Writer's Yoga is dedicated to keeping writers writing. We post several writing prompts a week that are centered around a common theme. Come join in on the fun and keep writing!
I won't publish the ask (they asked me not to), but I thought I'd still answer it publicly!
no, royalties are not a significant source of income for most authors. if you wrote something like Project Hail Mary, then absolutely, the royalties would be substantial! but that's like winning the lottery. Ryan Gosling is not starring in the movie adaption of most books.
when you sell a book to a publisher, you get what's called 'an advance against royalties'. it's usually split into multiple parts, so you might get one third for the initial sale, one third for the final revised manuscript, and one third on the publishing date.
an advance against royalties is the publisher saying "we believe you will eventually make X amount in royalties, so here it is ahead of time." and then you don't actually see any money from royalties until the advance is paid off. most books do not make enough in royalties to pay off the advance (I have two children's books and one fiction book, and have yet to see royalties for any of them).
advances are still great, but you need to make them stretch! for instance, last year my net income was about 30k Canadian (21k USD), which is fantastic when you consider that I mostly made it through writing. but I'm definitely not a millionaire. I can live off my writing (not trying to undersell that!) but I'll probably remain in a low income bracket for the foreseeable future.
this isn't meant to discourage anyone from seeking out writing as a career! however, there is a reason that many authors have alternate jobs with writing on the side. or, you know, rich spouses.
this isn't me making a fuss about pirating (I've pirated way too many shows to run my mouth on that lmao), but there IS actually a financial incentive to having people buy your books!
buying books shows the publisher that they can make money off you, which means they're more likely to give you advances for future books. and advances are what authors live off (if they don't have a side job). that's why I always push pre-orders so hard! you have to be a racehorse worth betting on, or else they send you to the glue factory....
if I can offer one alternative to pirating: asking your library to stock the book also helps authors, and doesn't cost anything. the only downside is the patience required.
OOPS yes, @stjohnstarling makes a good point! everything I'm saying is from the perspective of traditional publishing, but it's a very different game if you're a self-published author
I will also add that this is why pre-orders can make a HUGE difference to authors - because if there's enough hype, publishers can pull more levers to build that momentum and reach more readers to help authors earn out their advance faster.
Trad publishing contracts person here to co-sign everything in this post. If you want to support an author you really like but are broke as hell, then you can buy their book when it's discounted, buy it used, borrow it from a friend, or use the library. The first step as an author is to get your book read, not to get it bought. The important thing for you as a reader is to spread the word about how good the book is so the publisher knows the audience is there even if sales aren't spectacular. Piracy of books, especially books from small/indie publishers, means the publisher will print fewer copies of their next book, and sometimes if it's an ongoing series the next books in the series will be canceled, either to be replaced by a book with a different premise or they'll cancel the contract for the next books entirely. The "hack" where you buy the ebook or audiobook and then return it for a credit also takes money directly out of the author's pocket since those payment/royalty systems are set up differently than if you were to buy a book from a bookstore and return it. In that situation the bookstore absorbs that loss, but returning the ebook means the money gets clawed back from the author's advance or royalties and they'll have to earn that back.
Pre-orders and Amazon/Goodreads reviews are used as a gauge by publishers to predict how many copies they are likely to sell and therefore how many copies they want to print. They want to sell most of what they print rather than print too many and end up with a bunch of copies no one wants that they'll have to pay to store or sell at a huge discount or recycle, which is what happens to unsold books. Most publishers have a limited amount of money and manpower to dedicate to any particular book, so if there's a book building up a lot of buzz, that'll give them reason to put their resources towards promoting that book to get a better return on their investment. If the publisher can't make money off a book or author they'll dump them.
Generally, every aspect of the publishing and book industries, including writers, agents, publishing employees, librarians, and booksellers are overworked and underpaid. Unless you're Stephen King or already famous, you don't make money off of books. We do it for sheer love of the game.
Use your library! Publishers have a whole department dedicated to selling their books to libraries and the author gets part of those sales. Increasing circulation of library resources means the libraries can make a better case to get more money from the government to buy more books that you want to read and they're a place to hang out for free. Libraries are the best gift humanity gave itself, use yours as often as possible.
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
God I have been struggling so much to explain my irritation with a certain trend I keep running across in LGBTQ+ "cozy fantasy books"
Because everytime I try to verbalize it, it just comes out as sounding like I'm trying to say there's like. An upper limit on how daydreamy an author can be about worlds in which their every fantasy is fulfilled (entire farming village based on mutual aid; where also everyone is queer and/or gender-conforming! And there is little to no conflict! And everyone knows therapy speak and is unfailingly kind and generous and good!)
Because like--there's not, really, an upper limit on these things.
