#we're all just sacks of meat and nerve anyway

[vowel-in-thug]

GEMMA I have once again fallen in love with another piece of your writing!! I think you mentioned a while back that you really enjoy writing extended metaphors. Do you have any tips on how to write good metaphors/extended metaphors? I still haven't graduated from similies :)

Awww thank you!!! I appreciate it, sincerely, especially because i’m in a Mood.

but i LOVE answering questions on writing, for probably deeply psychological reasons, which we won’t get into right now! and i’m going to use myself as examples in all of these which is REALLY OBNOXIOUS!!! but i’m too tired to try and hunt out other examples so sorry about that

recently, when i’ve been tackling metaphors, I’ve been trying to find things to compare that aren’t even the same kind of Thing. it’s helpful especially for writing noir which is all ridiculous metaphors. An example from the first noir au: “It’s barely a breeze, really, the waves twitching only as much as an accomplished sinner in church. They’re moving, sure, but they aren’t exactly calling attention to themselves.” You wouldn’t think on the surface that a weather pattern could be like a professional asshole on a Sunday morning, but that’s what makes it work, i think. 

and that in itself is an extended metaphor so let’s NUT for extended metaphors for a little while, my very favorite. technically, all it needs to do is go on for more than a single sentence, but you really want to assault people with these metaphor. you wanna knock em OUT. 

 if you’re looking for something formulaic, a good way to go about it is one of these ways:

1. A Large Extended Metaphor, aka the “Beatdown.” This is when you want to compare something to another thing, but you go broad with what you’re comparing it to. That way, you can list all the ways the first thing is like the second thing, in a row of maybe 3-6 sentences, exploring the idea of the first thing being this second thing from every possible angle you can think of. You hit ‘em with everything you’ve got, right from the start. I think this is a traditional take on the extended metaphor

an example from let us possess one world:

Silver always thought himself a single wave, out in the middle of the sea. He’d been out there by himself all these years – sometimes rising up in fearsome storms, sometimes becalmed with no purpose, ebbing and flowing endlessly. But now he was finding himself edging closer to the long, golden, rocky shore that was Captain James Flint. He knew at any moment he was going to find himself crashing down on that shore, pulled to it by the fates or the moon or God, and for a while he’d felt helpless, thinking about it. Recently, however, he couldn’t help but anticipate that moment of impact - the intense collide when they became one. He found himself yearning for it.  

Wham-bam, done. goodnight, nurse! 

2. The “Suckerpunch.” Write a regular, single simile or metaphor (they’re the exact same, if you want to write a metaphor but think you can only do similes, just remove the like or as and BOOM. ya good). Then, maybe a paragraph later, or even a whole page or chapter later, bring it back around to really knock the reader on their ass. 

From the cowboy au:

Flint had thought this part of himself had been killed off long ago, slowly dying over ten years, first beaten and hanged from a low branch outside a small Pennsylvania town before the killing blow, a shot through the back of the head in the Black Hills. The concave of his body was nothing more than an abandoned mine – absent of anything of worth, leaving only cold stone, the faint trickle of icy water, coughing dust, and the fading footsteps of people long gone. Truthfully, he’d been glad to be rid of those usual urges of most men. He knew all too well the mistakes they inevitably caused.

He’d known John Silver all of three days, but Flint was smart enough to know he had “mistake” written all over him.

But a part of him – a stupid part of him, a small part of him all lit up like a lantern at the end of a dark mineshaft – thought Silver had “inevitable” written all over him too.

These look very complex, but it’s actually really simple, you just gotta keep track of what you’re writing. Anytime you write a metaphor (or simile) and you’re like HOT DAMN THAT’S GOOD, tuck it into your head to bring back around some other time. it’s even something you can add in your second or third draft. if you like a metaphor, never let it go.

3. Use both. aka the “Death Blow.” Be Obnoxious Like That.

from the final smallpox:

In the moonlight, Thomas looks as still and cold as marble, though Flint can feel he’s anything but. He’d been stone for so long in Flint’s memory; for so long, he had seen himself as Odysseus, eager for rest after a perilous journey, far away from the sea. But now he knows he has a little bit of Pygmalion in him, warmed and wrapped around his own Galatea.

