soft words in dusty corners

kayla || she/ they || queer || writeblr || writer from a small town trying to keep my desert roots || WIPs: Nothing Scortched Lives in This House, No Eyes, The Magic in Our Bones, Crash into Earth, and No One Dies in the End

[helenvaughans]

[itsmistybitch-deactivated202605]

These posts are sisters

[nondelphic]

“you should write every day” bestie i’m trying to live every day. write?? i barely eat enough fruit.

[selenophyyy]

Writing Resources for Vocabulary and Dialogue Tags

Vocabulary

01. Word hippo

02. One look

03. Power thesaurus

04. Visual thesaurus

Dialogue tags

01. 300 words to use instead of said

02. 550+ alternative words for said

03. 200+ other words for said

(These pictures are not mine. Let me know if you know OP!)

⚲ Visit Creative Writing Library 🕮

[helenvaughans]

[itsmistybitch-deactivated202605]

These posts are sisters

[quasi-normalcy]

The rookie mistake in fiction writing is assuming that short stories will be easier to write than novels because they're smaller. No. This is the equivalent to thinking that it's easier to make a pocket watch than grandfather clock. Short stories are complex engineering problems.

[writteninashes]

I could talk about this all day

[punksalmon]

whenever you take too much time to write something know it is because stephen king has been stealing your life force

[mightymur]

The final, brilliant word on passive voice.

“She was killed [by zombies.]” <— passive

“Zombies killed [by zombies] her.” <— active

[christinaroseandrews]

This is legit one of the best ways to identify passive voice.

[ellipsus-writes]

If you haven't heard, the em dash has been getting a lot of attention lately…

Because it was trained on pirated work—including freely accessible online writing (like fanfic, academic texts)—ChatGPT picked up patterns and quirks native to human writing.

Including (sigh) the em dash.

There are other victims here (RIP tapestry and delve 🫠), but the appropriation of the em dash—a punctuation mark beloved by writers everywhere—feels especially personal.

A kind of low-grade panic is ensuing. Writers who once memed their own em dash overuse—the greatest punctuation mark ever to grace the control-freak’s lexicon, frankly—are suddenly backing away to avoid accusations.

No. More. We have centuries of dash-abusing writers behind us. We will not sit quietly while AI repurposes our beloved stilted aside—or the just-one-more clarification the sentence demands—or the dramatic pause your comma could never—etc.

You don’t write like AI—AI writes like you.

Defend the em dash.

(Feel free to download/share/stick it where it matters!)

[wiltking]

if you're writing and find yourself thinking 'this is too weird/gross/offputting/esoteric/ambitious/catered to my specific interests + sure to push away a broader audience' that is the devil speaking and it is a lie. you are already firmly on the right path and you need to double down

[redstonedust]

yes i'm a writer (non-practicing)

[anxeious]

[storyweavingspider]

The number of whites that treat AAVE like simlish instead of an actual dialect with specific rules, etc. is maddening actually

[kirby6aero]

“it’s tiktok speech” i’m gonna rip your heart out

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post

[archangelzunderwater]

If you have a toyhouse account (or you can just view the page from the link even if you dont have one) I created a thread on here callled AAVE is Not TikTok Slang, it goes over how AAVE has been co'oped online and a bunch of resources for learning about AAVE.

CreatingBlackCharacters also has a great post about AAVE if you should check out if your reading this and actually want to know more about AAVE, it IS a legitimate dialect, its existed for an incredibly long time, i grew up using it, i grew up hearing nearly every other Black person around me use it. Ive seen entire posts talking about words to hate and majority of them are always AAVE words, Woke is a good example of an AAVE word with a genuinely good meaning being completely decimated by white people online, now its either used by racists to call anything diverse bad or its used as a joke, its extremely frustrating how many people just do not take AAVE seriously. If you know what AAVE is and you still mock it, deny its legitimacy as a dialect or think its "cringe", that is infact, racist.

It is not bad or improper English, its not uneducated, its not gen-z or tiktok or internet slang or brainrot, it is a dialect used by Black Americans and Canadians that deserves just as much respect as any other language, please stop decimating our dialect.

[podcastwizard]

"yeah i know it's bad for the environment but like so many things are so i just use it anyway" COOL I'M GONNA BITE THROUGH THIS TABLE

[uhuh100]

[janeeyrewasfaecoded]

You omit the Oxford comma and those last two items in the list start lookin kinda gay. Like why are you two standing so close together

[melmili]

just wanna say i am a big fan of this trope specifically

[weird-goodbyes]

[probuccalfat]

i’ve been saying “do it scared” but now i gotta actually do it