Symbolism In Writing

so why should i care if people see my data

so glad you asked 😁 for one, any party holding information about the other shifts the power in their favor (rip rob kling i’m obsessed with him and think his work on the societal implications of technology should be mandatory reading for everyone <3) but most people don’t care about their data being stored because 1) “i’m not doing anything bad/illegal for me to be worried” 2) “idc if they know what i’m buying at target, what’s that going to tell them about me other than i like chocolate?” 3) “so what if they have my personal information? hows that going to impact me other than getting a few targeted ads?”

first off you need to understand that companies don’t just have access to what you do on their specific app. your data can be bought and sold to companies who aggregate all that information and put together a full picture of who you are. they get information about your spending habits, daily schedule, health, fitness, contact information, media preferences, etc etc so on and can sell that neat little package of information to anyone.

and let's not forget there is a historical precedent of certain demographics being targeted and criminalized! just look at the racial origins of loitering laws. who's to stop the government or other organizations from analyzing data and using it to silence and punish certain groups/people?

im too sleep deprived to be comprehensible rn but some articles

How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did Facebook Releases New Research into How People Respond After a Break-Up Why we should collectively worry about Facebook and Google owning our data Facebook Manipulated 689,003 Users' Emotions For Science How Steve Bannon used Cambridge Analytica to further his alt-right vision for America

How to Write a Character

↠ Start with the basics, because obviously. Name. Age. Gender. Maybe even a birthday if you’re feeling fancy. This is step one because, well, your character needs to exist before they can be interesting. But nobody cares if they’re 27 or 37 unless it actually matters to the story.

↠ Looks aren’t everything… but also, describe them. Yes, we know their soul is more important than their hair color, but readers still need something to visualize. Do they have the kind of face that makes babies cry? Do they always look like they just rolled out of bed? Give us details, not just “tall with brown hair.

↠ Personality isn’t just “kind but tough.” For the love of storytelling, give them more than two adjectives. Are they kind, or do they just pretend to be because they hate confrontation? Are they actually tough, or are they just too emotionally repressed to cry in public? Dig deeper.

↠ Backstory = Trauma (usually). Something shaped them. Maybe it was a messy divorce, maybe they were the middle child and never got enough attention, or maybe they once got humiliated in a spelling bee and never recovered. Whatever it is, make it matter to who they are today.

↠ Give them a goal. Preferably a messy one. If your character’s only motivation is to “be happy” or “do their best,” they’re boring. They need a real goal, one that conflicts with who they are, what they believe in, or what they think they deserve. Bonus points if it wrecks them emotionally.

↠ Make them suffer. Yes, I said it. A smooth, easy journey is not a story. Give them obstacles. Rip things away from them. Make them work for what they want. Nobody wants to read about a character who just gets everything handed to them (unless it’s satire, then carry on).

↠ Relationships = Depth. Nobody exists in a vacuum. Who do they love? Who annoys the hell out of them? Who do they have that messy, can’t-live-with-you-can’t-live-without-you tension with? People shape us. So, shape your character through the people in their life.

↠ Give them a voice that actually sounds like them. If all your characters talk the same, you’ve got a problem. Some people ramble, some overthink, some are blunt to the point of being offensive. Let their voice show who they are. You should be able to tell who’s talking without dialogue tags.

↠ If they don’t grow, what’s the point? People change. They learn things, make mistakes, get their hearts broken, and (hopefully) become a little wiser. If your character starts and ends the story as the same exact person, you just wasted everyone’s time.

↠ Flaws. Give. Them. Flaws. Nobody likes a perfect character. Give them something to struggle with, maybe they’re selfish, maybe they push people away, maybe they’re addicted to the thrill of self-destruction (fun!). Make them real. Make them human.

↠ Relatability is key. Your character doesn’t have to be likable, but they do have to be understandable. Readers need to get them, even if they don’t agree with them. If your character never struggles, never doubts, and never screws up, I have bad news: they’re not a character, they’re a mannequin.

↠ You’re never actually done. Characters evolve, not just in the story, but as you write them. If something feels off, fix it. If they feel flat, dig deeper. Keep refining, rewriting, and letting them surprise you. That’s how you create someone who feels real.

