writetobuildtheworld

[writetobuildtheworld]

mom can you come get me things are getting bad again and i feel every insult like a sharp tooth and i feel my dreams rotting under my fingernails and i feel too much all the time or else i feel nothing at all and it doesn’t seem to matter if i drink and dance and party or if i stay at home curled up to study

mom are you sure when i was born i was a person and not just a vortex. always hungry. always swallowing. no matter how much goes in me i always end up empty.

[writetobuildtheworld]

Did I daydream this, or was there a website for writers with like. A ridiculous quantity of descriptive aid. Like I remember clicking on " inside a cinema " or something like that. Then, BAM. Here's a list of smell and sounds. I can't remember it for the life of me, but if someone else can, help a bitch out <3

[writetobuildtheworld]

just a heads up to my fellow writers out there that AO3 is currently fighting off bots commenting on people’s works to tell them that AO3 will delete their fics “due to the works being deprecated”, and the deletion will affect their accounts unless the authors delete the fics themselves first. IT IS A SCAM. AO3 will NOT delete your works. please do NOT fall for these bots!

I’ve been told the reason why these bots are doing this is due to copyright infringement issue where they’re trying to steal your works (possibly to train AI but this is just a guess) ‼️‼️‼️and once you deleted your fics, it will be either very difficult or impossible for you to claim ownership of your own fics when they were already deleted.‼️‼️‼️

a reminder that AO3 will never contact you through your comments section (in case they claim to be one of the moderators). AO3 will only contact you through your email address which you use to register your account, and it will be from AO3’s official handle. not some sketchy ass @

so if you get a comment telling you you should “delete your works to protect your account because AO3 is doing blah blah blah” report that comment. don’t delete your works.

PLEASE DO NOT FALL FOR THESE SCAM.

AO3 IS NOT DELETING WORKS.

DO NOT DELETE YOUR WORKS JUST BECAUSE SOMEONE CLAIMS THEY KNOW SOMETHING.

[writetobuildtheworld]

A book with a first person narrator what describes everything with oddly specific clarifications and denials, coming completely unprompted.

"I poured myself a bowl of cereal that had no cockroaches in it."

"Her hair - which was real human hair, growing naturally from her own scalp - was brown."

"I walked to my car which I legally owned and whose rightful ownership had never been under question or dispute."

"Their dog was barking in a way that is entirely normal for a regular, full-blooded dog, and could not be mistaken for the vocalisations of a half-wolf, a jackal, or perhaps a hyena."

"My mother - who has never been convicted or imprisoned for manslaughter - emerged from the kitchen."

[writetobuildtheworld]

Re: fanfic commenting, the people who comment things like 'this is really great i liked it!' or '💗' are doing great, and i appreciate them.

comment box intimidates me regularly. it's hard. thank you for taking the time and trouble to affirm writers like that. it is meaningful to do!

but i feel like a lot of these are coming from people who really want to engage with the writer and give feedback and support, but are struggling with the process and resorting to the generic without being satisfied by it, and to them i wanted to say that if you want to level up your comments to a higher power level, you do not have to learn a whole new approach or be a different person with different observations, or anything like that.

just add small elements to what you're already doing.

so 'this is really great i liked it!' becomes 'this is really great i liked [thing]!' where the thing can be 'the dialogue' or 'the angst' or 'the pony' or literally any feature of the fic.

one word, +500% impact.

and '💗' while a perfectly lovely sentiment in itself can expand to '💗🐉⚡😭' to deliver 500% validation to the writer of a story where you had emotions about the bit where there was a dragon and dramatic weather.

and you don't have to make a sentence about it.

(i'm a fic writer with over a million words on Ao3 and i have absolutely resorted to emoji string comments when my brain wasn't feeling the sentence thing. no shame.)

it's delightful to know a real actual person liked your work and bothered to say so, but better still to get that sense of connection and affirmation from a thought they had about it.

so if you're someone who feels like they're really bad at commenting but keeps making a heroic effort to do it anyway because you know what an important element of the community feedback is, consider exploiting one of these force multipliers.

[writetobuildtheworld]

Blog Directory - Theory

10 Ways to Develop your Writing Skill

10 Questions to Ask about a Story

Are you Exploring your Concept to their Fullest?

Beginner's Luck (the illusion of a perfect first draft)

Camera as Narrator (my first ever post!)

Conventions of Genre

Creative Writing is all Confidence

Discovering your Weird Brain

Down with "Shock Factor"

Expanding on the Narrator

Experiencing and Writing

How to Read with Intention

How to Sentence Structure

Is it Possible for an Idea to be Beyond your Skill Level?

Maintaining a Writing Schedule

Playing with the Levels of Abstraction

Read it Out Loud!

Start a Dream Journal

There's no Such Thing as Fluff

The Reveal before the Reveal

When Writing Needs Therapy

Why Screenwriting is a Good Model for Novel Writing

Writing a Universal Story

Writing is Feeling

Writing Requires Fuel

Zoom in

Head back to the blog directory ->

[writetobuildtheworld]

Blog Directory - Plotting

10 Questions to Ask about a Story

Are you Exploring your Concepts to the Fullest?

