todays bird
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Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
$LAYYYTER
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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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if i look back, i am lost
Jules of Nature
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@writingiswonderful
Keep seeing that post where OP starts like 'Thinking about...grieving the undead' and then adds on about like. Real life situations where people have not died but have left your life and you would have reason to grieve them.
All respect, that's an important concept, but that is not what I am thinking about when I read 'grieving the undead'.
No need to keep this in the tags, you're completely right about this scenario!
(a realization about dialogue formatting, from a comic artist turned novelist.)
One of the first things a novice writer learns about speech tags is that they’re part of the “scaffolding” of prose. They should be largely invisible to the reader: use them when necessary, omit them when not, and be sparing in the application of verbs other than “said”. They serve only the function of clarifying who is speaking when it is necessary to do so.
Except:
Sometimes you might want to use a speech tag in spite of the redundancy. The fact that the reader’s eyes slide right over them is an exploitable property. By slicing a line of dialogue in half with a speech tag, you can force the reader to perceive a meaningful pause between two utterances—and the effect is much stronger than you might get out of an ellipsis or an em dash. Developing an intuition for when and how to do this is a huge part of learning to write dialogue, I think.
(And yes: if you ever wondered, this is exactly same the reason why comic artists sometimes “double bubble” their speech bubbles. Same end, different means!)
Hey btw, if you're doing worldbuilding on something, and you're scared of writing ~unrealistic~ things into it out of fear that it'll sound lazy and ripped-out-of-your-ass, but you also don't want to do all the back-breaking research on coming up with depressingly boring, but practical and ~realistic~ solutions, have a rule:
Just give the thing two layers of explanation. One to explain the specific problem, and another one explaining the explanation. Have an example:
Plot hole 1: If the vampires can't stand daylight, why couldn't they just move around underground?
Solution 1: They can't go underground, the sewer system of the city is full of giant alligators who would eat them.
Well, that's a very quick and simple explanation, which sure opens up additional questions.
Plot hole 2: How and why the fuck are there alligators in the sewers? How do they survive, what do they eat down there when there's no vampires?
Solution 2: The nuns of the Underground Monastery feed and take care of them as a part of their sacred duties.
It takes exactly two layers to create an illusion that every question has an answer - that it's just turtles all the way down. And if you're lucky, you might even find that the second question's answer loops right back into the first one, filling up the plot hole entirely:
Plot hole 3: Who the fuck are the sewer nuns and what's their point and purpose?
Solution 3: The sewer nuns live underground in order to feed the alligators, in order to make sure that the vampires don't try to move around via the sewer system.
When you're just making things up, you don't need to have an answer for everything - just two layers is enough to create the illusion of infinite depth. Answer the question that looms behind the answer of the first question, and a normal reader won't bother to dig around for a 3rd question.
#ok but i want to know more about the sewer nuns
How high is your bleed threshold?
If you're into roleplaying, you've probably heard about bleed. But do you know what memetic bleed is, or emancipatory bleed? There is a whole network of concepts out there about what spills over between characters and players. And if you've ever wondered why not everyone experiences bleed the same way, you'll love to read about bleed thresholds.
You know that clip of Brennan Lee Mulligan, the one where he’s talking about his character Evan Kelmp? Wait, I’ll just link to it. It’s a cl
Honestly? My main piece of advice for writing well-rounded characters is to make them a little bit lame. No real living person is 100% cool and suave 100% of the time. Everyone's a little awkward sometimes, or gets too excited about something goofy, or has a silly fear, or laughs about stupid things. Being a bit of a loser is an incurable part of the human condition. Utilize that in your writing.
Everybody's all "fuck canon", "death of the author", [insert Ron Swanson meme here] right up until the point that they realise they've sufficiently departed from the source material that they can no longer safely assume their target audience is already familiar with the basic premise, and that they've thereby put themselves in the position of actually having to write establishing scenes.
Like, yeah, you're a daring iconoclast who thinks canon compliance is the coward's way, but how's your expository writing? Be honest.
You know, I love this post. I've always wondered as a person who loves designing worlds and characters why fanfic authors don't just make their own stuff, especially when the fanfic is pretty much completely disconnected from canon. This finally made it click.
