#it's always fun to talk about this stuff

[swordsmans]

hi! can you explain a little more about what you mean by writing warmups and puzzles? are they practice?

yes! they're practice!!! this started getting long so i'll put more info below a cut, but basically: exercises help with creativity, puzzles help with form, and i learned to do this by mimicking fan-artists.

imagery exercise - basically, describe a really vivid environment in extreme detail and try to evoke emotion and character ONLY with objects/scene. think "howl's room" or "howl's bathroom" from howl's moving castle. describe the objects/environment of a single still "image" or moment and try to paint a character picture from it. this is one of a few exercises i use to practice avoiding reliance on internal monologue or narration to portray emotion/character (which helps keep characters out of The Void in "real" stuff), because you can't use dialogue or internal narration. Scene only, baby!

sense exercise - try to focus entirely on one non-visual sense in a single moment in time for as long as you can (touch, taste, smell, sound); the imagery exercise covers the "visual" sense. basically, try to paint an emotional picture with something other than visuals or explicit emotions (e.g. no "this smell makes me sad", explain the smell itself, etc. etc.). the "touch" version of this exercise is great practice for bringing physicality into your writing, too, if you feel like your characters are talking but not interacting.

dialogue exercise - start a conversation in the middle and try to give context only through dialogue, no info-dumps allowed, making it as realistic as possible. the conversation itself doesn't matter so much as practicing natural speech patterns and conversation flow. think about how conversation flows when you are talking to someone IRL and try to mimic that instead of trying to write "story dialogue". (i probably do this exercise the most frequently because i find it the most entertaining; it's great for practicing comedy!)

metaphor puzzle - this one is for practicing emotional lyrical writing the same way the imagery exercise practices physical lyrical writing, this time with a focus on consistency. basically, take an abstract image and use it as the baseline for a much larger, longer metaphor and make word salad about it. the most important part about this is going back to the beginning after you've finished to make sure your metaphor stays consistent the entire time. if you start off talking about the body and randomly switch to an ocean metaphor halfway through, figure out how to turn the ocean back into the body.

line puzzle - like the metaphor puzzle, this one is about staying consistent/concise/impactful. basically, take a line that doesn't sound exactly the way you want it to (maybe it doesn't have the right punch? maybe its flow is off?) and pull it out. then rewrite the sentence in as many different ways as you can possibly think of. change words, change the order, condense or expand as needed. this helps practice "honing" your language.

voice exercise - simple and straightforward; pick a character POV you don't normally work with and try to write something entirely in their voice. this often involves a very short "research" portion where i go back and read dialogue, etc. from that character beforehand, but not always.

outsider exercise - also known as "voice exercise 2". write a scene, internal monologue, observation, etc. of your character(s) from an outsider's perspective. the outsider character itself doesn't matter at all and should basically just be a vessel for their observations, because the point of this is to help you work on external character traits/behavior. basically--no matter what your character is thinking or feeling internally (and no matter how your character interacts with their friends or w/e) how does the world see that character with little/no prior knowledge. this is really helpful for establishing consistent character behavior without leaning on the "crutch" of internal monologue or narration. it's essentially the character version of the imagery and sense exercises.

ouroboros puzzle - basically, write a full-circle "piece" that ends where it begins. you can either start in media res and mess with time, put your character in a "habitual loop", go totally abstract with it, whatever. this one is hard to explain, but once you get the hang of it it's really fun and can help you work on adding temporal depth to your stories. like, it helps you work on the sense of scale/time before and after your story's physical boundaries, if that makes sense. the best example i can offer is that i once wrote a short horror piece about a possessed victorian lady who keeps killing every priest who tries to exorcise her because she doesn't understand that she's possessed, but i had to convey the "loop" of that through one interaction with one priest.

AU prompts - also straightforward, pick two characters and write an interaction with them in an AU setting while trying to keep them as close to their "actual" character as possible, and/or use an AU setting to tease out a part of their character that is harder to address in canon. This works for both fanfic and original stuff too! this is basically an alternate version of the "voice" exercise for characters that you are more familiar with and want to poke around with at an intermediate level.

read "regular" books a few times a year - okay, okay hear me out. even if you read like four non-fanfic books in the entire year, i cannot stress enough how exposure to different writing styles can help break you out of rut. i'm not even saying literary fiction or w/e here, it could be anything fiction. just immerse yourself in someone else's writing style for a bit because it can absolutely help get you out of your own head. fantasy/scifi is good for action, mystery/thriller is good for plot structure, romance is good for dialogue, horror is good for emotion/voice, etc. etc. also, it's fun! and i swear to you no "regular" book is going to be more time consuming than the 80k fanfic you can chew through at 2:00AM.

