The Skellingcorner

[legit-writing-tips]

Legit Tip #172

“Writing About the Loss of Parents”

A lot of characters grow up having lost parents - typically because it’s plot convenient and makes for great emotional backstory. 

As someone who actually grew up without my parents in real life, though, I know from firsthand experience that a lot of writers have a difficult time getting it right with characters, and simply don’t understand how to go about this process.

I remember one time in a discussion about Harry Potter, someone said that it was “ridiculous” that Harry would be so attached to the memory of his mother and father considering that he never knew them, and that he would mourn their loss. This was the silliest thing that I had ever heard!

I never knew my mother. She passed away when I was four months old, but I’ve mourned her loss throughout my life. I’m twenty-eight years old now, and it still pains me to think about what I missed out on because of her death. 

I’ve lost others, like the grandmother who raised me. It’s not the same kind of loss. The sense of loss that you feel is the loss of potential. 

When Harry Potter is staring into the Mirror of Erised, he’s mourning the family that he’ll never have the chance to experience. He’s mourning the fact that he’ll never have a mother and father to welcome him home, to celebrate his accomplishments, or to scold him when he gets into trouble. 

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Another very common emotion for children who are left behind when their parents dies is guilt, especially when the people around them are still mourning the loss of the parent. This is something that I experienced a lot as a child, especially since my mother was very young when she passed away. (I’ve seen this discussed a lot in connection with the Steven Universe fandom, though I haven’t actually seen the show myself - sorry I can’t discuss that in more detail!)

Guilt in connection with a parent’s death can be a powerful feeling for a young child, and can lead to a lot of anxiety. It can make a child or young adult feel anxious about the fact that they were “left behind” and they may worry that they’re not “good enough,” especially if they’re subjected to a lot of discussion about how great their deceased parent was (which is common when people are still in mourning for the deceased parent). 

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Another important thing to talk about is the fact that a child who has lost a parent can have extreme difficulty when it comes to separation anxiety. Even if the loss occurs very young, they will typically have strong feelings of anxiety when it comes to thinking about any kind of separation from an adult figure they have an attachment to. 

They may worry more about the death of the adult figures in their life, especially if those adult figures are older (as may happen if they’re being raised by a grandparent). I was very worried about my grandmother and great-grandmother and wouldn’t participate in sleepovers because I couldn’t deal with separation, for example. 

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And finally, as was already mentioned, a child who has lost parents at a young age has been exposed to death earlier than most children and, as such, may have a bit of a preoccupation with the idea of death that other children won’t. This could give them anxiety, or even a “morbid” outlook. They may be more “mature” than other children. 

They may worry about being hurt or killed themselves. They may be in need of reassurance from the adults in their life that they’re safe and nothing bad will happen to them. (Take into account the way their parent died especially when it comes to the source of the child’s anxiety - I had a big hangup when it came to cars and driving as a child). 

If your child is in a religious environment, they may think more about religion than other children, or even have anxiety surrounding their religion. They may worry more about whether religion is real or not - or, conversely, religion may be a big source of comfort for them because it means their parent is watching over them (if this is the sort of religion they believe in). 

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Ultimately, just remember that a child who has lost a parent is going to have a lot of complicated emotions to deal with. If they don’t have a strong and supportive adult figure in their life to help them out, then they are likely to be a little bit emotionally damaged by the time they reach adolescence, and you’re going to need to deal with that as a writer. 

Some of the things that you might need to work out include how they’ve dealt with their feelings of loss, how they’ve dealt with feeling “different” from their peers, and how they cope without strong parental figures if they don’t have them. 

[writeworld-blog]

[amandaonwriting]

Novel Structure

[writerswritecompany]

I decided to create these cheat sheets to help you show a character’s state of mind. Obviously, a character may exhibit a number of these behaviours. For example, he may be shocked and angry, or shocked and happy. Use these combinations as needed.

