Scribbled Fiction

Yeah, all the geeking out about the Mandalorian might be getting a little old, but hear me out. I am not really a Star Wars person(yeah, sacrifice me at the temple of Darth Vader), I LOVE the Mandalorian. Does it have its problems? Yeah. But so do most other stories. I'm not claiming it's perfect. I'm not even claiming that Cara Dune, despite the title of this post, is really perfect . But through her, the writers of this show have accomplished something that has been managed very few times before it. They wrote a really good strong female character. Now, the Strong Female Character™ thing is a piece of work that should really be saved for another post, but I do think that the whole thing is a little overblown. I think that everyone's putting undue pressure on writers to create female characters as tropes, and really poor tropes at that, rather than just people . And because of this pressure, the writers are giving the audience really weak girl characters beca...

Mentors in stories are quite frequently killed off to keep them from being too useful to the hero, so often that it's become almost a joke. I mean, have you seen the number of memes about this?? There was literally a place in the Lego Ninjago Movie called the Bridge of Falling Mentors. That's how far this has gone. Of course, I, a meme enthusiast, have made a meme about this, so here's one: View this post on Instagram Seriously tho ✒️ #writingmeme #writingmemes #writingfunny #writinghumor #writerslife #writerlife #writinglife #amwriting #amtryingtowrite #writersofig #writerpost #writersofinstagram #writerpost #writerpic #authorsofig #authorsofinstagram #writingposts #writingpost #writing #write #writingcommunity #writingcommunityofig #writingcommunityofinstagram A post shared by Bethany Meyer (@scribbledfiction) on Dec 30, 2019 at 6:38am PST News flash! The mentor doesn't have to die. I wrote a si...

Hi, I'm Bethany, I'm an asthmatic, and I'm here to    e d u c a t e  y o u So the inaccurate way asthmatic people are portrayed in stories really bugs me. They shouldn't be taking their inhalers for nothing, and certainly not every thirty seconds. I would dearly love to see a realistic asthmatic character, one that I can identify with and laugh with. I would love that. So. Your education on asthma begins now. What is asthma? Good question, I'm glad you asked. From Mayo Clinic: Asthma is a condition in which your airways narrow and swell and produce extra mucus. This can make breathing difficult and trigger coughing, wheezing and shortness of breath. So basically, my airways have less room to breathe in than yours, so I'm constantly at risk of having them suddenly close up or fill with mucus, therefore causing: an asthma attack. An asthma attack happens when either my tubes produce too much mucus(filling the airways) or when my tubes cons...

Let me set the scene. The protagonist is going on a quest of some kind, and at some point in the journey, they are told of the Impossible Task™. There is something that they absolutely must do to reach their goal, but allegedly it's so impossible that no one before them has ever accomplished it. This is normally when some character pops out the line about 'many have tried, but all have failed'. This would be all well and good, especially since the Impossible Task is such a good way to prove your protagonist's worth in the conflict and show off their skills, but there's a big problem that I notice almost every time this trope appears. The task is, like, super easy?? The protagonist decides to attempt the Impossible Task™ despite the odds. Then they pass with flying colors. Easily. First try. At this point in the narrative, I'm very confused. Why couldn't anybody else ever do this if our young hero got it so easily? The Impossible Task is s...

I honestly don't know what's with the way people write families anymore. I've known a lot of big families over the course of my life, and none of them look like the family from Yours, Mine, and Ours , with fighting every minute, absurd schedules for bathroom time, the house is near burning down at least twice a day. Just... no. So let's do a little list of true and false so that all of us writers out there can get this right. False: Everyone is constantly fighting because there's limited space. Yeah, I'll admit, with eight of us total in the house, there's a little less elbow room than there could be. But if you've grown up like that (like the kids in every since big family movie have) you don't really notice it. You're more likely to notice the extra space other people have. The family in  Yours, Mine, and Ours had a massive house anyway, so I don't know why they were all bunched together in every scene. Realistically, if they re...

The terms optimist  and pessimist  have a different connotation today than they were originally meant to. These words used to mean individual things, not represent ridiculous stereotypes. But as culture has changed and as stories have taken more and more precedence in our daily lives, we become more accustomed to keeping certain terms confined to the four walls of the little boxes we put them in. For example, these days the word pessimist  means someone who thinks only dark and depressing things of everyone. An Eeyore, a Grumpy Smurf, someone who never smiles and eats gruel three meals a day. The word optimist  is hardly better. Optimists are thought to be obnoxious and delusional. They see no wrong and think the whole world is made of rainbows and cupcakes. Think Smurfette. This is how we've been shaped to think by stereotypes in the stories around us. And because we've been taught to think this way, this is how we think we should act as an optimist or a...

