RES: Writing

A feel of the setting. As soon as a reader opens the first page, they need to be immersed in your world, no matter how significant the setting is to the story. If you’re bouncing between ideas, pick a setting with strong imagery and sensory details. It helps to take the primary emotion of the scene (e.g. if a character is being chased, the primary emotion would be fear) and use it to color the scenery (wind/rain/thunder, darkness) and sensations (flashes of color, conversations blurring together, heart pounding, panting). These will tie your theme together and draw your reader in, as well as inspiring empathy for the POV character.

Information about the main character. Don’t see this and jump to infodumping, though – no one cares about your character’s MBTI at chapter one. But they do want something to let them know who they’re dealing with. Take a predominant trait and let us see it and feel it throughout that first chapter, so we feel like we’ve learned something. It’s like when you meet someone at a party! If they share too much, you’re uncomfortable; if they share too little, they’re just “that person whose name I forgot.” But, if they’re that guy with the big hat, or that girl who kept shouting “You communist!”, then it’s a lot easier to remember their name is Sam.

Something obscured from the reader’s view. Your first chapter risks functioning as a short story, or “that interesting book I started but forgot about,” if there isn’t incentive to keep reading. You need to answer a lot of questions, of course, but you have to leave a few unanswered. Take the mystery of your plot (and if you don’t have one, that’s another ask entirely) and drop us right into it – even if it’s something small.

A taste of what the story will be. The first chapter should be interesting, exciting, yes – but it should represent what the story is, so think about the whole story for a minute. What’s the genre? Who are the key characters? What’s the arc and the plot that we need to look for? It’s like a first date – you want to look good, of course, but if you misrepresent yourself, the relationship won’t last. Let the readers hear your author’s voice, loud and clear, and let them know what to expect from here out.

Stakes, stakes, and more stakes. Mystery is one thing. Not knowing what might get you is one very good thing. But knowing for certain that something is out there – something bad is going to happen and it’s only a matter of time – will turn pages for you. Even if we don’t know exactly who the character is or what they’re facing, let us feel that nervousness of, “What if she does this? “What if he doesn’t get there in time?” “What if he never breaks up with that girl?” Otherwise, you’re advertising a merry-go-round, and that’s never as popular as a rollercoaster. I know that from Rollercoaster Tycoon too. Seriously, merry-go-rounds make garbage money.

Methods I myself find useful for improving my depictions of minority exeriences, other than “sensitivity readers”

Try to privilege nonfiction sources on your topic (like “Being poor at an Ivy League college” or “Clothes of Japan” or “Women’s Experiences in the Armed Forces, 1939-45″ or whatever) written by the people they’re about.
Seek out memoirs, diaries, and other personal accounts of people who lived the experience you want to know about. The previous category of book will tell you that a regulation was X; personal accounts will include things like, “Then afterwards we all went out, completely ignoring Regulation X, and did Y thing all the livelong day.”
Find cultural informants, people willing to talk to you about their experiences, and listen to them raptly. Get a sense of who they think they are and what they feel their experiences meant. Do them as much good as you are capable of, because their stories were a gift to you. If at all possible, be up front: “I’m a writer, considering writing about [topic]. I’m interested to hear your experiences.” If at all possible, ask: “Would you be all right if I included some of what you tell me in my work?”
Find members of the minority group who have written criticism of their fictional depictions, especially recent ones, and read it.
At the same time, look back to criticism from older generations. Thought shifts as trends shift and social change advances. That way you’re acquiring not just a checklist of what to do or not do, but a sense of how society has changed and how problematic tropes used to be considered. As a creator, you have the ability to manipulate tropes and change perceptions; you might as well know how that’s been done in the past and where it’s going in the future.
As you go, consider the diversity of experience you’re dealing with here–two people with the same backgrounds and living through the same events may have wholly different experiences. This is important, since you are not writing the impartial embodiment of an experience, you’re writing a human being. At some point you’re going to have to decide which particular quirks or opinions your own character takes in; acquaint yourself with the spectrum of possibilities.
Find a depiction similar to what you intend to write, and go search out its fanbase. Watch their fanworks, blogs, and discussions with alertness to how fans respond to the issue you care about–what they knew or assumed coming in; how they interpreted the media they consumed; how they’ve responded since them. This will give you a reasonable model for your own audience.

If you don’t like hitting people, it’s surprisingly difficult to train yourself to be okay with hitting people.
4th kyu(ish) is when a student is most likely to be a danger to another student (at least in jujutsu), because they’re getting good enough to be able to do real damage but don’t have enough control yet.
Bruises are pretty common, especially if you’re doing blocking techniques (or, generally, hitting each other).
If someone does a technique wrong, it’s not too hard for them to do a decent amount of damage to either themselves or the person they’re doing the technique on. Incapacitation techniques in particular can go wrong, because they’re based on putting a person’s body in stress positions.
Depending on what kind of martial arts being studied, a lot of techniques require less effort than people think they should.
Different types of martial arts and different dojos will subscribe to different levels of traditionalism, including how much English is spoken in instructions, what kind of beginning/ending ritual there is, and what is worn for day-to-day practice.
Disregarding military/military-esque training, which I’m not qualified to talk about, someone isn’t going to go from totally unexperienced to not-a-liability-in-a-fight-to-the-death in a matter of months. Please stop having characters go from being new to holding their own in high-stakes fights against people who wants to kill them in a matter of weeks.

when will people understand the concept of the jungian shadow as inherent darkness of desire and want and thought that must be understood and tempered by careful thought and an ethical code and not like, eliminated, because it can’t actually be humanly eliminated
What’s more, it must be treated with respect and compassion–not embraced and given free rein, no; but without understanding and acknowledgment, it will only grow, and grow worse.

Similarly, the body reacts profoundly in trauma. It tenses in readiness, braces in fear, and freezes and collapses in helpless terror. When the mind’s protective reaction to overwhelm returns to normal, the body’s response is also meant to normalize after the event. When this restorative process is thwarted, the effects of trauma become fixated and the person becomes traumatized.
—

Waking the Tiger, Peter Levine

Honestly, one of the bigger things I find myself stumbling over when reading survivor characters is the disconnect between mind and body. Someone will take something like hypervigilance and write it as a thought process- unaware or unsure how to write it as something that is body driven as well. Writing that treats trauma reactions as only happening in the mind is writing that lacks depth.

I was talking to someone about Fury Road today and they said ‘I just hated how it had no plot. They just left and then turned around and went straight back, it was so stupid’ and I think my soul was in danger of leaving my body because really - that’s the whole point. That’s the great message of Mad Max Fury Road - they need to leave and go back because they need to understand that the Green Place doesn’t exist. Valhalla doesn’t exist. There’s no better place waiting, no Eden to escape to, nowhere for Furiosa and the wives to run to. This world, broken and damaged and war-torn as it is, is all they have, and if they want a Green Place then they have to make it themselves. They have to choose peace. They have to choose love for each other. They have to take the seeds from the older, violent generation and start again. They have to destroy the oppressive power structures holding them back, capitalism and the patriarchy that Immortan Joe represents.

The Green Place was around them all along, and it takes this long, cyclical journey to understand that, both for them and for the audience. The circular narrative structure is an absolute work of genius, and the fact that the entire plot can be boiled down to “they leave and come back” is an indication of how well this works as an action movie - that the plot is simple enough so everyone can understand what’s going on while explosions are going off and cars are racing past at 100mph - yet it’s still incredibly rich and wonderfully complex too.

And what a pertinent message to send out - the generations before us killed the world and now it’s up to us to fix what’s broken. There’s no Green Place but the one we make ourselves, which will be born out of fire and blood and rise from the ashes of the old world.

1. Does your disaster answer the scene question, as posed by the scene goal?

2. Is your disaster integral to the scene (e.g., is the disaster a direct culmination of the scene conflict)?

3. Is your disaster disastrous enough?

4. If your character partially or totally reaches his scene goal, is there a “yes, but…” disaster waiting to slow him down?

5. Will your disaster prompt a new goal from the character?

1. Direct obstruction of the goal (e.g., the character wants info which the antagonist refuses to supply).

2. Indirect obstruction of the goal (e.g., the character is sidetracked from achieving the goal).

3. Partial obstruction of the goal (e.g., the character gets only part of what he needs).

4. Hollow victory (e.g., the character gets what he wants, only to find out it’s more destructive than helpful).

1. Does the opposition to the character’s goal matter to him? (If not, he doesn’t want the goal badly enough in the first place.)

2. Does the conflict organically evolve from the goal?

3. Is the opposition’s motivation logical within the overall story?

4. Does the conflict lead to a logical outcome (resolution or disaster)?

5. Does the conflict directly interfere with or threaten the protagonist’s goal?

1. Direct opposition (another character, weather, etc., which interferes and prevents the protagonist from achieving his goal).

2. Inner opposition (the character learns something that changes his mind about his goal).

3. Circumstantial difficulties (no flour to bake a cake, no partners to dance with, etc.).

4. Active conflict (argument, fight, etc.).

5. Passive conflict (being ignored, being kept in the dark, being avoided, etc.).

There is a mistaken notion that trauma is primarily about memory—the story of what has happened…It’s a too-simplistic view in my opinion. Your whole mind, brain and sense of self is changed in response to trauma.
In the long term the largest problem of being traumatized is that it’s hard to feel that anything that’s going on around you really matters. It is difficult to love and take care of people and get involved in pleasure and engagements because your brain has been re-organized to deal with danger.
It is only partly an issue of consciousness. Much has to do with unconscious parts of the brain that keep interpreting the world as being dangerous and frightening and feeling helpless. You know you shouldn’t feel that way, but you do, and that makes you feel defective and ashamed.

i really respect the star wars franchise for not compromising or stopping to take time to explain what the hell everything is or whats happening like outside of the intro scroll its just in the world 100% like bam! heres a planet with these things! u dont know what they are? well fuck it cuz theyre here! also! this guy! we’ll say his name one time and then thats it! he’ll just be here for the rest of the movie! here u go! some terms were throwing in that may be bullshit but this is star wars so screw it! bam! space! bam ! flying ships and shit! u dont get it? well sucks for u cuz were still moving along assholes! pew pew laser fighting montage with characters whose names we may not have brought up but ull grow to care for them anywayyyyy!

give me stories with supportive exes.

give me relationships that end for all kinds of reasons besides one of the people involved being secretly The Worst.

give me exes that ended things mutually and maturely. give me exes that were each other’s friends before they got together and remained friends after. give me exes that still love their ex and that means that they want them to be happy and thrive, and not that they will make them unhappy trying to get back together

give me people that still share a workplace, or a cause, or a goal. who are capable of caring for kids, pets and/or houseplants together, without turning it into a serial hostage exchange

give me exes who know each other like the back of their hand, who still share in-jokes, who tease each other about new crushes

give me exes who are each other’s perfect wingmate, who help their ex get ready for a date, who text them at three a.m. because ”OMG i just met somebody who’s such a your kind of person, you absolutely gotta meet them”

give me stories with supportive exes

“our teeth and ambitions are bared” is a zeugma
and it’s a zeugma where one of the words is literal and one is metaphorical which is the BEST KIND
I didn’t know about zeugmas until just now! That is so awesome, everybody:
zeug·ma
ˈzo͞oɡmə/
noun
a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g.,John and his license expired last week ) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (e.g., with weeping eyes and hearts ).

Sometimes miserable things happen in a final book and the series overall turns in to something even more amazing — you feel every success and struggle more deeply and truly and memorably because of the agony and the high-pitched stakes. Sometimes, though, miserable things happen in a final book and those consequences actually manage to undo every good and bad thing that has happened in the series before it — everything is now rendered meaningless and not worth it in light of the way events unfolded in the end.