Steph Megary

fantasy writeblr | currently working on my debut novel(s)

[megarywrites]

wip re-introduction — the Seafoam diptych by Steph Megary

volume I — The Silent Shore | volume II — The Unforgiving Sea | genre — high fantasy | status — 2nd draft | pov — single, first | themes — grief, resilience, vengeance, sisterhood | romantic subplot — friends-to-lovers | trigger warnings — misogyny, sex trafficking/sexual assault, religious oppression, homophobia, major character death | links — excerpts, artwork

summary | Thala Galanis is coming of age and unmarried with absolutely no intention of remedying that. Which, in Grea, means that you’re a spinster and fit for nothing but a life of service as a Stoli in Katania. After tragedy strikes her family with the untimely death of her father, she concludes that there really is no other option available for her other than joining the ranks of the Stoli, unless she can find it within herself to marry her very-willing childhood friend.

Which…she cannot.  

Besides, there are worse fates to endure than to live your life in silence and in service to the gods and your community, aren’t there? 

However, when she arrives in the capital, she discovers how very wrong her assumptions were. What’s expected of the Stoli is far more sinister than she could have ever imagined, and there is no way for any of the young women to escape the fate that awaits them all. Until, that is, she takes matters into her own hands and stains them with blood—a stain that will never wash off the further she travels down the path to vengeance. 

Because what happened to her should never happen to anyone else. 

It has, though…to countless others…

But, if she gets her way, she will be the very last.

[sawasawako-archived]

every love story is about the struggle to say “i love you”

[boasamishipper]

[darkspaceboytoy]

Oh also you do have to read real books. Like you have to read the books. You can’t just read fanfic, those are not books. You can if you just want to write fanfic, but if you want to write books, you kinda gotta read books. No, posts do not count.

[birdplushie]

torture the character some more. put her in her worst nightmare and don't let her out

[molabuddy]

really specific trope i like that i feel like can only be explained in a diagram

[biocrafthero]

[luna-azzurra]

I genuinely cannot explain to a non-writer what it feels like when a chapter suddenly clicks. it's not satisfaction. it's not relief. it's this horrible specific feeling like you just remembered something you never knew. like the story was already there and you finally stopped being in the way of it. i don't know what to do with that feeling. i just close the laptop and stare at the wall for a bit.

[bevsi]

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with relating to characters, “they’re literally me” etc but if that’s the only way you engage with stories you’re kinda missing the whole point of Characters being vehicles through which we can see perspectives outside of our own. and also you’re going to get upset when the Character acts in a way that is not Personally Relatable to You

[bevsi]

doubly for shipping. at risk if biting the hand that feeds me, a well written fictional relationship should ideally be more than a didactic template for how to have a nice relationship

[berryinnit]

t-shirt with the words “high-functioning corpse” printed on it

[valtsv]

medieval knight raising the visor on his helm just so you can see him rolling his eyes

[yogi-bogey-box]

reblog to give prev some of that good writing mojo

[yogi-bogey-box]

somehow all these good vibes have washed back on me and it's great. y'all are manifesting writing mojo for each other and me and I love it. keep going. don't stop.

[mournfulroses]

Ada Limón, , from a poem titled "Thirteen Feral Cats," featured in Startlement: New and Selected Poems

[dykecinema]

Women covered in blood. Reblog if you agree.

[tamiscolaris]

over and over, by me

i was having thoughts so i made a poem about them

[headspace-hotel]

aaaaaaaaaaaa

[headspace-hotel]

how were so many of the things that were basic writing/plotting advice in Every Single craft book when I was a teenager just completely straight up wrong

[headspace-hotel]

the biggest and worst offender I think was plotting advice that encouraged me to build my plot around my characters "desires" or "goals"

protagonists were kind of forced into a flat dichotomy of 'active' (takes actions to further their own goals, thus driving the story) and 'passive' (is acted upon by events beyond their control, moving them through the plot) with 'active' being considered good and passive being considered bad

I think this framework is very locked within a certain cultural viewpoint... specifically of a 20th century western white male. For one thing it assumes a "protagonist" will have a certain level of agency, to have goals and pursue them, overcoming obstacles in the way. It is not very inclusive of characters that don't have much agency.

It also assumes that desire/want = orienting toward or pursuing.

As far as I am concerned, characters don't have goals. They CAN, but these goals aren't actually the functional gears of the plot, and are instead their conscious rationalizations of what's really running the show.

Rather, characters have instincts and drives. I don't like to say "desires" because desire suggests something that is explicit, a thing that the character can attribute their feelings to.

I realized when reading Shakespeare's Othello that interesting characters often can't be understood in terms of "goals" or "desires" because they don't understand what they want or why they want that and they constantly act in ways that are contradictory to what they want or think they want. What a character consciously thinks is a whole layer on top of their actual instincts and feelings, which are primal and buried in traumas and needs and other aspects of creaturehood, and often is a fiction to resolve contradictions and dissonance in the demands of the creature-self. some characters can reflect upon their own thought processes and some cannot.

real humans don't often act rationally to pursue goals, they just do stuff based upon a seethe of inner instinct and the reasons why are post-hoc rationalizations. i like writing characters that reflect this and exploring the ways they do and don't understand themselves, the fictions they use to understand what's going on in there

[flicker-fly]

Love this post because it gets at something I've vaguely felt, which is that often the most interesting characters have some core inconsistency to them (sometimes entirely unexplained). That contradiction feels instinctively real, maybe because it's forcing you to either solve the contradictions yourself, putting more life into the character, or give up and acknowledge the unknowable aspects of other people's minds. (imo Hamlet is like this.)

Whereas a character with perfectly coherent motivations and traits is almost more like a stylization, excellent as a side character or for a particular narrative purpose but not as chewable.

I'm always being reminded of the Hugh MacLennan quote from The Watch that Ends the Night:

“But that night as I drove back from Montreal, I at least discovered this: that there is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and that the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.” (274)

And I think that's a really great point about storytelling as well, and tragedy, that characters are also stuck with the consequences of things they can't take back but never really understood. They've become the kind of person who does [action] and they have to contend with that.

[headspace-hotel]

Exactly I agree fully!!

[ltwilliammowett]

Eddying foam: The Young Australia, by Montague Dawson (1890-1973)

[princess-of-morkva]

put that woman into a Situation now. i'm serious. drop that sad whiteboy you've been chewing on for the last three hours and just try chewing on the Woman. it's so much better out here. the world is beautiful. you are putting yourself in a cage. take my hand and come with me. put that woman into a Situation