the point of horror is to leave you feeling unsettled. jump scares, special effects, and monsters are not necessary. when writing horror, write about what scares you. what keeps you up at night. if you’re good, you’ll leave other people scared of it, too.
A mummy on display at the British Museum gets fed up with all the small children constantly yelling at it (“Mummy? Mummy!”) and finally decides to get up out of its sarcophagus, and find out what the hell all these little British kids could possibly want from a 3000 year-old Pharaoh.
Just a reminder my blog is trans inclusive. It’s bi inclusive. It is pan inclusive. It is intersex inclusive. It is ace/asexual inclusive. It is aro/aromantic inclusive. It is queer inclusive.
I don’t support terfs or exclusionists.
If you came here looking for an ally in your bigotry you came to the wrong blog. Go away. You are not welcome here.
“oh no we need to practice for our fake dating” is the funniest trope to me cause like. there are so many people who force themselves into a shitty relationship they hate just because of amatonormatiivity that it’s an ingrained part of popular culture to joke about hating your partner.
which is to say, oh my god you dont need to hold hands and go on fake dates, you don’t even need to agree on a single detail of your cover story beforehand. you can literally stand 6 feet apart at all times and look profoundly uncomfortable and all anyone will think is “yikes™. not my problem”
actually people should address this in fanfic more because “i know we could half-ass it, but i wouldneverfake mistreat my fake husband, how dare you” is absolutely delightful
New trope: fake dating for spite.
“Look, my only goal here is for our pretend relationship to be demonstrably healthier than Aunt Rita and Uncle Carl’s fifteen year, three child marriage - which means the bar is so low we probably can’t fuck this up”
When I say I’m proud that my novel brought people to tears, it’s less about sadism and more about “I am going to get a good grade on novel, a real thing that it is possible to aquire”
Eight Rules For Writing – from a long ago piece I wrote for The Guardian.
1 Write.
2 Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3 Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4 Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5 Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6 Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7 Laugh at your own jokes.
8 The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
we teach girls to shrink themselves, to fit themselves more compactly in a transistor. we expect girls to double in processing efficiency every two years. we say to sufficiently advanced girls, you are indistinguishable from magic
been thinking abt characters with what i’m calling strong Big House Impulse. Big House Impulse is the desire to make all of your friends live in a big house with you. A classic example of a character with Big House Impulse is Gansey of the raven cycle.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a Literal House, it is moreso about wanting to have your all friends in the same location for extended periods of time with frequency and regularity. For example, to Tamaki Suoh, the host club is Big House.
I’d argue that stories that provide the audience with the Big House Fantasy(all your friends live in a big house together), is separate from characters who possess Big House Impulse, as a characters big house impulse might not actually be fulfilled. Something like the webcomic Check Please! provides big house fantasy, but lacks a distinct character who is particularly motivated by Big House Impulse. The Haus is already infrastructure of the story, not the result of a character pushing for its existence.
I’d say this trait can often overlap with but is distinct from Motherhens and a homestuckian concept of the Friend Leader, but they can also exist without each other. I’d say common traits of characters with Big House Impulse is being a bit(or a lot) of a control freak, a fear of change and despite having good intentions, not always understanding the actual desires or needs of their companions. These characters also tend to be prone to loneliness, despite being well loved by their companions. I think Big House Impulse pushed to its most extreme form would be “i want to lock all my friends in a tower like rapunzel so nothing bad can ever happen to them.”
anyway. this has just been me speaking out of my ass for a few paragraphs. thank you and good night [takes a deep bow and is pulled off stage by a comically large hook]
