Tag: writing

roachpatrol:

olanthanide:

villainsexuale:

wintergaydar:

Take creators stepping in and dismissing fan theories and interpretations of their works with a grain of salt. This is a lesson I learned early, from Anne “my vampires aren’t gay and also I might sue you” Rice. 

During the peak of my Vampire Chronicles love, I – at that time, a very petty fifteen-year-old –  set out to underline every single really queer moment in the whole series. Spite aside, I quickly realized that in a series where the protagonist runs away to Paris with clearly his violinist boyfriend, and convinces his next super angsty obviously boyfriend to MAKE A VAMPIRE CHILD WITH HIM to keep said angsty boyfriend from leaving, this was easier said than done. 

I mean, she’s not fully wrong – Lestat’s not gay, he’s very bisexual. Louis and Nicki are both hella gay, though. 

Anyway, I’ve meandered. The point is – creators can say wildly inaccurate things about their works sometimes. Anne Rice went Christian and didn’t want her books to be SUPER FUCKING QUEER anymore. Creators’ views on what they’ve made can change over the years. You never fucking know. 

Sometimes I just want to wave my English major wand over fandom and cover everyone in “the author is dead” pixie dust. Because…it doesn’t matter??? The second they put their creation out into the world, they forfeited the right to be the sole authority on its interpretation.

One of the most important things anyone ever told me, as both a writer and a reader, was when my AP English teacher said to me, “Your thesis statement can be whatever you want it to be. You can tell me that King Lear is gay and in love with Kent, and divvying up his kingdom between his daughters is his way of divesting himself of the role of heterosexual fatherhood he’s been forced into. I don’t care what you say – you just need to show me how the text supports it.”

Creators put things in their work that they didn’t consciously intend to. Creators intend things in their work that don’t come through in the text. Once it leaves their hands, it’s yours now.

So I have just learned something life changing from your AP English teacher via tumblr osmosis that I failed to grasp during my entire high school stay, including my own AP English.

every story is told to a different person and to every person it is a different story. and that’s not just okay, it’s wonderful. 

writerlyn:

The most important writing lesson I ever learned was not in a screenwriting class, but a fiction class.

This was senior year of college.  Most of us had already been accepted into grad school of some sort. We felt powerful, we felt talented, and most of all, we felt artistic.

It was the advanced fiction workshop, and we did an entire round of workshops with everyone’s best stories, their most advanced work, their most polished pieces. It was very technical and, most of all, very artistic.

IE: They were boring pieces of pretentious crap.

Now the teacher was either a genius OR was tired of our shit, and decided to give us a challenge.  Flash fiction, he said. Write something as quickly as possible.  Make it stupid.  Make it not mean a thing, just be a quick little blast of words. 

And, of course, we all got stupid.  Little one and two pages of prose without the barriers that it must be good. Little flashes of characters, little bits of scenarios.

And they were electric.  All of them. So interesting, so vivid, not held back by the need to write important things or artistic things. 

One sticks in my mind even today.  The guys original piece was a thinky, thoughtful piece relating the breaking up of threesomes to volcanoes and uncontrolled eruptions that was just annoying to read. But his flash fiction was this three page bit about a homeless man who stole a truck full of coca cola and had to bribe people to drink the soda so he could return the cans to recycling so he could afford one night with the prostitute he loved.

It was funny, it was heartfelt, and it was so, so, so well written.

And just that one little bit of advice, the write something short and stupid, changed a ton of people’s writing styles for the better.

It was amazing. So go.  Go write something small.  Go write something that’s not artistic.  Go write something stupid. Go have fun.

theenglishmanwithallthebananas:

theenglishmanwithallthebananas:

theenglishmanwithallthebananas:

theenglishmanwithallthebananas:

This was the funniest hour of my life

At the end of the panel we gave them a round of applause for being so brave in trying to write straights and cisgenders

Especially Jasika, who got very emotional about her childhood with straight parents

types of comments on this post:

-straight people saying :/ love is love :/ gay or straight why does it matter ://///

-gay people saying wait no really i’ve never written a non-lesbian pls help

-people pointing out that even straight people don’t know how to write straight people without unnecessary romance

Hi Brenna! Lately I’ve been doing a lot of writing but one things that’s distressing to me is how much my skill does not line up with my passion and ambition. There are stories that are very important to me and I want to write them NOW but I’m afraid I’m not a good enough writer to do them right. I don’t want to wait until I’m good enough to do those stories but I also don’t want to “ruin” them. Did you ever struggle with that?

brennayovanoff:

Oh. OH man, this is one of those totally-normal/the-absolute-worst things. (Ira Glass actually has a really nice quote about it, which Zen Pencils then made into a really nice comic.)

I think that quote/comic is good advice on its own, but I would just like to add:

In my opinion, you should work on the stories you’re passionate about NOW, even though you might feel like you’re not ready to do them justice. In my experience, people will pretty much always push themselves harder for the things they care about, and that extra dose of investment can really help speed up the process, even if it can’t wave a magic wand and overnight it.

That said, you might still be disappointed with your early efforts, which means it’s really important to remember that you didn’t ruin ANYTHING. You tried to tell a story you care about, and if it doesn’t look right yet, so what? It’s not gone. You didn’t use it up. Even if it turns out well, even if you’re pretty satisfied and it looks pretty story-shaped and you wind up publishing that early attempt somewhere (not required, don’t worry if you don’t)—even IF that happens … if later you get to thinking “oh wow, I wasn’t ready, I could do so much better now” you still get to try again. 

I think we have this idea that as writers, the worst thing we can do is repeat ourselves. But actually, we return to our personal interests and obsessions all the time. Edgar Allan Poe wrote like a million stories about premature burial.  Artists sometimes have whole Blue Periods. I will pretty much never stop writing stories about moral ambiguity and what makes something a monster—that’s just what’s on my mind. Now, the particulars may change as you gain practice and experience, you might plot differently, or decide to play more and more deeply with character, or overhaul your descriptive style, whatever. That’s just artistic development. But you can ALWAYS come back to an idea.

It took me 7 years, start to finish, to write Places No One Knows. I wrote four other books during that time, and in between, I kept coming back to Places, and that’s fine. Right now, I’m working on a book that I’ve wanted to write forever and did not feel ready for—a lot of days I still don’t feel ready for it—but it’s never a slog and it’s never boring. I love it a lot. I might not do it right. I definitely won’t do it perfectly. But that’s fine. And I don’t mean that in the everything-is-on-fire way. I just mean it in the art-is-never-exactly-what-you-wanted-it-to-be-but-some-days-you-get-really-close way. And that? That feeling? That’s just pretty damn fine.