Tag Archives: on writing

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monstersinthecosmos:

I just wanted to pop in and remind all the fic writers & RP’ers out there that you don’t have to listen to the black & white thinkers trolling this website who want to shit on you every time you bring up something sympathetic about your character.

It’s okay for “bad” characters to have sympathetic traits. It would be boring as fuck if they didn’t. It’s unfortunate that so many people out there are too salty and dense to understand a complex character, but don’t let it get you down!

If you’re a good fic writer or RP’er it’s really important to take all facets of the character’s personality into consideration. You aren’t here to write a 2D ebul cartoon. You should be taking their motives into consideration. You should be figuring out their demeanor. If they are a charming sociopath, you should write them as being charming. That’s the whole fucking point!

Fic writers and RP’ers engage in fandom in a way that unwraps characters and tries to figure out what makes them tick. We want to figure out why they feel the way they feel, we want to figure out their temperament, we want to understand. It’s an exercise in creative empathy and there are a lot of people out there who just don’t have a creative bone in their body. They’re gonna try to shout you down for acknowledging that a character can have gray morality or be a dichotomy in some way and I hope it doesn’t discourage anyone. 

So get outta my face with all this purity politics bullshit, plz & thank you. Acknowledging conflicting pieces of your character is a responsible and creatively intelligent thing to do, and people who don’t get that can eat a dick.

Don’t let it stop you! 

^^^ THIS ^^^

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aj-eddy:

As some of you may know I’ve been studying Professional and Creative Writing for three years now, and I’m heading into a fourth year of study for Honours, and one thing that has really stuck out for me over the past few years is how much pressure people put on you to write a story with some kind of important meaning.

This needs to stop.

There’s nothing wrong with writing a story with purpose and meaning, but when you limit yourself to writing a story around those morals, then you restrict what you can write.

Write what you want to write. 

Write stories for fun. 

Write stories with no moral messages and see what meaning other people read into it.

Write a story by focusing on the characters, the plot, the narrative, whatever; just write the story you want to tell, becasue if you limit yourself to writing around that moral message then you lose the possibility to open your text up and create depth to it by having multiple meanings and moral messages, contradictions and ideologies that your readers will hold onto and literature students will gush over.

Write what you want to write.

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monstersinthecosmos:

oodlenoodleroodle:

finnglas:

anneapocalypse:

Shipping is such a multilayered thing too.

You can ship characters for happily ever afters, sure, you can ship them for tragically-then-happily, you can ship two or three or four or more, you can ship endless combinations of personality types and relationship dynamics

but you can also ship characters under very specific circumstances, or for a certain period of their life but not for all of it, or only in a certain universe. You might say “I ship these characters” and what you mean is you think they are fascinating together and could have a story together. That story could be any kind of story. 

Sometimes it means you want them together for the rest of their lives. Sometimes it means something different than that.

I don’t know about you, but for me, “I ship it” means “There is a story in this ship and I am interested in that story.” 

for me, “I ship it” means “There is a story in this ship and I am interested in that story.”

Thank you for articulating this. Yes. Exactly.

#not all ships are what i think a good rship looks like #but there’s a story there 

Also for those of us who write or consume fanfiction, shipping can mean “I need to fix this thing that bothered me in canon, let me tell you my version of it where it’s not so gross and where I criticize it in a way that the creator did not.” I don’t understand people who can’t grasp this. Black & white thinking is not a good look. 

Or I mean. Maybe it’s still gross lol. We wouldn’t have a horror genre if dark and awful shit didn’t intrigue people on a base level. Just because it’s not for you doesn’t mean there’s no value in it for people who like to look hard at things that frighten them. 

^^^^THIS^^^^

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headjudgelen:

fizzylimon:

doodlesanddandelions:

allthingslinguistic:

ladysparklefists:

idk I just love how we Young People Today use ~improper~ punctuation/grammar in actually really defined ways to express tone without having to explicitly state tone like that’s just really fucking cool, like

no    =    “No,” she said. 

no.    =    "No,” she said sharply.

