I'm not the dragon. I'm not the princess either. @nolongerharbor - Tumblr Blog

anyone else ever daydream for 6 hours straight and then after ur just like nah let’s scrap that and do it all again but slightly to the left

astudyingreer

my brain: *out of breath* Was that good?!

Me in a beret, taking a long draft from a cigarette and leaning back in my director’s chair: once again, from the top, this time with feeling

#writing

tincek-marincek

Would you like a cup of tea? 🍵 Enjoy some of my recent studies ✨ Done in Photoshop CC with Wacom Cintiq 27QHD like usually.

morebooks-pls

Currently Reading Update

I just finished Bloodwitch by @stdennard and OH MY GOD!!!!! It was soooooo good!!!

Where is my witchlands fandom at? Someone please come talk to me about it!! Especially that ending.

nolongerharbor

Me too!! I couldn’t put it down, and now I don’t know what to do with myself. I have so many questions!! What’re your thoughts on the ending?

#bloodwitch #thewitchlands

baeduan

witchlands characters as john mulaney quotes:

Safi:

Iseult:

Aeduan:

Merik:

Vivia:

Stix:

Ryber:

#thewitchlands

I read Bloodwitch way too fast and now I have the worst book hangover. The Witchlands series is so good!! How am I supposed to do anything when all I want to do is re-read the entire series/sleep in ice until the rest of the books are out??

#Bloodwitch #thewitchlands

maggie-stiefvater-deactivated20

So, I'm impressed with quite a lot about your writing, but one of the things I'm impressed with the most is how you do characters. The characters are just really /Real/ and alive and vivid. My characters are round and have flaws and motivations and everything that smart people say good characters need to have, but. They're still just not as /Real/ as yours. So if you have time, could you give some tips for developing characters? Thanks!

Dear protecterwinsmith,

Let’s say someone asked you to draw a person.

If you’d never drawn a person before or thought you didn’t have much time, you might do one of these guys:

Example A: stick dude. A stick dude is recognizable as a person because it follows the baseline, easiest rules of personhood. It’s got a head, a torso, a familiar arrangement of limbs. You don’t need more to get the concept of “person” across.

Now, if you had a bit of experience drawing people or thought you had more time, you might do something more like

Example B: Cartoon Dude. Cartoon Dude is even easier to recognize as a human. He follows the rules of personhood even more: he’s got facial features, ears, hair, clothing, shoes. You can tell one cartoon dude from another cartoon dude. You can populate an entire series with cartoon dudes and the storytelling would work, because they would effectively follow the baseline rules of human anatomy as well as being unique enough to tell apart.

Now let’s say you had a bit more time or you had some more experience drawing people and someone asked you to draw a human realistically. Depending on how much you’d done it, you might get

Example C: 3-D dude without reference. A 3-D dude drawn without reference is even more recognizable as human. He can hold all sorts of nuance in his expression because he follows the baseline rules of personhood even better than the previous two. More nuance means more empathy from the viewer, and more empathy usually means more emotional resonance.

And finally, let’s say someone asks you to draw a human but gives you an actual person to look at. In the same amount of time given, you might end up with

Example D: Portrait with reference. This guy (one of my brothers, in fact) follows the rules of personhood, their effectiveness limited only by my ability to capture them in the time given or by my level of experience. He’s recognizable as both a person and an individual because of the specificity of his facial features, and moreover, he is unlikely to look like any other person I would draw using this method because of my close adherence to his, you know, actual face.

If you think about this in terms of characters, you could build a novel with any one of these sorts of character.

Example A: A novel built with stick man characters would be incredibly stylized. Fairy tales are often stick figure characters. Instead of being fully-fleshed individuals, they’re types. This is the stick figure woodsman (we can tell it’s him, he’s drawn with an ax). This is the princess (we can tell it’s her, she’s got a crown and some long hair added to the stick figure). This is the knight (we can tell it’s him, he’s got a sword and a stick horse). People don’t actually look like stick figures, but as long as the characters are all stick figures, the narrative still works at some level, because it tells you the rules and follows them, even if they aren’t the rules of reality. The moment you draw one character as something more than a stick figure, though, the viewer suddenly realizes how the others are merely made of straight lines.

Example B: When I first began to write, I used to write novels with accidental cartoon characters. I knew I couldn’t populate a novel with stick figures, so I tried to flesh them out. What makes a human a human? I asked myself desperately. Specifics! I made character worksheets and dutifully filled them out with attributes. Height, hair color, eye color, hobbies, place of residence, parental occupation, etc. etc. I ended up with characters who followed the rules of being human, and they could carry a story, but they still didn’t feel real.

I’m skipping Example C for now, because it’s a byproduct, for me, of failing to remember the lessons of Example D.

