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“To make the right choices in life, you have to get in touch with your soul. To do this, you need to experience solitude, which most people are afraid of, because in the silence you hear the truth and know the solutions.”
— Deepak Chopra
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"i wonder if we ever think of each other at the same time."
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Just learned about garden path sentences.
They’re basically a literary prank– the sentence starts out in such a way that you think you know where it’s going, but the way it ends completely changes the meaning while still being a complete and logical sentence. Usually it deals with double meanings, or with words that can be multiple parts of speech, like nouns and verbs or nouns and adjectives.
So we get gems like
The old man the boat. (The old people are manning the boat)
The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families. (The apartment complex is home to both married and single soldiers, plus their families)
The prime number few. (People who are excellent are few in number.)
The cotton clothing is usually made of grows in Mississipi. (The cotton that clothing is made of)
The man who hunts ducks out on weekends. (As in he ducks out of his responsibilities)
We painted the wall with cracks. (The cracked wall is the one that was pained.)
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you follow the advice of the people around you who are the most toxic, unhealed version of themselves. and you expect yourself to excel after following that advice?
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I am once again pondering the fact that Marty McFly is just such a fantastic character. Like, especially when you look at other male protagonists in the 80s, they all follow a similar trend. A lot are uber cool and suave, with the added side effect of also being a jerk. Many are popular jocks or whatever. Big flirts. Edgy and troubled or sleazy, etc.
And Marty is sort of in his own category entirely. He's cool, but he's not? He skateboards and kills it on guitar but has 2 whole friends--his girlfriend and a disgraced scientist--and crippling self-doubt and can't go a day without falling down or tripping over his own feet or nearly being killed by a car.
He's polite. He's respectful. Won't let anyone mess with the people he loves and doesn't let a moment pass by where he can thank somebody or apologize for a wrongdoing. (seriously, Marty has beautiful manners. Like, it is quite noticeable how often he says, "please," "thank you," "excuse me," or "sorry".)
His emotions are all SO BIG and he doesn't hold back on them. He gets all animated when he's excited and yells when he's scared and cries when he's sad and pulls his friend into big ol' hugs.
He literally never knows what is going on. Marty exists in the constant state of confusion. Between asking Doc to "wait a minute" every other sentence and his ever-changing, scattered thoughts, Marty is just out there trying to survive. Just slow it down, alright? He's a smart guy, but he's also got elevator music playing in his head. Really really fast elevator music.
Time means nothing to him. His watch is broken. He's racking up tardies like it's nobody's business. Stopping by the garage to look for Doc and play some guitar when he should be at school. He's got to get out of that stupid suit RIGHT THIS INSTANT even though he's got one shot at the lightning strike at the clock tower.
Marty just. Does things. There is zero impulse control. A synapse fires and Marty's brain goes "!!!" and that's that. Punch the bully who's twice your size, buy that sports almanac, just Walk Away while Doc is talking to you. Buy that sweet leather jacket. Ignore ALL instructions you're given! Marty, you need constant supervision and I love you for that.
He's just. Marty is the most character. Look at him.
They really knocked it out of the park with this guy.
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Expanding a thought from a conversation this morning:
In general, I think "Is X out-of-character?" is not a terribly useful question for a writer. It shuts down possibility, and interesting directions you could take a character.
A better question, I believe, is "What would it take for Character to do X?" What extremity would she find herself in, where X starts to look like a good idea? What loyalties or fears leave him with X as his only option? THAT'S where a potentially interesting story lies.
In practice, I find that you can often justify much more from a character than you initially dreamed you could: some of my best stories come from "What might drive Character to do [thing he would never do]?" As long as you make it clear to the reader what the hell pushed your character to this point, you've got the seed of a compelling story on your hands.
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You meet god and she's mostly dead fish. You ask her why and she says most of the world is dead fish, and she's made herself to appeal to the most common denominator, the everyman funnyman comedy show that runs for eleven seasons but with the entire universe in mind. You ask her how much of the dead fish is your fault, she says it's far less than you'd think, in the grand scheme of things. You ask her if you matter at all. If you can do anything. She shrugs her rotting shoulders and says mattering is a made-up concept, like life, but sure, you can matter if you want to, on some scale. She has many scales. She doesn't know what you mean by 'anything', but you can do everything you can. You ask her if it's enough. She says there's no base requirement for deserving to exist. She's smoking a joint and the smoke filtering out of her gills gathers and forms gas giants and red dwarfs. You ask her if there's any hidden secrets of the universe you should know and she says it's not a secret if she tells, plus it's fun to let you figure it out yourself. You ask her if any of your questions were right questions and she says you worry about being right so much it might keep you from fucking around, which is as close to meaning of life as she ever bothered to make. You don't ask but she says she loves your hair, also your whole being, also your planet. She says she figured out what love is yesterday and is trying it out, which explains the ten thousand rainbows and sudden influx in rains of fish. She offers you a drag of her joint and you wake up half past midnight behind a chain restaurant clutching a smoked salmon. The new stars are winking like they're in on some joke and you're sure if you try hard enough you'll remember what it is.
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“You don’t find your worth in someone. You find your worth within yourself and then find someone who’s worthy of you. Remember that.”
— Unknown
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