LMAOO
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âCommander Vimes didn't like the phrase 'The innocent have nothing to fear', believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like 'The innocent have nothing to fear'.â -- Discworld (Snuff)
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okay what did i miss
(yes some of these overlap and some are suppositions. for example if parchment is always used for ephemera, rough drafts, notes, and never re-used or re-purposed, we can also assume that the author is unaware of wax tablets as a concept)
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Also I feel like the point Derin was making here was less "you need to have a perfectly articulated deep and meaningful Message in mind for your work" and more "You need to understand what the Appeal of your work is, the primary thing it does well and that people will come to it for".
I feel like I start out most of my projects with the point of "here's a neat Person I invented, look at all of their problems and relationships". And then the themes just kind of organically grow themselves as you go because if your character and their problems are interesting enough they just kind of come with themes.
But I still feel like "look at this fictional person and their problems" is what people come to stories looking for. I've never been like "Ooh somebody recommend me a book with X theme".
The Three Commandments
The thing about writing is this: you gotta start in medias res, to hook your readers with action immediately. But readers arenât invested in people they know nothing about, so start with a framing scene that instead describes the characters and the stakes. But those scenes are boring, so cut straight to the action, after opening with a clever quip, but open in the style of the story, and try not to be too clever in the opener, it looks tacky. One shouldnât use too many dialogue tags, itâs distracting; but you can use âsaidâ a lot, because âsaidâ is invisible, but donât use âsaidâ too much because itâs boring and uninformative â make sure to vary your dialogue tags to be as descriptive as possible, except donât do that because itâs distracting, and instead rely mostly on âsaidâ and only use others when you need them. But donât use âsaidâ too often; you should avoid dialogue tags as much as you possibly can and indicate speakers through describing their reactions. But donât do that, itâs distracting.
Having a viewpoint character describe themselves is amateurish, so avoid that. But also be sure to describe your viewpoint character so that the reader can picture them. And include a lot of introspection, so we can see their mindset, but donât include too much introspection, because itâs boring and takes away from the action and really bogs down the story, but also remember to include plenty of introspection so your character doesnât feel like a robot. And adverbs are great action descriptors; you should have a lot of them, but donât use a lot of adverbs; theyâre amateurish and bog down the story. And
The reason new writers are bombarded with so much outright contradictory writing advice is that these tips are conditional. It depends on your style, your genre, your audience, your level of skill, and what problems in your writing youâre trying to fix. Which is why, when Iâm writing, I tend to focus on what I call my Three Commandments of Writing. These are the overall rules; before accepting any writing advice, I check whether it reinforces one of these rules or not. If not, I ditch it.
1: Thou Shalt Have Something To Say
Whatâs your book about?
I donât mean, describe to me the plot. I mean, why should anybody read this? Whatâs its thesis? Whatâs its reason for existence, from the readerâs perspective? People write stories for all kinds of reasons, but things like âI just wanted to get it out of my headâ are meaningless from a reader perspective. The greatest piece of writing advice I ever received was you putting words on a page does not obligate anybody to read them. So why are the words there? What point are you trying to make?
The purpose of your story can vary wildly. Usually, youâll be exploring some kind of thesis, especially if you write genre fiction. Curse Words, for example, is an exploration of self-perpetuating power structures and how aiming for short-term stability and safety can cause long-term problems, as well as the responsibilities of an agitator when seeking to do the necessary work of dismantling those power structures. Most of the things in Curse Words eventually fold back into exploring this question. Alternately, you might just have a really cool idea for a society or alien species or something and want to show it off (note: it can be VERY VERY HARD to carry a story on a âcool original conceptâ by itself. You think your sky society where they fly above the clouds and have no rainfall and have to harvest water from the clouds below is a cool enough idea to carry a story: Youâre almost certainly wrong. These cool concept stories work best when they are either very short, or working in conjunction with exploring a theme). You might be writing a mystery series where each story is a standalone mystery and the point is to present a puzzle and solve a fun mystery each book. Maybe youâre just here to make the reader laugh, and will throw in anything you can find thatâll act as framing for better jokes. In some genres, readers know exactly what they want and have gotten it a hundred times before and want that story again but with different character names â maybe youâre writing one of those. (These stories are popular in romance, pulp fantasy, some action genres, and rather a lot of types of fanfiction).
Whatever the main point of your story is, you should know it by the time you finish the first draft, because you simply cannot write the second draft if you donât know what the point of the story is. (If you write web serials and are publishing the first draft, youâll need to figure it out a lot faster.)
Once you know what the point of your story is, you can assess all writing decisions through this lens â does this help or hurt the point of my story?
2: Thou Shalt Respect Thy Readerâs Investment
Readers invest a lot in a story. Sometimes itâs money, if they bought your book, but even if your story is free, they invest time, attention, and emotional investment. The vast majority of your job is making that investment worth it. There are two factors to this â lowering the investment, and increasing the payoff. If you can lower your audienceâs suspension of disbelief through consistent characterisation, realistic (for your genre â this may deviate from real realism) worldbuilding, and appropriately foreshadowing and forewarning any unexpected rules of your world. You can lower the amount of effort or attention your audience need to put into getting into your story by writing in a clear manner, using an entertaining tone, and relying on cultural touchpoints they understand already instead of pushing them in the deep end into a completely unfamiliar situation. The lower their initial investment, the easier it is to make the payoff worth it.
Two important notes here: one, not all audiences view investment in the same way. Your average reader views time as a major investment, but readers of long fiction (epic fantasies, web serials, et cetera) often view length as part of the payoff. Brandon Sanderson fans donât grab his latest book and think âUuuugh, why does it have to be so looong!â Similarly, some people like being thrown in the deep end and having to put a lot of work into figuring out what the fuck is going on with no onboarding. This is one of science fictionâs main tactics for forcibly immersing you in a future world. So the valuation of what counts as too much investment varies drastically between readers.
Two, itâs not always the best idea to minimise the necessary investment at all costs. Generally, engagement with art asks something of us, and thatâs part of the appeal. Minimum-effort books do have their appeal and their place, in the same way that idle games or repetitive sitcoms have their appeal and their place, but the memorable stories, the ones that have staying power and provide real value, are the ones that ask something of the reader. If theyâre not investing anything, they have no incentive to engage, and youâre just filling in time. This commandment does not exist to tell you to try to ask nothing of your audience â you should be asking something of your audience. It exists to tell you to respect that investment. Know what youâre asking of your audience, and make sure that the ask is less than the payoff.
The other way to respect the investment is of course to focus on a great payoff. Make those characters socially fascinating, make that sacrifice emotionally rending, make the answer to that mystery intellectually fulfilling. If you can make the investment worth it, theyâll enjoy your story. And if you consistently make their investment worth it, you build trust, and theyâll be willing to invest more next time, which means you can ask more of them and give them an even better payoff. Audience trust is a very precious currency and this is how you build it â be worth their time.
But how do you know what your audience does and doesnât consider an onerous investment? And how do you know what kinds of payoff theyâll find rewarding? Easy â they self-sort. Part of your job is telling your audience what to expect from you as soon as you can, so that if itâs not for them, theyâll leave, and if it is, theyâll invest and appreciate the return. (âOh but I want as many people reading my story as possible!â No, you donât. If you want that, you can write paint-by-numbers common denominator mass appeal fic. What you want is the audience who will enjoy your story; everyone else is a waste of time, and is in fact, detrimental to your success, because if they donât like your story then theyâre likely to be bad marketing. You want these people to bounce off and leave before you disappoint them. Donât try to trick them into staying around.) Your audience should know, very early on, what kind of an experience theyâre in for, what the tone will be, the genre and character(s) theyâre going to follow, that sort of thing. The first couple of chapters of Time to Orbit: Unknown, for example, are a micro-example of the sorts of mysteries that Aspen will be dealing with for most of the book, as well as a sample of their character voice, the way they approach problems, and enough of their background, world and behaviour for the reader to decide if this sort of story is for them. We also start the story with some mildly graphic medical stuff, enough physics for the reader to determine the âhardnessâ of the scifi, and about the level of physical risk that Aspen will be putting themselves at for most of the book. This is all important information for a reader to have.