so, yes, they are basically practice! i have spoken about them before, but looking back it's usually in the same breath as other writing stuff (specifically re: the 250k+ fic). essentially whenever i am feeling bored or stuck (or like i want to write but don't have any ideas), i will pick an exercise to keep my brain "in practice" even if it doesn't amount to anything. they're not "stories" so much as ficlets. usually they're between 200-1.5k words, but i have had some go on for much longer if i keep poking at them for a few days. pretty much everything under 20k on my ao3 was once a warm-up/puzzle/exercise that i thought was decent enough to post, including the last two chapters of "harbor lights". almost all of them usually get scrapped, though.

if you've been around for a hot minute, you know that i didn't have a lot of so-called "formal" training until i was in my mid-twenties, so most of what i learned about "the writing process" actually came from mimicking fan-artists! drabbles and ficlets were basically it on livejournal, and i watched my artist friends on dA/tumblr doing doodle warmups for years. it's really helped a lot over the past 10+ years. i tried to take the same philosophy of like "lighting practice" or "background practice" or "perspective practice" along with like... fic prompt challenges or w/e and apply it to everyday writing, and these are some of the prompts/exercises that i've come up with.

of course, you can find a million different lists of fanfic or original writing exercises online, but i sometimes struggle with stuff like that because i think that's because most of what's out there are more prompts than exercises. personally, i do feel like i get more creativity out of flexing my technical muscles. i know i'm not breaking new ground here, but i think you are never too good or too experienced to stop practicing!

so, yeah! _(:3 」∠)_

[crumb-crumblet-s-crumbington]

WAIT ARE YOU ARE YOU CUPTOAST??????????????

euuummmmmm.... mauybe....

[jvlianbashir]

"the creator said in a reddit thread -" "the official twitter account posted that -" "the actors confirmed in a livestream that -"

i don't care and that's not real to me. put it in the text.

[sergle]

I'm listening to a lot of Maintenance Phase (bc I love it) and this comes up sometimes, so I'll just be sat here thinking about how common it is for little kids to grow up watching their moms and other women in their life jump from diet to diet. Just as ambient background noise in your childhood, the adults around you obsess over calories aloud, express guilt over eating enjoyable food, frame exercise as a form of punishment for eating, and so on.

[genericpuff]

vent post

[kyouka-supremacy]

Hey (^-^)/

I have a question: What did Atsushi mean in this panel when he said "the fact that you're the one standing in front of me"? I don't get it.

And why Akutagawa's face seem conflicted by hearing that?

I'm not entirely sure - that line is fairly ambiguous - but I can share my own interpretation! Here, Atsushi is trying to explain Akutagawa that the reason why Dazai has not acknowledged him yet is not, as Akutagawa is convinced of, because he isn't strong enough, and that his being powerful is actually of no interest to Dazai. Atsushi suggests that there's something else Dazai is waiting for Akutagawa to grow better at before acknowledging him, and Akutagawa will only be able to see what it is by keeping himself from killing (likely, what Atsushi is thinking Akutagawa lacks is moral virtue to some extent, compassion and humanity. I feel like that's also consistent with how Dazai sees Akutagawa in Beast, and what believes is wrong with him: “It’s human nature to lash out with violence. But if hurting others is your natural instinct… then you are nothing more than a mindless beast” (Dazai, Beast novel, page 18) ).

Akutagawa so far has believed that everything he could do to be seen by Dazai, was proving his own strength; and that his current situation of not being yet recognized was due to his own limits on that front. With that last line, I think Atsushi is telling him: “The reason you are where you are now [both in terms of his path towards being acknowledged by Dazai and overall current status as conjunction of events that led him to be where he is] has nothing to do with your strength or lack thereof. You're here in front of me [in your current situation that led you to this place in this moment] because there's something you've yet to realize [that would be, once again, that strength is not what Dazai seeks in him but rather for Akutagawa to accomplish a moral step up]”.

