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.
I actually started doing this last week, before I ever saw this post and let me tell you, as someone who can do (usually snarky) dialog but struggles with everything else in a scene
Sometimes people hit a place in their life where things are going really well. They like their job and are able to be productive at it; they have energy after work to pursue the relationships and activities they enjoy; they’re taking good care of themselves and rarely get sick or have flareups of their chronic health problems; stuff is basically working out. Then a small thing about their routine changes and suddenly they’re barely keeping their head above water.
(This happens to me all the time; it’s approximately my dominant experience of working full-time.)
I think one thing that’s going on here is that there are a bunch of small parts of our daily routine which are doing really important work for our wellbeing. Our commute involves a ten-minute walk along the waterfront and the walking and fresh air are great for our wellbeing (or, alternately, our commute involves no walking and this makes it way more frictionless because walking sucks for us). Our water heater is really good and so we can take half-hour hot showers, which are a critical part of our decompression/recovery time. We sit with our back to the wall so we don’t have to worry about looking productive at work as long as the work all gets done. The store down the street is open really late so late runs for groceries are possible. Our roommate is a chef and so the kitchen is always clean and well-stocked.
It’s useful to think of these things as load-bearing. They’re not just nice – they’re part of your mental architecture, they’re part of what you’re using to thrive. And when they change, life can abruptly get much harder or sometimes just collapse on you entirely. And this is usually unexpected, because it’s hard to notice which parts of your environment and routine are load bearing. I often only notice in hindsight. “Oh,” I say to myself after months of fatigue, “having my own private space was load-bearing.” “Oh,” after a scary drop in weight, “being able to keep nutrition shakes next to my bed and drink them in bed was load-bearing.” “Oh,” after a sudden struggle to maintain my work productivity, “a quiet corner with my back to the wall was load-bearing.”
When you know what’s important to you, you can fight for it, or at least be equipped to notice right away if it goes and some of your ability to thrive goes with it. When you don’t, or when you’re thinking of all these things as ‘nice things about my life’ rather than ‘load-bearing bits of my flourishing as a person’, you’re not likely to notice the strain created when they vanish until you’re really, really hurting.
Almost two weeks after reading this, and I’m still kind of blown away at what a ridiculously fruitful definition this is. Like I had no idea that load bearing things were a thing that needed to have a word for them, but now I’m like holy shit I’m so glad that there’s now a word I can use to refer to this really important class of Thing.
This is astounding. Load-bearing. Forget spoons, this concept is wonderful. I’m going to update my Spear Theory with this.
Oh god, please delete the extra spaces between paragraphs in your fics on AO3. Please. I know it takes ages and it’s really annoying to do, but it is an immediate backspace away from your story if I’m on mobile because I get one sentence per page and acres of white space.
I can help! There is an easy way to do this if you have a word processor! Instructions with screencaps follow:
1. Before you paste your text into the Ao3 text box, make sure “Rich Text” is clicked.
2. Paste your story into the Ao3 text box (like you usually do)
3. Instead of hitting post, go back and click “HTML.” Your story will suddenly show the HTML markup, including all those pesky extra spaces:
4. Open a new, blank document in your word processor. Copy all the text from the Ao3 window and paste it there.
5. Do a find / replace for all the lines that say “<p> </p>”, replacing them with nothing.
6. Now you have a document with HTML markup and no extra carriage returns.
7. Copy this and open up your Ao3 window again. MAKE SURE “HTML” IS CLICKED. Paste your nice new text into this window.
8. When you click “Rich Text” again, your story will look beautiful and have no extra spaces!!!!!!
9. Now you can post your story!
10. Congratulate yourself on your amazingness, win $100,000,000,000,000, become best friends with Idris Elba, roll around with a pile of happy puppies
oh look! @thepurrbutton i may be able to give you chapters with proper spacing again!
