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

I’m taking that creative writing class and I just.  Okay.  Guys.  Explain me a thing.  WHY have I read two stories in this past semester about rape?  I mean, I guess the one was more about abuse followed by murder (see my rant here), but still, Christ.  Honestly I’m going to meet with the teacher about the most recent one, which I’m supposed to critique for Thursday, and just be like, “I fucking cannot do this.  I am not objective enough to say shit about this girl’s writing.  This is pages upon pages of a girl who witnessed the rape of someone she considered a friend and did nothing, and I have spent way too much time on the wrong side of that equation to be objective here.“  I just.  Do not understand why rape is the thing.  Like, guys, it’s not like it’s edgy and cool, okay, I promise, people have been hideous to each other since fucking Ur was nothing but a twinkle in the eye of some random ape.  They’re not treating it as a very deep trauma and dealing with the fallout and handling it with as much care and compassion as possible, it’s not even fucking productive, it’s just annoying, Christ, fucking STOP.

Also, I honestly don’t care if it makes me a cultural heathen, I don’t like weird abstract writing that’s intended to ‘push the boundaries of what we think of as prose.’  Like, no.  It’s not a failing on my part if I want to read fantasy novels with, oh, I don’t know, plot and characters and literally anything other than obsessive navel gazing.  The next time I have to read the literary equivalent of that very famous piece of modern art that’s literally just a piece of plywood painted uniformly blue, I am going to scream.  

fujoshi-kianna-leigh:

thesylverlining:

birdbolts:

so back when i was in college, someone in creative writing class with a friend of mine wrote a story. it started out as a simple story of a wedding, and the bride and groom were arguing over infidelity that may or may not have happened and then some weird dude showed up and said some cryptic shit and left.

and then the guy showed up again, much later, at the reception. naked.

and then he ran to the cake. and began fucking it. 

i used to have a printout of the story and i distinctly remember the line “oh my god, he’s fucking the cake!”

the most amazing part is that was written for a grade.

someone wrote this story.

someone wrote this story, where a man puts his dick in a wedding cake and fucks it until he’s had enough, and handed it in for credit. he did not fail the class.

if cake fucker guy can write a story and have faith in it, so can you. believe in yourself.

I like to reblog inspirational writing things. Usually they’re stuff like “you can do it!” and “tips for staying motivated” and character development and worldbuilding.

This… takes the cake, you might say.

if cake fucker guy can write a story and have faith in it, so can you. believe in yourself.

(Source: lumenant, via littlestartopaz)

feynites:

libations-of-honey-and-milk:

In fairy tales and fantasy, two types of people go in towers:  princesses and wizards.

Princesses are placed there against their will or with the intention of ‘keeping them safe.’
This is very different from wizards, who seek out towers to hone their sorcery in solitude.

I would like a story where a princess is placed in an abandoned tower that used to belong to a wizard, and so she spends long years learning the craft of wizardry from the scraps left behind and becomes the most powerful magic wielder the world has seen in centuries, busts out of the tower and wreaks glorious, bloody vengeance on the fools that imprisoned her. 

That would be my kind of story.

When Princess Talia was fourteen, her eldest sister was placed in a tower.

Princess Adina was eighteen by then, and so of a marriageable age. She had grown quite beautiful, though she was more willful than winsome, and she did not care for the notion of the tower very much at all. Their mother did her best to persuade her on the subject. After all, the queen herself had been eighteen when her own parents had sent her to live in that very same tower, to be safely tucked away until her husband could be chosen, and then ride out to claim her. A tradition going back ages and ages.

