Yay, unsolicited advice time! Or, not really advice, more like miscellaneous tips and tricks, because if there's one thing eight years of martial arts has equipped me to write, it's fight scenes.

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Fun things to add to a fight scene (hand to hand edition)

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Just thought these might be useful! If you want a more comprehensive guide or a weapons edition, feel free to ask. If you want, write how your characters fight in the comments!

Have a bitchin day <3

-As mentioned, if you whack anyone in the nose, even lightly, their eyes will water and their vision will be briefly compromised.

BUT ALSO -If they're not a frequent/trained fighter they will automatically raise both hands to their face and drop their head downward, instinctively, to protect their face. You can use this.

-High kicks are for taekwondo tournaments or that VERY rare moment they're called for. Most people used to fighting won't swing a kick above the waistline because these are easy for another moderately adequate fighter to get under and shove UP. One of my favorite tactics because every dude tries to be Chuck Norris so they learn high kicks but not breakfalls.

Sometimes it's useful to look at your dialogue and ask yourself, "would a real human being talk like that?" But it's also good to ask the follow-up questions of "would the way a real human being talks sound good here" and "does this character actually talk like a real human being or are they weird about it."

if you've never engaged with a creative art on a regular basis you need to understand that it requires concerted effort to get into "the groove" to make something and every second that it takes to get into that groove causes physical pain, but the only thing worse than doing it is not doing it.

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

Mordor.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!

So what is a rain shadow?

Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.

Oh yeah nothing is more annoying than fantasy maps that can't get mountains, rivers and rain shadows right.

May I recommend my new favorite tool: Mapgen4. You start with a random seed and then add mountains, valleys, shallow water, or oceans as you like. You can adjust the wind direction to make wind shadows off the mountains fall where you want. You can adjust overall raininess to make the rivers larger or smaller, or have more or fewer tributaries. It works best for small, isolated landmasses (think islands more than continents) but as there’s no scale bar and it’s all slightly abstracted anyway you can do whatever you want with it. I’ve only just started playing with it but it’s SO FUN.

the problem with having an evil mastermind manipulator oc is that i am not particularly good at being any of those things

(holding up oc) yyeah this is them. theyre really evil and wretched. love causing pain and lying. master of manipulation and gaslighting and- oh? how do they do all that? wwell you see. with. with their um words. and big smart brain

More on pre-electricity lighting.

Interesting to see this one pop up again after nearly two years - courtesy of @dduane, too! :->

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After experiencing a couple more storm-related power cuts since my original post, as well as a couple of after-dark garden BBQs, I've come to the conclusion that C.J. Cherryh puts far too much emphasis on "how dark things were pre-electric light".

For one thing eyes adjust, dilating in dim light to gather whatever illumination is available. Okay, if there's none, there's none - but if there's some, human eyes can make use of it, some better or just faster than others. They're the ones with "good night vision".

Think, for instance, of how little you can see of your unlit bedroom just after you've turned off the lights, and how much more of it you can see if you wake up a couple of hours later.

There's also that business of feeling your way around, risking breaking your neck etc. People get used to their surroundings and, after a while, can feel their way around a familiar location even in total darkness with a fair amount of confidence.

Problems arise when Things Aren't Where They Should Be (or when New Things Arrive) and is when most trips, stumbles, hacked shins and stubbed toes happen, but usually - Lego bricks and upturned UK plugs aside - non-light domestic navigation is incident-free.

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Here are a couple of pics from one of those BBQs: one candle and a firepit early on, then the candle, firepit and an oil lamp much later, all much more obvious than DD's iPad screen.

Though I remain surprised at how well my phonecam was handling this low light, my own unassisted eyes were doing far better. For instance, that area between the table and the firepit wasn't such an impenetrable pool of darkness as it appears in the photo.

I see (hah!) no reason why those same Accustomed Eyes would have any more difficulty with candles or oil lamps as interior lighting, even without the mirrors or reflectors in my previous post.

With those, and with white interior walls, things would be even brighter. There's a reason why so many reconstructed period buildings in Folk Museums etc. are (authentically) whitewashed not just outside but inside as well. It was cheap, had disinfectant qualities, and was a reflective surface. Win, win and win.

