The Skellingcorner

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
plotlinehotline

Plotting a Realistic Story from a Cast of Characters

Sometimes when starting a new story, you have your cast of characters completely figured out. You have all their back stories written out, you know their jobs, and their strengths and weaknesses. You’ve got all these vivid characters in mind, and maybe you even have a setting, but then you’re faced with the scary question, “Now what?”

Plot can be overwhelming when you have no idea where to start. But if you break it down, it’s not quite as stressful. 

  1. Decide if you want to write realism or fantasy. I’m using these two terms in the broadest sense of each word. In this case, realism refers to anything that could happen today in the current state of our world. It could be a true story. I’m including any kind of sci-fi, magic, time travel, other realms ect. under the category of fantasy. Which of these sounds the most exciting to you?
  2. If it’s realism, start with your protagonist. If you don’t have one chosen from your character list yet, now’s the time. Even if you’re considering multiple protagonists, you’ll need to choose one character to start with. Now answer this question: What currently makes your character happy? Some places to start:
  • People (relationships)
  • Possessions (a nice home, an eclectic collection)
  • Life situation (a job they enjoy)
  • Experiences (hobbies, travel)
  • Innocence (dependence on others, stress-free, always protected)

Make a list of everything that makes your character happy at the beginning of your novel. Then, for each item on your list, write a sentence explaining how that thing can be taken away from your character. If it’s their job, it could be: They get fired. They get laid off. Something forces them to quit. You don’t need to go into too much detail yet. 

Once you have a sentence for each item on your list, look at each one and decide which sounds the most fun to write. If the sentences don’t contradict each other, you might choose more than one. Depending on how big or small these things are, one might be enough, but try to cap it at three. You don’t want to take too much away from your character. 

When this thing is taken from your character, they will likely try to get it back. This is your character’s goal throughout the story. So then it’s on you to decide if they will:

  • Get the exact same thing back - will they get their job back?
  • Get something similar back - will they find a better/different job?
  • Find happiness elsewhere - will they end the story jobless, though still happy because they’ve found new love, purpose, interests?

Choose a direction to explore for each of the items you’ve chosen. Whichever path you choose, this is how your character’s goal is fulfilled. It shouldn’t happen until the end of the story. 

At this point, you should have a starting point and an end point. The middle consists of obstacles. Make yet another list of how you can stop your character from reaching the end point. What setbacks can they have? 

If you did choose more than one item to take away from your character, it could be that one of them emerges as a dominant plot arc. If that’s the case, you can either eliminate the others you originally chose, or you can use them as subplots. 

Do the same for other characters if you have them. Once you have a plot arc (starting point, end point, and obstacles) for each one, then look at ways you can tie the plot arcs together. How could they intersect? Could an obstacle for one character be a turning point for another? Do they help or hinder each other in achieving their goals?

You started with a cast of characters. Now, you should have a basic plot. And you can keep building on this plot, making it more detailed, more complex. You could also just start writing and see if more ideas come about as you’re writing. 

planning the story brainstorming
simplyoriginalcharacters

Writing Characters With Mental Illnesses or Disabilities

Before I link today’s resource posts, I wanted to take a minute to write out my thoughts on a subject that is near and dear to my heart (and my life). I’ve actually been trying to write this post for a while now, but I’ve been struggling to put the way I’ve been feeling into words (which is a problem I deal with disturbingly frequently, given that I’m a writer).

Please don’t use mental illness or disability as flavoring for your character.

What I meant when I say this is that I have seen characters who supposedly have a mental illness who never suffer from a single symptom. I have seen characters who are written to have a disability, and then given a method of “canceling out” the actual ways in which that disability impacts their lives so that they might as well not have it in the first place.

Do not do this. Don’t do it to me and don’t do it to the millions of other people in the world living with mental illnesses or disabilities. For everyone’s sake, do better. It’s not edgy or cool to give your character depression just because you want a reason for them to contemplate suicide on a regular basis. It’s not a new and interesting spin on the story of an autistic character to make them a walking encyclopedia of random facts. It’s not okay to pay lip service to a character being vision-impaired and then write them like a seeing character, nor to write a deaf character who somehow magically never has trouble understanding other people. Your character is not automatically more nuanced, well-rounded, or fleshed out because you slapped the label of “mental disorder” or “disability” or “chronically ill” on them and declared them to be a unique and special snowflake.

I touched a little bit on why this is a problem before, but let me reiterate it here. As a person who is living with a dissociative disorder, I tend to look for media featuring characters like myself. Often, those characters have a dissociative identity disorder and are portrayed as dangerous, unstable, or violent. I, myself, am none of those things, but this portrayal is what makes it hard for me to tell people that I have a dissociative disorder that sometimes prevents me from experiencing the world in the same way they do, because that is the image that people associate my particular mental illness with. I need better representation, and so do the other people who are consuming that media because it might be the only time they encounter information about dissociative disorders.

Mental illness and disability are not flavors. For those of us living with them, they impact every area of our lives: how much we sleep, how much energy we can devote to certain tasks, whether or not we have to take medication just to function, whether we’re in pain, whether we can handle long periods of social interaction, how we react to certain situations and settings…everything. The list goes on and on. If it’s truly important for your character to have a mental illness or a disability, be prepared to do some really in-depth research on exactly how it’s going to affect them and their life. Be prepared to really write what you’re saying you want to write.

