Read this. Please. It is an incredible, beautiful and now Hugo nominated story. And something I feel every queer individual can take a LOT from. I did not write it, nor am I trans, but the author is.
How to Write Better Smut
Writing erotica isn’t for the faint of heart - whatever anyone tells you, there is a certain ‘cringe’ factor to writing a sex scene that doesn’t really exist in any other part of fiction writing. Even those who are fairly experienced in real life can find themselves floundering when they first try to write a realistic and compelling sex scene. Why? Well, probably because it feels a little personal.
So, in many ways it’s all about practice - actually writing or reading sex scenes will provide a sharp learning curve. However, there are a few changes that you can implement to elevate (almost) any sex scene immediately.
6 Tips for Writing Better Sex Scenes
These 6 tips are very simple and can be implemented by making a few changes to an existing manuscript as well as when you begin to write a new piece. So, don’t be afraid to haul out a few old drafts and see what a difference these changes can make! Read More on Vocal
To add to this - remember that there is no need to write hardcore sex if you are uncomfortable with it. In fact, if you are writing for traditonal publication, less explicit is better.
It can be far better to write about everything that surrounds sex in order to give the same effect in the reader without writing a scene that will bump your book into an e-rated market with limited marketing options (key for career writers to consider).
Making sure you write effective romance can be just as important as writing a steamy sex scene. At the very least, you should take steps to avoid common mistakes to make sure that your reader is invested in the relationship. If you’re not writing erotica, there’s a high chance that your reader will treat the sex scene as supplementary in nature.
So, to keep it short and sweet, when writing smut you should:
- Engage all the senses
- Build a solid romance
- Don’t overindulge in details (unless writing erotica)
- Humanize the acts (sex is not porn, its ridiculous and strange at many points)
- Don’t be afraid of letting your characters laugh
- Talk about everything around the act; don’t limit yourself to body parts!
( Just a personal thing about the “bring all the senses into it” advice. Does anyone else hate it when taste is brought into it, or is that just me? I can’t stand descriptions of what a kiss tastes like, let alone other things; it’s an immediate turn off for me. Is there anyone else who hates that, or has a personal dislike for one of the senses being used in those scenes?)
you can explain why it’s important for aspiring authors to read published books and not just fanfiction without condescending to fanfiction authors/readers and implying it’s inherently of lesser quality
like a lot of fanfiction is genuinely good and well-written! there’s some amazing work there! there is absolutely fanfiction out there that’s the same quality as well-written published works. being like ‘well, it’s cute, but it’s not real writing’ is just dismissive and frankly completely untrue.
but, at the same time, there are a lot of reasons it’s important to also read published works, and those reasons aren’t just ‘it’s better’. for one, a lot of writing original fiction involves introducing one’s own characters and setting to an audience who knows nothing about the characters or worldbuilding, which is generally not something you’re going to learn how to do by only reading stories where you already know the world and characters. that doesn’t mean the work isn’t good; it just means it doesn’t teach all of the skills you’ll need to know when writing
im a lifelong fanfic writer, but one thing fanfic won’t teach you is how to end a story. or how to structure one, really. fanfic is itself a continuation of a story, it’s a transformative work, and… it’s kind of rare for long, chaptered fic to actually be complete. it’s awesome when it is! but you do kind of get used to reading fanfic as a big nebulous cloud of what-ifs, and furthermores, and so ons, and etc.
published fiction pretty much always has to have a start, middle, and ending. you can’t really learn formal anatomy from fanfiction. you can learn a lot of creative stuff that published fiction rarely has the freedom to engage in–aus and remixes, for instance–but fanfic really isn’t where you’re going to be able to study structure and discipline.
Thank god. Finally some good fanfic vs. published story dialogue.
Fanfiction is also usually published as the author writes it, which means authors are limited in their ability to retroactively change story elements (removing plot holes or subplots that go nowhere, or adding foreshadowing for an important event they decided they wanted 1/3 into their story, etc). This means stories overall are generally less “polished” than professionally published work.
On a similar note, fic writers can “get away with” a lot more fluff that doesn’t move the story forward– ie, dedicating an entire chapter to characters cuddling, or spending a very long time explaining the economics system of a secret wizard world. This is a strength of fic because it’s often what people want to read– but it’s also something that usually hinges on the reader already being deeply invested in the characters and the world, which is a luxury you’re not going to get from a lot of original fiction.
Fanfiction isn’t necessarily better or worse than original fic, but it is a fundamentally different art. An aspiring fiction author reading only fanfic is like an aspiring fiction author reading only poetry; it’s great to enrich your skills by reading widely, but if you don’t read *the kind of art you are trying to make*, you won’t know how to make it.
Hyper-specific advice because I don’t see enough of this!
- make your characters have inaccurate perceptions of themselves. your character might think they’re selfish but at every opportunity they act selfless. we all have blind spots so give these to your characters too! (this works best with first person pov but I’m sure you can do it in third.)
- make a character’s personality trait helpful sometimes and harmful other times. impulsivity that makes them act quickly in high-stress situations which is great but it also sometimes results in the wrong choices.
- make an excel/google sheets doc for your outline. for mine i have the chapter number, the date, the character pov (since mine is first person and switches between 5 characters), a summary column, and a continuity column. my story takes place in one setting but most stories have multiple locations, so you could include a column for that, the time of day, even the moon phase (one of my wips is from the perspective of animals so that is super important for that story).
- you can also use excel/sheets for keeping track of your conlang. for my animal wip i have constructed a language called Vannro and I have 300 some-odd entries into my excel doc. i have columns for the Vannro word, the English translation, etymology and derived words (for some), the part of speech, and the subject. you can easily sort in alphabetical either in English or your conlang, and also sort by excluding all entries that aren’t under the subject “derogatory” or “places” etc. I always forget what my “be” verbs are so I sort through the part of speech column so I can find “is” “was” “are” etc.
- use perspective to create tension for your reader. for example, in The Blackwater Anomaly in a chapter from Rainer’s pov, we experience his nightmare, however in a later chapter from Holly’s pov, when she asks him directly, he lies and says he hasn’t experienced any nightmares. Holly doesn’t know he is lying but the audience does. I also have characters who do not get chapters from their perspective, who may or may not be lying, and so both the audience and the characters experience that anxiety and uncertainty together.
- consider using deep pov. you can read some articles about it but essentially you make the audience experience the story at the same time as the character and it makes your narration more active. this can also be done in third person. this has a lot to do with “show don’t tell” (although sometimes its better to just tell). remove some “telling” words like “thought/felt/saw” and just get directly into what’s happening. instead of “Ava saw a shadow fall across her shoulder” make it “a shadow fell across her shoulder”. your reader will know who you’re talking about. this even jumps into the unreliable narrator when you change “I felt like Isaiah was blowing me off” to “Isaiah blew me off.” the former has room for doubt and makes your character seem weaker. if she thinks she’s being blown off and she’s pissed about it, make her say that! you have to make the audience believe it’s true, it makes them more invested in the character’s experiences and emotions. and then if they later find out Isaiah wasn’t really blowing them off, there was an emergency or something, both the character and the audience can feel regretful together over misreading the situation and being pissed at Isaiah. if you leave room for doubt, then your reader will just feel unsurprised during the reveal and frustrated at your character for being stupid up until then.
- you don’t have to “show” everything. sometimes there’s boring parts of a narrative that no one really cares about. you can either make a break in the text to show a time skip happened when your character was driving from point a to point b or you can give a paragraph or two about the drive, just telling what happened, even include an accident on the side of the road or an unexpected and frustrating road closure. its a very mundane and relatable aspect in our lives and we don’t need to be “shown” these, we can just be told. summarize the nonessential by telling or just skip it.
For Novice Writers: the quick test for Are You Being Scammed Or Not...
I read a sad case today of a young writer who had had her story rewritten into illiteracy by a so-called publisher, who then abused her in email when she wrote to complain. She wsn’t getting paid for her story – instead she was actually buying copies of the anthology to show people that she had sold a story. And I thought, it is time to remind the world, and to enlighten young writers, about…
Money flows towards the writer.
