Tag: writing

thebaconsandwichofregret:

valkyrie1605:

Something I found that makes a scene easier and longer:

Writing the dialogue first.

I never used to do this, but one night it was really late and I was half asleep but I wanted to get some work done. So I decided to just fill in the dialogue I wanted for the scene.

I found myself with close to 1000 words of dialogue. (I obviously tagged who said what, how it was said, etc.)

When I came back to the document, I just filled in the action, the background, descriptions and plot.

I ended up with between 3000-4000 words in one sitting.

Maybe this won’t work for everyone, hell maybe someone else has already pointed this out, but I just wanted to share this writinf tip.

This is exactly how I write. It makes things so much easier.

If you imagine scenes like little movies happening in your head, this helps you get the core ideas down without getting bogged down in detail. I also add important expression or movement notes (blocking, as it were) in brackets like I’m writing a script.

writernotwaiting:

maneth985:

carry-on-my-wayward-butt:

jumpingjacktrash:

thepioden:

shredsandpatches:

prismatic-bell:

saoirseronanswife:

“in this essay i will explore” memes piss me off because it implies y’all still using first person pronouns when writing academically. childish ass

In this essay, this writer will explore the implications of pretending that one’s own personal view is not part of one’s essay, and the inaccessibility of academia related to established custom of artificial detachment.

In this essay, I will demonstrate that the blanket ban on first-person pronouns in high-school and some university English classes is poorly understood and hastily adopted as a result. I will further illustrate that it is a mere substitute for explaining to inexperienced writers that excessive use of phrases like “I think” or “I believe” is unnecessary and rhetorically weakens academic writing, and that opinions expressed in an essay are already assumed to be those of the author. Finally, I will address strategies for effectively conveying that information to students, who often find it difficult to grasp.

In this essay, passive voice will be used throughout in order to distance the work done from any researchers, or, in reality, kind of imply all experiments were done by magical lab gremlins and the results were simply recorded. 

in this essay, enlightenment will descend upon you without the agency of any living being. you will know things, yet know not how you know.

prepare yourself. it begins.

anyone in this essay smoke weed

LMAOOOO I love everything about this

As a writing instructor, I twitched over every style point in this post, while appreciating deeply its satiric intent.

shredsandpatches is entirely correct. In academic philosophy we do the first person “I will argue/show/explore” thing all the time.

This actually became a problem when the department secretary of my undergrad philosophy department was taking night school classes and asked a philosophy grad student to give comments on her paper, and then she got a bad grade for using first person philosophy-style.

maramahan:

I see a lot of writing tips and I post a lot of writing tips but I feel like I’ve been forgetting the most important one: you’ve gotta learn to trust yourself.

And I don’t mean that in sort of “uwu have faith in yourself! You can do it!!” kind of way. I’m not here to repeat empty affirmations–I’m saying you’ve consumed a lot of media over the years. You know what you like and what you don’t like. You have good taste. 

But if you’re like me, all that certainty goes out the window when you’re writing your own stuff. “Will the readers like that?” you think. “This is too weird. It’s unrelatable. Nobody else’s story looks like this–I must be doing something wrong.”

“This is silly,” you tell yourself. “Why do I even bother?”

And when you start doubting yourself like that, that’s the moment you stop creating. You get blocked and stressed and it gets all too easy to fall back on cliches and stereotypes. You start stripping away the things that make the story uniquely yours in order to make it look more like everyone else’s. 

Which is infinitely sad. 

You’ve lived a life no one else has seen, and you have ideas that nobody else in the world could think of. Even if the story has been ‘done’ before, there’s nobody else who can tell it like you. You can start with the most ‘cliche’ idea ever, but if you come at it with any measure of emotional honesty, it’ll still be new–because it’s being told by you. 

I just finished a draft of a book that’s probably the most painful thing I’ve written so far. It’s way out of my comfort zone, and I had to explore aspects of myself I prefer not to think about. I did a lot of second guessing, and a good bit of whimpering facedown on the floor because writing is scary and hard. 

And rereading the draft now, the absolute best parts are the bits where I gave up on convention and I wrote what I wanted exactly the way I wanted to write it. Yeah, it’s kinda silly and kinda dumb and kinda just a big load on nonsense–but it’s MY nonsense. If people like it, great. Wonderful. If they don’t like it, well–reading is a subjective experience, and maybe my work just isn’t for them. That’s okay. 

Be you. Be honestly, genuinely you. It’s a scary, vulnerable position to put yourself in, but… Even if you’re one in a million, there are 7,000 people just like you–and that’s 7,000 people who will read your work and go “this writer gets me.”

Write it for them. Write it for you. Create shamelessly. Learning to write is only half learning the craft–the other half is learning to trust in the value of the things you have to say.

keybladewyvern:

claricechiarasorcha:

ryntaia:

sirikenobi167:

unforth-ninawaters:

seananmcguire:

possiblestalker:

indianajjones:

opalescentlesbian:

entropyalarm:

katfiction2001:

“writers always know exactly where they are going with their work!”

r u sure

“no writer does anything by mistake, it’s all very strategic”

r u sure

“they use symbolism in everything. for example, a simple sentence symbolises directness and-”

R U SURE

The best moments in writing is when you discover you did something absolutely genius by complete accident.

A miscellaneous world-building detail from ten chapters earlier accidentally saved a character’s life once

“Omg this line is genius and the best reference!”
“Thank you I did that entirely on purpose!!” *sweats*

READER: “(points out symbolism and foreshadowing and depth)”

AUTHOR:

I once literally flipped a coin to decide which character was going to die in a multi-award-nominated novel.

I was once rereading a manuscript before editing it and discovered that in an early chapter I’d put in a line without any forethought that ended up aligning perfectly the plot and is now my favorite line in the entire book even though when I wrote that sentence I hadn’t even come up with that plot point yet.

In my book series, I have done various things on accident and then, looking back, yelled BRILLIANT and went with it. And, often times, my characters just DECIDE things, like one character was in love with another and I was “WHAT?” but went with it because it was actually a VERY good story and made some of the plot stuff that much more interesting. 

If you ever wanted to know my creative process for writing, congratulations, this is it. 

Writing a story like

There’s an author’s note in an Isaac Asimov short story collection – Isaac Asimov, mind you – and I can’t for the life of me remember which it was because my mom has a billion of them, but basically he went to a lecture on his books where the teaccher was lecturing on all the symbolism and themes and such and Asimovewent up to him and was just like “Uhhhh…. I didn’t put any of that in? It just…. no? Not really?”

And the lecturer legit looked ISAAC FUCKING ASIMOV straight in the eye and said, “What do you know, sir? You’re just the author.”

And Asimov described it as being a fairly profound moment in his career.