dibleopard-writes

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everything u need to know about me can actually be explained by the fact that i read that poem about the serving girl wearing the pearls so they're warm for her mistress when i was like 11 and it rewrote my brain chemistry forever

like this Changed Me

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Mauro C. Martinez (American, 1986) - Shelter (2022)

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More random tropes that I fucking love: Becoming the mask you wore.

Like oh shit, this character who was sent to spy somewhere under a false identity suddenly realises they've started to genuinely become the person they claimed to be? Someone who's been telling the same lies about who they are for so long that they're actually forgetting that the story isn't true? Finding themselves genuinely doing the things they pretend to do in front of people, when they're alone and nobody's watching? Answering to a name that wasn't supposed to be theirs without thinking?

Ooohh-hoh-hoh, you lost track of yourself in pretending to be someone else? You were only supposed to impersonate somebody, a plausible background and a name you came up with on the spot, and now that the people you were supposed to infiltrate have become your true companions? You lost yourself in the game you played, and no you no longer know who you truly are, and where your true loyalties lie? And both sides would mark you a traitor if you came out with the truth. On a scale of one to ten, how bad did you fuck up.

Fuck that is a good trope. Never seen it done badly. Pour that shit on a table and I'll chop it into lines and snort it.

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Writing Advice: How to Create Conflict when Your Characters are Competent.

Featuring Leverage, the ultimate in Competency Porn.

Make them so good it gets them in trouble. So you've got a hacker and he's the best, definitively. Okay, well, one of his fake IDs just got called for jury duty. You pretended to be a psychic so well, someone kidnapped you to talk to a dead crime lord.

Make them targets. You're so good, enemies you didn't even know about are trying to kill you just so they won't have to take you on in your element. You're being blackmailed into doing a thing because you're the only one that can.

Limit the scope of competency. Sure, you're competent as a fighter, but your hacker is in jail and now you have to do his job and you are not competent in that. Yeah, you can climb a building, but do you know what you need to do to not end up in a crevasse while climbing a mountain?

Raise the stakes. Can you handle extracting a orphan being used by a washed up actress to fund her extravagant lifestyle? Yes. But can you handle extracting 30 orphans being used by the Slovenian mob to fund gunrunning? Maybe all you wanted was to get enough money to buy back a house, but instead you have to ruin the company so that all houses they illegally obtained are returned to their rightful owners.

Make others competent, too. Your characters are the best, but are they the best of the best? If you take you enemy down, do you go, too? If you win, does it make them win? Does it get out of hand and make other people start noticing when you're trying to keep your head down? Do they know every trick in the book and know the next move before you make it?

Make others painfully incompetent. Your characters are the best, but are they woefully unprepared for people who are not even good? Can your hologram hacker roll with it when the vital information is on a casset tape? Is the old mentor up to date on the recent technology, or is he going to screw you because he assumes the cops are just as corrupt/incompetent as when he was young?

Have some standards. Specifically, morals that make it impossible for your characters to back out or gets them in trouble for doing things "off-script." You can't leave on the train someone just stole for you because you've got to go back and stop the bad guys from bombing the IRS (even if we don't like them). You wish you could just say no to that assassin contract and leave, but someone's getting assassinated and you have to stop it because you're a good guy.

Bring up the past. Do you think that bad guy you brutally scarred a decade ago is going to carry a grudge? Do you have to save your ex-wife from the bad guy, who may also be her boyfriend, and if you suggest that she'll shut you out and you won't be able to save her or get paid? It's Draaamaaaa, babee.

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🍂

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I am a big advocate of revealing big secrets in your story sooner rather than later.

See, if you keep all your secrets until the end, you risk becoming a Rowling, always with your GOTCHA right in the climax. You're just pulling the rug out from under the readers, and not giving them much time to do anything with that information.

But what if you revealed some of your secrets earlier in the story? Not even necessarily to the characters, either - you could have the person who knows about it reveal it to the audience through internal thoughts, but not letting the other characters know until later (and possibly not through them at that!).

