keithriwrites

[keithriwrites]

[keithriwrites]

It is very funny seeing Trump supporters lose their shit over being called ‘Weird’.

It absolutely attacks them at their core.

[keithriwrites]

choose your fav puppy

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[keithriwrites]

the beginning of a beautiful friendship

New fic alert! This is my first published work set in my own Pureblood Culture 'verse, as opposed to @ellorypurebloodculture's, titled The Isles of Avalon.

[keithriwrites]

New work in 'to reach for tomorrow' out

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New fic up

[keithriwrites]

title tales: the axe forgets (but the tree remembers)

Marietta Edgecombe & Luna Lovegood genfic.

Lady Luna Lovegood keeps a diary of every awful thing Miss Marietta Edgecombe says to her. Some day, she will hand it to her cousin and watch him destroy the witch who tries to cut her down.

[keithriwrites]

Hey there, I'm Keith/Ri (either is fine).

This is my writing sideblog, my main is @shadowicepuma.

I mainly write original works, fanfiction in my rendition of Ellory's PC 'verse (@/ellorypurebloodculture), and Star Wars fanfiction (almost exclusively centered around the Jedi, and also within the Kenjedi/Obi-Wan Kenobi Collective 'verse). I post longer pieces on AO3 and some short pieces here.

Asks are open! Feel free to ask about my worldbuilding, I love any opportunity to talk about it.

On Wednesdays I do an ask game called WIP Wednesdays, where if you send me an ask with a word, and the word appears in one of my WIPs, I'll share the sentence it appears in.

Works currently being posted and series listed below the cut

Series:

to reach for tomorrow requires letting go of yesterday: PC 'verse, Lily Evans centered

building home: PC 'verse, centered around a group of OCs' relationships along with some canon characters

and the universe said i love you (and i said i loved it back): Star Wars, Jedi focused, fix-it AU, unpublished

Untitled Clone Wars AU: pretty much exactly what the title says, Star Wars fix-it, Jedi and Clone Culture focus

Works:

I'll tell you how the sun rose (A ribbon at a time): building home 'verse, chapter 1 up, no update schedule

Wix Celyn Sayer of the Considerate House of Sayer sends their Courtship Offer to Lord Charlus Potter, seeking permission to pursue Heir James Potter.

[keithriwrites]

hi, i made a quiz: plan a fantasy novel and i’ll tell you what makes you attractive. 

i hope you guys enjoy it. tag with your results, if you like! 🌹

[keithriwrites]

some notes on POV

I wanted to type up a little rundown of quick n dirty writing tips based on things I see a lot in fic/ amateur original manuscripts, and, uh, it turned out that they all revolved around POV. Nailing point of view in fiction writing is both crucial and one of the least intuitive building blocks of writing to learn: an understanding of POV has been the only useful thing i took from my college creative writing classes, and god knows how long I’d have stumbled along without it otherwise.

So! I am saving you, baby writer, the trouble of slogging through a miserable writing class with a professor who’s bitter as FUCK that genre fiction sells better than his “sad white man drinking” lit fic novels. Here are some assorted writing tips/ common mistakes and how to fix them, as relating to POV:

(this turned into a WALL OF TEXT so i will be using gifs to break it up)

> “I watched the ship tilt” “he saw the sky darken” “she noticed flowers growing on the rusted gate.” no. If the character who felt/saw/noticed etc is your POV character, whether in first or third, then this is called filtering and it takes the reader out of the story by subtly reminding them of the separation between the POV character and themselves. in most styles of writing, this is bad, not to mention it unnecessarily complicates your prose. try again: “the ship tilted.” “the sky darkened.” “flowers grew on the rusted gate.” Readers will instinctively understand that the POV character is witnessing the story happen, they don’t need to be told it.

I’m not telling you to never refer to your character “watching” something, of course: “I watched the birds dart around for hours,” isn’t filtering because watching is a notable activity, here, rather than an unnecessary obfuscation of the “real” thing happening. But understand how phrasing can jar readers momentarily apart from the character viewpoint, and use it with intention.

> Close Third Person POV still requires you to be mindful of your POV character. this is a rookie mistake i see allllllll the time. “Josh cried stupid tears at the beautiful display by the dancers,” is a sentence in Josh’s POV. “Stupid” tells us how he feels about the tears, “beautiful” tells us how he feels about the display. ok. all good so far. BUT.

