#writing Life #writing Theory

#writing life #writing theory

Types of side characters

1. Foil Characters: These side characters are designed to contrast with the main character, highlighting their qualities or flaws. Foil characters can provide a different perspective and challenge the main character's beliefs or actions.

2. Mentors or Guides: These side characters serve as mentors or guides to the main character, providing wisdom, guidance, and support. They often have more experience or knowledge in a specific area and help the main character navigate challenges or learn important lessons.

3. Comic Relief Characters: These side characters bring humor and levity to the story. They provide comedic relief during intense or serious moments and can help balance the overall tone of the narrative. Their wit, clumsiness, or unique personality traits make them enjoyable and entertaining.

4. Love Interests: Love interests are side characters who are romantically involved with the main character. They add a romantic subplot to the story and can contribute to the main character's personal growth and development. Love interests can be supportive, challenging, or even create conflict within the narrative.

5. Antagonists or Villains: Side characters can also take on the role of antagonists or villains. They oppose the main character's goals and create conflict and tension in the story. Antagonists can have their own motivations, complexities, and backstories, making them more than just one-dimensional obstacles.

6. Friends or Allies: These side characters are the main character's companions, friends, or allies. They provide emotional support, camaraderie, and assistance throughout the story. Friends or allies often share common goals and values, and their relationships can help showcase the main character's growth and strengths.

7. Family Members: Side characters who are family members of the main character can play significant roles in shaping their identity and backstory. They can provide emotional connections, conflict, and a sense of history within the narrative.

8. Background Characters: While not all side characters have to be highly developed, background characters help create a sense of realism and immersion in the story. They populate the world and add depth to the setting, even if they have minimal impact on the main plot.

9. Rivals or Competitors: These side characters compete with the main character, pushing them to improve, overcome obstacles, or achieve their goals. Rivals or competitors can be a source of conflict, motivation, and personal growth for the main character.

10. Witnesses or Observers: These side characters serve as witnesses or observers of the main events in the story. They may provide insights, commentary, or serve as a narrative device to convey information to the reader.

Jungkook's growth over the years ♡ I feel so honored to have the opportunity to watch him grow into this amazing person and such a talented artist. 970901 — Happy Birthday Jeon Jungkook!

“Writing is like breathing, it's possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.” — Julia Cameron

Practical Benefits of Creative Writing if You Need Some Motivation

Writing stories isn't just a hobby. It's a practice that sharpens so many skills. You'll use these skills all your life, so write that silly idea and let's start refining these talents that come from our work:

(Psst—this is where you should open that copy of your resume if you're also applying for jobs!)

Communication: You know how to use words to convey complex and simple ideas.

Emotional identification (for personal benefit, not so much standard careers): You'd be surprised how many people can't name or describe their emotions, much less make them something others can feel.

Thematic analyzation: You can find or create a common thread between wildly different people.

Community building: You can bring people together by making them feel things deeply.

Perspective shaping: You make others try on new perspectives through your characters and their challenge, which also points back to your communication skills.

Encouragement: You know how to make other people dream through your work.

Empathy: You remind readers they aren't alone in their experiences—we are all going through different versions of pain together.

Typing: Let's be real, every boss will think you're amazing if you can type with more than two fingers at a time (or with two fingers really fast!).

Time management: You're always finding ways to fit your writing into your schedule, even if it's only once a month.

Commitment: because that 100,000-word fanfic won't just appear on paper because you daydreamed about it.

Self-reliance: When you set a goal to write a story, you (mostly) finish it. All on your own!

A willingness to learn: Your editing and revising work keeps you open to growth opportunities, which is essential to being a good person/team member/employee.

Organization: Those folders with all your story ideas, character outlines, and plot arcs? That's a skill, my friend.

