Tag: writing

peachdoxie:

deciduqueen:

Tips for writing an essay with executive dysfunction: do this.

Write out bits and pieces of the essay. When you get to a part you can’t/”don’t want to” write, put it in bold brackets. Get as much done as you can and come back in a half an hour or so!

If the executive function is still bothering you, take it one bracket at a time. Don’t delete the bracket until you’re done “filling it in,” so to speak. If you need to take more breaks or hop to the next bracket, you can do that too! Similarly, if you have a thought you want to get down but you aren’t sure how to word it, put it in bold brackets as well!

It may not “cure” the executive dysfunction or procrastination problems, but it makes writing the essay more like putting shapes in holes of the same shape. It can be a pain, but the process is a bit more streamlined and user-friendly.

I know this may not work for everyone, but as someone who has really bad executive dysfunction and problems focusing (thank you, ADHD!) this works REALLY well for me! I hope by sharing it it can help other people (with and without executive dysfunction/adhd) too! o/

This strategy also works for individual words as well. Not sure what works to put? In its place, put a bracket and fill it in. I often use a synonym of the word I want to go there because it helps me know what to fill in later, but there have also been times when I’ve just put [word] to signify that I know some word needs to go there, but I’m not sure what at the moment.

To make sure that you’ve cleared all the brackets before turning in your assignment, you can use the search function and just type a single bracket in. Once your search returns no brackets, you know that it’s ready!

bookishdiplodocus:

mareebrittenford:

writing-references-yah:

I think the best piece of character design advice I ever received was actually from a band leadership camp I attended in june of 2017. 

the speaker there gave lots of advice for leaders—obviously, it was a leadership camp—but his saying about personality flaws struck me as useful for writers too. 

he said to us all “your curses are your blessings and your blessings are your curses” and went on to explain how because he was such a great speaker, it made him a terrible listener. he could give speeches for hours on end and inspire thousands of people, but as soon as someone wanted to talk to him one on one or vent to him, he struggled with it. 

he had us write down our greatest weakness and relate it to our biggest strength (mine being that I am far too emotional, but I’m gentle with others because I can understand their emotions), and the whole time people are sharing theirs, my mind was running wild with all my characters and their flaws.

previously, I had added flaws as an after thought, as in “this character seems too perfect. how can I make them not-like-that?” but that’s not how people or personalities work. for every human alive, their flaws and their strengths are directly related to each other. you can’t have one without the other.

is your character strong-willed? that can easily turn into stubbornness. is your character compassionate? maybe they give too many chances. are they loyal? then they’ll destroy the world for the people they love.

it works the other way around too: maybe your villain only hates the protagonist’s people because they love their own and just have a twisted sense of how to protect them. maybe your antagonist is arrogant, but they’ll be confident in everything they do.

tl;dr “your curses are your blessings, and your blessings are your curses” there is no such thing as a character flaw, just a strength that has been stretched too far.

This is such a fabulous flip side of what I’ve always known about villians. That their biggest weakness is that they always assume their own motivations are the motives of others.

Such a good tip for writing realistic characters.

eldritchsandwich:

solarcat:

talieclandestine:

mababees:

writing-prompt-s:

Your church-going, God-worshipping sister adopted a small child and you’re excited to see them. But when you do, the child is a menace. They’re throwing things everywhere, setting furniture on fire with seemingly nothing, chanting in Latin to summon demons, but the weirdest thing is that your sister doesn’t seem to mind.

“You literally adopted the antichrist, Anne. What the fuck.”

“Yeah, I knew when I saw him at the orphanage. I figured if the kid had some decent fucking parenting that we could avoid the whole ‘Revelations’ shite. Nasty business, that.”

George, who’s name has been kindly changed from Damien, approaches his new mother with a huge spider in his hands. It promptly bursts into flames.

“Good job, love. Now go find the rest.” George’s face makes no expression, but his eyes shine when he recieves a pat on the head for his efforts.

As the months go by, George seems to settle down. He adjusts to school, friends, and the positive reinforcement Anne gives him. She encourages the good he does, even though the powers he uses aren’t “good”. When she gets calls from the school, it’s about a rambunctious boy that won’t sit still. Not a destroyer of the world and innocence.

It’s at Christmas dinner, that you let slip your amazement to your mother. How good Anne is for him and how he’s improved a lot. Still summoning hellhounds for games of fetch, though.

“Oh, he’ll forget how to do that when he falls in love the first time,” Your mother laughs, smiling wide.

“How do you know that,” you ask bewildered.

“Because, you did.”

okay so someone please write the story of the family of super-low-key holy warriors who have made it their mission to locate the antichrist in every generation (because when one gets spoiled they try AGAIN) and adopt them and love them into not being the antichrist anymore, thus perpetually delaying the apocalypse

delaying the apocalypse via good parenting I love this

roachpatrol:

stunt-muppet:

derinthemadscientist:

librarian-amy:

scanlan:

susiephone:

wearevengeancenow:

nerdgasrnz:

inspectorwired:

movie tropes that will never get old to me:

  • a thing happens + two people exchanging money in the back
  • fourth wall breaking
  • “give up all your weapons” and that one guy that spends the entire evening taking his weights worth out his pockets
  • *a terribly loud crash* meowing/ car sirens heard offscreen
  • alternatively: a terribly loud crash and one of the characters going “oops” in the most casual voice
  • “fuck you” “well if you insist”

#alternatively alternatively: *terribly loud crash w/ sirens and cat screeching*#person: *off camera* ‘I’M OKAY’ (via @zenlida)

character being all “you expect me to do X?” Gilligan Cut to character doing X

  • the squad gets captured and interrogated separately, and they’re all telling equally terrible, completely contradictory lies
  • people completely missing the completely unsubtle, very visible dangerous thing in the room with them
  • alternatively, people absolutely seeing the completely unsubtle, very visible dangerous thing in the room with them and just not giving a shit
  • bonus points if it’s a beleaguered minimum wage employee who just goes about their business like “yep same shit as always”
  • someone pretending they don’t know another character is eavesdropping, only to casually reveal at the end of the scene that they know (*leaving* “tell tom that he can come out now” *tom drops from the ceiling in spy gear, irritated*)
  • choosing to deal with the villain by just leaving them alone in a room with another character
  • the “hands go down” trope
  • example: “any questions?” *everyone’s hands go up* “…that AREN’T sarcastic?” *everyone’s hands go down*

how could all y’all forget “ACT NATURAL!”

These are all great but let’s not forget two characters giving extremely biased flashbacks to the same event that each paint the other as an incompetent loon

i would like to respectfully add: scenes where a character walks into a room, sees something scary, and turns around and walks out with no reaction or change of expression

  • a high-stakes zany action scene forced to come to a complete halt while some characters take a very, very long elevator ride

why is there no electricity after the apocalypse?

roachpatrol:

jumpingjacktrash:

something people writing post-apocalyptic fiction always seem to forget is how extremely easy basic 20th century technology is to achieve if you have a high school education (or the equivalent books from an abandoned library), a few tools (of the type that take 20 years to rust away even if left out in the elements), and the kind of metal scrap you can strip out of a trashed building.

if you want an 18th century tech level, you really need to somehow explain the total failure of humanity as a whole to rebuild their basic tech infrastructure in the decade after your apocalypse event.

i am not a scientist or an engineer, i’m just a house husband with about the level of tech know-how it takes to troubleshoot a lawn mower engine, but i could set up a series of wind turbines and storage batteries for a survivor compound with a few weeks of trial and error out of the stuff my neighbors could loot from the wreckage of the menards out on highway 3. hell, chances are the menards has a couple roof turbines in stock right now. or you could retrofit some from ceiling fans; electric motors and electric generators are the same thing, basically.

radio is garage-tinkering level tech too. so are electric/mechanical medical devices like ventilators and blood pressure cuffs. internal combustion’s trickiest engineering challenge is maintaining your seals without a good source of replacement parts, so after a few years you’re going to be experimenting with o-rings cut out of hot water bottles, but fuel is nbd. you can use alcohol. you can make bio diesel in your back yard. you can use left-over cooking oil, ffs.

what i’m saying is, we really have to stop doing the thing where after the meteor/zombies/alien invasion/whatever everyone is suddenly doing ‘little house on the prairie’ cosplay. unless every bit of metal or every bit of knowlege is somehow erased, folks are going to get set back to 1950 at the most. and you need to account somehow for stopping them from rebuilding the modern world, because that’s going to be a lot of people’s main life goal from the moment the apocalypse lets them have a minute to breathe.

nobody who remembers flush toilets will ever be content with living the medieval life, is what i’m saying. let’s stop writing the No Tech World scenario.

the thing *I* get mad about is no one goes and fixes up any of the hundreds of thousands of airplanes lying around, or even puts together any new ones. like the big fucking stumbling block for all those thousands of years for humans seemed to just be no one managed to combine the idea for a propeller with an engine that would spin it fast enough. but now the genie is thoroughly out of the bottle: drawings of planes have the propeller on it. we will remember that the secret to airplanes is smallish airfoil wings and a very very fast propellor (or three) for a thousand years, until all the books and drawings and planes themselves have decayed away. 

like yeah you couldn’t make commercial jetliners in your garage, but if you camped out in an old airfield, you could probably bang together some kind of working franken-cessna. 

judiops:

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.

I think the only times I can think of where “It was all a dream” really works are in pieces like Over the Garden Wall, Ink, Coraline, and Mirrormask. In all of those, the characters ‘wake up’ again in their ‘normal’ world, but there’s a very strong implication that the dream world is as real, if not more so, than the ‘real’ world, and the things they did in the dream world had a very direct impact on the waking world– not in an “I’m gonna be a better person” sense, but literally who lives and who dies at the end of the story.

Notably, in most of those, it’s stated flat-out within the first couple of minutes that the character in question is dreaming. It’s not a big reveal, it’s a fundamental detail of the setting.

If you’re gonna do a dreamworld, actually commit to doing a dreamworld.

Whatever it is you do, ACTUALLY COMMIT TO IT.