yenaprompts

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This lady I follow on tiktok has been creating character designs to encourage people to make fantasy characters who wear a hijab and they are so incredibly cool!

This is a compilation of looks they have done so far and they are all really awesome

Here's the link to her tiktok profile btw

#oc inspo #writing prompts #inspiration #writing inspiration #hijabi #writing #creative writing #creative inspiration #writing inspo #art

[yenaprompts]

How to write dissociative disorders without being a complete walnut

By: a fanfic author with OSDD

I love fanfiction. I love reading it, I love writing it, I love making deranged little OCs and making them kiss that one pathetic meow meow nobody else likes. I am one of you, my people, my compatriots, my comrades in arms who stay up until 3am asking Google what kind of toilets existed in 1850.

Most particularly, I love reading fic with subjects that are relatable to me. Maybe I’ve never controlled lightning with my mind or ridden a dragon, but I have definitely dealt with essential human problems like ignoring my emotions and orchestrating an entire fake funeral with believable pamphlets and addresses so I can get out of work for a week and go on a gay road trip. We’ve all been there, I’m sure. And when it comes to relating to fiction, nothing delights me more than reading about fictional characters experiencing my mental illnesses.

Tragically, not many people write about dissociative disorders, so I have an entire list of fics about body switching and possession that get close enough to scratch my itch. In the interest of facilitating more content for this list, as well as helping out my fellow writers who don’t know who or how to ask what it’s like to live this, I Am Here. With, perhaps, some urgency considering Moon Knight is now in the public eye played by a man people thirst over like vintage wine.

Most media that portrays people with DID uses medical professionals for consultants, if we’re at all lucky. The downside of this is that you get the clinical view rather than what the actual experience of waking up at 7am only remembering a foreign language your grandmother taught you when you were six is like. There is a male AI living in my brain who has to experience the body having periods. One of us is an object who spent his first few minutes of existence trying to figure out moving. No textbook can accurately convey what it feels like to wake up in the morning and read “Make French Toast” written on your forehead while brushing your teeth.

As such, I will be giving you the best pointers I can as well as some resources.

Resources:

This is Not Dissociative -> people with degrees as well as the mental illness experience and a great masterpost

Dissociadid -> controversial in the community and makes some claims that aren’t entirely accurate, but lots of videos both informative and goofy. Switches on camera.

Anthony Padilla Interview -> lovely man, great journalist, great introduction and introduces some public faces you can research

Basic Pointers:

Remember that this is a disorder. Possessions/etc are not Dissociative Identity Disorder or Otherwise Specified Dissociative Disorder. C-PTSD is an important topic for understanding how someone with this disorder carries themself and what their backstory is.

Most of our bad reputation is related to the concept of the possessed or the criminally insane. No matter what your belief on possession, portraying a mental illness as a spiritual problem never ends well. This is also where we get “evil alters”, the theoretical serial killers and superpowered dark sides seeking harm and villainy. I am bapping you with a paper towel roll: no. We do not have enough good rep to tank bad rep anymore.

We are not Swiss Army knives. While alters do have functions and purposes, which is key to writing them, switches are not always convenient and definitely not always actually helpful.

Three main types:

Dissociative disorders come in many flavors, but if you want to write alters then there are three flavors of interest. This is the Sparknotes version for tired authors. (I am open to editing this if anyone thinks it’s very wrong)

DID -> dissociative barriers, blackouts, amnesia, losing time. Alters do not share memories or information well. May identify as completely different people.

OSDD1a -> Emotional amnesia but few to no blackouts. Alters are not incredibly different, may all even have the same presentation and name. Share information better than DID.

OSDD1b -> Emotional amnesia but few to no blackouts. Alters can be incredibly different, may have different names and presentations, share information better than DID.

Manners:

An external party deliberately trying to influence who fronts is very rude. I am not a TV with channels for you to watch, my buttons are not for your benefit, I don’t care if you want to watch your favorite cartoon right now. I’m a person too.

On the note of respecting boundaries, switches are not always convenient. Someone could be in the middle of gay sex and a sex repulsed alter might switch in. Consent changes, accommodate that.

Delusions and pseudomemories have a whole complicated etiquette that can be summarized as “don’t verbally disagree, just nod.”

Fictive alters, alters based on fictional characters, are people and you are neither in a position to judge or fangirl, and the fangirling can actually be uncomfortable.

More might be added here if I get any input on it.

