I think the best piece of character design advice I ever received was actually from a band leadership camp I attended in june of 2017.
the speaker there gave lots of advice for leaders—obviously, it was a leadership camp—but his saying about personality flaws struck me as useful for writers too.
he said to us all “your curses are your blessings and your blessings are your curses” and went on to explain how because he was such a great speaker, it made him a terrible listener. he could give speeches for hours on end and inspire thousands of people, but as soon as someone wanted to talk to him one on one or vent to him, he struggled with it.
he had us write down our greatest weakness and relate it to our biggest strength (mine being that I am far too emotional, but I’m gentle with others because I can understand their emotions), and the whole time people are sharing theirs, my mind was running wild with all my characters and their flaws.
previously, I had added flaws as an after thought, as in “this character seems too perfect. how can I make them not-like-that?” but that’s not how people or personalities work. for every human alive, their flaws and their strengths are directly related to each other. you can’t have one without the other.
is your character strong-willed? that can easily turn into stubbornness. is your character compassionate? maybe they give too many chances. are they loyal? then they’ll destroy the world for the people they love.
it works the other way around too: maybe your villain only hates the protagonist’s people because they love their own and just have a twisted sense of how to protect them. maybe your antagonist is arrogant, but they’ll be confident in everything they do.
tl;dr “your curses are your blessings, and your blessings are your curses” there is no such thing as a character flaw, just a strength that has been stretched too far.
This is such a fabulous flip side of what I’ve always known about villians. That their biggest weakness is that they always assume their own motivations are the motives of others.
This is brilliant!!
Writer’s dilemma: wanting critique on your writing that will help you improve in places that you can’t see yourself because you’re too close to the problem, but also knowing you’ll have a straight up anxiety attack at the thought of anyone seriously critiquing your work.
“maybe if I check tumblr again, the story will finish writing itself”
*narrator voice* “the story would not, in fact, finish itself. Stories are passive objects, and will lie there like a dead fish unless a writer expends a great deal of effort* to bring them to any sort of a satisfying end”
*a word that here means ‘lying on the floor and crying’
Hey Anon! It’s really impossible to say without knowing more about the story and what you’re aiming to do with it. Basically, tense is a tool in the writer’s toolbox, and past and present each give and take certain benefits.
Past:
– Past tense, especially third person, is one of the clearest and most versatile points of view. It allows you to head-hop easily, it allows you to establish a versatile psychic distance ( “how close are we to the character” as in, are we seeing them from the outside or are we deep inside their heads, or are we somewhere in between?) and temporal distance (when is this story being told from?).
However, it can slow the pace and tension, setting the audience slightly removed from the action.
Present:
– Present tense is immediate and action packed. It can make for really tense prose in an action adventure setting because anything could jump out from around the corner. There isn’t a narrative sense of this story already being finished as it’s told, we’re living it as it happens, so it’s anyone’s guess who lives and who dies at any given moment. I often find myself accidentally slipping into present tense when writing action-packed stories in a modern setting, because I want to capture that immediacy and threat, but I find it hard to sustain so sometimes I’ll end up going back later and switching those scenes back to past tense because it’s easier for storytelling. Action scenes, but also sex scenes can be well-written in present tense, bringing us that immediacy though in the latter perhaps not adding the sense of possible death 😛 I mean, unless you’re into that.
The downside of present tense however is that it can create a muddled, dreamy quality to the mental image your story imparts on the reader, sort of like a shaky-camera in a film. And like the shaky camera it certainly ups tension and excitement in a film, but sometimes we just want the clear steady storytelling that past can give.
To illustrate, there’s one rather famous story that plays with past and present tense in a way that may illustrate my point. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” is mostly told in past tense, except in one scene, when the clock is striking, where we slip hauntingly into present to illustrate the dreamlike quality and strangeness of the flow of time:
There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams. And these –the dreams –writhed in and about, taking hue from the rooms, and causing the wild music of the orchestra to seem as the echo of their steps. And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the velvet. And then, for a moment, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock. The dreams are stiff-frozen as they stand. But the echoes of the chime die away –they have endured but an instant –and a light, half-subdued laughter floats after them as they depart.
The thing about giving yourself permission to half-ass things is that it’s not just a way to ensure something-as-opposed-to-nothing gets done: sometimes it can also be a way to trick yourself into whole-assing things.
I know this ain’t universal, but for me, executive dysfunction often boils down to my brain balking at the number of steps a job nvolves. If a particular job involves, say, five different sub-tasks, my brain will go: “man, I can’t do five things – that’s too many things; this job is impossible” – even if each of those five things is quick and easy by itself.
So what I’ll do is pare it down. I’ll say to myself: “okay, I’ll only do one or two of the things”. It’ll be an extremely half-assed job, but half an ass is better than no ass at all.
Now, here’s the trick: once those two things are done, it’s much easier to say “hey, since I’ve gotten this far, I might as well do the third thing as well – I mean, I’m already here”. And, well, now that I’ve done the third thing, there are only two things left, and I’ve already demonstrated that I can do two things, so what’s my excuse?
