Lady of the Land @Lady@cat.family

this is like 95% of my experiences asking questions of strangers on the internet

“what is your favourite type of pizza and why”

“oh, pizza? usually when i want pizza i open the map app on my phone and scroll through the nearest places until i find something with lots of stars”

you ever ask a question on the internet and have people give you answers which are kind of on the same topic but not really what you asked for at all

anyway final, reveal‐all or sudden‐change‐in‐perspective or even brilliant‐moment‐of‐persuasion conversations solve the wrong problem and attempt to resolve the narrative tensions of the story in place of the structural ones. they very rarely take place in structural time and closing out your story that way is footgun which spits in the face of all your hard work actually trying to architecture something pleasing or meaningful, effectively saying “none of that structure actually matters because in the end these words were the key”

at which point you might as well toss out the entire rest of the story and just print that, if that’s what you think

for example star wars converts the narrative tension of the impending threat of the death star, around which the story is structured, into the narrative tension of the rebels launching an all‐out war against the empire, about which the story structure has nothing meaningful to say

i think a lot of writers write themselves into impossible situations because they rely entirely on the narrative for tension, and narrative tension can never be completely resolved without it sounding like somebody is running a con

in fact, the only utility narrative tension has for the writer is in giving weight to the tension in the story’s structure; the goal of the writer is to convert narrative tension which is structurally entwined into narrative tension which is structurally free, at which point the story reaches its close

if you are going to have your protagonist have a life‐altering conversation, first of all you should stick it at the BEGINNING of the work

if you are a writer who is puzzling over how to end your story, and your great idea is to have your protagonist have a life‐altering conversation which changes their perspective and resolves all the tensions currently present in the narrative

stop, please, and don’t

it does not work

« As an example, if you have 1,000 motivated fans who would pay you $1,000 a year to purchase your music or your digital art, you’ve just earned a million dollars. » thanks but i don’t need NFTs to do that, i can just sell bath water

think i need to do better at remembering to tell the stories i actually want to tell

instead of getting sucked into bogs of shit i couldn’t care less about

or that i had more time

i wish writing didn't take so long

does the temperature being higher actually increase the amount of UV radiation output by the sun or are people just conflating those two for some reason

kind of girl who spends the weekend fucking off and playing pokémon

this is not the last gasp of a dying party it is the culmination of 40 years of wins

trying to explain to people that no, just because we got gay marriage recently does not mean that the republicans were on a losing streak before trump

it's like showing someone a chessboard and being like “how do i proceed from here” and getting back “well generally when playing chess you want to balance pressuring your opponent and defending your king”

you don't have to tell me about splitting up action with context i have an entire aesthetic theory and annotation symbology honed precisely at solving this exact problem i promise i'm aware

help i asked for writing advice and everybody is replying like i've never written a story before

if only they had more courage, like the democrats