I mean, that's not universally why people write fanfic, but yeah – one of the principal appeals of fanfiction as a medium is that you can skip all the legwork of acquainting your audience with the setting and characters and get straight to the good bits.
(These habits do not necessarily serve one well when making the jump to original fiction, of course; when folks remark that a work of original fiction "reads like fanfic", what they often mean is that the author makes frequent inappropriate assumptions about the audience's prior knowledge and can't write establishing scenes for shit.)
I just think everyone should take a moment to consider the question "what is your visual shorthand for cruelty?" and then follow it up with a critical "and who taught you that?"
specific examples include but are not limited to
why is an evil timeline character design disabled? (why do the heroes go through equally punishing battles and never lose an arm, a leg, an eye?)
why are the futuristic scifi terrorists uniformly darker skinned? (why are the heroes so much lighter?)
why is the greedy boss fat? (why are the heroes skinny?)
why is the criminal mastermind heavily scarred? (why is the brooding, traumatized hero unscathed?)
why is the predatory creep a bearded person in a dress and makeup? (why are none of the heroes trans women?)
who taught you that this is how things are?
how long do you plan on repeating it?
guys the point is "reflect on how you have learned bigotry through exposure and you parrot it in your own works and in the fandoms you engage with without self awareness" not "tell me, specifically, what random motifs you think are evil"
on the flipside, to everyone adding notes about hooked noses, turbans + headscarves, nonwhite features and cultural clothing in general, mental and physical disorders, and surely others I've missed in recollection: you are entirely right and should say it.
So one day a dwarf is talking to a human and finally realizes that when humans say woman, they generally mean “person who is theoretically capable of childbirth” because for whatever reason, humans assign social expectations based genital differences. (What a fucked up culture, the dwarf thinks.) But hey, better communication! So the next time the dwarf introduces theirself, they say, oh, by the way, I am what you call a “woman.”
And the trade negotiations just stop. They just stop cold. The tall people insist on speaking to the man, they insist on talking to the lady dwarf about all sorts of irrelevant bullshit, like recipes and childrearing and perfume
so the dwarf goes back home, enraged
and is like “BTW guess what happened, we’re all just going to be men forever now as far as the tall ones are concerned”
and everyone is justly horrified at this barbarism but they all agree to do whatever it takes to squeeze those tall bastards for all the resources they are worth
and the dwarves get surlier, and the trade agreements less generous
and the tall people are all “what a miserable and greedy race”
but really they’re just still nursing a grudge about how goddamn backwards and sexist the tall people are
because their best negotiator, one of their sacred cave people, got snubbed the instant she said she was capable of childbirth - and a mortal insult like that can never be forgiven
Because Pi’s tags are great:
#yes good #personal headcanon: dwarves have fundamentally misunderstood human pronoun usage #and gender roles #they are very perplexed by it #eventually they went ‘fuck it apparently ‘he’ is the correct word’ #‘it’s their language and they keep using it for us’ #so then you have this situation where dwarves are cognizant of the words ‘mother’ and ‘wife’ #but not the usual use of ‘she’ secondary headcanon specific to Tolkien dwarves #dwarves that choose to bear children are held in high regard #because they are making new dwarves it is the ultimate craft #that’s what mahal did you made a new person #it is very impressive #everyone is impressed
Just as an additional thought, we hear that women dwarves generally stay within the mountain and are a protected, guarded subset of the dwarves. There’s not many of them, so there’s an implication that women dwarves are too precious to be allowed out.
But what if this too is a mistranslation? What if the dwarves were talking to the Men and when asked “where are all your women?” they hit a wall. They whisper amongst themselves, and eventually come back with a question, “What’s a woman?” The Men are incredulous.
“Why, the members of your race that bear children, of course!“
More dwarven whispering.
They reach the conclusion that Men mean dwarves who are currently pregnant. Well! Of course those dwarves are currently safe within the mountain, well cared for and generally loathe to travel until the child is born. The Men take this to mean that all dwarven women are discouraged from traveling, and that their primary purpose is childbearing. Dwarves find this a satisfactory outcome, especially with the way Men treat their women, and so even when the misunderstanding becomes clear to them they never correct it.
I like these. I like these a lot.
