Random @thenightwolf51 - Tumblr Blog

Protect him

It’s really refreshing and affirming to hear these words spoken by another human! Sometimes (often, if we’re being totally honest with ourselves), I feel insane for thinking that people should just be able to be friends with other people regardless of whether or not someone is married or they’re an opposite gender, without having to make it weird and sexual. Please can we just go back to all being friends on the playground and playing in the dirt together.

literaryvein-references

When your Character...

Gets into: A Fight ⚜ ...Another Fight ⚜ ...Yet Another Fight

Hates Someone ⚜ Kisses Someone ⚜ Falls in Love

Calls Someone they Love ⚜ Dies / Cheats Death ⚜ Drowns

is...

A Ballerina ⚜ A Child ⚜ Interacting with a Child ⚜ A Cheerleader

A Cowboy ⚜ A Genius ⚜ A Lawyer ⚜ A Pirate ⚜ A Spy

A Wheelchair User ⚜ A Zombie ⚜ Beautiful ⚜ Dangerous ⚜ Drunk

Funny ⚜ In a Coma ⚜ In a Secret Society ⚜ Injured ⚜ Shy

needs...

A Magical Item ⚜ An Aphrodisiac ⚜ A Fictional Poison

A Coping Strategy ⚜ A Drink ⚜ A Medicinal Herb ⚜ A Mentor

Money ⚜ A Persuasion Tactic ⚜ A Quirk ⚜ To be Killed Off

To Become Likable ⚜ To Clean a Wound ⚜ To Self-Reflect

To Find the Right Word, but Can't ⚜ To Say No ⚜ To Swear

loves...

Astronomy ⚜ Baking ⚜ Cooking ⚜ Cocktails ⚜ Food ⚜ Oils

Dancing ⚜ Fashion ⚜ Gems ⚜ Herbal Remedies ⚜ Honey

Mushrooms ⚜ Mythology ⚜ Numbers ⚜ Perfumes

Roses ⚜ Sweets ⚜ To Argue ⚜ To Insult ⚜ To Kiss

To Make False Claims ⚜ Wine ⚜ Wine-Tasting ⚜ Yoga

has/experiences...

Allergies ⚜ Amnesia ⚜ Bereavement ⚜ Bites & Stings

Bruises ⚜ Caffeine ⚜ CO Poisoning ⚜ Color Blindness

Facial Hair ⚜ Fainting ⚜ Fevers ⚜ Food Allergies

Food Poisoning ⚜ Fractures ⚜ Frostbite ⚜ Hypothermia

Injuries ⚜ Jet Lag ⚜ Kidnapping ⚜ Manipulation ⚜ Mutism

Pain ⚜ Paranoia ⚜ Poisoning ⚜ More Pain & Violence

Scars ⚜ Trauma ⚜ Viruses ⚜ Wounds

[these are just quick references. more research may be needed to write your story...]

Writing Resources PDFs

maramahan

I feel like a very important part of worldbuilding for any universe with a magic system is asking yourself ‘how would people use this to do crime?’

white-aster

YES. Or, if you're writing a heist/crimefic, you also need to think about how people IN LAW ENFORCEMENT would use these powers.

These questions keep you from being blind to the implications of your magic system on the wider world. From thinking no further than your plot and leaving the rest of the world sitting in a default blank slate mode that will leave your reader thinking, "if everyone can fly then why are the cops RUNNING after them?" or "if 5% of the population can just create matter with no sweat, then why are they heisting, why not just make a shitton of gold?" etc etc.

Fundamental changes to humans' capabilities can have GRAVE implications for human society, and the best books actually LET THEM. You don't have to address them all, but recognizing that superpowering people will mean superpowering both crime AND law enforcement will let your world feel much much more real.

maramahan

Yessss this is exactly what I’m talking about!

Asking yourself about crime leads you to ask yourself about law enforcement — which then leads you to ask how those interactions impact everybody else and what sort of unique cultural norms might evolve as a response!

Like. How would a population that includes animal-form shapeshifters handle a murder investigation where the victim/suspect might’ve genuinely been confused with a non-sapient Forest Creature? What customs might this society invent to proactively prevent tragic accidents?

What does burglary look like in a world where people can casually teleport? What’s to stop a guy from warping into a political figure’s home to casually reenact the ides of March? If the teleportation magic allows a person to kidnap people bring passengers, what stranger-danger rules might’ve popped up to keep folks from randomly getting yoinked??

Even if the story in question has absolutely nothing to do with cops or robbers, CRIME is an incredibly useful starting point when it comes to exploring how a fantasy world might be different from ours <3

ailithnight

It's about integration.

Fantasy often falls flat because the author just added fantasy elements on top of the normal world. For depth and grounding, those elements need to be integrated into the world.

Crime, as a starting point, is a way to get you thinking about how to weave them into the fabric of the world you are creating.

