Anyway Most Writing Advice Is Frequently Contradictory To Other Writing Advice You Might Receive From

Writing great friendships

Some of the best chemistry/relationships in fiction exist between characters who are/become friends. Here are some tips for making friendships come alive on the page:

1. Banter

One of the most interesting aspects of fictional friendships is the way the characters interact with each other whilst important plot points are occurring.

If your characters have easy banter, teasing one another without missing a beat and managing to bounce off each other even in the toughest circumstances, it will be clear to the reader that these two are/should be good friends.

Friends know each other well. They know the other’s character so well that they can easily find something to tease each other over. However, this also means knowing which topics are off-limits.

If you want to write a good, healthy friendship, your characters shouldn’t use humour/sarcasm as a way to hurt the other. It should be good-natured and understood as such from both sides.

Different friendships will have different types of chemistry. Some friends may tease each other with facial expressions. Others may already anticipate a snarky remark and counter it before it’s been spoken. Others will have physical ways of goofing around. 

Some friends might not tease each other at all. Banter isn’t necessary; it’s just a good way to make your characters come alive and make their friendship one that is loved by readers.

What’s important is chemistry - the way they automatically react to each other.

Think Sam and Dean in Supernatural or Juliette and Kenji in the Shatter Me series.

2. Mutual support 

Unless you purposefully want to write an unhealthy/toxic friendship, your characters should both be supportive of the other. 

This means that, even if one is the MC and the other the side-kick, both should be cognisant of the other’s feelings and problems, and should be considerate in this regard.

Few things will make your MC as likable as remembering to check in and be there for their best friend even when they are in the thick of a crisis.

You need to show your characters being vulnerable in front of each other and being supportive in ways that are tailored to the needs of each friend.

So, if one of the characters really responds to physical comfort, the other should know to give hugs/rub their back when they’re not feeling well. Similarly, if one of them doesn’t like being touched and responds to material comfort, have the other bring them ice cream and join them for a movie marathon. Whatever works for your characters.

What gets me every time is when a character is falling apart and won’t listen to/be consoled by anyone but their best friend (but this is just personal preference).

3. Knowing the other’s past/family life

This really only applies to characters who have been friends for quite a while.

Good friends know each other’s backstory - the highs and lows and mundane details. They know they layout of their family home and they probably know their family members well.

Friends will often talk about these things, only having to mention a few words for the other to know what they’re talking about i.e. “The ‘09 Thanksgiving disaster” or “You know how Uncle Fred is”

This will instantly make it clear that your characters are close and have come a long way together. 

Perhaps there are issues at home/trauma from the past that the other character will immediately understand. So, if one character appears with a black eye, their friend might know that the father was probably drunk the night before and got violent. Or if the character has a nightmare, the friend might know that it was about childhood abuse etc.

This can also apply to good things i.e. if one of the characters gets a nice note in their lunchbox, the other might know that their grandma is in town.

Whatever works for your story should be used to indicate the level of unspoken understanding the friends have.

4. Being protective

Few things will make your readers love a friendship more than the friends being fiercely protective of each other (in a healthy, non-territorial way).

Has someone hurt one of the characters? The other should be furious and want to exact revenge. Does someone say something demeaning to one of the friends? The other should defend them immediately and vehemently.

This can also take on a humorous twist if one of the characters starts dating someone. The friend can make extra sure that said date is sincere and promise to exact vengeance if their friend is hurt.

This can also be a great plot device, since it could explain why the MC’s best friend joins the quest/goes along on the journey. Perhaps this is the main plot point: a character seeking to protect/avenge their friend.

If you want to go in a toxic direction, this can be taken too far i.e. a friend who never lets the other spend time with anyone else/stalks the other/is patronising etc.

5.  Common interest(s)

Even if the two characters are vastly different, there should be something that keeps them together besides loyalty.

This is especially important for characters who become friends throughout the course of the novel.

This doesn’t have to mean that both of them go hiking every weekend or want to become pilots one day. It could be something small, like a love of cheesy movies or a shared taste in music. Maybe they both enjoy silence/don’t like other people. Maybe they are both social justice warriors, but for different causes. 

This could also be common characteristics instead of interests. Perhaps both are very ambitious/funny/social.

There should just be some factor that ignited the friendship and brings the two of them together.

This doesn’t necessarily have to be a big part of your story, but you should at least have it mentioned to make the friendship appear more authentic.

