I have……………..two? More chapters of this first draft? Maybe three, depending on whether I need to switch POV narrators again?
aaaaaaaaaHHHHHHHHHHHH
New ask game: tell me what happens at the end of my WIP.
Today's Document

oozey mess
we're not kids anymore.

#extradirty

Love Begins
Cosimo Galluzzi

JVL

if i look back, i am lost
tumblr dot com
No title available
h
occasionally subtle

izzy's playlists!

pixel skylines
Not today Justin
No title available
Three Goblin Art
Sweet Seals For You, Always

No title available
ojovivo
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom

seen from United States

seen from Japan

seen from United States

seen from United Kingdom

seen from Sri Lanka
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Japan
seen from United States

seen from Spain

seen from Germany

seen from United Kingdom
seen from United Kingdom

seen from United Kingdom
seen from Romania

seen from United States
seen from Sri Lanka
@erinisawriter
I have……………..two? More chapters of this first draft? Maybe three, depending on whether I need to switch POV narrators again?
aaaaaaaaaHHHHHHHHHHHH
New ask game: tell me what happens at the end of my WIP.
me: *points at adult character who is taller, stronger and older than me* small child. must protect at all costs. shelter. very tiny
“As for “Write what you know,” I was regularly told this as a beginner. I think it’s a very good rule and have always obeyed it. I write about imaginary countries, alien societies on other planets, dragons, wizards, the Napa Valley in 22002. I know these things. I know them better than anybody else possibly could, so it’s my duty to testify about them.”
—
Ursula Le Guin
30-Day Writing Challenge (for novelists)
this challenge is intended for novel writers who have had a strong novel idea for a while and know their story fairly well, or who have already made a little progress on a novel, and are stuck on it. i’m not an expert so i don’t know how much this is actually going to help you get out of that rut, but the hope is that you’ll spend a month immersing yourself in the world of your story and you’ll get some motivation out of it. i’d suggest taking about 30 minutes (at least) to do each activity, and to do everything completely distraction-free, with your phone in another room and your computer on do not disturb (if you’re writing on a computer). enjoy you nerds.
1. Write out your entire plot, even if you’ve already done it. This will re-familiarize you with your project.
2. Get the basic information on your main character. Write their backstory up until the point where your novel begins, make note of characteristics, and get their basic appearance down. Got multiple main characters? Great! You get to write more. (That’s what you get.) For all characters, make sure you know:
your character’s wants
your character’s values
at least five character flaws
the role your character will play in the story
how you want them to change over the course of the story
optional but recommended: cultural aspects like race or religion, which will help you develop their background and values a lot better.
3. Do some basic worldbuilding: what year is this novel set? Country? Planet? What are some traditions or norms? Is there magic or new technology? What’s up with the government? If your novel is set in our current world, work out the specifics of the characters’ neighborhood, home, city, etc.
4. Without allowing yourself to see any previous versions that may exist, write the opening scene.
5. Do what you did on day 2, except for your antagonist. No clear-cut antagonist? Pick whoever’s closest, or do the prompts for a supporting or minor character.
6. Research day: go through what you’ve already written and highlight everything you wanted to look up later, then spend some time researching it. You’ll probably find out more things that you’ll want to add to the plot.
7. Character day: you’ll have four of these, so divide up your characters accordingly. Do some of the character work you did for your main and antagonist for however many . You can go into less detail if they’re less important, but make sure you still know the six main points that you got to know about the more featured characters.
8. Pick a few parts of your worldbuilding exercise that you want to go more in-depth into (i.e. political systems, technology, cultural traditions) and spend about thirty minutes writing, brainstorming, and researching things to flesh them out. There will be three worldbuilding days, so make sure to save some material for the others!
9. Look through the plot you wrote out and see if you can find any plotholes, concepts you want to flesh out more, or parts that are unclear or missing. Really take some time to understand what the problems are, and come up with some possible solutions. It’s great if you figure out what you want to do, but if you don’t, that’s fine! You still made progress.
10. Without allowing yourself to see any previous versions that may exist, write the ending scene. Spoiler alert: this is going to be really hard. You can try writing a couple contenders, or even outlining a scene if you’re not quite sure where to go. Don’t worry about trying to make it pretty, because it’s not gonna be pretty: you don’t have all the details that you would if you were writing in chronological order.
11. Character day
12. Write your favorite scene. If you have a strong story idea in your head, you most likely know the one: you daydream about it when you wish you were doing something else, it plays like a movie in your head, it’s probably located somewhere around the middle of the book, and you probably haven’t let yourself write it because you “haven’t gotten there yet”. Today’s the day. Go nuts.
13. Rewrite the opening scene from a different character’s perspective. I know this sounds really cliche, but even if it doesn’t give you more insight on the story, it’s fun to do.
14. Worldbuilding day