[nownovel]

New Post has been published on http://www.nownovel.com/blog/writing-a-good-book-15-ingredients/

Writing a good book: 10 ingredients of great novels

Writing a good book is something every fiction writer aspires to. When writers ask for feedback from the Now Novel community, a popular question is ‘Is my idea good enough?’ Having a great story idea to start with helps. Yet a satisfying novel is a combination of multiple important components.

[writeworld-blog]

how-to-write-a-book-now.com

How to Write a Synopsis of Your Novel

by Glen C. Strathy

To sell your novel, you may need to know how to write a synopsis, even if you are a pantser-type novelist who can write a whole novel without making an outline first. Agents and publishers will often ask for a synopsis along with sample chapters before they request a complete manuscript.

The biggest mistake most people make when they try to write a synopsis for the first time is to create a bare bones plot summary, along the lines of “First this happens, then this happens, then this happens…” Synopses written this way tend to be so dry and boring even the author would have trouble understanding why anyone would want to read the full novel.

Imagine, for example, if a sports writer described a hockey game as “First one team scored. Then the other team scored. Then the first team scored twice. Then the game ended.” Pretty boring, yes?

- See more at: http://www.how-to-write-a-book-now.com/how-to-write-a-synopsis.html#sthash.luoazyx1.dpuf

Read More →

[writeworld-blog]

Reverse-Engineering Your Character Arc

lunabeck said: Hello! I did try looking around, but all questions on character development tend to be about HOW to develop them. my problem is a bit different. because i know her development, and how she is at the end of the story and all that, I keep writing her like that in the beginning. so pretty much I’m having trouble writing her BEFORE the she changes cause i keep writing her like she already had everything happen to her. I’m sorry its confusing, thank you!!!

Thank you for your question, lunabeck!

I’d spend some time figuring out what changes will be made to this character over the course of the story and why these changes are made. Where along the plotline of the story does your character acquire some of these changes you’re talking about? Why do these changes occur? What was your character like before the changes?

Examples? You betcha!

Example One:

So let’s say that your character (let’s call her Tara) feels a certain way about this guy Bert at the end of the story. She likes him. Cool. Did Tara always like Bert? Is it a worthy plot point to make her not like Bert at some time before the end of the story? If so, what changed her mind?

Perhaps Tara met Bert at the beginning of the story and they totally started off on the wrong foot. Maybe Bert insulted Tara’s friend. Maybe Bert had had a few too many Long Island Iced Teas and acted foolishly. Fair enough. It happens to the best of us. Over the course of the story, Tara has to grow to like Bert, though, right? Because at the end of the story, she likes him, and we know that going in. So what changes?

Bert could get a kitten. Everyone likes kittens. Then maybe Bert helps Tara move. That’s always endearing. Maybe Bert apologizes to Tara for insulting her friend, and Tara realizes that she’s been super hard on Bert for months over some tiny thing. Maybe this interaction puts Tara into an introspective mood, and she finally understands how judgemental she can be toward strangers because of her own fear of inadequacy. Then she and Bert move forward as equals in their friendship. Roll Credits.

The point is that Tara doesn’t always have to have liked Bert. It might actually be more interesting if they don’t start off as besties, you know? Tension between characters is conflict, and conflict drives stories. Maybe play around with what changing relationships might do for Tara’s character arc. If she likes Bert when she didn’t before, how has that changed her emotionally? How would such a change affect her reactions to events in the beginning of the story versus the end of the story?

Example Two:

Maybe Tara moonwalks her way through the story as a kind, generous person and an epic dancer. That’s fantastic (and definitely fun to have at parties), but it doesn’t have to be that way.

What if Tara starts off sort of dull and rude? And she can’t dance. Lame. 

Basically, what if Beginning-of-the-Book Tara and End-of-the-Book Tara are exact opposites? How could you make that a thing?

What events would have to occur in the story to change Tara from rude and dull to kind and generous, from a non-dancer to an epic dancer? 

