May 2013
3 posts
bogleech:
What they say: “do you have to use swear words? It’s just so unimaginative, it’s a sure sign that you’re less intelligent!”
What they actually mean: I’m a big fat baby wiener and I go to Big Fat Baby Wiener Sunday School but I don’t want to expose my ridiculous sensitivity to uh-oh words so I’m going to transparently pretend it’s not about that and just call you stupid.
2 tags
zeonhime:
the worst feeling about trying to draw is being a mediocre artist. You realize you’re not terrible and family and friends who can’t draw at all tell you all the time how amazing you are, but you, as the artist, have seen what amazing really is and you realize that it isn’t you.
April 2013
1 post
1 tag
I clutch my ego to my bosom and cry.
Ah it still kills me that I can’t post writing anywhere without voiding its “virgin” unpublished status. I suppose I could post and remove, fuck posterity I won’t have. But my point is, art has a quantifiable outcome. This is the art piece, this is the scan I posted to my website to publicize my art and (presumably) my name. You can’t do that with writing, it’s...
March 2013
4 posts
1 tag
4 tags
I write about writing more than I actually "write"
Signs of an amateur: over-thinking. They teach me to deeply analyze stories, to really pull apart their craft and content cell by cell, and then they tell me not to think so hard about my own intent. Bullshit. Can’t spell it out, that’s melodramatic. Got to work in subtlety even if it’s lost on the audience of choice. Should be some explanation, especially in spoken character histories. I want...
1 tag
fashion-badger:
Hey, this is just the first page and a half of my creative writing final (and they’re still a bit rough). If anyone wants to take a look, could they tell me if the tense and POV are okay? First-person present can be tricky to read and I want to make sure it’s not too confusing.
Read More
[I am one of your followers, just reblogging to my writing blog]
The POV and tense...
Whoops, I started an experimental second/first person piece that’s more poetic than narrative, when I should be writing some bland and emotionally detached Story for seminar. Because I’ve never met a bunch of writers with so little willingness to move past their own boundaries and character preferences. But I’m generalizing, it’s only about four people like that....
February 2013
4 posts
2 tags
sarcasmosaur:
So stupid shit was going on in [TAG] guild chat last night and I hear I may have pissed somebody off by joking around at them but seriously
The idea that there is some vast, impassable chasm between men and women and all female characters must be written with some mysterious, ineffable ~feminine~ quality to them…really gets under my skin? (I mean especially as a person of...
2 tags
technoskates:
Study debunks notion that men and women are psychologically distinct bemusedlybespectacled:
sinidentidades:
The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has dealt a devastating blow to the notion that men and women are fundamentally different when it comes to how they think and act.
“Although gender differences on average are not under dispute, the idea of consistently...
“No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened...”
– Erin Bow (via writersrelief)
This I like.
(via jjtaylor)
January 2013
6 posts
6 tags
By Popular Demand: Freelance Badassery Class...
weavercat:
lucybellwood:
Hey Badasses!
Many of you requested that I put my lecture notes from Monday’s talk online, so here they are (just click the “Read More” link below this paragraph — it’s a mother of a post and I didn’t want to clog up everyone’s dashboards).
I mention Jonathan Lethem’s wonderful essay on creative appropriation — The Ecstasy of Influence — down in the “Suggested...
3 tags
mycitylight:
Common Writing Mistakes
tygermama:
amandaonwriting:
Benjamin Dreyer is the VP Executive Managing Editor & Copy Chief of Random House Publishing Group. Below is his list of the common stumbling blocks for authors, from A to X.
One buys antiques in an antiques store from an antiques dealer; an antique store is a very old store.
He stayed awhile; he stayed for a...
2 tags
Horse Anatomy Post
xehhx:
Making this post for future reference
Horse Hair direction charts
Vaginas, Wombs and Menstruation →
yeahwriters:
tetw:
A Tetw reading list
The New Full-Frontal by Ashley Fetters - Has Pubic Hair in America Gone Extinct?
Snip, stitch, kerching! by Marie Myung-Ok Lee - A look at designer vagina surgeries and the questionable motives of the doctors who perform them.
We Do Abortions Here by Sallie Tisdale - A nurse at an abortion clinic describes her work.
The Sanguine Sex by Caitlin...
December 2012
3 posts
1 tag
I don't normally do this
debonaireodactyl:
but after reading all of the responses to this episode I felt highly inclined to add my own insights.
Read More
1 tag
Writing this poem on women's magazines and,
“Look for sugar under one of its many names including brown sugar…”
WOW THANK YOU WOMAN’S DAY, YOU SAVED ME.
November 2012
6 posts
Things we know about the Mushroom War
scarecrows:
charleneislame:
gunmetal-blue:
pretendplaytime:
1000 years ago there was a terrible war, and everyone was dying.
Marceline, a young half-demon, was left alone on earth.
Simon Petrikov, an antiquarian, was battling the evil of a cursed crown that had saved his life at a terrible cost. Simon met Marceline in the wasteland of earth, and they took care of each other.
The nuclear...
2 tags
I’d be interested in finding some theory or research on thinking in references, and how that changes the way we link ideas. Because that’s how my sister, my father, and I talk. We bounce jokes and references off each other like a code. My sister sends me an email with a link to a reading of Poe’s “The Raven”, and comments “LENOOORE”; she’s linked the...
Moniquilliloquies.: Genre Help: Horror →
thewritershelpers:
Hey, y’all! How’s that writing coming along?
Today in Genre Help, I’ve compiled a list of links to help further understand and write HORROR (Wiki page definition). (With some appropriate music~ X)
—
SUB-GENRES
Gothic
Lovecraftian
Noir
…
1 tag
I actually wrote a poem I’m happy with. Needs some editing; for right now, I’m going to let it steep.
Of course, all this during a time when I was supposed to be writing an essay due tonight.
October 2012
7 posts
1 tag
1 tag
I don’t know what to do with this writing. I think it has some merit, and I want to shove it in everyone’s face, but nobody wants that. It seems such a waste to write this and edit it and put all this love and care into its creation, then file it away in my hard drive forever. Oh well, I guess.
I guess that’s the problem, too much ego. Everything is the ego. Everything is...
1 tag
2 tags
EXTREME craft
A list of extreme craft exercises for that one class prompt. For future reference and posterity, I guess. I want them all down in one place so I can come back to them in the future.
Inventory system for scenes and environments.
Piece-a-night, handwritten, on the 30 Days monster challenge (poem or flash)
Making a cliche literal.
~Extreme~ edit of an old piece—rewrite story without...
1 tag
Diverse Fantasy World Creation for Dummies
toastradamus:
weeaboo-chan:
crossystuck:
I think the reason why all fantasy settings have generically white people lies in the mother of all reasons:
Starting with the culture.
Unless you’re actively trying to make a POC, you are going to start with the culture of the fantasy situation you’re familiar with, and that is, of course, medieval Europe. And if you’re basing a story based on...
Putting Emotion In Story
mooderino:
The travails and adventures of your characters should have more than a superficial effect on the reader. Ideally, the impact should be somewhere between enthralling and devastating.
But how do you convert words on a page to tears in eyes, lumps in throats or hearts in mouths?
There are two basic ways to transfer emotion from page to reader: sympathetic and empathetic.
...
5 Character Points You May be Ignoring
writingbox:
You don’t need to describe your character down to the finest detail; let your reader do some imagining of their own (they seem to enjoy that!) But there are a few character points that affect how they interact with their world which you can reveal through action.
Height: Do they need to duck through doorways, or bend to speak to their friends? Do they struggle to reach the top shelf...
September 2012
9 posts
1 tag
the-vashta-nerada:
have you ever cried over a character
i don’t mean in the way a lot of people say like “OMG ALL MY FEELS MY CREYS”
no
i mean
have you ever felt such emotion towards a character that you just cried
because you wanted to be with them and help them and make them feel better
because they’ve helped you so much but you can never do the same for them.
2 tags
Dialogue Clinic
mooderino:
Dialogue is one of the most important parts of a story. Readers will skim through everything else, but rarely will they skip over dialogue. It’s engaging, it’s fun, it brings a story to life. Plays, movies, radio are all constructed around speech.
Turning functional dialogue into something more, something that rivets and entertains, is difficult. It would be great if we could just...
1 tag
A Writer's Paradise: Writing Tips 101: The use of... →
thatwriterjunkie:
Ok so more of my nit-picking writing tips here. Today we look at the words “Began” and “Started” in prose. We usually see this when a character is in the beginning stages of doing something. Such as:
“Drake began walking to the front door when Sarah swung it open.”
Or
“Gale started to cry…
2 tags
Finally broke through the first set of issues with my most recent story project. Now on to a whole new set of issues brought up by the previous solutions. Mostly, can I actually write these things as well as they must be written? A lot of the storytelling success will rely on absolute control and subtlety. Yeah that sounds like me. I write like a bad anime sometimes, I just can’t.
Got to...
1 tag
2 tags
Constant arm-flailing frustration over conceptualizing themes and “meanings” and then inserting them intelligently into a plot somehow. That is your summary of me as a “writer.”
My tiny pea brain can’t handle it.
2 tags
30 Days of Character Development!
oslusiadas:
HEY RPERS, what if I started a meme. It’s a simple meme. You answer one question every day for thirty days, and by the end of it, you hopefully learn even more about your character and become a better roleplayer because of it! 8Dc Y’all should totes spread this around. Here’s the list.
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August 2012
4 posts
“Writing has nothing to do with publishing. Nothing. People get totally confused...”
– Peter S. Beagle (via writingquotes)
1 tag
“Some beginning writers weigh down their speech tags with adverbs that tell the...”
– How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them — A Misstep-By-Misstep Guide, Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman (via electric-snake)
everythingissymbolic:
That awkward moment when you pull out a piece of writing thinking it needs a polish and instead it needs life-saving surgery, organ transplants, a stint in rehab, and quite possibly a stay in the Witness Protection Program.
2 tags
Writing fanfiction for fandoms I don't even belong... →
I liked the cartoon a lot because of the characters. But fandom is different.
Anyway. Wrote a thing to practice letting dialogue and dynamic characters carry a scene, rather than introspection and observation.
July 2012
6 posts
2 tags
Oh no
I’m writing a dumb fanfiction intro chapter, just to have it written. The concept is old, worn out, and doesn’t appeal to me anymore, but I like the introductory scene, up to a certain point. I want to let the characters carry a scene primarily on their interactions. I write so many introspective, observer characters who basically do nothing (guess what sort of person I am).
I wonder...
2 tags
How to start? By starting.
billcorbett:
Great advice from Gail Simone below, about writing comics but quite applicable to other creative fields. When people ask me how to get into writing, comedy, etc., the first thing I do now is ask a (hopefully) polite question back: “Well, what have you tried so far?”
So often my answer will mostly be “Wow, great! Keep doing THAT and don’t give up.” And other times if it seems...
