#write better stories

[fromcainwithlove]

author’s notes today: hey guys so just a warning there isn’t 100% explicit verbal consent even though they’re both really into it so remember this is FICTION, also they don’t use a condom :((( but in real life safe sex is important!!! please be safe out there everyone

a/n back in the day: kept thinking about ____ stabbing knives through both of _____’s hands to pin him in place while they fucked so here you go lol =P

[rozmorris]

Transitioning from non-fiction to fiction? Enjoy uncertainty and trouble

In many kinds of non-fiction, we tend to seek certainty. Answers. Solutions. But those qualities are not so desirable in stories. Most stories are about trouble in some way. But this is often uncomfortable for authors who are used to writing factual books. They don’t like trouble, ambiguities, uncertainties and muddy waters.     Here are a few examples I’ve recently seen from my work with…

[inbabylontheywept]

bad dating stories time: the shoe incident

so in highschool, my best friend wasnt allowed to go on dates unless there was another couple there to keep an eye on him. part of this was his parents being insane, but also, part of it was him being insane. in a problem with no reasonable parties, there are no reasonable solutions.

at some point in my junior year, my sorta-gf broke up with me, and i just wasnt feeling dating, which was bad for my friend, because he had a good thing going with a girl he met in court.

he kind of hounded me about it. kept pushing me to just put me feet back in the dating pool and i wasnt real thrilled about it, because i knew he was pushing me for his own benefit, not mine, so i kept telling him to fuck off, and after a few weeks of being told that i would date when i was damn well ready, he eventually said: okay. what if i paid for the date AND found you a blind date AND all you had to do was show up?

and i shouldve said no, i know, but i let him wear me down, and i will own my fault in that. a date starting on such a stupid premise could never have gone well.

but he still managed to find a way to make it worse.

i dont know how long he tried to set a blind date up. it couldve been multiple attempts. he couldve stooped to this immediately. but what happened in the end was that he called a girl from the ward he attended - a girl that he knew had a giant, mushy crush on him - and he said: hey! how would you feel about going on a date this weekend?

(you know, implying it was with him, but never actually saying it.)

and she said YES WOW I WOULD LOVE TO and he said great! and then he called me up and said he found me a date.

i did not learn about his crimes until several weeks later. i will die swearing before god almighty that i would never have allowed this travesty to happen if i had known.

that was on a monday. the date of the date rolled around that friday evening, and im sorry to confess, i really phoned the whole thing in. i showed up in my favorite comfy outfit, which was also a fashion crime: basketball shorts and flipflops and a baja hoodie. it was super comfy but it made me look kind of crazy. i picked him up first, and then i picked up his date next, and then we went to pick up my date, and thats where you're gonna get the play by play.

i arrived, walked across the yard, and knocked on the front door. she opened it almost immediately, like shed been waiting right by it, and i could see her expression go from OMG IM SO EXCITED to super disappointed, then disgusted and finally pissed. and because i didn't know about my friends sins, i thought it was from my outfit. which seemed... harsh. like, hey, im allowed to be quirky, fuck you. also its a blind date, i thought the deal was that we were both going to be sad broken sacks of mortality.

anyway, we looked at each other for several seconds before she slammed the door in my face.

i looked back at my friend. he was sweating bullets. i dont know what he expected from this, but there was this big long pause where we both tried to figure out what to do, and then the door opened up, and her dad invited me in, and he said she was gonna need a few minutes to finish getting ready, and that in the meantime we could sit and talk.

we did not talk. we did sit. i sat down on the couch, and he sat down in a chair across the couch, and then instead of talking he cleaned his pistol on the coffee table. i wasnt actually sure if it was a threat, or if it was just a fidget thing for 40+ year old republican men, but when i tried to help he got snappy so i just watched him put a pistol back together.

he was okay at it.

eventually my date came downstairs, still mad as hell for reasons beyond my ken, and i felt pretty guilty for being such a mess because i thought that was why she was so angry. i tried to make up for by walking her to the car and getting the door for her, just generally trying to be extra polite, but before i could make it back to the drivers side, her dad called me back to the door. so i flipped around, went to the door, and immediately regreted my decision.

soon as i was within range, her dad got waaaay too close to me, leaned in, and said "whatever you do to her, i will do to you," and my brain went into overdrive making three consecutive realizations.

realization one was, damn, the pistol thing was a threat. that sucks. what an asshole. realization two was, wait, im autistic and even i know theres a 0% chance me and my date even hold hands, least of all boink. does this guy actually think there's even a 1% chance of anyone in that car getting laid tonight? is he an idiot? and then realization three went through, which was wait, is this guy threatening to fuck me? and unfortunately, with my brain doing so much processing, my mouth was left to run amok, so somewhere between realization 2 and 3, i said:

"i can't get pregnant"

which, i swear, wasn't actually me trying to be a smartass, it was just me pointing out that he couldn't actually follow up on that threat. it just wasn't possible. we do not live in the omegaverse and im not scared of you.

still, it was an insanely catastrophic thing to say, and the moment we both heard it, we bluescreened. that single sentence obliterated both of our momentary streams of consciousness like a saltine in front of a sand blaster. problem was, he'd probably gone his whole life not even realizing someone could say something that stupid, and making that realization was going to cost him a lot of thinking time. me though? i had been saying shit like that for 17 years, i didnt have to rewrite my expectations of human nature, i just had to plan an exit and start striding. so i was already halfway back to the car before i heard "hey. hey come back. Hey. Hey. HEY. HEY WAIT. HEY GET BACK HERE. HEY-"

and then i was in my car, and i drove away.

if this happened today, he'd have called her, and the whole thing wouldve imploded then and there, but back then, there were still a decent number of teenagers without cell phones. especially the teenagers of insane, gun toting parents. so she just said: whoa what was that all about? and i said: dont worry about it, he'll tell you about it when you get home.

and she said: ok and went back to staring daggers at me and my friend.

WHICH SURPRISINGLY isnt even how the story ends.

we went to an improv comedy show, and it was a disaster. it shouldve been like, 7/10 tops, but between my date being mad, and my friend having a good time, and me having the existential terror of knowing that a guy with a pistol was probably waiting outside his house for me to come back, it was easily 11/10. i laughed way too hard at everything. especially the jokes that flopped. id sit there in this mostly silent room and laugh until i dry heaved a little, and my date was absolutely disgusted, and even my friend was a little embarrassed, which would just make me laugh harder. i laughed so hard that night i could barely talk the next day. and then the show ended, and my friend said, you know, that was a good time, but i think we should maybe do something a little chiller? who wants to walk around the park? and his date said yeah, and my date said no, and i finally had mercy on the poor woman so i said, look, im gonna drop you off. and i am so, so sorry about this, but im dropping you off like a block away. super duper sorry.

do talk to your dad about the pistols thing if you dont want this happening more in the future tho.

and she said: okay. so i dropped her off, and she walked a block down, and that was that.

then i drove my friend and his date to a park that was good for wandering. i figured they wanted something more private, so instead of following them around point blank, i chose a park with this 30 foot rope tower, and i climbed to the top and i said: hey i can see you anywhere from up here, you are officially chaperoned from a distance. get panopticoned idiot. except my friend really is an idiot, and he didnt really get the whole 'now i dont have to third wheel so insanely hard with you guys' thing so he climbed up the tower too, and then his date followed behind him, so there are three people basically sitting together on top of a telephone pole.

and then they started making out.

i was close enough to hear it.

i didnt really know what to do so i was just kind of sitting there, dissociating, when some college kids came around and started shaking the tower. my friend's date went aaaaaaaaaa im afraid of heights :( and my friend went oh, dont worry, ill hold you tight ;) and i went hey, im gonna climb down and ask them to stop.

so i did climb down, and i did ask them to stop, and they flipped me off, which i wasnt even mad about. at that point i was i was like yeah, it would be weirder if this wasnt a mess. gods plan has been to fly this day like a 747 into my metaphorical twin towers and brother he is close enough for me to see him grinning through the cockpit window. still, eventually the college students got bored, so they climbed up the tower, which gave my friend and his date a window to climb down, and together we walked back to my car.

now, i cant explain why this is, but sitting back in the drivers seat was my carriage-back-into-a-pumpkin moment. i'd been chill about all the chaos, just rolling with the punches, but sitting down made me realize how much of a shitshow the day had been, and while i couldnt go back and fix all of it, i could go back and fix one thing.

so i told my friend and his date, hey, you two, stay here and don't do anything weird. don't. then i walked back to the rope tower, and i started picking up the shoes the college students had left at the base in order to climb.

about halfway through this, i realized that if i took all their shoes, they might think i was in it for the money, and i actually wanted them to know i was in it specifically to spite them. fuck those guys. so i put all the right shoes back, gave myself a 100 foot headstart, yelled "nice shoes, assholes", did a little jig, and started running.

my advice to everyone is that college students are faster than you think. even with the headstart, and the whole climb down the tower thing, i was still only fivish seconds ahead of them by the time i got to my car. i flung the door open, looked in the backseat, didnt see anyone, flung the stolen shoes in the backseat, heard two "ow"s, took that as proof of presence, jumped in and pealed out of the lot.

my friend and his date popped up a few seconds later. they were, uh, doing something weird in the back seat. my one request - obliterated.

they climbed up to ask where the hell all the shoes had come from, and i was like yeah i stole them from the college students, and they were like oh. cool. hope you had fun. and i was like, i did. i did. but speaking of fun, what were you doing back there?

and for the first time in my buddies life, i think he was actually embarassed.

