IMPORTANT LINKS!

#PLOT

#WRITING PROCESS

#SCENE HELP

#GENRE

#STYLES

#CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT AND DESCRIPTIONS!!!!!!!!!!!

#WORLD BUILDING

#BLOG RECS

#RESOURCE BLOGS

IMPROVE WRITING: 

http://www.write-better-fiction.com/writing-blog.html

http://www.writerlylife.com/home/

http://grammar.about.com/

ALSO SOME COPYRIGHTS

http://copyright.gov/eco/

HELPFUL WEBSITES

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/

http://www.writing.com/

http://www.writingexcuses.com/

http://procrastinatingwritersblog.com/

http://terribleminds.com/

http://litreactor.com/

https://rowanvalebooks.wordpress.com/

fictionwritingtips:

In order to create a relatable character, you must think about them as having several layers. Knowing and choosing character traits is important because you don’t want them to be one dimensional. It’s all not as simple as saying “this person is mean” or “this person is kind”. Think about the…

Location, Location, Location: The Fundamentals of Choosing a Setting

writeworld:

sunshineboi94 asked: How important is location to a story? I’m asking about specific location, not setting. I know landscape, climate, and environment can all be important details but is it necessary to give an exact location to your story? Personally, I feel like it makes it less relatable, but I could benefit from some outside opinion. Also, if you are to give it a location does it have to be a real place? Not a fantasyland but a fake place such as Mayberry?

Figuring out your setting is a little frightening; it can often feel like you’re locking yourself into a decision. Location details are important as they often inform your plot and characters and create the story’s backdrop, so it’s worth it to explore this topic.

Whether or not you decide to use a “real place” (such as New York City) or a fictional place (such as Fictionville) is a complicated decision, so here are a few things to keep in mind.

First, let’s talk about the advantages of real locations.

• No world-building required. New York already exists. In this circumstance, you don’t have to worry about laying out an entire location. This gives you liberty in the sense that you can spend energy and time on other parts of your story, but it has limitations that will be explored later in this article.
• Strong cultural roots. As something of an extension of the world-building point, when you use a place that really exists, all of the information about that point is at your fingertips. This means research, but it also means that nothing can slip through the cracks. If you want to refer to something in your story, you can refer to it without having to think of its world-building ramifications. For example, if your characters decide to go see a musical, you can research whether or not the town in which your story takes place has a theater, as opposed to having to ask yourself, “would this town that I’m inventing logically have a theater?”
• Name recognition. Everybody knows about New York. If your story takes place in New York, they know what that means and they probably know about it on some level. Using it as your location will allow all of the reader’s knowledge about the place to fill in the setting. This is not, however, an excuse to not use strong details in terms of your setting. (We will talk about details in a jiffy).

Now that we’ve gone over some of the more general advantages to working with a real location, here are a few things to keep in mind while doing so:

• Get it right. This means research. Even if you live in this place, it means research. Misrepresenting a place, whether it’s a matter of geography, culture, or something in between, is a travesty and will be a failure in your story. Make sure, when you include a detail or piece of information, that it makes sense, is credible, and contributes to the image of the place that you are trying to express.
• Go to there! The best way to research is to experience the location. Look around for concrete details: what do the buildings look like, how do people get around, what sort of slang do they use, what are the more interesting or prevalent aspects of the culture. Of course, research is critical in representing a place accurately, and the most accurate way of research is going there and learning about it first-hand.
• Understand the culture. If you cannot visit the place for whatever reason, find resources. Use the Internet, books, film, television, and anything you can get your hands on. Try to immerse yourself in the place as best as you can. Looking something up on Wikipedia is cool, but not enough. Listen to music that came out of that place. Read the books. Watch the films, the local news, the sports teams. Check the weather. Talk to the people. Get primary sources. Get to the heart of that place’s culture.
• Google Maps. Even if you live in a place, you can still mess up. It happens all the time. Which side of the street is that café on? Are you positive? Completely? Might as well check. Google Maps (especially street view) is a resource to which writers of older generations did not have access. Take advantage of it. Also make use atlases, maps, and anything that can clear up any geographical confusion. There’s no reason to make a mistake in the age when everything is instantly knowable.
• Be convincing. Now that you have all of this information, you have to write it in a way that builds the place for the reader. They haven’t done the research that you have, and so it is your responsibility to create the world as you know it. There are a couple of ways to go about this:
  • Use concrete detail. Show them the place. Giving strong sensory detail is the best way to get readers involved and interested in a place with which they’re unfamiliar. If the reader is familiar with the place, using concrete details will make them feel like they know what’s going on and they’ll feel that you are portraying it accurately.
  • Use dialect. What do these people call a long sandwich? Is it a sub, a hoagie, a hero? Getting in touch with vernacular can make or break how convincing your story is. Dialogue should blend in with landscape; make it convincing. A misplaced slang word can throw off your reader’s sense of place. Be careful.
    In this vein, here is a helpful article regarding writing accents in a story.
  • Let the story fit. Stories aren’t built for every setting. Setting is a living part of the story that interacts with characters, plot, and everything else that goes on the page. If your story does not make sense in your chosen setting, choose a different setting or choose a different story. A disconnect between those two ideas will cause a collapse.

