#like you’re telling me my teacher lets me draw silly shit on the board sometimes AND I’m doing fucking great in physics???

[gods-favorite-autistic]

My favorite achievement has gotta be breaking the stereotype of like the silly person being really dumb and the stereotype of like nerds in general because i do so much stupid shit yet to some of my friends I’m probably their smartest friend like having that balance is so great

[duhragonball]

For the writer's ask, can you please do 26 and 27?

Sure.

26: What is the worst writing advice in your opinion?

27: What is the best writing advice?

Maybe this is a cop-out, but I sort of feel like any writing advice can be good or bad depending on who you're giving it to. People usually point to oft-quoted "rules" like "don't use passive voice!" or "don't use too many adverbs!" But I think those have some value. I imagine someone who actually needs to hear that advice, and they probably wrote like this:

The handrail was steadily grasped, and the stairs were decended noisily by the ruggedly strong limbs of the same man: Tex Danger, Robot Cowboy.

And you can do stunts like this, but nobody wants to read a whole story of clunky sentences. So I always assumed the "rules" about adverbs and passive voice originate out of necessity. A teacher whose students were just figuring it out as they went, and just throwing in words without considering how they look when you read them back.

Actually, I'll bet it was a word count trick. Adverbs and passive voice are great ways to pad out a book report, and short story writers do get paid by the word, so there's plenty of incentive to try it. Either way, I feel like someone needed to hear it, but now the pendulum has swung the other way, and novice writers worry about using adverbs at all, which is silly.

By the same token, I'm tempted to say the best writing advice is to just do it. Someone on Twitter asked Thunderbolts writer Jim Zub for advice on how to start a story, and he replied "Start". It cuts to the heart of the matter. People want a list of steps to follow, but this isn't like baking a cake. There's no ingredients to buy, no oven to preheat, just you and a blank page. Step one is writing. Step 100 is writing. There's smart ways to go about it, but organizing your gel pens and decorating your writing dayplanner isn't part of the process.

On the other hand, Jim Zub's run on Thunderbolts was fucking awful, so for my money "Start" was the first mistake he made on that book. He also wrote a tweet about how stories should always have a plan, rather than just improvising shit, like they did with the final episodes of Game of Thrones. Again, solid advice, but all I could think of was how lousy and slapdash those Thunderbolts issues were, and that this was apparently by design. It was supposed to be a shitty twelve-issue commercial for Secret Empire. He planned it that way. Fuck...

Sorry, I'm getting off-track. The problem with advice like "Just DO IT!" is that it's a little too dismissive. It overlooks why writers are reluctant to get started. Do they lack confidence, or do they just not have a proper handle on what they want to do? I've been Just Doing It since 2015, and I still get stuck from time to time, so it wouldn't help me much to hear that advice. I'm already taking it.

For what it's worth, I think the best advice I know to offer is to experience other stories, especially ones you have to read. Nothing wrong with watching a show, but I think it helps to see the printed words, so if you see a turn of phrase or an apt description you really like, you'll know exactly how to use it yourself in the future. Other people's stories are a great way to gain inspiration. The key is not to just get mired in one kind of thing. If all you ever read is Teen Wolf slash, then you're going to end up in a bubble where it's hard to write anything else well. I doubt your Teen Wolf fic will be any good either, because it'll end up looking like all the others you've read. You need some diversity in your head.

"Write what you know" is generally decent advice, although I really only benefitted from it as I got older and had more life experience to draw upon. It's shitty advice for teenagers and twenty-somethings, because it makes them feel like they aren't knowledgable enough to write anything, or that their raw imagination is 't good enough.

"Show, don't tell," is pretty shitty advice, at least where prose is concerned, because showing and telling are the same thing. I mean it makes sense when you think about it, but it's like the adverb thing. All it does is make writers paranoid that their show/tell ratio is out of specification. It's art, not science. People like to be told things once in a while, it's okay.

You can trust your readers to imagine the stuff you don't describe. If you're trying to describe things in extreme detail, you'll just bore them to death, or offend them, if the thing you're describing is a woman. If you want to tell your reader a woman is beautiful, just have her show up, and have another character go "She's beautiful!" Don't even explain why. You can even have another character go "Enh, I don't see it." Let your reader decide the hotness for you. I've seen too many male authors embarass themselves trying to explain why asses are sexy. Just acknowledge that asses are sexy and move on.

Other shitty advice: Outlines. I'm not saying outlines are bad across the board, but everyone hypes them up like they're required, and for a lot of writers they actually kill the creative process. Not everything needs a blueprint. Sometimes you just gotta screw around for a while before you can figure out what you're making.

Good advice: Don't just screw around. Fanfic has a bad reputation mainly because a lot of fic authors are more interested in gratification than quality. Even if you're doing it for free, take some pride in the craft. Don't just slap something together and post it so you'll get comments or kudos or whatever. Dare yourself to do a little better. I'm not saying don't have fun, but I think when you're passionate about something, you can take satisfaction from it even when it's not fun. Writing isn't always fun, so you have yo decide if you're willing to put up with the non-fun parts of it. And improving your skill gives you a way to make it worthwhile.

I think that'll do for now.