The thing about doing it this way is, it gives you the opportunity to do more. The more your audience knows, the more you can do with them. It opens up new possibilities for plot threads or character development, and you don't have to work so hard to keep every little thing hidden. You get to build up your characters out in the open, where your audience can actually see what you're doing, even if they still don't have everything. Heck, it can build up anticipation, too! The readers know the secret, but the characters don't, and the readers want to see them find out.

I used to keep a lot of secrets in my writing. Now that I'm thinking back, a number of those secrets were about certain aspects of various relationships. For some reason, I always thought, wouldn't it be suuuuper neat to have this be a reveal at the climax or something? So I just kept saving it and saving it.

But then people would read a chapter here and there. They would ask questions about those relationships. And I started deciding to put those reveals earlier. I don't know what it was that made me do it like that, but it did. And let me tell you, it was such a weight off my shoulders. It wasn't some big plot reveal in the climax, it was just a part of who the characters are. And with that laid out already, I could build on it to create the real arc.

Now, I'm not saying you should reveal everything. Some things should be kept secret. It's the kappa element of storytelling, as C.S. Lewis called it, though perhaps not as thorough as he meant it. But it's a question of discernment:

Is this a plot point that needs to wait and be unveiled at the more proper time, or is this a vital part of the character that needs to be known to understand who they are?

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i made a character sheet. free to use as you wish, feel free to change whatever you want XD open source ass thing. spent all of ~maybe an hour on it.

Credit: the text in the insert-image box comes from this video, and the text for the top three lines (intense, complex, fruity) comes from this post. The actual image was made with the free NBOS character sheet creator, which is a sort of dated but free and solid text-layout sheet maker intended for ttrpg style character sheet creation.

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my very serious writing advice for people who are trying to write more morally complex characters is to stop caring about their morality and focus instead on their individual motivations

it’s hard to articulate exactly what I mean, but the essence of it is basically: when a character does a murder, not only do I not care about whether they’re justified in doing so, it’s straight-up irrelevant. a character’s moral standing from some nebulous universal standard has no bearing on the plot or their interactions with other characters and has no use in the story for me as a writer. what does matter is why the character thought they were justified and then if it comes up to other characters, what they think about it.

you can obviously think about your characters’ morality but it’s not your job as a writer to interpret your stories for your readers and tell them how to judge your characters. your readers can see the evidence for themselves and draw their own conclusions. your job is just to understand why a character is motivated to act in a certain way and have it make sense

focusing on character motivations is a much more versatile framework than trying to give them specific personality traits or moral alignments, and frankly more useful to understand why a character would do a certain thing instead of just what they do. that way when something fucked up happens and your character starts acting differently, there’s an actual logical reason for it that isn’t you forcing characters to do things because it’s what’s required to make the plot go

when you write your characters with the understanding that people are not static and they act differently under different circumstances, complexity in character and morality follows naturally.

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Had an epiphany about worldbuilding today

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it’s woobifying when you put him in miserable situations that make him cry pathetic tears, when I put him in miserable situations that make him cry pathetic tears it’s finitude unexpectedly discovering its smallness before divinity in a grotesquely real moment of suffering which is at the same time arresting grace 

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Oh hey btw: If you're starting your second draft of something and you're having a hard time editing out the useless fluff that doesn't lead the story anywhere, consider changing tactics: Condense, don't cut.

"Kill your darlings" is bullshit, you shouldn't throw out things that spark joy, just put them into good use or somewhere they're not in the way. Combine scenes, characters and locations. You've got two beloved but unimportant background characters with only a vague scraping role in the story? Combine them. Have just one, who now has the traits, speaking lines and the role of both of them.

You've got a Super Important But Boring scene, and a scene that doesn't progress the story but was basically just you indulging in describing a wonderful location? Combine them. Have the characters have that Super Important Conversation in the pretty rose garden or the lovely bookshop you wanted to include.

