10 Rules for Believable Fantasy Maps. 10 THINGS TO DO BEFORE YOU START WRITING YOUR BOOK. In Defense of Soft Magic Systems. Grammarly: Free Writing Assistant. Copyright-Friendly Toolkit. However fabulous Creative Commons and Public Domain content may be, sometimes you really need to use copyrighted material. Say you plan to comment on popular media or current events. For instance, you may be planning to critique the portrayal of Native Americans in commercial films.
You are going to want to “quote” some commercial films like Pocahontas, Lone Ranger, and Dances with Wolves. If you are reviewing a book, you may want to share its cover art. You may use copyrighted content without asking permission if you believe that your use falls under the doctrine known as Fair Use. Fair Use is a little complicated. In general, when you transform original content, repurpose it, and add value to it in your own remix, you may be able to claim the use fair. According to American University’s Center for Media and Social Impact, these two tests or questions help you plan whether to use the copyrighted work of others without asking permission: American University.
Character Arc Template: Building a Character Arc in 5 Steps. Writing character profiles and brainstorming main characters’ arcs helps establish story direction. A good character arc template includes facts about your characters’ goals, high points and low points. Here are 5 steps to building a dynamic character journey: 1. Find your character’s first goal Interesting first goals develop out of interesting initial situations. An unbearable situation your main character wants to escape (e.g.
A good starting point to use when you create a character arc template is a situation involving big unknowns. A character’s first goal springs from desires and goals established early in your story. To make first goals intriguing: Hint at obstacles: In Cinderella, the reader wonders how a girl dressed in rags can compete at a lavish ball, and how the stepmother will respond if she finds out about this desire)Add stakes: What’s at stake if a character fails in pursuing their goal? 2. Sometimes, secondary characters do a little bit of both. 3. 4. 5.
Adjectives/Adverbs. 9 Easily Preventable Mistakes Writers Make with Dialogue. Dialogue has been my own writing nemesis and I continue to find it a challenge, although each day of writing seems to improve it slightly! Today, author and blogger Ali Luke helps us with some basic dialogue mistakes and how to fix them. Whether you love writing dialogue or dread it, you’ll probably agree it’s an essential part of fiction. Unless you’re writing an experimental short story, you’re going to need to include some dialogue – and it needs to be done just as well as the rest of your writing. Dialogue has many roles in your story. It can: Reveal characterAdvance the plotMake characters seem realGive a sense of action unfolding Dialogue is also easy and fast to read. It breaks up the page, adding white space and making your story look more attractive. Unfortunately, dialogue is also easy to get wrong. (You can also look out for them in published books, too — plenty of pros still aren’t getting these right.
Mistake #1: Being Too Formal Me and him went to the shops.I dunno.If I was you… Place & Location | Adam Aitken. Location – notes Much as a place can elicit the greatest mystery and contemplation, or even dread and anxiety, place prompts story-telling. Location can be the empty white space that demands meaning, and narrative will provide that: in other words location is an essential starting point or anchor for the narrative’s eventual form, structure, and plot.
Place can be an index of the inner soul. “First sentences are doors to worlds” - Ursula Le Guin (in La Plante 2007, The Making of a Story, WW Norton and Company, New York, p. 467) “We gotta go somewhere, find some place.” – Jack Kerouac, On the Road “Writers of popular works…tend to do well on the concrete side of things: they bounce their characters around from New York to London to Paris and in and out of restaurants and beds and whatnot, but somehow it doesn’t add up to much emotionally. Flaubert, Madam Bovary (1856) Paris, more vague than the ocean, glimmered before Emma’s eyes in an atmosphere of vermilion. CHAPTER 3 Home W.G. Like this: Six Easy Tips for Self-Editing Your Fiction | Kristen Lamb. There are a lot of hurdles to writing great fiction, which is why it's always important to keep reading and writing. We only get better by doing. Here are some self-editing tips to help you clean up your book before you hire an editor.
