Tag: ideas

Character In-Depth

Hello and welcome back! Last week I talked about a method for outlining the pertinent information on the primary characters of your story. The PCs include the main character, the main antagonist, and anyone else who has a major impact on the main story points in the outline. The very basics of information about them included their name and personality traits, what drives them, their goal, and the overall role they play in the story. With this information, it will be easier to map out paragraphs or lists containing ideas for not only what they will do when confronted with whatever issues you throw their way, but also how they will consistently interact with other characters. This step is very important for the writing process, even if you are not writing an outline for your entire story. I know characters don’t always start out their best, in fact it’s better in most cases if they don’t, so if you want to keep track of where they will end up at the end of the story that is a good thing to do.

Physical Description

Most stories, contain a physical description for their primary characters. Putting a name with a face can help the readers to become more invested in your character by making them seem more tangible. This information can also help to pinpoint how they will act or be treated in certain situations. If a war breaks out, a six-year-old girl and a sixteen-year-old boy will be treated very differently by everyone around them so it is important to have each of these in mind even if they are ultimately never in the work.

Here’s a list of things to consider for your description:

  • Age
  • Race
  • Ethnicity
  • Religion
  • Physical or Mental Handicaps
  • Skin, hair, and eye color
  • Height and weight

Once you have those important things listed, I suggest taking a moment to think about how your character feels about these parts of him or herself. Does he hate his hair color? Is she only still a member of her religion due to her parents? Does he obsess about his image? Does she feel there is a disadvantage to how she was born? This will all effect how they interact with others and how they treat themselves.

As an example, one of my female characters grew up in a home where old and new ideas about gender have clashed in an unhealthy way. She’s had to listen to her father complain that the women need to maintain jobs while in the same breath stating that housework is women’s work. She has spent many hours wondering if her family would have been better off if she, the eldest, was born male. This means she has a tendency to push herself to do what she feels a man would be able to do without any regard for if that makes any sense. Did she get stabbed? That’s not so bad! Her dad worked on his job all day with stitches in his hand once!

Personality Description

This step takes the primary trait from the last step and expands upon it do to the information in the personal description. If your character is a jokester, and has a background of depression stemming from losing his parents at a young age and being passed around foster homes, it’s possible that he’s sarcastic and uses dark humor to cover up how he actually feels. Or, maybe he’s more optimistic in spite of his past woes and has a bubbly sense of humor that lights up the whole room, though he might not have the best sense of timing in what others would consider serious situations. You will have to decide which option best fits the character you’re going for and stick with it.

When you’re talking about the main character or one of the “good guys” some writers are tempted to shy away from anything other than messy hair and makeup for personality flaws with these individuals. This makes for a flat and boring character without any room to grow. It’s fine for your character to be somewhat unpleasant at the beginning of the story, even your protagonist. The only thing you need to worry about is making sure they are not completely unlikable. The vast majority of people are not going to feel sorry for a serial rapist no matter how sympathetic the rest of their character arc is.

Your villain, on the other hand, is a trap for the exact opposite problem. I love a well-written villain with the potential to be saved: however, I don’t care for a wimp who shouldn’t really be a villain in the first place. So, don’t be afraid to let your villain kick puppies every once in a while to drive home that this is a vile piece of creation that your reader should be worried about. If you decide to redeem them, they can log some community service hours at the local shelter to learn their lesson but again, that’s after their character growth.

Voice Description

Some of the information for this was discussed in the personal description part. Where they are from and who they are make up the bulk of their voice. There are still a few nuanced things to think about when it comes to their interactions with others. For this section think things that are more personal than their demographics. Think of hobbies they have, the type of friend they normally spend time with, their job, things that excite or scare them. These are all things that will be carried out in their interactions with the plot and other characters. If your main character usually hangs out around the boys and is most comfortable in a classical “teen guy” type environment, he would most likely not be cool when his new stepsister needs him to make an emergency run for some tampons and Midol.

I hope you find these different steps helpful. Even if you don’t get as deep as say, the last example, knowing where your character is comfortable will help remind you when they shouldn’t be. These kinds of character outlines I, and others like me, have found to be helpful in keeping on character when writing a character so you don’t have one chapter where your character seems off script. Thank you so much for reading! Comment any questions you have and have a great day!

Will’O’Wisp

I suppose I can’t ignore these nuisances in my work and I’ve decided to cover them as quickly as possible. Will’O’Wisps are far more trouble than pixies by my reckoning, though others don’t see it that way. Perhaps it has something to do with how nearly invisible they are to most until they are power-filled. Oh! What a curse it is to see them in their every stage of life.

Will’O’Wisps come in three colors that I have observed; red, blue, and green. Their environment is primarily in towns or in densely inhabited forests. There can be exceptions to this rule in the case of a particularly powerful fire traited practitioners who are able to bend the wisps to their will and anchor them to a set point for a task. They do, however, maintain a priority on their own survival and will wander in turns to seek sustenance if no feeding method is set up.

