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Giveaway Contest: We’ve partnered with Alma Books to give away five of their beautiful Alma Classics Evergreens editions (pictured above)! Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on June 4, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, Alma Books has agreed to make this an International giveaway! Good luck!

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Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away ten vintage paperback classics by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Walt Whitman, George Orwell, and others. Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on April 22, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

Literature Asks

Quotes from literature to inspire you when writing!

“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.” - J. D. Salinger, “A Girl I Knew”

“The curves of your lips rewrite history.” - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.” - Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“I took a photo of us mid-embrace. When I am old and alone, I will remember that I once held something truly beautiful.” - Joe Dunthorne, Submarine

“If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.” - W. H. Auden, “The More Loving One”

“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Who, being loved, is poor?” - Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.” - Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.” - Toni Morrison, Beloved

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you…I could walk through my garden forever.” - Alfred Tennyson

“I’m watching her talk. Watching her jaw move and collecting her words one by one as they spill from her lips. I don’t deserve them. Her warm memories. I’d like to paint them over the bare plaster walls of my soul, but everything I paint seems to peel.” - Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies

“I don’t want you to miss all the things that someone else can give you.” -  Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

“You can love someone so much… But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.” - John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.” -  Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Just… isn’t giving up allowed sometimes? Isn’t it okay to say, ‘This really hurts, so I’m going to stop trying’?” - Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“I’m just so thankful for our little infinity.” - John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I hope, or I could not live.” - H.G. Wells

“I hadn’t expected that a tiny glimmer of hope for the future could transform someone so utterly.” - Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel

“Your eyes are full of language.” - Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters 

“You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture.” -  Junot Dìaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“You can pretend for a long time, but one day it all falls away and you are alone.” - Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea: A Novel

“I’ve never had a moment’s doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life.” - Ian McEwan, Atonement

“You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how.” - Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind

“I like flaws. I think they make things interesting.” - Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

“In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” - Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“He doesn’t want you to be real, and to think and to live. He doesn’t love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms.” E.M. Forster, A Room With A View

“The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn’t stop each other on the street to say I love you.” - Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.” -  Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.” -  P.D. James, The Children of Men

“I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.” - Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong 

“Above, the starts shone hard and bright, sparks struck off the dark skin of the universe” - Stephen King

“The mouth is made for communication, and nothing is more articulate than a kiss.” - Jarod Kintz, It Occurred to Me

“If it weren’t for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it” - Nicole Krause, The History of Love

“I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world…” - Frank O’Hara, Having a Coke With You

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.” - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Don’t be the reason someone feels insecure. Be the reason someone feels seen, heard and supported.”

— Cleo Wade

on fanfic & emotional continuity

Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation. 

Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character - let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred - you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different - perhaps wildly so - story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place. 

Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity - not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit - the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.

Fanfic does not do this. 

Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters - and fic readers - the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions. 

The fact that ficwriters en masse - or even the same ficwriter in different AUs - can produce multiple contradictory yet still fundamentally believable incarnations of the same person is a testament to their understanding of characterisation, emotional continuity and narrative. 

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þ!

A feature of English which I think is stupid,

If we’re carrying on with this game,

Is how we abolished the thorn and replaced it,

With two letters that meant the same.

The þ was a letter, amazing, astounding,

Perfect in every respect,

Representing the ‘th’ sound and shortening words,

The one thing it didn’t expect;

One day T and H went and burgled its meaning,

And then, thanks to the printing press,

Its symbol mutated and morphed into Y,

Which is pointless, I must confess.

Þoughtlessly, the þ was forgotten,

Þreatened as the language evolved,

Þankful for þose who knew of old English,

A topic where it was involved.

It only survived in Modern Icelandic,

In English it’s treated with scorn,

And as barely anyone knows it exists,

Please try to remember the thorn.

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