#writing stuff #writing tips #creative writing

nondelphic

writing is 10% storytelling and 90% rearranging three sentences for an hour like you're trying to solve an ancient curse

paperplateprose

not now kitten. daddy's realizing that the scene he invested 1000 words into could be significantly improved but only if he started over from scratch

thenightwolf51

Something I've done in this situation is starting the scene completely over but keeping what I already wrote a couple spaces under it. Then as I rewrite and reach points or lines, I delete them from the original.

sentientsky

repeating this to myself forever and ever

thatlittleegyptologist

"Using an Oxford comma is a sign of AI"

bestie boo, let me fill you in on something: if you're going to take any part of 'good grammar' and randomly assign it to She's A Witch! AI, you might as well give up. It's over. You're cooked. Anyone who has spent the last decade or more learning to type properly, anyone who has spent any time writing articles/papers/essays that require you to use 'good grammar' is going to fall into that 'oh no it might be AI' trap.

Stop hunting like it's 1692. You're not going to find Goody Proctor at the ChatGPT sacrament. What you're going to do is exactly what happened back then: harming people who've done nothing wrong.

arviyya

can I reblog this a million times

petralemaitre

Everyone can reblog it: you, me, and all our followers.

ailithnight

I suddenly wonder how many neurodivergent people are getting falsely flagged for using AI because their writing voice is "overly" proper, formal, sesquipedalian, and/or articulate.

thenightwolf51

You can pry my em dashes from my cold dead hands. I love using them for little asides

#writing stuff #writing

mercurialmilk

New reaction image for ‘posting something on the internet and having it be wildly misinterpreted’

nerdpoe

Danny, curious, put his DNA into an Ancestry test. Naturally, he put Wes Weston's name in there just in case the sample was obviously contaminated with ecto.

He wants to settle an argument with Jazz once and for all; are the Fentons more Irish in their ancestry, or are they Danish?

Meanwhile, one of the many, many alarms the Justice League has start going off. Someone's DNA just matched with two registered members.

Wally West and Zatanna Zatara.

Or: Jack and Maddie made a test tube baby from the DNA they found on the scene of a nasty Justice League fight, and decided he was super cute, so that's their son now. They never told Danny. Now, Wes Weston is staring at two superheroes standing awkwardly in his doorway, and the stupid family curse makes them not believe him when he says he never submitted DNA to that test. And fuck him, since he led with that any "opposite day" attempts don't override it, so he can't get away with agreeing with them either. He doesn't know what the hell is going on, but he's going to blame Fenton.

mkarchin713

Idea.

Wes and Danny are secretly twins.

nerdpoe

He does a DNA test just to humor them and it comes back as not exactly the same, but the same results.

Which means a sibling turned in that test.

And since he's pretty sure this was Fenton, he's just sitting on the couch having an existential crisis.

ailithnight

Wes Weston has always made a point of not thinking too hard about where he came from. He knows he has a... gift. And if he looks too deeply at things, sometimes he catches glimpses of the layers of reality that mortal minds were never meant to see. Beyond the Realms. Beyond the Bleed. Beyond the Fourth.

If Wes looks too closesly, sometimes he sees the world as a cartoon and himself as a nameless background character. And sometimes when he looks, it's a comic instead, himself a still image on a page created by an incomprehensible hand. And sometimes when he looks, there's just words. Words and words and words and maybe the occasional image and so many words on a background of blue. And when Wes looks there, he sees where he came from, and he knows he was not here before. They put him here. They saw a face and They made it his and the left him here without past or future and barely present because he was never even really rea-

Wes Weston makes a point of not thinking too hard about where he came from.

But here, in this moment, by gods does he want to try. Because What, the Fuck?

rosinkattery

muffinsandstardust

photo id: #How do y'all feel about a Wes who could be self aware#But refuses to be#Who chooses to shrug off and ignore the oddities and plot holes and idiosyncracies of his existance#Because the alternative is madness

thenerdycupcake

… new Wes Weston headcanon accepted

#dpxdc #dcxdp #wes weston #headcannon accepted

brucebocchi

the concept of “plot armor” has done irreparable damage to media analysis and literacy. “oh the only reason this character didn’t die is because they need to be alive later in the story” you don’t fucking say.

gailynovelry

Honestly? If a reader feels like a character has plot armor, the problem isn't "plot armor." It's that the author wasn't able to craft a situation where the reader felt like it was reasonable for the character to survive. So one of a few things might have gone wrong;

The character should have had a better telegraphed/foreshadowed/established method of survival.

The situation should have been better scaled to the methods of survival that the character had on them.

Something about the character's survival is genuinely less emotionally impactful than a character death would have been.

The character's survival would have felt more meaningful to the reader if it came with some reasonable consequences, sacrifices, or drawbacks.