Now I shall point to one of the most concerning points of these creatures existence, their food source. Will’O’Wisps feed solely on the energy of other life forms through and attach and drain process. This would not necessarily be a damning feature, after all I have met others who require at least partial supplementation in this vein who are quite commendable individuals, the complete mindless and conscienceless way these achieve their meal is what is most inexcusable.

No matter the hue, Will’O’Wisps will latch onto a living creature–be it animal, plant, or person–and drain their life force to power themselves. Those who can see them have often noted, and later saved, those who were nearly at death’s door due to the sheer enormity of the swarm they are surrounded by. Even as few as four have the ability to completely destroy a person through illness in a matter of months. For a creature in possession of such an extraordinarily high self-preservation instinct it seemed almost unthinkable that they would be dull enough to not ration their host to survive for long periods of time. In all observed cases, this does not seem to be true and it is often wondered if they are drawing something else into their host with these illness and their death that they would prefer. It has been noted (and please skip this line if you are weak of stomach) that the corpses created and guarded by Will’O’Wisps are far colder and last far longer, even in the midst of summer, than non-affected ones.

If draining the life of the host, who almost exclusively has no way to see it until it has fully engorged itself, was not bad enough there are the effects that have been noted along with attachment that can add to the detriment of the person. Red wisps, known also as Ire Wisps, can not only set fire to dried brush and buildings if they feels that there is not enough living energy to draw from; they also can pump blinding rage and seething hatred into the host. This accelerates the release of energy for their consumption and exhausts the host much faster than otherwise. The host also, even if not filled with such ire, has a high probability of meeting a literal fiery end by combustion as the Ire Wisp seeks to eke every last drop of presence out of the host.

Blue wisps, or Guide Wisps, are the most often tamed and utilized by those who are able to do so. They are the most tameable with the promise of steady feeding deliveries and are the most intelligent: as far as brainless orbs of energy can be said to have intelligence. They can be taught paths and be stationed solidly in an area. Free roaming, on the other hand, adds an additional danger to their abilities. When one or more attach to a host they are known to fill that host with a desire to roam. A sense of needing to find treasure, a lost loved one, or just food or a mate in animals, will overtake the host and have them begin wandering in a seemingly random pattern that seems to be crafted by the Guide Wisp for the purpose of collecting its kin and finding a new suitable host to all of them. This minimizes the work the colony as a whole has to do and enables moving across vast areas with a high level of deadening.

Finally are the green or Energy Wisps. These are characterized by an increase of paranoia and tiredness which makes them some of the hardest to spot if you don’t know what to look for. They are also the most prolific, meaning a host will soon be covered with the nuisances once they are selected. However, they still manage to be the least destructive as they lose interest in their host at a certain threshold of energy and will move onto the next before death.

The Energy Wisps are also unique in that they are the only ones that can be farmed beneficially. If, for example, you are a low energy type who needs to feed yet keeps to yourself for long stretches in fields with farming or herding, green wisps can take a shallow measure from your herd or nearby plants and convert it into a human quality substance. My father showed me how to do so by peeling of the outer flame and drawing out the collected energy which leaves the bottom covering and the core. It will not kill them and they have no flesh with which to experience pain. The downside is this sharing feature tends to attract other wisps meaning if you see a green wisp at its full power outside in the night, there will most certainly be blues and reds hanging in the shadows for you to take the bait.

Is there anything else to say about these abominations? Well, yes, I suppose their is now that I look to my sketches. Blue and red wisps have cores that swirl counterclockwise while green swirl clockwise. If you are like the baker in my home town around the castle and cannot by sight distinguish red from green be certain to check the direction of that swirl before attempting to drain a wisp. Reds and blues are quite toxic on top of their other negative qualities.

Characters

            If you’re following along, I’ve outlined how to go from a basic idea for a story to a full skeleton outline. That’s a lot of work and, in some short stories, that might be all you need to get your project underway. However, often times in novels you will need more to flesh out your pieces and that normally falls to side plots. So how do you choose side plots? The first thing to consider is your characters.

            The main plot is your main character interacting with the antagonist and the objective they are trying to solve. In many stories, your character can’t do it by themselves and needs help from others. While making your skeleton for the main plot, you most likely realized that there were characters, or needed to be characters, at certain points in the story. Maybe it’s a best friend, maybe it’s a mentor, or maybe it’s the guys being paid to help with the scheme. Though they touch into the main part of the story, they probably wouldn’t have enough room to be introduced and grow without a few side happenings. How do we know what scenes we need to add to keep the plot moving believably?