But there is an invisible line of tolerance for me where it turns from "cozy fantasy" to "oh my god grow the fuck up; this is so saccharine it's become one-note and boring and dull that I can't actually ENJOY the low-stakes cozy vibes"
But it sounds like I'm complaining about "there's too many gender queers and not enough homophobia in this book" and it's Not That
Ugh idk take your 2 stars and let me delete this book off my Kobo, I finished it and that's honestly more than I think it deserved.
(a 4.07 average star rating are you FUCKING kidding me)
The problem you're trying to pinpoint is TENSION ISSUES, and cozy fantasy is fuckin RIFE with them. Major chronic problem with the genre, and editors just keep letting authors get away with it instead of developing the story.
Low stakes are fine, utopian settings are fine, even low-conflict is fine -- but you gotta have a source of tension SOMEWHERE, or it pisses people off. If everyone's cooperating together and an amazing team and there's no interpersonal drama, ok great, but hit them with a tornado or a famine or heavy rains that wash out the fields right after planting.
The following have been called the "7 types of conflict" but people always think conflict means fighting or angry feelings, so i do think that "7 types of tension" might be a better wording:
Person vs Person (this is the one that cozy fantasy is most allergic to, and that's ok!)
Person vs Society (cozy fantasy also allergic to this one, we're still fine!)
Person vs Self (inexplicably underutilized, it rules, highly recommend)
Person vs Supernatural
Person vs Fate
Person vs Technology
Person vs Nature
And here is a list of free cozy fantasy tension points for each one of those. Feel free to steal these, adapt them, tweak them, etc -- as long as you promise to commit to the bit and actually make your protagonist face their problems head-on and have feelings about them and actually DO SOME HARD WORK to resolve them instead of conveniently handwaving it all away. (Your protagonist's name is Blue.)
Person vs Person: Blue's neighbor has a longstanding grudge and is trying to get Blue's bakery shut down by any means necessary, including reporting Blue to the health inspectors, who threaten to shut the whole operation down. (If you are writing for adults, then the grudge is bad enough that it CANNOT be solved with the power of friendship or by offering said neighbor free daily croissants. C'mon, don't wimp out. Imagine the Worst coworker you've ever had. Imagine the pettiest HOA lady ever.)
Person vs Society: There is a war in the neighboring kingdom which has impacted the chocolate chip import market. Blue's bakery is struggling financially, and the bank is making ominous noises about Blue's fantasy student loans.
Person vs Self: Blue is having a crisis of faith. They inherited the bakery and they hate running it, but they feel an obligation to their beloved dead relative. They don't know how to balance this against their own dreams, and they feel a ton of guilt about it.
Person vs Supernatural. Blue boasted that they're a better baker than the local hearth goddess. Blue now has a curse that fucks up every loaf, danish, cookie, and sticky-bun they touch. They can't even go into other people's bakeries without jinxing them.
Person vs Fate: Several generations ago, a fortune-teller spoke a prophecy that says the bakery will fail if someone matching Blue's description takes over. Blue doesn't give a shit about that, Blue is determined to make it work, Blue spits in the face of Fate.
Person vs Technology. A new bakery opens just a block away from Blue's, with newfangled magical ovens and staffed entirely by magic robots. Can Blue compete against this? We explore the upsides and downsides between artisanship and mass manufacturing.
Person vs Nature. A really bad winter strangles the town, trapping people in their homes. Blue doggedly wades through waist-deep snow on their daily bread deliveries to the old folks of the town, but they slip on ice and twist their ankle really bad.
(Anyway read my book Yield Under Great Persuasion, which is an M/M cozy romantasy with lots of different tension points -- we've got a lil bit of #1 and #2, a WHOLE LOT of #3, and a smidge of #4 and #5)
For Intersex Jam 2026, I made an informative zine. “Intersex Inclusion: A Crash Course for Creatives” is a quick primer on how to include intersex experiences in your creative works. The text-only version* is available for free, licensed under CC BY 4.0, and I encourage others to repost and use this zine in place of asking random non-activist intersex folks about how to represent our entire community with dignity.
* (it's supposed to be in comic form, but due to rampant computer crashes, I wasn’t able to assemble the artwork into a screen-reader accessible PDF in time for the deadline.)
Overwhelmingly, the most common question I see from allies to random bystanders who just so happen to be publicly intersex is “how do I include intersex people?”
I know they mean well, but it gets tiring. I hold no enmity for them in my heart; in spite of that, I’m tired. I want to see folks like me being considered at all—without having to see random, non-activist intersex folks awkwardly struggling to rehash the same three points again and again because well-meaning but ignorant allies keep asking the same question of non-activists while prostrating and flagellating themselves over how they didn’t spawn into existence as a perfect ally. It’s such a demanding task that thinking about it makes me want to roll over and take a nap.