I need to see more characters in fiction who have mental illnesses or disabilities and who are treated with compassion, understanding, and acceptance by both their authors and the other fictional characters around them, and so do you. I need to see these characters living full and rich lives, not as “inspirations” to readers or other characters, but because people can have mental disorders or disabilities and still have full, rich, lives, and often do. We have friends and family, likes and dislikes, hobbies, flaws, skills, personalities - everything that people who are not mentally ill or disabled have. You need to write characters like us accordingly.

I’m not saying don’t write characters who have mental illnesses or disorders. Please, write them! We need that kind of diversity! I’m just saying that you need to do your research and make a concentrated effort to understand what you are writing and to communicate information about what you’re writing to your readers. Whether you’re writing a character who has trouble processing speech and needs a few seconds to parse what other people are saying, a character who needs to stim in order to focus, a character who needs a friend to read the menu board at a new coffee house to them, or a character who’s annoyed because places that legally should be wheelchair-accessible aren’t, do your research. Write the character’s personality, traits, likes, dislikes, etc. with the knowledge that you cannot separate the person from the illness or disability and that they are not less of a person because of that.

Now for some other perspectives on this and some resources:

There are so many more resources out there (some of these links lead to more links) but I hope that this small sampling can get you started on the right track. Good luck!

-Kyo

SOC Character Bootcamp mental illness chronic illness disability
winterbramble

Thanks so much for your ask! I’ve meant to do a tutorial like this for a long time. This is the way that I draw big girls, though it’s quite a short and basic tutorial. I hope it helps!

the “area of gain” part was pretty much taken directly from -here-, a VERY informative and helpful tutorial. Here’s a couple of tutorials that I think are pretty good: link and link.

tutorial fat chubby art art tutorial brambletutorials
heartlessharless

5 ways to increase/decrease suspense in your writing

Suspense is one of the trickier parts of writing to manage effectively because, as the author, you can’t experience your story the way a reader does. If you don’t have enough suspense, it can be difficult to keep your readers interested. If you have too much, frustrated and stressed-out readers might throw your book against the wall. Too much suspense can even backfire - if you try to keep your readers constantly on edge, they can stop taking things seriously and the end result is as though you never included any suspense at all.

So how can you tell if you’ve reached the right balance? Unfortunately, I can’t answer that for you. Some things really do require feedback from honest and insightful readers. Once you have that feedback, however, there are easy tricks to adjusting the level of suspense without a drastic re-write. Here are my five favorite methods.

Promises and Payoffs

  • INCREASE SUSPENSE by promising something huge and then giving your reader something unexpected. To borrow an example from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, imagine a teenage boy and girl sneaking into an empty building. Everything from the costumes to the lighting is designed to make you uneasy about the girl’s safety but, in the end, she’s the vampire. Give the audience something sensational and they won’t be disappointed that you didn’t deliver on what you originally promised.
  • DECREASE SUSPENSE by promising less than you plan to deliver. For example, if you plan to kill off a character as they walk through a dark alley, let them worry about being mugged rather than murdered. Not only is it less suspenseful, the payoff is more shocking.

Characters are Crucial

  • INCREASE SUSPENSE by shifting the focus to a character who’s more involved in the action or one who has more at stake. Even if you have a single POV character, another can come in and demand that character’s attention, along with the readers’.
  • DECREASE SUSPENSE by focusing on a character who’s more concerned with a secondary goal. Subplots are a fantastic way to give your readers some room to breathe.

Calm vs. Chaos

  • INCREASE SUSPENSE by cutting back on the action. Suspense flourishes in the quiet moments when your characters have time to think and to anticipate what may be in store for them.
  • DECREASE SUSPENSE by giving your characters a big, exciting mess to deal with. Even when that mess causes more problems and puts more pressure on your characters in the long run, you’ve still created an oasis where both they and the readers are too distracted to worry about how the big picture will pan out.

Devil’s in the Details

  • INCREASE SUSPENSE by concentrating on the details of the setting. Horror movies are great at this - every creak of a door, every shadow across a wall keeps the audience immersed in the experience and tense with anticipation.
  • DECREASE SUSPENSE by breaking the “show, don’t tell” rule and allow exposition to help you move things along. You don’t need to take readers through every aspect of your story in excruciating detail. It’s okay to gloss over some things and it helps readers relax because they know you’re not going to be springing any surprises on them just yet.

Ticking Time-Bomb

  • INCREASE SUSPENSE by imposing a deadline that your characters struggle to meet. It’s one of the oldest and most obvious tricks in the book, but very effective.
  • DECREASE SUSPENSE by allowing your characters to believe that the deadline has been met or pushed back. If they (and the readers) believe that they’ve accomplished their goal or bought themselves more time, it relieves pressure and allows everyone to relax until the truth’s revealed.
writing tips writing advice writing suspense angpent i told you i was going to do this six or seven hundred years ago this is super long and still feels too short to actually be helpful and obviously not everything will work for every story and there are occasions when these will not work to their intended effect i'm not psychic i don't know anything about your story these are just a jumping-off point
octoswan

I made these as a way to compile all the geographical vocabulary that I thought was useful and interesting for writers. Some descriptors share categories, and some are simplified, but for the most part everything is in its proper place. Not all the words are as useable as others, and some might take tricky wording to pull off, but I hope these prove useful to all you writers out there!

(save the images to zoom in on the pics)

writing writing reference writing resources writing ref writing tips thank god for google images geography