Writing Tips - Eyeballs!

writing tips - eyeballs!

our favorite woohoo

Sooooo.....coupla things to start.

No orbs. NO ORBS. bad, stupid, dumb, disgusting, gross. orbs is weird. stop using it

eyes are really cool and have a lot of cool emotion. use them more! not just 'heart eyes' and 'tears'. there's other cool stuff.

ANATOMY

Eyes have three visible parts: sclera (whitish part) Pupil (black thing in the middle) and the iris (colored bit).

Pupils dilate and constrict. irises do not. stop mixing them up. Another thing: Dilate means to grow larger, constrict means to shrink.

When would your pupil be dilated?

Lust

Happiness

Dark environments (that's why ur eyes look sparkly when you look at the stars! v cute)

cocaine or other stimulants (does not dilate with weed or booze, but may look glassy.)

When would the pupil be constricted?

head injury

bright light

seizure

fear

DESCRIPTION

yall know how i feel about orbs. But if you feel like you're running out of vocab or that it seems cliche, think about this stuff:

Eyes are windows to the soul. Use describing the eyes as a vessel to show emotion. don't just say what they look like. Show don't tell blah blah blah. Example

Not great:

His eyes were glassy with tears, lashes sticking from the moisture. He couldn't look them in the eye, too wrought with grief.

yeah, okay, whatever. meh.

better:

The light was extinguished behind his eyes. Grief had dulled his gaze to a muddy grey, no longer sparkling with curiosity. Tears clung his lashes together and blurred the sadness spilling from his cheeks.

Thereee we go, that's some good shit.

Alright, go away now xox

so i changed the request rules

i'm allowing smut, but it'll be mild and to my comfort level. It'll kinda be touch and go as far as what I'm comfortable with writing, cause I'm slightly inexperienced with it. pls be patient!

xox

Writing tips! pt. 1

Fluff advice

Use fluffy words. I mean like softy words, not a lot of hard endings or consonants. words that feel soft, you feel me? (I am autistic so maybe just me but lemme show you some examples and definitions)

snuffle

tuck

coo

murmur

mumble

smush/squish

bundle

soft (obv)

gentle

nuzzle

burrow

you feel me??? does it make sense?? as opposed to 'cuddle, mutter, smash, wrap' which mean essentially the same as above. If you use words that feel or sound phonetically like the vibe you're trying to get across, it reads much better. Paragraph example of a generic fluff scene (G rated dw) using themed words and non-themed words.

Theme:

warm cotton sheets and syrupy midday sunlight draped gently over the entwined forms on their shared bed. a hazy, drowsy blanket of pleasure made their eyelids heavy. feeling too far away, (A) shuffled closer to (B), nudging their nose into the soft space of their cheek. B murmured sweetly, caressing A back to sleep. smushed a close as can be, the two lovers drifted into a cozy pocket of love

No Theme:

warm cotton sheets and bright midday sun shone through the window over the entwined forms. sleeping soundly, wrapped in their love for each other, the day crept forward. (A) yawned and rolled closer to (B), wedging their nose into (B's) soft cheek. (B) chuckled, whispering their partner back to the safe world of sleep. together again, the two lovers drifted into dreamland.

Difference? or just me?

In other words, think of small children when you think of fluff. (NOT LIKE THAT) the tone, the softness you would approach a toddler with. toddler speech is kinda soft too, since they aren't capable of hard sounds with their teeth (or lack thereof) so their words sound sweeter. (an' instead of and, 'bubba' instead of 'papa', you get the idea). Adults also change words to fit a softer, gentler mood. "Lovey' instead of love, 'Doggy,' instead of 'dog'. this same vocabulary shift can add another layer of cuteness to ur fic.

Hope this helps! message w more questions xx

writing tips pt. 2- angst

angst is all about the sad, heart wrenching stuff. usually, there's quite a bit of internal narrative because its the best way to truly experience the pain. well, when writing a train of thought, write it like the thought appears. this might mean breaking the grammar rules. that's ok! it might give grammarly hemorrhoids but whatever. a break in the system, so to speak, draws the reader's attention. Shakespeare does this when he breaks the meter. the stutter in the pattern makes the audience go 'hey, that's important,' and the context directs the new feeling. same thing!

