Im Researching Light Symbolism While Editing My Book And Its So Weird That The Healing One Is The Green

i’m researching light symbolism while editing my book and it’s so weird that the healing one is the green light when it’s so often used in movies to depict something evil

In the classic ‘just read the same sentence about 100 times over while editing and now I don’t know what words are’ predicament 😭

I know this is a normal cycle of creativity slump.

I know that having a gigantic event this week is taking a lot of thought process, leaving less for creativity.

I know that this has happened before and has always resulted in creative outpouring happening again.

I know making slow progress is still progress and that's important.

I know there's life stuff going on that's taking up a lot of time and causing emotional stuff, and it's more difficult to balance work life on top of that.

I know all of this, but I'm still worried that I'll never get my creativity back, that writing will be this painstaking forever.

My self-appointed rules for drawing comics:

No pages with only talking. If all the characters are doing is talk, they should be doing something while having this conversation. If that is not possible, there should be something happening in the background - even if it's just a faceless background character spilling a glass of water and cleaning it up.

The illustrations should be clear enough that even a person who can't read the text would have some kind of a grasp of what's going on, and how the characters feel about it.

Every character who is speaking in this panel should be in this panel, unless it's explicitly funny that they are not.

Each character's design must be distinct enough from each other that they can't be confused with any other one from any angle or distance.

Make the characters' body language clear enough that a reader could tell how they are feeling even if their face isn't visible.

Fit the characters around the dialogue, never the other way around. They should be positioned in order of who speaks first, no matter how strange of an angle that must take. A character whose speech bubble is on the left should be on the left of a character who says something on the right.

In both setting and characters, quality is measured by consistency, distinction and clarity. As long as a reader can tell who the characters are, where they are and what they are doing, it's a good panel. A comic consisting of extremely well-drawn individual panels, but where locations and characters aren't recognisable on sight, or are hard to tell apart from each other, is worse than one drawn with stick figures.

In the end, it mostly boils down to consistency, clarity, motion and emotion. As long as each individual panel meets those standards, it's good enough. Anything above and beyond that is a bonus, not a requirement.

Being a writer is trying to google things as inconspicuously as possible so you don’t end up on a watch list.

Anyway does anyone know how many pounds of force would be required to break a windshield with someone’s head?

Writing advice from my uni teachers:

If your dialog feels flat, rewrite the scene pretending the characters cannot at any cost say exactly what they mean. No one says “I’m mad” but they can say it in 100 other ways.

Wrote a chapter but you dislike it? Rewrite it again from memory. That way you’re only remembering the main parts and can fill in extra details. My teacher who was a playwright literally writes every single script twice because of this.

Don’t overuse metaphors, or they lose their potency. Limit yourself.

Before you write your novel, write a page of anything from your characters POV so you can get their voice right. Do this for every main character introduced.