I really love the little detail of paw prints on the promotional posts for THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT because all of this stuff is coming from Taylor’s desk, so of course the cats would be stepping all over her desk and leaving their marks on her documents.
sylvia plath, todd anderson and virginia woolf (aka ACTUAL tortured poets) watching taylor “im breaking up with my boyfriend for his intense depression and blaming it on him, im dating a racist who enjoys watching woc being brutalized and harasses young woc artists, i sent my fans out on a hate train to attack a young woc actress for a line she had to say as part of her job to show how mentally ill her character was, im dating a maga supporter, i refuse to say anything about a current genocide despite being the most influential person in the world right now, i am a billionaire, i fly 13 minute flights and have the highest carbon emission of any celebrity, i am a known white feminist who only speaks about issues when it affects me and has constantly let my fans get away with extreme racism and even encouraged it by associating myself with known racists” swift call herself a tortured poet (her writing sounds like a bunch of thesaurus words slapped over gabba hanna and rupi kaur-esque poetry that was created purely as a trinket for an edgy pinterest board)
But in my attempt to create a character that overthinks so much that reality happens in the background/through a very heavy lens....
I ended up following a lot of writing advice, it improved my writing, and I have an overthinking character! (Although this works for pretty much every type of character, just edit the writing style to your needs.)
In essence:
Give your character a lens with which they view the world. For my character, they are a storyteller and will make a story about the clouds and the wind. For a character that has a deep knowledge about... physics and statistics for example, might make metaphors to that and notice such things more often
But don't stop it at just interests! If you can combine the lens with the internal conflict (desires, fears, current perception of the world) It has a whole layer of depth.
~What does this new information mean to the character? ~
For example, you can have the musician character notice the sounds of everyone's voices, and that will reveal what the musician character thinks of others.
You can have a character that's analytic try to decode their sensory perceptions and try to figure out what they are feelings and why. They may spend a lot of time trying to figure out their past and what specific moments made them the way they are, and they might do the same for others. This will reveal that the analytic character cares a lot about knowing everything and they might be scared to leave things up to chance/unexplained.
Jealous characters will see other people's achievements and either downplay those achievements or try to imagine themselves surpassing them. (The 'smart child' that's slowly falling behind anyone?)
AND MY BEST ADVICE IS TO PRACTICE WRITING THIS BEFORE YOU START INCORPERATING IT INTO YOUR WIP! For me, I would plot like crazy then... kind of go off the rails in my actual writing. Then I'd get upset that my writing didn't match my ideas.
And it's okay! Getting to know your character takes time.
What works for me is to write some loose notes down, then I'll do some practice snippets. Random ideas with no coherent structure or events... it's just practice for the character.
Backstory also helps! (and it doesn't necessarily have to be tragic... just informative to the character on how they should navigate the world)
If you have your character reacting and analyzing what is happening to them and what they are going to do about it, then pretty much every type of paragraph (scene description, describing another character, actions etc.) are going to be a lot more fun to read and write!
And as always - the best writing methods are the ones that work for you, take what you need, modify it for your wip, or make something up on your own. There's no need to take advice as the end all be all!
I just keep circling back to “I find the artifacts/Cried over a hat/Cursed the space that I needed/I trace the evidence/Make it make some sense/Why the wound is still bleeding” as we slowly get more information about this album.
Therapy? You mean holding hands, receiving love letters, buying books, watching full moon, getting tiny drops of rain splashed on your face, forehead kisses, reading while sitting on the library floor and pretending to be the main character.