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[bvbuntin]

The power of a single, closely-observed detail

Alexander has red hair and hazel eyes.

His cheeks are fuzzy with stubble.

He wears a button-down shirt, with the sleeves rolled up to his forearms.

On his wrist is a watch.

These details build a picture in your mind of a man named Alexander. But what they don’t do is make him feel like a unique, living, breathing human being.

That is, not until you lean close — and smell the chlorine coming off his still-damp hair, from his morning swim.

And only then does Alexander start to rise up from the page, giving you a clearer sense of his life and personality.

Why is that?

The initial details about Alexander’s hair color, eye color, and clothes aren’t very unique or surprising. They’re kind of… expected, and easy. They’re things writers often reach for — the things you notice about a stranger who bumps into you on the street.

The chlorine in his hair, in contrast, is an intimate, closely-observed detail.

And that intimacy is a powerful thing.

Specific, closely-observed details bring characters to life, because they tell a story about the character — cuing us into what makes them a unique human being.

Writing multiple details like this in your descriptions is ideal, but even just including one as a “tent-pole” descriptor can help your characters come to life like never before.

How to find a good tent-pole detail

My approach for finding a good, closely-observed tent-pole detail is to start with a general understanding of the character, and then riff on various details that could illustrate their personality or background. More often than not, these details start out broad or miss the mark, but if you keep tweaking and probing to make them more specific, your character’s unique personality will eventually start to shine through.

For example, in one of my previous posts about writing interesting characters, I describe a character named Sal as having “wispy blonde hair, knotted up in a bun with a mechanical pencil.”

That mechanical-pencil messy bun was my tent-pole detail (which I supported with others, like wire-frame glasses sitting askew on her nose and a Metallica sticker on her phone case). But I didn’t have her hairstyle figured out right away.

At first, all I had was my desire for Sal to have a bit of a messy, no-fuss look (to reflect her personality), so my initial description went something like: “She wore her wispy blonde hair in a messy bun.“

But that wasn’t unique or specific enough. So I thought about how to make her messy bun more distinct. That’s when I recalled a friend of mine who used to tie her hair up with a pencil. Adding a pencil made things more interesting, but it still felt a bit too trendy for Sal. So I twisted it to be more offbeat — making it a mechanical pencil.

And there it was. Suddenly, I had the detail I was looking for, and while the rest of my details helped flesh Sal out, it was her hairstyle that ultimately elevated her description into something truly unique to her character.

You can do the same.

Simply dig deep to find what makes your characters unique, and put what you find on the page.

Then watch as your characters come to life through description.

— — —

Your stories are worth telling. For tips on how to craft meaning, build character-driven plots, and grow as a writer, follow my blog.

And check out my new Instagram!

[bvbuntin]

There’s a lot of layers to the idea of “hating” your writing and whether or not that’s a bad thing. Yes, it’s not super healthy to perpetuate negative self-talk in the form of constantly bemoaning how your writing is shit and it makes you feel like shit. Probably even worse to make this practically an expectation. And I’ve definitely heard people speak as if they genuinely do not derive joy from the act of creating, and it’s a little depressing! It’s valid to question this. Shouldn’t the things we do for fun be things that are fun?

On the other hand, to act as if the activity of writing has to be pleasant and joyful ignores the example of many, many writers throughout time who struggled a great deal with their work and went through immense doubt and emotional turmoil over it. Great writers. There’s no doubt that loathing your work can be a part of writing, writing very good stuff even, whether or not it’s constructive.

And honestly? As someone who spent so much of my early life torturing myself with perfectionism? I’ve been in the place where I kind of needed to know that the kind of struggle I was dealing with could be okay. My relationship with my work has been unhealthy as shit at varying points before. I would get really upset when my writing wasn’t working the way I thought it should as a young teenager. It would completely upturn my life for long periods of time. It was agony. But what my parents always said to me was “If you hate it so much, then don’t write.”

