translate well to the written word. Reading is consumed differently.