If you are mindful of the investment your readers are making, mindful of the value of the payoff, and honest with them about both from the start so that they can decide whether the story is for them, you can respect their investment and make sure they have a good time.
3: Thou Shalt Not Make Thy World Less Interesting
This oneâs really about payoff, but itâs important enough to be ts own commandment. It relates primarily to twists, reveals, worldbuilding, and killing off storylines or characters. One mistake that I see new writers make all the time is that they tank the engagement of their story by introducing a cool fun twist that seems so awesome in the moment and then⊠is a major letdown, because the implications make the world less interesting.
âIt was all a dreamâ twists often fall into this trap. Contrary to popular opinion, I think these twists can be done extremely well. Iâve seen them done extremely well. The vast majority of the time, theyâre very bad. Theyâre bad because they take an interesting world and make it boring. The same is true of poorly thought out, shocking character deaths â when you kill a character, you kill their potential, and if theyâre a character worth killing in a high impact way then this is always a huge sacrifice on your part. Is it worth it? Will it make the story more interesting? Similarly, if your bad guy is going to get up and gloat âAha, your quest was all planned by me, I was working in the shadows to get you to acquire the Mystery Object since I could not! You have fallen into my trap! Now give me the Mystery Object!â, is this a more interesting story than if the protagonistâs journey had actually been their own unmanipulated adventure? It makes your bad guy look clever and can be a cool twist, but does it mean that all those times your protagonist escaped the bad guyâs men by the skin of his teeth, he was being allowed to escape? Are they retroactively less interesting now?
Whether these twists work or not will depend on how youâve constructed the rest of your story. Do they make your world more or less interesting?
If you have the audienceâs trust, itâs permissible to make your world temporarily less interesting. You can kill off the cool guy with the awesome plan, or make it so that the Chosen One wasnât actually the Chosen One, or even have the main character wake up and find out it was all a dream, and let the reader marinate in disappointment for a little while before you pick it up again and turn things around so that actually, that twist does lead to a more interesting story! But you have to pick it up again. Donât leave them with the version thatâs less interesting than the story you tanked for the twist. The general slop of interest must trend upward, and your sacrifices need to all lead into the more interesting world. Otherwise, your readers will be disappointed, and their experience will be tainted.
Whenever Iâm looking at a new piece of writing advice, I view it through these three rules. Is this plot still delivering on the bookâs purpose, or have I gone off the rails somewhere and just stared writing random stuff? Does making this character âmore relateableâ help or hinder that goal? Does this argument with the protagonistsâ mother tell the reader anything or lead to any useful payoff; is it respectful of their time? Will starting in medias res give the audience an accurate view of the story and help them decide whether to invest? Does this big twist that challenges all the assumptions weâve made so far imply a world that is more or less interesting than the world previously implied?
Hopefully these can help you, too.
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The Three Commandments
The thing about writing is this: you gotta start in medias res, to hook your readers with action immediately. But readers arenât invested in people they know nothing about, so start with a framing scene that instead describes the characters and the stakes. But those scenes are boring, so cut straight to the action, after opening with a clever quip, but open in the style of the story, and try not to be too clever in the opener, it looks tacky. One shouldnât use too many dialogue tags, itâs distracting; but you can use âsaidâ a lot, because âsaidâ is invisible, but donât use âsaidâ too much because itâs boring and uninformative â make sure to vary your dialogue tags to be as descriptive as possible, except donât do that because itâs distracting, and instead rely mostly on âsaidâ and only use others when you need them. But donât use âsaidâ too often; you should avoid dialogue tags as much as you possibly can and indicate speakers through describing their reactions. But donât do that, itâs distracting.
