line's fiction blog

when u are writing words are your currency and you don’t need to spend as little as possible but it is imperative that you spend as wisely as possible. each word is being exchanged to the reader for meaning. “crimson blood” it’s usually crimson we can skip that. “hummed throatily” humming is already throaty, skip it. “‘what’s that?’ he questioned,” that is already a question, skip it. you need to bite harder. choose stronger verbs. use more evocative imagery. use the space of the page, the sounds of the words, use metaphor, use scene dressing. add dimension add texture use every tool at your disposal. there’s nothing worse in prose than spending words like they’re cheap and meaningless. if you don’t believe that what you’re writing has meaning, if your sentences read like you are trying to convince yourself, why should i believe it? you can smell insecurity and panic in a piece and it destroys the entire thing

evoking bertholt brecht’s “the way people cast a play!” quote as a spell against prescriptive, stereotypical, fatalistic typecasting

past tense of william shakespeare? william shookspeare

Wouldiwas Shookspeared

delete this

I don't think Tolkien is a good fantasy writer because he scored the highest at some objective Best Fantasy Book Test that every fantasy writer has to take, I think he's a good fantasy writer because he created a world based on things that he was interested in. I feel like a lot of fantasy writers think that they need to create a whole language for their world because Tolkien did and obviously his books are the best so they have to emulate him, but Tolkien did that because he was a linguistics nerd. I think the lesson to be learned from him is not that you have to include elves and deep history and new languages, but that you have to write endlessly about the things you are a huge nerd about and use those things to create your fantasy world

[touches a random piece of dirt in greece] achilles and patroclus were in love here

one of my creative writing professors once said that to evaluate a work as good or not, first you ask what the work is attempting to do, and then you evaluate how well it does it. and this is how to judge everything from critical essays to romance novels to snack packaging to theory tracts.

im realizing very fast that people do not in fact know that sometimes things in stories suck on purpose and it sucking is the point

Reading some more of the preview for this book, and I realise this is by far not the biggest problem, but I'm begging this guy to just use 'shadow' instead of 'umbra'. I promise I will not accuse you of being a philistine.

*throws this in the face of everyone who has ever accused me of writing purple prose*

I thought the Amelia Peabody series was purple. I owe the author an apology. Uffda

doing research in the field of humanities is interesting because there isn’t necessary this paradigm of the most recently published studies are by definition the best that you get in the hard sciences, like sometimes that book published in 1909 really continues to be the best foundational text about 1590s amsterdam, but then again sometimes i’m reading a text published in the 60s and it starts describing italian culture as “oriental” with no further discussion and i’m like hmmm maybe i should find something a little more current

book dedications are so tender here is this piece of art i made for an audience of thousands. but really every word is for you