Hello, Writeblr!

Random Question Time! Do you make art of any sort (mood or aesthetic boards, playlists, face claims with minor quick changes) for your characters?

Thank you for the question!

I often make aesthetics and playlists and sometimes edits with face claims.

I also like to play scenes and background stories out in my head while playing a piano piece with the right mood.

OKAY LISTEN UP YOU BEAUTIFUL OC-DEVELOPING FIENDS

After my long and lengthy years of developing characters (not really) I have a nugget of wisdom for y’all.

Do this:

Look. You don’t need any artistic talent. Hell, this could be a vaguely brain-shaped oval with some words in it.

But the point of this is that you draw your character’s brains and fill it with the things they think of most, the things that matter to them most, the things that are so essential to them that they are nothing without it.

I find that doing this helps so much when shaping a character’s voice, and it visually maps out their personality in a way that character sheets can’t.

For example, my character Isha is logical and she compartmentalizes things, so I drew a more angular design, while Aster’s mind more resembles her anxiety and wandering thoughts.

Yeah that’s all.

Knock yourself out friends.

writing characters with dyslexia

by me !! a dyslexic

hopefully this might be a useful little guide so you can avoid the misconceptions and any stereotypes - I saw someone do this with adhd and I thought a dyslexia one might be interesting

reading

this differs from person to person but for me I have to read over things four or five times before they actually go into my head, sometimes this gives people headaches or makes them nauseous. letters often “jump” or sentences merge into one long word; people often have trouble with light sensitivity and pages can seem too bright

writing

some people have vary varied handwriting and can go from neat to messy to big to small within minutes, spelling is often phonetic but PLEase doNt Talk AbOUt thIS For AgEs it’s only a very small part of being dyslexic

speaking

dyslexic people often speak faster than their brains create sentences so can trip over words or stutter or mix up words (par kark instead of car park), this can be embarrassing so could make for a good scene ?! people also get a lot of tip of the tongue experiences where they can’t find the right word (I once couldnt remember the word ‘embarrassed’ and I called it ‘when you go red and nervous’) so that makes for more interesting speech patterns in your characters

memory

oh my lord this is so overlooked but lots of dyslexic people have really bad short term memories - things like listening to instructions and forgetting them immediately, or forgetting that they were saying mid sentence

sense of direction

not so common but people often lose their sense of direction and can struggle telling left from right - I don’t know too much about this one though so I’m not going to go into it too deeply !!

hearing

filtering out background noise can be super difficult so people can seem like they have poor hearing but really everything can just seem very loud - this can be distracting and frustrating too and it bugs my friends so much because I make them repeat everything whoops

I’m sure there’s more things but this is just a short list, I’ll add anything if I think of it - feel free to add anything yourselves !!

The 8 Laws of Foreshadowing

the slaughter of finches. a wip introduction.

category. new adult.

genre. apocalyptic, low fantasy.

point of view. multiple, third person omniscient.

themes. apocalypse, man v. human, man v. society, man v. nature, supernatural creatures, mystery, found family, war, humanity.

status. outlining, first draft.

type. standalone.

links. old tag. new tag. inspiration tag. powerpoint. pinterest board.

synopsis & characters.

Lees verder

WIP: The Hunters

Genre: Futuristic Sci-fi

Themes: Good vs Evil, Right vs. Wrong, Abuse of power, Corrupt government, Guilt, Revenge

Synopsis: At the edge of the universe all hell is about to break loose. Victor Romanov, the man responsible for The Attacks, has escaped maximum security prison and is out for revenge. Captain William Marlow and his team of bounty hunters plan to bring him in and collect their biggest award yet. However, Marlow’s past catches up to him in the form of Eve, a defective AI, and he soon begins to question who the real villain is. Maybe Victor Romanov should get his revenge.

Excerpt: Before him kneeled a young woman. Her big blue wondrous eyes were skyward. It annoyed him that she wasn’t focused on the gun in his hand that was pointed at her face. It angered him that he was annoyed. But above all else this was not the face his gun should be pointed at. But he had orders. And the law came before everything else. Order before everything. And yet this felt… wrong. Sweat rolled down his temple. Don’t pull the trigger. He screamed inside himself. His body didn’t listen. He squeezed the trigger. Before the body could hit the floor Marlow woke up.

Eve was sitting on his bed looking down on him with those big blue eyes. “What is this noise?” she asked over the music which was still playing. Marlow sighed “They call it music if you can believe.” He rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “Oh, I don’t like it.” She stated matter of factly. “Music off” he commanded and the ship obeyed. Now in silence, Marlow sat up and found his face mere inches away from Eve’s. This close he could smell her. She smelled warm with an underlying sweetness. She lean forward, her sweetness was a little overwhelming and brought unease to his stomach. That’s when it dawned on him that he was only wearing boxer shorts and nothing else. He pulled the covers closer and leaned away from her. Her eyes searched his face. He wondered what she was looking for. He wondered if she would find it. He tried to remember what her kind were capable of. All of the destruction he witnessed. But being face to face with her… well he was having a hard time wrapping his mind around the idea of her being capable of any kind of carnage. But that’s the point isn’t it? Look non threatening then rip their throat out. He resisted the urge to cover his throat. “You talk in your sleep.” was all she said. He realized that he was holding his breath. “Did I say anything interesting?”

