Making your angst hurt:the power of lighthearted scenes.
I’m incredibly disappointed with the trend in stories (especially ‘edgy’ YA novels) to bombard the reader with traumatic situations, angry characters, and relationship drama without ever first giving them a reason to root for a better future. As a reader…
I might care that the main siblings are fighting if they had first been shown to have at least one happy, healthy conversation.
I might cry and rage with the protagonist if I knew they actually had the capacity to laugh and smile and be happy.
I might be hit by heavy and dark situations if there was some notion that it was possible for this world to have light and hope and joy to begin with.
Writers seem to forget that their reader’s eyes adjust to the dark. If you want to give your reader a truly bleak situation in a continually dim setting, you have to put them in pitch blackness. But if you just shine a light first, the sudden change makes the contrast appear substantial.
Show your readers what light means to your character before taking it away. Let the reader bond with the characters in their happy moments before (and in between) tearing them apart. Give readers a future to root for by putting sparks of that future into the past and the present. Make your character’s tears and anger mean something.
Not only will this give your dark and emotional scenes more impact, but it says something that we as humans desperately, desperately need to hear.
Books with light amidst the darkness tell us that while things are hard and hurt, that we’re still allowed to breathe and hope and live and even laugh within the darkness.
We as humans need to hear this more often, because acting it out is the only way we stop from suffocating long enough to make a difference.
So write angst, and darkness, and gritty, painful stories, full of treacherous morally grey characters if you want to. But don’t forget to turn the light on occasionally.
I used to work in a little market and we had to cut blocks of cheese in approximately 1lb cubes. To this day, 1lb = 1 block of feta cheese, in my head.
My gym trainer was talking about guys lifting up to 1000 lbs.
Gender roles in a nutshell: the Beauxbatons and Durmstrang entrances in The Goblet of Fire.
also, to my knowledge neither of those schools were sex-segregated in the books
That bothered me more than the Dumbledore yelling, actually.
Nicolas Flamel was an alum of Beauxbatons.
The first headteacher of Durmstrang was a witch.
Bam.
In the books, it even says that there were boys and girls from each school. Thanks Hollywood for making Durmstrang buff and all athletic men and Beauxbatons all feminine and dainty.
Just imagine what it would have meant for every kid watching, seeing girls walking beside the guys in Durmstrang being “manly” and boys walking with Beuxbaton being flirty and feminine.
It would have shown that girls and boys can be however they want.
It also suggested that the only way a female could have be selected to participate was if she was not up against any male competition. In the books Fleur is chosen as the best candidate for her school from a selection of female AND male students. And she was the best PERSON. Not the best GIRL.
all men are Russian and all Women are French.
Select your gender: 🔳 Russian 🔳 French
ah yes my gender is French and my pronouns are oui/baguette please respect that merci beaucoup
im starting a gang and we’re gonna go out and destroy every golf course. rip up all the grass and replace it with native plants and fruit trees and shit. we move at midnight be there or be a casualty of the revolution
So today pulling into Stop and Shop, this lady cut me off and nearly drove into me, and then, when I tried to pass her, she swung to the right and nearly hit me again, and then flipped me off.
So somebody is having a bad day and taking it out on me. That’s fine. It’s harmless, and I don’t know what’s going on in this woman’s life. I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt she’s not just a piece of shit and is just having a bad day.
But then I park and she follows me, and gets out of the car and starts swearing at me and getting in my face.
Now I go from “indifferent” to “I’m gonna fuck with this woman’s head.” Now I would say I’m a gentleman of size, and in all black and bemohawked I probably look spookier than I actually am, so props to this lady for getting in my face. Now of course I’m not going to hit her, or even threaten violence. That’s shitty. Nobody should get threatened with violence.
Instead, I take a step back, narrowing my eyes like I’m studying her face really closely, and then I touch one of the several piece of “occulty” jewelry I’m wearing (none of which, by the way, are magicked in any way at all). Then I mumble some nonsense under my breath, and then make the fig gesture and the horns at her.
She stops, wide-eyed.
“WHAT THE HELL DID YOU JUST DO TO ME?”
I chuckled, and shake my head. “Nothing at all.” I say in a not-terrible convincing voice. “But every time something bad happens to you today, you’re gonna be thinking of me.”
Tess's Back Up 