What are motifs that crop up in your writing?

What are motifs that crop up in your writing?

One for me is the sound of water. Waves crashing, fuzzy rain, a long and solemn shower, y'know, those kinds of things. Something about it is just so evocative to me.

>Formless, yet capable of any form.

Water is patrician.

Is your setting someplace wet?

I end up with a lot of religious motifs in mine, due to being raised in a strict Catholic household. I enjoy writing characters who challenge authority too.

And beyond that, water is just such a central experience in everyone's lives. We all know what water sounds like (assuming we aren't deaf) by intuition. It's eminently understandable.

I grew up on the West Coast so my default setting is beachside town. The beach is just such a lovely place...

I'm going to be going to school in Mississippi, so of course I had to read some Faulkner. Now, ambient noise above total silence have become the main source of sound in my writing. I especially love crickets, cicadas, and (if a modern theme) the buzz of street lamps on a twisting suburban road.

I talk about night and the sky a lot for some reason.

>loss
>solitude
>the death of someone who doesn't deserve to die
>flowers
>an evil/morally ambiguous character attempting to be good and failing
>birds

I have a dumb moon fetish

Everyone deserves to die

>A dumb moon crept across the night sky, in Cheshire Cat smile with a dopey inflection. I hated that moon, ignorant of the world below, ignorant of its own stupidity. If I had a rocket, I would fill it full of textbooks and crash that rocket on its surface.

the moon is cool tho

if you stretch the meaning of a word into something so broad that it applies to everyone you're only destroying the word and saying nothing of the subject described.

qt young adolescent girls

Guns. And not guns as in 'shooty fight scenes', but guns as a representation of a person's freedom being curtailed. The minute a person picks up a gun they're in thrall to the idea of using it, and most of the time they're doing so in the name of some nebulous 'duty' - so I tend to write about people who see their firearms as both liberation and enslavement. Guns are awesome but also awful, and I try to almost give them characters of their own.

Orion. It actually looks like a man with a bow. All the other constellations just look like lines.

wanderers, nakedness, sleep

Im actually drafting a fantasy novel where the waters of the world are magically enchanted purely by nature. The larger the bodies of water, the stranger the phenomenon can take place. So it will be a wanderlust novel with the protagonist being a researcher of all natural wonders of this waterworld, going through ocean waterfalls, sky rivers, needle rain, fountain of youths, whirlpool ponds. Can you give me some advice of water imagery or other works that you take reference from?

Horizons, hills, cumulus clouds in otherwise empty skies. It's honestly a problem how I just default to sky descriptions, but the sky really does set the mood of a place.

The process of dying.

train journeys, journeys in general, anthropomorphic animals, hell/kingdom of the dead, ghosts...

too bad I'm so self absorbed I wanted to think about these. I don't think that any good writer would care enough too look back at the paltry crap they've done and see the common themes, but here we are. I'm sorry

pace

let me read some, I like how that sounds

I like water too OP. I think we intuitively understand water as the source of all life, I'm pretty sure that's what Jungian analysis says anyway. Hey, it's not all bullshit.

I like to use urban street-lights as well - there's something unusually poetic about the warm orange glow you get from those artificial lights.

I think I've written a cringey amount of scenes where characters reach some epiphany in a dark tunnel/cave/in the wilderness that I never properly explain. Trying to create a sense of mysticism, that revelations are possible but can't be written of directly. The Tao that can be spoken is not eternal or whatever.

I also try to throw in religious symbolism but making it really subtle, I wasn't Catholic as a child but grew up surrounded by the faith and only really embraced it later.

Reflections, always reflections. In water, in mirrors, in gold and silver, in eyes. There's something about the real not being observable at once with yourself in it. Not being part of the real unless it's in the eye of someone else or something else.

Sound always take the form of vibrations for me, visible tangible vibrations.

I seem to have the thing for pillars and broken columns as well.

Isn't Mississippi the poorest, most backwoods state that even puts rural Alabama to shame?

You don't think good writers are aware of the things they write?

Suicide. Intentionally overwritten dialogue. The wind. Filling in a trench with a mountain. Fear of opening up. Poor attempts at humor and low brow trying to save myself from crawling too far up my own ass.

Looking into the past as to which decision to make for the future, women, failures

travel plays a huge part of the writing too, for last 2 years it's all I've been doing.

I use street lights a lot as well, user. Goddamned Baudelaire. I also seem to write a lot about wet autumn leaves on fresh black asphalt.

pic related t b h

christ you're dull

mostly yes

appalachia feels like a different country

Thanks.

It's not a motif, but I always seem to break nouns into their own (grammatically incorrect) sentences for extra emphasis. A distracting, improper sentence. I'll leave it just jutting out from a perfectly readable passage.

Dust clouds, Fog, Red sky.

The sound of first snow on dry, crackled leaves.

long travels
opiates
co-dependence
hermits
broken phones
may-december fuckbuddies
androgyny

If that weren't the case, there'd be no editors.

Unless you're criticizing all authors, but I'm sure you don't want to look silly.

Being aware of is not the same as paying perfect 100% attention all the time and never making an error or writing something dull/redundant.

>I like to jerk off while looking at myself in the mirror: The Thread

Gross.