A spatlua?
ID: A retweet of a DiscussingFilm tweet by Emily @memilies. The original tweet contains a picture of Louis and Lestat from Interview With The Vampire and reads: “Interview With The Vampire Season 2 has halted filming due to the studio’s unwillingness to give the actors fair pay and working conditions.” The retweet reads “I love this phrasing, more of this please.”
END ID
I love that this post doesn't include the actual text of his tweet, just his impending presence. This is the visual equivalent of a scare chord.
PSA FOR ALL INCOMING COLLEGE STUDENTS
Please, for the love of Prime, put the slightest bit of thought into the email address you use when applying to college. You need to switch gears between education you have to go through to education that will lead to a career. Consider that your professors, your advisors, your financial aid assistants, anybody at the college may at one point need to reach out to your personal email. Don't assume everyone will rely on your student email, we all know you don't read that shit.
If you don't have a generic contact email that you wouldn't be afraid of your grandma seeing, make one. As you do so, please consider:
- Don't have anything sexual in your email address. I mean it. All those 69s and clever wordplays aren't so funny when you have to read them over the phone to me to confirm your ID. Also I know what goatse is, you twits, I've been on the internet longer than you.
- Don't use your gamertag as an email address. Or your reddit name, or your AO3 ID, etc. It's basic CYA to keep your online life and your real one separate. As silly as that seems, you really don't need someone in your engineering class finding those Homestuck fics you wrote when you were fifteen because your professor forgot to use BCC to hide your email. Protect yourself.
- Don't use your birth year in your email. This is less of a professional problem then it is a basic security issue. You're giving away personal information that could be used to compromise your online accounts every time you email someone. Play it smart and use a random number.
- If it will embarrass you to read it out load to someone, rethink using it for school. If your name is "Matt Smith" and your email is some sort of play on the 11th Doctor, you're probably fine. If your email is 11thDocsLoveSlave, please... Spare us both. I promise you it's not worth having to look me in the eye as you tell it to me.
- Don't use your high school email. You no longer have access to that when you graduate from high school. We cannot contact you with an email you can't access. Don't shoot yourself in the foot on the way out the door.
Listen, as someone with a really awkward personal email that I've been meaning to change for years, I have been there. Save yourself and get an email you wouldn't mind your professor, your boss, or your mom knowing about.
Hot off the presses, but uh if you do have an email you use for school/work/semi-professional reasons, make sure it has an appropriate name attached to it or that you identify yourself within the email for clarify.
This update brought to you by the extremely awkward phone conversation I just had with "Evil Morty."
Cat shaped hole filled with a dumb dumb we renamed Colfax. She’s a mess. I love her. Mo’ the old man is curious but mostly confused.
So... I found this and now it keeps coming to mind. You hear about "life-changing writing advice" all the time and usually its really not—but honestly this is it man.
I'm going to try it.
I love the lawyer metaphor, because whenever I see “John knew that...” in prose writing I immediately think “how? How does he know it?” Interrogate your witnesses. Cross-examine them. Make them explain their reasoning. It pays dividends.
All of this, but also feels/felt. My editor has forbidden me from using those and it’s forced me to stretch my skills.
[ID: The full text of an article. It reads:
"Writing Advice": by Charles Palahniuk- In six seconds, you’ll hate me.
But in six months, you’ll be a better writer.
From this point forward – at least for the next half year – you may not use “thought” verbs. These include: Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires, and a hundred others you love to use.
The list should also include: Loves and Hates.
And it should include: Is and Has, but we’ll get to those, later.
Until some time around Christmas, you can’t write: Kenny wondered if Monica didn’t like him going out at night…”
Thinking is abstract. Knowing and believing are intangible. Your story will always be stronger if you just show the physical actions and details of your characters and allow your reader to do the thinking and knowing. And loving and hating.
Instead, you’ll have to Un-pack that to something like: “The mornings after Kenny had stayed out, beyond the last bus, until he’d had to bum a ride or pay for a cab and got home to find Monica faking sleep, faking because she never slept that quiet, those mornings, she’d only put her own cup of coffee in the microwave. Never his.”
Instead of characters knowing anything, you must now present the details that allow the reader to know them. Instead of a character wanting something, you must now describe the thing so that the reader wants it.
Instead of saying: “Adam knew Gwen liked him.”
You’ll have to say: “Between classes, Gwen was always leaned on his locker when he’d go to open it. She’d roll her eyes and shove off with one foot, leaving a black-heel mark on the painted metal, but she also left the smell of her perfume. The combination lock would still be warm from her ass. And the next break, Gwen would be leaned there, again.”
In short, no more short-cuts. Only specific sensory detail: action, smell, taste, sound, and feeling.
Typically, writers use these “thought” verbs at the beginning of a paragraph (In this form, you can call them “Thesis Statements” and I’ll rail against those, later) In a way, they state the intention of the paragraph. And what follows, illustrates them.
For example:
“Brenda knew she’d never make the deadline. Traffic was backed up from the bridge, past the first eight or nine exits. Her cell phone battery was dead. At home, the dogs would need to go out, or there would be a mess to clean up. Plus, she’d promised to water the plants for her neighbor…”
Do you see how the opening “thesis statement” steals the thunder of what follows? Don’t do it.
If nothing else, cut the opening sentence and place it after all the others. Better yet, transplant it and change it to: Brenda would never make the deadline.
Thinking is abstract. Knowing and believing are intangible. Your story will always be stronger if you just show the physical actions and details of your characters and allow your reader to do the thinking and knowing. And loving and hating.
Don’t tell your reader: “Lisa hated Tom.”
Instead, make your case like a lawyer in court, detail by detail. Present each piece of evidence. For example:
“During role call, in the breath after the teacher said Tom’s name, in that moment before he could answer, right then, Lisa would whisper-shout: ‘Butt Wipe,” just as Tom was saying, ‘Here’.”
One of the most-common mistakes that beginning writers make is leaving their characters alone. Writing, you may be alone. Reading, your audience may be alone. But your character should spend very, very little time alone. Because a solitary character starts thinking or worrying or wondering.
For example: Waiting for the bus, Mark started to worry about how long the trip would take..”
A better break-down might be: “The schedule said the bus would come by at noon, but Mark’s watch said it was already 11:57. You could see all the way down the road, as far as the Mall, and not see a bus. No doubt, the driver was parked at the turn-around, the far end of the line, taking a nap. The driver was kicked back, asleep, and Mark was going to be late. Or worse, the driver was drinking, and he’d pull up drunk and charge Mark seventy-five cents for death in a fiery traffic accident…”
A character alone must lapse into fantasy or memory, but even then you can’t use “thought” verbs or any of their abstract relatives.
Oh, and you can just forget about using the verbs forget and remember.
No more transitions such as: “Wanda remember how Nelson used to brush her hair.”
Instead: “Back in their sophomore year, Nelson used to brush her hair with smooth, long strokes of his hand.”
Again, Un-pack. Don’t take short-cuts.
Better yet, get your character with another character, fast. Get them together and get the action started. Let their actions and words show their thoughts. You -- stay out of their heads.
And while you’re avoiding “thought” verbs, be very wary about using the bland verbs “is” and “have.”
One of the most-common mistakes that beginning writers make is leaving their characters alone.
For example:
“Ann’s eyes are blue.”
“Ann has blue eyes.”
Versus:
“Ann coughed and waved one hand past her face, clearing the cigarette smoke from her eyes, blue eyes, before she smiled…”
Instead of bland “is” and “has” statements, try burying your details of what a character has or is, in actions or gestures. At its most basic, this is showing your story instead of telling it.
And forever after, once you’ve learned to Un-pack your characters, you’ll hate the lazy writer who settles for: “Jim sat beside the telephone, wondering why Amanda didn’t call.”
Please. For now, hate me all you want, but don’t use “thought” verbs. After Christmas, go crazy, but I’d bet money you won’t. End ID]
#this is decent advice#the trick is to know when to use a complex sentence vs a boring sentence#in my opinion#if you’re using the style suggested#it can have HUGE benefit to then drop in a ‘mc sat by the phone and wondered why she didn’t call’#bc now you are establishing that bro my guy#she hates you#and the character doesn’t have the awareness to know it#I also feel strongly about giving the reader a break#sometimes this style gets heavy#I don’t agree with the is has thing tho#like it’s more important to find new ways to use them#by which I mean!#go for things like ‘Duo is TV Static’ or ‘Duo has ants where his blood should be”’
^that
I also want to say that...this is really good advice *for editing*, until this sort of thing becomes second nature, if it ever does. If you get stuck pulling a "but I can't just say 'he felt awful'" and it means you're not getting words down, toss this rule out and write "he felt awful". You can edit it later, if it turns out to need it. Sometimes those short little sentences work, as @amberlyinviolet points out in the tags above.
Can you imagine how good life would’ve been of puppets were taken seriously as an art form like Jim Henson wanted? Even Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal weren’t allowed to really be seen as more than just kids movies because nobody can see puppetry as an art form for anyone but children.
If Miss Piggy could say fuck the world would be a better place.
My boy is gone. We had to put Fred down today. He was 20.