Having a viewpoint character describe themselves is amateurish, so avoid that. But also be sure to describe your viewpoint character so that the reader can picture them. And include a lot of introspection, so we can see their mindset, but donât include too much introspection, because itâs boring and takes away from the action and really bogs down the story, but also remember to include plenty of introspection so your character doesnât feel like a robot. And adverbs are great action descriptors; you should have a lot of them, but donât use a lot of adverbs; theyâre amateurish and bog down the story. And
The reason new writers are bombarded with so much outright contradictory writing advice is that these tips are conditional. It depends on your style, your genre, your audience, your level of skill, and what problems in your writing youâre trying to fix. Which is why, when Iâm writing, I tend to focus on what I call my Three Commandments of Writing. These are the overall rules; before accepting any writing advice, I check whether it reinforces one of these rules or not. If not, I ditch it.
1: Thou Shalt Have Something To Say
Whatâs your book about?
I donât mean, describe to me the plot. I mean, why should anybody read this? Whatâs its thesis? Whatâs its reason for existence, from the readerâs perspective? People write stories for all kinds of reasons, but things like âI just wanted to get it out of my headâ are meaningless from a reader perspective. The greatest piece of writing advice I ever received was you putting words on a page does not obligate anybody to read them. So why are the words there? What point are you trying to make?
The purpose of your story can vary wildly. Usually, youâll be exploring some kind of thesis, especially if you write genre fiction. Curse Words, for example, is an exploration of self-perpetuating power structures and how aiming for short-term stability and safety can cause long-term problems, as well as the responsibilities of an agitator when seeking to do the necessary work of dismantling those power structures. Most of the things in Curse Words eventually fold back into exploring this question. Alternately, you might just have a really cool idea for a society or alien species or something and want to show it off (note: it can be VERY VERY HARD to carry a story on a âcool original conceptâ by itself. You think your sky society where they fly above the clouds and have no rainfall and have to harvest water from the clouds below is a cool enough idea to carry a story: Youâre almost certainly wrong. These cool concept stories work best when they are either very short, or working in conjunction with exploring a theme). You might be writing a mystery series where each story is a standalone mystery and the point is to present a puzzle and solve a fun mystery each book. Maybe youâre just here to make the reader laugh, and will throw in anything you can find thatâll act as framing for better jokes. In some genres, readers know exactly what they want and have gotten it a hundred times before and want that story again but with different character names â maybe youâre writing one of those. (These stories are popular in romance, pulp fantasy, some action genres, and rather a lot of types of fanfiction).
Whatever the main point of your story is, you should know it by the time you finish the first draft, because you simply cannot write the second draft if you donât know what the point of the story is. (If you write web serials and are publishing the first draft, youâll need to figure it out a lot faster.)
Once you know what the point of your story is, you can assess all writing decisions through this lens â does this help or hurt the point of my story?
2: Thou Shalt Respect Thy Readerâs Investment
Readers invest a lot in a story. Sometimes itâs money, if they bought your book, but even if your story is free, they invest time, attention, and emotional investment. The vast majority of your job is making that investment worth it. There are two factors to this â lowering the investment, and increasing the payoff. If you can lower your audienceâs suspension of disbelief through consistent characterisation, realistic (for your genre â this may deviate from real realism) worldbuilding, and appropriately foreshadowing and forewarning any unexpected rules of your world. You can lower the amount of effort or attention your audience need to put into getting into your story by writing in a clear manner, using an entertaining tone, and relying on cultural touchpoints they understand already instead of pushing them in the deep end into a completely unfamiliar situation. The lower their initial investment, the easier it is to make the payoff worth it.
Two important notes here: one, not all audiences view investment in the same way. Your average reader views time as a major investment, but readers of long fiction (epic fantasies, web serials, et cetera) often view length as part of the payoff. Brandon Sanderson fans donât grab his latest book and think âUuuugh, why does it have to be so looong!â Similarly, some people like being thrown in the deep end and having to put a lot of work into figuring out what the fuck is going on with no onboarding. This is one of science fictionâs main tactics for forcibly immersing you in a future world. So the valuation of what counts as too much investment varies drastically between readers.
