A Writer's Life @thewriterslife - Tumblr Blog

What would having everyone telepathic/telekinetic do to a civilization? Culturally etc?

Telepathy

Mind defense courses taught early and often so people aren’t having their minds hijacked left and right

No secrets. You might think that’s great, but there are some things (even in government) that should be need to know. Humanity in a group is not a rational thinker.

Therapy will probably be easier

No privacy. Which leads to paranoia, isolation, discomfort, and so on. If your society is used to such things, isolation from the group might be a form of punishment

There might be a kind of hive-mind (unless people can protect their thoughts) because everyone is sharing their thoughts and it might be difficult to distinguish one’s own thoughts from others’

Telekinetic

No manual labor (widespread unemployment?)

New security measures to protect against theft and vandalism (maybe items that are too heavy to

Telekinetic events in the Olympics!

Murder rates go up because it’s easy to telekinetically smash someone into a brick wall or throw a knife into their chest

Change in warfare. Why use planes and tanks and ships when your enemy can just throw them to the ground or flip them or capsize them? It might be drone warfare or soldiers in close-quarters combat.

Both

Some sort of power nullification will probably be invented to control individuals

You need to consider what children will be like. Children don’t have self-control and they tend to be irrational and emotional. Tell a telekinetic five year old he needs to go to bed and he might throw his parent through a wall. An older child might know restraint, but a younger child (or, God forbid, a baby) has no such discipline.

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curseofthefae

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peachymints

I play a very dangerous game

it’s not my fault people have the gall to make attractive OCs

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music-faith-dreams

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just-writer-problems-deactivate

Requested by mythlover20.

(Half the reason I even love writing is because I can torture my characters for my own sick amusement.)

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writingquotes-deactivated201509

Gather knowledge about the craft of writing. Immerse yourself in the art of it. Then write. Write yourself silly. Write yourself mad. Write yourself blind. Trust the excitement that builds within you when the idea is good and the writing is superb. You can do it, but that’s the hell of it as well as the exultation of it. You have to do it.

Elizabeth George (via writingquotes)

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captainlordauditor

levels of headcanon:

This is heavily supported by text/subtext and is likely what the creators intended for me to get from this

this is sort of supported by the text and could, conceivably be what the creators intended for me to get from the text/subtext

there is no evidence either way

there is slight evidence against my headcanon, but I don’t care

I’ve stopped giving a shit about canon

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theroadpavedwithwords

Writers are Sadists, and That's Okay

We’ve all committed a brutal murder at some point. Maybe it was the time you bashed in that poor girl’s head with a frozen block of cranberry juice, or that time a best friend was brutally gutted in the final showdown against a villain. Maybe you had someone committed to an institution for several years or had their parents killed in a violent bloody car crash.

I’m here to tell you it’s okay. It’s okay to indulge in violence on the page. It’s okay to make your characters hurt, and it’s okay to make your audience hurt as well. And here’s the reason why.

Pain is good for plot development. It can drive events. Did someone close to them die? How does that affect the rest of their life? An example of pain/tragedy driving plot development is Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone. It starts out with a poor infant having his parents killed by a mass murderer and being dumped on an abusive family. That’s a lot of Tragedy. What about when Harry believes Voldemort is torturing Sirius? When I first read that, my heart stopped. And Harry goes running off into danger, which has Sirius running after them, which (SPOILER) ends with the death of Sirius and everyone knowing that Voldemort has returned. That pain experienced by the characters allows the plot to develop. Tragedy and violence can help define how the plot is going to develop; are the characters searching for revenge? Are they trying to catch a killer?

Pain drives character development. In real life, we are not spared tragedy and pain, and we shouldn’t spare our characters the same way. Humans are constantly evolving mentally and emotionally, and the biggest hiccup of life is pain and tragedy. How we respond to that helps define who we are, and it will help define who your characters are through the depictions of how they react and deal with it. Remember though, there should always be a reason for the pain – your readers will need to know that it happened for a reason, even if the reason is to nudge a character in the right (or wrong) direction.

Pain is interesting. This is a bit of a brutal truth. Pain often equals feels, and if there’s one thing people like, it’s the feels. We love it when we hurt for someone. We love to cry our eyes out, and we measure books against others by how they made us feel. Yes, good feelings are a huge part of this need for feels, I won’t deny that. But pain, and the feelings associated with the emotional devastation that can come with books are part of the reason we as readers love them. When a well-written character that is written like a person and whom we identify with feels pain, we empathize with them, and people in general feel good when we empathize. We love to connect, and people (and characters) connect over pain. Pain can also shock us, and if people didn’t like to be shocked, entire genres would become moot.

Writers can work out their own angst. Oh come on. You guys had to see this one coming. We can work out our anger and rage on people that don’t actually exist. We can be twisted and mean and damn it, that feels good sometimes.

(As always, the usual disclaimer that you guys don’t have to listen or agree with me. I’m going to go research creative ways to kill the characters I love.)

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writingquotes-deactivated201509

All fiction may be autobiographical, but all autobiography is of course fiction.

Shirley Abbot

jescritora

yes mom I’m on a baby name website

no mom I’m not pregnant

phoenixwritings

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I’m much more a gardener than an architect.

George R.R. Martin (via lifeisforevershipwrecked)

hellanne

I would rather die of passion than of boredom.

Vincent Van Gogh (via stay-ocean-minded)

writerswritecompany

Daily Writing Quote

wholelottaquotes

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

C.S. Lewis. (via wholelottaquotes)