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i have this writing style i like to call “uncertain.” it’s where the narrator isn’t really sure what they’re talking about either
That is so powerful and I want to write a short story in this style now thank you
“the park had been there for as long as i’d lived there, i think. i couldn’t be sure. i was never one to go to the park anyway” nobody has any clue what’s going on
self aware unreliable narrator
(via heywriters)
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🗣 DIVERSITY IS NOT SAMENESS.
(via noninfacies)
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TW: POLICE BRUTALITY, DEATH
The footage circulating on social media shows three officers intervening against a young Romani man who keeps trying to get out from under them. One officer holds the man’s feet, another then kneels on his neck for several minutes.
A third officer helps handcuff the man, who is shouting. Several Romani people who are bystanders can be heard in the footage commenting on the intervention.
“They’re smothering him,” a woman’s voice can be heard to say. “That’s their job,” a man’s voice says, defending the police intervention.
~~~
Michal Mižigár, a Romani student of history and Romani Studies who won the Aspen Central Europe Leadership Award in 2019 from the Aspen Institute Central Europe, commented that the footage shows “The Romani Floyd today in Teplice!” Recalling the attack on Romani children at a summer camp run by the Romani musician Ida Kelarová and the death of a Romani man in police custody inside a pizzeria in Žatec, he added: “I feel genuinely powerless and sad. This is not the first case.”
His name was Stanislav Tomáš
i’ve gotten a few messages asking if there are any donations set up for his family, or for the local Romani community there. AFAIK, there isn’t, though i will make a separate post/update this one if i come across one. THAT SAID, the European Roma Rights Center is currently demanding a new investigation into the case, and you can help by donating to their organization! There will also be a demonstration in Teplice this coming Saturday, if you are in the area and wish to participate!
(via noninfacies)
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Let’s talk about something called the “sunk cost fallacy”.
Say that you’ve bought a concert ticket for $50 for a band that you don’t know that well. Half an hour into the show, you realize that you don’t actually enjoy the music and you aren’t having a good time - instead of leaving the concert to go do something else, however, you sit through the remaining hours of the concert because you don’t want to “waste” the cost of the ticket.
Congratulations, you’ve just fallen victim to the sunk cost fallacy.
The “sunk cost fallacy” is something that all humans are prone to when we make decisions. Simply put, it’s the human tendency to consider past costs when we make choices, even when those costs are no longer relevant. When you’re deciding whether or not to stay at that concert you aren’t enjoying, you will likely consider the cost of the ticket when you’re making your decision - for instance, you’d probably be a lot more willing to leave a $5 concert that you aren’t enjoying than a $50 concert that you aren’t enjoying. But taking the cost of the ticket into account at all is a mistake.
When you’re making a rational decision, the only thing that matters is the future. Time, effort and money that you’re spent up until that point no longer matter - it doesn’t make sense to consider them, because no matter what you decide, you can’t actually get them back. They are “sunk” costs. If you decide to stay at that concert, you are out $50 and you’ll have a mediocre evening. If you decide to go leave and do something more fun, you are out $50 and you’ll have a better evening. No matter what you choose, you have lost $50 - but choosing to leave the concert means that you haven’t also spent an evening doing something you don’t like.
The sunk cost fallacy is sometimes also described as “throwing good money after bad” - people will waste additional time, resources and effort simply to justify the fact that they’ve already wasted time, resources and effort, even if it leaves them worse off overall.
Common examples of sunk cost fallacy in everyday life include:
- refusing to get rid of clothes that don’t fit or that you never wear because they were expensive
- going to an event that you no longer want to go to because you already bought the ticket
- spending more and more money on repairing a car or computer (or something else that depreciates in value over time) instead of buying a new one because you don’t want to waste the money you put into earlier repairs
- continuing to watch a movie or TV show you aren’t enjoying anymore because you’ve already watched part of it
- finishing a plate of food that you’re not enjoying or are too full to enjoy, because you don’t want to waste it
- refusing to get rid of unused, unwanted or broken items in your home because the items were expensive
Perhaps the most damaging example of sunk cost fallacy in everyday life, however, is relationships.
People often use the length of a relationship to justify staying in it. You’ve probably heard this logic - you may even have used it yourself:
“I can’t break up with him or the two years we spent together will be for nothing.”“If I leave her, it will mean I wasted the five years I spent with her.”