No    =    “No,” she

stated

firmly.

No.    =    “No,” she snapped.

NO    =    “No!” she shouted.

noooooo    =    “No,” she moaned.

no~    =    “No,” she said with a drawn-out sing-song.

~no~    =    “No,” she drawled sarcastically.

NOOOOO    =    “No!” she screamed dramatically.

no?!    =    “No,” she said incredulously.

I’ve been calling this “typographical nuance” and I have a few more to add: 

*no* = “No,” she said emphatically. 

*nopes on out of here* = “No,” she said of herself in the third person, with a touch of humorous emphasis.

~*~noooo~*~ = “No,” she moaned in stylized pseudo-desperation.

#no = “No,” she added as a side comment.

“no” = “No,” she scare-quoted.

wtf are you kidding no = “No,” she said flatly. “And I can’t believe I have to say this.”

no no No No NO NO NO NO = "No,” she repeated over and over again, growing louder and more emphatic. 

nooOOOO = “No,” she said, starting out quietly and turning into a scream.

*no = “Oops, I meant ‘no,’” she corrected, “Sorry for the typo in my previous message.”

I cannot express how strongly I absolutely love language and writing and communication but if anyone asks why I will be showing them this post from now on

this is great, but I got to “no no No No NO NO NO NO” and immediately started singing “mamma mia, mamma mia, mamma mia let me go”

no no no nO (no no no)= “No,” she said, sticking to the status quo

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keybladewyvern:

claricechiarasorcha:

ryntaia:

sirikenobi167:

unforth-ninawaters:

seananmcguire:

possiblestalker:

indianajjones:

opalescentlesbian:

entropyalarm:

katfiction2001:

“writers always know exactly where they are going with their work!”

r u sure

“no writer does anything by mistake, it’s all very strategic”

r u sure

“they use symbolism in everything. for example, a simple sentence symbolises directness and-”

R U SURE

The best moments in writing is when you discover you did something absolutely genius by complete accident.

A miscellaneous world-building detail from ten chapters earlier accidentally saved a character’s life once

“Omg this line is genius and the best reference!”
“Thank you I did that entirely on purpose!!” *sweats*

READER: “(points out symbolism and foreshadowing and depth)”

AUTHOR:

I once literally flipped a coin to decide which character was going to die in a multi-award-nominated novel.

I was once rereading a manuscript before editing it and discovered that in an early chapter I’d put in a line without any forethought that ended up aligning perfectly the plot and is now my favorite line in the entire book even though when I wrote that sentence I hadn’t even come up with that plot point yet.

In my book series, I have done various things on accident and then, looking back, yelled BRILLIANT and went with it. And, often times, my characters just DECIDE things, like one character was in love with another and I was “WHAT?” but went with it because it was actually a VERY good story and made some of the plot stuff that much more interesting. 

If you ever wanted to know my creative process for writing, congratulations, this is it. 

Writing a story like

There’s an author’s note in an Isaac Asimov short story collection – Isaac Asimov, mind you – and I can’t for the life of me remember which it was because my mom has a billion of them, but basically he went to a lecture on his books where the teaccher was lecturing on all the symbolism and themes and such and Asimovewent up to him and was just like “Uhhhh…. I didn’t put any of that in? It just…. no? Not really?”

And the lecturer legit looked ISAAC FUCKING ASIMOV straight in the eye and said, “What do you know, sir? You’re just the author.”

And Asimov described it as being a fairly profound moment in his career.

Gallery

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anniech:

anniech:

he would understand

this is ok to reblog if u relate btw

Like blood magic?? Putting stuff from yourself into a character?

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neil-gaiman:

More like trying to create a version of the character in your head, using your memories and hopes and dreams and thoughts and imagination, and then seeing what happens if you ask that character a question or place them in a stressful situation. How they behave isn’t necessarily how you’d behave. But it’s based on parts of yourself.