If You Bought That New Game I Just Have To Say This:

Aimee Seu, from "In Flux: 25"

Remember.

TumblrClan is no place for a fox-hearted Twittypet like Elon Musk. 

Plot Devices to Complicate Your Story

You’re excited to write an upcoming story, but the plot seems pretty simple from start to finish.

How can you make it more complicated to deepen your themes, lengthen the story, or leave your readers with plot twists that make their jaws drop?

Try a few of these devices 👀

Add motivation to your instigating action

When the princess gets kidnapped at the start of your story, your hero will rescue her, but what’s the antagonist’s motivation for kidnapping her? If they’re in love with the hero and take their jealousy to the extreme or secretly know that the princess asked them for an escape plan to avoid marrying your hero, the plot is much more compelling.

You could add this detail anywhere in your plot, even in the first chapter.

Layer a second motivation underneath an action

After the princess is kidnapped, the hero starts their journey to rescue her. The reader finds out in the second chapter that the hero is being blackmailed to retrieve the princess and return her to their kingdom’s biggest rival to start a war.

Amplify the original problem

Your protagonist rescues the princess and brings her home, only to find out that she’s had a twin brother all this time who has been taken hostage by the antagonist in retaliation for the princess’ escape.

Introduce a second, more evil villain

The antagonist has kidnapped the princess for their own motivation, but the reader discovers in the middle of your story that they serve a more evil villain who holds a personal grudge against the princess’ father and wants his whole kingdom to suffer as revenge.

Create conflict that brings your protagonist to their rock bottom

The protagonist rescues the princess, almost reaches their home kingdom, but she escapes. The king sends the protagonist to prison for their failure and sentences them to death in three days. The reader will feel the hopelessness along with your protagonist, which is where you can create something that injects new hope into your plot (like a dramatic jailbreak thanks to the protagonist’s best friend).

Make a character betray another

The protagonist reaches the princess with the help of their best friend, but the princess stabs the protagonist in the back by trading their best friend for herself through an unbreakable vow

Reveal an unreliable narrator

Your protagonist agrees to rescue the princess for the sake of the kingdom, but the second or third chapter reveals that they are really on a mission to kill the princess for personal revenge against the king.

Reveal that the villain has known everything the whole time

Your protagonist and princess escape, but the villain factored that into their plan to start a war and have their forces waiting outside of her castle when they arrive home

Introduce sudden regret that changes a character’s arc

The protagonist has to leave their best friend behind to ensure the princess’ escape, but in leaving them, the protagonist realizes they’ve been in love with their best friend the entire time. Regret motivates them to head back for their best friend and risk their life twice as soon as the princess is home safe.

Temporarily kill a character

The princess kills the villain with some help from your protagonist, so they think they’re safe. On their way back home, the villain sets a trap for them in the woods because they actually survived the attack.

Try using Chekov’s gun

Before leaving for the princess, your protagonist gets a potion made by a family member. The directions? “Use it in your moment of greatest need.” The protagonist uses it later when they’re facing the villain or after hitting rock bottom, so the potion becomes a plot device that instigates your second or third act.

Accelerate the plot

Your reader thinks the plot is all about rescuing the princess, but she returns home in the first 100 pages. The real plot begins by choices or actions made during her rescue, which unravel into a much larger story/world event.

You likely won’t be able to use all of these plot devices in a single story. You may not even have the first plot for more than one.

Consider what you’re writing and what dynamics your characters/plot present to decide if any of these tricks could enhance your writing.

And speaking of scurvy, I am eternally amused by the thing where some ancient form of healing that was born in a time where people didn't know exactly how the human body works, or what causes it to stop working sometimes, that still somehow worked. Like how so many old folk medicinal plants were listed as a cure for various ailments that - from a modern view - are clearly just symptoms of scurvy, and the plant itself is rich in vitamin C.

I recall reading some story, no recollection of the exact time or place, where the king of a large empire suffered from constant horrible headaches and was incapable of falling asleep unless drugged or blackout drunk. Sick of taking temporary fixes to dull the pain and having to be sedated every night, he called up some old sage healer who was said to know how to fix things nobody else could explain, and the healer heard his symptoms and went

"Hmm. You spend too much time being a king. Your skull is packed so full of kingly thoughts that they don't all fit in there and that's why your head is in pain. You need to spend time not being a king." And prescribed him to schedule three days every month where he must go to a peasant village where nobody knows he's the king, live with a family there under a fake name and identity, work in the rice fields with them, eating the same food and sleeping on the same mats. Absolutely nobody is allowed to address him as the king, speak to him of any royal or political matters, and he himself is not allowed to think any kingly thoughts or think of himself as the king.

