Artemis--writes - I Supposedly Write Books

its so scary to put yourself out there but a SINGLE message saying "hi i loved what you made it touched me in some way" makes it all worth it 10000%

I need everyone to know that the ship Götheborg, the world's largest ocean-going wooden sailing ship, answered a distress call the other day.

Imagine waiting for the coast guard or whatever to show up and instead a replica of 18th century merchant ship pulls up and tows you to the coast.

The fact that The Hobbit is such a lighthearted family-friendly book, especially when compared to LOTR, actually breaks my heart when you consider that it is Bilbo’s writing. That journey was anything but a fun trip for him. He went through real dangers and horrifying moments. He saw violence for the first time. At the end of it, he lost his love. And he went home traumatized, heartbroken, and forever changed.

Yet when he wrote the story down, he emphasized the more successful and fun parts, and glossed over the depth of his pain and grief when the losses happened (even leaving Fíli and Kíli’s deaths to a throwaway line.)

Because what else could he have done? Nobody else could possibly understand his pain. Bilbo wasn’t like Frodo. He didn’t have a Sam who he shared the experience with and could talk to about it every day afterward, to help him work through writing down the details of the darker parts of the story. And his other friends lived far away and could only visit occasionally.

And the hobbit children were all full of wonder about Elves and dwarves and trolls, so he put the focus on that.

I feel like that was his way of dealing with his trauma.

In the past fifty years, fantasy’s greatest sin might be its creation of a bland, invariant, faux-Medieval European backdrop. The problem isn’t that every fantasy novel is set in the same place: pick a given book, and it probably deviates somehow. The problem is that the texture of this place gets everywhere.

What’s texture, specifically? Exactly what Elliot says: material culture. Social space. The textiles people use, the jobs they perform, the crops they harvest, the seasons they expect, even the way they construct their names. Fantasy writing doesn’t usually care much about these details, because it doesn’t usually care much about the little people – laborers, full-time mothers, sharecroppers, so on. (The last two books of Earthsea represent LeGuin’s remarkable attack on this tendency in her own writing.) So the fantasy writer defaults – fills in the tough details with the easiest available solution, and moves back to the world-saving, vengeance-seeking, intrigue-knotting narrative. Availability heuristics kick in, and we get another world of feudal serfs hunting deer and eating grains, of Western name constructions and Western social assumptions. (Husband and wife is not the universal historical norm for family structure, for instance.)

Defaulting is the root of a great many evils. Defaulting happens when we don’t think too much about something we write – a character description, a gender dynamic, a textile on display, the weave of the rug. Absent much thought, automaticity, the brain’s subsconscious autopilot, invokes the easiest available prototype – in the case of a gender dynamic, dad will read the paper, and mom will cut the protagonist’s hair. Or, in the case of worldbuilding, we default to the bland fantasy backdrop we know, and thereby reinforce it. It’s not done out of malice, but it’s still done.

The only way to fight this is by thinking about the little stuff. So: I was quite wrong. You do need to worldbuild pretty hard. Worldbuild against the grain, and worldbuild to challenge. Think about the little stuff. You don’t need to position every rain shadow and align every tectonic plate before you start your short story. But you do need to build a base of historical information that disrupts and overturns your implicit assumptions about how societies ‘ordinarily’ work, what they ‘ordinarily’ eat, who they ‘ordinarily’ sleep with. Remember that your slice of life experience is deeply atypical and selective, filtered through a particular culture with particular norms. If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing – because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.

We... need worldbuilding by Seth Dickinson

stop trying to make your draft perfect on the first try. your characters don’t care. your plot doesn’t care. even the imaginary readers in your head don’t care because they don’t exist yet. just write the terrible version. write the cringey dialogue and the scenes that go nowhere and the metaphors so bad they make you cringe into next week. because guess what? you can’t edit a blank page, but you can edit a hot mess. embrace it.

why have i not seen anyone talking about how fundamentally nihilist no man's sky is? like.

the entire story of the game revolves around the fact that the entire universe is ending soon and that you don't know how long you have left to live before everything you know and love is completely and utterly gone. and there is nothing anyone or anything can do to save it.

and yet the game tells you: go. explore. make the most of the time you have. discover new things and make friends and create wonders. not because they'll last, but because they won't. because the things you find and create are worth seeing even if no one will ever remember them.

and when the time comes? sit back with your buddy at the end of everything, pour yourself a drink, and toast to oblivion.

This is exactly why he's my favorite fantasy character of all time.

guys do you get it when i say aragorn is the definition of the words "gentle", "love", and "beauty". not in the conventional way, but i think aragorns existence itself defines those words. the ranger in him grins, as free as the winds and you see that chaos in him and yet you also feel his quiet strength that makes him uniquely aragorn. the whimsy of the elves as estel grew up to be the man now known as aragorn. gentle as he sings to the trees, sings to his horse.... his calloused hands cradling everything with such tenderness someone might wonder how he does that when it's been hardened by years of fighting with a sword and shouldering burdens.... aragorns love at the same time is something beyond either romantic or platonic, its the type of love that you just give out to the world. love built on courage, and kindness, and faith, and hope, as what his name estel means.... and to be able to love like that..... i think is what you call a being who embodies beauty.....

you'd have to stop the world just to stop the feeling!!

(now available as a sort-of-wallpaper and print~)

WE GOT AROMANTIC TRENDING BOYS!!!! (gender neutral)

LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOOOOO