#out**

also p.s IF you don't mind, do you have any tips for writing? I've been trying to improve at it for awhile, and I have made some progress but I tend to struggle writing stuff revolving settings and how people interact with each others.

Otherwise that's all, love your works :)

thank you!! im not as confident in my descriptions but i do love writing dynamics. i am lucky to have so many in my life to draw upon. so thank u!!

as for advice!! i will tell u a secret. there are RARELY words in my mind. i am thinking about stories all the time -- genuinely all the time -- but they are almost always movies in my head. sometimes comics or animations, but really every idea i have is transliterated from movie to fic.

and like.......it kind of sucks actually. nothing i come up with ever translates as nicely as i would like it to to literature. there are some things words cannot convey, and it never stops frustrating me that what i write is not the same or as good as the movie in my head. (if i had a bajillion dollars, i would spend it all on movie sets and copyright fines. lol.)

however i've noticed that in the act of transliterating my brain movies to written fic, i'm pretty good at moving the 'camera' and writing dialogue. straight dialogue is easy -- i can just write down whatever convo i hear in my head -- the challenge there is the body language; i will never be able to use words to say what body language says but i have learned over time that certain deliberate movements can very clearly communicate emotions or even sentences. lemme see if i can come up with an example:

"I just -- well." Will scratches the back of his neck, staring out to the common. "It's gonna be pretty empty? At camp, I mean. So if you wanted to hang out." He looks back abruptly, eyes shining something hopeful and biting back a lopsided smile. "I would be amenable!"

like i have a very clear picture of what will is doing here. he is standing on the porch of the hades cabin, literally minutes before curfew, rocking back and forth in his scrubs he forgot to take off, avoiding nico's eyes as he asks him on a totally not-date. totally. but i have to pick and choose what motions to write, because 1) when you space out dialogue, even by a sentence, it reads as a pause between sentences and words. which is the point, a lot of the time, but if you describe too much between dialogue you'll have pauses where you don't want them, and 2) everything must be INTENTIONAL. if you describe a scene in intense detail, that means it will be important to the story. whether or not readers consciously know this, it is one of the rules of stories -- lots of details, lots of importance. you have to pick and choose. you don't want to overstate the importance of a gesture anymore than you want to understate an important one. and if you break this rule but overdetailing constantly, nothing seems important.

ANYWAYS.

the other part of that -- 'moving the camera', which i wrote for the setting piece of your question. when i am imagining stories in my head, when i'm watching them, i get a camera focusing on what's important. does that make sense? in film, the camera knows that you, audience, are watching. in a pov film -- like ferris bueller, or deadpool -- that characters know the audience is there and speak to the audience (percy does this in his books, too). but in most movies, the characters do not know that they are in a movie. they are unaware that they are characters. you, audience, are a voyeur, intruding on their lives, with the help of the invisible cameraman, who takes videos from their lives and brings them to you. the cameraman is your window. and you, audience, know, as a person yourself, that the story you see on the screen leaves out details of life (like using the toilet, sleeping eight whole hours, etc etc). so you understand, even subconsciously, that the cameraman only shows you scenes that matter, that the cameraman moves from angle to angle and shot to shot. i, writer, know this also. so when i am imagining these movies in my head, the camera in my mind shows me the important angles, the important scenes. characters say things in my head and the cameraman shows me the reaction of the characters around them, and then i know who to focus on, when the camera changes, when to move the camera around.

this is a very long winded and kind of metaphorical way to say a couple things that i will now spell out:

practice. ALL THE TIME. ive been writing an a nearly daily basis for the past four years. i don't post everything. the really early stuff was awful. but i improve because i PRACTICE.

learn intentionally. i have taken writer's craft courses, i have read essays and listened to writers talk. i don't just learn by doing, i learn by LEARNING. i learn from professionals. i know it doesn't seem like that but you didn't just magically learn how to write well when learning english. it is a skill and an art and there are specific actions that you need to do to write well. you have to look into them. you have to practice using them.

read/watch and NOTICE. i do not just read or watch for fun, although i do love to read and watch films. i look for symbolism, for details, for mannerisms. if something is really good, look at it again. what emotion is the character feeling? how do you know? what did they do to show it to you? how would you describe that character's tone of voice? why has the film chosen to show you this angle? what details are present in the paragraph? how does this character form dialogue? what does this character care about? how do you know? you need to do literature circle on the regular i mean it.

ENJOY what you're doing. i write for fun. i write for me, for my own audience -- although the attention i get on here doesn't hurt lol. it is so much easier to care about something you love. practice doing something you want to do, write because you want to see your own stories in words, not because you want to impress others. impressing others will come.

⚡️Doing a second pre-order round for these dapu stands! (xxx) ⚡️