Fortunately, I am an old dog incapable of learning new tricks; hence, I am back on my bullshit to provide a bunch of infographics loosely assembled into a zine. I made sure to pack it with resources and citations good for your nutrition, all with love from the universe.
Take my hand. Let’s be inclusive of intersex experiences in our creative works, together.
This is a zine specifically focused on creating and developing intersex characters, how to handle intersexuality in a variety of genres and creative project types, how to worldbuild while conscious of intersexuality, and common pitfalls for uninformed allies new to writing intersex folks. For references more specific to writing, see versegm’s “An Intersex Writing Reference” and Hans Lindahl’s “Tips for Writing an Intersex Character with Grace.”
[Content warning: in order to respectfully but realistically talk about intersex history, this zine contains brief, undetailed discussions of topics such as medical gaslighting and abuse, sexual harassment and assault, and medical and sexual abuse against children. These are included strictly for the purpose of educating on intersex history and experiences. Slurs and bigoted or discriminatory language towards intersex folks and traits are included without censorship, also to educate on their history and meaning. Full content warnings are available within the zine itself.]
part of me wants to be like "do people really not know this" and part of me knows full well i only read the labels because i have gut problems and don't want to suffer
anyway i've had my eye on the fat content for years. actual ice cream made with real cream won't trigger my lactose intolerance, because the higher the fat content of dairy, the lower the lactose content. my personal tipping point is around half-and-half so if you make "ice cream" with with skim milk, the enshittification i experience is unfortunately literal
I don't know how to articulate this well, but I really fucking hate the way a lot of thin writers write fat characters. Like how men write women "breasting boobily" there is something so dehumanizing about how fat characters are often written. "He waddled", "he lumbered", the writer of the book I'm reading always mentions this characters "fleshy hand" when he does something with his hand. Like, we already know that he's fat. There is no need to describe everything he does as "doing it fatly".
I've gotten some really interesting insights by thinking of fanfiction as the "default" mode of storytelling and thinking of original fiction as a variation off of that
Across the (several) novels I wrote as a teenager, nothing ever fit into the "rough draft -> more polished drafts -> final draft" sequence.
I would write something that was supposed to be a first draft, then completely rewrite it to the point that I didn't have a first draft and a second draft, I had two different first drafts. My sense of what I wanted to write evolved very quickly, and I never reached a stable enough sense of what my stories were about that I could begin to refine it instead of being trapped in an endless cycle of scrapping everything and starting over
My adventure with Bucky Barnes fanfiction (first reading it, then writing it) led me to these things:
multiple different, mutually contradictory versions of the same story can exist and all of them can have value at the same time.
The idea that writers imagine "their own" stories and characters out of nothing is a cultural idea we made up. Nothing is really "original," we just have a (legally enforced) cultural norm of making stories appear separate by giving characters distinct names, using different plot and worldbuilding elements, not deriving too much from any one particular influence
Being a storyteller is deeply connected to being a story-listener. You have to hear the story before telling it yourself.
the concept of "originality" makes it really difficult to learn the storyteller/story-listener thing, because the way we're taught to see it is that writers can somehow, like, sublimate everything they read into raw Ideas and then use those ideas as ingredients to create Their Own Thing.
Which, yes you can pick and choose what tropes you want to use, but breaking something down to its atoms means you can no longer see how the thing works as an organism, because you took it apart.
I think our culture has difficulty seeing stories holistically because the idea of "originality" is so pervasive.
Playing in an environment where the storytellers are exchanging the same story, telling and re-telling different parts and in different ways, deriving ideas from each other and refining those ideas with further iterations until they become their own "canons" that sprout more stories, helped me understand a lot of things I didn't understand before.
In the Bucky fanfiction ecosystem, those ideas and tropes that were assembled to form the whole weren't just interchangeable parts anymore: it was clear how they supported certain themes, evoked certain emotions, explored certain ideas, and so on.
The "nodes" of story that clustered together and intensely cultivated new variations were functionally entangled with imagery, symbolism, and particular literary techniques, and seeing how different storytellers engaged these things taught me a deep understanding of their possibilities.
Therefore when I got it in my head to write my own fanfiction I had done a lot of deep thinking about what my take on the story was going to be "about" and the themes it would engage and the techniques it would use to do that. Because I had already read 30+ different iterations of the story of Bucky Barnes, the man who would become the Winter Soldier, that were all compelling in their own way.
I'm starting to think that this is a fundamental part of the storytelling process and the idea of "original fiction" has grimed it up a little bit. You have to hear the story before you can tell it.
Is it possible, I thought, that this is what a "first draft" often functionally is? I ended up writing so many "first drafts" that were just sloppy assemblages of ideas I imperfectly guessed I might like, and once they were assembled, I realized I didn't like those ideas and what they communicated.
