RedHunterRock

"If I put it to paper then it will become sullied by my inexperience, mangled by my stilted pacing and weak dialogue. Everyone will be able to recognize my fingerprints on its body, and the headline will read 'A tragedy! The grand vision, strangled by a clumsy oaf!'"

And I am taking your hands in mine and I am looking you in the eye.

Your story isn't complete.

It feels complete, until you become bold enough to strike the first words. And then you will realize that you only know half of the story. A quarter of it. A handful of fragments.

Your characters will blurt out bits of their past that you didn't know existed until you reached the period at the end of the sentence. Whole countries will rise up between marching lines of ink, bitter rivalries and hopeless loves and ill-healed scars. You will be driven to research trade routes in Morocco in the 14th century and the chemical composition of bulletproof glass (which you will then call 'acrylic' anyway, because it flows better than 'polycarbonate'.)

And dear friend let me tell you, letting yourself write the story is a fae bargain. Because as you transcribe the words, beamed into your mind and flowing through your beautiful hands (or voice, or whatever tool you choose as your hammer for the forge) you will get to read your story, too.

You will falter. You will doubt, and file away letters and lines as you wonder 'but is this good enough?', and some stories will never make it out of your workshop.

It is all worth it to feel the euphoria of those first few letters striking the paper, when you become the first person to ever see this story. And once you experience that joy, you will return to the forge again and again.

1. If you see this post, highly recommend taking it as an opportunity to set a timer for 15 minutes and switch over to ACTIVITY YOU ENJOY. if after those 15 minutes, you want to go back to scrolling, that's okay!

2. Huge shout out to this popping up in my notifs often, bc I do go back to activity.

YOUR BODY DOES THIS ON PURPOSE

art block is your brain telling you to do studies.

draw a still life. practice some poses. sketch some naked people. do a color study. try out a different technique on a basic shape.

art block doesnt stop you from drawing, it stops you from making your drawings look the way you want them to. and thats because you need to push your skills to the next level so you can preform at that standard

Write a description of an object. write the weather today. Write a made up characterization of a random photo of an actor from the internet as to the character they are in that picture. Write a little story about your pet’s day. Write about spilling soup and make it super dramatic and tragic. Write about someone’s day being ruined and make it funny. Write a meetcute coffeeshop AU of two OCs you’d never put together- maybe from different stories. Write them breaking up.

One of my professors was straight up like "I don't want you reading papers about this book until we finish it!" and we had writing things for the first 20 minutes of every class because he wanted to know what WE thought, not what we had become convinced was THE thing to think.

When I was in my second year of college, I spiraled out into this whole "Jane Eyre is a lesbian!" thing, and my professor (not the same guy as above but delightfully insane in her own right) was like, "Wow, I've never heard this from anyone," and instead of being like, "um this is not what has been agreed upon by everyone else" went "Tell me more." Now, as a forty year old woman who has never stopped engaging with stories on both an enjoyment and academic level, the paper I would write with age and distance would be more "Homosociality, desire, and the domesticated male in Jane Eyre" or something like that, nineteen year old me was a little reductive and simple, but same vibes.

But my professor did not think I was right, she thought I was being INTERESTING, and so she encouraged me and championed me to write that paper and I actually presented it at the student division of a conference! The cool thing about that was, that when I was defending it, I was having to think about it, but it was in the spirit of collaboration, it felt like. No one was trying to 'win' the conversation.

Doc, what the fuck are you--I saw a really interesting thing this morning, someone talking about Shrek, of all things, and how they thought it was about how you cannot turn an ogre into a man, but he can make you become an ogre. And I immediately went, "Wow! Okay, interesting, not how I read that at all, TELL ME MORE." It was really jarring for me, then, to see pretty much every comment be like, 'uh you are wrong and also stupid." Sure, maybe that's not the intention of the work, but I don't for one goddamn motherfucking second think Charlie Bronte was sitting down going "I am going to write a woman so gay..." nor do I think the read of her as same sex-attracted is the end all be all of interpretations. It's mine, for sure! But like...talking about stories is supposed to be fun and it's supposed to be about possibility.

That one post got me thinking about how we are, in fandom often all looking at this same text, and there's immense pressure to have a 'right' interpretation--I was at the nexus of so many Sailor Moon fandom wars, and while I got into a few tussles, I was also stupid to do that. This characters are not real, and I was shutting down POSSIBILITY. And even after I was like, 'Wow, I don't think this is actually a very fun way to do stuff" it turns out you can't magically give everyone the same revelation you have simultaneously. Which is upsetting. And I see these same patterns repeat over and over and over again.

In my old age, I'm less interested in he "He would not say that" and more interested in "Cool, tell me why he would say that?"

Don't misunderstand me, there are points of view and ideas on different texts where I'm like, "Hm. I don't care to engage with that." Remember that the window we're looking out of is as important as what we're looking at, and will DOUBTLESS change the appearance. But the whole reason we have each other is to try and find other windows! It's not actually to find someone who is the next pane of glass in your same window. I miss that environment, where you could trust that everyone coming to the table was engaging with the same ground rules and that there was an expectation of, detachment doesn't quite get to the heart of what I'm talking about, but we were expected not to take the text or the analysis of it personally, even when it was hard. And sometimes it was. But I think it led to me having--for example it's crazy to me to have one 'right read' on any given text. I had a SUPER FUCKING ANIMATED conversation with a fellow lit nerd about whether or not GdT's Frankenstein was emotionally faithful to the text (which is not the same as being literally faithful nor the same as being good)and it was so fun, EVEN THOUGH we were coming at it completely opposed. But it was so fucking fun.

I wish I could do that with anime and cartoons, but you can't. People take Shrek personally. So I'll never have that same fun.

The final, brilliant word on passive voice.

“She was killed [by zombies.]” <— passive