Reblog if you found these tips useful. Comment if you would like a Part 2. Follow me for similar content.

OKAY LISTEN UP YOU BEAUTIFUL OC-DEVELOPING FIENDS

After my long and lengthy years of developing characters (not really) I have a nugget of wisdom for y’all.

Do this:

Look. You don’t need any artistic talent. Hell, this could be a vaguely brain-shaped oval with some words in it.

But the point of this is that you draw your character’s brains and fill it with the things they think of most, the things that matter to them most, the things that are so essential to them that they are nothing without it.

I find that doing this helps so much when shaping a character’s voice, and it visually maps out their personality in a way that character sheets can’t.

For example, my character Isha is logical and she compartmentalizes things, so I drew a more angular design, while Aster’s mind more resembles her anxiety and wandering thoughts.

Yeah that’s all.

Knock yourself out friends.

Huevember -green

Random Question Time! Do you make art of any sort (mood or aesthetic boards, playlists, face claims with minor quick changes) for your characters?

Thank you for the question!

I often make aesthetics and playlists and sometimes edits with face claims.

I also like to play scenes and background stories out in my head while playing a piano piece with the right mood.

The Ten Genres

From Save the Cat by Blake Snyder

“Take the story from ‘What is it?’ to ‘What is it most like?’”

Monster in the House

A monster, a house, and people inside the house who really want to kill the monster

House = confined space

Monster = formed from a sin committed by a character

Jaws, The Exorcist, Alien

Golden Fleece

Quest myth

A hero goes on the road for one thing and ends up with themselves

The goal is internal growth

Milestones = people and incidents that cause change within the hero

Star Wars, Back to the Future, The Road Trip

Out of the Bottle

“I wish I had a _______” + “What if?”

An underdog who does not succeed for long

Has a moral

Alternative: comeuppance in which a character with that _______ has it taken away

Bruce Almighty, Love Potion #9

Person with a Problem

An ordinary person finds themselves in unordinary circumstances

Primal problems like love or survival

An average person must solve the Problem by finding it within themselves to be the hero

The bigger the enemy, the bigger the odds to overcome and the more heroics

Terminator

Rites of Passage

Life transitions and their external conflicts

“Monster” is vague, unseen, unnamable

Ex. teenage years, vices to overcome, midlife crisis, any crisis really, old age, break up, grieving

Everybody’s in on “the joke” except the hero

Only experience can offer a solution

Victory is accepting the Problem and surrendering to it

Ladybird, Call Me By Your Name

Buddy Love

Love story in disguise

Can include romantic love, usually platonic

hate/disagreement to realizing “we need each other”

“We need each other” causes more conflict because who can tolerate needing somebody?

All is lost moment = separation, fight, goodbye-good-riddance

Resolution = surrender egos to overcome Problem

One is changed, one is the changer

Don Quixote, Thelma & Louise

Whydunit

Why over who

Does not include hero changing

Audience discovers something about human nature

Walks on dark side

All about discovery

“Are we this evil?”

Citizen Kane, Mystic River

The Fool Triumphant

Underdog and the advantages of anonymity

Set underdog against an establishment

Usually includes accomplice that’s in on the joke and gets brunt of repercussions

Outsider thrill of victory

Forrest Gump

Institutionalized

Sacrificing goals of few for the many

Groups, institutions, “families”

Honors institution AND exposes problems of losing individuality to it

Breakout character’s role is to expose group goal as a fraud

Told from newcomer’s perspective who can ask “how does this work?” and eventually: “who’s crazier: them or me?”

Group dynamic is crazy and self-destructive

Pros and cons of community over self

Loyalty can blind common sense

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, August: Osage County

Superhero

Extraordinary person finds themselves in an ordinary world

Foster empathy through hero being misunderstood, their pitfalls and disadvantages, and human qualities

Zoolander, X-Men, Gladiator, Dracula

Never mow the same grass twice — How to improve faster as a writer

One of the most important writing lessons I ever learned came, surprisingly, from my college trumpet instructor.

“Michael,” he’d say with a heavy sigh, pulling off his glasses and rubbing the lenses with the bottom of his shirt. “You know I hate to mow the same grass twice.”

It was a phrase he used a lot, in band and private lessons, whenever someone made a mistake he’d already told them to correct. Because in his mind, once he’d identified a mistake in your performance, you needed to do everything you could to keep it from happening again, for two reasons.