That’s all. All writers should remember it. When a commercial publisher contracts a book, it will pay an advance against royalties to the writer. Money flows towards the writer. Literary agents make their living by charging a commission of between 10 and 20% on the sales that they make on behalf of their clients, the writers. When advances and royalties are paid by a publisher the agent’s percentage is filtered off in the direction of the writer’s agent but the bulk of the money still flows towards the writer. If a publisher ever asks for any sort of financial contribution from a writer, they’re trying to divert money away from the writer, in direct contravention of Yog’s Law. If an agent ever asks for up-front fees, regardless of what they call them (reading fees, administration costs, processing fees, or retainers), then they are trying to divert money away from the writer, in direct contravention of Yog’s Law. It’s a brilliantly simple rule. We should thank James D Macdonald for it in the best way there is. Buy his books
Money flows toward the writer.
No, that doesn’t mean that the author should get paper and ink for free, or that he won’t pay for postage. It does mean that when someone comes along and says, “Sure, kid, you can be a Published Author! It’ll only cost you $300!” the writer will know that something’s wrong. A fee is a fee is a fee, whether they call it a reading fee, a marketing fee, a promotion fee, or a cheese-and-crackers fee.
Is this perfect? No. Scammers have come up with some elaborate ways to avoid activating it. But it’s still a good and useful tool, and will save a lot of grief. Any time an agent or publisher asks for money, the answer should be “No!”
Possibly time to reblog this.
Anonymous asked:
wait can you please explain to me why a french book has more words than an english book? they say the same thing, yeah? why 400 more pages in french version? does it just take more words to speak in french, or is the actual content more…. descriptive in a way that takes more words to understand? i’m not as stupid as it sounds like i am. thank you
That's not a stupid question! You do literally use more words to express an idea in French (generally speaking). Translators call this the expansion / contraction ratio of languages. Translating a text from English to Romance languages like Spanish, French, Italian typically makes it 20-30% longer. Other languages like Chinese or Korean will result in a contraction. Appropriately enough, the French term for "expansion ratio" is "taux de foisonnement" which has an expansion ratio of +33%.
It's a combination of factors:
- word length: English uses so many monosyllabic words, unlike languages with mainly Graeco-Latin roots. It can be a headache for translators who translate online stuff because apps designed with English in mind have tiny frames and buttons meant for tiny English words and if you can't modify the layout, your language might just not fit... Same problem when you translate subtitles, or small signs in public places (“Please wait here” is 16 characters in English, vs. you need 15 characters in French just to say ‘please’ / s’il vous plaît...)
- rigid syntax: in French you can't use shortcuts like "word length". You've got to say "the length of the word". We don’t have concise adjectival structures like X-friendly, X-based, X-prone, and often need to use an entire clause (“which is prone to...”) to translate them. Articles are mandatory (e.g. you would need to start this sentence with "the articles" rather than "articles"), the possessive form can’t just be a quick apostrophe (not “Mary’s friend” but “the friend of Mary”) etc.
- a general preference for simple, active, direct and pared-down writing in English vs. a preference for 'diluted', passive, indirect, embellished phrasings in French. French adores grammatical emphasis / redundancy while English hates it (I saw a translation recently where the English phrasing was “This explains—”; the French one was: “C’est donc ce qui explique”, I.e. “It is therefore that which explains—”) Someone very accurately commented on my last ask “French goes on and on enjoying itself.” English style guides are absolutely obsessed with advising writers to prune their sentences, use straightforward syntax, remove 'unnecessary' words, while this really isn't perceived as evidence of good writing in French. Writing talent rather lies in “savoir manier la langue” / knowing how to wield the French language, and keeping your sentences direct and to the point doesn’t demonstrate your ability to do that...
- English prefers connecting ideas implicitly rather than explicitly, which is easy to do with short, straightforward sentences. I was translating a text the other day that was full of logically-linked sentences, e.g. “This is part of a larger problem. We won’t solve it without tackling [other thing].” English doesn’t mind this staccato style but French finds it ugly and much prefers to use one long, flowy sentence, eg “Seeing as it is part of a larger problem, we won’t be able to solve it without—” or “This is part of a larger problem, and consequently it won’t be solved unless—” I remember reading a bilingual edition of a novel in which the original French went “Il s’acquitta du montant puis, après avoir froidement salué, il sortit.” The English translation was “He paid the fee, coldly bowed, and went out.” The French version says “He did X, then, after doing Y, he did Z,” while in English the ‘then’ and ‘after’ are implied by placing actions one after the other (in the first example, the ‘consequently’ is similarly implied.) French likes to add tool-words everywhere in order to keep its more convoluted sentences clear, by making all the logical connectors visible.
So this mixture of etymology, grammatical differences and just plain cultural preferences (which of course stem from the nature of the language) is how you end up with a 700-page book in English becoming a 1000-page book in French...
This is very important. There’s really no excuse for being French.
I thought for so long that time was like a line, that our moments were laid out like dominoes, and that they fell one into another and on it went, just days tipping one into the next, into the next, in a long line between the beginning and the end. But I was wrong. It’s not like that at all.
Mike Flanagan can really overdo it with monologues (see Midnight Mass), but you know what I’m here for it every time.
I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and aren’t actually part of the original.
Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”. The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.
And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA.
The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining society”. The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.
There’s a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. There’s a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators can’t capture that same genius, largely because they’re trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you’ll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.
Some people on this website learnt the word “trope” and let it settle comfortably into the vocabulary space that should have been occupied by the word “cliché”.
“Trope” is a neutral word. If a particular trope is overused ad nauseam, it becomes a cliché. Saying you hate tropes does not make any sense.
morally grey does not mean “is bad but also sad”
a character that is morally grey will not burn the world down because it makes them feel powerful, they’ll do it because they perceive something about it to be broken. moral ambiguity has nothing to do with a character’s past, and everything to do with the relationship between their actions and their intentions.
Great distinction!
A character who does bad things because they’re sad, betrayed, or hurt by their circumstances may be sympathetic, but they aren’t necessarily morally grey.
A character becomes morally grey when there’s a sense of truth, goodness, or justice in their purpose, but the actions they take to achieve that purpose are troubling, even amoral.
lol I am in such a stressed-out blind rage today from insurance bullshit that I wrote up a glossary of health insurance terms (things like deductibles, premiums, and copays) because all the free guides online are unnecessarily complicated and the only way you can squeeze a dime out of these bullshit companies is to understand their overly-complicated policies. give em hell
This is a GREAT guide folks - it’s simple, straightforward, and deals well with the overly complicated alphabet soup of medical insurance. Knowing this stuff can prove REALLY helpful, and the examples used are a great resource.
Wait for the master.
The amount of confidence oozing from this dude
i re-watched it several times, looking for what he does differently. finally i spotted it. look at the line of motion in his strike. it’s not especially fast, he doesn’t wind up more than the others, and it’s not a matter of strength – the guy who knocked over the stand probably put more muscle into it. but there’s a unity of movement he has that the others lack. his body and sword are all one curve. everything moves at once along the same line.
from a physics perspective, that means all the force he’s applying is concentrated at the point of contact between his sword’s edge and the target, and it moves at just the speed that breakage propogates through the material. too slow and it wouldn’t have enough force; too fast and he’d get ahead of the break, shoving the target over instead of cutting it.
from a writing perspective, that means that i should focus on describing a master swordsman’s smoothness more than their strength or speed, and can also have witnesses be confused at the effectiveness of strikes that don’t actually seem all that fast.
Chloé Zhao, who just won an Oscar for best director, writes fanfiction.
That's the kind of validation I needed in my life. Thank you, ma'am.
iconic
Some amazing book dedications:
PEOPLE WOULD HAVE DIED
The enemies and siblings ones lmao
Hi Mr Gaiman,
How does it feel that you will never write a story as good as our Lord and saviour J.R.R. Tolkien?To live in his shadow for the rest of your life. Like the rest of the writers doomed to mediocrity.
I’ll never write a Tolkien story as good as Tolkien’s good ones, no. But then, I don’t think he could ever have written a Neil Gaiman story. So overall it works out.
I’m definitely not in competition with all other writers. I’m sorry you think all writers except Tolkien are mediocre, and suspect that you are missing out on some wonderful writers and excellent books.
