LWYZLWYZ

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
ask-whitepearl-and-steven

oubii asked:

would you have any small writing tips to share with others who are attempting to write their own stories?

ask-whitepearl-and-steven answered:

Sure.

Disclaimer: This is not a full on tutorial on how to write. These are just tiny, tiny little grains of wisdom of things I realized here and there. Do not eat this advice like a full course meal. It isn’t one. It’s just a dusting of some spices, and I am salt bae-ing them over you, but they are not calorically relevant without a story.

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1. Help your readers read your story.

AKA: If you want your readers to build a house, you better take them to a Home Depot and teach them how to use a screwdriver first.

You want your readers to read your story easily? You gotta make your story easy to read. That means learning how to make sentences easier to understand. That means breaking up walls of text into smaller bites. That means - yes - spelling words consistently and using accessible (not Correct, necessarily, but ACCESSIBLE) grammar!

You want your readers to understand your world? You gotta give your readers tools to understand it with. That means explaining new concepts! That means describing stuff a lot! That means using visual language if you don’t have actual visuals!

Your readers will not read your mind to know what you MEANT to say. You have to say what you mean. You have to mean what you write. Learn to write clearly. Learn to help your readers.

2. Something that takes you a month to make will take your audience ten minutes to read.

You want to spend an hour drawing one comic panel? Great. You wanna spend an hour writing a single paragraph? Fantastic. You wanna use up a week perfecting a script? Amazing!

Your readers will still glance at that panel for a second before moving on. Your readers will still eat that paragraph in a bite. Your readers will skim that script. If you’re lucky.

You cannot control how much your work is appreciated. But you CAN control how much of your time you sacrifice to make it.

Balance the scales.

3. You are not talented.

Neither am I. Nor are any of us.

Listen to me. Listen.

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Talent is a beautiful, useful word. But it often lies to us. It suggests that we are born better than others.

This is not often accurate. What talent hides within itself is not pre-ordained inherent skill. It is not something you are birthed being. It is not a statistical difference of physicality.

Talent starts with passion.

Maybe you have passion for stories - so you beg your grandfather to read to you before you can recognize words, and you write a lot in every school assignment, and you pay attention to EVERY story you watch in school plays, and you observe all the characters you see in movies, and you CARE. So. Much. And this moves you to try to write, and then to try again, and then to try harder.

Talent does not exist, because no amount of ‘you were made for running’ can make you run. No amount of 'you were the son of great authors’ can make you write.

But inherent curiosity can push you forward. Inherent curiosity can make you watch, and observe, even before you understand you are observing. Inherent curiosity for your personal interests makes you a fan of writing, of drawing, of world-building. It makes you research how to be a great author before you even know what research is. It auto-tunes you to what you know is good about these things, and it gives you the necessary tools to know what will work and what won’t.

So when you think you are talented, understand that this is not something that was done to you in the womb. It was something you raised, and watered like a seed, before you even knew what you were growing.

Don’t rely on talent. Understand that you got this far because you CARE about this thing. And don’t forget to care. Because that’s what has carried you this far, and it is the only thing that can carry you even farther.

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also, cringe is dead.

rugnor
purpleweredragon

Every day, millions of plastic pellets – lentil-sized pieces of microplastic – are pouring into our ocean, spilling from ships transporting them around the world.

You may not realise it, but almost all of the plastic products we use – from water bottles to toothbrushes to fridges – are made from these melted-down pellets or ‘nurdles’.

And though they’re only tiny, they’re causing huge harm to marine wildlife and habitats – smothering seagrass meadows and filling the stomachs of seabirds and seals, fish and turtles, meaning many starve to death.

It’s a scandal that these pellets are being allowed to pollute our ocean, especially when it’s preventable.