“Josh cried stupid tears at the beautiful display by the dancers. It was everything he’d wanted from this production, from the lighting to the costumes to the exquisite choreography. Martha had to suppress a fond smile at his reaction; he was always so sweetly emotional after the curtain fell.”

Do you see what’s wrong with this paragraph? The first two sentences are Josh’s POV, and then the third one suddenly becomes Martha’s. A lot of amateur writers don’t even realize they’re doing this, which in its most egregious form is called “head-hopping,” but it’s disorienting and distracting for the reader, and makes it harder to connect with a single character. In multi-person close 3rd POV story, the POV should remain the same for an entire chapter (or at least, for an entire scene/ segment,) and change only between them. If you’re new to POV wrangling, watch your adjectives/ interiority (we’ll get to that in a second) and think “which character am I using as a lens right now, and am I being consistent" every once in a while until you get the hang of it.

> Related: let’s talk about interiority. Interiority is a more sophisticated way of thinking of a character’s “internal narration,” IE bits of prose whose job is not to advance the plot, set tone, or describe anything, (although it CAN do any of those things as well, and good prose will multitask) but to give us a specific sense of the character’s internal life, including backstory, likes, dislikes, fears, wants, and personality. In the above example paragraph, the middle sentence “It was everything he’d wanted from this production, from the lighting to the costumes to the exquisite choreography” Is interiority for Josh. It tells us that not only did he love the show, he’s very familiar with this art form and thus had expectations going in; likewise, listing the technical components is a way of emphasizing his enthusiasm while pointing out that it’s informed, implying that Josh himself is intellectually breaking down the performance even in appreciation.

“That’s a lot for a throwaway sentence you made up for an example.” Well, yeah, a little interiority goes a long way. Interiority is what creates the closeness we have to POV characters, the reason we understand them better than the non-POV characters they interact with. It’s particularly key in the first couple chapters of an original work, when we need to be sold on the character and understand the context they operate in.

If readers are having trouble connecting to or understanding the motivations of your character, you might need more interiority; if your story’s plot is agonizingly slow-moving (and you don’t want it to be) or your character is coming off as melodramatic, you might need less. It’s not something you should necessarily worry about; your amount of interiority in a WIP is probably fine, but being able to recognize it for what it is will help you be more mindful when you edit.

(Fanfic as a medium revels in interiority: that’s how you get 10k fics where nothing happens but two characters lying in bed talking and having Feelings. Or coffeeshop AUs that have literally no plot to speak of but are 100k+ long.)

> try not to describe the facial expression of a POV character, even in third person. rather like filtering, it turns us into a spectator of the character when they’re supposed to be our vessel, and since it’s *their* POV, there should be other ways available to communicate their emotion/ reactions. There are ways of circumventing this, (the example sentence where “Martha had to suppress a fond smile” is an example) where their expression is tied up in a physical action, or something done very deliberately by the character and therefore becomes something they would note to themselves, but generally, get rid of “[pov character’s] eye’s widened” and “[pov character] smiled.”

so that’s what i got! go forth and write with beautifully deliberate use of POV.

[keithriwrites]

How To Write Latinx/Hispanic characters (And How Not To)

Okay, so you wake up one day and decide you want to include a Hispanic/Latinx character. That’s great, I’m always up to seeing more diversity everywhere! That being said writing a culture that’s different than our own can be very challenging sometimes and thus here I am with this post pointing out the more general things. There is so much diversity within the Latinx/Hispanic community I could in no way really cover how to write all of us. 

How To Refer To Us

Okay, let’s start out with the basics. 

Let’s get one thing clear. We’re not Spanish. We speak Spanish, of course. Colonization will do that. But we are in no way Spanish. Spanish people are from Spain, European and very much not from Central or South America. Of course, there are dozens of different countries within Latin America but as a whole, we are all Latinx/Hispanic.

There is sometimes a bit of confusion as to how to refer to us, and really it depends on the person. 

Hispanic is the one I most commonly use to describe myself because it’s very gender neutral and I just like the way it sounds. 

Latinx is the one that causes a bit more confusion. Latino is the singular used when referring to males. Latina is used as the female singular. Now the way Spanish works, the masculine singular is also as plural to refer to everyone both male and female as a whole. They are Latino, for example. Latinx is a more gender-neutral usage that refers to males, females and any nonbinary or genderfluid people. It’s not all that common to use in actual dialect as it is online though. At the end of the day, it depends on a persons preference. 

