Writing What You Don't Know: The Assistants

Hmm. My first instinct is that she would be feeling guilty over “not liking her” like she was doing her a disservice, more intensely then if she had been alive she may begin thinking she was better post mortem. Guilt is weird like that

id imagine she would be very shocked, and then when they are in relative safety they may either collectively repress this or talk together or a weird mix of both idk. It sounds like a chaotic scene and i believe she would be very confused and scared the whole time and possibly forget chunks of it especially if it included waiting, it would make sense to have gaps when recalling events

(I remember the waiting being very tedious, and shockingly non eventful between dyings, ive also heard victims of murders and massacres describe waiting even with the real possibility of being gunned down any second as “boring” as there is not much to do, like watching paint try except with the looming fear of death, a lot of trauma can be shockingly boring actually)

The trial would be salt in the wound geezus good luck girl

 

In the same story, I've accidentally created a pretty unfortunate autistic stereotype. I wanted to use an autistic character and also a whump-attracting male character who's weaker and less capable than the female lead (I was like fourteen when I came up with these and sick of popular fantasy gender tropes) and combined them in one. Not good, as I know now. Obvious solution = make more characters autistic, and also I need to give him a chance to demonstrate competence. He was abused pretty badly for reasons relating to the autism, so he has reason to be nervous and under-confident, but he needs to be able to intentionally do something useful and succeed. I considered having him able to see through magical illusions but that isn't really being "competent", it's a quirk. I feel like I really ought to have done better with him.

 

give him a niche skill and have it come in handy?
this is a thing I have had happen to me. sometimes it is a skill I learned because Special Interest, and sometimes it's something I learned because being abused can lead to some.....strange skills. but it would give him a chance to do something useful, and in a situation where he's the possibly the only one who could've done the thing.

 

are nsfw questions ok here? under a labeled cut, of course.

there are some smut scenarios i'd like to write about that i have no experience with.

 

You may wanna check out the Bottom Serket forum, that's where the smut discussions are.

I'm having problems not relating to the actual writing; reading negative reviews of bad books is fun but it paralyses me with regard to my own writing. I worry I'm writing something horribly offensive without knowing :(

 

@hyrax this thread is probably a good place to ask!

 

@prismaticvoid oh perfect, i never even knew that thread was a thing! thanks!

 

TFW the way you invariably picture your OC tying her headscarf may not be physically possible >_< I was imagining it wrapped around her head, then around and around the length of her hair, then the resulting wrap twisted and tucked up under the head-wrap part. My hair isn't long enough to test this.

 

It... sounds possible at least, if a little bit uncomfortable, bc it might pull on the hair?

 

I do something kinda like that for post shower towel hat. you need the part around the head to be quite tight so the "tail" will be held in it. it won´t stay up if you shove it under the back of the neck portion, it will have to go over the head so not all the weight is hanging on it.

ETA: My hair is waist length

 

*googles* Ah, yeah, I've been picturing something like a towel turban but with the twist at the nape and tucked under the back. If it was knotted or pinned would it stay?

 

It would probably need to be pinned at the front to keep from falling off there, smooth fabric with smooth hair = easy gliding.

 

Spoiler: spanking discussion

What are everyone's thoughts on writing a setting where hitting children is normal and the by all other standards very loving parent does it, in the name of historical accuracy? On one hand it's a fictional world, but on the other it has a lot of the other bad stuff of the time period too.

 

I want to write things with a real sense of danger but at the same time I really really hate killing characters. Anyone got any tips for biting the bullet there?

 

Have other unwanted consequences. The first thing that pops into my head is "serious injury" but could be anything, depending on the context.

 

Spoiler: late reply, thank u adhd and insomnia

I'd say that as long as there's evidence to point to the character(s) not being all-knowing or magically perfect, it'd be fine. Whether or not it's acceptable to spank your kids is something that's very much debated today, and if it's becoming uncommon then it's only as of the past 20 years or so as research has started coming in to point to it being a remarkably ineffective means of punishment - I know that my parents spanked me and my siblings, and that it wasn't regarded as unusual or wrong for them to do so, and I'm only 30.

