welcome, my delightful fellow tumblrians, to jb's wonderous IF-dev related blog!! as of now, no IF's are in the process of being manufactured just yet.
If your character has a chronic illness or chronic pain please understand that they have already made peace with a version of their life that other people would find unbearable. They are not constantly in crisis. They have adapted. They have systems. They know their body in a way healthy people never have to. They are also exhausted in a way that doesn't show and angry sometimes in a way they feel they're not allowed to be. Write that competence and that exhaustion together. Both are true at the same time.
The Plagiarism Panic: Why You're Afraid & How to Write Your Story with Confidence
You've got a fantastic idea. The characters are whispering in your ear, the plot twists are unfolding in your mind, and you're buzzing with creative energy. You sit down to write, fingers poised over the keyboard, and then... it hits.
That icy finger of doubt.
Have I heard this before? Is this too similar to [Popular Book/Movie]? What if someone accuses me of stealing their idea? What if I accidentally plagiarize?
The "Plagiarism Panic" is a common, often crippling fear for many writers, especially those embarking on their first story or venturing into new genres. It's a significant roadblock that can stop creativity dead in its tracks. But here's the truth: for most fiction writers, this fear is largely misunderstood and, frankly, overblown.
Let's unpack why you feel this way and, more importantly, how to confidently write your unique story.
Why the Fear is Valid (But Often Misguided for Fiction)
The concept of plagiarism is deeply ingrained in our education system. Copying a paragraph from Wikipedia in a school report? Absolutely plagiarism. Attributing sources in academic papers is crucial. This foundational understanding is important, but it often gets misapplied to creative writing.
For fiction, plagiarism isn't just about using similar ideas. After all, there are only so many core human conflicts and archetypal stories. Hero's journeys, love triangles, chosen ones, revenge plots – these are foundational building blocks that have been around for millennia.
True plagiarism in fiction typically involves:
Direct copying of prose: Lifting sentences, paragraphs, or entire chapters word-for-word without permission or attribution.
Copying unique and specific expressions: Taking a highly unique plot sequence, a very specific character's backstory and name, or an entire world's original magic system or creature design and presenting it as your own. This is where the line blurs between "inspiration" and "theft."
Substantial Similarity: When the expression of your story (not just the general idea) is so similar to another work that an average reader would readily recognize it as essentially the same story, differing only in minor details.
What it's NOT (usually):
Having a similar trope (e.g., "a wizard school").
Using an archetypal character (e.g., "a grumpy detective").
Being inspired by a theme or concept from another work (e.g., "what if the world ran on dreams?").
Unconsciously being influenced by something you read years ago.
How to Conquer the Plagiarism Panic and Write with Confidence
Instead of letting fear paralyze you, embrace these strategies to empower your writing:
Embrace Your Unique Voice & Perspective: This is your ultimate weapon against plagiarism accusations. Even if you're writing about a well-trodden trope (say, vampires), your personal take, your character's specific anxieties, your descriptive style, and your unique perspective will make it undeniably yours. No one else has your life experience, your quirky sense of humor, or your specific way of looking at the world. Inject that into every sentence.
Transform Your Inspirations: Instead of merely imitating, ask "What if...?"
"What if the 'chosen one' actually didn't want to save the world?"
"What if the 'vampires' were allergic to blood?"
"What if the 'lost princess' was actually a villain in disguise?" Take an idea you love from another work and twist it, turn it inside out, and see what new, strange, and wonderful thing emerges.
Dive Deep into Your Characters: While general character types exist, make your characters specific. Give them unique quirks, flaws, backstories, speech patterns, and motivations. Two heroes might both be brave, but your hero's bravery might stem from a crushing fear of failure, while another's comes from unwavering faith. These individual details create originality.
Build Your World (Even if it's Earth): Even if your story is set in a real-world city, what are the specific details, the hidden corners, the local legends, or the atmosphere you bring to it? What makes your version of London or a futuristic Mars unique?
Read Widely (and Critically): The more you read, the more you understand the vast landscape of storytelling. You'll see how different authors tackle similar themes, how tropes are reinterpreted, and how stories truly become original. This broad exposure also lessens the chance of unconsciously mimicking a single source.
