All life on Earth uses oxygen, iron, and phosphorous – very reactive elements by galactic standards. It turns out we are the “acid blooded aliens” from the standpoint of another intelligent life form. Write about this from an aliens perspective.
note to self: just because someone did the thing you were thinking about doing, and did it way better than you could ever hope to do, doesn’t mean it would be stupid or pointless to go ahead and try to still do the thing anyway.
Also, when it comes to creative things? There really is no “better”.
Sure, someone might be more technically accomplished than you – you might not be able to colour as nicely or craft a sentence that rings as poetically – but art is only really secondarily about that. It’s firstmost about what you, uniquely, have to express, and how the precise way you express it might be what others need to relate to it – even if it’s less flashy, less “beautiful”, and gets fewer notes.
I promise you this: there are obscure fanfics with only a handful of notes that are the read-and-re-read favourites of someone too anxious to comment. There are drawings done by 14-year-olds in poorly-blended markers that are someone’s favourite because they spoke to something that nothing else did. There are covers of songs where your voice cracks and you cringe every time you hear it but someone thinks the way it cracked just at that moment added beauty to the song. There are angsty three-line poems you wrote at 4am that someone once called “pretentious emo trash” that are loved by someone else going through the same thing as you.
And I guarantee you, there is something unique about your art. Even if you’re “saying something someone else has said”. Even if you’re the thousandth person to take on the subject. Even if you feel like you’re not at all unique. You’re bound to express something, however subtle, that didn’t exist until then.
Art is about connection. And the more you create, the more chance you have of finding other people who experience the world the way you do.
“But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.“ via @neil-gaiman
The “two cakes” theory of content production.
It was only yesterday that I was lamenting thing I no longer felt allowed to do because someone had done similar.
I ought to read this post daily. Maybe twice daily.
The girl that everyone knows but never talks to is a witch. If desperate, people got to her for solutions. She helps, but for a price. One day she comes to you in need of a favor, and in return she promises the memories she took from you nearly a year ago in a deal you no longer remember.
You can feel it every time you die in another dimension. Normally it’s infrequent but today you are hit with billions of deaths at once. Something’s coming, and it just killed you in almost every other plane of existence.
‘we used to be in a band but you left bc you despise the music industry now we’re world-famous i wrote a song abt missing you i hope you get lonely when you hear it on the radio bc THAT’S HOW YOU MAKE ME FEEL YOU ASSHOLE’ AU
‘we’re new roommates and someone told you i’m at the hospital you panic and then you remember i work at a hospital’ AU
‘you are a selfish, parasitic, amoral person who has done unforgivable things why did you give up your life to save mine’ AU
‘you live across the hall and you’re in your underwear every time you open the door it’s so frustrating stOP SMILING OH GOD I CAN’T EVEN LOOK AT YOU IN THE EYES’ AU
‘we were childhood best friends who meet again and have to work together we used to be v close and i actually lov– hey why don’t you remember me at all did you get amnesia or something’ AU
‘you’re an atheist and im a conservative gay catholic you’ve never been a jerk abt my faith and u even wait for me outside the church every sunday i really appreciate it’ AU
‘we’re both travelers and i hate how you speak the native language so well where are you staying btw do u want to make out’ AU
‘it’s raining hard and i only have my designer coat then you, a savage person in a truck, came along and now i’m soaking wet do you know how much this coat costs’ AU
‘who am i??? what happened?? ??? well mate, i’m just a loyal bar patron and a total stranger whom you kissed and asked if i wanted to see your butt last night’ AU
‘i had a terrible day and i’m on the bus stuck in heavy traffic you’re waiting for your ride outside and we have a staring contest then u blink and smile like the big dork that u are i cant believe i smiled back’ AU
In the heart of the fairy mound, there were two identical
cradles, each with an identical infant inside.
“One of these babies is the one you bore,” said a fairy.
“The other is the changeling we left. You may leave our hall with whichever
child you claim as your own. Choose wisely.”
“But they are both
my children,” the human mother protested indignantly.
The fairies whispered amongst themselves in surprise and
confusion. At last, one asked, “How do you mean?”
“I came to get back the child you stole from me, the one who
is mine by blood. I never agreed to give my adopted child back to you.”
Perhaps her words touched the fairies’ hearts; or perhaps
her stubbornness impressed them; or perhaps they simply found the argument
amusing, novel enough to merit a reward.
She left the fairy mound, an infant in each arm, and brought
them home.
It’s hard to remember the first time it happened, isn’t it? It’s been said to you, around you, about you so many times that pinning it down to a first time feels as pointless as patterngift (because, really, who cares if you always know how to pair stripes with more stripes?). As soon as you hear the phrase, Good girls don’t, you have a million words, phrases, treatises ready to fill the space that follows. Good girls don’t curse, good girls don’t have sex, good girls don’t shout or drive fast or dream big.