So I thought, What if all writing is fanfiction, and when you write a first draft, you are essentially writing something to write fanfiction of.
This way of thinking of it is fascinating in what it implies. Fanfiction is not a linear continuation or refinement of the original; it can be a retort, a further extrapolation, a complementary piece, an antagonistic refutation. There's always an inversion: listener becomes teller. In other words it implies that first draft and further drafts are a call and a response, rather than an increasingly "improved" version of the same thing.
It suggests that it's actually fine or even expected to have multiple drafts that aren't necessarily linear improvements on each other. It also suggests that a first draft shouldn't be read thinking "okay how do I improve this" but "what sticks with me about this?" The failures or inadequacies of the first draft are not so much things to repair as things to respond to.
I don't know what I think about this, because honestly, after experiencing fanfiction, the intensely private nature of writing original fiction seems to run contrary to the nature of storytelling, which is communal.
I have a sort of distaste now for the idea of creating a story, characters, and world that is "mine" and that mine is the definitive and "real" version of. I don't want to be fixed into the "teller" role, it's not right. I don't know what to do with this feeling!
been stewing on an analytical approach to fiction which I call "is this book afraid of me?" and in order to answer this question you determine how hard the book is trying to make sure you don't come after the writer on twitter
Please keep making art. Please make it for yourself. Please don’t let everything become even more of the same flat general appeal nonsense that doesn’t seem to have anything to say
The irony of this new breed of self-righteous AI hunters on AO3 is that they're all just copy and pasting peoples fics into AI detectors, which are all operated by AI and therefore THEY are feeding people's work into the algorithm without their consent and in some cases no doubt circumventing the locks people put on to avoid getting scraped...
Don't copy and paste anyone's AO3 work into third party websites, you're not the good guys in this situation?
Look, it’s a weird hill to die on, especially when I don’t really explain, but children deserve to experience fear, disgust, and discomfort in safe scenarios where they can process those sensations.
Media for children used to be scary and that’s important.
“Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.”
― C.S. Lewis
It's not a fun part of the movie when a character the kid likes dies, but they can experience loss without losing someone they actually know that way, and learn how to deal with grief in the future from how the protagonist is taught to deal with it. The real deal will still be way worse, but a 7 year old who's allowed to know what death IS is likely to grow into a 15 year old who can deal with their feelings when it happens.
Hiccup from the How to Train Your Dragon Books: I've nearly been eaten six times! Once not even by a dragon but by the man who would become my greatest foe who was planning to cut me in pieces and eat me raw. I was also assaulted and marked with a slave brand, forced to see my family and friends impressed into slavery, and got tortured by being dunked repeatedly in a freezing ocean that would have drowned or frozen me. Am I a joke to you?
Sources:
How to Train Your Dragon (nearly eaten once)
How to Be A Pirate (nearly eaten THRICE, twice by a dragon, once by a human)
How to Ride A Dragon's Storm (nearly eaten by a dragon, assaulted and branded)
How to Seize a Dragon's Jewel (nearly eaten by a dragon)
Glad everyone is getting so much joy from early Quaker names! Looking forward to seeing any future pets/children/bands/drag acts named after stuff on this list.
Fake Names Your D&D Characters Made Up To Get Into A Formal Event: Eustace Cockery, Corn Russell, Marvelous Scanfield, Elizabeth Poope, Gey Poope, Job Bland, Love Beer, Rich Whale
The irony of this new breed of self-righteous AI hunters on AO3 is that they're all just copy and pasting peoples fics into AI detectors, which are all operated by AI and therefore THEY are feeding people's work into the algorithm without their consent and in some cases no doubt circumventing the locks people put on to avoid getting scraped...
Don't copy and paste anyone's AO3 work into third party websites, you're not the good guys in this situation?
"it's ok to show (x) in fiction as long as the bad guy gets punished!" the bad guy doesn't have to get punished. in fact the bad guy can win altogether. the bad guy can entirely get away with it. hope this helps
and this part might make some people's head explode but: characters can be written to forgive things you personally wouldn't ever forgive. not everything is written as what you'd perceive to be the right choice. not everything is a self-insert & protagonists don't have to be relatable.
You are aware that a fictional character is just a rhetorical construct designed to fulfill a narrative/thematic purpose right? That their actions are written by an author who wants to use them to explore complex ideas and moral gray areas within the safe confines of fiction right? That they aren't a real person who has killed real people right?
I don't know how to articulate this well, but I really fucking hate the way a lot of thin writers write fat characters. Like how men write women "breasting boobily" there is something so dehumanizing about how fat characters are often written. "He waddled", "he lumbered", the writer of the book I'm reading always mentions this characters "fleshy hand" when he does something with his hand. Like, we already know that he's fat. There is no need to describe everything he does as "doing it fatly".
