rabbitsquirrel

Also, for a cheat code: if you cook your characters right, you can get them to tell the reader all about themselves by how they project on other people.

This reminds me of the advice for writing image descriptions: giving the number and color of stripes in someone's shirt is nowhere near as helpful as conveying what they're doing, including a sense of how/why they're doing it (are they celebrating? are they angry? etc.)

(To digress slightly, I think that particular flavor of literal showing probably comes from writing as if the writer is a camera rather than a writer. A movie might start by showing a character frantically opening cupboard doors and the fridge, and rely on various other details - the actor's facial expressions, soundtrack - to engage the reader. And hopefully convey the sister's birthday party through a banner in the next room rather than clunky "It's my sister's birthday today, as you know..." dialogue. But as a writer, I can use my words instead, and it's often smoother to do that. And of course, one could hybridize the approaches over the course of the scene - "I grabbed the eggs from the fridge, looked at the clock, and swallowed a scream. If I had any chance of getting this cake ready in time for the party, I'd better get a move on. Standing on tiptoes to pull the mixing bowl from the cupboard, I wondered why I'd agreed to host my sister's birthday at noon when I rarely got out of bed before eleven.")

Tuula Lehtinen — Van Huysum VI (oil on canvas, 2023)

because it happened to me and im wondering if this was a product of the ongoing cultural change around gay issues. before i ever had the chance to say to my parents "i am this" my mom was already sitting me aside to tell me "if there is anything you want to tell me, i want you to know ill accept you no matter what"

And yeah, I can ignore all the times it's trying to get me to cut out any semblance of my own voice, or shove things into the wrong tense, or make the most random suggestions on comma usage. But if it's getting all that WRONG, what is it just straight up missing that I SHOULD be correcting? What real spelling and grammar errors are still lurking in there?

Industry standards are industry standards FOR A REASON. Having everyone on the same workflow can be crucial to getting things done effectively and correctly without creating a lot of extra work. And those things are not going to change overnight, as much as we might want them to.

Yeah, Word, let me just leave this whole chunk of dialogue without the closing quotation marks. That's the thing to do. How dare I have two punctuation marks in a row. It's not like that's how closing quotation marks fucking work.

I am going to light something on fire.

aecolyte

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