I write and I art

Eep, okay, well I’m sorry to hear the research isn’t going well. Do make sure you’re researching in the right places and the stuff you’re reading is by actual historians/professionals and not Joe Bob or Rainbow Mountain’s Blog of Skewed Opinions (unfortunately either can also be “professionals”). Don’t use the “revisionist interpretation” unless it’s genuinely concrete and accurate, as opposed to an inaccurate and biased “version” of history we’re familiar with. Sometimes history surprises you. Sometimes your teachers are wrong. Sometimes people really want history to look their way when it didn’t. Learn to be discerning.

If it’s simply an area of history that was not well documented or was from a time that could not be recorded, it’s possible we still don’t have the accurate history. Therefore, theories will fly and “information” will be contradictory. I say this only because I’ve had asks expecting non-existent historical info from me, lol.

Go to a library or an actual online database if the era/location/events you’re researching are not showing up on the first page of Google or all you’re getting is conflicting info.

make up some lie, or

eventually get around to “I am not working because of depression/anxiety,” and subsequently have to deal with whatever bullshit-riddled and completely unsolicited opinions on mental illness this stranger feels obligated to share with me.

So my therapist was like, “You don’t have to do either. You can just say you haven’t worked in a while because you’re recovering from an illness.”

I tried it when the home inspector was here today, and it fucking worked. He was like, “oh, I’m sorry, are you doing better now,” and I’m like yeah, and don’t worry, it’s not contagious, awkward laugh, and we moved on.

Medicine

A Study In Physical Injury

Comas

Medical Facts And Tips For Your Writing Needs

Broken Bones

Burns

Unconsciousness & Head Trauma

Blood Loss

Stab Wounds

Pain & Shock

All About Mechanical Injuries (Injuries Caused By Violence)

Writing Specific Characters

Portraying a kleptomaniac.

Playing a character with cancer.

How to portray a power driven character.

Playing the manipulative character.

Portraying a character with borderline personality disorder.

Playing a character with Orthorexia Nervosa.

Writing a character who lost someone important.

Playing the bullies.

Portraying the drug dealer.

Playing a rebellious character.

How to portray a sociopath.

How to write characters with PTSD.

Playing characters with memory loss.

Playing a pyromaniac.

How to write a mute character.

How to write a character with an OCD.

How to play a stoner.

Playing a character with an eating disorder.

Portraying a character who is anti-social.

Portraying a character who is depressed.

How to portray someone with dyslexia.

How to portray a character with bipolar disorder.

Portraying a character with severe depression.

How to play a serial killer.

Writing insane characters.

Playing a character under the influence of marijuana.

Tips on writing a drug addict.

How to write a character with HPD.

Writing a character with Nymphomania.

Writing a character with schizophrenia.

Writing a character with Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Writing a character with depression.

Writing a character who suffers from night terrors.

Writing a character with paranoid personality disorder.

How to play a victim of rape.

How to play a mentally ill/insane character.

Writing a character who self-harms.

Writing a character who is high on amphetamines.

How to play the stalker.

How to portray a character high on cocaine.

Playing a character with ADHD.

How to play a sexual assault victim.

Writing a compulsive gambler.

Playing a character who is faking a disorder.

Playing a prisoner.

Portraying an emotionally detached character.

How to play a character with social anxiety.

Portraying a character who is high.

Portraying characters who have secrets.

Portraying a recovering alcoholic.

Portraying a sex addict.

How to play someone creepy.

Portraying sexually/emotionally abused characters.

Playing a character under the influence of drugs.

Playing a character who struggles with Bulimia.