…(a page and a half later)…

Flint watches him a little while longer, the deepness of his sleep turning him back into stone. But no longer is he the flat, detail-less picture in his memory, the features all smoothed away by time. Now, the masonry is perfect for its imperfections — the scars, the stubble, the bend of his fingers, the unruly tufts of hair, the slightest rise and fall of his chest like Rome. He’s a sharp, precise, finely-carved relief, etched right into Flint’s heart.

Literally just. Never shut up. Keep going. Beat it like an unwanted mule. Wring that metaphor out with your bare hands until all that’s left is crumpled computer code and a reader begging for mercy. If you ever think your point has been made from just a single-lined metaphorical sentence - you’re wrong. You need at least seven more sentence before the reader FINALLY understands exactly what you mean because you’re writing it and therefore it’s all necessary. 

[vowel-in-thug]

Hello, this is a question about writing if that’s ok? I always get stuck on stories in the outlining stages. I’ll have half of the story worked out from the initial burst of inspiration and then maybe a week’s worth of riding out its last waves, but after that I just keep procrastinating on outlining further, and weeks stretch into months with no progress so I’m even more discouraged. I love the actual writing and I really am a planner and need my outline but somehow I just 1|2

oh anonymous babe, i think your part 2 of this ask was eaten by The Beast :( so i’ll try to answer off of this and if there’s something integral i’m missing, feel free to send it again!

but what i’m mostly gonna say is YO SAME. i don’t think any writer has beginning, middle, end plotted out from the start. it’s usually like “i know the beginning and i know the end but how to go from point A to point B????” or “okay this is how is starts and i have a few random scenes in the middle but how to connect?? how to end???” and STARTING can also be a real bitch. basically, writing is a pain in the ass. basically i don’t recommend it at all

but if you’re a stubborn, masochistic binch like myself, my advice is really: you got half a story worked out?? great!! write that!! if your scenes don’t come to you linearly but you’ve got a handful mentally played out down to the last detail, right that!! write endings first!! go hog wild!!

the current story i’m working on, in it’s initial planning had a totally different storyline in my head, and i eventually stalled on it because i didn’t even realize how much i hated what i had come up with. so it took me a while to stop, retrace my steps a little, and rewrite a new outline, even though i had written the first third of the story. you might have to go back and rewrite some things once you’ve developed your whole idea, but that’s what editing is for!

you seem like a very productive person (read this as though i said it enviously) so don’t get stuck on not knowing every detail! just get started!

[vowel-in-thug]

Hi Gemma (and Hailey)! Can I ask you both a writing question? When you have a scene that revolves entirely around two characters having a conversation and working through Feelings, how do you structure that scene, if at all? Do you outline the goals or the beats of the conversation first, or do you just get them talking and see what happens and rewrite after? 1/2

2/2 I’m thinking specifically about Flint and Silver talking over whiskey in your first smallpox fic and in Hailey’s “don’t come closer, don’t let go of me” when they’re on their way to Savannah, because both stories stick out in my mind as times I was just incredibly impressed with the way you made a scene like that work and flow naturally. I hope this is not too weird a question—if the answer is basically your god-given talent, fair enough! ;)

Hey! Thank you!

So I obviously can’t speak to @annevbonny‘s process, so I’ll just talk of my own.

As I’ve mentioned before, I like to storyboard my fics and break each moment down into bulleted scenes. As I’ve also probably mentioned before, and if I haven’t, it’s probably just obvious to everyone, I take a long time to actually sit my ass down and write.

But while I procrastinate, I am thinking about whatever scene is coming up next. And other future scenes, but I try to at least focus on what I need to work on next. And I think about it.... a lot.....

 So what’ll usually happen is by the time I actually start writing, I’ll usually have my goals, as you said, for the scene, as well as a number of specific lines I want to include, in my head. I just have to connect the dots. 

In the first Smallpox fic, for example, I had two specific goals in mind. It was right after the finale, so the anti-Silver people were out in full-force, and since I couldn’t actually lay a real smackdown on these jerks, I had to use my story to try and show how OBVIOUS it was that Silver wasn’t the villain at the end of our story. He was just a man trying to find a bit of peace for his loved ones, and himself. I wanted to make that clear to everyone that John Silver is, actually, a sweet baby angel.

