Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

tyleroakleyisthebae:

rockangel98:

Listen up! Facebook has now opened a new gender option, known as custom. With it you can define yourself as fluid or in whatever name you give to your gender. You may also pick your prefered pronoun that will be used by facebook when announcing your birthday and other events, so that people can use it about you. Please repost this to get it as far and wide as you can, because this is something that is not widely known yet. Please reblog this and tag friends or family, anyone who you think wants or needs to know. Thank you!

PROGRESS.

(Source: marvelminx, via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

amielleon:

julystorms:

an-ime-goil:

thewritewire:

Show vs. Tell 

Great description of the difference.

In one of my fiction-writing classes, we had a workshop where we critiqued each other’s writing. There was one student that had a story about a poor boy, who had to work to help his family. At one point, the writer describes his room, and it sounds pretty standard: “vintage posters of rock musicians on the wall, an old board game his family had kept for years, battered Nike sneakers under the bed”. Our teacher said, “Your main character’s pretty selfish.” We all stared at her. “I mean, his family barely has enough to eat, and he’s spending money on buying expensive vintage band posters and Nike shoes?” I was shocked. I hadn’t thought anything of that description - it was just to paint a vivid picture, right? And I didn’t know vintage posters were expensive. What if the Nike shoes had been given to him as a gift? What if the mother had bought them? But it was the moment I realized that great writers put a lot of thought into all those seemingly useless details they leave in there, and they’re all clues leading to a larger truth. It’s not good enough to paint a vivid picture and put in details. Those details will be read into, and they need to point to the truth of your story or your character. That student certainly didn’t mean to make their character come across as selfish. And yet that was the conclusion that the details led to. 

At the same time, sometimes the curtains are just blue, so to speak, and it doesn’t mean anything. Which is why consistency is also important. I wouldn’t have necessarily surmised that the character in the original post was clumsy just cause he tripped once - so establish this trait, remember that you made him clumsy, make him drop crumbs all over their lap and almost drop things that are handed to him. Otherwise I will assume his clumsiness is a one-time thing. It’s your job as a writer to include meaningful details, just as it is to establish when something is just a coincidence, or a plot device. 

This is good. I bolded the part I felt was most important; good writers include details and keep things consistent, but I agree that great writers include those details for a reason and make them actually mean something (versus allowing them to simply be decoration).

The commentary’s better than the original post.

When I was a young writer, I thought details were there for the sake of being details. You enter a room, you describe the room so the reader can see it in their head, the end.

But in fact, nothing is supposed to be so pointless as to simply check off a box next to “Imagery” in an English class workbook. These details are meant to give the reader something meaningful about the impression it makes on the perspective character, or what’s up with this world and its people.

As for the original post… I think either could work depending on context. If you were trying to have that awkward kid really own this story, making it a story about her perspective rather than a series of events we the readers are watching, you’d go with the left, because it captures a sense of the kid’s understanding of the world rather than appealing to ours.

It’s also worth noting that the right example is very zoomed in, and forces you to go into the details of this particular event and follow it to a reasonable stopping point, which may or may not be desirable.

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)