Reblog If You Can Hear This Image I'm Trying To See Something

This also applies to self care as well.

not sure if this will make sense to anyone besides me but: the antidote to negativity is not positivity, its warmth

Peter: Mr. Stark, I’m sorry I spilt soda on your carpet

Tony: it’s ok Peter accidents happen, how do you think you got here?

Peter: i-I wHAT? MR. STARK?!?!? WhAt Do YoU mEaN aBoUT tHaT?

Tony: What, did you plan get bitten by a radioactive spider to join the avengers or something?

Peter: ...........

Tony: what did you think I meant?

Peter: ........nothing, nevermind

Hi dads. How was your vacation?

You were happy with getting an A+ on your “vampire myths” essay, with a comment about how you did excellent research, but you thought that was the end of it. A few days later, though, you open your door to find a vampire and a vampire hunter on your porch.

Was she wrong though?

"Dick and Vanilla Extract" sounds like a good book title

“Public libraries are such important, lovely places!” Yes but do you GO there. Do you STUDY there. Do you meet friends and get coffee there. Do you borrow the FREE, ZERO SUBSCRIPTION, ZERO TRACKING books, audiobooks, ebooks, and films. Have you checked out their events and schemes. Do you sign up for the low cost courses in ASL or knitting or programming or writing your CV that they probably run. Do you know they probably have myriad of schemes to help low income families. Do you hire their low cost rooms if you need them. Have you joined their social groups. Do you use the FREE COMPUTERS. Do you even know what your library is trying to offer you. Listen, the library shouldn’t just exist for you as a nice idea. That’s why more libraries shut every year

YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES A BILLION TIMES YES THANK GOD

Let’s goooooooo

The single most important piece of writing advice I would give to a lot of amateur writers is to write less beautifully - or at least to write beautifully less.

I rarely find a piece of writing I can't read because it's too simple, or too concise and to-the-point - not memorable, perhaps, but also not a headache on a page. On the other hand, I see loads of pieces which are effectively unreadable because they're far too rich to swallow, and badly in need of watering down a bit.

The absolute worst culprit is the dialogue tags and stage directions. I'm a big fan of letting people write in their own style, but I would love it if a lot of writers could please cool it with letting me know every time a character blinks or licks their lips. I don't need to know that, especially if it happens every time they speak.

So many dialogue excerpts look like this:

"So this is how we talk?" he queried quietly, his eyebrows furrowed into knots. "Apparently," she replied with a puzzled grin, bouncing on the balls of her feet with restless energy. "Isn't that... exhausting?" he questioned, a lop-sided smile snaking its way across his lips. "The bouncing?" she asked shyly, her eyelids fluttering in shame. "No, of course not," he told her, his lean arms reached out to pull her closer. He buried his face into the mess of her hair, taking a deep breath of her perfume. "I just feel a little nauseated by all of these actions." "I don't know what you mean," she giggled, brushing the hair back out of her eyes as her cheeks flushed red. "Don't worry," he sighed, rolling his eyes up towards the ceiling.

I'm assuming this is a convention that comes from somewhere, given its ubiquity - perhaps somewhere in the world of fanfiction, where there will be short, intimate pieces entirely focused on the ways in which characters interact with each other. But to me, in an original work, it's so exhausting that I can't make it down the rest of the page.

Dialogue may be the worst, or most obvious offender, but the same principle extends pretty much everywhere else. Each line doesn't have to be some great quote you can hang on your wall, and it's hard to read a whole story written like that.

There's been some recent backlash on here against modern films where every line of dialogue is a quip, at the expense of building an authentic conversation, but that's how a lot of people start out writing - thinking that each sentence should be made as flowery as possible, when too many flowers in the same pot will crowd each other out.

You need to leave some gaps to let the sunlight in, and illuminate the beauty of the occasional flourish you do include. Think of it like vanilla extract, to make a reference that was topical when I started writing this post: you need to add a little for flavour, without which the writing will be too dull, but tip the bottle and I will actually be sick. Write beautifully less. Learn to embrace the prosaic.

Imagine a game like spore but you start out in a truly completely empty universe. Nothing but stars and planets. So instead of starting out with panspermia, on your first planet, in your first playthrough you have to play this "chemical stage" to decide the kind of stuff your planet's life will be made of. Then on other planets after that you can choose to do it again to make a completely different life or populate this planet via panspermia using life forms from your first world to see how you can get different things from the same ingredients.

So as you play and replay you can slowly fill up the universe. And maybe you can also have a simulation mode to just let things progress a little ways without you messing with it to see how things progress.

And as you keep playing it can get progressively harder to start life from scratch because now panspermia events happen so often (a toggle able feature) that every planet becomes increasingly competitive as time goes on.

Just an idea.