[bbybluemochi]

[OC] i miss drawing my eldritch monster oc soooo bad 🐙

[lilybug-02]

Maybe relying on the next generation to solve all your problems is a doomed-to-fail solution...*cough*

Bug Fact: Scientific research on the subject of yawing in insects is essentially nonexistent, but bees are thought to exhibit the phenomenon for thermoregulation.

V2 First || Prev // Next

Volume 2 Masterpost ▴♥︎▴

Okay I'll be 100% honest, I could not find a secure Scientific source for this bug fact. (yes I try to make my bug facts as accurate as possible). Theres not a lot of information on insect yawning. Who knew? (sarcasm😑).

There were a few scientific articles on bee thermoregulation, but I am not reading ALL OF THAT just to figure out if bees separate their mandibles a little bit.

I found this fact at Urban Beelife. Yawning would involve their Mandibles to open past neutral and snap back.

[callmeizukunotdeku]

one of my favorite brands of Jason and Tim angst is when Jason realizes that Bruce had been treating Tim like his replacement, not as Robin, but as Jason

Robin's a mantel, a mask that gets passed down from one brother to the next

Jason is a person. full stop.

just,,, something about making Jason's thinking shift from "Bruce replaced me by getting another son" to "Bruce found a kid that looks like me and he acts like the kid is me"

and Jason trying to bring this up with Tim, who knows better and expects worse just replying "at least, now that you're back, he's stopped calling me by your name"

and Jason is like "no, no, you should be asking so much more from him; this is Batman for god's sake"

"yeah" Tim agrees "I asked him to keep me around even though he doesn't need me any more. he seemed to be fine with the idea"

"need you? tim that's a fully grown adult he doesn't need you to do anything for him"

and Tim just gives him a you haven't seen the half of it look and Jason remembers that technically he's right

tim didn't need to do anything, he needed to be someone. and now that Jason is back, he doesn't need to be anyone anymore

but how much of himself did he lose trying to become someone else?

[urfriendlywriter]

How to get to know your characters better?

(feel free to add your own thoughts to this list, hope it helps!) req by @miricalebabyy44 <3

what will your character be like if they were in your shoes?

is your oc the mom friend or the dad or the childish one in their friendgroup ?

do those "poet, king, soldier" quiz for your oc. im being fr

do the "36 questions to fall in love" quiz as your oc.

ik your ocs trauma have an impact on their character, but how would they be like, if they hadn't gone through that experience?

does your oc have similar tastes as you do? (music, art, fashion, coffee/tea etctetc)

will they "i only live once so I'll do it for the plot." or will they "i only live once ffs, i don't wanna die." ?

what is your ocs opinion of love? how is/was their love life on a scale of 1-10?

will your oc let go of someone precious to them when they know they're putting them at danger?

around whom does your oc lets their guard down?

are they romantically constipated or a hopeless romantic?

what type of music does ur oc like?

write a lot about your oc if you're struggling to get to know them. find a drabble prompt, and write what they'd do.

do they trust others easily or do they get trusted by others easily?

what is something your oc will never talk to anyone about? (their answer can be deep, like some emo trauma or like smthng like back when they shit their pants or smthng yk)

do they give off golden retriever energy, or a black cat energy? (or both?)

what will THEIR opinion be on YOUR current life? will they be ur friend? will they trust you?

will your oc survive in a fantasy setting, a war setting, a dystopian setting, a futuristic setting, a medieval setting? will ur oc survive after getting stranded on an island, or a forest?

does your oc like their parents, do they like how their life is, do they feel like they're born in the right gen?

if they are ever to get one wish definitely granted, what would they wish for?

how did they react to their first kiss? (if they have had it by now lmao)

what's an ideal day for your oc?

lastly, who does your oc go to when they've fucked up?

[vapolis]

saw some posts about how IF writers need to free themselves of the shackles of long word counts and honestly, I agree. some of my most favorite published IFs are 180k words long without code. that's an average chapter for some on here which is impressive and amazing for readers but telling a story in less and having it make an impact still is also incredibly impressive to me

[ofswordsandpens]

thinking about a world in which RR actually committed to the path he set Percy on in hoo (wherein Percy has become jaded, angry, and resentful at the gods for breaking their sworn promises, is frequently sympathizing with Luke, is getting more and more powerful, and frequently losing himself to wrath) and instead of the subsequent Percy Jackson books being about getting recommendation letters, we could have gotten a trilogy exploring a fallen hero arc for Percy (that would ultimately have a positive resolution to it.)