Additionally, I think Atsushi might also imply: “The reason you're here in front of me, the reason Dazai decided you had to be here, is so that you could see something you still can't grasp”, since both sskk and the bsd author seem to be fairly assured that everything sskk themselves do is because Dazai wanted them to, in some sort of weird determinism (“Why were you so eager to put Akutagawa-kun against that tiger lad? [...] How long have you been aiming for this scenario?” “From the time I met Atsushi-kun.” (Hirotsu, Dazai, chapter 37); “Why do you think Dazai-san put us together?” (Atsushi, chapter 51); “Dazai-san didn't abandon me after all. This was all a trial. A guidepost, lined with wailing.” (Akutagawa, chapter 85); and even more examples could be made; everything sskk do, seems like it's because Dazai wanted them to at some point.)

The reason why Akutagawa looks so conflicted, then, is probably out of bewilderment for Atsushi's words, for the revelation that proving his strength - that is everything Akutagawa has tried to do since meeting him - is actually not the way to make Dazai acknowledge him.

Here's an alternative fantranslation to the official English translation + the raws of that page for further insight :)

[warpedpuppeteer]

So I've talked about how Buck is possibly older than Eddie here before.

This topic came up on twt and some people are unhappy because they finally realized Buck is possibly older than Eddie (or they're the same age at least) because they think Eddie is too mature to be younger. Like, you know that you don't have to be older to be mature?? 😭

Eddie can be younger than Buck and be more mature. Because he was raised in an environment where he wasn't allowed to be a kid! He was forced to be the man of the house when he was a child, enlisted when he was 19/20 and then became a single parent. He literally had no choice. His maturity always relates back to his responsibilities. (Very common with the oldest kid in poc families. We're always told we are more mature than our age and we grow up thinking it's a compliment)

Buck's maturity is completely different! He was able to seek therapy on his own because he wanted to be a better person and recognized his flaws. He was able to forgive his parents despite how much they broke him!! He's able to grow as an individual.

Eddie on the other hand has trouble growing as an individual because he always falls back into the mindset of being a father first more than anything else. That's why it's taken so long for him to open the can of worms that is Shannon's death. And remember how he also joined an illegal fight club??

Shout-out to @/solemnsun on twt btw who I've started talking to about this who pointed out that they both balance each other out which helped them mature in ways they couldn't when they're alone. Buck allows Eddie to be silly and emotional and impulsive and Eddie allows Buck to be more nurturing and parental and less reckless. (They've got a really cool timeline worked out about how Buck is born before Eddie with a lot of details and proof so I highly suggest you check it out )

Buck and Eddie are both mature and immature in different ways. Just because Buck is possibly older than Eddie in canon doesn't negate any of Eddie's maturity. It's literally just canon ages 😭

[tizeline]

OOO, I like the implication that the yokai trio are gonna watch their dad get devoured by Shredder and achieve the same effect the scrapped Shredder!Splinter arc we almost got!.... unless you're going in a different direction than canon 👀👀👀👀

Oh wow, I didn't even think about adapting the Shredder!Splinter plot in any way in the AU XD. But I've already mostly figured out how I wanna do the season one finale and beginning of season 2, and I don't wanna change it now soooo....

I'm actually gonna stick pretty close to canon, Draxum is gonna put on the Dark Armour only to, not too long after, get slurped like a Capri Sun and unceromoniously spit out, and then Shredder is gonna start running around wrecking shit. That still isn't gonna be too fun for the Drax Trio to witness, of course!

[fellamarsh]

another thing i've been trying to do recently is read more self-published stuff. "but fell," you say, "you're a self-published author. surely you've been reading self-published stuff all along" and then i laugh for so long in response we both become uncomfortable.

see, the fear (which has for a long time been killing my mind) that i'll read other self-published stuff and find out that it's so much better than mine that i might as well stop writing forever kept me from doing that basically ever. i have a hard time not unfavorably comparing my work to others and had convinced myself i was being smart by withholding an avenue of de-motivation (reader: i was not being smart). it also doesn't help that i'm pretty low income and have a hard time spending money on books i haven't already read, and that self-published stuff isn't always available at the library---but really a lot of it was just me being a coward. which i'm working on. i could talk about how this particular cowardice is Very Silly, but i think enough has been said about it on writeblr and in the Writing Space in general that i don't feel the need to (though i will if anyone wants me to).

instead, i wanna talk about the self-published things i have read in the past few months and ask about the self-published things you love!

so: what happened was i got real sick, and while i was real sick i (naturally) read over 200,000 words of ace attorney fan fiction in the span of a few days. eventually i got bored of it (and also maybe annoyed at how people were characterizing some of my guys), but i still wanted to read something gay and romantic and nice, something i knew was gonna end happily, which isn't my typical fare.