When I worked as an editor, I found it frustrating when I couldn't even get to the story because I was too distracted by these all too common oopses. There are many editors who charge by the hour. . #1 The Brutal Truth about Adverbs, Metaphors and Similes I have never met an adverb, simile, or metaphor I didn't love. First of all, adverbs are not all evil. Check your work for adverbs and kill the redundant ones. Metaphors and similes are awesome, but need to be used sparingly. When we use too much of this verbal glitter, we can create what's called "purple prose. " Huh? Oh, the boulder is squarish shaped! Thing is, the metaphor made me stop to figure out what image the author was trying to create.
Go through your pages and highlight metaphors and similes. One Simple and Incredibly Painful Way to Fix Your Novel Draft. How to Write a Character From Start to Finish. The best fiction is about a character who changes in some significant way. The selfish brute learns to put others first. The woman marrying for money decides to marry for love. The career ladder climber learns to cut back on his hours to enjoy his family. The bitter old crone learns to let others in. The independent pilot of the Millennium Falcon learns to care about a cause. We love to see characters transformed. —by Jeff Gerke Most of the time, main characters in fiction are changing for the better. But there’s also room for characters who change for the worse. Perhaps most intriguing of all is a “bad” character who flirts for a while with the idea of being good, but then decides that his true self is on the dark side of the street. Of course, not every story has to be about a character who changes. Whether your protagonist ultimately turns toward or away from the light will be up to you, but we’ll look at ways to send her on a journey in which she’s transformed.
The Inner Journey. Character is the very life of fiction. Setting... 25 Things You Should Know About Character. Previous iterations of the “25 Things” series: 25 Things Every Writer Should Know 25 Things You Should Know About Storytelling And now… Here you’ll find the many things I believe — at this moment! — about characters: 1. Without character, you have nothing. 2. A great character can be the line between narrative life and story death. 3. Don’t believe that all those other aspects are separate from the character. 4. The audience will do anything to spend time with a great character. 5. It is critical to know what a character wants from the start. 6.
It doesn’t matter if we “like” your character, or in the parlance of junior high whether we even “like-like” your character. 7. It is critical to smack the audience in the crotchal region with an undeniable reason to give a fuck. 8. You must prove this thesis: “This character is worth the audience’s time.” 9.
Don’t let the character be a dingleberry stuck to the ass of a toad as he floats downriver on a bumpy log. 10. 11. 12. 13. The law of threes. Anne Tyler’s Tips on Writing Strong (yet Flawed) Characters. Anne Tyler belongs to a disappearing generation of writers, those who came into their own in an era when it was more than enough to—well, to simply write. Intensely protective of her craft, she hasn’t given an in-person interview or participated in a book tour since 1977. In an age where writers are expected to lead double lives as self-promoters to enjoy any semblance of commercial success, Tyler carries on just as she always has, remaining steadfast in her singular devotion to her writing process.
And she can get away with it, too, because she’s Anne Tyler—and she’s just that indisputably good. If Tyler’s writing career sounds like a luxury, a lofty dream come to life—penning a well-received book every few years in the quiet of her home in Baltimore, eschewing the media in favor of the companionship of her characters—it’s one she’s earned. Her books are about families, and the complications therein—marital discourse, sibling rivalry, resentment and, underneath it all, love. Character Chart for Fiction Writers - EpiGuide.com - StumbleUpon. If you're a fiction writer -- whether you're working on a novel, short story, screenplay, television series, play, web series, webserial, or blog-based fiction -- your characters should come alive for your reader or audience.
The highly detailed chart below will help writers develop fictional characters who are believable, captivating, and unique. Print this page to complete the form for each main character you create. IMPORTANT: Note that all fields are optional and should be used simply as a guide; character charts should inspire you to think about your character in new ways, rather than constrain your writing. Fill in only as much info as you choose. Have fun getting to know your character! If this character chart is helpful, please let us know! To join our community, which focuses on online writing, visit -- and feel free to show off your character charts. Looking for more character questionnaires / charts? Keeping it Real: A Rough Guide to Using Real People As Fictional Characters. Pop quiz: what do Ebeneezer Scrooge, Alice in Wonderland and Tintin all have in common? OK, the title makes the answer obvious (and if it didn’t, you’re too tired to be reading this): all of these ‘fictional’ characters were based on real people.