The reality, though, is that staying in a mediocre relationship doesn’t “give you back” the time you’ve already invested in that relationship. It just makes the relationship longer. If you stay in a bad relationship for five more years to avoid “wasting” the first two, you haven’t actually made those first two years worthwhile - you’ve simply spent seven years of your life in a bad relationship. There’s nothing we can do to recover time and effort (and in most cases, money) that we’ve already spent. But we can forgive ourselves, and we can stop letting our past mistakes continue to define our futures.
To put it in Marie Kondo’s words, those things have served their purpose to you, even if their only purpose was to teach you that you do not like that thing. That ticket has now taught you that you do not like this type of band/concert, and leaving the concert is not a waste of that ticket because the ticket has already served its purpose to you. Don’t hold onto things solely out of guilt, because their purpose in your life is over now, and holding onto them will not bring you joy.
(via noninfacies)
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ways to tie knots on pendants and keychains
(via noninfacies)
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I know we talk about purity culture a lot but one thing that I think stemmed from that (and is really annoying to have to explain every time it comes up) is the idea that you have to justify a bad character’s actions before you can like them. antagonists and villains make a story interesting, it’s okay to like them just because they’re entertaining or the aesthetic is cool or you like a foil to the hero or whatever. villains are interesting. you can enjoy them without explaining why they’re actually totally innocent and misinterpreted or whatever
reasons I have liked villains/antagonists before without agreeing with their actions:
- their aesthetic is cool
- their motives are complex and well-written so their character is just incredibly interesting to think about
- they’re simply ✨funny✨
- they have a really interesting dynamic with the hero
- their backstory or motives are relatable so I can see where they’re coming from
- they parallel another character and it’s cool to see the “they went down this road but this other character coped/chose differently so now one’s a hero and one’s a villain” situation
- they just cause trouble and that’s entertaining
(via noninfacies)
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“ Just gather us all in one place and kill us all with missiles. Let us all die at once as martyrs. Because what you’re doing right now is torture! “
I am still sorry if putting this in blm and stop asian hate offends anyone, but as you know by now, social media platforms are preventing Palestine from trending. And you deserve to know the truth. And Palestinian deserve to be heard
(via noninfacies)
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[ID:
We Were All Wounded at Wounded Knee by Redbone plays in the background of the Tik Tok.
White text starts at the top of the screen, displaying information. “The song you are hearing was not allowed to be played on U.S radio stations in 1970’s”.
The dancer makes hoops go from Eagle to Earth form.
“It created by a popular Native American band called Redbone and it hit number 1 charts all over Europe.”
“The song raised awareness about what happened at Wounded Knee”
They finish the Earth form, centering themself. “Let’s get it trending”.
Screen switches to the Tik Toker’s name and username, James Jones / @notoriouscree
END]
No one’s reblogged this video with versions of the whole song yet, so here’s a spotify link and the youtube video.
(via noninfacies)
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Hot take: Actual literary analysis requires at least as much skill as writing itself, with less obvious measures of whether or not you’re shit at it, and nobody is allowed to do any more god damn litcrit until they learn what the terms “show, don’t tell” and “pacing” mean.
Pacing
The “pacing” of a piece of media comes down to one thing, and one thing only, and it has nothing to do with your personal level of interest. It comes down to this question alone: Is the piece of media making effective use of the time it has?
That’s it.
So, for example, things which are NOT a example of bad pacing include a piece of media that is:
- A slow burn
- Episodic
- Fast-paced
- Prioritizing character interaction over intricate plot
- Opening in medias res without immediate context
- Incorporating a large number of subplots
- Incorporating very few subplots
Bad pacing IS when a piece of media has
- “Wasted” time, ie, screentime or page space dedicated to plotlines or characters that are ultimately irrelevant to the plot or thematic resolution at the cost of properly developing that resolution. Pour one out for the SW:TCW fans.
- The presence of a sidestory or giving secondary characters a separate resolution of their personal arc is not “bad writing,” and only becomes a pacing issue if it falls into one of the other two categories.
- Not enough time, ie, a story attempts to involve more plotlines than it has time or space to give satisfying resolutions to, resulting in all of them being “rushed” even though the writer(s) made scrupulous use of every second of page/screentime and made sure every single section advanced those storylines.
- Padding for time, ie, Open-World Game Syndrome. Essentially, you have ten hours of genuinely satisfying story….but “short games don’t sell,” so you insert vast swathes of empty landscape to traverse, a bunch of nonsense fetch quests to complete, or take one really satisfying questline and repeat it ten times with different names/macguffins, to create 40 hours of “gameplay” that have stopped being fun because the same thing happens over and over. If you think this doesn’t happen in novels, you have never read Oliver Twist.