15. Research day: research new stuff that you hadn’t written last time, plus anything over from the first research day. Not sure what to research? Characters’ cultures, the history of your setting (if in our world), famous fictional worlds, language development… if you sit and think for a little, you’ll figure out something you want to know.
16. Pick a few of your favorite character relationships: romantic, platonic, familial, whatever you want, and spend some time sketching them out. Think about their arcs, how they met (if they’re not related), what they think about each other, how they interact… basically anything you want, as long as you come away knowing more about the relationships between your characters. Also, please make only half (or less) of these romantic! It’s super important to develop the other relationships in the story.
17. Pick up from where you left off in your opening scene and write the next scene. Again, don’t look at any previously existing drafts.
18. Character day
19. Emotion break! Make a list of everything you don’t like about your book. Get all your insecurities out onto the paper, then refute everything you don’t like. If it’s specifics like “I don’t like that x happens”, figure out how to make x not happen. If it’s general doubts like “This has been done before and I’m unoriginal,” refute that too! Everyone doubts their work all the time and I can guarantee that we are all more critical of our own work than others will be. Finish today’s unconventional activity off by writing a list of everything you love about your book.
20. Pick any scene you’ve written for this book, whether it be from this challenge or something you had before, and rewrite it in some form of AU. Change the genre, time period, location, context… you are a god.
21. Worldbuilding day
22. You know those books that are stories told entirely in poems? You heard me. (Start anywhere you want to, write at least five or however many you can get done in 30 minutes. No one will ever read them, so don’t complain that you’re not a poet.)
23. Find a list of dialogue prompts and pick a few to do with your characters. Want a challenge? Choose two characters at random. (I mean using a generator or drawing names out of a hat. COMPLETELY random.)
24. Pick up from day 16 and write the next scene.
25. Last character day :(
26. Write, or at least, begin, a very short story in your world. Try to include no characters from your actual story. If your novel takes place in our world, focus in on the characters’ neighborhood, time period, workplace, school, etc. This exercise will help you get to know your world through a different perspective. Don’t stress too much about this! It doesn’t have to be very long or even to be finished.
27. Fun day! Pick three of these activities to do with your novel:
Make a playlist about the novel as a whole, or make some character playlists
Design the cover
Cast actors in the film/TV version
Draw: character portraits, scenes, maps, landscapes…
Put together a moodboard for the novel or a character
Write that completely unrealistic scene you love so much but can’t put in the novel for plot reasons
Make memes about your characters
Sit and daydream for a solid 10 minutes about the Vibe of the novel
Anything that falls into a similar category
This is a callout activity for all you ””””””””writers”””””””” who spend more time daydreaming about novel ideas than actually writing. (this is 100% a joke because this is 100% me)
28. Rewrite your opening scene from a different narrator. If you wrote in first person, use third. If you wrote in third, use first. You can also mess with second person if you feel like you have an artist superiority complex and aren’t like other girls.
29. Pick your favorite activity from so far and do it again.
30. List everything that you need to do before you can jump right into the first draft. Then do it.
yes i am a writer. yes i have seven wips with four words in between them. yes we exist.
how do i decide if i want to write in first or third person
First Person
Advantages:
You get to know one character quickly and effectively
Builds attachment
Simpler
Let’s you cheat at info dumps
Epistolary stories are an option (journal style like The Martian or Dracula where everything takes place in letters or blogs)
Limitations:
Tougher to distinguish between viewpoint characters with each one you add
Untrustworthy narrator
Hard to be epic in scope
Gives away that the protagonist lives
If your audience doesn’t like the voice of your main character it will be a horrible experience for them
You don’t get the advantages of third person
Third Person
Advantages:
Large casts work better than in First Person
Sometimes better for scene/setting of immediate nature
Epic scope
Best for hiding things from the reader (except for omniscient)
More viewpoint freedom
Easier to off characters
Shows inherent discord (conflicted thoughts and dialogue)
More immersive (for some)
Easier to forgive characters of their mistakes
Limitations:
Can’t cheat on info dumps
Don’t get the advantages of First Person
These are from my notes on Brandon Sanderson’s lectures. I highly recommend them to anyone interested, I believe he is posting the most recent semester on his YouTube once a week.
Hey. I have a message for aspiring authors (or already published ones) out there. It’s a little story I wanted to share~
When I was a kid, I spent at least half of my free time in the local library. I was that one kid who basically refused to go anywhere near the “popular” book racks, unless I was given a good recommendation for something. So you know what I did instead?
I went to the furthest back shelves, the depths of the young adult section, chose whatever I thought had a cool cover or an interesting synopsis, and sat down and read it. Many of those books were by lesser known authors, maybe they’d been out for a few years, but most hadn’t ever had time to shine.
