"She was a girl made of stories and stars."

I am a writer. Deal with it. Check out my main blog @reshiramgirl88

[bivillains]

So many characters should be permanently disabled in multiple ways or AT THE VERY LEAST have severe chronic pain but everyoens a coward so no one writes the effects of the injuries they inflict </3

[human-pet-they]

when the author describes someone dying and you can just tell they’ve never actually died by the way it’s written

[goth-queen]

[succubusboyfriend]

you have permission to pick that 2 year old "abandoned" project back up. it's not mad at you for setting it aside. and maybe time and distance have helped ease or erase the things that made you put it down in the first place.

[eraserheadadult]

one time in college i was in a creative writing class and this guy was holding up the critique with what i can only describe as like cinemasins dinging another student's writing. and at some point the professor said "the plot is the fork and the prose is the meal. you are critiquing the taste of the fork"

[writers-bane]

You're afraid to write because you care too much about your craft. Not because you suck.

You want it to be perfect. Worthy. You're scared it won't be good enough. But the thing is, everything you write is worthy if you write it with heart.

That fear doesn't make you a fraud, or lazy. It makes you a perfectionist who doesn't write as much as they should because their fear is choking them. Your writing will never be perfect—nothing ever is.

So stop waiting for the perfect moment and go pour your heart out. Unleash your wild—and slightly disturbing—imagination onto those pages. Go create magic that only you can make.

GO WRITE THE THING YOU KEEP THINKING ABOUT DAY AND NIGHT. And make sure you write it for yourself before anyone else!

[gr8writingtips]

writing tip #4159:

struggling to get writing done? take up a worse hobby so you procrastinate doing that by writing

[gr8writingtips]

writing tip #4141:

pick up your writer's block and club yourself over the head with it repeatedly

[kitkatpancakestack]

Not gonna lie the way some of y'all put words on a page is....whoagh. there really is magic in this world.

[ashen-crest]

I can do it. I can write a chapter. I am capable of putting sentences together. I know what a comma is. I am Aware of the Character.

[cloudabserk]

WARNING do NOT start reading books and comics or watching movies or looking at art!!! you will start wanting to create art yourself. or god forbid. writing.

[cambriancrew]

[halfabouros]

No but actually LMAO

[chimaerakitten]

Not enough military-adjacent sci-fi takes advantage of the humble rearguard action tbh.

(Not talking about hard military sci-fi since I haven’t read enough of it to say one way or the other. I’m talking soft quasi-military sf like Trek)

Like if you think about it narratively they’re incredibly useful because it’s a type of battle where:

1. No matter how spectacularly well the people fighting one do, it’s inherently not gonna successfully take down the big bad. Because the battle that could have done that is already lost. So it’s a time when they can win (achieve their objective of a successful orderly retreat) without winning. Always useful in a story where you need your protagonists to not win until the end.

2. You have an excuse for your Very Clever Plucky Band of Protagonists to be taking on a much much bigger and better armed force without it being just plain stupid to do so. No idiot balls here, just an acknowledgment that we inherently have to be asking a small force to hold off a large one, so the rest of our large force can get clear.

3. Great potential for a heroic sacrifice that doesn’t feel contrived BUT a sacrifice is not required. As mentioned in point 1 your protagonists can also do really well without it screwing up the pacing of the story. This means that your audience will not know for sure which way it is going to go based on the rules of storytelling. So you can get genuine tension/suspense and genuine catharsis.

4. Battle tactics and objectives can be complex and difficult to get across on page or on screen at the best of times, but “cover everyone else’s retreat from a lost battle” is easy to understand, sufficiently high stakes, and emotionally impactful—much more so than any convoluted “get the macguffin” or “take this territory” could ever be.

5. The combo of high stakes, inability to retreat (the whole point is they’re already retreating) and desperation mean it’s a perfect excuse for your protagonists to pull out all the stops. That experimental weapon that has a one in three chance of blowing up? Might as well use it because if we don’t not only are we dead, all our friends retreating behind us are too.

6. A rearguard action is easy to make unambiguously heroic or at least more morally defensible many other kinds of battle. Whatever lead up to this, right now our allies are just trying to not get killed/captured and we are standing between them and a force that wants to overwhelm and kill/capture them. This works even when the antagonist force isn’t evil or dishonorable, because “chase a retreat to try to turn it into a rout or full surrender” is considered pretty acceptable in many kinds of warfare, so your Honorable Enemy is likely to engage in it to an extent—it’s not reserved for the Evil Forces of Evilness.

[wire-smith]

It's also a very good role for a Powerful Party of Heroes to actually be useful in the context of an army. Like, being ten times better at throwing lightning doesn't actually matter that much when you're standing in a line of five hundred guys who throw lightning, all throwing lightning on command by ranks. The extraordinary power of Our Heroes kinda gets swamped if the army is big. But a rearguard action is EXACTLY when you want to deploy a tiny number of specialized weirdos with an outsized impact and unconventional style.

Edit: whoops I can't read. You said sci-fi. So lightning magic isn't a good example. But the same idea applies I think to an expert sniper or tricked-out mech or Millennium Falcon Special Starship or whatever. Whatever the cool thing that the protagonist party does, it can probably shine more when they're on their own as a rearguard than as a single unit within a much larger army.

[chimaerakitten]

Fantasy and SF are only separate when they really try so I think your lightning example stands 😆

And yeah this is a very good point. The usefulness of packing an outsize punch goes up exponentially as the number of units on the field decreases.

Plus, it’s a good excuse to allow valuable protagonists and/or their special equipment to be on the front line. Normally we try our best to keep a screen of destroyers and cruisers between the enemy and our extra big and expensive space flagship so it can fire proton missiles unimpeded, but on the retreat it’s already gonna be the slowest part of our force and it deals the biggest damage per shot, so it makes tactical sense to expose it to fire and let it tank hits for us. We just gotta hope that afterward all we gotta replace is the ablative armor.

[luxfuxxvii]

not now kitten, mommy needs to get up off her ass and overcome her fear of writing poorly because it's better than not writing at all.

[writingdose]

a writer’s struggle

[raindropsonglasss]

[absurdlyinaccurate]

me, the motherfucker with over 50 abandoned works in progress: i have an idea

[teddyrocker]

is that woman character actually “not well written” or are you just not paying attention to her. is that woman character actually “less interesting” or do you just not care about her.