Also! You can stop it from doing this in the first place by using the right settings in your word processor. From the Rich Text Editor (RTE) help text (linked from the question mark next to “Type or paste formatted text.”):
Press Enter once between paragraphs. Pressing Enter twice will insert a blank paragraph, creating additional, and likely unwanted, space between paragraphs when you paste into the RTE. The Archive uses top and bottom margins to create the appearance of a blank line between paragraphs; you can use the paragraph formatting options in your text editor to create a similar effect without adding extra <p> tags.
In Google Docs, you can go to the “Format" menu, choose “Line spacing,” and then choose “Custom spacing.” It will let you set how much space you want before and after paragraphs.
In LibreOffice, go to the “Format” menu and choose “Paragraph.” Under the “Spacing” heading, there will be options for Above and Below paragraph.
Those are the only programs I have handy, but generally, you want to look in the formatting menu for something about either paragraphs or spacing, and you’ll find a similar option there. You can then use any amount of spacing that’s pleasing to your eye and it will still have AO3′s usual amount of spacing between paragraphs.
(I could teal deer about all the whys involved – why did fandom start hitting Enter twice, why do paragraphs on computers and paper have different amounts of vertical space, why does the RTE not know what to do when given text where someone hit enter twice, why don’t we we change the parser if we can’t change the RTE – but that’s probably a little more detail than necessary to be helpful.)
To set paragraph spacing in Scrivener (Windows), go to the “Tools” menu and select “Options.” Select the “Editor” tab. Click inside the window with text, then click the line spacing menu:
Select “More…” and you’ll see this pop-up:
Set “Before” and “After” in the “Spacing” section to whatever you want. They start at 0.00 and I just increased them until I liked the look of the text. There, now you only have to hit Enter once!
If you do end up having to go back and backspace the lines, it’s a great opportunity to do one last edit as well!
tbh a lot of my advice boils down to “hey you know that terrible horrible looming thing you’re doing your best to avoid and distract and escape as much as possible but no matter what you do it just keeps looming and looming and ruining your life”
One is the Lady of the Waking Waters, an immortal mermaid. The other is a thief, who steals lives until a wish can be fulfilled, and a life-changing choice can be made.
This is a cool short story about love and obsession and needing to find the balance between them. It’s poetic and surprising, although maybe not quite as beautiful as I expected from that gorgeous cover art. I’m glad I just read it on the website instead of buying it because I don’t think it was long enough to make buying it worth it, but if you have like ten minutes to kill this is a good choice to squeeze in.
A composer in an unstable city-state accidentally discovers the perfect singer for his work—a clockwork man—and sows the seeds of revolution.
What a beautiful story. Even though it’s a little thick to work through, it’s also rich, inventive, and strange. This story doesn’t explain anything. It doesn’t offer context. It just exists to offer a peak into a city on the brink of revolution, full of wonders and common horrors. It has the feel of a dream, but the emotional weight of a novel. I may not understand any of the characters, but I am full of emotions from their story, and that matters more.
Avi comes across these foreboding words scrawled on the bathroom mirror, but what do they mean? Is this a curse, a prediction, or a threat? And how does anyone know his real name when he hasn’t even told his mother yet? Then there is Ian—the cool new guy at school who is all sunshine, optimism, and magic. All the things that Avi doesn’t know how to deal with…yet.
Words can’t express how much I love this story. If you check out only one novella from this post, please make it this one. It’s got sunshine boys, grumpy boys, an overabundance of moms, support for queer kids and perfect Jewish representation. It made me tear up about these boys and bounce at the Jewish jokes. Its official tagline is “A romantic, #ownvoices fairy tale for trans boys,” and I guess that’s a good review too.
You can read it for free at thebooksmugglers.com here.
These books can also be purchased if you’re inclined and would like to support the authors/publishers! Or, support them by reading and reviewing.
If you’re new to actions with an arrest risk and you don’t have experienced protestors with you, there’s stuff you can find online about having a legal team, writing the name of a lawyer on your body, saying NOTHING to the cops except the name of your lawyer, etc. That’s all good advice.
