#dickinsons
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Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Susan Gilbert featured in The Selected Letters of Emily Dickinson
#lit#emily dickinson#letters#quote#words#typography#fragments#susan gilbert#selections#letter collection#p
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Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Dr. and Mrs. J.G. Holland (1858)
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In the past fifty years, fantasy’s greatest sin might be its creation of a bland, invariant, faux-Medieval European backdrop. The problem isn’t that every fantasy novel is set in the same place: pick a given book, and it probably deviates somehow. The problem is that the texture of this place gets everywhere.
What’s texture, specifically? Exactly what Elliot says: material culture. Social space. The textiles people use, the jobs they perform, the crops they harvest, the seasons they expect, even the way they construct their names. Fantasy writing doesn’t usually care much about these details, because it doesn’t usually care much about the little people – laborers, full-time mothers, sharecroppers, so on. (The last two books of Earthsea represent LeGuin’s remarkable attack on this tendency in her own writing.) So the fantasy writer defaults – fills in the tough details with the easiest available solution, and moves back to the world-saving, vengeance-seeking, intrigue-knotting narrative. Availability heuristics kick in, and we get another world of feudal serfs hunting deer and eating grains, of Western name constructions and Western social assumptions. (Husband and wife is not the universal historical norm for family structure, for instance.)
Defaulting is the root of a great many evils. Defaulting happens when we don’t think too much about something we write – a character description, a gender dynamic, a textile on display, the weave of the rug. Absent much thought, automaticity, the brain’s subsconscious autopilot, invokes the easiest available prototype – in the case of a gender dynamic, dad will read the paper, and mom will cut the protagonist’s hair. Or, in the case of worldbuilding, we default to the bland fantasy backdrop we know, and thereby reinforce it. It’s not done out of malice, but it’s still done.
The only way to fight this is by thinking about the little stuff. So: I was quite wrong. You do need to worldbuild pretty hard. Worldbuild against the grain, and worldbuild to challenge. Think about the little stuff. You don’t need to position every rain shadow and align every tectonic plate before you start your short story. But you do need to build a base of historical information that disrupts and overturns your implicit assumptions about how societies ‘ordinarily’ work, what they ‘ordinarily’ eat, who they ‘ordinarily’ sleep with. Remember that your slice of life experience is deeply atypical and selective, filtered through a particular culture with particular norms. If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing – because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.
We... need worldbuilding by Seth Dickinson
#seth dickinson#worldbuilding#writing#ten.txt#if you're reading this go read the traitor baru cormorant#neowwww
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#dickinson series#emily dickinson#susan gilbert#emisue#lgbtq#wlw pride#lesbian#wlw community#wlw film#actress#wlwedit#pride lesbian#wlw tag#wlw post#wlw love#wlw#wlw blog#lesbiancinema#couple lesbian#hailee steinfeld#ella hunt
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Emily Dickinson in a letter to Elizabeth Holland wr. c. 20 January 1856
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#emily dickinson#dark academia aesthetic#academia aesthetic#chaotic academia#classic academia#light academia aesthetic#dark academia#soft academia#romantic academia#study motivation#studyspo#studyinspo#studying#study aesthetic#study notes#study space#studygram#study blog#light academia#classic literature#poetry#art academia#art#books#libraries#book quotes#literature quotes#deep quotes#life quotes#relatable quotes
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HARRIS DICKINSON Postcards from London (2018)
#harris dickinson#postcards from london#filmedit#filmgifs#mancandykings#dailyflicks#fyeahmovies#usermichi#cinemapix#userfilm#userstream#gifs#mine#*#cinematv#tvandfilm
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i audibly GASPED THIS IS TOO GOOD
#thank you twitter#agatha x rio#my fav couple with my fav poet#agathario#agatha all along#agatha harkness#rio vidal#emily dickinson#poetry
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Emily Dickinson, from The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
#lit#literature#typo#typography#fragments#light academia#dark academia#poetry#poem#emily dickinson#the collected poems of emily dickinson#oops typo!#240309
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AYO EDEBIRI Dickinson (2019—2021) S02E08, I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
#ayo edebiri#ayoedebiriedit#dickinson#dickinsonedit#femalegifsource#userbbelcher#userbru#useraashna#userjacko#userrachel#tusercourtney#tuserrobin#userspree#userclara#userrobin#tusercj#*
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Emily Dickinson, from a letter featured in The Selected Letters of Emily Dickinson
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Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Mary Bowles
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if i can stop one heart from breaking — emily dickinson
#honkai star rail#hsr#sunday hsr#robin hsr#they KILLED me#this took forever bcos i was futzing with it for a week my bad#robin's named after a bird but sunday IS the bird#he even has an “injured" wing (pierced) like are you kidding. he did it to himself.#UGHHH i could write an essay#penacony#hsr fanart#if i can stop one heart from breaking#emily dickinson#rizsart
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Emily Dickinson, from Poem #1320 ("Dear March--Come in--"), The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson [ID'd]
#q#lit#quotes#poetry#typography#march#emily dickinson#spring#dear march come in#the complete poems of emily dickinson#id included#m#x
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Emily Dickinson, “Ghosts.”
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