These are the principles that guide my thinking when it comes to fiction:

1. Bullying and harassing are wrong.

2. Real people have needs; fictional characters do not.

3. We can’t determine for certain anything about people based on the works they create or engage with.

4. Fiction affects reality but we can’t predict how.

txttletale:

i don’t even give a shit if they pack the site with algorithmic garbage to appeal to new users i dont look at the ‘for you’ page anyway and xkit blocks out all that other dumb shit but the phrase 'the outdated decision to focus on the following page’ is like if one million canaries marched on stage with red flags and died in perfect synchronization with each other

veridium:

If you’re reading this: this is your sign that your WIP is worth writing, is worth the effort, and that you are doing great. Keep going, take breaks, reflect. But do not lose sight of how far you’ve come on this project! You can do it!

Looking back, a Tale Told By a Morty has had too many exposition infodumps. Off the top of my head:

• Part 1, Chapter 3: How the Sweetoppi adventure went
• Part 1, Chapter 9: How the time travel adventure went
• Part 2, Chapter 12: Rick’s history with Morty’s boss (sort of; there’s no actual dialogue).
• Part 2, Chapter 14: Morty’s rescue of Rick and his subsequent injury

Once I finish this series, if I decide to edit it, I think I’d like to pare down some of those. The first one can stay as is- I want to evoke the image of someone telling their story really fast, just absolutely gushing. The second one, I’d like to keep some parts for Summer’s reactions. The third one, I think I could simplify. The fourth one is totally unnecessary.

Honestly, I used to feel like I needed to be specific about everything characters said to each other. I don’t know why. I’m over it now, though. I could’ve had an infodump about Rick’s rescue of Morty in the last chapter of part 3, but I held back!

lady-fey:

lady-fey:

How to handle info dumps that are rehashes for the audience, but needed for the characters

It’s incredibly common to tell a story where character A goes through something that deeply affects them. However, no one but character A and the audience know about this thing. A good portion of the story’s tension will come from the audience waiting to see character A confess the truth of The Thing to another character or even to a larger cast.

However, such info dumps often take a long time to write out in dialogue format and that presents a conundrum for the writer: you need to let character A tell their story in full, but the audience will be bored if you do that. Because the audience already knows the full story and they don’t really want to read a summary of it.

So what do you do?

You use one of my favorite writing techniques! I’ve never seen a name for this thing, so I’m going to call it “emotional exposition”. You can call it whatever you like. The basic idea is this: you skip the dialogue and focus on summarizing the events in an extremely short fashion that evokes the right emotions in the audience.

For example, say Alice saw someone get murdered and she’s kept that secret for a long time. This scene was the book’s opening, though, so the audience knows the full details. Alice is now confessing what happened to her friend, Sarah. Sarah gets the full dialogue and detailed information. The audience gets this:

Sarah watched in silence as Alice rose to her feet and crossed the room, coming to a stop beside the window. For a long while, the young woman didn’t say a word. She just stared out into the night. Finally, just as Sarah was considering saying something, Alice started to talk.

Her voice never rose above a whisper and yet Sarah could hear every word with perfect clarity. She sat there, horror growing, as her best friend spoke of a little girl hiding in a closet, smothering her sobs as a villain took away the only family she’d ever known.

Because the audience already knows what happened, they don’t need to know exactly what Alice is saying. What they need to know is how Sarah is reacting to what she’s being told. That’s why you can do this dialogue skipping thing and just give a brief callback to the events that are being discussed. It’s enough to remind the audience of what happened, but you trust them to remember the important stuff. Then you can move straight to the fallout of Sarah’s reaction to Alice’s confession without bogging the story down by rehashing things the audience already knows.

I use this technique and similar stuff all the time when I’m writing and I highly, highly recommend it. It allows for these emotional moments to be far more impactful because they’re not bogged down in unnecessary details. It also lets you skip over explaining the same thing 10 times even though the characters might need to.

No offense taken, it’s a fair point! Sometimes you want to skip the info dump, other times you want to show it. It’s all up to the author because, when it comes to writing, there’s very little in the way of hard rules. You just collect techniques in your writing kit and then slowly learn when and where you like to use them. That’s how you develop a style.

As a general guideline, you should always consider showing the full dialogue during big, climatic confessions/reveals because people do like to watch them play out. You just have to balance that fact against how long the explanation is going to take and what the in-story audience is going to do as they hear it.

If the info dump is on the short side or if the reveal is an actual discussion, then I tend to err on the side of showing it in full. However, if the info dump is going to go for longer than a page and the in-story audience is just going to sitting there listening? That’s when I pull out this technique in spite of the scene’s importance. Where you draw the line is up to you and the story you’re telling.

I’ll end this by saying that exposition gets an undeserved bad rep in some circles. Revealing things in a naturalistic fashion doesn’t mean avoiding info dumps like the plague. It means using them sparingly and delaying them until the audience is ready to sit through them (don’t answer questions until your audience is asking them. Very important rule that one). After all, out here in the real world, there are times when the best way for us to learn a thing is via listening to a lecture or reading an instruction manual. That fact is just as true in fictional words and it’s on those occasions that we use info dumps.

(i kinda cheated on that last ask game and only sent it to a handful of people because in some cases i couldn’t find the ask link i’m gomen)

creativepromptsforwriting:

I never had people draw fanart for one of my fics or write something based on it, but I just know that that is such a high honor and show of love. I once had someone ask me if they could translate my fic in Chinese and I was like, wow, they love it enough to want to put time and effort into it to show it to more people.

1. Baking
2. Writing stories
3. My cats
4. Whenever I find a new song that makes me go “I need to listen to this twenty, thirty times in a row”
5. Spooky stuff

uglypsyche:

I love people who have whole rooms dedicated to their favorite characters and Im so so so so serious about this. I mean like collecting plushies printing out art owning posters etc etc. Everything like that. I know theres people who will find it “cringe” but I find it so genuinely enamoring that theres people who dedicate so much time and money and love and such to a character. Bonus points if its like a total side / background / otherwise considered “irrelevant” character. I love you so much. Yes your favorite character loves you & I hope Im invited to your wedding + You should be as self indulgent as possible about your dedication / love towards a character because it is good for your Soul

aryashi:

elfwreck:

sanerontheinside:

marvel-lous-things:

Me, in tears, halfway through writing a 300 word essay: I can’t do this anymore

Person on A03 who’s writing for fun:

Inconvenient Truth: these are the same person

Yeah, well, I can’t stretch out that review of 16th century economics by adding a gratuitous hand job.

#not with that attitude you can’t

skiplo-wave:

Alright Barbies, kens, and oppen homies what we watching first

Barbie

Oppenheimer

Double feature let’s goooo

See Results

dognoselover:

im calling myself out on this one

fangirltothefullest:

moths-in-hats:

The Muppets as Goncharov (1973)

the only goncharov remake I want is a muppets version

Genuinely the best take on this not-movie everybody else go home Goncharov Muppets is God Tier.

thatfinewine:

These two frames cracked me up so bad I had to make them a reaction image

spiritmoodboards:

Shipboard for Mirabel and Isabela (Encanto)
For me, actually :) This is how my memories are in my kin! <3 since I didn’t have any requests rn thought I’d make a few self indulgent ones

Send an ask, we’re open!!

adamsmasher:

greywrenn:

memeclassheroes:

#‘el pastel promedio tiene tres leches’ es en realidad un error estadístico. El pastel promedio tiene 0 leches. Leches Georg#quien vive en una cueva y absorbe 10.000 leches al día#es un valor atípico qeu no debería haberse contado (via @deathbycoldopen)

I don’t speak Spanish but I understand every word