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writeworld-blog

Researching Orphans and Orphanages

Anonymous said: Opinions on orphanages and/or orphaned characters? Cos I’m writing one but IT’S SUCH A CLICHE I’M DEAD

Well, don’t die. That’s the first thing. This is not even a little bit worth dying over.

I don’t know what time period you’re talking about, or where your story is set. That’s not so great news, since it makes helping you out very difficult. WriteWorld isn’t a research blog, but I’m willing to do a few Google searches for you because you seem a bit overwhelmed. In the future, please don’t ask us to do research for you. We’re not really into that.

As far as our opinion on orphanages and orphaned characters goes, I (C of WriteWorld) think that if you want to write about them and you can pull it off, then you should write about them. Orphans have always been popular in stories, especially stories aimed at young people for some reason, but just because an orphan is a popular sort of character doesn’t mean you can’t write about them. Popularity doesn’t necessarily indicate a cliche, though a popular trope can sometimes become cliche. Cliches arise when a lack of original or deep thought eats a hole through the heart of a particular subject, making it groan-worthy and/or disrespectful. You can read over the topics on the TVTropes page linked below and find clear examples of tropes that have become cliched. But I’ll leave you to that. For now, let’s talk research.

Where should you start? Well, how much do you know about orphanages generally? Did everything you know about orphanages come from stories in movies, TV, and books? Read these articles on orphanages, adoption, etc. to gain a very broad understanding of the subject.

Do you know the difference between orphanages and group homes? Yahoo Answers user Wildgrl explains the general difference very well:

An orphanage is run by a private organization, such as a church, ministry, hospital, outreach clinic, etc. It provides long term care for children with no known parents, but also supports runaways as a safe-house / halfway house and shelter.

A group home is a facility that is jointly run by the states Dept of Family Services and the Dept of Corrections. They are often dual-use facilities in that they house foster youth and transitional kids that are coming out of a juvenile corrections center.

These aren’t the only valid definitions for orphanage and group home, and both are worth exploring more deeply, but I understand that you just want to know more about orphanages. So, on that note…

I’m just going to assume that you’re talking about modern-day, privately-run American orphanages for children with no living biological parents. If that’s the case, I recommend that you check out these articles and resources as well as do research on your own:

Or how about actually visiting the websites of modern-day orphanages?

You could even look up an orphanage near you and volunteer! Ain’t nothin’ quite like going to a place and actually experiencing what it is like to be there.

And here are just a few articles, resources, and IAMAs on modern-day orphanages from around the world:

There are TONS more resources on this topic on the internet. You could also check your local library for resources on orphanages, group homes, adoption, foster care, etc. You could research experts on this topic and interview them. There might even be a few fellow writers here on Tumblr who could help you out, either with research of their own or from their personal experiences with orphanages and/or group homes.

Remember, you’re writing about real things that affect real people. Please do more research than this. Please. I’m begging you. I literally just pulled together some articles I thought were interesting from the first few search queries I made. That’s barely enough research to write a Tumblr post on this subject, let alone an entire book.

If you need some help learning to conduct your own research, check out our research tag. There are great resources there to get you started.

Thanks for your question, and I hope this helps!

-C

orphans orphan orphanage resources group home group homes writeworld responds by c character help character setting
stevechatterton

Twenty rules for writing detective stories

Originally published in the American Magazine (1928)

  1. The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery.  All clues must be plainly stated and described.

  2. No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.

  3. There must be no love interest.  The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.

  4. The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit.  This is bald trickery, on a par with offering some one a bright penny for a five-dollar gold piece.  It’s false pretenses.

  5. The culprit must be determined by logical deductions — not by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession.  To solve a criminal problem in this latter fashion is like sending the reader on a deliberate wild-goose chase, and then telling him, after he has failed, that you had the object of his search up your sleeve all the time. Such an author is no better than a practical joker.

  6. The detective novel must have a detective in it;  and a detective is not a detective unless he detects. His function is to gather clues that will eventually lead to the person who did the dirty work in the first chapter;  and if the detective does not reach his conclusions through an analysis of those clues, he has no more solved his problem than the schoolboy who gets his answer out of the back of the arithmetic.

