megarywrites

[megarywrites]

“you’re so quiet” yeah i’m rewriting the same 3 sentences in my head while imagining a dramatic betrayal between fictional people. i’m BUSY

[megarywrites]

[megarywrites]

one of my greatest pet peeves in fiction, and it is truly stupid I know, is that no one seems to understand how genuinely hard it is to kill someone via stabbing. stab wounds have a mortality rate of like 5%. especially abdominal stabbing. tv shows and movies show dudes getting stabbed one time in the lower abdomen with a tiny knife and then they fall over. like what did he die of precisely. that man died of Small Knife

[megarywrites]

istg every time i sit down to write my focus just flies straight out the window

[megarywrites]

Marcel Proust, from a letter featured in The Selected Letters of Marcel Proust

[megarywrites]

Reblog if your art project has not, does not, and never will make use of generative ai at any point in your creative process.

[megarywrites]

setting up a tiny detail in one chapter to pay it off in the next few chapters feels sooo devious like oooh i can't wait to write the small little reference here that 70% of readers will miss but 30% of readers will cheer for

[megarywrites]

affirmations for writers: i know how to write. i have seen sentences before, and i know how to make one. i can identify up to several words and their meanings. i am not afraid of semicolons.

[megarywrites]

Hey general tip to new writers (and some published professionals while I'm at it): You don't need to make it explicitly clear that your protagonists are hot.

People who enjoy reading books about hot people will naturally assume that any character mentioned is sexy unless explicitly stated otherwise, and people who don't care about whether the characters are conventionally fuckable or not will not care either way.

Feel free to describe them having features that you find attractive, and have them feel attracted to each other, but don't try to hammer it to the readers that they should find this particular character attractive. Just describe the features that they have, truthfully, and let the readers who are attracted to those features find them attractive.

[megarywrites]

Thala Galanis — from the Seafoam duology

If I am to be ruined, I would rather it be on my own terms. In my own way. By my own hands. 

[megarywrites]

Karen Larson Turner “The Sound and The Fury“ oil on linen 24" x 36"

[megarywrites]

the truly terrible thing about having to go back and rework a pacing issue in something you already rewrote is that you feel like you're just stalled and making absolutely no progress whatsoever, even though you are

[megarywrites]

not enough scenes in books where characters kill someone and throw up afterwards. like something has to be done

[megarywrites]

Being a writer is hearing a new song, going "oh no", and surfacing a week and a half later with 50,000 words added to your WIP while you have lost track of time, space, food, and social obligations

[megarywrites]

structural editing has me so overwhelmed that i've just made thousands of different plans and outlines and summaries instead of doing something about the issues in my manuscript.

[megarywrites]

On the Snow White gifset I reblogged that shows Snow White scrubbing the castle steps, there’s a comment exclaiming (with delight, I assume) “This Snow White isn’t a girlboss!”

That just about sums up all the “anti-woke”/“anti-girlboss” rhetoric we’ve been hearing nowadays.

I used to think I agreed with it. I was all in favor of arguing in defense of girly girls and traditional femininity, and of saying that characters like the classic Disney Princesses didn’t need to be “updated” to be great characters. In theory, I still feel that way.

But when people so viciously bash any hint of feminist updating to these characters, the way they did with live action Snow White... that rubs me the wrong way.

When a person looks at Snow White scrubbing the floor – not showing much of her personality at all yet, just scrubbing the floor – and their response is "Now this is the right way to portray her! None of that icky girlboss wokeness!" I don't think they're being progressive. Even if they identify as a feminist and arguing that "real feminism is teaching girls that they don't need to act like men"... it's not progressive.

[megarywrites]