Now go forth and write characters that actually make people feel something. And if you need a reminder, just ask yourself: Would I care if this person existed in real life? If the answer is meh, start over.

sometimes you need dialogue tags and don't want to use the same four

money is such an underrated accessibility option.

like people want to think any disabled person who is after money is morally suspect some way, because they're not asking for "treatments" or "accommodations" like a lot of our issues can be fixed way more easily with money. can't drive? paying for a taxi is often one of the more accessible alternatives. can't cook? you can pay more to have prepared food delivered to you. food restrictions? that food straight up costs more money. can't clean? you can pay for someone to do that. house inaccessible? having (lots) of money can help with that, you get the gist.

having money won't make us abled. it also won't stop our symptoms from being distressing, painful, or debilitating. but there's a huge gap in experience between the average poor disabled person and someone who's actually wealthy. you can buy your way out of some of the difficult situations most disabled people are left to rot in. wanting money, needing money, asking for money is pretty natural when it's such a useful tool. why get so weird about disabled people wanting money like i'm pretty sure everyone wants money anyway

10 Traits That Make a Character Secretly Dangerous

❥ Disarming Humor. They’re the life of the party. Everyone’s laughing. No one’s noticing how much they aren’tsaying.

❥ Laser-Sharp Observation. They see everything. Who’s nervous. Who’s lying. Who would be easiest to break. And they don’t miss.

❥ Unsettling Calm. Even in chaos, they stay still. Smiling. Thinking. Calculating.

❥ Weaponized Empathy. They know how to make people trust them. Because they know exactly what people want to hear.

❥ Compartmentalization. They can do something brutal, then eat lunch like nothing happened.

❥ Controlling Niceness. The kind of kindness that’s sharp-edged. You feel guilty for not loving them.

❥ Mirroring Behavior. They become whatever the person in front of them needs. It's not flattery. It’s survival—or manipulation.

❥ Selective Vulnerability. They know how to spill just enough pain to make you drop your guard.

❥ History of “Bad Luck”. Ex-friends, ex-lovers, ex-colleagues… they all left under “unfortunate” circumstances. But the pattern says otherwise.

❥ Unshakeable Confidence in Their Morality. They don’t think they’re the villain. That makes them scarier.

Ursula K. Le Guin on How to Become a Writer.

How do you become a writer? Answer: you write.

It’s amazing how much resentment and disgust and evasion this answer can arouse. Even among writers, believe me. It is one of those Horrible Truths one would rather not face.

The most frequent evasive tactic is for the would-be writer to say, But before I have anything to say, I must get experience.

Well, yes; if you want to be a journalist. But I don’t know anything about journalism, I’m talking about fiction. And of course fiction is made out of experience, your whole life from infancy on, everything you’ve thought and done and seen and read and dreamed. But experience isn’t something you go and get—it’s a gift, and the only prerequisite for receiving it is that you be open to it. A closed soul can have the most immense adventures, go through a civil war or a trip to the moon, and have nothing to show for all that “experience”; whereas the open soul can do wonders with nothing. I invite you to meditate on a pair of sisters. Emily and Charlotte. Their life experience was an isolated vicarage in a small, dreary English village, a couple of bad years at a girls’ school, another year or two in Brussels, which is surely the dullest city in all Europe, and a lot of housework. Out of that seething mass of raw, vital, brutal, gutsy Experience they made two of the greatest novels ever written: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

Now, of course they were writing from experience; writing about what they knew, which is what people always tell you to do; but what was their experience? What was it they knew? Very little about “life.” They knew their own souls, they knew their own minds and hearts; and it was not a knowledge lightly or easily gained. From the time they were seven or eight years old, they wrote, and thought, and learned the landscape of their own being, and how to describe it. They wrote with the imagination, which is the tool of the farmer, the plow you plow your own soul with. They wrote from inside, from as deep inside as they could get by using all their strength and courage and intelligence. And that is where books come from. The novelist writes from inside.

I’m rather sensitive on this point, because I write science fiction, or fantasy, or about imaginary countries, mostly—stuff that, by definition, involves times, places, events that I could not possibly experience in my own life. So when I was young and would submit one of these things about space voyages to Orion or dragons or something, I was told, at extremely regular intervals, “You should try to write about things you know about.” And I would say, But I do; I know about Orion, and dragons, and imaginary countries. Who do you think knows about my own imaginary countries, if I don’t?

