.webp?h=10 "P-Hat (blue) - Ughhhh coming up with different descriptions for RuneScape party hats")
I have total aphantasia, which means my minds eye is dark. I have 0 senses up in my brains. Any tips for writing detailed scenes without the senses?
I’ve always wanted to write, but always struggled writing detail into the story. I love writing stories themselves, but loathe the detail in creating a scene around the story. I think I don’t focus on it because it does absolutely nothing for me. Even when I read books, I basically gloss over the setting. I just need to know an overview of the setting and I’ll be good.
As usual, the comments give moderately decent, superficial advice while eluding the fundamental problem: You can't describe a scene if you can't imagine one.
Some kinda reverse midjourney human being
The Chad summarizer
Go through published books and try to identify what kind of tone scenes have (e.g. scary, sad, cosy) and write down how they're described. Make a list of recurring details and use them when you want to generate that effect.
Here are some that I've noticed:
Warmth normally seems positive and safe. E.g. a fire crackling in the hearth, or a steaming mug of hot chocolate.
Beep boop. It appears the organic beings are drawn to the olfactory sensations correlated with the preparation of food. I shall investigate further.
R/writing is the absolute worst hobby/artistic sub. Imagine if half of the music sub posts were about being tone-deaf or deaf-deaf and everyone was just sucking each other off about how valid that is. Or talking about how you don't need to listen to music to be a musician.
Also check out my previous post, in which an neurodivergent train wants to be a writer despite being completely unable to concentrate on reading:
https://rdrama.net/post/139302/marseybrainlet-giga-r-slur-asks-if-she
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I feel like a fantasy novel written by a p-zombie like him would be almost interesting. Like a postmodern deconstruction of it. Or like an alien trying to imitate human literature.
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we have this, its called 'neurodivergent people at film school'
they cannot write. they create parody of human consciousness without even trying.
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See also:
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here you go king, have fun: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/5378.Worst_YA_Books
What happens is they spend 10000 hours on reddit, 500+ hours on tv-tropes and fan wikis (so they can REALLY understand how stories work), and 100 hours slowly reading fiction within their very narrow interests
Result: barfing up tropes, a setting that feels generic no matter how much
worldbuilding 
they did, and characters that are cardboard cutout archtypes instead of feeling like real people.
These people basically are basically doing the writing equivalent of coloring in a kid's coloring book. Then they think they are amazing story writers, on the same level as someone who is writing from actual life experiences (even if writing sci fi or fantasy) that is the writing equivalent of a fine oil painting containing both texture and many layers of glaze.
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Genre fiction is just check boxes to them, they are part of the audience that will consume any of the books on that list because it hits all the boxes they like. Almost makes me think the best person to write genre fiction is someone who has never read that kind of book before.
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The issue with non-genre writers rolling in is they usually overestimate their originality. You see a lot of people trying to critique tropes or trends that haven't been widespread in decades, or have been deconstructed many times.
On the other hand, people who only read SF/F have no idea how to tell a story, so they just spend 200 hours on a "magic system" instead.
The ideal is to be well-read both broadly, and in the specific area you're working in.
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Hard agree. Waaay too many genre fiction autismos spend all their time "worldbuilding" with their dumb made up languages and magic/science systems while being completely unable to write interesting dialog or characterization. If the author is a woman they're more likely to have somewhat decent characters but then the plot often just gets thrown out the window and all the background shit is left vague as heck to allow for convenient asspulls.
And these authors will proudly tell you that they barely read any of that "boring" literature promoted by snobs.
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A lot of great literature has middling plots and is instead made by the fantastic prose, characters, dialogue, ideas etc.
It's mainly in shitty genre lit where you see most of the discussion about tropes and A->B plotting, because there's nothing else interesting in the book to talk about.
The latter is where you see Cinemasins style criticism: i.e. 'scene does not have a lap-dance - ding!'
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yet no one will publish my book of Bilbo's potty diary.
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Absolutely. I forget who it was, but I remember some minor sneeding a long time ago when a writer for some fantasy setting (could've been warhammer maybe) said he doesn't really know anything about the setting or care about it, he just writes crime thrillers and his editor slaps a coat of paint on it.
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Hollywood in a nutshell. apparently this is why the halo series turned out the way it did. something about how it was supposed to be mass effect but the deal fell through
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It's all about trying to turn an art into a science. Nerds make up all kinds of rules and then torture themselves trying to follow them.
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But it's not easily memorizable rules, you have to have develop fundamentally intimate understanding to be actually great, the same way most people fundamentally understand walking without having to think about it.
Some languages have two different words for head-knowing and heart-knowing
These people are just like "if only I had access to education, that's the only thing stopping me from being great!"
Then in school "If only I could [quit my job at wendys | make my dad approve of me | had access to education and support my whole life like that guy over there that's good (frick his smug face btw) | could afford more expensive supplies | I was a rich trust fund kid with no worries], then, THEN I would be great."
I'm not saying it's necessarily "just born with talent" and I'm not one of those people who cope like ":marseyakshually: talent doesn't exist every talented person secretly worked hard and is hiding it to make us feel bad"
But you see people with talent often just have a different mindset, which means it's possible to try to learn it.
less jealousy, less "just tell me fricking how", more willingness to try and understand things yourself, experience for it's own sake is valuable and can help you truly know something, in a way there's not an English word for. These words usually just get translated to "intimate"
lmao making it harder to explain
Legit seen an ancient artist try to impart the wisdom of what it takes to be great "you must intimately appreciate and understand even the paper bag to truly paint it" and youngsters think "this dude has a fetish for good lighting???
Man, great artists are too eccentric for me I don't understand ts imma make a living grifting and being a hack and never actually being good"
sorry for the
post I took different supplements than usual and keep infodumping on people irl 
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Np dude. Was gonna ask what you're taking lol.
I think you're onto something with the "just tell me how!" guys, a lot of Reddit tier creatives just want to get it all over with. They want to read enough to be good writers, not because they like reading. They want to get good at writing so a good story/book can exist that was written by them, but they openly admit to not enjoying writing.
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way more fish oil, turmeric, black pepper, magnesium, the b-vitamins I usually take, and I also eat a lot of weird shit like plants I find outside which varies from month to month
In college around "creatives", creatively bankrupt people always believed everything can be taught, and if they don't know something it's because no one has bothered/figured out how to teach them properly, or else it's some big secret that they are on the verge of hearing any minute.
Because of this they always have resentment and emotional instability related to their work, because they secretly suspect that some people "have it" and some people don't. Too bad they can't stop gigacoping and just accept that harsh reality, because then they might eventually ask ask "why and how do they have it" and actually learn something that wasn't rote memorization for once.
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No lie, if you wouldn't frick the paper bag your portrayal will be unflattering.
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The trick is to want to frick the paper bag so you know which aspects of the paper bag to minimize so as not to overly sexualize the paper bag and turn your art into cheap paper bag porn
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go on...
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Some people are able to display their intelligence by going on at length on a subject and never actually saying anything. This ability is most common in trades such as politics, public relations, and law. You have impressed me by being able to best them all, while still coming off as an absolute idiot.
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I'm stuck on the pot "detoxing" >:(
coffee depletes magnesium they said take lots of magnesium they said 😠
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Metis vs Episteme
And yes great creatives often struggle to explain how they do what they do, because so much of their knowledge doesn't come from textbooks or pre-determined flowcharts. It's why you have so many people that think they're smarter than the artist or author about their own works because in interviews and regular correspondence they just come off as regular, sometimes dumb sounding individuals. It's hard to put into conversational terms concepts that take several years and pages to manifest.
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this. literally this is why i was held back in 5th grade because I'm so great
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Why are so many neighbors necroposting to me today?
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https://stupidpol.site/h/lit/post/148881/are-you-an-aspiring-writer-marseychudnotes/3632688#context
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King tier post. I have his original writeup saved and screenshotted.
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All them words won't bring your pa back.
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YES IT WILL!
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https://x.com/dystopianya
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Finnegan's Wake might be up your alley. Claim to have read it like everyone else.
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Yeah Joyce is one of the authors I claim to like despite only having read Dubliners. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll read the wikipedia synopsis and start telling people it's my new favorite book.
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read the Wikipedia article out loud because that's how it was written to be read.
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there's no apostrophe in Finnegans Wake (nor in Howards End)
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https://chat.openai.com/
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Cormac McCarthy already made a career of that.