But the one that haunts you is this: good girls don’t use firegift.
It’s not an official rule, and no one would tell you it was, but just the same, they’d repeat the rule-that’s-not-a-rule and look at you with an expression as if to say Not my fault. This is just the way things are.
Gifts arrive sometime in your late teens. You know this. You can sort of judge when it might come based on when your parents’ did, but like your first period, it’s always a surprise. When you were very small, you imagined what it would be like to have firegift. You ran around with the girls and boys in your neighborhood battling villains made of ice or wood or who breathed combustible gasses, and you took all of them down with your own two hands, blessed by firegift. When you were a little older still, you heard the story of girls in other countries who kept their families alive with the simplicity of their gift. You heard the story of the woman saint, given firegift to save an entire people.
But at some point, you realized those were the exceptions. Those were the girls who weren’t like other girls. And their stories were qualified by others.
By the pilgrim girls who didn’t know any better and set fire to an entire colony one hard winter.
By the slave girls who were deemed too dangerous on account of their gifts and were murdered on discovery.
By the immigrant girls, penniless and starving, turned away at the gates.
By the lesbian girls incarcerated and drugged until fire was nothing more than a distant memory.
That doesn’t happen any more. At least, not in the same way. In today’s world, a girl with firegift can have a mostly normal life. She can go to school, get a job, find love, but she won’t ever be quite like other girls.
You know about those girls. They are sharper, they are stolen kisses and cigarettes and combat boots. They are confidence and wicked smiles and tattoos. They do things other girls don’t and maybe that other girls shouldn’t. You’ve heard them say it, Not like other girls. And it felt true, but also like something said about them before it was said by them.
You’ve spent days wondering what you’d do if yours was firegift. Hide it, probably. Join the ranks of “giftless” girls who are pitied, but not ostracized. It’s more common for girls to go giftless than for boys to, and no one thinks twice about it.
No one in your family has firegift. There’s no reason for you to worry over it the way you do, but on a random day in August, as you sit on your bedroom floor picking out the perfect outfit for the first day of your senior year, your hands spark and catch fire. You clap them together immediately.
The first thing you do when the fire is gone is check to make sure you are alone. You are. The second thing you do is look in the mirror to see if anything else about you has changed. It’s a strange impulse. Gifts don’t come with physical changes, but you feel different, so you peer into the mirror to see if anyone might tell by looking at you that you’re no longer like other girls.
Can they?
Probably not.
For a moment, your mind fools you into thinking things are as simple as they were when you were small. You feel the thrum of power in your fingertips, in your very heart, and you are eager to open your hands again and fill them with fire.
Firegift. You have it.
Now, you panic. Your mind fills with stories about good girls and other girls and you wonder where you fit between them. Is there even space between them? You discover you have so many questions and if another gift – any other gift – had been the one you ended up with, you’d have answers. You know exactly how the world opens up for those with numbergift, with earthgift, with musicgift. And for anything you didn’t immediately know you’d be able to Google! Can you Google? Does someone monitor questions about firegift? Will they track you down? Alert your parents?
Downstairs, you hear your parents clattering around in the kitchen, prepping dinner and pouring their evening glass of wine. You try to imagine what it will be like to tell them and see the panic and sorrow on their faces. You try to imagine what life will be like now that you’re not like other girls.
And then you stop. You look at your hands. You palms are open, empty. They are marked by the same lines that have always been there, your thumbs are disproportionately shorter than the rest of your fingers, and the underside of the knuckle on the middle finger of your left hand is scarred from a childhood fight against an imagined ice villain. These are the same hands you’ve always hand. You are the same girl you’ve always been.
And that’s when you understand. The girls who are not like other girls were created by the same stories that told you what good girls are and what they aren’t.
You have firegift. And you are exactly like other girls.
Natalie C. Parker is the author of the Southern Gothic duology Beware the Wild, which was a 2014 Junior Library Guild Selection, and Behold the Bones (HarperTeen). She is also the editor of Three Sides of a Heart, a young adult anthology on love triangles publishing from HarperTeen, Dec. 19, 2017. She is the founder of Madcap Retreats, an organization offering a yearly calendar of writing retreats and workshops.
me: I’m so excited to write this fic, it’s going to be good, I love it, I’m so pumped
*writes it in head before sleeping, gets emotional over songs that could fit the story, elaborates background and characterisations, writes lines on phone*
also me, in front of laptop: yeah, but no, I’ve got nothing
just moving along like everyone else 