Female Characters To Avoid In Your Writing:  An Illustrated Guide.

the suffering never ends

How to Get Motivated After a Long Break

I haven’t written in a while. I had some life stuff going on and I forgot how difficult it is to get back into writing after a long break. There’s a manuscript waiting for me to edit it and another story idea waiting for me to flesh it out. What’s the best way to approach this?

First, make a list

Start by getting everything in order. Grab your favorite notebook (or designate a new on to 2016) and starting listing what you want to work on this year. Is there anything you need to finish up? What are your goals? What do you want to accomplish by 2017? These plans don’t have to be anything grand, they can be small steps toward your goals. Be realistic and know your limits.

Focus on tying up loose ends

The first thing I’m going to do is finish up the novel I’m in the middle of editing. Do you best to finish projects first before moving on to something else. Engross yourself in that story again and try to continue where you left off. Try to reread what you already edited to familiarize yourself with where you were going. It feels great to finish things. It will get you motivated for your next project.

Get yourself excited again

It’s hard to work on something that doesn’t motivate you. If it’s been a while, try to figure out what excited you about that project in the first place. Reread old notes. Look over your story and focus on characters. Why do you like them? What motivated you to write this story? Try to tap back into your excitement and get back into the same mind frame you were in when you were writing.

Toss stale projects

Sometimes a story just doesn’t work. You lost your passion for it and you’re unable to get a back. The story feels old and it doesn’t speak to you anymore. That’s fine. Not everything is going to stick and you need to know what you should move on from. If you’ve stopped writing because you’re just not excited about your story, maybe it’s time to move on. However, if you’ve stopped writing because life got in the way, there’s a chance you can still motivate yourself to work on that story. The decision is up to you.

-Kris Noel

This website goes into more detail about using multiple POVs.

Ways to un-stick a stuck story

Do an outline, whatever way works best. Get yourself out of the word soup and know where the story is headed.

Conflicts and obstacles. Hurt the protagonist, put things in their way, this keeps the story interesting. An easy journey makes the story boring and boring is hard to write.

Change the POV. Sometimes all it takes to untangle a knotted story is to look at it through different eyes, be it through the sidekick, the antagonist, a minor character, whatever.

Know the characters. You can’t write a story if the characters are strangers to you. Know their likes, dislikes, fears, and most importantly, their motivation. This makes the path clearer.

Fill in holes. Writing doesn’t have to be linear; you can always go back and fill in plotholes, and add content and context.

Have flashbacks, hallucinations, dream sequences or foreshadowing events. These stir the story up, deviations from the expected course add a feeling of urgency and uncertainty to the narrative.

Introduce a new mystery. If there’s something that just doesn’t add up, a big question mark, the story becomes more compelling. Beware: this can also cause you to sink further into the mire.

Take something from your protagonist. A weapon, asset, ally or loved one. Force him to operate without it, it can reinvigorate a stale story.

Twists and betrayal. Maybe someone isn’t who they say they are or the protagonist is betrayed by someone he thought he could trust. This can shake the story up and get it rolling again.

Secrets. If someone has a deep, dark secret that they’re forced to lie about, it’s a good way to stir up some fresh conflict. New lies to cover up the old ones, the secret being revealed, and all the resulting chaos.

Kill someone. Make a character death that is productive to the plot, but not “just because”. If done well, it affects all the characters, stirs up the story and gets it moving.

Ill-advised character actions. Tension is created when a character we love does something we hate. Identify the thing the readers don’t want to happen, then engineer it so it happens worse than they imagined.

Create cliff-hangers. Keep the readers’ attention by putting the characters into new problems and make them wait for you to write your way out of it. This challenge can really bring out your creativity.

Raise the stakes. Make the consequences of failure worse, make the journey harder. Suddenly the protagonist’s goal is more than he expected, or he has to make an important choice.

Make the hero active. You can’t always wait for external influences on the characters, sometimes you have to make the hero take actions himself. Not necessarily to be successful, but active and complicit in the narrative.

Different threat levels. Make the conflicts on a physical level (“I’m about to be killed by a demon”), an emotional level (“But that demon was my true love”) and a philosophical level (“If I’m forced to kill my true love before they kill me, how can love ever succeed in the face of evil?”).

Figure out an ending. If you know where the story is going to end, it helps get the ball rolling towards that end, even if it’s not the same ending that you actually end up writing.

What if? What if the hero kills the antagonist now, gets captured, or goes insane? When your write down different questions like these, the answer to how to continue the story will present itself.

Start fresh or skip ahead. Delete the last five thousand words and try again. It’s terrifying at first, but frees you up for a fresh start to find a proper path. Or you can skip the part that’s putting you on edge – forget about that fidgety crap, you can do it later – and write the next scene. Whatever was in-between will come with time.

Chapters: 5/? Fandom: The Mallorca Files (TV 2019) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Miranda Blake/Max Winter Characters: Miranda Blake, Max Winter, Inés Villegas Additional Tags: Wintake, post-series 3, Canon Divergent, Feelings Realization, Series 3 Episode 4 "Water Water" Mention, Undercover as a Couple, threat of gun violence Summary:

It’s Valentine’s Day, and it’s the first one since Max broke up with Carmen six months ago. Miranda tries to cheer Max up. Also, they go undercover as a couple again.

How to be Your own Best Friend

1. Treat yourself the way you would treat a person who you loved, highly valued, and cared about.

2. Always love yourself – no matter what!

3. Only say positive, compassionate, understanding and affirming things about, and to, yourself.

4. Hold your own hand in tough and stressful times. Don’t abandon yourself, or let yourself down.

5. Respect yourself, and the efforts that you’re making to be a better person, and to change and to grow.

6. Understand your limitations, be patient with yourself. Accept that it takes time to master anything at all.

7. Be kind to yourself when you feel self-critical, or you want to be judgmental and hard on yourself.

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Common Ground Tag by koalathebear

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Cry by angelqueen04

Aftermath by Vickysg1

Uncrossed Lines by tyger cub

The Burden of Leadership by digitalfletch

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CG Balcony Scene by Lizabeth

writing is either

or

there is nothing in between.

how did you get into writing and getting published?

I’ve always loved writing.  I wrote poetry and stories all the time when I was a kid.  I have piles and piles of notebooks at my house full of decades’ worth of everything from fanfic smut (decades before I had the internet and knew that “fanfic smut” was a thing) to terrible poetry to novels in progress.  I didn’t know that being a writer was a real job people could have, I just liked to write and make up stories. 

I went to college to study theatre because I thought I wanted to be an actor (as it turns out, I VERY MUCH did not).  My school didn’t offer playwriting on the regular, but we had a visiting professor for a year who was a playwright and I took his class, and he was the first person who said to me, “You know, if you wanted to do this, this is something you could do.”  I wrote my first play for his class (reblogginhood was in it!) and kept writing after that. 

Then at some point in my twenties, I don’t really know why, I stopped writing.  I think I hit a point where I had kind of decided, “okay, this isn’t practical, this isn’t a real career, I need to figure out how the fuck I’m going to pay my electric bill, I need to give up this dream and go, like, be a regular human.”  So I did that for awhile.  I got into the world of arts management and worked for a bunch of different theatre companies doing marketing and fundraising and things like that.  And it was fine, I was good at it, I met a lot of people in the theatre world and all my friends were cool artists and it was great, but then it made me really sad because there was a part of me that felt like they were living this great exciting life I wasn’t living because I had stopped trying to even have that. 

Then a friend of mine asked me to help her write grants for this new project she was starting, which was a citywide new play festival that anyone could be in.  You didn’t have to be fancy or famous, you didn’t have to even be any good.  You just had to write a play, and show up.  So I signed up and I paid my fee and for seven years in a row, every year I wrote a new play for the festival.  I just kept writing and writing and writing and writing.  It was a huge amount of hard work.  I lost money on every show because I was paying actors out of my own pocket and printing playbills at Kinkos.  I borrowed coffee shops and warehouses from friends, anywhere I could perform for free.  I directed the shows myself if I couldn’t afford a director.  I ran sound off my iPod.  I tore my own tickets at the door.  I was working two jobs, around 60-hour weeks, and then writing until like 2 in the morning because that was the time that I had.  And then slowly, I got better.  My crappy amateur plays, where I was trying to copy the voices of other, better writers improved because I started to figure out what I really cared about and what I really wanted to say.  I applied for tons and tons and tons of awards and grants and fellowships and residencies.  I won a couple of them (maybe one out of every 50 things I applied for) and that helped get other people to take me seriously, but the most important thing was that I just kept writing and writing.  I had a new play in the festival every year, so slowly people started to know who I was and recognize my name.  Not zillions of people, but handfuls at a time.  The first show had like 30 people in the audience each night; I worked my way up to being able to fill a 200-seat venue.  Then I got asked to join a company of local playwrights who produce one show a year by one of their member writers; they had watched me busting my ass over the past seven or eight years and knew that I was a hard worker and had been watching my work get better and then finally one day they asked me to join and offered me a full production of one of my plays.  (That’s happening next month.) 

In between writing plays, I wanted to challenge myself, so I tried a few times to do National Novel Writing Month.  I never finished, but I had a few chapters of a time travel science fiction story about Watergate that I was noodling around with that I really liked, and from time to time I would pick it up and play with it some more in between theatre projects.  Then one day my brother, who is an L.A. film editor, called me to tell me that a company he worked with was branching out from film into publishing and was looking for science fiction novels.  I didn’t have a novel, I had like four chapters and some shrapnel, and was reluctant to show it to anyone, but my brother sent it off to his friend anyway, and they called me three days later to tell me they wanted to publish it and would pay me an advance to finish it.  (It’s coming out this summer.)

There are an infinite number of different directions a writing career can go, and no one writer’s path to success is necessarily replicable by any other writer.  I’m fully aware that my story of how I got a novel published is a weird one with a strange combination of luck and coincidence and circumstance and privilege and a million other forces I can’t control which resulted in my unfinished novel landing on the desk of someone looking for just such an unfinished novel.  But the important part is everything that happened before that, all the years of staying up until three in the morning or skipping happy hours with friends because I had to write, all the years of staged readings of mediocre plays where I was paying actors in pizza and hugs because I had no money, and even all the years of working demanding and tedious marketing and fundraising jobs for theatre companies, because that was how I became a writer.  There’s how to become a writer, and then there’s getting a book published.  Honestly I still cannot tell anyone how to get a book published.  “Have a brother who knows someone starting a publishing company” isn’t a career plan.  But I can tell you how to be a writer.  You just have to write.