It’s not an unusual thing for a writer to do. In fact it’s so common, the subject has inspired a whole book of its own: The Godfather Was A Girl written by Eamon Evans, who, I’m assuming, is a real person and not a piece of fiction inspired by a real person. But let’s not get reductive. Just because something is commonplace doesn’t mean it is right. The big no-no: writing about your family When author Hanif Kureishi produced his novel Intimacy in 1998, its story line about a man who leaves his partner for another woman seemed unexceptional.
You can see her point. I'm just the messenger. To which you might ask how Kureishi might have felt if his partner had chosen to make a record of her own. I see dead people: channeling historical figures. Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots. By Michelle Legro The art of mechanized storytelling, or what a cardboard robot has to do with melodrama and Law & Order. You are an author about write a story. How shall it begin? Perhaps there is a single, basic plot: a conflict that needs to be resolved. Perhaps there are two questions to be answered: will my story have a happy ending or a sad ending? Perhaps the conflict has one of several distinct oppositions: man vs nature, man vs. technology, man vs. god or man vs. self. In 1894, French critic Georges Polti recognized thirty-six possible plots, which included conflicts such as Supplication, Pursuit, Self-sacrifice, Adultery, Revolt, the Enigma, Abduction, and Disaster.
Original copies of Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots are very rare, with an asking price of more than $250. Plotto, reissued last month by Tin House, was a manual that aimed to mechanize the entire narrative trade. Wycliffe Hill, inventor of the Plot Robot, from Popular Mechanics, 1931. 1a. 9b. 61. 1282. TEN SIMPLE KEYS TO PLOT STRUCTURE. Structure is something that every agent and executive in Hollywood talks about, and that all of us teachers/authors/consultants/gurus/whatever go on and on about, to the point that it can seem complicated, intricate, mysterious and hard to master.
So I want present plot structure in a way that simplifies it – that will at least give you a starting point for properly structuring your screenplay without overwhelming you with rules and details and jargon. Here are what I consider ten key elements of structure – ten ways of looking at structure that will immediately improve the emotional impact – and commercial potential – of your script. THE SINGLE RULE OF STRUCTURE I once got to work with long time television writer Doug Heyes, who used to say that there is only one rule for achieving proper plot structure: What’s happening now must be inherently more interesting than what just happened.
Structuring Your Story’s Scenes, Pt. 8: Options for Reactions in a Sequel. At the heart of every sequel* is the narrating character’s reaction to the preceding scene’s disaster. This is where the author gets the opportunity to dig around inside his character’s emotional and mental processes and find out what he’s really made of. The scene is about external action; the sequel is about internal reaction. The sequel will sometimes be entirely confined to the POV character’s mind; other times, it will be dramatized through action or dialogue. Although the sequel possesses three basic and unavoidable parts, just like the scene, it is much more flexible in execution. The three parts may take place within a single sentence—or be stretched out over many chapters. Sometimes one or the other of the parts may be implied; sometimes they may appear to be intermixed with the pieces of the scene. Because the scene’s goal/conflict/disaster are an external expression, they are almost always easy to pick out once you know what you’re looking for.
Options for Sequel Reactions 1. 100 Exquisite Adjectives. By Mark Nichol Adjectives — descriptive words that modify nouns — often come under fire for their cluttering quality, but often it’s quality, not quantity, that is the issue. Plenty of tired adjectives are available to spoil a good sentence, but when you find just the right word for the job, enrichment ensues. Practice precision when you select words. Here’s a list of adjectives: Subscribe to Receive our Articles and Exercises via Email You will improve your English in only 5 minutes per day, guaranteed! 21 Responses to “100 Exquisite Adjectives” Rebecca Fantastic list!
Ali Smith: Style vs content? Novelists should approach their art with an eye to what the story asks. Point 1: "What's it all about? " v "What's it all – a bout? " Fight! Fight! Fight! In the style corner, a battered old copy of Ulysses. In the content corner, the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho. "Writers go wrong when they focus on form, not content," Coelho told a São Paulo newspaper earlier this month. Or did he mean "Ulysses is a tweet"? Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise.
Or maybe I'd read one of the most original writers at work in the novel in English right now, Nicola Barker. I was thinking how incredibly precise those first lines were, and yet how crazily effortless they seemed; Schaefer's style (his – ahem – 'voice') so enviably understated, his artistic (if I may be so bold as to use this word, and so early in our acquaintance) 'vision' so totally (and I mean totally) unflinching.' The Passive Voice. Narrative Tenses for Fiction. Resources For Children's Writers. Culture - Michael Morpurgo on how to write for children. About self publishing. WRITING GENERRATORS. Characters. Generators. Name Generators. Fantasy Writing Help! Writing Generators. Joseph Campbell Myth-Hero Cycle. Creative Resources. Crimson Daggers - RANDOM GENERATORS.
Analyze My Writing. MyStorybook.com | Make Kids' Books Online For Free! The Internet Writing Workshop: Write - Critique - Learn. Poets & Writers | Contests, MFA Programs, Agents & Grants for Writers. Online Writing Lab (OWL) The Inner Struggle: Guides for Using Inner Conflict That Make Sense. 100 Character Development Questions for Writers. Physical Descriptions - List of Hair Colors. Character Flaw Index.
Character Archetypes. Character Qualities. Medieval Names - List of Medieval Names. Online Book Writing Tools | Start Free | World Anvil. Writing App - Creative Writing Software - Milanote. Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots. TEN SIMPLE KEYS TO PLOT STRUCTURE. Structuring Your Story’s Scenes, Pt. 8: Options for Reactions in a Sequel.
Keeping it Real: A Rough Guide to Using Real People As Fictional Characters. Character Chart for Fiction Writers - EpiGuide.com - StumbleUpon. Anne Tyler’s Tips on Writing Strong (yet Flawed) Characters. 25 Things You Should Know About Character. How to Write a Character From Start to Finish. Set up Your Story in the First Paragraphs. This Itch of Writing: Psychic Distance: what it is and how to use it. 9 Easily Preventable Mistakes Writers Make with Dialogue. 20 Great Writers on the Art of Revision. One Simple and Incredibly Painful Way to Fix Your Novel Draft. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: Early drafts and history.
Six Easy Tips for Self-Editing Your Fiction | Kristen Lamb. 20 Great Writers on the Art of Revision. One Simple and Incredibly Painful Way to Fix Your Novel Draft. Six Easy Tips for Self-Editing Your Fiction | Kristen Lamb. True or False? Pay Attention to Structure to Tell if a Story is Made Up. Set up Your Story in the First Paragraphs. Place & Location | Adam Aitken. Writing Style. Creative Writing. Personality Types. Untitled. How to Write a Character From Start to Finish. Voice. Character is the very life of fiction. Setting... Keeping it Real: A Rough Guide to Using Real People As Fictional Characters.
Character Chart for Fiction Writers - EpiGuide.com - StumbleUpon. Anne Tyler’s Tips on Writing Strong (yet Flawed) Characters. Plotting. Character Outlines. Character Crafting. The Importance of Female Sex Workers in Fiction. Most common last names in the United States, top 1000. 33 Ways to Write Stronger Characters — Well-Storied. Mexican Naming Patterns. Realistic Characters: Creating Personas. Character Development. Character graphs. The Mother Of All Character Questionnaires. Worksheets | creative writing blog. A mixture to die for. — Character Development Questions: Hard Mode.