Opewriting Theater

Dissecting Story

[opewritingtheater]

Character Reactions Through Filters

So you've got a character who's upset about something, but there are lots of kinds of upset. Are they angry, grieving, fearful? And how do they express it? Do they vent, so they reach out for comfort, do they isolate themselves or suppress the emotion with substances or distractions?

One way to figure that out is by thinking about what their emotions are filtered through. If a character is dealing with a powerful but primal emotion, like fear, attraction, or joy, they'll express it differently depending on how they think of themselves, and how they want to be seen. Things like ego, training, and social situation form the filters that give form to the raw emotions, like those differently shaped play-doh extruders.

Let's say you have a spoiled child, and he trips over a book and gets hurt. He knows that his family dotes on him, so he'll go to them, teary-eyed, and wait for somebody to say "there, there, why don't we get you some ice cream?" For him, showing sorrow and being visibly upset are productive: he gets rewarded for those reactions.

Now take an old cowgirl who grew up with five rough-and-tumble brothers. In her house, being soft meant you got picked on. So when she trips over a book and hurts herself, she can't cry. But the negative emotion is still there. Maybe she suppresses it, or maybe she gets angry instead. "Who left this damned thing out? I should tan your hide!" Her filter will skew any expression of emotion away from apparent "weakness."

What filters do your characters' emotions go through? Which kinds of expression do they reject, and which do they enhance?

[opewritingtheater]

Sorts of Superstructure

I was thinking about all the kinds of large building you could write about, and I had an urge to categorize. Which of these types of settings would you be most likely to write a story in?

The House: Like the house in House of Leaves, or the Oldest House in Control. A large structure divided into rooms. Those rooms might have different purposes, or their purposes might be obscure, but each room is different. If it's explicitly called a "house," there's an implication that something lives there, even if it's never seen.

The Tower: It's vertical! Divided into floors, and as you go up, intensity or weirdness probably increases. Each floor might be a world unto itself, but their physical hierarchy implies some other hierarchical relationship between them, too. It's up to you to decide what.

The Pit: Like the tower, it's vertical, but intensity or weirdness increases going down instead of up. Like Dante's Inferno, or the Abyss in Made in Abyss. Also divided into horizontal slices of a vertical whole, like floors.

The Machine: It serves some specific purpose, which the audience might or might not know. It's divided into systems that interact. If the machine is an engine, producing energy, there will be a system to bring in fuel, and one to expel exhaust products. If it's a vast computer, there will be processors, heatsinks and fans, and wires linking everything up.

The Ship: A moving superstructure. It might be an arc designed to deliver a doomed civilization to a new world like the colony ships of Pandorum or Last Exile. It might be a floating city, like The Maw in Little Nightmares. You get to play with questions like where the ship is going, and if it will ever get there at all.

[opewritingtheater]

Worldbuilding in Layers: The Setting of Senlin Ascends

The tower of Babel is as wide as a city, but no one knows how tall; when airship pilots fly toward the top they are shot out of the sky. Thick clouds cling to its higher levels, hiding them from view. People come from across the world to throw themselves into its lower levels and climb, earning it its nickname “the sink of humanity.” It’s in the nature of humankind to gravitate toward the tower, to be swept up in its chaos, often never to return.

Josiah Bancroft chose a wonderful stage for his novel to play out on. There is inherent gravity to a setting like this, it has a way of drawing people in. The tower is a structure so immense that it becomes the defining feature of its world. It is the hook that will catch a reader’s attention, it’s the centerpiece of the elevator pitch, it’s the main gimmick. It might have ended there, have served as only a gimmick, but in Senlin Ascends, it does more.

The tower makes such a strong first impression because of its scale. Its size makes it unmistakably important, and implies plenty of space for mysteries and wonders within. The tower makes a promise to the reader that the rest of the story, which will take place in and around it, will match that initial sense of awe.

read more...

(Image generated using Midjourney AI)

[opewritingtheater]

Aesthetic Alchemy: Mixing up a Memorable Mood

Imagine a kitchen like a long hallway, filled with the scent of rosemary and smoke. A long cast-iron slab is suspended from the wall on the right side, with wood fires raging underneath. Chefs in white hover over it, frying thin slices of pork or beef in puddles of sizzling oil. Chefs in gray work the other side of the hall, mixing ingredients on a cold marble countertop, their knives and spatulas clinking against the stone and sending puffs of flour and spices into the air.

If I did my job, that passage made you feel something. Not in an emotional sense, and not a physical sensation, but a mood, a unique state of mind. These are the kinds of feelings that I think define an aesthetic: the cocktail of images and sensory descriptions that gives a book, (or any work of storytelling), its atmosphere.

The aesthetic of a work has a powerful influence on the experience of a reader, but it’s rare that I find advice on how to deliberately craft or alter it. This article is meant to fill that gap, to examine what makes aesthetics work well, what can sabotage them, and how to shape them with intention.

Read More...

(Image generated using Midjourney AI)

[opewritingtheater]

Should Your Villain Be Morally Gray?

