#writing foundations

[writingwithfolklore]

Writing Foundations: Creating Paragraphs

                You can have the best story in the world, but if it’s all in one chunk on the page, you may struggle to find people willing to read it. To break it up, you need to know where and when to create new paragraphs.

Every new paragraph starts with an indent. So, to create a new paragraph, hit the enter key, and then the tab key, which is typically on the left side of the Q and either says TAB or looks like two stacked arrows pointing in separate directions.

So when do you start a new paragraph?

1. Anytime a new character speaks

The most obvious place to break up your paragraph is when a new character is speaking. Take this example.

“Hi John,” said Mary as she walked into the room. John was reading a book, and tucked a bookmark between the pages as she sat next to him. “how was work?” “It was good,” she replied, “but my boss really didn’t like the draft I sent her.” “That’s too bad, I thought it was some of your better work.”

Vs.

                “Hi John,” said Mary as she walked into the room. John was reading a book, and tucked a bookmark between the pages as she sat next to him.                 “How was work?” He asked.                 “It was good,” she replied, “but my boss really didn’t like the draft I sent her.”                 “That’s too bad, I thought it was some of your better work.”

See the difference? So you make a new line whenever a new character is speaking. In the case of Mary speaking twice, “It was good…” “but my boss…” we keep that in the same paragraph. Whereas when John speaks after Mary, it becomes its own paragraph.

The only time you may split the same character speaking is if they have a large chunk of dialogue. In that case, you can split their dialogue according to the next rule.

2. Any new idea

This isn’t necessarily a hard rule like the last one is. We have a lot of room to make interesting creative decisions when breaking up description or action. For the most part, though, you’ll want to break up your paragraph whenever there’s a new thought or idea. So:

                A thin plastic film coated the room, making the furniture gleam in the sunlight streaming through the windows. On her right sat a couch upholstered in ivy coloured fabric, untouched by time.                 Anna swept her fingers through her hair, chewing on her lip. She watched Rick out of the corner of her eye, “What are you thinking?”                 The detective’s expression was completely neutral, though he clutched his pen tightly in one fist. In his other hand was a notebook, three questions written across it in blocky text, 1. Why are all the clocks stopped at 5:32? 2. Where’s the murder weapon? 3. Why did my wife leave me? “Same as the others,” he said, tapping his pen against the last question, “the plastic wrap killer.”

So in this example we go from describing the room, to describing an action Anna is doing, to describing the detective, and then his notes. These are all separate ideas, so we can split them into their own paragraphs.

                As well, as long as it’s about the same character or within the same ‘idea’, description can be paired with dialogue. You can see Anna’s dialogue comes after the description of her. You can totally do this, or you can split it into its own paragraph if you’d like. It looks natural where it is because Anna is the subject of the paragraph, and she’s also the one speaking.

                In the case of the detective speaking, his action comes between dialogue. Also allowed, since the detective is the subject of that paragraph.

3. Any new location or skip in time

Similar to the last, if the scene starts outside, when they move inside it’s a new paragraph. If they go into a new room, get into a car, etc. Any time they change location, it starts a new paragraph. Same for a skip in time. If you need to go from day to night, new paragraph.

Kayde looked anxiously up at the looming oak doors. The windows were dark, layered in years of dust and grime. It’s now or never, they thought. They pushed through the doors and into the foyer. Kayde seemed to wait there for hours, and by the time someone came to greet them, it was already dark outside.

4. For style/effect

                This is one of my favourite parts of writing. Once you nail when you should be splitting your paragraphs, you can start to play with splitting them for effect. I do this quite a lot. Take this example:

                She fixed an ugly stare at herself in the mirror, long locks of brown hair hanging in front of her eyes. A pair of sharp scissors gleamed at the edge of the glass, pinched between her fingers. Dania raised the scissors to her hair.                 Snip.                 A lock fell towards the sink, the edges rough and imperfect.                 Snip.                 Another.                 She chopped and hacked away at her hair until it was clumped in an unsightly pile over the drain of the sink, her head round and covered in patches where she didn’t quite get close enough to her skin.                 She was finally free.

                While the cutting of her hair could be in the same paragraph, it gives it more drama and effect when it’s split. Any time a character is going through something shocking or emotional, maybe try playing around with the paragraph to see if you can add some additional drama to it.

                Paragraphs can be as long or short as you’d like them to be, as long as you have intention behind it!

[writeouswriter]

[autolenaphilia]

It's funny how clearly uninformed a lot of criticism of Mozilla and its browser Firefox is. Like people say "it's just another corporation, out to make profit, just like Google." And that ordinary users promoting Firefox are just giving them free advertising.

