itsjustanotherwriter

[itsjustanotherwriter]

Me trying to leave a comment on a fic I love but not knowing what to say

[itsjustanotherwriter]

did it hurt? when the little people inside your head refused to follow your carefully-plotted novel outline?

[itsjustanotherwriter]

Me: *trying to sleep*

New fanfic idea that I’ll probably never write:

[itsjustanotherwriter]

MOOD!

[itsjustanotherwriter]

This has been a PSA.

[itsjustanotherwriter]

i could fix him (the piece of media i just consumed that was poorly executed but had a good premise)

[itsjustanotherwriter]

5 things your character can't do while speaking

Choke. Just think about it, seriously. Think about what choking is and imagine speaking while it’s happening. That would fuckin’ hurt, man.

Hiss. Look, it’s just not possible, okay? No matter how “evil” you want your character to seem.

Snarl. Animals snarls. The Beast from Beauty and the Beast snarls. The Hulk snarls. You know who doesn’t snarl? PEOPLE WHEN THEY’RE SPEAKING.

Shriek. Come on, 99% of the time, “shriek” is not the word you want.Let’s face it: if you put an exclamation point at the end of the sentence, your reader gets the picture. Don’t bring to mind banshees and screaming toddlers.

Sneer. I’m not even going to bother explaining this one. “SNEER” ISN’T EVEN A SOUND.

[itsjustanotherwriter]

writing tip #3240:

if you're on tumblr, and i'm on tumblr, then who's writing the book?

[itsjustanotherwriter]

hey what's up with the "!" in fandoms? i.e. "fat!" just curious thaxxx

I have asked this myself in the past and never gotten an answer.

Maybe today will be the day we are both finally enlightened.

[itsjustanotherwriter]

Shout out to all the notes-app poems, love letters, secrets, novels, diary entries, bucket lists and lyrics that were hurredly typed into people’s phones at 3am and then hidden from the world and forgotten. Maybe one day you’ll open the app and laugh at how pretentious you were, or maybe you’ll smile at that part of yourself that noone else saw

[itsjustanotherwriter]

thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes

reasons for this:

basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.

like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why. Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.

here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.

TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.

Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”

all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope does and why its specific characteristics let it do that

I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.

But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.

In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.

On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”

like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not

[itsjustanotherwriter]

for the love of god if you’re writing deaf/mute characters and they’re using sign language to talk PLEASE use quotation marks, don’t do just italics or brackets or whatever other thing it is people do. sign language is STILL A LANGUAGE. just because it’s not spoken doesn’t mean it’s not real dialogue. if you’re writing someone speaking spanish, do you write their dialogue like ‘[the flower district is down south,] she said in spanish’ like NO!!! IT DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT, USE QUOTATIONS MARKS AND JUST SAY THEY SIGNED.

just know that you can describe their facial expressions! or how flowy their hand movements are, if they move excitedly or animatedly when happy, if they’re slamming their hands and moving aggressively when angry, how their brows scrunch or how rigid their hands get, you can still be creative and describe what they’re conveying even though they’re not using a spoken language. watch videos of people signing! look at how beautifully expressive it is! it is a LANGUAGE, treat and write it like one. use quotation marks

[itsjustanotherwriter]

the thing all sherlock holmes adaptations get wrong is making the guy an irredeemable asshole who treats everyone like shit . not only is it not reflective of the original stories they miss that “nice, smart, well mannered dude who snorts coke when he needs to think” is possibly the funniest character ever devised 

[itsjustanotherwriter]

How do you stop getting new ideas and instead finish the existing projects, asking for a friend

[itsjustanotherwriter]

Well folks I've been sitting on this little script for ages and finally decided to just go ahead and publish it. What does it do?

you can enter any ao3 link - for example, to your bookmarks or an author's works page - and automatically download all the works and series that are linked from that page in the format of your choice

if your format of choice is epub (sorry, this part doesn't work for other file formats), you can check your fanfic-savin' folder for unfinished fics and automatically update them if there are new chapters

if you're a dinosaur who uses Pinboard, you can back up all the Pinboard bookmarks you have that link to ao3

don't worry about crashing ao3 with this! this baby takes forever to run, guaranteed. anyway ao3 won't let me make more than one request per second even if I wanted to so it's quite safe

I've been working on this for about two years and it's finally in a state where it does everything I want and isn't breaking every two seconds, so I thought it was time to share! I hope y'all get some use out of it.

note: this is a standalone desktop app that DOES NOT DO ANYTHING aside from automate clicking on buttons on the ao3 website. Everything this script does, can be done by hand using ao3's regular features. It is just a utility to facilitate personal backups for offline reading - there's no website or server, I have no access to or indeed interest in the fics other people download using this. No plagiarism is happening here, please don't come after me.

[itsjustanotherwriter]

good characters are not good people

i love hot people covered in blood as much as the next but calling every character you like a bossbabe girlboss lil meow meow malewife has really negatively affected people’s abilities to view them objectively. 

a good character has a proper motivation, want, & need ; 

this should be the case for almost all of your characters. however, i do understand that there are exceptions, such as stagnant characters.  

a good character is understandable & interesting ; 

your characters do not have to be likable. liking them as a character also does not mean that you like them as a person. good characters do not have to be good people, they don’t even have to be decent. the roles of protagonist and antagonist in themselves are passive and do not equate to good vs evil. 

i feel like so many people are afraid of having an unlikable protagonist for fear of being seen as a bad person or justifying their actions. it’s not. writing about knights doesn’t mean you want to joust someone to the death, writing about dystopian governments doesn’t mean you condone them. 

trust your audience ; 

this post is really only meant for a small portion of people who consume media in a way where characters become caricatures. if your character is an assassin, have them assassinate people. don’t try to shoehorn in ill-fitting traits and arcs in an attempt to “negate” their darker traits. 

and if your narrator is unreliable, trust your readers to figure that out. unless you legitimately don’t see why people hate holden caulfield ig. 

at the end of the day, your characters need to fit their descriptions, and the narrative should support that. don’t accidentally weaken your enemies to lovers romance fam. love you and good luck. 

people who “just want to write about taboo subjects” do not interact with this post. 

[itsjustanotherwriter]

“maybe the curtains are blue because the author just liked the color blue” set human critical thinking skills decades back