This blog will be on hiatus until December.

With that said, I will not be abandoning this blog, and I will be back. I simply can’t keep up here until I have a bit of time off from work and school.

Déraciné Literary Magazine: Call for Submissions

Déraciné is seeking fiction, flash fiction, and poetry for the debut issue of our gothic literary magazine.

We are looking for dark, psychological literature that may (although is not limited to) express feelings of social, physical, or psychological displacement. Works may explore these themes using elements of horror and fantasy. We accept art as well. 

Full details and submission guidelines can be found on our website. 

Deadline: October 10th, 2017

Please send us a message if you have any questions.

Please check this out! It looks like a great idea and is an awesome opportunity to drive into the writing community and get your work read!

Inciting Events and Their Purpose in Storytelling

No, that’s not supposed to say “exciting events”, though an inciting event should create some form of excitement for the reader.

The Inciting Event is the event or decision that begins a story’s problem, but is not always directly connected to the plot. In some cases, it can also be seen as the event that promises the reader that there is a story to come, even if there needs to be a bit of setup.

For example, let’s say a character runs into an old family friend on their way home from work. They have a nice chat, but think this is odd because that person is supposed to be across the country. A bit later, the character gets kidnapped by that ‘friend’ because of an old secret. If the plot is about escaping the kidnapper and learning family secrets, then the inciting event would be first seeing the old friend and the questions that were raised.

Keep reading

Writing Advice by fight-for-your-write 

When you start a story, no matter how long, you should know what at least one character wants. 

A character objective can be as simple as “Sally wants Bill to grab her a cup of coffee” to “Robbie wants to tell Gerry of his true feelings but he cannot due to his crippling anxiety and societal pressure.” 

Keep in mind, a good story can come out of a simple objective. The key to that is emphasizing an emotion directly connected to the character’s objective. 

A drabble can have an objective as basic as “Terry needs to brush their teeth” and can still be something other than that simple situation. Explore your character’s emotions as they go through a task. There’s always something to explore if you dig deep enough. 

A moment of change is exactly what it sounds like: a moment in the story where things suddenly shift.

It doesn’t have to be a plot twist. The shift can be drastic or it can be simple. 

As you write, ask yourself this: What about this scenario is different to your character? What about the situation strikes them as something new? 

Granted, there can be interesting stories in showing a character doing the same thing they do every day, but the best stories out there all have a moment where the MC’s life twists itself on their head in one moment. 

Chihiro’s life changed the second she stepped into the Spirit World. Clark Kent’s life changed when his parents told him that he fell out of the sky in a rocket. Mikasa Ackerman’s life changed when she saw her parents die in front of her. 

What moment makes your character change? 

It’s easy to get caught up writing paragraphs of text to set the scene of the situation. 

While there’s nothing wrong with that, it can get a little redundant to write about a character’s viewpoint on a subject only to have them say it in dialogue a few paragraphs later. 

Essentially, there are two ways to explain information to the audience. 

For Example: 

VS. 

There are good things in both, but redundantly explaining things to your audience several times comes off as condescending. It’s not risky to assume that your audience can think and piece things together on their own. 

My advice will always be pick one. The choice is up to you.

Ernest Hemingway (via writingdotcoffee)

Poppy Z. Brite

Character Design: Part 1 (Introduction)

Today, I’d like to discuss character design. I guess the question on everyone’s lips is: what is the best way to design interesting and engaging characters? The answer is that there isn’t an objectively best way. Each writer has their own approach, and some approaches will work better for some people than for others. If an approach doesn’t suit you, the best course of action may be to keep trying different approaches until you find one that does suit you.

That said, in this series of posts, I will be going over one approach to character design that I’ve found useful.

The Five-Fold Approach

I’ve found that if often helps to consider five different areas when it comes to character design. The aim is to develop an interesting and engaging character by developing a solid grasp of the character across all five areas. These areas are:

Looks, Appearance, and Mannerisms

For many people, this will be the easiest area to flesh out. Essentially, it boils down to what your character looks like. This extends beyond their physical features to the clothes they wear and even the way they carry themselves. In other words, it covers all of the visual cues that other people would perceive when looking at your character.

Here is a brief list of things that you might want to consider:

Remember, you don’t have to go into too much detail when describing a character’s appearance. Let the reader build their own image of the character in their mind, albeit one shaped by the most important features of the character.

