luna-azzurra:

Your character doesn’t need to be likeable. They need to be legible. The reader needs to understand every decision they make even when it’s wrong, even when it’s ugly, even when they want to shake them. Likeable is easy and forgettable. Legible is what makes someone stay with you for years. Make the logic of every bad choice visible. The reader doesn’t have to agree with it. They just have to follow it.

anonyymoose:

highly recommend: making that character’s mourning WORSE!!!! make them play pretend with that corpse. make it seem like they’re moving on until they start telling the new person to start dyeing their hair the color of the person they lost and start calling them their name to make it clear that they’re hanging out with this person now to try and make them into the old one. make your grieving character put people in the same situation the person they’re mourning died in and have them hope they die to prove it was unpreventable. make your grieving character put people in the same situation the person they’re mourning died in and have them hope they live to prove that it wasn’t doomed to happened. make your grieving characters actively harm the people around them and the memory of the person they lost. I love you morally dubious grieving characters

alexanderwales:

One of my favorite information theory things is parallel construction.

Let’s say you have a piece of information, but either you’re not allowed to have that information, or you don’t want to reveal your sources. Well, sometimes you can just say “I’m not telling you” and that works. But in certain circumstances, you can instead produce an alternate explanation for how you might have gotten this information, now that you have it.

So, let’s say that you’re a private detective in possession of mind-reading abilities, but you don’t want people to know that you have mind-reading abilities. This means that you can’t act on what you seeing when mind-reading … except that you can engage in parallel construction. If you’re trying to catch a cheating spouse, you read the mind in order to know when and where to be, and then everyone will just assume that you were doing a normal tail and stakeout. There’s no reason to suspect you of being a mind-reader.

It’s a really interesting problem, trying to construct a plausible way that you could have obtained this information, and it gets harder depending on what the parameters are. Are you trying for a fig leaf? Or does it need to be rock solid, standing up to scrutiny?

This is one of the things the Allies had to think about after the Enigma code was broken. If they acted without any obvious reason to act, they’d be found out, so they would e.g. send out a scout plane to spot a ship whose location they already knew. That way the Axis would report being spotted by a plane, and it would just seem like luck.

This is also one of the things that’s done by our pervasive surveillance state. NSA intercepts point DEA (or whomever) in the right direction, then they do a “random” traffic stop or “anonymous tip” as justification. The defendant and their attorney don’t ever find out the real origins of case. Which is, in my opinion, less fun than the Enigma example.

starcut-sand:

When I was in college, my Creative Nonfiction professor would regularly have us do something she called “hotspotting” (she didn’t know that this was already a term tbc) with our rough drafts. Basically, hotspotting is when you look at your draft and pick out your favorite sentence, or one of your favorite sentences–one that you’re really proud of–and write it down in a blank sheet in a notebook. Not a new document, a physical notebook. (You are not allowed to use technology for hotspotting.) And then you set a timer for however long–like maybe ten to twenty minutes–and you elaborate. You treat that one sentence as if it’s the opening sentence to a new draft, and you write from there, until the timer is up.

It sounds like a gimmick, but honestly, some of my best writing in that class came from hotspotting. Usually, the sentence you consider the “best” is the one that really gets to the heart of something you’re trying to convey. In a rough draft, it tends to be that you’re fumbling around a bit before you really hit on the heart of things. So with hotspotting, you’re starting from a less fumbly place, which means you’re able to dig into your subject in a much deeper and more precise way. It makes you feel like a surgeon, a little bit.

So I do recommend trying it, even just for fun, even if you think the rough draft you have is already good. You might surprise yourself with what you come up with! :)

byoldervine:

Once again recommending that writers, especially newer writers, start ‘rubber ducking’

When you’re stumped and you don’t know what’s not working for your writing, or you don’t know where to go next, take out a rubber duck (or any equivalent friend/inanimate object, I like to use my dogs) and start explaining every single detail as if the rubber duck knows nothing about writing or about your story. Explain out loud what’s going on, what part you’re up to, why you’re stumped, and what you know you need to get to when you figure out how to get there

Somewhere along the line of putting it into words and externalising the thought process, it’s likely something will slot into place

mossbear-minese:

snowstories:

My biggest tip for fanfic writers is this: if you get a character’s mannerisms and speech pattern down, you can make them do pretty much whatever you want and it’ll feel in character.

Logic: Characters, just like real people, are mallable. There is typically very little that’s so truly, heinously out of character that you absolutely cannot make it work under any circumstance. In addition, most fans are also willing to accept characterization stretches if it makes the fic work. Yeah, we all know the villain and the hero wouldn’t cuddle for warmth in canon. But if they did do that, how would they do it?

What counts is often not so much ‘would the character do this?’ and more 'if the character did do this, how would they do it?’ If you get 'how’ part right, your readers will probably be willing to buy the rest, because it will still feel like their favourite character. But if it doesn’t feel like the character anymore, why are they even reading the fic?

