Writing Irony

How bodies decompose

Wilderness survival skills

Mob mentality

Other cultures

What it takes for a human to die in a given situation

Common tropes in your genre

How bodies decompose

Wilderness survival skills

Mob mentality

Other cultures

What it takes for a human to die in a given situation

Common tropes for your genre

"i should have seen it coming."

"given your history, i should have known better."

"please tell me that at least a part of it was real."

"[friend's name] tried to warn me about you, but i didn't listen, you know."

"i was ready to give you my heart."

"you should have killed me earlier, so i wouldn't live to see this."

"get away from me."

"kill me right now then, i dare you."

"i should have left you bleeding to your death."

"do you have any regrets doing this to me?"

"i hope you will remember this until your death."

"i loved you in this lifetime. i won't make that mistake in the next."

"no one could have saved you."

"somehow, i expected that this would happen eventually."

"do we really have to end it all?"

"the worst of it all, it's that if you ask now, i will forgive you."

"are you expecting me to beg for my life now?"

"you made a promise."

"we could have had a thousand of tomorrows together."

"i lost, didn't i?"

"i deserve this. you deserve to kill me"

"technically you won't kill me, because i gave it to you. do it properly, then."

"make it quick, please."

"please tell me why."

"was i not enough for you?"

"please forgive me for pushing you this far"

It’s normal to have a hard time coping with stress and still maintain your creativity.

Yes, there are stories of authors/creatives/artists who manage to create amid hardship and adversity. But that’s THEIR story. Not yours.

Every person has responsibilities of their own they have to deal with. Every person deals with stress and copes in different ways.

Do what works for YOU to manage your mental health, take care of your responsibilities, and nurture your creativity.

The way we talk about characters in stories would be better if we really understood that characters are just tools that writers use to tell a story.

Once we understand that, we can start talking about how the character is used to tell the story, about whether we think it’s an interested story, and about what makes something an interesting story to us.

Which are all really fun and interesting things to talk about.

But we can not do that unless we accept that characters are not people. They do not have thoughts. They do not have opinions. They do not make decisions. They only exist as tools to tell the story.

Other tools in a story are things like a chair in a story where people sit, or a palace in a fairy tale, or the sun in a story about a hot dessert. A character is like that chair, that palace and that sun: only a tool to tell the story.

A character is not like a real person. A real person can be ‘good’ or bad’ (or both) because they do good or bad things (or both), a character can only be a useful tool or a not useful tool to tell a story.

But when you critique the story you need to stop suspending that disbelief and look at the story through another lens, just like @queeranarchism says.

And you can be critical of stories. They are reflective of the values of the author. But you can only see those values clearly when you look at the story as a story.

Example: J.K. Rowling really shows her fatphobia in the Harry Potter books by portraying a lot of unlikable characters as fat, and emphasizing their fatness at the exact moments when she wants you to dislike them. Aunt Marge is the obvious example. Aunt Marge ‘sausage fingers’ get described as she is abusing Harry in order to amplify the sense of disgust that you have for her. It’s clear that J.K. Rowling is using ‘fat’ as a stand in for ‘bad’. Fuck JKR.

That’s a valid critique of a story.

When you do not suspend disbelief, what you get is discourse between people who go “Harry Potter is a fatphobe because he is clearly judging Aunt Marge for her fat. Everyone who defends Harry Potter is wrong. Fuck you fatphobes!” and people who go “Harry Potter did nothing wrong! Aunt Marge is clearly an abuser. Anyone who brings up fatphobia here is protecting an abuser! Fuck you abuse apologists!”

thank you.

@staff​

https://www.tumblr.com/abuse

“What Tumblr is not for:

Non-Genuine Social Gesture Schemes. Don’t participate in schemes to drive up non-genuine Follows, Likes, Reblogs, etc. Don’t orchestrate or engage in “follow trains”, where users are encouraged to follow lists of other users to gain more followers for themselves. Don’t make bulk or indiscriminate use of messaging features, like Fan Mail or Asks, to, for example, bait Reblogs/Follows or drive traffic to your blog or website. If you want people to like you, just play it cool and be yourself.”

A few, very big blogs have been dominating the writing, poetry, and quotes hashtags; this makes it more difficult for writers to get their work noticed. Additionally, this makes harder for readers to support independent writers.

The blogs, in particular, have caught my attention:

@thoughtkick

@quotefeeling

@thehopefulquotes

@thebookquotes

@thezeroquotes

@meineluft

@perfeqt

@emptystic

@theperfeqtquotes

I suspect these blogs are all managed by the same person or group. They are aggressively self-promoting each other. This prevents normal, every-day writers from entering the space.

Below is proof, and a full confession. 

In summary, they admit to owning every top blog posting under the hashtags: “poetry, writing, quotes.” They go on to say that they even own my blog. Lastly, they say that they aggressively dominate the top spots for the hashtags to “people like [me] don’t get seen anymore.

I have been in correspondence with Tumblr Staff since Monday, December 28th regarding this abuse. 

From the Community Guidelines,

“As a global platform for creativity and self-expression, Tumblr is deeply committed to supporting and protecting freedom of speech. At the same time, we draw lines around a few narrowly defined but deeply important categories of content and behavior that jeopardize our users, threaten our infrastructure, and damage our community.

bringing back this great example.