Keep reading

(Source: libations-of-blood-and-wine, via feynites)

Helpful things for action writers to remember

berrybird:

• Sticking a landing will royally fuck up your joints and possibly shatter your ankles, depending on how high you’re jumping/falling from. There’s a very good reason free-runners dive and roll. 
• Hand-to-hand fights usually only last a matter of seconds, sometimes a few minutes. It’s exhausting work and unless you have a lot of training and history with hand-to-hand combat, you’re going to tire out really fast. 
• Arrows are very effective and you can’t just yank them out without doing a lot of damage. Most of the time the head of the arrow will break off inside the body if you try pulling it out, and arrows are built to pierce deep. An arrow wound demands medical attention. 
• Throwing your opponent across the room is really not all that smart. You’re giving them the chance to get up and run away. Unless you’re trying to put distance between you so you can shoot them or something, don’t throw them. 
• Everyone has something called a “flinch response” when they fight. This is pretty much the brain’s way of telling you “get the fuck out of here or we’re gonna die.” Experienced fighters have trained to suppress this. Think about how long your character has been fighting. A character in a fist fight for the first time is going to take a few hits before their survival instinct kicks in and they start hitting back. A character in a fist fight for the eighth time that week is going to respond a little differently. 
• ADRENALINE WORKS AGAINST YOU WHEN YOU FIGHT. THIS IS IMPORTANT. A lot of times people think that adrenaline will kick in and give you some badass fighting skills, but it’s actually the opposite. Adrenaline is what tires you out in a battle and it also affects the fighter’s efficacy - meaning it makes them shaky and inaccurate, and overall they lose about 60% of their fighting skill because their brain is focusing on not dying. Adrenaline keeps you alive, it doesn’t give you the skill to pull off a perfect roundhouse kick to the opponent’s face. 
• Swords WILL bend or break if you hit something hard enough. They also dull easily and take a lot of maintenance. In reality, someone who fights with a sword would have to have to repair or replace it constantly.
• Fights get messy. There’s blood and sweat everywhere, and that will make it hard to hold your weapon or get a good grip on someone. 
• A serious battle also smells horrible. There’s lots of sweat, but also the smell of urine and feces. After someone dies, their bowels and bladder empty. There might also be some questionable things on the ground which can be very psychologically traumatizing. Remember to think about all of the character’s senses when they’re in a fight. Everything WILL affect them in some way. 
• If your sword is sharpened down to a fine edge, the rest of the blade can’t go through the cut you make. You’ll just end up putting a tiny, shallow scratch in the surface of whatever you strike, and you could probably break your sword. 
• ARCHERS ARE STRONG TOO. Have you ever drawn a bow? It takes a lot of strength, especially when you’re shooting a bow with a higher draw weight. Draw weight basically means “the amount of force you have to use to pull this sucker back enough to fire it.” To give you an idea of how that works, here’s a helpful link to tell you about finding bow sizes and draw weights for your characters.  (CLICK ME)
• If an archer has to use a bow they’re not used to, it will probably throw them off a little until they’ve done a few practice shots with it and figured out its draw weight and stability. 
• People bleed. If they get punched in the face, they’ll probably get a bloody nose. If they get stabbed or cut somehow, they’ll bleed accordingly. And if they’ve been fighting for a while, they’ve got a LOT of blood rushing around to provide them with oxygen. They’re going to bleed a lot. 
• Here’s a link to a chart to show you how much blood a person can lose without dying. (CLICK ME) 
• If you want a more in-depth medical chart, try this one. (CLICK ME)

Hopefully this helps someone out there. If you reblog, feel free to add more tips for writers or correct anything I’ve gotten wrong here. 

(via amusewithaview)

athenaltena:

ubercream:

mister-smalls:

ubercream:

mister-smalls:

Petition to sit down all the people who make coma theories about Adventure Time and tell them “listen, this fucking show is about the last human living in a post-apocalyptic world where deadly magic has been reawakened following a global thermonuclear war that wiped out the rest of the human species, how much fucking darker do you want it to be”

Even though I thought my first Creative Writing professor was kind of a douche, he made a good point about this. One of our first assignments was to write in this eerie, otherworldly style (we were mimicking a specific author whose name escapes me), so we had to write about eerie otherworldly things happening. It’s no exaggeration to say that more than half the class had a “big reveal” where we find out that the story’s strange events and themes are all in the mind of some person in an insane asylum, or someone having a drug trip.