Illegal Activity

Examining Mob Mentality

How Street Gangs Work

Domestic Abuse

Torture

Assault

Murder

Terrorism

Internet Fraud

Cyberwarfare

Computer Viruses

Corporate Crime

Political Corruption

Drug Trafficking

Human Trafficking

Sex Trafficking

Illegal Immigration

Contemporary Slavery 

Black Market Prices & Profits

AK-47 prices on the black market

Bribes

Computer Hackers and Online Fraud

Contract Killing

Exotic Animals

Fake Diplomas

Fake ID Cards, Passports and Other Identity Documents

Human Smuggling Fees

Human Traffickers Prices

Kidney and Organ Trafficking Prices

Prostitution Prices

Cocaine Prices

Ecstasy Pills Prices

Heroin Prices

Marijuana Prices

Meth Prices

Earnings From Illegal Jobs

Countries In Order Of Largest To Smallest Risk

Forensics

arson

Asphyxia

Blood Analysis

Book Review

Cause & Manner of Death

Chemistry/Physics

Computers/Cell Phones/Electronics

Cool & Odd-Mostly Odd

Corpse Identification

Corpse Location

Crime and Science Radio

crime lab

Crime Scene

Cults and Religions

DNA

Document Examination

Fingerprints/Patterned Evidence

Firearms Analysis

Forensic Anthropology

Forensic Art

Forensic Dentistry

Forensic History

Forensic Psychiatry

General Forensics

Guest Blogger

High Tech Forensics

Interesting Cases

Interesting Places

Interviews

Medical History

Medical Issues

Misc

Multiple Murderers

On This Day

Poisons & Drugs

Police Procedure

Q&A

serial killers

Space Program

Stupid Criminals

Theft

Time of Death

Toxicology

I wanted to type up a little rundown of quick n dirty writing tips based on things I see a lot in fic/ amateur original manuscripts, and, uh, it turned out that they all revolved around POV. Nailing point of view in fiction writing is both crucial and one of the least intuitive building blocks of writing to learn: an understanding of POV has been the only useful thing i took from my college creative writing classes, and god knows how long I’d have stumbled along without it otherwise.

So! I am saving you, baby writer, the trouble of slogging through a miserable writing class with a professor who’s bitter as FUCK that genre fiction sells better than his “sad white man drinking” lit fic novels. Here are some assorted writing tips/ common mistakes and how to fix them, as relating to POV:

(this turned into a WALL OF TEXT so i will be using gifs to break it up)

> “I watched the ship tilt” “he saw the sky darken” “she noticed flowers growing on the rusted gate.” no. If the character who felt/saw/noticed etc is your POV character, whether in first or third, then this is called filtering and it takes the reader out of the story by subtly reminding them of the separation between the POV character and themselves. in most styles of writing, this is bad, not to mention it unnecessarily complicates your prose. try again: “the ship tilted.” “the sky darkened.” “flowers grew on the rusted gate.” Readers will instinctively understand that the POV character is witnessing the story happen, they don’t need to be told it.

I’m not telling you to never refer to your character “watching” something, of course: “I watched the birds dart around for hours,” isn’t filtering because watching is a notable activity, here, rather than an unnecessary obfuscation of the “real” thing happening. But understand how phrasing can jar readers momentarily apart from the character viewpoint, and use it with intention.

> Close Third Person POV still requires you to be mindful of your POV character. this is a rookie mistake i see allllllll the time. “Josh cried stupid tears at the beautiful display by the dancers,” is a sentence in Josh’s POV. “Stupid” tells us how he feels about the tears, “beautiful” tells us how he feels about the display. ok. all good so far. BUT.

“Josh cried stupid tears at the beautiful display by the dancers. It was everything he’d wanted from this production, from the lighting to the costumes to the exquisite choreography. Martha had to suppress a fond smile at his reaction; he was always so sweetly emotional after the curtain fell.”

Do you see what’s wrong with this paragraph? The first two sentences are Josh’s POV, and then the third one suddenly becomes Martha’s. A lot of amateur writers don’t even realize they’re doing this, which in its most egregious form is called “head-hopping,” but it’s disorienting and distracting for the reader, and makes it harder to connect with a single character. In multi-person close 3rd POV story, the POV should remain the same for an entire chapter (or at least, for an entire scene/ segment,) and change only between them. If you’re new to POV wrangling, watch your adjectives/ interiority (we’ll get to that in a second) and think “which character am I using as a lens right now, and am I being consistent" every once in a while until you get the hang of it.