And I think it’s intuitive to ask “Why are you doing this?” when someone is in pain over something they’re doing for fun. But it never helped me to be told that the solution to my pain was to stop writing because I wasn’t hurting because I was writing, I was hurting because I was a perfectionist and it was destroying my life. So as well-meaning (and obvious) as “You should write because it gives you joy and pleasure, and stop tormenting yourself doing something you hate” may be as advice, I don’t think it will help people. Because I wanted to enjoy writing. And I don’t think that hating the act of writing or hating your writing is an indication that you’re not Meant To be a writer. I used to take comfort in the fact that people hated their writing. Why? Because I didn’t know how to deal with my perfectionism, and I needed reassurance that I could make it.

Was it healthy for me to hate my writing? No! Not at all! But I didn’t want to stop writing, not really; I wanted to heal my relationship with creativity, and being told that I shouldn’t write if I hated it so much made me feel like there was no way to do that. I feel like most writers who say they “hate” their writing are the same.

So I’m kind of falling on both sides here; I don’t think it’s healthy or necessary to loathe your writing, and I don’t think it’s good that writing communities normalize it, but I think it does more harm than good to go the other way and blithely say well, if you hate your writing you just shouldn’t write! Hating your writing isn’t a “normal” part of writing. That doesn’t mean that you won’t. If the writing process is drudgery to you, that doesn’t mean your desire to be a writer is invalid; it more than likely means that your relationship with your own creativity needs repair.

Basically—no, it’s not “being a writer” to hate your work; writing doesn’t have to be persistently painful and awful. A lot of writers wrap up a lot of their self esteem in their work, and they’re basing their self worth on their ability to make good stuff, and their standards for themselves are just so fucking high that it’s killing them, and while this is not a “normal” part of writing, it’s also terribly, terribly common and it’s something we can all work on and get through. “Normal” is a weird word to use because seriously, none of you are alone in loathing the shit out of what you create. But for a lot of you, there’s more going on than just the squabbles with the Inner Editor that everybody experiences, especially if it’s intense enough for the word “hate.”

Seriously, if the memes about loathing and avoiding your work sound like you, it’s worth it to look into and be aware of perfectionism and self esteem issues as legitimate mental health issues you could be dealing with. And it’s okay to deal with those things. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to write, there’s nothing wrong with keeping at it even if it’s hard as hell. Sure, writing should be enjoyable for people, but many, many writers wrestle with negativity and fear, and it can be devastating and immobilizing, and that side of writing is okay to talk about, and it’s an experience many people share.

It’s just that it doesn’t have to be that way forever. It can get better, and it will. This is not “just what writing is like.” It’s not “haha writing be like that.” You’re not alone, but...you can start to overcome the fear and negativity. You can work toward a point where one day you’ll be having a blast with your WIP’s. You’re very brave to keep going. It can get better. It will. It’ll be okay.

[bvbuntin]

On writing every day

“Write every day” is maybe one of the most common pieces of writing advice I see passed around and I’ve seen an equal number of posts criticizing its ubiquity. 

Now, as someone who has benefited a ton from sticking to a writing habit, I don’t want to dismiss this advice, but there is no universal way to write a book and there is no one thing that will help all writers. I’ve seen people claim outlining is as universal a rule. It’s really not. 

Writing every day has a lot of potential merit in it. Even if you think you can’t or that it won’t help, I encourage you to try for a while and see what happens. When you sit down at a desk at the same time each day, eventually your brain learns to get into that creative mindset at the same time each day. It becomes a habit. I’ve found that once I get into a habit, I can’t skip a day without spending my whole “writing time” thinking about my story and getting ideas for my story because that’s what I’ve trained myself to do. The genius in this is that you don’t have to wait for inspiration; the inspiration will come to you at the time you pick. 

BUT. Writing every day isn’t going to work for everyone, so this is my take: 

It’s not so much important to write every day as to pretend to write every day. By this, I mean sit down at your desk, open your document or take out your manuscript (do people write longhand anymore?), reread your previous writing, caress the keyboard, correct your typos and spelling errors from before. Write random words or keysmash and erase it. Maybe brainstorm or worldbuild. The key is to physically interact with your story in some way every day. 

