Today's Document
Xuebing Du
oozey mess
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Love Begins
KIROKAZE
dirt enthusiast
RMH
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Product Placement
Not today Justin
titsay
⁂
Kaledo Art
Game of Thrones Daily
d e v o n
No title available
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Misplaced Lens Cap
if i look back, i am lost
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@relatablegenzwriter
I really hope the earthworms I place in the grass with both hands know I love them. I hope the silent deer on the side of the road knows I cant help, but regardless I love them. I hope the feral cats that live behind my apartment know I love them. I hope they weren't scared when the sanctuary picked them up and healed them. I did my best. I play god in the only way I know how, tiptoeing around things much smaller then I. Loving, loving, loving.
babe are you okay? you’ve barely touched your word count
I want to make people see how much has been taken away from them.
Did you know that there are dozens of species of fireflies, and some of them light up with a blue glow? Did you know about the moths? There are thousands of them, bright pink and raspberry orange and checkerboard and emerald. They are called things like Black-Etched Prominent, Purple Fairy, Pink-Legged Tiger, Small Mossy Glyph and Black-Bordered Lemon.
Did you know that there are moths that feed on lichens? Did you know about the blue and green bees? The rainbow-colored dogbane beetles? Your streams are supposed to teem with newts, salamanders, crawdads, frogs, and fishes. I want to take you by the hand and show you an animal you've never seen before, and say, "This exists! It's real! It's alive!"
There are secret wildflowers that no website will show you and that no list entitled "native species to attract butterflies!" will name. Every day I'm at work I see a new plant I didn't know existed.
The purple coneflowers and prairie blazing star are a tidepool, a puddle, and there is an ocean out there. There are wildflowers that only grow in a few specific counties in a single state in the United States, there are plants that are evolved specifically to live underneath the drip line of a dolomite cliff or on the border of a glade of exposed limestone bedrock. Did you know that different species of moss grow on the sides of a boulder vs. on top of it?
There are obscure trees you might have never seen—Sourwood, Yellowwood, Overcup Oak, Ninebark, Mountain Stewartia, Striped Maple, American Hophornbeam, Rusty Blackhaw, Kentucky Coffeetree. There are edible fruits you've never even heard of.
And it is so scary and sad that so many people live and work in environments where most of these wondrous living things have been locally extirpated.
There are vast tracts of suburb and town and city and barren pasture where a person could plausibly never learn of the existence of the vast majority of their native plants and animals, where a person might never imagine just how many there are, because they've only ever been exposed to the tiny handful of living things that can survive in a suburb and they have no reason to extrapolate that there are ten thousand more that no one is talking about.
It's like being a fish that has lived its whole life in a bucket, with no way of imagining the ocean. The insects in your field guide are a fraction of those that exist, of all the native plants to your area only a handful can be bought in a nursery.
Welcome to the Earth! It's beautiful! It's full of life! More things are real and beautiful and alive than a single person could imagine!!!
Writing is not about 'telling an epic story' or 'making something that will outlive you'. Writing is about going "You know what would be fucking awesome?" and then committing word crimes
tired of female characters who are so sanitised need more dirt bag women who stink and pick their nose and are rancid abrasive people and not in a consequence free epic girlpower way in a most of the other characters are reasonably disgusted by them way
I see… so many writing advice posts on Tumblr that can single handedly kill a young/beginning writer’s style that it makes me want to scream sometimes.
Let yourself be messy in writing. If artists are allowed to get paint over everything, including themselves, you’re allowed to have choppy sentences where the rhythm is weird and where you, god forbid, used an adverb.
Be the literary equivalent of an elementary school art class and be wild, innovative, and try new things out. In the end you’ll have created something you had fun doing rather than trying to fit yourself into a set of rules set forth by “Who Knows What Their Credentials Are Besides That They’re A Creative Writing Major”.
Absolutely be messy. Even confident, more experienced writers would do well to experiment with various voice and styles.
Had a revelation recently and thought it might help other people too.
There is absolutely NO shame in having a ton of projects on the go and switching between or even dropping them on a whim.
Hobbies are meant to be FUN.
You can have 20 writing projects, or knitting, or whatever your thing is, and putting them down for a bit or abandoning them is a-okay.
I personally would never think that someone who started playing a video game and then decided to play another before it was finished was a quitter, so why am I so judgemental towards myself?