If the story was terrible, I stopped after the first few pages and put it back to pick out another. And I was picky. But I found so many gems. I found so many books that I fell in love with, that I still remember. I was inspired by so much of that wonderful writing.
So. If you’re planning on publishing your work, either by traditional or other means, but you’re feeling discouraged because you don’t think it will ever get that much attention?
Put it out there, anyways. Put it out there for kids like me. Put it out there for adults like me. Put it out there because there will always be someone who reads your book and loves it, who adds it to their favourites list, and who goes on a search for all of your other writing.
If you love your story, put it out there for those who are bound to love it, too.
The main reason I’m ending up uninterested in books
is, I think, excessive streamlining and/or efficiency.
By this i mean the first chapter gets the plot going immediately and the book zips on from event to event, smoothly progressing the plot without a paragraph out of place. The irony is that books like this, despite being very fast-paced, tend to bore me to death. “Cut out what doesn’t progress the plot” seems like good advice, but I feel like it makes it actually very difficult to care.
A story needs downtime. Having characters constantly be in life-threatening situations and just never letting up from beginning to end sounds like it would cause nail-biting suspense, but it does exactly the opposite. I find I can’t bond with characters if I don’t see them just hanging out, goofing off, or being themselves in a situation where they are relaxed enough to do that. I’ve read a lot of books where every single second someone is in danger and they have to run again or fight again and the relationships never capture me because the characters have not been given time to develop the relationships or even be themselves because they are constantly in survival mode.
When a character is trying to run from death, their priority is going to be that. You can shoehorn in information drops of supposedly emotional backstory all you want, but if no one ever gets to genuinely kick back, we don’t get to see what they’re like when they’re fully themselves. We don’t get to see what kinds of things they say when they feel safe, what might spill out of them when they are relaxed. We don’t get to see what makes them smile and laugh and the mundane details of who they are, because they don’t spend more than a few paragraphs trying to not die.
Downtime is not just important to allow room for character development, it’s important to establish a status quo or at least a “what could be.” What is at stake? What has the antagonist/problem taken away from the characters? What will they lose if they don’t succeed in their fight? What do they have to lose?
Many of these action-packed books I read try to make the reader care by dropping in references to a past or a future in which characters were able to do things like bake cakes or sit in the windowsill and watch the rain and not have to worry about things and being told about those things never has the same impact as experiencing them. If a character thinks “hmm, what if someday we could hang out and have fun together like friends,” that’s sad, I guess. If we get to see the characters hanging out and having fun together like friends, and then a disaster happens and that is brutally ripped away, that’s WAY more effective. If a character comes home to their house burned down or their dad murdered, that’s…supposed to be upsetting, I guess. If you first wrote about the character sitting on a porch swing with their dad identifying bird calls and eating partially burnt banana bread that dad could never make quite like mom used to…and then murdered the dad…now we’re talking.
Repeat after me: if you don’t give it to your readers in the first place, you can’t cruelly rip it from their arms!!
I’ve found it a lot better to alternate downtime and more “actiony”/high tension scenes instead of trying to maintain the latter all the way through. Quiet, relationship building scenes and fast-paced, suspenseful scenes are not antagonists, they are sisters and perfect complements of one another. I exploited this fact to the max on my last WIP. I let my characters have fun and joke and laugh. Then I hit them with some scary event that reinforced the overhanging tension again. Then let them relax a bit, developed them as people and the mundane facts about them. Then out of nowhere, things get worse. They try to pull themselves together. I add in a little bit of fluffy goodness but before my characters can contemplate what this means for their relationship–BAM. Shit goes down. And more things fall apart. And more. And now some more fluff, you deserve it ‘kay? But all of a sudden…
The “down” periods didn’t make the book boring, they seem to have made it nigh unputdownable (one of my readers had to go to work on like three hours of sleep after staying up half the night finishing) because they made my readers really, really, really, REALLY want to see my characters safe for good. I was able to develop the relationships just enough to whet appetites for more, and cause immense frustration when I broke up the good stuff with serious bad stuff. Do you want your betas to curse at you and threaten you? This is how you do it, it seems.
I read YA novels that give the main couple like 2 pages of breathing room so they can kiss. And then their noses are back to the grindstone. Do I know these people, or care? No idea, because they’ve been too busy running from laser sharks to have much by way of a conversation. But letting them sit down for a chapter or so is “”””boring.””””
Give your characters downtime. Keep the tension going in the background, but give them a bit to rest here and there. Do it right and it’ll make things hurt so, so much worse.
Theres this whole thing about ‘don’t include scenes that don’t progress the plot.’ And to some degree that makes sense- you don’t want a book filled with things that don’t matter.