            First, we need to meet the characters. By this point you should already have some idea who your primary characters are. Even if you don’t have names, you should at least have some place holders like: male hero, evil wizard, protagonist’s mom, friend who wants out of the friendzone, etc. Just like in the real world, these are all different people who will have different ideas, beliefs, goals, and motivations. Knowing what all of these are will be the key to crafting a realistic set of side plots to help get everyone to the final goal.

            For this exercise, you’re going to want to stick to the main characters who are going to impact the main plot line. These I’ll refer to as Primary characters. Later, you’ll need to think through Secondary characters, those who only affect a side quest in a significant way, and Background characters, those who are there but could really be swapped out for anyone without change. But for now, we’re concerned with the big guns and not Drunk Guy Randy who lives at the local tavern because Martha left him for shoving 15 peanuts up his nose whenever he gets drunk. Unless Randy knows where the magic amulet of liver health rests. Then you can worry about him now.

            Take out a note book or a piece of paper or a Microsoft word sheet. Got it? Good. Because now it’s time to figure out who is going to be in this story and write… you guessed it: a sentence to let us know who we’re dealing with. Don’t worry, this will be expanded upon later.

Sentence should contain

            First, we need to decide your PM’s name because that’s important. No more place holders for you! Behind the name is a great tool and doesn’t carry the stigma of a sixteen-year-old girl walking into the bookstore to buy a baby name book. I swear, I’m just working on a book! Remember, unless your society is weird, parents choose names for their babies. The rich, white, Europeans are not going to name their child after an anime character and the nerdy anime cosplayers who live on minimum wage are not going to name their kid Sir Reginald III. So, make sure your name matches what their parents would have chosen, as well as your character.

            Next, we need to come up with each PM’s defining trait. How would people who know them describe them? Idealist? Jokester? Happy? Sad? Shouty? This is a snap shot of how the world perceives them that will dictate how they tend to act. If a character is going to tell jokes and play pranks, they’re a jokester or trickster. If they are a sunny ball of happiness, they are an optimist. If they think things should be done a certain way to lead to the best outcome, they are an idealist. You will want to choose something that will be easy to show at all times, unless something major happens to pull them out of their typical mood. I won’t list any dos or don’ts here because it completely depends on your own style and talent to decide what is and isn’t reasonable for you.

            Now that we know what the PM acts like, what drives them? Why do they do what they do? Is your character a dad fighting to make the world a better place for his children? Is your character like my MC: a dreamer who has a vision of a better future and wants to act on it? For your main character, this is what will get them to accept the main quest. For your villain, it will be why they are evil, even if it’s just because they want to be evil. For PMs who aren’t the MC or the villain, why do they help or hinder the hero? What do they hope to gain or are afraid to lose?

            Different from their drive, what is your PM’s main goal? This is what they are heading towards. The villain is evil because of his drive. His goal is what he hopes to achieve with his evil. The children are their father’s drive, but his goal is to topple the evil regime and make the world better.

            What is the character’s role in the story? Are they the main character? Main villain? The love interest? The Mentor? A minor villain? Why do they deserve to be in this story at all and what makes them count as a PM?

            And those are our pieces! With this, you should be ready to craft a killer one to two sentence character description that will help you know how to move forward with your story. Next Monday, I’ll talk about fleshing out those sentences and Wednesday I’ll cover creating the side plots. In the meantime, I’ll see you Friday with another bestiary entry and leave you with an example sentence. Thank you for reading and liking! Feel free to comment with any questions or other methods that you have found that work for you on each subject.

James Mooney, a hardworking immigrant with a dark sense of humor, wants to lift his family out of poverty and away from the scaffolding that his brother died working on by making quick money with good moonshine and teaching others how to do the same.

Starting the Plot

Welcome back! I want to take a minute to thank everyone who has read my last piece. I was not expecting to see so many views in just a few days so early on!

In my last post, I talked about finding the Main Five of a story: the Character, Setting, Objective, Opponent, and Stakes. These are the foundational pieces of a story; you can’t build a novel, movie, game, or anything else without knowing the who, what, when, where, and why. Now that the foundation is set, where to go from here?

The simple answer is plot. The less simple question that follows it, how do you come up with the plot? Personally, I didn’t have a great deal of trouble with this step other than having far too many ideas for any sane person to work into a story. However, I’ve had friends who will know one or two things that they want to transpire in their final masterpiece but don’t know how to string them along and link them together coherently. Between some of my own trial and error and getting a few others involved, I think I have a good two-part suggestion for anyone facing similar struggles.

Premise and Synopsis

So the first step in part one is to create a premise and a synopsis to help guide you and keep you on track. That way, when you are pulling together the main plot points later you have a cut-and-dry guideline to keep you moving in the right direction. This way, unlike me in some early cases, you don’t wind up sobbing at the cutting table when you realize you’ve written three or four books at the same time and none of them are going anywhere near a coherent conclusion.

