In the West, plot is commonly thought to revolve around conflict: a confrontation between two or more elements, in which one ultimately dominates the other. The standard three- and five-act plot structuresâwhich permeate Western mediaâhave conflict written into their very foundations. A âproblemâ appears near the end of the first act; and, in the second act, the conflict generated by this problem takes center stage. Conflict is used to create reader involvement even by many post-modern writers, whose work otherwise defies traditional structure.
The necessity of conflict is preached as a kind of dogma by contemporary writersâ workshops and Internet âguidesâ to writing. A plot without conflict is considered dull; some even go so far as to call it impossible. This has influenced not only fiction, but writing in generalâarguably even philosophy. Yet, is there any truth to this belief? Does plot necessarily hinge on conflict? No. Such claims are a product of the Westâs insularity. For countless centuries, Chinese and Japanese writers have used a plot structure that does not have conflict âbuilt inâ, so to speak. Rather, it relies on exposition and contrast to generate interest. This structure is known as kishĆtenketsu.
I saw your bookbinding post, and I am one of those odd people who already knows how to bookbind, but doesn't have the faintest clue how to print something out into signatures. Or even to get two pages onto one page. Could you teach us how to do that as well?
I personally tend to use a program called Bookbinderâs Collator. It costs around 10⏠in total.
Just load your pages up on this program and it will sort it into signatures for you.
You can also check out @renegadepublishing they have a Google doc of resources collected including a bunch of imposing/collating software options including free ones.
make your character reflect yourselfă Ą like insert your interests and hobbies onto your protagonistă Ą this way, you won't have to struggle with coming up with a whole new personality for your characteră Ą it makes design so much easier!
put a bit of your voice and project it into the character, so it can use your opinions in dialogue.
make your character flawed! they don't have to be messed up and traumatized, but make them normală Ą give them bad habits! they're usually cute and funny.
come up with basic things about the protagonist when you begin your character design. start with things like: their favorite food, or favorite color, even.
they don't necessarily have to be trauma-inflicted.
when choosing a name, you don't always have to pick a name that reflects their characteristics. it's not always successful, so try using a name that you just like
when choosing a name, make sure it's easy to say (for the most part) and it has a certain flow and vibe to it.
make your character go through everyday struggles, even though your plot might be dramatic, it doesn't mean your character always lived like that. show a bit of their life before the whole climax, before the whole life-changing event. show their true emotions! not every character is as cool as a cucumber and standoffish.
like I said, making a character TOO aloof could be a bit annoying to read at times, so give them thoughts that truly have emotions
give them failures! give them moments of humiliation or embarassment-- they're human, after all
Writing what feels like a dozen pages only to figure out after that you haven't even gotten through half a page is a universal experience across all writers.
What I'm about to tell you is one way I've found helps getting through that psychological toll.
One day I was writing my novel (a-luchador-detective-versus-a-lady-vampire sort of affair) when I got a certain idea. I picked up my copy of Authority by Jeff Vandermeer that I had on the desk and decided to make the line length in my work the same as that paperback edition. Margins were widened and line spacing was adjusted, leaving me with a sort of narrow manuscript.
You've no idea how much my productivity went up.
Logically, finishing a line became much faster, which lead to quicker finished pages, which produced a longer-looking manuscript. Of course, this doesn't mean that my writing was immediately faster per se,
but the feeling of being faster placebo-ed me in a way that increased my output.
Now I'm hitting my daily word-count much more consistently and I believe this was partly responsible.
Humans like numbers going up, if we wouldn't both videogames and billionares wouldn't exist. Seeing my page count increase is a reward to my brain which gives me a boost to get to the next page. By decreasing the length between rewards I'm put in a more constant progression loop, no longer feeling the slog of going up a hill and being met with a thousand more.
And at the end, if I want to check my actual progress, the real gauge will forever be the total word count, which we shouldn't obsess over, anyways.
The journey to create a novel or other piece of long-form media will always be more of a marathon than a race, and should be undertaken with the mindset of a marathon. All progress is incremental, and you should not be emotionally punishing yourself for not finishing a quarter of your book in the last week, as if that were somehow possible.
The length of a novel is such that any time-saving and efficiency-increasing life hacks we apply would only be reducing our-time-finish by weeks at the most, so why the rush?
I believe the key to writing faster is to write constantly first.
Can't be fast without stamina. So go ahead; write and make writing easier on you.
Hey y'all! I'm back again with yet another segment of Writing tips. Today we're going to cover something a bit more vague, conditions. No, not the terms and/or conditions of some contract. What I'm referring to is the current condition of an item, a place, or even a creature.
probably why so many teens take to social media where they can enthusiastically share their interests and achievements and get positive feedback that their parents never gave
I remember once, when I was in my early 20s, I was an afternoon supervisor at my job, and I worked with mostly teenagers, and the one day this one kid, who was like 15, was bored so I suggested he could clean out the fridge. He did and when he was done I said he did a good job.
After that, this kid was cleaning out the fridge at least once a week, and I was like, âwhy are you always cleaning the fridge?â Like, I didnât mind, but it seemed odd. And he said, âone time I cleaned the fridge and you said I did a good job. I wanted to make you proud of me again.â
Literally, I changed the entire way I interacted with teenagers after that. I actually got a package of glitter stars and I would stick them on their nametags when they did a good job, and they loved it.
My manager had commented on how hard these kids work and I said, âtheyâre starved for positive feedback. They go to school all day then come to work all evening and no one appreciates it because itâs expected of them, but theyâre still kids. They need positive feedback from adults in their lives.â
Like, everyone likes feeling appreciated. Everyone likes being complimented and having their efforts be noticed. Another coworker (who was a mother of teenage children), hated that I did this, and said they were too old to be rewarded with stickers, but like⊠it wasnât about the stickers. The stickers were just a symbol that their effort was noticed and appreciated. I was just lucky that I learned this at a time when I was still young enough to remember what it was like to be a teenager. I was only 2 years out of highschool at that point and highschool is fucking hard. People forget this as they get older, but ask anyone and almost no one would ever want to go back and do it again, but they expect kids to suck it up because theyâre young so they should be able to do school full time, plus homework, and work, and maintain a healthy social life, and sleep, and spend time with family, and do chores and help out at home, and worry about college and relationships and everything else, and then just get shit on all the time and treated like theyâre lazy and entitled. And then they wonder why teenagers are apathetic.
For a german exam I had to argue against an article that was essentially âkids these days, they donât care about anything and are constantly on their phonesâ and really it was the easiest essay Iâve ever written.
Teens donât talk to adults bc adults only ask âso, howâs schoolâ to then interrupt them two sentences in. And because they canât engage in a conversation about buying houses and working in a bank. I wouldâve loved to talk about philosophy and politics and history with family the way I did with friends and in class but because I was young no one took what I had to say seriously.
And no, teens arenât always on their phone. Theyâre on their phone when theyâre bored. You think Iâm on social media when Iâm with my friends? When Iâm talking about something Iâm interested in?
Maybe the reason kids are so distant and always on their phone during family parties and the like is because youâre failing to engage and include them.
When you respect kids, they really respond and learn from you. But if you treat kids like âtheyre just a kid, what do they know??â then youâll never find out.
As a Disneyland Cast Member, Iâll add my own experience onto this â
Very frequently, when I first speak to a child while Iâm at work, theyâll kind of withdraw and act uncomfortable and shy. Their parents will then rather frequently tell them to not be shy and try to coax them to talk to me â whenever that happens, I always, without fail, politely dissuade the parents from pressuring them.
âIâm a stranger,â Iâll tell the kidâs parents. âI donât blame them for not talking to me â if they were anywhere else, theyâd have the right idea, to not immediately trust me.â
I cannot tell you how many times Iâve seen that same kid â simply after hearing their initial reaction being validated, instead of reproached â immediately open up to me after that. I also cannot tell you how many times that child and I would go on to start a frigginâ marathon conversation, and I got to hear all about how great their day was or what their favorite Disney movies were or what rides they liked and didnât like or how much they like a certain Disney character or songâŠall from me validating that initial feeling and showing genuine interest in what they had to say.
This isnât just young children, either. I will always remember being positioned outside the Animation Academy one day and starting up a conversation with a young lady, perhaps 12 or 13, who joined the line with her father a full 25 minutes before the class was supposed to start. Now keep in mind, we do a drawing class every 30 minutes: there was no one else in line at that point, and no one else joined the girl and her father in line for a full fifteen minutes. So I could tell pretty quickly that this girl was very emotionally invested in getting a good spot for the drawing class: a conclusion all the more bolstered by the fact that she had a notebook under her arm. I asked her if she was an artist â she said yes, but seemed uncomfortable at the question, so I skipped even asking her if I could see her work, instead admitting that I myself wasnât very good at art, but that Iâm trying to get better and that I love the history of Disney animation. On the screens around us was video footage of different Disney concept art and animation reels, so I pointed one of them out (for Snow White) and asked if she knew the story behind the making of the movie. Upon confirming that she didnât, I proceeded to get down on the floor so I could sit next to her and her father and dramatically tell the whole story of how âUncle Waltâ created the first full-length animated motion picture, even though everyone and their mother thought he was an idiot for even trying, and how the film ended up becoming the first Hollywood blockbuster. After the story was over, the girlâs father said that his daughter really wanted to be an animator when she grew up, and she finally felt comfortable enough to open her notebook and show me some of her artwork. It was wonderful! Every sketch had such character and you could tell how much work she put into it! And I could tell how much telling her that â and sharing that moment with her, where we got to connect over something we both really enjoyed â had meant. And after the class was over, she sought me out to show me what she and her father had drawn â and sure enough, hers was great! (Her fatherâs was too, really. XD)
People, kids and teens included, love sharing what they love and how they feel with others. You just have to give them the chance to show it.
I feel like I am obliged to add one more thing: donât ever think that the kids wonât feel your unspoken judgements cause they do!
I felt always like a âproblemâ in my family, until I was about sixteen, I got this teacher who was litterally the first to tell I was worthy. He changed my life up till this day.
Also how do grown ups imagine how âweâ will ever learn to engage in conversations with adults properly if you donât teach us?
I told one of my new coworkers (who is 26) that he was doing really well and that I was proud of him and his progress. I thought he was going to start crying for how quietly he said âreally?â.Â
Positive feedback makes the biggest difference to everything.
I used to have a coworker who only spoke Burmese. She knew a few words in English, but literally it was like âhey Susu, can you clean the cooler for me?â âYes yes, I clean, I clean.â Sheâd moved to the US in her late 30s and never really got the hang of English. (I donât say this to make fun of her. She was a refugee fleeing a brutal and bloody war in Myanmar and her broken English was a sign of deep determination and tragedy. I say it because the language barrier, and the extent of it, is important to what happened next.)
She was shy, and kind of withdrawn, and extremely slowâit took this woman an hour to do a sink of dishes that took me 30 minutes and I was considered not particularly fastâbut she was absolutely dogged. She would do her job and get it done.
So this one day I realized we had all kinds of âhey, great job!â cards on our little recognition board thing for almost the whole crew, but none for Susu, because âshe wonât understand anyway.â So I threw a couple of simple sentences into a translation app and spent like half an hour very painstakingly drawing these sentences in Burmese characters (and drawing is really what it wasâI felt like I was four years old and holding a pencil for the first time again) and gave her the card. She kind of glanced and it and went âoh thank youâ and then did this massive double-take and raised it in front of her face and read it, and read it again, and then just about hollered âOH THANK YOU THANK YOUâ and I showed her where she could pin it on the recognition board if she wanted. She chose to take it home instead, which, totally fair.
All it said was âthank you for your hard work, youâre very reliable.â
Everything changed after that. She started using her limited English more, picking up new words here and there (rather amusingly, ours was a multilingual kitchen but she didnât know which words belonged to which language, and you really havenât lived until youâve seen a tiny Burmese woman slap a fryer and say âOy vay this thing, yeah! Pendejo!â I mean yes, completely valid emotion about that fucking fryer, but when this is how youâre discovering sheâs picked up both Spanish and Yiddish and thinks both of them are English, lemme tell you, that sure is an Emotion), enthusiastically participating in things.
She was in her forties.
Nobody but her children had spoken a word to her in Burmese since she left home.
People just want to be known. Sometimes thatâs all it takes.
This is one of my favourite posts. I use these strategies a lot with my students, and by the second week, I can usually get half the class to engage in the discussion, even online.
The most important part is that just saying that you appreciate them Diane work for all kids and teenagers. Sometimes you have to be willing to actually show that.
