Hardest part of writing is accepting that some people will not fucking get it & you just have to like cope with that because over-explaining it just makes it worse

— Vladimir Nabokov drops this brilliant bit of insight roughly half way through his lecture on James Joyce’s Ulysses, the last of his in Lectures on Literature.

A small list of random ass sites I’ve found useful when writing:

Adding to this since I’m working on a shifter au one-shot:

More:

Even more:

From “Fictional Dead Jews” in People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn

I made this in reference to comic/game stuff but I’m glad to see this one’s going over well with all the writers

Reblog to give your followers and mutuals the strength to continue

Review: Skysong by CA Wright Rating: 4/5

All her life, Oriane has sung her song to bring the dawn. But when something calls her to the palace, she finds herself trapped. Her only hope is the lady's maid assigned to her who sings a song of her own.

When I saw this was a reimagining of Hans Christian Andersen's The Nightingale, I couldn't figure out how Wright could possibly have reimagined it into something interesting. The original is just ... lacklustre. But this is one of the most beautiful fairy tale retellings I've come across in a long time. 

The writing is simple and enchanting. The characters are calm but full of emotional underneath. The story itself is quite action-packed but reading it felt like flowing down a quiet river which was an incredibly nice feeling. 

This isn't a hashtag-cozy-fantasy but it's certainly a fantasy that leaves you with a warm fuzzy feeling inside. And there are lesbians. So if those things appeal to you, definitely track down a copy. 

me watching 'gratuitous' sex and violence and ''problematic representation'' in my shows and movies made for adults

I have never been on the same page as fandom’s clear communication fetishists and I never will be. I love miscommunication, concealment, pigheadedness, and lies. I think characters should talk around what they have to say and ignore each other and impute needs and beliefs onto others that have nothing to do with those other people and everything to do with maintenance of the ego. A little clear communication is fine but it should come at the end and be earned by repeated instances of snobbery, tomfoolery, self righteousness, or blockheadedness. If you decide you hate a character just because that character isn’t communicating in the way a therapist might coach them to, well consider that people don’t actually talk like that at all and that most of us get things wrong many times before we inch our way out of the labyrinthine darkness of our own heads.

Scope and pacing are not concrete and immutable. Not everything you write has to have the same level of detail, nor always be a 100k novel.

It's completely possible to tell the story of a romance that blooms over months or years in a 1000 words of short, snapshot scenes-- as long as you show the important scenes.

This is especially true in fanfiction where the set up is done for you, but can, in the right circumstances, be achieved in original fiction just as well.

Sometimes you don't need to write the whole novel. Sometimes you can just boil the story you want to tell down to its impactful, punchy essence. (and then it doesn't take a year to write.)

I went to a talk by a short story writer who gave me a wonderful, albeit morbid analogy: if it were possible to shrink an elephant down to the size of an ant, or vice versa, keeping all its organs in proportion, it still would die because it is required to be the size it is to function. He said works of fiction are the same way - they call to be a certain length and just won’t work if you change that. Shorter works aren’t limiting in any way - they are just what that story calls for, and if you tried to stretch it into a full length novel, it just wouldn’t hit the same.

I feel like when I say ‘relatable’ what I really mean is ‘resonant.’ I don’t want characters who I feel are like me, I want characters who have emotions so strong I can feel them through the page.

I think this is important because a lot of us forget the power of stories to make us feel things about characters who are not like us, who have experienced things that we never will. The purpose of listening to someone else's story should not necessarily be identification, but understanding.

i’ve been rewatching hbomberguy’s plagiarism video and it always gets me when he says “creative people often have trouble recognizing their skills as skills because eventually they feel like second nature.”

and i think we’d all benefit from hearing that once in a while.