Finish your Drafts

Motifs and Throughlines

Should I Edit or Rewrite?

Stick to your Twist

The Last Chapter

Troubleshooting your Plot

Your Plot will Always have Holes

Head Back to the Blog Directory ->

[writetobuildtheworld]

i’m not making him better OR worse i’m simply staring at him like this

[writetobuildtheworld]

Mr. Neil, I have perhaps the most important question I could ask here.

The core of writing advice has one thing. One, special thing to it. And that is: “Write. Write write write.”

But what COUNTS as writing? Surely writing a manual for a lawnmower has nothing to do with becoming a fiction writer.

But what about writing fan fiction? Writing out a dnd story with original characters? Does it just have to be publishable work in the most serious sense?

What counts as writing is writing. Learning how to express yourself clearly is everything. Writing a manual for a lawnmower that’s a good manual for a lawnmower will teach you a lot of about clearly telling people what things look like and how to do things in your fiction. No joke. Write.

[writetobuildtheworld]

you can literally never go wrong with having diners in your story regardless of its genre. like they're false beacons of hope, they're safe havens for the lost and unwanted, they exist as a bridge between worlds, they're haunted by the memories of all the people who have been there before, they're both cozy and eerie, and they're literally always there. every town has a diner. every town knows what those flickering red lights mean. and stories about diners never fail to fuck severely.

[writetobuildtheworld]

The reason none of my wips get finished

[writetobuildtheworld]

Its all “i love putting guys in situations” until were on a filler episode. Where are the REAL putting guys in situations lovers.

[writetobuildtheworld]

weird cultural shift detected

Fam, be careful with your time online. I highly recommend sinking some time and energy into offline pursuits.

Try: knitting or crochet; gentle movement, stretching, walking if you can; playing a musical instrument, whether it's piano or penny whistle; and especially reading.

I do not mean performative BookTok reading that we do for likes because our neurotransmitters have been nerfed by modern life.

I mean actual reading that we do for ourselves alone.

If reading is hard, if attention or energy or memory are operating at a deficit, I get it. Nevertheless, please try. If you notice you're skipping across big chunks of text like a river stone, if you can't finish a paragraph, slow down, pronounce the words out loud. Stop sometimes and ask yourself what you just read. Explain the story or article or poem to your blorbo or your cat or a stuffed animal.

If your head feels scrambled up, no judgment. We may have incredibly intractable neurochemical reasons that this is hard. Just tell the blorbo, "That's hilarious, I don't remember any of what I just read. Let's read it again, together."

(Please don't ask A.I. to do this for you. Please. It's your right to read and think about it your own way. A.I. doesn't actually understand anything. Please don't assume it will guide you safely through this next weird phase of our human culture.)

If reading longform, offline, makes you feel bored or anxious, be gentle and patient with yourself. Start with stories you remember well, reliable sources of well-being. But please know you will need to put some backbone into it in the long run.

I think we are going to need to rebuild our ability to think, to process experience. This will be an unsupported activity. In fact, most of the really powerful cultural forces are making it very hard for us to notice, feel, perceive, or think clearly.

Not sure what, but something's happened quite recently that is making this situation much worse, some kind of tipping point.

Please read something every day.

Your friend, greenjudy

[writetobuildtheworld]

you balance the catholic guilt & you still eat too many servings of pasta. you split the pomegranate but you think of the lord jesus and his guts spilled across your dining room table. yesterday was father's day and you went to church. your father is also a deacon. he wants you to marry a nice man one day, when the lesbianism wears off.

you are religiously traumatized, probably, but also the world is in absolute chaos. you feel guilty all the time about not being endlessly informed - about the mini breaks you take between in-person activism & volunteer work and doomscrolling through online news articles. you feel guilty you dropped a sweater on the ground. you feel guilty you cannot afford rent. you feel guilty, and you quite actually feel guilty that you feel guilty.

your father isn't a tall man, but he is good at being imposing. yesterday was hard. all father's day activities are. you watched him radicalize in the last 10 years, moving from a man who had some ignorant views to - whatever this is. he crowed at you that 250,000 people showed up to trump's military parade. you have seen the pictures and think that it's very unlikely there were more than 100k. but your father has no shame. your father just says the thing without checking it.

you have a conspiracy theory that, in some small part, the parade was also to rebrand june as military appreciation month. how often they have said why is there no veteran's month, even though there is. the white house's stance on pride this year was that they did not want to acknowledge something that "only affects 7% of the population." you don't know where they got that number, but it's guilt-free. it's just, like, out there. they get to just say things. you can't even fucking imagine.

you haven't grown up. you still wear the 2014 tumblr style shit sometimes. you are still on tumblr. you are still thinking about girls and "holy holy holy" and it always does feel magical and rebellious and incredible to kiss her. nothing is new about love until it is your love, and then it is impervious. and yet - still you feel stuck, and guilty, and the acid in your stomach refuses to settle. all the yearning and the stupid shit, and the fucking guilt.

you make a little poem in your notes app. you make your hands into a little prayerful steeple. your mother tells you that you make yourself crazy. you have a running joke with your friends that if you had no mental illnesses, you'd be unstoppable.

but when you kiss her, you feel it. when you buy groceries. when you forget to text back - you feel it. the little thing inside of you, always fucking chipping away at things.

