I Relate To Simon Because, I Too, Spend Most Of My Time In A Gay Panic™

This is Arthur Rimbaud erasure and I will not stand for it

British gays have Oscar Wilde, french gays have Proust.

I was at Hogwarts and someone had been posting pictures of the cartoon snake that says “pwease no steppy” all over the Slytherin common room.

honestly, i was sort of upset with our talk with Dumbledore in the end of our first year…

Me : once he slapped me in charms class.... It was awesome

Rowan: Bill Weasley is awesome

Rowan: He’s the most popular boy at school

Rowan: He’s the best duellist too!

Me: I hear his hair is insured for a thousand galleons

Me: I hear he’s got an eight-pack

Me: I hear he fought an Acromentula and won

Soooooo I started this game too. the only problem (besides the energy system) is that Im so gay Im in love with every girl, Rowan, Penny and (yes, yes, I know) even Merula

Rick Riordan finally snapped and released emails he sent to The Lightning Thief movie makers….

I can’t stop laughing

How to Kick a Reader in the Gut

Disrupt the reader’s sense of justice. 

This generally means setting a character up to deserve one thing and then giving them the exact opposite. 

Kill a character off before they can achieve their goal. 

Let the bad guy get an extremely important win. 

Set up a coup against a tyrannical king. The coup fails miserably.

Don’t always give characters closure. 

(Excluding the end of the book, obviously)

A beloved friend dies in battle and there’s no time to mourn him.

A random tryst between two main characters is not (or cannot be) brought up again.

A character suddenly loses their job or can otherwise no longer keep up their old routine

Make it the main character’s fault sometimes. 

And not in an “imposter syndrome” way. Make your MC do something bad, and make the blame they shoulder for it heavy and tangible.

MC must choose the lesser of two evils.

MC kills someone they believe to be a bad guy, only to later discover the bad guy was a different person altogether.

Rejection is a powerful tool. 

People generally want to be understood, and if you can make a character think they are Known, and then rip that away from them with a rejection (romantic or platonic) people will empathize with it.

MC is finally accepting the Thing They Must Do/Become, and their love interest decides that that’s not a path they want to be on and breaks up with them

MC makes a decision they believe is right, everyone around them thinks they chose wrong.

MC finds kinship with someone Like Them, at long last, but that person later discovers that there is some inherent aspect of MC that they wholly reject. (Perhaps it was MC’s fault that their family member died, they have important religious differences, or WERE THE BAD GUY ALL ALONG!)

On the flipside, make your main character keep going. 

Push them beyond what they are capable of, and then push them farther. Make them want something so deeply that they are willing to do literally anything to get it. Give them passion and drive and grit and more of that than they have fear.

“But what if my MC is quiet and meek?” Even better. They want something so deeply that every single moment they push themselves toward it is a moment spent outside their comfort zone. What must that do to a person?

Obviously, don’t do all of these things, or the story can begin to feel tedious or overly dramatic, and make sure that every decision you make is informed by your plot first and foremost. 

Also remember that the things that make us sad, angry, or otherwise emotional as readers are the same things that make us feel that way in our day-to-day lives. Creating an empathetic main character is the foundation for all of the above tips.

ahh yes, the inseparable combo of quidditch jocks and sexual awakening…

stop 👏 pitting 👏 the 👏 writing 👏 process 👏 against 👏 each 👏 other 👏

daydreaming about scenarios is FUN

outlining is 

writing them down is 

rewriting is

editing is

having a finished story is REWARDING

I made some catradora posters this weekend!