Every month I am writing a short story inspired by artwork. The inspirations for this piece are linked here: X X
Continue readingTag: writer
Thoughts on Writing: Giving Characters Purpose
Your main cast should all have their own roles and personal arcs through the story that help further the plot – or make it more complex. But what about minor characters? What about those that appear only for one scene? How do you justify them?
Continue readingThoughts on Writing: Researching for Diversity
Obviously, as a person who exists in this world, I care about adequate representation of diverse characters, lifestyles and experiences in media. But also, as a creative writer and reader, I care about writing and reading diversity because it is more interesting than experiencing the same thing over and over. Limiting your creative experiences to the same voices and the same stories is stifling. Diversity encourages growth!
Thoughts on Writing: Plan of Attack
You can spend hours planning your story, fleshing out your characters, drawing maps, making notes of all your foreshadowing points – but then you get to actually putting pen to paper (or hand to keyboard) and suddenly you have no idea where to start. So what is the best way to go about it?
Thoughts on Writing: Character’s Stories
There are a million and one things to think about when it comes to making a character. There’s the basics: gender, age, name, where they’re from, what they want, strengths, weaknesses… All things you could make a handy-dandy chart about. You could even make a D&D style character sheet if you wanted. But these are just details, and your character is first and foremost a tool for storytelling. This is why the character story is so important.
Thoughts on Writing: Formats
As I’ve leaned into short stories over the years, both reading and writing, and something that is incredibly popular, and often very effective, is to use a different format to tell a story. Plenty of writers have perfected the art of telling a tale in prose, using all sorts of techniques to fit so much information in only a few pages. But, with exceptionally short stories that may only be a few thousand or even a few hundred words long, branching out in format is a great way to concisely get across a lot of information. I myself have explored many types in my second book The God Killer: and Other Tales of Chaos. Even now while I’m redrafting my first novel, I find myself new ways to diversify the reading experience.
Thoughts on Writing: Tackling Writer’s Block
If I struggle to write, something that runs in my blood and is the reason I breathe, there’s likely at least one of two things happening:
- I don’t know what I’m supposed to be writing.
- My personal, human self is not doing well.
Thoughts of Writing: World-Building and the Benefits of General Ignorance
With any sort of speculative fiction, world-building is the first and most important tool you have to hand. We all dream of the comforts of the Shire, or the magic of Narnia, or the wonder of far off planets ou favourite sci-fi heroes visit. Even urban fantasy or near-future stories have to build on the world we know now into something unusual and exciting. To create such an immersive environment, a writer will find themself armpits-deep in research, maps, notes and references that far extend the needs of the plot.
Thoughts of Writing: Characters and Restraint
Having done two degrees in writing, and self-published two books and two poetry collections (lots of two’s here, I should shake that up), I like to believe I’m decently versed in the theories, techniques and bones of writing a story. Executing them is another matter, and how you use the elements of writing varies between genre, style and personal unique preferences. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, and I’d consider one of my strengths to be a character.
Now, I could write a whole page about how to make a character, but that would be so boring and you could find that from literally any book or blog about writing. They’d probably be far more eloquent and informative, as well. What I’d instead like to talk about is how we apply the writing principle of restraint on character creation, and whether (especially modern) writers over-apply that to their cast.
a place of words 