Now that we’ve explored real settings in some depth, let’s take a look at fictional settings. First: why use one?

• You are in total control. Nothing shows up without your consent. You can construct anything and put it in your story, as long as it doesn’t feel too far-fetched (and even if it does!). If you need to include a boarding school, or a café, or a societal norm or value, then you don’t have to worry if such an institution already exists, because your place is fictional.
• The research is all on you. If you don’t understand the Subway system, for example, you might have to do a lot of research if you’re writing a story that takes place in New York. If you’re building your own place, you can design whatever public transportation system that you like, which runs on your characters’ schedules. Perks. By not having to conform to a real place, you don’t have to worry about your story being an accurate representation of anything.
  This does not preclude the fact that your story should be realistic in terms of how certain kinds of places operate. If Fictionville is a rural area with a population in the low hundreds, you still need to make sure that you are accurately portraying that kind of place.

There are a few things to focus on while developing Fictionville:

• World-build. Even if you are not writing fantasy, any created fictional place should be planned well. Treat it like you have to create a universe from scratch, because you basically are. The more fully you think about Fictionville and the more you understand its history, culture, and people, the richer it will come across on the page. Here’s an article on the basics of world-building. Applying its principles to your own place will be helpful. 
• Understand geography. You don’t have to make a map, but you should know the ins and outs of your town on a geographic level. If making a map would help you, do it, but you should at least know how large Fictionville is, how many people live there, what is located in what place, how to people get from one place to the next, etc., so that you do not make logistical errors in your story.
• Place it. If applicable, try placing Fictionville somewhere in the real world. Maybe it’s in northern Ohio, or just outside of London. This, like many aspects of the planning and development process, does not have to be included in the narrative itself, but will help give Fictionville cultural roots.

Finally, some general remarks about writing any kind of setting.

• Use concrete details to your advantage. Your setting, no matter where it is, will live or die by the details you use. You do not have to describe every element of a setting, but using certain ones that trigger the sense can familiarize readers with the location. This is a somewhat lengthy post on detail that includes a section on setting in the middle.
• Assume unfamiliarity. Writing your story with the assumption that the reader has never seen your setting in person forces to you try even harder to bring it to life. Knowing that the reader is unfamiliar can make it daunting and difficult to write setting, but this notion should motivate you to represent the place as faithfully and richly as possible.
• Bus schedules aren’t enough. There are two sides to setting: logistics and soul. If a character gets on a specific bus route, it’s probably a good idea to research if such a bus actually exists, but this is only one side of writing about setting. The part that is infinitely harder is understanding the spirit of a location, what makes it tick, what motivates its citizens, and how this culture matches your story. Whether your place is real or made-up, this will be your greatest challenge in writing setting.

And so, which one should you pick? Like always, there is no single, correct way to write something. Hopefully this article explained some of the advantages and requirements of either writing about a real place or a fictional one. At the end, the reader should not be able to tell.

Further Reading:

• Our Setting Tag
• Writing Somewhere You Haven’t Been
• Creating a Setting

Favorite Books for Real Settings:

• Dubliners by James Joyce (for Dublin)
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (for the American West)
• Typee by Herman Melville (for Nuku Hiva)

Favorite Books for Fictional Settings:

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (for Maycomb, Alabama)
• The Harry Potter Series (for Hogwarts)
• Rabbit, Run by John Updike (for Mt. Judge, Pennsylvania)

We appreciate the question; if you have any queries, comments, or concerns about this post or writing in general, please send us a message via our ask box!

