i don't do bad sauce passes
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I'd rather be in outer space đ¸

romaâ
Cosmic Funnies
Game of Thrones Daily
almost home
Stranger Things
Sade Olutola
Cosimo Galluzzi

ellievsbear
Claire Keane
will byers stan first human second
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
tumblr dot com
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pixel skylines

titsay

Janaina Medeiros

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@tinymcfalconpunch
"Are you okay" NO. THERE ARE LITTLE FICTIONAL BITCHES IN MY HEAD. AND THEY'RE KISSING.
IMPORTANT: TUMBLR HAS MADE A DEAL WITH MIDJOURNEY/OPENAI.
YOUR ART AND IMAGES ON TUMBLR ARE BEING USED TO TRAIN AI MODELS.
The opt-in is automatic, but you can turn it off in settings.
Go to "Blog Settings" -> "Visibility" -> "Third-Party Sharing" and turn on "Prevent third-party sharing for [blog]". (This post shows how to do it on browser and on mobile.) You need to do this with every sideblog. (Note: The option in settings might not appear if your app hasn't updated yet. You can still opt out via browser.)
Spread the word. Everyone on Tumblr needs to know about this.
I was today years old when I learned that when you type âotp: trueâ in AO3 search results it filters out fics with additional ships, leaving only the fics where your otp is the main ship
Gamechanger
Hereâs a cheatsheet of all the available hidden search functions. â-creators:[whatever]â is another exclusion that can be particularly useful.
rt, to make my life easier
Holy shit. Rt to save time
WAIT HOLY SHIT GUYS
If zombies were real, you wouldn't first be warned by the approaching horde by their smell, by their groans, not even a cloud of smoke of the dust they raise coming closer from the horizon. It would be the flies. Hordes and hordes of insects, corpse-flies laying eggs on the carcasses of people who still walk, eating the eyeballs from their sockets, climbing across their unfeeling leathery skin. And the buzzing. The inescapable, deafening buzzing. Everywhere. Like you did not just kick a hornet's nest, but the very ground you walk on was a hornet nest, and each step caused another explosion of insects.
Insects, corpse flies, the buzzing. Their swarms blacken the skies, more horrifying than their migrating meals. The deafening cacophony of constant buzzing, the horrid noise of the living who feast on the dead who feast on the living. The buzzing.
The endless, inescapable buzzing.
Hereâs an invaluable writing resource for you.
Was looking for this information just yesterday. Thanks so much.
Yâall I could have used this so many times before oh my good god
Converting to metric, itâs
Comment Bingo: Old Fic Edition
Very simple rules: connect 5 squares in a line by commenting on fics that suit the task in each square
Very simple goals: encourage newbie or nervous commenters; encourage fandom writers to KEEP WRITING
"their relationship is strictly platonic" "they're so in love" well, more importantly, they are fucking weird and abnormal about each other in an undeniable way
how much do you really care about the likes to reblog ratios on here??
hate it and it needs to change
itâs disappointing but not going to stop me from writing
donât pay attention to it
as long as my loyal readers comment or rb i donât care (all <10 or more of them)
donât write iâm just nosy
not trying to stir the pot iâm just genuinely curious lol
MY THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS ON THE ABOVE RESULTS.
so after letting myself stew and think on if i really wanted or needed to say anything, needed being the key word here. iâve decided that why not. this is my space and for those who care about my takes will care, and those who donât are more than encouraged to not read this or by all means rb with your own constructive opinions (meaning donât be an asshole about it).
Hot take: Actual literary analysis requires at least as much skill as writing itself, with less obvious measures of whether or not youâre shit at it, and nobody is allowed to do any more god damn litcrit until they learn what the terms âshow, donât tellâ and âpacingâ mean.
Pacing
The âpacingâ of a piece of media comes down to one thing, and one thing only, and it has nothing to do with your personal level of interest. It comes down to this question alone: Is the piece of media making effective use of the time it has?
Thatâs it.
So, for example, things which are NOT a example of bad pacing include a piece of media that is:
A slow burn
Episodic
Fast-paced
Prioritizing character interaction over intricate plot
Opening in medias res without immediate context
Incorporating a large number of subplots
Incorporating very few subplots
Bad pacing IS when a piece of media has
âWastedâ time, ie, screentime or page space dedicated to plotlines or characters that are ultimately irrelevant to the plot or thematic resolution at the cost of properly developing that resolution. Pour one out for the SW:TCW fans.