And naturally, this worked. Taking a regular scheduled break from a highly stressful office desk job to completely decompress, paired with physical exercise in the form of hard but simple physical labour, plain and simple food and Just Not Thinking About Your Fucking Job All The Time does help chronic stress, which here was worded as "spending too much time being a king clogs your brain."

Sometimes you do have ghosts in your blood, though I'm not entirely sure whether you should do cocaine about it.

do as miku says

⚠️THIS IS ABOUT COPYING AND PASTING URLS, NOT GOOGLE OR EZGIF OR AO3 ETC⚠️🚫🚫

don't send this ugly link:

when this works:

don't paste this ugly shit:

when this works:

⚠️IF THE LINK WORKS AFTER REMOVING THE EXCESS AFTER THE ? - REMOVE IT!⚠️

⚠️if it doesn't work, it's not tracking. use common sense. broken URL? this meme don't work. URL still work after "?" shite removed? Remove it from links.⚠️

this extension does this for you: github.com/ClearURLs/Addon

Oohh my favourite one recently is this cello artist called Takénobu! He does improv sessions every Tuesday for an hour and he posts his sessions as podcasts on his website. Very steady tempo that's not too calming but slightly restless at a good pace. It's not quite classical tho, on Spotify I think they classify it as contemporary classical.

Youtube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCrguPgSvx7TNvMuNUAScIiA?feature=shared

Improv sessions: https://www.takenobumusic.com/mellow-cello-podcast

It’s literally that simple

Friend: “hey my son can’t concentrate on his homework. He chooses to do literally anything else everytime. He said his head doesn’t feel like it.”

Me: “Did you give him music?”

Friend: “No! No tech until he’s done! He doesn’t need more distracted.”

Me:

“k, bring me the child”

*Go to her house*

*points to the obviously ADHD boy struggling with his homework*

Me: “so your head doesn’t feel like doing homework?”

Son: “yeah. It would rather do ANYTHING else.”

Me: *unwrapping earbuds* here, listen to this for an hour while you do it.

French voice: 1hr later

Son: “k I’m done! :-)”

Friend: “wow, what’d you give him? Concentra, Adderall, Ritalin‽”

Me: “Sweet Dreams by Eurythmics” and some lo-fi.

What I was taught growing up: Wild edible plants and animals were just so naturally abundant that the indigenous people of my area, namely western Washington state, didn't have to develop agriculture and could just easily forage/hunt for all their needs.

The first pebble in what would become a landslide: Native peoples practiced intentional fire, which kept the trees from growing over the camas praire.

The next: PNW native peoples intentionally planted and cultivated forest gardens, and we can still see the increase in biodiversity where these gardens were today.

The next: We have an oak prairie savanna ecosystem that was intentionally maintained via intentional fire (which they were banned from doing for like, 100 years and we're just now starting to do again), and this ecosystem is disappearing as Douglas firs spread, invasive species take over, and land is turned into European-style agricultural systems.

The Land Slide: Actually, the native peoples had a complex agricultural and food processing system that allowed them to meet all their needs throughout the year, including storing food for the long, wet, dark winter. They collected a wide variety of plant foods (along with the salmon, deer, and other animals they hunted), from seaweeds to roots to berries, and they also managed these food systems via not only burning, but pruning, weeding, planting, digging/tilling, selectively harvesting root crops so that smaller ones were left behind to grow and the biggest were left to reseed, and careful harvesting at particular times for each species that both ensured their perennial (!) crops would continue thriving and that harvest occurred at the best time for the best quality food. American settlers were willfully ignorant of the complex agricultural system, because being thus allowed them to claim the land wasn't being used. Native peoples were actively managing the ecosystem to produce their food, in a sustainable manner that increased biodiversity, thus benefiting not only themselves but other species as well.

So that's cool. If you want to read more, I suggest "Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America" by Nancy J. Turner

He likes to lurk in the halls

Yeah and hes grumpy as hell having to deal with all these asks on a daily basis but at least people enjoy the weird noises he calls music

how long have you been on tumblr?

Shut the HELL up MAN. are u trying to piss me off?