If you are busy or not feeling well, you can make your daily goal just to get on your computer and open your document. It will still help you. 

Now, the great thing about my advice is that you can ignore it, because there’s no right way to do anything…but if you’re struggling to find time to write or make progress, this might be something to try! 

[bvbuntin]

Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. –C.S. Lewis

I found this great piece of writing advice from C.S. Lewis on twitter today.(courtesy of @thatboycanteach)

I know the phrase “show don’t tell” confuses a lot of people who are new to critiquing/workshops, because all writing is telling… isn’t it? 

But this is exactly what writers are talking about when they use that phrase. 

This is also why, when critiquing your work, writers might tell you to remove adjectives and adverbs, or why you might hear that those two types of words are “bad writing.” It’s not that you’re never allowed to use an adjective or an adverb, but that–like Lewis says–it’s much more preferable to be terrified, than to be told something is terrifying. 

Whenever you tell your reader what the characters in a story are experiencing, instead of letting your reader have an experience alongside your characters, you miss an opportunity to invite your reader into the story. If you miss too many, eventually your reader will stop waiting for their invitation and simply leave. 

[bvbuntin]

Look, the writeblr thing isn’t for every writer out there. I’ve tried it. My posts on writing don’t gain traction. I can’t make fancy mood boards, discord groups move way too fast for me, excerpts of mine get little interest, and, most importantly, I don’t have anything new to say about writing. Does that suck sometimes? Sure. But, at the end of the day, it’s fine!

I’ll keep writing. I won’t concern myself with making it marketable to this platform. I’ll submit to agents. Maybe one day, I’ll be published. Maybe not. But, really, most of the population isn’t on Tumblr which means most of your future readers aren’t on Tumblr either. They don’t give a shit if you can make a meme out of your ocs or overlay snow on a mood board. They care about your story.

So, while it might be nice to have people really excited about my work, it’s the work that’s the important part. So what if this community isn’t for you! So what if people aren’t sending you dozens of asks about your ocs! Just write, man. It’ll find the right people. You’ll find the right people. But, you’ve got to write it first and worrying about how to gain followers on here is only going to get in the way of that.

[bvbuntin]

Divergent is a bad book, but its accidental brilliance is that it completely mauled the YA dystopian genre by stripping it down to its barest bones for maximum marketability, utterly destroying the chances of YA dystopian literature’s long-term survival 

[bvbuntin]

Hey

You’re allowed to enjoy your writing.

You’re allowed to be super passionate about your story.

You’re allowed to fall in love with your characters.

You don’t have to hate your writing or be ashamed of liking your own work. It’s your blood, sweat and tears. Your ideas, and this magnificent creation that you made.

Appreciate it.

[bvbuntin]

I remember you had a post on your old blog, about how to fall in love with your story again. Do you think you still have it around somewhere, WQA? That post had some life-saving advice that could come handy for someone!

Getting Excited About Your Story Again

Oh! I didn’t realize I never re-posted it here, so thank you! Here it is, plus a couple links to newer, similar posts with more ideas. I hope this helps!

1) Cast your characters, or if you’re artistic, try drawing them. If you’ve got Photoshop skills, try making a movie-style poster for your story.

2) Create a tumblr gallery filled with images that inspire you where your story is concerned. These could be images of things in your story, things you want to include in your story, or just things that make you think of your story.

3) Make a playlist of songs to serve as a soundtrack for your story.

4) Make a list of five things you love about every character, five things you love about the plot, and five things you love about the setting.

5) Write a short essay about the important themes in your story and why they matter to you. See if similar themes run through any of your other stories.

6) Get a fun and easy going friend or sibling to play “radio show” with you. Have them interview you about your story as though you were an author talking about their novel on a radio show. Try to be serious about it for as long as you can–which won’t be long because it’s super cheesy but lots of fun.

7) Try to write a poem about the plot of your story as though your protagonist was the one writing it.