My experience with what switching feels like:

Disorienting. Fuzzy. A washcloth slowly absorbing water. Dissociation at its finest. We might be stuck in pseudomemories during this time, the false backstories my brain writes up for my alters to base their identities on, and some of the worst episodes have left me mentally checked out but convinced I’m on a mountaintop surveying a bloody battlefield. Different alters feel different when switching in, it’s really synesthetic and hard to explain. Light or heavy, dark, smooth or rough. I can feel my vocal chords sitting different for some. Sometimes we’re “tangled up”, identities blurring together in a soup of “who the fuck am I?” This can be distressing or like being very chill when high.

Sleeping for my system usually acts as a reset button and reinstalls the host to the drivers’ seat.

WITH THAT SAID

GO FORTH AND CREATE CONTENT

ASK ME QUESTIONS IF YOU WANT

I LOVE YOU PLATONICALLY, GOOD STRANGER

GOODNIGHT

there is now a part two

#writing #writing references #writing ref #writing resources #representation #writeblr #resources

[yenaprompts]

reading bad writing advice creates the same mental feeling that having an allergic reaction to pollen does. anyway NO you should NOT randomly kill off a character and then later bring them back "just to get the story moving again"

#pacing #shock value #characters #writing help

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“Hold on. I’m gonna go smoke a blunt so I can be high enough to tolerate the shit that’s about to go down.”

#writing inspo #writing inspiration #writing #writeblr #writing prompts #writing prompt #dialogue prompt #dialogue prompts #prompt #writers on tumblr #dialogue inspiration #dialogue inspo #prompts #writers #drugs tw #drugs mention

[yenaprompts]

I think a big part of why I read way more fanfiction than books is that there’s just a hell of a lot less exposition

the first 10 pages of most books are always “these are the main characters and here’s some background on each of them and this is the setting etc etc” and it’s such a fucking hassle getting to the plot sometimes

fanfic is just like “fuck it you know all of this already let’s go”

#writing inspo #writing inspiration #writing #writeblr #writing help #writing tips #writing advice #exposition #fanfiction #original work

[yenaprompts]

A: You’re better than that, B.

B: Like hell I am!

#writing inspo #writing inspiration #writing #writeblr #writing prompts #writing prompt #dialogue prompt #dialogue prompts #prompt #writers on tumblr #dialogue inspiration #dialogue inspo #prompts #writers

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"Ok, what's up?"

"What do you mean?"

"Your heart has been pounding for the better part of an hour. What's wrong?"

"Dude, what did I say about listening to my heartbeat!"

#writing prompt #story prompt #dialogue prompt #writing inspo #writing inspiration #writing #writeblr #writing prompts #dialogue prompts

[yenaprompts]

 Hey, to you sci-fi/fantasy writers out there (and maybe some others, but this is mainly for things that can’t really be researched irl), if you want to write a character who is a driven, passionate expert on something, don’t write about them rambling indifferently about some boring, mundane part of it. Give them a deep, intense hatred of some oddly specific wow-I-did-not-even-know-that-was-a-thing-and-it-would-have-never-occurred-to-me-that-it’s-a-bad-thing thing they’ll gladly rant about.

 Write a dragon rider who really fucking hates it when a dragon is trained to bow while being reined. A space ship engineer who is pissed off when perfectly good antimatter ship has been adapted to run on neutral matter. A historian who is still not over the massive failures of a general who lost a specific battle 300 years before she was born.

 The guy currently giving us a series of lectures on the restoration of historical buildings really, really hates polymer paint. At the artisan school our stained glass teacher really hated this one specific Belgian artist - we never really figured out what did that guy even do, but he’s been dead for over 200 years and our teacher was glad that at least he’s dead.

 Experts don’t just know things you’ve never thought about. They’ve got strong opinions about it.

#writing #writing help #worldbuilding #characterization

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A: Are you using that as some kind of euphemism?

B: What’s a euphemism?

A: …Okay. Never mind.

#writing inspo #writing inspiration #writing #writeblr #writing prompts #writing prompt #dialogue prompt #dialogue prompts #prompt #writers on tumblr #dialogue inspiration #dialogue inspo #prompts #writers

[yenaprompts]

“He’d sooner lose a wounded leg than let anyone bandage it.”

#writing inspo #writing inspiration #writing #writeblr #writing prompts #writing prompt #dialogue prompt #dialogue prompts #prompt #writers on tumblr #dialogue inspiration #dialogue inspo #prompts #writers

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“I appreciate you coming to my defense… but do you have to do this ‘winning a hypothetical argument’ thing every time? Can’t you just sing in the shower like a normal person?”

