Writing Adjacent

Sign-ups Now Open!

Amaze amaze amaze! You can sign up for Project Hail Mary Bingo [here]

Sign-ups will remain open until August 5th, and cards will be delivered in batches weekly. The prompt swap form will open when the first round of cards goes out. 🚀

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

so, let’s see if i can explain this the same way that i learned. read a sentence out loud. you come to a full stop when you hit the period, and you take a normal, breath. but, when you hit a comma, you take a slightly longer pause. and when you hit a dash - you take an even longer pause. 

this is a natural rhythm that we pick up when we’re first taught to read; we do it without even thinking. but when you start to think about it, you realize that it can become a tool.

think of your heartbeat. a period is badump. a comma is badump-dump. and a dash is thump badump. one breath. a longer breath. two breaths.

that means what you read automatically affects the rhythm of your breathing and your heartrate. which means that you can control the amount of physical tension your reader feels… by altering your punction and your sentence structure.

for fast paced scenes, you use short sentences. a lot of hard stops. mostly periods, with just a few comma’s thrown in for the full breath. your reader’s heartrate accelerates. their breathing is slightly and unintentionally, on their end, quicker. you hit the dramatic ending of the scene - and your reader’s body phsyically feels the gasp, the breath of fresh air, of these longer sentences.

now, read that paragraph again ant take note of your natural pauses, and how it subtly affects your breathing. 

the same thing can be said of comma’s and dashes. while they can be used as a breath of fresh air, they can also cause a new line of tension as they lead your reader to hold their breath. during this section, you should use longer sentences; breaking up the harshness of the pauses by using variations of punction. read this paragraph out loud from the start and take note of how long you go between pauses and full breaths. 

and then, comes the biggest trick.

the hard stop.

the paragraph.

because while the periods, commas, and dashes are variations on a short stop, the paragraph is a hard stop. you take a full breath. you pause for a moment, then move to the start of the next paragraph.

which means you can create an entirely new sort of dramatic tension. read the sentences that are in bold. see how you take a naturally longer pause at the end of each paragraph?

see how it makes you feel? 

how it makes you breath different? 

how doing it once, twice, or three times creates a different line of tension? 

this little magic trick can be used to cause a reader’s heartrate to speed up during a fight or chase scene. it can be used to cause their breathing to slow down during moments of dramatic tension, sorrow, or softness. and it can be used to create hard breaks that add a new level of physically felt emphasis to your written work.

it's the early stages of theo and liam's relationship, they are dating but the rest of the pack haven't exactly made peace with it and they still have their doubts and worries.

so, they get into the truck and scott deliberately takes the passenger seat because, subconsciously, he doesn't want theo and liam falling into their usual dynamic.

he wants to keep an eye on things.

and liam hesitates for a second before going to the backseat with stiles.

theo doesn't argue.

liam doesn't argue.

but the ride is... quiet.

no one's really talking and theo's grip on the steering wheel is tighter than normal.

and then they stop somewhere and they get out of the truck.

when they get back in, liam automatically slides into the passenger seat.

not even thinking about it. just instinct.

and theo visibly relaxes.

not dramatically.

just... his shoulders drop a little. his grip on the steering wheel loosens. the tension leaves his jaw. tiny things.

but scott and stiles notice them.

and suddenly liam is talking again.

theo is answering.

they're bickering, they're laughing. they look like they even forgot scott and stiles are in the backseat.

and scott and stiles are sitting in the back thinking, "...when was the last time we saw liam this comfortable?"

because their lifes are basically a sequence of:

getting kidnapped

getting possessed

getting hunted

getting kidnapped again

so, the kid is wound tighter than a damn guitar string half the time.

but here?

he's relaxed. and theo is too.

which is somehow even weirder.

because they have seen theo around the pack.

theo is always watching, always calculating.

always waiting for the moment someone decides they don't want him there anymore.

but next to liam?

none of that is happening.

they notice the way theo automatically hands liam his drink when liam's hands are full.

the way liam knows exactly where theo keeps things in the truck.

the way theo glances at liam every few minutes just to check he's okay.

the way liam immediately notices if theo goes quiet.

and the horrible realization starts setting in.

not, "oh my god, they're dating."

they already knew that. (and they were not exactly fine with it)

the realization is, "oh my god, this isn't temporary."

because scott and stiles have spent months telling themselves;

maybe it's a phase.

maybe liam will realize theo isn't worth the trouble.

maybe theo will leave.

maybe it'll fizzle out.

maybe.

and then they're sitting in the backseat watching two people who fit together so naturally it almost hurts.

watching liam reach over and steal theo's snacks without asking.

watching theo complain while automatically moving the snacks closer.

watching liam grin because he knows theo doesn't actually mean it when he complains.

watching theo pretend to be annoyed when he's obviously fond.