8) Draw maps and floor plans of your setting and sets. Go window shopping online to look for furniture and props to fill your character’s home with.

9) Make a Wordle using words from your story.

10) Read your story out loud as if you were reading it to a group of fans. Try to imagine their reactions at different points in the story. When would their attention be the most rapt? When would they smile? When would they sniffle? When would they cheer?

Feeling Unmotivated with WIP Getting Unstuck: Motivation Beyond Mood Boards & Playlists

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Have a question? My inbox is always open, but make sure to check my FAQ and post master lists first to see if I’ve already answered a similar question. :)

[bvbuntin]

In the first poetry workshop I ever took my professor said we could write about anything we wanted except for two things: our grandparents and our dogs. She said she had never read a good poem about a dog. I could only remember ever reading one poem about a dog before that point—a poem by Pablo Neruda, from which I only remembered the lines “We walked together on the shores of the sea/ In the lonely winter of Isla Negra.” Four years later I wrote a poem about how when I was a little girl I secretly baptized my dog in the bathtub because I was afraid she wouldn’t get into heaven. “Is this a good poem?” I wondered. The second poetry workshop, our professor made us put a bird in each one of our poems. I thought this was unbelievably stupid. This professor also hated when we wrote about hearts, she said no poet had ever written a good poem in which they mentioned a heart. I started collecting poems about hearts, first to spite her, but then because it became a habit I couldn’t break. The workshop after that, our professor would tell us the same story over and over about how his son had died during a blizzard. He would cry in front of us. He never told us we couldn’t write about anything, but I wrote a lot of poems about snow. At the end of the year he called me into his office and said, “looking at you, one wouldn’t think you’d be a very good writer” and I could feel all the pity inside of me curdling like milk. The fourth poetry workshop I ever took my professor made it clear that poets should not try to engage with popular culture. I noticed that the only poets he assigned were men. I wrote a poem about that scene in Grease 2 where a boy takes his girlfriend to a fallout shelter and tries to get her to have sex with him by tricking her into believing that nuclear war had begun. It was the first poem I ever published. The fifth poetry workshop I ever took our professor railed against the word blood. She thought that no poem should ever have the word “blood” in it, they were bloody enough already. She returned a draft of my poem with the word blood crossed out so hard the paper had torn. When I started teaching poetry workshops I promised myself I would never give my students any rules about what could or couldn’t be in their poems. They all wrote about basketball. I used to tally these poems when I’d go through the stack I had collected at the end of each class. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 poems about basketball. This was Indiana. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I told the class, “for the next assignment no one can write about basketball, please for the love of god choose another topic. Challenge yourselves.” Next time I collected their poems there was one student who had turned in another poem about basketball. I don’t know if he had been absent on the day I told them to choose another topic or if he had just done it to spite me. It’s the only student poem I can still really remember. At the time I wrote down the last lines of that poem in a notebook. “He threw the basketball and it came towards me like the sun”

[bvbuntin]

I’m tired of Indigenous characters portrayed in shows; here’s why.

they always speak to animals or plants

Now, I don’t know about my fellow natives, but I can’t speak chipmunk.

their tribe, band, or clan is never specified

I feel like this explains itself. This is a common trope where the character is just defined as “native american”.

almost always half naked

Hyper sexualization is a big part of this, but it’s also a way for non-ndns to imply that we’re s*vages and dirty.

red skinned

First of all, “redskin” is a slur. Second of all, literally no one on Earth is red.

happy to help the light skinned character

Indigenous people are always side characters, helping the mc, who is almost always light skinned, go on their journey.

used for magical purposes

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re only in shows because there’s this racist stereotype that we practice magic, or that we’re mystical people.

starts fights/wars firsts

You all were the ones who came on our land and decided to commit genocide, not us. Get your facts right.

exaggerated features

For example: fat or super lanky, big nose, no eyes or small eyes, used in an ableist manner, big hips

seen as an animal

Regarding the term “sp*r*t an*mal,” which many nowadays use in an extremely racist way, we are seen to be able to transform into an animal or have an animal companion.

