Jill Marie Hackett

Musings of a writer, artist, and lover of story.

[fictionwritingtips]

[storyasart]

I compiled most of the writing websites I’ve mentioned on my blog into one post. I find a lot of these sites useful, so hopefully they can help you out!

Imagination Prompt Generator: This give you a one-sentence writing prompt that will help you come up with ideas. I think it also allows you to set a ten minute timer for each prompt.

Wridea: I really like this site because you can write down simple ideas that you can organize later and put into a bigger project. You can share these ideas or the site will help you randomly match ideas. It’s great for brainstorming and building a fully formed outline.

List of Unusual Words — Here’s a site you can browse through that gives you a list of unusual words for every letting in the alphabet. If you’re looking to switch up your vocab, or looking to develop a way a character speaks, this is a good reference.

Picometer — Here’s a writing progress meter that can be embedded on your site or blog. There’s also the Writertopia meter that shows word count/current mood. 

Cut Up Machine: This website takes whatever words you typed or pasted into the box and rearranges your sentences. It’s not practical for writing a novel, but it might help with poetry OR coming up with ideas. Experiment with it and see what you can come up with.

Orion’s Arm: This is a great website to use if you want to research worldbuilding or if you have science questions. There are tons of resources you can use.

Word Frequency Counter: If you’re finding that you’re using the same words over and over again, this website should help. You’ll be able to count the frequency usage of each word in your text. This should help you switch up the words you’re using and understand where the problem might be.

Phrase Frequency Counter: This is same site explained above, but it counts the phrases you’re using.

My Writing Nook: This allows you to write or jot down ideas wherever you are. You don’t need to have your laptop in order to access it, so it might help you during this time. You can write as long as you have your phone.

Writer: The Internet Typewriter - This site lets you write, save, share, and/or convert your writing online. I tried it out and it’s pretty cool. It saves for you and is a great way to brainstorm or plan out some ideas.

The Forge - The Forge is a fantasy, creature, spell, and location name generator. It’s awesome.

One Word: This site gives you one word to write about for 60 seconds. This should help you get started with your own writing and will work as a writing prompt to get you warmed up. It’s a great way to get yourself motivated.

Confusing Words:  On this site you can search through confusing words that often stump many writers. It’s not a huge reference, but it should help you with some writing/grammar issues.

Cliché Finder: This site allows you to enter parts of your writing and it will search for clichés. If you find that you’re using the same phrases over and over again, this will help a lot. I haven’t messed around with it too much, but it looks useful.

Hand Written Fonts: If you’re looking for great hand written fonts, this is a great reference. All of them are pretty awesome.

Tip of My Tongue — you know when you’re trying to think of a specific word, but you just can’t remember what it is? This site will help you narrow down your thoughts and find that word you’ve been looking for. It can be extremely frustrating when you have to stop writing because you get a stuck on a word, so this should help cut that down. 

-Kris Noel

[wordpainting-deactivated2023071]

True enough.

[storyasart]

Desire: What Makes Your Characters Tick

As mentioned in last week’s article, desire is one of the essential ingredients to generating conflict. Your character’s desire will inform everything from the subtleties of acting to the external forces necessary to alter your character’s behavior throughout the story. Without a solid understanding of desire, its elements, and how to use them, a story can fall victim to superfluous scenes and characters that behave irrationally. Hopefully, this crash course in desire will help avert those major pitfalls.

The Definition of Desire

Desire can be broken into two components: Want (with a capital ‘W’) and action.

“Want” is the character’s emotional law–that psychological itch your character would die to scratch. This element of desire is conceptual in nature. A character whose wife is murdered by a jealous ex-lover might want his grief to end at any cost. It’s important to identify this high-concept element first because stories are designed to capture a perfect storm of dramatic circumstance; most (if not all) of that character’s personality traits, physical traits, and even his environment are governed by his emotional law. To a character, Want is motivating. To a writer, Want informs the story’s design.

