Thomas Wolfe once said "You can't go home again."

    Well, that's great for old Tom but he wasn't a chick who made a pact with her friends when she was twelve to get together whenever any one of them needed each other. So, here I am driving back to my childhood home in Indiana, a place I can tell you I never wanted to see again.

    I guess a promise is a promise.

    DEMI MOORE as Samantha Albertson
    — Now and Then (1995) dir. Lesli Linka Glatter

    with great pain comes the great inability to form a coherent sentence

    [ID: a 4-page comic in illuminated manuscript style of a person standing outside. /1: They look to the distance and say: "What is that dolorous cloud: that dreadful fright I see now on the dark horizon?" /2: They turn, upset, and say: "Alas! It is the brain fog approaching!" A purple cloud enters the panel. /3: They hold up their hands against the approaching cloud, saying: "A curse upon that fog that steals my eloquence. I...hate...it" /4: The cloud surrounds them and they say: "cloud"..."bad" /ID]

    a thing i think is good to keep in mind, and this does not invalidate or diminish concerns about the state of art under capitalism or storytelling in mass media, is that, if you go out and snuffle around in the places in the world where the art that is further from your immediate line of sight dwells you will find enough interesting art to eat well in your mind for your entire life

    werewolfetone

    You know I do think that a lot of people need to get more comfortable reading nonfiction to understand Things & Ideas. I see a lot of people especially online expecting to be educated on current issues or on political ideologies or what have you ~through fiction~ and while that often works for like. the gist of the idea. you do kind of need to read nonfiction to understand most things past their most simplistic form

    werewolfetone

    For instance a work of fiction can tell you "homophobia is bad" but do you want to understand why homophobia is bad? why it exists? how it manifests? what a microagression is? how to combat it? that's the territory of nonfiction, you shouldn't expect fiction to tell you that. and furthermore refusing to engage with nonfiction and instead assuming fiction will tell you need to know on an issue is going to result in a warped perception of the issue that's going to be completely unproductive for everyone involved

    fixyourwritinghabits

    And not only do you need to do your research, you need to do your research thoroughly. A very real, very important example of this is Naomi Wolf's misunderstanding of a legal term in a book about the persecution of homosexuality in Victorian Britain. Because she had only researched to confirm her own thesis, she identified several people as being executed for being gay, when that's not what happened. Wolf's revised book still received harsh criticism for conflating persecution for consensual gay relationships with people convicted for sexual assault.

    Wolf encountered this problem because she formed a conclusion and researched to find it, a problem she's had her whole career. But even while researching for fictional projects, it's essential you keep looking into it, especially if you encounter evidence of something counter to what you thought. Don't just read one book - as this case study should show, a popular author can lead you astray - but as many sources as you can. You will end up with a stronger story.

    I felt like this needed to go beyond the human mother. This needed to go back to ideas of the creator and that God is not just male, but of the creator being female and male. So this is the feminine story coming down to earth, leaving this soul space, and saying goodbye to Mother Creator as I go to Mother Earth.

    | Tori Amos on her song "Mother" for Rolling Stone, 2009.