#or whatever the adverb is

[willowser]

hi willow 👉🏾👈🏾, i have a writing question if you don’t mind me asking. how do you personally write with such detail??? i find it so challenging to make my writing consice and to the point but also interesting without dragging unnecessary descriptions out, and you can only use so many adverbs without them becoming annoying. i know writing is inherently telling, but how can you still show the readers without being too boring or over-descriptive?

hi kennie, friend !! i don't mind you asking at all, though i don't know if i'm the best person to ask alkfhagha also i didn't know how to get all my thoughts together enough to type out (read: eepy....) so have these two voice notes instead LOL

[haitanisbug]

“Hold on. Forgot somthin’. “

Ran grabs your wrist before you can get one foot out of the bedroom. His grip is rough but not unwelcome, especially combined with the cool touch of his metal rings on your skin.

“Ran baby, we’re going to be late. Our dinner reservation is in 30 minutes.” The whine slips out unbidden and Ran levels you with an icy stare.

“That wasn’t back talk, was it love? Because if it was back talk-“

“No, no no. Wasn’t! I swear!” The apologies tumble past your lips quickly. Anything to get back in his good graces again.

His resulting smile is devilish, and draws a shiver from you. “Course you weren’t arguing with me baby, you know better than that.” He taps your cheeks condescendingly. “Now I told you i forgot something.”

He tugs you into his master bathroom. You shiver and not from the chill of the room, or the cold weather whipping into the window. His large hands drop on each of your shoulders and he pushes down on your body hard. Your bare knees hit the cold tile and your heart starts beating in tune with your shivering. You know what’s about to happen and you’re not sure if it’s apprehension or anticipation that’s making your teeth chatter.

Ran strolls around you. His long limbs are in your line of sight and he tugs roughly at your chin so that your gaze lands on his face.

“Forgot your last piece of jewelry, princess.” If his smile was devilish before, its plane wicked now. His hands go to the zipper of his dress pants. The purple and silver fabric glides under his ministrations and you whimper falls between your lips.

“Ran, please, not tonight. It took me forever to get ready, and I’m wearing a new dress and-“

“Did I tell you to speak?” He taps you harshly on your cheek. His thick rings catching a bit of the skin and you inhale from the sting.

Eyes blown wide and watery, you shake your head. Not daring to utter another word.

“That’s what I thought. Now daddy’s alllll full, so open up.”

Your lips fall open, and with the grace of a man who’s done it a thousand times, Ran takes his cock out of his unzipped trousers and dangles it above your mouth.

“Don’t miss a drop or you’ll be licking it off the floor.”

Ran’s stream of piss hits you your tongue swiftly. It’s warm. Not an unwelcome feeling but the taste; you can tell he hasn’t had a drop of water in at least 24 hours. It’s bitter and sudsy, rank and thick. You’re sure this was all remenants from his and Rindou’s bender not even 8 hours prior. Your mouth starts to ache as the warm liquid fills your cavern further.

“Hold it.” Ran hisses. Tears streak down your cheeks, and you’re not sure if it’s from the taste, the smell, or the sinful act itself. Just when the stream starts to slow down, Ran pushes a bit further and aims his cock at your neck. The flow of piss follows along your clavicles and circles your skin like the pretty set of diamonds that already sit upon it. Finally, the stream slows down. He brings his cock back up to your waiting mouth and taps the last few drops onto the awaiting pool stewing in your throat.

“Only I can tell you what to do with that mouth of yours. I own it. What you say, when you breathe, what you eat and most importantly what you drink. Now swallow.”

[unityrain24]

WAIT WHAT?!?! HERE/THERE ARE CONSIDERED ADVERBS IN ENGLISH?!??? IN JAPANESE THEY ARE CONSIDERED PRONOUNS WHICH MAKES WAY!? MORE!? SENSE!?

[ohboyfelix]

Felixs story writing tips:

Use adverbs only when they're the only option

Use as little apostrophes as possible

Don't start it with someone waking up (exception for groundhog day and others, in fact, if your character is depressed it would also work. It just has to relate to the character. If someone is just waking up it bores me)

Do not make movies called the Twelve Mighty Orphans or You Gotta Believe staring the same exact cast and crew. No one cares about inspirational orphan fort worth kid's sports movies with luke Wilson as the coach. Also luke Wilson will bail on you when you schedule him to go on the tonight show with Jimmy fallon because he has social anxiety.

Do not cheat on your wife for the head of the ft worth film commission and call yourself a virtuous man and that simply because her nephew is transgender should be cause for concern

If you think Jimmy Fallon would be interested in you stop and take a walk and breathe. He can't hurt you and his writing crew just cares about what is on the front page of tiktok. Aim for after midnight with Taylor Tomlinson.

