Why Do You Write Like You Need It To Survive?

Just a resource dump for everything and a space to sort out ideas. No need to follow. Just me suddenly getting serious. Used to be test-drive-writing.

[chipper-smol]

Two ways to build a character playlist

1: Painstakingly going through hundreds of songs and dismissing them if they tangent in the slightest from the character. Arranging songs in order of plotline so that it takes you on a secondary adventure. Squinting at a song for an hour straight because it really resonates with the character… but its a love song.

2: Ok so the first two minutes don’t really fit them at all but this one lyric made me go OOF so *tosses it in*. The singer sounds like them and the animatic in my head is entertaining as hell *tosses it in.* I have this one idea for an AU I haven’t written out yet and this song really fits it *tosses it in.* The art reminds me of-

[amygdalae]

breaking into cold sweat shaking crying throwing up trying to make an oc that isnt nonbinary and bisexual

[firefox-official]

anything i could ever write is not even half as funny as this calvin and hobbes strip

[ijustreallylovedaredevil]

So I’ve noticed a bunch of medical errors in fics I read, so I decided to post this handy guide to some of the most common errors and some background on basic medical things.

ps- they are not medical treatment or first aid advice. I’m not actually a doctor. yet. but I am certified in first aid. this is just so your writing can be more realistic.

[emi--rose]

Am a doctor and can verify. I will stop reading a fic if it’s medically inaccurate because I get so annoyed and also I’m not fun to watch TV with.

[pnfpn]

“I have all these OCs! But no story…”

bruh

make a fighting game

[k8katbloggity]

But what if half your ocs are softys and not made for fighting?

[combinecremator]

dating sim

[clonedroids]

this post changed the game

[luckycaricature]

Hey btw if you don’t know how to program, you should check out [novelty], which is a free Visual Novel creation software. Absolutely no programming required, and it’s super easy to use, I played with it some when I was a teen but the only reason I didn’t do much with it is cuz I made my story complicated and had like 5000 different branching routes that kept spawning new routes and made myself confused LMAO

But yeah, it’s a WYSIWYG with a really straight-forward GUI, if I remember correctly.

It even comes with some free backgrounds and characters and stuff, and this is what it looks like:

Did I mention it’s super duper free? It hasn’t been updated since 2010, but it has basically all you’d need to make a simple visual novel.

Just make sure your DirectX runtime is updated, cuz it can act buggy if it’s outdated, but this program is so old that I doubt it’d even be an issue lol

[pixel-cat-1]

holy shit

[becausedragonage]

This is so cool? Can you imagine fanfic in this format?

[scripturient-manipulator]

YO

[shoothisisanemptyblog-deactivat]

@becausedragonage @ashidoodle can I recommend Choice Script? It’s like a choose your own adventure coding program. The finished product looks like this, where every option sends you down a different path:

They are literally books you can play. You can even insert your own character’s name and pronouns and that would make writing reader inserts so much easier And as a writer who can not art, writing and making dating sims and games is more convenient.

The coding is also super simple and easy to learn and all it requires other than the program files is a text editor. And just like that you can start typing up like you would your own fanfics or stories. Plus it’s very versatile so you can make your game/book as simple or as complicated as you want, and even implement stats and inventory systems.

AND CHOICE SCRIPT IS ALSO SUPER DUPER FREE. THE COMPANY EVEN PUBLISHES YOUR FINISHED GAME FOR YOU AND GIVES YOU ROYALTIES IF YOU CHOOSE TO SELL IT. THE PROGRAM STILL GETS UPDATED AND  THE COMPANY PUBLISHES BOOKS EVERY MONTH INCLUDING THE FANMADE ONES. THERE’S ALSO A FORUM FOR PEOPLE TO POST WIPS AND TALK ABOUT CHOICE SCRIPT AND GET HELP.

[star-the-honeybun]

And there’s Ren'py, also for visual novels!

[theawesomeraccoon]

@raimeyl @mexicanesecat 👀

[theinvisiblespoon]

Holy shit

[madly-handsome]

Ooooof I’m gonna use thessee

[thewritinghole]

For any burgeoning digital storytellers/narrative game devs out there! :)

[ao3skin]

Also good ol’ Twine is incredibly easy to learn for text games with multiple choices! You don’t even need to deal with images if you don’t want to and it works in the browser (there’s also a downloadable version) and it generates html files that you can play in your browser.

