sawdust-emperor - Tumblr blog

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Wait for it

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fromsoftware comic

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“omg you’re so creative. how do you get your ideas” i hallucinate a single scene in the taco bell drive thru and then spend 13 months trying to write it

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gray heron playing in the snow (18.04.2024)

@todaysbird

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if anyone ever asks why return of the jedi is my favourite star wars film i’ll just send them this gif

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Advice/hard truths for writers?

The best piece of practical advice I know is a classic from Hemingway (qtd. here):

The most important thing I’ve learned about writing is never write too much at a time… Never pump yourself dry. Leave a little for the next day. The main thing is to know when to stop. Don’t wait till you’ve written yourself out. When you’re still going good and you come to an interesting place and you know what’s going to happen next, that’s the time to stop. Then leave it alone and don’t think about it; let your subconscious mind do the work.

Also, especially if you're young, you should read more than you write. If you're serious about writing, you'll want to write more than you read when you get old; you need, then, to lay the important books as your foundation early. I like this passage from Samuel R. Delany's "Some Advice for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student" (collected in both Shorter Views and About Writing):

You need to read Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Zola; you need to read Austen, Thackeray, the Brontes, Dickens, George Eliot, and Hardy; you need to read Hawthorne, Melville, James, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner; you need to read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Goncherov, Gogol, Bely, Khlebnikov, and Flaubert; you need to read Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, Edward Dahlberg, John Steinbeck, Jean Rhys, Glenway Wescott, John O'Hara, James Gould Cozzens, Angus Wilson, Patrick White, Alexander Trocchi, Iris Murdoch, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Vladimir Nabokov; you need to read Nella Larsen, Knut Hamsun, Edwin Demby, Saul Bellow, Lawrence Durrell, John Updike, John Barth, Philip Roth, Coleman Dowell, William Gaddis, William Gass, Marguerite Young, Thomas Pynchon, Paul West, Bertha Harris, Melvin Dixon, Daryll Pinckney, Darryl Ponicsan, and John Keene, Jr.; you need to read Thomas M. Disch, Joanna Russ, Richard Powers, Carroll Maso, Edmund White, Jayne Ann Phillips, Robert Gluck, and Julian Barnes—you need to read them and a whole lot more; you need to read them not so that you will know what they have written about, but so that you can begin to absorb some of the more ambitious models for what the novel can be.

Note: I haven't read every single writer on that list; there are even three I've literally never heard of; I can think of others I'd recommend in place of some he's cited; but still, his general point—that you need to read the major and minor classics—is correct.

The best piece of general advice I know, and not only about writing, comes from Dr. Johnson, The Rambler #63:

The traveller that resolutely follows a rough and winding path, will sooner reach the end of his journey, than he that is always changing his direction, and wastes the hours of day-light in looking for smoother ground and shorter passages.

I've known too many young writers over the years who sabotaged themselves by overthinking and therefore never finishing or sharing their projects; this stems, I assume, from a lack of self-trust or, more grandly, trust in the universe (the Muses, God, etc.). But what professors always tell Ph.D. students about dissertations is also true of novels, stories, poems, plays, comic books, screenplays, etc: There are only two kinds of dissertations—finished and unfinished. Relatedly, this is the age of online—an age when 20th-century institutions are collapsing, and 21st-century ones have not yet been invented. Unless you have serious connections in New York or Iowa, publish your work yourself and don't bother with the gatekeepers.

Other than the above, I find most writing advice useless because over-generalized or else stemming from arbitrary culture-specific or field-specific biases, e.g., Orwell's extremely English and extremely journalistic strictures, not necessarily germane to the non-English or non-journalistic writer. "Don't use adverbs," they always say. Why the hell shouldn't I? It's absurd. "Show, don't tell," they insist. Fine for the aforementioned Orwell and Hemingway, but irrelevant to Edith Wharton and Thomas Mann. Freytag's Pyramid? Spare me. Every new book is a leap in the dark. Your project may be singular; you may need to make your own map as your traverse the unexplored territory.

Hard truths? There's one. I know it's a hard truth because I hesitate even to type it. It will insult our faith in egalitarianism and the rewards of earnest labor. And yet, I suspect the hard truth is this: ineffables like inspiration and genius count for a lot. If they didn't, if application were all it took, then everybody would write works of genius all day long. But even the greatest geniuses usually only got the gift of one or two all-time great work. This doesn't have to be a counsel of despair, though: you can always try to place yourself wherever you think lightning is likeliest to strike. That's what I do, anyway. Good luck!

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Baird's tapir Tapirus bairdii

With yellow-headed caracara Daptrius chimachima

Observed by infinitaselva, CC BY-NC

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IM GOING TO STAB MYSELF IN THE FOOT I JUST SENT MY ENGLISH TEACHER MY ESSAY ON HAMLET AND IT WAS STILL NAMED “the fresh prince of denmark yo holla”

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GODDAMN!

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thirteen's era appreciation: 333/?

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Could a Dalek from Doctor Who kill MacBeth?

(If you’ve already done this one, just put the link in your answer please)

Yes, a Dalek from Doctor Who could kill Macbeth!

Their robotic appearance is actually just a mobility vehicle that Daleks utilize at all times, but they still apply for the Unconventional Birth Clause for other reasons, as the creatures within them are initially grown in incubation chambers and are then manually removed and given their own mobility casing when they are ready.

As for the Gender Clause, Daleks are most often referred to with neutral pronouns and implied to be sexless, though a few specific Daleks (typically ones of higher importance in their society) have been referred to with masculine pronouns. For our purposes, we will assume that Daleks are genderless by default, with a few exceptions that would become relevant in a case-by-case basis, so Daleks generally apply for the Gender Clause. This also somewhat extends to the Birth Parent Clause, though since no female Dalek has been shown to my knowledge, the BPC is much more certain to apply to all of them.

Thank you for your submission!

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The doctor heard that "You would make a good dalek" once and NEVER forgot it

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I think the Daleks are one of the best representations of fascist ideology and the failing thereof. Mainly in that they're really pathetic more than anything. They're sad little creatures locked safely away from the world inside their shells and desensitised to everything but hate. They could never build a real culture of their own yet they are utterly and dogmatically convinced of their own superiority. They are an entire civilisation built solely to destroy and categorically incapable of anything else (literally. Their design is comically inefficient). The single smartest Dalek who ever lived ran the numbers and came to the inescapable conclusion that their species is doomed to failure and the only way for them to survive is to rethink their ways... so they killed him.

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Catching up with the new episodes so excited for the car