zwritesstuff - Tumblr blog

[zwritesstuff]

Writeblr (re)introduction - I’ve moved blogs!!

Hello! I’m Z, and I was previously found at @zwritesstuff. This is going to be kind of a messy blog, but I’m hoping to reblog a lot of advice posts and maybe post some of my own (I’ve already made one on characters and one on the first draft) as I find inspiration/a need for them. But you’ll also find a bunch of writing memes on here as well, because writing is hard and we all need a laugh sometimes

Some things about me:

23 years old

being bullied by several mental illnesses (so i’m distant sometimes)

can’t stop coming up with new wips (seriously i have 4 original wips rn and like 12 fanfics)

i really love world building and establishing characters but i struggle a lot with plot and actually. writing

the reason i remade my blog is because i wanted to separate this content from my main blog so that i can get on more tag lists 

i am absolutely going to be on the lookout for new wips to follow, so please feel free to let me know what wips you have going on right now and i’ll check them out!!

please reblog and say hi in the tags so that I can start following people !!

[zwritesstuff]

Writeblr (re)introduction - I’ve moved blogs!!

Hello! I’m Z, and I was previously found at @zwritesstuff. This is going to be kind of a messy blog, but I’m hoping to reblog a lot of advice posts and maybe post some of my own (I’ve already made one on characters and one on the first draft) as I find inspiration/a need for them. But you’ll also find a bunch of writing memes on here as well, because writing is hard and we all need a laugh sometimes

Some things about me:

23 years old

being bullied by several mental illnesses (so i’m distant sometimes)

can’t stop coming up with new wips (seriously i have 4 original wips rn and like 12 fanfics)

i really love world building and establishing characters but i struggle a lot with plot and actually. writing

the reason i remade my blog is because i wanted to separate this content from my main blog so that i can get on more tag lists 

i am absolutely going to be on the lookout for new wips to follow, so please feel free to let me know what wips you have going on right now and i’ll check them out!!

please reblog and say hi in the tags so that I can start following people !!

[zwritesstuff]

if i can make my brain work tonight i’m going to remake this blog specifically so that i can follow more of you and get on a bunch of taglists

[zwritesstuff]

peak fantasy environment designs:

floaty islands

glowing mushrooms

bigger versions of normal animals

animalistic dragons

deep, sentient forests

sky/space whales

[zwritesstuff]

Top 11 Tips for Staying Inspired on Long-Term Projects

for the writer whose inspiration keeps running away.

Recognize that inspiration is, essentially, a faceless trickster deity and, to control it, you must be very, very clever.

Feed it carefully. If you want it to focus on your dark fantasy rather than your optimistic science fiction … feed it darkness, feed it magic, feed it the grimmest of aesthetics.

Remember that you only have so much creative energy. Use it wisely.

Set up a reward system. If you finish this draft, you can print it. It can be on your shelf. Your book. On your shelf. It exists!!

Remind yourself why you started it in the first place. Make a concise list of all the things you love about it (and conveniently forget those that you don’t) and pin up on your bathroom mirror. Add to this list.

Share it with a close friend. Make them love it. Make them want to read it to the end. Make them promise to swear at you if you don’t finish it.

Set reasonable goals and deadlines.

Let yourself take breaks. During your breaks, consider feeding your inspiration monster art and music and movies and peanut butter cookies.

Write down any and every idea. From the most bizarre to the most wonderful. Don’t discount anything.

Stay alive. You can’t keep inspiration if you don’t stay alive. Eat often (at least once a day), hydrate even oftener.

Find a writing community to scream at and just scream. AAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

[zwritesstuff]

Yes, I do teach creative writing: your opening scene

The opening scene is the most important piece of your novel. This scene determines whether your reader is pulled in or puts the book down. Here are some important do’s and don’ts.

DO write it as a scene, not a data dump. You may have a fantastic premise, a marvelous alternate history or post-apocalyptic world or magical realism to die for, but if you don’t engage your reader in an actual scene, you will bore them.

DO write a scene that immediately introduces a character that the reader can root for. Yes, I know Stephen King has had great success introducing victims that are then shortly afterward killed off. That’s a horror trope and we expect it. But if you are caught up in world-building and haven’t dreamed your way into a character who is worth following through 100,000 words of writing, your story is pointless. I have read many pieces of fiction by would-be writers who can’t grasp this essential concept, and without exception, they fail to engage the reader.

DO introduce the stakes right away. In case that’s a challenge that needs some exposition to develop, create some immediate stakes (a life threat works) that keep the tension high and the reader engaged until you can lay out the larger stakes.