[writetobuildtheworld]

art + lemony snicket

x x x x x

[writetobuildtheworld]

Link to thread

Link to news story

[writetobuildtheworld]

after meaning to get around to it for years i finally listened to almost the entirety of Sold a Story and it is as groundbreaking as everyone says it is. it's also the most confusing, to me, single event in American culture in my lifetime and my reasons for thinking that are pretty complex so im not sure theyre fully formed yet. there's a list of shit in this podcast that made me feel like i was going insane

i KNEW something was going on at a population level, i've been noticing it for years, people kept telling me i was imagining things, but i was RIGHT, two generations of kids have been reduced to barely-literate levels of language function because of this shit and you CAN see it and hear it while talking to people in the world!

the entire adoption of the Calkins programs in the first place were based on the majority of people responsible for American child education deciding basically overnight that "children don't need to learn phonics in order to become strong readers" which is literally and not figuratively equivalent to saying "children can learn algebra without learning what numbers are". it is so self-evidently false i dont even know how to respond to such an assertion. you have to be fundamentally devoid of common sense to think this is true. language is comprised of sounds (phonemes), sounds are represented by letters, letters make up the alphabet, the alphabet makes up words, and words make up sentences. you cant just skip over the parts of this you dont like, it's the basis of our entire civilization. "i dont need to learn individual notes i just want to play to saxophone" okay well. too bad? you cant

american primary education apparently has no communication whatsoever with the scientific fields of human behaviorism, pediatrics, neurology, linguistics, the science of learning generally, and there is next to zero communication between teachers who are actively responsible for educating children and the entire research field of educating children. they just dont talk to each other, at least in huge swaths of the country. in retrospect this is obvious, i just have been assuming incorrectly this entire time that maybe, surely, some aspect of how our public schools are administered is in some way being guided by scientific evidence and research. this has apparently not been the case for 20+ years. Lucy Calkins herself claims she "didn't know" that the research on how children acquire language had been essentially settled by the 1990s, she just wrote her stupid book based on her own self-assurance that what she THOUGHT children were doing when they learned language was correct. she ddin't check, she didnt ask about research or studies, she didn't test her hypothesis, she just told everyone she had figured out how to teach kids to read based on nothing but her own untested assumptions. and everyone was like "okay sounds good". every single person involved in this process is or was in a position of responsibility for educating american children. and almost none of them thought to ask "okay, but have you tested it? does it work?" because they didn't test it, and it doesnt work, and for some reason that was never even brought up

teachers kept being interviewed on this podcast who kept saying things like: "they never taught us how to teach children to read" and "they didn't teach us how children learn so i had no idea how it worked" and then explaining this was why they were so easily hoodwinked by the Calkins program. i don't understand this. what is actually taught during the two year degree programs at teaching colleges? if it's not child psychology, pedagogy, neurology, and actual techniques for teaching children, what are they teaching you to do there? one of my friends who went to a teaching college told me they mostly provided classes on lesson planning.

individual teachers apparently are not reading books or articles or papers on any of these subjects either. so having graduated from a teaching college knowing nothing about children, teaching, or even basic english literacy ("i didn't know how to teach phonics and no one told me" is another thing actual teachers kept saying on the podcast. girl, SESAME STREET can teach basic english phonics, and it does), almost none of them actually do any investigation on their own. they just show up to their workplace (the school) and "teach" whatever admin hands them. ?????????????? how is this possible?

i realized last night in a fugue of post-exertional malaise that the three-cueing method of teaching reading is training children to approach language very similarly to how a large language model does it. they laboriously instruct the children to guess what the next word in a sentence will be, often by actually covering the word with a post-it note and then cajoling and badgering the child until he guesses the word under the post-it, based on the vibes on the sentence he's reading. this doesnt teach you to read, it teaches you to act like youre reading

this isnt directly addressed in the podcast but we used to just teach everyone english like it was an actual system that has parts and rules and structures, because that's what a language is. everyone would start with phonics and the alphabet, then later do stuff like sentence diagramming and grammar, neither of which have been taught in primary schools in decades. i think i was probably the very last generation of kids to get ANY of that stuff unless they went to an exceptional school, and it was only because my 8th grade teacher knew it was important and went against school admin's instructions in order to teach it. the couple days of sentence diagramming and grammar he gave us, out of SPITE, have been more useful to me in reading and writing than the entire rest of primary english education i received in public school, and i didn't even go to a school that had adopted three-cueing stuff yet.