Anyway if you want excuses/community for making visual novels NaNoRenO is about to start (March2022 for those reading this message in the future.) on itch.io (like nanowrimo, but about visual novels!)

[wantstoflyafraidtofall]

hey writers! OneLook Thesaurus lets you find that word you can’t think of but can describe! go check it out!

[teaboot]

How to write kids, if you don't remember being one or haven't lived with any

1. Kids never feel as small as you see them. A three year old thinks a one year old is a baby and a six year old is grown up. A six year old thinks a three year old is a baby and a twelve year old is an adult. Age is about perspective. One year is a huge age difference to a little kid.

2. Little kids might not be conscious of their physical limitations, but they can still be frustrated by them. A seven year old might see an adult do something relatively simple, like draw a straight line or perfectly crack an egg, and try to do the same thing, only to be frustrated when it doesn't work.

Imagine suddenly having an injury that makes a skill you use every day become difficult- you feel you should be able to do the thing, and you understand the thing should be easy for you, but it isn't. It can be immensely frustrating to have a brain that grasps a concept that language or fine motor skills haven't caught up to.

3. You know when you forget a word, and have to make something up on the fly to describe the word? That's pretty much exactly what learning your first language is like.

You know what you intend, but you don't have a way to express it, and it can move you to tears with frustration when everyone around you is suggesting the wrong thing, or seems completely certain they understand what you mean, and they don't.

You don't have a word for "Later"? You might try saying "next time", or, "after", or, "before tomorrow".

This might result in saying, "Are we going to the park next time?", "Are we going to the park before tomorrow?", or, "Are we going to the park after?", all of which can result in different answers.

4. Kids feel like adults are a different species. They don't get why we do certain things, and they don't understand why we don't want to run around with them all the time.

If sitting still is boring, coffee tastes bitter, and long conversations only happen with weird-smelling strangers who talk to them like they're stupid, then they truly will not understand why anyone would *want* to be left to have coffee with a friend without welcome distractions to make it bearable.

Aren't you bored? You aren't doing anything. How could you possibly be stimulated without any food or toys or music or anything? Why don't you just leave? Do you *have* to be there, the way you had to go to work? Adults are weird.

5. Children have complex social relationships that are just as varied as yours.

A room full of third graders might look like indiscriminate chaos to an adult, but pick a well connected kid, and they'll tell you that Megan is the fashion icon who can do hair really well, Thomas is the athlete, Gray gets mean when he has to share so nobody wants to play with him, Paisley can't read and the boys make fun of her for it so don't make her work in a group with Anthony, Dillon put a bug in their food once so they'll never trust him again, and Matthew's parents let him watch family guy so he says bad words and makes grown-up jokes that make other kids uncomfortable.

You don't see this stuff because you aren't inside the society. They are, and they do.

6. Time. Moves. So. Slow. Five minutes really does feel like half an hour. Sit still for five minutes? That's like you sitting in a waiting room at the DMV for an hour. Wouldn't you get annoyed and impatient? They haven't learned to hide their irritation yet. That's really the only difference.

7. "Reading in your head" requires understanding that you have a Voice, which people can hear, and Thoughts, which are audible only to yourself. This can be a difficult concept to grasp. If a kid is reading out loud, and you tell them to read quietly, there's a good chance they're going to whisper or mouth the words instead of going totally silent the way you might. Splitting the self into multiples like "Internal monologue VS public perception" or "What I look like VS how I think I look" is alien and bizarre. If a kid thinks they look like a Dragon and you laugh at them? Ouch. They might be mad for a while.

8. Repetitive chores make no sense when your awareness of time doesn't extend beyond a week or so. Why should I wash my blankets? They don't look dirty and I don't smell anything bad. Blankets don't get dirty unless you put dirt on them. If you put a blanket in a washer, you can't use that blanket AT ALL the ENTIRE TIME it's being cleaned. That might be an hour, but it will *feel* like a week. And you have to do that every two weeks?? That's overkill. Why even bother?

9. Kids have opinions about adults. They will have a sense about whether an adult is "real-kind" or "fake-kind". An adult who listens respectfully to what they have to say, asks thoughtful questions, and takes their concerns seriously? That's a good adult. An adult that oversimplifies their struggles, ignores their complex social rules, and gives bullshit advice like "just walk away from bullies" and "turn your chores into a fun game"? That's not a trustworthy adult. That's an Adult™. An Adult™ doesn't consider them to be a real human being with thoughts and emotions. An Adult™ sees them as an inferior, amusing pet. And they will actively sabotage An Adult™ like that.

10. Emotions are physical at a young age. Joy might make their body buzz until they can't help but wiggle or jump around. Sadness might be a huge physical pain in their throat and heart. Everything they experience is still relatively.New to.them, so there is very little frame of reference to decide if this is a "big hurt that will last forever and ever and never go away", or a "small hurt, that can be fixed easily and won't matter in five minutes". If someone lies to them about getting a cookie, that very well might be all the betrayal of your best friend sleeping with your husband.

Fortunately, a child probably won't be able to burn all your clothes in the yard without your notice.

[musashi]

'its not realistic for two characters to talk in the middle of a sword fight' cool I wrote it anyways because it fucks severely

[errorschacha]

To be clear, I am absolutely 100 percent supportive of dishonest children. I endorse minors who swindle, who bamboozle, who are treacherous and who commit acts of fraud. In fact, it is moral and righteous. And you probably deserve it.

[yukippe]

reblogging posts about oranges in the hopes your mutuals will reblog it from you to simulate peeling and sharing oranges online

[v9z-deactivated20201221]

rb this with ur opinion on this shade of pink:

[inkwingart]

This is magenta, and not pink. Unlike pink, magenta doesn’t actually exist. Our brain just invents magenta to serve as what it considers a logical bridge between red and violet, which each exist at opposite ends of a linear spectrum.

TL;DR this color is fake (and also I hate it)

[achromic-red-dreams-doze-angrily]

w

what

[achromic-red-dreams-doze-angrily]

im

[pococurantina]

[shaaknaa]

Wait til you learn about Stygean Blue

[pyrrhiccomedy]

Your brain is a badly-designed hot mess of bootstrapped chemistry that will tell you that all kinds of shit is happening that has no correlation to physical reality, including time travel. It just makes things up. Your brain is guessing about what’s happening when your eyes saccade, what’s happening in your blind spot, and what the majority of the visible light spectrum looks like, and you don’t know it’s happening because it doesn’t aid your survival to become aware that a lot of what you see is fake.

The human eye only has three types of color sensitive cones, which detect red, blue, and green light. Your brain is making up every other color you perceive.

Let’s have a little fun with that thought. This is the visible spectrum of light.

You will of course note that yellow is on the chart. Yellow has a discreet wavelength, and is therefore a distinct physical color. But we can’t see it.

“Sorry, what the fuck?”

What we call yellow is just what our brain shrugs and spits out when our red and green cones are equally stimulated. We have light receptors that can pick up on the physical spectrum of light we call yellow: that’s why yellow things don’t just look like moving black blocks to us. But your brain has no fucking idea what the color yellow looks like. 

Some animals have eyes that can perceive the color yellow! Goldfish have a yellow cone in their eyes. If they could talk, they could tell us what yellow looks like. But we wouldn’t be able to understand it.

What your brain actually sees of the color spectrum:

We can measure the wavelength of light, so we know that when we see ‘yellow,’ we are seeing light in that 550-ish nanometers range. But we don’t have a cone in our eyes that can pick that up. Your brain just has a very consistent guess about what color that wavelength of light could be. We decided to name that guess ‘yellow.’ We can’t imagine what yellow really looks like any more than a dog can imagine the color red.

Here’s the funny thing: your brain is never perceiving just one photon of light at a time. Something like 2*10⁸ photons per second are hitting your retina under normal conditions. Your brain doesn’t individually process all of them. So it averages them out. It grabs a bunch of photons all coming from the same direction, with the same pattern, and goes, “yeah, that cup is blue, fuck it, next.”

That’s how colors blend in our eyes. So sure, if a photon of light with a wavelength of 550 nanometers bounces into our eyes, we see what we call “yellow.” But if we see two photons at the same time, coming from the same object, one of which is 500 nms and the other of which is 600 nms, your brain will average them out and you will still see yellow even though none of the light you just saw was 550 nms.

So how does magenta factor into this?

Well, as we’ve just established, when your brain sees light from two different slices of the visible light spectrum, it will try to just average them together. Green plus red is yellow, fuck it. If it’s more red than green, we’ll call that ‘orange.’ Literally who gives a shit, we’re trying to forage over here. There are bears out here and it’s so scary.

What happens if you take the average of blue and red light, which we perceive to be magenta? What’s the centerpoint of that line?

Fucking green.

Hey, that’s not gonna work? We live on a planet where EVERYTHING IS GREEN. If something is NOT green, that means it’s either food, or a potential source of danger, and either way your brain wants you to know about it.

So your brain goes, WHOOPS. Okay - this is fine. We already made up yellow, orange, cyan, and violet. We’ll just make up another color. Something that looks really, really different from green. 

And so it made up magenta.

So, physics-wise, is magenta “real?”

No; there’s no single wavelength of light that corresponds to magenta. But you’re rarely seeing only a single wavelength of light anyway. And even when you are, every color other than RGB is a dart thrown on the wall by your meat computer. This is the CIE Chromaticity Diagram:

Explaining this thing is a little more than I want to take on on a Saturday morning, but I’ve included a link above that goes into it a little more. The point is that only the colors that actually touch the ‘outline’ of the shape actually correspond to a specific wavelength of light. All of the other colors are blends of multiple wavelengths. So magenta isn’t special.

Given that color is just a fun trick your brain is playing on you to help you find food and avoid danger, is magenta real?

Yeah, absolutely. Or at least, it’s just as real as most of what we see. It’s what we see when we mix up blue and red. It would be disastrous from a survival standpoint to perceive that color as green, so we don’t. Because it’s not green. Light that’s green has a wavelength of around 510 nm. Stuff that’s magenta bounces back light that is both ~400 and ~700. Your brain knows the difference. So it fills in the gap for you, with the best guess it has, same as it does with your blind spot.

The perception of color exists within your brain, and your brain says you see magenta. So you see magenta.

[atopfourthwall]

[humanpersonface]

So I googled Stygian Blue and…

Yall.

FORBIDDEN.

[the-aro-ace-arrow-ace]

HOW TO SEE THE FORBIDDEN COLOURS

[bunjywunjy]

Hyperbolic Orange is the color my soul is

[crittizen]

Dark tumblr show me the forbidden colors

[simonalkenmayer]

We are back on this again.

[liquidlyrium]

“The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.” - Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

[specandkorvi]

Korvi, leaning across his desk: why are you in love with a Rasthi? Sim, barely blinking: why are you

Korvi:

[unicyclehippo]

me, panicking, not writing my story: it’s stupid, it’s a stupid story!

the tiny gremlin in my brain, enjoying a lollipop & wearing the Most Eyewateringly vibrant shorts: so what?

[haliagreen7]

Listen to that gremlin more

[thewriterswitch]

Every writing advice ever: If you’re having trouble with a scene, skip it and write a different part of the story.

Me: If I don’t write in chronological order, I will die

[venus-stood-still-1999]

[headspace-hotel]

The two types of fantasy writers

1. Feverishly calculating the body mass of your dragon species, spent 5 hours last night researching the origins of steel, losing sleep over horseshoes, 20 tabs open, should a cockatrice be warm-blooded?, will die if they don’t immediately figure out when honeybees were first domesticated

2.

[valleyhowler]

There are hardly any female werewolves because they break all the classic rules of femininity. They force you to confront female violence, strength, size, grotesqueness and uncontrollability. Historically female shapeshifters always shift into something dangerous (snake) or sleek (cat) or dainty (bird) but female werewolves ignore the masculine gaze completely. They're distorted beasts that have no ulterior motive except to destroy. Nothing about them is nurturing or modest. They're the opposite of what a woman "should be." Their omission from pop culture is not an accident.