No, you see, I wish to be an author. Not in marketing. Or an influencer. I wish to tell my stories, be told I did a fantastic job, and then go back to my hovel to scribble some more. I am delicate of constitution and awkward in crowds.
On October 23, 1969, Samuel Beckett's publisher, Jérôme Lindon, received a telegram from the Swedish Academy informing him that Beckett had been awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature. Lindon swiftly relayed the message to Beckett with a telegram of his own: "Dear Sam and Suzanne. In spite of everything, they have given you the Nobel Prize--I advise you to go into hiding."
According to Lindon, both Beckett and his wife were appalled and distressed by the announcement of the prize. Beckett anticipated the disruption of his reclusive lifestyle by way of this immediate spike in fame.
Beckett, then staying at the Hotel Riadh in Nabeul, Tunisia, nevertheless agrees to an interview with Swedish Television but on the condition that he is asked no questions.
No, you see, I wish to be an author. Not in marketing. Or an influencer. I wish to tell my stories, be told I did a fantastic job, and then go back to my hovel to scribble some more. I am delicate of constitution and awkward in crowds.
reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics
Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.
And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!
Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.
this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.
my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.
so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.
the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.
also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:
it's right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.
#but again. mordor looks like that becaue sauron made it#and he's an ass
On a Watsonian level, sure.
On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.
I don't know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to "what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century."
I mean, it's true he didn't know about plate tectonics, but he did know what mountains look like, and that it's not normally That. And it wasn't his style to break that kind of norm without cause.
LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)
Mordor is a rectangle because Sauron is an asshole.
#the rain shadow thing otoh was undoubtedly total ignorance#but those mountains were made as the fortress of a demigod#too steeped in evil to understand beauty#it's *supposed* to look like something that Shouldn't Exist#like quite often this is something that happens in worldbuilding yes#things are arranged Wrong because a person doesn't grasp the underlying logic#but mordor is a bad example for the same reason it's an obvious one#it's So Very Wrong because it was designed to be wrong#to give you a bad feeling with how much it shouldn't look like that#if he just wanted it unapproachable on all sides it could've been in a caldera formation it didn't *need* corners#the corners were a choice#tolkien's job involved lots of looking at maps and things okay#meanwhile people whose lives revolved around the weather generally knew where the rain happened#long before it was formalized into 'rain shadow effect'#people not having The Science doesn't mean they don't have eyes and brains
I wrote an entire paper in college analyzing the geology of the Misty Mountains and to a lesser extent the White Mountains (the Misty Mountains are easier because we get a cross-section via Moria). One thing I discovered that still knocks me for a loop when I think about it is:
Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?
I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.
There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.
Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.
(And as prev excellently points out, when Jirt made screwed-up geology it was very much on purpose. Mordor shouldn't be square! Mount Doom shouldn't be doing any of the things it does! A composite volcano shouldn't even have especially hot lava! Even the Gulf of Udun, the circular feature at the upper left corner of the square, shouldn't be like that -- perfectly round features should be impact craters or calderas, not The Mountains Just Do This In A Suspiciously Convenient Way. These are all the way they are because Sauron forced them to be, in defiance of the laws of nature. Remember, he's akin to Balrogs and was a Maia of Aulë -- he's a volcano spirit in many ways.)
"The simultaneous borrowing of French and Latin words led to a highly distinctive feature of modern English vocabulary: sets of three items, all expressing the same fundamental notion but differing slightly in meaning or style, e.g., kingly, royal, regal; rise, mount, ascend; ask, question, interrogate; fast, firm, secure; holy, sacred, consecrated. The Old English word (the first in each triplet) is the most colloquial, the French (the second) is more literary, and the Latin word (the last) more learned." (Howard Jackson and Etienne Zé Amvela, "Words, Meaning and Vocabulary: An Introduction to Modern English Lexicology." Continuum, 2000)
via ThoughtCo
Though I like how John McWhorter phrases it better:
But language tends not to do what we want it to. The die was cast: English had thousands of new words competing with native English words for the same things. One result was triplets allowing us to express ideas with varying degrees of formality. Help is English, aid is French, assist is Latin. Or, kingly is English, royal is French, regal is Latin – note how one imagines posture improving with each level: kingly sounds almost mocking, regal is straight-backed like a throne, royal is somewhere in the middle, a worthy but fallible monarch.
Small fantasy worldbuilding elements you might want to think about:
A currency that isn’t gold-standard/having gold be as valuable as tin
A currency that runs entirely on a perishable resource, like cocoa beans
A clock that isn’t 24-hours
More or less than four seasons/seasons other than the ones we know
Fantastical weather patterns like irregular cloud formations, iridescent rain
Multiple moons/no moon
Planetary rings
A northern lights effect, but near the equator
Roads that aren’t brown or grey/black, like San Juan’s blue bricks
Jewelry beyond precious gems and metals
Marriage signifiers other than wedding bands
The husband taking the wife's name / newlyweds inventing a new surname upon marriage
No concept of virginity or bastardry
More than 2 genders/no concept of gender
Monotheism, but not creationism
Gods that don’t look like people
Domesticated pets that aren’t re-skinned dogs and cats
Some normalized supernatural element that has nothing to do with the plot
Magical communication that isn’t Fantasy Zoom
“Books” that aren’t bound or scrolls
A nonverbal means of communicating, like sign language
A race of people who are obligate carnivores/ vegetarians/ vegans/ pescatarians (not religious, biological imperative)
I’ve done about half of these myself in one WIP or another and a little detail here or there goes a long way in reminding the audience that this isn’t Kansas anymore.
One Of The Issues With People Trying To Do World Building Can Be Seen Here Because, The Concept Of Marriage Can Be Excluded Entirely, In Place You Could Do Something Like, A Society Without Romantic Relationships Entirely It Could Be Utopian Or Dystopian As In A Society Where Everybody Is Able To Have Relations With Anyone Else Provided Consent, Or It Could Be Where Parents Are Chosen By Maybe The Government Or Maybe The Gods/God To Make Perfect Stronger Children
"Well I need a wife and I realized why should only noble women get tournaments to find partners." said the king to his advisor. "So I'm holding the first ever royal consort tournament." "My lord, this is a very strange ide—" said the advisor. "Oh it's happening, I was just informing you of it."
✧ Broken ribs suck. You don’t just “walk it off.” Breathing hurts. Laughing hurts. Existing hurts. Characters with rib injuries won’t be doing heroic sprints.
✧ Concussions aren’t instant naps. Dazed vision, nausea, dizziness, maybe even personality changes, but they’re not going to collapse neatly like in the movies.
✧ Blood loss is sneaky. It’s not just about dramatic pools of blood. It’s dizziness, confusion, and the body getting cold as circulation tanks.
✧ Adrenaline lies. Someone can take a serious injury and not feel it until the fight’s over. That “I didn’t realize I was bleeding until later” trope? Very real.
✧ Twisted ankles are brutal. One bad step and suddenly running is off the table. Even walking hurts like hell. Perfect way to ground a chase scene.
✧ Burns linger. Even small burns hurt more than most people expect. Blisters, infection risk, constant pain, it’s not just a cool scar later.
✧ Dislocated shoulders = useless arm. Characters can’t keep swinging a sword or firing a gun. They’re basically fighting one-armed until it’s fixed.
✧ Shock is a thing. Pale skin, trembling, rapid heartbeat, and eventually disorientation. A character might not even realize how bad their wound is.
✧ Stitches aren’t magic. Getting sewn up is painful and recovery takes time. They’re not instantly battle-ready after a needle and thread.
✧ Scars tell stories. Some fade, some don’t. Some stay sensitive forever. Don’t forget the aftermath when the wound becomes part of the character.
well see it can do the work of the colon, the semicolon, or the parenthesis with more speed and less formality than any of these, plus you can use it to capture the stream-of-consciousness effect of a comma splice with much less loss of clarity. sort of an all-purpose punctuation for the casual yet elaborate written construct.
basically I think that if your protagonist doesn’t want to fuck someone so bad it makes them look stupid, then there probably isn’t enough energy in your story. “Fuck someone” isn’t literal btw—they can want to uncover the secrets of their parent’s death, they can want to prove their worth, they can want a donut from one particular bakery—it can be anything so long as they want it so bad that they’ll make decisions that make any sane person go “are you a moron??”, with little to no forethought, or even tons of forethought and this is still the option they chose. Because they want to fuck that thing so bad.