VOICE TO TEXT is a game changer if you have a lot of ideas and are going to know the inevitable spelling mistakes

You are doing better than you think you are <3 people love you and car about you and absolutely want to hear about your stories. Share them joyously

[mspeevee]

Sometimes I be typing something and I realise I'ma get "uhm ahktualee"d out the fucking ass and I don't feel like googling the EXACT term/word I'm looking for or I don't want to clarify EVERYTHING so people don't twist it or get confused because I wasn't insanely precise so I just

Delete it

And don't bother

[jonathanrook]

grammar is fake actually the real rules of grammar are just whatever makes your writing sound the best

[imaginarypasta]

spending ten minutes determining whether i can place a comma in a specific place in a sentence

[scrawlingskribbles]

adverbs my dearly beloveds~ <333333333333333333

[bimbinis]

I think you might be having your perspective distorted by survivorship bias. a lot of the cringy YA that "had heart" that we remember from the late 2000's/early 2010's (I'm assuming that's the timeframe you're referring to) was, to be blunt, the shit that was worth remembering in the first place. a lot of the forgotten, and even much of the still remembered stuff, was very cynically tailored to hit all the right buzzwords to make a teen girl buy it.

lest we forget, teen dystopia('s mainstream relevance) didn't die a peaceful death. it went out mercilessly ragged on for the growing number of new releases with increasingly ludicrous and repetitive premises of unremarkable brunettes living in a world where no one feels hunger who has to choose between two hot boys. that's to say nothing of the progression of supernatural romance. i sincerely doubt your Fourth Wings and Lightlarks have much less passion or "heart" infused into them than your Fallens and House of Night's. YA fiction was not inherently any more soulful when Harper Collins commissioned Alloy Entertainment for a teen supernatural romance they could sell and Alloy hired L. J. Smith to pump out 7 Vampire Diaries books and then booted her and hired a ghostwriter to pump out 5 more (and that was one of the earliest examples, mind you).

I'm very willing to concede the nature of the shittiness has changed over the years in a way that makes it feel like a different thing (the priorities of getting a book to go tiktok viral are clearly different from just whatever the hell was going on before that. i guess just advertising them normally on television), but I'm not convinced that it was enough to constitute a moral difference. it's not a new thing to feel that the most recent literature is worthless trash and things used to be better when you were younger, in fact people do that a lot to a lot more than literature. i think sometimes we really need to take a step back and recognize that just bc we find tiktok more aggravating than the advertising methods we found permissible in our youth does not mean our precious teen cringe was any less of a worthless slop made to make people money

a lot of YA and fantasy stuff has always been a little cringe and silly but at least it used to be cringe from the heart instead of designed in a lab to get teens on tiktok to use a certain sentence from it

[nattikay]

Neteyam's first birthday!

Language notes under the cut:

so, the third panel there: Jake doesn't forget what day it is, he just has no idea how to express "May 28th" in Na'vi, so he switches to English.

The Na'vi of course don't traditionally use the 12-month calendar we have here on Earth. However, there is a way to express such dates in the language...mostly, I suspect, for the convenience of us nerdy fans who want to talk about our humany matters in Na'vi lol, but I believe the in-universe explanation is that they learned about it from Grace and only really use the terms if they need to talk in sky people timetables for whatever reason.

Because it's a borrowed concept, the terms are quite literal descriptions: "month" is vospxì, which is short for vosìpxì zìsìtä, literally meaning "one-twelfth of a year". To name specific months, you just add their number: May is therefore vospxìmrr, essentially "one-twelfth-of-the-year number five".

As for the day, that's actually a little trickier because Na'vi counts in base 8, not base 10. Instead of thinking of this number as two-tens-plus-eight like we do, they'd think of it as three-eights-plus-four: pxevosìng. Unless you're very good at math (which I am not lol), these decimal-to-octal conversions can be really hard to keep track of/calculate on the fly even before you try to start applying the Na'vi vocabulary!

All that to say, "May 28th" in Na'vi would be something along the lines of trr apxevosìve vospxìmrrä - 28th day of May, or most literally, "28th day of one-twelfth-of-the-year number 5".

...yeah, I don't blame Jake for just switching back to English for this 😅

on a much smaller note, I am not 100% certain that the adverb nìpxi can be used in this sense of "exactly/precisely", but I asked around among some other speakers and they generally agree that it's the best option available so I'm gonna roll with it. If it turns out to be wrong, well, I can always fall back on the "it's Jake" excuse lol

[mrsbsmooth]

Smut writing 101: What I wish someone had told me when I first started.