[screambirdscreaming]

Perhaps the most peeving thing here is the way people keep jumping up to say, "you dont understand! I just want comforting narratives where people like me are embraced by society, as a break from reading stuff where I have to think about implications - you just don't understand the appeal of reading cozy mindless things to relax!"

And I'm like. Actually I really do! I often enjoy stories that are comforting and not emotionally challenging! I just dont find narratives of assimilation comforting. I don't find it reassuring or mindless to be shown a world where certain people have been moved from the "marginalized" box to the "normalized" box, and proceed to have a totally standard normal-guy low-stakes narrative from the lap of societal acceptance! I dont find it at all a balm or comfort to the struggles of marginalization. I find it grating and exhausting, and it makes me feel *more* aware of the forces of oppression and how they exist as the necessary inverse process of the forces of normalization.

There's a lot of political baggage here, obviously. Without digging too deep into that: if the type of story that gives you the least cognitive dissonance is one where you are - without changing in any way - allowed back into realms of "socially normal", what that means is basically that you consider your expulsion from normalcy an aberration, rather than a sign of deep flaws in the concept of social acceptance. You have not integrated your own experience of marginalization into a perspective on what marginalization says about society. You have not sought solidarity with other perspectives on marginalization, or if you have, it's still with the back-pocket loophole that you think you might, personally, be allowed back in. And that you're not sure you wouldn't take it, if you were.

And I get that for queer people right now, a lot of this is hazy. Maybe you would be allowed back in! Maybe you are! There's been a big swing in social acceptance, even if it's really unstable. Maybe the idea of a world where you, personally, can go back to being unmarginalized is a possibility that feels genuinely comforting.

But if you, or your friends, are a little farther out of reach of that edge. If the nature of society is so fundamentally hostile to you that simply being "accepted back in" would not meaningfully alleviate what hurts you about society - if the bare minimum for a world that isn't hostile to you requires deeper than a surface-level change - than playing pretend with that surface level change provides no comfort. If anything, it makes the cognitive dissonance worse - and makes you feel like your supposed allies are fairweather friends who would ditch you in the struggle if they were offered a bargain of acceptance. Which is very lonely and upsetting.

Or, regardless of how personal it is to you, if you've read and thought deeply enough into history or social theory to see how arbitrarily constructed the whole concept of social acceptance is - if you're a bit aware of the implications and underpinnings of things like family structures and divisions of labor and the like - the kinds of slight-of-hand shortcuts that are used to put those problems out of sight become very frustrating. Again it's a matter of cognitive dissonance: whether the typical fiction/fantasy "stock answers" to various concerns reassure your sense of how things normally work, or whether they raise red flags of horrors shoved out of sight.

Some people will act like you're "overthinking everything" and "actively looking for problems" if you talk about your emotional reaction to those red flags. But no: it's as direct and thoughtless as the reaction of finding them a comforting reassurance of business going on as usual. (You could say, the curtains are red at home. Comfort is a matter of perspective!)

Anyway, it comes back to a baseline of: what ways of conceptualizing the world feel easy, comfortable, and thoughtless to you? They may not be the same as the concepts you would consciously acknowledge, or agree with on a cognitive level! There are a lot of layers to integrating ideas into your worldview. It can take a lot of time and reflection for things to reach deeply, to the level of your intuitive reactions.

When people say, "I know it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny, but it's just really mindless and relaxing" - what that indicates, I think, is a certain particular position on that curve of conceptual integration. Where your deep emotional relationship to the idea of normalcy and assimilation is in a different place than the concept you consciously hold. And I can see where people get really upset when you push on this, because it feels like you're invalidating the things they truly and actively believe, by pointing out that the things they emotionally resonate with are in fundamental contradiction to those beliefs.

But it's also really annoying when people insist that you "just don't understand the appeal of mindless comfort fiction", when what you are actually trying to say is that you think it would be nice if people wrote more fiction that was comforting to people who find the idea of assimilation uncomfortable.

[baejax-the-great]

The thing is... if you think the pursuit of glory is stupid and immature and kind of worthless, this should probably make Achilles a more compelling Greek hero to you because his entire character arc is coming to the same fucking conclusion.