There was also a lot of jibe on tumblr dot com about the decision to not give Silver a defined backstory. People were split, and I was heavily in favor of that decision. I loved it. And so my other goal, which I thought was just as important, was to give Flint the same conflict. Now Flint is the one with a backstory he cannot speak of, with traumas that eat at him, that he cannot share with the man he loves. It was not only important to acknowledge this, but for Flint to share that he understood exactly what Silver meant now. And even if he still believes himself capable of accepting Silver’s backstory, and not judging or shaming him for it, he’s not sure if he really believes Thomas to do the same for him, so he gets it.

Even though I guess this sounds pretty rigid, it’s important to go with the flow. Sometimes,  connecting the dots between planned-ahead lines can be a real bitch, and sometimes conversations naturally veer away from where you want, and it’s hard to stick that landing, so to speak, to that next point I’d been planning for weeks. 

It’s okay. If there’s a way to steer towards your plans, you’ll find it (which sometimes explains my word counts 😬) and if not, either re-evaluate the conversation to see if it’s working or scrap the lines altogether. It’s good to plan but it’s good to let your stories be flexible. I can’t remember now if every planned-ahead line made it in, or if the lines I like a lot in that conversation were ones I’d been thinking of for weeks, so in the end, it’s all the same.

also, for some more concrete advice about writing conversations: no one likes to read two people just sitting have a conversation back and forth and that’s it. dialogues like that work outside of the written word. 

so bring another element into it: actions that the two characters might do together (pouring a drink, touching each other) or memories that might be sparked (it must be awful being you) or the outside world piercing through their little conversational bubble (madi and thomas out in the garden). this really helps to make it seem like you’re not just writing a script, and is a good way to get your reader to really focus on what they’re saying.

hope that helps!

[vowel-in-thug]

Hello beautiful and wondrous Gemma! I come to you for help with writing and Vonnegut. I have often heard the advice that one should withhold information from the audience whenever possible, only giving them as much as they need to know at a certain point in the story and leading everything else implied or to be revealed later. This is said to be a good way to create suspense. BUT Vonnegut said to always give the audience as much information as possible 1/2

so they can finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last pages. In your experience, which approach works best and why? Thanks for reading this!

hold on lemme get a fresh cup of coffee before i answer this

okay, so. the way i heard this described by a creative writing teacher i had back in school is readerly vs writerly texts. both are different takes on how to fully immerse your reader in the story. 

readerly texts are more your classic world-building books. they show you EVERYTHING because they want to understand everything the characters might know and understand, so you’re one of them. readerly authors include Dickens, JKR, and many fantasy novelists.

writerly texts work under the assumption that you already know everything the characters might know. you’re already a part of their world, and so they don’t explain anything - they just GO. authors like Faulkner or Joyce, you navigate the current along with the characters while simultaneously trying to figure out where the fuck you are. 

interestingly, reading a readerly text is easier on the reader, but harder on the author, and vice versa. so i think there’s pros and cons to both.

that isn’t to say that there are contextual layers to readerly texts, or it’s impossible to figure out things in a writerly text unless you’re workshopping it for weeks in a high school literature class (although, in the case of Harry Potter, you’re just going to have to assume that any interesting layers you might discover are completely coincidental at this point)

so, truthfully, i’m not sure what’s better. but here are some opinionated bullet points if you’re just skimming at this point:

i think it’s important to balance sharing information with the reader and an exposition dump. i tend to be afraid of writing too much exposition and so have to physically force myself to write things out because sometimes there’s no way a reader would ever come to know it without me telling it. 

that being said, understand where information would come naturally in real life. would you tell your entire dark tragic backstory to a person you just met? probably not, and even if you would, that’s an exception not a rule to human behavior, and a reader probably won’t believe it

building tension is important, but make sure it makes sense to the tone/plot of your story. if you’re writing Pride and Prejudice, you don’t need the tension of, say, And Then There Were None

DON’T leave everything important to implication. this goes for both plot points and a character’s sexuality, for the tired media-consumers among us. i think a good example of this is the first season of Fleabag. throughout the whole season, you know there’s more to her friend’s death than what we’re told in the first episode. you KNOW that moment informs most of fleabag’s decision-making and character. you can possibly even figure out the truth before we’re told, if you’re a savvy media-consumer. does that make the revelation hit less hard? absolutely not, because it was beautifully done. the tension was absolutely there throughout, and leaving the truth just implied would have felt cheap and disappointing

another thing, sort of related - i am tired of TWISTS. it’s not cool if your story only exists to trick your readers. i am tired of everyone wanting to twist things and getting upset that their writing is seen as predictable if a handful of people guess it first. what matters is if the story as a whole is satisfying and engaging, not just a trick ending

suspense only works if it builds to a point before coming down. if you never seen Anthony Perkins dressed in his mother’s clothes and wigs, then Psycho would be a failure. 

