FINALLY 👏 SOMEONE 👏 SAID 👏 IT. 👏 ALL OF IT.  👏ALL AT ONCE. 👏

(Thank you @fallingawkwardly​ for bringing this to my attention.)

Yup, I agree with a lot of these, it points out many cliches, I think there are good things to consider and more variety in fantasy worlds would be nice. However, something about it was bothering me. Is it that sometime epic fantasy just need focus on that : being epic and fun? Authors shouldn’t feel they have to fixate on world building to please all the Brandons of the world and make everything realistic because they are first most writing an engaging stories. Good worldbuilding can be a part of it but there are great stories with minimal amount of it. Do I really want to read 3 chapters on horse breeding ? NO. And more science ? Could be fun, but that’s not the appeal for me : the perrilous realm, the enchantment, the wonder, the misty lake from which a lady slowly emerges, the wounded hero losing his path in the forest at twillight, the radiance of a sunset on a city of silver and gold, the sword that speak to tell the sad warrior it agrees to drink his blood as he kill himself, the young girl flying among the clouds on a goose, the great dwarven cities carved in mountains and glittering with gemstones, etc..

That’s what I love about fantasy : the magic. And I like when the worldbuilding makes me feel that the magic is real, not when it tries to be realistic.

Some of Brandon’s complains are linked to idea that a fantasy story isn’t realistic enough, because many authors are deep in the worldbuilding rabbit hole, and while trying to construct real-like secondary world can be fun, it’s very hard to do well because there is always one more thing thing to consider. Along the way they forget about what makes fantasy magical and fun.

All of these are things a writer might need to know for worldbuilding purposes (I remember Terry Pratchett nattering to @dduane​ and me about “rain shadow effect” in Discworld) but have very little relevance to the actual craft of storytelling.

Bringing a story to a screeching halt for exam-paper answers to a list of bullet points like the OP isn’t how such research is used. Answering that list is what goes into Supplementary Material, like cutaway diagrams of Star Destroyers or how to cook the cuisines of Westeros (yes, cuisines plural; not all the same soup.)

James Bond boarding a plane isn’t a cue for the history of flight from the Wright Brothers onward. His vodka martini shaken not stirred isn’t an excuse for that long argument about bruising the gin and why vodka isn’t used for martini anyway. Drawing his Walther PPK shouldn’t - though some thrillers do - prompt a digression about muzzle velocity and grain-weight of ammunition.

It’s good for the writer to know all these things; it means, even in fantasy where they’ve made it all up themselves, that they’ll be writing about something “solid”, and the assurance of such writing is what makes some fantasy worlds feel so real. But unless these things have some bearing on the story - usually by having an effect on plot direction or character development - they have no business being shoehorned into what is a finite amount of space between Beginning and End just to show how much research the writer has been doing.

That said, there are a couple of very worthwhile points in the OP that go further than off-screen worldbuilding: for instance, weights, measures, distances, coins and especially language. These shouldn’t be the same everywhere, and are important enough to have an effect on the story.

”The Common Tongue” is a convenience, but isolated villagers speaking it with 100% fluency is unlikely. There can be interesting tangles (comedy to relieve tension, or something deeper) when a character who only knows the Proper Version of a language gets into a conversation with someone speaking dialect (Eton-and-Oxford English meets Geordie or Glaswegian.)

How about the same word with a different meaning? Modern example: is the person saying “Nice buns” referring to baked goods or anatomical features? Context makes it clear, but maybe not fast enough to avoid trouble.

There should indeed be small businesses - bookbinders, printers (or at least scriptorium-style copy shops), saddlers, blacksmiths, swordsmiths, cobblers, weavers, all providers of the impedimenta of adventure. There’ll be taverns and eating-houses, so is there smuggling? How much is a pound of pepper in the open market versus under the counter?

Maybe there’s an embargo on the booze from a hostile country but it’s still popular; that’s why brandy - already smuggled in peacetime to avoid excise duty - continued to come illegally from France to England during the Napoleonic wars. Wine wasn’t smuggled to the same extent because it was lower-profit, so drinkers shifted from claret (French, enemy) to port and Madeira (Portuguese and Spanish, ally.)

There should also be bankers and merchants, and if you think that sounds dull, check on what the Medici and Fugger banking houses got up to during the Renaissance, and how they got so powerful.

There’s a phrase in Ireland: “Your money’s no good here.” That’s usually nice to hear, it means you won’t be able to pay for a drink since others are buying it for you. However, once currency goes beyond RPG-style “gold, silver and copper pieces” you start getting foreign money and that money may be “no good here” in a more awkward way.

Is foreign money always acceptable? Is some acceptable and others not? Why not? “I don’t like the look of it” is a frequent reason. Though they don’t have the Queen’s head on them, notes issued by Scottish or Northern Irish banks are legitimate UK Sterling currency. But try shopping with them in England and see how far you get.

Is coinage actually coinage, or just bits of gold or silver in convenient shapes? Has the metal content been debased so the weight value is less than the face value? (I did the “hero melts silver coins to shoot a werewolf” thing in “The Demon Lord”, then had the hero find out that devaluation hadn’t left enough silver in them to do the werewolf any real harm…)

“Why aren’t your character’s teeth rotting?” - because in the medieval setting on which a lot of fantasy is based, they didn’t eat tons of refined sugar since it hadn’t been “invented” yet. (Wall-to-wall bad teeth is yet another Mucky Middle Ages cliché which probably originated with “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”.)

Interesting detail: in the mid-late 1500s when sugar became more available, it was still hugely expensive. Rich people ate lots of it to prove they could, so sugar-related tooth decay was a disease of the rich (Elizabeth I’s teeth were a mess). Less-rich people sometimes stained their teeth to simulate decay and suggest they were wealthier than they were…

The king being worried about his nobles increasing their power through marriage and alliance is sound enough, but also a Chekhov’s Gun - unless it’s going to have an effect on the later story, mentioning it in lengthy detail serves no purpose apart from Showing Your Work.

Who domesticated the wheat used to make the bread your characters are eating? Who invented the ale-making process for the beer they’re drinking? Who breeds the horses they’re riding?

Unless it has an effect on the plot, who cares?

What matters in story terms is who offered their last piece of bread to the characters and why. Who’s getting drunk on the ale and about to talk too much so they give something away. Who’s riding a horse so different to the usual run of local ones (an Arab in a land of Icelandics, for instance) that they might as well carry a “Not From Here” flag.

Fantasy isn’t unrealistic, and good fantasy rests on a solid bedrock of its own alternate reality.

What it shouldn’t be is dull.

Peter up there is right of course, but I also have just been reading a Mercedes Lackey book that IS really interested in who’s breeding horses and why and whether they’ll find a copper deposit soon and what it means to be a king and what to do with all these bored highborn children and building sewers and how to enforce laws fairly – and it’s great. It’s not dull at all, it’s wonderful.

(It works partially because it’s about the founding of a kingdom; but she has these kinds of world building details throughout her books. I DO want to know how you train a furious and bad tempered stud to pull a plow as the basic setup of a short story, thank you Misty.)

“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

ISN’T THAT AWESOME??

#in english class in high school my teacher had us write our own zeugmas in class#and one guy came up with ‘he fell from her favor… and the window’#i am forever looking for opportunities to use that one

She dropped her dress and inhibitions at the door.

What’s this? My favorite rhetorical device showing up on my dashboard?

IT HAS A NAMEEEE!! OH MY GOD!!!

I LOVE THIIIIIS!!!

One I’ve loved was “on their weekend trip they caught three fish and a cold”

I love these they’re like a pun and a metaphor wrapped up into one neat phrase

Didn’t know the name for this, but definitely one of my favourite rhetorical devices.

The folk song “ Maderia, My Dear” has some of the cleverest zeugmas I’ve ever heard and I feel the need to bring it up any time they’re being discussed. Although, fair warning, it’s a song about an old man getting a teenage girl drunk so she will sleep with him.

“She lowered her standards by raising her glass, her courage, her eyes, and his hopes.”

This is a friendly reminder to never, ever publish your book with a publishing company that charges you to publish with them. That is a vanity press, which makes money by preying on authors. They charge you for editing, formatting, cover art, and more. With most of these companies, you will never seen a cent of any royalties made from sale of your book. A legitimate publishing company only makes money when you make money, they will never charge you to publish with them. If a company approaches you and says "Hey, we'll publish your book, just pay us X amount of money," tell them to go fuck themself and block them.

Remember, kids: money should only ever flow FROM your publisher TO you.

Here's a very well-maintained resource by the SFWA (Science-Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association) that lists contests/editors/small presses/etc. with predatory behaviours:

Go forth and publish safely!

Limits of the Human Body

Body Heat = 107.6 F

Cold Water = 40 F

Hot Air = 300 F

High Altitude = 15,000 ft

Starvation = 45 days

Diving Depth = 282 ft

Lack of Oxygen = 11 minutes

Blood Loss = 40%

Dehydration = 7 days

Writers finding this post:

Thank you

Europeans about half of this post:

Body Heat = 42 C

Cold Water = 4 C

Hot Air = 148 C

High Altitude = 4572m

Starvation = 45 days

Diving Depth = 390m

Lack Of Oxygen = 11 minutes

Blood Loss = 40%

Dehydration = 7 days

Europeans seeing this version of this post:

Some of My Favorite Ways to Describe a Character Who’s Sick

TW for vomiting below cut !!

we are in a media literacy crisis

friendly reminder that characters don't need to be saints to be entertaining. and telling a story does not mean endorsement. art does not need to be all about morally good people.

IDK if this was meant as hyperbole but it's literally true:

Adult literacy is low.

Child literacy is low.

Information literacy has shifted dramatically in the last decade, but reputable information sources like research journals and factual news reporting have been unable to keep pace.

We are genuinely in a crisis of media literacy, with ever fewer genuinely factual resources available in the style and language used by contemporary audiences.

It may sound condescending, but we genuinely need to remind people, or worse, explain to them for the first time that art is not evidence of real world behaviour.

So, thank you, for this reminder. Genuinely.

You're correct:

Art does not need to feature exclusively morally pure characters. Art is not proof of the creator's secret, violent desires.

someone in a fanfic: s-stutters in embarrassment

me, closing the tab: sorry I must go

When people stutter, they usually reword what they’re saying as they speak, and subconsciously insert “filler words” such as “uh, like, you know,” and etc.

*puts on speech therapist hat*

ACTUALLY! It depends on why they are stuttering. 

A Nervous Stutter results in what is called Mazing, or rewording the sentence. That is the classic “I, um… well I… look it’s just that… so we…” that @hellishhues is talking about. When someone is mazing their words you’re seeing a form of Speech Apraxia where the brain is having trouble forming verbal speech. This can be brought on by brain damage, memory loss, anxiety, nerves, and several other things. 

The root cause of a nervous stutter is a disconnect between the mouth and the brain. 

With this you will also sometimes see the classic “S-s-s-sorry…” especially if the person has been training to speak clearly and is now at a point of fatigue or stress where they are not mentally capable of forming the words.

The other kind of stutter is a Physical Stutter, sometimes referred to as slurring, and another facet of Speech Apraxia. This stutter is caused when the muscles of the mouth, tongue, and throat are physically unable to form certain sounds. This is most often seen in the very young and victims of brain trauma. 

Sounds are acquired at different ages, so a 2-year-old will probably not be able to clearly pronounce certain words (which is why toddler sound so off when they’re written with developed dialogue). These mis-pronunciations are sometimes referred to as lisping, but only if the sounds are run together. If the person starts and restarts the sound because they got it wrong, it can also sound like the classic sound stutter. 

But it all depends on why the character is stuttering!

Do they have Speech Apraxia, Audio Processing Disorder, muscle dysfunction, or another medical reason to stutter? (1)

Are they stuttering because of anxiety, stress, or fatigue? (2)

Does the stutter stem from intoxication or blood loss? (3)

All of those will sound different! 

1 - Will have mazing, repeated sound stutters, and be the classic stutter that annoys OP.

2 - This is where you’ll see the repetition stutter, mazing, rephrasing, and filler words.

3 - This is where you are more likely to see starts and stops and slurring of words. 

My mum has apraxia and I just wanted to say that’s one of the most concise and clear ways I’ve seen it explained, thank you!

This is like the people always mocking “X let out the breath they didnt know they were holding” as an unrealistic cliche. Just because you dont realize its real doesnt mean its not real

I have a physical stutter and was in speech therapy for 10 years and @lianabrooks hits the nail on the head with her explanation. There are many different types of stuttering, with different causes. Thank you!

The old “it was like this back then” saying does not apply in this case.

helpful sites for writers

i have a little collection of websites i tend to use for coming up with ideas, naming people or places, keeping clear visuals or logistics, writing basics about places i've never been to, and so on. i tend to do a lot of research, but sometimes you just need quick references, right? so i thought i'd share some of them!

Cheat Code #2 for accommodating disabled characters in sci-fi/fantasy:

How you aid a disability depends on if it's a new development or had always existed.

i.e.: If someone's lost their legs to a griffin biting them off last week, giving them steampunk prosthetic legs is a good aid. There's something they can't do, that they very recently could, that they need to learn to work around. The prosthetic legs still need an adjustment period to learn how to use them, but your character knows how legs should work and can figure it out more easily.

If someone lost their legs because, as a child, they wandered away from the space field trip and got partially eaten by a carnivorous plant, then it depends. Prosthetic legs can technically work, but the longer the character was without legs, the harder it'll be to re-learn how to use them. You might want to go with bionic legs for short distances, but a hover chair for daily use.

If someone was born without legs, then prosthetic legs are more hindrance than they're worth. Your character has never had legs, and has no idea how they're supposed to work.

Imagine if you're in a world of centaurs; you're given prosthetic hind legs, and now expected to be able to climb up cliffs with the grace of a mountain goat. It's a whole new skill you'd have to learn, and you would get annoyed with it very fast; how are they supposed to sync with the legs you already have? How are you supposed to balance? You can't feel anything, you don't know how much space it occupies.

Someone who's always been disabled doesn't need the thing they were born without, they need aid that lets them do what everyone else can in a way they're familiar with. If your character has always been deaf, glasses with subtitles appearing on them are infinitely more useful than aids that let them hear, because hearing when you've always had silence is going to have a steep learning curve and be ridiculously overwhelming.

Your rule of thumb?

Try to give them something they're used to.

Note: This is different with very small children, because they're already learning how to use every part of them. If a toddler in your sci-fi was born without legs, they can be taught to use bionic legs at a very young age, but it has to start early or it'll run into the problems above.

Cheat code 1: How to avoid eliminating disability in your setting

Cheat Code 3: How to make your setting itself disability-friendly

This.

I don’t know about others but the only reason I put both is so that whichever someone clicks on, they will find my fic. So if there is supposed to be rules, I guarantee you that no writer knows these ones. We can barely get people to comment, you think we’re going to specifically choose & or / ? Hell no.

I’ve been in fandom for twenty years, and “/” means romance and “&” means no romance was literally one of the first things I learned. It dates back to Star Trek fanfiction of the 70s. I’m boggled by the fact that anyone who’s been reading fic on AO3 for more than like five minutes wouldn’t know that, and I’m curious as to what fanfic community you come out of.

I don’t think that tagging with both is actually going to get your fic in front of more readers. People looking for romance often exclude the “&” tag if there are too many gen fics tagged with both. People looking for gen often exclude the “/” tag if there are too many fics with both. So rather than putting your fic in front of twice the people, you are in fact more likely to get your target audience ignoring your fic because it has a tag they don’t want.

Also, by overtagging you are more likely to annoy potential readers away from your fic than entice them. A fic tagged both & and / better have both romance and a ton of platonic interaction between the two characters, like a slow burn romance friends-to-lovers arc. If it isn’t, I’m going to be very unhappy because the author lied to me with the tags to try and trick me into reading a fic with deceptive advertising.

When I’m in a fandom and see tagging where some of the tags don’t really apply and are just there to get it in front of more eyes, I’m going to assume one of two things. Either the author is a newb who doesn’t know anything, or the author is purposefully spamming the tags because they don’t care about lying to their potential audience and think that “spray and pray” is an effective tactic. In the first case, their writing probably will not be very good, so why bother reading their fic. In the second case, the fact that I can’t trust the tags to be accurate means I’m not going to read it to see if it’s interesting even if it has a tag I like. Chances are, that tag isn’t actually in the fic anyway, and even if it is, by spam-tagging the author is making the archive harder to use for everybody. Why would I reward bad behavior with attention? No. Far better to mute the author and move on.

More to the point--and no, I will never stop harping on this, because we have GOT to stop leaving our strongest points in the drawer--it doesn't matter if you heard of this convention before joining AO3 or not, because it's in AO3's tagging FAQ.

[id: the "How do I tag a romantic or platonic relationship?" section of the tagging FAQ here.]

"But Jo," you may argue, because you're wrong. "There's no way to find that without digging through site FAQ menus, and that's really inaccessible!"

sure

except

that when you go to post a new fic, and you go to put in those relationship tags, you see this

[id: the Relationships field]

and that tooltip, the one THERE TO EXPLAIN HOW THE FIELD WORKS, links to the Relationships segment of the tag FAQ, which explicitly lays this shit out.

I don't care if you don't know fandom history. I don't care if you've never heard a goddamn word about the spirk shippers. I don't care if you've never been exposed to fandom culture in your life. It is, frankly, not fair to expect those things of everyone.

What is entirely fair to expect is that you will READ THE INSTRUCTIONS PRINTED NEXT TO THE FUCKING BOX, actually. Forget fandom conventions. It genuinely doesn't matter whether you agree with or respect fandom conventions. This is a site policy. This is explicitly how tagging on AO3, specifically, works.

I see it a lot in my students that the ONLY mode they can engage with literature on is one in which they either say it's good because it's "relatable" or it's bad because they "can't relate to it" as well, and I feel like this is a symptom of the same problem. An unwillingness to engage with fiction outside of its ability to be a mirror to your specific worldview and set of morals. But art doesn't exist to give you moral purity badges--it's a mode of expression that produces conversations between artists and readers. And to engage in those converesations on an adult level you need to learn to process the discomfort of flawed human realities productively.

I just discovered foodtimeline.org, which is exactly what it sounds like: centuries worth of information about FOOD.  If you are writing something historical and you want a starting point for figuring out what people should be eating, this might be a good place?

CHRISTMAS CAME EARLY

this is awesome but the original link just turned into a redirect loop for me, here it is again (x)

OH HELLO

No more potatoes in medieval novels!

Limits of the Human Body

Body Heat = 107.6 F

Cold Water = 40 F

Hot Air = 300 F

High Altitude = 15,000 ft

Starvation = 45 days

Diving Depth = 282 ft

Lack of Oxygen = 11 minutes

Blood Loss = 40%

Dehydration = 7 days

Writers finding this post:

Thank you

Europeans about half of this post:

Body Heat = 42 C

Cold Water = 4 C

Hot Air = 148 C

High Altitude = 4572m

Starvation = 45 days

Diving Depth = 390m

Lack Of Oxygen = 11 minutes

Blood Loss = 40%

Dehydration = 7 days

Europeans seeing this version of this post:

How to draw Black characters. Because it's way too obvious when you drew a white person and gave them Black skin.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRg6YsKN/

-fae

If you're an artist please listen to her. PLEASE. 🙏🏾 I cannot stress these tips enough.

If you're baffled by the prevelance of the "THIS meets THAT" format of pitches when it comes to books, it's because publishers literally make authors come up with it. They're called "comps," and the industry uses them to gauge the market potential of a story concept. When deciding whether to acquire a book a publisher WILL look at the success or failures of similar books to figure out how big of an advance they're willing to risk. If your pitch doesn't come with comps that have "proved" to be popular, it'll be seen as Too Out There and it'll be less likely to sell. It's annoying and it's bullshit but it's industry mandated, not something authors do as a quirky trend.

Also authors may not get a say in which comps are used. I have a friend whose book got described as "Dexter meets Twilight" in marketing material which was ABSURD and probably actually turned away some readers who would've loved it because it was nothing like Twilight but she kind of just had to...go with it. You have no power as a debut author, man. What are you gonna do, tell the industry professionals you know better than them?