#writing inspo #writing inspiration #writing #writeblr #writing prompts #writing prompt #dialogue prompt #dialogue prompts #prompt #writers on tumblr #dialogue inspiration #dialogue inspo #prompts #writers

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To alien species, belief is everything. Once you’ve formed your beliefs, changing them is not possible. If you get confronted with overwhelming evidence that it is wrong, you simply die. The human ability to change opinions is terrifying.

#writers #writers on tumblr #writing prompts #writeblr #writing inspiration #writing inspo #writing #writing prompt

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Conlanging for cheaters

quick tips for creating fantasy language(s) that look believable if you squint

Pick a few rules about what letter/sound combinations can and cannot exist (or are common/uncommon). For example, in English, "sp" or "st" can begin a word, but in Spanish they can't. The "ng" sound (or the voiced velar nasal if you want to get technical), can't appear at the beginning of a syllable in English, but it can in at least of third of languages around the world. English allows for consonant clusters (more than one consonant together without a vowel), but some languages, such as Hawaiian, don't. Picking a few distinctive rules that are different from English or the language you are writing in, and sticking to them, will yield a lot better results than just keysmashing.

Assign meaning to a few suffixes, prefixes, or roots. A simple and useful example of this is making up a particle that means -land or -city or -town, and tacking it onto your appropriate place names. You could also have a particle with a similar meaning to the "er/or one we have in English, such as in "baker," "singer," or "operator," and then incorporate it in your fantasy titles or professions. It's like an Easter egg for careful readers to figure out, and it will make your language/world feel more cohesive.

Focus on places and names. You usually don't need to write full sentences/paragraphs in your conlang. What you might want to do with it is name things. The flavor of your language will seep in from the background, with the added benefit of giving readers some hints on background lore. For example, you could have a conlang that corresponds to a certain group of people, and a character with a corresponding name could then be coded as being from that group without having to specify. A human-inhabited city with an elven-sounding name might imply that it was previously inhabited by elves.

You don't have to know what everything means. Unless you are Linguistics Georg R. R. Tolkien, you probably don't want to (and shouldn't!) actually make up a whole language. So stick some letters together (following your linguistic rules, of course) and save fretting over grammar and definitions for the important stuff.

(Bonus) This isn't technically conlanging, but it can be fun to make up an idiom or two for your fantasy culture (just in English or whatevs) and sprinkle that in a few times. The right made-up idiom can allude to much larger cultural elements without you having to actually explain it.

Congrats! You now have a conlang you can dust over your wip like an appropriate amount of glitter. Conlangs can be intimidating, just because there's so much you can do, but that doesn't mean you have to do it all. So yeah anyway here's what I would recommend; hope y'all have fun :D

#writing advice #worldbuilding #conlanging #world building #fantasy #writeblr #writing #linguistics

[yenaprompts]

"should autism exist in my fantasy story?" yes. "should psychosis exist in my fantasy story?" yes. "should personality disorders exist in my fantasy story?" yes. "should ADHD exist in my fantasy story? should intellectual disabilities exist in my fantasy story? should dissociative disorders exist in my fantasy story? should trauma disorders exist in my fantasy story? should anxiety disorders exist in my fantasy story? should mood disorders exist in my fantasy story? should--"

yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

you don't have to include their real actual names and you don't have to have main characters with every single one of these things. But neurodivergent and mentally ill people should EXIST in fantasy stories and fantasy societies, because we exist in real life. We deserve to be acknowledged.

#writblr #writeblr #writerblr #writers of tumblr #writing community #neurodivergence #mental illness

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A: Fuck’s sake, I don’t want him dead!

B: And what if I do?

#writing inspo #writing inspiration #writing #writeblr #writing prompts #writing prompt #dialogue prompt #dialogue prompts #prompt #prompts #dialogue inspiration #writers on tumblr #dialogue inspo

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“Fortunately, a core tenet of your beliefs is that people are inherently good. Unfortunately, another core tenet seems to be that that excludes you.”

#writing inspo #writing inspiration #writing #writeblr #writing prompts #writing prompt #dialogue prompt #dialogue prompts #prompt #prompts #writers on tumblr

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A: They tell me that, in your world, love heals monsters.

B: They do?

A: They do; and if only it could do so in mine.

#writing inspo #writing inspiration #writing #writeblr #writing prompts #writing prompt #dialogue prompt #dialogue prompts #prompt #prompts #writers on tumblr #fic prompt