I guess what you’re asking is if a story should be top heavy or bottom heavy with information, and personally, I tend to go bottom heavy. I don’t give it all away up front, which i guess is the opposite of Vonnegut’s advice (i’m sorry KV) but unless you’re writing a murder mystery, i wouldn’t leave ALL the answers to the end. cockroaches are a bitch.  

[vowel-in-thug]

Can I ask you something weird? In vol 2 of your collected tumblr prompts, there's a story where Jack warns Silver about falling in love with his captain. And when Silver asks what happens if his captain loves him back, Jack's attention shifts to how cold the room is, and how he fell down a well as a child and ever since then he hates the cold and avoids it at all costs, and he says that he has no experience of that. I thought this was such a beautiful way to convey Jack's feelings about his 1/2

2/2 unrequited affections, and I was just wondering if maybe you remember how you came up with that, or what made you choose that specific memory to give him in that moment? Were their other options that you considered and discarded? I hope it’s not too weird a question, just ignore this if it is–it just really worked for me as a reader and I’m trying to analyse it from the writer’s perspective :)

“can i ask you something weird” like those aren’t the best fucking questions ever :)

so that story – i can’t remember when i wrote it, because tumblr doesn’t fuckin date things and i compiled all those to ao3 later. i remember i wrote it in the rose reading room at the NYPL and i had a jacket, so i think it might have been cold out, and i remember when i left, i saw the giant black sails skull ad on the side of the bus, which i think they stopped running once season 4 started, but i could be wrong.

so either s4 hadn’t started yet and i either am a psychic who predicted a, jack hated the cold and b, that he obviously was in love with vane – or it had and i am just misremembering. or it’s all a coincidence.

which should tell you, i don’t know specifically why i chose that memory, specifically. i think jack has the potential to be this tragic figure, since we know his story and it’s fucking depressing, but because of his personality, it just isn’t. so he takes this fake trauma i created and it’s not about what happens to him, it’s about how it’ll never happen again, and it hasn’t. 

but i think you’re asking about the writing device i used? which i actually use alot hahaha. i think tv tropes calls part of it a wham line or a wham shot, and these things are a LOT harder to use in writing than in movies or tv (i can’t remember exactly but SPOILER ALERT FOR A YEARS OLD BOOK when the Half-Blood Prince came out, i am pretty certain snape actually killing dumbledore was on the beginning on a page you had to turn, so some people  (like me) wouldn’t see it happening at the bottom of the page before it was supposed to happen, and if i am remembering that right than JKR definitely made sure the pages fell that way). 

when something is supposed to STOP a reader in their tracks, especially in surprise, there are two ways to do it, but let’s talk about the way i did it here. the wham line really here is: “So what happens,” says Silver, looking at him long, “if you get your Captain to love you back?” It’s said after a few lines of dialogue already, and a longer speech by Jack, and it was important to me at this moment for everything to just STOP. people (or at least me) tend to speed through dialogue, and i wanted that question to linger for a little bit before giving an answer. i wanted people to wonder: why is silver asking this question? is he already in love with flint? is he thinking about using it as a way to manipulate flint? would jack have an answer to that question? i’d just suggested jack/vane a few lines above, am i being blatant about it now? i needed that question to hang in the air, and in a movie, it will hang with long silences or music cues or an actor’s facial tics or something like that. but i don’t have that. and sometimes just saying “jack doesn’t answer right away.” isn’t long enough. 

so what could happen is either an external moment – something else happening on the scene to stop the conversation, like an introduced character or a kiss or a gunshot, but that would take away from the wham line (essentially, making that external thing a what moment) and not what would have worked here. 

so instead i used an internal moment – what might be going on in the heads of those actors with their damned useful facial tics. the question leaves jack feeling cold, because he is, at the end of the day, a very solitary person. no one is really at his level, no one matches him intellectually or in his goals (he feels) and no one really would choose him over someone else (again, he feels). he has friends, partners, acquaintances, etc, but they all have other people he thinks they would rather be around. he wasn’t only cold or wet in that well as a child, he was hopelessly, desperately alone, and the two are easily intertwined. a captain that loves you back? he isn’t lying to silver. he honestly doesn’t know what that feels like.

but rather than just having jack contemplate all of the above, thoroughly depressing me and everyone reading it and himself, i like to focus on sensory things or older things. things that might not connect right away on the outside, but i think human beings actually do think like that. a sight or a smell or a feeling of something will bring a flash of something else entirely, in a way we’re not always conscious of. 

so rather than silver asking that, and jack (between s2 and s3) thinking, “i’m always alone,” he thinks back to when he was a child, when he was alone, and feels as cold as he did back at the bottom of that well. and hopefully it becomes clear to the reader before jack even says it, that if vane ever loved him, he sure as hell didn’t show it

i hope this even kind of somewhat answers this question for you lol

[vowel-in-thug]

Hello Gemma, do you have advice on how to make writing more emotional or to increase its emotional impact? Thank you!

hello there! i’m not sure but i’m happy to make something up!

step one: weep openly onto your keyboard and let your tears do the typing.

no okay not that. i don’t know? and by that i mean i have an idea but i guess it’s two-fold. i’m just guessing though, when you say “emotional” you mean “sad or upsetting”? because if it’s positive emotions my tactic is basically just “how gross can i make this be without puking all over myself.” so how to give something sad or upsetting emotional resonance.

first of all, i don’t think i ever actually write anything traumatic. like, in the moment of tragedy. i’ve written a couple fights scenes, but that’s just like who is hitting what and where and how and why. fight scenes are pretty basic on the surface (although choreography is a bitch, though i’ve found that they never read as stilted as it feels to write). but the fact that they’re pretty basic kind of goes towards my point: sadness is about what happens after.

when upsetting things are happening, people typically respond one way: shock. there’s a numbness, there’s a helplessness, everything sort of retreats. you may cry, you may not. you may scream, you may not. but emotionally, there��s almost a kind of disconnect that is difficult, for me anyway, to make compelling.

things i’ve written that i think are particularly sad are usually being told to someone else by the person who experienced them. for example, flint’s hamiltons story in the cowboy au, silver’s story about his abusive caretaker in that older one with the cigar, thomas’s story of how his hand was broken in the second smallpox fic. and i like writing this way because i like writing things i understand. it’s so much fucking easier writing things you understand. i have never been as abused as silver was in that story, but i know about telling someone something upsetting about my life and then trying to laugh it off as a joke. i know about telling someone something, not thinking much of it anymore, but they’re reaction throws into sharp relief just how fucked up it was. the survival is part of what makes things sad. it’s not death that breaks my heart, it’s who gets left behind. 

and not only will you have someone who experienced a strong emotion in a position to reflect on it: old fears, healed wounds, understood personality traits, etc – but now you have someone new who is experiencing this strong emotion for the first time, but not having the sad or upsetting thing actually happening to them. in essence, the characters becomes your readers. 

to put this in a Black Sails situation: we never see thomas being dragged away to bedlam, fighting and screaming and miranda’s confusion and desperation and thomas clinging to miranda and telling her to take care of james, etc etc. i’m not saying it wouldn’t have been compelling. but we’d only seen thomas a few short scenes before that, so it’s easy to understand why they didn’t do it that way. instead, for james to return and see miranda, silent and staring into a fire. miranda, thinking she’s out of tears but then james comes back and she has to go through it again and they come back. miranda, who we’ve seen and been puzzled by for a season and a half, and we finally understand her pain. and james, far more upset than we’ve ever seen him in 13 episodes, james for the first time ever at a total loss for dealing with a situation, james who cannot control the outcome, james turning into flint – this scene has such emotional impact that will linger, let’s face it BS fans, for the rest of our damned lives. and it’s incredibly intentional too – thomas is just gone, just like that. now we know the ghost that’s been haunting flint and miranda these years, and that scene is appropriately haunting.

as for any kind of other emotional impact – anger, jealousy, anxiousness, etc. i mean. we’re not monkeys at a typewriter making shakespeare. even if your story and your character’s story are worlds apart, you have felt the same things your characters have felt. and i don’t mean use it in a dumb zen way. i mean what things physically occur to you when you get angry. for instance, my ears get really, really hot when i’m angry. when i’m anxious, my stomach churns and not only will my hands shake but i will just stare at my hands shaking. when i’m jealous of someone, i will think of anything to keep myself thinking about it, to the point where i feel guilty thinking about what i’m jealous about. we experience emotions in different ways, and even if your ears don’t get hot when you’re angry, i think it’s a pretty understood response. when you’re feeling a strong emotion, you’re just sort of rendered down to biological responses we can’t control. if the outside story is distressing to the character, than a majority of what’s described should be the internal world. 