It's in basically any post criticizing Mozilla, including on this site. Like using tumblr search I quickly found a post that was largely positive, but argued that Mozilla operates "under capitalist incentives" And outside tumblr I found a blog post out on the interwebs that criticized Mozilla and outright wondered "I don't know if Mozilla's business model ever made sense, it makes a lot more sense if it's something closer to a nonprofit rather than a commercial entity."

Well, let's research the Mozilla Corporation, see what that business model actually is. Let's begin that research by going to the wikipedia article, and read the two introductory paragraphs. And it turns out that it's "a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation", which is a non-profit.

"The Mozilla Foundation will ultimately control the activities of the Mozilla Corporation and will retain its 100 percent ownership of the new subsidiary. Any profits made by the Mozilla Corporation will be invested back into the Mozilla project. There will be no shareholders, no stock options will be issued and no dividends will be paid. The Mozilla Corporation will not be floating on the stock market and it will be impossible for any company to take over or buy a stake in the subsidiary."

Turns out that it is not just "closer to a non-profit", it is literally a non-profit. Turns out you only needed two paragraphs on wikipedia to learn that, the most basic online research possible, which basically every post I found criticizing Mozilla failed to do.

This is entirely different from any other entity calling itself corporation, which is all about creating profit or money for its shareholders, the "capitalist incentives" spoken about earlier.

If you read further into that article, you will learn that the Mozilla corporation literally only exists separate from the foundation for tax and legal purposes, but it's still a non-profit operation.

This makes it reasonably immune from the enshittification process I've written about before. there is no incentive to fuck over the experience for end users for the sake of shareholder profits, like what tumblr is doing right now.

It means that Firefox is an exemption to the rule that "if something is free, you are the product", because there is no product to produce profits for shareholders, it's a charitable endeavour for a free and open internet, as laid out in the Mozilla manifesto.

This doesn't mean non-profits make corruption impossible, there is plenty of corruption in non-profit foundations. But unlike actual capitalist corporations, it doesn't have the greed and corruption built in. And if you are going to criticize Mozilla and Firefox, which it does sometimes deserve, you should have your basic facts straight before doing so, if you expect me to take you seriously.

[essektheylyss]

Okay but seriously, Erro's story is making me lose my fucking mind. The god of justice becoming mortal amidst an era of injustice, of not just twisted justice but a lack of it, where there is no rhyme or reason to who lives and dies, not only because of the war but also because there is nothing and no one left to enforce justice in the wake of war. There are no institutions (in the broad sense) to base any idea of justice upon, and when left to individuals to enforce in an era where survival alone is paramount, it of course falls to the wayside. There's a reason why the Platinum Dragon is a lawful deity, after all. Even a unit as small as the immediate family takes herculean efforts to maintain; the families we see in Divergence, both made and found, are scattered, torn apart, before and during this time frame. The series begins with a desperate attempt to save a family, with Fiedra orchestrating Crokas's rescue (and Erro's along with him), and even that effort could've failed had Crokas not made it out of the walls.

Of course Erro, raised to believe in the ideals of justice, loses faith. While the war rages on, there can be no justice. The scale of destruction barely leaves room for nature, let alone civilization.

Of course only in the war's wake, when the rebuilding begins, can justice become again a consideration, and it is is not innate. People must choose it, choose to prioritize it in the process of rebuilding, and not everyone does! But those who do choose it are those who Erro follows—and leads, as nothing more than a civilian, as he steps first into the fray to defend what small justice there is. All of Torm's Hill, who do step into battle in his wake. Nia, who holds faith even in loss by the bloody tips of her fingers. Crokas, who has believed he is only a monster even when he is little more than a scared child, using that belief as a weapon in defense of other scared children. Fiedra, whose ruthlessness is turned against the continued stirrings of injustice when her instinct would have urged her to join them. Garen, who remains until the end nothing more than a stone-carver, choosing to build even after recognizing when it is necessary to destroy.

Erro did not lose faith in the ideals of the Platinum Dragon���he lost faith that those ideals could survive the era in which he was born, an era that, in another form, he had helped shape. And in this form—a lonely wanderer, no better than any other traveler along the road—he saw those ideals rekindled, by the people who choose to pick up the torch. Only in knowing that that torch would be carried after he, Erro, was gone, was the Platinum Dragon able to keep faith that the world that he was leaving behind could become a better one in his wake.