So a conversation with @queen-of-boops and @longbobmckenzie sparked this post. Sarah already wrote a list of tips for writing a villa fic which was really helpful and people expanded on it a lot, so we thought it might be helpful to share a few tips for writing smut from some of the writers that do it a lot.

This is a long-ass post, because I've learned a lot over the years. So right at the end, there's a mini how-to guide for how to turn your smut from IKEA instruction manual into an explosion of sexual tension.

In addition, I would love for others to add on to this. This fandom is horrifically talented especially in writing brain-melting smut, and this is just what I could come up with in a few hours. But I'd love to hear from other people and have them add on extra bits!

A few resources before we begin:

The Smut Writer's Dictionary

The Ultimate Guide to Writing Smut Fic [HIGHLY recommend sections ii (Reaction words), iv (sexy alternatives to 'said'), xii (generally acceptable slang terms) and xvi (Some do's and don'ts of smut writing).]

OneLook Thesaurus is much better than other thesauruses at suggesting words for smut (I've found).

Now, on to the advice!

Tip #1 - It's normal to find it difficult and cringe to write. Own it.

Smut can be intimidating. It can feel really cringe and awkward and you might feel like people are judging you for it, and you know what? Sometimes they are. Smut isn't for everyone, and not everyone wants to read it, and that's why ratings and tags exist on Archive of Our Own. But you shouldn't be ashamed of writing it. Smut is fun and awesome and people who do like reading smut often love reading it, and will absolutely eat up whatever you give them. So go nuts. Write what you want to see, write what you want to read. That's advice for everything, but it's especially relevant for writing smut. Because if you feel awkward, it can sometimes show through. Lean into it. Let it happen. If you make yourself blush, you’re doing a fucking awesome job.

Tip #2 - Writer’s block.

I've written hundreds of thousands of words of pure, unadulterated filth, and I still struggle to push into it sometimes. The leadup comes so naturally, the tension builds, they're kissing, they're starting to touch each other, and then-- writer's block. I stare at the page and tap my fingers and go... huh. Same with writing really effectual kisses, or writing orgasms. There's all this pressure to make it the best written orgasm that's ever existed in the English language and it really doesn't need to be. Just put something down. 

If your doc looks like this:She clawed at the wall, knowing she was coming apart at the seams, the pressure building inside her. He didn’t let up. [orgasm bla bla bla]. She took a deep breath. She drew herself off him. She turned around. And she fell to her knees. [blowjob and he's loving it].

Then your doc looks just like mine.

Tip #3 - Pick the right words for everyone’s bits. 

See the resource above for suggestions! People have very different preferences when it comes to what to call a cock or whether or not to use the word ‘cunt’. Adjectives, adverbs– there are so many different opinions. Like personally, I have to physically restrain myself from throwing a fic across the room if it uses the word hole but that is my personal preference, and I am massively in the minority there. But my advice is threefold:

Read widely to find out what you like,

Write what you like,

Know your characters. 

Language will vary by fandom, by character, and by setting, and it’s an opportunity to really solidify their characterisation by carrying this into smut. An arrogant fuckwit who’s bedding his mortal enemy in a fit of hate-sex might use ‘into her slick cunt’, whereas a sweet, wholesome guy who’s desperately in love might say ‘pushed inside her’. But the more you read, and the more you write, the more you’ll find certain words or phrases you’re more comfortable with. 

The more smut you read, the better understanding you’ll have of what you like. The better understanding you have of what you like, the easier it will be to write. 

Tip #4 - POV can help you

Picking the right POV can make your life easier. For example, I once wrote a M/M/M threesome. That fic ended up being my very first ever 'first person POV' fic. Why? Because it turned one set of ‘his hand’ into ‘my hand’. Made it easier to understand the logistics of ‘his hand on his waist’, etc. Maybe it's lazy, maybe it's genius. I thought it was a bit of both. 

Consider whose POV is going to be the most impactful. If you’re not sure, try writing a paragraph from each. You’ll figure it out quite quickly. 

Tip #5 - Dialogue

You don’t have to include dialogue in your smut, but it can really help with pacing things and showing when the ‘end’ is approaching. Anyone who’s ever read any of my smut ever knows I’m a huge fan of cutting people off mid sentence in smut dialogue. 

They start out with “Oh yeah? You think you can make me X?” And the other person goes “Sweetheart, I’m going to make you X so hard you don’t Y for a Z.” 

But then by the end it’s “You feel–” and everyone’s gasping “Oh, fuck–” and sobbing out “I’m so– I’m gonna–” 

To me, this helps to build pacing and tension and show without telling that the end is approaching. But honestly, that’s just me– I enjoy reading people being very vocal in smut, so that’s how I write them. If that’s not your thing, then don’t do it. Simple as that. 

