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If you're reading this...

go write three sentences on your current writing project.

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Protective/Loyal Dialogue Prompts

- “I’ll handle this.”

- “Stay behind me.”

- “If you hurt them…”

- “Get away from them!”

- “Don’t come any closer!”

- “I’m with you to the end.”

- “I’ll carry you if I have to!” 

- “They don’t deserve you.”

- “I’ll always be here for you.” 

- “Tell me who did this to you.”

- “I just want to keep you safe.” 

- “Get your hands off my ____.” 

- “I won’t let them near you again.”

- “I’ll do anything for you. Anything.”

- “You’re safe with me, I’ll protect you.”

- “Don’t you touch a hair on their head!”

- “You touch them again and I’ll kill you!”

- “You don’t have to be scared anymore.”

- “They thought they could get away with this?”

- “It’s over. They’re not going to hurt you again.”

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I felt that 💀💀💀

Ouch.

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Will Smith and Margot Robbie interview each other

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one day you’ll have written a novel of your own.

you’ll be able to hold it in your hands, feel the weight of it - each chapter, each page, each word that you so lovingly crafted. you’ll be able to watch each scene, something you built and tended and know most intimately, unfold beneath your hands again with every turn of the page. you’ll be able to run your thumb down the spine of the book and feel the shape of your name pressed into the side, because this is yours.

so keep writing. because your novel is just waiting for you to bring it into existence.

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Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules For Writers

1. First write for yourself, and then worry about the audience. “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story. Your stuff starts out being just for you, but then it goes out.”

2. Don’t use passive voice. “Timid writers like passive verbs for the same reason that timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe. The timid fellow writes “The meeting will be held at seven o’clock” because that somehow says to him, ‘Put it this way and people will believe you really know. ‘Purge this quisling thought! Don’t be a muggle! Throw back your shoulders, stick out your chin, and put that meeting in charge! Write ‘The meeting’s at seven.’ There, by God! Don’t you feel better?”

3. Avoid adverbs. “The adverb is not your friend. Consider the sentence “He closed the door firmly.” It’s by no means a terrible sentence, but ask yourself if ‘firmly’ really has to be there. What about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before ‘He closed the door firmly’? Shouldn’t this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, then isn’t ‘firmly’ an extra word? Isn’t it redundant?”

4. Avoid adverbs, especially after “he said” and “she said.” “While to write adverbs is human, to write ‘he said’ or ‘she said’ is divine.”

5. But don’t obsess over perfect grammar. “Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story… to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all. “

6. The magic is in you. “I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him.”

7. Read, read, read. “You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

8. Don’t worry about making other people happy. “Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second to least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”

9. Turn off the TV. “Most exercise facilities are now equipped with TVs, but TV—while working out or anywhere else—really is about the last thing an aspiring writer needs. If you feel you must have the news analyst blowhard on CNN while you exercise, or the stock market blowhards on MSNBC, or the sports blowhards on ESPN, it’s time for you to question how serious you really are about becoming a writer. You must be prepared to do some serious turning inward toward the life of the imagination, and that means, I’m afraid, that Geraldo, Keigh Obermann, and Jay Leno must go. Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.”

10. You have three months. “The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.”

11. There are two secrets to success. “When I’m asked for ‘the secret of my success’ (an absurd idea, that, but impossible to get away from), I sometimes say there are two: I stayed physically healthy, and I stayed married. It’s a good answer because it makes the question go away, and because there is an element of truth in it. The combination of a healthy body and a stable relationship with a self reliant woman who takes zero shit from me or anyone else has made the continuity of my working life possible. And I believe the converse is also true: that my writing and the pleasure I take in it has contributed to the stability of my health and my home life.”

12. Write one word at a time. “A radio talk-show host asked me how I wrote. My reply—’One word at a time’—seemingly left him without a reply. I think he was trying to decide whether or not I was joking. I wasn’t. In the end, it’s always that simple. Whether it’s a vignette of a single page or an epic trilogy like ‘The Lord Of The Rings,’ the work is always accomplished one word at a time.”

13. Eliminate distraction. “There should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with. If there’s a window, draw the curtains or pull down the shades unless it looks out at a blank wall.”

14. Stick to your own style. “One cannot imitate a writer’s approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what the writer is doing may seem. You can’t aim a book like a cruise missile, in other words. People who decide to make a fortune writing lik John Grisham or Tom Clancy produce nothing but pale imitations, by and large, because vocabulary is not the same thing as feeling and plot is light years from the truth as it is understood by the mind and the heart.”

15. Dig. “When, during the course of an interview for The New Yorker, I told the interviewer (Mark Singer) that I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said that he didn’t believe me. I replied that that was fine, as long as he believed that I believe it. And I do. Stories aren’t souvenir tee-shirts or Game Boys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small; a seashell. Sometimes it’s enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all the gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same.”

16. Take a break. “If you’ve never done it before, you’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. It’s yours, you’ll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited. It’s always easier to kill someone else’s darlings that it is to kill your own.”

17. Leave out the boring parts and kill your darlings. “Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your ecgocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.)”

18. The research shouldn’t overshadow the story. “If you do need to do research because parts of your story deal with things about which you know little or nothing, remember that word back. That’s where research belongs: as far in the background and the back story as you can get it. You may be entranced with what you’re learning about the flesh-eating bacteria, the sewer system of New York, or the I.Q. potential of collie pups, but your readers are probably going to care a lot more about your characters and your story.”

19. You become a writer simply by reading and writing. “You don’t need writing classes or seminars any more than you need this or any other book on writing. Faulkner learned his trade while working in the Oxford, Mississippi post office. Other writers have learned the basics while serving in the Navy, working in steel mills or doing time in America’s finer crossbar hotels. I learned the most valuable (and commercial) part of my life’s work while washing motel sheets and restaurant tablecloths at the New Franklin Laundry in Bangor. You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”

20. Writing is about getting happy. “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.”

(Via Barnes and Noble)

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Poison Ivy - Animated by JamieFayX

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get to know me meme: favourite dc ladies (2/5) 2. Poison Ivy It took God seven days to create paradise. Let’s see if I can do better

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when fics don’t update

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If I Could Tell Her- Dear Evan Hansen

ATTENTION

If you see this you are OBLIGATED to reblog w/ the song currently stuck in your head :)

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Dumb comic imma just slap on here 😂

I’m not dead, I just never use tumblr anymore lmao

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katama_k/

Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/katama_k

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Character Creation

(Not another form.)

I’ve been running my characters through these questions lately so I thought I might as well share them? They are meant to be a fun but challenging look at how your characters are going to interact with each other and the plot. 

The examples and explanations are simplistic versions and some stories (especially complex ones) will create variation on the standard.

MOTIVATION

1. What does your character want? 

This is something they think will make their life better. They either start out the story wanting it or decide they want it at the inciting incident. It’s driven by internal desires that are strong enough to force the character to make external choices within alter the plot. Often this want demonstrates a flaw the character will have to overcome by the end of the story. (Ex. Ash wants vengeance for her sister at any cost to herself and others.)

2. What does your character need? 

This is what will in actuality make their life better. It should build off or contrast their want in some way. (Ex. Ash needs to let go of her quest for vengeance in order to protect the people she loves and let them protect her in turn.)

3. At what point does your character realize that what they need isn’t what they want, and what drives this understanding? 

This should happen near the end of the story, usually at the beginning of the climax.

Bonus: If your character doesn’t chose to go after what they need instead of what they want during the above realization, at what point do they make this choice, and what drives it?

RELATIONSHIPS

(Note this can apply to both romantic and platonic relationships!)

1. What external influences are keeping these characters apart? 

These are things within the world, likely out of their control, such as war or social expectations or conflicting goals or a looming knowledge they’ll be separated.

2. What internal beliefs are keeping these characters apart? 

This is generally old baggage that comes from a feeling, such as fear of being betrayed or not feeling good enough, but it can also be something that arises as time goes on, such as the fear that being honest about their changing beliefs will cause a rift.

3. What does the character have to lose if the relationship falls apart or doesn’t mature?

This can be anything from not having someone there to share their dreams with to not having the skills the other personal provides their sleuthing partnership.

4. What does the character gain if everything works out and these two people are happy together?

Pretty much the same as question three except, you know, opposite.

PERSONALITY

1. If your character is placed in a bare room with a single closed door and told to pick one of these items, which do they chose: a knife, a shield, or a bandage.

Bonus: Why did they pick that item?

2. If you had to portray this character through one action (not a personality trait or a descriptor but an action) what would they be doing?

This could be a hobby, or nervous habit, a presentation of emotion, etc, but it has to show who the character is.

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Love this

Ahh sorry for the rush job! Really wanted to do a drawing for Mermay and had a tight schedule today! So just a quick gesture :) I hope I’ll have time to do more, sounds like it’s an overall good challenge.

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[Image description - Images of the rainbow pride flag with the text: SHIPPING DOESN’T MAKE YOU AN ALLY, BUT IT DOESN’T MAKE YOU GROSS OR A FETISHIST EITHER, KEEP SHIPPING WHAT YOU LIKE. End description.]

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Taking Creative Liberties ✏️

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My Daughter’s Coming Home

When I first saw I was getting a call from an unknown number, I thought it was another sales call. I only answered it on the off chance it was from my friend Irma, I knew she’d gotten a new phone number.  

“Hello?”  

It was quiet except for someone breathing on the other end. I frowned but tried again. “Hello, is someone there? Or is this another robot telling me I’ve won a cruise?”

I heard a quiet laugh, followed by a sob.

“Hi mom.”

Read On…