New answers tagged technique
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I personally used a "th" to substitute the s's.
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So Alpha lies and manipulates to trick the Lord into thinking one of the neighboring lords is trying to ruin him, and then she asks for his support? Does he know about this? Maybe it can be a possibility for him to figure it out during their conversation (if I am understanding you right).
You could also do the classic thing where everything is going ...
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Nel here! If you think the character is too perfect than, depending on the setting, she can be bullied for something like a visible scar(like on her face)from some kind of surgery. She could have a really meaningful flaw like, idono, rising slight paranoia! Yeah, probably not. Maybe Making her be insecure or having a deep change of heart.
Make sure she ...
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Nel here! I think that would be interesting! About the insane character... Stick with her for the first few chapters then, even if she isn't insane yet, change perspective early in the story! You can get the reader used to changing perspective if you start early in the story. Instead of titling the chapters in a way that hints what comes next, you can use ...
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The things we don't write well are the things that we don't observe well. If your characters don't have flaws, it's because you don't like to see the flaws in yourself and others.
Try taking an objective, non-judgemental, deep look at the weaknesses of yourself and the people closest to you. Are you greedy, selfish, quick to anger, slow to forgive? We all ...
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If you are willing to be mean to yourself, maybe listen to sad songs, or read sad things, or tap into past memories of when you felt sad/heartbroken yourself (this applies to any emotion). Remember how your body responded then. Maybe, if you get involved enough, you'll feel reactions during the exercise (if you can even call it that). Then you can ...
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I've heard that a good character has strengths and weaknesses, motivation, and backstory. If you flush out a backstory, you will have given your character experiences that shape who they are. How would _______ event affect them as a person? You could the real-life research method in another answer along with this to get a realistic effect. But if you have a ...
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Hi Rebecca that is a really interesting concept and should be very feasible.
Introduce the wife first, apparently as a secondary or minor character.
Introduce the husband as though seen through the wife's eyes. For example, whatever he does is witnessed or experienced by her: don't show him in isolation as that would undermine the principle.
Along the ...
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It's not usually the protagonist, but there are many stories where our preconceptions about a character are challenged. It's more common that somebody turns out to be the bad guy instead of the good guy, but the other way around works too. Often, it's more complex and the reveal is just about providing a different backstory from the one that was implied. ...
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Strunk and White advise: Make the paragraph the unit of composition.
Break all your disparate ideas up into notions that can be described in a single paragraph. Some of these will follow each other logically as a sequence of a handful of paragraphs, and some will be single paragraphs that are entirely separate.
Some paragraphs will be dependent on others. ...
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I have a lot of scattered notes about that subject-matter which I have no idea how to arrange.
You could go back to the old fashioned method:
Write each note on a separate index card.
Clear a large space on your floor.
Shuffle and scatter the notes on the floor.
Randomly examine cards and rearrange them:
If the ideas are similar, place the cards side-by-...
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Hemmingway has some solid advice (tip 5). Don't describe the emotion, describe the thing that caused the emotion.
Imagine a young couple, expecting their first child, and suffering a miscarriage. It's probably very difficult to describe accurately what that feels like, but even if you succeeded, it wouldn't make the reader actually feel it. If, however, ...
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Use research and reference
Visual artists now that the best shortcut to making a drawing more realistic is to use research and reference. Here is an example (from Scott McCloud's Making Comics) of the difference between a gas station drawn purely from the imagination, and one based on reference images:
No matter how good your imagination is, the details ...
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The point of an essay is to make a point. Sorry about that. It just slipped out.
Still, it is a valid statement. An essay should take the reader from a "Your Are Here" vantage point to a new, hopefully more enlightened, vantage point. The job of the essayist is to find, and refine, a path that makes that journey as easy as possible.
The first task is to ...
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Well, to be honest, this is a perfect example where you want to show how the character is feeling. So have a thinking about what your character is doing in response to this heartbreak and insert this into the scene.
Like, I have a character in my novel, in one part, she is nervous when she is ambushed (quite by accident) by another character at a quiet ...
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The first question I would ask is: what is your story about? Is there a theme that it's trying to address? Furthermore, is the story more about the character and how the character changes, or about things that happen in the world around her?
The degree to which a flaw is "deep" depends greatly on where the main conflict of the story is. I know this is a ...
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One: the most common mistake is to confuse personality flaws for character flaws. Personality flaws are superficial e.g talks loudly on phone or chews with an open mouth. Character flaws need to be deeper and meaningful. Is your character torn between moving away to another state for her career and taking care of her ill mother who can't travel with her? ...
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I'll Get The Bus Today
There may well be other changes in behaviour as well...
So, if your character is drinking a lot at night, they might well decide to catch the bus the next day because they know they are still intoxicated, and therefore can't drive.
Calling in sick, or working from home.
Self conscious about body odor because alcohol does make you ...
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This Character won't Appear Drunk
If a character is self medicating with alcohol, they probably aren't getting wild-college-party-blackout-drunk every night. They are drinking enough to calm themselves - to "take the edge off."
If this character is a ways down the path to alcoholism, he will need to drink a LOT to appear intoxicated. And alcoholics often ...
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