Part 2:

stem

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I'll be at Tomo arts market this Sunday~!

"If you use em dash in your works, it makes them look AI generated. No real human uses em dash."

Imaging thinking actual human writers are Not Real because they use... professional writing in their works.

Imagine thinking millions of people who have been using em dash way before AI becomes a thing are all robots.

REBLOG IF YOU'RE A HUMAN AND YOU USE EM DASH

I apparently have le villain origin story 'tism

@ellipsis-dotdotdot

#divorcearcdivorcearc

Writing love stories like how I used to play with Barbies: Insane lore, the craziest breakups, smashing the characters faces together to make out. It’s the best honestly.

#twasalsomewhodecidedtohavethemsplitapartaskids #*mauivoice*yourewelcome

My characters are so happy right now :) Should I... ruin... everything?

random book idea

• Esmeralda is a stunning golden-era showwoman and singer. She's all short pixie cuts gelled and glittered with glam, calf-exposing glittery dresses with a slit halfway down the skirt, and black heels. In the early 1960s, she's untouchable.

• Francisco is a top-notch criminal who steals from the rich and gives to the poor. He's quick, witty, light on his feet, and always red-handed but always wearing gloves. 

• Esmeralda’s been divorced from Francisco for twelve years, ever since her second child Ava was born….if ‘born’ is the right way to put it. They had drifted apart; Esmeralda chasing success and Francisco being drafted into the war between the so-called heroes, magical humans with a somewhat toxic humanitarian facade- and the wearh, blood-sucking villains who rule the lands underground. 

• In Francisco’s absence, Esmeralda made a deal with William, a wearh with whom she has a bit of a history, to transform her pet bird into a living child- she just wanted to feel as though she had a purpose again- especially after the authorities had sent her son Arlo off to his designated “training center,” a school designed to harness children's powers and prepare them to become successful heroes as they reach adulthood. 

• Esmeralda just didn't understand why they had to take him at two.

• Arlo is an independent, solitary, shy kid. He grows up in books and maps and rules, always following, always on the sidelines. He wants nothing more than to break free. 

• Ava is different. Esmeralda’s hidden charm, she learns at one and a half to hide in the garage whenever any car pulls up in the driveway, and to only go to the market early in the morning, before the shops officially open. She's brilliant, social, energetic, loves inventing and designing anything and everything she can get her hands on. With a creative, fast-moving mind, she loves exploring and yearns to see the world and meet everybody who lives in it. 

• Ava meets Arlo, once a summer, only for a month. September is the hottest month of the year, but the two children always run around outside from before the sun peeks above the horizon, to long after dusk when the tiny “glowbugs” create a spectacle of sunny spots through the forest behind the house.

• Those were the good days. But then one night- in December- Ava hears a knock on her window. She almost doesn't recognize the boy hanging by two paralyzed hands on her windowsill. Arlo hadn't visited the previous year, claiming he'd been too busy in a rushed, chicken-scratched letter. He had been thirteen at the time; now he was fourteen. Considering the fact that she hadn't seen him since he was twelve, her age at the present, she had been expecting a very different boy. A boy with untied shoelaces and a missing molar or two, not a tall and lanky kid with a deep voice and long bangs that hid his eyes. 

• He says he doesn't have much time. Much time before they catch him, the people who had taken his dad and forced him to kill- or worse, the people who were trying to kill his dad. He says he wants to run away, and he has been collecting for years and now possesses every map that's ever been reprinted or even sketched once. 

• With Ava hungry for adventure and Arlo desperate for escape, they formulate a plan beneath spilled candlewax and messy scribbles of possible paths on worn-out maps. And thus, their adventure ensues.

I trust That GP*-Eft over ChatGPT any day.

You will never, ever see me use any generative AI in my writing or other creative endeavors, not even to spin up a list of ideas. You don't get to be a good writer by letting an algorithm do the hard stuff for you. Doing the hard stuff is how you become a good writer, and then a better writer. It's as much about the process as it is about the output, and if you're only focused on the latter then you're missing the point. Never let your writing--or art, or music--become so commodified that you lose the sheer joy (and frustration) of creating in the first place.

*GP = Great Perfect

Fanfiction is great because you can see so clearly how people learn to write.

Some people, it's clear, learned almost entirely through absorbing the world around them. Grammar and punctuation will be all over the place, spellings are approximate, but the voice of the narration will come through so clearly. You can hear the dialect of the people around them as of they're telling the story. It's not a written story, it's a transcription of how they talk in their day to day life.

Some people learned through reading a gazillion books as a kid. Grammer and spelling will be rock solid, formatting occasionally based on the single tab of physical books rather than the double tab of online scrolling, but dialogue is often stilted and overly formal. You might notice a lack of contractions and very rigid rules they made for consistency that actually have a lot more flexibility than they think. They tend to have a fantastic grasp of sentence flow, though.

And other people formally learned how to write. This could be anywhere from taking school classes seriously because they enjoyed writing stories as a kid to literal certifications and jobs in the field. Grammer is flawless. Punctuation is triple checked. Foreign words are in italics. Characters have distinct voices. But their self indulgence is tempered by perfectionism. They know precisely what they want from a fic. Authors notes often feature mutterings about their happiness with the chapter. Kaomojis often appear! They seek a style to their writing, and it makes for some wonderfully clever plots! These are the ones most likely to get fun with formatting!

And some people.... Some people examined it all. They dissect dialogue, people watch, cross reference behaviours and compare characters to people irl. You can tell almost immediately who had formative experiences with Terry pratchett and/or ghibli, because it's these people. While others see writing as fun, expression, craft, they see it as art. Plain and simple. Sure, the grammar is occasionally sacrificed on the altar of creative freedom, and the occasional sentence might miss a full stop, but these people seem to self reflect on themselves as part of the art making process. On occasion, these people have the most masterful grasp of dialogue and invocation and hand sewn characterisations. Formatting is pretty standard because all the focus is on the actual words. These fics can be edited to the moon and back!

All of these can vary wildly in forethought and quality, and betas can often catch individual problems before they hit post, but just. Isn't it so cool? What's that one Oscar Wilde quote about every mask just being another fragment of yourself?

Did you recognise yourself?

when i realize i have to write the scenes in order to get to the scenes i want to write

officially made a reader cry...am i a real writer now?