DO begin in medias res, which means “in the middle of things.” Most beginning fiction writers make the mistake of starting too early in the plot. Meet the monster on page 1. 

DON’T include a flashback in the first chapter. Work on a scene, which means time is NOT compressed. It should include dialog, action, description, setting, and interior monolog. Keep everything happening within that scene for at least the first chapter. You can bring in a flashback in Chapter Three.

DON’T shift points of view within a single chapter. Let the reader establish a strong bond of interest (even if it’s with a POV villain) over the course of a whole chapter.

DON’T open the story with your character waking up unless it’s because she’s got a gun in her face (or a knife to her throat – you get what I mean). We don’t need to follow a character through their mundane daily routine. 

DON’T be coy. Beginning writers often have this idea that they need to hold back on revealing all their secrets – what’s in the box, who’s behind the curtain, where they’re going next, etc. Their well-meant plan is to slowly reveal all this over several chapters. Trust me on this one: tell your readers instead of keeping it a mystery. You WILL come up with more secrets to reveal. Your imagination is that good. Spill it now, and allow that revelation to add to the excitement.

[zwritesstuff]

Your book is going to be great; just put one word in front of the other. 

[zwritesstuff]

I changed the font and spacing to reread my first draft and it’s a totally legit trick but also it’s so funny how much of writing is just playing mind games with yourself. Stuck on the blank page? Write a grocery list! Words won’t come? Switch to writing on a yellow legal pad! Having trouble working consistently? Create a daily writing ritual! Is everything just Bad? Write in Comic Sans! Set a timer! Set a weird deadline! Write 1000 words EXACTLY, no more and no less! Mess with the font colors! Get up early! Stay up late! Dress up to do your writing! Or write naked!

the writer’s brain is just a puzzle toy that we have to turn over and over in every direction to get the Creativity to fall out

[zwritesstuff]

I’m tired of the idea that “good fiction is always realistic”.

There’s a difference between being realistic and being believable, and too many people confuse the latter for the former.

An audience doesn’t actually want realism, they want a world that’s decently fleshed out and follows some kind of logic.

That’s what good fantasy is; you know it would never work in real life but it’s portrayed so cool that you wish it would.

[zwritesstuff]

[zwritesstuff]

me creating any character: if they're not overpowered but heavily nerfed and extremely traumatized then what's the fucking point

[zwritesstuff]

my brain: here have a character idea :)

me: sweet thanks can i have a plot now

my brain:

[zwritesstuff]

I think the best piece of character design advice I ever received was actually from a band leadership camp I attended in june of 2017. 

the speaker there gave lots of advice for leaders—obviously, it was a leadership camp—but his saying about personality flaws struck me as useful for writers too. 

he said to us all “your curses are your blessings and your blessings are your curses” and went on to explain how because he was such a great speaker, it made him a terrible listener. he could give speeches for hours on end and inspire thousands of people, but as soon as someone wanted to talk to him one on one or vent to him, he struggled with it. 

he had us write down our greatest weakness and relate it to our biggest strength (mine being that I am far too emotional, but I’m gentle with others because I can understand their emotions), and the whole time people are sharing theirs, my mind was running wild with all my characters and their flaws.

previously, I had added flaws as an after thought, as in “this character seems too perfect. how can I make them not-like-that?” but that’s not how people or personalities work. for every human alive, their flaws and their strengths are directly related to each other. you can’t have one without the other.

is your character strong-willed? that can easily turn into stubbornness. is your character compassionate? maybe they give too many chances. are they loyal? then they’ll destroy the world for the people they love.

it works the other way around too: maybe your villain only hates the protagonist’s people because they love their own and just have a twisted sense of how to protect them. maybe your antagonist is arrogant, but they’ll be confident in everything they do.

tl;dr “your curses are your blessings, and your blessings are your curses” there is no such thing as a character flaw, just a strength that has been stretched too far.

[zwritesstuff]

If you’re reading this: this is your sign that your WIP is worth writing, is worth the effort, and that you are doing great. Keep going, take breaks, reflect. But do not lose sight of how far you’ve come on this project! You can do it!

[zwritesstuff]

How To Foreshadow

Foreshadowing is a necessary part of any well-executed story. And yet, despite all its prevalence and importance, it’s actually a concept that many authors have a hard time getting their minds around. If we sift foreshadowing down to its simplest form, we could say that it prepares readers for what will happen later in the story.