> Related: let’s talk about interiority. Interiority is a more sophisticated way of thinking of a character’s “internal narration,” IE bits of prose whose job is not to advance the plot, set tone, or describe anything, (although it CAN do any of those things as well, and good prose will multitask) but to give us a specific sense of the character’s internal life, including backstory, likes, dislikes, fears, wants, and personality. In the above example paragraph, the middle sentence “It was everything he’d wanted from this production, from the lighting to the costumes to the exquisite choreography” Is interiority for Josh. It tells us that not only did he love the show, he’s very familiar with this art form and thus had expectations going in; likewise, listing the technical components is a way of emphasizing his enthusiasm while pointing out that it’s informed, implying that Josh himself is intellectually breaking down the performance even in appreciation.

“That’s a lot for a throwaway sentence you made up for an example.” Well, yeah, a little interiority goes a long way. Interiority is what creates the closeness we have to POV characters, the reason we understand them better than the non-POV characters they interact with. It’s particularly key in the first couple chapters of an original work, when we need to be sold on the character and understand the context they operate in.

If readers are having trouble connecting to or understanding the motivations of your character, you might need more interiority; if your story’s plot is agonizingly slow-moving (and you don’t want it to be) or your character is coming off as melodramatic, you might need less. It’s not something you should necessarily worry about; your amount of interiority in a WIP is probably fine, but being able to recognize it for what it is will help you be more mindful when you edit.

(Fanfic as a medium revels in interiority: that’s how you get 10k fics where nothing happens but two characters lying in bed talking and having Feelings. Or coffeeshop AUs that have literally no plot to speak of but are 100k+ long.)

> try not to describe the facial expression of a POV character, even in third person. rather like filtering, it turns us into a spectator of the character when they’re supposed to be our vessel, and since it’s *their* POV, there should be other ways available to communicate their emotion/ reactions. There are ways of circumventing this, (the example sentence where “Martha had to suppress a fond smile” is an example) where their expression is tied up in a physical action, or something done very deliberately by the character and therefore becomes something they would note to themselves, but generally, get rid of “[pov character’s] eye’s widened” and “[pov character] smiled.”

so that’s what i got! go forth and write with beautifully deliberate use of POV.

While dialogue should be guided by reality, it shouldn’t directly imitate it. If you actually wrote out all the pauses and “ums” and all the other small slip-ups people regularly make, it would be unnecessarily hard to follow conversation. That said, dialogue still needs a natural flow to it that can come from things like individual speech patterns, perspective that shapes word choice, sentence fragments, etc.

Take the exposition out. Use regular exposition and context to convey information instead of trying to show it in dialogue. Any conversation shaped specifically around conveying info is going to start sounding “off” really easily, plus it’s a quick track to cheesy and fake-sounding writing. 

Make sure dialogue matters. Just like any other part of a story, dialogue needs to move the story forward (or backward) with a purpose. “Meaningless” conversation shouldn’t exist, but not every word needs to be 100% plot-related. Conversations should change something about the story, or at least teach the reader something about a character, the plot, or setting. 

Watch the tags. It’s best to use “said” as often as possible and save any different tags for when the line really matters. Too many different tags cause the reader to focus on the tags rather than what’s being said, and it can get cheesy rather quickly. (You can use “said” 100% of the time, but some people like to write with variance– and that’s okay! Just be aware of the effects that different tags can have because not all tags are actually tags, some are redundant and weaken writing, and others are distracting due to connotations.)

Over-tagging is a problem too. In cases of 3+ characters all participating, you may have to tag every line, but when there are just two people in a conversation then untagged dialogue allows for easier flow. You still have to remind the reader of the speaker about every 5 lines, but there’s no need to tag every single line. 

It’s better to use an action than an adverb. Adverbs aren’t the end of the world, but they’re still “telling” and weaken your writing. When you want to convey that someone should be saying something a certain way, describe their body language or an action to show the emotion because it better shows the scene by providing a concrete image for the reader.