My professor said something like, “you just successfully wrote a world that feels separate from our own, but got frightened last minute and shoe-horned in normalcy. You showed that you were afraid to commit to something different and interesting.” Though I’m typically a contrarian and a piece of garbage, I am inclined to agree with my professor. I feel like people who write coma theories and the like are afraid to accept that the world of the story is separate from our own. They like everything wrapped up in this crazy little realism box where nothing out of the ordinary happens in fiction.

you win the Best Addition to a Post prize

Thank you :)

This pretty well hits the nail on the head as to why I generally hate coma/dream theories and people who think they’re so fucking deep for coming up with it. In my book it’s LAZY, plain and simple.

ESPECIALLY since it’s all-too-often used as a way to cop out of building any sort of resolution for your characters and relationships.  It’s lazy storytelling, lazy characterization, and frustrating as fuck.  I call it ‘flinching,’ as in “You played Russian Roulette with your plot, and you flinched when you pulled the trigger.”

(Source: frog-and-toad-are-friends, via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

pilferingapples:

marauders4evr:

See, the problem with people who aren’t in wheelchairs writing about and/or drawing people who are in (manual) wheelchairs is that the people who aren’t in wheelchairs tend to think that there’s only like four movements that you do in a wheelchair. You can either push forward, push backwards, turn left, or turn right. And the characters do it all while sitting up straight or bending forward so that their noses touch their knees.

But the amount of motions that I go through on a daily basis are actually amazing. And the body language…you could write an entire book on the body language of someone in a wheelchair.

Like right now, I’m more relaxed, so I’m slouching slightly. I’ve got my right foot on its footrest and the left foot on the ground. Every so often, as I stop to think of something to say, I’ll push with my left foot to rock the chair slightly.

But usually, I sit mostly upright with my upper-half slightly leaned forward. When I’m wheeling across the campus, especially if I have somewhere that I need to be, I’ll lean and shift my weight in whichever direction it is that I’m going. It helps make the wheelchair glide that much more smoothly. How far/dramatically I lean depends on how fast I’m going, the terrain, if there’s a turn, etc.

Plus people who don’t use wheelchairs don’t understand the relationship between grabbing the wheels, pushing, and the chair moving. Like I’ve seen things written or have seen people try to use a chair where the character/that person grabs the wheel every single second and never lets go to save their lives. Which isn’t right. The key is to do long, strong, pushes that allow you to move several feet before repeating. I can usually get about ten feet in before I have to push again. It’s kind of like riding a scooter. You don’t always need to push. You push, then ride, then push, then ride, etc.

And because of this, despite what many people think, people in wheelchairs can actually multitask. I’ve carried Starbucks drinks across the campus without spilling a single drop. Because it’s possible to wheel one-handed (despite what most people think), especially when you shift your weight. And if I need to alternate between pushing both wheels, I’ll just swap hands during the ‘glide’ time.

I’ve also noticed that people who don’t use wheelchairs, for some reason, have no idea how to turn a wheelchair. It’s the funniest thing. Like I see it written or, again, have seen people ‘try’ a wheelchair where they’re reaching across their bodies to try to grab one wheel and push or they try to push both wheels at the same time and don’t understand. (For the record, you pull back a wheel and push a wheel. The direction that you’re going is the side that you pull back.)

Back to body language. Again, no idea why most people think that we always sit upright and nothing else. Maybe when I’m in meetings or other formal settings, but most of the time, I do slightly slouch/lean. As for the hands…A lot of writers put the wheelchair user’s hands on the armrests but the truth is, most armrests sit too far back to actually put your hands on. There are times when I’ll put my elbows on the edges of the armrests and will put my hands between my legs. Note: Not on my lap. That’s another thing that writers do but putting your hands in your lap is actually not a natural thing to do when you’re in a wheelchair, due to the angle that you’re sitting and the armrests. Most of the time, I’ll just sort of let my arms loosely fall on either side of the chair, so that my hands are next to my wheels but not grabbing them. That’s another form of body language. I’ve talked to a few people who have done it and I do it myself. If I’m ever anxious or in a situation where I want to leave for one reason or another, I will usually grip my handrims - one hand near the front , one hand near the back. And if I’m really nervous, you’ll find me leaning further and further into the chair, running my hands along the handrims.