At first glance, this may seem counter-intuitive. Why would we want readers to know what’s going to happen later in the story? If they know how the book turns out, they’ll have no reason to read on.

True enough. So let me reiterate. The point of foreshadowing is to prepare readers for what happens later in the story. Not tell them,just prepare them.

Foreshadowing’s great strength lies in its ability to create a cohesive and plausible story. If readers understand that it’s possible that someone in your story may be murdered, they won’t be completely shocked when the sidekick gets axed down the road. If, however, you failed to properly foreshadow this unhappy event,readers would be jarred. They would feel you had cheated them out of the story they thought they were reading. They would think you had, in essence, lied to them so you could trick them with this big shocker.

Readers don’t like to be cheated, lied to, or tricked. And that’s where foreshadowing comes into play.

Foreshadowing, Part 1: The Plant

We can break foreshadowing down into two parts. The first is the plant. This is the part where you hint to readers that something surprising and/or important is going to happen later in the book. If the bad guy is going to kidnap the good guy’s son, your plant might be the moment when your hero notices a creepy dude hanging around the playground. If your heroine is going to be left standing at the altar, your plant might be her fiancé’s ambivalence toward the wedding preparations.

Depending on what you’re foreshadowing, the plant can be blatant or subtle. Subtle is almost always better, since you don’t want to giveaway your plot twists. But, at the same time, your hints have to be obvious enough that readers will remember them later on.

Usually, the earlier you can foreshadow an event, the stronger and more cohesive an effect you will create. The bigger the event, the more important it is to foreshadow it early. As editor Jeff Gerke puts it in The First 50 Pages:

Basically, you need to let us in on the rules. If the climax of your book is going to consist of getting into a time machine and jumping away to safety, we had better have known in the first fifty pages that time travel is possible in the world of your story.

Foreshadowing, Part 2: The Payoff

Once you’ve got your plant in place, all that’s left is to bringthe payoff on stage. If you planted hints about kidnapping, jilting, or time travelling, this is the part where you now get to let these important scenes play out.

As long as you’ve done your job right with the plant, you probably won’t even need to reference your hints from earlier. In fact, you’re likely to create a more solid effect by letting readers put the pieces together themselves.

But you’ll also find moments, usually of smaller events that were given less obvious plants, that will benefit from a quick reference to the original hint (e.g., “George,you big meanie! Now I understand why you wouldn’t choose between the scarlet and the crimson for the bridesmaids’ dresses!”)The most important thing to remember about the payoff is that it always needs to happen. If you plant hints, pay them off. Just as readers will be confused by an unforeshadowed plot twist, they’ll also be frustrated by foreshadowing that excites them and then leads nowhere.

Foreshadowing vs. Telegraphing

The trick to good foreshadowing is preparing your readers on a subconscious level for what’s coming without allowing them to guess the ins and outs of the plot twist. You don’t want your hints to be so obvious that they remove all suspense. In her October 2012 Writer’s Digest article “Making the Ordinary Menacing: 5 Ways,” Hallie Ephron calls this “telegraphing”:

When you insert a hint of what’s to come, look at it critically and decide whether it’s something the reader will glide right by but remember later with an Aha!That’s foreshadowing. If instead the reader groans and guesses what’s coming, you’v etelegraphed.

Some clever readers will undoubtedly be able to interpret your hints, no matter how cagey you are. But if you can fool most of the readers most of the time, you can’t ask for more than that.

Foreshadowing vs. Foreboding

Foreboding—that skin-prickling feeling that somethinghorrible is going to happen—can be a useful facet of foreshadowing. By itself, foreboding isn’t specific enough tobe foreshadowing. Unlike the plants used for foreshadowing, foreboding is just an ambiguous aura of suspense. Jordan E. Rosenfeld describes it in Make a Scene:

[F]oreshadowing … hints at actual plot events to come, [but]foreboding is purely about mood-setting. It heightens the feeling of tension in a scene but doesn’t necessarily indicate that something bad really will happen.

Foreboding is useful in setting readers’ emotions on edge without giving them any blatant hints. But when it comes time to foreshadow important events, always back up your foreboding by planting some specific clues.Most authors have so intrinsic an understanding of foreshadowing that they plant it and pay it off without even fully realizing that’s what they’re doing. But the better you understand the technique, the better you can wield it. Using this basic approach to foreshadowing, you can strengthen your story and your readers’ experience of it.

Source x

[zwritesstuff]

to my fellow writeblrs: i believe in you so much

[zwritesstuff]