Anxiety - typically spiralling, out of control thoughts. formatting might look like: a lack of commas, cut off sentences, repeated words, unpredictable sentences ->

"no no no no couldn't be happening this isn't real please no god don't let it be them-"

anxious vocab (behavior description)

tremble

unsteady

stutter

cower

whimper

quake

fret

keen

Anger - similar to anxiety, racing thoughts that get angrier and angrier. builds up, add more expletives, italics, language gets more intense. Anger is be more verbal, so add some actual dialogue in the middle ->

how could they. unbelievable. one fucking job, and they screwed it up. it was all so perfect, so fucking precisely planned and they couldn't get their head out of their motherfucking ass long enough to-

"DAWSON! GET YOUR ASS DOWN HERE!"

tip - italics are a little better than caps lock. idk why but we've all equated italics to intense emotion. caps is kind of jarring and more like a shout. 'shout' is different than 'bellow'. which sounds angrier? bellow, right? like in my previous fluff post, vocabulary and dialogue description is a biggie.

running out of angry vocab, try:

bellow - shout, but with more of a roar

seethe

stew

growl

rage

furious

venomous

bristle/bristled

spat

spew

hope this helps! xo

what's the favorite trope? comment any I missed!

if you have two favorites, comment ur 2nd one

WRITING TIP: grammar. good god.

just because it's tumblr doesn't mean you can throw grammar and spelling out the window.

COMMON MISTAKES:

Not indenting for paragraphs. I know tumblr doesn't have the 'tab' function, but at least do a paragraph break. When?

If someone new is speaking

If the setting/action has changed

a new thought

think of it like the camera angle changing in a movie. Would the camera break to another room? or would you watch five minutes of bouncing and spinning while the camera moves to the right location. (Hint: it's the first one)

Big blocks of text make me homicidal. Knock it off.

Apostrophes!

It's: it is

Its: belongs to 'it'. We think it can also be it's, but it's not (see what I did there huh huh hee hee hooo boy)

Possession: Jenna's, Jess', The Twins'. NOT Jennas', Jess's, The Twin's. If there is a group, put the apostrophe after the plural 's'. PLURALS DO NOT HAVE APOSTROPHES IF I SEE THAT AGAIN I WILL REVOKE YOUR LITERATURE LICENSE AAAAAH.

Punctuation goes inside the quotation marks. "Like this." "Not this".

Dialogue punctuation.

"If you're talking and something happens," she said, dodging past a car, "you'd punctuate with a comma and lowercase." See how I didn't capitalize the bold word, or put a period after 'happens?'

Don't do this:

"If you're talking and something happens." She said, dodging past a car, "You'd punctuate with a comma and lowercase."

bad. wrong. booo.

MISUSING SEMICOLONS.

; this baby. makes a cute face ;) but is also useful!

it explains a clause, like so (an excerpt from my drabble 'Deal With It, pls read xoxoxo): "it was cozy; you'd pulled a blanket over your head and your music played gently." I said something was cozy, and then I explained how after a semicolon. It's not just a fancy comma. Don't use it like a fancy comma. it's like commentary of the actual writing. Professional parentheses.

PARENTHESES.

Don't use them. It doesn't make any fucking sense. use a semicolon or a colon or a comma or hyphens or literally anything else. underscores, even. just not parentheses. it's so weird.

WRITING STYLISTICALLY

Bold, italic, all lowercase, that stuff. use it consistently! you don't have to follow the rules if you make it seem intentional and consistent.

Bold.

emphasis, intense, eye-catching. good for a groundbreaking revelation. not the strongest choice for anger. has a staccato feel to it. punctual, concise.

Italic

wistfulness, pause, contemplation, haunting emphasis. good for flashbacks, whispering, angsty emphasis. If you overuse it, it'll feel kinda weird. i know we love her but give her some space. Otherwise it feels like pumping the gas and slamming the breaks really fast during the sentence.

all lowercase.

she's cute, she's aesthetic, she can get confusing sometimes. we need Capitals so that we can identify the Important Things. names, places, proper nouns, I know you know 'em. if you wanna start ur sentence lowercase, okay sure, but it gets muddy if you do it everywhere.

ok byeee xox