Feel free to look up “native american character” and physically cringe.

We are here. We will never go away. You cannot wipe us clean of our humanity with your racist caricatures.

[bvbuntin]

The dearwriters Revision-Checklist

III. Character Revision

Certainly not universal, mostly a hodgepodge of a bunch of writing advice gathered over the years. Hope it helps

1. Names Check: Look at your character list. Any names too similar to each other? One does one character have too many (nick)names?

2. Autonomy Check: Who makes the decisions that impact the plot? (learn more about character agency in this post)

3. Character Arc Check: Did this character significantly change and how is this shown?

4. GMC Check (learn about the concept in this post)

5. Description: main description of the character shortly after they first appear? Occasionall little details/reminders of their description during the story? Special details in focus? Effect on POV-Character clear?

Check out the other parts here:

I. Pre-Revision

II. Plot-Revision

[bvbuntin]

Dear Writers,

Publishing online will make it harder for you to publish traditionally.

Now don’t freak out! This doesn’t mean that publishing your fanfiction will make it impossible for you to become a published author. It DOES mean however, you shouldn’t publish online the very project you want to publish traditionally.

If you legitimately want to publish a novel via the traditional publishing route, be aware that putting it on Wattpad or other sites may not be the way to go. Of course there are cases of Wattpad authors who get book and movie deals. But those usually have a very big online following. Or they don’t finish the work online or delete it. Or go into selfpublishing. It’s a way to do it. But it certainly is not the path of least resistance.

In the industry you can seriously diminish your chances of an agent picking up your work when people can read it online for free. And Wattpad doesn’t have the best rep in some parts of the traditional industry.

You have to imagine how many queries these agents get that start with “I am 13 and 53 people have already read my book on Wattpad!” and proceed to show just very poor quality writing (which, let’s be real, we’ve all been there, no shade towards 13 year olds with hopes and dreams! You’re doing great, sweetie!). Even if that’s not you, the agent will physically recoil the second they read the word “Wattpad”. I know this because this is the exact same reaction I and my colleagues have when checking out new manuscripts at work (for those of you who don’t know, I work at a publishing house).

And your agent doesn’t care how big your wattpad following is unless it’s seriously huge and you have a platform akin to an influencer.

Plus it makes your work more vulnerable for plagiarization.

I’m not saying don’t ever publish online. Do it! Have fun with it. But be aware of these issues if a writing career is your goal.

[bvbuntin]

Okay, your answer to that ask #10 piqued my curiosity. Do you have a scene you've written recently you'd be okay with sharing and to explain your process?

Can do! :)

So usually, this whole process takes about 10 mins. I write in very short bursts, back and forth with my wife, so each response is usually about a paragraph. I’ll start by reading the bit above, to mentally settle myself into the moment. In this example, Daphne and Shale were discussing her poor reaction to a bit of magic.

The first words I get are almost always the dialogue, so my first pass will look something like this:

“Maybe the spell in it was innocuous then, but powerful. The smoke--” [beat, cuts off, changes tactics] “It’s not important. You’re probably right, I’m seeing shadows in every corner. I promise I’ll relax more once we’ve made a few more jumps.” [beat: softer side of Shale]

So the ‘info packet’ I got was the spoken words, and the overall emotional vibe. Sometimes my beats will look like [physical action: moves closer], or [emotional intent, uncertainty], but they’re almost always placeholders. Just something to jot down, to show myself the pause I felt in the dialogue. I “hear” and “feel” my scenes more than I “see” them. I usually only get visual data in that first “info packet” if its directly relevant to the moment.

I’ll write like this til I run dry, chasing the dialogue and the feeling til it starts to feel like I’m reaching for it/making it up, rather just going with the gut feel of the character. I’ve got enough reading/writing experience at this point that I can usually tell what should come next, but it sits different in my head. So I try to limit myself to the genuine first burst, and don’t try to force it much past that initial impression.