like i’ve never hyperventilated before, but as soon as a character is described as doing so, i always check my breathing, and it will always speed up. we’re all just sacks of meat and nerves anyway so you might as well ramp them up to 11 and describe how being camera shy makes someone’s toenails hurt and i’ll be like “bitttttchh yes me too the fuck”

i hope there was at least a single sentence in here that was helpful

[vowel-in-thug]

Hi Gemma, how long does it generally take you to come up with an outline for a story you want to write? I'm trying to be more productive, because right now thinking up a story takes me months and it's super demotivating. I get flashes of ideas here and there, non-linearly, and I develop them, but for some reason I can't ever get to a full story, I have a ton of half-outlined stories in my WIP folder though. Any advice you might have to offer would be greatly appreciated!

OH GOSH i’m probably not the best person to approach if “””””productivity””””” is what you’re after lol i take forever to write. but i’ll give this a shot. SURPRISE IT GOT LONGGGGGGGG

well, first of all let me say i am RIGHT THERE WITH YOU. i’ve mentioned here before but before i started writing fic, i had like a five-year bout of writer’s block. i wrote for school and that’s it. nothing creative, nothing on my own. so, y’know, thanks black sails. 

but either way, you are ahead of where i was because i had NO ideas for anything, like a ton of half-outlined stories in a WIP folder??? my dream 2-3 years ago. i would have killed for an idea.

so i’m gonna talk about the process for the cowboy au because it’s by far my longest. like, literally the longest thing i’ve ever written. i’ll try to make this as clear as possible though, in case you haven’t read it.

i first started with what people in ~*~industries~*~ call an elevator pitch, or a book jacket summary. a better way i feel is to think about telling your best friend this story idea in a text message. just be as succinct as possible but trying to map out a whole story as best you can. 

the thing about this though, is to not only expect changes to occur while you’re writing, but to embrace them. 

so my text message to my girl allie would have been something like “they’re a gang of bank robbers, trying to find a hidden loot by a famous zorro-like bandit named vasquez, but somehow silver gets his hand on the map ala the show, and he ends up sort of joining his crew to find it.” but that’s just the set-up, there’s no real conflict once silver joins the Walrus Gang. so then that became: “of course there is a sheriff or law agency that’s been gunning for the Gang since they’re extremely wanted men (and woman)” 

but that ^^^ conflict – took me uhhh awhile to come up with (i’d been ruminating on this cowboy au since i started writing BS fic lol) a lot of internal considerations and thinking of specific scenes just in my head. and that doesn’t even take into account the shit that goes down before the Law gets involved, aka the Fancy Gang. i hadn’t even realized singleton was betraying them right away.

so what i’m saying is, try to write a brief (ha, ironic) summary. like a page. as vague as you like, but SOME direction. like physically write it out. 

i didn’t decide to write in three chapters until i started outlining what would become the first chapter. because those images you have in your head – boy do I get those too, but i try to think of them as scenes instead. you storyboard it. you make a bulleted or numbered list and write out the images you have, in hopefully some kind of sequential order (when i was writing my master’s thesis, i wrote the scenes or ideas on notecards if i hadn’t figured out how to arrange the ideas. it’s a bit different bc it’s nonfiction but the concept is the same). 

for the first outline of the first cowboy chapter, it probably looked something like this:

the gang rides into Nassau 

Flint speaks to Eleanor to try and track down the map

they hear a man at the wild west show might have it

meet silver

i knew they would have to discover through word of mouth about silver (we can’t ALL be clever with a secret feather, BS dads), but having these different scenes rumbling around in my head is so not helpful. I look at a list like that and it’s like, oh. obviously the place to expand and add more is in #3: how and when and why they hear about the wild west show. their discoveries. this was when i decided i would be using multiple povs, because i wanted to show anne with max, and flint with sherriff scott, and i needed somewhere for billy to go, and then of course the only other villain whose name i remembered ned low comes in. and that brought in that whole concept. just like any time you think of a new idea, they sort of spring from another idea, and just like that, your list expands, and you’ve got the making of a clear outline.