Doing your hobbies in a way that brings you joy isn’t selfish or weak, it’s…literally the whole point of them. Go nuts!
hello am writer NOT robot
it is very gracious to make your acquaintance i am extremely literate and melancholy and do not sound like a homo sapiens (fig. 1) because of my words
i am not frequently visiting this website of “tumbler” as i am frequently making more words and visually entertaining myself by affixing my gaze on the molten sand attached to a hole in the wall and remaining stationery while contemplating my existence the way i used to contemplate what cereal to choose for breakfast
i apologize but i must leave you, i am obliged to stare at the blueness of my curtains and conceptualize my own sadness that they represent
guys i found the post from the first time i 🍃
writers block tip:
open a document and tell a story from your own life. you don't have to change any names or details, but tell it in a way that you would enjoy reading. this can sometimes scratch the same itch as writing fiction, for when you feel that urge to write but have nothing to write.
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!
Perfect example of "start with the bomb:"
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.
the first line of the Hunger Games is also as perfect as the beginning of a story can be, imho.
When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold.
We begin chapter 1 with Prim's missing-ness. That's the bomb.
And we end chapter one with Prim's name being called at the reaping. There's the explosion. BOOM.
just so yall know
art block is your brain telling you to do studies.
draw a still life. practice some poses. sketch some naked people. do a color study. try out a different technique on a basic shape.
art block doesnt stop you from drawing, it stops you from making your drawings look the way you want them to. and thats because you need to push your skills to the next level so you can preform at that standard
think of it as level grinding for your next work.
As a scientific illustrator- this is 100% true and going to review your basics will fix it every goddamn time. Not only does it keep your skills sharp, when you’re not emotionally invested in the final product of a piece, you relax and your brain makes more/better art juice for you. So, when you get back to that big/important piece? You’ll know what to do and how to do it.
Nothing in nature blooms all year round. Rest, and take care of yourself.
i want someone to put this into writer’s blocks now
Writer’s block means you need to relearn the whole alphabet. idiot.
hmm i think it is time to mix prose and poetry. can someone teach me how to write poetry
i kind of love the unspoken assumption that nearly all works of fiction that take place in the current day have no covid
How to Fix Your Storys Middle
If you’re feeling lost in your 2nd Act, or noticing that things are getting slow, saggy or unraveling, here are some things to consider:
Are you weaving in your subplots? If so, can you thicken them up?
Do you have a love subplot that you’ve been progressing? Are you using it to create tension and drama? Subplots (especially romantic ones) can create juicy conflict and motivation for your characters in the main plot. Add in a training subplot if your protagonist needs to know a certain skill or master a power while on their journey. Add in chaos— an axe murder moves to town, a tormented beast breaks free from their eternal prison, an ex-girlfriend comes back into the picture. Explore other subplots and how they could beef up your middle.
Do your characters have goals? Motivations?
I’m not talking about small goals, but the big ones that completely change your characters as they try to accomplish them. Do they want to defeat the evil villain, or do they have a murder to solve? Are they in search of their soulmate? If you don’t have a clear direction of your characters goals, your 2nd Act can become hard to navigate through.
Have you teased the Antagonist?
Some bad guys don’t ever meet or face off against the protagonist until the end, and that’s okay as long as you weave them throughout the story. Voldemort is a good example of a villain who is sprinkled throughout the story seamlessly. Add rumors of them, strange flashbacks or visions, their evil grunts doing their dirty work and so on. Make sure to place bits and pieces of your villain throughout the story, otherwise there is no suspenseful build up.
Do you have a MacGuffin you could add?
An object, item or idea that your characters need to obtain, thus giving them motivation. Some definitions say that the MacGuffin should be insignificant to the characters/audience and only be used to trigger the plot into motion. We don’t necessarily have any emotional ties to the Horcruxes in Harry Potter. Instead, all seven of them serve to solely propel the plot towards Voldemort and it’s end.
George Lucas, creator of Star Wars, believed that the audience should actually care about the MacGuffin as much as they do the characters. In Episode IV, the MacGuffin is the plans/blueprints of The Death Star— a planet-destroying weapon. The characters need to steal the plans before the weapon is built. We don’t want to see planets full of our favorite characters obliterated, therefore this type of MacGuffin pulls on our emotions more than the previous definition.
Could you introduce a twist?
What secrets can you reveal? What surprises can you spring on your characters and the audience? In Harry Potter, we’re caught off guard when Sirius Black is revealed not to be a bad guy, but instead an ally of Harry’s all along. Make sure you’re sprinkling in red herrings and hints along the way so that the reader doesn’t feel totally blind sided, cheated or confused at the sudden change in events.
