#writing to connect

[madstronaut]

This post by @void-my-warranty gave me much food for thought because first of all, omg activating my 'is the sun some tumblr anon bothering you my queen' mode (tbh it's always latently activated on this hellsite when i see my beloved moots/writers bothered) upon noting voidy's reaction - I've also read that post in question re: "all smut is writers fucking all their readers" and I will agree to disagree with that premise; sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, but it's definitely more than that imho?

The interesting thing about the meaning of stories is that oft times you start with an author's intention, but when combined with the lens through which a reader chooses to consume it (their heart, their mind, their mood, their past, their joys, their sorrows, what happened to them that day, or last year, or as a child, etc.) something quite curious occurs and the story can alchemize into something new and altogether surprisingly meaningful and wonderfully and cathartically important to both the reader and the writer in a way that wasn't anticipated when the fic was written/posted.

Drawing from personal experience as well as chats with IRL/tumblr moots here - I see smut as a way to explore and express sexuality in a safe space and by extension, fanfic/writing itself is a way to explore and express the entire spectrum of being human and all its crests and troughs. I find it hard to properly express sometimes how I feel about fanfic (cough or do I) and the impact it has had on me but poet Lemn Sissay's answers here in his interview with Natasha Lunn on love summed it up in such a poignant and beautiful way. Apt because well, he's an award-winning poet lol

🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿

text: Another way of feeling our shared humanity, I've found, is through stories.

Although there are fairy-tale narratives I could blame for my fantasies in relationships, there are also stories that have brought a real form of love into my life. I'm not referring to books or novels about love, specifically, but rather passages of writing that have the power to make you feel a little more alive.

The paragraph that gives you a tingle of recognition. The lines that feel as if they are directly written for a deep, secret part of you, that you weren't necessarily even aware of until it was woken up by words.

Reading such a passage is, I think, a form of love. Like any relationship, that intrinsic recognition is a way of understanding and being understood, of seeing and being seen. The psychiatrist Gordon Livingston said that 'the fundamental requirement for any satisfying relationship is a reciprocal ability to see the world as others see it, to be able to put ourselves in someone else's shoes.'

And that's what a truthful piece of writing does: by allowing us to access another person's reality, it shifts our mind into a higher gear of empathy. This deep clicking into place doesn't happen often. But when it does?

Those passages become a source of love for us to reach back for the next time we feel desperate or alone, like a float thrown out when you've lost the energy to carry on swimming.

This is how I have felt reading Elizabeth Strout's books and watching Kenneth Lonergan's films. It's how I feel every time I read - and speak to - the writer Sarah Hepola too. Her words carry me back to a peaceful place inside myself where I know what really matters. - excerpt from Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn

I'm not even halfway through the book, but I highly recommend it already.

[existingillusion]

[flintpunks-mind]

A co-worker of mine was standing outside with me during a break from customers to share a cigarette with me, and told me about how he had lost his brother that he was close with some years ago. He told me about how they used to be in a band together with some friends, and how ever since he'd died, he hadn't played any music because he'd been too scared and anxious. I told him about how I'd lost my brother to suicide some years ago.

I went home and pulled out an old tiny wooden box my brother had given me before he'd died. I'd been using it to store guitar picks I'd collected over the years, including one guitar pick that used to be his. I haven't played the guitar since he'd died, my hands are too small to play some of the chords, so I play bass and piano instead.

I went to work the next day and gifted my brothers old guitar pick to my co-worker. I told him that it'd been sitting in a box for ten years unused, and would probably sit there for longer if I kept it there. Told him that I thought he deserved to have it, because I bet he could put it to better use than I ever would. Told him I didn't feel like it was coincidence that me and him would cross paths with each other in our lives, and that it seemed suiting that we had these similar experiences but split in two halves. That somehow, I felt like he was meant to have the guitar pick. I told him that I knew he'd not played guitar since his brother died, but that if he ever decided to play again one of these days, maybe he'd be able to honor both of our brothers by using that guitar pick.

He almost cried. He thanked me. Then he went home that night and for the first time in years he played the guitar.

I don't know what the meaning of life is or what my purpose is, but I do believe that love and human connection is one of the most important things in life. It's finding ways to tell strangers you love them and share experiences with others. I think it's all just about love.

