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throwbackblr

The Most Popular Song of Each Month 1997 to 1999

#music

teabasket

Blossom 九重紫 (2024), dir. Zeng Qing Jie, Guo Feng

#cdrama #guzhuang #blossom

teabasket

A Splendid Match 良陈美锦 (2026) ; dir. Jin Xiong Hao

#gif #cdrama #guzhuang

nexttimeisnotthesame

Round two results: Lord Chen hit the target with all five arrows. Miss Gu hit the target with all five arrows. It's a tie.

#a splendid match #cdrama #良陈美锦

storge

Why were you with the witch? She saved my life.

Mei Chaofeng & Guo Jing The Legend of Heroes (2024)

#the legend of heroes #金庸武侠世界 #cdrama

morweneledhwen

Ci Sha in a photoshoot for his upcoming drama The Way Home.

#ci sha #cdrama

baixue-temple

can't have SHIT in the jianghu!!!

#zhan zhao adventures #lol #cdrama

aceinthetrap

An ultra extended flowchart for identifying dynasties! Even identifying sub-periods of each dynasty. As always, this is a general guide ther

does the makeup look sad or happy? >>> goth & sad >>> middle tang dynasty [lmao]

#hanfu #guzhuang #history

guzhuangheaven

the heir opening credits

#the heir #家业 #cdrama

movielosophy

宴遇永安 | them

#宴遇永安 #cdrama #yummy yummy yummy

aceinthetrap

YUMMY YUMMY YUMMY 《宴遇永安》 (2025)

#宴遇永安 #yummy yummy yummy #cdrama

whatagrump

Apparently a lot of people get dialogue punctuation wrong despite having an otherwise solid grasp of grammar, possibly because they’re used to writing essays rather than prose. I don’t wanna be the asshole who complains about writing errors and then doesn’t offer to help, so here are the basics summarized as simply as I could manage on my phone (“dialogue tag” just refers to phrases like “he said,” “she whispered,” “they asked”):

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

“There’s no dialogue tag after this sentence, so end it with a period rather than a comma.” She frowned, suddenly concerned that the entire post was as unasked for as it was sanctimonious.

thewritinggrindstone

And!

“If you’re breaking dialogue up with an action tag”—she waves her hands back and forth—”the dashes go outside the quotation marks.”

writing-is-a-martial-art

Reblog to save a writer’s life.

#writing

wafflewarrior111

So... I found this and now it keeps coming to mind. You hear about "life-changing writing advice" all the time and usually its really not—but honestly this is it man.

I'm going to try it.

missroserose

I love the lawyer metaphor, because whenever I see “John knew that...” in prose writing I immediately think “how? How does he know it?” Interrogate your witnesses. Cross-examine them. Make them explain their reasoning. It pays dividends.

heck-in-a-handbasket

All of this, but also feels/felt. My editor has forbidden me from using those and it’s forced me to stretch my skills.

ineedthesons

This is your "show not tell" advice explained!

tarysande

Editor here.

First, let me preface this with something very important: you can treat all of this advice as SECOND-DRAFT ADVICE. It is so much easier to rewrite this kind of stuff once you have words on the page. Telling yourself the first draft is totally appropriate and acceptable.

What we’re talking about here are FILTER WORDS (and to some degree verbs of being). Yes, “thought” words are included. But so are “heard, saw, looked, tasted, smelled” etc.—most words having to do with the senses.

This isn’t black and white advice; sometimes you’ll use these words and that’s okay. They’re not WRONG. They’re just weaker. And they’re weaker because they create distance between the reader and the experience of the character.*

If you want your reader to feel like they’re experiencing the story right alongside the character, you want to cut down on filter words.

*This is particularly important with first person and close third POVs. The reader always knows whose eyes they’re seeing through and thoughts they’re privy to. So you don’t need to tell them “I saw X.” Or “I heard X.” Or “I thought Y.” You can just jump into the action/observation as it’s happening.

This is also where you want to pay attention to verbs of being.

“It was rainy.” Versus: “The rain pounded against the roof.” Or “The rain howled like an injured animal.” Or “The rain tapped against the window like an anxious lover.” All of these are inviting the reader deeper into the experience of the story by using stronger verbs and similes. And, at the same time, they stir feelings (instead of TELLING feelings). And feelings keep your reader engaged. Engaged readers keep turning pages; engaged readers become FANS.

the-haiku-bot

This is also where

you want to pay attention

to verbs of being.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

defilerwyrm

The most valuable advice that Author Ex gave me through the years that we wrote together was this: the problem with all these filter words is that they create distance in the POV.

That means that when you read a line like

John saw that the curtains were open.

It immediately takes you OUT of the character's perspective and instead tells you what they experience as a secondhand observation.

You don't have to get fancy or purple with how you rephrase things like this. Not everything needs a ton of breathing room.

You wanna know what's perfectly impactful while keeping a tight POV?

The curtains were open.

Simple as that.

porcupine-girl

What I always love about this every time it crosses my dash is that while it's good advice, it's not actually framed as advice. It's framed as a time-limited challenge. That's very different!

It's not saying "never use these words again." It's saying "give this a try, a really hardcore try, just for a little while (it says six months but obviously you can adjust that), and see what happens." Which is so much more useful, because it's framing it as a learning experience.

If you do this, for six months or two months or one full story or whatever, at the end of that time you'll have a better understanding of when these words are and aren't necessary and when and how to use them to get the specific effect you want - because like defilerwyrm says, they create distance, and maybe sometimes you want that!

So much writing advice falls flat because you can always think of an exception that allows you to ignore the rule. But a writing challenge gives you a chance to explore new territory and see how it works.

#writing

stydixa

What are you afraid of, a fate worse than death? No, just death, isn't that enough? CLUE (1985) Dir. Jonathan Lynn

#clue #movie

romchat

Ah, no wonder the visuals of The Heir are so good--it's the same director as Story of Yanxi Palace! I'm going to have to add Hui Kaidong to my favorite Cdrama directors list because I just love how he uses space and scale to world-build. In Yanxi, he used the giant walls and lavish furnishings of the Forbidden City to draw parallels between women in the imperial harem and birds trapped in gilded cages. In The Heir, he uses similar techniques to portray the burden of legacy.

Several of the main characters in this story belong to families with a longstanding reputation of being masters in the craft of ink making. And we see this legacy in the show’s use of scale. Look at the sets of family homes and the tall vertical lines that dwarf the families who inhabit them. Or the extras populating the background and the ink-making props dirtying the frame. There is a sense that these characters are part of something bigger than themselves and they are expected to uphold that tradition through painstaking labor, high standards, and ruthless accountability.