Example D: Example D is how I build characters now. I begin by studying real people instead of by creating lists of traits. I end up with shadows I forgot to draw in my cartoon version, hair that looks like actual hair instead of what I sort of remember what hair looks like, and feet that have all the toes drawn in because with a reference, I can remember how to accurately draw a pinkie toe. Real people are complicated and surprising. If I were building a character with a fear of water without looking at a real person, I might give them the phobia because they’d nearly drowned once: the easiest and most logical answer. It wouldn’t necessarily be wrong — it would follow rules that a reader would understand. But if I looked at a real person with a fear of water, I might discover that their fear developed because of an obsession with quantifying the abstract, and trying to understand the concept of an infinite body of water made them anxious. A much more complicated answer, but more specific and more real because of it. If I populate a book with characters built like this, I’m going to end up with a nuanced story that should have more emotional resonance. Moreover, the more I study real humans and build characters from them, the less I have to lean on real humans to make secondary characters. As I learn the more subtle rules of how people’s personalities are made, I can start to build new humans who don’t exist — who nonetheless appear as if they could.

Example C: I’m returning to example C because it’s a cautionary tale for me. Even though I feel that I’m worlds better than that old version of me writing cartoony people who could only exist in a two-dimensional place, if I get lazy with my character development, or if I try to create a sort of person I’ve never met in real life from scratch, I can still end up with one of these weird cartoon-realistic hybrids. A character who nearly looks real but lacks the subtle, observed nuances that I can only get from keeping an eye on real life. These characters follow the rules, and they have back stories and hobbies and nuance, but they’re still lacking the surprising, non-linear subtleties of a real person, or they’re lacking the specificity that comes from studying a real-life elbow and carefully transcribing the shape of it.

There are particular sorts of things I look for in real people when I’m stealing bits and bobs, but that is a topic for another blog post. For now, I’m going to go figure out why I still can’t draw feet.

urs,

Stiefvater

#on writing

maggie-stiefvater-deactivated20

For those who can’t make it to the Seven Sentences seminar but wish they could, here’s some of my writing advice that I’ve put online (and everything else I’ve written on writing is tagged as how-i-write on Tumblr):

Writing Characters That Are Not You

Why I Don’t Use Character Profiles

How Metaphors and Figurative Language Help Convey Emotion

Fleshing Out Characters By, Like, Using Real Flesh

How Salient Noise Helps a Novel Feel Real

Creating Creepy Atmosphere

The Disposability of Ideas

Time Management

Finding a Critique Partner

#on writing #references

maggie-stiefvater-deactivated20

I had the privilege of meeting you on a tour and you're just like your stories--hilariously mystical, unrepentantly authentic, heart-achingly human. I would just like to know if you have any dubious life advice for those of us trying to get published? How did you do it? Thank you for existing!

Dear hadal-sunlight,

Why thank you.

I knew I wanted to be a writer ever since I was tiny. Not just a writer, but a commercial author, with paperbacks in airport bookstores. I had a dream! An enormous dream. A huge, unreasonable, uncapped dream of making it into the top 100 bestsellers.

But I also had a long timeline for this dream: in the back of my head, I thought it would be great to hit the bestseller list by age 50, and then maybe work my way up to nipping at the heels of those Tom Clancy types.

The difference between these two, the dream and the expectation of the dream, is what made every setback and rejection not sting. They were all part of the plan, after all. The plan: keep working, getting better, trying, learning, living the biggest and coolest life I could in the meantime and eventually, at age 50, succeed.

The plan got ruined when I got published before that, but the sentiment never wore off. Dream big, but stretch the timeline long, and love the journey.

urs,

Stiefvater

nolongerharbor

“Dream big, but stretch the timeline long, and love the journey.”

#on writing

sovietpostcards

Orest Vereisky “By the Window” (1991)

expressions-of-nature

Glacier Bay National Park by Matt Howard

sixpenceee

Creative cardboard cutout designs by @reemtwaim

the-vaudevillain-deactivated202

Let's talk about mynoise.net

Have you ever been listening to Rainymood and thought, “Yeah, this is good … but it would be nice if I could customize the sound more, or if there was a little more choice.

Let me introduce you to MyNoise.

MyNoise is a customizable sounscape looper with so many options, even within each soundscape. So say, for instance, you really love rain sounds when you write or study or relax. Anything. I know I’m a big fan of rain sounds. They have a page for that.

But say you like really high, pattery rain, and LOTS of low thunder. Here’s where MyNoise really stands out: you can customize that. See those sliders with all the cute colors? That is your equalizer. You can adjust the levels based on what you want to hear more and less of. Here’s how it looks when you want high, pattery rain and low, rumbly thunder:

But say rain isn’t really your jam. Say you want something a little more ambient, a little more background noise-y. Something with people. Well, they have customizable coffee house chatter that even has the levels listed for things like “kitchen,” “babble,” and “table”:

Or say you miss the ocean.

Or say you miss your cat.

Or say you miss your spaceship.

Or say you miss the dungeon where you and your team of scalawag adventurers used to explore and face off against, say, dragons. In the dungeon.

This site is seriously so helpful, and those are just a fraction of every kind of sounscape the site has to offer. The best part is that if you want to layer it with music (for instance, I’ll layer a playlist + rain + coffee shop if the scene I’m writing takes place in a coffee shop), you can adjust the master volume, meaning all of your layers stay at their respective volumes, just louder or quieter.

Enjoy!