Unicorn Enchantress

Mystical - Cottagecore - Myths & legends - My fandoms - Random, funny

[sentient-cloud]

It’s so hard being a silly goose in this anti-whimsy society

[kurulover]

[xiaq]

Hey so, uh. Have y'all seen the Pedro Pascal feature in Esquire, or

[birdoflastsummer]

the end of The Big Short isn’t fucking around

[hymn-of-the-moon]

Good time to have this on people’s dashes again

[unicornenchantress]

(via Prologues - Bad or Good?)

[writingquestionsanswered]

How to avoid info dumping at the end of a story (with a huge world change) for a large cast of supporting characters in order to let readers know how these characters are getting on with their lives?

My first, second, third, etc. drafts of this climax and resolution chapter keep getting messier the more I try to make this information more organic and less boring. I can't seem to break out of telling this information to the reader when I know that showing works better.

There is an epilogue chapter which is dedicated to showing the lives of my two protagonists a few years after the story's resolution so I'm not worried about how that plays out.

Thank you for your time, and for this blog. I recently discovered it, and have sent it to my other writing friends.

Story Clunky with Supporting Characters' Resolutions

It sounds like you're trying to do way too much with your ending. :)

I like to think of story endings in three stages:

-- taking stock as the "dust settles" from the climax -- settling into the post-climax situation/world -- "sometime later" epilogue, if any at all

Taking Stock as the Dust Settles

Regardless of whether your story's climax is the final round of a cheer competition, a last-ditch effort to prevail upon a love interest not to leave, a courtroom battle with an innocent life on the line, or an epic showdown between good and evil, from the first second the climax is won or lost, a period of "dust settling" begins. This period can play out over minutes, hours, even a full day or two immediately following the climax. During this time, the protagonist/s and any main characters directly involved in the climax take stock of the impact of their win or loss by tending to any casualties, examining the consequences, and determining next steps. In story structure, this period is known as "falling action" because things are ramping down toward the ending.

Settling Into the Post-Climax World

Now we skip ahead to when the dust has settled. The casualties have already been tended to. The consequences have been examined and addressed. Next steps have been determined and taken. This is days later, possibly weeks, maybe even months. The protagonist/s have settled into their new, post-climax situation or world. If they won a cheer competition and the result of that was being accepted to a college dream team, they're packing up the car, ready to drive to their new college life. If they won a major court trial and the consequence was being able to retire with a clear conscience, they are cleaning out their office and daydreaming about sipping tropical drinks on a beach somewhere. If they overthrew an oppressive usurper and the consequence was being able to assume their rightful place on the throne, they are flanked by hopeful courtiers as they make their way into the castle for their coronation.

Sometime Later/Ever After Epilogue

Some stories skip ahead several months, a year, even a few years to show where things finally end up. The cheerleader may be performing during a college homecoming game. The lawyer may be drinking a mojito on a beach in Mazatlan. The queen may be watching a joust at the Queen's Tourney while the citizens of her happy, thriving kingdom enjoy the festival.

Where do main characters fit into all this? It's easier to address the main characters during the "dust settling" stage, because they were part of the climax. They're already there, already participating.

However, depending on what your protagonist/s "settling in" and "sometime later" stage looks like, the main characters who were involved in the climax may not even be present. They may be off doing their own thing by that point, and it may be tempting to leave the protagonist to go show what each of those characters are doing, but that's how you end up with an overblown, clunky ending.

If your characters are a part of the protagonist's "settling in" and "sometime later" stages, you can find a way to have them participate in the scene that is mainly highlighting what the protagonist is doing. For example, let's say the usurped heir has a bestie who is a knight-in-training, as the now queen is walking into the castle for her coronation, she might look at the flanks of hopeful courtiers and see her best friend in their shiny new Queen's Guard armor, and she might think about how she's excited to hug them during the knighting ceremony later that day. With just a few sentences, we've let the reader know that the knight-in-training has been inducted into the Queen's Guard and is going to be knighted. Then, if you choose to do an epilogue where the beloved queen is watching a joust during the Queen's Tourney, you could have her watching her bestie compete and win, illustrating that they're now a successful knight. And let's say there was a blooming relationship between this knight and another character... when the knight wins, they jump off their horse and embrace the loved one. Now the reader knows they're together and having their own little HEA. Again, just a few sentences, no big deal.

In other words, the point isn't to do a five paragraph dive into what each character's life is like now. You just find the most important element or two, then find a succinct way to illustrate it--showing, telling, both... whatever works. If a character wouldn't be present during either of these two stages, the narrator or protagonist can tell the reader (briefly) where they ended up. Or, maybe the protagonist gets a text message that hints at a few things, or maybe another character asks about them and the protagonist fills them in.