First, because as he said, he doesn’t like to mow the same grass twice. And second (and more importantly), because if you let yourself repeat a mistake, that mistake will start to become a habit.

A bad habit.

And the more you let yourself repeat that habit, the more deeply ingrained it becomes, making it increasingly difficult to fix and slowing your progress as a musician (or artist, or writer). So his suggestion was this: Identify what needs to change, and firmly commit to fixing it now.

Confession Time

So. I was a very average trumpet player. My instructor and I had a great rapport, but he had to tell me to mow the same grass twice, three times, and more often than he ever would have liked, because I just wasn’t focused or passionate enough about trumpet to fully commit to his advice.

But I was focused and passionate enough about fiction to commit to his advice when it came to writing. So I applied his mindset in my creative writing workshops, particularly when I started my MFA.

And I tell you what, everybody. It worked wonders — helping me improve enough in that first year alone to win our MFA program’s top fiction prize and to earn a teaching assistantship.

3 Steps to Quickly Improve Your Writing

With my trumpet instructor’s advice in mind, I put a 3-step process on loop throughout my time in the MFA:

Share a short story with your fellow writers. (A workshop is great, but online writing friends work too.)

Sift through everyone’s feedback to find one high-priority “bad habit” in your writing that they seem to be honing in on.

When you sit down to write your next story, commit to breaking that habit at any cost, even if it means making other mistakes because of it. (New mistakes are better than old mistakes.)

This is How it Went for Me

The first short story I shared in my MFA workshop had a clear issue: the narrator was passive and underdeveloped. One of my classmates called him a “window character,” someone through whom we could observe the other, more interesting characters who actually drove the plot. The rest of the workshop agreed, and looking back at some of my past stories, I realized that passive narrators had become a deeply ingrained habit of mine.

So the next time I wrote a story, I strictly committed myself to writing a more active narrator.

The Result?

A moderately active narrator. Not perfect, but better than I’d done in a long time. It was progress — me chipping away at the bad habit.

The next story I wrote showed much more progress. It had a highly active narrator, and so did the story after that. And that’s when a new, better habit formed: writing active narrators without even thinking about it. And that let me shift my focus to improve upon something else (such as making all my narrator’s actions stem from their core emotional struggle). And something new again after that (using more figurative language, loosening up my writing voice, etc.).

And that’s how you can improve, too. The goal, again, is to use peer feedback to identify habits in your writing you don’t like, and then to mentally commit to replacing them with habits you want, one by one.

It’s a slightly different way to approach feedback. We tend to primarily use feedback as a way to help us improve an individual story — but it’s also a fantastic opportunity to improve your future first drafts.

You’ll be surprised how quickly your writing improves when you do this.

The key, though, is to commit to tackling just one major habit at a time. Why? Because writing is hard, friends, and fiction is a complex tapestry of various techniques, all coming together at once. That means your attention is always inevitably split while writing, so if you try to fix multiple habits at once, you’ll likely spread your attention too thin to succeed.

So identify a single change you want to see in you writing. Make it happen the next time you write a story, no matter what. Then, before you sit down again to write the next story, find something new you want to change or improve.

You’ll love what happens to your writing when you commit to never mowing the same grass twice.

And when you do, far away, in a brightly-lit college band room in Minnesota, my old instructor will raise a hand to conduct a trumpet ensemble, pause — and smile.

— — —

For writing advice and tips on crafting theme, meaning, and character-driven plots, check out the rest of my blog.

And if you’re feeling discouraged, remember this: Every story has something wonderful inside it, including your own.

PREPPING YOUR NOVEL.

if you want to start your novel but you’re not sure where to start, i’ve collected a bunch of resources to help you along! this includes characterization, plotting, worldbuilding, etc. @made-of-sunlight-moonlight

CHARACTERS.

name generator: this one is pretty handy. it has a bunch of different generators based on language, gods, fantasy, medieval, archetypes, etc.

➥ reedsy name generator

personality types: this is just the standard mbti personality list. it lists the strengths and weaknesses of each type, as well as how they do in relationships, etc.

➥ mbti 16 personalities

enneagram: the enneagram personality types. this may help with characterization because it has “levels of development.” it also lists common fears, desires, and how each type interacts with one another.

