Sometimes You Don’t Make Art That Changes The World. 

Things I’ve noticed are essential in plotting and would probably have saved me a lot of time if I had considered it earlier

The START of your story - how fucked up flawed is your premise/character at the start? what do they have to change? why are they HERE?

The END of your story - How do you want your main character/theme/universe to change after your story? Does it get better or worse? THIS SETS UP THE TONE DRASTICALLY.

What you want to happen IN BETWEEN - the MEAT of it. What made you start writing this WIP in the first place. Don't be ashamed to indulge, it's where the BRAIN JUICE comes from. You want a deep dive into worldbuilding and complex systems? Then your start and end should be rooted in some fundamental, unique rule of your universe (what made you obsess over it?). Want to write unabashed ship content? Make sure your start and end are so compelling you'll never run out of smut scenarios to shove in between scenes (what relationship dynamics made you ship it in the first place?).

The ANTE - the GRAVITY of your story. How high are the stakes? Writing a blurb or interaction? start with a small day-in-the-life so you can focus on shorter timelines and hourly minutiae that can easily get overlooked in more complicated epics. Or you can go ham on it and plot out your whole universe's timeline from conception to demise. Remember: the larger the scale, the less attached your story may get. How quickly time flies in your story typically correlates with the ante (not a hard rule, ofc, but most epics span years of time within a few pages, while a romance novel usually charts out the events of a few months over a whole manuscript.)

Everything else follows….?

sometimes the best fanfics are written by middle aged adults with years of writing experience who simply know how to craft a good story. but also sometimes the best fanfics are written by a sixteen year old girl with something deeply wrong with her

been stewing on an analytical approach to fiction which I call "is this book afraid of me?" and in order to answer this question you determine how hard the book is trying to make sure you don't come after the writer on twitter

how did women in 1817 read wentworth’s letter to anne and not immediately start running through the streets screaming

A cosmic tribute to my current favourite comment in YouTube history

"Cheer up!" Said she.

"Alas, no cheer there either."

sir gawain would do numbers on tumblr

Writing about a child rapist did not make Vladimir Nabokov a child rapist.

Writing about an authoritarian theocracy did not make Margaret Atwood an authoritarian theocrat.

Writing about adultery did not make Leo Tolstoy an adulterer.

Writing about a ghost did not make Toni Morrison a ghost.

Writing about a murderer did not make Fyodor Dostoevsky a murderer.

Writing about a teenage addict did not make Isabel Allende a teenage addict.

Writing about dragons and ice zombies did not make George R.R. Martin either of those things.

Writing about rich heiresses, socially awkward bachelors, and cougar widows did not make Jane Austen any of those things.

Writing about people who can control earthquakes did not make N.K. Jemisin able to control earthquakes.

Writing about your favorite characters and/or ships in situations that you choose does not make you a bad person.

It’s a shame that in this day and age these things need to be said.

Never have I felt so much like a protagonist

your protagonist doesn’t need to save the world. maybe they just need to save their plant collection, one dying ficus at a time.

“You can examine a text closely as a doctor of letters, but you are utterly incapable of examining yourself. You, the zoologist, never the beast. You, the reader, never the text. What if you are both?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

In another life, I think I would have really liked just having tea parties and telling stories with you <3

Has anybody else noticed that it seems that nobody tells children fairytales anymore? It seems that they only read them books or have them watch movies; oral storytelling appears to have vanished. Perhaps it’s just in my area, but it has quite literally been years since my friends, family, and I have met a child who has even referenced a fairytale character that didn’t appear in a Disney movie.