Theravenlyn-writes - A Celebration Of Story-telling

The narrative of ‘this person was disabled but their disability was cured as part of their story’ is ableist

Guys, stop being crap to creators. You aren’t hurting Amazon. You’re stealing from writers.

On using white or light-colored things as a symbol of evil, and black or dark-colored things as a symbol of good: I thought this video might generate some ideas for the writeblr community. A few bullet points to help you get started tearing white away from the idea of inherent goodness:

The color white can be used to demonstrate the appearance of purity/’righteousness’, with an emphasis on the idea of purity being incorrect and/or on the situation absolutely not being pure or righteous

A society all in white is uniform, but not individual (and those not in white may therefore represent freedom and the ability to break free)

White can represent opulence– it’s obscenely difficult to clean, which means someone in white likely isn’t getting into a lot of situations where they’d get dirty, or they don’t clean their own clothes. Think dry cleaning or hoop skirts; it’s long been fashionable to show off how little you work

White tends to look fairly blank– it’s not filled in, not interesting, and not particularly creative. This can point back to a lack of individuality, or it can mean something unfinished…

A white outfit, for example, might mean the character in question simply doesn’t care about their appearance and is throwing on the most ‘default’ notion.

Clearly the sci-fi community (dystopian sci-fi specifically) owns none of these ideas, and just as clearly, each of these ideas can be used symbolically with race; just be thoughtful when writing, as always.

So go out! Write evil white characters! And, just as importantly, give darkness and dark-skinned characters a space to shine.

the hunger games films tore out the books teeth. like it does the series such a disservice when it stands for nothing, says nothing, passes no judgement.. katniss speaks so plainly in the books about what she thinks of the capital. of what they do to her and her family and the districts. of the different worlds she witnesses as she’s straddled between 12 and the capital.. she calls it barbaric. she calls it disgusting and wrong and horrifying, over and over, and the films were like how do we market this teen romance.

my dad–also a writer–came to visit, and i mentioned that the best thing to come out of the layoff is that i’m writing again. he asked what i was writing about, and i said what i always do: “oh, just fanfic,” which is code for “let’s not look at this too deeply because i’m basically just making action figures kiss in text form” and “this awkward follow-up question is exactly why i don’t call myself a writer in public.”

he said, “you have to stop doing that.”

“i know, i know,” because it’s even more embarrassing to be embarrassed about writing fanfic, considering how many posts i’ve reblogged in its defense.

but i misunderstood his original question: “fanfic is just the genre. i asked what you’re writing about.” 

i did the conversational equivalent of a spinning wheel cursor for at least a minute. i started peeling back the setting and the characters, the fic challenge and the specific episode the story jumps off from, and it was one of those slow-dawning light bulb moments. “i’m writing about loneliness, and who we are in the absence of purpose.”

as, i imagine, are a lot of people right now, who probably also don’t realize they’re writing an existential diary in the guise of getting television characters to fuck. 

“that’s what you’re writing. the rest is just how you get there, and how you get it out into the world. was richard iii really about richard the third? would shakespeare have gotten as many people to see it if it wasn’t a story they knew?”

so, my friends: what are you writing about?