“Action” is how the character chooses to express Want. Continuing the above example, if the character whose wife was killed wants his grief to end at any cost, he could determine that seeking revenge on the murderer is a good way to feel relief. The nature of his actions are further directed by the details of his Want, which the writer constructed at the onset of the story. Maybe the character is a detective but no longer believes in the force of the law, so he chooses to seek revenge by using his keen sleuthing skills to locate and murder the murderer–and get away with it. Or the character could be a psychologist who chooses to act on his Want by going to therapy, during which he discovers the real murderer is himself. As you can see, two characters can have the same Want but take opposite actions. This is how desire becomes such a complex story element and essential tool to writers.

Typically, a character’s fundamental Want will not change during the course of the story, even if the character himself changes. The character Scrooge, from A Christmas Carol, fundamentally wants relief from the pain of loneliness. Seeing people lively and together during the Christmas holiday causes Scrooge pain, so he lashes out at his community, drowns his sorrows in work, and insists that his poor secretary come in on Christmas Day. However, the ghosts that visit him on Christmas Eve ask Scrooge why he feels so lonely, show him that he has a place in his community, and they give him the tools he needs in order to reconnect. Now Scrooge is a happy and generous man–but note! His Want never changed, only his actions. (Of course, exceptions to this trend to exist, but that’s a different article altogether.)

Two-by-Two

Want and action can technically exist independent of each other. However, without the detective’s emotive reaction to murder, the psychologist’s training to seek help, or Scrooge’s deep-seeded loneliness to explain his humbug, their respective stories fall apart. That’s why it’s important to couple these two concepts into a single motivating story element: desire.

Do you take note of your character’s desires before starting a scene?

[storyasart]

As mentioned in last week's article, desire is one of the essential ingredients to generating conflict. Your character's desire will inform everything from the subtleties of acting to the external forces necessary to alter your character's behavior throughout the story. Without a solid understanding of desire, its elements, and how to use them, a story can fall victim to superfluous scenes and characters that behave irrationally. Hopefully, this crash course in desire will help avert those major pitfalls.

The Definition of Desire

Desire can be broken into two components: Want (with a capital 'W') and action.

"Want" is the character's emotional law--that psychological itch your character would die to scratch. This element of desire is conceptual in nature. A character whose wife is murdered by a jealous ex-lover might want his grief to end at any cost. It's important to identify this high-concept element first because stories are designed to capture a perfect storm of dramatic circumstance; most (if not all) of that character's personality traits, physical traits, and even his environment are governed by his emotional law. To a character, Want is motivating. To a writer, Want informs the story's design.

"Action" is how the character chooses to express Want. Continuing the above example, if the character whose wife was killed wants his grief to end at any cost, he could determine that seeking revenge on the murderer is a good way to feel relief. The nature of his actions are further directed by the details of his Want, which the writer constructed at the onset of the story. Maybe the character is a detective but no longer believes in the force of the law, so he chooses to seek revenge by using his keen sleuthing skills to locate and murder the murderer--and get away with it. Or the character could be a psychologist who chooses to act on his Want by going to therapy, during which he discovers the real murderer is himself. As you can see, two characters can have the same Want but take opposite actions. This is how desire becomes such a complex story element and essential tool to writers.

Typically, a character's fundamental Want will not change during the course of the story, even if the character himself changes. The character Scrooge, from A Christmas Carol, fundamentally wants relief from the pain of loneliness. Seeing people lively and together during the Christmas holiday causes Scrooge pain, so he lashes out at his community, drowns his sorrows in work, and insists that his poor secretary come in on Christmas Day. However, the ghosts that visit him on Christmas Eve ask Scrooge why he feels so lonely, show him that he has a place in his community, and they give him the tools he needs in order to reconnect. Now Scrooge is a happy and generous man--but note! His Want never changed, only his actions. (Of course, exceptions to this trend to exist, but that's a different article altogether.)

Two-by-Two

Want and action can technically exist independent of each other. However, without the detective's emotive reaction to murder, the psychologist's training to seek help, or Scrooge's deep-seeded loneliness to explain his humbug, their respective stories fall apart. That's why it's important to couple these two concepts into a single motivating story element: desire.

Do you take note of your character's desires before starting a scene?

[caesaretluna]

                     Write Real People                     click and drag game

ONE RULE: DON’T CLICK AND DRAG UNTIL YOU FIND SOMETHING YOU LIKE!

if you want me to add anything just write me. i’ll add that and update the post!

I love all the click and drag games on Tumblr and after I read an article about diversity in YA books, I wanted to make a click and drag “game” myself. (i think this was the article, but i’m not sure, sorry)

[storyasart]

The central desire of anyone listening to a story is that they want to be moved. An audience is always asking: please move me so that I will care. I want to be moved. Please tell me a story that ennobles me.

Bobette Buster, DO/STORY/How to tell your story so the world listens

[storyasart]

The way you move is your autobiography in motion.

Leil Lowndes, How to Talk to Anyone

[storyasart]

The basis for all story is conflict. Without it, a story cannot progress, characters’ actions do not have meaning, and the audience loses interest. The difference between Jane saying, “The weather is nice,” and “You will not believe what that jerk said to me last night,” is the potential for conflict.

But having potential isn’t enough. It’s entirely possible that Jane recites her conversation with the jerk she met last night, and her story comes out flat. The jerk may have insulted her, but without the existence of any true conflict, Jane’s so-called story is really a complaint. No one want’s to be complained at; the listener loses interest.

This lack of engagement is a death-knell for anyone who wants to hold a reader’s attention. The good news is you don’t have to be Jane. (I apologize if your name is Jane.) Once you know how conflict is defined, it’s easy to identify in your writing. And once you’re able to identify it, you’ll be able to milk your scenes for all their worth. Bye-bye Jane.

So What IS Conflict?

Conflict is the exact moment when your focal character’s desire meets opposition.

By definition, conflict requires three things: A focal character, the focal character’s desire, and opposition to that desire. If your scene contains these three elements, you have a story.

Your scene’s focal character should be the individual with the most at stake. The higher the stakes, the more interesting the situation. A reader doesn’t want to know what’s happening to the executioner, he wants to know what’s happening to the guy with the rope around his neck. Unless, that is, the executioner is the one who really committed the crime, and the guy he’s about to kill is his best friend and last chance for redemption. Once you’ve identified the character in your scene who risks losing the most, assess his desire.

It’s important to recognize the difference between a character’s story-desire and his scene-desire. A character’s story-desire can be large, but his scene-desire is always small and directly relevant to the scene’s details. In the words of Dwight V. Swain, author of Techniques of the Selling Writer, a character’s scene-desire is “so explicit that you might photograph your hero performing the act to which he aspires.” For example, a character with the story-desire to achieve social reform in his community could have a scene-desire to win a potential ally to his side. The photographic representation of his scene-desire would be the focal character shaking hands with his new ally.

Desires come in one of two flavors: change or relief. “Change” desires are proactive needs based around acquisition – getting the girl, stealing the purse, saving the child. “Relief” desires are reactive needs based on resistance – not getting killed, mitigating blackmail, resisting confinement. The focal character must always enter a scene with a strong desire in mind, even if it’s a strong desire to sit quietly in a coffee shop, and then it’s the writer’s responsibility to challenge it.

And now for the explosion. Given that you have an appropriate focal character with a strong desire, all that’s left to achieve conflict is equally strong opposition. Like desires, opposition comes in two forms: a person or a thing. Because a person has motive and the ability to counteract, I find that the most engaging conflicts involve human (or intelligent-creature) opposition. Environments and objects do make effective obstacles, but they cannot respond to a change in the focal character’s desire, should one occur. It’s easier to trap the focal character in your conflict if the focal character’s opposition can readily adjust to struggle.

If you are missing any of these elements, or if they are not equally balanced, you do not have a conflict, and therefore you do not have a story.

What ISN’T a Conflict?

Everything else. Put another way, any scene in a story that does not contain conflict is a situation–the circumstance that surrounds an event. A conflict always takes place within a situation, but a situation does not always contain conflict. Storytellers are prone to creating situations because, in day-to-day life, people most often exist in situations. A situation in real life feels natural. Not so in story.

Little Johnny wants his favorite cookie before dinner, but the cookie jar is on top of the refrigerator. He looks over his shoulder to see if mom is in the room. Then he reaches up and takes the cookie jar. Turns out, the refrigerator is a mini-fridge.

Also turns out, this scene is a situation without conflict. Conflict does not arise until all elements in the situation are perfectly balanced. If Johnny is at risk of getting caught by mom, he is an appropriate focal character. If the cookies are his favorite, his desire is strong. But the opposition, a mini-fridge, is laughable. Turn that mini-fridge into a full-size refrigerator, and suddenly the situation has conflict.

Granted, situations without conflict can be interesting, but the interest only exists after the reader has established a personal connection with the character, and even then it doesn’t last long. That’s why the denouement (the resolution of a story) is so short. The conflict is over. All the reader wants to know now is whether or not the characters live happily ever after, the end.

Do I Always Need Conflict?

The short answer is “yes,” but you deserve to know why.

The writer and reader are in constant dialogue with each other. The reader asks questions, and the writer responds with answers during crafted moments. The art of storytelling is concerned with the kind of questions the reader asks and the particular method of the author’s response.

Because a situation is structurally imbalanced, a reader can’t grasp why the presented information is relevant. As a result, the only question a reader can ask is, “And then what?” If the situation continues, the writer is responding with, “And then this.” This dialogue will repeat (“And then what?” “Then this.” “And then what?” “Then this.”) until either the reader get bored or the writer establishes balance in their scene and voila–conflict is born. Finally, the reader asks the story question, “Will Little Johnny make it to the cookies before mom finds out?” to which the author replies, “Wait and see.”

Every scene requires conflict, but the intensity and type of conflict will fluctuate from scene to scene. Sometimes, it will be more intellectual than physical. A scene featuring a character that must make a decision still has conflict if the argument for each side is equally forceful. Achieving this kind of texture in your story will keep the drama fresh.

Everyone instinctively knows when a situation has escalated into conflict. That’s why readers put down books without it and writers around the world start giggling maniacally when they encounter it. If you, too, are writing, and you are not consumed by sadistic glee, take note. Your character might not be in conflict.

[storyasart]

Dwight V. Swain -- Techniques of the Selling Writer

[writingquotes-deactivated201509]

The only rule I have found to have any validity in writing is not to bore yourself.

John Mortimer (via writetothestars)

[1000-or-bust-deactivated2017031]

It only takes one yes to get published. Keep looking for that yes.

Randy Ingermanson (via 1000-or-bust)

[1000-or-bust-deactivated2017031]

You are stubborn. You are exhausted. You are determined. You are a Writer.

Marie Lu (via 1000-or-bust)

[1000-or-bust-deactivated2017031]

What qualities and/or conditions are most valuable to a writer? Spontaneity. Freedom. The opportunity for unstudied, impulsive roving through the backlands of his mind. Which are the most detrimental? Inhibition. Self-censorship. Restraint.

Dwight V. Swain, author of “Techniques of the Selling Writer” (via 1000-or-bust)

[1000-or-bust-deactivated2017031]

Why does your reader judge the focal character? Because he can’t help doing it; can’t restrain himself. Convictions, feelings, are part of him—his most inner being. When he bumps into the right stimulus, they come boiling forth, reaffirming their own existence in heightened tension and speeded pulse. If your reader DOESN’T judge, count on it that the focal character is too bland and innocuous and uncommitted to be worth writing about.

Dwight V. Swain, author of “Techniques of the Selling Writer”. (via 1000-or-bust)

[1000-or-bust-deactivated2017031]

The best observation anyone can make on preparation, planning, and production is that everyone has a God-given right to go to hell in his own way— and don’t let anyone kid you out of yours.

Dwight V. Swain, author of Techniques of the Selling Writer (via 1000-or-bust)

[writerswritecompany]

[yeahwrite]

Learn it!

[1000-or-bust-deactivated2017031]

What a writer seeks is a way of life, and that way constitutes its own reward. The criterion is never art for art’s sake…always, it is art for self’s sake. You write because you like to—need to, have to—write; there is no other valid reason.

Dwight V. Swain, author of Techniques of the Selling Writer (via 1000-or-bust)