@silentlycrazy ’s tags because they’re a great addition to this.
i absolutely love this whole post.
This kinda implies that making a child and raising a child are considered two different crafts if he’s going back to adventuring after just one year. Same as how some might specialize in refining raw material, while others make things out of the stuff that has already been refined to some extent.
I’m picturing a Childcrafter’s Guild whose craft consists of raising children to such an age that they might start an apprenticeship, and finding suitable mentors to introduce the children to. They also advise and assist any of their people who are attempting such a project on their own and provide classes as needed. Nothing good comes of anyone attempting a complex craft without proper instruction after all.
Since children are seen as something of a communal project the concept of ‘parents’ is another one that doesn’t have a clear translation into dwarven culture. Eventually they figure out that while the literal translation is “the one who brought you into the world”, functionally it’s used to refer to a relationship similar to that of Master and Apprentice, except for some strange reason that relationship is assigned at birth with no attempt made at checking for compatibility.
sharing a very sage bit of advice from The Simpsons' own John Swartzwelder that i've been trying to hamper down in my writing and drawing alike. let your inner crappy little elf do his worst
I’m sure other people have talked about this more at length and know more than me but I would like to see a true-life rendition of the Middle Ages and Renaissance where gay marriage is on the table.
Because it actually is very diplomatically useful! One thing you want as a member of the ruling class is children to 1) inherit your lands and titles and 2) to make alliances with other rulers. However, there are many cases where marriages made for alliances resulted in children that disrupt the line of succession or planned inheritance (differently under primogeniture than under split systems). (See Henry VI)
If rich people in that time weren’t pretty solidly convinced that marriages were solely between one man and one woman, they could have had the benefit of alliance without the muddling of the inheritance tree.
A lot of wealthy young men and women, even members of the ruling class, were committed to the church partially (there are a host of other reasons) to avoid their offspring making competition for their siblings (this was largely centered around gender, too, in eras where women came after their brothers in succession). (See Queen* Matilda) A child living as a member of the church can do you some favors, but arguably so can a child in a guaranteed-childless marriage.
And then there’s sooooo much diplomacy required to feel out this stuff. If you offer a childless marriage to another ruler who NEEDS descendants, he’s going to take offense, whereas if the marriage seems like your own family grabbing for his power via succession, he might prefer a childless one. Think of how courting and arranged marriages would be handled differently, and the amount of intrigue required.
Oh, the third son stood to inherit little, and was betrothed to a man, but then his elder brothers die and he is suddenly in need of an heir? Alas! Whatever shall he do!
Oh, the most eligible bachelorette in the land is seeking male OR female suitors… how interesting… I wonder why her father has arranged it so…
Oh, the lord chose to marry another man for love and lo and behold! This man hath conceived, and his family confirms that he in his childhood bore a girl’s countenance and bearing!
So was walking the dog today and entirely by chance not because two ravens sat in an oak tree and cawed at me noticed that there were, in professional terms, a shitassload of bees flying around the neighbor's tree.
I investigated and yup. Swarm. 40 fuckin feet up.
SOOO, knocked on the door, explained the situation, got permission, dragged out a spare empty used hive and some drawn comb and plonked it under the tree with a swarm lure and some lemongrass oil dripped on for good measure. Really was hoping they took to it because there's storms rolling in this afternoon/evening (again.)
Good news is that I just checked as the thunder started to rumble to the west and there's a lot of buzzing inside the hive and the swarm is no longer in the tree! Won't know for sure for a day or so but I THINK they found my offering of a home acceptable and got in under cover ahead of the rain.
Me, 1415 PM, apparently talking to the sky; GIRLIES LOOK! I GOT YOU A HOUSE! I MADE IT ALL NICE! THERE'S SOME FOOD IN THERE FOR YOU! HOP ON IN AND GET OUT OF THE RAIN!
The neighbors, watching out their back window; my god she's totally lost it
THEY ACCEPTED MY OFFER OF A HOUSE!!!
