The best fantasy writers don’t write fantasy in the fluffy, hocus-pocus sense, they change the rules by which the world works and then write very carefully and logically by those rules.
Terry Pratchett (Quote from ‘A Slip Of The Keyboard’)
Tag: writing tips
I always find it kind of weird that matriarchal cultures in fiction are always “women fight and hunt, men stay home and care for the babies” because world-building-wise, it makes no sense
think about it. like, assuming that gender even works the same in this fantasy culture as it does in ours, with gender conflated with sex (because let’s be real, all of these stories assume that), men wouldn’t be the ones to make the babies, so why would they be the ones to care for the babies? why is fighting and hunting necessary for leadership?
writing a matriarchy this way is just lazy, because you’re just taking the patriarchy and just swapping the people in it, rather than actually swapping the culture. especially when there are so many other cool things you could explore. like, what if it’s not a swap of roles but of what society deems important?
maybe a matriarchy would have hunting and fighting be part of the man’s job, but undervalued. like taking the trash out or cleaning toilets: necessary, but gross, and not noble or interesting. maybe farming is now the most important thing, and is given a lot of spiritual and cultural weight.
how would law work? what crimes would exist, and what things would be considered too trivial to make illegal? who gets what property? why?
how would religion work? how would you mark time or the passage into adulthood? what would marriage look like? if bloodlines are through the mother, bastardy wouldn’t even be a concept – how does that work?
what qualities would be most important in a person? how would you define strength or leadership? what knowledge would be the most coveted and protected? what acts or roles are considered useless or degrading?
like, you can’t just take our current society and say you’re turning it on its head when you’re just regurgitating it wholesale. you have to really think about why things are the way they are and change that.
THIS IS SUCH A GOOD POST THOUGH.
I think what really bothers me about the whole “men take care of the children and tend house because they’re not in charge” thing is that it reinforces the idea that traditionally feminine work SHOULD be undervalued. That there’s no way anyone could see raising children and think, “wow, what a valuable contribution to society”. Even though families are what societies are MADE of, and if you ignore the welfare of your children the society falls apart in a generation or two.
Imagine if women were seen as the ideal political leaders BECAUSE they’re the ones best suited for raising young children. What if it was assumed that government positions were sort of scaled-up households, and that only a leader who saw their subjects as their children could be fair and compassionate enough to rule effectively? What is a village, or a country, but an extended family?
On the one hand, the ability to use physical force effectively is super important for a low-tech society, and there’s always the threat of hostile military takeover, either from outsiders or via internal revolt. On the other hand, a society where all the men want to rebel is probably not a society that’s being run at all effectively, and there are other ways of maintaining control (ie religion, cultural traditions, propaganda, etc). Women could be the more educated group–in some ways that’s even intuitive, since a non-magical preindustrial society is one with a high infant mortality rate, which means it has to have a high birth rate to compensate, which means women will be pregnant a lot. If they have trouble consistently working physically demanding trades, why not assign them to jobs that require more mental exertion? Why not a society where all the lawyers are female, all the doctors are female, all the historians and most respected poets are female? If you keep that up for long enough, eventually that gets seen as an inherent sex difference, and men don’t exert physical force because holy shit they’d have no idea what they were doing once they gained power.
It doesn’t have to be these specific differences, of course. But I think that’s the thought process that most of the best worldbuilding comes from–why are things this way? How have they stayed this way? Just saying “what if women could tell MEN what to do!” is so boring compared to asking why we value the things we value. Besides, fictional societies that are created without asking why things are the way they are are not going to stand up under close scrutiny, whether they play into or subvert our expectations.
This is such an excellent addition to my post, @apprenticebard, I am rubbing my hands together with glee.
an exciting guide to writing action scenes
So, you have to write an action scene – but how? Action
scenes can be difficult to get into at first, but they can be fun if you keep
some simple guidelines in mind. While many people feel like it takes a movie to
make action interesting, there’s several ways you can make action jump off the
page and excite your readers.There are four things you should keep in mind: energy,
weight, setting, and gimmicks. The first 2 are actually more interesting
written than in a visual format, since you can communicate them directly to the
reader in ways a visual medium can’t. ‘Gimmicks’ I’ll explain when we get
there.Energy
People get tired! The longer an action sequence goes on, the
more tired your character gets. This adds excitement, as your reader wonders if
the character is really going to make it. It also gives a sense of time –
instead of just a bland recitation of who’s punching where and what, the
readers know that there is only a limited amount of punch to give. SUSPENSE!Tricks: have your character start a fight when they’re
already exhausted. Or, have your character quickly burn all their energy and
then have to conserve it for the rest of the fight. Has your character had to
run for a long time and is now forced to defend themselves while out of breath?