Two, itâs not always the best idea to minimise the necessary investment at all costs. Generally, engagement with art asks something of us, and thatâs part of the appeal. Minimum-effort books do have their appeal and their place, in the same way that idle games or repetitive sitcoms have their appeal and their place, but the memorable stories, the ones that have staying power and provide real value, are the ones that ask something of the reader. If theyâre not investing anything, they have no incentive to engage, and youâre just filling in time. This commandment does not exist to tell you to try to ask nothing of your audience â you should be asking something of your audience. It exists to tell you to respect that investment. Know what youâre asking of your audience, and make sure that the ask is less than the payoff.
The other way to respect the investment is of course to focus on a great payoff. Make those characters socially fascinating, make that sacrifice emotionally rending, make the answer to that mystery intellectually fulfilling. If you can make the investment worth it, theyâll enjoy your story. And if you consistently make their investment worth it, you build trust, and theyâll be willing to invest more next time, which means you can ask more of them and give them an even better payoff. Audience trust is a very precious currency and this is how you build it â be worth their time.
But how do you know what your audience does and doesnât consider an onerous investment? And how do you know what kinds of payoff theyâll find rewarding? Easy â they self-sort. Part of your job is telling your audience what to expect from you as soon as you can, so that if itâs not for them, theyâll leave, and if it is, theyâll invest and appreciate the return. (âOh but I want as many people reading my story as possible!â No, you donât. If you want that, you can write paint-by-numbers common denominator mass appeal fic. What you want is the audience who will enjoy your story; everyone else is a waste of time, and is in fact, detrimental to your success, because if they donât like your story then theyâre likely to be bad marketing. You want these people to bounce off and leave before you disappoint them. Donât try to trick them into staying around.) Your audience should know, very early on, what kind of an experience theyâre in for, what the tone will be, the genre and character(s) theyâre going to follow, that sort of thing. The first couple of chapters of Time to Orbit: Unknown, for example, are a micro-example of the sorts of mysteries that Aspen will be dealing with for most of the book, as well as a sample of their character voice, the way they approach problems, and enough of their background, world and behaviour for the reader to decide if this sort of story is for them. We also start the story with some mildly graphic medical stuff, enough physics for the reader to determine the âhardnessâ of the scifi, and about the level of physical risk that Aspen will be putting themselves at for most of the book. This is all important information for a reader to have.
If you are mindful of the investment your readers are making, mindful of the value of the payoff, and honest with them about both from the start so that they can decide whether the story is for them, you can respect their investment and make sure they have a good time.
3: Thou Shalt Not Make Thy World Less Interesting
This oneâs really about payoff, but itâs important enough to be its own commandment. It relates primarily to twists, reveals, worldbuilding, and killing off storylines or characters. One mistake that I see new writers make all the time is that they tank the engagement of their story by introducing a cool fun twist that seems so awesome in the moment and then⊠is a major letdown, because the implications make the world less interesting.
âIt was all a dreamâ twists often fall into this trap. Contrary to popular opinion, I think these twists can be done extremely well. Iâve seen them done extremely well. The vast majority of the time, theyâre very bad. Theyâre bad because they take an interesting world and make it boring. The same is true of poorly thought out, shocking character deaths â when you kill a character, you kill their potential, and if theyâre a character worth killing in a high impact way then this is always a huge sacrifice on your part. Is it worth it? Will it make the story more interesting? Similarly, if your bad guy is going to get up and gloat âAha, your quest was all planned by me, I was working in the shadows to get you to acquire the Mystery Object since I could not! You have fallen into my trap! Now give me the Mystery Object!â, is this a more interesting story than if the protagonistâs journey had actually been their own unmanipulated adventure? It makes your bad guy look clever and can be a cool twist, but does it mean that all those times your protagonist escaped the bad guyâs men by the skin of his teeth, he was being allowed to escape? Are they retroactively less interesting now?
