Man I have never known straight dude writers to shy away from putting out stuff like ‘my thinly-veiled self-insert goes on a mediocre adventure but more importantly ends up in a love quadrangle with these four female characters who are all incredibly hot to me’, but most of the lady writers I know get nervous if they write one (1) love story where *gasp* two whole dudes compete for the same lady’s love!
So listen.
Listen.
Go out and give your warrior witch lady a magic talking panther that flies and five hot elf boyfriends (or girlfriends, or datemates, whatever) who all happily share her. Or fight over her. Whichever. Make each of them as smoking hot as you please. Indulge yourself. Live.
And this goes absolutely double for WoC and trans ladies and queer ladies and everyone else who has extra troubles with being shamed for your indulgence.
If you’re going to worry about stuff in your story it should be things like ‘is that trope racist?’ or ‘how do I fix this plot hole?’, not ‘am I putting in too many elements that I personally enjoy?’
The best way I can explain it, is that talent is something you have a particular natural aptitude for and skill is something you can acquire.
I’ve met plenty of talented and even gifted writers in my time, but a lot of them actually lack the skill to do anything with that talent. So they might churn out a golden phrase and an absolutely soul shaking concept here and there, but when it comes down to putting it on paper, they lack for fortitude to persevere with it.
Talent, after all, can make things feel like second nature, so when something doesn’t flow easily or is not perfect on the first or even second try, they lose interest because well, if they were talented this would be working out for them, but it’s not, so clearly there’s no point in trying. They’re just not Talented Enough.
This is a mindset I labored under for a lot of my teens and my early 20s. I am a talented writer, I was made aware of this by my elders using words like “gifted” and “extraordinary” a lot, right up until I hit college age and suddenly talent counted for absolute shit compared to those able to sit down and methodically work their way through something without having to wait for the lightning strike of genius to occur.
Which is when I had to go back and learn the actual skill of writing, and I’ve been honing it ever since, both through my work and through my personal meanderings in the written word.
By contrast, skill is something that is acquired, it’s a tool that you will spend years fiddling with to get it working the way you want it to. It takes whatever small aptitude you have for something, and provided you keep nurturing it and learning from your experiences, you will eventually improve. You can also, with significant mastery, make it look effortless like talent.
Combining the two should be a goal of any writer, however small or large their inherent talent is. Cause I’m telling you from experience, talent alone does not a success make. I’ve watched careers be built on talent and discovery, only for it to melt away in the wake of realizing they don’t actually know how to sustain what they’re doing. They burn out and fizzle before they really get a chance to shine. While on the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of skilled writers become absolute powerhouses of fiction because they found the formula that works for them, and they’re going at it like a dynamo.
Talent might get you noticed amidst the sea of voices all vying for attention, but it’ll be your skill that keeps you afloat.
Talent’s nice and all, I guess, but skill builds careers.
me: this scene is so boring i wish i could write this other scene i’m really excited about instead
brain: you can
me: explain how
brain:
but like if the scene is boring why are you writing it at all. why is it in your story.
ever since this post blew up people keep saying this but like not every scene feels like a banger when you’re writing it but it doesn’t mean the scene is unnecessary or unimportant to your story this post was just meant to be a silly reminder to not let yourself get stuck on hard to write scenes and it’s okay to take a break to focus on a scene that feels more fun/easier to tackle and the ol “if it feels boring to write then it will be boring to read” adage is not true alright over and out ✌🏻
i don’t mean, do humans give them names. of course we do. we name everything. we name frogs and fish. i mean, do corvids recognize names and answer to them?
and also, do corvids have specific sounds they use to refer to each other? that one’s maybe a bit more esoteric, i don’t know if anyone’s even done the research. but this is for a fantasy novel, so if it looks sorta plausible i can go with it. i just want to know if it’s within the behavior set, you know?
thank you for the responses! it seems crows do indeed have the concept of names, and use names, and distinguish between individuals that way. they reference people who aren’t present! that’s pretty dang advanced for an animal!
next step: figure out what crow names are like.
so far i’ve been writing casimir calling his crows ‘hey asshole’ and ‘you little pirate’ and ‘smartass’ and it occurs to me that those are pretty good crow names. but if crows give each other names he’d use those.
i feel like crows probably have names that sound like 1930′s gangsters. like ‘knuckles’ and ‘bugsy’. except crow themed. ravens have Very Dignified Names and then shorten them in awkward ways. like a raven called Steals Fire From The Clouds would get called Cloudy. there is definitely a raven that the crows named Moose.
I have to quote you a bit of The Raven and the Reindeer by T Kingfisher:
“Do you have a name?” asked Gerta. “I do,” said the raven. Gerta waited. The raven fluffed its beard. “I am the Sound of Mouse Bones Crunching Under the Hooves of God.” Gerta blinked a few times. “That’s…quite a name.” “I made it myself,” said the raven, preening. “I stole the very shiniest words and hoarded them all up until they made something worth having. Sound and God were particularly well-guarded. Crunching I found in a squirrel nest, though.” “May I call you Mousebones?” asked Gerta. “It’s…a lot to say all at once.” It was hard for a creature with a beak to scowl, but the raven managed, mostly with the skin around its eyes. “I suppose,” it said. “If you must.”
that raven is a lot more dignified than the ones i’m writing. 😀
are you keeping in mind that crows hate ravens and will bully them wherever they can? it’s entirely possible that the only names crows give to ravens are variations on ‘hey fuckface!’
Your church-going, God-worshipping sister adopted a small child and you’re excited to see them. But when you do, the child is a menace. They’re throwing things everywhere, setting furniture on fire with seemingly nothing, chanting in Latin to summon demons, but the weirdest thing is that your sister doesn’t seem to mind.
“You literally adopted the antichrist, Anne. What the fuck.”
“Yeah, I knew when I saw him at the orphanage. I figured if the kid had some decent fucking parenting that we could avoid the whole ‘Revelations’ shite. Nasty business, that.”
George, who’s name has been kindly changed from Damien, approaches his new mother with a huge spider in his hands. It promptly bursts into flames.
“Good job, love. Now go find the rest.” George’s face makes no expression, but his eyes shine when he recieves a pat on the head for his efforts.
As the months go by, George seems to settle down. He adjusts to school, friends, and the positive reinforcement Anne gives him. She encourages the good he does, even though the powers he uses aren’t “good”. When she gets calls from the school, it’s about a rambunctious boy that won’t sit still. Not a destroyer of the world and innocence.
It’s at Christmas dinner, that you let slip your amazement to your mother. How good Anne is for him and how he’s improved a lot. Still summoning hellhounds for games of fetch, though.
“Oh, he’ll forget how to do that when he falls in love the first time,” Your mother laughs, smiling wide.
I was reading my writing today, and let me tell you, it may not be good, plot is not the best, and characters are a bit stereotypical, but boy do I have fun writing it
This is such a good mindset to have. There is positive energy in this post
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
People in badly written fantasy stories will usually talk about the major historical events of their world and how magic has affected the lives of everyone, but ask a person in the real world to describe the effects of WWI and the invention of the combustion engine on modern life and they’d probably couldn’t tell you.
Broke: every character seems to know everything about the history and lore of the world
Woke: most characters can’t tell you much besides the basics but there are some that can tell you more complete but specific parts
H Y P E R W O K E: Every character tells you a wildly different version of the past and what effects it has on the present, ranging from the government is an imperialist, colonizing body obsessed with power to the one true ruler was sent by the gods and has smote down anyone who got in his way to “Oh you mean Jeff, the quote unquote tyrant of the west? I knew that guy! He was alright, never did anything wrong really just wanted some soup.” And there’s no way to tell what actually happened
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!
If Cthulhu can be summoned by humans who are so far beneath it, why can’t humans be summoned by ants? The answer is they should be.
Well if a bunch of ants formed a circle in my house I’d certainly notice, try to figure out where they’d all come from, and possibly wreak destruction there.
That’s why knowing and correctly pronouncing the true name is so important to the ritual. Imagine how impossible it would be to not go take a look if the circle of ants started chanting your name.
And they’re like, you can’t leave because we drew a line made of tiny crystals – now you have to do us a favor.
And you’re like, let’s just see where this goes “yup, you got me… what’s the favor?”
and usually the favor is like, “kill this one ant for us” or “give me a pile of sugar” and you’re like… okay? and you do, because why not, it isn’t hard for you and boy is this going to be a fucking story to tell, these fucking ants chanting your name and wanting a spoonful of sugar or whatever.
And SOMEtimes you get asked for things you can’t really do, one of them, she’s like, “I love this ant but she won’t pay any attention to me, make me important to her” and you’re like… um? how? So you just kill every ant in the colony except the two of them, ta-da! problem solved! and the first ant is like *horrified whisper* “what have I done”
for some reason my brain won’t let go of this one, so….
