@careful-fear / careful-fear.tumblr.com
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hi i am cal, they & them, and this is my second attempt at an introduction because my first one was not doing it for me. i'm currently attempting to get back into writing, and maybe make some friends along the way. please send me wips, asks, tag games, messages, prompts, anything. interaction is difficult so some direction would be helpful.
My problem with heterosexual romance novels (which I am reading under duress due to my coworker book club but find somewhat entertaining cuz they're not something I normally wld read) is that whenever the love interest is an asshole the author also makes him all dommy dom. when what I really want is for him to be thoroughly put in his place. All of these shithead Christian grey knockoff guys in these books would be excellent brat material but nobody cares what I want. Nobody cares what I want
of all the iterations of the Damaged Character, i'm such a total sucker for what i call the longest con. yes! please! god! DO IT, make your ENTIRE LIFE into the world's most elaborate undercover operation, seal up every chink and crack and opening, make them ALL THINK you're evil and dissolute and louche [looks piercingly at Laurent VI of Vere]—make them fully believe you're just a shallow pretty playboy who might also be a sociopath [stares at Fei Du]—let the entire town be convinced you're an unhinged serial killer who's just too smart to get caught [gazes at Lee Dongsik and tries not to sob]. THEY'RE ALL WRONG ABOUT YOU, especially the ninnyhammer who to his complete horror is falling ineluctably in love with you, but DON'T DROP YOUR STORY, whatever you do, however tormented and devastated you are, because you're SO CLOSE to your revenge—
Katniss *thinking about the Mockingjay pin*: Wow this was Madge’s aunt’s, what a precious and valuable family heirloom, it must have been special to her, I’ll treasure it forever.
Maysilee *thinking about the Mockingjay pin*: this bird is ugly and stupid I’m literally never going to wear this.
We don’t talk enough about how fanfiction writers love to give character large amounts of non-specific paperwork they hate doing
say more pls
Yeah sure why not.
So most stories take place when Events are Happening, and this means that no matter what kind of job the characters have, they’re probably not too focused on them. Fanfics, on the other hand, often show the down time. Which means that the writer has to figure out what the hell these characters do in their jobs. Unless the characters have a job the author understands or knows well, the author is often at a loss for what to have the character doing.
So they sit them at a desk and give them paperwork. What is the paperwork for? Rarely specified. It is Paper Work for the characters Important Adult Job they have and they need to read or sign it or something. And there’s always a line about how Character Hates Paperwork. Doesn’t matter if Character is a Mafia Boss or a General or a Diplomat, here they are in an office trying to get out of Doing Paperwork.
There’s also a sense of, like, humor and mundanity that comes with it. Like the examples above, it always particularly stands out to me when a dangerous individual is griping about some paper they need to sign or something. The less you can picture Character doing paperwork, all the better to force it upon them. If Character is saddled with Paperwork, they’re usually now concerned about the physical damages their motley crew causes, because damage = More Paperwork.
Anyway I just think it’s fun or funny, Sephiroth doing paper work and Sawada Tsunayoshi doing paper work and this just in, Tony Stark is doing paperwork. Sorry, Phoenix Wright can’t play right now. Yeah, it’s paperwork.
A very non-exhaustive list of actual paperwork they could be completing/reviewing/approving, in no particular order:
Your Royalty or Nobles in your feudal society should be doing this constantly unless you want to show how they're losing the kingdom and about to be usurped or overthrown.
petitions, speech-writing, complaints, requests, assignations, disputes, judiciary forms, declarations that need signing off on, matters requiring the Royal seal, matters requiring a royal endorsement, pardons, judgments, invitations, rebuttals, census data, crop yields projected or actual, livestock records, water rights, Sumptuary laws, taxes taxes taxes...
solid point there!
even when the royalty look like they're just fucking off to have fun, they're doing Socially Mandated Fuck-Off and Have Fun Time
Tournaments? Gotta show you're manly and virile through sport, or the nobles will supplant you. Feasts? Gotta show you're wealthy through conspicuous consumption, or the nobles will supplant you. Patronizing the arts? Gotta show you're cultured and erudite, or the nobles will laugh at you behind your back and probably supplant you.
Lawyer here. Here’s some more mundane/modern ones for you:
And if you want to get into modern military, the forms are numbered, and people will refer to them by either their actual name, or the number. (Have you filled out the 4187 for this? Yes, I filled out the personnel action form.)
The military has so many forms.
