The SpanNard Agenda

it is always narratively correct to make your characters sleep together before they sort through the hundreds of lies and misdirections between them. make things worse make things worse make things worse #i love betrayal #i love lying #i love people feeling bad about themselves

You can make a movie with where the only white character is a man named Ray Cism whose one line of his 16 seconds of screen time is “I seriously hate women and minorities.” and you’ll find fifty bajillion reader x Ray Cism fanfics and renaissance style drawings of him with a halo of golden light

it is honestly amazing how much of writing and editing is just. logistics. like... do i use a name here or a pronoun? if i move this dialogue tag to the middle of this line and break it in half, does the end of the line hit harder that way? what if i move the tag to the front? what if i remove it entirely? ...wait, whose point of view am i in; can i reasonably say this character is appalled, or must i say they look or seem or sound appalled? is this a deliberate action or a step-removed one; is her hand closing on his shoulder, or is she closing her hand on his shoulder? environment environment environment, we need to break all this dialogue up with some narration, the scene is coming untethered. what! are! they doing! with! the rest of their bodies that are not hands! fuck fuck fuck FUCK i forgot we covered this two chapters ago and now i either need to cut this whole chunk or find a reason to reprise the conversation from earlier. name or pronoun? name or pronoun? name or pronoun? move this clause around in this sentence? oh i'll add this phrase-- nope, never mind, past!me added the same phrase two lines down. okay, if i add too much environmental narration it's going to take away from this bit, but not enough and it won't feel grounded. what if i move this to its own line? where the FUCK are their hands?

One of the best things about being a writer is thinking of something small you can add to your work that’s just. Devastating. Like you’re sitting there going. Oh. That would be diabolical. People would get really riled up about that. Exquisite. Let’s do it.

i bring a sort of "there's a fatphobic terror at the centre of all eating disorders" vibe to the conversation that thin people don't like to hear

wish everyone could perceive the Vague Concepts in my head because i just know you would looove my Vague Concepts. you would think im so smart if you saw the misty clouds of Vague Concepts floating around in my head. #MyVagueConcepts

i agree so much about making your blorbos pathetic but i do fear that many take this to mean 'make them more traditionally feminine/submissive' which genuinely hurts my soul. make your blorbos pathetic in interesting character-oriented ways. understand their neuroses and turn the dials up to eleven. juxtapose the parts of life they handle extremely well with the parts of their lives that make them eat shit. make them angry. make them cold. make them pave their own way to hell while building walls preventing them from seeing any other way. please i'm begging you no more pathetic as an euphemism for bottoming im gonna mclose it.

You actually cannot skip to being good at a creative endeavour that you haven't put much practice into. You cannot trick your way out of the 'knows that your work is not what you want it to be but don't know how to improve it' stage by planning or reading or talking about it really really hard. At some point you just have to craft through it until your brain finds it's own unique way back to the 'everything I make slaps' stage and be prepared to start the cycle all over again. You just have to make that project you're excited about slightly less good than you want it to be. (Says this standing in a pool of blood and covered in blood and also coughing up a little blood)

everyone stop reblogging this I hate to be reminded of my own good advice

I don’t know why I’m making it exclusive to books. Any other media too. Sometimes I forget that there are things other than books.

lesbian scifi is so easy. here’s a woman in cargo pants and a tank top on a spaceship. are you with me

maybe it’s not even cargo pants. maybe it’s coveralls rolled to + tied around the waist. maybe she even has fuckoff boots

Reblog and put in the tags a character whose arc was completely destroyed by bad writing.