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) is the United Nations agency responsible for the safety and security of shipping and the prevention of pollution from ships. It has the power to classify plastic pellets as marine pollutants, which would make them subject to much stricter shipping regulations – immediately.

rugnor
werewolfetone

That reminds me it's so wild when one of those people on here who is a "leftist" with 10000 terms and conditions to that leftism that add up to them being a vague centrist liberal accuses someone of being a bad leftist for holding, like actual hardline anarcho-communist or marxist-leninist or whatever beliefs. like the people who go "piracy is good unless it's this or this or this or this or this or" and the "it's not punk to steal from small businesses" type posts and the people who insist that millionaires are actually working class. most embarrassing type of guy on this site imo

rugnor
fhtagn-and-tentacles

LOVECRAFT MEETS GRIMSHAW 

by Oliver Wetter
arachcobra

What I personally love about these, is the vibe they give off that the eldritch beings are normal. Just part of the world. Like, you’re on the way home and you just pause and step aside, because the pferldescryb is making its way down Main Street. Or you stop by the river, as a nearby lady remarks that’s it’s a beautiful full eye today. It’s sort of a cozy weirdness.

rugnor
spitblaze

'the human body is perfect god doesnt make mistakes' what about wisdom teeth then. huh. gonna let those bastards grow in and fuck up your jaw for god. didnt think so

nicodiangeloisliterallymefr

also the exploding appendix

enkiduofvideogames

there's an entire book about all the ways the human body is fucked up, but the highlights I remember are:

-The blood vessels for our rods and cones in our eyes don't run behind them but rather in front of them. It's like putting the power cables *over* a camera's lens

-the nasal sinus cavities fucked up during evolution. when our skulls shortened, we went from having a straight shot from one end to the other to having basically a basin which can collect mucus, which then has the actual exit for the chamber at the top of it. this normally isn't a problem bc cillia can work viscous mucus up it, but when we get sick and produce super watery mucus, it no longer works, which is why our noses get stuffed up.

the book is called Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes. I recommend it.

fittingoutjane

Most mammals can’t get scurvy. They make their own Vitamin C. But in primates, the gene to make it is broken. Normally, when an important gene breaks, the organism dies and has no surviving descendants, but when it broke a few million years ago, our ancestors were living in a lush climate with lots of fruit and survived the failure just fine.

Then humans invented fire and clothing, and moved to colder climates where fresh food was only available part of the year, and scurvy was born.

And our reproduction, oh heavens. There are SO MANY WAYS that human reproduction is fucked up that simply DO NOT APPLY to other animals, even the our nearest relatives, the great apes. When a gorilla is giving birth, she finds a nice hiding place in the trees, squats down for like half an hour, and pushes out a baby. Humans, not so much. In fact, the outcomes of unassisted childbirth in humans are so poor that most anthropologists agree that we must have invented midwifery in some form before we became fully human.

68bears
natalieironside

I love it when I tell doctors that I'm a LARPer and an endurance hiker and one of the most frustrating things about chronic pain is how hard it is to go to the park and do my favorite physical activites, and they'll look at me like a dog that's just been shown a card trick and ask, "Have you tried exercising?"

natalieironside

Brother, you don't even know how bad I wish we could try exercising rn

chronicallysickchick

Chronic illness patients: so I really like to do [physical activity] but it's gotten like, physically hard to do lately

Genius doctors: have you tried increasing your physical activity?

natalieironside

"I'm so fucking good at health."

friendlyfrankenstein

I once had to patiently tell a doctor "I don't really think it's ethical to ask me to exercise my way out of a pain spike?" and she looked like it was the first time she'd ever really thought about it.

rosalarian
webcomicname

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rosalarian

Once in college, I had a classmate trying to tell me that being gay was unnatural, so I pointed out all the ways that queerness shows up in nature, but then he moved the goalpost to "yeah, but humans are held to a higher standard than animals, so we should be above base natural instincts." He then tried badgering me into going to his church. This was in the same class where I had to argue against the "born this way" concept of queer origin, because too many of my classmates saw it as a disease that could be cured. If there was a cause, then there could be a solution. (And also because the professor theorized that male queerness was caused by a lack of testosterone, a claim that is so wildly false in so many ways that even at 18 I could see right through it.)

My point is, when they say we're "unnatural," they mean "freakish." They don't actually care about nature.