“You said no a lot. No to what?”

He swallowed hard. How the hell was he supposed to deal with this. His eyes landed on the mark on her face. This time he didn’t hesitate. He brought his hand up and cupped her cheek running his thumb over the black cross. To his surprise she leaned into his touch. “Do you remember Aquaria?” he asked. She answered with barely a whisper. “Yes.” Just then the door hissed open and Marlow jerked his hand away. Doc stepped in. “We’re … uh almost there.” He said as his eyes bounced back and forth between Marlow and Eve. Doc, now blushing, turned and left. Marlow scooted around Eve and got out of bed. “Where are we going” Marlow pulled on his black pants and buckled his belt. “Hiemal” he answered as he strapped on his thigh holster. “It’s a hellhole filled with bad people.” He pulled on an old grey Henley. Then he grabbed his boots and sat down next to Eve. He began lacing up his boots. “If we go there does that make us bad people?”

“Depends on who you ask”

“Well I don’t think you’re bad.”

Marlow straightened up and chuckled. “Thank you” He noticed she wasn’t wearing her shoes and saw an opportunity to get rid of her. “Now go put on your shoes and meet up in the control room.” She hopped off the bed and left the room. The tension Marlow didn’t realize he was holding left him. He run his hand through his buzzcut. What the hell just happened? Marlow had seen a lot and been through a lot but this was taking the cake as the weirdest. He grabbed his gun from underneath his pillow, checked that it was loaded, and holstered it. He pulled on his coat and left his room.

Wow, interesting idea!

💡

Hey yourwriters, thanks for the light bulb 😁

One of the ideas I still have to write is about a group of children that are taken away from their parents under the pretense they are in need of special teachers who end up on a different planet because the government knows the world is dying and theses kids DNA tells they will develop powers outside earth and the politicians thought the best way to guarantee survival of mankind is to send these kids away so they will start a new society with the help of adults who were picked for this.

Bad thing is the kids and their caretakers strand on the other planet and are forced to survive there and deal with the native inhabitants.

Never mow the same grass twice — How to improve faster as a writer

One of the most important writing lessons I ever learned came, surprisingly, from my college trumpet instructor.

“Michael,” he’d say with a heavy sigh, pulling off his glasses and rubbing the lenses with the bottom of his shirt. “You know I hate to mow the same grass twice.”

It was a phrase he used a lot, in band and private lessons, whenever someone made a mistake he’d already told them to correct. Because in his mind, once he’d identified a mistake in your performance, you needed to do everything you could to keep it from happening again, for two reasons.

First, because as he said, he doesn’t like to mow the same grass twice. And second (and more importantly), because if you let yourself repeat a mistake, that mistake will start to become a habit.

A bad habit.

And the more you let yourself repeat that habit, the more deeply ingrained it becomes, making it increasingly difficult to fix and slowing your progress as a musician (or artist, or writer). So his suggestion was this: Identify what needs to change, and firmly commit to fixing it now.

Confession Time

So. I was a very average trumpet player. My instructor and I had a great rapport, but he had to tell me to mow the same grass twice, three times, and more often than he ever would have liked, because I just wasn’t focused or passionate enough about trumpet to fully commit to his advice.

But I was focused and passionate enough about fiction to commit to his advice when it came to writing. So I applied his mindset in my creative writing workshops, particularly when I started my MFA.

And I tell you what, everybody. It worked wonders — helping me improve enough in that first year alone to win our MFA program’s top fiction prize and to earn a teaching assistantship.

3 Steps to Quickly Improve Your Writing

With my trumpet instructor’s advice in mind, I put a 3-step process on loop throughout my time in the MFA:

Share a short story with your fellow writers. (A workshop is great, but online writing friends work too.)

Sift through everyone’s feedback to find one high-priority “bad habit” in your writing that they seem to be honing in on.

When you sit down to write your next story, commit to breaking that habit at any cost, even if it means making other mistakes because of it. (New mistakes are better than old mistakes.)

This is How it Went for Me

The first short story I shared in my MFA workshop had a clear issue: the narrator was passive and underdeveloped. One of my classmates called him a “window character,” someone through whom we could observe the other, more interesting characters who actually drove the plot. The rest of the workshop agreed, and looking back at some of my past stories, I realized that passive narrators had become a deeply ingrained habit of mine.

So the next time I wrote a story, I strictly committed myself to writing a more active narrator.

The Result?

A moderately active narrator. Not perfect, but better than I’d done in a long time. It was progress — me chipping away at the bad habit.

The next story I wrote showed much more progress. It had a highly active narrator, and so did the story after that. And that’s when a new, better habit formed: writing active narrators without even thinking about it. And that let me shift my focus to improve upon something else (such as making all my narrator’s actions stem from their core emotional struggle). And something new again after that (using more figurative language, loosening up my writing voice, etc.).

