#learning from

[whenmemoriesfrost]

learning from donna tartt's the goldfinch chapter one: boy with a skull

i spent some time today with the first chapter of donna tartt’s the goldfinch, and thought i could write a series of blog posts about reading this novel for the first time, and discovering how it can inform my own writing. 

what i immediately love about tartt's writing is the commitment to detail. she doesn't leave a stone unturned in the narrative - everything is specific and vivid, which allows for very tangible characterisation. i felt as though i really saw her descriptions, particularly of the streets of new york in the rain, and the met in ruins.

i highlighted this passage because i was impressed by how much movement, tension, mood, and character study tartt can fit in a single sentence. it's a real skill to be able to pull a reader into the narrative like that and imo can only be achieved through the perfect balance of detail and pacing.

everything, from theo's youth and guilt, to his mother’s whimsy and intelligence, and the beauty of art and architecture and space, is painted with a tragic light. i'm already connecting to theo as a character. i see myself in him, i find him believable and a compelling narrator. since i'm writing my current wip in first person for the first time, the goldfinch is already making me think about how i can use visual detail in my stories in a way that characterises my narrator, in a way that brings his flaws outside of himself and makes them visible.

[oceangenasi]

I'm absolutely obsessed with Laios' logic that the other shapeshifters made mistakes the real party members were too knowledgeable/careful/wise to make

but for Marcille he's like "only the real Marcille would do something that fucking stupid"

[thisshadowwrites]

i have seen gay porn less homoerotically charged than whatever the fuck they were doing in that hyundai civic

[0sbrain]

alternatives for ai to design ocs

hero forge

picrew

the fucking sims 4

your local furry artist

bitmoji

shitty photoshoped collage

DeviantArt bases

zepeto

making edits of your favorite character

searching "dress up game" on the app store

learning how to draw

[apollos-boyfriend]

every time some jerk complains about the new minecraft update “not adding any value to the game” i think about that one jschlatt clip where he discovers a lush cave for the first time and is genuinely rendered speechless by its beauty. so much of minecraft’s charm and beauty is exploring and discovering new lands and generation and falling in love with a world that was made for you and to love you

who give a shit if the pale garden doesn’t “add” anything game breaking. it will be worth it for the hundreds of thousands of players who stumble upon it by chance. only a few people will be able to relate to being handed a new op block/mechanism on a platter but everyone remembers the feeling of still being new to minecraft and the wonder of uncovering all its quirks. it’s about the loving the universe for its smallest of features and creatures as the love letters tho humanity that they are not exploiting the universe for all that its worth jackass ‼️‼️‼️

[batgirlteeth]

hey, trans girl whos looking to be more social! self-deprecation wont make u more relatable and funny i assure you! if you want people to like you, theyll be drawn to the qualities you like about urself! and you dont have to apologise for you presence anymore babe, youre allowed to be here. people will want you around if you want to be around yourself. youve gotta be your own best friend

[nonebinary-leftbeef]

DEVASTATING the lyric you've been mishearing is better than the real one

[inkiedraws]

Luffy's not used to being the big brother.

[whenmemoriesfrost]

learning from donna tartt's the goldfinch chapter 4: morphine lollipop (early novel spoilers ahead!)

chapter 4 sees theo meeting pippa (whose story mirrors theo's in some ways) for the first time since the explosion, as well as the beginning of theo's friendship with hobie, and the return of his father a year after he left theo and his mother.

particularly with the introduction of theo's father and his new partner xandra, i've been thinking a lot about dialogue as a characterisation tool. dialogue is probably the thing i struggle with most when writing fiction. i find it difficult to write convincing dialogue that isn't stiff. there's a scene in this chapter where theo has been taken out to dinner at a touristy restaurant, shortly before leaving for las vegas. the dialogue in this scene, as his father tells a story about the budding acting career he had in his youth, is masterful at revealing his father to be a jaded, delusional man without ever explicitly saying it, by having him relay a story that has no real connection to the plot. it's really clever. the two of them really remind me of my rotten uncle and his wife.

my skin crawls when i think of the painting, buried in theo's mind and in the prose. it is this far-away, concealed little burst of tension. it's a real skill to achieve that.

[thirrith]

IT IS DONE

pattern is based on Andrea Cull’s DNA Pullover, and the double helix cable pattern was charted by @ub-sessed, which can be found here

[prolibytherium]

One of my all time biggest pet peeves with historical(ish) fantasy is when the writer constructs a religion with a clear bias that it's stupid and false and therefore only the Stupid People and/or commoners believe in it and all the smart/elite main characters are like, quasi-atheists or otherwise just routinely flout established religious conventions of orthodoxy and/or orthopraxy because they're Too Smart for it or etc.

It's usually an extension of assumptions that people in the past were just less intelligent than in the contemporary, just being like "I know that the sun is a star millions of miles away that the earth orbits, but this ancient religion describes it as a chariot flying through the sky" and not really bothering to learn the context and just (consciously or subconsciously) settling on 'that's a crazy thing to think and was probably believed in because they were Stupid'.

And that whole attitude pisses me off so much. People were as 'smart' 10,000 years ago as they are today. These beliefs aren't just desperate, random flailing to explain phenomena that could not directly be accounted for either, it's not like people just looked at the sun and went "Uhhh I don't know what the fuck that thing is, actually. I guess it might be a chariot or a boat or something?? Yeah let's go with that." and based entire religious practices on this. Every well-established belief system exists within broader contexts of cultural values/subjective perceptions of reality/knowledge systems/etc, and exist as part of a historical continuum of religious practices that came before. Even when not Materially Correct, they have context and internal logic, they're not always dead literal with zero levels of allegory, and they're never a result of stupidity.

[kazieka]

hold up im reading more about the lionfish thing and this one island in Honduras has had such a huge problem with lionfish that the measures they have taken include

• getting special exemption from the Honduran government to allow divers access to harpoons and spears which are otherwise illegal in fishing

• public campaign to teach people how to prepare and eat lionfish (apparently they are very tasty once the poisonous spines are removed) (but watch out)

• holding lionfish combination hunting competition and cookout (reportedly they killed and cooked 1,700 in a day) (someone killed 60 of them with a rubber band spear gun???)

• most recently and apparently out of desperation, the divers in charge of culling the lionfish in the Roatan Marine Park just started. feeding the lionfish they killed to sharks. bc what else are you gonna do with it

• the sharks don’t seem to notice or be affected by the poison and begin hanging out with the divers

• the sharks then were seen hunting and killing the lionfish on their own

like this is nuts to me sorry. the sharks just had to be shown “hey this is food, did you know?? you can eat these!! here try one!!” we are possibly altering an entire foodchain bc we like feeding the big ocean wolves

[mebssann]

imagine you're living in the post apocalypse and your adopted dad still makes you do homework

[s-ccaam-era-crepe]

feel free to put location/area in the tags