Of course, that was the plan all along. The catch is that I can’t go into it intending to do the five things one at a time; five things taken one at a time is still five things, and my brain goes “nope – impossible”. I have to honestly intend to half-ass it, even though I know that once I start the momentum will probably carry me through doing it properly.
And that’s why brains are dumb.
great advice on dealing with executive dysfunction, which is common in ADHD as well as anxiety and depression!
aosdjoadj oh gosh, Anon, I confess I was worried that the post wasn’t good enough and didn’t have enough examples and didn’t encapsulate every kind of twist one could have, since I blanked after three on all the points I wanted to make, so this really means a lot to me, thank you!
Whew, that’s a lot of my most recent ones! I’m sure I have more if I go back a few years, but this’ll get you started.
It should be noted though that all these essays could be re-tagged as “Maggie yells at Maggie about things she needs to remember” – I don’t pretend to be an expert on any of the topics I’m writing about. They’re generally things I’m trying to improve at, or they’re mistakes I’ve seen mainstream stories make, or they’re solicited advice that I did my best to answer and to acknowledge I don’t have all the answers. But I hope you will enjoy them!
I’m finishing up Detroit: Become Human and I’m going to have some story-writer thoughts on that later but here’s a non-spoilery, writerly, unrelated to DBH rant about How to Write a Twist (according to Avelera):
– A good twist should illuminate the story backwards and forwards in time.
Example of a good twist: (Spoilers) Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense” reveals that our main character was dead the whole time. This recasts the story and invites us to take a second look at the nuances of the scenes before the reveal. We become suddenly aware of elements we were willing to ignore before because of storytelling conventions, such as camera angle, leaps forward in time, and who Willis’s character has spoken to throughout (Hint: no one except the little kid except in flashbacks). The director invited us to ignore these elements the first time as mere film conventions, playing with time and POV. The movie is re-watchable beyond the initial shock of the twist as we look for clues that we missed the first time that reveal the story from an entirely different angle.
Example of a bad twist: (Spoilers) Shyamalan’s “The Village” reveals that the monsters that have terrified this village throughout the story were always in fact the elders putting on silly costumes to scare everyone. It’s a Scooby Doo style “It was old man Jenkins in a mask the whole time!”. This makes the film un-rewatchable, because all the tension has fled. Scenes that scared us initially because we thought there was a monster become ridiculous in retrospect. We also learn that we were never in the past, this is a weird commune of hippy LARPers who decided for some reason to pretend they were living in the goddamn 1600s and decided randomly to talk as if they lived back then, meaning besides there being no supernatural element there was actually never any danger to this community at any point that they didn’t bring on themselves by being dumbasses.
– A good twist should be built into the story from the beginning.
The author cannot just decide to take the most shocking ending and tack it on to the end. You must know your twist and have it built in organically to the fabric of the story from the beginning. Even non-storytellers can feel the underlying direction of a story, even if they can’t articulate how they know it. Readers can tell if you had this idea from the start, or if you just made up a twist at the end ala “Rocks fall, everyone dies.” Even if they are initially shocked by your “twist” they will feel dissatisfied because you did not give them the tools to figure this out on their own.
To this end: you should give your audience all the tools necessary to solve your mystery before the characters do. Ideally, an attentive audience should be one half-step ahead of the characters for maximum satisfaction. A very savvy audience may figure it out well before that, but even people who were not actively trying to solve the mystery should figure it out around the same time the characters do in a way that doesn’t make them feel cheated that they couldn’t have solved it if they looked. An example of a tip to achieve this: if it’s a murder mystery, don’t wait until the very end to have the murderer appear as a character.
If you want to be particularly devilish, you can tell your audience the answer to your twist waaay back in the beginning, at a point where they might not have even been aware that the mystery was there, so that it’s forgotten by the time the question is raised. An example of this would be Shadow’s cellmate in American Gods (Spoilers) Low-Key Lyesmith, who is introduced well before we’re told that the Norse gods are hiding in plain sight in America. (And if you don’t get that twist, say it aloud to yourself.)
– A good twist should make your story pleasurable to revisit, not pointless.
Going back to point 1: ancient audiences knew the ending of the Trojan War as portrayed in The Iliad and The Odyssey. (Spoilers) They knew Troy falls, Patroclus dies, Hector dies, Achilles dies, frankly everyone except Menelaus and Odysseus dies or meets a bad end, and Helen is reclaimed. They still loved the stories of the Trojan Cycle. Why is that? Because it’s not about “IF” Troy will fall it’s about “HOW” Troy will fall. Who will suffer? Who will meet their end beautifully, who will meet it ignobly? Which sides with the gods pick? Who will be thwarted? Who will we wish would survive, even knowing that they will not? Homer puts the audience in the position of the gods, having our favorites, yet knowing from the beginning who will live and who will die.
