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Nuts and Bolts: “Thought” Verbs

In six seconds, you’ll hate me.

But in six months, you’ll be a better writer.

From this point forward – at least for the next half year – you may not use “thought” verbs.  These include:  Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires, and a hundred others you love to use.

The list should also include:  Loves and Hates.

And it should include:  Is and Has, but we’ll get to those, later.

Until some time around Christmas, you can’t write:  Kenny wondered if Monica didn’t like him going out at night…”

Instead, you’ll have to Un-pack that to something like:  “The mornings after Kenny had stayed out, beyond the last bus, until he’d had to bum a ride or pay for a cab and got home to find Monica faking sleep, faking because she never slept that quiet, those mornings, she’d only put her own cup of coffee in the microwave.  Never his.”

Instead of characters knowing anything, you must now present the details that allow the reader to know them.  Instead of a character wanting something, you must now describe the thing so that the reader wants it.

Instead of saying:  “Adam knew Gwen liked him.”

You’ll have to say:  “Between classes, Gwen was always leaned on his locker when he’d go to open it.  She’d roll her eyes and shove off with one foot, leaving a black-heel mark on the painted metal, but she also left the smell of her perfume.  The combination lock would still be warm from her ass.  And the next break, Gwen would be leaned there, again.”

In short, no more short-cuts.  Only specific sensory detail: action, smell, taste, sound, and feeling.

Typically, writers use these “thought” verbs at the beginning of a paragraph  (In this form, you can call them “Thesis Statements” and I’ll rail against those, later)  In a way, they state the intention of the paragraph.  And what follows, illustrates them.

For example:

“Brenda knew she’d never make the deadline.  Traffic was backed up from the bridge, past the first eight or nine exits.  Her cell phone battery was dead.  At home, the dogs would need to go out, or there would be a mess to clean up.  Plus, she’d promised to water the plants for her neighbor…”

Do you see how the opening “thesis statement” steals the thunder of what follows?  Don’t do it.

If nothing else, cut the opening sentence and place it after all the others.  Better yet, transplant it and change it to:  Brenda would never make the deadline.

Thinking is abstract.  Knowing and believing are intangible.  Your story will always be stronger if you just show the physical actions and details of your characters and allow your reader to do the thinking and knowing.  And loving and hating.

Don’t tell your reader:  “Lisa hated Tom.”

Instead, make your case like a lawyer in court, detail by detail.  Present each piece of evidence.  For example:

“During role call, in the breath after the teacher said Tom’s name, in that moment before he could answer, right then, Lisa would whisper-shout: ‘Butt Wipe,” just as Tom was saying, ‘Here’.”

One of the most-common mistakes that beginning writers make is leaving their characters alone.  Writing, you may be alone.  Reading, your audience may be alone.  But your character should spend very, very little time alone.  Because a solitary character starts thinking or worrying or wondering.  

For example:  Waiting for the bus, Mark started to worry about how long the trip would take..”

A better break-down might be:  “The schedule said the bus would come by at noon, but Mark’s watch said it was already 11:57.  You could see all the way down the road, as far as the Mall, and not see a bus.  No doubt, the driver was parked at the turn-around, the far end of the line, taking a nap.  The driver was kicked back, asleep, and Mark was going to be late.  Or worse, the driver was drinking, and he’d pull up drunk and charge Mark seventy-five cents for death in a fiery traffic accident…”

A character alone must lapse into fantasy or memory, but even then you can’t use “thought” verbs or any of their abstract relatives.

Oh, and you can just forget about using the verbs forget and remember.

No more transitions such as:  “Wanda remember how Nelson used to brush her hair.”

Instead:  “Back in their sophomore year, Nelson used to brush her hair with smooth, long strokes of his hand.”

Again, Un-pack.  Don’t take short-cuts.

Better yet, get your character with another character, fast.  Get them together and get the action started.  Let their actions and words show their thoughts.  You – stay out of  their heads.

And while you’re avoiding “thought” verbs, be very wary about using the bland verbs “is” and “have.”

For example:

“Ann’s eyes are blue.”

“Ann has blue eyes.”

