Another Poor Sport Quitter Toddler Tantrum Everyone, Feeling Real Convicted Right Now

I love you and forgive you by the way, just so you know

Today’s edition of curse of crush on unattainable boy is less unattainable and more curse; he’s single and handsome and goes to my school and is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever had a conversation with and we talked for hours, but it’s finals week and then I’m going abroad and he’s graduating, and right person wrong time SUX pals, getting your heart broken in three hours is very melodramatic but no less miserable for it. Had we but world enough and time etc etc

Writing Tips Masterlist

Last updated May 28, 2021.

World-Building

4 Tips for Writing Magic

Creating a Culture

Totalitarian Governments

Creating a Distinct World

Creating (Fictional) Medicine

Describing New Settings

Writing a War

Writing a War with Superheroes / Magic / Fantasy

70 Questions for World-Building

Creating Superstitions

49 Questions for Creating a Religion

The Tie Between Characters and World-Building

34 Questions for Creating a Government

36 Questions for Music in World-Building

Creating a New Species

42 Questions for Creating an Education System

An Introduction to Creating Fantasy Races

Characters

Developing Character Appearance

Developing Character Personality

Multilingual Characters

Creating a Wardrobe

How to Name Your Characters

Your Characters vs. Already-Established Characters

Effective Point-of-View Character

Writing an Impactful Death

Writing with Archetypes

Designing Your Characters

Mute Characters

Thinning Your Cast

Not Enough Characters?

84 Questions for Developing Plot and Character Roles

Sexuality without a Relationship

Consistent Personalities

Skills and Knowledge

Creating Conflict

Character Arcs

Sympathetic Characters

Name vs. Pronouns and When to Use Them

Creating Character Voice

Characters Who Are Learning Another Language

Character Fears

Finding Motivations

Creating Character Flaws

Emotionless Characters

Introducing Your Characters

List of Character Aesthetics

Relationships

Dynamic Relationships

Sibling Relationships

Believable Romance

Characters Who Don’t Know How to Relationship

Complementary Character Traits

Writing a Slow-Burn Romance

Characters Who Fall Out of Love

Groups of Characters

Making Compatible Characters

Emotions

Frustration

Grief

Fear

Planning & Plotting

Planning a Series

Writing an Outline

Tips for Writing Subplots

Non-Point-of-View Romantic Subplots

Avoiding Generic Plots

Planning and Pace

Plotting vs. Pantsing

The “Downer” Chapter

Changing Your Story’s Length

How to Start Your Story

Editing & Prose

Writing with Emotion

Controlling Pace with Detail

Steps of the Editing Phase

Descriptions in Context

Imagery

Dialogue

Showing vs. Telling

What is passive voice?

Reworking Moments of Exposition

Adverbs

When to Cut Your Content

Avoiding Cliches in Your Story

The Importance of Vocabulary

Writing Beginning Paragraphs

How to Establish Tone

Making Exposition Natural

Motivation

How to Balance Multiple Projects

How to Fall Back in Love with Your Story

Writing Every Day?

Sticking with Your Story

Getting (Back) Into the Writing Habit

Setting Realistic Goals

Shiny New Idea Syndrome

Positive Writing Mindset

Staying Motivated on Your Projects

Getting in “The Zone”

Keeping Writing Logs

Avoiding Burnout

Breaking Out of Writer’s Block

How to Deal with Not Achieving Your Goals

Scenes

Quick Decisions

Travel Scenes

Breakdown in the Shower

General Writing & Miscellaneous

The Joys of the First Draft

Injuries

Creating Suspense

Writing Poison

Prophecies

A Word to Young Writers

Making a Moodboard

Consuming with the Producer Mindset

For First-Time Writers

Building Your Writing Skill

Advice for Student Writers

How to Do Research

How to Maximize Your Writing Time

How to Make Your Book Look Like a Book

On Experimenting in Writing

When to Use Multiple Points of View

Building Theme

Becoming a Beta Reader

Background Music While Writing

Why Committing to a Project Can Be Stressful

Warm-Ups for Writers

Determining Your Story’s Genre

Why do we get stressed when we don’t write?

Writing Short Stories

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And it’s summer again

Sun like tangerine juice

Sky as blue as candy

Days are long and lazy

Speeding to an old song

Flying down the highway

Palm trees in the rearview

Sink into the ocean

Sparkles on the surface

Oldnew freckles darken

Grass is green and dying

Want to skin my knees by

Running on the asphalt

Close my eyes and breathe out

Sweet tea, sticky fingers

Melting ice cream, longing

Sprinklers, seafoam, swimsuits

Everything is all wet

Undercurrents, secrets

Wild, charged, electric

Whispers, laughter, screaming

At the top of my lungs

Sand between the bedsheets

We’re alone together

Only in my mind’s eye

Heat stroke made me drowsy

Home at last, I’m woozy

Piano in a dim room

Fingers fumble, keys sing

Journal then forget it

Playlist, dance, cry after

horizontal body

Everything becoming

Young, but now I’m older

Want to be a kid and

Want to be a grown up

Somewhere in between, though

Endings are beginnings

Time’s a shifting seascape

This enchanted country

Infinite and dreamy

invincible in sunshine

Weak knees in the moonlight

Nothing so romantic

As a joke and shy grin

from a boy with straight teeth

Learn the lines in all things

think I might’ve found a

Paradise right here, now

All divine, eternal

Suspended in summer

Surely it won’t end, right?

Update it has been 8 days and I am completely hopeless someone come help me

Today

I laughed until my abs ached with a coworker over silly emails. I wrote texts in iambic pentameter at the bus stop for the fun of it. A baby leaned on my chest like I was the safest place in the world, and another stretched her arms up to me to be held like I could bear her to the moon itself. A book about emotions during Holy Week written for toddlers moved me so much I read it twice. I walked briskly, squinting into warm sunshine, the brightest in days. I saw Jesus more clearly in the character of Moses by reading Acts 7 as if for the first time, I empathized with Paul as I reflected on this murderer going before his old enemies to declare his new allegiance, the shame, the fear. I marveled that Stephen saw Jesus standing at the right hand of God, a Chekhov’s gun I recalled in my class this evening, which, by the way, was the best I’ve been to so far. I realized it’s all about the long slow work of building a community. All of it. This is the work of God Himself. And we image Him in a thousand little ways, with our singing and storytelling and desire to create beautiful, uncorrupted things. Tears pricked my eyes as I realized this. I cooked myself a delicious dinner from scratch while singing Sondheim with my roommate, and put away leftovers for tomorrow. I ate peanut M&Ms and pineapple upside down cake, and felt food freedom and joy in my body. This body can hold two hefty babies at once. This body can sprint to the bus stop and jog up the escalator. This body can do a silly little dance in the kitchen and slide on the tile in socks. I felt seen in my botticelli shirt, known as people recognized that not once but twice I’ve worn artwork. I gave Abby a big hug. I spoke of church without shame in my class, though my heart raced before. I puzzled over the poem mine own John poynz on the metro, missed my stop, and had to backtrack. I read Dracula and chuckled at how girlhood hasn’t changed in 100 or 1000 years. Humans have always laughed and cried and shared salacious stories with their friends. I fretted over what to wear to the movies tomorrow night to see my friends all together. I felt useful and accomplished today. I felt so, so human today. I nearly cried euphoric tears while washing dishes. What greater joy could there be than to be alive on a Wednesday? What greater hope could there be than a realer, truer, freer life to come?

There is no poem that I could write to say

In better terms than this plain journaling

The wonders of existing in the world

Embodied, in community, and free.

I’m weak and I’m decaying, sure, that’s true

But I will never be this young again

And never have more clarity of thought

Or lightness in my heart than I do now.

Great God, what gift you’ve given me to see

That greatness isn’t some ambitious goal

Or changing the whole world, just baby steps,

and loving others through the little things.

Miss Lois told me that and she was right.

Amen and glory hallelujah, Lord!

Oh look its just me and my grief and my jealousy and my bitterness and my fruitless wishes to be better again <3

It is father’s day in this foreign country, and I miss my dead father, and I didn’t intend to bring him up at all, but my host mother of all things mentioned that anne hathaway is jewish because she was on the news, (I can’t understand well enough what they’re saying on tv so I couldn’t tell you why) and I said that I’m jewish, and that my grandfather came from Russia, and she asked if it was my mother or father’s father and I of course said my father’s and she said not your stepfather who lives with you right? It’s your father who doesn’t live with you anymore? Which in retrospect is a bit intrusive, and I was like yeah and she said, does he still live in America? and I just said, because I don’t know any euphemisms or nicer ways to say it in their language, he’s dead. And I feel glad to have spoken of him aloud today, to have remembered him, but I made things uncomfortable and awkward and I could have avoided it, and I feel a little shame, but I haven’t done anything shameful, so I am writing this out in my own language to process it. Thanks for listening void :/

Hi all, here are some Diotima quotes from Plato’s Symposium that are making me lose my mind at 2 am. All quotes are from the Cambridge University Press (2008) Translation.

Poems for a summer day:

Emily Dickinson

(my favourite poet)

A something In a summer's day

Summer shower

Further In summer than the birds

As sleigh bells seem In summer

It can't be "Summer"!

Summer for thee, grant I maybe

It will be Summer - eventually

I taste a liquor never brewed (the best poem ever)

The one who could repeat the summer day

What shall I do when the summer troubles

Ourselves were wed one summer - dear

So much summer

I know a place were summer strives

Would you like summer? Taste of ours.

There came a day at summer's full

Her final summer was it

Twice had summer her fair verdure

The trees like tassel - hit and swung by

John Keats

The Human Seasons

On the grasshopper and cricket

Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a Summer's Day

Over hill, over dale - from A Midsummer Night’s Dream

William Wordsworth

Book Fourth [Summer Vacation]

Daffodils (not about summer, but gives me summer vibes)

The Solitary Reaper (again, not about summer, but gives me summer vibes)

Langston Hughes

Summer Night (not about summer, but brilliant poem)

Pablo Neruda

100 Love Sonnets

Poem XVI

Poem LI

Poem XCII

Charles Baudelaire

L’invitation au voyage

Amalgamation of Poems

(these poems are grouped in amalgamation not because they are in anyway less relevant than the others above, the poems below have not been read by me or had been read long ago.)

Moonlight, Summer Moonlight by Emily Jane Brontë

June by John Updike

Love Song, 31st July by Richard Osmond

Apples by Laurie Lee

Warm Summer Sun by Mark Twain

A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky by Lewis Carroll

Fireflies in the Garden by Robert Frost

Midsummer, Tobago by Derek Walcott

A Green Thought by Katharine Towers

Adlestrop by Edward Thomas

When we got to the beach by Hollie McNish

Summer Stars by Carl Sandburg

Before Summer Rain by Rainer Maria Rilke

Morningside Heights, July by William Matthews

Miracles by Walt Whitman

Bed in Summer by Robert Louis Stevenson

Summer night, riverside by Sara Teasdale

The Idea of Order at Key West by Wallace Stevens

In Summer by Paul Laurence Dunbar

For once, then, something by Robert Frost

Summer Holiday by Robinson Jeffers

A boy and his dad by Edgar Guest

Long Island Sound by Emma Lazarus

Bath by Amy Lowell

Summer Morn in New Hampshire by Claude McKay

In the Mountains on a Summer day by Li Bai (personal favourite)

Backyard by Carl Sandburg

Idyll by Siegfried Sassoon

If you get there Before I do by Dick Allen

Fishing on the Susquehanna in July by Billy Collins

Indian Summer by Dorothy Parker

Fragment 31 (Jealousy) by Sappho (brilliant poem)

Constantinople by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Green by Paul Verlaine

From the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, quatrain IX

To Natasha by Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin

[These poems have an aspect of summer and definitely, most of them have addressed deeper issues through the appearance of a beautiful imagery of summer. This has been created from my own reading experience, google websites and recommendations from friends and professors. If you want me to add anything more, leave an ask or comment. Enjoy these beautiful poems and no hate please.]