*emerges from the other room covered in blood* you should see the word document
does it look like this

if i look back, i am lost

ellievsbear
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
noise dept.
Cosmic Funnies
One Nice Bug Per Day
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Show & Tell
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Xuebing Du
Today's Document
we're not kids anymore.
almost home

PR's Tumblrdome

Origami Around
YOU ARE THE REASON
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Mike Driver
seen from United States

seen from Hungary
seen from United States

seen from Australia
seen from Belgium

seen from Brazil
seen from Poland
seen from Türkiye
seen from Singapore
seen from Brazil

seen from Hungary
seen from Australia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Morocco

seen from Malaysia

seen from United States

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@writingteraca
*emerges from the other room covered in blood* you should see the word document
does it look like this
PACING IS ABOUT LOAD BEARING WALLS.
*staples violently to my own forehead*
This is such good advice.
All I will add is: WRITE THOSE BREAKFAST SCENES if you want to, they can be absolutely critical in getting a handle on your characters. Or even on the setting. Write them all to fuck. Go hogwild.
Then cut them. They're for you, and for the characters. Not the readers.
Ref Recs for Whump Writers
Violence: A Writer’s Guide: This is not about writing technique. It is an introduction to the world of violence. To the parts that people don’t understand. The parts that books and movies get wrong. Not just the mechanics, but how people who live in a violent world think and feel about what they do and what they see done.
Hurting Your Characters: HURTING YOUR CHARACTERS discusses the immediate effect of trauma on the body, its physiologic response, including the types of nerve fibers and the sensations they convey, and how injuries feel to the character. This book also presents a simplified overview of the expected recovery times for the injuries discussed in young, otherwise healthy individuals.
Body Trauma: A writer’s guide to wounds and injuries. Body Trauma explains what happens to body organs and bones maimed by accident or intent and the small window of opportunity for emergency treatment. Research what happens in a hospital operating room and the personnel who initiate treatment. Use these facts to bring added realism to your stories and novels.
10 B.S. Medical Tropes that Need to Die TODAY…and What to Do Instead: Written by a paramedic and writer with a decade of experience, 10 BS Medical Tropes covers exactly that: clichéd and inaccurate tropes that not only ruin books, they have the potential to hurt real people in the real world.
Maim Your Characters: How Injuries Work in Fiction: Increase Realism. Raise the Stakes. Tell Better Stories. Maim Your Characters is the definitive guide to using wounds and injuries to their greatest effect in your story. Learn not only the six critical parts of an injury plot, but more importantly, how to make sure that the injury you’re inflicting matters.
Blood on the Page: This handy resource is a must-have guide for writers whose characters live on the edge of danger. If you like easy-to-follow tools, expert opinions from someone with firsthand knowledge, and you don’t mind a bit of fictional bodily harm, then you’ll love Samantha Keel’s invaluable handbook
Santa is on strike due to global warming. All presents this year will be delivered by Sasha the Christmas Tiger. Milk and cookies may not be sufficient.
“MUST BRING PRESENTS TO GOOD CHILDREN”
“Yes good”
“AND EAT THE BAD ONES”
“Wait no”
“EAT THEM”
“sasha no”
@burstofhope the Christmas tiger is watching
She is making a list
It is not easy with her paws but she is making it
shes almost here
Okay fine this is the ONE Christmas thing I will reblog before Thanksgiving BUT THAT’S IT
if he was still alive I know in my heart that Terry Pratchett would have done a bit about Igors and Igorinas doing gender confirmation surgery by now. going into a lab full of bubbling vials and picking out a penis from a tank the way you pick a lobster. that one, please. you gotta be careful though because they'll really try to upsell you into getting two or three installed. people going to the clinic as pairs and just having parts swapped out for a discounted rate. maybe you actually just trade brains, that's even easier. Igorth have already been doing that thurgery for thenturieth.
#one day an igor forgets the lock the cage and a pack of penises escapes into ankh-morpork#the watch spends the next three weeks rounding them up
how DARE you leave this in the tags (affectionate)
Everyone knew it was best not to look too closely at Igor's jars.
Vimes was beginning to wish he had looked more closely at the most recent additions before Igor came lurching up the stairs to inform him:
"They have ethcaped, thir."
"Escaped. What has escaped, Igor."
"Thome of my.. appendageth, thir."
"Appendages."
"Yeth, thir. Of the... intimate variety."
"Of the intimate..." Vimes trailed off as the dawning horror overwhelmed his vocal cords.
He rallied. "Igor. HOW have they escaped? They are not known for their... perambulatory abilities."
