Yeah But

yeah but

ghosts who are friends with the living

ghosts curiously listening to their fleshy friend’s heartbeat

ghosts snuggling up to their living friends to feel their body heat

ghosts basking in the sun to warm their ecto-bodies up so they won’t be so cold to the touch

ghosts huddling close to their living friends in windy weather for fear of getting blown apart

ghosts watching horror movies with their living friends and worriedly turning to them and going like “i’m not that bad am i?” pointing at the murderous stringy-haired banshee onscreen

people ouija-ing their ghost friends as if they were casual phone calls all like “hey you wanna hang out soon”

ghosts going to museums with their living friends and shaking their heads while looking at the exhibits all like “no no no this is all wrong. i was there and it went nothing like this.”

ghosts getting really giddy and excited whenever they hear music from their era

Character Development: Part 1

The Basics

Character development can refer to the actual creation process in which you decide your character’s strengths, flaws, goals, features, etc, or it can refer to a character’s progression/transformation throughout a story, which is also known as an arc.

Your Character: How Much Do You Need to Know?

Some will say you need to be aware of everything when it comes to a character, including miscellaneous minutia, but when you follow that advice you’ll find it’s all too easy to get bogged down. In order to make things easier, it’s best to have an outline (or at the very least a general idea) for your story, and then consider your characters within that context. Make sure you flesh out these basics:

Features and Identifying Characteristics - Consider what makes them unique in both physical appearance and personality.Their voice and mannerisms are also important here.

Goal (s) - What does your character want and how does it drive the conflict in the story? How does your character’s goal, and the lengths they’ll go to accomplish it, affect others?

Strengths and Flaws - You can divide these into major and minor categories. Some will affect the character and those around them more than others. It’s important to try to find a balance between the two, even if it’s not initial. The character can find a balance during the story.

Fears - These are very important to know because they’ll influence your character’s behavior. Fears can be internal and external, major and minor.

Reactions - How does your character handle situations that occur within your story, and what do those reactions say about your character to themselves, other characters, and the audience?

Interactions - How does your character conduct themselves around other characters? Why?

Static vs. Dynamic Characters

Simply put, a static character is one who does not change in a story while a dynamic character does. Dynamic characters tend to have legitimate, major growth, whether it be over the course of a single story or over many. Their personality, beliefs, perspective, or even goals may be altered by their experiences, and they learn something, whether it be good or bad. Both kinds of characters will appear in stories, and it’s alright to have either in the main character role.

You may also see static characters referred to as flat and dynamic characters referred to as round.

Static Character Examples: Sherlock Homes, Hannibal Lecter, Indiana Jones, Han Solo, Robin Hood, James Bond, Tarzan, Huck Finn, Long John Silver, Classic Superheroes (Batman, Superman, Spiderman).

Dynamic Character Examples: Harry Potter, Ebeneezer Scrooge, Bilbo Baggins, Batman (Batman Begins), Buzz Lightyear, Darth Vader, and Aladdin (Disney).

Character Arcs

The key to writing a good character arc is maintaining believable change in the eyes of the audience. If your character is a pretty nice guy for most of the story, then suddenly decides to do something vile, like kill a kitten for no good reason (other than your Master Plan to make him a villain), your audience is going to be confused. Character arcs aren’t just about the beginning and the end, but how you get to that end. They are a progression.

There are three basic types of character arcs: positive, negative, and flat/no change.

Positive: Your character begins at a low point, and by the end of the story reaches a high and is better off than where he was when he started. An external force causes a change within the character. An example would be The Hero’s Journey (Shrek) or overcoming an internal obstacle.

Negative: Your character begins at a high point, and by the end of the story hits a low and is worse off than where he was when he started. An external force causes a change within the character. An example would be The Fall from Grace (Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader).

Flat/No Change: The character, at some point, has already found their truth, accomplished their goal, come to terms with their struggles, or had a major change at some point prior to the story and already knows how to handle things. These stories tend to focus on how the character can affect his world, and not the other way around.

There are, of course, different degrees of severity to these arcs, and depending on how long your story is, or if it’s over the course of a series, a character may go through multiple arcs.

