#a wider audience meaning 5 people might see it if I'm lucky

[judicent]

Awh no that's mee

[deliciousscaloppine]

hi! is it too late for the author asks? i'm curious about 1 & 26. (btw, you're not a native speaker? my second language foundation is so weak, sigh, i'm meng-yaoish envious)

Hi And It’s Never Too Late For Asks! Also there’s nothing to be envious because in exchange for my english proficiency i was cursed to botch all my following attempts at learning other languages.

1. Where do you typically get your ideas?

E V E R Y W H E R E. Writing takes being curious about the world, and being curious about the world means devouring everything and anything that comes out of the world. To narrow it down a bit, think to yourself what interests me? What moves me? Where do I come from, and what was hidden from me growing up, where will i find out more about the things i don’t know, but want to learn. That’s a big starting point for every writer. 

Then you get to pick and choose from your huge arsenal of tidbits, what matches best the world, the themes and people you want to write about. If you are on tumblr, you are already incredibly lucky, because there are so many archives, projects, artists and scholars sharing content on everything. From architecture and fine art, to history and archaelogy, clothing, poetry, anything and everything. Between us, the people who are big “foreign” cinema watchers, are the best bloggers, they blog about films, political sciences, art, photography, by osmosis you are bound to pick things up.

Another good idea is to go to bookstores, and libraries in big metropolitan areas- consider it a trip. U don’t have to go looking for the book of your life, but just looking at titles, and picking up books that u can’t even begin to recognize what they are about, is a great start to augmenting your world. Old films from all over the world are so pivotal to acquiring a wider perspective.

And one last tip. If you write, the best place to look for ideas is literature - you’ll have to read. But I get how that can be daunting. So secret tip, for people with short attention spans, that don’t have a lot of time, R E AD plays. Read theatrical plays, they come from every era, and every place of the world, they are short and succinct, and don’t rely on abstractions. Their best feature is that they actually are written for an audience, so they are much more considerate to the reader, as opposed to S E R I O U S literature which can be as obscure and difficult to wade through. 

26. How do you go about world building?

1. Choose a setting. What kind of world does your story take place into?

2. Ask yourself how will this world facilitate telling your story.

3. H A V E   O P I N I O N S. Everyone might rave and roll about how every part of your personality must be perfectly curated to fit some globalized image of what the internal human landscape should look like. So many young people, they will drown and overload themselves with all that background noise before learning to hone their own inate sense of what works best for their circumstance. So learn your circumstance, learn it well, and learn to advocate for your self and your worldview. That’s a major starting point for an author. And the internal inconsistencies that you encounter on your way there, are the shadows that are going to make the world you are building pop.

They are not to be avoided, if anything they are the talking point.

4. Research. Now that you sort of know where this takes place, and why you’ve chosen to set it there, undoubtedly there are black spots in your knowledge of this place. Is it some long gone time? Historical? Or fantasy? Some other country? Some allusion for our globalized times (sci fi and all its derivatives?) Find out more about it, by diving into what other people have written. AND don’t make it easy on yourself. Don’t try to just get the general idea, really dive into the logic that governs these places. That is what you are building when you make a world, a new logic under which your story will be understood.

Sometimes this research will make new worlds and new stories for you down the line.

5. Immerse yourself...in the history of objects. Ultimately what is left to describe a world, are the objects in it. And objects speak of human actions. So douse yourself with how gloves used to be made, how people made the mixture for a porcelain teacup, or how they used a chamberpot. All that doesn’t have to inhabit your world, but it will inform it. It will teach you about how the characters value their time, what landscapes they come across. A maid closed up in a house that has to clean and wash things, sees up close all the dirt of her employers. 

 Her world is completely different from that of say a university professor living in a campus not having to physically take care of anyone but himself.

These things give dimension to one’s writing.

6. Finally, a world allows for inconsistencies, the people in it resist definition, as we too resist definition in our time. Obvs some characters might just be cardboard cut outs, and there is nothing wrong with that. BUT avoiding to write for types - this characters is like so, and they behave like so all the time - creates a more nuanced human landscape. And ultimately your world is the people in it.