At the Embassy, Achilles spells it out--he has come to realize he values his life more than he values glory, more than he values the riches Agamemnon has promised him. He had a few days to think about it, and it turns out dying in a war that has nothing to do with him for men who don't respect him just doesn't seem that great a deal to him anymore. He wants to go home. There is the complication that all the other Greeks will die without Achilles' participation in the war, and so it is Phoenix, his mentor, and Ajax, his friend, who convince him not to leave then and there. He decides to stay and see what happens.

When Patroclus dies, Achilles realizes there was something he valued more than his own life--his friend. Without him, his life has lost that value he only just found, so he might as well pursue revenge or the empty glory and riches he no longer cares about. That's his tragedy.

By the end of the Iliad, Achilles is very much of the opinion that glory and riches weren't worth it, and when we see him again in the Odyssey, he says he would have rather been a long-lived humble shepherd or something rather than briefly a king of men.

So I guess my point is if your beef with Achilles is that glory is stupid, well, he agrees with you. Congrats on having the greatest of the greeks on your side. I've heard he's great in a fight.

[foolsocracy]

cheeeese

[sparrowlucero]

Reading comprehension site. As far as I understand it, your point is moreso that often stories set in a world without homophobia, transportation, etc. Are treated as morally better. Meanwhile stories which are parallel to real world queerness, identity, and oppression are often viewed negatively. Mostly because there's a standing idea of "you could have made it better by simply not including the homophobia and transphobia".

In my mind, both are morally equivalent, and both are examining themes which may be interesting in the context of queer experiences and liberation.

yeah that's exactly what I'm talking about... I'm basically just arguing against that more extreme mindset you sometimes see around queernorm stuff and pointing out that maybe it's not great to implicitly lump stuff like, say, steven universe, queer as folk, and i saw the tv glow together as the 'lesser' or "more harmful" type of work we should seek to avoid because they focus on queer struggles, or otherwise downplaying the value of themes that aren't like, escapist enough in some way.

Honestly I think at some point the discussion around depictions of homophobia- specifically, criticism aimed at the thought that (often quite fetishistic) homophobia (or sexism, racism, etc) needed to exist in fantasy for the sake of "historical realism", and of bury your gays-type stuff - sort of got telephone game'd into "it's weird to depict bigotry or gay characters suffering/dying when you could just not do that; no one wants to see that" and then in turn "the best, most valuable and desired way to depict queerness (race, disability, gender, etc) is to make it normal and as downplayed as possible" and i think it's worth pointing out that that's often not great advice/a good metric for judging queer fiction overall.

[vertigris-art]

Just found you for the first time and I like your art! What's your manga about, if you don't mind me asking?

(Read from right to left)

Thank you! I'm bad at writing blurps (especially in english) but: It's a slice-of-life, comedy manga in which you follow bear girl Gris on her daily shenanigans as she moves into the city of Kemoshima — a city that was once heralded as the safe heaven for Chimeras but has since become a derelict slum, ran be mafia families.

I've got about 37 pages released so far over on my dedicated website. Right now you need a Patreon sub to read it but when CH.1 is fully released, it will be free to read!

[infinitelystrangemachinex]

I could wax poetic about why Viktor's League backstory is inherently more interesting and more thematically resonant than where they went with him in Arcane season 2, but the cold hard truth is

a man covered in grease and probably blood who builds his own body out of scraps with his own two hands, can in fact build any contraption out of dinted metal sheets and a few screws including a deathray, performs deeply inadvisable operations on desperate but consenting people with his own tools, generates a cult following against his wishes because of his ability to inadvisably help people but the power's all his now anyway so he may as well, wants to clean up and save the undercity but is (only sort of) misunderstood as a walking Geneva Convention violation a freak and a supervillain, torments his arch-nemesis on at least a weekly basis and probably homoerotically hunts him for sport, had his life's work misattributed to people in the ruling class and is angry and tragic about it forever, tries to rip out his own emotions and is unsuccessful but pretends like he was not, is actually oddly kind to children, and is at the end of the day still just some guy,

is just hotter okay

[hightowerz]

of course the show that is fundamentally centered around two sisters and their tragedies becomes centered around men and said sisters are sidelined and their arcs are pushed to the sidelines and all the phenomenal care that went into their characters went down the drain. ​one’s arc is literally “the traumatized / mentally unwell character’s happy ending is committing suicide because they are simply too broken to heal and be happy” trope, and her mental instability is forgotten. the other is reduced to a mere plot device, has no agency of her own, and her trauma and anger is treated like a complete and utter joke for the sake of a shitty ship, and because the writers literally, point blank, were bored with her. it’s so sad because the tragedy of these sisters is so utterly devastating, so encompassing and so intricately woven into the narrative. but make it about two men i suppose?