If you want to add a rage level, there’s the Regular Paperwork and then the special hell of Fuckup Paperwork.
Cause there’s the invoice, and the follow up invoice and the we are about to have a problem follow-up invoice.
There’s the incident report and then the I swear I yelled at that worker about this don’t be mad at me if they do it again second warning documentation
The requisition form and the it has been six months now get me the fucking thing or you’re gonna hear from Cindy escalations form.
Paperwork has layers and protocols and backups.
May I add: GRANTS.
If your character is any sort of lawful do-gooder or works for anything charitable or non-profit, they'll always need to deal with grants.
Grants are when a government, organization or rich person say "I have a large amount of money and I want it to be spent on this cause I care about". And everyone who is attached to the cause has to write an essay about why they deserve it including
And THEN if they get the money, they've got to keep track of every item on that list and write a report AGAIN when the project is done explaining how according-to-plan everything went.
If they're a Batman sort and they're giving away money, then someone has to read through two hundred copies of the above.
Grant writing and management is a full time job that's NOTHING but paperwork and emails, but is also necessary for most nonprofit and charitable organizations.
The biggest compliment ever is when someone sees your creative work and says that they’re now inspired to go out and create something, too
Quote of the day
For a more technical term, desires about our desires (e.g. be less impulsive, more selfless, etc.) are called "second-order desires." If you have good second-order desires in place, you can trust them to produce good likes.
If you guys are like me, and you struggle a little with describing locations, can I suggest…
as a lifesaver.
There is a WHOLE SERIES of these!! Amazon has like half the series under Ackerman, Angela and the other half under Puglisi, Becca, but both authors worked on all of them. The Emotion Thesaurus has done SO MUCH to help me improve my writing of body language and such too. And they’re each like $5-6 for the Kindle version with quick links in the table of contents and everything. I cannot recommend these enough, they’re super special awesome.
An example of how this has helped me was in this section here; the first photo is the first draft and the second is the final version of this scene. I mostly used The Emotion Thesaurus for this; the emotion being conveyed here is relief and relaxing after suppressing stress for a long time, but S himself isn’t really aware of his own emotional state here and I could not use those words to describe what he was feeling inwardly. So instead I used what he feels in his body and his surface rationalization, and it just reads so nicely this way imo.
These are also on Zlibrary for people who do not want to support amazon.
Honestly, I need to see more of the “MC does not so great thing in a worse situation in order to survive” trope. Like listen—the thing about people doing things to survive is that survival is not always moral, and yet in media I see characters like this villainized or the MC always gets to do the moral thing.
Here’s the thing: a lot of times, our options don’t include the moral thing. So let your MC choose between one bad thing and another. Let them decide which one they can live with.
if you push buttons on a keyboard, letters will appear on the screen. and with that power you can do anything
i think it was cruel to give lightning mcqueen a foot fetish, as he lives in a world where all feet are wheels. he has nothing.
sorry i wasnt talking to you i think
screaming, crying, throwing up, as I force myself to write a story i'm very passionate about and love writing and have no obligation to write except that i want to
fascinating that when you tell people "you have to learn the rules to break them" when talking about drawing/painting etc everyone nods and agrees but the second you say "you have to read books if you want to write better" there's a horde of contrarians begging to be the wrongest people ever all of a sudden
if one more person in the notes of this post says "omg op has clearly never talked to a beginner artist!!" as if im not a literal professional artist and was making a broad point........ this time im really gonna do it
and reading only fanfiction does not count as reading books to get better at writing. Fanfiction, where everyone reading it already knows who the characters are and what their relationships are and what the setting is and all that crap, is not the same thing as reading an original self-contained story.
If you only read fanfiction, you will not be able to write original stories well.
Reading books does not have to be expensive. It can be completely free. Project Gutenberg exists. So does the Internet Archive's lending library.
Fanfiction works in ways that original fiction doesn't. You can't write original fiction like it's fanfiction if you want your story to actually be well written and interesting.
I think it's important to point out why fanfiction is different - so much context and interest hooks depend on you already being interested in the source. You are familiar with these characters and therefore don't need to have the basics built into the story. With original work, you need all that underlying character development to be in the story you're writing to make us want to read it. You could 'cheat' and give us a modern Sherlock Holmes - but we still need your version explored in narrative to actually care about it. Dr. House is more than just Sherlock Holmes in a hospital, he has his own issues and foils and quirks. The Holmes from the TV show Sherlock and Elementary are vastly different takes on the same character. You need to read original fiction in order to learn how to do that in your own original fiction. Fanfic is great, but it intentional has gaps that make it a different form.
Fanfiction also is generally structurally different.
If you want to write a novel, you are kept to a pretty strict word range--generally 70-120k words, though that varies a bit up or down depending on the genre. Some genres have fairly strict structural and plot expectations, as well.
A romance novel is a specific thing. A mystery novel is a specific thing. Being able to write a shippy fanfic, even one of the correct length to count as a romance novel, does not necessarily mean that you know how to write a romance novel--because there are different expectations between them.
Fanfiction is often in conversation with other fanfiction, and published fiction is often to varying degrees in conversation with other published fiction--but despite what a lot of people seem to think, published fiction is often not actually in conversation with fanfiction, even if fanfiction is in conversation with published fiction.
One thing that you tend to see with people writing original fiction for publication who don't really read much published fiction in that genre is that they will sometimes approach it with the attitude that they are writing something that nobody has ever thought of before. It is a new, different, groundbreaking approach, with new, different, groundbreaking ideas that nobody else has done and nothing can compare to--
And that simply is not usually the case. Finding comps can be hard, it's one of the worst parts about querying, etc., etc., but in many genres, you are not inventing something totally new. You are not the first person to think, what if this romance novel doesn't need to have a happy ending (spoiler alert: it's not a romance novel). You are not the first person to write queer polyamorous urban fantasy. You are not the first person to write a book with queer characters or disabled characters or non-white characters or non-Christian characters. Your groundbreaking new idea for a sci fi thing that you repurposed from a fanfic, that just feels dated and derivative, because it is, and anyone who knows the genre would know that.
That arrogance and that dismissal of existing publishing history and norms shows in people's writing.
Anyway, read books. They're actually pretty great.
read everything, read widely, read inside the genre you want to write, but especially read outside of your genre
the more you read the more you have to draw inspiration from. It fertilizes the creative soil
Just to elaborate a bit on my read outside of your genre stance
think of it as adding genetic diversity to a population. Someone who has only read a specific genre only has what is already in the genre to draw from. This often results in very trope heavy and stock standard genre pieces, which isn't bad per se, but when the vast majority of the genre also has those same tropes, it's hard to distinguish it from the hoard of similar books
a friend of mine calls it "creative inbreeding" which is a whole discussion to have a couple drinks into a conversation
but being able to incorporate elements from other genres can really strengthen your story. Take Jordan Peele for example. He's a great comedic actor and has written and directed some of the most iconic horror movies in recent years. And actually looking at his work, there are elements of his writing that do actually transfer between genres. Being able to draw from other influences can really make you stronger as a writer
your writing does not have to be outstanding or exceptional. seriously, I read books all the time with just average writing, maybe some of the minor characters are one dimensional and cliched, maybe the dialogue is a little cheesy, maybe the plot is a little shaky, but the characters and their dire situation have hooked me. your story doesn’t have to be 5 stars to be worth writing and sharing and it will find the people who will love it.
I think the thing is that writing fiction isn't one skill, it's like twelve plus skills in a trenchcoat. Characterisation, prose, plot development, pacing, dialogue, general premise, world building, knowing where to start, the list goes on. And that's not even getting into stuff like SPAG, editing your own work, research, catching plot holes, and other more nuts and bolts stuff.
Being just okay at all of those is still very fucking impressive! And a writer being really good at one of them has carried me through a lot of books where other parts were significantly weaker.
the "came back wrong" trope except like... they didnt. like this mad scientists wife died, and so he studied necromancy, brought her back, and she came back and it all worked. like she came back exactly the same as she was before with literally no difference. but the scientist guy is like "oh no... what have i done.... shes Different now!!!! she came back Wrong!!!!" and shes just like. chilling. reading a book. cooking dinner. shes just so so normal but in the guys mind hes like "oh shes soooo weird" but shes just normal
Peer reviewed tags from @somanyofthekids
NO its a JOKE and YOU DONT GET IT. ITS NOT THAT DEEP
While she was dead he put his memory of her on such a high pedestal that she could never live up to it alive
alternatively‚ she came back perfectly fine but he thinks she came back wrong‚ because the tragic reality is that he never actually knew his wife
im going INSANE thats MY POST.
It's your post but the journey to posting it changed it to such a degree that even its closest intimacies are now foreign to you. Sorry dude.