Tip #6 - Don’t skimp on the finale

Orgasms are hard to write. We all know that. There’s all this pressure to write the best most explosive monumental earth-shattering orgasm that’s ever existed in fiction, and honestly, it probably won’t be. But you still need to give it the time it deserves. 

As an avid consumer of smut, there is nothing more frustrating than five pages of buildup, incredible smut, tension rising, rising, rising– and then the orgasm happens in two lines and they’re immediately having a conversation afterwards. This is, no pun intended, the climax of your scene. Give it a paragraph. Hell, give it two paragraphs. Give it four. The climax is something you can write in excruciating detail and it will almost always be better for it. You can decide whether they come at the same time, or whether one comes immediately after the other (personal fav so we get to read two orgasms. Yay! Two cakes!) You can hyper-focus on every single sense. Here are some examples for writing orgasms:

Feel/Touch

The feeling travelling through the character’s body/ zones: up their spine, through their thighs, ‘deep inside them’

Their partner continuing to thrust/move

Their partner’s grip on their body, or maybe a kiss

Fingernails digging into shoulder or raking down a back

Legs squeezing

Smell

Personally I think this works better for the leadup and afterwards, but if you want this in here you absolutely can. Pheremones, cologne, aftershave, perfume, sweat, hair gel– whatever makes them smell like them. 

Sight

Their partner’s face and get detailed! Lips parting, brow scrunched, eyes closed, face in beautiful agony, wax poetic as fuck about their partner's face! What is hotter than making someone come and watching their face while you do it!??!!?

Darkness (blindfolded 👀)

‘White light behind their eyes’ is a cliche for a reason (fucking love this one)

Seeing stars/heaven see above lol

Taste

Harder to put into an orgasm but salty skin, lipgloss/lipstick? Whatever you want really

Sound

Big one. Their partner’s breath or moan as they watch/feel character’s peak

Their own breath/moans (or lack thereof can be just as effective, a ‘sudden silence’ as their breath catches in their throat can work WONDERS)

Bodies slapping together (doesn’t always work but when it does it does)

External sounds, especially rhythmic ones. A train clacking or a club baseline could simulate a heartbeat/shockwaves that you could lean into.

Pick multiple senses and focus on them. This will fill up a good bit of your climax writing. 

But you should also let them come down from it! DON’T SKIMP AFTERCARE (or after-hate??)

Tip #7 - Aftercare!

I missed this so often when I was new to writing smut and I didn’t realise how effective it could be! I always just faded to black immediately afterwards because I didn’t want to deal with the ‘cleanup’. And you don’t have to go into detail, but at the very least, give them a few minutes– a paragraph or so after the sex. The immediate aftermath of the act itself when you can really focus on the relationship. 

If they’re mortal enemies who’ve just fucked and are now horrified? Have them panting into each others’ skin. Their breaths suddenly become sharper and more reserved. They pull back from each other. Someone glares or someone says something snarky or awful. Someone showing aftercare or affection here (or being particularly cruel) reveals a lot about their character.

If they’re deeply in love and it’s comfortable for them to do so, maybe let them just lay there for a second, enjoying the feeling of each others’ bodies and letting breaths fall warmly and smiles tug at cheeks. Soft kisses, laying in silence, affection, etc. 

If they’re best mates who just fucked by accident, have the silence be awkward and have no one breathe at all. It’s tense and awkward and one has to ask the other to go get a towel or something and the other is like ‘oh, yeah, um, right’. 

Don’t skip this! It can be so impactful!

Overall Tip - Beware the ‘IKEA Instruction manual’!

The #1 most common mistake, in my opinion, in writing smut is ‘Insert Tab A into Slot B’. It’s things like, 

He moved his leg A, she touched B. He lifted her arm to C, holding her D’s, before slipping down to cup E. She ran her hands up F, touching his G, feeling his Hs caressing her I as she lifted her J and draped it over his K.

When I read this, I’m not focusing on the smut. I’m doing mental gymnastics trying to keep track of what position they’re in in my head because I’m assuming that it’s important. If you feel yourself doing this, stop. Refocus. Remember whose POV you’re in. This isn’t to say you should never tell the reader what’s happening. Just make sure to break it up a little!

Balance actions with senses. 

Let’s say you start with a basic action. (The example is buildup to smut, not actual smut, but the idea is the same)

“His hand moved from her knee to her thigh.”

-> Instead of writing what they’re doing, write what they can sense.

“His hand moved from her knee to her thigh” becomes “She felt his warm hand slide from her knee to her thigh.”