Creativity: You're in touch with your creative instincts, which brings vision to projects and team efforts that produce better results

sometimes i just sit and think about how nathan scott was wearing his engagement ring beneath his clothes even after his fall out with haley.

shatters me that he's fictional. i'd be down bad for real-life nathan scott and all his domesticity. so down for domesticity and monogamy with real-life nathan scott.

i don't wanna date. i want nathan scott, goddammit!

frowns

BETWEEN COMFORT & CHAOS | 001

wc: 2k

tense & pov: present, third person

tracklist:

002 | 003 | 004 | AO3

Inconveniences.

Small, quaint, little blips in a routine. 

Like tiny, little lint balls lining the inside of a shirt - a shirt that had been practically flawless prior to the misfortunes of laundry day; discomforting, irritating, but miniscule enough to dismiss. To learn to tolerate. 

Inconveniences. 

Small, quaint, little blips in a rushed run-down of a formerly organic routine. 

The first of which, a missed alarm - correction, it would have been ‘missed’  if so it had run in the first place. Rin, however, had forgotten to turn the dial on her bedside clock the night prior. 

It rang around 9 AM, instead; a rise time for off days. 

Today is Monday. The opposite of an off day.

Rin stumbles out of the cushioned embrace of her bed, entangled at the ankles by a knot in the sheets, which she doesn't became aware of until the solid wood of the floor slaps her chin.

The unanticipated impact leaves her breathless for a number of seconds, before she releases a long and painful groan. Her ribs contract at the slightest twist, in response to what Rin can only imagine is a developing bruise, as she starts up and towards the adjoining bathroom.

She scrambles for her cellphone amidst the sheets that billow around her like a dress, or a cloud.

When she lifts the screen to her line of sight, she squints through the dimness to find its display of a low battery warning. There's another painful blow to her cheek, only this time it's not from the dense, solid wood, rather the weight of realizing she'd forgotten to plug it in the night prior.

Unfortunately, this is not the first occurrence. She makes a habit of sleeping the night with her phone at the foot of her bed, unplugged. At first, only ever intends to scroll her socials mindlessly for increments of half-hours until midnight falls; means to lay it on its charging port by then, but more often than not, drifts into slumber before that point. In the morning, it's always the same; she reprimands herself, promises to never do it again.

The next night, unsurprisingly to everyone but her, she does it again. Jennie, her teenage sister, jokes that her forgetfulness will one day be her demise; says something along the lines of "She'll forget the date and place of her funeral."

With about 20% residual battery (estimating up, for the sake of optimism), her screen illuminates. A sort of squawk leaves her parted lips as she reads the time. A squawk like that of a goose with its tail feathers catching light.

She’s up, now, legs squared determinedly. Yet, she trips clumsily over sleep-drugged feet while they wrestle with the persistent tug of the sheets who plead Stay, just this once. 

Trampling over miscellaneous objects scattered around her bedroom floor, she reminds herself of the urgency with which she must clean her room, but it's only one of many tasks on her immediate to-do.

Right now is not the time.

Her tail’s on fire. Heart’s pumping erratically. Adrenaline saturating her system. Heat flushing her cheeks and nape. 

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck…” 

The second inconvenience of the day is a diluted cup of coffee, served not in her usual thermos, but in the first vase she could salvage out of the pile seated at her sink.

The amber liquid’s aroma falls flat and drowned over her palette; a cloud of candied cotton dampened by humidity on what should have been a sunny festival day.

Groceries, her mental to-do list elongates. Don't forget coffee for tomorrow. Don't' forget coffee, a voice in her mind recites obsessively.

Running groceries today tops all other items on her list in terms of priority. It's more urgent than the cleanliness of her bedroom. She cannot survive another morning living off crackers and a few pinches of coffee grounds. But even more urgent, she must catch her bus and make it to work before her boss hears word of her tardiness. 

Rin shuts her eyes, her grip strangles the ceramic handle of the mug as she forces the gulp down, despite the objection of her palette. 

She heaves a sigh upon succeeding, and brings the pads of her thumb and forefinger to pinch the bridge of her nose, in a bid to discourage a growing migraine. 