It’s also important to remember that visual cues can and will be interpreted in certain ways. A powerfully built character who gets right into the faces of other people will be perceived as pushy and aggressive. A character who slouches all the time and refuses to make eye contact may be perceived as timid or withdrawn.

Personality

Personality is about how someone thinks, feels, and behaves. Given the background that I come from, I’ve often conceptualised the personality of characters using the Big Five Personality Theory. The theory posits five major groups of personality traits:

As you can imagine, situating your character on all five of these dimensions should give you a fairly good idea of their personality and how they are likely to react in a given situation. There are, of course, other models of personality. Rather than argue about their validity and reliability here, I will simply say that you should use whichever model helps you structure your thoughts best since the objective is to create an interesting and engaging character, not to create a valid and reliable model of personality (let’s leave that to the psychologists).

Intelligence

This shouldn’t need too much of an explanation. Your character’s intelligence is all about the intellectual weaponry they can bring to bear against the challenges they face. However, intelligence can be a tricky thing. People can be very good at one thing and quite poor at another (e.g., someone might excel with numbers but be hopeless when it comes to writing essays).

Here are some of the dimensions along which characters might vary in terms of their intelligence:

Again, these are just some of the facets of intelligence, and you can’t simply declare that a character has excellent short-term memory. You need to put these abilities into context and give readers reasons to believe that character possess the abilities they do. For instance, if you want readers to believe that a character has an excellent memory in a world with magic in it, you could have the character memorise an entire book of spells in an extremely short period of time.

Other Abilities

This area is a grab bag of all the different abilities that your character might have. These can vary wildly depending on the genre and setting that you’re using.

Consider a spy thriller. Your main character might have the following abilities:

In contrast, if you’re writing a fantasy novel, your character might have abilities like:

One of the most important things to realise is that the abilities your character has will strongly influence the actions that they take. If someone is an expert swordsman, then they might try to fight their way out of a situation. However, if they’re an expert negotiator or someone who can control the minds of others, they might opt for a less bloody approach.

Always keep in mind what abilities your character has and how they might influence their actions. More importantly, try to develop a solid enough grasp of your character’s abilities that you can imagine how they would react or use their abilities in a diverse array of situations.

History

This is all about your character’s past – where they’ve come from and how it has influence them. Some of the things you should definitely establish, at least for yourself if not immediately for the readers (keeping them in suspense can be a good thing), are:

For many people, their family and friends will be the biggest influence on them. Does your character have brothers or sisters? If so, how do they feel about them? Did they have a best friend as a child? If they did, did that friendship last into adulthood? If not, why did it fail? If you want to create an in-depth, engaging character, you need to be able to answer questions like this.

Similarly, what sort of upbringing did your character have? Someone who was raised by both of their parents in a wealthy household will obviously see the world quite differently from someone who scratched out a living as an orphan on the back streets of a dingy city. Understanding your character’s upbringing will help you to understand how they see the world and what they may want in the future.

It is also critical to make a note of any pivotal events in your character’s life. For instance, if someone lived in a city that was burned to the ground during a brutal war, this is likely to influence their behaviour and views later on. Likewise, if someone found themselves stranded in the wilderness as a child and was forced to fend off wild beasts and survive alone for several months, that too will influence them in the future. In many ways, life is a series of milestones. You need to know what the biggest ones in your character’s life were.

The schooling, education, and other training that a character receives can also prove to be enormously influential. First of all, was your character schooled at all? In many scenarios (e.g., fantasy settings), it may not be common for everyone to be literate. Knowing how to read would thus be a powerful advantage. If they have been schooled, did they pursue further studies? In a fantasy setting, this might mean going to a magical academy. In a more realistic setting, it might mean a normal university, or, in the case of a soldier, a military academy. In all of these examples, the schooling, education, and training that a character has received will undoubtedly influence not only their views but also their abilities and even their intelligence and personality.

To know where someone is going, look to where they have been. To understand where your character is going, you have to understand where they have been and where they’ve come from.

Summary

Designing interesting and engaging characters isn’t always easy. It can take a lot of time and effort. However, you can often make your life easier by making use of a mental scaffold to help structure your thoughts and direct your energy. If you’re not sure what to do, then think of the five areas outlined above:

If you can honestly say that you’ve got a thorough understanding of your character in all five areas, then you’re well on your way to creating a great character.

If you want to read more about my thoughts on writing, you can find those here.