But they didn’t listen, because they don’t understand, they have it all backward. They think an artist is like a roll of photographic film, you expose it and develop it and there is a reproduction of Reality in two dimensions. But that’s all wrong, and if any artist tells you, “I am a camera,” or “I am a mirror,” distrust them instantly, they’re fooling you, pulling a fast one. Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts—only in the truth. You get the facts from outside. The truth you get from inside.

OK, how do you go about getting at that truth? You want to tell the truth. You want to be a writer. So what do you do?

You write.

Honestly, why do people ask that question? Does anybody ever come up to a musician and say, Tell me, tell me—how should I become a tuba player? No! It’s too obvious. If you want to be a tuba player you get a tuba, and some tuba music. And you ask the neighbors to move away or put cotton in their ears. And probably you get a tuba teacher, because there are quite a lot of objective rules and techniques both to written music and to tuba performance. And then you sit down and you play the tuba, every day, every week, every month, year after year, until you are good at playing the tuba; until you can—if you desire—play the truth on the tuba.

It is exactly the same with writing. You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned how to do it.

Of course, there are differences. Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done anywhere, and it is done alone.

It is the experience or premonition of that loneliness, perhaps, that drives a lot of young writers into this search for rules. I envy musicians very much, myself. They get to play together, their art is largely communal; and there are rules to it, an accepted body of axioms and techniques, which can be put into words or at least demonstrated, and so taught. Writing cannot be shared, nor can it be taught as a technique, except on the most superficial level. All a writer’s real learning is done alone, thinking, reading other people’s books, or writing—practicing. A really good writing class or workshop can give us some shadow of what musicians have all the time—the excitement of a group working together, so that each member outdoes himself—but what comes out of that is not a collaboration, a joint accomplishment, like a string quartet or a symphony performance, but a lot of totally separate, isolated works, expressions of individual souls. And therefore there are no rules, except those each individual makes up.

I know. There are lots of rules. You find them in the books about The Craft of Fiction and The Art of the Short Story and so on. I know some of them. One of them says: Never begin a story with dialogue! People won’t read it; here is somebody talking and they don’t know who and so they don’t care, so—Never begin a story with dialogue.

Well, there is a story I know, it begins like this:

“Eh bien, mon prince! so Genoa and Lucca are now no more than private estates of the Bonaparte family!”

It’s not only a dialogue opening, the first four words are in French, and it’s not even a French novel. What a horrible way to begin a book! The title of the book is War and Peace.

There’s another Rule I know: introduce all the main characters early in the book. That sounds perfectly sensible, mostly I suppose it is sensible, but it’s not a rule, or if it is somebody forgot to tell it to Charles Dickens. He didn’t get Sam Weller into The Pickwick Papers for ten chapters—that’s five months, since the book was coming out as a serial in installments.

Now, you can say, All right, so Tolstoy can break the rules, so Dickens can break the rules, but they’re geniuses; rules are made for geniuses to break, but for ordinary, talented, not-yet-professional writers to follow, as guidelines.

And I would accept this, but very very grudgingly, and with so many reservations that it amounts in the end to nonacceptance. Put it this way: if you feel you need rules and want rules, and you find a rule that appeals to you, or that works for you, then follow it. Use it. But if it doesn’t appeal to you or doesn’t work for you, then ignore it; in fact, if you want to and are able to, kick it in the teeth, break it, fold staple mutilate and destroy it.

See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness. You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities. Nobody else in the world can do it, or ever could do it, or ever will be able to do it again.

Excerpted from THE LANGUAGE OF THE NIGHT by Ursula K. Le Guin. Copyright © 1989 by Ursula K. Le Guin.

I recommend Le Guin's book about writing, Steering the Craft:

Write Characters Who Feel Dangerous (Even If They’re "Good")

╰ Make their unpredictability a feature, not a bug

A dangerous character isn’t just the guy with the gun. It’s the one you can’t quite predict. Maybe they’re chaotic-good. Maybe they’re lawful-evil. Maybe they’re smiling while they’re plotting the next five ways to ruin your day. If the reader can’t tell exactly what they’ll do next — congrats, you’ve made them dangerous.