- O

seasalticecream32:

Of all overused tropes, the most prevalent (even in “professional” writing) is the “abusive parent” trope. If your MC doesn’t have abusive parents, then it is almost a guarantee that one or more of your supporting characters have abusive parents (and it’s almost always abusive mothers.) I know that I’m not one to talk as I’ve got a story in progress that’s main plot centers on an abusive mother and an emotionally manipulative villain (Bees), but I have been reading a lot of stuff lately and man, that seems to be the main motivating factor for most MC’s traits.

So here are some traumas for your MC besides abusive parents! Add some variety, learn to write different and interesting narratives!:

1.) MC sees something traumatic as a child that alters their life in irrevocable ways. (The Nick Adams Series)

2.) MC takes part in something as a child that they now realize is morally ambiguous or even outright morally wrong. (All of Summer in a Day)

3.) MC witnesses a crime as a child.

4.) MC is a bully in school and doesn’t realize it until they are confronted, leaving them unsure of their social interactions for a long time. (This happens in people’s lives more than you might think.)
5.) MC experiences great fear at an early age due to an accident (ex.: falls from a great height or gets left behind at a superstore on accident.)

6.) MC loses grandparents or siblings at a young age.

7.) MC survives a wild animal attack of some sort.

8.) A physical marker on the MC leaves them in constant anxiety over their physical features.

9.) MC meets or talks to someone who leaves a lasting negative impression on them, either of humanity or of their family specifically. (Otherwise non-abusive parents behave in unfavorable ways towards someone else.)

10.) MC gets ahold of medication or drugs on accident and ends up in the hospital, left with a distrust of medication in general that lasts throughout their life.

And that’s just for potentially traumatizing events that shape part of your MC’s traits. There are all sorts of things that could motivate or inspire your MC to behave in questionable or curious ways. The world does not begin and end with abusive parents in fiction, and before you do use that trope I would suggest making sure you fully understand the extent of what your writing.

I am reading a book right now that uses child molestation (and an abusive mother), abandonment (by a single mother), two different characters have alcoholic mothers (both single mothers), and a sexually promiscuous mother. The narrative suffers greatly for this, bc the writer has NO IDEA how to handle such sensitive and painful subjects. Remember, it’s very difficult to write about these subjects with the sensitivity and respect they deserve. So please use these tropes sparingly, and please avoid them if you feel that you may not be able to write them respectfully.

“

As a writer, creating characters is probably the most important thing you do. Get it wrong, and the story will be wrong no matter how well plotted.

Here are 25 things to know.

Characters that have everything they need and want in life are pretty damn boring.
In the real world, strong female characters go by another name: women. Try writing about them.
Not every character needs to have some past trauma simmering beneath the surface to be interesting. Well adjusted people can be just as deep and complex if you give them the right goals.
There’s a difference between being quintessential and being a cartoon, but not a big one.
Watching a character fail but keep trying is usually more interesting than watching them succeed.
Don’t judge your characters—even the villains. If you do, they’ll lack truth. Instead, find out why they are the way they are, and accept them for it.
Often what we remember most about memorable characters is how they interact externally—think, Mulder and Scully, Romeo and Juliet, Lucy and Ethel. The interaction, the relationship, these are traits in and of themselves.
Real people sometimes like lascivious and licentious things: porn or weed or orgies, or porn, weed and orgies—you get the idea. So, why can’t your character like some of these things, too?
Sometimes they should die.
A name is a terrible thing to waste, and it can shape your character more than you might think. Choose wisely.
There are no recipes for great characters, but if there were — the chef would probably create something simple with a few, fresh and fantastic ingredients instead of a plethora of overly processed junk.
Archetypes are for people who are too afraid to be creative.
Even an evil character who’s evil for evil’s sake has redeeming qualities that allow us to empathize. Find them and play them up.
It’s okay if the character’s gender is the last thing about them you decide.
At a base level, every character wants the same things: food, shelter, sex — how the these primary instincts, the id if you will, interact with the ego (personal identity) can be an endless source of exploration.
Just because a character lives in the past doesn’t mean she has to conform to outdated stereotypes.
They all have flaws, and it’s the flaws that make them who they are.
In real life, we strive to avoid conflict. But in fiction, characters who always agree have no life—at least, not one worth reading about.
A character’s back story is the least important thing in the story.
Don’t be surprised when a character you’ve created does something you don’t expect. That’s called magic and you should just get out of its way.
The thing your character wants most might never surface in the story, but it still drives every. single. thing. they. do.
Real people are seldom interesting enough to make great characters. Create, don’t imitate.
They don’t always tell the truth.
Likewise, they don’t always say what’s on their minds.
When drawn correctly, when given goals and even just a few layers, most of the other details fall into place.

”

-Jusin Mclachlan
25 things about creating characters

writers

garrisonbabe:

• write that sentence, that dialogue, that scene that terrifies you
• don’t delete shit, just move it to another document
• have a “bits and pieces” document for all the odds and ends you can’t fit anywhere else
• think of the color of a person’s eyes, imagine something reflected in them, now write that scene
• fiction doesn’t have to be 100% accurate, don’t research yourself to boredom
• i’m being serious there’s a thing called suspension of disbelief and it’s magical (yes that’s me making a joke)
• write something that makes you cry
• write something that makes you laugh
• write something you can’t explain to other people
• write something you won’t remember until you read it the next day
• don’t read about the publishing industry until you really, really need to. all it will do is make you unbelievably tired
• listen to music from open world RPG video games, you’re welcome
• always take a small journal or some paper and a pen with you
• write by hand in a journal every once in a while
• put the ending of your story in the beginning and see what happens
• listen to input from other people. yes you’re the writer, but they’re the reader and they want to help you make something spectacular
• said is not dead dude like wtf
• the thesaurus is shiny and lovely and a great resource but don’t let words get in the way of your story telling, you don’t need to write prose as poetry for it to be beautiful
• just finish the draft first, worry about perfection after
• yes, you do have talent
• yes, you can do this. you already are
  

Three Things You Need in an Awesome Short Story

30secfantasy:

In an age of constant distraction and novelty from a thousand different sources fighting for your attention, getting your writing in front of people and having them read it in its entirety gets more and more difficult with every addition to Amazon. However, if you can find someone with a few seconds or minutes to spare, putting a short story in front of them can be a good way to showcase your writing chops. Also, if novel writing is more your thing, you can use short stories to try out different methods of writing that can be brought into your core work. After writing several hundred, I’ve found a pretty good method to generating a self-contained short story that you can knock out in fifteen to thirty minutes. I tend to develop my stories by determining conflict, resolution, and a beginning in that order.

1. Conflict

You absolutely need to have a conflict to have a story. Anything else is more-or-less ‘slice of life’ writing, which absolutely can be interesting in its own right, but it’s not something the majority of the reading population demands. Wikipedia has a good starting list of different types of conflict that are commonly found in literature and every grade-school english class. There are an unimaginably large amount of ways to spin these conflicts into different settings or themes.

It is important to note that the conflict should not be overly complex. For a short story, only focusing on one character’s struggles is enough to keep it interesting while keeping the word count at bay. It’s extremely tempting to go above and beyond and write out every intricacy of what is going on, who is at odds with whom/what, etc, but this oftentimes takes time away from the next most interesting and important thing to have in your short story.   

2. Resolve that conflict

If the conflict is not resolved, then the story is more of a cliffhanger than an actual tale: great to branch off of, but terrible to end with forever.

A lot of the time resolving your conflict with a twist or a big reveal tends to be more satisfying than doing what’s clearly obvious for the characters. Sometimes this ends up being a punchline, and can cheapens the story if it seems too random or there was no lead-up to it. When you’re done with your first draft, and you feel this is the case, try dropping in a few clues earlier in the story that make the ending more believable for the reader.

Regardless of what you do, make sure that your story has a conclusion before you start writing otherwise you risk writing yourself into an unbelievable ending. And finally…

3. Start your story

The last thing you should do, is actually start your story. This should be a cakewalk now that you know how your story ends and what your characters are struggling over. Here are two ways you can start yours:

Start the story with your conflict. Your reader will be dumped right in the middle of the action and can pick up the pieces of setting and characterization either through the conflict, or towards the resolution. If your readers need more background revealing your conflict, move on to the second method to start a story.

Give your reader some background. One or two sentences of some information that is necessary for the story should be enough. It is really important that the information sticks to being necessary, otherwise meandering may occur. If you do find yourself wanting to expand the story,or write an additional one, go for it! Just make sure you finish the one at hand before sending your characters off on another adventure.

Everyone has their own method, I just find that this works best for me. If you give this method a try, feel free to share. Creative feedback on shorter works can definitely be applied to longer pieces, and you get the chance to explore characters, events, and worlds!

-30SecFantasy