If Your Plot Feels Flat, STUDY It! Your Story Might Be Lacking...

If your plot feels flat, STUDY it! Your story might be lacking...

Stakes - What would happen if the protagonist failed? Would it really be such a bad thing if it happened?

Thematic relevance - Do the events of the story speak to a greater emotional or moral message? Is the conflict resolved in a way that befits the theme?

Urgency - How much time does the protagonist have to complete their goal? Are there multiple factors complicating the situation?

Drive - What motivates the protagonist? Are they an active player in the story, or are they repeatedly getting pushed around by external forces? Could you swap them out for a different character with no impact on the plot? On the flip side, do the other characters have sensible motivations of their own?

Yield - Is there foreshadowing? Do the protagonist's choices have unforeseen consequences down the road? Do they use knowledge or clues from the beginning, to help them in the end? Do they learn things about the other characters that weren't immediately obvious?

The term and concept of "rent lowering gunshots" has seeped into my mental vocabulary, and I've welcomed it there. Something I'm up to is gross and weird? Good, keeps the rent low. Keeps judgy people out. Post weird shit on your blog, do weird shit to your hair, be as fucky as your heart ever wants to be. If you're not the one making the profit, make yourself unprofitable. The aposematism of brightly coloured creatures is there to warn predators, not friends.

You have no moral obligation to make yourself palatable for those who would consume you.

we all have that one homie who volunteers to take first watch that they might contemplate the heavens in solitude

the thing about adulthood is when someone says something extremely rude to you, you can either turn the other cheek or calmly & firmly correct them. The third option is to tell them “say that again, I’ll bite you” & everyone sort of nervously laughs and tries to move on from your little joke. Which is why I think it’s very important that when they do say it again you follow through. Nobody actually expects you to bite them. We should be biting more. Also if you’re with the county health department do not read thi s post

I know I’m being an insufferable worldbuilding nerd here, but my basic metric for evaluating media with very inhuman protagonists is “how easily can one offer a complete and coherent account of this media’s plot without ever mentioning the fact that the protagonist is, for example, a talking car?”. The harder it is, the higher it scores.

i'm all the people i've ever loved

loseness lines over time by olivia de recat, @i-wrotethisforme, Kaveh Akbar, Olivie Blake