But there’s a difference I don’t think people understand. Unnecessary scenes like waking up in the morning, or having a mundane conversation don’t progress the plot, and so they’re seen as boring. And that’s true.
What you need to do is make sure that these ‘downtime,’ scenes progress- if not plot- then character. Which to be fair, is more important than the plot.
No scene is ‘unnecessary,’ if you utilise it in the right way.
you know what trope i just go maximum apeshit for every goddamn time?
when a character has to improvise a weapon under urgent circumstances.
im talking characters in handcuffs using them to garrote enemies
characters swinging objects that are WILDLY un-aerodynamic (a table, a a garden gate.)
or throwing objects that are wildly un-damaging (an inflatable chair, a bunch of flowers)
throwing something soft and light over someones head as a brief distraction
using the ENVIRONMENT against their adversary (pulling a rug from under them, slamming a door in their face)
using weapons that are broken or not working properly, or using them the ‘incorrect’ way (using an empty gun as a bludgeon, Elizabeth Swann pulling that sword off the wall but it still being attached to the wall display)
swordfights using anything BUT swords
people macgyvering wildly ‘low-tech’ improvised contraptions to defeat massively high-tech and well organised attacks
loading a blunderbuss or shotgun with something commonplace and either not-at-all dangerous or surprisingly lethal (sand, cutlery, buttons)
i love this trope so much
The one problem I have with my writing is my characters will say something, and all i will put is “she said”
or “I asked”
and I really need to fix that
Does anyone have any tips for what I can do to help combat this problem?
I had the same problem! Here’s some tips which helped me a lot:
1. you don’t always have to put anything after a character says something. For example when two people are talking, and you have established which character speaks first and witch second, the reader understands who is talking without you telling
2. instead of dialogue tags, write some stage directions. For example:
“I don’t know about that”, he said and paced around the room.
versus
He paced around the room. “I don’t know about that.”
But you don’t have to put them between every statement so not bog down the flow of the dialogue.
3. For similar things show emotions of the POV and describe emotions of the other charter(s) through gestures, expressions etc when they are interesting for the conversation (especially in situations where the action/emotion is in contrast to what the character says)
3. Try using dialogue tags only when necessary, that is, when it’s not clear from the context who is speaking, or when the tag itself (shouted, whispered, said weirdly etc) is important. Side note: I don’t think the whole discourse of “always use said” and “never use said” is very helpful. Both can be stylistic choices too. I don’t think you should force yourself to come up with other tags than said, but I think using other tags when appropriate is fine and actually good :D
4. I heard a nice way to practice these things and did that couple of times! Write the whole dialogue without any tags (use different colored text for different characters if you forget who was who) or anything else than the actual dialogue. Then start to add stage directions, emotions and tags till the conversation makes sense and flows well!
None of these are like hard rules but they are helpful guidelines to me at least :) And a lot of how and how much you use each thing is about style!
I fear the writeblrs who are able to find FCs for all of their OCs because 1. how 2. HOW
I know this is probably not a cry for help in how to find face claims… But as someone who literally cannot write and develop characters without a face claim, (Thus I have face claims for all of them…) here are a few resources I love to use.
FACE CLAIM DIRECTORIES
https://lazyresources.tumblr.com/fc
https://angeldustmt.tumblr.com/fcdirectory
https://rphelper.tumblr.com/fcdirectory
https://fcdatabase.tumblr.com/tags
https://astridrps.tumblr.com/afccollection
https://bunchoffaceclaims.tumblr.com/masterlist1
https://bunchoffaceclaims.tumblr.com/masterlist2
https://bunchoffaceclaims.tumblr.com/masterlist3
https://bunchoffaceclaims.tumblr.com/masterlist4
https://sonamhelps.tumblr.com/periodfc
https://herorps.tumblr.com/fcd
https://roleplaytipsandadvice.tumblr.com/directory1
https://roleplaytipsandadvice.tumblr.com/directory2
https://thehumbleroleplayer.tumblr.com/diversefcresourcedirectory
I find that watching a lot of media helps! Whether it be movie, music, TV shows, anything, if there is a face that makes you think “Huh… I think I see something, maybe”, write it down. I have a note in my phone with an ever-evolving list of potential face claims whether I use it or not.
I also have a pinterest board to gather some faces I like in one place, especially if I’m looking for a face claim that isn’t a famous celebrity.
imagining your otp doing the forehead touch is literally the most important thing in the whole world. everybody take a second and stop scrolling and imagine your otp doing the forehead touch. okay. you can move on now.
you know how often the characters I write do forehead touches or the jaw stroke or hold the other by the cheek? It’s a big writing kink of mine
The second draft also doesn’t have to be perfect. The second draft can be just as messy as the first. Take the second as a way to use all those ideas you thought of to make it better and refine it more.
It doesn’t have to be perfect. You can have over 800 drafts if you need it.
meme?
My two modes when typing:
Mode 1: click-clack to the max, blindtouch 100%, haven’t looked at a keyboard in seven years
Mode 2: what its typoisfng what aer keyus hhow do wowrds
who’s to say these are two different modes?