and suddenly all those "maybe"s start looking really stupid.

because it doesn't look fragile, it doesn't look forced.

it doesn't even look new.

it looks like they've been doing this forever.

and scott, who has spent years protecting liam, gets hit with the realization that liam isn't just happy around theo.

he's home around theo.

which is a much scarier thing to realize.

because if liam's heart has decided theo raeken is home, then scott can't really fight that.

he doesn't even want to actually.

and stiles eventually leans toward scott and quietly goes, "i hate that this is kind of adorable."

and scott sighs, watching theo and liam argue over music.

and for the first time he thinks, "maybe this isn't something I need to protect liam from."

maybe this is something that's helping him.

and somewhere up front liam and theo are still arguing about absolutely nothing.

I made this tutorial in January but it only recently occurred to me to post it here on tumblr. It basically looks like IOS messages and you can scroll through the messages like you’re scrolling on a phone. It works with LADS emojis as well.

As you can see from the GIF, the emojis are animated, not still images. The skin can also display still images if you’d like.

N.K. Jemisin's article 'Describing characters of color in writing'

Mary Anne Mohanraj's article on approaching characters of colour

Renee Harleston's article How to 'Write Characters of Color Without Using Stereotypes'

Working with Colour, a resource site for writers

the book Writing the Other by by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, which had a description that cut deep, because I've definitely fallen into this trap out of fear:

and then a video recommended by @sheprd (thank you!) about pitfalls in descriptive language

(also I was gonna call it “The Quiet Die Young” so if you haven’t listened to Painkiller by rainbow kittens surprise and thought of Scott McCall, what’re you doing?)

Sometimes Scott wondered where the human in him ended and the werewolf started. It was a thought that had haunted him since his first full moon. He knew he wasn’t a monster, just a werewolf that had been drilled into his head over the years. But he wasn’t human. He hadn’t been for a long time but sometimes he had trouble concluding when that human part of him really died. When there was no going back, no way around it, no denying it.

When he was first bitten, every new experience felt like he was finally losing his humanity. He was seeing things he shouldn’t be able to see, hearing things he shouldn’t be able to hear and it was all insane. He didn’t need his inhaler. He had done a fucking flip over another player! Scott McCall, human Scott McCall, could not do these things. It felt like his humanity was slipping from him with every action he took. Every full moon, every rage related transformation, every fight or random sleep walk to the wood felt like he was losing a part of himself.

The first time he felt more werewolf than human was when Peter controlled him in the school. He was trying to protect his friends, to save himself. To show that he was just like them, a scared human teenager. But he was the only one that could fight the alpha. But as peter took control of him, the feeling was like nothing he had ever felt before. It felt like a drug, like every part of his body had a brain of it’s own. Like his own brain wasn’t his own. The panic he felt was washed away by the feeling of wanting to do what the voice in his was telling him to do: to go kill his friends. The rage was there, the strength was there. He could imagine, or maybe it was the alpha imagining he couldnt tell, their terrified faces as his claws tore them apart. In the back of his mind he felt disgusted. He could hear a constant stream of consciousness petrified by how wrong this was, how this wasn’t him and he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to be the monster controlling him, he wanted to be normal again, he wanted to be normal so bad. This isn’t human, this isn’t normal. Thankfully the voice was loud enough to get him to lock the door instead of opening it.

When his mom found out he wasn’t human and avoided him for weeks, that was like a slap in the face. A glaring reminder that he wasn’t human. That the woman who birthed him didn’t see him as a human. Because he wasn’t the kid she had given birth to anymore, he was altered. A different species than he had been, an other. He wasn’t her little boy, he was a werewolf.

With this whole “not human” thing, Scotts favorite part was being able to take peoples pain. Probably the strangest part of being a werwolf but it also made Scott feel human. Helping someone in anyway you can is the most human thing you can do. So when Void took that pain from him, the pain he had taken from others, Scott had felt so human that it didn’t actually feel human. The pain leaving his body left some kind of relief, some kind of emptiness. It felt kind of…good, that was the most surprising part. It took everything from Scotts body that he was using to be human.

When he bit Liam it was the most unhuman he had felt in months. He couldn’t be human if he could make someone not human. If he could ruin someones life like this. He never wanted to do it, never wanted to subject someone to the life he had been living since. And God Liam was just a freshmen younger than Scott had been, the kid was only 14, maybe 15, Scott didn’t even know. Fuck he didn’t even know this kid and he had just ruined his life. He had told Liam that he wasn’t a monster, that he was werewolf. But some part of Scott wished he could say that things would stay the same, that Liam would still be the same human he was. But he knew that wasn’t true.