Once I “run dry”, I fill in. Sometimes I fill from the back, sometimes from the front. If I’m feeling more connected to the emotional tone the scene ends on, I’ll start there. In this example, I was really hooked on the vibe of Shale’s change of emotion/demeanor, so I just kept going past the end of the dialogue to describe how this moment changed him. So I just tacked right onto the end this bit:

He smiled, and it utterly transformed his face. Even his too dark eyes seemed touched with an inner warmth, a flash of avian gold. But mostly his smile made him look younger, less severe, less stony.

The “point” of this part of the exchange was to show him softening, hence the [beat: softer side of Shale] in my first burst. In this second pass, I’m less “in Shale’s head” and more in the third person narrator spot, so I can add in details like how his eyes look like his eagle form’s eyes. Now that I’ve captured everything from the “info packet”, I’m fleshing out and reinforcing this paragraph’s purpose, and tying it into the larger narrative. This is easier for me to do after the first go, so it’s like “in character burst”, “narrator color”, “smooth”.

The smooth step is optional, if I’m low on time/energy. The bulk of the scene has been communicated and I’ve left myself enough info to fill in and smooth the other beats. In this example I did it all in one go, but I’ve also totally come across beats I’ve just kinda left when I do editing later. The more breadcrumbs I can leave myself in the first past, the easier doing fill in later is.

For this scene, [beat, cut off change tactics] becomes: He stopped, shaking his head. That’s it, simple. Just enough to break up the two sentences, give it a transition. Then I see how my bit matches up to what was immediately before it, and decide if it needs a beat or if the paragraph can just start with dialogue. Since I wanted to show Shale changing, I added a bit showing him thinking over what his companion had just said. So the finished product looks like this:

Shale frowned, but this time it was a frown of consideration. “Maybe the spell in it was innocuous then, but powerful. The smoke--” He stopped, shaking his head. “It’s not important. You’re probably right, I’m seeing shadows in every corner. I promise I’ll relax more once we’ve made a few more jumps.”

He smiled, and it utterly transformed his face. Even his too dark eyes seemed touched with an inner warmth, a flash of avian gold. But mostly his smile made him look younger, less severe, less stony.

So that’s it! It’s all much more organic than this break down makes it seem, mostly decision made without conscious effort, but these are the thoughts behind the gut instincts. It definitely gets easier over time, and is really helpful for the ADHD think-too-fast style of writing I’m prone to. I don’t know if it would work for everyone, but if you find your flow getting interrupted by minutiae, I highly recommend giving it a shot. Tweak the process, make it work for you. There are no rules in rough draft. Do whatever it takes to get the bones down. You can always go back and make a piece stronger, but you can’t edit what doesn’t get written. So write dirty, write “wrong”, as long as you get it down.

Hope this helped! Thanks for the very excellent question! It was really fun to write :D

[bvbuntin]

hey siri how do i explain to tumblr that ‘bury your gays’ is about more than the texual death of queer characters and that the textual death of queer characters is not, therefore, always a bad thing

[bvbuntin]

The Himba (singular: OmuHimba, plural: OvaHimba) are indigenous peoples with an estimated population of about 50,000 people living in northern Namibia, in the Kunene Region (formerly Kaokoland) and on the other side of the Kunene River in Angola. The OvaHimba are a semi-nomadic, pastoralist people, culturally distinguishable from the Herero people in northern Namibia and southern Angola, and speak OtjiHimba, a variety of Herero, which belongs to the Bantu family within Niger–Congo. The OvaHimba are considered the last (semi-) nomadic people of Namibia.

The Himba often cover themselves with otjize paste, a cosmetic mixture of butterfat and ochre pigment, to cleanse the skin over long periods due to water scarcity and protect themselves from the extremely hot and dry climate of the Kaokoland as well as against mosquito insect bites. The cosmetic mixture, often perfumed with the aromatic resin of the omuzumba shrub, gives their skin and hair plaits a distinctive orange or red-tinge characteristic, as well as texture and style. Otjize is considered foremost a highly desirable aesthetic beauty cosmetic, symbolizing earth’s rich red color and blood the essence of life, and is consistent with the OvaHimba ideal of beauty. The OvaHimba are also accustomed to use wood ash for hair cleansing due to water scarcity.