"Really, thir? I've alwayth found them to have a mind of their own at timeth."
Vimes was staying calm. Yes. That was it. He was staying very calm. Definitely NOT thinking AT ALL about how Vetinari and... Good lord, The Times, would react to marauding pack of penises. Would it be a pack? Or would they go off on their own?
"I wath exthperimenting with cuthtom grown oneth, you know. For thothe who cannot grow their own."
"Err... what? Of course you were. I mean. Very good."
Pictured: An Igor harvesting appendages
(tweet 1) (tweet 2) (article)
Nanowrimo
and that's my 50k for the month done, almost half of a redraft of Captain Gwyn's children/ Flamestone coven.
This aledgedly bringing the total words I've logged on the Nanowrimo site to 505,655 ...which is a hecking lot of words.
I still don't write consistantly though...
Writing prompt? No. Writing much delayed.
There is a type of plot that is prevalent in YA books and starting to get into general lit that I do not like. It is a similar trope to the MacGuffin, but instead of the plot being driven by an object, it is driven by the characters being in some sort of situation with formally fixed stakes.
Just as a MacGuffin is an object with no specific properties that affect its importance to the story, the identifying characteristic of this plot is that exact nature of the situation is irrelevant or at least not very important.
A very common example is when characters are involved in some sort of game or competition—for example, the first Throne of Glass book involves the protagonist competing to become the king's assassin, but the plot of the book would need to change very little if the competition was a beauty pageant.
"Gamified" plot lines like this often also include MacGuffins (to drive the "game"), confirming the tropes' similarity in my head.
The other common example is the "magic/superhero/assassin school" plot. The "school" is often just a device that brings the characters together and keeps them on a predetermined track, but there's nothing about what the characters are learning or even the school's specific identity as an educational institution that affects the plot.
so here's what i'm talking about:
The Hunger Games is NOT an example of this. The specific nature of the "games" drives and affects the plot on every level: it threatens the immediate survival of the characters, defines the culture and politics of the world, and affects the characters' relationship with each other. How the Hunger Games came to be, how tributes are selected, how the games are filmed and broadcast, and the "rules" of the game are all relevant.
But some of the successors of THG picked up the "formal game/competition" aspect and jammed it into their stories as a kind of pre-cast mold for the plot and stakes. This sucks and it's annoyingly commonplace.
These plots are probably attractive because they let authors avoid, or at least postpone, the hard questions about character motivation and stakes by trapping the character within an institution or binding arrangement of some kind.
When you're in college, you can offload most of your motivation to do things onto their utility in helping you graduate. However, as a college student, you also regularly face the question, "Why don't I drop out and become a stripper?"
Okay, that question is a stand-in for the general "why am I doing this, and why don't I leave?" but I think it's a good test to apply to stories where a protagonist older than like 15-16 attends an Institution.
Does your character think about "dropping out and becoming a stripper [or whatever is appropriate for their world and age group]?"
If so, why don't they?
If the answer is "they literally Cannot leave," you Must include this in your awareness of the kind of story you are writing. Your character is trapped in a coercive situation, and it makes sense for this to affect them in some way.
What you must Not do is use the coercive nature of the situation to "bury" the question of your character's motivation.
You must also be prepared to write About Institutions and to do so consciously. If a formal structure or coercive force is needed to prevent your character from fucking off out of the story entirely, that's a conflict and friction that underlies everything else. You can write this kind of story without explicitly tapping that conflict, but if you're trying to do something like that and it's???? very? hard??? it's worth looking into this as the reason why.
There's something here about how people have learned to be unable to see the The Friction as a "conflict" in a storytelling sense. Really, all of us are part of at least one Structure that would kill us for trying to leave.
Interpreting this in literature sounds very similar to what's called a Marxist reading of a book.
I'm writing this out partially because if you grew up on YA books, it's Super Easy to reproduce tropes as a baby writer that work or don't work depending on an element you don't know exists and that isn't taught.
This one in particular led me down into a bout of writer's block that I ultimately never solved, back when I was 15 or so. I hit a wall that can be described as "my character is basically in a cult, she doesn't have any of the tools to escape it, and the plot requires her to" and I realized this, but I did not have the vocabulary to make sense of what the problem was—she had what seemed like sufficient MOTIVATION to escape the cult, but she COULDN'T, because psychologically she could not do it, and therefore I could not make her do it.
