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The night sky on Mars

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Just overheard my dad say "life looks so fun in commercials" like he was making a passing joke instead of casually distilling the entire advertising-industrial complex into one bar.

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gk

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Maybe I'm the last person on earth to discover Josh Johnson, but in case I'm not, you should watch this. This standup set (?) made me literally laugh so hard I cried while also laying down astonishing straight truth. Powerful.

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nobody warns you that writing makes you obsessed with hands. what are they doing? are they trembling? are they clenched? are they—

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“One of the most solid pieces of writing advice I know is in fact intended for dancers – you can find it in the choreographer Martha Graham’s biography. But it relaxes me in front of my laptop the same way I imagine it might induce a young dancer to breathe deeply and wiggle their fingers and toes. Graham writes: ‘There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.’”

— Zadie Smith (via campaignagainstcliche)

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“A masterpiece was created in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone today” video by Kyle Kotajarvi

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from last year’s workshop: Cool Writing Hacks that ripped my heart out but made my work better anyway.

-not every line of dialog needs an action attached to it. somebody doesn’t need to shrug or scratch their arm or glance at other people every two seconds of a conversation unless the motion means something. you’re not writing stage directions and you can trim this stuff down to make your dialog snappier. (this one in particular felt like a callout of me specifically, goddammit)

-if you want the audience to remember something–especially something that will be important in a climactic moment–you have to show/tell them at least twice beforehand. preferably three times. otherwise they will not remember! they simply will not!!

-the room layout isn’t usually all that important BUT if there’s going to be a fight scene you BETTER fucking figure out a way to convey that entire layout early in the scene or no one will know what the fuck is going on

-on that note, get somebody to read your fight scenes even if you are ABSOLUTELY SURE they make sense on the page. on the first pass they probably don’t. (unless you have a gift i would kill for. some do!)

-eyes cannot talk. eyes can’t talk! it’s easy to say that someone has “rage in their eyes” or “their eyes were telling me to run” but that’s all shorthand for other body language we notice subconsciously! try digging in and describing that body language instead. you will likely get something richer that way

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First Name Last Name

Source: @mjseidlinger

If you’re looking for more writing humour, please explore this tag on the website: Writing Humour

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While people are inclined to whip out their phones and film when they see something alarming happening, those videos are not always recorded in a way that can be used as evidence in a legal proceeding or to support advocacy tactics.

At the human rights organization WITNESS, where I work as the senior U.S. program coordinator, we’ve learned that video has a greater chance of making an impact when it’s filmed ethically and strategically, and released in coordination with advocacy and legal efforts. Using the camera in your pocket can be a valuable way to ensure the world bears witness to abusive policing and systemic racism, help hold authorities accountable, and advocate for the real safety of our communities.

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“We are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have it in ourselves to be or do. […]. We share our lives with the people we have failed to be. Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken. We refer to this as our unlived lives because somewhere we believe that they were open to us; but for some reason—and we might spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find and give the reason— they were not possible. […W]e know more now than ever before about the kind of lives it is possible to live. We discover these unlived lives most obviously in our envy of other people, and in our daily frustrations. The myth of our potential can make of our lives a perpetual falling-short, a continual and continuing loss, a sustained and sometimes sustaining rage. [It] makes of our frustrations a secret life of grudges. Even if we set aside the inevitable questions—how would we know if we had realized our potential? Where do we get our picture of this potential from? If we don’t have potential what do we have?—we can’t imagine our lives without the unlived lives they contain.”

— Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (via exhaled-spirals)

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How you think writing a large main cast will go: So many different character arcs. So many possible relationships and storylines. So much potential for different interactions. Found family. Everyone gets their screen time. All readers will find someone to relate to. This is gonna be so good!

How writing a large main cast actually goes: It’s been 50K words and everyone’s had like five lines of dialogue. During every conversation at least one person’s standing around doing nothing for three pages. Are you going nuts or have these three characters done nothing except provide comic relief for two story arcs? You haven’t even touched on the depths of everyone’s characters and you’re already halfway through the story. There is no end in sight. You are crying.

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🔥: Capricorns

The second most attractive earth sign but with more brains so it sort of balances out. I will say though, I have never seen boring done so well as by capricorn men. Sometimes I feel like they go out of their way to not do interesting things to keep up the image of being boring.

Also we get it, Jan, we all start dying from the moment we're born, just take the damn shot and enjoy yourself for the five minutes you have scheduled off.

Come to think of it capricorn is the personification of the "death and taxes" idiom. ( I checked and lo and behold guess what star sign Ben Franklin was smdh)

I love y'all but put some chill in the itinerary. And sitting quietly thinking about your work doesn't count.

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Frank Bidart, 1984

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“When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lamppost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: “it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks.” And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it. When I read this letter of Van Gogh’s it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about *design* and *balance* and getting *interesting planes* into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest *academical* tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on. But the moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it. And Van Gogh’s little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care.”

— Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit (via raggedybearcat)

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can you imagine if star trek had cold opens