[jasminebythebay]

ouroboros follows samsara 🐍

[hersweetrevenge]

[opencharacters]

i love you backrooms. i love you scp foundation. i love you goncharov. i love you jenny everywhere. i love you mesperyian, i love you creepypasta, i love you open collaborative creativity!

[garadinervi]

Louise Bourgeois, Les Mimosas d'Abord, (engraving, watercolor, gouache and colored pencil on paper), 2008 [Centre Pompidou, Paris. © The Easton Foundation / Adagp, Paris. Photo: Audrey Laurans/Centre Pompidou]

[bertieorangy]

Y/N type 1 : Man, that character’s hot 🥰

Y/N type 1 : I’d like to hold hands with them or something, only if they wanted to 👉👈

Y/N type 2 : I’d like them to take me in the kitchen—

Y/N type 2 : bend me over the stove and spank me with a spatula

Y/N type 1 : huh?? 😰

Y/N type 2 : then I’d like them to take me to the bedroom—

Y/N type 1 : what happened to “hi, how are you” ??? 😭😭

Y/N type 2 : —kiss me so hard that I can’t breathe

Y/N type 2 : in fact, I’m going to put this in my username so that this is the first thing anyone know—

[taikeero-lecoredier]

Article Link about H.R. 9495 and why it will destroy non profit orgs

Find your House representatives here

If H.R. 9495 is passed, this would without a doubt fuck over non profits orgs, which we need more than ever in this time and age.

Spread the word before its too late. It musnt pass.

EDIT: THE ACLU SET UP A SCRIPT FOR THIS ! PLEASE USE THIS !

SEND MESSAGE HERE AND CALL YOUR REPS

----------------------------------

The No King Act must be passed,however,and fast.

The No King Act and How you can send your message to reps,with help from ACLU

[grigorikarpin]

Metaphysician/Karpin 001 Proposal - The Stillborn City

After nearly a year of drafting and re-drafting, here is the strange odyssey of Agent Kennedy as she learns everything one could hope to learn about the Sarkic world. And then more.

Originally a draft by Meta for the 3000 contest, it was never finished. Now, after a year of our collaborating, it is in a new form, almost completely rewritten and yet intended to preserve his original vision.

It's about 15k words, and is one of the most ambitious things I have ever been involved in writing.

[yanderedrabbles]

I read you from a small Mexican town with less than 5,000 habitants, our streets have no pavement, we steal electricity from a nearby city and we do not show up in Google Maps, Waze or any GPS app. (To be fair, I only stay here a few months of the year, still, POOKIE your amazing writing is INTERNATIONAL 💕💕)

Mexican baddie in the inbox woo hoo!!

I think as a fellow developing country girly, it's just so fun to imagine my readers in similar scenarios to me. Like we're all active in this niche but from places you'd never expect.

Like, I post all of my stuff from a busted android, live in a house that pre-dates my country's democracy and sometimes the WiFi cuts out because they stole the cables again. Like you wouldn't expect yandere smut to be coming from a place like that y'know?

[nekofaust]

Meri and Glass for the April Fools article Fandation !

Had alot fun designing stuff here

[jon-sedai]

And remember kids, the next time someone tells you, "George R. R. Martin wouldn't make Jon Snow the typical fantasy hero because that's cliche".....

Oh yes he would!

One viewer wants to know what character would you play (on the show)? GRRM: If I could magically clap my hands and become a different person, it would be cool to play Jon Snow who's much more of the classic hero. Everybody wants to be the classic hero! ABC Interview, 2014

GRRM: And the character I’d want to be? Well who wouldn’t want to be Jon Snow — the brooding, Byronic, romantic hero whom all the girls love. Meduza Interview, 2017

In fact he already has ☺️

[existentialterror]

every single scp author I ever met is on tumblr is this a requirement

You know I could say something about SCP site culture having just really swung tumblrwards over the years and how this is a pretty good place for writers with creepy/surreal tastes, since I'm sure there is actually a disproportionate number of SCP authors on tumblr (vs. other social media sites) -

But I'm also a rationalist, so I must take Bayes' theorem into account: is tumblr maybe the main place you meet internet strangers? Like, where else would you be meeting them?

[flagellant]

watch time: 2 minutes

A teaser trailer for Fox's Head Productions' first video essay, comparing horror tropes of Native American burial grounds to real-life indigenous oppression, desecration of holy lands, and our modern fears of nuclear fallout. There is always something in the basement.

Song is from Signalis OST. Footage is from the US Government's Department of Energy recordings of Project Trinity and ATOMCENTRAL.COM. Writing, voice acting, and video editing done by Laika Dowitcher of Fox's Head Productions.

Full video coming soon. Subscribe to stay tuned.