Then he argued with Stiles, that depressing rainy night where he just wanted to know one thing: Did Stiles kill Donovan in cold blood? Was Theo right? Was Stiles keeping a murder from him? The confrontation hadn’t gone anything like he wanted it to. Stiles yelled, Scott yelled and Stiles didn’t say he didnt do. Instead he basically said that he did it because he was only human. Was Scott not human anymore? Did Stiles not see him as a human? As someone, no something, that could make mistakes? Scott wished his enemies would just die all the time but he couldn’t kill them. He had the ability to kill them. Did that make him not human; that he could kill people so easily? He thought not wanting to kill was the most human thing about him but did Stiles just feel like he was less human or no, more than human because he refused to kill?

But really, in his head it was 30 minutes after his mom had revived him in the school library.

(also I was gonna call it “The Quiet Die Young” so if you haven’t listened to Painkiller by rainbow kittens surprise and thought of Scott McCall, what’re you doing?)

Sometimes Scott wondered where the human in him ended and the werewolf started. It was a thought that had haunted him since his first full moon. He knew he wasn’t a monster, just a werewolf that had been drilled into his head over the years. But he wasn’t human. He hadn’t been for a long time but sometimes he had trouble concluding when that human part of him really died. When there was no going back, no way around it, no denying it.

When he was first bitten, every new experience felt like he was finally losing his humanity. He was seeing things he shouldn’t be able to see, hearing things he shouldn’t be able to hear and it was all insane. He didn’t need his inhaler. He had done a fucking flip over another player! Scott McCall, human Scott McCall, could not do these things. It felt like his humanity was slipping from him with every action he took. Every full moon, every rage related transformation, every fight or random sleep walk to the wood felt like he was losing a part of himself.

The first time he felt more werewolf than human was when Peter controlled him in the school. He was trying to protect his friends, to save himself. To show that he was just like them, a scared human teenager. But he was the only one that could fight the alpha. But as peter took control of him, the feeling was like nothing he had ever felt before. It felt like a drug, like every part of his body had a brain of it’s own. Like his own brain wasn’t his own. The panic he felt was washed away by the feeling of wanting to do what the voice in his was telling him to do: to go kill his friends. The rage was there, the strength was there. He could imagine, or maybe it was the alpha imagining he couldnt tell, their terrified faces as his claws tore them apart. In the back of his mind he felt disgusted. He could hear a constant stream of consciousness petrified by how wrong this was, how this wasn’t him and he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to be the monster controlling him, he wanted to be normal again, he wanted to be normal so bad. This isn’t human, this isn’t normal. Thankfully the voice was loud enough to get him to lock the door instead of opening it.

When his mom found out he wasn’t human and avoided him for weeks, that was like a slap in the face. A glaring reminder that he wasn’t human. That the woman who birthed him didn’t see him as a human. Because he wasn’t the kid she had given birth to anymore, he was altered. A different species than he had been, an other. He wasn’t her little boy, he was a werewolf.

With this whole “not human” thing, Scotts favorite part was being able to take peoples pain. Probably the strangest part of being a werwolf but it also made Scott feel human. Helping someone in anyway you can is the most human thing you can do. So when Void took that pain from him, the pain he had taken from others, Scott had felt so human that it didn’t actually feel human. The pain leaving his body left some kind of relief, some kind of emptiness. It felt kind of…good, that was the most surprising part. It took everything from Scotts body that he was using to be human.

When he bit Liam it was the most unhuman he had felt in months. He couldn’t be human if he could make someone not human. If he could ruin someones life like this. He never wanted to do it, never wanted to subject someone to the life he had been living since. And God Liam was just a freshmen younger than Scott had been, the kid was only 14, maybe 15, Scott didn’t even know. Fuck he didn’t even know this kid and he had just ruined his life. He had told Liam that he wasn’t a monster, that he was werewolf. But some part of Scott wished he could say that things would stay the same, that Liam would still be the same human he was. But he knew that wasn’t true.

Then he argued with Stiles, that depressing rainy night where he just wanted to know one thing: Did Stiles kill Donovan in cold blood? Was Theo right? Was Stiles keeping a murder from him? The confrontation hadn’t gone anything like he wanted it to. Stiles yelled, Scott yelled and Stiles didn’t say he didnt do. Instead he basically said that he did it because he was only human. Was Scott not human anymore? Did Stiles not see him as a human? As someone, no something, that could make mistakes? Scott wished his enemies would just die all the time but he couldn’t kill them. He had the ability to kill them. Did that make him not human; that he could kill people so easily? He thought not wanting to kill was the most human thing about him but did Stiles just feel like he was less human or no, more than human because he refused to kill?

But really, in his head it was 30 minutes after his mom had revived him in the school library.

me: omg it's william. of shakespeare fame

book: he was scribbling with his quill pen mumbling to himself "hmm what if there was a play.... but it was WITHIN the play..."