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theknownstoic · 3 years

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10 Mistakes to Avoid in Action

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Over-Describing

When it comes to action, it helps to remind yourself that readers like to inject action with a hint of their own imagination. They can fill in the blanks very easily with written action scenes, because unless otherwise stated, a reader will assume that the characters are moving quickly with a lot of precision and a lot of energy. Try to comb through all of your action scenes and ask what your reader can and can’t infer. By all means, hint at the highlights and intensify focus on important details or symbolic moments, but the action is not why they’re here. They’re here for the progression the action creates.

Superhuman Pain Tolerance

As it turns out, getting hurts is painful. Getting hit or kicked or stabbed or shot is painful, and unless the injury was very light or minor, it’s gonna hurt for a while. Even if your character is the type to repress their own feelings and ignore their pain, some inability due to pain or injury is unavoidable, especially if your character is simply human.

No Internal Events

Action scenes are about more than what the characters are doing with their body. It’s mentally taxing, and incredibly revealing how an action scene plays out. Use this to your advantage. Use body language, pacing, emphasis, and expression to show how your character is feeling, what they’re thinking, and portray the larger implication of the scene overall.

No Stakes

Every action scene needs stakes. It’s a simple truth, but one that is often ignored or excused away. Even if the action scene is for “entertainment”, it needs to play a role in pushing the story forward somehow. Create a smaller conflict that the characters attempt to solve, resulting in the fight scene, and then revealing a larger truth about the overall plot or developing the characters themselves. Someone needs to have something to lose or something to gain.

Scene Accomplishing Nothing

I touched on this in the last point, but any scene whose sole purpose is “entertainment” will probably be cut in the final draft because out of all moments to make up the final product, a meaningless action scene is the quickest to cheapen it, at least to an audience. There must always be an immediate purpose, and an overarching place in the story.

Thoughtless Character Actions

What your characters do is revealing. Body language is the hardest to manipulate to suit one’s own agenda, so the way your character fights can do an incredible and efficient job of developing them. Be intentional in your choreography of action scenes. Question why your character would choose to lunge at that moment and shy away in another. Why does this character avoid the physical confrontation versus another character who actively seeks it out as the ultimate solution to the problem?

Destroying The Suspension Of Disbelief

Your reader can let a lot of improbabilities slide, but not everything. There has to be some logic in the way action scenes play out. Where did that helicopter come from and who sent it? How are they all communicating with each other despite being miles apart? Where is this endless hoard of enemy soldiers materializing from?

Editing Too Kindly

Cut out what doesn’t develop the story or the characters. World building can be an iffy task during an action scene, but occasionally those moments are valuable. Action scenes should never occupy too much space, because there’s only so many words a reader can read in one sitting in which characters attack each other.

Muddy Descriptions

Be succinct and precise in your description. Avoid filler and excessive context, and please don’t spend paragraphs describing the city center before the upcoming action scene results in it being destroyed.

Be Intentional With The Tone

Tone is everything. Where the tone begins and where it evolves to is so, so telling about your story and the characters within it. If your action scene starts with a funny moment that is interrupted by an abrupt and unexpected attack, follow through with an appropriate tone like smug victory. If it starts with a devastating loss, the ending should be equally impactful.

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theknownstoic · 3 years

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study with adhd

Hi, it’s werelivingarts. I’ve been creating contents about academic life, but I realize that I leave out many students who are having ADHD that can make studying very challenging. I’m a no expert in this field, but I’ve been researching some tips that ADHD students find useful. Therefore, I really hope that some of the tips can help you to make studying less boring and easier! ❤️

Remember: Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re being silly, or lazy, or fussing over nothing. They are trying to apply rules that work for standard brains. You don’t need to explain anything, it is nobody’s business but yours. Don’t let anybody shame you or push you around. All you need to do is smile and say, “Well, it works for me.” 💙💜💻

P/s: If you have any useful tips, please share them below!

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theknownstoic · 3 years

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What are some spiritual books for beginners?

If there is one book which one must read is “AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF YOGI” because it is one of the 100 most spiritual books of the 20th century.

What is this book about?

Its the life story of the yogi guru Paramhansa Yogananda and his encounter with spiritual figures. He was born as Mukunda Lal Ghosh in Gorakhpur, India, into a Bengali Hindu family.

At the beginning of this book, it tells you about the life story to becoming a monk and establishing the teachings of kriya yoga meditation.

Autobiography of a Yogi is an introduction to the methods of attaining God-realization and to the spiritual wisdom of the East, which had only been available to a few in 1946.

It has been in print for seventy years and translated into over fifty languages by Self-Realization Fellowship.

BOOK SUMMARY OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF YOGI:

The key takes away from the book.

Self-Realization

The knowing -in body, mind, and soul- that we are one with the omnipresence of God; we do not have to pray that it come to us, we are not merely near it at all times, but that God’s omnipresence is our omnipresence. We are just as much a part of Him now as we ever will be. All we have to do is improve our knowing.

Living a Life of Happiness

Live quietly in the moment and see the beauty of all before you. The future will take care of itself.

Quote from the guru:

“You come to earth to entertain, not to be entertained”

If you are able to make someone happy through your work is the ultimate peace you seek in life and your life goal is to be the wave and to liberate the world.

Be comfortable within your purse,” he often said. “Extravagance will buy you discomfort.

Ordinary love is selfish, darkly rooted in desires, and satisfaction. Divine love is without condition, without boundary, without change. The flux of the human heart is gone forever at the transfixing touch of pure love.

Living in Purpose and Being Purposeful

Man’s conscious state is an awareness of body and breath. His subconscious state, active in sleep, is associated with his mental, and temporary, separation from body and breath. His superconscious state is a freedom from the delusion that “existence” depends on body and breath. God lives without breath; the soul made in his image becomes conscious of itself, for the first time, only during the breathless state.

“Since you alone are responsible for your thoughts, only you can change them.”

Being in Service

The human mind is a spark of the almighty consciousness of God. I could show you that whatever your powerful mind believes very intensely would instantly come to pass.

The deeper the Self-realization of a man, the more he influences the whole universe by his subtle spiritual vibrations, and the less he himself is affected by the phenomenal flux.

The Law of Success: Using the Power of Spirit to Create Health, Prosperity, and Happiness

The Power of Thought

You demonstrate success or failure according to your habitual trend of thought. In you which is the stronger —success thoughts or failure thoughts? If your mind is ordinarily in a negative state, an occasional positive thought is not sufficient to attract success. But if you think rightly, you will find your goal even though you seem to be enveloped in darkness.

Will is the Dynamo

Along with positive thinking, you should use will power and continuous activity in order to be successful. Every outward manifestation is the result of will but this power is not always used consciously. There is mechanical will as well as conscious will.

You Can Control Destiny

The mind is the creator of everything. You should, therefore, guide it to create only good. If you cling to a certain thought with dynamic will power, it finally assumes a tangible outward form. When you are able to employ your will always for constructive purposes, you become the controller of your destiny.

But you should always be sure, within the calm region of your inner Self, that what you want is right for you to have, and in accord with God’s purposes. You can then use all the force of your will to accomplish your object; keeping your mind, however, centered on the thought of God—the Source of all power and all accomplishment.

The above is just a glimpse of the book. I can tell the change in my vibe after reading this highly recommend for the person who wants direct change in their life.

IF YOU HAVE READ SO FAR,

THEN I AM TELLING YOU, YOU ARE A DEEP THINKER AND I ALSOI KNOW YOU ARE HIGHLY INTERESTED IN SPIRITUALITY.

THIS BOOK IS MADE FOR YOU

AND THIS ONE IS WORTH GIVING A SHOT

LINK TO THIS BOOK

https://amzn.to/3c2ISE

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theknownstoic · 3 years

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THE POWER OF NOW

1-Sentence-Summary:

The Power of Now shows you that every minute you spend worrying about the future or regretting the past is a minute lost, because really all you have to live in is the present, the now, and gives you actionable strategies to start living every minute as it occurs.

Read in: 4 minutes

Favorite quote from the author:

Leading a very troubled and problematic life, coined by many periods of serious depression, Eckhart Tolle found peace overnight, quite literally.

Plagued by depressing late-night thoughts, he started questioning what it is that made his life so unbearable and found the answer in his “I” – the self-generated from the power of his thoughts in his mind. The next morning he woke up and felt very much at peace because he’d somehow managed to lose his worrier-self and live entirely in the now, the present moment.

After spending several years doing nothing but enjoying his new-found peace, eventually people started asking him questions – so he answered. Eckhart started teaching and published The Power of Now in 1997, which eventually went on to become a New York Times bestseller in 2000 after Oprah Winfrey fell in love with it and recommended it.

Here are 3 lessons from it to help you worry and regret less:

Life is just a series of present moments.

All pain is a result of resistance to the things you cannot change.

You can free yourself from pain by constantly observing your mind and not judging your thoughts.

Ready for a trip to this beautiful place called the present? Let’s go!

Lesson 1: All life is, is a series of present moments.

If I asked 100 people to name the two most common bad feelings they can think of, 99 of them would probably respond with regret and anxiety.

Wouldn’t you?

The reason we regret and worry about a lot of things lies in the way our minds work. The constant stream of consciousness and thoughts in our head, which plays 24/7 in our heads, is mostly preoccupied with 2 things: the past and the future.

When you wake up 10 minutes too late in the morning, what’s the first thing you think? “Shit, I overslept, I wish I hadn’t hit the snooze button.” closely followed by “Oh no, now I’ll be late for work, I’m sure my boss will yell at me!” – and voilà, you’ve ruined at least the first half of your day.

Tolle says that the only important time is the one we think about the least: the present. The reason only the present matters is that everything happens here. Everything you feel and sense takes place in the present. When you think about it, the past is nothing more than all present moments that have gone by, and the future is just the collection of present moments waiting to arrive.

Therefore, living in any other moment than the present is useless. If your task is to hand in a research paper in 14 days, neither regretting all this time you procrastinated nor worrying about the big workload that’s to come will actually help get you there.

But if you just start solving the first tiny problem and come up with an outline, it’s all downhill from there.

Lesson 2: Any pain you feel results from resisting the things you can’t change.

I’m a big fan of stoicism. Part of their philosophy includes the idea that the only pain you really suffer is the one you create yourself.

Tolle would surely agree since he argues that pain is nothing more than the result of you resisting to all the things you cannot change. We think a lot about the future and the past, but can live only in the present and have therefore no means to change many things from the other two that we’re unhappy about.

Then we fill the gap between these by developing a resistance to these things, which is what we experience as pain, whether psychological or physical.

When you’re angry, that anger usually makes you think and act less rational, which more often than not results in a worse situation and thus, more pain – but it’s really all in your head.

Lesson 3: You can free yourself from pain by constantly observing your mind and not judging your thoughts.

How then, can you get rid of pain? Tolle recommends 2 things:

Constantly ask yourself: “What will my next thought be?”

Stop judging your thoughts and urges.

The first strategy is based on an effect from physics, called the quantum zeno effect. It says that you can freeze any system in its current state by constantly observing it. Asking yourself this question over and over will usually delay your actual next thought, thus giving you enough time to realize how much time you actually spend in autopilot mode. This way you can start interrupting your mind and thus separating from it.

The second method is meant to help you listen to your body and learn to accept the constant, nagging thoughts in your head, about what you should be doing or not doing. The next time you do wake up late for work, just listen to that voice that says “You should’ve done better!”, but don’t act on it. Notice it, see it, accept that it’s there, but don’t give in to its advice.

These two tools will help you separate your body from your always-on, thought-driven mind, after which you’ll be in less pain because you resist the things you can’t change a lot less.

Want to get more out of everything you read?Get our reading guide. You’ll remember more, better, and longer - no matter what you read.

What else can you learn from the blinks?

How your ego stops you from being happy and what to do about it

What you can learn from Buddha’s six-year abstinence about the wisdom of your body

How to live in the now by being in a state of permanent alertness (kinda like Jason Bourne)

Why living in the present can be hard for your partner to deal with, but also offer a great chance to improve your relationship

What to do with the pain that isn’t avoidable, like when a loved one dies

Why surrendering to the present does not mean you’ll live a passive, boring life

Who would I recommend The Power of Now summary to?

The 29 year old, who’s worried, because she hasn’t figured out her life yet, the 85 year old who regrets the many stupid things he did during his youth and at war, and anyone who spends more time complaining than actually working on improving things.

https://amzn.to/2Z8b9UL

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link to book 👆

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theknownstoic · 4 years