Writing advice from my uni teachers:

This is legit good writing advice, especially the first bullet point! In playwriting class we did a bit where every bit of dialogue had to be an accusatory question and it was glorious.

me: i'm adding realism to this medieval fantasy setting

what people think i mean: grime, gratuitous sexual assault and murder, misogyny, child marriage

what i actually mean: everyone reads out loud, women are spinning wool all the time, peasants marry at 20, people wear colors.

I only have marriage data on people in my family tree (the online genealogy thing has made it like popping bubble wrap for me, so it has been a very useful distraction which has incidentally yielded a lot of interesting info) but there are 2,159 of them thus far and I have it going back 500 years. Which I thought might at least adjust for any changes in social mores.

Based on that 500 years of data (YES I DID A SPREADSHEET)

1. people marry their age-mates

2. they mostly get married no earlier than 18 or 19

3. usually in their early-mid 20s

4. oftentimes it was the woman who was older, if there was a 5+ age gap.

5. Marriage date and when a first child came along were not necessarily in that order (best one is 15 years between kid no 1 and wedding date).

In 1525, the daughter of the local manor-occupier married my ancestor when he was 26 and she was 37. I have a vision of someone saying "Now Susannah, don't you think it's time you got married?" and she said "FINE. Okay, that one's kinda cute." She had kids at ages 40 and 45 and died at 75. In the 16th century. I bet she wore all the colours, did all the reading aloud, and was all about women spinning.

One worldbuilding thing that's always fun to do is take something you've encountered in the real world, and apply something similar with the same logic into your own. Like those sayings that have two halves, but people usually only know the first half and misunderstand the saying - like "birds of a feather flock together (until the cat comes)" or "great minds think alike (but fools rarely differ)." So I came up with a few for The Book I'm Not Writing:

Hungry dogs are loyal dogs (until someone else feeds them) - neglecting and mistreating your underlings may work as a short-term tactic for making them obey, but it's also a guarantees that they'll betray you at first chance.

The mouth of an idiot is as loose as the strings of their purse (so be there when gold may drop out) - just because nine out of ten things that someone says are completely useless doesn't mean you should dismiss them altogether. They might still know useful things, even if they can't tell it's useful.

Blood makes a foul dye (it stains, but it won't last) - here "foul" is often interpreted as "brutal" or "gruesome", when it's meant as "of low quality". Using violence as your way to establish dominance and maintain authority because it's easier than building networks of mutual trust and respect is as stupid and short-sighted as using blood to dye clothes because it's cheaper than proper pigment.

A fool will starve to death while waiting for grain to grow (but it is also a fool who'll slaughter an ewe an hour before it lambs) - Immediate problems require immediate solutions, but you'd better make sure that your drastic emergency solution is the right one.

A blind horse will go as you guide where a half-blind one dare not (both through the darkness and down a cliff) - an agent who doesn't know the purpose of their task will obey blindly, where one that knows some part of it might disobey out of distrust, but neither is as reliable as one that does see the big picture, can draw their own conclusions from the information they gather, and adjust their plans accordingly.

if you're trying to get into the head of your story's antagonist, try writing an "Am I the Asshole" reddit post from their perspective, explaining their problems and their plans for solving them. Let the voice and logic come through.

We had a lot of fun with this one on the discord so reblogging it here as well!

Showing 'Excitement' in Writing

Why you should write healthy marriages:

1. They aren’t done enough.

2. They help other people understand what a healthy relationship looks like.

3. Fights can last for weeks and still be part of a healthy marriage.

4. Stereotypes. Break all the marriage stereotypes.

5. Soft cute couple moments DON’T stop after marriage.

6. Marriage is completely independent of character arcs. Those two individuals with trauma will still be two individuals with trauma but with gold rings.

7. A healthy marriage is one where people understand that their partners have baggage/trauma/flaws, but love them even in rough patches. 

8. It isn’t that healthy marriages aren’t compelling, it’s that people don’t know how to write marriages correctly. 

9. Marriages being an end goal often perpetuates that women are trophies to be won.

10. Marriages being an end goal often perpetuates that someone’s “freedom” ends there. Bury this trope, please, I beg of you.

Best trick I ever picked up. Seriously.

I have also learned this is great for [PICK A COOL NAME FOR A SHIP] and [LOOK UP THE FACTS ABOUT OXYGEN LEVELS] and [WHAT’S THE WORD] and [DOUBLECHECK CHARACTER’S EYE COLOR] and ALL KINDS OF THINGS.

Anything that isn’t critical in the moment, and could be filled in later while I’m currently trying to burn through writing pages that will be lost if I don’t get them out right now? Brackets.

This is seriously the best advice, and it really helps put it into perspective that the first draft is just that- a draft. There’s no reason to agonize over a particularly tricky bit of writing when you could just leave it in brackets and skip to the good parts, the parts you’ve visualized. I also use brackets for [fact-check this], [use a stronger verb], [is this in character?] and other notes as I write, just so I don’t forget what I want to work on when I go back and edit. 

Note the good sense of [brackets] not (parentheses).

Parentheses AKA round brackets can appear in fiction, usually as an afterthought in a character's thoughts or narration (as I saw them used just recently), but square brackets hardly ever do.

"people show their true colours in life threatening situations" no, they show you what they act like when they're mortally terrified, an emotion notorious for literally turning your entire brain off to the point where people who go into those situations as a profession need to be literally trained on how to not have that happen

@clawedandcute For some reason, this post makes me think of your stories and how you write certain characters

Oooooooo

Hey, if you have no choice but to infodump, always use characters, never the narrator to tell things to the reader.

This way, if you got something wrong and someone points it out later, you can argue that this character in particular was lying/misremembering/was ignorant of the exact details. You, the author, obviously knew what the real facts were all along.

*shoves plothole inside other less noticeable plothole* *throws a rug over it* My characters are dumb but i in fact am god

You. You get it.

Apparently a lot of people get dialogue punctuation wrong despite having an otherwise solid grasp of grammar, possibly because they’re used to writing essays rather than prose. I don’t wanna be the asshole who complains about writing errors and then doesn’t offer to help, so here are the basics summarized as simply as I could manage on my phone (“dialogue tag” just refers to phrases like “he said,” “she whispered,” “they asked”):

And!

Here’s one that a lot of people miss, but that can be helpful for the reader: 

Obviously, people can often get it from context even if you don’t do this, and grammar and punctuation is a thing that evolves and changes over time, but I do like this rule because it actually benefits the reader. 

I need to review often.

You know those things you think you can’t write because they’re an emotion not a plot?

Try oneshots!

Oneshots are great because they can be just a single scene or moment. They allow you to write that one conversation you want to write without needing to create a whole story around it.

You wish you could just write about that character getting a damn hug for once? Do it! Who needs a huge context? Just put it out there!

Oneshots, people! Write them read them. Love them. They’re awesome.

May I also suggest for consideration, the drabble?

100 words. Just enough for that trivial exchange you can’t get out of your head. Or a sucker punch of an emotional moment. All with a handy word limit to give it a ‘writers challenge’ credential.

And if you need a little extra, a double drabble!

And if you’re looking to explore a character or a relationship in more than 100 words but still without having to have plot, may I suggest my favorite form, the 10x100? Ten separate drabbles of 100 words each, all little windows into a life or a pairing or a place or whatever tf you want. I use them to figure out who characters are and how they’ve changed over time. Has the bonus of feeling artistic and moody and meaningful even though you just slapped ten disjointed thoughts together and called it a day.

I’ll also add, since some people may think “But do readers want to read that?”

Yes. I want to read that.

Sometimes I want to read fic but my fave stories haven’t updated recently and I am not mentally ready to commit to a new, long story. Short fics like these are perfect for those moments. They scratch the itch I have for fic without becoming a big time commitment, or the dread that the story I’m loving may never be finished. They’re the perfect, say, lunchbreak read. I love oneshots for this reason. Write them, people will read them.

Also, one of my favorite things about fanfic as a genre?

Emotion is a plot.

I discovered this and haven’t ever looked back.

Fanfic is a character-drivem genre, rather than a traditional plot driven genre. We come for the characters, for thier emotions, for thier interactions with each other. That is the plot.

Don’t sell yourself short, as I used to, by saying you don’t have a plot because all you have are emotions. Emotions can and do spiral into complex stories.

…….take a look at my stupid high word count based solely on comfort the sad boi he is hurt

(Pls note: I fully support all of the above advice. This is just an extra idea that actually got me into writing)

Emotion is a plot.

@alisuwink if you ever want to try writing a oneshot, here’s some more tips ;)