anonymous asked: do you have any tips for creating characters and picking personalities?? thank you xox
i got this ask just about a billion years ago, but i just discovered it half-finished in my drafts & i have a lot of new thoughts, so i decided that i’d finish it up for consumption. so, yes, anon, i think i would have some tips ! creating characters and their personalities is one of my favorite things to do, and definitely one of my stronger suits in writing. so, here are some things that i think about and keep track of when i write a character.
face claim — i do this either first or last, and i usually have a few different options. i think doing it first is a lot easier most of the time, because then you can use certain things about the face claim ( them having gifs of them smoking, with color hair, etc ) to include in your character, and if you’re doing it last it can feel like no one is fitting quite right.
family — so, this is the one i usually have the most fun with. i love writing how a character’s family impacts them as a person, and there’s a lot of ways to carry that through. i feel like a lot of writers will revert to an extreme when it comes to families, and it’s not necessary, all the time, really. what i’m trying to say is a character’s family doesn’t have to be abusive for the character to have ‘ issues. ‘ maybe a character is in a big family, the youngest, and their dad isn’t the same as the others, and the whole family kept it from them for years. bam, trust issues. maybe your character is adopted, but spent a lot of time running away from foster homes. bam, independent. or maybe your character’s parents are emotionally unavailable and they never learned how to form real relationships. there’s SO much workroom. have fun with birth order too. spoiled youngest children, morose middle children, and the ever successful eldest daughter, ofc. also, how big a character’s family is can impact how well they work with other people. having big families teaches you to learn interpersonal skills at a very young age.
background — there’s a lot of way this works. parent jobs, for example. if they had parents with more serious professions, maybe they felt pressured to go into same or likewise professions. or if they came from old money. how did they fit into that world ? were they perfectly happy, attending debutante balls and going to yacht clubs, or were they unruly and their parents wound up sending them to boarding schools. or maybe they grew up less fortunate and learned from a young age how to take responsibility and be self-sufficient.
ethnicity — i love using how this impacts characters. there’s a lot of guides for specific ethnicities, so i’d check those out. but it’s really easy to put it into characters in small ways that make a big, and way more cohesive, difference. your character is spanish ? have them speak spanish, or just conversation spanish, or they know curse words and nicknames and nothing else. they get their christmas gifts on the day of the epiphany. your character is jewish ? maybe they’re non-practicing, or jfb ( jewish for bubbe ) jewish, or they take great pride in their faith. there’s so many ways your characters ethnic bg can influence them, and so many ways to have fun with it. maybe they were born in one country, but moved to another, and have always been conflicted about it. or they feel like they’re not a “ real ” latinx because they don’t speak spanish.
defining moment — it’s easy to write a character, their family, their personality, and then say ‘ and then, they found their way into this, ‘ but i beg of you to put some defining moments into their timeline. things that happened at basically any age that changed how they see the world. here are some of my favorite defining moments i’ve given characters: death of their beloved brother, losing their hearing at a human right’s rally, their role model older sister getting expelled for school & completely distancing themself from them, qualifying for the olympics, predicting the death of their distant mother, coming out and being loved more for it, being in the car with their grandparents when they crashed, & cutting off their parents and leaving the countries.
What are possessive pronouns? They stand in for nouns that are possessed/owned, ex. mine, yours, hers, theirs. They’re also very useful (and quick to learn!)
mine: le mien (m.) / la mienne (f.) / les miens (mpl.) / les miennes (fpl.)
ex. le portable est le mien (the phone is mine)
notice that the form of “mine” used (le mien) matches in gender and number with the noun, “le portable”
yours: le tien / la tienne / les tiens / les tiennes
his/hers: le sien / la sienne / les siens / les siennes
ours: le nôtre / la nôtre / les nôtres / les nôtres
yours (formal/pl.): le vôtre / la vôtre / les vôtres / les vôtres
ex. les maisons (f.) sont les vôtres (the houses are yours)
I spent the morning transferring these parent functions into slides. *insert fatigue* Anyway, doing the layout was fun, and I thought I’d share them here if anyone wants to review :)
Includes: linear, quadratic, cubic, square root, cube root, exponential, logarithmic, absolute value, reciprocal, six trig functions, etc.
Hey guys, so this guide is floating around on tumblr but I feel like I need to give you my opinion on the matter seeing as I see more roleplays based in Victoria (mostly Melbourne) than anywhere else. And as a Victorian and a Melbournian I feel like I can instruct you in how the school system works down here. Especially university considering I’m currently studying. Let’s go shall we?