Also, on a related subject - a character’s legs should usually be at 90 degree angles, the cushion should come to about their knees, and the armrests should come to about their elbows. You can always tell that an actor is not a wheelchair user when their wheelchair isn’t designed to their dimensions. (Their knees are usually inches away from the seats and are up at an angle, the armrests are too high, etc.) Plus they don’t know how to drive the chair.

Let’s see, what else? Only certain bags can go on the back of the chair without scraping against the wheels, so, no, your teenagers in wheelchairs can’t put their big, stylish, purses on the back. We don’t always use gloves since most gloves actually aren’t that helpful (as stated above, wheeling is a very fluid motion and gloves tend to constrict movements). Height differences are always a thing to remember. If you’re going for the “oh no, my wheelchair is broken” trope, nobody really has ‘flat’ tires anymore thanks to the new material for the wheels but it is possible to have things break off. We use the environment a lot. I always push off of walls or grab onto corners or kick off of the floor etc. Wheelchair parkour should really become a thing. 

This is all of the physical things to think about. I could write a thesis on the emotional treatment of your characters with disabilities. But for now, I think that I’ll stop here. For my followers in wheelchairs, is there anything that I left out?

Also why isn’t wheelchair parkour a thing? Somebody make wheelchair parkour a thing.

This is all REALLY GOOD and I wish something like this would be in more art guidebooks and classes. 

One thing I’d add is that some of the posture stuff here is specific to wheelchair users who have the right chair; a lot of people (hi, past me) have to use chairs that aren’t at all the correct size, and that’s going to change posture, ease of use, etc.  That’s such a broad variable that it’s probably useless to try and cover here, but it’s something to be aware of and research if it seems relevant to a character. 

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

mustangsally78:

animate-mush:

transgirlsamwinchester:

clairwitch:

mylordshesacactus:

charamei:

transgirlsamwinchester:

stop telling ppl to write like hemingway i promise u adverbs are not another face of the dark lord satan its ok

If writers took every bit of writing advice that was in the format ‘Don’t use X part of the English language’, all English fiction would read like Spot the dog

#Spot chases the ball#the ball chases Spot#the ball conquers nations#the ball still chases spot#see spot run#run spot run#the ball is coming

IMO Adverbs can be pretty nasty sometimes (”’I can’t wait!’ said Tom excitedly” is still a pretty bad sentence) but it all comes down to how you use them, and what words you put them together with.

Generally, you should try to avoid using adverbs in phrases like ‘she said happily’ or ‘he screamed loudly’. Aside from that, adverbs aren’t inheritly bad. 

And ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’ isn’t a bad sentence at all. 

thats not really anything inherent to adverbs, it’s just redundancy. the dialogue is speaking for itself. ’“i can’t wait,” said tom excitedly’ is a bad sentence, but ’“i cant wait,” said tom flatly’ is chill. id probably throw a comma in there before ‘flatly’ for pacing but u do u

“dont use adverbs” is basically a really shitty way to verbalize “redundancy is often awkward and makes your audience feel condescended to if it’s not done well”–because lgr there are times when redundancy is okay, there are times when literally everything is okay

break the rules of literature. theyre shitty rules anyway

First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing, because verbing weirds language

Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing, because no verbs

Then they for the descriptive, and I silent because verbless and nounless

Then they for me, and, but no

REBLOGGING BECAUSE THE LAST POST IS BRILLIANT.

(Source: patrexes, via primarybufferpanel)