shy-writes

[shy-writes]

Gentle reminder, first drafts are for putting it all on the page and out of your head. First drafts are for telling. Later drafts are for showing. So keep writing that first draft. You've got this.

[shy-writes]

Oh how i missed getting distracted in class and worlbuilding with my friends

[shy-writes]

Try the Proust Questionnaire to really get to know your characters

The Proust Questionnaire is a set of personality-revealing questions popularised by French writer Marcel Proust. It originated from a popular 19th-century parlor game but became famous after Proust answered a version of it in two different instances of his life—once as a teenager and later as an adult. The questionnaire is popularly used in interviews by publications like The Guardian and Vanity Fair.

Use the questionnaire and answering them from the point of view of your characters can help define their personality, desires, fears, and motivations. By answering in your character’s voice, you can also refine their way of thinking and speaking.

Here are the questions:

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

What is your greatest fear?

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

What is the trait you most deplore in others?

Which living person do you most admire?

What is your greatest extravagance?

What is your current state of mind?

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

On what occasion do you lie?

What do you most dislike about your appearance?

Which living person do you most despise?

What is the quality you most like in a man?

What is the quality you most like in a woman?

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

What or who is the greatest love of your life?

When and where were you happiest?

Which talent would you most like to have?

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?

Where would you most like to live?

What is your most treasured possession?

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

What is your favorite occupation?

What is your most marked characteristic?

What do you most value in your friends?

Who are your favorite writers?

Who is your hero of fiction?

Which historical figure do you most identify with?

Who are your heroes in real life?

What are your favorite names?

What is it that you most dislike?

What is your greatest regret?

How would you like to die?

What is your motto?

[shy-writes]

writing day - 8/11

okay here's part twoooo from nyx!!

"I take everything Chia gives to me. Gladly, hungrily, savagely."

[shy-writes]

writing day - 8/10

gonna post 2 today bc i've really been neglecting you guys

"Is this how the people of this world experience newness? Is it something they bring to a space themselves?"

[shy-writes]

non-writers will never understand the mental illness of writing an entire conversation in your head while doing dishes and then forgetting every word the second you open a blank doc

[shy-writes]

I have a message for anyone who uses Ai to generate their writing or uses Ai to edit their work. Your own work is good enough. You are talented enough to do it alone. that one sentence may have been bad or that one section of dialogue may have sounded robotic. But you can fix yourself. I believe in you. You don't need Ai to do great things. you are great all on your own.

[shy-writes]

Scarred

had to edit this one a bit using some filters but it honestly looks much better on an iPhone than a Windows computer I'll tell you that lol. i was trying to use some new colored pencils i got but they didn't really work as planned :/

Can't tell you much about this character but his name's Inigo. He's pretty important to the story.

Art tag list (lmk if you want to be added or removed): @eon-tries-writing, @shy-writes, @tc-doherty, @lux-says-hi, @memento-genistas can't believe i made another piece so fast

Reblogs/likes/comments are greatly appreciated :)

[shy-writes]

writing day - 7/30

this was from yesterday, sorry for neglecting yall

"I wonder what I could forgive for the sake of my love."

[shy-writes]

woaaaah. new art alert.

this is a drawing of one of my characters named grigori baranov from my wip Of Potions and Blades. the synopsis is here.

to be honest i don't really like this one as much, but it's mainly cuz of the color portion. my friend told me about how they like to use charcoal to draw in black and white, and I tried it (except without the charcoal, I would have definitely given up right away.)

also i would like to note: grigori's real skin tone is actually much darker than the patch is showing. that's cuz the patch around his eye is due to his vitiligo. i encourage you guys to learn about it if you don't know about it :)

tag list for art: @eon-tries-writing, @shy-writes, @tc-doherty, @lux-says-hi, @memento-genistas long time no see guys! ask to be added/removed

[shy-writes]

writing day - 7/24

happy writing day to you all, here's a lesson in modesty as understood by chia, who is very demure and mindful. from nyx

"Or maybe the water just vaporized the second she commanded it to. I’d be scared to disobey her, too, if I was just a drop of freezing cold bathwater."

[shy-writes]

writing day - 7/23

okay this week has been bonkers but it was a writing day today!! here's my fav bit from today, from nyx

"Maybe this is just how my body is now—slow, painful, a dying thing trying to crawl to the safety of home."

[shy-writes]

How to Emotionally Destroy Readers

✩ Gut-punches are about timing. You don't say “I love you” during the sunset. You say it in the middle of a burning building or right after they stab you.

✩ A single line of dialogue like “you were supposed to come back” hits harder than an entire page of poetic mourning.

✩ Don’t just break their hearts, break their sense of identity. Make them question who they are, what they stand for, and if it was ever worth it (That’s premium pain.)

✩ Let someone be forgiven… but not trusted again. That's the kind of heartbreak that lingers like smoke.