Photo by  Daniel Nieto   from  Pexels More for the Underused series! I'm really loving this series, because I love reading posts of this kind, and writing them is even better!!!! So today we're doing YA characters, because we all know there's only about ten of them, and they're all a little bland. Let's add some flavor to these books by making more of these guys: The teenage grandma. She drop pearls of wisdom. She knit. She bake cookies. She take you in when you overcoming breakup. She fabulessssss. But no lie, you gotta love the old-soul girls who are basically your old grandma, but in a teenage girl's body. Bonus points if you can find a way to make a teenage grandpa character. The blonde murder child. I will forever adore the blonde murder child. She or he(but I like it best when it's a she) is smol and cute and they seem like the most innocent pure thing at first glance. BUT NO. This character is a force of nature. She(we're going with...

Yeah, I know I've talked about romantic cliches before, but not in this series! (This heavily-spread-out series that I never seem to be done with, anyway) Some of the ones in this post are ones that are harmful, and others are ones I'm just sick of. So let's get into it! 1. Abusive relationships. I can't talk about this enough. Abuse is not romantic, is not funny, is not okay. If someone's getting beat up, whether it's physically or emotionally, the relationship should either be over or head straight to counseling. 2. They're clearly not in love, don't even like each other, but the writer puts them together. I've been noticing this a lot anymore. If one of the characters in the relationship is meant to end up with a different character, the relationship they're in seems. . . strained, to put it nicely. The two of them always seem like they're not in love, not in like, not even friends. They just kiss or live together or something un...

All the non-writer people seem to think that we're super smart or something. Let us all take a moment to giggle to ourselves. Done? Good. Let's move on. So, um, where did this come from? Are people just learning about writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and Andy Weir and assuming that we're all that intelligent? Cuz I'm not. I need Google Maps to figure out my proximity to anything in the state I live in. I can never remember how to spell unneccessary.(by the way, that's not it.) It takes me an average of five to ten years after the fact to think of that word I was trying to use. *cringe* I'm not sure exactly what people think they're saying when they assume in their literature classes that we know every fact that we include in our novels for certain(ha) and that we put everything we put in for a reason(HA! HA! HA!) and even that we know what we're doing at all(I'm crying laughing now please stop). Some days I squint at my screen and just go,...

*inhales* *long sigh* *opens eyes* I need you to understand something. Not all farms are Old Macdonald. I've lived on farms for a good part of my fairly short life. The first one was a much more active farm, with a lot more animals (which I lived on from probably around age 7 to age 9, but I remember it clearly), and the other is the one I still live on and have for all five of my teenage years. I've had a variety of experiences from these two farms and other ones I've visited, and I feel like I should tell people what it's like so that they can represent us the way we deserve. So, just like my post on writing realistic moving, I'm going to make a pretty little numbered list with some things to remember if your character lives on a farm. 1. Farms are not all the same. Farm people in books and movies are all the same: They get up at four in the morning, put on their denim overalls and brown boots, and go milk the cow. Then it's weed the fields, ga...

Ancient Greece called. They want their statues back. I hate to burst your beautiful little bubble of reality, but not everyone in the world is a supermodel. Not everyone can have the clear skin, the perfect body type, the delicate hands and perfect hair. We can't all be the flawless image of beauty that our society has set up for us. And you know what? That's good. Because if everyone matched that flawless image, I wouldn't be able to find anyone in a crowd. We talk about having diversity in books, but there's more than one type of diversity. What about having some diversity of appearance? Why has culture corrupted us so much that if we see a protagonist that isn't Hollywood-golden-girl status on appearances, we like her less? It feels wrong. The first example of this problem that comes to mind is the Never Ending Story. In the book, Sebastian was described as being a fat little boy. Don't judge me on the description. It's what the book said...

C'mere for just a second. Sit down. I have a little trope to tell you about. It's called the Black Best Friend. It's not just for when the MC's best friend is black, but oho, let me tell you: every word of the trope's name is selected oh-so-carefully. The term Black Best Friend refers to when the white protagonist has a best friend that is Asian, black,  Hispanic, Phillipino, any of the minorities. Here are a few examples: Ella Enchanted Whichever Cinderella Story this is Yes, even Percy Jackson. Crucify me now. Doesn't mean I don't like these movies. I love 'em. But they have committed a crime here. But it's only ever the best friend who is the minority. Very seldom is it the main character. Let's talk for a second, my writer friends. I think white people are well  represented in books. Very well represented. One could even say overly  represented. I think a lot of this is just because it's what we tend to see, so ...