Inconveniences. How even the ones you train yourself to dismiss grow unbearable under the right measure of pressure. They keep adding, amounting; a string being pulled, stretched, tensed until it snaps clean. Retracts and slaps you on the cheek. Leaves a red mark, blotchy with blood. 

She makes up her mind. Determinedly decides that today is not her day, could not be, will not be. There is no redeeming it, for the more she recites it in her head, the further it continues to manifest itself. Until she's too deeply caught in the whirlpool to convince herself otherwise.

Days like such make her wonder how many inconveniences, exactly, it would take to conclusively alter the course of one’s fate? 

The notion isn’t foreign to Rin. She’d read testimonies before, about people who’d been lead away from a tragic fate by some minor and random inconvenience – a blip, or glitch, or something that absolutely shouldn’t have happened, that wouldn’t otherwise have happened, on any given day. Say, the person whose car breaks down on the commute to work, who later discovers through a news report that a shooter unleashed havoc at their work-place, claiming the lives of a dozen victims. A dozen. Could have – would have – been a dozen-and-one if by some stroke of luck, or misfortune, their car had not broken down. 

In light of those rare, almost ordained cases, Rin attempts to see light in even the worst possible conditions. Today, though, her optimism is gasping for breath, attempting to match pace with her dashing body. She left it in the heaps of blankets at the foot of her bed. 

Silver linings fall dull and mute. 

Everything seems to serve as an obstacle in her blazing path.

The keys get lost. Shoe laces become undone. Chatty neighbor happens to step foot out of the house at the same time as Rin; there goes ten priceless minutes of Rin nodding incessantly and feigning a polite smile all the while trying to end the conversation that should have never begun. 

Left shoe still undone, her legs slice through the chill morning fog, as she sprints down her neighborhood street. Leaving the rosy-cheeked, grey-haired lady chatting to herself. (She doesn't notice until Rin's five doors down; never really talks to others to hear their perspectives, but rather feel self-important from the influence of their audience)

Rin's worn satchel is pinned under her arm. A young golden sun tints her cheeks with some life, as it streaks in between buildings. 

A green bus slows near a couple of gathered people. A half-a-second before it comes to a complete halt, it pries its gates open with an elongated creak. 

Rin’s still sprinting a few blocks down. Her chest is galloping, short of air; it burns in that oxygen-deprived way. The fine muscles of her calf, do to. As if they are wearing away under the erosion of acid.

Her pace slows from fatigue and resignation. Starts imagining what's the worst that could happen if she were to half-ass a last minute call-out from work. Stands like an awkwardly placed tree amidst the street, swaying, bag sliding down her frame, shoelaces sprawled over the concrete like roots burying her there.

The breath she gathers to lift her voice and plead for a bit of patience is knocked out of her lungs before the words form at her lips. Her palms slaps against the cold concrete on either side of her already bruised chin, her cheek suspended by mere inches. 

The culprit lies on the ground, by her feet, groaning and clutching his knee. 

Rin’s lips whisper a forlorn “Noo!” as her eyes watch the bus pick-up and drive-away. Tears pool on her lash line, either from the frost biting her face or in response to the overwhelming frustration that comes with the shattered expectations of what should have been a ‘normal day.’ 

Normal days are never extravagant, until you are deprived of them. Until you are reminded they are not something inherently owed to you, and that much like all things, they too can be deprived.

Chord snapped, patience drawn thinly, Rin sits up, heated and ready to pounce. Her sharp eyes lock onto the wrecker. She’s made up her mind. She’s ready to name him the culprit of all the inconveniences of today. 

When she glances over at the soon-to-be-subject of all of her projected frustrations, that’s when she feels it. The sharp, stinging slap of the metaphorical rubber band against her cheek. 

Her throat chokes with the threat of a sob. Just when she thought the day could not possibly get worse, it does. 

The biggest inconvenience yet. 

The bane of her existence. 

A subject she’d sought refuge in never, ever, seeing again. 

There’s a distinct luminescence haloing his crouched figure. Could be the early morning sun, beaming over the neighborhood. Could be a concussion. Regardless, it's dizzying. Has this optical illusion effect of making the subject in her field of vision double, like when she'd wear 3D glasses to the cinema.