and if you’re looking at a list that’s 20+ numbers you’re like “okay maybe this should be chaptered” and then you gotta decided what moments are gonna leave people wanting more – is it something being resolved or a cliffhanger or a dumbass punchline like who the fuck is long joe silverado?

so this might all be old news and not at all helpful to you, in which case i’m super sorry lol. my advice is always to write things out (and my advice is to always write things out by hand . not only does it make you think clearer than typing but the beauty of a new pen and notebook will make you WANNA write) and to first look at the forest – even if that forest is just a green, amorphous blob on a Google Map, it’s still know by everyone as a Forest. 

and then try to look at each individual tree, and number the trees. and that’s your outline. and then when you add the actual plot, character, dialogue, setting, tone, etc those are your leaves and bark and living creatures and nests and cracks and sap and all the other tree accoutrements, i think i lost sight of this metaphor i’m sorry

[vowel-in-thug]

[1/2] Hello! I just wanted to message you on this Fanfiction Writer's Appreciation Day, because I would never be able to pic a fic of yours to leave another comment under and I sadly don't have time to give all of them my love today. So, *clears throat* You're an amazing writer. I adore your stories. I have unhealthy adiction to rereading "you are the queen and i am the wolf", the orange verse will always fill me with warmth and "find you and hold you down" is one of the hotest thing I've read.

[2/2]Usually with a favourite author there’s some one thing I adore about their writing,they always make me lagh,cry, etcYou can invoke any feeling, create any atmosphere, and I doubt it’s easy, but you make it look incredibly easy, because with every fic with just few lines you have me hooked and totally convinced of whatever scene and emotionally involved in whatever is going onYou’re amazing at creating the feel of any fic you go with Thank you so much for the stories you’ve shared so far.

OH MY GOSH :’))))))))))))) THANK YOU FOR THIS!!!!! you are so unbelievably kind oh my gosh. i don’t deserve such praise, i’m gonna cryyyyyy

also thanks for the shoutout for one of my earlier fics! i’m glad those are still legible, i feel like i was pretty rusty when i was first starting out. fun fact: i wrote that because of the first conversation i ever had with @jadedbirch which i believe went something like “hey i’m El so you know what this fandom needs, more BDSM amirite?” 

i’m glad i get atmosphere across because that is actually my #1 concern haha. i studied poetry and journalism to learn that those few punchy sentences are the most important, so i’m glad my thousands of dollars on education aren’t being wasted!!!!! but for real, this comment means SO FUCKIN MUCH TO ME oh my god. tone is always the one thing of mine i’m never sure about

and you should know, i am currently working on a smallpox fic that i am both very very excited about but also very nervous about, because a LARGE portion of it is from thomas’s POV which a) i’ve never done before and b) a majority of the scenes don’t even HAVE FLINT in them (although he is still very much Present in that way where he is always Present in both my fics and MY LIFE) which is so way way out of my ballpark. so i’m excited for the story but dreadfully unsure whether i was doing any of it, or him, justice – and then you sweep in here, with your sweet, reassuring words and your Lord TH icon and it’s like thomas is patting me on the shoulder going “you got this, girl. keep going.” SO THANK YOU FOR THIS

sorry for rambling TLDR: I LOVEEEE YOU THAAAANK YOU

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Hi! I don't know if you do this kind of thing, but I love how you use tone and atmosphere in your fic. Is there advice you could share on the topic or could you maybe talk about your process? If not, cool and have a great day either way!

😍😍😍

Oh gosh this is such a kind question, and even though I’m shy and self-conscious as fuck, I actually love talking about the writing process. So thanks for giving me something to muse on while stuck on the train!!!

So, basically. A long, long time ago, I had aspirations to be a screenwriter. I love movies, and I wanted to write them. But once I started studying ~*~the craft~*~ I realized it wasn’t for me. I feel like now, when I write dialogue, everything moves too FAST, and I’m pretty sure it stems from this brief period of my teenage years. Scripts and plays, as everyone knows, are mostly dialogue, and I wanted to show ALL of it. So I switched back to story writing.

Because tone, and especially atmosphere, are all about describing the world around you. Describing the motions of the people, the air quality, the weird bodily aches, the unexplained sounds - what you choose to describe affects the character’s mood and vice versa. I can’t function in a world of just dialogue. I need to control all of it. Maybe I would have made a better director, but we’ll never know.

