maddstermind

[maddstermind]

To truly, successfully eroticize the monstrous you must be brave enough to make the object in question actually ugly. At the heart of the fantasy is a person whose very form is so profoundly unacceptable that there is significant social stigma attendant upon finding them attractive - a person who feels deeply their own repulsiveness, who expects universal rejection for their appearance - and, crucially, another person who treats them as if they are beautiful.

For this to be effective, the monstrous character can't just be plain - they have to be wildly, fascinatingly unacceptable - prodigiously, fantastically, sublimely ugly. If you're anxious about the character not being hot you'll never pull it off because the entire fantasy is about not being afraid.

[maddstermind]

Could you reblog this if you enjoy seeing your writer friends ramble about their wips on your dash?

[maddstermind]

If your plot feels flat, STUDY it! Your story might be lacking...

Stakes - What would happen if the protagonist failed? Would it really be such a bad thing if it happened?

Thematic relevance - Do the events of the story speak to a greater emotional or moral message? Is the conflict resolved in a way that befits the theme?

Urgency - How much time does the protagonist have to complete their goal? Are there multiple factors complicating the situation?

Drive - What motivates the protagonist? Are they an active player in the story, or are they repeatedly getting pushed around by external forces? Could you swap them out for a different character with no impact on the plot? On the flip side, do the other characters have sensible motivations of their own?

Yield - Is there foreshadowing? Do the protagonist's choices have unforeseen consequences down the road? Do they use knowledge or clues from the beginning, to help them in the end? Do they learn things about the other characters that weren't immediately obvious?

[maddstermind]

The Chosen One Trope Doesn't Have to be Boring

We recently discussed favourite and least favourite tropes on the WWF discord, and The Chosen One trope came up right away for least favourite. We talked about how it tends to take away a character's agency and personality... But it doesn't have to. Here's how to use the Chosen One trope without falling into those common pitfalls:

1. Don’t rely on it for characterization

What other characters think and feel about your protagonist is only a small percentage of who they are. Chosen Ones tend to lean heavily on this factor, but then don’t have additional characterization that would earn them the respect and love of those around them.

Being chosen for a destiny should be something that comes after they’ve already lived a life and created a unique personality, and while it may change them in a certain way (maybe it goes to their head, or they get crushed under the weight of the responsibility), that change is still an indication of who they were in their “before” life.

2. Don’t take away their agency

Even if they are forced to go on this quest, that doesn’t mean that they have no agency. Conflicts that arise while the protagonist is on their quest should rely on them as individuals and their strengths outside of being a chosen one. They should also prey on their weaknesses. This forces the protagonist to make decisions based on who they are, and will thus still hold consequences for them and those that they love.

To achieve these first two points, it will be helpful if you...

3. Give them an actual Motivation

There tends to be two kinds of chosen ones. The reluctant ones, who try to run away or avoid their destiny (Katniss Everdeen at no point ever wants to be the Mockingjay) And the heroes who take their chosen one status in stride (like Moana).

But it’s important to consider why your character would fall into either category. If they are reluctant to fulfill their destiny, what about it scares them? Or threatens them? Or maybe they feel inadequate or insecure about their new status? There should be an internal and external reason why they don’t want to do this.

If they are super jazzed to go, why? Yes, there’s the draw of being special—but try to come up with a deeper and more personal reason why someone would be happy about having a quest forcibly placed onto them. For Moana, it gave her a chance to fulfill her dream of travelling the ocean (internal), and she felt responsible for saving her island (external).

4. Subvert it

The chosen one is a pretty common trope, so consider ways you can subvert it to make it unique to your writing. Some subversions I’ve seen in the past is the “chosen one was a lie” (such as in the first Lego Movie), the destiny they’re chosen for is evil, they die and someone else finishes their quest, the Chosen One is actually not the Chosen One, there are multiple chosen ones (could Frodo have ever completed his quest without Sam?) Are there any other subversions you can think of?

What’s your favourite and least favourite trope?

[maddstermind]

You don’t need to say “She was sad.” Show me the untouched coffee gone cold. The half-written text that never gets sent. The way she laughs at a joke and then immediately looks away. People don’t announce their emotions, they live them, they try to hide them, they pretend they’re fine when they’re not. Make your readers feel it between the words.