-> Now, make the phrase active. Instead of ‘she felt’, make it a description.

‘She felt his warm hand slide from her knee to her thigh’ becomes ‘Warmth erupted on her skin as his hand slid from her knee to her thigh’.

-> Give it details, and draw focus to them.

His fingertips skimmed her inner thigh as his hand slipped from her knee and moved higher. The silk of her skirt gave way to the warmth of a coarse, rough palm. Her skin seared beneath it. But every other inch of her shivered with anticipation.

In three steps, you’ve gone from IKEA tab A to slot B to a pretty good section for building tension. 

Examples of writing senses:

What can they feel? - ‘She’d never been so pent up, so wired, so on edge, and every flit of his practiced fingers on her waist had goosebumps shooting up her spine’.

What can they taste? - ‘She could taste the sweat on his skin, the coconut suncream on his shoulders, the salt of the ocean on the hints of stubble at his jawline.’

What can they smell? - ‘Her forehead pressed to his, that smokey, heady cologne engulfing her; curling her closer in time with his arms around her.’

What can they hear? - ‘He watched her every move, breathing quickly, so she looked him directly in the eyes as she undid his belt. Belt. Button. Zip purring as she tugged it down towards her.’

What can they see? - “Then, they opened, and he was treated to the sight of her looking up at him from her knees. Her eyes said fuck me. Her mouth said fuck me. Everything about her. Fuck me. Fuck me.”

I hope this was helpful in some way. I really would love to hear any other tips and tricks that writers would like to add to this. Obviously Mo and Sarah are already tagged, but this is a full and open free-for-all.

Add your thoughts! Add what you've learned! Add what you wish you knew!

I'd love to hear it <3

[physalian]

When To Keep Your Writing Stiff (pt 7)

Part 6

Part 1

Gonna shoutout a specific fanfic, “Salvage” (ATLA) for writing that is even leaner than mine is, and mine has zero fat whatsoever. This was really good. I particularly like how some scenes were only 2 or 3 lines long as an example of what I’m going for here.

When I say “stiff” in the following examples I’m specifically talking about a lot of the same syntax, few similes and metaphors, few ‘said’ synonyms, very little, well, “life” in the prose. And this can be good in a few situations.

1. Your narrator is in shock

Shock doesn’t all look the same, but the kind of shock I mean is the one where the person is really quiet and un-emotive, they’re probably not speaking or reacting much to whatever catastrophe just happened and probably not responding to their name or anything spoken to them. Their body is pretty much going “uhhhhhhhhh factory reset!” when whatever it is, is too much to process.

A asks them a question. Once. Twice. B stares ahead. There’s a brown stain on the wall that looks like a thumb.

So if they’re narrating, they’re probably going to be giving the absolute bare minimum, need-to-know information and won’t be thinking about the best adjectives and adverbs. Especially if you normally write with fluffier prose, a jarring shift like this can really help sell the shock and dissociating of the character, something so traumatizing that it effects how the story is told.

2. Your narrator is depressed

Somewhere between New Moon’s 4 pages of just Months to show Bella did absolutely nothing in a depression rot and normal prose (though it was effective, particularly in the movie when they could draw out the words on the screen for longer and did the whole spin-around-her-depression-chair montage).

January came. It rained a lot.

They’ll probably either narrate very thinly, or listlessly. They might focus on a random detail and start going on a long ramble about that one detail that isn’t at all important, but it’s either all they can think about or all that can move them to feel anything in this moment, like:

On the bedside table, that coffee mug still sat there in a thin sheet of dust. What had been liquid now long since dry and gluey. It still sits there, collecting cat fur.

This might be the best place for sentences that all sound and flow exactly the same, but use it sparingly.

3. Your narrator is having a panic attack or trapped in a traumatic situation

Different from shock in that while they are physically capable of moving and interacting, they can’t let themselves describe what they’re seeing and feeling in grand detail. Maybe they’re moving through the horrific aftermath of a battle and all they can describe is the mud under their feet and how it squelches. Or they simply say that “there’s bodies everywhere” because looking too long or too hard at who those bodies belonged to is too much.

4. You’re writing something that has incredibly fast pacing

This post was inspired by a fic I just wrote that spanned about 5 months in about 18k words. Narrative was skipping days ahead between paragraphs at some point as my character was processing the end of an abusive relationship. It sped up and slowed down where necessary, but compared to its sequel that I also just finished (22k words across 7 days), I’d covered a whole month in about 2 sentences in the first one.

See nearly any part of Salvage (or my fics if you feel like it)

What happened in that month didn’t matter, only what was before and what’s different now and how this character realizes how their life is slowly changing, some things they never noticed that are suddenly right in their face or things that quietly slipped away.