I also write original fiction, which you can find here.

Three Ways to Start a Story

For some writers, beginnings are the hardest part because they set the stage for the rest of the story. They need to be interesting, informative, and give the reader a taste of what they’re getting into, making them important and stressful to worry about. It never helps that there are near endless ways to start a story, and each method may not be a useful as another depending on what kind of work is being started.

So, here’s three (out of many) ways to start a new piece of work, with a small explanation of each method and a few pitfalls to avoid.

Keep reading

Writing Advice: Commas in a Quote

So I’ve noticed a lot of people write the commas in a quote wrong. Some people will put the comma outside the quotes, when in actuality the comma is supposed to go inside the quotes. Let me give you some examples.

“That is so cute,” She said enthusiastically as she watched her best friend play with the cutest puppy she’d ever seen.

“Wow, I can’t believe this is happening to me,” He sighed miserably.

See what I mean?

Note: This is true only for American English. In British english, the comma does go outside the quote. 

Character Tropes pt. 1: The Asshole with a Heart of Gold

Now, when looking through this particular series, please keep in mind that this is all how I see these tropes and my personal opinions on them.

Examples

This trope often makes the character based on it loved by their respective fandoms. It’s the type of character you’ll see being paraded around as the “precious baby” or the “sinnamon roll”.

However, this trope can be used very wrong and being horribly stereotypical, making the character feel far more flat than they should be.

This trope, like most, should only be used as inspiration or a base for your characters. If you want this sort of character, look up characters that have this trope and see what about these characters you like or dislike, or see how their writing failed and try to improve upon it.

When writing these characters, you want to make their goals relate to family or friends, not a selfish goal, like wealth or power. You want the character to obviously care for their friends and family, but you want to make them seem like selfish people on the surface.

Now, there’s also characters that are “headcanonned” to be this trope, but they’re really only assholes.

Examples

While pure asshole characters can be just as loved as the assholes with hearts of gold, it’s good to remember that the pure assholes are selfish and only in something for themselves, rather than for the sake of someone else.

For example, Reaver a character I personally love. Reaver is 100% an asshole. He’s vain, conceited, greedy, and rude and quite often takes as much pride in that as he does in his wealth and sexual exploits. Many people, because of his mostly unknown past and childhood, love to make him secretly care about the people who end up close to him (Hammer, Garth, and Sparrow). As fun as that is, that’s not his character.

Compare him to his own comrade, Garth. Garth is stoic and cold, often disregarding others and showing blatant disgust with people like Reaver or even people like Hammer, whom he considers dimwitted. Garth, however, does things for the good of others. He comes to consider Sparrow (the player character) a friend and to some degree, Hammer to be a friend as well. He does what must be done to save Albion because he feels it’s his moral obligation, and is willing to make sacrifices to protect thousands of innocents. Reaver does the same things, but only because if everyone else is dead, he cannot continue to kill people to retain his youth and long life.

So, when writing the Asshole with a Heart of Gold character, try to make sure the jerkiness doesn’t override their affection for others. Make sure their personalities don’t override their positive morals. Make sure their negative attitudes and vanity or selfishness don’t outshine their positive qualities.

Character Tropes pt. 2: Idiot Father and in Charge Mother

The Idiot Father, or the Bumbling Dad, trope is a trope I personally despise. It was an intentional subversion of the 50′s father, and was really popular in the late 1980′s and through out the 90′s and 2000′s, and is even still in most family sitcoms to this very day.

The trope relies heavily on family stereotypes. The mother/wife always taking charge, nagging her husband to death about every little thing she perceives as wrong. The father/husband being more interested in sports games than his own children, always forgetting about anything in regards to romance with his wife, and doing everything wrong. All with the in-laws driving both spouses insane. 

Examples

When writing families in your stories, whether it be for a book, comic, or cartoon, avoid this trope at all costs. If you can make this trope work, good, but to make it work you’d have to make the marriage functional. 

Typically, when you encounter this trope, the main question that pops into your mind when you see the couple interact is, “Why the hell are you two married when you have nothing in common, and everything about how you interact tells me you hate each other?”.

I cannot think of a way to make this trope actually work, but if you can think of a way, please let me know.

This trope is over done and any humor that once accompanied it is gone. 

When writing a happily married couple, you want to ensure that their marriage is functional. Here is a list of Do’s and Don’t’s.

Do

Don’t