#it's hard!!!

[onevoltperoctave]

the feminist workout guide is in progress!

[canongf]

recovery is hard!!! i'm tired. i can't get comfortable. i'm in pain and i'm swollen. sometimes i'm so swollen that breathing is a chore. i can't open my mouth, so i can't yawn or lick my lips. i can't brush the back of my teeth so i never really feel clean. i can't chew any food and i'm hungry. i look in the mirror and i don't recognize my face yet. it's hard!!! but i know eddie thinks i am so strong!!!

[limerental]

I do get why people don't write more for minor book characters tbh

because a) characterization tends to build off of the familiarity of established fandom tropes and if you don't have that with a character yet, you're having to scrape that out of the text yourself and you can't just rewatch something, you have to dig through multiple books for small tidbits of context and fill in the blanks with all your own headcanons

and b) there's a large risk that that lack of familiarity will also mean absolutely no one will want to read your niche book character fic

[yellowocaballero]

Do u have any tips on writing tension and payoff, or writing in general? I look up to your writing greatly and any advice u give would be very much appreciated

Ahh haha that’s plotting stuff which I am very obviously not amazing at (exhibit A: Solitaire, holy shit what a mess). A far better person to ask would be @lazuliquetzal, who is stellar at this (mostly through watching RL Stein masterclasses). Also @coolcurrybooks who herself taught me a lot about plot structure. Also I’ll preface this by saying “I don’t know anything about plotting or writing and I’ve taken like one boring class and I’ve never read any books on this and I don’t know what I’m talking about”, and pretend I say that a hundred times. I only know this from reading books. 

I suck at plotting so much that I try to keep it really simple. But thanks for asking about tension, because so many fanfics just deadass do not have it and it drives me bonkers fucking yonkers. Stories need conflict. Do not write a story without conflict, good god. The conflict can be ‘who gets the last piece of pie’, it doesn’t matter, but it should happen and it should be further than just a miscommunication. Characters need flaws - actual, legitimate, ‘oof’ flaws. Not just emotional character conflict, although that’s important too (characters should change as people over the course of the story, or at the very least the reader should find out more about them). Physical conflict. Stakes. The physical conflict and, and probably should, be a metaphor for the emotional conflict, but you should have both. 

A character wants something. There are barriers to getting that thing. They want that thing for psychological reasons. Oh, man, will character get that thing?! Time will tell! 

That’s tension. Tension is necessary for a ‘bingeable’ story. Someone stays up until 3am reading your fic? It had tension. For me tension means that the story is constantly escalating. I think of it in terms of momentum - the train gets going and picks up steam, and at the climax it crashes into a wall. Things are always getting worse. There is a ‘lowest point’ in the story where all seems lost and the characters and reader feel as if all is lost. Then the characters pick themselves up again, you get the cathartic and satisfying climax, and then the story wraps up. Introduce the story, introduce the characters and dynamics, world-build, hit them with that conflict, escalate, lowest point, climax, falling action. It’s really simple but so long as the basic structure is there it works. For me personally...writing is boring, it’s boring when you’ve been doing it for eight hours, so every time I get bored during writing I make something stupid happen. It’s not very scientific.

Payoff is just the release of that tension. It’s your character going the entire story convinced they’re unloved only to realize that their friends loved them all along. If you’re me, it’s the dramatic monologue about their feelings and the realization that everything they needed was within them. If you introduced a problem, solve it. If you introduced a character thread, do your best to wrap it up. If you’ve been spending the entire story on the edge of your seat just WAITING for that smarmy villain bastard to get what’s coming to him, when he does it’s very satisfying.

Also good tension/payoff is twists, which are important for thrillers. Twists aren’t appropriate for every story, but good ones can give a lot of zest. Good payoff is knowing that the characters have changed, grown, and learned. You’re proud of them!

This is specific advice to fanfiction and also just me bitching about something that’s just personally not to my taste: I get that it’s really fun to just kinda keep writing something so long as it’s fun. But when beginning to write a fic, it really helps a lot to have that ending in mind. I almost never know what’s going on in the middle of a story lol, but I normally know where they’re going to end up. And if you’re just like...writing and writing and writing, then all sense of momentum and tension and payoff is lost. I hate my stories most when I feel like it’s bloated and meandering. Every scene should have one, two, three, four purposes. Every conversation needs meaning. 

Critically ask yourself why you’re writing this, why that is happening. What does this conversation say about A, how would B be his own worst enemy here? Who’s your audience? What’s your genre? Have you read books/watched movies in your genre? Go read your genre. What does your genre do, how does it manufacture tension, what are the character dynamics in your genre? I decide my genre, I imbibe my genre until I’ve memorized the plot structure of my genre, then I replicate it. If you’re me, at this point you hit the genre with a hammer.  

Does that help? I don’t know if that helped. Fanfic writing is its own...unique thing, that is written in a strange way. Some of that way is great and some of it is not great. I cannot emphasize enough that I figured out how to plot my bad 90s romcom battle of the sexes/problematic bet fic by watching three movies in that genre and then ripping them apart with my teeth like an angry dog. 

TL;DR: Read a lot, write a lot, know what you’re writing, know where you’re going, and have fun getting there!

[g4yr4t]

yknow what’s hard? when someone says they’ll be somewhere by some time and then they’re like. late. even if it’s just a couple of minutes late, because then my brain goes “well if they aren’t following the rules anyway, they might be an hour late, or they might not get here at all” and I’ll have to try not to get anxious or melt down and I’m just now realizing that that’s very autistic of me is all.

[winnifredburkle]

100 Images of … Harry Potter 

Harry Potter rolled over inside his blankets without waking up. One small hand closed on the letter beside him and he slept on, not knowing he was special, not knowing he was famous, not knowing he would be woken in a few hours’ time by Mrs. Dursley’s scream as she opened the front door to put out the milk bottles, nor that he would spend the next few weeks being prodded and pinched by his cousin Dudley…He couldn’t know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: “To Harry Potter - the boy who lived!”

[theplantqueer]

Doing some more family history stuff, and just had a look back over the 1799 baptismal records in the little town on the little island in the Azores my family’s from, to see if I could find my great(x4) grandmother, Esperanca. The handwriting’s incredibly difficult to read and is in creatively-spelled portuguese, but I translated the start of it (badly), and it so far seems to say that no-one knew who her parents were? She was just found as a baby by these two dudes and baptised at the local church and I think taken in by two other locals

this whole thing is like a really hard but satisfying treasure hunt that no living person seems to have the answer to lol