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I'd say read through these to help you structure your characters. https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/write-character-arcs/ I don't know if more experienced writers agree with this or call it a load of bull, but I myself do find characters most interesting if they have a flaw or misconception that impedes their success in the story during the first act, and which they must accept or overcome by the final act to achieve success. You can then play with this framework by having characters fail to overcome their flaw, or misattribute failures to one of their good traits instead, or double down on their flaw entirely. When reading the articles on the site above, you have to remember that the "Lie" as the author calls it, is such a flaw or misconception. As a writer, you have the final say in what is a flaw and what isn't. That's part of the internal rules of the world you create. If the central theme of your story is "violence is cool and good" then the flaw your character might have is their unwilligness to fight, or they might wrongfully believe that people are inherently good. On the other hand, a story about compromise would consider these traits strengths that let your character resolve their plot after overcoming their violent tendencies or misconception of others. On the subject of structuring specifically, you can plan these character arcs out to more or less coincide with the plot beats. At the end of your first act, the protagonist should have suffered as a result of their flaw, enough to know they need to change if they want to get what they want. By the final act, the protagonist must have dabbled with solutions and alternative approaches enough to make a final decision in how to tackle the problem. That's when you decide whether they find the "truth" and get their happy ending, or stray further from it and end in tragedy. The latter is effective for side characters that you use as influences or mirrors to the protagonist.
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Feb 27, 2017 17:03
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Ironic Twist posted:Can everyone share their own strategies for writing dialogue? Besides stalking/wiretapping Dialogue in novels is a "best of" of the dialogue you have IRL. Keep it short, don't meander, every sentence needs to achieve something (even if it's just showing/revealing the personality of the speaker). So basically think about your own dialogues and think "what was the essential part oft his 10-minute talk and how can I distill this into single lines" and avoid the "uhs" and "ums" and repeating yourself.
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Mar 10, 2017 23:28
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That was a good read, yeah. I do like you touching upon "reader expectations" because I never really linked that with genres specifically. It's the reason why so much fantasy seems to be formulaic as well: the reader signed up for a story about elves, dragons, possibly kings and queens. To market yourself as a fantasy story and then to not deliver on that is a waste of your reader's time, no matter how good your story is. Conversely, people who might like your story, dodge your book because they expect traditional fantasy poo poo and they have 0 interest in any of that world-saving magic nonsense.
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Jun 21, 2017 13:40
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Dr. Kloctopussy posted:You might want to go check the date on a newspaper, because if you're finding mostly Elves and Dragons on your fantasy shelves you may have traveled 20 years into the past. I recently read Robin Hobb and although probably not an elf, the Fool (if that's his name in English?) is definitely similar enough to count. Spades of dragons though. EDIT: I may have been reading fantasy books written 20 years ago
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Jun 23, 2017 17:26
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In my defence I did see a Belgian book called "the dragon queen" in a store recently. It was written in 2014. So maybe us belgians are just traditionalists. EDIT:  Published in 2013 actually. But it's the first book in a trilogy! According to the description on goodreads, it's about an evil queen who uses magic to plant thoughts in her subjects' minds. In this tyrannical queendom, the people only look forward to a lethal competition that is organized whereby the contestants vie for the throne. Thus far, the Queen has won every single competition, but this time, her daughter unexpectedly registered to vie for the throne herself... Deltasquid fucked around with this message at 12:12 on Jun 26, 2017 |
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Jun 24, 2017 13:37
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So, two prose-related questions: First of all, a large part of prose seems to be about cadence and rhythm. I've started reading out sentences out loud to check if it's easy to trip over them, but I'm still having issue coming up with good alternatives if I find a sentence is clunky, and coming up with little clusters of words that roll off the tongue easily together is still quite hard to me. For example, recently I saw a judgment of the Court of Justice of the EU of all places, which stated that "[the Member States and the EU] must endeavour to adapt to each other." I think these words, put together, have a certain je ne sais quoi. Is there any way you guys come up with these or any sort of method, or is it mostly just being used to playing with language and recognizing opportunities as they present themselves? Secondly, as we all know, words can evoke a specific atmosphere, but words can also evoke a place. I remember, months ago, seeing a series of books whose name I forgot, but they were essentially a series of thesauruses where the author compiled words that evoked a specific location, like "The Mediterranean" had a series of herbs, trees, plants, things which immediately evoked a feeling of mediterranean countries. I assume they were words like olives, olive trees... But I'm having thinking of more than that. Similarly, one that evoked "China" had words like jade, bamboo, tigers... Etc. What are your experiences with such compilations, if any? Does anybody here use a particularly good one, or are there any free compilations or methods that essentially achieve the same thing? As someone who isn't a first language English speaker, I'm sometimes worried there are words that I didn't even know existed which evoke a certain mood or feeling and which I could use. Using a generic catch-all thesaurus is also a bit too broad for this purpose if you don't know specifically what word you'd like a synonym for.
