lightningstruckagain

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does anyone know how to make a desicion

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not funny it happened to me i was carried to ohio in a swarm of bees

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Don’t listen to the haters. I care about your spotify wrapped.

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artists please divorce yourself from the internet attention machine and focus on becoming weirder and having more fun instead of creating more engagement for corporate social media giants

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When you become 20 something, you have to forgive yourself or you will never grow up. You have to forgive yourself for everything and learn from it.

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Sometimes as a woman it’s important for you to wake up late and be alone in the house on a cloudy cold day with your feelings.

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Richard Siken, Boot Theory // Frank Bidart, The War of Vaslav Nijinsky // astralcorbozo on TikTok // Mary Herbert, A Long Time in the Desert // Dan Deacon, When I Was Done Dying

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girl help all i do is endure

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Remember when you'd turn on the radio and almost always Poker Face was playing

Back when God was still listening

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Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings

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these images of sandra oh in the 90's/early 00's live in my mind rent free

hey god it's me again

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“Two thousand years ago, Aristotle wondered why the great poets, philosophers, artists, and politicians often have melancholic personalities. His question was based on the ancient belief that the human body contains four humors, or liquid substances, each corresponding to a different temperament: melancholic (sad), sanguine (happy), choleric (aggressive), and phlegmatic (calm). […] But Aristotle’s question never went away; it can’t. There’s some mysterious property in melancholy, something essential. Plato had it, and so did Rumi, so did Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, Maya Angelou, Nina Simone … Leonard Cohen. But what, exactly, did they have? I’ve spent years researching this question, following a centuries-old trail laid by artists, writers, contemplatives, and wisdom traditions from all over the world. […] And I’ve concluded that bittersweetness is not, as we tend to think, just a momentary feeling or event. It’s also a quiet force, a way of being, a storied tradition–as dramatically overlooked as it is brimming with human potential. It’s an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world.”

— Susan Cain, from Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole (Crown, 2022)

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where's that quote abt like. being embarrassed abt the thinness of ur life the way ur embarrassed by a threadbare piece of clothing. bc like yeah

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being in ur 20s is about parking in the back of the grocery store parking lot and immediately bursting into tears

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Ok but before you go throwing random stuff into your story to spice it up or get it un-stuck, consider doing the following:

Grab a few events (minor or major doesn’t matter) from earlier or later in the story and trace out the causal chains. What caused it and what did it cause? Can the domino effect lead to a new event?

Trace out the “story” of the main cast’s motivation. How does the motivation interact with the story and how does the motivation change over time?

Go hunt for story elements you put in earlier that could be escalated into subplots.

Take a few characters who have different levels of information (or are more or less close to antagonists) and go through the story from their perspective. Perhaps you don’t know what should come next for your main character, but it might be obvious what comes next for a different character.

When you throw in new characters, first try to repurpose old characters. This makes them feel less cheap and gives them a better chance at developing depth. And when you do want to use a totally new one, consider someone who’s related to an existing character or a causal chain. The reader might already be wondering where X character’s parents are, after all. 

Point is, the deeper the connections between your story elements, the more satisfying the read. You don’t have to view those connections as a constraint. They can tell you what needs to happen next.

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she let me hit because i have the exact same correct interpretation of her favorite characters as her

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the past isn’t behind you it coils inside your body that’s why some years you feel closer and more nostalgic for certain ages than others just fyi