  7. There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better.  No lesser crime than murder will suffice.  Three hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime other than murder.  After all, the reader’s trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded.

  8. The problem of the crime must he solved by strictly naturalistic means.  Such methods for learning the truth as slate-writing, ouija-boards, mind-reading, spiritualistic se'ances,  crystal-gazing, and the like, are taboo.  A reader has a chance when matching his wits with a rationalistic detective, but if he must compete with the world of spirits and go chasing about the fourth dimension of metaphysics, he is defeated ab initio.

  9. There must be but one detective — that is, but one protagonist of deduction — one deus ex machina. To bring the minds of three or four, or sometimes a gang of detectives to bear on a problem, is not only to disperse the interest and break the direct thread of logic, but to take an unfair advantage of the reader.  If there is more than one detective the reader doesn’t know who his codeductor is.  It’s like making the reader run a race with a relay team.

  10. The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story — that is, a person with whom the reader is familiar and in whom he takes an interest.

  11. A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question.  It is a too easy solution.  The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person — one that wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion.

  12. There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed.  The culprit may, of course, have a minor helper or co-plotter;  but the entire onus must rest on one pair of shoulders:  the entire indignation of the reader must be permitted to concentrate on a single black nature.

  13. Secret societies, camorras, mafias, et al., have no place in a detective story. A fascinating and truly beautiful murder is irremediably spoiled by any such wholesale culpability.  To be sure, the murderer in a detective novel should be given a sporting chance;  but it is going too far to grant him a secret society to fall back on.  No high-class, self-respecting murderer would want such odds.

  14. The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be be rational and scientific. That is to say, pseudo-science and purely imaginative and speculative devices are not to be tolerated in the roman policier.  Once an author soars into the realm of fantasy, in the Jules Verne manner, he is outside the bounds of detective fiction, cavorting in the uncharted reaches of adventure.

  15. The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent — provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it. By this I mean that if the reader, after learning the explanation  for the crime, should reread the book, he would see that the solution had, in a sense, been staring him in the face-that all the clues really pointed to the culprit — and that, if he had been as clever as the detective, he could have solved the mystery himself without going on to the final chapter.  That the clever reader does often thus solve the problem goes without saying.

  16. A detective novel should contain no long descriptive   passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no “atmospheric” preoccupations.Such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction.  They hold up the action and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion.  To be sure, there must be a sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude.

  17. A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt of a crime in a detective story.  Crimes by  housebreakers and bandits are the province of the police departments — not of authors and brilliant amateur detectives.  A really fascinating crime is one committed by a pillar of a church, or a spinster noted for her charities.

  18. A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide. To end an odyssey of sleuthing with such an anti-climax is to hoodwink the trusting and  kind-hearted reader.

  19. The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal.  International plottings and war politics belong in a different category of fiction — in secret-service tales, for instance.  But a murder story must be kept gemütlich, so to speak.  It must reflect the reader’s everyday experiences, and give him a certain outlet for his own repressed desires and emotions.

  20. And (to give my Credo an even score of items) I herewith list a few of the devices which no self-respecting detective story writer will now avail himself of.  They have been employed too often, and are familiar to all true lovers of literary crime.  To use them is a confession of the author’s ineptitude and lack of originality.  a) Determining the identity of the culprit by comparing the butt of a cigarette left at the scene of the crime with the brand smoked by a suspect.  b) The bogus spiritualistic se'ance to frighten the culprit into giving himself away.  c) Forged fingerprints.  d) The dummy-figure alibi.  e) The dog that does not bark and thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is familiar.  f)The final pinning of the crime on a twin, or a relative who looks exactly like the suspected, but innocent, person.  g) The hypodermic syringe and the knockout drops.  h) The commission of the murder in a locked room after the police have actually broken in.  i) The word association test for guilt.  j) The cipher, or code letter, which is eventually unraveled by the sleuth.