Worry less about whether a character would do something, and more about how they’d sound while doing it.

I don’t remember where I saw this piece of advice so I can’t credit it, unfortunately

But it was along the lines of “instead of asking whether something is out of character, ask ’what would it take for this character to do this’”

Which I think fits really nicely with this advice of making the actual action itself also feel in character

jesncin:

my high school english teacher would often critique our literature analysis work by pointing out: “you’re treating these characters like they’re real people. They’re not. They’re characters”. And it took me a long time to understand what he meant by that. Because I always thought “isn’t that the point? That writers want to write characters to be so three dimensional that they act and feel like real people?” but that’s not it.

Characters are tools a writer uses in service of a story. Of course characters can be written with depth to the point they feel real to us, but they exist in service of their narrative. Something real people aren’t beholden to at all. When discussing characters, I think it’s easy to accidentally see these characters as “real people” and not extensions of the author’s beliefs. Tools for a narrative. Means of storytelling.

luna-azzurra:

Ways I Show a Character is Emotionally Burned Out (Before They Even Realize It Themselves)

I love writing characters who think they’re fine but are actually walking emotional house fires with bad coping mechanisms.

• They stop doing the things they used to love and don’t even notice. Their guitar gathers dust. Their favorite podcast becomes background noise. Their hobbies feel like homework now.
• They pick the path of least resistance every time, even when it hurts them. No, they don’t want to go to that thing. No, they don’t want to talk to that person. But whatever’s easier. That’s the motto now.
• They’re tired but can’t sleep. Or they sleep but wake up more tired. Classic burnout move: lying in bed with their brain racing like a toddler on espresso.
• They give other people emotional advice they refuse to take themselves. “You have to set boundaries!” they say—while ignoring 8 texts from someone they should’ve cut off three emotional breakdowns ago.
• They cry at something stupidly small. Like spilling soup. Or a dog in a commercial. Or losing their pen. The soup is never just soup.
• They say “I’m just tired” like it’s a personality trait now. And not like… emotionally drained to the bone but afraid to admit it out loud.
• They ghost people they love, not out of malice, but because even replying feels like too much. Social battery? Absolutely obliterated. Texting back feels like filing taxes.
• They stop reacting to big things. Catastrophes get a blank stare. Disasters feel like “just another Tuesday.” The well of feeling is running dry.
• They avoid being alone with their own thoughts. Constant noise. TV always on. Music blasting. Because silence = reckoning, and reckoning is terrifying.
• They start hoping something will force them to stop. An accident. A missed deadline. Someone else finally telling them, “You need a break.” Because asking for help? Unthinkable.

luna-azzurra:

Ways I Show a Character is Emotionally Burned Out (Before They Even Realize It Themselves)

I love writing characters who think they’re fine but are actually walking emotional house fires with bad coping mechanisms.

• They stop doing the things they used to love and don’t even notice. Their guitar gathers dust. Their favorite podcast becomes background noise. Their hobbies feel like homework now.
• They pick the path of least resistance every time, even when it hurts them. No, they don’t want to go to that thing. No, they don’t want to talk to that person. But whatever’s easier. That’s the motto now.
• They’re tired but can’t sleep. Or they sleep but wake up more tired. Classic burnout move: lying in bed with their brain racing like a toddler on espresso.
• They give other people emotional advice they refuse to take themselves. “You have to set boundaries!” they say—while ignoring 8 texts from someone they should’ve cut off three emotional breakdowns ago.
• They cry at something stupidly small. Like spilling soup. Or a dog in a commercial. Or losing their pen. The soup is never just soup.
• They say “I’m just tired” like it’s a personality trait now. And not like… emotionally drained to the bone but afraid to admit it out loud.
• They ghost people they love, not out of malice, but because even replying feels like too much. Social battery? Absolutely obliterated. Texting back feels like filing taxes.
• They stop reacting to big things. Catastrophes get a blank stare. Disasters feel like “just another Tuesday.” The well of feeling is running dry.
• They avoid being alone with their own thoughts. Constant noise. TV always on. Music blasting. Because silence = reckoning, and reckoning is terrifying.
• They start hoping something will force them to stop. An accident. A missed deadline. Someone else finally telling them, “You need a break.” Because asking for help? Unthinkable.

mephistopheles:

what people flagrantly misunderstand about culturally iconic ‘logicians’ like spock and sherlock holmes is that they are fuckinggggg annoying. like you canNOT write for nor adapt either of these characters properly without understanding that they are admirable in many ways, yes, but they are repeatedly and gleefully, ON PURPOSE, fucking massive nuisances to literally every sane individual around them, all the time. they love bothering people, they LOVE it, it makes them SO HAPPY, and THAT, not their brilliance, is what makes them the best. spocks a BITCH