Writing Tips/What Beta Readers Taught Me

Since I’ve been learning a lot from my beta readers, I’d thought I’d share what I’ve learned (and just some general writing tips) here. (Mind you, this is just off the top of my head so not everything from the beta notes is included.)

- Besides themes find the “glue” that hold your story together. For example, in Avatar: The Last Airbender, the glue was the Fire Nation War (and trying to stop it). This main goal was present throughout all four seasons, including in the side-quests. All characters had different motivations for teaching Aang, but the war kicked off all the events and was why Aang was learning the elements to begin with.

- In order to help the characters feel more like real people, have them react differently to the same event. For instance, when a character dies, Person A could be sad about it while Person B could be angry.

- Don’t be afraid to extend out scenes for tension.

- Have your character asks questions. Especially if they’re new to a place/culture.

- If you want to do a twist, drop small clues leading up to it, so it won’t come out of nowhere.

- Don’t have the characters share everything with each other.

- For research, try to find a video/source with a first-hand experience. For example, for anxiety, try and find a video with a person talking about what its like to have anxiety.

- It’s always good to have a second pair of eyes of your writing.

- When it comes to descriptions, use the five sense to help draw the reader in. Namely touch, sight, smell, hearing, and taste.

- Have the character’s choices impact the plot, not the other way around. For instance, Aang running off after learning he was the Avatar was what allowed the Fire Nation to succeed in the war.

- Find the main theme of your story (see chart) and revolve everything (character arcs, chapters, etc.;) around it. This will help cut out fluff chapters and make the writing more cohesive.

someone please let crowley hear his wahoo

Energy Management

A human-based organization method

click on images for better resolution; images also available here (link to google drive)

Tags

crowley david tennant Alec hardy casanova bad samaritan david tennant is a fucking cool actor woah I need my sanity back someone please give me my sanity back im so anxious holy bloody hell

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boozedcowboy

3 years ago

holy fucking shit op this is raw emotion

Any suggestions/inspiration for a STEM-focused, dark academia aesthetic? I'm something of a reformed humanities student finishing an engineering degree this time around.

I think STEM in Dark Academia is an underappreciated aesthetic. The humanities seek to understand what it is to be human, and this is a complex venture indeed. But studying STEM means you seek to understand the world around you. And my God, are there mysteries to be uncovered. Let’s go down the list together, shall we?

SCIENCE.

Latin words fall from your lips as easily as a prayer, and isn’t there piety in this? Devotion, worship? There must be, for you to be able to dig your hands into the breathing body of the world around you and have it speak back. Messily scrawled chemical equations are practically tattooed onto your arms and hands, and sometimes you wake with the molecular structure of a human red blood cell drawn carefully on your heart with no memory of putting it there, but it moves with the pulse of your heart. Bubbling beakers and plumes of emerald, cobalt, violet flame. Faded lab coats. Hair cut short or pulled back neatly, not a single tendril hanging down. Dirt under fingernails, sleeves rolled up and out of the way. You know poisons, toxins, you know the pump of blood through arteries, you know how close we are to death, and you know how it feels to hold the hand of human long dead, still cold from the cooler. Death hates you, because you are helping humanity evade it.

TECHNOLOGY.

Lines and lines of code stare back at you from the over-bright screen of your monitor. You know, you know that we could be more, that the future is a few keystrokes away if only you can organize your tumbling thoughts and the wall of symbols in front of you. You like the way robots move; tiny, carefully planned, yet oh so jerky motions that can’t help but remind you of when a baby deer takes its first quivering steps. You think humans were like this once, in the beginning. You think the movement in a motor resembles the inner workings of a human heart. You imagine the veins that pump blood through your body as wires on a circuit board delivering electricity from one place to another. Leather shoes laced as tightly as possible, tiny blueprints doodled on the soles. Bronze bells hanging from a bedroom window, a crumbled silk shirt. How far can you push at the boundaries of what is possible before something breaks? Will it be you or reality that gives first?

ENGINEERING.

What is it about the smoothing of clay into shapes that makes humanity stop and say, “This must be what it feels like to be God”? How much more can you feel it, with the power in your fingertips and in the corners of your mind to make things humans could never do? To push civilization past its breaking point and remake it anew, better, stronger, more than God ever did? What is the difference between man and machine, and should you even care in the first place? You are like God alright, you are participating in something divine, something holy. You double check every equation and think about what it means to be alive. You decide that, in the ever moving cogs of this great clock, you will be the first piece that moves, the one that pushes the others to succeed. Pencils stabbed into messy buns, lipstick stains on pale coffee cup rims. Your eyes are sharp and focused, but your thoughts are ever moving and desperate with desire to create, to bound forward into the future you are oh so carefully envisioning, every piece laid out and pinned down within an inch of its life. Children are starving, the world is burning, and you can do something, you can fix this, because if you don't, who else can? Who else will?

MATHEMATICS.

What is math? A meaningless formal game. Above the door at Plato’s Academy were inscribed the words, “Let no one enter here who is ignorant of geometry.” How can it be that both are true? A secret language exists that no one is born into, but is available to all willing to learn. Astronomy, the constant ever cycling of the universe around us, our own home a puzzle piece in a cosmic dance. Meandering lines of equations that are beautiful, beautiful, because you know what they mean and they speak to you, they sing. You write them with calligraphy pens and hang them above your desk, they are as much an expression of the human condition as a Picasso; show our creativity more than a Monet. Hands dirty from dragging them over cramped pages of numbers and graphite dust, equations traced into the foggy glass of your favorite coffee shop, messy hair and bitten down nails, math pun t-shirts under tweed blazers, the theory of relativity scrawled sloppily on your knee, the world around you the sum of shapes and numbers and you can see it, you can hear it.

STEM in Dark Academia is nonstop in its restlessness. There is always more to be discovered, further to push, limits that can and will be broken. There is a darkness to that beauty, a madness that permeates the cracks of every field. A historian could have told you not to make the atom bomb. A scientist can’t help themself from seeing how much destruction is possible.

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boozedcowboy

4 years ago

I don't even like yellow why tf is my tumblr full of yellow

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boozedcowboy

3 years ago

heyy! with school starting again, I decided to combine a lot of helpful post, so you can rock the new school year! I’ve spent quite some time going through different masterposts and the ones i included here are very helpful resources. good luck for the new school year! <3

STUDYING

study effectively

revise method

take a break

study journal

planning the perfect study schedule

all the things that got me studying after one year of living through tv-show characters and wasting time on youtube (be honest, we all need this)

how to memorize

flashcards

preparing for exams

how to pull an all-nighter (but pls only do this in extreme situations)

how i study