I think it'd be funny to have a character who keeps trying to break the fourth wall and failing

We also need lady knights that are kind of like long haired anime men and that look like if you anthropomorphized a borzoi hound and have long eyelashes and a sword and have a noble seriousness to them but go silent and look away if flustered (talking to myself)

concept: black magic which heals and protects

a doctor parts skin with a careful touch, turns a tumor into shadow, and seals his patient once more with black threads.

a teenager buys black pills from the pharmacy, swallows one, lies back. they find themselves shrouded in darkness, and for the first time in a long time they sleep well. in the morning they wake under their covers, safe and warm.

a parent casts a shadow over their child, whose body overheats quickly. with the shadow protecting them, the child can walk safely under the sun, fearing neither sunburn nor heat stroke.

light moves swiftly, but darkness is everywhere, and all connected. white magic transportation moves its passengers at dangerous speeds; it’s black magic which harnesses the everywhereness of the dark and turns it into the safest and most efficient transportation known to life.

( x )

love those stories where the conflict isn’t centered around a person or an institution so much as it’s. the breaking down of a lie. the conflict is between the layers of the lie and reality, the arc comes from the journey through the lie and out the other side, the characters show you who they are in relation to the lie while under enormous pressure and so on. marvelous.

I keep seeing people making fun of using growled, hissed, roared, snarled etc in writing and it’s like.

have you never heard someone speak with the gravel in their voice when they get angry? Because that’s what a growl is.

Have you never heard someone sharply whisper something through the thin space of their teeth? Or when your mother sharply told you to stop it in public as a kid when you were acting up/being too loud? Because that’s what a hiss is.

Have you never heard a man get so blackout angry that their voice BOOMS through the house? Because that’s what a roar is.

Have you never seen someone bare their teeth while talking to accentuate their frustration or anger while speaking with a vicious tone? Because that’s what snarling is.

It’s not meant to be a literal animal noise. For the love of god, not every description is literal. I get some people are genuinely confused, but also some of these people are genuinely unimaginative as fuck.

I know time loop stories are often about characters going on an emotional journey and/or learning a lesson but if I was stuck in a time loop I would very quickly stop caring about consequences

Who cares if I spend all my money if the purchase wouldn't have even happened the next day? Who cares if I finally flip someone at work off? If I got angry and wanted to throw my phone at the wall, I could without needing to buy a new one.

Coming out of a time loop must be incredibly difficult. You'd have to relearn small petty consequences the way an astronaut relearns gravity after returning to earth. You have to relearn how to live like the next day actually matters.

Hey btw, to new writers who want to write angst: Nothing illustrates darkness as well as sparse and brilliant highlights.

If you want to write a character with an unspeakably awful past, there’s no need to go into deep and gory details about how horrible it was. Readers who can’t relate to it won’t relate to that, and the readers who have been there generally don’t want to see that. Instead, highlight some of their happiest moments but make them unsettlingly small.

Sprinkles in some realism, too. Having a character go “my parents were abusive monsters and I’ve literally never had a happy moment in my life” isn’t realistic, and both the people who haven’t witnessed that kind of thing outside of fiction, and the people who have personally lived it will just go “yeah, yeah, tragic childhood, misery, darkness, we’ve all seen it”, and being nothing but negative makes the character both uninteresting and unlikeable.

Now, having someone casually think or say shit like “I think my happiest childhood memory was that christmas when dad was in prison. Nobody was yelling or throwing anything and mom was sober the whole time”, and be genuinely surprised by other peoples’ concerned reactions - now jesus christ that’s bleak.

Oh my gosh. I just found this website that walks you though creating a believable society. It breaks each facet down into individual questions and makes it so simple! It seems really helpful for worldbuilding!

"amab or afab" im alab experiment that went wrong

me: hey so how far does your 'all-seeing' sight extend?

the many eyed creature in my basement: ARE YOU ASKING BECAUSE YOU TRIPPED ON YOUR OWN SHOELACES IN THE FOYER AND FELL ON YOUR FACE?

me: oh... so you saw that... :(

the many eyed creature (trying to be nice): ................ NO.

I truly hate the word “unalive.” There are so many other euphemisms that fictional Italian mobsters worked so hard to provide you with and you just ignore them.

people always talk about evil clones like oooh a dark mirror oohh what if you saw what a cruel person you were/are capable of becoming. and well yes but what if you were the evil clone. what if you looked in the mirror and what you saw was so bright it blinded you. what if you had to know exactly how good you could have been.

the problem with having an evil mastermind manipulator oc is that i am not particularly good at being any of those things

I fully understand that the preponderance of evidence is that George Lucas put absolutely zero thought into what Naboo’s culture was actually supposed to look like outside of what we see on screen, but as far as unintentionally effective worldbuilding goes, establishing that Naboo a. has a tradition of electing literal children as figurehead rulers of its planetary government, and b. apparently also has a tradition of assassinating these children with sufficient frequency that dressing up a bunch of other children as decoy targets has become standard operating procedure by the time of Padmé Amidala’s reign suggests that maybe the fact that this random backwater is a breeding ground for Sith Lords isn’t as unlikely as it initially appears.

One of my favorite tropes is character with a nasty toxic personality who tries very hard to do the right thing anyway