I think a really great example of this is in the movie version of The Mockingjay [spoilers for The Mockingjay, the movie in particular.] After the climax and the "dust settling" stage, Peeta reads a letter (from Annie, I think?) that updates him and Katniss on how she and some of the other characters are doing. We get one line about Gale, an important character and one of the most important people in Katniss's life, when we are told about his military appointment. But, that's all we need. We don't need to see him actually performing that role, or know where he's living or who he's loving or what he does in his spare time. We just need one point of reference that roots him in the space of the "ever after." Gale has been promoted to a captain in district two to help keep order and security. Boom. Done. End of story.

And there are many supporting characters whose endings we don't get to hear about. It's okay for us to wonder where this character or that character ended up.

So... be honest about who needs to be rooted in the "ever after" in some way. Who will the readers care about the most besides the protagonist/s? Rank the characters from one to whatever, and address only the top three to five. Find a way to work the characters naturally into the protagonist's "settling in" or "sometime later/ever after" epilogue so the reader can get a glimpse of them there. Or, if they are in another place at that time, find a way to have the protagonist/s learn of where the characters ended up so the reader can learn along with them.

It's going to make for a much less clunky, much smoother ending. :)

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

♦ Questions that violate my ask policies will be deleted! ♦ Please see my master list of top posts before asking ♦ Learn more about WQA here

[unicornenchantress]

(via New Sequel Books in 2024!) Check out the exciting frenzy I fall into over sequels coming out in 2024, or that have already come out! There’s a second book that retells the Sleeping Beauty fairytale, more from YA author Tamora Pierce, and some less-famous newbies that are killing me with suspense!

[unicornenchantress]

For my fellow writers & readers, even if you don't follow my blog - can you answer this quick poll for me? It would help me see what people are most interested in these days in the writing/reading world.

[thekhoolhaus]

25 years ago an unknown Chinese protester stood in front of a tank in defiance of the government. No one knows the identity of the man but he was given the nick name “Tank Man”. This is one of the most iconic photographs of the century.

[fluffynexu]

It’s actually been 27 years now since the incident known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre occurred. The picture above, famously referred to as “The Tank Man” was actually taken on June 5, the day after the massacre. (Which honestly makes him the one of the bravest person, to go back and stand up to a regime after such a terrible event transpired)

So what happened? I’m gonna give the TL;DR version:

April 15, 1989. Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party Chief dies.

Many people, including  workers, laborer, students and some officials come to mourn. You see, those protestors were originally there to mourn, not protest.

Time passed and there were some hunger strikes, and protests, and a call for accountability and reform from the government.

Eventually, things went south, because the communist party doesn’t have time to deal with these sorts of “demands” and grievances.

Keep in mind, the people wanted not the end of the Communist Party, but for the party to stop with the official corruption, rule of law, and the gross monopoly of information and power.

Incidentally, China still suffers from all of these SAME problems to this day…

June 3, 1989. The massacre started at night to disperse the crowd. Many were shot, wounded, and killed.

June 4, 1989. Some of the parents of the protestors who never came home went looking for them. It was still total mayhem.

June 5, 1989. The iconic image of the tank man was taken. To this day, no one knows what became of this person.

Content Warning for video: blood

“Tell the world…”

I cannot stress how important it is that people remember and know about this event. Do you know how China responded? With lies and censorship.

Even now, in 2016, we do not have an official death toll on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Chinese government doesn’t even acknowledge the event as a “massacre”. And they weaves these cover stories of “counter revolutionaries trying to overthrow the government”. Therefore, the violence was necessary to ~protect~ the people. (Or some bullshit like that)

The amount of lying and censorship in China is, quite frankly, scary amazing. Tumblr, which somehow managed to fly under their radar, found itself being blocked in that country.

After all, tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.

And those who remember the incident in China? …………well, you tell me.

Please at least REMEMBER this tragedy. Untold innocent lives were lost, and a nation has been fed a lie for almost three decades now from their oppressive af regime.

[learningtoacceptchange]

I have never seen this video before.

What the fucking hell.

What the hell.

[naanima]

Tiananmen Square happened when I was seven, and let’s just say children have a really interesting way of interpreting information.

I just remember thinking it was a happy event, because all these people were out on the street, and at first the army were interacting with these people. And it almost looked like a festival because people were singing and talking, and hopeful. And then tv coverage for the events got cut off.

The blocking of the live coverage had all the adults anxious, nobody said anything for ages, I just remember my grandmother saying, “Just be glad your father isn’t in China, now.”

And that stuck with me to this day. Because yeah, if dad had been in China then he would have been in Beijing studying, he would have been on those streets with those other students.

It was the first time I knew that something horrible had happened to all those people I saw on the television. I don’t even remember how I knew that the army must have shot at the civilians, I just knew. Because when you grow up in China, especially in the 80s you knew there were things you don’t say, that you can’t express in a public forum, because that can get you and your family in trouble. You just knew, and it didn’t fucking matter if your were a child or an adult.

To this day I don’t remember how I found out what happened in Tiananmen Square, because the news covered it up, but people found out. My grandparents knew, my uncles and aunts knew. Extended family visited my grandparents, I remember people telling my mother not to mention my father’s name because my father was a Chinese Beijing University graduate, who had gone overseas. Because there were people who died in the protests that my dad knew.

And it was all just so frightening because nobody was telling me directly what was happening, but I just knew that all the people on the streets was probably dead.

Looking back on it, Tiananmen Square instilled in a me a life long distrust of governments, but especially the Chinese government. I’m ethnically Chinese but I never want to return to China, not even for a holiday, and this has been my attitude even before Xi Jinping took power. Because Tiananmen Square was a peaceful protest that ended up with the army using heavy artillery against their own people. How can you trust in a system, in a government like that? Because if my dad had delayed further studies overseas by two years he would have been one of those students, one of those fucking kids on the streets that would have died.

And you know, when the Umbrella movement was happening in Hong Kong I was deeply panicked and just anxious because I kept on thinking all those people, all those kids are going to be killed. And when that didn’t happen it was such a relief.

When I found out years later that Chinese people a few years younger than me didn’t know what happened in Tiananmen Square I was so fucking angry. I can’t even articulate the rage and the sheer tiredness of it all.

Dad and I talked about Tiananmen Square a few times through the years, broadly, politically, and at times with sheer rage on dad’s part. I don’t even know what I wanted to say, but just fuck this fucking regime.

[potteresque-ire]

I was In Hong Kong when Tiananamen Square Massacre happened. Hong Kong was still a British colony then and had full freedom of press, and its reporters were there recording live footage while trying to stay as long as possible when tanks rolled in and shots were fired, when students lay in blood and their fellow students piled the injured bodies on those wooden plank carts to get them to the hospitals, while asking the Hong Kongers who were there to support the movement to please remember that night and spread the story of the massacre far and wide, because they already knew they would be silenced, if not imprisoned or murdered.

That night, and in the upcoming months, Hong Kong was in perpetual tears, and in literal shock.

Hong Kongers were mostly Chinese, just south of the border with people traveling back and forth. It also shared a language, and so HKers could follow the whole movement and hear news that western media had little access to without the distorting effect of translations. And they followed very closely, because by then, Hong Kong was already scheduled to be returned to China in 8 years time. How the Chinese government dealt with the movement would be a sign of how it’d treat dissent, how it’d treat people who’re used to the idea and practice of freedom.

What they saw was deadly. Ugly. It broke the hearts of millions of Hong Kongers who trusted that The Chinese Government had left its Great Leap Forward, its Cultural Revolution days behind. Those who could leave, left. Everyday the airport was filled with families about to be torn apart, who decided to trade the life they had in one of the richest, most vibrant and freest city at the time with the unknown, just so their own children would have the freedom to speak their minds, to have a higher education and not to be seen as the enemy of the state because higher education always led to independent thinking, to questioning, to asking for a better government as those university students in Beijing in the spring and summer of 1989 did.

The heartbreak and fear was almost palpable in its intensity. Most HKers were refugees from China or 1st generation of them. Unlike the HK youths now protesting who are more generations removed, they felt much more connected to the people in China. They still saw themselves as Chinese, like those students in Beijing. They mourned. They cried and cried and cried. They wore black or white everyday like it was the death of their closest relatives. TV stations played these Tiananmen Square clips all day. I can still play many of them out of my memory, can still recite what the students and government officials said (for example, they didn’t use tear gas because they only had three), the songs played — I know every word of China’s national anthem for that reason; the students were singing it. They were patriotic. They demanded reforms because they wanted their country to do better. 8964 was and still is, etched in my psyche. It is just one of the long list of atrocities this government has done against its people, but this one, I was close enough to feel it.

China censored the June 4th Massacre quickly and thoroughly — if you believe China has censored queer material, for example, I’d say this — the extent of that censorship is not even close to what a true China censorship does. A true Chinese censorship is you can’t find the info, or a hint of that info anywhere. You can’t talk about it in a roundabout away. You can’t change some elements of time/place/person and pretend it’s fictional. It would literally ban the numbers 8,9,6,4 from search results, even though the searcher may really be just be interested in the numbers themselves. Whoever speaks of it may be sent to the police station for a “discussion”; their family would be sent, if the speaker is outside China; the speaker may be arrested, and may never be seen again.

The western worlds pretended to be enraged about the massacre for a while and soon forgot about it, kept its diplomatic relations with China and did business with its government as usual. UK returned Hong Kong to China as scheduled, on July 1st, 1997. The city has been the only place that insisted on the mourning the victims and had done so insistently, consistently for 30 years, holding a yearly candlelight vigil in Victoria Park until this year, when because of the protests, the Chinese government decided to not even pretend to honour the international treaty they signed that promised HK its freedom until 2047 anymore. They shut the vigil down in the name of the pandemic (there were <10 cases/day then). Still, some people risked being arrested to go to Victoria park and lit their candles.

The Chinese government fears HKers for this reason. They are outside their iron curtain / firewall but have always been close enough geographically, culturally and ethnically to know and more so, to care. And there’s nothing more a government like China’s fear than people who insist on remembering the truth. With the National Security Law in place in Hong Kong now, probably the yearly vigils can’t continue. To understand how insane that law is, by writing this reblog, by saying things that make you dislike the Chinese government, I’m already in violation of its Article 38. It doesn’t matter I’m writing it in a foreign country. It doesn’t matter I’m a foreign citizen. That law includes everyone on Earth.

Yes, that includes you. And you. And you. And you. They can arrest you for trying to overthrow the Chinese government if you pass the borders of Hong Kong.

Please help remember 8964 Tiananmen Square Massacre. That summer day, Beijing citizens asked Hong Kongers to please remember this event for them because they knew they wouldn’t be able to afford to remember it themselves. Now that Hong Kongers can’t afford to remember it anymore, I’m hoping that everyone who reads this to please remember it, for the students who perished only because they wanted their government to be better, for the Tank Man who, on his way home with his groceries, decided to stand in front of a tank all by himself because it was the right thing to do.

[ramdomcitizen]

I remember this. Please take a moment to read it.

[tinymintywolf]

just realized i never posted these here whoops! saw vol 3 for a second time today and it still made me cry again LOL

[amelia-mariee]

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3 spoilers

I need to talk about that scene with the baby raccoons. It’s so gentle and beautiful for so many reasons, but I think one of the best things about it is just that of all the guardians, it’s Rocket. The softest, most tender moment from any of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies (and maybe even the whole MCU, but that might just be me), is centered around Rocket. A snarky, sarcastic, closed-off raccoon who runs around shooting with machine guns, tore a man’s face apart, and is constantly making fun of people and pushing everyone away. He is known for being the toughest out there, and now he’s looking at these little baby raccoons and he’s holding them so gently. They are just like him, except he wasn’t allowed to stay gentle like them. Rocket is the way he is because he’s a victim of horrific abuse, and he has the chance to save these little babies before anything bad happens to them. It’s just so perfect. This movie was so beautiful.

[metamorphesque]

musings on loneliness

sylvia plath, nickie zimov, charles bukowski, masashi kishimoto, haruki murakami, holly warburton, charles bukowski, the beatles, nigel van wieck, marta zamarska, sylvia plath, van gogh

if you like this, you can buy me a ☕

[unicornenchantress]

How to narrow down this blog so it isn't just random stuff I like and reblogs? Should I focus on cottage core, mythology, art, funny stuff? How to decide...

[birdcagewalk]

[adventureswithteddy]

The Pelorus River cut a path through steep and heavily vegetated hillsides which allowed Teddy to peak his head out for a look up valley. He knew that his path inched along the bank for many miles but all he could think about was a quick swim in the crystal blue waters. 

[metamorphesque]

— A Prayer, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 

[text ID: I’m only asking for strength for my days. Teach me the art of small steps.]

[veryluckyclovers]

snow friends :*)

[writingf3]

One day you’re 12 and miserable and the next day you’re almost 24 drunk dancing in your underwear in your apartment that you love with your lunch packed for your job that you love and it’s like damn shit actually gets better

[writingf3]

I post stuff like this approximately once a month but it just always hits me that I had 3 friends who killed themselves as teens because they couldn’t see it. And I need you to see it.