Is the character’s opponent keeping their distance, forcing the character to
expend more energy?Weight
Fighting, jumping, running, etc. all involve throwing your
weight around. Think about where your character’s feet are at all times.
Footwork is vital! It’s how people establish their balance – and a good fight
scene will often have characters going off balance or using their weight
against someone.Tricks: Make your character overbalance their opponent –
this is set up really well with a dodge, or tricking the opponent into
overextending themselves. Have your own character lose their balance and have
to find it again as they scramble to regain their center of gravity.Setting
Is there a lot of room? Are they outside? Inside? Things
they can trip over? Throw at each other? Stuff they have to maneuver around?Tricks: Have your characters fight in an enclosed space. Give
someone the high ground. Back people up against a wall.Gimmicks
What is your character good at? Play to your character’s
skill set. How tall are they? Are they fit? Also, consider whether or not the
character has any injuries or sore spots that they have to work around. This
adds variety to the scene.Tricks: Fuck your characters up as they fight! Pile on the
injuries. It helps you pace things and again helps the reader feel like an
action scene has progress and momentum rather than just being a list of items.
Writing a novel when you imagine all you stories in film format is hard because there’s really no written equivalent of “lens flare” or “slow motion montage backed by Gregorian choir”
You can get the same effect of a lens flare with close-detail descriptions, combined with breaks to new paragraphs.
Your slow-motion montage backed by a Gregorian choir can be done with a few technques that all involve repetition.
First is epizeuxis, the repeating of a word for emphasis.
Example:
Falling. Falling. Falling. There was nothing to keep Marie from plunging into the rolling river below. She could only hope for a miracle now, that she would come out alive somehow despite a twenty-foot drop into five-foot-deep water.
Then there’s anaphora, where you write a number of phrases with the same words at the beginning.
There were still mages out there living in terror of shining steel armor emblazoned with the Sword of Mercy.
There were still mages out there being forced by desperation into the clutches of demons.
There were mages out there being threatened with Tranquility as
punishment for their disobedience, and the threats were being made good
upon.Mages who had attempted to flee, but knew nothing of the outside
world and were forced to return to their prison out of need for
sustenance and shelter.Mages who only desired to find the families they were torn from.
Mages who only wanted to see the sun.
This kind of repetition effectively slows the pace of your writing and puts the focus on that small scene. That’s where you get your slow pan. The same repetition also has a subtle musicality to it depending on the words you use. That’s where you get the same vibe as you might get from a Gregorian choir.
Damn I made relatable reblog- bait post and writer Tumblr went hard with it. This is legitimately very good advice.
The Hardest Part of Writing Good Character Arcs—and How You Can Make It Look Easy! – Helping Writers Become Authors
Nuts and Bolts: “Thought” Verbs
Actually
The question I get the most is how I write characters that feel like real people.
Generally when I’m designing a human being, I deconstruct them into 7 major categories:
1. Primary Drive
2. Fear: Major and Secondary
3. Physical Desires
4. Style of self expression
5. How they express affection
6. What controls them (what they are weak for)
7. What part of them will change.1. Primary Drive: This is generally related to the plot. What are their plot related goals? How are they pulling the plot forward? how do they make decisions? What do they think they’re doing and how do they justify doing it.
2. Fear: First, what is their deep fear? Abandonment? being consumed by power? etc. Second: tiny fears. Spiders. someone licking their neck. Small things that bother them. At least 4.
3. Physical desires. How they feel about touch. What is their perceived sexual/romantic orientation. Do their physical desires match up with their psychological desires.
4. Style of self expression: How they talk. Are they shy? Do they like to joke around and if so, how? Are they anxious or confident internally and how do they express that externally. What do words mean to them? More or less than actions? Does their socioeconomic background affect the way they present themselves socially?
5.