Rin blinks incessantly. She can’t bring herself to trust her sight. Can’t believe she body-slammed into him of all people. In the seven years she’s spent living in the neighborhood, not once had she brushed shoulders with him. 

The last time she'd seen him had been at their high school graduation ceremony - which must have been nearly six years ago, now.

Weighing the abstract concept of time in her shaken mind, she finds it hard to palate how much time has lapsed, and how little he appears to have changed. Like a stand-still capture on a polaroid square, he's just the same.

He scrunches-up his nose in disturbance, and turns over his hand to the palmar side, eyes peeling over his newly acquired abrasion. As the seconds lapse, the adrenaline in his system wanes, and the sting of scraped flesh starts settling in. 

He winces and diverts his attention from it, gathering that looking at it only will make it hurt worse. 

Dark brown eyes meet Rin as he finally acknowledges the collision. The reality that he’d somehow inconvenienced someone even further than the day had started to inconvenience him. 

The halo persists through Rin’s desperate blinking. Futility lies in her attempts to clear her field of vision, as she rubs the dorsal sides of her hands over her eyes in a bid to remove what she believes is only a pesky little speck of dust, a lash, or even a tear. 

Inquisition curves his healthy brows but the curiosity quickly dims, becoming replaced with a sour frown. A distasteful grimace. Reality and recognition strike him. But worse than the reel of memories snapped onto the film player of his mind, is the Earth spinning vertigo that comes on as his eyes trace over the aura emanating off her. Brighter than the sun. 

Loud-bright. Like a mallet smashed against a bronze bell within his head. Like he’s suddenly developed synesthesia and every glimpse of light is painfully loud. 

Rin dances her gaze around, reading the disinterested people who brush hurriedly past. They appear awfully dull in demeanor and appearance in relation to him. Absent of any halo, they are akin to gray bodies blurred into the background scene of the lens of a camera. 

Slowly, and fearful, Rin draws her gaze back to him. Traces over the halo. 

That’s when her mother’s voice rings across her head, like an ominous tolling bell, indicative of an end. An armageddon. Her armageddon. When I met your father, it was like I could see for the first time.

Rin wouldn’t call this newfound sight, rather sudden-onset blindness. She feels like her optic nerves are being torn by the fibers. Imagines this distortion is was what cats see on a daily basis. Understands why they constantly want to strangle and mangle anything within their vicinity. 

She wants to strangle him. Toys with the idea the more she looks at him. The more the lights dizzy her. 

Somehow, she places the fault in his hands. She's still run by a childish instinct, to want to kick his shins and run away from his stupidly handsome frown. He had always felt like too much to handle, to understand, to wrap her tiny adolescent mind around. Now, older, and hopefully wiser, Rin still defaults to running away from complexity. Likes to coax life with a broad brush, shoving worries under her bed like monsters to run from, behind closet doors, into the margins of tomorrow. 

She figures that if she continuously runs, the problems will never catch up to her. But, she’s only selectively ignorant to the snowball effect. Hopes it amasses enough to crush her at once and allow her no room for reflection on how things could have – should have -- been. 

His lips almost mouth Don't run. Fear-stricken. Please, don’t run. 

Instead, he voices (cracking voice): “I think I’m having a stroke.” Then braces his clumsy weight against the nearest wall. His breathing quickens, mirroring the alarming panic blaring within Rin.

“What are the chances that we are both having a stroke at the same time?” 

He lifts his worried gaze, a bead of sweat forming on his temple, complexion awfully pale. Rin thinks he might just hurl. “What are the chances that you are my soulmate?” 

It’s funny, because Rin didn’t see this coming – Rin didn’t see much of today coming, but certainly not what happens next. 

Rin is the one that hurls. Chunky acid made its way up the column of her throat without as much as a warning. The contents – whatever it was she managed to down while standing in the fridge light last night. 

All over his lavish shoes.