You’d be surprised at how many people fail to give their characters motivation, and so write a story that’s less good than it could be.
It’s surprisingly easy to come up with an incredibly cool plot and characters without giving the characters enough motivation to make it actually compelling enough to read or even write. If you have a cool af idea that you somehow just can’t bring yourself to write, ask yourself what the main character wants, and how is that driving their decisions?
They need to want it so bad that it makes them look stupid. They need to impulse-buy a half-broken spaceship by mortgaging radioactive land, because they’re just that desperate to prove themselves more than a discarded scrap of a far greater history. They need to want their home and their people safe so much that they’ll risk their own soul to march across hundreds of miles of unknown and terrible danger to throw a cursed ring into a volcano. They need to love someone so much, and need them to know it, that they’ll blurt it out in the middle of a press conference or royal ball, or surrounded by enemies with a garrote at their throat or about to be frozen in carbonite or in the middle of a storm-tossed sea battle between pirates, British Navy, and the undead—or, they need to love someone so much that they’ll swear fealty to an evil emperor and kill a bunch of friends and children for the power to save them. They need to be so balls-to-the-wall insane in at least one regard that the plot isn’t just happening to them, they are in some way causing the plot.
Also keep in mind! When it comes to character development, “WANT” is NOT the same as “NEED”! Sometimes a character knows what’s good for them, what will truly often make them happy, but more often they don’t. They want the acclaim and adoration of the crowds, but really they need the recognition, acceptance or love of one particular person—and maybe that person is their own self. They want to avenge the loss of their loved one, but really they need to accept the loss and move on. A refusal to accept what they need is usually going to get in the way of what they want—and sometimes they figure it out just in time to go forward and climactically achieve their goal, or maybe they double down on their character flaws in a classic display of Greek tragedy!
As an Aro-Ace who was very uncomfortable with your post until this point: THANK YOU!
Also, one caveat: there is one rare type of story where the protagonist cannot become stupid over what they're after. This is the detective story where their character is in many ways a placeholder for the audience to try to solve the puzzle (as opposed to more thrilery types of detective story) and the detective's internal motivations are basically irrelevant because they are in many ways a framing device.
Ironically, ACD Sherlock Holmes, who most people would immediatley think of for this sort of always detached detective, does not always fit this caveat protag type. He can and has done stupid.
Emotional Walls Your Character Has Built (And What Might Finally Break Them)
(How your character defends their soft core and what could shatter it) Because protection becomes prison real fast.
✶ Sarcasm as armor. (Break it with someone who laughs gently, not mockingly.)
✶ Hyper-independence. (Break it with someone who shows up even when they’re told not to.)
✶ Stoicism. (Break it with a safe space to fall apart.)
✶ Flirting to avoid intimacy. (Break it with real vulnerability they didn’t see coming.)
✶ Ghosting everyone. (Break it with someone who won’t take silence as an answer.)
✶ Lying for convenience. (Break it with someone who sees through them but stays anyway.)
✶ Avoiding touch. (Break it with accidental, gentle contact that feels like home.)
✶ Oversharing meaningless things to hide real depth. (Break it with someone who asks the second question.)
✶ Overworking. (Break it with forced stillness and the terrifying sound of their own thoughts.)
✶ Pretending not to care. (Break it with a loss they can’t fake their way through.)
✶ Avoiding mirrors. (Break it with a quiet compliment that hits too hard.)
✶ Turning every conversation into a joke. (Break it with someone who doesn’t laugh.)
✶ Being everyone’s helper. (Break it when someone asks what they need, and waits for an answer.)
✶ Constantly saying “I’m fine.” (Break it when they finally scream that they’re not.)
✶ Running. Always running. (Break it with someone who doesn’t chase, but doesn’t leave, either.)
✶ Intellectualizing every feeling. (Break it with raw, messy emotion they can’t logic away.)
✶ Trying to be the strong one. (Break it when someone sees the weight they’re carrying, and offers to help.)
✶ Hiding behind success. (Break it when they succeed and still feel empty.)
