Tag: writing

wrex-writes:

ageekyreader:

flynneware:

WE FOUND IIIIIIIIIT OMG Me and some people have been searching for this image for a couple months now xD Woke up to see someone found it and told me! So happy! Thanks @naariel!

To all my artist friends, this one’s for you ❤ 

Ooo – this is a really good reminder for writers too! @merigreenleaf Looky! This is why sometimes I tell you that you are doing better and you are like, “but there is so much wrong here!” We are at different seeing places and your writing really is getting better. Plus I haven’t read it as many times as you have lol

This is like a detailed infographic elaboration on that Ira Glass remark about how your taste exceeds your skill when you first start, and so you feel like you aren’t improving even when you are. 

shipping-isnt-morality:

A quote from a paper I’m reading:

“To convert any ‘enemy’, we must show him not simply that [we] are against him, but that he is wrong, wrong according to his own fundamental standards. To tell him that he is wrong according to our standards gets us nowhere, though it may be great fun; the problem is to find, among his standards, at least one that is violated by what he proposes to do.”

lynati:

scaliefox:

millenniumfulcrum:

Tumblr:  We want complex villains! 
Tumblr:  But they can’t do anything villainous or complex ever. 

My favorite quote on this is Lemony Snickett when a school district banned his book due to the marriage plot by the villain.

He merely responded

“I’m sorry, but I’m at a loss on how to write a villain that doesn’t do villainous things.”

I watched season three of Daredevil last night, and was thinking how Wilson Fisk in particular had been written throughout this series. He’s a bad person. There’s no denying that he’s a bad person; a villain. But he’s genuinely in love with Vanessa; it’s not just a bullshit entitlement / possessive thing.

And all I can think is the purity wankers insisting that what he feels CAN’T be true love, because he’s a bad person, and Bad People aren’t capable of things like love, or acts that aren’t 100% self-serving.

And then all I can think about how if any of them intend to one day be authors themselves, how flat and boring their villains are going to be if they can’t accept that people can be any degree of good and bad traits and actions. That you can be awful to everyone you encounter and still be willing to die for them / for the cause of “good”, and that neither thing cancels out the other.

And neither should be ignored for the sake of trying to cast the character as strictly black or white. Frankly, the more complex the greyscale, the more interesting your villain / antagonist is going to be, and the more complex the dynamic they have with the heroes and the better the story you are trying to tell.

If you ignore the complex motivations in the antagonistic characters you encounter in media and literature, you’re never going to be able to *write* someone with complex motivations.

Resources and Advice for Depressed Authors

wrex-writes:

junipernight:

– 

Four Tips for Writing When You Are Depressed: Exactly what it says on the tin.

– If routines help you, but you struggle to establish one with writing, you may just be expecting too much. Set an intentionally small goal, whatever that may look like for you, but then focus on reaching that goal every day. You may discover that when you aim for a light word count each day, you are able to overshoot your goal on many days, but still be able to reach it on the worst days. This in turn makes it easier to avoid self-judgement if you’re still working on the whole treating-yourself-kindly thing. Avoid sharing the specifics of this goal with people, especially people who write easily and people who have overblown confidence in your abilities as a writer, because nothing takes the accomplishment out of writing every day for 3 weeks in a row for the first time in your life like your dad saying, “Only xxx words a day?” 

–  Why Writers are Prone to Depression: a discussion of several famous depressed authors, some theories about why authors are disproportionately likely to be depressed, and some lifestyle choices that could potentially help a little. 

– “’Getting’ Yourself to Write” – an entreaty to stop and consider why you might be avoiding writing in the first place, a criticism of writing advice that focuses only on developing unquestioning self-discipline, some advice for treating yourself kindly as an author, and one of the most mindful Tumblr posts I have ever read. A round of snaps for @wrex-writes, everybody.

–  Why You Should Let Your First Draft Suck and some advice for getting your inner critic to shut up and get on with it until you can at least finish the first draft.

–  Why You Don’t Need To Worry About Hating Your Own Work: some potential explanations for why you hate your own work, and some ways to re-contextualize it.

– How to Stay on Task: This is, technically, a guide for adults with ADD, not authors with depression, but I for one seem to have developed the concentration of a goldfish as some sort of bizarre coping mechanism for dealing with di/stress, so I believe it may be helpful anyway.

– Try writing in 15- to 20-minute bursts.

– 10 Affirmations for Creative Writers: Some basic writing affirmations, how affirmations work, and some advice to creating your own specific affirmations. (In addition to their tips, here’s one from me: the subconscious doesn’t respond to negations, so phrase your affirmations in ways that avoid words like “not” or “don’t.” For example, “I can stay on task!” will work better than “I won’t be distracted!”)

_______________________________________________________

That’s it for now. Y’all know the drill: If you have moderate to severe depression, seeking a  good therapist and possibly taking medication are the best things that you can do to manage your depression. Still, I don’t know how much writing-specific advice general therapists can give. I’ve never asked.