And that’s how you can improve, too. The goal, again, is to use peer feedback to identify habits in your writing you don’t like, and then to mentally commit to replacing them with habits you want, one by one.

It’s a slightly different way to approach feedback. We tend to primarily use feedback as a way to help us improve an individual story — but it’s also a fantastic opportunity to improve your future first drafts.

You’ll be surprised how quickly your writing improves when you do this.

The key, though, is to commit to tackling just one major habit at a time. Why? Because writing is hard, friends, and fiction is a complex tapestry of various techniques, all coming together at once. That means your attention is always inevitably split while writing, so if you try to fix multiple habits at once, you’ll likely spread your attention too thin to succeed.

So identify a single change you want to see in you writing. Make it happen the next time you write a story, no matter what. Then, before you sit down again to write the next story, find something new you want to change or improve.

You’ll love what happens to your writing when you commit to never mowing the same grass twice.

And when you do, far away, in a brightly-lit college band room in Minnesota, my old instructor will raise a hand to conduct a trumpet ensemble, pause — and smile.

— — —

For writing advice and tips on crafting theme, meaning, and character-driven plots, check out the rest of my blog.

And if you’re feeling discouraged, remember this: Every story has something wonderful inside it, including your own.

blooming blossom: lockdown

@flashfictionfridayofficial

the world is silenced by a virus it is scarily quiet in my town even the station is calm because of the lockdown on the road I see only an empty bus   my whole world is turned upside down captured between these walls I feel lifeless how do you stay all right in such a crisis? so alone and so scared of this new crown   but through my window I see the blossoms of my cherry tree even now not everything is wrong I take a picture to remember nature is still growing normally   I send it to my sister, who works in a hospital all day long I send it to my grandma, who I now cannot visit safely I send it to you, I hope you stay safe and fine and strong

Hey! Do you have any tips for people who've reached a block in their writing? I've been trying to plan out a plot for my book, but I've reached a point where I can't think of anything else

What to Do If You Get Stuck While Outlining Your Plot

Hi! Thanks for writing. Getting blocked can happen at all stages: Before writing, during writing, during outlining, in the idea stage, etc. But since you specifically said you’re reaching a block in your plot planning, I’ll address that :)

#1 Make sure your character’s motivation & conflict are “big” enough

If your character doesn’t have a book-length problem, you can get stuck trying to fill in empty space in the plot. In order to find more events to flesh out your story, you may need to make adjustments. Is their desire strong enough to fuel a book? Is the conflict big enough? Is their problem difficult to solve? If not, how can you make their problem harder? Or take longer to resolve?

You might need a combination of a fiercer desire, a bigger problem, more problems, more obstacles, and/ or a more stubborn antagonist to reveal potential scenes and events. For help with your character’s motivation and conflict, check out the PDF “Creating Character Arcs” in my Free Resource Library.

#2 Plot your story backwards

This can help you make sure you have a strong enough ending and open up new possibilities you might not have noticed while plotting forward. I have a post about it here.

#3 Use the but/therefore method

The but/therefore method is a great way to fill holes. It tests the cause-effect connections between your plot and character and almost always reveals gaps that need to be addressed with new or stronger scenes. Use this template for each scene or chapter:

Main character wants ______, but _______, therefore ______.

What comes after “wants” is the motivation for that chapter or scene. After “but” goes the conflict or obstacle. After “therefore” is the result or action the character takes, which leads into the next goal, and so on, and so on.

Chapter-by-chapter it might look something like this:

Chapter 1: Julian wants to ask Matt to the dance, but he’s scared of being rejected, therefore he slips a cryptic note into Matt’s locker.

Chapter 2: Matt doesn’t see the note. Now Julian wants to get into his locker and retrieve it, but the principal sees him trying to jimmy open the lock, therefore Julian is given detention for a week.

You can also do this scene-by-scene. My suggestion would be to start with the chapter outline, see what it reveals, then move into the scenes if you still feel stuck.

#4 Ask questions

Classic un-sticking questions start with “what if” or “why”? Asking questions can unlock new story directions you might not have noticed were there before.

What if the main character’s ex-boyfriend came back to town? What if they didn’t achieve that small goal back in chapter 4? What if they were hiding something? etc.

Why are they avoiding their sister? Why is it so difficult for them to apologize? Why haven’t they quit their job if they hate it so much? etc.

#5 Consider creating a subplot (or two or three)

A book-length story usually needs a few side stories to flesh out the main one. Look for areas of your story that could be expanded, characters that might take the story down a related tangent, and conflicts that seem small but could be bigger with some digging.

#6 Take a break

Sometimes, you just need to give it a rest. Walk away from your outline for at least a week. When you come back, you may see things you didn’t see before and be able to breathe new life into it. In the meantime, let your mind wander. It’s amazing what creative solutions writers can come up with when they aren’t “trying.”

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The Literary Architect is a writing advice blog run by me, Bucket Siler. For more writing help, check out my Free Resource Library, peruse my post guide, or hire me to edit your novel or short story. xoxo