Accepting an offer on a house is a big deal, hooray!!!
tags too good to leave: #I hope they are stretching their tiny wrists #before signing the miniaturized stack of paperwork #on their little mortgage #don’t worry #each page just says #will make honey and enjoy house in safety #but each girlie has a page to sign
The Causal Chain And Why Your Story Needs It
The most obnoxious thing my writing teacher taught me every story needed, that I absolutely loathed studying in the moment and that only later, after months of resisting and fighting realized she was right, was something called the causal chain.
Simply put, the causal chain is the linked cause-and-effect that must logically connect every event, reaction, and beat that takes place in your story to the ones before and after.
The Causal Chain is exhausting to go through. It is infuriating when someone points out that an event or a character beat comes out of nowhere, unmoored from events around it.
It is profoundly necessary to learn and include because a cause-and-effect chain is what allows readers to follow your story logically which means they can start anticipating what happens next, which is what is required for a writer to be able to build suspense and cognitively engage the audience, to surprise them, and to not infuriate them with random coincidences that hurt or help the characters in order to clumsily advance the author's goals.
By all means, write your story as you want to write it in the first draft, and don't worry about this principle too much. This is an editing tool, not a first draft tool. But one of the first things you should do when retroactively begin preparing your story to be read by others is going step by step through each event and confirming that a previous event leads to it and that subsequent events are impacted by it on the page.
When your character is standing knee-deep in literal or metaphorical shit with a weapon in one hand and their last hope of surviving evaporating around them, and they’re wondering how their simple smuggling job/adulthood ritual/simple morning in an ordinary village led to ALL OF THIS, both they and the reader need to be able to backtrack through every single choice, mishap, attempt at fixing earlier problems and panicky flight or fib led them unerringly to this moment. That chain cannot have breaks in it, or you lose the whole impact.
speculative fiction writers i am going to give you a really urgent piece of advice: don't say numbers. don't give your readers any numbers. how heavy is the sword? lots. how old is that city? plenty. how big is the fort? massive. how fast is the spaceship? not very, it's secondhand.
the minute you say a number your readers can check your math and you cannot do math better than your most autistic critic. i guarantee. don't let your readers do any math. when did something happen? awhile ago. how many bullets can that gun fire? trick question, it shoots lasers, and it shoots em HARD.
you are lying to people for fun. if you let them do math at you the lie collapses and it's no fun anymore.
YOU GET IT
@jadegrimm
Putting this as a separate post because I don't want to hijack the original post.
But! If you're interested in this stuff, I recommend Mortals: How the Fear of Death Shaped Human Society by Rachel and Ross Menzies
Right, so a child's understanding of death comes in 4 stages:
Irreversibility - recognising that the dead don't come back to life. This usually occurs between ages 4 and 5 years old.
Applicability - understanding everything alive dies
Inevitability - acknowledging that all living things must die eventually
Non-functionality - the understanding that death is characterised by the body ceasing to function including speaking, hearing, dreaming etc
Stages 2-4 occur between ages 7 to 10.
Whilst fear of death occurs in children as young as 5, it comes to its full height around the age of 7-10, when the final stages are understood.
This fear ebbs and flows, with specific parts of life increasing it. This can include the ability to ruminate (around age 12), life changes, becoming a parent, losing loved ones etc.
And as an interesting side note, these stages can be fully characterised by how a child speaks about death
Stage one they will acknowledge that grandma isn't coming back. But, they may speak of her as "sleeping" or may worry she's scared because there's a storm outside etc.
By stage four, there is the understanding that the dead do not experience anything. Which is a very big concept to wrestle with. We cannot imagine ourselves as not existing, yet must come to terms with the fact that grandma is not there. That her body was just a vessel for her to move around in. And that whatever belief system is in place to explain what she was... Is gone.
To an extent. There is always going to be a child who sees more death than others and therefore skips a stage or two. However, there is biology and psychology at play that won't allow certain steps to be skipped. A 4 year old only just coming to understand their own existence is not going to understand the ceasing of existence at death.
But, they may understand that everyone can and will die if they live in a war zone, for example. Or through a plague. Etc.
Religion, personality, culture etc is also going to play a part in how this understanding is expressed, too.
A person who is told that someone is in heaven, still living but in a different way, may reach stage 4 later than a person raised atheist or in a religion without an afterlife. But, that same person may understand the inevitability of death earlier as their religion speaks of it more often.
So on and so forth.
weird, I don't think I experienced death close to me as a kid, but i've had a pretty realistic understanding of death basically as far back as i can remember?
I didn't really understand the mechanisms that would cause a person to die as a young kid, though When I was 6 I would get out of bed in a panic crying because I was afraid my heart would stop randomly
I remember one of my biggest moments in therapy being the one when I (exasperatedly) admitted that maybe my mother dying might have had a traumatic effect on my personality. I had a lot of trouble acknowledging this for two reasons: 1. my dad was an absolute superhero and wrecked himself mentally trying to give me a normal and happy childhood, and I felt that saying that I was ‘traumatised’ by my mum's death was disrespectful of his efforts 2. I felt like it would have been stupid to be traumatised by it.
The conversation with my therapist was something along these lines:
Me: I mean, yes it makes perfect sense for me to be willing to do anything to avoid being abandoned by someone, if I felt like my mum abandoned me as a kid. But it's also kinda stupid, because she didn't abandon me, she fucking DIED. It wasn't her choice. So it would be completely illogical of me to be afraid of abandonment when it's blindingly obvious that I wasn't abandoned at any point.
My therapist: It might be blindingly obvious to you as an adult, but psychological trauma responses don't happen based on logic. And even if they were, how old were you when this happened?
Me: 2 and a half years.
Her: Exactly. No offense, but you had no way of NOT internalising it as abandonment. You had no way of understanding death at that age.
Me, offended: Hey!!! I was a very smart kid, I'll have you know.
Another worldbuilding application of the "two layer rule": To create a culture while avoiding The Planet Of Hats (the thing where a people only have one thing going for them, like "everyone wears a silly hat"): You only need two hats.
Try picking two random flat culture ideas and combine them, see how they interact. Let's say taking the Proud Warrior Race - people who are all about glory in battle and feats of strength, whose songs and ballads are about heroes in battle and whose education consists of combat and military tactics. Throw in another element: Living in diaspora. Suddenly you've got a whole more interesting dynamic going on - how did a people like this end up cast out of their old native land? How do they feel about it? How do they make a living now - as guards, mercenaries? How do their non-combatants live? Were they always warrior people, or did they become fighters out of necessity to fend for themselves in the lands of strangers? How do the peoples of these lands regard them?
Like I'm not shitting, it's literally that easy. You can avoid writing an one-dimensional culture just by adding another equally flat element, and the third dimension appears on its own just like that. And while one of the features can be location/climate, you can also combine two of those with each other.
Let's take a pretty standard Fantasy Race Biome: The forest people. Their job is the forest. They live there, hunt there, forage there, they have an obnoxious amount of sayings that somehow refer to trees, woods, or forests. Very high chance of being elves. And then a second common stock Fantasy Biome People: The Grim Cold North. Everything is bleak and grim up there. People are hardy and harsh, "frostbite because the climate hates you" and "being stabbed because your neighbour hates you" are the most common causes of death. People are either completely humourless or have a horrifyingly dark, morbid sense of humour. They might find it funny that you genuinely can't tell which one.
Now combine them: Grim Cold Bleak Forest People. The summer lasts about 15 minutes and these people know every single type of berry, mushroom and herb that's edible in any fathomable way. You're not sure if they're joking about occasionally resorting to eating tree bark to survive the long dark winter. Not a warrior people, but very skilled in disappearing into the forest and picking off would-be invaders one by one. Once they fuck off into the woods you won't find them unless they want to be found.
You know, Finland.
probably shitty worldbuilding idea: fantasy world that keeps going
they keep sending out expeditions to try and map the whole world and figure out if it's round or flat or what but it just keeps going and they keep meeting new people who've met other people coming the other direction and everybody so far has found that it just keeps going
Elf TV: exclusively 300 season-long soap operas
Dwarf TV: How It's Mined followed by a 4½ hr documentary about salt
Gnome TV: those sensory videos for cats where bugs and mice and birds crawl around on the screen. they really like this
Orc TV: Mythbusters and Top Gear reruns
Halfling TV: the most incredible impassioned storytelling you've ever witnessed always neatly contained in 2 seasons max
Fairy TV: imagine Impractical Jokers except theyre capable of stealing people's faces . this is the only show that fairies have