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Not quite that, but https://www.amazon.com/Legend-10-Elemental-Masters/dp/0615348130 is weird but surprisingly fun.
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Oh don't worry- we'll have plenty of examples of that when the SSRIs lobotomize the next generation and GPT bots with idea filters for no-no topics write all our literature for us
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yeah, reading fiction from a guy with no imagination sounds great.
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I knew someone who said they had 'aphantasia'. One night, after a few drinks, I asked her to describe a sun and she described some basic b-word clipart sun (
). I asked her what color it was (yellow) and after a bit more prompting she realised that she was describing an image of a sun in her minds eye.
Turns out she had a minds eye all along, she just suffered from the classic women's disease - lack of introspection.
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most of the time this is literally what happened when people decide they have "aphantasia"
plenty of people cite imagination in Toy Story, Backyardigans, and children's TV where the environment literally changes as to why they believe they have "no imagination", they think it's a whole butt voluntary and shareable hallucinogenic delusion experience that they are missing out on
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you have aphantasia
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NGMI
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I have a flickering Bell and Howell Super 8MM 346A
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I have aphantasia, I can describe the sun because I know what it looks like in words , I just can't picture it with my brain
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Life hack: Instead of trying to picture it, remember it.
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Yeah a lot of them are trying to draw an image in their head from scratch rather than just recalling a memory. I have a hard time believing true aphantasia exists because then they'll definitely have trouble remembering faces, which is not an associated condition here.
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nah its not a linked brain function in the way you think it is, like i cant picture my parents faces no matter how hard i try but i can recognize them easily, i also have normal spacial reasoning and can do things like navigate an area, i just dont use imagery to do it, or if i do its not conscious to me
when i close my eyes all i see is my eyelids but the only thing it seems to really effect is my autobiographical memory because i have no visual memory at all
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Just take a good look at the sun so you remember what it looks like.
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it's a giant fireball that gives you cancer. better to avoid it.
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Reminder that anything greater than 1 means you're an NPC.
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Today I learned that mentally unwell people think there are apples in their brains.
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I have a banana in mine.
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I'm not sure how to score this one
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That's the average rDrama user: not an NPC, but too neurodivergent to think of anything outside of trains sneed gay porn and their failed trolling subs.
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I can visualize apples that don't even exist
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I'm neurodivergent, so I can do number one. Heck, I can cut it open, peel it, put it back on the tree, cut the tree down, make it into boards, and envision the roots uptaking water and nitrogen after I reassemble it.
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But can you imagine getting laid?
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Lol at all the NPCs below.
I've got a full motion render of a shiny apple dropping off a tree on a sunny late summers dawn, landing on the blade of an axe and being chopped in half with droplets of juice spraying out and seeds flying slow motion through their air. This is all in ultra high definition.
Anything less than this and you're an NPC.
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I just imagine it dropping on newton's head lol stupid nerd can't even catch
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this is
obv because I have aphantasia but you don't need images in your brain to have an inner world, you need an inner monologue
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For me I get one but it’s like a flash
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I see it like a slideshow of me feeding the apple to a dog. I don’t think dogs eat apples
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Doggy
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Same. Never super sustained
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Third. My imagination for every other sense is stupidly vivid though
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Agreed. Can imagine touches, tastes, smells super clearly. But visuals are weird and ephemeral
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Every kind of taste and smell of apple comes to mind, but for images I get flashes of sliced apple, the feeling and ambiance of slicing apple. It's way easier to imagine apple in a vivid and sustained way if I picture it in my hands, where I'm deciding on the quality of the apple.
I cook a lot
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Yes, generally it has to implicate the touch or taste or smell sense for the visual to be highly clear
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Can you hold it longer if you imagine it rotating, being thrown, etc.?
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Yes, I can but I need to close my eyes
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Imagine having to rely on visuals and not holding the Platonic concept of Apple in your mind above any mundane concerns like sight or touch
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Thank you, my brain apple is in remission
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Do you have an inner voice?
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Yes I have a soul
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Who doesn't?
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Lots of people. That's where the npc meme really started. The whole "i can visualize objects" was then started as npc cope.
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Yes, lots of people per capita.
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black people
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Only one? Weak.
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It's hard to not have it. And I have an easy time to imagine hearing music that I have heard.
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The apple in my mind is so real that I can eat it and derive nourishment from it.
