Took Me Until About Halfway Through College Before I Realized Study Means Play With The Material In A

Took me until about halfway through college before I realized “study” means “play with the material in a variety of ways until you understand it” and not just “read the assigned chapters and do the homework” and I think that probably should have been discussed at some point prior to that.

There have been a couple of posts going around about how smut writers have the challenge of keeping a sex scene interesting when there's only a few different actions and a few different body parts to talk about

And yes, funny jokes about writing, but when I see posts like these I want to scream

If you feel like the sex scene you're writing is repetitive, no number of synonyms for "thrust" will help you. Synonyms for "cock" or "cunt" will REALLY not help you.

Sex scenes are character studies as much as they are action scenes. What are the characters' frameworks for what they're doing? Emotions, thoughts, specific physical sensations. If there are metaphors, do the metaphors make sense with the characters' experiences/the story's theme's/the setting? Is the sex scene completing a character arc, even a small one? Is there a character arc within the sex scene itself, even a small one?

A really good sex scene is specific and grounded to the physicality, emotions, and thoughts of the characters involved. Even if it's a PWP!

It's been said that the largest sex organ is the brain, and this is not a joke, especially when we're talking about the medium of the written word!

everybody’s always on writing prompts like “what if there was a world where everyone had a timer ticking down to their death… but you met someone whose timer said infinity!” or “what if everyone had their cause of death tattooed across their forehead… but you met someone whose forehead said THE CREATURE!” Enough -

enough. stop with the shock value. there is no need to insert THE CREATURE; the benign concept of such a world is horrifying enough. not even in urgency, but just in banal, everyday interaction. imagine you meet someone and their timer says two years. not tomorrow, not urgently soon, but two years. enough to do quite a lot. they could fall in love in that time - could they get engaged? have a baby? you might otherwise get to know them, befriend them, but perhaps you opt not to, make a conscious choice not to invest in your own grief. what balancing act would every individual person have to participate in - I have ten years, is that long enough to be a good mother to children? is that long enough to secure a caretaker for my own mother? my wife will die a few months before me. my newborn’s timer reads nineteen years.

and cause of death. you interview for a job and emblazoned across the healthy, smiling face of the HR lady is MALNUTRITION. your country is prospering, safe, but every person you meet on the street from the babies to the old women read BOMB. BOMB. what kind of havoc would fate wreak on the world? what about the loss of privacy? how would that shape our notions of hope? idk man I think a lot of those ancient poems were right, and the fates are monsters. I’m interested by the framing of these ideas as trite horror tales when the premises themselves are so much more disturbing if simply taken to their logical ends

REVERSE TROPE WRITING PROMPTS

Too many beds

Accidentally kidnapping a mafia boss

Really nice guy who hates only you

Academic rivals except it’s two teachers who compete to have the best class

Divorce of convenience

Too much communication

True hate’s kiss (only kissing your enemy can break a curse)

Dating your enemy’s sibling

Lovers to enemies

Hate at first sight

Love triangle where the two love interests get together instead

Fake amnesia

Soulmates who are fated to kill each other

Strangers to enemies

Instead of fake dating, everyone is convinced that you aren’t actually dating

Too hot to cuddle

Love interest CEO is a himbo/bimbo who runs their company into the ground

Nursing home au

Okay, you need to make sure you play this game at some point. Maybe not today or anything, because you’ll need about thirty minutes and a serious willingness to understand how it works, but - it’s so worth it. It’s basically an answer to our occasional frustration - why do assholes always come out on top? - and the beautiful thing about it is that not only does it explain how that happens, but also how we can change it.

“In the short run, the game defines the players. But in the long run, it’s us players who define the game.”

“But let me give you the dark side of writing groups. One really dark side of writing groups is, particularly newer writers, don’t know how to workshop.

“And one of the things they’ll try to do is they’ll try to make your story into the story they would write, instead of a better version of the story you want to write.

“And that is the single worst thing that can happen in feedback, is someone who is not appreciating the story you want to make, and they want to turn it into something else.

“New workshoppers are really bad at doing this. In other words, they’re really good at doing a bad thing, and they’re doing it from the goodness of their heart. They want you to be a better writer. They want to help you. The only way they know is to tell you how they would do it, which can be completely wrong for your story.”

—Brandon Sanderson, Lecture #1 Introduction, Writing Science Fiction And Fantasy