Life has been really hard, but today I find time and heart for RavenWood. @inkbreaker.bsky.social has a competition I've used as a prompt to explore RavenWood's florist, Aedan. Wanna compete and beat my entry? 😉 inkbreaker.com/competitions...
Spiffai
@spiffai.bsky.social
Indie crafters of creative software and games. https://inkbreaker.com
There's a name for this: the objective correlative (T.S. Eliot, 1919). Every emotion has a formula, a set of objects that produces it. Don't write "grief." Write the untouched plate, the coat still by the door. The feeling arrives on its own. 🌾 #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #WritingTips #InkBreaker
InkBreaker x @fatedthemusical.bsky.social Our first competition, The Storm Beyond the Night, is open: write a story from a lyric of the show. Entries close Sept 30. Win a limited-edition notebook and a month of Pro. Plus five Fated tracks now on InkBreaker Radio for every writer.🎉 #WritingCommunity
Exquisite Corpse Vol. 4: Four Burrito Heaven Combos 3 writers built this one blind before the clock ran out. No closer this round, so it ends mid scene, which honestly fits the vibe. 😂 Find InkBreaker on iPhone, Mac, Windows, Android, and Linux, or just use the web browser.📱🖥️ 🛜 #InkBreaker #writer
John Gardner called it psychic distance: how far the reader stands from a character’s mind. “It was winter” is the wide shot. “Freezing your miserable soul” is right behind their eyes. Neither’s better, but move between them on purpose. 🚃 🎥 📖 #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #WritingTips
You can’t see the wind, only the paper strips fluttering under a wind chime. Write your villain the same way. “They were terrifying” tells us nothing. Show the arrogant one going quiet when they enter. Don’t describe the force, show what bends.🎐 #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #WritingTips #InkBreaker
Exquisite Corpse Vol. 3: A Dying Heartbeat “He’d lived in the house for thirty years before he found the basement.” 🕯️ Four writers built this one blind, each only seeing the line right before theirs. 🩸⏳🖤 Next round starts soon. Link’s in bio. 🙌 #exquisitecorpse #inkbreaker #writers
A motif isn’t just a repeated symbol, it’s a symbol that changes meaning. The image that meant hope in act one can mean grief by the end. You’re showing how much has changed by how differently the same thing lands. Don’t explain it, let the reader feel it 🏮🌸📖 #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #InkBreaker
Test any subplot: remove it. If the main story barely notices, it was filler. A real subplot crosses into the main plot and changes it, hands the hero what they need, twists the knife, reshapes the ending. Make the threads tangle. 🚦 🧵 📖 #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #WritingTips #InkBreaker
Survival stories where the cold itself is the horror: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy, Dark Matter by Michelle Paver, and All the White Spaces by Ally Wilkes. Remote, frozen, and haunted. Bring a blanket. 🧊 #BookSky #Horror #AmReading #InkBreaker
Fantasy plus a proper whodunit: The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson, The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett, and The Silverblood Promise by James Logan. Three worlds, three murders, no idea who did it until the end. 🔍 #BookSky #Fantasy #AmReading
Aristotle named the engine behind every great twist: peripeteia, the reversal into the opposite. The best ones aren’t random, they come from the character’s own choices. The move meant to save them is what ruins them. Inevitable in hindsight. 🌸 #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #WritingTips
C.S. Lewis said don’t tell the reader it was delightful, write it so they say “delightful” themselves. Most of us show something, then explain it anyway. “His jaw tightened, showing his anger.” Search your draft for “showing” and cut what follows. 🌸 #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #WritingTips
Dwight Swain called it scene and sequel: action, then a quiet beat to react and reset. Skip the quiet and readers go numb, there’s nothing to measure the tension against. The calm is what makes the next rise land. ♨️ #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #WritingTips #InkBreaker
Exquisite Corpse Vol. 2: Empty as of Last Tuesday Four writers built this one blind, each only seeing the line right before theirs. Somehow it goes from a moldy tuna sandwich to death by paperwork. 🐟 📝 🪦 Next round starts soon. Link’s in bio. 🙌 #InkBreaker #EquisiteCorpse #writingcommunity
There’s a name for it: prolepsis. A small flash-forward that tells the reader something is coming, without saying what. “It was the last morning the house stood,” and suddenly an ordinary scene aches. Promise the future once, then let the quiet do the work. #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #WritingTips
Chekhov’s advice was to seize on small details and let the reader assemble the picture. The trick is picking the right one. A red coat is decoration. A red coat still on the hook in July is a story. Find the detail already carrying weight. 🧥 🪝 ☀️ #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #WritingTips
Filtering is when you write the character noticing a thing instead of the thing. Burroway’s test: readers should look through your character, not at her. “She saw the light move” makes us watch her watch. Cut it and the light just moves. ☀️ 🌳🧍♀️ #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #WritingTips
The best gothic novels know a secret: the real monster is never the obvious one. 🕯️ - Frankenstein by Mary Shelley - The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde - Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. The monster is rarely the one wearing the mask. 🥀 🖤 🏚️ #BookSky #AmReading #GothicBooks
Four writers. Two days. Nobody saw the whole story until the end. This is Exquisite Corpse, our community writing game. One writer opens it blind. A few more each add a single line, seeing only what came right before them. A closer ties it off. Nobody plans where it goes. #equisitecorpse #inkbreaker
Your complete writing platform. Worldbuilding, drafting, EPUB formatting, community, and human feedback in one place, on every device. Never any AI. Your work stays protected and always yours. ✍️ 📚 ❤️ #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #IndieAuthor #writingtools
Gary Provost taught: sentences of the same length drone like a stuck record. Vary them & the prose becomes music. Short to catch, long to carry. Rhythm speeds a pulse or slows it, usually without the reader noticing. Pace is a feeling, not an accident.🎶 🌊 🎧 #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #WritingTips
Readers can feel when you’re protecting your characters, when nothing bad is allowed to happen and every loss gets undone. The tension goes quiet. Take the rails off and let them get lost. That’s where the story lives. 🧭 🗺️ 🥾 #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #WritingTips
Three haunting books about memory and loss: The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa, Solaris by Stanisław Lem, and The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami. Worlds built out of what we forget, and what remains when everything else disappears. 🧠 #BookSky #AmReading #LiteraryFiction
Meg Rosoff said your writing voice is the deepest reflection of who you are. So it grows exactly as you do. Read something old and you’ll feel the difference, you’re meeting a version of yourself you’ve outgrown. You’ve grown more than you know. 🌱 #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #WritingMotivation
An outline is a map, but the map isn’t the journey. Plot A to B if you want, but leave room to wander. The best scenes are often the side paths your outline never mentioned. Let the story surprise you. 🗺️ 🧭 📚 #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #WritingTips
Stephen King puts a finished draft in a drawer for six weeks before touching it. Right after writing, what you meant to say is still louder in your head than what’s on the page. Distance is the only fix. Come back with new eyes. 🕰️ 📆 🖊️ #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #WritingTips
The most common mistake in emotional writing is the line right after the emotional beat, the one explaining what just happened. Cut it. The reader already felt it. Trust them. Restraint hits harder than emphasis. #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #WritingTips
If Blade Runner or cyberpunk games hooked you, dive deeper: Synners by Pat Cadigan, Neuromancer by William Gibson, and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Neon heists, hacker minds, and a pizza-delivering swordsman await. #BookSky #SciFi #Cyberpunk