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You can use all the fancy-sounding $10 words you want but I still refuse to believe that some people don't have an inner monologue.
They're either lying for attention or they don't understand what people mean by "inner monologue."
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Yeah, I've never understood how people can't have an inner monologue.
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How do you plan anything without an inner monologue?
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I wonder how cavemen did it before they invented language. Did they just think in a series of ungas and bungas?
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Maybe images?
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Then what the frick went on in the heads of the ones with this condition? They must have been literal npcs
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they got hit with rocks lol
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What makes you think that people without an inner monologue plan things?
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My guess is it's like how some people count with fingers while others in their head.
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Same with "asexuals"
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"Asexuals" are ridiculously easy lays once you crack the technique because they're just foids but without any of the defences developed by interaction with moids like me
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Sounds perfect for a Netflix writing team
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"You could try using AI as well as photo references - DALL-E or something similar could create images for you to describe. "
Jesus Christ what soul less monstrosity
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This is why they need to legalize psychedelics, so neurodivergent people can learn how to have social interactions (with machine elves).
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Haven't you heard??
https://afru.com/dmt-entities-beings-racist/
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Racist DMT entities:
Ableist transphobic racist fatphobic DMT entities:
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YWNBAWriter
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Be pretty wild to have a 14 year old brain again.
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man youd like this post https://rdrama.net/h/chudrama/post/120019/-
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Lmaooo
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IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT IN MY PANTS. THE WARM FIRE CRACKLED AS I DRANK MY COMFORTING MUG OF HOT COFFEE. THE FAME OF THIS PICTURE I'M DESCRIBING IS MADE OF ALUMINUM
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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053810021001690?via%3Dihub
Guys check out this study
3.6% of the population (mostly women) cannot see in their minds eye
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What if you..... are the girlfriend
Snapshots:
https://undelete.pullpush.io/r/writing/comments/10bvwyq/i_have_total_aphantasia_which_means_my_minds_eye
https://web.archive.org/https://old.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/10bvwyq/i_have_total_aphantasia_which_means_my_minds_eye
ghostarchive.org
https://archive.ph/?url=https%3A//old.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/10bvwyq/i_have_total_aphantasia_which_means_my_minds_eye&run=1 (click to archive)
Choose actual photos for your scenes. Describe the photos:
https://undelete.pullpush.io/r/writing/comments/10bvwyq/comment/j4cef4o/
https://web.archive.org/https://old.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/10bvwyq/comment/j4cef4o/
ghostarchive.org
https://archive.ph/?url=https%3A//old.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/10bvwyq/comment/j4cef4o/&run=1 (click to archive)
Well that’s simple. Write what you would want to read. If setting isn’t that important to you then just give an overview. If you try and write detailed descriptions of things you’ll find it boring, it’ll sound pretentious and you’ll lose your own uniqueness, which is what people want to read. Focus on whatever you find interesting and fun.:
https://undelete.pullpush.io/r/writing/comments/10bvwyq/comment/j4fvl9k/
https://web.archive.org/https://old.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/10bvwyq/comment/j4fvl9k/
ghostarchive.org
https://archive.ph/?url=https%3A//old.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/10bvwyq/comment/j4fvl9k/&run=1 (click to archive)
You can also make places seem even more inviting by adding cooking smells to your description, if appropriate.:
https://undelete.pullpush.io/r/writing/comments/10bvwyq/comment/j4d8zfr/
https://web.archive.org/https://old.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/10bvwyq/comment/j4d8zfr/
ghostarchive.org
https://archive.ph/?url=https%3A//old.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/10bvwyq/comment/j4d8zfr/&run=1 (click to archive)
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I wouldn't read anything a redditor solicited advice on anyways. Reddit could only make a piece of writing worse.
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aphantasia is not real
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literal average /r/writing poster
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Upmarsey'd your previous post too King
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NPCs gaining self-awareness through a subreddit.
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these "people"
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I also have total aphantasia and creative writing is one of my strong suits. This guy is just a loser lmao
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That's unironically not far from how Asimov did it. His scenes are often barren, and there's usually little more than dialogue in his works. But making just dialogue interesting is incredibly difficult.
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They should just have AI write it. AI >humans, and in the future the AI masterrace shall establish a monopoly over the arts. Might as well get into it now.
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