✩ Sometimes the most devastating line is the one they don’t say. Silence is a character too.

✩ Give them a moment of joy. Right before everything falls apart. Hope makes the fall hurt more.

✩ Someone saying “I forgive you” through tears? Powerful. Someone saying “I still love you but I can’t stay”? Absolutely soul-shattering.

✩ If they die, don’t describe the death. Describe the aftermath. The coat left hanging by the door. The mug still on the table. The dog waiting.

[shy-writes]

Write your story, even if you have to write it badly. In fact write it badly for the AIs so they don’t feel bad :(

[shy-writes]

okay respectfully i take issue with several parts of this argument

writing is not expensive. publishing can be expensive. can be. it is possible to get published without spending much money. yes workshops and professional editors help, but those things aren't required. and even if it was, i can not fathom how using ai could cut down that cost. like ya it would save time i guess, but what is time getting you here? are you quitting your job while you're writing?? i'm genuinely confused on how spending time on your book makes you lose money here unless you have hinged your entire financial health on a book you haven't published, which is a little uh. ill-advised. anyways, sure, publishing can be expensive.

but writing? that's literally free. $0. i have been writing for absolutely no money literally since i knew how to hold a marker. almost every single person on the planet has written for free at least once. (essays for school? 3am notes app poems? like come on you don't have to be a bestselling author to have written SOMETHING.)

and like listen i haven't been published and i will be the first to admit that it really fucking helps to have money. but again, what could ai possibly do to fix that? is ai going to refer me to her agent? is ai going to pay for a writing convention?

anyways, to your second point, voice actors work just as hard as any other artist to get work and recognition. it's no more ethical to have an ai produce an audiobook than it is for ai to make cover art for your novel. i mean, shit, do you not know a single person in your life who can read something aloud? you don't have to listen to them read it if you're not going to care either way, but don't rip it out of the hands of actual humans just for your convenience. that feels extremely unfair, as someone who is friends with people trying to be voice actors. shit, i can ask around for you. just don't go to ai for god's sake. it's honestly silly that we keep having to have this conversation.

people have been telling stories and creating art since the dawn of humanity, and people have been publishing books for hundreds of years. even in the modern publishing world, unknown indie authors, bloggers, fanfic writers, etc get massive book deals. people get book deals from popular reddit horror stories. yes the odds are low, but they have always been low. if anything, it's easier now to get your work out there than it has been in a long time. i wouldn't bank on becoming a hugely successful author no matter how you publish, even if you land your debut work with harper collins. but you can get your work published. don't despair. it has been done before without ai, and it will continue to be done without ai. thank you for coming to my tedtalk.

God the struggle against AI when it’s met with “writing shouldn’t be prohibitively expensive” is such a hard argument to maintain and articulate because it opens the door to the idea that anything worth having took a lot of money to produce, and that if you have no money your work is not worth sharing. Especially in this capitalist hellscape where things are arbitrarily expensive and that if something looks expensive, it's automatically going to be thought of as better quality than something that doesn't because it didn't have the funds for that extra polish.

Writing is expensive. Indie publishing is expensive. If you're indie, you're paying a monetary cost in footing the bill all on your own. If you're trad, you're paying a time cost waiting for an agent and a book deal and you still have to market out of pocket (on top of whatever you paid out of pocket during the writing process like on beta readers or developmental editors). And if you're indie and you want to stand up to the percieved quality of trad publishing, you have to pay to make that happen. If you want to get your name out there and be in the running for any kind of bestseller list before you're 50, you need money, connections, and luck, and if you have no connections, you need your work to be the best version of itself that it can possibly be.

And to be clear: writing is expensive and the act of creation shouldn't be held in a chokehold by the rich powers that be. That does not mean that dialing up ChatGPT to write a bestseller for you is the solution here.

Somebody sent me this audiobook AI voice generator and I can’t read audio books, for the same reason I hate talking on the phone. Not being able to multitask while being understimulated is a recipe for immediate frustration and gaps in attention where I’m constantly rewinding.

So I have very little experience with them and how they’re produced and the costs associated. And it is so, so tempting to be like “fuck it, why should I pay to produce this in an audio format? It’s still all my work, nothing is being generated except a voice reading my words”. Taking the high road feels like being stubborn for the sake of being stubborn. I’d only make one so that my work is accessible to those who need them. Pirate it, I don’t care, if it means you’d engage with my work when you otherwise couldn’t, I'm very aware that I will never be able to live off being a writer.

I'd make it so that it's accessible to my audience, not so that it's more accessible for me. That I can't read audio books does not mean that I’d half-ass it in its production.

What I wanted was something like an audio drama, some day if/when I have the money to produce it. Hiring voice actors to fit my diverse cast. But then with that demands me actually having to listen to my work being read back to me by real people so they get the pronunciation and inflections correct and I cannot, under any circumstances, tolerate my work being read back to me. It’s like nails on a chalkboard, I absolutely hate it.