Hairstyle and jewelry play a significant role among the OvaHimba, it indicates age and social status within their community. An infant or child will generally have his head kept shaven of hair or a small crop of hair on his head crown. This soon is sculptured to one braided hair plait extended to the rear of the head for young boys and young girls have two braided hair plaits extended forward towards the face often parallel to their eyes. This style is called ozondato, the form of wear being determined by the oruzo membership (patrilineal descent group). The style remains during preadolescence until reaching puberty. Some young girls, with exception, may also have one braided hair plait extended forwards, which means they are one of a pair of twins.

OvaHimba girl

OvaHimba girl dancing

OvaHimba boy

OvaHimba girl, one of a set of twins!

OvaHimba children, both boys and girls, removing ticks from goats.

From pubescence, boys continue to have one braided hair plait.

A young man wearing a braid known as ondatu. Namibia. Photo by Nigel Pavitt

Once they reach puberty, OvaHimba girls will have many otjize textured hair plaits, some arranged to veil the girl’s face. 

This girl is going through puberty, a fact made plain by her hairstyle, which has been designed to cover her face and help her avoid male attention. The puffs at the bottom are either goat hair or synthetic.

(In daily practice, the hair plaits are often tied together and held parted back from the face.) 

This girl’s braids are arranged to reveal her face, indicating that she’s ready to be married.

Women who have been married for about a year, or have had a child, wear an ornate headpiece called the Erembe, sculptured from sheepskin, with many streams of braided hair, coloured and put in shape with otjize paste. 

Married women wearing erembe

Unmarried young men continue to wear one braided hair plait extended to the rear of the head. When Himba men marry, they start wearing turbans, which they never take off unless someone in the village dies. After a death, their heads are shaved.  Because the turbans are never removed, things can get a little itchy underneath, so men carry pointed arrow-like instruments to scratch it with.

Married OvaHimba men. #s 1 and 3 wear a scratching implement in their turbans.

Widowed men will remove their cap or head-wrap and expose un-braided hair. 

Himba widower. The habit of using a head-scratching implement is hard to break.

[Source]

[bvbuntin]

Underwriting: ways to boost your word count

I wrote a fic recently and the word count for the first draft came to about 40,000 words – roughly the length of a novella or ficlet. And that’s fine because I wasn’t striving for a novel or a 100K slow-burn coffee shop AU.

But coming to edit my first draft I realised something about myself. I am an underwriter. My fic could actually be at least 10k (maybe 20k) longer. Of course it’s not all about word count, it’s about the story, but in this case a smaller word count isn’t because I’m a fantastically efficient storyteller it’s because I’ve missed out a lot of stuff. Like, Important Stuff.

So as I set out to add muscle to the skin and bones I’ve already created in draft one I thought I’d share five tips for my fellow underwriters to help you flesh out your writing too.

1)     Make sure to describe the place and space in which the action happens.

There are quite a few places in my first draft where there’s no indication as to where things are taking place– or there is, but it’s the bare minimum and not really enough to build up a clear picture. This probably because as the writer I know exactly what the place looks like so I make the assumption that a bare minimum description will mean the reader knows too.

Now I’m not saying go into masses of detail about what your settings look like. In some cases it’s not useful to describe setting in a lot of detail (e.g. during really fast paced action sequences) but doing a verbal sketch of the space is essential for putting your characters in context and reader understanding.

I really is a fine balance (which is why beta readers are your friend!) But definitely go back to your setting descriptions if you’re an underwriter, they might need some work.

2)    Make sure to describe your character’s appearance.

Similar to the above point – you know what your characters look like, but unless you describe them, the reader won’t.

It’s fair to say that descriptions are open to reader interpretations, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t describe them in a healthy amount of detail. So you might try to nail down some of the interesting quirks about your characters to help the reader build a picture – not only will it help the readers understanding, it’ll boost your word count too!