╰ Give them a weapon that's personal

Anyone can have a sword. Yawn. Give your character a weapon that says something about them. A violin bow turned garrote. A candy tin full of arsenic. Their own charisma as a leash. The weapon isn’t just what they fight with, it’s how they are.

╰ Let them choose not to strike and make that scarier

Sometimes not acting is the biggest flex. A truly dangerous character doesn’t need to explode to be terrifying. They can sit back, cross their legs, sip their coffee, and say, “Not yet.” Instant chills.

╰ Layer their menace with something else, humor, kindness, sadness

One-note villains (or heroes!) are boring. A dangerous character should make you like them right up until you realize you shouldn’t have. Let them charm. Let them save the kitten. Let them do something that makes the eventual threat feel like betrayal.

╰ Show how other characters react to them

If every character treats them like a nuclear bomb in the room, your reader will, too. Even if your dangerous character is polite and quiet, the dog that won’t go near them or the boss who flinches when they smile will sell the danger harder than a blood-soaked axe.

╰ Make their danger internal as well as external

It’s not just what they can do to others. It’s what they’re fighting inside themselves. The anger. The boredom. The itch for chaos. Make them a little bit scary even to themselves, and suddenly they’re alive in ways pure external "baddies" never are.

╰ Don't make them immune to consequences

Even the most dangerous characters should get hit—physically, emotionally, socially. Otherwise, they turn into invincible cartoons. Let them lose sometimes. Let them bleed. It’ll make every moment they win feel twice as earned (and twice as scary).

╰ Tie their danger to what they love

Real threats aren't powered by anger; they're powered by love. Protectiveness can be feral. Loyalty can turn into violence. A character who's dangerous because they care about something? That's a nuclear reactor in a leather jacket.

╰ Remember: danger is a vibe, not a body count

Your character doesn’t have to kill anyone to be dangerous. Sometimes just a glance. A whispered rumor. A quiet, calculated decision to leave you alive — for now. Dangerous characters control the room without ever raising their voice.

In the past fifty years, fantasy’s greatest sin might be its creation of a bland, invariant, faux-Medieval European backdrop. The problem isn’t that every fantasy novel is set in the same place: pick a given book, and it probably deviates somehow. The problem is that the texture of this place gets everywhere.

What’s texture, specifically? Exactly what Elliot says: material culture. Social space. The textiles people use, the jobs they perform, the crops they harvest, the seasons they expect, even the way they construct their names. Fantasy writing doesn’t usually care much about these details, because it doesn’t usually care much about the little people – laborers, full-time mothers, sharecroppers, so on. (The last two books of Earthsea represent LeGuin’s remarkable attack on this tendency in her own writing.) So the fantasy writer defaults – fills in the tough details with the easiest available solution, and moves back to the world-saving, vengeance-seeking, intrigue-knotting narrative. Availability heuristics kick in, and we get another world of feudal serfs hunting deer and eating grains, of Western name constructions and Western social assumptions. (Husband and wife is not the universal historical norm for family structure, for instance.)

Defaulting is the root of a great many evils. Defaulting happens when we don’t think too much about something we write – a character description, a gender dynamic, a textile on display, the weave of the rug. Absent much thought, automaticity, the brain’s subsconscious autopilot, invokes the easiest available prototype – in the case of a gender dynamic, dad will read the paper, and mom will cut the protagonist’s hair. Or, in the case of worldbuilding, we default to the bland fantasy backdrop we know, and thereby reinforce it. It’s not done out of malice, but it’s still done.

The only way to fight this is by thinking about the little stuff. So: I was quite wrong. You do need to worldbuild pretty hard. Worldbuild against the grain, and worldbuild to challenge. Think about the little stuff. You don’t need to position every rain shadow and align every tectonic plate before you start your short story. But you do need to build a base of historical information that disrupts and overturns your implicit assumptions about how societies ‘ordinarily’ work, what they ‘ordinarily’ eat, who they ‘ordinarily’ sleep with. Remember that your slice of life experience is deeply atypical and selective, filtered through a particular culture with particular norms. If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing – because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.