But atmosphere is what I make the reader notice, and tone is how I make the character notice it. I guess they’re pretty similar. But you can describe a haunted house objectively and create a genuine atmosphere of a haunted place. But whether or not what you describe frightens or excites or annoys your character, that will affect what she sees and feels about the atmosphere you want to create.

Like for instance: right now, I’m feeling kind of anxious. And I could say that, and it might mean something to you, if you’ve experienced any anxiety, but it might not. I could tell you it’s because I’m broke as shit and I have too many things to pay for before I get paid next week, but again, I can only guess if you, the reader, understands.

But right now, I’m riding the Brooklyn bound F train on a Saturday afternoon, and people keep piling into my car. I’m wedged in a two-seat next to a woman in a hot pink dress, who is writing something in a tiny notebook. I keep trying to read it because I’m nosey, but it’s all scratched out and written in some kind of code, and she’s just crossing things out on every page, or going back through it to read the things she can’t read. My nose itches. To my left, a man stands against the door and he’s too close to me. All I see is a black shape in my peripheral that keeps making me pause and start every time the train jerks to the right and he tips towards me. My scalp itches. The air in the car is barely working and it’s humid out, and it just feels like that ozone-smelling, plastic-y stale air from the subway station is being pumped in every time the doors open. My thigh ITCHES. More people just came in the car, including a sleeping baby in a stroller, completely oblivious to the strangers crowded around her, the sweat dampening her hair. People stand in every spot around me like trees in a dense forest. The taste of cold pizza I had for lunch three hours ago won’t dislodge itself from my tongue, no matter how much water I drink. The train conductor keeps talking through the speakers, but it’s an old car and his voice is muddled and I can’t hear him over the chatty teenager girls whose carefree, high-pitched accents make them sound like they’re speaking another language, even though it’s only English, and my feet are sweating because I thought it might rain today but it hasn’t, it’s just gray and hot and my goddamn hair behind my left ear won’t stop itching, and I still have 8 more stops to go.

And I’m feeling anxious.

I don’t actually think you need to go through the five senses in every paragraph, but branch out from just SEEING or FEELING things. And you don’t need long paragraph breaks of description, either. I make fun of Mary Shelley alot, even though she a Main Bitch, because sometimes you’ve just got to cut those three chapters, describing the might of God’s nature because your readers just want to know about the monster, okay? Long paragraphs are good for proving a point, but short, quick, invasive sentences also prove a different kind of point.

I’m still itchy, but the subway car is much emptier now.

When I think of tone and atmosphere, I just think that means realism. Even the things I write where I try to really emphasize a different, abnormal atmosphere (the sequel to “i”, the cowboy au), the more you give people to imagine, the easier it is to capture your intended mood. When I say realism, it doesn’t mean “realistic” but rather real to the people in the story, which in turn makes things feel realer to the reader.

TLDR i’m almost home and I’m probably gonna write some more, but my process i guess is to try and make everything realer to the people in the story, and if it feels real to THEM, the reader will believe.

And that, my friends, is how I increase my wordcounts ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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jadedbirch replied to your post “Hi Gemma, how long does it generally take you to come up with an...”

Most of the time when I start writing a multi-chapter fic, I actually have no idea what's going to happen in the later half of said fic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i think that’s more typical tbh and i know plenty of people who write that way. and if that method works for you (and believe me, it works for you lol) then all i have to say to writers like you is: you’re all absolute psychopaths and personally i think you should be arrested :/

but for real i have abandoned WIPs (in a previous life) because i couldn’t figure out where the story is going! and i hated it! i hated myself! so i try to have a vague understanding of beginning, middle, and end so i know where i’m trying to get to. 

the important thing to realize, BACK TO MY ANON, in the outlining stage, there is no one rushing you but yourself (whereas, with publishing a WIP without knowing the ending, you might feel some pressure from others, but some people are comfortable with this because, to repeat, they are INSANE!!!!!!!!)

take as much time as you need developing your story. in this stage, it only belongs to you, and no one else. i’ve been plotting a novel, like a forreal novel of my own ideas, since march of this year. just in the developmental stage, because if i start it and i won’t know where it’s going, i’ll get discouraged and never finish it. right now, it’s all mine, and the few people i’ve told the plot to, but even then, that’s part of the outlining process. take your time with your stories!!