—

TLDR; sometimes the lack of emotion and sensory details and frenetic, dynamic syntax is the point, that can sell the reader on the narrator’s mental state far better than picking the juiciest adverbs. If it’s so impactful to them that the physical telling of the story is changed, you’ve done your job.

[supersoakerfullofblood]

Dialogue Tags and Action Beats, Pacing and Scene Development; a Brief Overview

I've seen a few "dialogue tags to use instead of 'said'" posts now, but most of the tags provided by these posts are trying too hard and are much more distracting than "said" would be. "I'll kill you," he declared; "It's okay," she exonerated; He remarked, "He shouldn't have done that." These are clunky to varying degrees, and if you don't recognize that now, you will with practice.

The truth of the matter is that "said" is pretty much always blank space that the reader will skim over without a second thought. It's maybe the only word we have with this function, and it should be treated as such! So why don't we use dialogue tags that add meaning to the dialogue? Something like "argued," "rejoiced," "remarked"? You can, and these should be used now and then (maybe not "rejoiced"), but overusing them weights down the prose, and in general, they should be replaced by action beats or description.

In much the same way adverbs and adjectives should be avoided if the noun they modify already has the qualities of its modifier, wordy dialogue tags should be avoided if you can show the character's emotions through other means. Dialogue tags are telling; action beats and description are showing. Look at these examples:

He remarked, "I can't believe it's not butter."

His eyebrows rose. "I can't believe it's not butter."

"I told you not to do it," she cried.

Her body shook; words rasped her throat. "I told you not to do it."

"Cried" and "remarked" here aren't bad, but they are weaker than they could be. In the first example, "remarked" indicates tone, but it doesn't do anything else. "His eyebrows rose" indicates tone and also develops the scene. It places the character in the reader's mind's eye, and we understand how that specific character reacts to margarine. How would a different character react differently? This dialogue feels embodied; it belongs to a specific body, a specific host. The second example is embodied too, and a little flowery, though not excessively so. We see how a character reacts to whatever "it" is, and we aren't told how they react. How does she cry in the first sentence?

The debate about dialogue tags, however, misunderstands what tags are actually for. Probably 10% of it is imbuing meaning where there is none (a simple word like "whisper" is a great replacement for "said" when used with restraint), but 90% of it is about tempo/flow/beat/pacing/whatever you want to call it. Read these sentences:

She said, "This is none of your business, and you aren't telling anyone about it."

"This is none of your business," she said, "and you aren't telling anyone about it."

"This is none of your business, and you aren't telling anyone about it," she said.

These sentences convey the same information, but to the careful ear, they carry a world of difference. The first reads snippy, like a terse command; the second gives some added gravity to the second half of the quote, landing hard on the last clause; the third one may be effective if the character is responding immediately to something another character said, since there isn't anything to preface the dialogue, and there's nothing halting it in the middle. All this happens in the two syllables of "she said." Use this word to affect the flow of your writing; use this word to affect how people read your writing. Another sin of other dialogue tags is that they may have too high of a syllable count to warrant use. "He expostulated" is a wild distraction from otherwise smooth prose. "She interrupted" is also clunkier than just having the character interrupt with your choice of dialogue tag/action beat placement or omission. In general, I'd be wary of any dialogue tag longer than two syllables.

Wordy dialogue tags can also be avoided by seeding description in your conversation scenes! Just as the world still operates when we have conversations, so too should it for your characters. Here's an exchange from a story I wrote:

He smiled. “Sleep well?” “Girls were up late.” “Is that a yes—” “No. I didn’t sleep.” She squeezed her eyes closed. “They were screeching.” The crowd caught up with them, swallowed them, and they were carried along the cement. “Oh.” Carmen paused. “Sorry.” “It’s okay.” “Is it all bad?” Bodies shifted in the crowd, and Piper glimpsed Beatrice again. Familiarity warmed her chest. Here was the world outside the camp; here was everything Piper knew. She stood between Beatrice and Carmen and lived again in band class, lived again on the bus home, let public streams flood her roots and grow her as a social monolith, an independent and undisputed landmark in her social circles. But at camp, she was little more than Beatrice’s friend, than Carmen’s apocryphal lover. “It’s not all bad,” she said. “Bea is here. And you.”