✶ Avoiding conflict at all costs. (Break it when silence causes more pain than the truth.)
✶ Focusing on everyone else’s healing but their own. (Break it when they hit emotional burnout.)
C'mere. Listen. There are people out there whose sheer inability to write would dazzle you - lots of them - whose writing is so bad partly because they are so stunningly confident in their own ability that they have never even for a second questioned whether it's possible for them to improve.
These writers are indescribably better equipped to succeed - success, here, being gaining a readership and possibly an income - than writers who spend any amount of of time thinking critically about their skills and improving at their craft, simply because they're prepared at all times to promote their astonishingly bad writing.
This is the actual yard stick you're being measured against in the real world, not whatever standard you're holding yourself to in your head. You can't writhe around in fear of people judging you while the world lavishes that guy with attention and money.
To be honest, there's no greater confidence builder or motivator than just immersing yourself in the raw, unfiltered reality of the books on the Amazon bestseller charts. Read enough of those as part of your professional development and you will lose all illusions about the world and become truly free.
A lot of people tagging this with their least favourite popular book of choice, but I literally mean the Amazon charts. Go on the Amazon charts. It's not a metaphor.
We're having a Trope Flip Fest here at the Prompt Foundry for November 2025!
We all have our favorite tropes in media and fanwork, and we all have tropes we merely tolerate or are bored of. Either way, there's lots of room to have fun exploring the possibilities of turning the usual tropes on their heads!
A big thank you to everyone who helped contribute to this list by sharing their favorite tropes! It's great to have the community chime in.
These prompts are particularly well suited to prose writers, especially fanfiction writers, since that's the realm we're drawing inspiration from this month, but all artists and forms of creative work are more than welcome to join the fun.
Feel free to combine different days’ prompts with each other, or combine them with other events, like OC-tober, Inktober, or last year's Nom Nom November! Use your OCs, your favorite characters from media, your own experiences, whatever tickles your fancy.
If you use this list, please tag me here @thepromptfoundry, I’d love to see your writing and art!
Respond to as many prompts as you want or as interest you, don’t worry about missing or skipping any, or posting your work after the day the prompt is assigned to. Remember, this is supposed to be fun!
If you have any questions or musings, check our FAQ, and if you don’t find your answer, shoot me an ask.
Plain text list below the cut:
1 Cursed to Lie
(Truth Serum)
2 Too Many Beds
(Only One Bed)
3 Forced Distance
(Forced Proximity)
4 Fake Divorce
(Fake Marriage/Fake Dating)
5 Misplaced My Person
(Accidental Child/Family Acquisition)
6 Suddenly Old
(De-aging)
7 Last Kiss
(First Kiss)
8 Life-Saving Celibacy
(Bang or Die)
9 Spontaneous Time Freeze
(Time Travel)
10 “It's Complicated” Punch
(True Love's Kiss)
11 Blorbo In The Real World
(Isekai/Transmigration)
12 Irredeemable Heroes
(Redeemable Villains)
13 Unrequited Apathy
(Mutual Pining)
14 Dropouts and GEDs
(High School and College AUs)
15 Enforced Secrecy
(Secret Reveal)
16 Oh, Please Kick Their Ass
(Touch Them You Die)
17 Actually Good Parenting
(Various Characters' “A+ Parenting”)
18 Characters All Over the Map
(Bottle Episode)
19 Open Book Acquaintance
(Mysterious Stranger)
20 It Doesn't Matter Who It Is
(Identity Porn*)
* Note that “Identity Porn” refers to shenanigans around the maintenance of secret identities, and need not be sexually pornographic.
21 Highly Specific Memories
(Amnesia)
22 Too Hot for Human Contact
(Cuddling for Warmth)
23 Fated Foes
(Soulmates)
24 Intense Platonic Devotion
(There's No Platonic Explanation for This)
25 Orchestrating a Breakup
(Playing Matchmaker)
26 How Worse Things Could Be
(Fix-it)
27 Hate Potion
(Love Potion)
28 The Faintest Family Resemblance
(Identical Cousins/Matched-set Siblings)
29 Fraught Farewell
(Meetcute)
30 An Uncertain Future
(Happily Ever After)
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