Pure Evil, Forces of Nature, Redemption Arcs

The love for gray villains is well deserved. Darth Vader isn’t much fun if we don’t think he could turn to the light. A Song of Ice and Fire’s white walkers are a real threat to Westeros, but they lack the depth that the Lannisters’ tangled web of family relationships brings to the story.

In fact, if you turn to the internet for advice on writing antagonists, you’ll see a lot of advice like “make your villain complex, give your villain a believable motivation, don’t give them black and white morality.” Advice like that makes for good content, it’s short and sweet, and it slots nicely into a “top ten ways to…” style listicle, but it only presents one of the options. It’s entirely possible to write a very effective villain who doesn’t have a single good bone in their body.

But before ignoring all that common advice, we should probably figure out what it actually means. How do you make a villain morally gray? What benefits does it provide?

Read More...

(Image generated using Midjourney AI)

[opewritingtheater]

Names as a tool for worldbuilding

Efficiency

In any writing, naming something helps save time in the long run. A name is a symbol, a container for more complicated information. It helps to be able to refer to Ganondorf instead of saying "the buff ginger who keeps reincarnating to fight Link over and over again and is sometimes pig" every time you need to talk about him.

Importance

Because we name things that we expect to be referring to again, a reader will expect named things to show up in a story multiple times. Giving a character, a place, a concept, etc. a specific name can hint to readers that it's going to be on the test, and they should probably remember it.

Mystery

If you give reader's a name out of context, especially if you make it clear that it's important, it turns into a mystery box. The reader can't see inside it, they don't know what the name refers to, but they know that it's going to be important. You can have it appear in dialogue, in old dusty tomes, in the protagonist's dreams, and each time give the reader a little more information about it, until eventually the name has been filled with meaning.

This is where it can help to have names that sound cool. If the name suggests a question, some sort of mystery, in and of itself, readers will be curious about it from the start. One way to do this is to build a name around a contradiction. Something like "the lofty abyss" or even "beggar's magic", which isn't so much a contradiction as an unusual pairing.

Naming Patterns and Linguistics

In a setting with its own languages or dialects, names will probably reflect the language of the people who invented them. Readers might be able to guess at the nationality or culture of a character based on their name, if they've been exposed to similar sounding names of the same origin.

If you use invented words to name things, the same word might appear in multiple names. Readers can recognize similarities between names and guess at the meaning of a new name based on ones they already know.

Real Names and Allusions

In stories set in our own world, (whether its past, present, future, or some alternate timeline), you can borrow the names of real things to make use of their preexisting associations. A laser-firing satellite codenamed "Damocles" has different implications for the story than an unnamed one.

William Gibson's book Neuromancer does this to great effect. A man has lab grown eyes made by Nikon. A Salvador Dali inspired melting clock has holographic hands that bend to fit its frame. A Rastafarian space station called Zion. These specific details that pull from the real world make the setting feel much more grounded and real.

[opewritingtheater]

How Simple Can You Make a Character?

When is a character complete? How much do you need to know about them before you start drafting? You could go on adding to a character’s appearance, backstory, voice, mannerisms, and other details forever, and sometimes it feels like that’s how long it will take before you’re happy with them. The trouble with that is that we don’t have forever. So just how lazy can we be?

read more

(Image generated using Midjourney AI)

(Turned out pretty weird this time. For anyone who doesn't know, you can join the beta for free on discord and play around with it yourself.)

[opewritingtheater]

Quick Character Analysis: Vash the Stampede!

TRIGUN SPOILERS AHEAD

A not-quite-human fellow, he was raised on the spaceship that first deposited humans on the planet 150 years before the series begins. He had a brother, (named Knives Millions as if to remind you that you're reading a manga), who killed their caretaker and sabotaged the colony ship.

Vash is a capable gunman, but lives the way his caretaker would have wanted, as a pacifist. The huge bounty on his head makes that a challenge.

That conflict between the constant violence that follows him and his determination not to kill gives us most of our drama. It's the sort of setup you'd expect for a static character: Can he remain strong in the face of increasing pressure to break his code?

His backstory is revealed in bits and pieces, but important bits are hinted early on, which strengthens the drama. We learn who his caretaker was and how much he loved her, and it lends weight to his relentless optimism and pacifism, it tells us why he fights to maintain them.

It also feeds into his personality. The goofiness that he maintains even in a hail of bullets isn't just there for comedy, it's a reflection of his ideology: to keep a light heart even in the most dire situations. The moments where that comedic persona drops away are even more powerful by comparison.

The drama is further deepened by the inclusion of a pair of traveling companions who learn bits of his backstory just a little slower than the reader. Seeing their curiosity about him, and their reactions to what they learn, gives his character more anchor points and his emotional journey higher stakes.

Vash finds a foil in his brother, who doesn't think humans deserve to exist. It's a bit of a stereotypical villain motivation, but it contrasts Vash's determination to protect people. In the same vein, the setting itself acts as a foil for him: it's an unforgiving land where people use and abuse each other for profit. It's clear that he can't fix that, so the question is whether he can stand up to it without breaking, and for how long.

Vash is well suited to a long, serialized story. He's a character with a simple, dramatic backstory and an over-the-top personality. He doesn't change much, but his most important facets are reinforced and reiterated over and over again, explored and challenged in different ways. He's not very subtle or complex, and doesn't have to be. Peak shounen character, imo.

[opewritingtheater]

Build-a-Beast: Advice on Fictional Creatures

The animal kingdom is an oft-overlooked province of the art of worldbuilding. It’s very easy to write a world with different continents, countries, and technologies, but the same creatures as we have on earth. It’s a bit of a shame, I think. Adding even a single fictional creature to a world can make it feel much more fantastical, much more alien.

A lot of fictional animals end up being chimeras, combinations of shapes and behaviors lifted from animals in the real world. They can fit well in certain settings, especially ones with lighter, more whimsical moods. If you’re trying to sell the realism of your setting, though, creatures like this can break immersion.

read more...

(Image generated by Midjourney AI)

[daily-prompts]

Prompt 1929

How dose the world keep spinning in your story? Your characters may be caught up in their issues, but there’s still a world outside. How can you communicate that?

[opewritingtheater]

A really good thing to keep in mind. I like to write down a number of steps for some process going on in the world at large, and sprinkle them in where they fit. That way, the reader can see signs of change outside the main plot and get a sense that the world is larger than just the experience of the main characters.

[opewritingtheater]

Ticking Clocks & Outlining with Beats

New Blog Post

How can you keep track of all the complicated bits and pieces of a story? How much detail should an outline contain in order to make the drafting process go smoothly? What's a ticking clock? These questions and more answered in today's blog post, please enjoy!

[opewritingtheater]

Writing Challenge: A hidden character dynamic

Write a pair of characters that seem at first to fit nicely into some familiar dynamic, (master & student, lovers, a guard and the one they protect), but actually have a more complicated relationship.

Here's my take on the idea, with a detective and his Watson:

The detective sat, puffing on his pipe, while his portly, bespectacled assistant brought the last of the partygoers into the room. They waited in silence while the detective set his pipe aside.

“Well then,” said his assistant, “don’t keep us in suspense!” 

The detective smiled. “Of course. As Ms. Flannery’s door was locked when the ring was taken, it would seem that, as the lady herself put it, ‘the thieving cur must have had a key.’ In fact, this was not the case.”

“Then they climbed in through the window,” said lord Flannery. 

“Not in, my lord, but out the window. Remember that Ms. Flannery’s door was open for a time while she went to fetch a glass of water. The thief slipped in then, and hid in the room until the lady had left. They stole the ring, then, finding the door locked, left through the window, climbing into the branches of the big oak and back down into the garden.”

Lord Flannery humphed. “That’s well and good, but we need to know who did it.”

“Ah, but I do know. Our thief is Mr. Bellamy, who was seen walking up the stairs one moment, and in through the front door only a few minutes later. I believe he’s already met with my associates at Scotland Yard, whom I contacted before asking you to gather here.”

“What about the footprints in the garden bed?” asked the cook.

“Ah yes, the footprints!” The detective paused for a moment, as if a cloud was passing across his face. “The footprints,” he repeated. “That’s really quite simple, would anyone like to take a guess?”

The assistant cleared his throat. “It’s cruel of you to test these people, who’ve just been through such a fright. Besides, they weren’t with us when we found the boots in the shed.”

The detective’s face brightened again. “A fine point, I suppose I’ll lay it out. The footprints were planted, using a pair of boots in the gardener’s shed. There was fresh mud on them. Bellamy was hoping to frame a member of the staff. Now I really must explain all this to the police. If you’ll excuse us.” 

Before anyone had a moment to protest, the detective ducked out of the room, and his assistant followed close behind.

The two men were silent until they’d walked around the bend in the driveway, then the assistant straightened his coat and looked at the detective with mock amazement.

“I have no idea how you ever made a living at this without my help.”

“Oh, be quiet. It was a lot to remember.”

“Maybe I’ll let you solve the next one by yourself.”

“You’re still technically in custody, so you work for me.”

“If you keep making mistakes like that, I’ll ask them to throw me back in prison so I don’t have to witness any more of your idiocy.”

If anyone tries their hand at this, I'd love to read it! Let me know in the comments, or mention me in your post!

[annarts05]

book things post-super-scary-battle

the emotional moments after a battle, characters have almost died, or *gasp* they HAVE DIED, and it’s just..a lot. and i love all the potential ahh <3

Characters needing to stay at friends’ houses because it isn’t safe 

or just because they want to stay together after, y’know, almost dying

it could either become super angsty with tears, hugs, and injuries

or it could be super fun and “let’s try to forget” with board games and yelling and wearing ugly pajamas, basically a big sleepover

Characters being injured and that beautiful wake-up scene where their friend/SO is right there and they both look like crap but they’re both just sO HAPPY they’re not dead </3

Late-night conversations between characters about their fears, both for the future, things that happened in the past, nightmares that they’re having, whatever

Eating favorite foods and characters saying really dumb things just to feel happy again

Characters laughing ALWAYS makes me smile as long as I like the characters

Please let them laugh <3333