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All right, there were no switches to turn on a light. But there was no need for what C.J. describes as stumbling about to reach the fire, because there were tinderboxes and, for many centuries before them, flint and steel. Since "firesteels" have been heraldic charges since the 1100s, the actual tool must have been in use for even longer.

Tinderboxes were fire-starter sets with flint, steel and "tinder" all packed into (surprise!) a box. The tinder was easily lit ignition material, often "charcloth", fabric baked in an airtight jar or tin which would now start to glow just from a spark.

They're mentioned in both "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings". Oddly enough, "Hobbit" mentions matches in a couple of places, but I suspect that's a carry-over from when it was just a children's story, not part of the main Legendarium.

Tinderboxes could be simple, just a basic flint-and-steel kit with some tinder for the sparks to fall on...

...or elaborate like this one, with a fancy striker, charcloth, kindling material and even wooden "spills" (long splinters) to transfer flame to a candle or the kindling...

This tinderbox even doubles as a candlestick, complete with a snuffer which would have been inside along with everything else.

Here's a close-up of the striker box with its inner and outer lids open:

What looks like a short pencil with an eraser is actually the striker. A bit of tinder or charcloth would have been pulled through that small hole in the outer lid, which was then closed.

There was a rough steel surface on the lid, and the striker was scraped along it, like so:

This was done for a TV show or film, so the tinder was probably made more flammable with, possibly, lighter fuel. That would be thoroughly appropriate, since a Zippo or similar lighter works on exactly the same principle.

A real-life version of any tinderbox would usually just produce glowing embers needing blown on to make a flame, which is shown sometimes in movies - especially as a will-it-light-or-won't-it? tension build - but is usually a bit slow and non-visual for screen work.

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There were even flintlock tinderboxes which worked with the same mechanism as those on firearms. Here's a pocket version:

Here are a couple of bedside versions, once again complete with a candlestick:

And here are three (for home defence?) with a spotlight candle lantern on one side and a double-trigger pistol on the other.

Pull one trigger to light the candle, pull the other trigger to fire the gun.

What could possibly go wrong? :-P

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Those pistol lanterns, magnified by lenses, weren't just to let their owner see what they were shooting at: they would also have dazzled whatever miscreant was sneaking around in the dark, irises dilated to make best use of available glimmer.

Swordsmen both good and bad knew this trick too, and various fight manuals taught how to manage a thumb-shuttered lamp encountered suddenly in a dark alley.

There's a sword-and-lantern combat in the 1973 "Three Musketeers" between Michael York (D'Artagnan) and Christopher Lee (Rochefort), which was a great idea.

Unfortunately it failed in execution because the "Hollywood Darkness" which let viewers see the action, wasn't dark enough to emphasise the hazards / advantages of snapping the lamps open and shut.

This TV screencap (can't get a better one, the DVD won't run in a computer drive) shows what I mean.

In fact, like the photos of the BBQ, this image - and entire fight - looks even brighter through "real eyes" than with the phonecam. Just as there can be too much dark in a night scene, there can also be too much light.

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One last thing I found when assembling pics for the post were Folding Candle-lanterns.

They were used from about the mid-1700s to the later 20th century (Swiss Army ca. 1978) as travel accessories and emergency equipment, and IMO - I've Made A Note - they'd fit right into a fantasy world whose tech level was able to make them.

The first and last are reproductions: this one is real, from about 1830.

The clear part was mica - a transparent mineral which can be split into thin flexible sheets - while others use horn / parchment, though both of these are translucent rather than transparent. Regardless, all were far less likely to break than glass.

One or two inner surfaces were usually tin, giving the lantern its own built-in reflector, and tech-level-wise, tin as a shiny or decorative finish has been used since Roman times.

I'm pretty sure that top-of-the-line models could also have been finished with their own matching, maybe even built-in, tinderboxes.

And if real ones didn't, fictional ones certainly could. :->

as both a fanfic writer and an original content writer i struggle so much with wording the fact that they ARE different and while you’re practicing and growing as a writer when writing fanfic, it is not the same as original writing and fanfic serves a different purpose than original content a lot of the time which is why fanfic “hits differently” and fanfic authors are able to focus on things that the canon might not and neither are inherently bad or lesser they’re just different and saying there’s no need for books when you have fanfic is oversimplifying a million things because of that

but there’s really no good way to word it without people getting really mad at me because 1. it’s kind of complicated and more nuanced than you’d think and 2. this is tumblr

I’ve said it a million times and I’ll keep saying it,fanfic authors have the cheat codes of not having to get their readers emotionally invested in their characters and world. The very reason we have readers is because they are already emotionally invested,and I personally think establishing a world and characters and drawing readers in is one of the most difficult and nuanced parts of writing. But all the heavy lifting of that is already established,which is why we can jump into the middle of season 6 of a show or the third movie of a franchise for a ficlet or a oneshot or drabble and it can hit so hard,because there has already been the seasons and films and books getting us to this point. You have years and sometimes hundreds if not thousands of other creators’ passion and work to leap from and add your own beauty to,it’s one of my favorite parts of fanfic character studies and little “moment in time” fics,it’s a very special medium that offers us the ability for these creative liscenses.

Without the original content,without the books or films or shows,you’re essentially writing your own original work,which is its own wonderful thing,but as we’ve established,that’s not the point of fan works. We are in essence,the interior decorators of the creative world. The foundations have already been poured and the framework of the house already built. We’ve meandered through the halls and rooms and up the stairs that form the latticework that is the very essence of the building we’ve fallen in love with and become so enamoured with. But maybe after sitting in the kitchen,with it’s counters and cabinets and appliances,you feel that it is missing some of the finer details you’d love to see. So you paint the walls blue and you hang pictures in the bare spaces and pick out dishes that fit your aesthetic just so. Someone else would choose to decorate the kitchen differently,and that’s wonderful and fine,because we all want our own kitchens don’t we? The kitchen is gorgeous and functioning and fully fitted before you came along,but perhaps it is lacking a garlic press or some wine glasses which you would like,because those are utensils that you love and see a lot of use for.

We can afford to be picky over what kind of wine glasses we want in our kitchens,what curtains we want on our gorgeous bay windows or what light fixtures would make the bedrooms pop;because the house has already been built with love. And sometimes maybe certain details of the house are a little wonky,in the way things are when there is a team working on a project. The architect drew up the plans and the construction crew dug deep for water lines and pipes and a foundation. The carpenters built the walls and the masoner laid the rock and the plumber fitted the pipes and sinks and tubs and toilets. The electrician wired your walls and made sure you have air conditioning and the home inspector made sure it wouldn’t collapse around your ears. Sometimes a light switch is in an odd place,sometimes you don’t understand why the backdoor is there,so you work with what you have and you decorate around it,sometimes drawing the eye away from the weird light switch,and sometimes enhancing it.

I personally think a house is better for its decorations,but everyone disagrees on just how they want it. But the main point is you can’t decorate a house without the house. Sometimes you walk into a house created by such a master architect and which is so finely built with so many jaw dropping and phenomenal features that you don’t feel the need to add much decoration. Perhaps what you do add is simply to enhance,simply there to draw loving and syrupy slow attention to a spiraling staircase or the breathtaking view of mountains from a window. Sometimes the house isn’t made with love,it’s part of a home development that is utilitarian more than anything. But its foundation is good and you see a diamond in the rough worth to the ways its halls are built,so you move in and you fill it with bright yellow paint and sunflowers in vases on dining room tables and life and make it yours. But we all need homes in the first place,built by people whose jobs are to pour foundations and sweat through the hard labor of putting together walls.

I love this metaphor and I think it fits incredibly well–including how, as a fanfic author, you can build an entire extension onto the house or build a garage that was missing, things that will require you to know many of the same skills that built the original house (like how to structure the worldbuilding and weave it into the actual frame/foundation) if you want to create an entire AU and populate it with entirely new characters/new support beams and siding and windows and plumbing and electrical wiring. Without the original books, fanfiction wouldn’t exist because we’re building on what came before.  Fanfiction has the freedom to build a new extension on the house or just cut right to hanging up the perfect curtains for that gorgeous bay window that’s already there.  Fanfiction doesn’t have to build a world or get you invested or tell you how things work, the original already did that and that’s a specific skill to learn. Reading both of these can teach you so much about the skills you’ll use as a writer, as well as there can be huge amounts of overlap because fanfic can do a lot of the same heavy construction that the source material does.  That takes real skill, fic isn’t a lesser artform, especially because it focuses on such different experimental styles that canon can’t/won’t do or it focuses on emotional moments that very few source materials will, it can teach you a lot about how to structure different types of stories. But Tag’s right, we need homes in the first place to build from and, for all that each of us can probably name a dozen novel-length fics we’ve read that we feel are at least on par (if not better) than the original canon, there is still a difference between building a house in the first place versus adding onto a house that we and our friends have already toured through. And I desperately need more of both of those in my life, because one enhances the other.  Sure, there are some houses that are perfect when the contractors are done with them, but that’s not what really makes my heart sing.  My heart sings for the combination of a beautiful house structure that is then filled with the perfect artwork and vases of flowers and curtains and throw rugs by the fans.  Both take skill and both are invaluable.

The house metaphor speaks so much to me as I come from a blue collar background. (Parent was a tile setter; spouse was a carpenter before career change.) One of the things that a lot of people don’t understand in the building and refining of a home is that different skills are required, even among similar fields of expertise. My husband was a fine woodworking carpenter. He has enough knowledge about the basics of framing a home and the other carpentry involved in building it, but he cannot do it with the same speed and skill that others can. Ask him to make custom cabinets or custom trim or furniture or special novelties (chess boards, toys), and hands down, he’s your guy. Both framers and fine woodworkers are carpenters, but the skillsets are different enough that there is a learning curve if one wants to do the other’s job.

Original fiction and fan fiction are both writing. But they aren’t the same skillset. Making the jump from one to the other does require some learning. And honestly, I wish I had understood that years ago. I wouldn’t have spent so much time beating myself up for having trouble intuitively writing original fiction when I was clearly writing fanfic just fine but instead focused on learning the specific skillset required for it. A framer doesn’t expect to make perfect custom cabinets the first day they step into a fine woodworking shop. Transitioning between types of fiction writing is no different.

This is why she’s my favorite author.

Check out “Barry Lyndon”, a film whose period interiors were famously shot by period lamp-and-candle lighting (director Stanley Kubrick had to source special lenses with which to do it).

More recently, some scenes in “Wolf Hall” were also shot with period live-flame lighting and IIRC until they got used to it, actors had to be careful how they moved across the sets. However, it’s very atmospheric: there’s one scene where Cromwell is sitting by the fire, brooding about his association with Henry VIII while the candles in the room are put out around him. The effect is more than just visual.

As someone (I think it was Terry Pratchett) once said: “You always need enough light to see how dark it is.”

A demonstration of getting that out of balance happened in later seasons of “Game of Thrones”, most infamously in the complaint-heavy “Battle of Winterfell” episode, whose cinematographer claimed the poor visibility was because “a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly”.

So it was nothing to do with him at all, oh dear me no. Wottapillock. Needing to retune a TV to watch one programme but not others shows where the fault lies, and it’s not in the TV.

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We live in rural West Wicklow, Ireland, and it’s 80% certain that when we have a storm, a branch or even an entire tree will fall onto a power line and our lights will go out.

Usually the engineers have things fixed in an hour or two, but that can be a long dark time in the evenings or nights of October through February, so we always know where the candles and matches are and the oil lamp is always full.

We also know from experience how much reading can be done by candle-light, and it’s more than you’d think, once there’s a candle right behind you with its light falling on the pages.

You get more light than you’d expect from both candles and lamps, because for one thing, eyes adapt to dim light. @dduane​ says she can sometimes hear my irises dilating. Yeah, sure…

For another thing lamps can have accessories. Here’s an example: reflectors to direct light out from the wall into the room. I’ve tried this with a shiny foil pie-dish behind our own Very Modern Swedish Design oil lamp, and it works.

Smooth or parabolic reflectors concentrate their light (for a given value of concentrate, which is a pretty low value at that) while flatter fluted ones like these scatter the light over a wider area, though it’s less bright as a result:

This candle-holder has both a reflector and a magnifying lens, almost certainly to illuminate close or even medical work of some sort rather than light a room.

And then there’s this, which a lot of people saw and didn’t recognise, because it’s often described in tones of librarian horror as a beverage in the rare documents collection.

There IS a beverage, that’s in the beaker, but the spherical bottle is a light magnifier, and Gandalf would arrange a candle behind it for close study.

Here’s one being used - with a lightbulb - by a woodblock carver.

And here’s the effect it produces.

Here’s a four-sphere version used with a candle (all the fittings can be screwed up and down to get the candle and magnifiers properly lined up) and another one in use by a lacemaker.

Finally, here’s something I tried last night in our own kitchen, using a water-filled decanter. It’s not perfectly spherical so didn’t create the full effect, but it certainly impressed me, especially since I’d locked the camera so its automatic settings didn’t change to match light levels.

This is the effect with candles placed “normally”.

But when one candle is behind the sphere, this happens.

 It also threw a long teardrop of concentrated light across the worktop; the photos of the woodcarver show that much better.

Poor-people lighting involved things like rushlights or tallow dips. They were awkward things, because they didn’t last long, needed constant adjustment, didn’t give much light and were smelly. But they were cheap, and that’s what mattered most.

They’re often mentioned in historical and fantasy fiction but seldom explained: a rushlight is a length of spongy pith from inside a rush plant, dried then dipped in tallow (or lard, or mutton-fat), hence both its names.

Here’s Jason Kingsley making one.

@lurkinglurkerwholurks look it’s Cherryh of the Cuckoo’s Egg!

Honestly? My main piece of advice for writing well-rounded characters is to make them a little bit lame. No real living person is 100% cool and suave 100% of the time. Everyone's a little awkward sometimes, or gets too excited about something goofy, or has a silly fear, or laughs about stupid things. Being a bit of a loser is an incurable part of the human condition. Utilize that in your writing.

Hear me out

That ship dynamic meme but poly

[ID: Three sets of sleepwear. First, a bleary-looking person holding a candle and wearing a simple blue sleeping gown with a nightcap. Next, elaborate and fluffy pink sleeping robes, and finally, heart-patterned boxers. End ID]

I want to write a book called “your character dies in the woods” that details all the pitfalls and dangers of being out on the road & in the wild for people without outdoors/wilderness experience bc I cannot keep reading narratives brush over life threatening conditions like nothing is happening.

I just read a book by one of my favorite authors whose plots are essentially airtight, but the MC was walking on a country road on a cold winter night and she was knocked down and fell into a drainage ditch covered in ice, broke through and got covered in icy mud and water.

Then she had a “miserable” 3 more miles to walk to the inn.

Babes she would not MAKE it to that inn.

Are there any other particularly egregious examples?

This book already exists, sort of! Or at least, it’s a biology textbook but I bought it for writing purposes:

It starts with a chapter about freezing to death, and it is without a doubt the scariest thing I’ve read in years (and I read a lot of horror fiction).

It's less textbooky and more popular writing, but also of interest may be this book: Last Breath by Peter Stark (the original subtitle was "Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance," which I think is far more descriptive than "The Limits of Adventure").

Along with factual information, each chapter features an imaginary character who is facing the hazard in question—hypothermia, heatstroke, drowning, dehydration, etc—to illustrate what it's like to experience it. And some of these characters survive! But more of them Do Not.

The first chapter (also about freezing to death! though the character manages to get found, get warmed back up, and survive) was originally published as a piece in Outdoor magazine, so you can read it to get an idea of whether you would like the book:

he’s just like me fr

we are the same

be proud of your original characters. it's no easy task to create a character from scratch, to make them believable and real and human. it takes time. it takes dedication. so what if they aren't perfect right away? so what if there are still things you're only now figuring out after time? characters evolve, they go through changes and arcs and stories just like real people do. and it's okay if your character develops over time, you don't need to have it all figured out right away. there are some things that will only ever clear up after writing them for a while, finding their voice, and seeing the way they interact with other characters. but this is your character, your creation, and you deserve to feel proud about it no matter what.

“he would not fucking say that!” then put him in a situation that makes him say it, we wanna see him squirm

It's good old fashioned characterization practice when confronted with "he would not fucking say that" to go "under what circumstances WOULD he say that?" And then go "and how would he get into those circumstances?" And boom. You have a MUCH more solid character.

It's also a fun magic trick as a writer to write a guy so well you get people foaming at the mouth on the comments going "HE WOULD NOT SAY THAT BUT HE *DOES* AND IT *MAKES SENSE* FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU!!!"

When your own OC becomes your blorbo it is both glorious and torturous

Me, holding a Guy in my hands: …he’s so,,,. Hnng… and. - y’know?

Everyone: No. Nobody knows.