Versus:

“Ann coughed and waved one hand past her face, clearing the cigarette smoke from her eyes, blue eyes, before she smiled…”

Instead of bland “is” and “has” statements, try burying your details of what a character has or is, in actions or gestures.  At its most basic, this is showing your story instead of telling it.

And forever after, once you’ve learned to Un-pack your characters, you’ll hate the lazy writer who settles for:  “Jim sat beside the telephone, wondering why Amanda didn’t call.”

Please.  For now, hate me all you want, but don’t use “thought” verbs. After Christmas, go crazy, but I’d bet money you won’t.

[ Essay by Chuck Palahniuk on August 12, 2013]

polish government has opened a website for ukrainians seeking safety and trying to cross the ukrainian-polish border:

ua.gov.pl

as of 13:10 polish time, it has been said as many people as possible will be let through the borders. they are also supposed to let through children who do not have passports, as to not divide families.

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I'm currently making a survival book, its going to inclue everything you need to run, how to cross borders (only if necessary), the safest states right now, the unsafest states, how to protect yourself in a red area, what places to stay at if your running, nearby jobs and other ways to get money, what foods are best to get, how to make certain foods, electronic related advice, the safest messaging apps, what not to say in messages, guide to doctors if you have a uterus or are a women, what plants are safe to eat, various poisons, how to deal with cops, a map of the local area and where cops hang out, how to survive in the woods, clothes you should bring, what to do about your period if your on the run, methods of birth control and what's the best, how to legally change your name and the amount of money it costs, how to a car if your in a non walkable area, first aid tips, how to get and use a burner phone, what type of weapons you might need and how to use them, a guide on how to use most commonplace guns, chargers to use for any devices you might bring.

All of it, I've got multiple notebooks to I'm spreading it across them.

I'm looking for other things to add too it, or if you see one or more subjects in here that you know a lot about/ can help with, feel free to reply or reblog with it, and if you don't want it attached to your profile, my asks are open and free to use. Anything is helpful, anything at all.

I'll be deleting this by January, you have until then to send.

Please, please please please, reblog this. don't just 'like' it

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Some idioms and phrases you should know about part I :

Salt of the earth: a very good or worthy person.

Gut-wrenching: making you feel very upset or worried.

Make a spectacle of yourself: to do something that makes you look stupid and attracts people's attention.

Pass muster: be accepted as adequate or satisfactory.

Putty in someone's hands: easily influenced by someone else, excessively willing to do what someone else wishes.

Look before you leap: carefully consider the possible consequences before taking action.

Set the wheels in motion : to do something that will cause a series of actions to start.

Off the books: without being included on official records.

A long Haul: something that takes a lot of time and energy.

An end in itself: a goal that is pursued in it's own right to the exclusion of others.

Night owl: a person who prefers to be awake late at night.

Kick the Bucket: to die.

Alter Ego: a person's secondary or alternative personality immediately or extremely quickly; at once.

Freak of Nature: something or someone that is unusual, rare, or abnormal in some way / To avoid attracting attention to yourself.

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if i think about them too long i’ll go insane (text from @/veniennes on tiktok)

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gonna post my entire stickman reaction pic collection

Since there's been a lot of fandom history on my dash tonight, I want to tell you about something I've referenced before, and which always gets funny notes in my inbox whenever I do:

The day fandom collectively lost its shit after logging into Delicious and finding it was like, a horrible mix between MySpace and Reddit.

Like AO3, it's a story of fandom using a space that wasn't intended for fandom, and then being utterly destroyed when that space decided to adopt hostile policies.

Delicious was a social bookmarking site, which was basically a way for users to save content from around the web. This was during a time when browsers were notoriously awful, and saving bookmarks locally was guaranteed to end in you losing everything because Firefox updated and did something weird, or Internet Explorer just randomly shat the bed and reinstalled itself when you weren't looking. And it was superior to browser bookmarks, because it had tags and organisational structures that were set by each, individual user.

And it happened to be perfect for fandom, because at the time we were primarily using LiveJournal, another site that didn't want us, and was actively trying to push us out. Delicious was used in two primary ways:

Readers of fic would use it to save the ones they liked, often using their account to curate reclists.

Community owners would use it to organise posts to the community.

Free LJ accounts only allowed so many tags, and even paid accounts often didn't have enough for large communities. Roleplay was huge on LJ, and users would often want tags for all their characters so they could find old threads. Some megafandoms with huge ensemble casts would very quickly run out of tags on their communities, especially if they tagged for content creators, tropes, kinks, etc. With Delicious' tag system, it was a perfect site for both of these purposes.

And then one day, without warning, we all logged in to do our thing, and it was a completely different site. Tale as old as time, Yahoo! bought it, decided it wasn't profitable enough, and decided to rebuild it from the ground up without any warning. They got rid of the tag system entirely, and I don't think anyone ever truly figured out how the new site was meant to be used.

But fandom was utterly and truly in a mass panic, because this backbone of how so many things were run just evaporated. Ever wonder why AO3 has the tag system it does? It was built by the same people who used Delicious. Before AO3, fandom had collectively decided that the information AO3 displays on fic headers was what should always be displayed. People would have to build their own headers, but they always included the same general gist of fandom, characters, pairing, rating, word count, warnings, kinks, and summary. You could browse a stranger's Delicious account, and would have a reasonable certainty of seeing these same, or very similar prefixes in their tag system.

So. Fandom is panicking. Entire communities are un-searchable, reclists are broken, people have lost years of bookmarked fic, and we were all scrambling to find something that worked like Delicious, or build something like it, but it had happened so abruptly that there wans't time to really coordinate.

Then, from the shadows came Maciej Cegłowski, aka Pinboard Guy. (Not to be confused with Pinterest.) Pinboard Guy had heard that Delicious had shat the bed, because fandom wasn't the only group that used the site, and weren't the only people who lost their bookmarks, but we were certainly being very loud and obnoxious about it. Pinboard Guy reached out to fandom on the whole, with a glorious gift. He had his own Delicious clone, that he built from the ground up and maintained for better privacy and security, and he sold accounts. At the time, it was around a $5 one-time fee, with a structure that increased the fee by a fractional amount for each new account. Basically, as server load increased, so did server costs, and this is how he managed to keep up with that.

He also understood that by its nature, fandom is very social, where his site was very asocial.

So he asked, what does fandom need? And someone opened up a Gdoc, and a lot of people put together a very well-written and organised (and enormous) list of ways in which fandom used social bookmarking. How we needed prefixes, and bundles, and a way to discover other accounts, along with detailled explanations of why. A lot of work was put into this, which was basically a fandom manifesto explaining to an outsider everything he would need to know to rebuild Delicious. For a lot of us, we didn't expect anything, but just being humoured was validating.

And then this man implemented these features for us. When you go into your account, you can tick a box that says you're part of fandom, and it will open up an entirely separate part of the site, that he built, just for us. He didn't have to do this. But he did it anyway. He's changed the pricing model since then, and it's now a yearly fee instead of one-time, because Pinboard is still run by Pinboard Guy, and no one else. No ads, no sponsors. Just Maciej Cegłowski and his ancient-ass code that still looks like the internet did in 2009.

And then, a few years down the line, like the fucking baller he is, Cegłowski bought Delicious and shut it down. Just killed it dead.

Not a lot of people within use Pinboard anymore, because AO3 also serves the first reason people used it: bookmarking fic. Allowing for external bookmarks meant that the reclist people didn't need to rely on a service that might not always be friendly to us. And then, well. LiveJournal kicked fandom out through a series of hostile policy changes, and Dreamwidth failed to take off, so we no longer really needed that community archive aspect.

But 2009 was a rough year for fandom, because it was the year fandom pretty much everything changed. While we gained a huge, centralised archive that wasn't the Pit of Voles that FFN is, we lost that centralisation when fandom fled LiveJournal for this fucking hellsite. Some of us vainly tried to make Dreamwidth happen, and clung to it in the desperate hope that Tumblr would fail and people would miss journals and communities, but it never happened.

And I'm telling you. When this Post+ thing finally drives fandom off this site, I'm gonna be torn between sitting back and laughing because it's the same shit all over again, and collapsing into utter despair because I am too goddamn old to learn how to use another site that isn't built for the way fandom likes to shove square pegs into round holes to make sites suit our needs.