Leveling Characters & Building Worlds. With Hunters having stalled in development, I’ve turned to what I can do for my other storylines. I have very basic notes written down about what each is about, not to mention having numerous mental files. There are eleven in total. But unlike Hunters, the ideas for all of them weren’t coming to me. What I needed was a process or a strategy to help them flow. Luckily for me, it was around Nanowrimo time so the Writers guild on HabitRPG was going nuts with updates, links and resources. I visited the website and read about the Snowflake method. So far all I’ve done is Step 1 for each storyline, but with that step, I discovered that there was a lot more I needed to work on. Then, browsing through my Facebook feed, one particular post from a fantasy/sci-fi writers group I’m in had me concerned. To solve the character issue, I decided to find some charts that challenged me with questions about my characters that I would have never thought of.
Next I read about world-building. Like this: Chapter 3: The Twins. ” Er… hi…” I replied, not sure who or what these two were. They felt like two halves of a whole, and I was stuck in the middle of them. ” Nice to see you two are socialising again,” Mita’s voice cut in. There was a slight jest in her words, as if there was something I was missing about the whole situation. ” It’s good to get away from him again,” the one to my left said back with a smooth, dignified tone. ” One can only stand so much of him.” ” Mr Perfect over there,” the one of my right growled through a mouth full of meat he had torn from a bone with his teeth. A glare of annoyance flew in front my face, going from the giver on my left to its recipient on my right. ” Eat like you’re at least some part human, idiot.” ” Now now, you two,” Mita cooed to them. ” Twins?” Ivan swallowed the last of his food and put down his knife and fork. ” Twins mean they were born from the same set of DNA at the same time.
You could say that again. ” The one that has the violet eyes like Jace?” ” Out. TLQ: Boss Encounter – The Dreaded Dialogue of the Hunters. Ah yes. If you’ve been reading for some time you would have seen this adversary mulling around. Now it’s time to face her head-on! So how am I going to defeat this chick? Well, her HP will go down when I complete these objectives: Find/make a template for storyboards for the cinematic partsFind/make a template for the non-interactive dialogueFind/make a template for the interactive/NPC dialogue that changes depending on event And then there is the multitude of events and their sub-parts that actually need to be written. 6 >1min (long) cinematic animations6 <1min (short) cinematic animations102 non-interactive dialogue sequences54 (at the minimum) interactive dialogue situations All up that’s 171 objectives. Template finding = 1 HP each = 3HP totalLong cinematic = 10 HP each = 60 HP totalShort cinematic = 5 HP each = 30 HP totalNon-interactive dialogue = 5 HP each = 510 HP totalInteractive dialogue = 7 HP each = 378 HP total Total boss HP = 981 HP.
So here’s the current boss status. Like this: TLQ: My Mount is a Drama Llama. Well, he is. As I found out when I drove home from the meeting with my life coach. Just as I was on the home stretch, a trail of white smoke appeared from the back of my car. I could see it in my rear vision mirror. Oi vey… The next morning I rang a tow-truck to take my poor car into town to the mechanic. One crisis resolved.
Out of my hole and into the bright light, I had to research a few things. Second on the research list was storyboards. As you can see in that picture, I have already started on them. Last on the list to research was how to run a Kickstarter campaign. I gave myself the deadline of starting the campaign on the 18th of August (as I write this post, 25 days away). So I have all this research and the startings of getting into the nitty-gritty of the game dialogue for Hunters, I’m off to show my questgiver/life coach.
Current Quest: Show questgiver results of my research Future Boss Encounter: Game dialogue Like this: Like Loading... Related TLQ: The First Questgiver In "TLQ" Storybird. 7 Habits of Serious Writers. Image credit: aless&ro With thanks to Michael Pollock for the article suggestion and title. I’ve been writing, on and off, since my early teens – but it’s only in the last three years that I’ve really taken my writing seriously. It’s made a dramatic difference. I write far, far more. I write better. I finish things – something which, at one point in my writing life, was pretty much unheard of. In the past few years, I’ve been lucky enough to work alongside all sorts of great writers, during my MA in Creative Writing, and in my freelancing.
Habit #1: Writing To be a serious writer, you have to write. Yes, that’s obvious. Maybe you’re one of them. Unfortunately, you won’t get any better at writing unless you actually write. I know it’s tough. You can do it. Writing “regularly” is key here. Get Serious Write. Habit #2: Focus Maybe you’ve planned to write for two hours on a Saturday morning. Writing is hard work – and you’ll come up with all sorts of distractions to keep you from it. LanguageTool Style and Grammar Checker. PageFour - Novel Writing Software - Software for Creative Writers - includes a tabbed word processor and easy navigation area. Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Rules For Writing Fiction. Everything you ever needed to know about screenwriting (but were afraid to ask) The architecture of all stories is pretty much the same Take just one story: a dangerous monster threatens a community and one person takes it upon himself or herself to kill the beast and restore happiness to the kingdom.
It's the story of Jaws. But it's also the story of Beowulf. And it's more familiar than that: it's The Thing, it's Jurassic Park, it's The Blob – all films with tangible monsters. If you recast the monsters in human form, it's also every Bond film, every episode of Spooks, House or CSI. You can see the same shape in The Exorcist, The Shining, Fatal Attraction, Psycho and Saw.
The monster may change from a literal one in Nightmare on Elm Street to a corporation in Erin Brockovich, but the underlying architecture – in which a foe is vanquished and order is restored – stays the same. Without empathy your work won't work A whole generation remembers how they flinched when they saw the fisherman's decapitated head fall out of the boat in Jaws. Reality television is drama. 25 Ways To Fight Your Story’s Mushy Middle. For me, the middle is the hardest part of writing.
It’s easy to get the stallions moving in the beginning — a stun gun up their asses gets them stampeding right quick. I don’t have much of a problem with endings, either; you get to a certain point and the horses are worked up into a mighty lather and run wildly and ineluctably toward the cliff’s edge. But the middle, man, the motherfucking middle. It’s like being lost in a fog, wandering the wasteland tracts. And I can’t be the only person with this problem: I’ve read far too many books that seem to lose all steam in the middle. Narrative boots stuck in sucking mud.
Seems like it’s time for another “list of 25″ to the rescue, then. Hiyaa! 1. Fuck the three-act structure right in its crusty corn-cave. 2. Hey, when you fake an orgasm, you gotta commit. 3. The shape of a story — especially the shape of a story’s middle — is a lot of soft rises and doughy plateaus and zoftig falls. 4. 5. 6. Sometimes, a story just needs blood. 7. 8. 9. 10. How to use a semicolon.
8 New Punctuation Marks We Desperately Need. 10 Things You Didn't Know About the Harry Potter Book Series. Plot Scenario Generator. Plot Scenario Generator. 500 Ways. Hungry for another double-barrel buckshot of questionable writing wisdom unloaded into your brain-guts? Ohhh, I have just the thing for you, my little ink-fingered word-cobblers. Available now: 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER. Okay, let’s get our procurement options on the table: Or, buy direct (PDF) from here: (A note about buying direct: if you buy direct, I send you the file — er, directly! What The Hell Is This? This is the sequel to 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING, and, as many sequels go, this one is bigger and badder — twice the size, in fact, of its predecessor. It features 20 “Lists of 25″ from the blog-bound pages of this very site. What lists, you say? Now, four of those are brand new and are not found here at terribleminds — Endings; Mood; Sleep-Deprived And Also Drunken Thoughts; and the writing exercises.
All told, it’s around 50,000 words of total content. None of it is replicated from 250 THINGS. Why Buy? Got a big bad case of the writer’s block? Or — or! If you procure? Cliche Finder. Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling. These rules were originally tweeted by Emma Coats, Pixar’s Story Artist. Number 9 on the list – When you’re stuck, make a list of what wouldn’t happen next – is a great one and can apply to writers in all genres. You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be very different.Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it.
Now rewrite.Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. 6 Tips for Cleaning Up Your Writing! [Guest Post] | An Evil Nymph's Blog. Most people struggle cleaning up their writing abilities and prowess. The following six quantitative tips will help improve your writing functionally for better performance, respect and recognition anywhere. 1. Use of serial comma The policy of preceding every item in a list but the last one with a comma is common to every student and that should never be forgotten at one point. Adherence to serial-comma style eliminates the dilemma in the sentence therefore brings more clarity to the audience reading the sentences. 2. One of the worst things that could happen to you as a writer is failing to write unique and original work. 3. Capitalization is the writing of a word with its first letter as an upper case and the remaining letters in lower case. 4. This is used where a sentence has two independent clauses. 5. 6.
As writers put much emphasis on something at times, they may make the whole article boring for readers. About the author: Sandra Miller is a freelance edtech writer from Brooklyn. Text analysis, wordcount, keyword density analyzer, prominence analysis. How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later. First, before I begin to bore you with the usual sort of things science fiction writers say in speeches, let me bring you official greetings from Disneyland. I consider myself a spokesperson for Disneyland because I live just a few miles from it — and, as if that were not enough, I once had the honour of being interviewed there by Paris TV. For several weeks after the interview, I was really ill and confined to bed. I think it was the whirling teacups that did it.
Elizabeth Antebi, who was the producer of the film, wanted to have me whirling around in one of the giant teacups while discussing the rise of fascism with Norman Spinrad... an old friend of mine who writes excellent science fiction. We also discussed Watergate, but we did that on the deck of Captain Hook’s pirate ship. Little children wearing Mickey Mouse hats — those black hats with the ears — kept running up and bumping against us as the cameras whirred away and Elizabeth asked unexpected questions. “What does that mean?” Ten Top Tips to End Writer’s Block Procrastination. Is writer's block a catchy phrase for procrastination on starting and completing written work? Mostly yes! But writer's block has a different tone than writing procrastination , which is putting off priority writing assignments or delaying writings that are personally valuable for you to do. A writer's block suggests you have an emotional barrier that prevents the written expression of your creative thoughts.
There is the unwritten poem, novel, or Hollywood script. A solution is waiting for the arrival of muses to feel inspired. This amusing mental distraction is an example of procrastination contingency-thinking. Writing is normally more procedural than creative. Procrastination is a nemesis for many whose profession includes written work.
What may cause writing procrastination? When you face writing challenges you feel tempted to put off, you meet the never-ending conflict between writing or engaging a familiar diversionary procrastination waltz. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Dr. Tests Document Readability. A List of the Best Free Digital Storytelling Tools for Teachers. About. Pursue your creative writing dreams with creative writing tips, help, and resources from novelist Pearl Luke. How To Overcome Writer's Block - 15 Tips. Image credit: athena As someone who spends a majority of my professional and leisure time writing (strategic communications by day, blogging by night and music on the weekends) I have battled the elusive writer’s block on more than one occasion.
Now more often than not, I am quite productive – In my free time during the last year, I’ve written 179 posts here, more than 15 new songs, and created a countless amount of content for clients during the work week. But there are times when all creatives, even the productive types, find themselves stuck. I thought today I’d share a few tips/tricks I use to overcome writer’s block, as I know many of you reading this are also writers: 1) Get your blood moving image credit: erica marshall As I wrote previously: finding balance is vital for workers in the information economy. 2) Change your surroundings image credit: KhayaL 3) Unplug the Internet image credit: cgatlin 4) Listen to some music image credit: max w image credit: kruggg6 6) File it for later. Plagiarism Checker - the most accurate and absolutely FREE! Try now!
Free Online Grammar Check, Spelling, and More | PaperRater.
Worldreaver. Exception. Blood gods. Lament of the two trees. Pokemon:bol. Bonds of blood. Angelus. Hunters. Hime-less. KING. Days of might and magic.