[maddstermind]

🚨WRITER BEWARE🚨

I've just gotten an email from a new "self-publishing platform" called Written (written.app), which is making suspiciously extravagant promises about the benefits they offer to authors. After further research, this is just "upload your book with us and we'll make it an NFT :)"

There is a "thesis" that you can read right on their website if you're interested in looking for yourself at the business model of their grift, but if you'd like to save yourself the trouble, I've pulled out some of the highlights of the receipts over on Bluesky. TLDR: I would not touch this platform with a ten-foot-pole. This is not a book-selling platform, this is a Coincidentally Book-Themed NFT Platform.

[maddstermind]

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….?

[maddstermind]

Unpopular opinion but if you don't enjoy the process you should find a different thing to do.

And I think this is true in general but now I'm talking about it in the context of AI.

If you don't enjoy making art and only care about the end piece and how it'll look and how much traction it"lol get online then making art is not something for you, find something you enjoy from start to finish.

Same goes for writing: if you do not enjoy writing and rewriting and then some more and instead want AI to write for you, being a writer is not something you should pursue.

Sure, not every part of creative process is going to be equally enjoyable but you should get satisfaction from solving the problems along the way and you should get a sense of accomplishment on your way of "making the piece yours" and you should have a sense of ownership once you are done.

None of these things will come from typing in a prompt into chatGPT. And I am sad to see so many people are missing on the opportunity to experience the joy of making something with their own hands and brains.

[maddstermind]

Apparently a lot of people get dialogue punctuation wrong despite having an otherwise solid grasp of grammar, possibly because they’re used to writing essays rather than prose. I don’t wanna be the asshole who complains about writing errors and then doesn’t offer to help, so here are the basics summarized as simply as I could manage on my phone (“dialogue tag” just refers to phrases like “he said,” “she whispered,” “they asked”):

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

“There’s no dialogue tag after this sentence, so end it with a period rather than a comma.” She frowned, suddenly concerned that the entire post was as unasked for as it was sanctimonious.

[maddstermind]

[maddstermind]

no. no. what the fuck? my writing's not allowed to make me feel things. i MADE you. you fool, i MADE YOU

[maddstermind]

hang on to every single aborted half-finished flimsy unrefined story/narrative/oc idea u have ever gotten obsessed w for 36 hours and then set aside like "idk how i'm ever going to use this. oh well", and/or every story bit u ever test drove for a while but then got bored of/outgrew but always thought a little longingly about, etc, bc maybe one day u are goign to get nailed straight in the forehead w the cumulative story idea that instantly combines like literally every single one of them. i do not guarantee that story will be good but what can u do

[maddstermind]

Instances of the word "love" in The Saint of Heartbreak.

[maddstermind]

using a multiverse as a narrative framework to tell an immigrant story really is THE best possible implementation of this concept. like the idea that every time you make a decision in your life a different branching universe splits off where you chose differently, while obviously broadly universal because of course everyone wonders what if (what if i had chosen differently, what would my life look like then), really does hit such a specific core question that is imo fundamental to the immigrant experience

all the time my parents talk about imagining what lives they might have lived if they had chosen differently, if they had never left home, if they had never come here, if they had not raised their daughter in a world and a culture so utterly foreign to their own where she might make her own choices that are painfully incomprehensible to them. it’s all tied up with a sense of grief and loss and regret and almost existential melancholy, not necessarily because they think they chose wrong specifically, not because they think they’d actually choose differently if they had a chance to do it over again, but merely because that choice is such a monumental one and the enormity of it and the ripples it would end up causing are only obvious in retrospect. you make the choice to uproot your life and move to a different world, a different universe, and once you cross that bridge you can never go back. you can never truly go home again. and when we do go back to visit, we see in their old friends and classmates and relatives funhouse versions of ourselves, people we might have been but never were and never will be.

every immigrant story is a ghost story and the ghosts that haunt you are all the people you left behind including yourself—versions of yourself, of your family, of your children, of the people that are you but that you are not, lives that you recognize but are not yours. immigrant stories are ghost stories are multiverse stories and in multiverse stories all of your ghosts inhabit your body simultaneously, everyone who came before you and after you and everyone you left behind, everything that is and everything that never was… it really is everything everywhere all at once i am going to scream

[maddstermind]

This is in no way the best way to post it but it is the only way I could get the format to stay

[maddstermind]

screaming, crying, throwing up, as I force myself to write a story i'm very passionate about and love writing and have no obligation to write except that i want to

[maddstermind]

obsessed with stories where you can never go home