By focusing on the experience of the story rather than focusing all your efforts on a surprising twist, you make a story that can be revisited even if people know the ending. By inserting a good twist, you can invite readers to look at the story again in a new light. Everyone knows that in most stories, the good guys will win, the bad guys will lose, the lovers will end up together, etc. etc. We’re suspending our disbelief in even pretending we don’t know how most movies will end, even on our first viewing. What we care about is how, not if these things will happen. Constructing a twist should play into this principle.
Greek Prophecies play will with this principle. In Herodotus there is a Delphic oracle that states: “If Croesus [King of Sardis] goes to war he will destroy a great empire.” We are told the ending before the story begins but in this instance, the empire he destroyed was his own. Now when re-reading this story we will be filled with foreboding at those words rather than triumph, but the story of the fall of Sardis is still compelling (if you’re a history nerd like me).
Writing is a rough gig. Get paid where you can. Here’s a bunch of places that will pay professional rates for genre (fantasy/science fiction/horror) short stories. All these markets take (and actually publish) unsolicited submissions – you don’t need an agent, and you don’t need to have previously published works.
Remember to format your shit, write a simple cover letter, don’t send the same story to more than one place at a time, make sure submissions windows are actually open, and never respond to rejection letters ever. Have fun!
(Information gathered from both Submissions Grinder – an essential resource for people actively submitting their work – and my own excessive and somewhat ridiculous reading habits.)
Current as of May 2018. Markets are listed alphabetically. Detailed info below the cut.
I have written one for Hobbit! “A Different Road” is kinda technically a monologue by an AU Bilbo who left the Shire after the Fell Winter and became an adventurer, but it DOES count as first person!
And if I may briefly launch into a diatribe on first person POV it is a hard, hard POV to write. I know it dominates YA literature but you are seeing the best of the best of authors, ones who can master that very difficult art, and who make it look deceptively easy.
First Person seems easy to a lot of beginner writers because 1) they’ve read a bunch of First Person, and how hard can it be? 2) you’ve developed your OC and it’s sometimes easier to write in sort of a diary format (especially if you’re a writer who practiced by keeping a diary) or just speaking with “I” as you would in an essay or real life.
But the thing is, First Person is very limiting in many ways and as such presents a ton of challenges over and above the basic challenges of writing and completing an actual story:
– If it’s First Person/Present Tense, it can be disorienting for the reader as we’re stuck in the very narrow view of the character. We know only what they know in that moment, so sometimes a writer has to resort to crazy coincidences like overheard conversation to expand the available information beyond what the character knows. Present tense in general, even in Third, creates a dreamy quality for readers that can be disorienting.
– First Person/Past Tense then the reader can automatically infer that the character survives long enough to tell their story after the fact. If you have a death-defying action packed adventure, that lowers a lot of tension because we know the protagonist survives at least to a certain point near the end. (First Person/Past can be well utilized in epistolary-style stories, btw, written down after the fact for a certain audience by the character.)
– First Person begs the question of not just when the narrator is speaking, but who the narrator is speaking too. One can also reasonably assume that how they tell their story is affected by who they are telling it to (a lover, a friend, family member, an enemy, a figure of authority, or an audience of strangers).
– To pull off an engaging First Person you have to have a strong and unique character voice. If your narrator just has a fairly bland, informative voice you might as well just keep it in Third Person because you’re not gaining much by having it in First.
(Aside: Third Person gives you a lot of tools, like the ability to jump around in time, to jump between characters inside and outside of scenes without confusing people, the ability to show events the narrator isn’t aware of, and the ability to kill characters in the middle of action because they’re not the vehicle through which the story is being told. To give an example, the Hunger Games books are told in very close First Person. We don’t know anything Katniss doesn’t know until waaaay after the events of the story, and the novels can be very claustrophobic at times as a result. The movies, in contrast, while a different medium, are in Third Person, in that we know events running parallel to Katniss’s experience as they are happening and even in her POV we see things external to her.)
Going back to the value of a First Person voice, man, when you can pull off a good First Person voice you are a god. One reason I’ve avoided it is because I don’t really think I can do most characters justice by staying in First Person the whole time because you have to be really engaging. What voice I can pull off I think I can still do by filtering the description in Third Person through their POV to add color, without taking on the limitations of the POV (see the beginning of The Only Way Out is Down which is Third Person but runs very close to First in terms of voice, a deliberate choice of something I wanted to practice on my part). Basically, I think I can do First Person, but I don’t think I can do it well, I’m not a huge fan of what is gained rather than lost in terms of using First over Third (a more intimate view and in exchange for all the above mentioned tools) and most importantly, I don’t think I can sustain it for more than a couple thousand words, much less write a novel in that voice.
That said, one of the best fics I ever saw, the one that made me believe First Person might actually be worth doing and isn’t universally garbage except at the highest published levels was a Bleach fic called “After the Fairytale Ends”.
To paraphrase my writing teacher: unless you have a deliberate idea of something you want to do in your story that can only be done in an alternate person and tense, just stick to Third Person/Past Tense. It’s the clearest, the easiest for readers, and provides the most tools for writers.
Avelera 