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kjscottwrites

unknown-lifeform

Me while writing: oh hell yes this is such a good sentence I'm the master of poetic imagery

The writing when I go back to edit:

suiheisen

MONKEY MAN (2024)

helpful-writing-tips

if you're trying to get into the head of your story's antagonist, try writing an "Am I the Asshole" reddit post from their perspective, explaining their problems and their plans for solving them. Let the voice and logic come through.

homunculus-argument

Hey, random writing tip: Instead of having something be a ridiculously unlikely coincidence, you can make the thing happen due to who this particular character is as a person. Instead of getting stuck on "there's no logical reason to why that would happen", try to bend it into a case of "something like this would never happen to anybody but this specific fucker." Something that makes your reader chuckle and roll their eyes, going "well of course you would."

Why would the timid shy nerd be at a huge sketchy downtown black market bazaar? Well, she's got this beetle colony she's raising that needs a very specific kind of leaf for nest material, and there only place to get it is this one guy at the bazaar that sells that stuff. Why would the most femininely flamboyant guy ever known just happen to have downright encyclopedic knowledge about professional boxing? Well, there was this one time when he was down bad for this guy who was an aspiring professional boxer...

I know it sounds stupidly obvious when written out like this, but when you're up close to your writing, it's hard to see the forest for the trees. Some time ago I finished reading a book, where the whole plot hinges on character A, who is 100% certain that character B is dead, personally getting up and coming down from the top rooms of a castle, to the gates, at 3 am, to come look at some drunk who claims to be this guy who died 17 years ago. Why would A do that, if he's sure that B is dead?

Because he's a Warrior Guy from a culture of Loyalty And Honour, and hearing that someone's got the audacity to go about claiming to be his long-lost brother in battle, there is no other option than to immediately personally go down there to beat the ever-loving shit out of this guy. Who then turns out to actually be character B, after all.

artbyblastweave

One reason I've never really pulled the trigger on any involved creative endeavors is that I'm a lazy disorganized invertebrate. Another reason is that it's increasingly apparent to me that if I ever made the jump over the fence from "member of the dilettante-commentariat" to "moderately-successful content creator" I'd need to nuke my internet presence and enter a perpetual digital hermitage, and I enjoy postin' too much to do that

keatsgay-deactivated20200126

foreshadowing done well makes me go feral like there’s NOTHING better than getting to the end a book or an important storyline moment and realising that the author laced information so intricately into their writing that weren’t noticeable upon first read but when you read back sections they’re light giant red flags like wow writing is amazing

antique-scarecrow

the best stories contain two stories: the one you read the first time, and the one you read every time after that

wild-west-wind

You know what fantasy writing needs? Working class wizards.

A crew of enchanters maintaining the perpetual flames that run the turbines that generate electricity, covered in ash and grime and stinking of hot chilies and rare mushrooms used for the enchantments

A wizard specializing in construction, casting feather fall on every worker, and enchanting every hammer to drive nails in straight, animating the living clay that makes up the core of the crane

An elderly wizard and her apprentice who transmute fragile broken objects. From furniture, to rotten wood beams, to delicate jewelry

A battle magician, trained with only a few rudimentary spells to solve a shortage of trained wizards on the front who uses his healing spells to help folks around town

Wizarding shops where cheery little mages enchant wooden blocks to be hammered into the sides of homes. Hammer this into the attic and it will scare off termites, toss this in the fire and clean your chimney, throw this in the air and all dust in the room gets sucked up

Wizard loggers who transmute cut trees into solid, square beams, reducing waste, and casting spells to speed up regrowth. The forest, they know, will not be too harsh on them if the lost tree’s children may grow in its place

Wizard farmers who grow their crops in arcane sigils to increase yield, or produce healthier fruit

Factory wizards who control a dozen little constructs that keep machines cleaned and operational, who cast armor to protect the hands of workers, and who, when the factory strikes for better wages, freeze the machines in place to ensure their bosses can’t bring anyone new in.

Anyway, think about it.

wild-west-wind

Construction wizards to turn back time to root out wood worm and strengthen old buildings.

A wizard tailors who transmutes cloth into fully made clothes without seems and leaving behind no scraps

A wizard who works in public transit, timing out teleports with detailed schedules, time magic, and enchanted communications, sending dozens of people to far away cities for a day or work or leisure

A team of wizard gardeners tend to trees grown far outside their native range, and ideal climate, encircled with runes and fed potions to grow none the less

A wizard sits in their office in the aqueduct, re-casting the spells that allow its precious water to flow to the city uphill

A wizard fisher casts water repelling spells on the sailors and the stairs, keeps the hoist on the anchor from rusting, casts balls of heat that keep everyone warm below decks. Their real job is to herd fish together so they can be caught in single huge nets, and keep them cold as the boat returns to land.