The presence of a sidestory or giving secondary characters a separate resolution of their personal arc is not âbad writing,â and only becomes a pacing issue if it falls into one of the other two categories.
Not enough time, ie, a story attempts to involve more plotlines than it has time or space to give satisfying resolutions to, resulting in all of them being ârushedâ even though the writer(s) made scrupulous use of every second of page/screentime and made sure every single section advanced those storylines.
Padding for time, ie, Open-World Game Syndrome. Essentially, you have ten hours of genuinely satisfying storyâŚ.but âshort games donât sell,â so you insert vast swathes of empty landscape to traverse, a bunch of nonsense fetch quests to complete, or take one really satisfying questline and repeat it ten times with different names/macguffins, to create 40 hours of âgameplayâ that have stopped being fun because the same thing happens over and over. If you think this doesnât happen in novels, you have never read Oliver Twist.
Another note on pacing: There are, except arguably in standalone movies, at least two levels of pacing going on at any given time. Thereâs the pacing within the installment, and the pacing within the series. Generally, thereâs three levels of pacingâwithin the installment (a chapter, an episode, a level), within the volume (a season, a novel, a game), and within the series as a whole. Sometimes, in fact FREQUENTLY, a piece of media will work on one of these levels but not on all of them. (Usually the ideal is that it works on all three, but thatâs not always important! Not every individual chapter of a novel needs to be actively relevant to the entire overarching series.)
Honestly, the best possible masterclass in how to recognize good, bad, and âthey tried their best but needed more spaceâ pacing? If you want to learn this skill, and get better at recognizing it?
Doctor Who.
ESPECIALLY Classic Who, which has clearly-delineated âserialsâ within their seasons. You can pretty much pick any serial at random, and once youâve seen a few of them, you get a REALLY good feel for things like, for exampleâŚ
Wow, that serial did not need to be twelve episodes long; they got captured and escaped at least three different times and made like four different plans that they ended up not being able to execute, and maybe once or twice they would have ramped up the tension, but it really didnât contribute anythingâthis could have been a normal four-episode serial and been much stronger.
Holy shit there were WAY too many balls being juggled in this, this would have been better with the concepts split into two separate serials, as it stands they only had four episodes and they just couldnât develop anything fully
Oh my god that was AMAZING I want to watch it again and take notes on how they divided up the individual episodes and what plot beats they chose to break on each week
Eh, structurally that was good, but even as a 90-minute special that nuwho episode feels like it would have worked a lot better as a Classic serial with a little more room to breathe.
How in the actual name of god did they stretch like twenty minutes of actual story into a four-episode serial (derogatory)
How in the actual name of god did they stretch like twenty minutes of actual story into a four-episode serial (awestruck)
If youâre not actively trying to learn pacing, either for literary analysis or your own writingâŚhonestly? Just learn to differentiate between whether the pacing is bad or if it just doesnât appeal to you. Thereâs a WORLD of difference between âThe pacing is too slowâ and âthe pacing is too slow for me.âÂ
âI really prefer a slower build into a universe; the fact that it opens in medias res and you piece together where you are and how the magic system works over the next several chapters from context is way too fast-paced for me and makes me feel lost, so I bounced off itâ is, usually, a much more constructive commentary than âthe pacing is badâ.Â
And when the pacing really is bad, youâll be doing everyone a favor by being able to actually articulate why.
Show, Donât Tell
This is a very specific rule that has been taken dramatically out of context and is almost always used incorrectly.
âShow, donât tellâ applies to character traits and worldbuilding, not information in the plot.
It may be easier to âgetâ this rule if you forget the specific phrasing for a minute. This is a mnemonic device to avoid Informed Attributes, nothing more and nothing less.Â
Character traits like a character being funny, smart, kind, annoying, badass, etc, should be established by their behavior in-universe and the reactions of others to themâif you just SAY theyâre X thing but never show it, then youâre just telling the audience these things. Similarly you canât just tell the audience that a setting has brutal winters and expect to be believed, when the clothing, architecture, preparations, etc shown as common in that setting do not match those that brutal winters would necessitate.Â
To recap:
Violations of Show Donât Tell:
A viewpoint character describing themselves as having a trait (being a loner, easily distractable, clumsy, etc) but not actually shown to possess it (lacking friends, getting distracted from anything important, or dropping/tripping over things at inopportune moments.)
