Luckyy19

This guy is absolutely right. How can you "reclaim" voices from a culture that's not yours?? Ancient Greek women are not from your own culture - if you even recognize that Greek culture is its own culture, separate from yours.

when you’re writing a conflict between two characters or factions of characters, you need to consider whether their disagreement over the premise or over the methods. put another way: do they disagree on the problem or the solution?

this is a genuinely tricky thing to identify, especially in very complex narratives, so let’s do some very simple examples.

the situation: pacifist nation X is about to be invaded by empire Y. the laws and cultural practices of the Xians make violence and death so abhorrent that even accidental death is as minimized as possible. the Ylings, on the other hand, are totally cool with straight up murder and think diplomacy is for wimps, but are also pragmatic enough that they won’t waste troops if they don’t need to. the king of X calls in his council and asks for their opinions.

character A: It is more noble to die for one’s beliefs than to live having broken them. We should allow the Ylings to invade us and if we die, we die. character B: If all life is sacred, then our lives are also sacred. We must fight back against the Ylings, even though that means we’d be committing violence.

A and B agree on premise but not solution: they both acknowledge that the Yling invasion is a bad thing that will lead to their deaths if unopposed and that the nonviolence code is important; what they disagree on is priorities and methods.

character C: We should invite them into our nation as honored guests. Maybe they’ll spare us or at least kill us more mercifully. character D: We should propose an alliance and intentional annexation in exchange for our lives. Being part of the Yling Empire is a pretty sweet deal, actually.

C and D agree on solution but not premise: they’re both okay with just letting the empire walk in and invade, but C thinks the invasion would be a bad thing and is just trying to minimize the damage, and D thinks it would be a good thing and wants to maximize the rewards.

character E: We should fight the Ylings and stay a sovereign nation; the nonviolence code is stupid and holding us back. character D: We shouldn’t fight the Ylings and try to be peacefully part of their empire instead; we’d be true to our code and reap the rewards of an alliance.

E and F disagree on both premise and solution.

Now, all possible permutations of this argument are fine. “Is this the best way to solve the problem?” and “What actually is the problem?” are both great sources of conflict. Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s entire plot is an argument over the methods to prevent death and crime, but everyone agrees that crime is bad; one of Zuko’s big character development moments is when he realizes that the problem with the world isn’t the other nations ungratefully rejecting the prosperity and unity offered by the Fire Nation, but that the Fire Nation routinely commits genocide in their quest to colonize the rest of the world.

The issue is when a disagreement over methods is treated like a disagreement over premise. The characters are positioned like one side’s entire worldview is correct and the other is wrong, but it turns out they actually disagree with what the other does rather than what the other believes.

A big giveaway that what you’re seeing is about methods and not underlying beliefs? If at any point it is said or implied that one character “goes too far.” “Too far” implies a point before that cutoff that the other characters or the reader would be okay with. You can’t go too far if going any distance in that direction is wrong. “Frollo in the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame goes too far when he tries to kill all the Romani in the city” implies that the problem isn’t racism in general, but mass murder specifically, and that if Frollo was only nonviolently racist, that would be fine!

Like, you know the joke about the guy who offers a woman a million dollars to sleep with him, then ten dollars after she accepts the million dollar offer, and when she’s offended and says she’s “not that kind of woman,” he says, “Oh, we agreed you were that kind of woman, now we’re just haggling over price”? If your characters are arguing about the best way to solve a problem, they have already agreed about the existence and nature of the problem. Now they’re just haggling over price.

Again: that kind of storyline is okay if you actually do want to discuss extremism v. moderation of the same basic principle. It’s okay for two characters to argue over the best way to free all of their country’s slaves. It’s also okay for two characters to discuss the best way of practicing slavery, if you want to show how ingrained it is in society or how even the character you think is a moderate is still evil or something. What doesn’t work is if your intention is to say how awful slavery is, but then the entire conflict is over the treatment of slaves rather than whether slavery is okay.

There is the problem, the end, and the means, and those are all things that can be disagreed with in different ways.

Let’s take a very basic scenario. Two people live together. There is a bookshelf full of books and there are books all over the floor.

Disagreement on the problem:

Person 1 thinks there are too many books on the floor. Person 2 likes having books on the floor because it makes the house feel lived-in.

Disagreement on the end:

Person 1 and 2 have agreed that there are too many books on the floor. Person 1 thinks the ideal end is that the house has exactly one bookshelf worth of books in it. Person 2 thinks the ideal solution is every book remaining in the house but simply being somewhere that is not the floor.