Meanwhile another colony of ants invades your house, and evidently that last ant has gotten some of them to join her in a circle and taught them the ritual because you’re coming out of the bathroom one day and you hear the ants singing your name. Sure enough it’s that ant, but she’s dark and fucked up now, and she’s like, “kill the queen. I will rule this colony” and you’re like, sure, I guess I kinda owe her, and you do it. And she manages to become queen, and they worship you. Which is cool, you’re not, you know, very important in the human world, but to these ants you’re practically all-powerful. You can’t be just, doing everything a bunch of ants tell you to, though, when would you watch netflx? So you tend to only show up for super important ants; you teach them some extra words and when hear them you go see what’s up. Usually. Also just to your name, if you’re bored. And, sometimes some of the ants are like, tell us more human names, and you’re kind of jealous of the idea of some other human diluting your private godhood, so you refuse.
Your roommate Greg is like, yo, that’s fucking awesome, I want ant worshipers! But whenever he approaches any, they run away, because it turns out that the illusion of control from the named summoning is what makes them feel safe around you. That’s great, because Greg is a dick who never does the dishes, and one day you decide to teach Greg a lesson.
So you show up at the colony, and you’re like, “yo, witch queen, did you think there would be no price for all these things? Your colony must do something for me, go to the Room of the Housemate, I will meet you there.” And you go sit on the couch and play Overwatch for a while. You’re like, right there, you can clearly see the ants all marching along the wall to Greg’s room, but to them you’re not even there, you’re so far away they can’t see you. It takes them, like, an ant week to make the journey. They have to figure out ways to get over and around things. Some of them drown, or get stepped on by the dog, or whatever. You win a game, you lose a game, you look over, and they’re trying to get through some cobwebs… looks like they’re mostly going to live, you keep playing, you look over, okay they’re all in there, and you stand up and walk over and by the time they’ve chanted your name once, you’re there. “right, hold on” and you look around and you see a twelve-pack of Greg’s precious fucking soda, that he keeps in his room and refuses to ever share, even though it’s a communal food household and you share your hot chocolate with him all the time. So you gather the ants unto you, and you poke a little hole in each of the sodas and you leave the room to the sound of the ants rejoicing. Greg will suspect of course, but he’ll never be able to prove the ants didn’t chew holes in the plastic and steal his stupid drinks.
But later, while you’re at work, Greg destroys most of the colony in a rage, and you come home to find the witch queen gasping her last “the Dew of the Mountain, which you had us steal, was cursed – and so I lay my curse on you” and then she dies.
Well first of all, you don’t really believe in curses, but last month you didn’t believe ants could know your name, so that’s unsettling. And second of all, you feel kind of bad. You know, not SUPER bad, cause she’s like, an ant. But still. And most importantly, third of all, Greg must pay.
But Greg has done more than kill a bunch of the colony. As you wait for eggs and pupae to replenish the ant population, you discover he has found some ants that didn’t go on the Mountain Dew raid, and he’s spared them, told them his name, and made himself a good sized cult in YOUR fucking ant queendom.
Greg has started locking his door. So now you NEED the ants. Once again you direct the ants loyal to you to journey to Greg’s room. You meet them at the door. A locked door means nothing to the ants, they don’t even know there is a door, and can barely perceive the difference between it being open and shut – either passing the threshold on the floor regardless, or being on its surface no matter the position. But you need them to get inside. You’re going to put itching powder in his underwear drawer and leave a raw fish under his bed. So you instruct the leading party of ants how to go into the Cave of Keyhole, and position the Magic Megaliths inside just right to enable the opening of the Great Door and allow you to pass into the Realm of Housemate.
Crouched by the door, you can hear when your ants are met by a party of Greg Cultists, who insist that if the Great Door is opened, the colony will be doomed. There is fighting. Your ants prevail, the lock tumblers are moved into place, and you swing the door open…
To find Greg! In his room all along! It’s a trap! His cultists attack you! I mean, they can’t do much real harm, but it kind of hurts and it’s super annoying. You order your ants to attack him, and they do, but he storms over and pours bleach down the colony entrance.
Now you and Greg are at war, and you both understand the unspoken rules to your fight. You can’t do things directly to each other, why, that would be assault. But anything you can get your ants to do is fine, because “she told the ants to do it to me” isn’t going to get very far with any authority figures that get involved.
Later, nursing your anger, you confer with your few remaining ants and stare moodily at your new prize, the ant farm that came in the mail. Bullet ants don’t usually get along with sugar ants, but you’re betting they will if a god tells them to. Meanwhile, you’ve got a laptop schematic to go over with your high priestess. It’s finals week, and if you time it right, he’ll lose everything…
Feel free to add your own stories paralleling human/otherworldly with insect/human interactions!
I’m going to have this repost a few times because I want to see which of my mutuals are into this kind of thing because I’m preparing to test drive a fiction share and writing prompt project
The Idea of the old gods obeying us not because of supernatural reason, but because they think it’s funny to watch the tiny animals fight IS the answer to everything
just moving along like everyone else 