Another note on pacing: There are, except arguably in standalone movies, at least two levels of pacing going on at any given time. There’s the pacing within the installment, and the pacing within the series. Generally, there’s three levels of pacing–within the installment (a chapter, an episode, a level), within the volume (a season, a novel, a game), and within the series as a whole. Sometimes, in fact FREQUENTLY, a piece of media will work on one of these levels but not on all of them. (Usually the ideal is that it works on all three, but that’s not always important! Not every individual chapter of a novel needs to be actively relevant to the entire overarching series.)
Honestly, the best possible masterclass in how to recognize good, bad, and “they tried their best but needed more space” pacing? If you want to learn this skill, and get better at recognizing it?
Doctor Who.
ESPECIALLY Classic Who, which has clearly-delineated “serials” within their seasons. You can pretty much pick any serial at random, and once you’ve seen a few of them, you get a REALLY good feel for things like, for example…
- Wow, that serial did not need to be twelve episodes long; they got captured and escaped at least three different times and made like four different plans that they ended up not being able to execute, and maybe once or twice they would have ramped up the tension, but it really didn’t contribute anything–this could have been a normal four-episode serial and been much stronger.
- Holy shit there were WAY too many balls being juggled in this, this would have been better with the concepts split into two separate serials, as it stands they only had four episodes and they just couldn’t develop anything fully
- Oh my god that was AMAZING I want to watch it again and take notes on how they divided up the individual episodes and what plot beats they chose to break on each week
- Eh, structurally that was good, but even as a 90-minute special that nuwho episode feels like it would have worked a lot better as a Classic serial with a little more room to breathe.
- How in the actual name of god did they stretch like twenty minutes of actual story into a four-episode serial (derogatory)
- How in the actual name of god did they stretch like twenty minutes of actual story into a four-episode serial (awestruck)
If you’re not actively trying to learn pacing, either for literary analysis or your own writing…honestly? Just learn to differentiate between whether the pacing is bad or if it just doesn’t appeal to you. There’s a WORLD of difference between “The pacing is too slow” and “the pacing is too slow for me.”
“I really prefer a slower build into a universe; the fact that it opens in medias res and you piece together where you are and how the magic system works over the next several chapters from context is way too fast-paced for me and makes me feel lost, so I bounced off it” is, usually, a much more constructive commentary than “the pacing is bad”.
And when the pacing really is bad, you’ll be doing everyone a favor by being able to actually articulate why.
Show, Don’t Tell
This is a very specific rule that has been taken dramatically out of context and is almost always used incorrectly.
“Show, don’t tell” applies to character traits and worldbuilding, not information in the plot.
It may be easier to “get” this rule if you forget the specific phrasing for a minute. This is a mnemonic device to avoid Informed Attributes, nothing more and nothing less.
Character traits like a character being funny, smart, kind, annoying, badass, etc, should be established by their behavior in-universe and the reactions of others to them–if you just SAY they’re X thing but never show it, then you’re just telling the audience these things. Similarly you can’t just tell the audience that a setting has brutal winters and expect to be believed, when the clothing, architecture, preparations, etc shown as common in that setting do not match those that brutal winters would necessitate.
To recap:
Violations of Show Don’t Tell:
- A viewpoint character describing themselves as having a trait (being a loner, easily distractable, clumsy, etc) but not actually shown to possess it (lacking friends, getting distracted from anything important, or dropping/tripping over things at inopportune moments.)
- The narration declaring an emotional state (”Character A was furious”) rather than demonstrating the emotion through dialogue or depicting it onscreen.
- A fourth-wall-breaking narrator; ie, Kuzco in The Emperor’s New Groove directly addressing the audience to explain that he’s a llama and also the protagonist, is NOT the same! This actually serves as a flawless example of showing rather than telling–we are SHOWN that Kuzco is immature and egotistical, even though that’s not what he’s saying.
- A fictional society or setting being declared by the narrative to be free of a negative trait–bigotry, for example–but that negative trait being clearly present, where this discrepancy is not narratively engaged with.
- (For example: There is officially no sexism in Thedas and yet female characters are subject to gendered slurs and expectations; the world of Honor Harrington is supposedly societally opposed to eugenics, yet “cures” for disability and constant mentions of a nebulous genetic “advantage” from certain characters’ ancestry are regular plot points that are viewed positively by the characters and are not narratively questioned.)
