my favorite thing about people recommending Terry Prachett to me is they go "oh check out these books of his!" and you think, oh huh that sounds like a seperate series!

no it discworld, its always discworld

and everyone always suggest somewhere different to start except for the BEGINNING

theres a million discworld books and so many different series within the series from the knowledge i have

how on earth do you start reading these, it seems like you just have to get lucky as a child and pick up the first book with no preconceived notions and just keep going

do you skip some, do you read them in a different order, do you have to read all of them?? how do you read these books

someone give me a specific order i have no idea where to start

and i thought trying to figure out what order to watch the star wars movies in was hard

I got you.

The best vegan chocolate cake

The Life Cycle of a Blackberry

two heterosexuals stand in a garden // 17.04

(yes this is les mis fanfic lol)

Los Angeles (1983)

depicting sexual assault in media is not an endorsement of it 🤝 it's reasonable for audiences to expect a certain level of care and awareness in its presentation 🤝 there is oftentimes an over-reliance on sexual violence in creating the backstories, trajectories, and conflicts of fictional women 🤝 sexual violence is prevalent in society and stories about it do need to be told as a reflection of our reality 🤝 sometimes male writers and directors are extremely bad at telling these stories and audiences are justified in demanding better

You know the Grimm version of Snow White makes more sense than most versions if only because in that version Snow White was like 7 years old.

Like imagine you find a 7 year old in the woods and she’s like my mom is gonna kill me because I’m prettier than her and she’s not kidding. You know this queen is that sort of person. So you and your roommates adopt the kid and tell her don’t talk to strangers. And she keeps talking to strangers and getting poison combs stuck in her hair and whatnot.

Like yeah that’s kinda stupid but also she’s seven. She likes apples.

Also imagine it from the hunter’s perspective. The queen tells you this bitch is prettier than me I need you to take her out in the woods and kill her. And then you see who you’re supposed to kill and it’s a 2nd grader. Like how are you supposed to react to that sort of situation? Kill a human child? No. Because you’re not a brainless evil minion you’re just some guy dealing with a cartoonishly evil monarch. Of course you let her go.

Bad look for the Prince of course. Even if she did age while she was in that glass case. He saw a dead woman and just decided to keep her. And once she stopped being dead he was like we’re married now

He did cause the evil queen to dance to death in red hot shoes though. That was kinda cool.

With the acknowledgement that I'm grasping at straws, is it ever directly confirmed that the Prince wasn't also 7?

See, I think that still works.

You are the guardsman assigned to protect the eight-year-old Prince. You are currently in the middle of the forest because he absolutely had his heart set on "going hunting", and the royal second-grader should definitely not be traipsing around the woods on his own. You let him go a little on ahead and he comes running back talking about how there's a dead girl in the clearing and there's no-one else around and he wants to take her home because she's really pretty, Hans, and she's all alone!

You let him drag you to said clearing and okay, that is one angelic-looking dead child alright, and on the one hand the quality of her clothes and the craftsmanship on the coffin (who builds a see-through coffin?) speak to potential Consequences if you simply carry her off, but also for the amount of vines that have grown on the coffin she looks extraordinarily un-decayed, so you should probably get the court alchemist's opinion on that, and there's no way he's going to come all the way out here in his embroidered velvet curly-shoes. And also this kid is technically assigned by God as your natural superior, or something.

So fine. You hoist the coffin onto your shoulder (it's not like the Prince can do it. He's eight.) and head back toward the castle, Prince chattering blithely all the way. And then you turn your ankle on a rock and suddenly there's a thump and a cough and a lot of shouting from inside the coffin and you have now become a key player in a tense political incident with the next kingdom over.

You should probably ask for a raise.

WAIT NO THIS IS GLORIOUS

Dripping turtleneck, Madmoiselle Opossum

Item: uniform shirt from a local ice cream shop, just in case you need to go undercover there

NOT EVERYTHING FEELS LIKE SOMETHING ELSE

Struggling with Setting and Plot

[Ask edited for length]

First, since you asked about copying vs inspiration, start by reading these posts:

Taking Inspiration from Another Story’s Premise Similarities vs Plagiarism Plagiarism vs Reference vs Inspiration Hopefully that will help you get comfortable with borrowing ideas from other sources but making them into something new and unique to you.

Next, being able to come up with characters is great, but unless those characters are rooted in a particular setting or situation, it doesn't help much with world building and plot. And while some writers can find a plot within a setting, I think for most writers its easier to start with the plot, and once you have the beginnings of a premise, it's not too hard to expand a plot from there. As luck would have it, you already have the beginnings of a premise:

People get stuck together in a new place and have to learn to accept it or find a way to escape.

Now we can look at that and start asking questions. Perhaps the easiest question to start with is "do they learn to accept it, or do they find a way to escape?" Which one? Because those are two very different goals. Choosing one and eliminating the other tightens up your premise:

People get stuck together in a new place and have to learn to accept it.

All right... I think the next logical question is who gets stuck together in a place? Is it two people? Three people? Five people? Twenty-six people? One-hundred people? You don't even have to figure out the exact number right now, but just knowing whether this story is about two people, a few people, a small group of people, a bigger group of people, or a huge group of people is going to really narrow things down.

A small group of people get stuck together in a new place and have to learn to accept it.

Okay... where do they get stuck and how? Let's brainstorm... are these modern day boaters, or a misfit bunch of 18th century buccaneers, who become castaways on a remote island? Are they a group of students whose project gets them sucked into another dimension? Are they far-future astronauts who get stranded on an isolated planet? Keep going...

A small group of students get sucked into another dimension and stranded when their science project goes wrong.

Ahoy, there! A PREMISE!!!

Now you can start brainstorming the specific details... who are these students? Middle school/equivalent? High school/equivalent? University? Graduate school? Where and when is their school located? 1926 Chicago? 1980s London? 2077 Kinshasa? 1926 Shanghai?

A small group of middle school students in 1980's London get sucked into another dimension and stranded when their science project goes wrong.

Time to start world building and brainstorming this alternate dimension. Is it going to be an alternate version of our dimension? Will it be a dimension that's similar to a past time/place on Earth? Will this dimension be like a futuristic city? Will it be something fantastical like a place that feels like an alien city, or like Blade Runner meets Ready Player One? Are there other people in this dimension? Or is this group completely on their own?

Now you can start to think about a conflict... what is the problem that must be resolved by the end of the story? Is it simply a matter of figuring out how to survive in this new place? Are they immediately captured by some faction or army or group, and they must escape, or convince someone that they're not dangerous, or win their freedom somehow? What is the specific goal they work toward in order to reach this resolution? What steps must they achieve? Who or what places obstacles in their path, and what obstacles?

Once you know all of this, you can figure out the nitty-gritty details like how many characters, who each one is specifically, and what their role in the story will be. You can look at various structure templates (like Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, Larry Brooks Story Structure, Dramatica, etc.) for guidance... just don't feel like you have to stick to it exactly. You can also read through posts on my Plot & Story Structure master list for more help with plotting.

I hope this post gets you over the hump, though! ♥

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I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

ART COLLAB WITH @ver0nica985 ☝️☝️ (She drew Justin!!)

TYSM FOR COLLABING W ME UR ARTS ACTUALLY INCREDIBLE, THIS WAS SO FUUNNN💗💗

MILES!!!!!!!! GO FOLLOW EHEHEHE

thanks for the collab brah... had so much FUNNNNN explodes you with my mind

(uses the “make your character say something while not actually saying it” writing advice i saw on here once)

(character interactions are now 200% more fun to write)

holy shit what

Pray tell, how does this advice work? For a friend

The way I’m familiar with it is:

Before:

And now, when neither Sarah nor the narration are allowed to directly say that she’s tired or doesn’t want to go to school:

Reminder for folks who

1: are new too writing

2: struggle to remember all this stuff WHILE they’re writing, and/or

3: feel like their writing is lacking even when they know this stuff

THIS IS A TIP BEST SAVED FOR REVISION!! A lot of stuff like this is! When you’re writing a first draft, the only thing you should be worried about is getting the message on the paper. My “first draft” usually looks more like a rough outline and jumps around between eloquent prose, emojis, sincere dialogue, and sometimes things like “blinking white guy dot gif”. Because that gif has a very specific emotion, right? But it’s hard to put into words, it’s time consuming, and when I’m just trying to get my thought out before it slips away from me, I don’t want to stop and ponder how best to go about it.

In your first or second pass, it’s okay and normal to say “I don’t want to skip school. I’m tired.” As long as the improved/revised version makes it to the final product, you’re a-okay. 👍

PS: if you’re a fanfic author and you’re just creating for the fun of it, you can disregard this entirely if you want. I looked at this and thought “yeah but that’s a lot of work” and then remembered that I don’t have to do it when I’m not Writing Professionally. Is it objectively good advice? Yes. Do I HAVE to do it when I’m just posting things on the internet for free? Absolutely not.

my favourite thing about tumblr is that we all accept the concept that the concept of a “world famous detective” is a feature of “the mystery genre” despite this post obviously being about Knives Out/Glass Onion and literally nothing else

World famous detectives. That is, people who are in-canon famous, and either directly famous for solving crime, or famous for something else (e.g. as novelists) and well known to their fan bases to have solved several/many crimes.

Sherlock Holmes

Hercule Poirot

Richard Castle

Jessica Fletcher

All of the above have at least one adventure where someone knows of their crime solving by reputation, and comes to them for help because of it, and not simply because they had an ad in the paper.

I would say the world famous detective is as much a genre staple as people in horror movies never having apparently seen a horror movie, or the lack of super hero comics in-Universe in superhero comics and movies.

‘world famous detective’ is a significantly bigger ask than ‘at least one person in their country of residence has heard of them’ actually

So first, yes obviously the original post was primarily and centrally reacting to the Benoit Blanc movies.

But I think the point was, no one watches that movie and says "huh, this is a funny premise of this movie in particular that it has a 'world-famous detective' as part of the premise". World-famous detective, sure, that makes sense.

In the real world, there's no such thing as a famous detective. It's not that Benoit Blanc is "too" famous; that's not a thing people are famous for! But in mystery stories—or at least the ones that I, as not a mystery genre fan, am familiar with—famous detectives are a recurring theme.

In your tags you flag Sherlock Holmes, who was certainly the second character I thought of when I originally read this post. My impression is that Poirot is a famous, if not world-famous detective; he shows up and people say "Oh the detective Mr Poirot". A Murder in Haversham Manor, the play within The Play That Goes Wrong, has a plot-point of "I've called my friend the famous detective who lives nearby", which is not a thing that has ever happened in real life. And sure, Haversham Manor is supposed to be terrible, but it's terrible in a schlocky genre way.

I would throw less-adult characters like the Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown in there as well; they're known as, like, people you can bring stuff to, detective as a notable vocation rather than a job. You can see this in Batman's origin and original tagline as the "World's Greatest Detective".

So like it does seem like a true thing about the mystery genre, that some of the conventions set up prepare us to accept "a world-famous detective" despite that not making any sense in real life.

death note postulates not only that there are world-famous detectives but also that there is an explicit ranking of who the most famous detectives in the world are, with agreed #1, #2 and #3 spots (all of whom are secretly the same person)

ok fine maybe i DID come back wrong. what are you going to do about it. kill me? put me back in the ground? after all this effort? all this pain and suffering only to find out bringing me back wasn't worth it after all? you worked so hard. are you going to waste all of that just because im not what you wanted? just because i belong only to myself? are you going to let me pick out my own coffin

by Aaron Burden

by consequence_s