[shaedan-archive]

pokémon go au

solenyanna and tam are team instinct. they are super invested and drag veszi into it, but he forgets he’s supposed to do as they tell him and joins team mystic because he’s like ‘i agree with this philosophy all the other ones are Wrong and Bad.’

‘you’re dead to me’ solenyanna declares, wearing all yellow and a headband with the pokemon logo for their bi-weekly pokémon go walk. tam nods solemnly

eilili and esteem are mystic and valour respectively. they met by fighting over the same gym for like a week and bumping into each other one day while defending it. they have a playful rivalry but go on runs together. whenever they’re in a room together they bicker good-naturedly over which team is better Constantly

when veszi is kicked out of solenyanna and tam’s group, he turns up at a raid battle all alone and confused and eilili adopts him out of teacher-ly pity. she and esteem teaches him how to game the system for maximum profit and veszi gets considerably more enthusiastic about the whole thing. he mentions them offhandedly to solenyanna and tam one day and they get all jealous and suspicious. veszi invites them along for a run – esteem and tam get along like a house on fire but solenyanna doesn’t stop suspiciously squinting at eilili. afterwards she tries to convince veszi to come back to them like ‘she doesn’t even nickname her pokémon! it’s unnatural!’ and ‘how can you just MURDER your vaporeon like that??? eilili teach you that did she uh huh uh huh I KNEW SHE WAS HEARTLESS.’

veszi shrugs. ‘we’re going to retake a gym down the street from valour and we need a good defender. snorlax is the new meta so my vaporeon is just taking up space.’

solenyanna mock-faints and then stomps off to complain to tam.

eventually tam and veszi have to stage an intervention – they get esteem on board and arrange a get-together only to ‘accidentally’ get caught up in other stuff. solenyanna comes home afterwards and grudgingly admits that eilili isn’t too bad after all and then two months (and a lot of puppeteering from their friends) later they’re dating.

kasiam and qi-lee are mostly confused and kinda amused by the whole thing. eilili gets them to tag along to one of their runs (she knows kasiam who knows qi-lee, like in canon) and tam seduces kasiam to team instinct via fruit basket deliveries (he knows a guy. don’t ask). qi-lee surprises everyone and goes valour. they’re both filthy casuals though who never get past level 10

malon is this team mystic fucker who keeps taking gyms from out under them for like four months. it gets to the point where they’re all working together to map out his habits and do 12-hour stakeouts with shifts around the affected gyms. there are CHARTS. eventually esteem catches him in the act and leaps out of the bushes like 'AHA I GOT YOU NOW’ except it’s the middle of july and he’s been sitting there for like three hours without water, so he then immediately falls on his face. malon gets him some water at a nearby cafe and they have a nice chat

back at home base esteem gets orders to find out his secrets and sabotage him. so esteem starts meeting up with him regularly (he’s very excited about being a spy and gets eilili to give him a fucking code name and shit. walkie talkies. she draws the line at disposable phones (that’s plural)). they start actually seeing malon around after that, mostly because they know what he looks like now. he waves and grins at them from the other side of the park and then notifications about their pokémon being ousted from the nearby gym pop up. solenyanna is ready to commit homicide and eilili is like 'i wouldn’t have anything against someone stealing his phone.’

tam, yelling: 'hey you hear that universe?!’

veszi: 'i hope he steps on a lego’

and then one day. one fucking day. esteem gets dropped off at their meeting spot by this fancy-ass car and as they watch the drivers seat window gets rolled down and that red-headed motherfucker leans out and gives esteem a kiss on the lips before driving off. esteem swoons for a solid minute while the rest of the group stares and then explode into various variations of 'WHAT THE FUCK ESTEEM.’

tam argues to have him expelled on the grounds of fraternizing with the enemy. eilili openly considers it and solenyanna is like 'okay he’s cute i get it but HOW COULD YOU.’ eventually it’s decided that he can stay, on the condition that he relays all useful information malon lets slip back to them.

malon still completely wrecks them every single time they cross paths, with his sleek silver fruit-brand smartphone flashing at them from the other side of whatever space the relevant gym is in. eventually the gang begrudgingly chills out a bit about him since he tags along with esteem sometimes and turns out to be this pretty nice, silly guy who plays pranks and is more of a trickster spirit than the Actual Devil™. also he makes esteem happy so there’s that

(that doesn’t mean the rivalry stops though. at some point malon names a dragonite after esteem – it’s all 'aww how cute’ for the first few days before it is realised that NOTHING can bring it down. it dominates the gym down the street for three. weeks. veszi is crying. 'it shouldn’t be this strong!’ he wails, face down on a stack of papers filled with calculations that covers 75% of his desk. 'this does not make sense! somehow he’s defying the laws of physics!’

solenyanna kinda pats him on the cheek awkwardly.

kasiam and tam take the gym after a while by leeching off of veszi’s tear-stained maths and kasiam’s strange ability to attract magikarp wherever he goes (i.e. a fuckton of gyarados’s. awful, awful gyarados’s but there are so. many) and put in a snorlax called 'malon suxx’ bc they’re actual children. it holds the gym for about two days before a level 36 stranger takes it over and both sides have to admit defeat)