But let me give you a bit of advice that is just as essential as all that:
If one of your comrades gets arrested, and you know they can be held for 6, 9, 12 hours, depending on where you are, you get a group of people together and you wait outside the police station.
You may be tired, you may be stressed, it may be freezing, you may need to take turns, but you take whoever can still physically and mentally bear it and you go to that police station and you wait for your comrade. You can spend the time taking care of each other, drinking hot drinks, doing whatever gets you through, but you wait.
And when your comrade gets out, you make sure they do not walk home alone in the dark thinking about the fucked up experience they just had, you make sure there’s a big fucking crowd of their comrades there to greet them with hugs and hot drinks and a cigarette if they smoke.
And whether the arrested comrade that just got out is happy or sad or pissed off, you take that for what it is and give that space and you support that. And you get them a hot meal and you hang out with them and you offer to let them stay at your place or you stay with them so they don’t have to spend that night alone with their thoughts.
You do this every damn time, regardless of whether you really like that comrade and regardless of how you feel about the thing your comrade got arrested for, regardless of how often they’ve been arrested. Because you never know how shitty their experience is going to be in there this time.
Trust me. This is absolutely essential. Once you’ve been arrested and have felt the difference between walking home alone or having your friends waiting for you, you’ll understand.
Be good comrades
I can’t stress how important this is. When my father and I were arrested in Seattle some years back for agitating for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, we were greeted outside the jail by the event’s organisers. They cheered us, had cokes and munchies for us. They drove us to our car and, during the drive, asked if we wanted to stay the night in Seattle with one of the organisers, they filled us in on what had happened after our arrests, they asked about and listened intently to what we experienced from arrest to release. They did so much so well that when another call went out for potential arrestees, we were amongst the first to raise our proverbial hands.
Read the post. Re-read the post. Remember it. And, when the chance comes, do it.
When I was arrested at a Black Lives Matter protest a few years ago, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice were doing Jail Support when I was finally let out of One Police Plaza at around 6am.
They had gotten a klezmer band to stand along the hill you have to go up to leave the jail, and as I walked to where the volunteer lawyers were waiting (they were there to make sure all 200+ people who were arrested that night would be represented at their later hearings. They also were surrounded by volunteers who had food, phone chargers, directions to all the nearby subway stops, and one of them let me borrow her phone to call my mom when I got frustrated with how slowly my phone was charging) the band played music, cheered and applauded.
Honestly? That band playing klezmer for me as I left jail, cheering me on and making me laugh… it’s a memory I really treasure.
It’s also one of my mother’s favorite stories. Before I told her about that band, she got so upset and agitated whenever anything reminded her of my arrest. She’d freak out, cry, start fussing over me, and so forth. After I told her about the klezmer band though? It became something she’d tell her friends about, over and over again, laughing each time. She stopped calling me to beg me not to go and protest every time she knew a big one was happening, and instead would call to make a joke about how if I want to listen to klezmer she has some CDs I can borrow.
When I think about that night, rather than any of the many many terrible things that happened from the moment the cops grabbed me onward, the first thing I remember is the klezmer, and how it made me laugh, and the popcorn someone gave me as I gave the lawyers my name and info, and the kindness of strangers.
After the dehumanization of even a few hours in police custody, those volunteers made me smile, and gave the night a new fun and funny angle to be remembered from. I actually laugh when I think about that night, thanks to them.
Jail Support is a beyond vital part of protesting. It really really is.
2018 Stanley Cup Champions. Washington Capitals. June 7th 2018.
You do not need to be a ray of sunshine to be the positive change you want to see in the world. Sometimes you can be a very small, very afraid flicker in the darkness. Just don’t let that flicker go out.
So, your landlord/parents/home inspector/favorite movie star is dropping by, and your place is a disaster. You don’t have much time to clean it up. You’re in emergency mode. Let’s get started.
Don’t panic. Panic leads to fear, fear leads to procrastination, procrastination leads to the dark side. You can do this, but you have to stay calm.
Unlike maintenance cleaning, we’re not looking to completely unfuck one space at a time. Instead, we want to decrease the overall mess in stages, spread evenly across the whole area that we’re concerned about. If you think your home is at Level 10 filth, we want to bring the whole thing down to a Level 9, and then down from there. One really clean spot in an otherwise messy home is not going to be helpful here.
Get prepared. You’ll want to shut the computer down (or turn the modem off if you need your computer to play music). Trust me. Get your music going. Gather up trash bags, your vacuum and mop, some rags or paper towel, sponges, and other cleaning supplies. Use what you have on hand. Don’t get distracted running to the store and spending an hour browsing cleaning supplies. A multi-purpose cleaning concentrate or a jug of vinegar will be just fine.
Breaks are very important. Depending on your time constraints, work in 20/10s (20 minutes working, 10-minute break) or 45/15s. But take breaks because otherwise you’re marathoning, and marathon cleaning is no one’s friend. Keep hydrated, don’t forget to eat, and check in with yourself frequently to make sure you’re physically doing OK.
Make your bed. This will be your home base if you get overwhelmed or need somewhere clear to take a break.
Start with the garbage. Going from room to room, throw out anything that is obvious trash. Once you fill a bag, take it out. Repeat as many times as necessary.
Move on to dishes. Gather the dishes from all over your house and bring them to the kitchen. If you can, start them soaking in a sink of hot, soapy water or start loading the dishwasher. After the dishes are all in one place, spend one 20/10 getting started getting them under control.
Now it’s time for your flat surfaces. Countertops, tables, dresser tops, etc. Clear them off and wipe them down. Don’t get distracted in too much sorting and organizing. We’re in crisis mode here. There will be time to get in-depth once this is all done. The same applies to cabinets and closets. Unless you have reason to believe people will be opening closed doors, leave these alone for now.
Attack the floordrobe and shoe pile. Get your clothes either put away or in the hamper. Start a load of laundry if you need to, but keep in mind that laundry and dishes have three steps: wash, dry, and put it away, goddammit!
Get random stuff up off the floors. If something is trash-worthy, throw it away now rather than just move it around a bunch of times. Otherwise, put stuff where it belongs.
Take another 20/10 or 45/15 to catch up on more dishes, if needed.
Head into the bathroom. Pour some cleaner in the toilet bowl, fill the sink with hot water and cleaner, and either spray the tub and shower with cleaner, or fill the tub up with some hot water and add cleaner and let it soak. Put everything away that’s out and shouldn’t be, clean the mirror, counters, and toilet seat. Sweep or dry mop the floor. Wipe down the sink and tub/shower, and give the toilet bowl a scrub. Mop the floor.
Sweep and mop the kitchen floor.
Vacuum everything you can, and sweep everything you can’t.
Walk outside of your house (don’t lock yourself out, please). Walk back in and see what catches your eye first. Go and deal with that.
If you’re being inspected or your landlord is coming in for repairs, spend time on whatever area they’ll be focusing on.
Give the whole place one more once-over and pay attention to anything you’ve missed so far.
It’s an old trick, but if your place is a little funky-smelling, put a pan of water on the stove on low heat and add some citrus or cinnamon or vanilla. Don’t leave it unattended or forget about it.
Take a shower, put on something clean, and eat something.
You can do this. It’s overwhelming, yes, but it is not impossible. You just need to do it. You have a list. You have directions. You have a whole bunch of Internet strangers who have been there before and who are cheering you on. You can do this, but you need to get started.
Why are you still here? GO. START. NOW.
the number of times in my past that I desperately wanted/needed someone to sit me down and tell me this stuff. I will never get back the hours and hours lost to headless-chicken mode, but it’s nice to know that in the last year I’ve learned so many coping mechanisms 😀
just moving along like everyone else 