Disagreement on the means:

Person 1 and 2 have agreed that the ideal solution is every book remaining in the house and being on a bookshelf. Person 1 thinks they should buy more bookshelves to fit every book. Person 2 thinks they should double- or triple-stack their shelves rather than spend money on new bookshelves.

None of the humans guarding him have even spoken to him. He doesn’t recognize the expressions on their mobile faces— that wasn’t on any of the flash cards given to him when the humans first joined the federation. They look still, like their flesh has hardened into exoskeleton. Their eyes gleam when they look at him.

He doesn’t know why it unsettles him so much. He wants to fly away, but his wings are bound much like all three sets of his thoracic arms. That’s another new thing – he did not know the humans had built devices like this, shackles and bonds strong enough to accommodate his species’ anatomy.

A flash of memory: Laser canons strong enough to tear through his ship’s shields and the horrible sound of ripping metal as their attackers latched onto the exterior hull and tore through it. Who could have known the humans capable of such savage interstellar warfare? Who could have foreseen?

The doors in front of him slide open and the human Captain strides in. He doesn’t know her name, but he recognizes her from the brief message she’d transmitted to him before the attack. Commander Mag feels his unease slide away. Finally someone of adequate rank to understand that he surrendered!

“I surrendered—“

“Yes, I’ve heard,” the captain says. She strides toward him, her footsteps oddly heavy for a being half his size. She stops in front of where he’s been forced to kneel. Her eyes, like her crew’s, glitter. “I suppose you want my thanks.”

ok awesome

so i have finished a psychological thriller novel, and have begun the process of doing research so i can prepare to query agents. now, my novel has some pretty intense triggers in it, so i am aware it’s a bit of a hard sell– that being said, many agents have a “do not send me your novel if it has these things” list, so that’s what I’m looking for so i don’t accidentally trigger someone.

so i’m going down this list, and i find this agent. their “do not send me” list includes the following: non-consent/sexual violence, age gaps, teacher/student relationships, stalkers, cheating, everyone dies at the end, miscarriage/pregnancy, and abuse masked as love.

okay, cool! everyone has different tolerances for stuff, and it’s perfectly reasonable to not want to be involved with a story that has stuff you’re uncomfortable with. not the agent for me, but good on them for defining their boundaries.

but then i scroll back up and they’re requesting for gothic horror.

excuse me?????????

gothic horror without pregnancy or miscarriage? gothic horror without cheating? without stalking? gothic horror without major character deaths? GOTHIC HORROR WITHOUT ABUSE BEING FRAMED AS LOVE AND THE INTERROGATION OF THAT DYNAMIC?????

HEY CAN I GET A GOTHIC HORROR WITH NOTHING???

And a lot of people would rather keep it unfinished and perfect in their head than done and flawed and out there. an unfinished draft can still be anything. once you finish it, it becomes one specific thing with specific failures that specific people can point to. so you keep tweaking. you keep saying it's not ready. you go back to the beginning again.

In a Victorian world of eternal night, where crystal lights flicker and vampires lurk, a mysterious death suggests more at play than meets the eye. Runner Owen Rosedown investigates…

It's an ordinary little house, this Honoria. Owen does not trust it, or the ones who live inside. The lady of the house is dead. Her husband is far more eager to move on than he should be, and far too close to his dead wife's nurse. Was Mrs. Albright's death a suicide, fueled by heartbreak? Or is this exactly what it seems to be?

Owen writes a letter, never to be sent, explaining it all.

Cast of Characters:

Owen Rosedown: Our hero, a young trans man employed by a prince. Why would a prince's servant care about this situation? Read and find out.

Mrs. Albright: Perfect wife, perfect mother. Perfect woman in the eyes of society. When she became disabled after an illness, words became her sanctuary. She had nothing else.

Mr. Albright: A barrister, openly callous and clueless about his wife now that she is gone. His attention is locked onto young Miss Wellstone. What does he really want?

Miss Wellstone: A former painter turned personal nurse, she was hired by Mr. Albright to care for his wife and the house when she became too ill to leave the sickroom. What else does she care for?

Miss Dolly: Mrs. Albright's maid, a deeply loving young woman who is devastated by the loss of her former mistress. She makes excellent tea.

Honoria: a small home in a very good neighborhood for the upper middle class. A tiny gothic marvel of stone and wood, in front it mourns with black ribbons. But out of sight, the garden is overgrown, and inside it is as silent and cold as the grave…

This WIP is a gothic story. It is meant to disturb you, scare you, and titillate you in different and sometimes overlapping ways. This series will only get more intense as it continues. Hope you're ready!

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