How they express affection: Do they express affection through actions or words. Is expressing affection easy for them or not. How quickly do they open up to someone they like. Does their affection match up with their physical desires. how does the way they show their friends that they love them differ from how they show a potential love interest that they love them. is affection something they struggle with?
6. What controls them (what they are weak for): what are they almost entirely helpless against. What is something that influences them regardless of their own moral code. What– if driven to the end of the wire— would they reject sacrificing. What/who would they cut off their own finger for. What would they kill for, if pushed. What makes them want to curl up and never go outside again from pain. What makes them sink to their knees from weakness or relief. What would make them weep tears of joy regardless where they were and who they were in front of.
7. WHAT PART OF THEM WILL CHANGE: people develop over time. At least two of the above six categories will be altered by the storyline–either to an extreme or whittled down to nothing. When a person experiences trauma, their primary fear may change, or how they express affection may change, etc. By the time your book is over, they should have developed. And its important to decide which parts of them will be the ones that slowly get altered so you can work on monitoring it as you write. making it congruent with the plot instead of just a reaction to the plot.
That’s it.
But most of all, you have to treat this like you’re developing a human being. Not a “character” a living breathing person. When you talk, you use their voice. If you want them to say something and it doesn’t seem like (based on the seven characteristics above) that they would say it, what would they say instead?
If they must do something that’s forced by the plot, that they wouldn’t do based on their seven options, they can still do the thing, but how would they feel internally about doing it?
How do their seven characteristics meet/ meld with someone else’s seven and how will they change each other?
Once you can come up with all the answers to all of these questions, you begin to know your character like you’d know one of your friends. When you can place them in any AU and know how they would react.
They start to breathe.
Do you have any advice on writing asexual characters? My protag is ace af but I am not and I really don’t want to mess this up!!!!
I’m not ace so I don’t have any specific things to point out, but I’ll say the same thing I do about all characters – their sexuality should never define them, even if it does play a role in their characterization. Ace characters aren’t aliens that are impossible to understand if you yourself aren’t ace. Think of their sexuality as one small part of what makes that character a person as a whole, consider how it may impact them socially, emotionally, etc., but don’t make it their defining characteristic.
Hey there! I’m ace, and I’m also writing asexual characters. Legit’s tips were really good, but here are some specifics for ya:
1) Know how your character feels about sex. Are they sex-positive, sex-indifferent, sex-averse, sex-repulsed? This is true of any character, even non-aces, but it’s something definitely to keep in mind when writing ace characters. If your character is grossed out by anything remotely to do with sex, be aware of that. Your protag might be really uncomfortable if their companions start smooching or groping nearby. If they’re sex-pos or sex-indifferent, it won’t bother them. They might not even notice. I’m sex-indifferent myself—it doesn’t bother me when others do it (within the limits of social decency), but I’m not especially interested in participating. I don’t care for graphic conversations about it, either.
2) Know how your character responds to advances. Most asexuals are completely obtuse when it comes to flirting. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule—many people might pick up how it’s done without getting why it’s done, but for me personally, I never understood the difference between flirting and a pleasant conversation. They also might not ‘get’ certain courting practices or sexual innuendo. So when writing an asexual character, know that if they are unlikely to ‘flirt back,’ or if they are, they probably don’t know that they are.
3) What are they really concerned about? The cool benefit to ace characters is that they aren’t going to be (or are less likely to be) distracted by sex or sexual attraction, so they won’t be derailed from their ‘quest’ by it. There are interesting ways to bring this out, depending on your story and genre. Is there another character who distracts people with their sexuality to get what they want (think Natasha Romanov)? Your ace character would totally not fall for it. Sirens? Ineffective. Strippers? Awkward. Keep in mind that being ace isn’t a superpower to exploit (though we’re pretty awesome), but if your character is in a situation where sexuality is a big deal, they’re going to react to it differently than everyone else.
4) We are not robots. Just because we don’t feel sexual attraction doesn’t mean that we’re completely devoid of all human feeling. It’s a major trope when writing about asexuals (i.e. lots of sociopathic villains are associated with being asexual) that really needs to be avoided. Do not use ‘asexual’ as shorthand for ‘emotionless’ or ‘socially awkward.’ Another good thing is keep in mind is that aesthetic attraction is totally a thing—an asexual person can find someone absolutely beautiful but have no sexual feelings for them whatsoever. I personally have a bad habit of staring at people or their features when they’re not looking because I think they’re so pretty (my fitness coach’s hair, for example). It is not in any way accompanied by anything sexual.
