#creativity tips with sofie

[sincerely-sofie]

I don't know how artists manage to make skeletons adorable. Like... seriously I know several Mangas and games with adorable skeles. Skul the hero slayer for example.

[sincerely-sofie]

Did you ever think up a name for the goat's patron? Curious because I love their desgin and I cant get them out of my head. Also, if its not too much trouble, do you mind going into your thoughts behind their design? For some reason I interpret it as vaugely Chinese/Journey to the West inspired (which has partly resulted in me calling them pigsy in my head), but idk if thats your you were going for.

(referencing the design found in this post)

Her name is Freya! She's the goddess of both life and death in her world, chained by her siblings to guarantee themselves immortality. She was freed from her chains by the Goat stealing her siblings' crowns and using their weapons to sacrifice himself in a vicious ritual that should have led to him being impossible to bring back from death's clutches. But Freya was terrified of losing him, and tried to stop him from slipping away as he died. She only managed to pin him between life and death, trapping him in the moments of his passing for what seemed like eons... Until a newly-crowned goddess from another world with an affinity for such things found and released him. (At least in the scrapped storyline / alternative AU where he appears!)

The main inspiration behind her design was that I wanted her to be an animal that's seen positively or negatively depending on the culture it's in, and has a connection with luck in order to contrast Narinder's being a black cat and fulfilling those requirements as well. So I made her a pig as a result!

I wanted her to contrast the Goat's very gloomy and dark design. She would have warm brown, bright gold, and vivid purple as her central colors as a result, though I didn't color her in the piece she appears in, so that's not clear at all, haha.

I'm not the best at conveying it in my art, but Narinder, at least in his updated design I never really draw, is meant to have diamonds as the main shape that his design is built around. He's supposed to have diamond-shaped eyes, ears, face, etcetera. And Freya has hearts to contrast that! A shape that has roundedness to its points.

I wasn't very inspired by Chinese motifs while designing Freya beyond the symbolism of pigs in that culture helping me choose her species. But her earrings were semi-inspired by furin wind chimes, which originate in Japan! You can read about those on their Wikipedia page here. I imagine that Freya would be the inspiration behind her world's lore for their version of furin.

As a little bit of parting trivia: the Goat was the one to do all of the plotting to free Freya, contrasting the Lamb and Narinder's dynamic. He was so utterly head over heels for her after she saved him from the massacre of his people, ashamed of her siblings' actions, that he was willing to do whatever it took for her to see the world she loved again, free of shackles.

[sincerely-sofie]

Advice for making a slow burn story??

Trying to plan one out for a character with a very TPiaG-like buildup with her lies crashing in around her in the end but I feel like I can't get any ideas for having stuff like. Actually Happen over more than 10 chapters without it feeling like I'm just stalling for time

Disclaimer: Not every story needs to be a slow-burn story. That genre of fanfic is put up on a pedestal everywhere you turn, but it's not automatically good, and my personal rule of thumb is that if a story is resisting efforts to make it longer as I write it, it's probably just not meant to be a slow-burn.

Double Disclaimer: In my corner of the world, TPiaG is actually not a slow-burn story! I'm actually a bit surprised people see it as one. In most genres of published fiction, it's actually wayyy on the shorter end. Especially for a "standalone" novel. What you read most influences your writing the most, and I've barely read any fanfiction to experience the efficiency of the medium— TPiaG is very much a case of "big fish, small pond" where it was written as if I was intending to publish it in a paperback instead of on Ao3. So the word count artificially appears large because of that, and the pacing seems slow when it's pretty dang speedy by most genres' standards.

Long story short, don't worry about making a fanfic like TPiaG in terms of buildup or anything. It's weird and exists in a strange in-between state betwixt fanfiction and traditionally published fiction. Anyhoo!

"How do you slow down the burn of your story?" Here are 3 handy hacks for just that!

TIP #1: Stop and smell the roses

Descriptive prose does WONDERS for stretching chapters that you've already outlined. Feel like things are going too quick? Set the scene a little extra! Tell us about the protagonist feeling her muscles seize and tremble with all the tension she's been carrying in her shoulders for so long, make us feel her eyes ache with the need to close and truly rest if only she had the chance, make us feel her stomach drop and her mind turn to numb static when the lies finally come crashing down and she realizes she's been found out!

TIP #2: Trust in the beach episode

Stuff doesn't have to happen in a chapter to justify it existing. Give characters breather chapters where not much plot happens so they can catch their breath after a bunch of action in the previous chapter— or simmer in the dread they're unable to escape in those quiet moments. Let the reader grapple with the events that have happened and how they impacted the characters. Moments of quiet make moments of chaos hit all the harder. The contrast is what makes everything stand out!

TIP#3: Treat the story like a Thanksgiving turkey and stuff it full of goodies

Brainstorm a ton of situations to put your characters in. Steal situations from media you love. Steal stock plots. Now see how you can fit as many of those situations as possible into your outline. If you want, you can trim the fat later on— but for now, see what you can fit comfortably into your outline while having fun as a writer. I had a LOT of ideas for TPiaG that I cut from the final product so it wouldn't drag weirdly in different places, and if I didn't bloat my original skeleton plot with all those unnecessary ideas, the story would have been done in under 6,000 words. You can always cut and condense extra chapters and plot points— making things less tightly packed after the fact is much harder! (Though I still miss the idea of Twig and Ark getting dragged into a dinner party by Gardevoir and Lyra...)

In conclusion: Describing scenery is useful for lengthening existing chapters; stalling for time in your outline is actually a good thing because it lets the readers and characters breathe and lets action-packed scenes hit harder; slam every idea you can into an outline and worry about trimming things down later; but also remember that slow-burn stories aren't always as good as fanfiction culture may tell you, and oil-fire stories are just as awesome as slow-burn ones. Good luck with your story, and let me know if I can answer your questions any better or give additional advice!!

[sincerely-sofie]

you have multiverse of Firn and Narinder and they are Better the Wool(drama with a happy ending), Death and the maiden(the most drama with a happy ending), role swap(Firn but big), pmd(Firn is chaos but compact), the yes definitely absolutely(the cat was into the lamb from the start).

That's the Sofie Signature: an absurd amount of AUs and alternate storylines + character interpretations! 75% of my original stories are just AUs and crossovers of the other 25%. Heck, I've considered making a family tree of my original projects just to prove to demonstrate how absurdly interwoven all those projects are.

Remember to recycle, kids! Don't reinvent the wheel. Work smarter, not harder!

[sincerely-sofie]

for the ask game: what's your general philosophy when it comes to designing ocs or giving new ones to currently-existing canon characters? always thought the way you did it with both was nice and i wondered what makes the process come to be as a whole?

My character design philosophy has evolved a lot over the years— for a long time, I was worried about making characters look "good" on a technical level and "accurate" to any source material. However, I've come to understand that unless your income relies on designing characters that fit that bill, accuracy and technical skills are both worthless. My philosophy on character design is now defined by the quest to make it fun to draw the character in question— and while what's fun for me will be different from what's fun for anyone else, the main factors of it for me are speed and storytelling.

As for speed, that usually entails streamlining details in existing character designs to simplify all the steps it takes to finish a rough sketch of them. The way I draw Ark is probably the most notable example of this, but Grovyle and Dusknoir have also suffered from my detail confiscation. It's a tricky line to walk between not streamlining a design enough and developing a headache when I want to draw it versus streamlining a design too much and sacrificing my satisfaction with a finished drawing, and I haven't quite figured out how to balanced it well. But as I learn and grow as an artist, details on designs that I would once omit to shave off an extra 30 minutes take 5 minutes or less.

Art from here and here. Dusknoir's come a long way in my art, and I'm still growing with every drawing I make!

As for storytelling, that's a subject I can go on and on about, but I’ll cool it and just say the three main questions for it are this: How does this character live? How do they express themself or try to blend in? How do those things impact each other? If you ponder those things for a bit, chances are you’ll have a solid bit of storytelling in your character design.

Some extra tips I have for myself are to use design tropes and concepts I personally enjoy looking at and drawing— stuff like blush marks, cat smiles, lil puffs of fur / hair, etcetera. Using shapes I enjoy is also a big boost in the fun factor of character design— swirls, hearts, and diamonds with circular cutouts are all motifs that frequently appear in my drawings! Though these drawings fail to showcase the lattermost example.

I can go on and on, but I’ve sat on this answer for too long already. If you have any follow-up questions, let me know!!

[sincerely-sofie]

🥀

Just curious on how it was while writing your story (since it reached such a character limit lol)

And I was wondering if you had any advice for those who wish to write a story like this? (Not the exact same, just how to write characters interacting lol)

(Referencing this ask game)

🥀 An answer to a question:

It's been difficult— this year's NaNoWriMo didn't go even half as smoothly as last year! Midway through November, I decided to give up on reaching 50k words for the sake of my health. Things shook out in a way that I could take up the challenge again, but by then I had fallen behind on my target word count, and getting back on track was no small task to accomplish. But I've kept at it, and even though I don't like the way this draft is going as I write it, I don't need to. Rough drafts exist to be edited, not to be published! :>

My top pieces of advice when it comes to writing character interacting are to find a way to know how they think, know what they want (and sometimes what they're afraid of) in a given scene, and to give them more depth than the story you're writing explicitly requires.

To write character interactions well, it's important to know how your characters think as well as how they feel. Being aware of what makes them tick is something vital to making them feel like actual people as you write them interacting with others.

In Better the Wool, Narinder is extremely haughty and proud— it's a trait that he's always had, but sank into much deeper after his imprisonment, and defines a lot of his interactions. He looks for ways to boost his ego and will readily belittle others to do that. If you hurt his pride, he'll lash out in response. He always has to get the last word in an argument. He doesn't accept criticism well at all. Egotistical behavior is his bread and butter, and it's largely rooted in shame. He has to act like nothing is his fault, or if it is then it was justified, because it's how he distances himself from his problems. Knowing that makes writing him both in and out of scenes with other characters much easier, and also allows me to recognize that a scene where he strays from his stubborn pride and is undignified and vulnerable will need to have a significant reason for him to behave atypically.

The Lamb, where Narinder is defined by his pride, is defined by her need for control. She is desperate to maintain the peace and unity amongst her followers, and perceives any bump in the status quo as reflecting poorly on her own worthiness as a person. Her need to control people is rooted in a need to keep people around her, as well as herself, safe. She might delegate tasks to others on occasion, but it's a struggle that she only survives out of necessity. Her giving up control of a situation, or even worse, passing it off to someone else entirely, is a choice she would not make lightly, and that's something I keep in mind during every interaction I write for her.

On the subject of knowing what the characters want, knowing what they need in contrast is a great help when writing interactions. Even if Narinder doesn't accept that what he needs is to set his pride down and make amends instead of getting back the Red Crown like he wants, it's always going to be needling away at him in the back of his mind during every interaction he has. This is a method of character development I learned from K. M. Weiland's blog, Helping Writers Become Authors. If you want to learn more about writing a Want vs. a Need, I recommend checking her stuff out!

As for giving characters more depth than your project requires, I like applying this strategy to my OCs the most, but it's relevant in fanfiction as well. I like to think up all sorts of trivia for characters— their favorite food and why they enjoy it (one OC of mine likes brownies with a pretzel crust, but hates brownies without it, because he grew up on his dad's recipe using pretzels and thinks that plain brownies taste bland without it), their thoughts on different concepts like family being the most important thing in one's life (another OC is fundamentally baffled by this idea because her society doesn't have nuclear families and the children in it are raised communally, so it's like asking her if the city she grew up in is the most important thing in her life), etcetera, etcetera. It's a way to get into the characters' heads more and have fun while enriching your understanding of how they perceive and interact with the world around them.

[sincerely-sofie]

"anonymous" ask for the ask game: what's the general motivation/drive that gets you to create, and how do you overcome the feelings of perfectionism that come to it?

My heart bleeds stories, and I accepted the gory ugliness necessary to allow such beautiful viscera to be seen.

On a more concrete note: My motivation to create has been rooted in many different things over the years. Genuine love of the act of creation, anger at the world and a need to vent that anger, fear of my own humanity, self-loathing, hatred, sorrow, joy, love, gratitude, rage— many different things. I'll be the first to admit that at this moment, it comes from a need to entertain and a fear of disappointing the audience. Admittedly not very healthy! But it does sit me down with a pen when I have an idea. I'm working on pivoting to better motivations :>

As for overcoming perfectionism in creative work, I find that this tends to be a symptom, and not the disease, if that makes sense. You can follow the line of perfectionism on the page back to self-loathing in the soul. My recommendation for overcoming creative perfectionism is to treat yourself like you're roommates with your past and future selves. Future You has a lot on their plate and really appreciates it when you do some extra chores so they don't have to worry about folding the laundry in top of doing homework and going to the shift they've been dreading at their job. Past You is really going through it and could use some forgiveness, maybe even encouragement. All of You are doing your best with what resources you have at your disposal, and while the living situation will be uneasy at first, eventually things will get easier. Past You will bring up funny jokes and happy memories more than they agonize over your previous missteps. Future You will be so proud of you, more and more with every passing day, and eager to live up to your dreams.

Perfectionism is the prickly flowerhead of the roots of self-loathing. Kill that thang. Uproot it. Take the gaping wound in the earth it left and plant something better in its place— if not love for yourself, love for others and how they believe you should love yourself. Sometimes self-love is a chore you perform out of obligation to friends before it's something you practiced with happiness.

[sincerely-sofie]

4, 10, and 24 for the ask game?

(Referencing this)

4.) A piece you wish got more love?

I didn’t expect it to get that much engagement, especially when its meaning wasn’t immediately apparent at that point in Better the Wool’s fanfic, but I wish I had waited to drop Black Sheep’s Lament at a better time so that people could have enjoyed it more.

10.) How do you deal with artblock?

I tend to just try and brute force things when I have art block (I'm actually in the middle of a bad case of art block right now!)— but when I'm being smarter about things, I take a deliberate step back from my projects. A set amount of time of zero work on the ones worst affected by the block, usually just a few days, but maybe a week or two if it's especially needed, paired with exercise, touching grass, and general self care is usually the best remedy!

24.) What's a compliment about your art that has always stuck with you?

Someone once very kindly said something to the effect that the art style I prefer to work in is juvenile, but in a really good way. And I just about burst into happy tears, because that's been my goal for a long, long time :>