I found many different websites offering the premise and synopsis advice, which is where I came across the concept to mull over, but none of the ones I found had what I considered to be a satisfactory answer as to what these should encapsule. I knew they were supposed to be short (a sentence for the premise and a paragraph for the synopsis) but that was the primary advice. About your story and short… not so helpful as it would turn out.

Part of the problem may be me and my over-wordiness or my uncanny ability to get sidetracked into a spiraling cyclone of writing whenever I set my hand to the pen or keys. My sister has the opposite problem, as more of an artist than a writer, yet having the need to write the basics of a story so she can craft her comic around it, she doesn’t get nearly as overblown as I do: which is where I finally realized what the answer to the issue was. In trying to get my sister to write more than three words before coming back to ask again how to proceed, I introduced her to the premise and synopsis in the following way.

For your premise, write a sentence containing all five of your main five as they will be presented in your story. If your main character is Joe the paperboy, your setting is New York during the 1920’s, your objective is helping Joe’s mother with her cancer treatment, the opponent is the loan shark who works with one of the local mob bosses, and the stakes is Joe, his mom, and his dog will all die if he fails, your premise might look something like this:

Joe needs to help his mother pay for her cancer treatments but the local mafia’s loan shark wants more than a paperboy in 1920’s New York can afford, putting the lives of him, his mother, and their dog at stake.

Simple, right? “What about the synopsis, then?” you may ask. The best way to think of it is a paragraph detailing the relationship of each of the main five to the other. This will put you a step deeper in explaining your story while still limiting what you can put in it. This was a life saver for helping me to keep on track. Don’t worry about a love interest, don’t worry about the mentor, or anything else. Just stick to those main five in a small paragraph. Here’s another quick example of what I’m talking about.

Joe is a 15-year-old paperboy who lives in New York in the 1920’s. Joe’s mother has cancer and can’t afford her treatments on her small maid salary and Joe’s paperboy money. Against his mother’s warning, Joe goes to the local mafia to get a loan from their loan shark who just so happens to be the 20-year-old bully who has harassed Joe since he was three. The loan shark is a dangerous and evil man who wants to give the loan for 350% interest with only one year to pay it off. There is no way for him to pay it back, but Joe can’t stand the thought of losing his mother so he takes the deal. Now he has to pay off the loan quickly or the shark will kill him, his mother, and their dog for good measure.

That almost sounds like it could be on the back cover of a novel or movie, doesn’t it? And we only know five things with just a bit of added information to flesh out the idea. Now we can look at this for the rest of our drafting process to make sure our story stay’s on track. If we come up with a great idea for Joe to find a wife, but it won’t happen until he’s 18, that’s going in a sequel so put it aside. If you come up with a story about some of the mafia members who don’t really factor into that exact synopsis, their story belongs in a spinoff.

The Flurry

Step one of part one is complete, but I can’t very well leave it alone at that. Don’t worry, this next part is straightforward which is why I didn’t think this needed to be it’s own part or article. I’ve made the mistake of skipping this part, possibly because it’s often forgotten or assigned to a different stage of the process, but this is the best place for it in my personal experience.

After you have your premise and synopsis on paper, you probably have a great number of ideas buzzing around in your head. After all, before the antagonist was just a loan shark and now he’s a loan shark who has made your protagonist’s life miserable for twelve years. For that reason, it’s the best time to put those trains of thought to good use before they careen off the bridge of distraction into forgetfulness cavern or get turned around and wrecked in the tunnels of overthinking plot classifications.

That’s why for the second half of this tip I want you to do the exercise of many names at this point. Some call it brain storming, other info-dumping. I’ve heard it called the morning minutes, word vomit, and a litany of other monikers. It’s like icee-pops: everyone calls them something different. The concept is completely the same in all instances. You set a timer for five, ten, or fifteen minutes (the most you can tolerate in one sitting) and you write.

Take those five foundational stones and the premise and synopsis mortar that bind them together and write about them. Just ideas. Why is the loan shark a bully? How long has mom had cancer? Why does the loan shark hate dogs? Where is dad? Why didn’t Joe find a better solution to his problem? Whatever questions come to mind, answer them. Don’t worry about anything like the hero’s journey, or three act structures, or anything that will come later. Just write like you took fifteen minutes on the first question and have fifteen minutes to answer the last three.

That is part one of the two part plot point outline: premise, synopsis, flurry of writing. The next article on Monday will pull together what to do from that point. Yes, I did say Monday and that is because Fridays are my days for building up my bestiary! I’ve always loved mythical creatures and as a fantasy author my works do and will include so many of them! I want to have a place to display my takes on these myths and legends, and will likely include other fantasy elements later on like my plants, races, languages, worlds, and the like.

Thank you again for reading! I hope to see you around and to pass on more of my writing tips and stories.