Remember to treat your characters like people. Force them into situations that expose them, and make them show who they really are.

Happy writing.

-Morgan

Important Infrequently Used Words To Know

by Paul V. Hartman

A

alacrity  a-LACK-ra-tee     cheerful willingness and promptness

anathema  a-NATH-a-ma     a thing or person cursed, banned, or reviled

anodyne  AN-a-dine     not likely to cause offence or disagreement and somewhat dull//anything that sooths or comforts

aphorism  AFF-oar-ism     a short, witty saying or concise principle

apostate  ah-POSS-tate     (also: apostasy) person who has left the fold or deserted the faith.

arrogate  ARROW-gate     to make an unreasonable claim

atavistic  at-a-VIS-tic     reverting to a primitive type

avuncular  a-VUNC-you-lar     “like an uncle”; benevolent

Read More →

which one of your otp is the one to die and which is the one to sit in the middle of the street, holding their dead body, rocking back and forth, screaming “come back, come back, come back”?

Describing Accents

Anonymous asked: Hey there! In the story I am writing it takes place on a different planet. However I really want a certain race of people to have African accents. How do I describe accents that don’t necessarily exist? I hope that made sense!

There’s a wealth of ways to encapsulate an accent, what with all the words available to you. It’s a matter of how straight-forward or creative you want to go. Maybe some of the methods below will help.

Adjective:

She had a fragile accent.

The people had throaty voices, sawing out words in blunt grumbles.

Metaphoric:

His voice was splinters and broken glass.

Her accent had a song-like quality that reminded her of swaying tides.

Straight-forward:

He had a French accent.

“I have to go,” she said, though from her accent, French, the words sounded more like “I hive tego.”

Straight-forward & ‘Technical’:

He had a French accent, perhaps Northern, his voice lilting the edges of his vowels and dragging out others.

Some methods work better in combination with others, such as straight-forward combined with technical (as shown). It truly shouldn’t take many sentences to give readers enough info to imagine how someone’s voice or accent sounds. Therefore I wouldn’t overdue the clues, as it can stir into offensive.

More Reading:

Describing Voices

55 Words to Describe Someone’s Voice

Online Thesaurus

Describing Qualities of the Human Voice

~Mod Colette

Hello my fellow writers.

Most people have heard of Evernote by now, but a lot of people (myself included) thought/think that it’s purely for business or shopping lists and what not.

I’m here to tell you that it’s not just for business. It can be a valuable tool for plotting and organizing your novel!

I’ve blurred out all the super pertinent details for my current project as well as my email address, but here’s how I set it all up.

1. Download Evernote. There are paid versions, but for what we’ll be doing, the free version works just as well. You have to make an account, because everything is in cloud storage, unless you make a local notebook.

2. Set everything up and make your first notebook. Title it however you want.

3. Make Notes in the Notebook. Obviously, you can do this however you want, but here are some note blocks to get you started;

-Plot: Here’s where you’ll put your premise, summary or outline

-Setting: Here’s where you’ll describe your setting. I found a cool thing when I was searching for Evernote templates that has key questions to answer about setting. Find it HERE. (If you have an evernote account, you can add it straight to your notebook!)

-Misc Ideas/Notes: This is just a place to jot down things you may think of that may not fit into any category or are incomplete. (I have lists of names and potential titles in mine)

-Characters: This is to hash out your characters!

-Snippets: I don’t always write in the right order or I’ll think of something a character might say or do, or a particularly awesome description I don’t need quite yet and I can add it here.

-Character Profiles: This was something I added because I found a really nice 100 question survey thing for characterization and I didn’t want to clog up my character page for this. I only did this for my four main characters, but as far as I know, there are no limits to how many notes you can have in a notebook.

I hope this helps someone out! I’m really excited about this because I’ve been having trouble getting my ideas sorted out in my head and this has really, really made things easier to see and think about!

Back to work!

-Amanda

P.S. It occurred to me that this could seem sponsored and I assure you that Evernote is not paying me to promote them, though if they did, I wouldn’t say no because money is nice. However, I’m nowhere near popular enough for that, so you guys probably have nothing to worry about! Happy writing!