Whether these twists work or not will depend on how youâve constructed the rest of your story. Do they make your world more or less interesting?
If you have the audienceâs trust, itâs permissible to make your world temporarily less interesting. You can kill off the cool guy with the awesome plan, or make it so that the Chosen One wasnât actually the Chosen One, or even have the main character wake up and find out it was all a dream, and let the reader marinate in disappointment for a little while before you pick it up again and turn things around so that actually, that twist does lead to a more interesting story! But you have to pick it up again. Donât leave them with the version thatâs less interesting than the story you tanked for the twist. The general slop of interest must trend upward, and your sacrifices need to all lead into the more interesting world. Otherwise, your readers will be disappointed, and their experience will be tainted.
Whenever Iâm looking at a new piece of writing advice, I view it through these three rules. Is this plot still delivering on the bookâs purpose, or have I gone off the rails somewhere and just stared writing random stuff? Does making this character âmore relateableâ help or hinder that goal? Does this argument with the protagonistsâ mother tell the reader anything or lead to any useful payoff; is it respectful of their time? Will starting in medias res give the audience an accurate view of the story and help them decide whether to invest? Does this big twist that challenges all the assumptions weâve made so far imply a world that is more or less interesting than the world previously implied?
Hopefully these can help you, too.
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in the hour or so it took me to draw this op turned reblogs off
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so i'm in this backyard chickens group on reddit and someone just discovered their hen is transitioning and everyone is stoked
anyway in case you didn't know chickens will sometimes spontaneously f2m and it's pretty cool
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this Mud-dauber Wasp chose our windowsil to build her nest! after a bit of investigation of me and my camera, she graciously allowed me to photograph her while she worked on her construction.
in the photos above, she has arrived with a ball of mud collected from somewhere nearby. this nest isn't for her to live in, but for her young to grow and pupate. in this mass of mud she will craft several individual cells, and provision them all with the paralysed bodies of orb-weaver spiders. each cell will have a single egg laid on the first spider, before being sealed off with more mud.
here, she picks the next spot to deposit her ball of mud, using her mandibles to smooth it onto the structure. when the larvae hatch, they will consume all the spiders in their respective cells, before pupating and then emerging as adults wasps.
each time she finished with a layer of mud, she would take a moment to groom her forelegs and antennae, before flying off to repeat the process. these photos were taken earlier in the Summer, and as of posting this, the adult wasps have yet to emerge.
Covered-cell Mud-dauber Wasp, female (Sceliphron laetum).
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There is Cinnabon in a shopping centre near where I live. I'm still not sure it'd be worth the trip?
i hope u get to visit a cinnabon in the us one day soon. it is DEEPLY WORTH the trip to the nearest cinnabon store from wherever u land, or whichever airport u land in
I don't ever intend to go back to the US, but if I did, Cinnabon would be the only thing to make it worth it
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me every day without fail: I'll do [chore] when I get home
me when I get home:
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I am deeply enjoying the facial expressions on both woman and bird in this marginal drawing.
(Cambridge UL MS Add. 4085)
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My cartoon for this weekendâs @guardian books
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just a reminder that "listened to marginalized people about their oppression" means "people know their own experiences better than you do" not "the most oppressed person in the room is always right about everything"
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My queers, we really need to put the "no men" thing away. Men are not inherently bad. There are queer men. There are questioning men. There's men that are just plain cool. Denying these men a space at our table is not helping - except the TERFs. I just came off the back of reading a transphobe gleeful rant about the need to have pride without men - They of course mean me. This kind of stuff is damaging to me and I really need us all to take a step back and maybe kill this "men dni, men not allowed" stuff. What you mean is "no men who are going to do mean stuff to me." And frankly those men won't give a shit about that kind of boundary.
But I promise you there's a fleet of good honest men who will see that and be sad they're not allowed in your version of queer spaces.
PATRIARCHY is what you hate. Dni Patriarchs.
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