 

okay so, I want to write a character who is deaf but I don't know a lot of stuff about it beyond some of the basics, so I'd really like someone to help detail things out for me

I'm thinking she's completely deaf from birth (probably via genetic mutation, since her twin sister's already cursed with an inherited genetic condition, though I don't know if full deafness via mutation can actually happen...I'm not a biologist either). she starts off as the daughter of a rich family, so her moms can get access to various resources easily, thus I'm thinking she'd know sign language from early on, though I don't know a thing about how that's specifically learned (same with lip reading, which I'd like her to know as well). her sister and both of her moms aren't deaf, which would probably make things more challenging to deal with for all of them. later she ends up living homeless for a while after running away from her family, and survives via a combination of using shelters and stealing peoples' wallets or food from dumpsters and the like; here I'm specifically looking for how her deafness would challenge her and what she'd have to do, if she could, to make up for it

and then just some overall stuff like how her deafness hinders the things she can do in everyday life--I near-exclusively write mundane slice-of-life stuff so it'd be good to know sort of how a day in the life generally goes for a fully-deaf person. I can infer some of the obstacles on my own, but I can't judge or guess at some points in what ways or how much they could be navigated, if at all

that's a pretty rough overview since I'm just giving the bare basics, but if more details on her are needed just ask; I've got her whole character pretty sussed out rn, and the deafness is something I'm applying onto her existing framework rather than developing her from scratch in mind with

 

one thing I would caution you on, as a person who is hard-of-hearing (albeit not completely deaf) is that lip-reading is....not an easy thing to do, not usually superbly accurate, and also kind of requires a fair amount of focus, especially since most people don't enunciate like they're expecting you to have to lip-read. which means it can be tiring to do. so....maybe try not to fall back on that too much, and it might also make sense for people who know her well to try and enunciate more....specifically, so that it's easier to guesstimate certain words/sounds. if that makes sense.
eta: like, the average lip-reader is not going to get more than 40% of what a person is saying to them from lip-reading, and I don't mean, like, people who are hearing and lip-read, I mean lip-reading folks IN GENERAL.

also, as a person who's stolen shit, audio cues can be....I mean, it's not like they're NECESSARY to pickpocketing people, but they're definitely a thing that lacking completely might require some sort of compensation for, I think. definitely she'd need to learn what kinds of things, if disturbed even slightly, are going to make a noise that might alert the person to 'hey someone is like, trying to grab something from you', and she might just have to straight-up avoid anyone wearing anything, say, metallic that might clink, because....it's one thing if you can HEAR that you've accidentally jostled the metal thing even slightly and need to give up on this now, and it's another if you can't hear that and just have to guess based on like, how close you are to the thing, if that makes sense? like, people definitely wear metallic clinky accessories on their belts and shit sometimes, that'd be an issue I can think of right off.

also, audio cues are often how people try and warn someone farther away of like, 'incoming disaster', which....your character is gonna need to be pretty visually observant, I think. which I mean, is absolutely a skill someone might pick up over time if they can't hear at all--but my hearing is pretty crap most of the time, and often unreliable, and I've straight-up missed people shouting from across the street that something's about to happen I should watch out for, and my visual observation is....still not the best.

 

Here's a short review paper that might help with the genetics part.

Tldr: Deafness can be genetic, although many of the mutations cause syndromic deafness (deafness as part of a suite of recognizable symptoms) rather than it by itself, unaccompanied by other traits. (Just as an aside - if they're identical twins, they should share basically all genetic traits, so one twin being deaf because of mutation and the other not is very, very improbable. The other point I wanted to make is that "genetic disorders" don't necessarily travel in groups; it absolutely depends on the disorder, where it is in the genome (eg, what it's linked to), how it manifests, etc., so just because one twin/sibling has a genetic disorder does not necessarily mean that another has a higher chance of having an unrelated disorder.)

I am a biologist :) (although specifically a microbial ecologist, so I'm by no means an expert in human stuff, but I do teach genetics....)

 

hello hello, i'm working on a fanfic and i have some questions about languages for anyone who speaks multiple languages fluently.

if you're remembering an event that happened in one language, do you remember it in that language, or in the language that you're most comfortable in? like, say that you're a native german speaker who's also fluent in french. if you're remembering a conversation that you had with someone where you were both speaking french, and you're trying to remember what was said, is that memory in french or in german?

(i hope that makes sense--i think that it can be hard to express what you mean when you're talking about memory and language)