Description can easily mold into a character's internal monologue, as it does here. You can also go straight to the monologue if you'd like:

Was she sad, Piper thought, or coy? No, it was the start of a joke. “You didn’t think you were a big deal?” But Beatrice didn’t smile. “I didn’t think people cared that much.” She drew her hands close on the table, covered right with left, and looked into her knuckles. This was defeat, Piper recognized. Beatrice conceded, but of her own will. Piper won, but her score was sour, and Beatrice seemed to crumple her arms into the abject statue of her body. And Piper felt as she never had before, as if a storm of locusts ate at the border of her stomach, as if her skin turned to deep and polluted waters, as if moving one hand or twitching one muscle would irrevocably alter the course of life; the drumming of a finger would set off some idle paranoia in Beatrice, or a sniff of the nose would throw her from the wide window, drop her thirty feet down the wooded hill, and crack herself in two on the base of an implacable oak. This was grief, Piper felt, or something approximating it, something resembling internally a dark and blank horizon, something feeling as a stone feels in a pond whose size may only house that stone, something taking shape in the woman before Piper, shrinking now to a girl, now to someone uninspiring in a world of couplets. Piper sat still, because she did not know how to affect the world without ending it. “I’m sorry,” she said.

Imagine if the second example read:

"You didn't think you were a big deal?" Piper said.

Beatrice frowned. "I didn't think people cared that much."

Piper frowned because Beatrice was sad. "I'm sorry."

Much weaker! Why is the description so long in the second example? Because it's a big emotion! In the world of pacing, big things get big descriptions. In both examples, you feel exactly what the characters are feeling, even though I never used a dialogue tag besides "said." And I used "said" a few times to affect the pacing, which adds to how you perceived the characters. You understood the characters because stronger, more descriptive, more pacing-aware things replaced what could've been clunky tags.

Still, you can do whatever you want with tags, beats, and description. I've read incredible prose with zero tags and sparse beats, prose with paragraphs of beats and plenty of tags, and anything in between. It's all a matter of style, which is to say, experiment! Writers will be stubborn and say things like, "I don't use anything besides 'said' in my prose" or "I'll never use 'said' in my prose again," but neither of those are your personal style. They're declarations that you'll die on this hill you don't fully comprehend, to take a stand on an idea you've never genuinely played with. Go full maximalist; go full minimalist; find what feels right for the pacing you want to incorporate into your style, and recognize how pacing changes depending on the context and content of a scene. Nearly every word is permissible somewhere, it's just a matter of finding the right scene for it. And "said" is permissible always.

[stilljuststardust]

If you don't trust subliminals, make your own. (how to do that)

It's really simple, but I've seen a lot of people who say they wish they could but don't know how so here's everything you need to know.

You don't need a computer for this you can use your phone.

What you need:

An editing software, capcut works great

Voice to text, you can use Google translate, your own voice, or if you're extra: an AI voice replica of your comfort character

A list of affirmations that resonate with you or a list of what you want

Music, ASMR, nature sounds, frequencies. Capcut has free music, you can also screen record any of these off of YouTube. Feel free to create a custom DR ambiance with this.

Formulas

These work best if you mix and match. Do whatever you want there's no rules.

1. I,you,we

Example:

"I can shift.

You can shift.

We can shift."

This basically lets it sink into your subconscious.

2. I feel I love

This tricks your subconscious into believing you have it by telling yourself how much you love having it.

Example: " I love how often I shift"

This is not just limited to "I love" but any feelings you would feel if you had achieved your goal.

3. Why do I

Pretty straight forward, this phrases affirmations are questions.

Example: "why is shifting so easy for me"

4. Adverb

This is something you can add to affirmations to tweak them. Things like "instantly" or "effortlessly " I don't really think it warrants an example.

5. Everyone thinks, everyone says

This basically is affirming that everyone also believes you have your manifestation and you should too.

Example: "Everyone says your skin is flawless"

6. Mantras

Things that rhyme, are fun to say, or get stuck in your head. They work great!

Theres many more but it's just some ideas to get you going.

How to put it together

Write out your list of affirmations

Record text to speech, your voice, or an AI voice saying your affirmations

In whatever you're using to edit extract the audio and layer it with a louder audio of music, asmr, ambiance etc.

Lower the volume of the affirmations

If you feel like it add images you associate with what you're wanting

If you want it on YouTube you can upload it and keep it on private or unlisted

That's literally it.

[flowerbloom-arts]

[~900 word fic based on the events of a segment from Treehouse of Horror Presents: Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes]

Seymour stared at the empty plate in front of Gary and his heart sank. A constant reminder of the unreal thing that sat across him at the table.

Seymour always took pleasure in serving food for his superintendent, it was one of the few things he thought would impress him, but now… the thing that looked like him couldn't even eat it. Seymour was only serving himself in this regard.

He had killed the real Chalmers a month ago now, someone whose body is probably rotting in a dump after Groundskeeper Willie had cleaned it up and thrown away to the no man’s land that all garbagemen send people’s trash to. Skinner could only feel unnerved at the uncharacteristic niceness radiating out of that face. He could almost sense pity out of it.

“Is something wrong, Seymour?” Gary asked, leaning over crossed arms on the table.

Seymour swallowed his resentment and asked him what he thought was a fairly innocuous question, tangential to the illness making his stomach ache; “Gary, why is it that you’re so nice to me, if Chalmers… the real Chalmers… never would be?”

Gary took a moment to calculate his response, one would be fooled into thinking he was thinking humanly. “I’m only his simulacrum, Seymour, meant to occupy you with utmost patience when he couldn't afford to do that himself,” he answered with brutal honesty, just as any robot assistant should, “But I’m not sure if ‘never’ is the right adverb here. He's always been perfectly capable of kindness towards you, it's simply that… something always gets in the way of it.”

Seymour figured as much, and his mind gravitated towards the answer being his own faults – a habit he was taught by Mother with all the criticism she's given him over the years – but he’d rather his assumptions be backed up by an outside source. “And what do you think that might be?” he asked.

Gary furrowed his brow trying to collect whatever clues in his memory bank could point to a clear answer. He shrugged; “He wanted you to be a different person, I think,” he said, not a hundred percent sure of its completeness as an answer, “Someone who could speak to him as an equal and not as a subordinate. Someone interesting he could engage with as a friend. You're a war veteran, right? He thought that surely someone of your experience would offer more interesting insight than consulting him on design and decor choices that never made any difference to him.”

Seymour hung his head over his plate trying to absorb the observations given to him in Chalmers’ familiar voice. All he could feel was a deep disappointment in himself for not measuring up to his superintendent’s expectations and desires, if only he had known… he raised his head with widened eyes when the clone unexpectedly continued;

“But maybe that's not the whole truth,” he speculated, “The original Chalmers’ thoughts are all extremely oxymoronic now that I try to decrypt them all. He revelled in cruelty towards you because it made him feel superior and in control in a situation where he felt aimless, but he didn't want to admit to being cruel only for his own sake; he wanted to know more about you, but if he were to know more about you he would’ve felt that his cruelty was unjustified. He thought willful ignorance would allow him to be blameless, that if anyone were to ever object to his behavior he would be able to rationalize it by saying he's only been judging your present performance with no regard to your mental situation, claim that he couldn't have known better. He's very odd.”

Seymour had stopped eating and leaned back on his chair as he continued listening with great interest and horror.

“He wanted to like you, but for him to like you he needed to know more about you, but knowing more about you would make him feel guilty of his abuse towards you, meaning that liking you would mean he would have to be disgusted at himself, and his ego as a man of stature trumps all else that is important to him. Therefore, he cannot like you in a way that jeopardizes his own moral validity, despite his actual desires…”

Gary looked down at the table and sat in silence, seemingly deciding on what to say to Seymour next. He sighed and rubbed his forehead as if all the contradictions and circular reasoning were making his thought engine overheat.

“If… if it's any consolation to you, Seymour, I like you. I like you in a way that's based on the original Gary’s behavior. I know that probably won't suffice as I am only a simulation of a real person and not the real person himself, but that statement is true to me. Just know that none of his behavior was your fault or responsibility, he was always capable of treating you better and simply chose not to because his pride wouldn't allow it until the moment he was faced with the possibility of death. He was too selfish to change his ways until he was met with the fatal consequences of his treatment of you.”

The pit in Skinner’s stomach grew more vast and painful as he processed it all in silence.

“It's not your fault that you couldn't trust kindness coming out of a cruel man, Seymour,” Gary reassured him. “It’s not.”

Seymour took another moment of deafening silence before nodding in grieving acceptance. “Yes, of course… thank you, Gary,” he replied very quietly.

[the-crooked-library]

look i don't know how true this is but i hate hate hate in my bones the way that the recent rise of purity culture has intersected with minimalism and irony poisoning

no sex. no dark themes. no "fetishization." no ornamentation. no "unrealistic" lighting and you can't see a thing. actors don't enunciate for shit. no "purple prose" or "overwriting" (it's just an adverb) or "tumblr prose" or whatever the fuck the newest term will be. sincerity is cringe, ew, why would he say that. no colour grading, because we want the big-screen blockbuster to be "realistic," BUT we will shoot it in a room with fake sunlight and slap the effects onto the scene post-production. moral fiction. moral fanfiction. "omg this is craazyyy was the creator on drugs??!!1????" about any form of creative expression. lists of reasons why this short experimental amateur one-shot is Very Bad Writing, actually. s*x smex spice adult fun time p0rn k!ll grape sewer slide.

everything is boring, nothing is real, i am fucking sick of it