Also, even if you’re not clinically depressed, or don’t know if you’re depressed, these resources may still be helpful to you if you, too, want to write but have difficulty concentrating, lose motivation halfway through all your projects, and/or hate your own work despite previous excitement or positive feedback…. which all lowkey sound like symptoms of depression to me tbh, but who am I to label you when I can’t even confidently label myself? So go forth and accept yourselves and your work, darlings, and add on to this if you want because Azar knows I need the help too! ❤

Ohhh awesome list! And not just cuz I’m on it 🙂

wrex-writes:

Do it! Write something RIGHT NOW! Grab a piece of junk mail or a paper towel and write LITERALLY ANYTHING on it. A SINGLE WORD.

Okay now you’ve written something. No obligation to do it again. But every time you think “ugh I want to write but I can’t write,” do that. You’ve started. You’re writing again.

on Loras and Jon C parallels

robb-greyjoy:

This post started because I’ve been asked on Loras how or why I am so sure he will survive the Siege of Dragonstone and my usual answer is “Cersei takes for granted he’ll die, and if a character is announce to be about to die/taken for dead but not shown dying, they’ll usually not die”; but expanding this discussion and connecting to JonC (as being the survivors is part of both their storylines) I found some parallels with him .

Keep in mind this post is more of a rant than a meta 😉 there is enough people in the world confusing personal opinions and rational analysis.

It’s not a mystery how the grief is part of queer story lines since the dawn of times.
You don’t need to arrive to the modern takes on HIV or homophobic societal violence to see this trope of one mlm lover surviving the other, we have examples already in the Greek mythology to spare. The most famous may be the Patroclus and Achilles, as Achilles had to see his older, calmer lover die and then threw himself in wrathful and reckless grief until he found his own death, but we can find more in the myths of Hyacinth and Apollo, Cyparissus, Ampelos and Dionysus, Hylas’ myth also entwines with Heracles, and many others; Clytium and Cydon too, if we include Latin epic poetry, were given the destiny of separation, differently from Euryalus and Nisus.
It is worth noting that the survivor trope does not always include the reciprocity of the feelings, as the dramatic factor is held by the survivor having to survive grief more than in the beloved dying.

Now, in ASOIAF, Loras may be considered the survivor, as he has to live after Renly’s death and is frankly unable to sustain such a horrifying grief.
In the books, Loras seems to be facing an Achillean reckless wrath coming from the pain of having lost his beloved, we see him going easily into self-destructive behaviors and self-punishment (of course, we’re going to pretend D&D’s “rebound promiscuity” take didn’t happen because while promiscuity may very well be a reaction to trauma, the way it was handled was a disastrous mess) in a cycle of loss of hope and inability to fully express the pain.
At this point of the narration, though, having Loras die is too distant from Renly’s death to make the two feel united or fully caused one by the grief of the other, and the dramatic effect would be erased by us having to absorb this romantic moment through Cersei who not only actively hopes for the death and almost takes it for granted (“Let him die and let him be quick about it”) (“Loras Tyrell was dying”) (“When he dies I must raise a statue of him somewhere”) and who was highly dismissive of Loras (“still half a boy, arrogant and vain”) (“She did not want Tommen growing close to Loras Tyrell. The Knight of Flowers was no sort of man for any boy to emulate.”) (“the king still spent far too much time in his company”) (“Ser Loras lusts for glory as real men lust for women”) and who, above all, provoked his death.
So I went back and forth playing with that “Dying is not dead” and queer rep, it came to my mind the other “presumed dead” canonically gay character in this series: Jon Connington.
So I thought I’d try to tie up some parallels between these two:

– Love lost and light simbolism

  • “I rose too high, loved too hard, dared too much. I tried to grasp a star, overreached, and fell.” – ADWD, THE GRIFFIN REBORN
  • “When the sun has set, no candle can replace it.” – ASOS, TYRION II

– Both excellent fighters, in strong CONTRAST with homophobic stereotypes

– Better fighters than strategists with a battle turning tragic

Keep reading

thlayli-rah:

snapdreygon:

andercas:

I feel like when you’re writing, organizing chapters and dialogue is easy

but jfc, the amount of time it takes to constantly keep people moving and make sure they’re in the right spaces and trying to come up with wording for it is always such a shock. 

Like, fuck, I made you pick up a coffee cup, you need to put it down at some point. also I can’t remember what I dressed you in, can you push up your sleeves? I don’t remember if you even have your shirt on.

and YOU. YOU OVER THERE, you got out of your chair earlier, but did you come back yet? Are you coming back? Where did you even go and why’d you get up? Fuck, I can’t make you sit down again already, you just stood up, go…over there. go get more coffee. Did you bring your mug with you? fine. bring the pot to the table and—wait, wasn’t the coffee pot already over here? shit, hold on, I need to go back and re-read and re-write

this is the most relevant thing i have ever read.

I think one of the most wild things as a writer is the sensation that you’re not actually directing your characters– they’re sort of directing themselves, and you’re scrambling around attempting to copy down whatever it was that they just did, but they don’t wait for you to finish copying. They just keep walking and talking and moving around and existing of their own volition and at some point you look up and you’re like “WHOA OKAY EVERYBODY BACK THE FUCK UP WHERE ARE WE”

It’s kind of like trying to write sheet music for an orchestra while it’s playing