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Oct 10, 2017 09:25
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Yeah I know, that's why I'm trying my hand at fiction writing. I need to move away from the poisoned well that are my studies. Still, that's one specific instance off the top of my head that had a certain cadence I liked.
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Oct 10, 2017 13:34
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The Sean posted:How many of you include romance subplots in your novels? They're usually things I find boring in books and movies if the genre is not romance (which I don't like, either); for me romance subplots often feel analogous to plot armor in application. For instance, a general action movie with one male and one female protagonist often results in them hooking up and there's no tension that it won't really happen in spite of how it's initially presented. Make it interesting then. Have them hook up around the 25% mark instead of the end, and see how the rest of the story plays out. Do they end up breaking up again? Do they have to overcome some personal struggles to make it work? It's perfectly valid to use the romance subplot as way to round out your characters if you don't go with the cliché of "protagonist wins, gets the girl, they live happily ever after" If you think romance subplots feel like plot armor in application, play with expectations and make it interesting by having the romance abruptly broken off or toxic or what have you. Or just omit it, if it'd get in the way of the story.
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Nov 2, 2017 23:09
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You can also have subplots that are kicked off by more mundane necessities (e.g. Zack really wants an apple pie) and which lead to him meeting lizard-folk who struggle to fit in themselves (e.g. a blind lizard who spends a bunch of time at the bakery?) You can then toy around with expanding on how the lizardfolk treat their ill or handicapped, the elderly, how they experience the world (do they have the same senses as humans?), how Zack reacts to that... Off the top of my head I could think of a sub-plot involving someone who gets kicked out of their hobby club for some reason, a young lizardling from a petty noble family that has fallen out of grace, someone who was caught red-handed for a petty crime when they were young and who were appropriately punished and regret their actions, but they feel things will never be quite the same, etc. Your world might not involve lizard nobility or crime & punishment or whatnot, but think about that kind of stuff. Think about who else could have trouble fitting in, and depending on the target age group, make the sub-plots heavier stuff or more lighthearted. You can probably reinforce the central theme of the book by having Zack interact with others who are outcasts of some sort, even of their "own" lizard community, and helping them get accepted back into their group of friends/social circle. Think about how to weave worldbuilding into these plots, show different aspects of lizardfolk community, and different ways people can be ostracized. I guess, if you really want to tie this into the main plot, these side stories provide Zack with "allies" for a lack of better term, who vouch for him at the novel's climax? I think that's how I'd do it. Deltasquid fucked around with this message at 10:46 on Feb 26, 2018 |
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Feb 26, 2018 10:42
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The tension could escalate not in the severity of the attack but rather on how close it actually gets to killing her. Maybe attempt 1 leaves nobody harmed but establishes the threat, attempt 2 wounds somebody close to the heroine, and attempt 3 actually gets close to killing her and leaves her with a permanent wound of sorts? Something like that, as well as maybe in how much collateral damage the assassins are willing to cause. Attempt 1 is clean, attempt 2 poisons a bunch of people, attempt 3 is a bloodbath on the guards as the attackers get more desperate to succeed?
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May 23, 2018 22:20
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