You've got two really cool locations that are in the same city but both only show up once, and it feels like a waste to indulge in describing them in detail? Combine them. The smoky tavern and the smoky witch's brew shop are now working out of the same building - the witch and the tavern keeper are now married.

If you feel like you have too much description or too many characters, don't throw anything out before you've checked if you have an empty shelf to put them in. Give the Cool Character Description to a previously nondescript character who only shows up to tell the protagonist the One Important Thing. Make the Cool Location You Described For Three Pages But Which Only Shows Up Once show up again later.

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sick and tired of templates being made by shitty people/being unfun so heres my cringe character template i ran out of ideas for halfway through

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there’s a thing I think about sometimes when I’m writing that I call ‘the rabies condition’

by which I mean: there are no contraindications to getting the rabies vaccine for post-exposure prophylaxis.

every other vaccine usually has a few contraindications like ‘don’t take this if you’re allergic to it’ or ‘if you’re pregnant discuss the risks and benefits with your doctor’ or ‘don’t give to children below age 6′ or something, but not the rabies vaccine. if you’ve been exposed to rabies, there is literally no medical reason that can justify not getting the rabies vaccine–you can be deadly allergic to literally every single ingredient and the correct decision is still to administer the vaccine, because if you don’t, you’re 100% guaranteed to die of rabies. even the life-threatening allergies are a step up in survival rate (especially since anaphylaxis is something that can be managed, even if there are risks associated with it)

which is to say, the rabies condition: if a character has been ‘exposed to rabies’, aka, in some impending absolute worst-case scenario, like the apocalypse or some death curse or the destruction of their entire city via demons or whatever, then that character has to take action and the consequences and risks no longer matter, because literally any other outcome would be better, and 1% chance of survival is still better than 0%. that doesn’t make those actions necessarily good, the same way that injecting yourself with something you know you’re deadly allergic not a good thing to do, but it’s still better than dying horrifically of rabies. desperate times and desperate measures etc

and then, after your character’s prevented some horrible thing by doing some almost equally bad thing, they should absolutely experience the consequences of those choices.

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anyway when Susanna Clarke said "Horror novels have this idea that there’s a secret at the center of the world. And that secret is horrific. [That ] isn’t much of a secret, really. So this would be more about the fact that, at the center of things, there’s a secret or mystery, and it’s joyful" that actually changed my entire life and how I approach any fiction and I think about it constantly

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When I was little, I loved the trope of “I love them [romantically] but I can’t tell them because I’m scared they won’t reciprocate.” But you know what’s occurred to me? This trope works even better in a platonic/familial sense, because it’s so much less common to admit those types of feelings to someone.

Give me two friends who have to keep biting their tongue to not introduce the other as “my best friend,” because wow, this person really is my best friend but what if I’m not theirs, and best is such a strong word, and will they be offended, and I don’t want to slip up they’re so cool

Give me a completely platonic boy/girl duo who sees each other as brother and sister but not wanting to say so, because that’s a really unusual thing to do, and in so many movies those relationships turn into a romance, and what if people think we’re faking it to “hide our feelings,” but wow I’m really not attracted to them and they’re like a sibling to me

Give me an adult who sees a child like their daughter/son and trying their hardest not to think about them that way, because at least somewhere (if not present), they have biological parents who might love and/or miss them, and I feel like that’s disrespecting them, and anyways how do I explain to a kid (especially a young one) that I love them like they were my own, and I know I trained them and mentored them and even raised them but what if they wish they knew their real parents and just aren’t saying anything to be polite

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Characters being compared to dogs always use terriers or pitbulls or something for their metaphors. “They grab on and they don’t let go” “They keep worrying at it until it’s dead” etc.

Anyway, I want to see collies used as metaphors. Albert Payson Terhune style. “He was like an attack dog–making slash-and-run attacks, cutting them up worse every time, never staying in range long enough to get hurt but circling back over and over.”

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Character-voice is I think one of the hardest parts of writing and here's two charts to explain my thoughts on why.

The intention:

The thing I think is maybe happening which I have no idea how to check or prevent: