Posts tagged writing help

• What your character had for breakfast.
• How many buttons are on their shirt.
• How many words you know.
• How you felt when your were writing.
• How extremely, sickeningly adorable any children or animals in your story are.
• A teenage hero who only wants to have fun and live their life but keeps getting crushed by the system (and whines often).
• The 10,000,000 year-long history of your setting.

Perfect photographic memory is a terrible plot device, and authors need to quit using it. Scientists are unsure whether it actually exists in the real world. If it does, perfect memory most likely lies entirely in the realm of savants and extremely young children. Check out the evidence. 

The sheer number of characters with eidetic memory makes me cringe. Half of them only have very good memory and the author tries to spice things up by using big words. The other half perform superhuman feats that literally nobody can do in settings without superheroes.

Photographic memory isn’t a fun quirk or a handy plot device. Unless your story is about aliens, it’s a physical impossibility. Stop it.

If you want a character to stick in readers’ heads for a long time after they finish your story, having a fleshed-out personality helps, but it’s not good enough. There’s an enormous difference between A) a character who is shy, tries to be brave around her boyfriend, wants to break free from society’s constrictions but is too lazy to do so, and can’t figure out how to care about strangers and B) the same character, only this time, she always wears a bright pink scarf and loves the study of insects.

Harry Potter has a scar, Katniss has a pin, John Egbert has a green ghost shirt, and Ash Ketchum and Finn the Human both have special hats. An item of clothing or extremely striking physical feature will stay in a reader’s mind far more easily than “defined cheekbones” or “large, blue eyes.” When you give physical description, try to give an unusual visual marker at least to your main character. Not necessarily to set them apart from the other characters or mark them as special within the story, but to set them apart from the hundreds of people your reader sees every day on their way to work or school.

Likes, dislikes, and obsessions make your characters pop off the page like no other character traits can. Sure, your protagonist is arrogant, but wouldn’t your story be more interesting if he were arrogant and liked pizza more than almost anything else? It doesn’t even have to be a plot point. Hobbies and interests make characters more human. Sadly, I’ve read many stories where the characters were only bundles of traits who only formed opinions about other characters and never on which TV shows deserved to be cancelled. Such characters are not fun to read about and probably need to be fleshed out more.

There are two ways to lose your momentum when writing a story: not knowing enough and knowing too much. Here’s how to keep going if either happens to you.

• Not knowing enough

Most of writer’s block comes from not knowing what happens next. You have point A down, point B lies somewhere over yonder, and between the two is an infinite wordless chasm.

I find the easiest way to prevent this is to stop and think about what I want in that chasm without my computer actually in front of me. The chasm won’t get filled with sentences; it can only be filled by entire plot points, which need outside planning.

If that doesn’t work, try making a list of all the things you don’t want to fill the chasm. Making the list will help you whittle your options down to what you do want.

When all else fails, try ending the chapter at point A, following a different character, and picking up the next chapter at point B. If A and B are far enough away from each other, you’ll still have to explain what happened, but interspersing backstory is easier than tackling narrative. This is the cheater’s way out, so don’t rely on it too much.

• Knowing too much.

If you have a good idea of what each paragraph needs to be, actually laying them out can get tedious. The idea is always more fun than the execution, and sometimes the former can completely clog up the latter with details.

Keep all of your main plot points. A good, detailed outline can help you  write faster. Make a concerted effort, however, to change the minor details. The false ambassador could be spineless instead of sarcastic and his pet could be a dog instead of a parakeet. Figuring out how to alter the small things can be as rewarding as thinking them up in the first place.

Make them…

• go to either extreme on a character trait (for example, way too trusting or far too distrusting.)
• have an extreme political or philosophical stance.
• have a set of interests that seem to contradict each other.
• try for something impossible.
• have completely opposite views from everybody around them.
• imitate the mannerisms of their favorite celebrity, fictional character, or animal.
• want badly to stand out and be unique.
• have no qualms about breaking a widely-held custom.

• Write it from a different perspective.
• Add a new character whose personality is specifically designed to rile things up.
• Figure out why you started writing it in the first place and put more emphasis on those elements.
• Kill somebody off and explore the consequences.
• Add or subtract complexity from the plot until you’re at your comfort level.
• Give a character a hidden motivation.
• Make a new outline that differs from the original and follow it,
• Put in new elements from a different genre.
• Skip to a random page in the dictionary and use the first word on that page to start your next sentence.

• Does it wrap everything up?
• Does it leave the reader something to think about?
• Does it feel rushed? (bad)
• Does it logically flow from the events of the story?
• Does it leave the reader thinking?
• Is it emotional?
• Is it memorable?
• Does it have a twist with no earlier foreshadowing? (bad)
• Is it just the right amount of happy and sad?
• Does it leave things open for interpretation? (only good if you want this effect)
• Is it as exciting as the rest of the story?
• Does it go on for too long? (bad)