The narration declaring an emotional state (âCharacter A was furiousâ) rather than demonstrating the emotion through dialogue or depicting it onscreen.
A fourth-wall-breaking narrator; ie, Kuzco in The Emperorâs New Groove directly addressing the audience to explain that heâs a llama and also the protagonist, is NOT the same! This actually serves as a flawless example of showing rather than tellingâwe are SHOWN that Kuzco is immature and egotistical, even though thatâs not what heâs saying.
A fictional society or setting being declared by the narrative to be free of a negative traitâbigotry, for exampleâbut that negative trait being clearly present, where this discrepancy is not narratively engaged with.Â
(For example: There is officially no sexism in Thedas and yet female characters are subject to gendered slurs and expectations; the world of Honor Harrington is supposedly societally opposed to eugenics, yet âcuresâ for disability and constant mentions of a nebulous genetic âadvantageâ from certain charactersâ ancestry are regular plot points that are viewed positively by the characters and are not narratively questioned.)
A character declaring that their society has no bigotry, when that character is clearly wrong, is not the same thing.
The narrative voice declaring objective correctness; everyone who agrees with the protagonist is portrayed as correct and anyone who questions them is portrayed as evil, or else there is no questioning whatsoever. For example: in Star Trek: Enterprise, Jonathan Archer tortures an unarmed prisoner. What follows is a multi-episode arc in which every person he respects along with Starfleet Command goes out of their way to dismiss the idea that he should bear any guilt, or that his actions were anything but completely necessary and objectively morally correct. No narrative space is allowed for disagreement, or for the audience to come to its own conclusion.
NOT Violations of Show Donât Tell:
A character explaining a concept to another character who would logically, within that universe/situation, be the recipient of such an explanation.
An in-universe explanation BECOMES a SdT violation if the explanation fails to play out in reality, such as a spaceship being described as slow or flawed in some way but never actually having those weaknesses. Imagine if the Millennium Falcon was constantly described as a broken-down piece of junkâŚand never had any mechanical failures, AND Han and Chewie werenât constantly shown repairing it!
Information being revealed through dialogue, period. Having your hacker in a heist movie describe the enemy security system isnât âtellingâ and thus bad writing. Having information revealed organically through dialogue is what âshowâ means.
The âas you knowâ trope is technically a Show Donât Tell violation, despite being dialogue, because itâs unnatural within the universe and serves solely to let the writer deliver information directly, ie, telling.
Characters discussing their own actions and expressing their motivations and/or decision-making process at the time.
The existence of an omnipotent narrator, or the narration itself confirming something. Narration saying âthere was no way anyone could make it in timeâ is delivering contextual information, not breaking Show Donât Tell.Â
Keep in mind that âShow, donât tellâ is meant to be advice for beginning authors. Because âtellingâ is easier and requires less skill than âshowing,â inexperienced authors need to focus on getting as much âshowâ in as possible.Â
However, âtellingâ is also extremely important. Sometimes, especially in written formats, the most appropriate way to deliver information to the audience is to just say it and move on.
Keep in mind that a viewpoint character in anything butâŚa portal fantasy, essentiallyâŚis going to be familiar with the world theyâre in. Not every protagonist needs to be a raw newcomer with zero knowledge of their new world! In most cases, a viewpoint character is going to know things that the audience doesnât. Generally, the ONLY natural way to introduce worldbuilding in this situation is to just have the narration point them out. (It makes sense for Obi-Wan to have to explain the Force; it would make no sense for Han to explain the concept of space travel to Luke, who grew up in this universe and knows what the hell a starship is. So, if youâre writing the novelization of A New Hope, you need to just say âand so they jumped into hyperspace, the strange blue-white plane that allowed faster-than-light travelâ and move the hell on.)
For that matter, in some media (ie, childrenâs cartoons) where teaching a moral lesson is the clear intent, a certain level of âtellingâ is not only appropriate but necessary!
The actual goal of âshowingâ and âtellingâ is to maintain a balance, and make sure everything feels natural. Show things that need to be shown, andâŚdonât waste everyoneâs time showing things that would feel much more natural if they were just told.
But thatâs not nearly as pithy a slogan.
(Reblog this version yâall I fixed some really serious typos)
Quick addition: When you Show, you Slow.
Taking the time to Show something rather than simply Telling it slows the moment downâand that can be a good thing! When you want a moment to have real emotional impact, when you want the audience to linger and really connect with the scene, use Show to slow them down and really make them live in it. Use descriptive language, engage the senses, and make your audience spend some time with it.
This is Not always desirable. If youâre heavily Showing in moments that arenât truly important, your audience will disengage and get impatient and then bored. I always err on the side of over showing in a first draft, over trimming to lots of telling in a second draft, then marrying them together in a third once Iâve gotten a better understanding of the pacing with the second Telling draft.
A tip for excellent writing I just learned: Don't introduce a character with their Dramatic Backstory. It makes readers go "oh alright this is the Dramatic Background Story Character" and establishes a baseline of Tragic, either for the story as a whole or this character in particular. With no contrast of light and dark, pure darkness isn't impactful, it just looks like the absence of anything to look at.
If you really want someone's dramatic backstory to hit the audience like a gut punch, let them get to know the character first. That way the dark backstory doesn't come off as a description of who they are, but an explanation to why they are the way they are. Bonus points for connecting it to something that's already been established as a part of the character - what a devastating blow to suddenly put together that hold on, that funny quirky thing that they always do is a fucking trauma response.
my dream as a fanfic writer is to write a story which people want to talk to me about and send asks about afterwards and discuss things the characters did and the symbolism and meanings behind certain lines and I'll be all "hehe thanks" but irl I'll be in literal tears because I wrote something that means something to someone
Reblogging again because I got an anon last week whining cause they did this to one of my unfinished series and the bot killed Y/N so now they want ME to give them a happy ending. Like. No. Suffer, bitch.
AI is the death of creativity. Anyone who does this to my stories and is stupid enough to brag about it will be blocked from ever reading my work again, AND I'll let everyone on tumblr know that you do this. We'll see how much fic you get to enjoy when every author blocks you forever.
Fic is a gift. I've said it before. Don't shit all over your lovingly handcrafted gifts, m'kay? This should be fucking obvious, but apparently for some of you it's not.
If anyone does this to me, I'm going to delete the story
I won't hesitate
If anyone does
this to me, Iâm going to
delete the story
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
ok genuinely though, fuck ai. and if you're using ai on someone else's fic, I'm pretty sure that's a violation of copyright because it's NOT YOUR FIC????
don't you dare do this to anyone
Im genuinely disgusted what the actual fuck is wrong with people!?
I don't even know where to start with this cause there's absolutely nothing RIGHT about it ?
Not only is it completely disrespectful to the author and their hard work but it also gives the impression that what we, writers, do is so easily dismissed and replaced by fucking AI? I don't know how people actually think this is okay. Using AI to write is already the death of creativity but to think you're allowed to give someone's else story an ending just because you cannot stand a hiatus or a lack of updates is completely disgusting.
Writers aren't robots but you're surely making it feel like we should be, at this point.
what am i smiling at ? the made up scenarios of course
writing tips/inspo/help
Character Movements #1
Punctuating Dialogue
50 WORDS TO USE INSTEAD OF âSAIDâ
traits turned sour
DESCRIBING THE PHYSICAL ATTRIBUTES OF CHARACTERS:
Vary your language with synonyms to use instead of "said"
WEBSITES FOR WRITERS
Descriptions in Between Dialogue
switch up your verbs (part one) ~
words to use when writing
writing resources - smut
Writing Resources: References
Writing Resources: Advice and Motivation
Writing Resources: Basics
Writing Resources: Characters
Writing References: Narratives
words to use when writing
writing perfect betrayal
toxic traits
words to use instead of...
fight scene
how to create a supermarket setting
kissing vocab
touch-starvation needs to be written with emphasis on the starving part. you are hungry to be touched. so hungry that even the very taste of it makes you nauseous. it has been long since anything has ever touched you, ever fed you - that your body has grown more used to that gnawing emptiness more than anything else. it's better for you to be held, to eat but it makes you sick to try. you know
petition
we need to bring back anon kink memes in a big way. no one is horny enough anymore. the other night i found a fic on an old kink meme from 2009 that was so well-written and also so raunchy and foul (affectionate) it could have stripped paint off my car. there is something about truly unapologetic filth that can be transcendent and tender and marrow deep and maybe if we all leaned into being anonymous depraved little weirdos again we'd learn how to have more fun.