Note: This one functions a little differently in a fic because the readers are probably familiar with how the character looks, but there is nothing wrong with adding your interpretation (or even reminding them, especially if the characters are from a book.)

3)   Include character reactions outside of what they say out loud.

Real life conversations aren’t just about the stuff that comes out of our mouths. So much of human interaction is about body language – so include it in your writing! Saying that the character covers their mouth with their hand when they talk suggests shyness. While another character crossing their arms shows they’re defensive -perhaps because they’re feeling threatened. In real life we don’t always say what we mean – but a lot of the time our actions give away what we’re really thinking. By including these actions around dialogue writers can influence how we as readers view characters and how we interpret interactions between characters. And it can boost your word count too.

The big stuff:

4)     Check your pacing.

When you write it feels like your scene is taking place over hours, days, weeks because when you’re writing it takes time. Reading, on the other hand, is much quicker. A seasoned reader can fly through a 100 page novel in a few hours – a seasoned writer can spend hours writing a 100 words.

When you read back your writing, make sure to check your pacing. You might just find that the Impossible Task you set for your characters at the start of the story is suddenly resolved within the next fifty pages. To boost your word count you might want to start by adding more obstacles between the character and their goal.

For example; your character has to find an object such as a precious jewel. Sounds relatively easy, right? But what if the jewel is lost in the mines of an ancient people, amongst thousands of other treasures that look very similar? What if no one has found this jewel because it’s guarded by a fire breathing dragon? What if the ancient mines and dragon are located in a mountain which is miles and miles away across dangerous lands? What if your characters need to enlist the help of someone with a very specific skill set?

You take one simple objective (finding the jewel) and you put into play a series of obstacles that must be overcome in order to complete the objective. Your underwriting tendencies, like mine, might just mean that there aren’t enough metaphorical (or real) dragons in your story!

5)    Sub-plots.

A sub-plot is a smaller scale plot - often involving the supporting characters - which runs secondary to the main plot. It can be directly linked to the main plot, i.e. the info provided in the subplot directly influences events in the main plot. Or it can simply be linked through place, time or themes of the overall story (e.g. Hermione’s elf rights campaign ‘S.P.E.W’ in Harry Potter and the OoTP is linked to the overall theme of oppression.)

Sub-plots are great because they can serve as some respite from a traumatic main plot; your character is fighting a war (main plot) but also fighting and failing (in hilarious ways) to win the affection of their love interest (sub-plot).

Plus, sub-plots can also help with characterisation, can cause your main character to have the moment of realisation which allows them to overcome the obstacles they face in the main plot and is generally a better reflection of real life! Sub-plots often centre on side-kicks and other characters – people who might not be as devoted to the end goal as the protagonist is. In fact, well written side characters seemingly live their own lives with their own goals. You might choose to showcase this in your sub-plot by letting the conflict of interest cause more problems for the protagonist to overcome.

Either way you could find your word count sky rockets as soon as you add in a few clever sub-plots.

I hope this helped!

Got any questions? Send me an ask

[bvbuntin]

do you think a Newsflesh movie would ever be a thing that could happen?

That depends on a huge number of factors that I have no control over.  Maybe JKR or Stephanie Meyer or Neil Gaiman would have the kind of money to fund their own theatrical production--I doubt it, though, movies are expensive, which is why they’re all made by the same six studios and so often look nothing like their source material.  Movies are made by committee.  What would have to happen:

1. Someone would have to option the rights.  This is the only step where I have any say.  If someone wants my rights, I can say “no, I do not trust you to make a good movie, goodbye.”

2. That someone would have to secure funding.  A movie can be made once funding is secured.  But it won’t necessarily be seen, ever, and at this stage, nothing I do makes things better.  I don’t have the cachet to control casting, or even necessarily influence it.  I don’t have the sales to get script approval.

3. The movie is made; the people who made it have to secure distribution.  This is where you have a prayer of seeing the movie.

4. Even if the movie is a piece of shit that I hate with every fiber of my being, this is where I play nice for the press tour and swear it’s amazing.