5) Remember that not everyone is the same. This kind of points to legit’s tip, too—the label someone chooses for their sexuality isn’t a set-in-stone law, and sexuality is fluid. Don’t shoehorn your character into any behaviors because “that’s what an asexual would do.” Every person is different, and while it’s good that you’re asking, don’t trap yourself with rules. This is kind of a disclaimer for everything I’ve written so far: not every asexual is the same and we all interact with our sexuality differently. No one is more or less ace because they don’t ascribe to all or any of the things I’ve said. These are just general observations and personal experiences meant to give you a helping hand.
An Example: To give you an idea of an ace character, here’s a description of my character, Princess Nevea (my version of Snow White).
Nevea lives in a culture where marriage and reproduction are incredibly important, and she is aware of this. However, she’s never been particularly excited about it except for one reason: getting married and moving to her husband’s home would get her away from her mother, whom she dislikes. Other than that, she gets pretty uncomfortable with the idea of sex and pregnancy and stuff. When she is awakened from her slumber and sees her prince for the first time, her reaction is “Oh. So you’re Prince Hadrian? Nice to meet you.” No butterflies or heated loins or anything. Later, when she is in hiding, she is utterly perplexed by the sexual advances of a man because she cannot reproduce the sexual behavior offered by the girl he used to be with. I haven’t finished writing the character yet, but she eventually chooses her own path and denies the ‘marriage-sex-pregnancy’ path set out for her as a princess in order to become a military leader and restore her kingdom. She ends up with either a romantic or queerplatonic partner (I haven’t quite worked out the details of their relationship), but I’m 95% sure she decides not to get married to him.
So you see that her asexuality is not her whole character (these are only small parts of the plot). She is a full character with complex feelings and many tribulations, but her asexuality is a part of her and in some way does influence her decisions or interactions with others. Nevea is also motivated by a desire to lead, a desire to feel cared for, and a desire to live up to her birthright. Asexuality is a part of your character, but not a defining characteristic (as legit said). They will be motivated by other things (and have to be), but being asexual will affect their lives and stories in some way.
I hope you found this helpful! If you or anyone else want more information or have other questions, I’m more than happy to help out!
I’ve been wanting to make one of my characters nonbinary, but he’s already pretty developed and I’m a little scared it might throw everything off- do you have any suggestions?
Pre-Existing Character being Nonbinary
Making an already existing RP / ask character nonbinary is something I wish more people would do, because not all nonbinary folks know that’s what they are early in life and it’s realistic for characters that have been adventuring around for a while to learn new things about themselves.
A couple ways you can do this:
- “Oh, that’s the word.”
This is something I did with one of my characters. Say that your character always considered themself “not a girl or a boy,” “<insert somewhat vageu description of an NB gender>”, but not having heard of nonbinary genders or seen them in a positive light until recently, they didn’t realize that’s what was up. They learn it, shrug, and say “Oh. Yeah. That’s me, I guess.”
- “But is that okay?”
Your character begins to get some education on nonbinary and trans issues, and it sounds appealing, but internalized transphobia makes them hesitate and insist. “No, what? I’m cis. I’m an ally, though.” They spend some private time educating themselves further before actually allowing themself to say “Yes, I am not a boy or a girl, and this is okay.”
(Make sure to avoid “born as x” phrasing, though. If your character wants to say “I was a boy then, yes, but I’m this” or “I have always actually been this” is a personal preference which will depend on how they individually feel about their gender.)
- Gender actually changes
Gender can be flexible. Sonetimes, someone may genuinely find that they don’t feel like the same gender they were a year ago. Sometimes one’s gender genuinely just changes as you change as a person, and this is okay; It doesn’t mean your character was wrong about the binary gender they may have called themselves before, it just means they’re something different now.
Lastly, it is important to note that being NB doesn’t really change someone’s personality. Their personality will be influenced by it because it’s an important part of their identity, but it won’t destroy their character development just to explore their gender. If anything, your character comes away understanding himself better.
Links:
starry-eyed 