Diversity within Latin America

Did you guys know that there are 33 Latinx/Hispanic countries? Because sometimes I’m convinced people think that after the US, there’s Mexico. And just that.

Nope.

Please for the love of god stop making everyone Mexican. We’re not. I mean I am but that’s beside the point (I’m also Costa Rican and would love to see a Costa Rican character out there *hint hint*) Very often we’re all mushed together and it just doesn’t make sense because every single country has its own diverse culture, slang, and lifestyle. 

An important thing to note is that we don’t all share the same slang. Or food. 

For example, in Costa Rica we say “Mae”. It’s the equivalent of “Dude” in English (though more gender neutral like Dude is in New York. In Venezuela, they say Chamo/Chama. I’m pretty sure there are 31 other variations. If including spanish speech is absolutely necessary, DO YOUR RESEARCH. If I hear one more Columbian character speak using Mexican slang…

In other news, we don’t all eat Burritos. Didya know that’s actually texmex? 

Food will vary depending on the region. Sometimes Enchiladas in Mexico are different than Enchiladas in El Salvador. In Costa Rica Tostadas is just toast. In Mexico, Tostadas are my joy and happiness. 

Another example, In Mexico they eat a lot of tortillas. In Costa Rica we eat rice with EVERYTHING. Apparently throwing rice into soup is not a normal thing everyone does. Who knew? I do actually because I researched!

Now we move onto the physical description. We can be tall, we can be short. We can have brown skin, we can have extremely fair skin. Diversity is among us. Also, families can be literal rainbows. In my direct family of four people, none of us share the same skin color. My dad has brown skin, my sister is more of a dark sandy color, my mom has an olive color to her, and depending on how healthy I am I’m either olive or pale in that way that makes you wonder whether you’re looking at a corpse. 

We can be naturally blonde too by the way. I’m not. But a lot of Hispanic/Latinx people are naturally blonde. Some people have blue eyes. My dad has some really nice green eyes I, unfortunately, did not inherit (I did spend the first month of my life with gray eyes though!) Afro-Latino people also exist! Asian-Latino people do as well! There is so much diversity among us! You have no excuse for making us look all the same. 

How Bilingual People Really Speak

If you do include Spanish within your WIP chances are your character is Bilingual. There are some… odd interpretations of how bilingual people out there speak. They make me go WTF sometimes. (Or most times really)

At the end of the day it really depends on the person, but here are a few things that really stand out:

Bilingual people are not gonna speak half English half Spanish to someone who we know won’t understand us. Especially not if we live in the good ol USA. Racism is a thing and chances are if we speak a half Spanish half English sentence we are going to have confused people, and we will probably be mocked. Now if your character is speaking to a friend or family member they might mix a bit of one language with the other, but there’s not going to be a seamless mix of both because it gets confusing very fast. I can either count in Spanish, or in English. I will have an aneurysm if I attempt to do it in both.

Also the whole “I forgot to switch back” thing is just weird, please don’t. 

Here’s a quick list of things we actually do as bilingual people. 

Accidentally translate a saying or phrase into a different language and watch confusing settle in others’ faces as they try to figure out who the fuck says that

Try to say a word in one language but you only remember the word for it in spanish so you just sit there trying to find the correct word, while your friends start suggesting words in hope that you guys can move on with the convo.

Making up “Spanglish” words and then realize they don’t actually exist (I’m still salty with my mom for telling me “Mopear” was a word. Apparently that is not how you say “To Mop” in spanish) 

Try to apply the grammar structure of one language into the other and confuse the fuck out of yourself and everyone else. 

Use a word in one language that seems similar to this word in another language and then find out they’re a different thing. (Embarazada does not mean Embarrassed guys. I found that out the hard way) 

That’s it for now!

There are probably a lot of topics I have not covered here, and I cannot speak for everyone, so I did make this post to cover the more general aspects of things, but if you have any more questions don’t hesitate to pop into my Ask box! Happy writing guys!

[keithriwrites]

“Hey I love your story! Is it okay if I draw-“ 

YES. PLEASE, GOD, YES, DRAW IT. DRAW IT AND SHOW ME. I WILL BEG YOU FOR IT.

[keithriwrites]

You know you write long chapters when you meet your goal of 25,000 words and are about halfway through chapter 3.