Focus on the "Expression," Not Just the "Idea": Remember, ideas are universal. It's how you express those ideas – through your specific plot, character arcs, dialogue, pacing, and prose – that makes your story unique and copyrightable. Don't worry about having a similar "concept"; worry about making your execution entirely your own.
Take a Break and Re-evaluate: If you're feeling intensely worried about a section, step away from it for a few days. Come back with fresh eyes. Often, the panic subsides when you can look at your work with a clearer head and see how much of you is truly in it.
Your Story Awaits
The fear of plagiarism is often a manifestation of a deeper insecurity about originality. But every story, in some way, builds upon those that came before it. What makes yours special isn't that it's conjured from a vacuum, but that it's filtered through the unique lens of you.
Don't let the "plagiarism panic" steal your creative joy. Embrace your influences, find your voice, and tell the story only you can tell. The world is waiting to hear it.
the fact that we only have “herculean task” and “sisyphean task” feels so limiting. so here’s a few more tasks for your repertoire
icarian task: when you have a task you know you’re going to fail at anyways, so why not have some fun with it before it all comes crashing down
cassandrean task: when you have to deal with people you KNOW won’t listen to you, despite having accurate information, and having to watch them fumble about when you told them the solution from the start (most often witnessed in customer service)
feel free to chime in i ran out of ideas much faster than i anticipated
Promethean task: opposite of a Cassandraean task. You have the right information, and SOMEONE has to share it. But it's all in the delivery and if you're the person to identify the problem you WILL be hated forever.
Oedipal Task: (1) Attempting to avoid an unspeakably awful outcome and in doing so creating the circumstances that will bring it about.
(2) Trying to solve an problem and discovering that you are in fact the problem you are trying to solve.
damoclean task: the thing you've been putting off long enough that it becomes a constantly hanging doom over your head
pyrrhic task: you can get it done but it's going to cost you
medean task: you can get it done and you don't care what it costs you
dionysian task: task that might not be -better- if you do it drunk, but -will- definitely be more fun
hegelochic task: it was a simple job, but your name will be recorded in the annals of history for how impressively you fucked it up
task of theseus: a project for which the parameters have changed so many times that you're not sure it IS still the same task
gordian task: ok technically there Is a Right Way to do this but it's going to be fiddly and awful and take forever and what if. what if you just said fuck it. and started slicing
she is a princess and you are a dragon. she will be married tonight. do not keep standing outside of her room like that, go inside. go get her. that is what proper dragons do.
not that you have ever been a good or proper dragon. when you hatched out of your egg, your eggtooth was too smooth. the other dragons were rough with you, put little holes in your wings.
you were not bold. you were odd. you liked rippling water and the shine of chitin when bugs scuttle and of course the movement of the stars. those were all acceptable interests albeit maybe not traditional. perhaps you had inherited these through some great-great-uncle or something. certainly a dragon may be wise, or clever, if they are not bold.
yes, you have been a great deal of a puzzle to the other dragons. your body is smaller and rather more soft than it ought to be. so speed should have been yours, perhaps - your mother said it would be like fighting a shadow. if a dragon is not aggressive, it may instead be cruel, sly; a backstab. but alas your scales - so iridescent that they almost shine like the moon at night, a glow from within - you are not a shadow, you are a beacon like the flash of a knight's blade. your father has said at least you would make a fine egglayer, a nice mate to a good male. a dragon like you may still be a good mother perhaps; and that is a fine thing to be; although of course it would have been better if you'd been a trove-hoarder instead.
what a dragon must not be is kind.
you have watched her now for six moons. what a good and proper dragon would do is to go inside and to snatch her. a very proper dragon would have kidnapped her many times over, but you will be the delight of your brood to princess-snatch even at all. when you catch her in your jaws and bring her home, they will love you, then. they don't think you're capable of it, but you are, because you're a proper dragon. you can show them that. if you go in, now, right now.
you are rather too glossy to hide in the shadows, so instead you have learned how to appear flat and round, a puddle of light. (how your siblings would mock you! a dragon should be matte, to blend with the night). you dapple your flank with mud. you perch in odd angles atop of trees, scuttle like the bugs you love - hither, tither, frantic.
what you must not do is fly with your wings full-out. alight, you will be limned by the moon's corona. you will be a beacon. you must remember this when (not if) you snatch her.
____
you found her because of the lake. this lake in particular was your favorite - nestled deep in the woods, between two mountains. it is very quiet; there is nothing to horde there so no other dragon bothers you. a gentle waterfall spills over into a deep cove, and there are many mossy caves you've spent your afternoons napping in. while it is not proper for a dragon to prefer such things, you like to lay in rolling tenure just under the water. you have become excellent at holding your breath, can do it for hours. it is the easiest way to appear as a patch of sunlight.
she was not sunlight. she was the night's joy. the dark press of water. her face at first concealed by many diaphanous layers. her breathing quick and quiet.
she had pulled them back to drink from her water flask. and there she had been: a princess. your first very-real princess. right there, only the reach of a single talon from you. if you had simply lunged then, you would have been able to take her easily, in one single movement.
but you did not take her.
she had startled you a bit; you'd been daydreaming about music, which you'd just discovered, and rather liked. you'd heard it from a little house while you snuck in and stole their sheep.
but you knew the sound of fear, of being followed. you'd been chased too many times, you knew what it looked like. the rapid jolt of fear.
you smelled her then; cinnamon and onyx, and perhaps that was what had blinded you. perhaps your mouth was just watering. whatever the case, you waited until she had fled back into the forest; and then you waited a bit longer. in her wake, a garrison of men, their hands rough.
oh. so they were not knights. they were just men chasing a young woman through the woods. perhaps they did not even know a real princess had been running from them. well, that was a relief. you are not good at fighting with knights, who have swords instead of cudgels. these were just men, so you rose from the water in the quiet way you'd learned from the fish. they did not hear you coming.
and besides. proper dragons do violence so well.
___
once you had smelled her you could find her, although such things have always been easier for you than for the others. you spend a great deal of time studying things - it allows you to analyze them. you have tried to explain to the other dragons that sometimes it is best to slow down, but of course no dragon should be slow.
at first you did not understand the confusion of the people's umwelt. they relied so much on their communication (only words and actions!) and what they could see with their eyes. you and the other dragons did not use these as much; but you liked prying out the little sonic differences between hello that means "i like you" and hello that means "i don't like you."
so it took you a while to learn that you were responsible for what had happened to her. men had gone missing, and even bad men going missing makes a big fuss. (you know that if it had been girls missing, it would be okay. many proper dragons steal girls because it will not bring a knight to their door). for a while she had been trapped on the palace grounds. it was determined that it was no longer safe for her to be just a princess, she must undergo some human transformation and become a wife.
even so. you had gone looking for her (only to study, of course, so you may know how to snatch her best). but that night you saw her descending from the window of a castle, quick and agile, moving like a whisper, clad almost entirely in black. you could see her quite well of course, although you were not seeing her; but instead her heat and her smell and her sound and all the other sensory noise all humans give off.
you followed her, keeping yourself in a cloud so you appeared as if mist. she stole off into the woods. you were interested in that, and watched her scuttle - although of course you could have taken her then, you wanted to study your prey as best as you could. she did not seem to do much in the woods, only run around cry into her little hands.
she appeared to be looking for something. she did not get far that first night; scurried back to her bed. over and over this happened - she would run as far as she could, only to go back again. it seemed rather boring to you, but of course you had been free your whole life.
and then one night - finally, she arrived at the lake. she sank to her knees then, her hands pressing into the water. her head tilted to the sky. her dark hair spilling in a caught breath behind her.
this is how you heard her voice for the first time. when she came again the next night, she did so more quickly, more assured. straight to the lake, as if it had called her.
she had skipped a pebble over the surface of the water. this action was dangerous, because it almost hit the sail of your wing. you had structured yourself very finely to look like a rockslide.
"three months." her voice was like her: it was deep and smooth and dark, a low violin string. "they want me to marry that bastard in three months."
and then she cried into her hands again, and the sound of it almost broke you.
you followed her maybe more than a proper dragon should, after this. more than just back to the castle and her bed. you hid along her daily walks and watched her in the throne room and saw her out riding horses. she was good with dogs and nice to her people and very much a proper princess, although you had heard it said a proper princess ought not to slip out at night and run around barefoot through the woods.
you discovered she is terrible with directions. you have often had to make a path more clear so she could get home again. she cannot hunt better than an egg; you have had to kill fish and push them subtly up to the shore.
but she appears to love the lake as much as you do. you have seen her read by candlelight (how foolish. the entire woods saw her each time). you have seen her build little paper boats to float along the surface. you have seen her strip her many layers and dive in, have seen her lay with her belly to the sky, floating like she is suspended by the hands of darkness itself.
oh. so she loves the stars, as well, then.
__
you must go in. she will be married tonight. that is a human thing, but you have since learned what it has meant. she will go to somewhere else, and you will not see her again, maybe ever. and then how will you be a proper dragon? go!
you have made yourself in the form of a gargoyle, hiding in the white stone. you can see into her room; and the tapestries that seem unlike her. everything in her room is very bright, which is bad for a proper dragon. there are many knights in the hallways and in their rooms, and their smell is itchy and repugnant to you.
her dress is white, which does not seem like her. you have only seen her wear black. she is sitting at some kind of desk, and she is crying again. she smells of cinnamon still, but moreso of grief. you can feel the heartbreak in her as if it was inside of you.
you cannot watch her cry anymore. you have watched too often without moving. that is shameful.
you nose the door open. you can move quiet, because you are not very big. she is within a cave of you, then a wingtip, and then she is standing up, looking into your eyes.
"it's you." her hand on your jaw is warm. "i thought i was imagining you, you know. i turned around that day. i saw what you did to those men. i have been looking for you since. i told everyone that i had an angel to protect me. they locked me in here anyway."
you are not an angel, you are a dragon. you have to keep your wings locked tight or you would explode the walls of this place. it makes you feel big, suddenly. you are not used to that sensation. you do not like to be locked in a tower. you believe maybe the princess does not like to be locked in a tower either.
you take her in your jaws. she is very small, and does not resist you. although you are not a strong flyer, you must take off in a single push. any other movement would be too slow. you must also hold your breath so you do not smell her, the clove and cinnamon and little bird of hope. your mouth would water and you would drop her.
against the full moon, you do the thing that is impossible. you stretch yourself out all the way, a bold and beaming arrow, and you fly. you can hear them cry about you now, loudly. a banner that would strike pride even into your father: dragon. dragon. dragon.
on the eve of her wedding, you snatch the princess from her tower.
an arrow whisks for you, and then dozens, and then hundreds. you are not afraid of pain. you have learned long ago how to fly with holes in your wings. you hold her very gently still, and you push past the smell of your blood.
in the night you are a star. someone somewhere could look up and see you and make a wish.
there will be another lake, you decide. you can find another lake. somewhere very, very far from here. however long you must fly, however long you must hold your breath: you will take her home, because you are a proper dragon.
___
sometimes they come for her, your treasure. you have built her a little castle here, deep in the forests off the map. and of course for you: a silver round lake like the shift of her iris. you bring her books and she brings you bugs to study. you let her saddle you, and together you ride through the clouds and fog banks. she is a shadow on your back; a warm and velvet thing. she makes you music and lives the way she should; free in the night like a promise.
but they do come. you have stolen a real princess, and they do not want her to be a princess. they want to make her into a brood mother, or into bait, or into prey. they always look into the caves first; into the places proper dragons stay. they are real knights, not just men with sticks. they are loud and their smell still makes you itch.
but she has made you brave now, and cunning. if a dragon is not big, it should be cunning. and since you are a proper dragon, and since your treasure is your most precious thing, you lay in wait.
let them come. you will let the light drip off of you, and then you will pour through them.
afterwards, your princess will tell you a story around the fire. she will patch your wounds as she did that first time. she will sing to you.
and in that moment, neither of you will be a title nor a story. she will just be herself, and you will just be you.
My biggest writing regret? Letting the fear of "bad pacing" make me gut every detailed environment and outfit from my drafts.
I thought I was cleaning it up. I was actually stripping out the atmosphere my readers loved most.
It's easy to overcorrect. World-building isn't all-or-nothing. The fix is to micro-dose the atmosphere.
Pick a few high-impact sensory details per scene. A texture. A specific color contrast. A scent that doesn't belong.
Describe the outfit—describe the room—when it reflects or violently contrasts the character's internal state. A pristine white suit reads completely differently when the man wearing it is quietly coming apart at the seams.
Your readers aren't there for the plot points alone. They're there for the world. Don't apologize for building it.
Fragments of a Villain Chapter 7 is up on AO3 and my website.
I think the last bit of this is my favorite. Just know what your descriptions are doing - setting up a rule/dynamic that will pay off later? Or is it to set a tone of a scene that redirects from what’s happening? Or maybe, to OP’s point, it’s to contrast someone’s outward presentation against internal strife.
IMO every sentence in a story is doing at least two or three jobs at once. Know the jobs and focus the details accordingly.
Every single fic update there is an author trying frantically to find the right balance between a nonchalant aside of "leave a comment if you enjoyed =)" and clinging desperately to the coat tails of a random stranger, dragging along behind them on the street wailing "Please, please! I have to know what you thought! I'm desperate to talk to people about this! Ask me about the alliterative repetition! Ask me about the symbolism!"
The popularity of the "incompetent stupid piece of shit husband and competent wife who loves him anyways" trope in media is a psyop to make women believe its normal to settle for an incompetent stupid piece of shit husband
But if a woman acted incompetent once then she will be literally crucified in the street and she's evil for manipulating her husband into settling for less and suddenly it's not a silly endearing sitcom trope 🤔
I want to thank you deeply, Lunan! Your game and a few others have inspired me to start working on my own piece of interactive fiction. I can't say that I'm very far along in any of the processes, but I am having a lot of fun :-)
Do you have any tips or suggestions to help a guy out?
You're so welcome, my dear Nony! I'm so excited that you're inspired, I love that so much.
Let's see...for some tips. I've posted a few things about process that might help. These are a bit long, but I encourage you to read them and see if they resonate with you:
Post 1
Post 2
Some quicker things that I've learned that I wished I would have been better at up front:
Organization: This comes from an adhd-addled brain, mind you. But in one easy place, you need to keep your code, your plans, your everything. And you need to keep it up as you go, not "eventually." LOL, my middle name has been "eventually" and it kinda bites you back after a while. For my next project, I have an over-arching project file and within it, I have all characters, plot, code, MC customization, outline, and even the information I've shared publicly. I can open it up at anytime and make notes or type up ideas.
Practice: Do a practice run. Make a miniature IF to get used to it. I did one privately to help me learn Twine and figure out which coding language I wanted to use. I didn't finish it, I just went until I got the hang of it. The file also became a bit of testing ground at times.
Editing: It is very difficult to edit your own work. This goes for any literary project - this is why editors exist. You will tend to see your work as it is supposed to look, and typos and errors will vanish before your eyes. Spell check helps, but doesn't always catch things. I recommend asking your audience to help you catch things. When you edit your own, walk away from it for a while and come back with fresher eyes. It also helps to paste your text on a different background!
I hope these help. If you have any specific questions, go ahead and send them my way and I will try to help. ^_^
If you're a new writer and you're asking yourself "is this too personal, is this too much, will people think this is weird" that feeling is the exact location of your actual voice. The stuff that makes you want to close the laptop is the stuff nobody else could write. The safe version is always worse. Always. I have never once read something and thought "this would have been better if it was a little less honest." go further. It's always go further.
You probably hear a lot of "DON'T EDIT AS YOU WRITE" advice, don't you? 😬
This is a dangerously vague piece of advice and one that's often taken too literally. Here's a quick breakdown of edits that are actually GOOD during writing.
I loosely disagree. While it’s great to fix those things if you can, sometimes you have to just get through the draft and come back later. My mentor even told me to write things like [fight scene happens here] or [this conversation is really boring] if I needed to in order to propel myself through the first draft.
Don’t get me wrong, it is super helpful if you can fix those things while writing. But speaking for myself (and a lot of people like me) that is not always possible. Sometimes any fixes can completely stall your progress.
For me, it is much easier to go back and edit for content, plot holes, info dumps, and unnecessary dialogue after I’ve done the hardest thing for me, which is the writing.
My point is that it’s all about finding what process works for you and sticking to it. If this works for you, great! If not, don’t beat yourself up about it.
⋆˙⟡ "You want to know why I did it. Fine. But you don't get to make that face afterward."
⋆˙⟡ "I wasn't always this. There was a version of me that would have stood exactly where you're standing. I mourned that version. I'm done mourning."
⋆˙⟡ "They took something from me that wasn't theirs to take and everyone who could have stopped it looked away. I just decided to stop looking away. The methods are different. The principle isn't."
⋆˙⟡ "You want a reason you can argue with. I'm not giving you one. Because you know it's legitimate and that terrifies you."
⋆˙⟡ "I didn't choose this. I arrived here because every other door was closed. Some of them by people who called themselves heroes."
⋆˙⟡ "The system you're defending failed me first. I didn't declare war on it. I just stopped pretending it worked."
⋆˙⟡ "There was a moment. One specific moment. Where someone could have done something and didn't. Everything after that is just consequence."
⋆˙⟡ "I'm not asking for sympathy. I stopped needing it a long time ago. I'm just asking you to be honest about the chain of events."
⋆˙⟡ "You keep looking for the place where I became wrong. It isn't where you think. It was quiet. It was ordinary. It was so small I didn't even notice until I was already here."
I have been mulling something over for a while and have decided to share.
As part of my job, I read a lot of fiction that's still in development. After a while, you start to see the same errors, misunderstandings and shortcuts crop up repeatedly with different creators and it gets me thinking what is the most elegant way possible I could explain the issues to someone wanting to improve?
The one that comes up the most often and is the hardest to explain is:
"Why don't people care about my characters and/or story".
It's always a thorny problem and I think I have a workable answer that applies in most cases:
A story is a series of revelations regarding compounding, unintentional consequences to character decisions.
The further you stray from this, the less people care.
It translates to:
1) characters have to make decisions otherwise there is no drama
2) Those decisions have to matter otherwise there are no stakes
2) The consequences have to interact with one another. A affects or causes B affects or causes C etc. otherwise there is no progression
3) There must be some unintended consequences otherwise there is no conflict
4) The consequences have to be revealed (even at least implied) otherwise there is no conclusion
This works at the micro scale in terms of dialogue:
The specific word/tone/movement a character uses affects how another character reacts in an unexpected or interesting way which in turn causes another reaction and these layer onto one another until a decision is reached and a consequence implied thereby completing the scene.
It also works at the macro scale in terms of plot:
The decisions characters made in a scene prompts/affects the characters and context of the scene that follows (even if we don't know it at first) and by the end those layered interactions have been revealed to us and we see the unexpected or interesting result.
In my anecdotal experience, most times people don't care about a work of fiction is not because of a technical issue with the execution but because the writer has subtly misunderstood what makes a story a story. Their main character doesn't make any decisions, the decisions don't seem to matter, it feels disjointed because consequences aren't layering, there's no conflict because there are no misunderstandings etc.
There countless technical aspects which affect the quality of a piece of fiction but most times when someone asks me to help them make people care about their story they first need to realise they have misunderstood what actually makes a story at a fundamental level and they need to recognise that before things can improve.
I dunno if this helps anyone. I hope it does. Sorry if it doesn't.
If anyone wants to use this to assess their own work let me know what you discover, I'm genuinely curious.
When writing always remember… a character flaw is only a flaw until becomes useful.
Is your protagonist manipulative? Well that’s awful… until they manipulate the antagonist into making a decision that saves the lives of their friends.
Is your protagonist a skeptic? Well that’s not good… until someone tries to lie to them.
Is your protagonist overprotective? That sucks… until someone they love is in danger.
Is your protagonist remorseless? Well that makes them pretty unlikeable… until a hard decision has to be made.
Your protagonist is honest? That’s good… until their survival depends on them being able to lie convincingly.
Your protagonist is brave? That’s good… until they foolishly run headlong into danger without a thought for the consequences.
Your protagonist is forgiving and able to see good in everyone? That’s good… until they continually forgive someone who doesn’t deserve it, and get taken advantage of because they can’t fathom that some people just suck.
Your protagonist is funny? That’s good… until they piss off everyone around them because they don’t seem to be taking the situation seriously, and they keep avoiding dealing with their problems by hiding behind humor.
Most personality traits aren’t inherently good or bad. It’s all about context, and how far they go.
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