The dominant narrative of writer's block was "push through it and ignore it," and this killed the entire project for me, because my inability to "make" her do the thing she wanted deep down was completely puzzling.
And this was because I hadn't intentionally designed her situation as a cult, and it hadn't occurred to me that there was a unique psychological aspect to being in a cult, because it was so similar to the books I was reading at the time—YA books with characters being driven through very structured, authoritarian institutions like a complex system of pipes.
There is, again, hella commentary on the society that writes these stories here, and it occurs to me that the whole idea of "motivation" as the main driver of a character's actions is very in line with rugged-individualism and capitalism.
It assumes a character is an independent, rational agent that acts to pursue an external goal, focusing on the character's agency and desire to obtain "something" they do not have.
The fatal flaw of this paradigm is very simple: real people have limited agency, do not know what they want, and do not act rationally, and well-written, complex characters usually reflect this.
In Othello, the titular character loves Desdemona and wants to be loved by her, but Iago toys with and amplifies his fear and mistrust, and he ends up murdering her instead. It is not useful or really even correct to say that Othello has a goal, or that he is motivated by desire for something; if you do frame it that way, you have to explain why his actions actively sabotage the thing he wants, and this explanation is likely to shift the "agency" onto Iago, and be very awkward in exploring Othello. I use Othello as an example because for me, it was a viscerally hard-hitting story about a character whose marginalization had made his approach to relationships deeply dysfunctional, because his constant awareness of his marginalization sabotaged his ability to trust.
You can say a great variety of things about Shakespeare's portrayal being racist or not, but his understanding of the experience of being "othered" hit like a ford f-350 being driven by a drunk wannabe redneck. And that's the main quality that I think makes Shakespeare enduring? The man had a DEEP understanding of the ways people have Something Wrong With Them and specifically could portray people doing wildly irrational things and show why it made sense for them to.
This was one of the things that I, as a baby writer, knew so crisply I could taste it, but simply did not have the words for—what a character wants is rarely what they think they want or what they have the mental and emotional tools to pursue, and it often doesn't make sense for them to have enough insight into themselves to make actions oriented toward a goal that aligns with their "wants." "Motivation" in the sense of an external goal or explicit desire is used interchangeably with "motivation" in the sense of driving emotions and urges, and those are VERY, VERY DIFFERENT.
I will not overcomplicate my plot
I will not overcomplicate my plot
I will not overcomplicate my plot
Due to unforeseeable events….
The plot is now overcomplicated.
I have lost control of the plot
The plot
He destroyed his outline
Yes
YES
The plot is out
If your plot feels flat, STUDY it! Your story might be lacking...
Stakes - What would happen if the protagonist failed? Would it really be such a bad thing if it happened?
Thematic relevance - Do the events of the story speak to a greater emotional or moral message? Is the conflict resolved in a way that befits the theme?
Urgency - How much time does the protagonist have to complete their goal? Are there multiple factors complicating the situation?
Drive - What motivates the protagonist? Are they an active player in the story, or are they repeatedly getting pushed around by external forces? Could you swap them out for a different character with no impact on the plot? On the flip side, do the other characters have sensible motivations of their own?
Yield - Is there foreshadowing? Do the protagonist's choices have unforeseen consequences down the road? Do they use knowledge or clues from the beginning, to help them in the end? Do they learn things about the other characters that weren't immediately obvious?
Writing is not about 'telling an epic story' or 'making something that will outlive you'. Writing is about going "You know what would be fucking awesome?" and then committing word crimes
Reblog the writers’ fortune cookie for luck!
Guys I reblogged this and then wrote an 8000 word story I didn’t even have a solid plan for. Reblog this shit.
rereading my own writing is just a constant fluctuation between "damn, girl, you wrote this? (affectionate)" and "damn, girl, you wrote this? (derogatory)"
I am also “damn, girl, you wrote this? (forgetful)”
I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything more in my life.
Source
teetotailer
first incidence of good writing advice i've seen in 10+ years on this platform and it's in the notes of a mustelid wreaking absolute havoc in a german grocery store
What to do when your WIP isn’t working