Markus Zusak - Bridge Of Clay 

Princesses and feminists, these are for Cassandra and Helen by @futureauthor-mabye. I hope you like them! Requests for OC aesthetics are open.

You know what? Maybe the iceberg on top is how much words there are on the paper. But you wrote that entire chunk of rock. Because a word is not just a word. With every sentence you weave, you are conveying a multitude of meanings, you are juggling different characters with different agenda’s, you have pages of background info rolling around in your head.  After writing, the iceberg may just be two characters having dinner together and talking about their spaghetti for a full paragraph. Yet beneath the surface you have written two characters carefully scanning each other’s reactions for any sign their dinner-date is in love, too.  The iceberg might be a stiffening of character A’s stance, a look, the balling of fists. But you know the trauma that happened when A was sixteen and you have been digging and groping for the most subtle and yet most right way to convey that.  For every action you write, you have written thoughts, discussions, motivations in your head. For every scenery you have plannend a country. Even if you only write a hundred words per hour, you are writing half a life. And your readers might not see the entirety of your work. But as they admire the iceberg, part of their awe will come from sensing something vast and enourmous underneath the water.  

working on my Sheith fantasy au and it’s… going. slowly

Thanks for the invitation to ramble! Come drop by on my blog/in my inbox anytime, I’d love to hear about your projects. I’m writing a historical fantasy, set in England around 1800. It’s about a band of traveling artists/magicians, each of them having left their homes and joined the group for their own reasons. I follow a couple of them throughout the story as they slowely split up because 1) Tin, a girl with a gun named Charley and the temper of a wargod, gets someone in prison per accident and goes on to attemp jailbreak 2) Silver, a lad pretending to be arrogant, leaves after a extensive misunderstanding and is taken in by a guy he is totally not falling in love with (spoiler: romance is the least of his problems) 3) Copper (sort of an asshole, but Silvers best friend) and Phosphore (she’s a godess, I don’t even know) go to find Silver but find quite something else and 4) Tungsten, the newest member of the group, tries really hard to understand himself, the world, and just to not fuck this up (spoiler: someone else fuck it up for him) I use this story to work with very different and diverse characters and I get to do a lot of historical research, so I really feel like I’m out playing and exploring!

Tell me what you’re working on!

I’m realizing as I see other writeblrs talk about their characters that I really don’t know what most of you are writing. (Or I did at one point and it’s hard to keep straight.) I’d love to become more familiar with your projects! I’m unfortunately an anxious introvert who’s too afraid to initiate conversations and I’m pretty sure the times I’m on Tumblr aren’t when anyone else is so I miss a lot of posts.

So I’m wondering if I could get all you writers to reblog this post and ramble about your characters? Or link me to a bio page for them if you have one? Or a page about your stories in general if you have that? If you want to, of course!

Please help out a curious person who stinks at talking to people. Even if we haven’t talked, I would love to hear your ramblings! 💚

if we’re mutuals, and I don’t care whether we’ve been mutuals for twelve (12) minutes or three (3) years, you can send me a message any time about any thing. family life is shit? bitch, tell me about it and even if I can’t help, I can listen. struggling with mental illness and feel like you can’t talk to anyone? talk to me. literally. you always can. saw a cute cat? SEND THAT BITCH MY WAY

The body will hold on Frank Turner, The Fisher King Blues // Don DeLilo, White Noise // Maurice Pirenne, Evening // The Crane Wives, How to Rest // Richard Siken // StarParkDesigns // Birdtalker, Heavy // Dan Clandenin, The Voice of God

original character moodboards

hi, friends! to celebrate 100 followers, i’ve decided to open up requests for oc moodboards!! i still can’t believe there’s that many of you following me (which is peanuts compared to others’ follower counts), and i also can’t believe that so many of you actually like my things? and characters?? to think, i’ve been too scared to share all this time.

so here, let me show my love for your characters and stories too C:

rules:

mbf me (i will check)

please reblog this post, let other people know!

maybe look at my art tag? or my patreon?

send me a 🐝 and an ask OR a submit (whichever is easier) with the character’s aesthetic/faceclaim/name/etc

feel free to add a quote, can be your own writing or a quote relevant to your oc

for now please just one character. i don’t know how many of these i will get!

here are examples of my moodboards. a fair warning, these might go kind of slow. i get busy sometimes! especially on weekends.

i will reblog this post again to let you know when i close requests. c:

kaveh akbar, 'calling a wolf a wolf' // doc luben, 'love letters or suicide notes' // @/nutnoce, tumblr // 'my body's made of crushed little stars', mitski // @/ojibwa, tumblr // 'spring', mary oliver

musings on Spring

— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke | Pablo Neruda (?) | Louise Glück, Vita Nova | Alberto Caeiro, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro | Vladimir Nabokov, Mary | Etel Adnan, Jebu | Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary | Bangtan Sonyeondan (방탄소년단), 봄날 (Spring Day) | Artwork by Claude Monet

25 Writing Questions

Tagged by the amazing @ally-thorne. Thanks!

1. Is there a story you’re holding off on writing for some reason? Apart from a few vague ideas, I'm holding off two major ones at the moment. I don't want to let them interfere with my current WIP.

2. What work of yours, if any, are you embarrassed about existing? Not many, actually. I've written a lot of bad stuff, (I'm still writing a lot of bad stuff), but that's how a writers grows. What I ám embarrased about is that I've allowed some people back then to read those pieces. Grown up people. Who knew full well how awful it was.

3. What order do you write in? Front of book to back? Chronological? Favorite scenes first? Something else? I mostly write from start to finish – not a chronological line per se, but the order in which I want my readers to read it. Sometimes I jot down little things for future scenes, but I don't fully write them till I reach the right point in the story.

4. Favorite character you’ve written? This is damn near impossible, but I think at least one of my favorites is Frank, a character from the only novel-lenght story I ever finished, called The Seasonschildren. He is gentle and stubborn in his beliefs and he tries so hard to fight in all the little ways for his great cause. He wants to keep all his loved ones safe, but he also feels so much pressure to keep all other people safe. I think he's one of the most human characters I've written, a balans of bad and good that turned out real well.

5. Character you were most surprised to end up writing? The Clockworker surprised me. He’s another characters from The Seasonschildren. The work is set partly during World War II, something I didn't expect to write in general, since I don't generally like war stories. He's not sympathetic and quite a bad father (though he tries, in his own way), and he doesn't grow in that aspect. He became a fascination to me.   

6. Something you would go back and change in your writing that it’s too late / complicated to change now If I am convinced it should be changed, I change it, no matter how much work it is (or I lose interest in the story altogether). Right now, I am considering wether or not I should get rid of one of the characters in my current WIP.

7. When asked, are you embarrassed or enthusiastic to tell people that you write? I used to be embarrased (really embaressed, I actually hid the fact that I wrote completely till I was fourteen), but now I'm enthusiastic! Especially in college, where I am surrounded by people who love art and creativity, and who genuinly want to hear about it.

8. Favorite genre to write Fantasy and childrens literature will always have a special place in my heart.

9. What, if anything, do you do for inspiration? I mostly try to find places with a good view to sit, and I listen a lot of music that makes me feel things. Sometimes I rewatch scenes from movies or series.

10. Write in silence or with background music? Alone or with others? Silence and background music are both fine, it depends on my mood and what I am writing. I always write alone, thought I sometimes do so surrounded by others (during lectures, for example).

11. What aspect of your writing do you think has most improved since you started writing? The first story I wrote was this: 'Kees wanted a chicken. He did not get a chicken. He did get a cat. He plays with the cat.' My plotting stayed somewhat the same, but I'd say I'm more creative with words now.

12. Your weaknesses as an author? I'm not that good at plot, and I can never finish a single thing.

13. Your strengths as an author? I like playing with words, which I think strengtens my descriptions. And I can create likable characters (I hope).

14. Do you make playlists for your work? No.

15. Why did you start writing? Well, the first time I ever wrote a story I was four, so I don't know. But when it moved from something all kids do to something that felt special to me, I think it was the need to escape and the need to explore. I was eleven, I disliked my life and I wanted to go on adventures.  

16. Are there any characters who haunt you? I've got some characters that have been with me for years, even though I still haven't written their stories. And their are characters types I somehow always end up writing, like two young kids, a shy boy and an adventurious girl. They come around in my work in different forms fairly often.

17. If you could give your fledgling author self any advice, what would it be? I am still a fledgling author, but I would advise myself not to be ashamed so much, and just enjoy having a passion. Let go of that perfection.

18. Were there any works you read that affected you so much that it influenced your writing style? What were they? I have this thing were I can copy a style pretty easily, but only just after reading it. It doesn't stick. I think my style is a combination of hundreds of books.

19. When it comes to more complicated narratives, how do you keep track of outlines, characters, development, timeline, etc.? Endless lists, fifteen documents, drawing with colours and arrows.

20. Do you write in long sit-down sessions or in little spurts? Either, depending how much time I've got.

21. What do you think when you read over your older work? Most of it makes me cringe. I used to be horribly pretentious. But cringing means you've gotten better, right?

22. Are there subjects that make you uncomfortable to write? Among the things I actually want to write about, I mostly struggle with representing minorties that I do not belong do. I think it's hugely important to be diverse, but I' scared as hell of doing it wrong. So I tend to ask around a lot.

23. Any obscure life experiences that you feel have helped your writing? Maybe my dad? He loves fantasy and he's got a lot of swords, and he knows material arts. So I learned some usefull fighting techniques at young age and I could get easy information/access to swords.  

24. Have you ever become an expert on something you previously knew nothing about, in order to better a scene or a story? I always do a lot of research, so now I know, among other things, how to built a clock, the etiquettes of duelling and ervything about being epileptic in 1800.

25. Copy / paste a few sentences or a short paragraph that you’re particularly proud of.

Most of my scenes I only like in context of the full story, or because they sound nice (but I write in Dutch, so these are hard to translate). I guess I like this bit: 'Look, growing up with four brothers and sisters, you learn at a very young age that your toys are never yours. Sooner or later they are going to be broken by someone who shouldn't have had his hands on them in the first place. Same goes for your plans, mate. Someone will always fuck it up, no matter how many times you lock the door. You just gotta glue the arms were the legs are supposed to be and laugh about it.' I'll tag @sancta-silje, @gracebabcockwrites, @create-and-procrastinate, @dreamsofbooksandmonsters and @anightravensecho. Only if you guys want to!

For Elementary it was a list of elements in my chemistry book in high school. The list gave the English names, which I hadn’t heard before, since English ins’t my native tongue. These words struck me as beautiful names for a band of traveling artists. (Tungsten, Tin and Silver stood out to me in particular. I just knew the people they would be from the first moment on). For Waterways, it was a setting - or an anecdote. A teacher told us about a small town somewhere in Spain which was painted blue entirely for the recording of a movie. I could not help imagining the inhabitants of that town watching one house after the other turn blue.  There’s no blue houses in the current version of the story, but that silent, dusty Spanish village stayed. 

I love hearing about this, so y’all should tell me what the very first spark of your WIP was! Was it a character? A line of dialogue? A setting?