Maybe she starts going to therapy to figure out how to transform her critical eye into a force for good instead of evil. Instead of valuing the short-lived high that comes from commenting on other people’s shortcomings, Tara could teach herself to use that critical eye to identify problems and her considerable intellect to work with others on creating solutions. Boom. Rudeness into kind generosity. 

Now, a change like this could take the whole story to evolve properly. This isn’t a one-trip-to-the-therapist change; this is a life-altering choice Tara has to make. It needs space. It needs time.

What about the dancing, you ask? Well, have her take lessons. (That sort of takes care of the dullness, too. Everyone needs a hobby!) Maybe dance class is where she meets Bert!

(These are, of course, extreme examples. Most character arcs are slightly more nuanced than this.)

If you’ve already got a character that is, in your mind, a finished project, it’s worthwhile to spend some time slowly unbraiding that character. Where do they seem weakest in terms of personality? How can you exploit these flaws in the beginning of the story? What personal or external struggles would cause even a subtle change in their personality?

At the end of the story, Tara, your character, is still human. If, say, Tara went from being incredibly ungrateful to counting her blessings, it is very rarely so drastic a change. Those are the kind of changes you really only see in articles about character development because they make for the clearest examples. They seem forced, inhuman even. It is more likely that if Tara starts off the story being incredibly ungrateful, she will still struggle with being ungrateful at the end of the story, if only internally. After all, the only type of finished person is a dead person. 

So if you have an end-of-the-book character in your mind and you’re trying to chart her journey, and maybe she has a habit of taking things for granted, or struggles with it a little, you can trace this character trait back to when it was at its worst and start there. You might even think about mapping out Tara’s development. Creating a map might help you visualize your character’s development vs. the story’s progression if that is where your trouble lies. It might help with timing and syncing up development with events in the story with each step of the character arc.

Essentially what you’re doing with character arcs is throwing rocks (story events) at a wall (the character) over a given period of time (the story). The rocks chip the paint. They crack the moulding. They dent the drywall. Eventually, if the rock is big enough or you throw enough little rocks at one spot on the wall, you’ll make a hole. At that point, the wall is changed forever. Even patching the hole won’t be perfect, and a patch can’t ever undo the fact that there was once a hole.

To reverse-engineer a character arc, figure out the chips and cracks and holes in the wall of your character, then find rocks that seem to match and decide how to throw them. 

Thanks again for your question!

-C and Hannah (theroadpavedwithwords)

[annakayart-blog]

Raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens, snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes, leather clad warrior babes being badasses, these are a few of my favourite things…. #cintiq #digitalart #workinprogress #fantasyart #artists #illustration #illustrator

[linestorm]

200 words that describe light

[everythingindierp-blog]

10 Underused Character Questions ~

Introduction -

1. Name:
2. Age:
3. Your favorite picture of your muse’s fc:

Questions -

1. What would be their twitter name? What sorts of tweets would they tweet?
2. What’s their favorite genre of movies? Of music?
3. What’s on their top queue on Netflix?
4. What’s their favorite scent? Do they smell like that?
5. Apple or Android? 
6. Favorite Season? Least favorite season?
7. Are they a bottom or top or versatile? 
8. Describe their morning routine. Do they wake up early or sleep in? Do they press the snooze button a bunch of times or do they immediately get up?
9. If they were to be compared to a canon character, who would that be? (Spirit animal)
10. Finish this sentence, muse: What would ___ do?

tag five people so they can get to know their muse too!

[korratea]

oh god but like. the best ships are the ones where they’ve been shown to work great as a team. where the characters balance each other out without eclipsing the other person but, instead, bring out the best in each other to get a job done or fix a problem. if i die young bury me in mutually beneficial partnerships

[thewickwheat]

@janearts let me dress up Bodran and now I’m at peace in my soul

We also learned looking at all the different concepts sketches that we were giving Bodran a very fantasy/medieval biker aesthetic.