There are so many possibilities outside of “stodgy academic who wears ugly robes” and “Very good holy man who helps everyone and the fact they’ve never had a job is never brought up” and “evil wizard toiling away on great evils in his evil tower in the evil country.”

ethanrayne

Wizards who come out and ward your home for you, like the magical equivalent of a home security system.

thecollectibles

Diviner Estella by Haiyang

letterful

i do love listmaking…

letterful

here be two decidedly incomprehensive lists based on highly arbitrary criteria — off the top of my head and in no particular order:

rattling like a bag of bones:

"gretel, from a sudden clearing" & "the promise" & "what the silence says" & "calvary" by marie howe,

"i watched you disappear” by anya krugovoy silver,

"the song of hen's head" & "this is a photograph of me" & "a sad child" by margaret atwood,

"bruise ghazal" & "i go back to may 1937" by sharon olds,

"harold's leap" & "deeply morbid" & "the orphan reformed" & "do take muriel out" & "not waving but drowning" by stevie smith,

"we who are your closest friends" by phillip lopate,

"the loft" by richard jones,

"eating together" & "death poem" & "party" & "you with the crack running through you" & "the numbers" by kim addonizio,

"thanks" by w. s. merwin,

"the bee meeting" & "lady lazarus" & "daddy" & "sheep in fog" & "fever 103" by sylvia plath,

"yesterday he still looked in my eyes" by marina tsvetaeva,

"we don't know how to say goodbye" & "the last toast" by anna akhmatova,

"unknown girl in the maternity ward" & "lessons in hunger" & "the truth the dead know" by anne sexton,

"anne sexton’s last letter to god" & "ophelia’s confession" by tracey herd,

"aubade" & "the mower" by philip larkin,

"the blue bowl" by jane kenyon,

"her long illness" by donald hall,

"myth" by natasha trethewey,

"the drowned girl" by bertolt brecht,

"in bertram's garden" by donald justice,

"to a poor old woman" by william carlos williams,

"report from a besieged city" by zbigniew herbert,

"napoleon" by miroslav holub,

"me up at does" by e.e. cummings,

"snow line" by john berryman,

"the hollow men" by t. s. eliot,

"dedication" & "in warsaw" by czesław miłosz—

resonating like a bright bell:

"what the living do" & "my dead friends" & "magdalene, afterwards" by marie howe,

"funny" by anna kamieńska,

"woman unborn & "i am panting" & "i'll open the window" & “tomorrow they’ll cut me open” by anna świrszczyńska,

"the book of hours" by b. h. fairchild,

"there is a gold light in certain old paintings" by donald justice,

"when eurydice saw him..." (an excerpt) by gregory orr,

"sometimes, when the light" & "the blind leading the blind" & "there are mornings" & "monet refuses the operation" by lisel mueller,

"try to praise the mutilated world" & "transformation" by adam zagajewski,

"the tower of babel" & "discovery" & "thank-you note" by wisława szymborska,

"all in green went my love riding" by e. e. cummings,

"while eating a pear" & "the dead" by billy collins,

"a meeting" by wendell berry,

"death at daybreak" by anne reeve aldrich,

"next time" by joyce sutphen,

"the god abandons antony" by c. p. cavafy,

"musee des beaux arts" by w. h. auden,

"falling and flying" by jack gilbert,

"goodtime jesus" by james tate,

"all my friends are finding new beliefs" by christian wiman,

"i’m glad your sickness" by marina tsvetaeva,

"angels" by maurya simon,

"the saints" by margaret atwood,

"dirge without music" by edna st. vincent millay,

"a refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in london" & "fern hill" & "do not go gentle into that good night" & "and death shall have no dominion" by dylan thomas,

"high windows" & "an arundel tomb" by philip larkin,

"please read" by mary ruefle,

"it was not death, for i stood up" by emily dickinson,

"men made out of words" by wallace stevens,

"ash wednesday" by t. s. eliot,

"on angels" & "this world" & "if there is no god" & "encounter" by czesław miłosz.

maia-beans

Weisshaupt mission was insane I still think about it ghghghhg

laskulls-deactivated20250318

I need help w... trans thing..

hey so if I want to refer to a character's past pre-transition, should I address them (in that situation) by their previous pronouns or just not bother? I know this is like, my decision to make/up to the character, but I've never done this before 😅 what should I do?

beidak-art

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