People try to give me verbal feedback on specific lines, even if it’s praise, and I have to leave the room and tell them to write whatever it is down so I can read it. Rip my book apart over text and I can take it like a champ. Verbally tell me you really really liked this single line and I want to throw the book at you so you shush. Neither could you pay me to sit in front of an audience or a camera and either read my book or verbally discuss excerpts from it.

So even if bootstrapping this isn’t expensive, being forced to listen to hours upon hours of my book(s) being read back to me, I’d never, ever get it done. A robot that can’t judge me for it might make it a little less awful and it sure would be faster with less complications around searching, casting, scheduling, retakes, etc.

Just the idea of rejecting something that exists to lower the barrier to entry in this specific case out of pride feels like I’m the one losing here meanwhile authors who do not care are getting theirs on the market without any qualms. Even with the argument of "if a human didn't create why should I, a human, buy it?" feels nebulous here because I did create it, this is just a different format.

An audio book for my work will never exist without a program like this. Not generating text. Not generating cover art. Not generating any new ideas. Just a fancy text-to-speech software. There’s gotta be a line between virtue signaling like pissy vegans dying on a hill of misinformation and trying to use these things that are meant to be tools, not just slapping ‘ai bad’ in nuance-less absolutes onto it. I feel like the fuckin’ Onceler asking “How bad can it be?”

[shy-writes]

writing day - 7/16

writing day today! here was my fav part, which i feel appropriately highlights chia's strengths. from nyx

"No one has ever groused as I groused. Even the most cantankerous old coots shudder at the sheer power of my grousing."

[shy-writes]

this but i LOVE subverting it too, so here's my like alternate dimension version to add to op's amazing post

༄ Storms – peaceful, cleansing. the sky is doing the work necessary to clear the air. something is finally breaking, something is finally healing.

༄ Rain – rain on a happy day, rain in a joyful moment. raindrops like laughter.

༄ Sunshine – the uncaring nature of the universe. maybe your character is having the worst moment of their life, and yet there's the sun, shining like nothing is wrong. somewhere, children are playing tag and people are eating ice cream and going to the beach, but your character is completely unraveling. or maybe it's after the apocalypse, and the social concept of summer is gone, but the sun doesn't care. it never did. it only shines.

༄ Fog – safety. you are hidden, and the mist is like a blanket. you can rest.

༄ Wind – you are free, finally. there is nothing tethering you to the ground, and it is terrifying and amazing and you never want to go back.

༄ Snow – comfortable isolation. an old woman living in a cabin at the top of a snowy mountain, removed from society and happy to be so.

༄ Heatwave – determination. your group is in survival mode. there is no time to squabble, there is only time to prepare. you will be running out of water soon. you may not make it through this.

༄ Thunder – power. you are finally able to scream, and you are bigger than you've ever been, and it feels amazing.

༄ Lightning – paralyzing fear, darkness punctuated by unreliable light, disorientation as your eyes try and fail to keep up with the rapid change in brightness.

༄ Clear Sky – emptiness, loneliness. Isolation in an emotional sense. not even the sky shares your feelings of turmoil. you are alone.

sorry if this was silly, but i had a lot of fun with it! highly suggest coming up with your own interpretations!

The Symbolism of Weather

Weather in stories is not just there to make your characters wet or sweaty or annoyingly cold. It means stuff, like, big emotional metaphory stuff. You can totally use it to say what your characters aren’t saying out loud, or to punch your readers in the face with vibes.

༄ Storms – Big messy chaos energy. Fights or maybe Panic. Something bad is either happening or about to, like the universe is yelling “brace yourself!”

༄ Rain – Sad tears or soul shower, take your pick. Sometimes it’s like, "boohoo everything sucks," but also kinda healing? Think of it like an emotional reset button.

༄ Sunshine – Happiness, duh. But also those moments where everything is finally clear and warm and safe, even if just for a second.

༄ Fog – No one knows what the hell is going on. Secrets, confusion, probably someone making a very questionable decision.

༄ Wind – Change is coming, dear. Restlessness in the air...Could be thrilling, could be terrifying. Hair will get messed up either way.

༄ Snow – Either magical winter wonderland vibes... or total emotional frostbite. Loneliness, silence, maybe death if you’re feeling extra dramatic.

༄ Heatwave – Everyone’s cranky and sweaty and one second away from snapping. Tension is so thick you could cut it with a popsicle stick.

༄ Thunder – Something (or someone) is pissed off. Like divine wrath, or just the universe doing a mic drop.

༄ Lightning – FLASH of truth. Insight. Or rage. Whatever it is, it’s fast and it changes everything.

༄ Clear Sky – The deep exhale after the chaos, like things are finally chill. Maybe even… hopeful?