Thanks For Saving Me, The Trouble Of Coming Up With An Birthday For My D&D Character!

Thanks for saving Me, the trouble of coming up with an birthday for My D&D Character!

Months of signs on the alignment chart

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.

Keep Your MCs Close

I typically write in third person limited, which intentionally places a distance between reader and character while allowing a look into the mind of whichever character we’re with. While this distance is part of the perspective, we still want to hold our protagonists close, and we do that through word choice.

Certain words and phrases can distance the reader from the character, which limits their relatability and the emotion that comes through in a scene. Consider these two examples:

She felt her eyes widen as she saw the monster turn the corner. Vs. Her eyes widened as the monster turned the corner.

Which puts you more into the body of the character and feels more in the moment?

The difference is using words such as felt, saw, heard. When you do an action, you don’t feel yourself do it—you just do it. While we’re technically on the outside of this character, we still want to be close to her experiences. As another example:

She felt sick as she heard the vase shatter. Vs. Her stomach turned, a tightness constricting around her ribs as the vase wobbled and tipped off the counter.

Now we’re in the emotion, we’re in this horrible moment with this character. Of course, that’s not to say there should be zero mentions of saw/heard/felt in your story. As with all writing advice, there’s a time and a place for everything. If the word works really well in the scene/sentence, or you’re intentionally placing distance between the character and reader, go right on ahead!

When my characters are kind of feeling out of it and woozy or drunk, they do feel themselves walking down the hallway, because being drunk sort of feels like being outside of your own head. Intention, as always, is key!

Good luck!

Creating Fictional Holidays

     Happy Holidays everyone!

     Like mythology or folklore, holidays can add an extra bit of realism and magic to your fictional worlds, and provide for an interesting setting to portray characters, culture, or even family dynamic.

      While you can use real world holidays and adapt them to your worlds, you may also want to create your own! Here’s a few things to consider:

1. What does your holiday celebrate?

Typically, holidays come from historical events or events believed to have happened by religious groups. Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Christ. Diwali celebrates the victory of light over darkness, or good’s triumph over evil. Passover celebrates Israelites’ escape from slavery. This would be a great chance to delve into the history of your world, and how it forms and influences communities.

Otherwise (and as well as), holidays can be expressions of important cultural values such as community, hard work, or family. The Day of the Dead (or Dia de los Muertos) is the celebration of honoring passed family members, Labour day is held to honour the struggle for unionization by working people. What does your holiday say about the society or community that created it?

2. How has your holiday adapted?

As much as holiday is entrenched in longstanding tradition, there is no escaping modernization and adaption to contemporary norms. As much as Christmas is a religious holiday at its roots, for many, it’s a celebration of family and gift giving. Rather than being a saint, Santa has become the jolly toy-maker separated from religion entirely.

If your holiday began to celebrate say Harvest season, but in modern times ‘harvest season’ is no longer regularly recognized, how does this society continue to celebrate this holiday? Where does tradition and modern standards intersect?

3. How do people perceive the holiday?

Even joyous, wholesome holidays are going to have haters. Just think of Valentines Day coming around every year—there are people who love it, people who hate it, and people who see it as a superficial excuse to fund capitalism and consumer culture. What do the people of your world believe about the holiday, or what groups/communities are invited or left out?

4. What rituals go into celebrating your holiday?

During Christmas, many families bring in a tree, wrap gifts to put under it, and bake cookies for a secret intruder in the night. A ritual is just a way people honour something—it doesn’t necessarily have to be cultish or ‘evil’. What longstanding rituals go into the celebration of your holiday?

Maybe gifts are exchanged, candles are lit, cards are given out, money is donated, certain foods are given up or certain times limit eating (such as fasting), families gather, parties are held, etc. etc. There are thousands of ways people celebrate what’s important to them. Consider how each family or character in your story might take a slightly different spin on the same rituals.

I hope no matter what or how you celebrate this year, you get time to spend with your loved ones <3

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

I don't know how to write the beginning but also without a beginning, I don't know how to write the plot points I already have blocked out so I never start writing, what would you recommend?

Can't Write, Unsure of Story's Beginning

Well, there are two ways we can not know how to write our story's beginning, so I want to cover both.

The first way is when we literally have no idea what needs to happen at the beginning. In that case, I would question where your other plot points are coming from, because your plot points should be stemming from the story's conflict, and the circumstances that ignite the conflict are the beginning of the story. In other words, if your story doesn't have beginning plot points, it doesn't have later ones, either. It just has a bunch of random things you decided to have happen. In that case, spend some time on my Plot & Story Structure master list to learn about conflict, plot-driven vs character-driven stories, story structure, etc.

The second way is when we know what needs to happen... we know our conflict/s, we know our inciting incident, we know what has to lead up to the inciting incident, we just can't figure the best way to showcase those things. I call this "finding a way into your story," because knowing what has to happen isn't the same as knowing the exact situation within which said thing will happen. For example, The Hunger Games inciting incident is when Katniss volunteers to replace her sister at the Reaping, and what has to lead up to that is some world building, setting up Katniss's internal conflict (being responsible for her mom and sister but wishing she could escape her dystopian world) and some laying out of the stakes (if something happens to her, her mom and sister won't survive.) There are a million ways this story could have actually started... it could have started with her already in the woods hunting with Gale. It could have started with her in town witnessing some peace keepers attacking a citizen. It could have started with her watching them set up for the Reaping. Suzanne Collins chose to have the reader wake up with Katniss and start a normal day with her, to illustrate the stakes (her mom and sister, and needing to take care of them) firsthand, to lay out the basic world building through Katinss's eyes as she walks through her district, and to explore her internal conflict while enjoying a little freedom while hunting with Gale. My posts Figuring Out Where to Start a Story and Deciding How to Open Your Story have some tips to help you out. :)

Happy writing!

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I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

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