now you may be saying (having gotten over all the uncomfortable laughter from earlier) "fell, you write gay romance. what do you mean that's not your typical fare?" listen. until a couple months ago i hadn't read a cut and dry romance novel since before i finished college. for context: i graduated in 2015. i know it doesn't make sense. i'm a guy who doesn't make sense.

but in this case it worked to my advantage. not the not making sense thing, but the not having read Published Romance in 1000 years thing. I didn't know where to start. I was very skeptical of everything the library had Available Now in the Gay Fantasy Romance category. what if it was all bad and also not good?

and then i scrolled past the familiar cover of our very own @ashen-crest's A Rival Most Vial.

now this was comfortable territory! this was a novel by a very nice writeblr person whose posts i enjoy! i already loosely knew the plot, i was familiar with the characters, i knew the names of things like rosemond street and the griffin's claw and that ambrose had blue hair and that at the end of it all there would definitely be Boyfriends. i didn't have to worry that this would be bad! i only had to worry that it would be really good!

but i wasn't worried about that, because i was officially Not Writing at the time, and because why the hell hadn't i read this book yet Ash literally emailed me some very kind words last year when my cat died??

Y'all, I devoured ARMV. If you haven't read it yet---especially if cozy fantasy is more your thing than it is mine---you should check it out Immediately. It was fun! It was heartwarming! It was sweet and earnest and confident! I was delighted to find it was occasionally hot! Ambrose and Eli snuggled up into my sick exhausted heart and found a permanent little place there. (Especially Ambrose. I have such a thing for Stiff Guys who Kind of Suck for Tragic Backstory Reasons and are So So Lonely They Don't Even Realize It. gawd)

(And a very small part of my brain spent the whole time wondering why I had been so afraid to really engage with the work my community is doing. The community that I'm in. The one I'm a part of. Why?! Maybe more on that later.)

But from there the curse was broken! I immediately devoured @stjohnstarling's What Manner of Man in a similar sort of frenzy (and hooooly shit guys am I excited for the expanded, finalized version to come out at the end of next month!) and started digging into @lurinatftbn's The Flower that Bloomed Nowhere (which I can already tell is going to be an All Time Favorite).

And now I want to ask you what your favorite self-published books are so that I can read them, too, but I think I will in another post that doesn't dedicate so much space to talking about my various and sundry Issues and isn't Terminally Long

[13eyond13]

love it when a character that's hard to read intuitively for you has like a dedicated fandom interpreter who can just glance at their blank face in a panel and then give you a 3k word essay on their innermost thoughts & desires & fears and neatly tie it back into the themes & whatnot as if it's the most obvious thing in the world

[aroaceleovaldez]

related to my prev post, i absolutely LOVE talking about fandom history, particularly riordanverse fandom history, and i've been actively around the tumblr part of the fandom for the better part of at least a decade now, so feel free to ask me about riordanverse fandom history or similar stuff like that!

[snowballthekitteninwonderland]

Rewatched Gilda (1946) recently, and immediately thought of the bnnuy and doggo husbands. The movie is so good, there's literally only ONE issue, which I *know* would be 100% solved if the Freelance Husbands were the main characters (will probably get into why that is in a different post tho) and so, a couple or more AU ideas were born....(Including a canon divergence/never met as kids/met as young adults AU, for which I also have a fic WIP)

Really wanna make an animatic redoing the whole Put The Blame On Mame scene but with the freelance husbands, with of course, Max being Gilda. There's even an excellent song cover from Alexandre Covers at YT, a Max animation is practically begging to be made....I really wanna do it qjhHUaj.

[sciderman]

howard the duck (1976) #10

[mezzmerizd]

There's something so theraputic and lovely about learning that childhood shows have fandoms that are still alive today,, fanart, animatics, fics, comics, all of it. It's great to see the love i had for shows as a kid be still shared today, especially with characters represented in ways I can relate to today, too :3

[frenchfry99]

Little post with my girls in @evillillad 's metal au

Had the motivation to finally finish Poison Garden refs 🎸🥀

Also doodle of Iris and her girl-best-friend teehee :3c

Iris is very protective over her bandmates,, kinda obvious if you look at them all together. Sometimes I think oh, Annie and Bee are so tiny and then I remember they're almost average, Iris is just HUGE (T o T)-

[doodlejoltik]

my favourite writing device is having an un-Rei-liable narrator