One Of The Best Tips For Writing Descriptions Of Pain Is Actually A Snippet I Remember From A Story Where

One of the best tips for writing descriptions of pain is actually a snippet I remember from a story where a character is given a host of colored pencils and asked to draw an egg.

The character says that there’s no white pencil.  But you don’t need a white pencil to draw a white egg.  We already know the egg is white.  What we need to draw is the luminance of the yellow lamp and the reflection of the blue cloth and the shadows and the shading.

We know a broken bone hurts.  We know a knife wound hurts.  We know grief hurts.  Show us what else it does.

You don’t need to describe the character in pain.  You need to describe how the pain affects the character - how they’re unable to move, how they’re sweating, how they’re cold, how their muscles ache and their fingers tremble and their eyes prickle.

Draw around the egg.  Write around the pain.  And we will all be able to see the finished product.

That is an amazing comparison.

Not even that, a lot of people do actually not know anything about gardening or food.

That makes it an even greater comparison.

I've had a hard time articulating to people just how fundamental spinning used to be in people's lives, and how eerie it is that it's vanished so entirely. It occurred to me today that it's a bit like if in the future all food was made by machine, and people forgot what farming and cooking were. Not just that they forgot how to do it; they had never heard of it.

When they use phrases like "spinning yarns" for telling stories or "heckling a performer" without understanding where they come from, I imagine a scene in the future where someone uses the phrase "stir the pot" to mean "cause a disagreement" and I say, did you know a pot used to be a container for heating food, and stirring was a way of combining different components of food together? "Wow, you're full of weird facts! How do you even know that?"

When I say I spin and people say "What, like you do exercise bikes? Is that a kind of dancing? What's drafting? What's a hackle?" it's like if I started talking about my cooking hobby and my friend asked "What's salt? Also, what's cooking?" Well, you see, there are a lot of stages to food preparation, starting with planting crops, and cooking is one of the later stages. Salt is a chemical used in cooking which mostly alters the flavor of the food but can also be used for other things, like drawing out moisture...

"Wow, that sounds so complicated. You must have done a lot of research. You're so good at cooking!" I'm really not. In the past, children started learning about cooking as early as age five ("Isn't that child labor?"), and many people cooked every day their whole lives ("Man, people worked so hard back then."). And that's just an average person, not to mention people called "chefs" who did it professionally. I go to the historic preservation center to use their stove once or twice a week, and I started learning a couple years ago. So what I know is less sophisticated than what some children could do back in the day.

"Can you make me a snickers bar?" No, that would be pretty hard. I just make sandwiches mostly. Sometimes I do scrambled eggs. "Oh, I would've thought a snickers bar would be way more basic than eggs. They seem so simple!"

Haven't you ever wondered where food comes from? I ask them. When you were a kid, did you ever pick apart the different colored bits in your food and wonder what it was made of? "No, I never really thought about it." Did you know rice balls are called that because they're made from part of a plant called rice? "Oh haha, that's so weird. I thought 'rice' was just an adjective for anything that was soft and white."

People always ask me why I took up spinning. Isn't it weird that there are things we take so much for granted that we don't even notice when they're gone? Isn't it strange that something which has been part of humanity all across the planet since the Neanderthals is being forgotten in our generation? Isn't it funny that when knowledge dies, it leaves behind a ghost, just like a person? Don't you want to commune with it?

OH MY GOD I LOVED THOSE BOOKS!!!

Just finished rereading the first Bartimaeus book and yeah, yeah, I can see why I loved these books so much as a child :>

I feel like these illustrations aren't 100% faithful to the source material but maybe they're how Bart wished things happened, you know??

I'm autistic, asexual and got ADHD

I've got too much energy: I'm a AAA-battery

I’m aroace and sometimes agender does that mean I am a AAA battery.

Certain words can change your brain forever and ever so you do have to be very careful about it.