We... need worldbuilding by Seth Dickinson

Character Flaws and Their Meanings

Impulsiveness : Acts on instinct without careful planning. Perfectionism : Sets unrealistically high standards, leading to self-criticism. Indecisiveness : Struggles to commit to decisions or choose a path. Arrogance : Overestimates one’s abilities and dismisses others. Pessimism : Habitually expects negative outcomes in most situations. Cynicism : Distrusts the motives and sincerity of others. Overconfidence : Places excessive faith in one’s skills, often underestimating risks. Stubbornness : Resists change and refuses to adapt to new ideas. Jealousy : Feels envious of others' success or possessions. Insecurity : Experiences frequent self-doubt and a lack of confidence. Procrastination : Tends to delay tasks, often leading to missed opportunities. Passivity : Avoids taking initiative and relies on others to act. Aggressiveness : Responds with hostility or force rather than reason. Selfishness : Prioritizes personal gain over the welfare of others. Fragility : Is overly sensitive to criticism and easily discouraged. Egotism : Constantly focuses on oneself and one’s own importance. Defensiveness : Quickly rejects or rationalizes away critique or new information. Manipulativeness : Exploits others to fulfill personal needs or desires. Recklessness : Shows a careless disregard for potential risks or consequences. Resentfulness : Holds lingering bitterness and grudges over perceived wrongs. Distractibility : Finds it hard to maintain focus amid competing interests. Impatience : Lacks the willingness to wait, often spoiling opportunities to learn. Perfunctory : Performs actions in a mechanical, uninspired manner. Self-Doubt : Consistently questions personal abilities and decisions. Arbitraryness : Makes decisions based on whim rather than reason or evidence. Rigidity : Is inflexible and unwilling to consider alternative viewpoints. Gullibility : Trusts too easily, often leading to being misled or deceived. Obsession : Becomes excessively fixated on particular ideas or details. Aloofness : Maintains emotional distance, appearing detached or indifferent. Intolerance : Refuses to accept differing perspectives or lifestyles.

Writing Advice for Brainstorming

Mix genres and time periods: Experiment by combining elements from different eras or genres to create unique settings and narratives.

Use "what if" scenarios: Pose unexpected questions (e.g., What if time travel operated on emotions rather than mechanics?) to spark novel ideas.

Draw from diverse mediums: Engage with art, music, or even scientific papers to inspire unexpected plot twists.

Embrace absurdity: Let illogical or surreal ideas guide you; sometimes the wildest thoughts lead to compelling stories.

Reverse clichés: Identify common tropes in your favorite genres and deliberately invert them to create fresh perspectives.

Incorporate personal anomalies: Transform your idiosyncrasies and personal struggles into rich, multi-dimensional characters.

Use mind-mapping: Visually plot your ideas in a freeform way to uncover hidden connections between disparate elements.

Small romance things that make me go FERAL

A very totally incredibly non-delulu list by Writerthreads

arm/shoulder/waist/SMALL OF THE BACK touches

HANDS BRUSHING, BUT TOO NERVOUS TO DO ANYTHING MORE

calling them by their name ("What's your opinion on this, X?") (they way they say their name makes their heart do funny things)

the way their voice goes heavy/breathy

CHIN RESTS ON THEIR SHOULDER

whispering into their ear and the way their breath tickles

non-affectionate nicknames just for them

recognising their laugh and trying to make them laugh just to hear it again

little private smirks/winks, watching their reaction when someone makes a joke

sniffing their hair/recognising their on their shampoo

eye contact so deep they feel like sinking

SMALL PECKS ON THE CORNER OF THEIR MOUTH/CHIN/FOREHEAD

recognising the sound of their footsteps

co-existing in the same space, acknowledging their presence and feeling safe

CARESSING THEIR CHEEK WITH THEIR THUMB

recognising their nervous ticks and comforting them, like putting a hand on their bouncing leg

tracing scars, freckles, moles, lines of their muscle, you name it (SCREAMS)

grinning when they blush

watching with pride as the other does a presentation/leads a mission/takes charge

making up private signals for each other

HAND KISSES

NECK KISSES

playing with their hair/brushing their hair/braiding their hair

Ah, love. That lingering warm, fuzzy feeling in your chest. I love love.