Your Writing Friend

The Bechdel:

two or more women talking to each other about something other than a man

The Mako Mori:

at least one female character with her own narrative arc that is not about supporting a man’s story

The Sexy Lamp:

a female character that cannot be removed from the plot and replaced with a sexy lamp without destroying the story.

Chef’s Specials:

The Anti-Freeze:

no woman assaulted, injured or killed to further the story of another character.

The “Strength is Relative”:

And generates at least one that I think ought to be added:

The Pizza Night Test

Wasn’t sure how to answer, so I found some other writers who could:

Writing on the Nose: what it is and why not to do it.

Show, Don’t Tell: What You Need to Know

Use All Five Senses To Enrich Your Writing

The Art of Subtlety

How being subtle can improve your descriptions

Definitely study more about the “show, don’t tell” guideline as well as the other senses that can be used in writing besides the essential five. Likewise, “on-the-nose” is generally used to refer to dialogue, so if you’re having trouble with that too, search “on-the-nose dialogue” for tips on improving.

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But then Person A finally gets to be alone and gets to their room and looks at the bed and realizes that it’s suddenly a lot bigger. And they’re too short to reach the blinds to close them, and that was always Person B’s job. And they’ll never fold clothes for someone else again, never need to ask someone to turn off the light, never try to stop them from snoring. And then moving away from it all, trying to forget, holding back tears in the kitchen cradling a cup of tea they realize that Person B will never drink tea with them again. And they’ll never help them reach their mug. And when they drop it to the floor, shattering it into millions of helpless individuals there is no one there to tell them not to move, not to step on the glass, not to cut themselves. That the mug has no worth because it’s worth was in the adventures of cleaning up the pieces and remembering it as it was. 

There is no one to stop them from hurting. And there is no one to drink tea.

❛  you’re a weapon and weapons don’t weep.  ❜

❛  hurt me once, I’ll kill you twice.  ❜

❛  never trust a survivor until you learn what they did to stay alive.  ❜

❛  death is the only god that comes when you call.  ❜

❛  I am teeth. I am royal. you are nothing to me.  ❜

❛  the sun will rise and we will try again.  ❜

❛  we’re just kids. we aren’t supposed to be heroes.  ❜

❛  I like my women like I like my Absinthe: bitter and intoxicating.  ❜

❛  what doesn’t kill me better run.  ❜

❛  she wasn’t looking for a knight. she was looking for a sword.  ❜

❛  don’t dehumanize bad people, because it’s their humanity which makes what they’ve done so terrifying.  ❜

❛  she isn’t just pretty. she is otherworldly and vaguely threatening.  ❜

❛  magic is not good or evil. is a knife evil? only if the wielder is.  ❜

❛  I don’t want your crown. see, I’ve come to burn your kingdom down.  ❜

❛  they broke my wings. they forgot I have claws.  ❜

❛  all that blood was never beautiful, it was just red.  ❜

❛  what do you do when there’s no hero in the story? simple. you kill the monster and crown yourself.  ❜

❛  how terrible it is, to love something that death can touch.  ❜

❛  you may not be interested in war, but it is interested in you.  ❜

❛  I feel divinity in my bones like aching. like fire.  ❜

❛  you make me feel and I don’t like it. I want it to stop. now.  ❜

❛  you are losing my interest and that is very dangerous.  ❜

❛  she will burn your kingdoms down, herself with it, if it means your ruin.  ❜

❛  it’s okay to be scared. it means your about to do something brave.  ❜

❛  she looks like divine absolution.  ❜

❛  I will not be another flower, picked for my beauty and left to die. I will be wild, difficult to find and impossible to forget.  ❜

❛  be careful with words. they can be forgive, but never forgotten.  ❜

❛  you not wanting me was the beginning of me wanting myself.  ❜

❛  I’m tired of fighting. for once, I want to be fought for.  ❜

❛  never run back to what broke you.  ❜

❛  I was quite, but not blind.  ❜

❛  your gut knows what’s up. trust that bitch.  ❜

❛  we all eat lies when our hearts are hungry.  ❜

❛  do not judge my story by the chapter you walked in on.  ❜

❛  I’m just a girl, standing in front of a salad, wishing it was a donut.  ❜

❛  you can miss something but not want it back.  ❜

❛  you can’t save people, you can only love them.  ❜

❛  I came, I saw, I made it awkward.  ❜

❛  we buy shite we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like.  ❜

❛  you’re always one decision away from a different life.  ❜

❛  my brain has too many tabs open.  ❜

❛  I’m not saying I hate you, just that you’re like the Monday of people.  ❜

❛  there’s no ‘we’ in fries.  ❜

❛  apology accepted, trust denied.  ❜

❛  death and I have been scandalously intimate for some time now.  ❜

❛  life happens. coffee helps.  ❜

❛  I am mine before I am ever anyone else’s.  ❜

❛  I rely a bit too heavily on alcohol and irony.  ❜

❛  very early in my life it was already too late.  ❜

❛  is that a threat or are you flirting with me.  ❜

❛  was the use of force necessary in completing your objectives?  ❜

❛  I’ll let you drag me to hell if it means you’ll hold my hand.  ❜

❛  I do bad things, and I do them very well.  ❜

❛  you drink too much, you cuss too much and you have questionable morals. you’re everything I ever wanted.  ❜