Different methods of speaking are better shown by word choice and overall syntax. Don’t purposefully misspell a word or write out an accent. It’s one thing to use slang, it’s another to twist the spelling so it imitates the speech on every line. Not only is twisted spelling hard to read and forces the reader to do extra work, it can get offensive in some cases. Loose grammar and sentence fragments are acceptable and allow for an expression of character individuality– spelling, clarity, and portraying a character with respect are the biggest issues here!

Avoid “talking heads” by not just having dialogue. There will definitely be brief moments where conversations snap back and forth between people, but majority of dialogue should not be “he said, she said” over and over again. This is typically a more common issue when the writer fails to have the characters do anything meaningful, often by separating their story into “plot action” and “plot dialogue” when a better writer combines them into the same scene, and even better, the same moment. If your characters aren’t able to do something during the conversation, then take some time to explore the setting or at the very least body language. 

Dialogue shows personality. We all speak differently and so will characters. Some might be more formal than others, some may be more expressive, others can use more precise language, etc. Let dialogue show things about people– it can often save the writer the trouble of spelling it all out in exposition anyway, and it’s more fun for the reader. 

Five sentences maximum per piece of dialogue is a guideline. In the case of a speech or monologue, this won’t be the case, but in the average conversation there shouldn’t be blocky paragraphs of speech. Even if your character actually needs to speak more than five sentences, try and break it up with description, scene interaction, or the other person saying something instead of just having a giant block of text.

Read more. One of the best ways to learn is to read, and novels all have a strong variety of dialogue for you to see examples from. Just remember to critique as you read, noting how the different methods of dialogue affect the story. Every choice has an effect and every effect matters to make sure you get the story you want to get across. 

Read it out loud for pacing and flow. Read your entire story out loud, actually, but in the case of dialogue this technique can be extra useful for determining if it sounds natural or not. 

your writing is a skill, not an inborn talent (unless, yeah, maybe it is). not everyone can do what you do and love

everyone says they want to write a book. everyone has what it takes to write a book. not everyone does it anyway. you be the small percentage of success you read about

your writing will always seem brickshit horrible because you wrote and read it a million times

you love this writing thingy. quitting it will be like cutting off your fingers one by one.

someone out there will want to read what you wrote.

someone out there wants to know what is on your mind. 

someone out there appreciates your art. they will share it with their friends. they will share it with their loved ones. they will share it with their future self because maybe what you wrote saved them.

And yet I see it touted constantly by writers and those who support writers, often bringing up the example of “Steven King writes 8 hours every day!” 

Here’s my counter-advice to anyone and everyone who has heard this “real writers write every day” crap. 

It’s a lie. It’s an absolute, outright lie, to say someone can write every single day without fail. Even the people who do it professionally take breaks. Even the people whose entire livelihoods are based on the written word will take time out and just relax. And that’s not even bringing up writer’s block or anything similar to it, or just feeling like you don’t want to write today. 

That’s all okay. I’ve spent weeks not writing before getting back to it, I’ve dropped projects and started them months later under new names, I’ve done all manner of things that so flagrantly fly in the face of the statement “real writers write every day” that frankly, for a long time, I started to think I wasn’t a real writer.

But that’s bullshit. You can take a break for any reason. Depression, work, illness, and and so forth may actively stop you from writing. You could spend time with your loved ones, or playing video games, or cuddling a dog, or going out to a bar, and choose to not write. That doesn’t make you a fake writer, it just makes you a human. 

A writer has to write, yes, and often too. But there is no universal law that you have to do it every day. There is more to life than staring at words on a screen. As Daniel Jose Older has said: 

Do engineers design every day? Do teachers teach every day? Do actors act every day?

Of course not. Because you need a break. People of all professions generally take off two days a week for a reason, and that reason is that if you kill yourself with your work you can’t actually do it anymore. 

Writers are lucky because the work is more lenient, and you can take off whatever days you choose, or write for three straight weeks before a long sabbatical, or write all day for three days and take the other four off. 

To be a writer, you have to write a lot, and then       – then you have to not write some.