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writing advice writing tips crime fiction
writeworld-blog thewritershandbook
helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com

4 Ways to Make Your Antihero Deliciously Irresistible - Helping Writers Become Authors

Antiheroes . . . those conflicted souls who pawned their moral compass to buy their next bottle of vodka. There’s nothing heroic about them and for the most part they only care about themselves. So why do we love them so much? Antiheroes are far from perfect, a trait which makes them very real and very human. We …
Source: helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com
hero antihero character character types conflicted character
tai-korczak

23 Emotions people feel, but can’t explain

  1. Sonder: The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own.
  2. Opia: The ambiguous intensity of Looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable.
  3. Monachopsis: The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place.
  4. Énouement: The bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self.
  5. Vellichor: The strange wistfulness of used bookshops.
  6. Rubatosis: The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.
  7. Kenopsia: The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.
  8. Mauerbauertraurigkeit: The inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like.
  9. Jouska: A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head.
  10. Chrysalism: The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.
  11. Vemödalen: The frustration of photographic something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist.
  12. Anecdoche: A conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening
  13. Ellipsism: A sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out.
  14. Kuebiko: A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence.
  15. Lachesism: The desire to be struck by disaster – to survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire.
  16. Exulansis: The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it.
  17. Adronitis: Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone.
  18. Rückkehrunruhe: The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness.
  19. Nodus Tollens: The realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore.
  20. Onism: The frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time.
  21. Liberosis: The desire to care less about things.
  22. Altschmerz: Weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had – the same boring flaws and anxieties that you’ve been gnawing on for years.
  23. Occhiolism: The awareness of the smallness of your perspective.

Source article. Where words came from.

Emotions emotion bizarre text post text feeling
writingwithcolor

Researching PoC for Fantasy

Anonymous asked: 

I was wondering, most of the stories that I write to not deal with racism or discrimination at all, however I often include POC in my stories as main characters. I am always hearing that you need to research POC before you can write about them, however if the story has nothing to do with the differences between different cultures and skin tones, or is even set in a fantasy setting, is it as necessary to research them?

Writing fantasy or any story without racism isn’t an excuse to skim on familiarizing yourself with PoC issues and the portrayals that affect them. We, the readers, are a part of a world with racism and discrimination that doesn’t completely vanish from our minds upon reading a story, even fantasy.

Therefore without doing your research you can still perpetuate negative stereotypes about people subconsciously or unintentionally. Say for example you have a Black character who happens to fit all or most of the traits of the Sassy Black Woman.

Even in this fantasy setting or a world without racism or its applicable struggles, you’d be implementing a racist trope that would make the book uncomfortable for me as a Black female reader, just as any harmful portrayal of PoC in a piece of writing would.

See also:

~Mod Colette

fantasy poc research asks tropes racism
nishakadam sergle
awaywardmind

new genre concept: soft apocalypse

the world as we know it has ended and mother nature starts taking back what’s hers. there are no zombies or cannibals or murderous bandits. the most valued members of the community are those who know how to garden and farm, sew and weave, treat wounds, work wood or build with bricks, cook from scratch. 

people bond together to begin rebuilding instead of killing each other. everyone teaches each other whatever they do know and works together to figure out the stuff none of them know. books become incredibly valued resources because they’re often the only way to learn critical information. if someone is elderly, disabled, or otherwise unable to work at the same level as most of the community, they’re taken care of by the others, not told any sort of “survival of the fittest” bs.

as the generations ware on, communities begin expanding into small cities. some of the settlements even find ways to repurpose solar or wind power on a small scale and have electricity in some of their buildings. storytellers wander the countryside telling tales of the old world in return for some hot stew or a place to rest for the night, and the mythos of the new world start to incorporate elements of the past. the only thing that remains constant is that humans survive, and they do it by working together.

arachnescurse

MAY I INTRODUCE YOU TO YOKOHAMA KAIDASHI KIKOU

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A CHILL AF MANGA ABOUT A ROBOT LADY RUNNING A COFFEE SHOP DURING THE DECLINE OF HUMANITY WHERE EVERYONE IS SUPER NICE AND HAPPY AND IT’S JUST REALLY LOVELY

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IT IS LEGIT ONE OF MY FAVORITE SCI-FI WORKS AND A HUGE INSPIRATION FOR MY WRITING

IF YOU LIKE A QUIET END OF THE WORLD PLEASE CHECK IT OUT BLESS

Source: awaywardmind
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