➥ enneagram types

emotional wound: your character should have something they believe about themselves that isn’t true. (ex: i’m worthless, i’m powerless.) this should start with an “origin” scene from their past, where something happens to create the wound. then there are three “crossroads” scenes to brainstorm, where things could have gone right for your character, but didn’t due to the wound, and because of that strengthened their belief in the wound. this helps you figure out why your character acts like they do. this is a really important one!!!

➥ emotional wound explained

WORLDBUILDING.

worldbuilding template: this is a pretty good template / guide about how to build your world. it talks about geography, people, civilizations, magic, technology, economy, and politics. (you have to download this through email though.)

➥ reedsy worldbuilding template

world anvil: if you really really want to go in-depth — this website is for you. there is so much you can do with this; i can’t list it all. history, timelines, important objects, cities, species — you name it, it’s probably on there.

➥ world anvil website

worldbuilding bible: this is just a general list on things to think about when worldbuilding.

➥ ellen brock’s worldbuilding bible

world creator: this website generates an entire planet. you can play around with the amount of land, as well as climate, although i’m not sure since i haven’t used it too much. here is the link if needed, though!

➥ donjin fractal world generator

inkarnate: this is a really commonly used one. it’s free and makes good quality maps. you can lay out cities, landmarks, regions, and they even have little dragon drawings you can put on your map.

➥ inkarnate website

a tip: don’t over-worldbuild! you’ll end up spending a lot of time on things you won’t need. focus mainly on the things that you will use!

PLOT.

plot generator: this one’s kind of nice because you can lock elements of the plot that you like. that way you can get rid of the ones you don’t like while keeping the ones you do.

➥ reedsy plot generator

writing exercises: this one has a couple different generators, including one that gives you a situation, characters, and themes.

➥ writing exercises

plot cheat sheet: this lists a whole bunch of plotting methods and their basic steps. i would play around with them and see which one works best for your method.

➥ plot cheat sheet by ea deverell

plot formula: this is mentioned on the cheat sheet, but it lists a bunch of beats and scenes which you might want to consider for those beats. kind of fill-in-the-blank-ish sort of thing?

➥ plot formula by ea deverell

save the cat: a method of plotting also on the plot cheat sheet above, but i wanted to point it out. i have been using this recently by taking a giant piece of paper, laying it out onto the floor, and making a timeline. pivotal scenes go on the right (ex: catalyst), while the bulk of scenes go on the left (ex: fun and games). i didn’t really have a website on this, but here is one that explains the beats. (i might make a post about this later, though?)

➥ save the cat explained

ETC.

story planner: this basically has a lot of templates that cover everything up there. the problem is that you get a free trial for a little while where you get as many documents as you want, then you have to pay for it. (although you can get around this by copying and pasting into a doc...?)

➥ story planner website

describing / related words: these kind of go hand in hand. if you put a word intothese websites, they will give you either a list of related words or adjectives respectively.

➥ describing words website

➥ related words website

ea deverell: i've pulled a lot of stuff from this website to put in this post, but there's a lot more that can be used. Like a lot on basically anything — plot, character, world, outlining, writing itself.

➥ ea deverell website

reedsy: again, i've pulled a lot of stuff from them to put in this post, but there's much more. it's similar to the ea deverell one.

➥ reedsy website

canva: this is more for making aesthetics and covers. (this thing is really helpful —and free!) although if you use this, i'd suggest pulling pictures off a website like unsplash; that way the pictures are free to use.

➥ canva website

i hope you found this helpful!! :) happy writing!!

Looking for a random cause of death for a character? Click here.

Looking for a random city? Click here.

Looking for a random city that people have actually heard of? Click here.

Need a random surname for a character? Click here. (They also give prevalence by race, which is very helpful.)

Helpful writing tips for my friends.

"I am sharp edges and shattered glass. Yet, when I'm with you, I am soft."

– write-away-from-here

people talk all the time about “primal instincts” and it’s usually about violence or sexual temptations or something, but your humanity comes with a lot of different stuff that we do without really thinking about, that we do without being told to or prompted to

your average human comes pre-installed with instincts to:

Befriend

Tell story

Make Thing

Investigate

Share knowledge

Laugh

Sing

Dance

Empathize with

Create

we are chalk full of survival instincts that revolve around connecting to others (dog-shaped others, robot-shaped, sometimes even plant-shaped) and making things with our hands

your primal instincts are not bathed in blood- they are layered in people telling stories to each other around a fire over and over and putting devices together through trial and error over and over and reaching for someone and something every moment of the way