[bizarrelittlemew]

i can't wait to be 30+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 40+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 50+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 60+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 70+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 80+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 90+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to look back on my life and know that i loved things deeply and passionately and was inspired to create and was part of communities with incredible people from all over the world brought together by the stories that touched us

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[marxism-transgenderism]

I can't stop thinking about the connection between early American settlers in the midwest and the creation of the myth of Johnny Appleseed as a way to explain away the miles and miles of indigenous food gardens as the creation of early settlers and the early Zionist settlers in Palestine who wanted to build Jewish-only farming communities and the use of the word sabra (a term used during the mandate system for a Jewish person who was born in Palestine) in global marketing to sell middle eastern foods grown exclusively by settlers rather than by indigenous Palestinians. How both are used to 'indigenize' settlers in the wider culture to the regions they invaded and erase the actual indigenous people who grew apples or corn or olive trees or chickpeas

[asoftepiloguemylove]

A QUIET LIFE WITH YOU // ON DOMESTICITY

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) dir. Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert // 呪術廻戦 Jujutsu Kaisen (2018-) cr. Gege Akutami

[baby-girl-aaron-dessner]

A poem written by Marcellus Williams about Palestine.

Despite DNA evidence proving his innocence, he was executed on September 24, 2024.

[bluerosefox]

A DPxDC soulmate au idea

So DCverse is a soulmate world (pick any soulmate way btw, words, touch, drawings on the skin, can't see color(s) until they see or touch them, etc etc)

DPverse doesn't.

Meaning Danny wasn't born with a soulmark BUT he gets one after becoming a halfa because he is now connected to the Infinite Realms.

SO its during another one of Vlad's schemes, he's popping into different worlds and stealing things or something like that (basically like that one ep where Danny chases Vlad through the timeline after he stole Frostbite's map)

During the chase they pop out into the DCverse in one of the hero cities (pick any, not picky on which) and their fight is getting a bit out of hand (Vlad's fault, he's using the stuff he's been stealing, and Danny is doing his best to getting innocent people from getting hurt)

ANYWAYS during the fight, one of the cities hero's come to try to help/find out whats going on when Danny is hit by Vlad and gets tossed at them. The moment they either touch or Danny/Soulmate says something to the other, Danny feels the odd mark on him burn up and is MEGA confused on whats going on but decides to do what he does best.

Ignore it for now. He'd figure it out later he still needs to stop Vlad.

He apologizes to the other hero and gets back into his fight, missing the look of complete smitten awe/shock said hero had on their face.

[beccawise7]

There is nothing quite as beautiful as being openly yourself with another and completely accepted for who you are.

~beccawise7 💜🖤

[cerleansky]

My therapist was so real for saying the meaning of life is found in connection.

People hug their friends when they meet up and hug them a little tighter when it comes time to say goodbye. My grandfather rebuilt the broken rocking horse my grandmother had as a child, a gift from her father. There's an indescribable ache that goes along with seeing someone you used to know intimately, the becoming of a common stranger. Coincidences that bind, one time I got an uber and the driver used to live in my home before me. It was the last place he saw his father alive as a child and he nearly cried when I told him the walls were still the same colour.

Has anyone ever gotten over their childhood best friend? Is that alone not a testament to the fact we are more than blood and bones.

It's all about connection, friends.

[thevioletcaptain]

i genuinely don't care how good a piece of ai generated art or writing looks on the surface. i don't care if it emulates brush strokes and metaphor in a way indistinguishable from those created by a person.

it is not the product of thoughtful creation. it offers no insights into the creator's life or viewpoint. it has no connection to a moment in time or a place or an attitude. it has no perspective. it has no value.

it's empty, it's hollow, and it exists only to generate clicks (and by extension, ad revenue.)

it's just another revolting symptom of the disease that is late stage capitalism, and it fucking sucks.

[thepathetickind]

a thorn in my chest - perhaps I was the one who put it there,

by laurenmaerie, ‘to keep a piece’

[existingillusion]

Kiersten White, The Chaos of Stars

[noodles-and-tea]

A scene from this fic by @katherynefromphilly !!