- A character declaring that their society has no bigotry, when that character is clearly wrong, is not the same thing.
- The narrative voice declaring objective correctness; everyone who agrees with the protagonist is portrayed as correct and anyone who questions them is portrayed as evil, or else there is no questioning whatsoever. For example: in Star Trek: Enterprise, Jonathan Archer tortures an unarmed prisoner. What follows is a multi-episode arc in which every person he respects along with Starfleet Command goes out of their way to dismiss the idea that he should bear any guilt, or that his actions were anything but completely necessary and objectively morally correct. No narrative space is allowed for disagreement, or for the audience to come to its own conclusion.
NOT Violations of Show Don’t Tell:
- A character explaining a concept to another character who would logically, within that universe/situation, be the recipient of such an explanation.
- An in-universe explanation BECOMES a SdT violation if the explanation fails to play out in reality, such as a spaceship being described as slow or flawed in some way but never actually having those weaknesses. Imagine if the Millennium Falcon was constantly described as a broken-down piece of junk…and never had any mechanical failures, AND Han and Chewie weren’t constantly shown repairing it!
- Information being revealed through dialogue, period. Having your hacker in a heist movie describe the enemy security system isn’t “telling” and thus bad writing. Having information revealed organically through dialogue is what “show” means.
- The “as you know” trope is technically a Show Don’t Tell violation, despite being dialogue, because it’s unnatural within the universe and serves solely to let the writer deliver information directly, ie, telling.
- Characters discussing their own actions and expressing their motivations and/or decision-making process at the time.
- The existence of an omnipotent narrator, or the narration itself confirming something. Narration saying “there was no way anyone could make it in time” is delivering contextual information, not breaking Show Don’t Tell.
Keep in mind that “Show, don’t tell” is meant to be advice for beginning authors. Because “telling” is easier and requires less skill than “showing,” inexperienced authors need to focus on getting as much “show” in as possible.
However, “telling” is also extremely important. Sometimes, especially in written formats, the most appropriate way to deliver information to the audience is to just say it and move on.
Keep in mind that a viewpoint character in anything but…a portal fantasy, essentially…is going to be familiar with the world they’re in. Not every protagonist needs to be a raw newcomer with zero knowledge of their new world! In most cases, a viewpoint character is going to know things that the audience doesn’t. Generally, the ONLY natural way to introduce worldbuilding in this situation is to just have the narration point them out. (It makes sense for Obi-Wan to have to explain the Force; it would make no sense for Han to explain the concept of space travel to Luke, who grew up in this universe and knows what the hell a starship is. So, if you’re writing the novelization of A New Hope, you need to just say “and so they jumped into hyperspace, the strange blue-white plane that allowed faster-than-light travel” and move the hell on.)
For that matter, in some media (ie, children’s cartoons) where teaching a moral lesson is the clear intent, a certain level of “telling” is not only appropriate but necessary!
The actual goal of “showing” and “telling” is to maintain a balance, and make sure everything feels natural. Show things that need to be shown, and…don’t waste everyone’s time showing things that would feel much more natural if they were just told.
But that’s not nearly as pithy a slogan.
(Reblog this version y’all I fixed some really serious typos)
(via heywriters)
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A Visual #Fashion Guide For Women - Necklines, Skirt Types & More!
Rebloggimg for writing reference
Wow! Now I know how to properly name all the things I don’t have the money to buy…
thank you
THIS
(via heywriters)
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I always feel so bad after oversharing like pls delete that from your memory and pretend it never happened
protip: it’s safe to overshare with your adhd buddies cuz those bitches have most of their recent memory automatically wiped clean by next morning
(via noninfacies)
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As a writer, I’ve come to accept that whatever verbal and written eloquence I possess is funneled directly into my stories. And as a result, when it comes to socializing there are no clever words left. Whether I’m talking to friends or making terrible small talk with the cashier at the grocery store, I’m going to sound like an AI in the very early stages of learning basic communication.
write like Shakespeare but talk like Pee-Wee Herman
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Neither hypervisibility nor invisibility is a privilege. Repeat it. Repeat it again. Hit yourself over the head with it. Do whatever it takes for you to internalize compassion for your peers with different issues. Being gawked at, fetishized, tokenized, and forced into the spotlight is not a privilege. Being ignored, silenced, neglected, and dismissed is not a privilege. Being forced to be an ambassador for your identity is not a privilege. Being told that you don’t even count as a member of your identity is not a privilege.
La Vie En Rose
“Lock up your libraries if you like;
but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt
that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf
