I Like Stuff

[Image ID: 4 panel comic of Phoenix Wright and Maya Fey from Ace Attorney. Phoenix says, "Maya, I have something to tell you. I'm bisexual." Maya spends a panel in shock thinking then says, "You like girls?!" End ID]

ok i’m very sleepy so i might not articulate myself well but the thing that distinguishes good imagery from bad imagery is relation and specificity. take the line which i am making up right now, “his eyes spoke the empty songs of forgotten meadows.” ok so those are all pretty words but all together they don’t actually mean anything because the concepts: emptiness, songs, abandonment, meadows, do not all overlap on the venn diagram. there are concepts out there that are related and those that are less related. take apples for example. associated with original sin, with computers, with temptation, with innocence, with wholesomeness. not particularly associated with the suez crisis. you say, “she reminded me of apples and gingham,” those are related concepts and that’s imagery that works. you say, “she reminded me of apples and strip malls,” i no longer know what you’re trying to convey. and then to turn imagery from merely functional (parts are related) into actually good, that’s where specificity comes in. “she reminded me of apples and gingham” is not very good because it’s broad. “she reminded me of the crisp bite of a tart winter apple and the stained gingham tea towel that lived above the sink of my childhood home,” now we are getting somewhere. it’s pretty easy to put words together that sound nice, but it’s less easy to actually convey meaning and set tone and establish style while keeping things actually comprehensible. too often i see people enamored with their own word choices and fully lost in the sauce and i wanna shake them every time and say this means nothing. this is a wordcloud of mood that tells me nothing.

[Image ID: Fan art of Alan Grant as a child leading a brontosaurus on a leash through a grassy meadow. End ID.]

[Image Description: Cartoon image of Parker, Hardison, and Eliot in free fall off a cliff alongside a red toy cart into a river below. Parker is enthusiastically throwing herself into the fall, Hardison is hanging on to her legs looking scared, and Eliot is above them, with crossed arms and a long-suffering expression.]

plot 150 words bed-sharing 200 words smut 800 words projecting my fears, insecurities, and anxieties onto a fictional character 9,356 words fluff 150 words someone who is good at fan fiction please help me budget my WIP, my family is dying

150 words of plot seems excessive.

thank you for the reasonable advice

writing isn’t hard. i just have to extract 80,000 words from my brain using sheer psychic force

you'll get the urge as an artist or a writer to say out loud the things you're worried about "the proportions are off" "kind of out of character" "i'm not good at summaries" "didn't get as much detail as i wanted" "i made a mistake and here's how" and that's the self-conscious part of your brain telling you "it's bad and if you don't tell them you know it's bad then they'll think you're stupid" but you've got to ignore that little voice and pretend you think it's good or else that little voice is going to ruin your life

I think strange horrible things should stop befalling my friends

I think strange wonderful things should start befalling my friends

rb to give prev strange wonderful things

I think strange horrible things should stop befalling my friends

I think strange wonderful things should start befalling my friends

rb to give prev strange wonderful things