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📖 ☕ Official Blog: www.zmwrites.com
How do people write fics that are 100’s of thousands of words long? Actually, even just 10’s of thousands? The power of some of my fellow writers frightens me sometimes, lmao
Because the longest fic I’ve ever written (and published) was 10k words. And I set that as a minimum word count goal for myself/barely made it over the finish line. So how do you guys do it?
I’m genuinely asking for tips, btw. I never seem to have enough story in my story to write more than about 5k for most of my fics. Not even that.
Hello friend!
I don’t usually reblog and answer but since you specified you’re asking for tips I thought it would be okay this time. These are all tips from a chronic long-form story writer. I struggle in the opposite direction, I simply cannot write a short story.
Anyway, onto the tips:
Give your protagonists friends and family - as soon as you expand your cast beyond protagonist and antagonist you have the potential for more story. Maybe your MC’s family disagrees with their choices? Maybe the BFF and MC used to date? Maybe MC’s mom thinks the Antagonist is just the bee’s knees. These are all small conflicts that you can add in to your story while giving you more space to world build and fatten up your story
World Build - and not always in the sense of “his house was blue and his furniture came from Ashley’s during their Once in a Lifetime Monthly Sale”. This can be give your character(s) more life, a house, a hobby, a job, interests, goals, obstacles, history, family. The more you zoom out from your story, the more potential for story you’ll find. But it’s not always about creating conflicts and nonsense to fill the space. Sometimes it’s just about throwing in relevant character building that enhances your central story. Maybe MC hates Protag and we know that, but there’s a whole backstory about a different character who behaved similar to protag and was mean to MC. You can develop that by giving yourself the space to let that story come out naturally. Maybe MC has a scar and they always hide it and they go to the gym where they meant Hot Potential Love Interest who is so interested in the scar and they keep asking about it and getting lied to and haha it’s a flirty situation, until MC has a bad day in your main plot and suddenly they explode at HPLI about the real story goddammit!!!!
Character arcs and subplots are literally essential to long stories. Your MC can have character arcs, your side characters can have character arcs (and should). So your main plot is about MC defeating the Antagonist, but that doesn’t mean its the only thing MC does. They could also have self-esteem issues and be in a bad friendship or relationship and that goes on for a while. At the same time Friend A could just be like you know you could be happier. At the same time HPLI is making the eyes at him. These are all technically small plots on their own. You give each time to develop out. It ends up like a braid of a bunch of extra little stories wrapped around the main one and they all help your MC get the confidence to defeat antagonist
All of your characters have to have both Goals (things they need or want, whether they know it or not) and Flaws (these are personality things) and Obstacles (they’re poor? they’re in a small town with big city goals? They live in a bad place. They’re ugly or beautiful. Etc, anything that makes it hard to get what they want). And I do mean ALL. Maybe your side characters’ goals/flaws/obstacles aren’t central to your plot but if they have them, they become more than cardboard cut outs to stand next to MC and agree and disagree on cue. Antagonist? ABSOLUTELY needs these things. Antagonist MUST have these things or you just have a piece of cardboard with a speaker behind it causing problems for a tiktok video.
I think setting yourself a word-count limit isn’t a bad place to start. I started writing when I was 13 and immediately decided I was going to write novels. I also convinced myself that novels were 100k (and I found out much later this isn’t true, necessarily). I actually had to go backward and learn how to write a good, solid story and not just a long one.
Set a word-count but also challenge yourself to add in more plot elements. You don’t have to sit and plot them out but have it in mind, I’m going to write a story and it’s going to have Protag and 2 side characters and they are going to have goals. As you get more comfortable with a larger cast, you should see it gets easier to write longer.
Good luck!
Hot take: Actual literary analysis requires at least as much skill as writing itself, with less obvious measures of whether or not you’re shit at it, and nobody is allowed to do any more god damn litcrit until they learn what the terms “show, don’t tell” and “pacing” mean.
Pacing
The “pacing” of a piece of media comes down to one thing, and one thing only, and it has nothing to do with your personal level of interest. It comes down to this question alone: Is the piece of media making effective use of the time it has?
That’s it.
So, for example, things which are NOT a example of bad pacing include a piece of media that is:
A slow burn
Episodic
Fast-paced
Prioritizing character interaction over intricate plot
Opening in medias res without immediate context
Incorporating a large number of subplots
Incorporating very few subplots
Bad pacing IS when a piece of media has
“Wasted” time, ie, screentime or page space dedicated to plotlines or characters that are ultimately irrelevant to the plot or thematic resolution at the cost of properly developing that resolution. Pour one out for the SW:TCW fans.
The presence of a sidestory or giving secondary characters a separate resolution of their personal arc is not “bad writing,” and only becomes a pacing issue if it falls into one of the other two categories.
Not enough time, ie, a story attempts to involve more plotlines than it has time or space to give satisfying resolutions to, resulting in all of them being “rushed” even though the writer(s) made scrupulous use of every second of page/screentime and made sure every single section advanced those storylines.
Padding for time, ie, Open-World Game Syndrome. Essentially, you have ten hours of genuinely satisfying story….but “short games don’t sell,” so you insert vast swathes of empty landscape to traverse, a bunch of nonsense fetch quests to complete, or take one really satisfying questline and repeat it ten times with different names/macguffins, to create 40 hours of “gameplay” that have stopped being fun because the same thing happens over and over. If you think this doesn’t happen in novels, you have never read Oliver Twist.
Another note on pacing: There are, except arguably in standalone movies, at least two levels of pacing going on at any given time. There’s the pacing within the installment, and the pacing within the series. Generally, there’s three levels of pacing–within the installment (a chapter, an episode, a level), within the volume (a season, a novel, a game), and within the series as a whole. Sometimes, in fact FREQUENTLY, a piece of media will work on one of these levels but not on all of them. (Usually the ideal is that it works on all three, but that’s not always important! Not every individual chapter of a novel needs to be actively relevant to the entire overarching series.)
Honestly, the best possible masterclass in how to recognize good, bad, and “they tried their best but needed more space” pacing? If you want to learn this skill, and get better at recognizing it?
Doctor Who.
ESPECIALLY Classic Who, which has clearly-delineated “serials” within their seasons. You can pretty much pick any serial at random, and once you’ve seen a few of them, you get a REALLY good feel for things like, for example…
Wow, that serial did not need to be twelve episodes long; they got captured and escaped at least three different times and made like four different plans that they ended up not being able to execute, and maybe once or twice they would have ramped up the tension, but it really didn’t contribute anything–this could have been a normal four-episode serial and been much stronger.
Holy shit there were WAY too many balls being juggled in this, this would have been better with the concepts split into two separate serials, as it stands they only had four episodes and they just couldn’t develop anything fully
Oh my god that was AMAZING I want to watch it again and take notes on how they divided up the individual episodes and what plot beats they chose to break on each week
Eh, structurally that was good, but even as a 90-minute special that nuwho episode feels like it would have worked a lot better as a Classic serial with a little more room to breathe.
How in the actual name of god did they stretch like twenty minutes of actual story into a four-episode serial (derogatory)
How in the actual name of god did they stretch like twenty minutes of actual story into a four-episode serial (awestruck)
If you’re not actively trying to learn pacing, either for literary analysis or your own writing…honestly? Just learn to differentiate between whether the pacing is bad or if it just doesn’t appeal to you. There’s a WORLD of difference between “The pacing is too slow” and “the pacing is too slow for me.”
“I really prefer a slower build into a universe; the fact that it opens in medias res and you piece together where you are and how the magic system works over the next several chapters from context is way too fast-paced for me and makes me feel lost, so I bounced off it” is, usually, a much more constructive commentary than “the pacing is bad”.
And when the pacing really is bad, you’ll be doing everyone a favor by being able to actually articulate why.
Show, Don’t Tell
This is a very specific rule that has been taken dramatically out of context and is almost always used incorrectly.
“Show, don’t tell” applies to character traits and worldbuilding, not information in the plot.
It may be easier to “get” this rule if you forget the specific phrasing for a minute. This is a mnemonic device to avoid Informed Attributes, nothing more and nothing less.
Character traits like a character being funny, smart, kind, annoying, badass, etc, should be established by their behavior in-universe and the reactions of others to them–if you just SAY they’re X thing but never show it, then you’re just telling the audience these things. Similarly you can’t just tell the audience that a setting has brutal winters and expect to be believed, when the clothing, architecture, preparations, etc shown as common in that setting do not match those that brutal winters would necessitate.
To recap:
Violations of Show Don’t Tell:
A viewpoint character describing themselves as having a trait (being a loner, easily distractable, clumsy, etc) but not actually shown to possess it (lacking friends, getting distracted from anything important, or dropping/tripping over things at inopportune moments.)
The narration declaring an emotional state (”Character A was furious”) rather than demonstrating the emotion through dialogue or depicting it onscreen.
A fourth-wall-breaking narrator; ie, Kuzco in The Emperor’s New Groove directly addressing the audience to explain that he’s a llama and also the protagonist, is NOT the same! This actually serves as a flawless example of showing rather than telling–we are SHOWN that Kuzco is immature and egotistical, even though that’s not what he’s saying.
A fictional society or setting being declared by the narrative to be free of a negative trait–bigotry, for example–but that negative trait being clearly present, where this discrepancy is not narratively engaged with.
(For example: There is officially no sexism in Thedas and yet female characters are subject to gendered slurs and expectations; the world of Honor Harrington is supposedly societally opposed to eugenics, yet “cures” for disability and constant mentions of a nebulous genetic “advantage” from certain characters’ ancestry are regular plot points that are viewed positively by the characters and are not narratively questioned.)
A character declaring that their society has no bigotry, when that character is clearly wrong, is not the same thing.
The narrative voice declaring objective correctness; everyone who agrees with the protagonist is portrayed as correct and anyone who questions them is portrayed as evil, or else there is no questioning whatsoever. For example: in Star Trek: Enterprise, Jonathan Archer tortures an unarmed prisoner. What follows is a multi-episode arc in which every person he respects along with Starfleet Command goes out of their way to dismiss the idea that he should bear any guilt, or that his actions were anything but completely necessary and objectively morally correct. No narrative space is allowed for disagreement, or for the audience to come to its own conclusion.
NOT Violations of Show Don’t Tell:
A character explaining a concept to another character who would logically, within that universe/situation, be the recipient of such an explanation.
An in-universe explanation BECOMES a SdT violation if the explanation fails to play out in reality, such as a spaceship being described as slow or flawed in some way but never actually having those weaknesses. Imagine if the Millennium Falcon was constantly described as a broken-down piece of junk…and never had any mechanical failures, AND Han and Chewie weren’t constantly shown repairing it!
Information being revealed through dialogue, period. Having your hacker in a heist movie describe the enemy security system isn’t “telling” and thus bad writing. Having information revealed organically through dialogue is what “show” means.
The “as you know” trope is technically a Show Don’t Tell violation, despite being dialogue, because it’s unnatural within the universe and serves solely to let the writer deliver information directly, ie, telling.
Characters discussing their own actions and expressing their motivations and/or decision-making process at the time.
The existence of an omnipotent narrator, or the narration itself confirming something. Narration saying “there was no way anyone could make it in time” is delivering contextual information, not breaking Show Don’t Tell.
Keep in mind that “Show, don’t tell” is meant to be advice for beginning authors. Because “telling” is easier and requires less skill than “showing,” inexperienced authors need to focus on getting as much “show” in as possible.
However, “telling” is also extremely important. Sometimes, especially in written formats, the most appropriate way to deliver information to the audience is to just say it and move on.
Keep in mind that a viewpoint character in anything but…a portal fantasy, essentially…is going to be familiar with the world they’re in. Not every protagonist needs to be a raw newcomer with zero knowledge of their new world! In most cases, a viewpoint character is going to know things that the audience doesn’t. Generally, the ONLY natural way to introduce worldbuilding in this situation is to just have the narration point them out. (It makes sense for Obi-Wan to have to explain the Force; it would make no sense for Han to explain the concept of space travel to Luke, who grew up in this universe and knows what the hell a starship is. So, if you’re writing the novelization of A New Hope, you need to just say “and so they jumped into hyperspace, the strange blue-white plane that allowed faster-than-light travel” and move the hell on.)
For that matter, in some media (ie, children’s cartoons) where teaching a moral lesson is the clear intent, a certain level of “telling” is not only appropriate but necessary!
The actual goal of “showing” and “telling” is to maintain a balance, and make sure everything feels natural. Show things that need to be shown, and…don’t waste everyone’s time showing things that would feel much more natural if they were just told.
But that’s not nearly as pithy a slogan.
(Reblog this version y’all I fixed some really serious typos)
Quick addition: When you Show, you Slow.
Taking the time to Show something rather than simply Telling it slows the moment down–and that can be a good thing! When you want a moment to have real emotional impact, when you want the audience to linger and really connect with the scene, use Show to slow them down and really make them live in it. Use descriptive language, engage the senses, and make your audience spend some time with it.
This is Not always desirable. If you’re heavily Showing in moments that aren’t truly important, your audience will disengage and get impatient and then bored. I always err on the side of over showing in a first draft, over trimming to lots of telling in a second draft, then marrying them together in a third once I’ve gotten a better understanding of the pacing with the second Telling draft.
