When writing couples, I like to use the Kiss Rule:
If they have to kiss for you to know they’re in love, you’re not writing a romance right.
I couldn’t agree more with this. As someone who has been married for 7 years (together for 9), kissing hardly proves anything of love, at least on its own. The starry-eyed lover type of intimacy is cute, but using it exclusively is like eating fondant off a cake. It’s sweet, looks polished and pretty, but lacks robust the flavour of combined elements — fillings, frosting, toppings, and the cake itself.
It’s gestures often overlooked, silent acts of respect without calling attention to them. Subtleties mixed with the obvious.
grooming, restraighten clothing, touch up hair, brush off crumbs
singing and dancing together
understanding your partner’s hurt rather than just apologising
trust and respect
knowing how to cheer the other up, how to piss them off, humour them
reassurance (e.g. I’m here to talk, you’re doing a great job, your insecurities don’t define you)
associating sights, smells, touches, songs, phrasing, etc with them (e.g. “I saw a pigeon today and thought ‘is this my partner?’”
hating dumb things they do, but finding them hard to live without and secretly loving them
compromising, sacrificing, reciprocation
Love is unspoken, tolerant, and a spectrum of emotions.
It’s accepting that you’ll fuckin’ hate their entire being at times, exclaim with vitriol, “god, you’re so fucking annoying” while you smile and know that it’s trivial in the grand scheme.
It’s real. It’s healthy. It’s fun. That’s what I try to encapsulate in my sappy romantic fiction because realistic fluff is so much more gratifying.
Yeah, sure, seeing new things is helpful as a fantasy writer. But. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that exposure to new things is the same as traveling. You know what else exposes you to new things? The internet. Documentaries. Books. Freaking Youtube. So when you’re bored of cats and cooking tutorials, go on an adventure!
TRUTH. What you need is imagination, and you don’t need to go anywhere to use it.
The best thing about the internet is that it means its not just the fortunate sons that get to learn, and explore and imagine and write. We get to see stories from all over the place, from all sorts of people, who bring All Kinds of New Ideas.
In my opinion, traveling serves one of two purposes–as a world building exercise or fodder for lazy writing.
As world building: Traveling allows you to learn a new place for the first time. Mundane things that pass you by in normal life now come off as new and exciting! Is the fauna a brighter green? The ambient pedestrian noise higher in pitch? louder? Quieter?
It can really help you learn how to build a scene so that the reader feels like they’re experiencing a new place!
That being said, I totally agree with @caitymschmidt about getting the same resources online. I, for one, tend to spend a lotmore time learning description from stock photos than I do traveling the world.
As lazy writing: Real places aren’t your fantasy backdrop. It’s fine to take inspiration from other countries and cultures, but describing real places and saying they take place on alien planets is not only lazy but verging on problematic depending on how it’s executed.
——
In other news, I read the article and Jill Criswell, the author, acknowledges that urging people to travel now is problematic and privileged. I don’t agree with her viewpoint personally (there are TONS of new experiences people can fold into their writing WITHOUT “saving every penny” to travel), but understand that her motivation for incorporating travel into her writing comes from a good place.
From what I read, I didn’t get the sense that she was gatekeeping so much as confusing her desire to use her work to encourage people to travel with legitimate writing advice.
Actually wait.
My good will pretty much ends at the title which, reportedly, she chose herself. I was going to argue that Criswell was just naive, but I changed my mind. So, yeah, this is gatekeeping at worst, clickbait without care of the harm this sort of mentality can cause at best.
[ID: a ‘quote’ tweet by Angie Thomas @angiecthomas “Nah. Things like this make underprivileged kids think that writing isn’t for them.” with an attached 'quoted’ tweet by SchoolLibraryJournal @sljournal “Want To Be a Fantasy Writer? You Need To Travel, a Guest Post by Jill Criswell” with a link to their article. End ID.]
Genrefers to fic that is not focused on romance. If your fic is not a romance fic, please give it this tag.
Otherrefers to fic that isfocused on romance, but is not specifically male/female, male/male, or female/female (like an OT3 (ship involving 3 people), a ship involving characters that are not male or female, etc). IT IS NOT FOR PLATONIC RELATIONSHIPS. IT IS FOR ROMANTIC ONES. please for the love of all that is holy do not tag your family-relationship-centered fics as “other” you are going to give people a HEART ATTACK.
“Character/Character” is for romantic pairs. “Character & Character” is for platonic relationships like friendship, family, etc. Please do not tag family-centered or adult-and-minor-centered platonic character relationships as character/character for the love of all that is holy
TheErating is for smut and literally nothing else (unless you have other unusual reasons to rate it E–I’ve seen people apply it to non-smut fics as a deterrent to keep minors away from it, but keep in mind it’ll make it so people who are trying to avoid smut will not find your fic). Your fic that has a lot of graphic violence but no sexual content does not need an E rating.
TheMrating is for fics that would basically be rated R if they were movies, and may contain graphic violence, some sexual content, and generally more serious subject matter than you would typically show a teenager. However, if your fic is almost entirely smut, please just give it an E rating.
Also,when you post a fic, you WILL want to give it a rating, or else AO3 will assume you’re probably posting smut and will warn everybody who clicks on your fic that it may contain adult content. If you don’t want that on your fic that contains no adult content at all, please just give it the proper rating instead of not rating it at all.
this post brought to you by PLEASE LEARN HOW THE TAGGING SYSTEM ON THIS WEBSITE WORKS YOU ARE GOING TO GIVE EVERYONE A HEART ATTACK
ANOTHER IMPORTANT THING I FORGOT TO MENTION!
“Creator Chose Not to Archive Warnings” means that at least one or more of the archive warnings (that is, “Major Character Death,” “Graphic Depictions of Violence,” “Rape/Non-Con,” or “Underage”) DOES apply to your story, and you’re choosing not to say which one it is. If you select this option, AO3 will put a warning on the fic that potential readers have to click through.
“No Archive Warnings Apply” means that none of the aforementioned archive warnings apply to your fic.
THESE ARE NOT THE SAME THING. IF YOUR FIC DOES NOT HAVE ANYTHING MAJOR THAT NEEDS TO BE WARNED FOR, PLEASE SELECT “NO ARCHIVE WARNINGS APPLY.”
Also, for the love of everything on earth, please stop marking your fics as complete when they are not? The chapter function of an incomplete fic should look like this:
number/?ORnumber/higher number
If you mark it as (for example) 4/4, you’re telling readers that the COMPLETE story has FOUR chapters and ALL FOUR have been posted, meaning once you read all four you will have reached the end point of the fic. It’s unfair to readers when an incomplete fic is marked this way.
The misuse of “creator chose not to use archive warnings” is VERY common!! Please read this and label your Fic appropriately so it can reach its audience ❤️
QUICK TRIGGER WARNING: I started writing this as a writing reference, but towards the end talking about trauma I may have gotten a little graphic, I never mentions what the trauma is referencing, just descriptions of, well, fear and how it affects me. But if you think that alone may be triggering to you, please move along and stay safe!
So, I’m thinking about fear right now. And about the different ways in which it is born.
Fears without an origin: Phobias, social anxiety.
From my personal experience these fears are easier to ignore. The fear itself is often stronger but because there’s no underlying cause, no real threat, no past experience that could repeat itself, it can be ignored.
I have social anxiety, and I could probably do a writing reference all about it, but for now, what’s important is the ignoreability of it. As a kid, I couldn’t speak to a stranger, for a very long time I couldn’t order food for myself or go to a store.
Heck, for a long time I couldn’t post online because “people would see it”.
But at the beginning of this term I saw an opportunity, offered by a stranger, so I walked up, spoke confidently and quickly sold myself, smiled, laughed and got given the chance.
There was a time that seemed impossible.
But what’s important here isn’t the improvement in my actions, it’s the lack of it in my emotions. See, I still have social anxiety, and although I do the things, I still feel the things. When I walked up my heart was going at a thousand per minute, my hands were visibly shaken and I was making a conscious effort to breathe.
When I left the situations I had tears of happiness from the pride I felt, but they could have just as easily been me breaking down after a failed attempt at social interaction.
The things with phobias and social anxiety is they don’t go away. Or at least I haven’t gotten rid of any in my twenty four years of life. You just learn to live with them. You learn to act despite them.
And learning to handle them requieres experience and a lot of it. Social interactions is something I both do and force myself to do every day. But others phobias like heights and spiders are far harder to get over.
Most characters won’t ever overcome those phobias, no matter how much you “show” them it’s harmless, because that fear is innate. Most people with phobias know of the “harmlessness”, it just doesn’t matter.
Fears with an origin: Traumas and experience.
Far harder to deal with from my experience.
You’re never going to be able to convince yourself something is harmless when it’s already harmed you in the past. You’ve never going to feel entirely safe in a place where you were hurt.
Traumas for me tend to be more mental than physical. Less shaking hands and tears threatening to escape, more flashbacks, disassociation and panic attacks.
Traumas are often sudden. I’ll be dealing with something just fine, proud of myself that I’m getting back into it, that I’ll recover. Then suddenly, with no warning, my mind fills with the worst scenarios, the one that I’ve already lived, the one I’ve already escaped from yet can never truly escape from. Often I’ll stop breathing, I’ll move very quickly away from the cause of my distress, I’ll break down.
I don’t know how to deal with trauma. I can walk through my fears, I can take a deep breath and force myself to act. But trauma is a different kind of fear. It goes deeper than my outer body, it lies deep within my soul and constantly threatens me with it’s presence, it’s interference.
Trauma threatens to take parts of my life away from me and never ever give them back.
From what I’ve seen, heard and talked to with people, similar to the fears we are “born” with, trauma doesn’t go away. We just learn to deal with it. But from my experience, I learn more to avoid it.Toavoid those situations that will cause me to break down, even if it means giving up on things I love.
We all probably deal with these two types of fears in one way or another. It’s likely the way they affect you is different then how they affect me. I did this intending for it to be a writing reference, it’s kind of what I do, but it got a bit deep at the end. But, if you’d like to reblog this and on some of your experience with fears, maybe we can learn something!
As usual, check out my book, stories I’ve written plus other social medias: here.
I am sorry if this article is a bit heavy and I’m a bit “vanished” right now. I’m really busy yet full of creativity, so I guess when I saw down instead of writing out a helpful series of tips I went full creative. I hope despite that you enjoyed and got something out of this!
It is surprisingly rare in the real world how many relationships consist of people the same age. (The older you get, the more rare it is, which makes sense as age is relative and what not).
For today’s reference I’m focusing on a minor age gap. As usual I’ll be talking from experience so for context sake I’m 23 and my partner is 30. A seven year gap, pretty common especially where I am. I’m saying minor because it’s the average, but averages vary depending on locations and culture so take that in mind.
With all this said, here’s a list of things that happen due to this age gap:
1.- Different shows and music growing up, different games too! My first pokemon game was Diamond on the DS, my boyfriend was around to play pokemon red. That’s like, the first one!
Similarly sometimes my boyfriends and friends start going of about an old show I’ve either never heard of, or binged as an adult because it wasn’t on television when I was a kid.
Sometimes it’s the opposite and I start going on about a show they never saw because they were too old. Or shows that I watched they will laugh at because, when it was on television it was “little kid’s show”.
This leads to both me and them discovering a lot of amazing new shows. I view this as a total positive. But if a relationship was not willing to give new things a chance, this could be a barrier, less things to talk about.
2.- General different childhoods. I’ve had internet since I was like six or seven. My boyfriends grew up without it. If you’re writing fantasy, this can be replaced with any important technological advancement.
Because of this specific one, I’m more technology dependant, I use an ipad instead of paper for example, where he is better at using dictionaries and maps.
3.- Language differences. I’m fortunate enough to have grown up with plenty of terms that weren’t in use when my boyfriend was young. Some are technological, while other’s are mental health or sexuality related. Because of this when we’re discussing news I tend to speak in a more “politically correct” kinda way.
This also affects expressions, I’m going to use an example in Spanish because I can’t think of an English equivalent, “Chachi,” is a word that means cool. There’s a lot of words like that in Spanish (Guay, mola, súper, lindo…). And it’s a term that my generation used a lot in High School, my boyfriend was older, didn’t use it and now it is not a normal part of his vocabulary. He’ll said mostly “mola”.
It doesn’t really make a difference. It’s just a difference I’ve noticed and thought could be fun to implement in a story.
4.- Fashions choices is obvious and I don’t think needs an example.
5.- Playgrounds songs and games. It’s kind of upsetting that I have more overlaps with my little sister than most of my friends. But it’s also kind of funny.
6.- Schoolling! This is a big one. We learnt different subjects, under different rules. Sometimes these differences are minor, back when he was in school he had to study religion. I studied ethics. But other times the entire educations system is changes so that now a degree is worth less and I am forced to not only considerbut consider almost mandatory getting a masters degree. Thank you politicians.
7.- Politics. We are one the same side of politics but the politics we have experienced and lived through are very different and that’s something you can tell when we talk and discuss stuff. I was too young when my country was in crisis to truly understand what was going on. It was just a word to me. He suffered the consequences.
This one is probably the one that can be incorporated the best into a fantasy setting. And now that I’m thinking about it, I believe Poison Study did quite a good job at doing it. Not going to spoil anything too big, but basically there’s a big political incident that happens before the books and the main character barely remembers it, while the love interest lived it. I highly recommend you give Poison Study a read! It’s one of my fave books of all time (even though I haven’t read it in years).
As usual, check out my book, stories I’ve written plus other social medias: here.
Are you in a relationship with an age gap? What’s your experience? Feel free to add to this post! I sometimes struggle with what differences are due to age and which are due to culture so I left quite a few things out.