❛  they will kill you, but first they will have to catch you.  ❜

❛  drugs might kill you but they’ll never break your heart.  ❜

❛  good girls are just bad girls that haven’t been caught.  ❜

❛  a pretty face doesn’t guarantee a pretty heart.  ❜

❛  no airbag, we die like men.  ❜

❛  true evil is, above all, seductive.  ❜

❛  it takes more courage to suffer than to die.  ❜

❛  you must be lucky to avoid the wolf every time. but the wolf? he only needs enough luck to catch you once.  ❜

We’ve got creepy ass 24/7 diners that say open but you can’t find the staff for half an hour. 

There’s a haunted house and a murder/ghost story in every town. 

There’s always a fishing hole no one goes to because of a tragedy living in the waters. 

The woods are dark and hunting season is the only time you enter them. So many ghost stories. Haunted everything. 

The mountains are alive with the sound of screaming. 

Devil’s tramping grounds, hollers, woods, stones, you name it, we got it. 

The old people may be racist and bigoted, but they have skin-crawling tales of caution and they’re all true. 

Everyone knows someone who’s drowned. 

We’ve all got a weird cousin who left the family and never came back. No one knows the circumstances of their disappearance but they were always an “odd duck.” 

Community is a foreign concept to many until autumn. People come in droves from the mountain valleys and hollers bearing crafts and baked goods for sale. Apple butter can be smelled from half a mile away and the sound of fiddles fill the air. You will not see these people again until next autumn. 

There are cemeteries everywhere, but the ones unloved are left for a reason. 

Do not step on the graves, but behind them. If you step on them, apologize to avoid haunting. 

Old oak trees = do not fuck with the tree. 

Where we’re not broken and mended together with threads thick enough to break my wings or cords spindling through your shivering bones. Where no one has to burn, neither drown. Where we’re meant to be. Where the universe stops for us. Where our bodies write   f o r e v e r   instead of  t r a g e d y. Where our names are written on wedding rings instead of gravestones.

Zeus sits at the bar, he’ll buy a thousand and one drinks and the girls who he smiles at will raise their eyebrows and think of the pepper spray tucked into their sleeves.

Hera waits at home. She knows the numbers of all the girls and she has their facebooks open on the computer. Her hands hover over the keyboard., She wants to tell them that men will always lie. She wants to take her own advice. She never will.

Apollo and Artemis travel the world. They are chasing the sun. Chasing the moon. They will never catch up. Their hand are curled around each others hip bones. Never in public though. They look too similar for that now. Society has learned judgement and so they keep their caresses safe in the shadows.

Poseidon wanders the shore. He wears a plastic poncho and carries a bag of trash. His tears mix with the salt water. No one can tell the difference. A girl with hair that moves like serpents trails after him, retribution in her eyes.

Hades lies in bed, his wife curled around him. He smiles because people will always believe in death and finally, finally he has beaten his brothers at something.

Athena paces through college campuses, handing out pamphlets on architecture. She scoffs at professors who are simply going through the motions. She carries signs in her hands as she marches through the streets with the students, screaming about the newest problem. She laughs wild, these children, these fearless children are her people.

Hestia wants her family to come home. She waits in the doorway, arms outstretched and a smile like forgiveness waiting to embrace the siblings whom she knows will never return.

Demeter counts down the days until her daughter returns. She smiles when children cheer over the snow days she gives them. There was a time when she had a child like that.

Persephone kisses her husband and grins when people tremble. She is vengeful and wears flowers in her hair and she will make damn sure that the world will never forget her name.

Ares walks through the Middle East, picking his way around the ruins of an elementary school. He stopped understanding war a long time ago. This was not brave, this was not heroic. This was senseless.

Aphrodite narrows her eyes at boys in cars who yell obscene things. She’s long since stopped romanticizing love. She is gaunt and over worked but sometimes she sees a teenage girl handing her baby over to an older couple who had tried for years and she feels young again. Sometimes, she sees Ares from across the room as soldiers embrace their loved ones and they smile at each other. 

 Hephaestus limps through his shop, his hands are worn down, his back is still twisted but people don’t seem to notice anymore. He makes their furniture, their toys and trinkets and they thank him, they pay him.

 Hermes runs through the streets of New York, Tokyo, London. He is young in this time, young and beautiful and slipping between business men, his hands finding their way into their pockets. He never stops laughing. 

 Dionysus mixes Zeus his drinks. He watches his family grin and cry and get sick in the back room of the bar. He holds back their hair and hands them another drink before they even ask. He’s been here a long time. He’s seen them drunk more often then he’s seen them sober. He is watching them flicker out and fade. 

 The gods are dying. The gods are dead. The gods are us.