High School;
High school, obviously, is incredibly important but only when you get to senior levels. We start high school when we’re 13 which puts us in year 7. Up until this point we were in primary school and we called them grades. Primary school goes from prep to grade six. Some people go to day care and kindergarten like I did, but they’re not really as important, just fun. So yeah, high school is a big change for all of us.
I grew up in the country in a town called Shepparton which is two hours away from Melbourne in the north. We had five high schools there and one in the town next to us, Mooroopna (no I’m not making up these names). In Shepparton, four of those six high schools have a special agreement, which is that they work together to provide classes that the other schools can’t run if they don’t get enough numbers. I thought it was a really good idea. So for example if my school, Shepparton High, had ten students who wanted to do French but Mooroopna had three, then whichever school has the best qualified teacher would then have the class and the students will have to travel to that school. This only happens for VCE classes though, which I will get to in a moment.
Our days were made up of six periods, two in the morning, two before lunch and two after lunch. We typically started the day with home group, which was just our assigned teacher calling our names, making sure we were present and then chatting for about ten minutes to fill the rest of the time. Our home groups were made up of two or more people from every year level, so that the younger students could have the older students for guides and stuff. We started every day at 8:50 and ended at 3:19. If you lived out of town, like me, you would take a bus, but you could also take a bus if you lived in town (you’d just have to pay for it).
Now the first three years of high school (year 7-9) are not really that important. It’s when you get to year 10 that you start buckling down and deciding on your future. In year 10, your course load is mainly made up by elective subjects with only three “core” subjects. Your elective subjects can be whatever you want them to be, but you have to keep in mind what you want to do when you leave high school because certain subjects lead into other subjects in VCE. In year 10 you can also “fast track” year 11 subjects. This means that you choose the subject and get put into a year 11 class. I think it’s like AP but I’m not sure. Year 10 is also your first exams, though they don’t really matter, they’re just preparing you for VCE. The core subjects which all had exams on them were English, Maths and Science. Your grade for every subjects was based on SACs (school assessed criteria or something) which was basically essays and multiple choice questions. They were generally easy unless you did something like psychology (which I did) because in psychology you had to go out and actually conduct a proper experiment. It was fun though.
After you finish year 10 and your first year of senior school, you move up to year 11. You also have the choice to fast track subjects in year 11, but here you choose if you want to do VCE or VCAL. VCE stands for Victorian Certificate of Education and it’s essentially the main one that everyone goes for because it’s always paired with being smart and stuff like that which is a harmful stereotype. VCAL means Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning, which in my opinion is much better. VCAL just means that you learn better doing than reading and I knew a number of people like that. In year 11 you have your first real exams. It doesn’t really count for a lot of your grade, but it’s still necessary. At the end of the year when you choose your subjects for your last year, you’ll choose which certificate you want to complete.
Year 12 is where the crying happens. By this point in your life you’ll be pretty cemented in your friendship groups. Bonds won’t be tested, but they actually grow stronger. You get your first “free period” which is a study period, but who actually studies? If you do VCE you have exams half way through as well as the end of the year. You also have to do a GAT, or General Achievement Test. This test is done in case you can’t make your exam for some reason (it has to be a damn good reason). It tests you on everything from English to maths to science to arts to music. It’s massive but you don’t actually have to complete everything, especially if you were like me and dropped maths as soon as you possibly could have.
Year 12 has some of the best experiences of all of my high school life. In year 12, towards the end of the year, you get a day when you can “muck up”, this is a muck up day and it is a right of passage. You get to school super early, the cleaners open it up for you and you go crazy. Me and my friends managed to barricade an entire floor of a building while singing the barricade song from Les Mis. Some people put yabbies in the roof. Some other people covered the year 12 teachers’ office with bean bag balls (which they were still finding a year after).
At the end of year 12, you get your results and your ATAR, Australian Tertiary Admission Rank, which is going to decide what university you go to. a few months before you would have logged into VTAC, Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre, and you would have listed your preferred universities and courses in order of “100/10 give me this one” to “I mean I’ll go but I don’t really want to”. This is a very stressful time for a lot of people, but the good news is that you can change your preferences at any time up until December 1st or something. All of the university courses require an ATAR, some of them also add extra things on top of that like a portfolio or an interview. If you know what you want to do at the start of the year, look into those extra requirements and start working on them. I needed a portfolio for my Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing, and that’s definitely something that you need to work on early.
When you get your ATAR, the important thing is not to worry. There are a number of ways into your dream course if you don’t get it the first way around. As if to make matters worse though, we have an award called the Dux award which is given to the student with the highest ATAR score. After this is when you’ll start getting offers from universities who have gotten all your information off of VTAC. Then it’s summer and you can go and have fun.
University;
We start university in March. There are so many universities around Victoria but the main ones to note are Melbourne University, RMIT University (my uni), ACU (Australian Catholic University), Deakin University, La Trobe University, Swinburne University, Victoria University and Monash University. These are the ones that you’ll hear the most about. On top of that you’ve got private universities which charge the ridiculous amounts for not really good classes (this is true because I have a teacher who got offered a job at a certain university but it was not paid nearly well enough and he wasn’t given anything he needed to write the course). The private universities normally are specialised in certain areas, like music or film or TV. But seriously, they’re not as good.
Depending on your ATAR you would have gotten an offer from either your dream university or your second favourite. The way offers work is that there are two rounds. One in December and one in January. You’re told to accept your first offer but if you get a better second offer (which is rare) you can accept that one instead. These offers normally come in the form of an email. Only VCE students will get an offer to a university.
When you start university you’re given the chance to choose all of your subjects from the recommended subject list. They are split up into lectures and tutorials. Lectures are normally held in big lecture rooms with tons of students all listening to the same teacher drone on and on. Tutorials are typically classes of 20 or so and held with one teacher’s assistant. These are for things like essays and projects and questions that you didn’t get to ask in the lecture. These days, almost every lecture is recorded and put onto the internet so that you’ll never miss out on something. You’re required to take your own notes and junk because that helps.
University course length varies from course to course obviously. A Bachelor of Arts is three years whereas a Bachelor of Science can be up to six years I think. You start in a undergraduate course, meaning that you’ve never graduated from university before you you have to start at the bottom. There are two undergraduate degrees and three graduate degrees. They are like so:
Now bachelors are the ones that everyone goes for. They are easy, but not the easiest. And they’re pretty good but all university course focus on the theoretical side of education and there’s no guaranteed job at the end of the tunnel. Once you’re done with university you’re on your own.
TAFE (Technical And Further Education);
When you say you’re going to TAFE or doing a TAFE course, it’s usually met with snide comments and “oh, really?”. Unfortunately TAFE has a lot of negative connotations around it, which unfair because TAFE is actually the better pathway to go through. Only certain universities offer TAFE courses, I’m going to focus on RMIT because that’s where I am.
There are multiple ways to get into TAFE, but I went through VTAC. The course I did, which was a Certificate IV in TV Production, didn’t need an ATAR but I had to complete a portfolio and an interview. It was at the interview that I decided that TAFE would definitely be better for me. Up until this point I was just like everyone else and leading towards my Bachelor of Arts (which I go in to). I changed my preferences after the interview and put the TAFE course at the top which was the best decision of my life.
TAFE is a little bit like high school in which you have a certain group of people that you spend the rest of the year with. I made friends really quickly and easily compared to my ex-housemate who still doesn’t have any friends. TAFE is more hands on and more centred around employability. All of my teachers still worked in the TV industry so I had connections straight away. TAFE typically only lasts a year but it’s the most intense year because you have to cram everything that employers want into one year. You’re kind of expected to go on beyond a Certificate IV though because people don’t hire someone straight out of the Cert IV unless you’re really, really good. TAFE is great because you learn everything, so you do things that you didn’t think you’d like and you find out that you have skills in that area. You’re given the first week to learn the base theory of everything and then you’re thrown into a TV studio and told to start filming. At least, that’s what happened to me.
After the Certificate IV, you have options of where you want to continue to. For me it was the Diploma of Live Production or the Diploma of Screen and Media. TAFE is all about pathways. There are always pathways to your dream course and honestly, TAFE is a good transition from high school to university. TAFE also has a hierarchy of courses.
TAFE is also so much cheaper than a university course. And, depending on your highest level of qualification, it’s also government subsidised meaning that it gets even cheaper. I think all up I’ve paid $2000 for my Certificate IV and my Diploma. So if you’re like me, from a rural area with not a lot of disposable income, this is pretty darn good.
And thus finishes my guide to the Victorian school system. As always, any questions I’ll be happy to answer. I hope that this helps you!
There's been some confusion about uploading icons and gifs in text posts, so I thought I'd clarify it.
Click the plus icon and then the camera to start uploading your picture. You'll get something like this:
You see that icon circled in red? That means your image is still uploading. Even though you can see the image in the text editor, posting now will result in a broken link. All you have to do is wait for that to go away...
Voila! Your image will work without a grey box or broken link.
This is probably random but I have a male character who crossdresses. But not because he feels like he's a woman or trans or anything like that, he's quite comfortable in the fact he's a man and male. He just does it sometimes for fun and because it's comfortable. Do you have any suggestions, or guides, on how to write this without going into cliches or being potentially offensive?
Believe it or not, I have a friend who is exactly like this so I'll try to help you to the best of my ability. Keeping in mind that I'm not a male cross dresser myself.
Here is a Wiki article about cross dressing in films
Here is a tumblr post
A history of cross dressing
There isn't a lot out there when I googled it.
I think just write him normally. Men who cross dress are usually more sure of their sexuality than men who don't. They're more open about things and I find it really easy to talk to my friend about guys who I find hot and he gives me opinions even though he is quite straight.
He would be pretty confident I'd think. And I also don't think he'd let anyone take the piss of him.
Those are my suggestions, I'm sorry that I'm not very good at this. I just don't want to accidentally go into stereotypes.
In Scotland, children are able to start nursery once they are three. They normally move onto primary school once they are four but in some cases, if the nursery school teachers do not think the child is ready for primary school, they can stay in nursery for another year.
Primary School
Primary 1 (4/5 - 5/6)
Primary 2 (5/6 - 6/7)
Primary 3 (6/7 - 7/8)
Primary 4 (7/8 - 8/9)
Primary 5 (8/9 - 9/10)
Primary 6 (9/10 - 10/11)
Primary 7 (10/11 - 11/12)
Secondary School
S1/First Year (11/12 - 12/13)
S2/Second Year (12/13 - 13/14)
S3/Third Year (13/14 - 14/15)
S4/Fourth Year (14/15 - 15/16)
S5/Fifth Year (15/16 - 16/17)
S6/Sixth Year (16/17 - 17/18)
College
optional
you can drop out of high school once you are sixteen and apply for college then
University
a lot of universities do not accept you if you are seventeen and in S5 but will still accept you if you are 17, in S6 and reach their standards.
here is a list of universities in Scotland you could possibly use for a roleplay, x.
Curriculum
some years you find that some pupils, due to their success in certain subjects and lack of good results in others, can be sitting different types of grades.
S3 - National 4
S4 - National 4, National 5
S5 - National 4, National 5, National 6 (which was previously and is more commonly called Higher)
S6 - National 4, National 5, National 6 (which was previously and is more commonly called Higher), National 7 (which was previously and is more commonly called Advanced Higher)
Subjects Taught in Primary Schools (not all these will be taught in every primary school)
English
Maths
Religious Education
Physical Education
Art
Science
History
Computing
Languages (French, Gaelic, Spanish, etc.)
Music
P.S.H.E. (Personal, Social and Health Eduction)
Subjects Taught at Secondary Schools (again, not all will be taught at every secondary school)
Can you find a good master post that has how to make a good plot for an RPG?
I don't think there's one, but here's some things that I've picked up over the years plus I've googled:
How to write a good plot
The golden rules for a good plot
What makes a good story?
5 tips for writing an effective plot twist
The big list of RPG plots
So you want to: write an RPG
Creating a good plot
Basically what I've learnt to do is to look around. See what people are interested in. Read lots! Brainstorm lots! People want plots that they can develop their characters in. They don't want something that is just smack one conflict and then the "what do we do now" factor.
A good plot is one that you can get lots and lots of characters out of, including a diverse range of characters. Plus you may want others to get characters out of it themselves. You don't want it to be revolving around two main people and then the rest sort of just stuffed in there to get more people to join.
A good plot gets other people interested. Not many people will see a regular high school plot as interesting. Make something happen in the high school. Maybe it's a school where you train to become high level assassins. Maybe the school isn't really a school but a front for a Russian bride scam (I don't know). Take the ordinary and make it extraordinary.
Reading a lot helps. Normally you should be reading anyway. A writer needs to read other peoples' writing. It helps create your own style of writing and it also helps you realise what genre you're interested in. Books are great for plots, especially books based in different universes and whole new worlds.
Take two existing ideas and mash them together. This is great when done properly. You can take elements out of multiple places and put them together to create your own completely new plot idea.
Basically have lots of fun. You can write the best plot in the world, but it won't matter if you're going to lose interest in it later on or if it's only a short term plot. Have fun with your plot. Go crazy! It's all yours, no one else has a say. Make sure that it's something that you can see going for a long time.
