bisexual-in-progress

[bisexual-in-progress]

character question

I’ve got some side characters for The Spirit Well I feel like I need to get to know better (beyond, like, character creation sheets). What are some things y’all do to get to know a character better? so far I’ve got:

moodboard

playlist

picrew

writing random scenes with them in it

anything else??

[bisexual-in-progress]

Me trying to figure out the distance between places and how long it’ll take a character to get there in a society that travels mostly on foot:

[bisexual-in-progress]

controversial opinion but bringing characters back from the dead is fine and doesn’t cheapen the existence of death and mortality if there are sufficient emotional and narrative consequences. i’m talking guilt, i’m talking lingering resentment and grief, i’m talking rejection from those who’ve already begun to move on, i’m talking complicated feelings about being returned to a life you departed from without grace or preparation without your consent and now have to deal with the fallout of, i’m talking repressed feelings that cannot be acknowledged without hurting everyone involved, because you can bring back what was lost but what happened cannot be undone. and that’s why i could fight marvel studios and win.

#misc tag #THIS!!! this this this #i brought back one of my characters #he was long dead and the person closest to him missed him ofc #but had moved on and grown since then #and they both have to deal with the fact that things have changed significantly #love that shit

[bisexual-in-progress]

wow i sure haven't done much on this blog in a while besides post pics of my kids

#ramblings

[bisexual-in-progress]

him.... I made my boy Juwon in this picrew and i love him.... king

#misc tag #he runs a business helping non-humans who come from other worlds

[bisexual-in-progress]

writing Strong Female Characters™

[@/moonlit_sunflower_books on ig]

i think there's a big difference between "strong female character" and "female character who has no emotions and punches things", and that's my main issue with writers who attempt to be feminist and result in taking away all humanity from their female characters. this post is going to talk about how to write Strong Female Characters well!

disclaimer: these are all my opinions and not to be taken as fact. i'm open to debate and constructive criticism as long as you're kind and respectful! i'm not a professional writer, i'm a student who writes for fun, and this is based on my own experiences and preferences.

give them motivation other than "proving people wrong"

don't get me wrong, spite can be a really great motivator for so many characters. but it's been used so many times for female characters that it becomes repetitive. many Badass Female Characters™ have been discriminated against by men in their life and want to prove their strength and their worth. while this can be part of their motivation, i think it would be refreshing to see something other than this as well. for example, give me a female character fighting for her family or her religion or for her country rather than against it. take helene aquilla from an ember in the ashes - she's the perfect example of a badass woman with unique motivation (if you don't know what i'm talking about, read the books)

let them have emotions

please dear lord give your characters emotions. even if your character is an angsty heartless assassin or someone traumatised into believing emotions are weak, no character is devoid of emotions. let them feel love, let them feel regret, let them have faith and remorse and mercy. inej from six of crows is my favourite example of this: she's a really badass knife wife, but she's religious and kind and empathetic while deciding how best to carve up her victims.

when you take away a female character's emotion, you're leaning into the stereotype that a) women are too emotional and b) emotions are weak. vulnerability is not a weakness, but it can be shown through narration rather than dialogue/action if that fits your character better.

let them fall in love

this one is entirely my opinion, but i feel like "i'm too hardcore for love" has kind of become the new "i'm not like other girls" - except this time it's marginally more subtle. i'd love to see female characters who are strong without giving up on love! like annabeth chase - none of her intelligence or strength is compromised because of her relationship with percy, and not once does she suggest that her love for him holds her back from reaching her potential.

let them fail

NO CHARACTER IS SUCCESSFUL 100% OF THE TIME and if they are, they're a badly written character. in order to see what your characters are made of, you have to break them, and this holds true for Badass Female Characters™ too. i think this holds true especially for physical strength - it would be refreshing to see them fail in a fight against a man sometimes (but obviously not all the time - possibly at the start of the story, before they gain strength depending on how their character arc is structured). honestly, even a woman failing against another woman! don't make your characters unbreakable.

give them a weakness other than pride

something very common among Strong Female Characters™ is that their weakness or "fatal flaw" is pride, such as with annabeth in pjo. pride can be a really strong weakness because of how much depth it can give to a character, and i think annabeth is really well written. but many other female characters have the same weakness, and once again, it becomes repetitive. i found this true with captain marvel as well: carol danvers is really awesome, but her entire personality revolves around the fact that she punches things and is too prideful. make your female characters have varied weaknesses! let them be loyal and stubborn and empathetic and convinced of their own intelligence.

or, let their pride not just be a character trait - make it affect their plot. make your character overconfident and fail because of it. make them unwilling to compromise. but also make sure it's a strength - them so confident that they convince a minor villain to side with them. essentially, make sure that it's not just for show and that it has an impact on their story.

i also think that the Prideful Character trope was kind of a fight against Not Like Other Girls, where the protagonist always ridiculously low self-esteem, and i will say that i much prefer someone prideful. but it would be nice to mix it up a bit and find a middle ground as well!

[bisexual-in-progress]

mundane scenes are important.

This is some unconventional writing advice, but here me out, because it's important and I don't see it being talked about enough:

Not every scene you write has to be essential to drive your plot forward. That's it. And your story doesn't need to be at high stakes at all times to be considered interesting, either.

Your scenes, that you include, should always be crucial to your story. Not important. Crucial. So, yes, it is important that your story isn't filled with scenes that don't affect or drive your plot forward, but it is also okay to include scenes in which your characters simply... exist.

Maybe it's not necessary to show your characters at work, signing papers at a desk (unless a dragon comes in and sets fire to the place or they get fired), but it might be necessary to have your characters invite a couple friends over, make some pancakes, and crack some jokes! A scene like that, while it might not contribute much to the overall plot of your story, will help bring life into it!

Giving your audience glimpses into your characters life, not only helps them connect with your characters, but it's a way for them to start caring more deeply about both your characters and the relationship between them.

Your story CANNOT simply be ACTION ACTION ACTION. Yes, it is important for your scenes contribute to your plot, but you can't forget the importance of establishing characters, as well as the world they live in and the dynamics between them!

YOUR PLOT IS ONLY HALF OF IT. If a scene is rendered useless in terms of plot development, but contributes in any way to the development of a character or relationship, it is not useless, nor is it a waste of space!

Learn what it means for a scene to be completely useless and what it means for it to be useful in terms of characterization, worldbuilding or exposition. You don't need to cut those scenes. Every scene has to serve a purpose, but there is a lot of purposes to be served.

So let your characters breathe, even for just a second. There needs to be down time. Otherwise the emotional impact you try to bring upon your audience won't come into play, because they have not been given enough time with your characters to start caring about them.

[bisexual-in-progress]

sometimes i think about nox who is like 7 feet tall and a literally huge brat and they just want to be loved but they're scared to and also they're literally god

#ramblings

[bisexual-in-progress]

one thing I've noticed reading friends' works in the past, they will always have a character who has a maybe-ridiculous protagonist name, and then all of their family have extremely normal names, and it's so jarring reading that the main character's name is like, Halo Eclipse yes a real example only to see that the next character introduced is his uncle, Michael

#ramblings #gonna ignore the fact Halo was a high school self-insert #if he had fun writing it that's all that mattered

[bisexual-in-progress]

every time i see that post about flashforwards on my dash i think of my ex-friend's extremely vague "running away from a mysterious dangerous magic thing" flashforward at the very beginning of their story ending with a "i'm X and this is my story" and i just. hmmm

#ramblings #not that flashforwards CAN'T be done well #but that was not it fam

[bisexual-in-progress]

for literal years i've had a story sleeping in the back of my mind and sometimes i think of it and think of things for it and i have general ideas for it but then it goes back to sleep, like it's not ready for me to think about it clearly yet, it's not ready to solidify, at one point it felt deeply personal and now it just feels like it's uncertain, it has certain concepts but doesn't know how it wants to be executed

#ramblings #it is based on the feelings a song gave me once #that other things have given me since #it is about a world opposite of ours #in the mirrors #a girl alone in a city of monsters #put there by a group of people who want her gone #a missing princess who has been usurped #and a person from our world called to help

[bisexual-in-progress]

character awareness level: i thought two of my own characters were a couple but then realized she's aro and he's gay and they're just platonic life partners, actually

#ramblings #let's not forget one of my own characters coming out to me as trans

[bisexual-in-progress]

for the record none of them are from the same plot but like. i love them

#ramblings

[bisexual-in-progress]

a living "ghost" who commits crimes so people will pay attention to her, a book who got turned into a human and all he wants to do is stare at ruins all day but some idiots formed a cult based around his brother and they keep bothering him, a bunny god of mischief who let a human start a cult for him because he desperately wanted attention, the princess of a kingdom who followed home a random guy who was actually part of a gang and said gang kidnapped her before she got the random guy to run away with her to another kingdom so she could live her life however she wanted before she was inevitably going to die

we got a medium who's afraid of ghosts due to Trauma, twins who accidentally took over a country to a repay a debt and only one person noticed, an immortal who spent like 1000 years or so chained to a rock and then got freed by the very passionate leader of a group of runaways and his reaction was kind of just "?????? but i'm supposed to be chained to the rock for some reason", a lazy rich cat man who got kicked out of his family because he uses their ability to speak to spirits for gossip and petty theft

#ramblings #a couple more

[bisexual-in-progress]

we got a medium who's afraid of ghosts due to Trauma, twins who accidentally took over a country to a repay a debt and only one person noticed, an immortal who spent like 1000 years or so chained to a rock and then got freed by the very passionate leader of a group of runaways and his reaction was kind of just "?????? but i'm supposed to be chained to the rock for some reason", a lazy rich cat man who got kicked out of his family because he uses their ability to speak to spirits for gossip and petty theft

#ramblings #among others

[bisexual-in-progress]

i have so many ocs and i just wanna TALK ABOUT THEM but there's so many i get overwhelmed. i have over 100 children how did this happen

#ramblings #maybe i will just make a list of vague character descriptions #so people can point at one and ask #hey what the fuck

[bisexual-in-progress]

Text: The forest path was brilliant with lamplight. They shone all shapes and sizes, one for every traveler who succumbed to the living dark.