Scribbled Fiction

This is about to be your new favorite thing. I'm currently watching through Once Upon A Time with my sister, and I couldn't help but notice- Snow and Charming have a certain... something about the way they see everything. It's all 'love wins' and 'it'll be all right, I know it' and 'I believe in you'. It really grabbed my attention. I was about to label it as just standard character angst, but it wasn't. It was like angst, but... in the other direction, you know? I'm calling it light angst. As in, like angst but the other way. The opposite side of the spectrum. The other extreme, if you will. While regular angst, or 'dark angst' as we'll call it so we can tell them apart for the post, is a dedication to believing that everything is terrible, tragic, empty, you know the gist. Picture the opposite of that, and you have light angst. Unashamed, open dedication to the belief that everything is okay and will turn out for the better ...

Whether you recognize the term or not, we all know the trope of the single-trait character. These guys show up at least once in every book, movie, and TV show, and they're useful because they fill up space and they're easily identified. A single-trait character is someone who appears in a story and is recognized/identified by (you guessed it) a single, solitary trait. The tall one. The loud one. The one who loves soccer. Characters such as these are useful as background characters, and they're easy to tell apart because they each only have one characteristic to be remembered by. Aside from Jamie, none of the kids in Rise of the Guardians strictly have  any deep characteristics, but since we were already dealing with such a large cast of  characters,  none of the kids strictly *needed* a complex personality . Now, before we go into how to use a single-trait character, let's first talk about how not to use a single-trait character. As always, this isn't necessarily wr...

So I've actually been an indie author(or working on being an indie author) for ages longer than I've talked about it or really had an online presence to mention it. I've wanted to be an author since I started getting into writing at age eleven, and I've always wanted to put my books into the hands of other people. Obviously, like the rest of us did, I eventually did my research and found out that doing what I wanted to do would be very hard, nearly impossible unless I really put my back into it. The world of traditional publishing involved a thousand steps I couldn't understand. But for a while, I thought it was my only real option, and it was what I pursued. There was a time where I desperately wanted to be a part of Harper Collins because I noticed they published almost all my favorite books at the time, and I considered them to be the  publishing house to go with. Bit of a shame that Harper Collins was basically ironclad and impossible to get in touch with. So I ...

Put your phone far enough away that you can't reach it because being too lazy to get up > desire to reach phone = you'll be forced to write Listen to Hans Zimmer soundtracks, they're literally written to keep you engaged and they help you focus When you're line editing, put things that will take more thought [in brackets] so that later you can just search the documents for the brackets and find all those things at once. If you're stuck on one thing in the document, go to a different thing and work on that. Your mind will be clearer to deal with the problem when you come back. If you're struggling to begin something, even an outline(cuz I do a lot), title it like this: Outline 1, But This is the Sucky Version . If you give yourself permission to suck or outline it in a way where if it's the worst it doesn't matter, it makes it so much easier to begin. Don't open the word document or look at the page until you already know how you're going to be...

Something I'm learning from this current draft of Robbing Centaurs and Other Bad Ideas is that I'm really bad at descriptions. I underdescribe, I overdescribe, I put in confusing visuals, my sentences are awkward... I'm just really bad at descriptions. And now that I think about it, descriptions are something that have always been really frustrating for me to try to write. I can picture all these cool places and ideas, but I have no idea how to make the reader see and feel them the way I do. It's probably one of the most frustrating parts of writing for me. Therefore, after seeing all the notes from my sweet editor on descriptions that could be improved, I did a hearty bit of googling on how to write descriptions. This is what I found.  Give the description a flow. Your MC spots another character in the room. What do they notice first, and why? What do they notice after that? Don't just say 'their hair was black and their eyes were blue', that doesn't wo...

Let's talk about some old WIPs of mine! Why? Who cares why! This list is in more or less chronological order of when I've written them, but it's actually roughly in order of how much I like them, or them as they are right now, unedited and possibly never seeing the light of day again. But still, whether or not they will see the light of day, I still wrote them and that gives them importance, so let's talk about them and give them a little love!  Trilagia How old I was: Roughly 11 through 12 Yeah, this was the first thing I ever wrote, and clearly, at the time I didn't know anything about a series or the fact that you had to know where it was going in order to write it, but these books are still dear to my heart even though I shall never read them again or I shall explode from cringe. Amarah was the first awesome short spunky girl character I ever wrote, and also the first lil gremlin we should not trust with matches. I also got to explore worldbuilding in this one e...

I first noticed this whole thing while watching Avatar: The Last Airbender(also known as one of the best written shows I've ever seen). Specifically, I noticed something about Prince Zuko, the antiheroic, morally ambiguous ex-prince who is chasing down for Aang most of the show. Granted, Zuko is AngstBoi extraordinaire, but something about him was just. . . different. Better. Even the way the artists made him move and pose seemed somehow more true to life than the other characters. And that's when I first started noticing all the stuff that I'm going to talk about today. I think he definitely looked his best when he had hair like this. Antiheroes are written to be attractive. Deep in our minds, we already know that antiheroes are the cool ones, the favorites, so when we write our own, that's how they come out on the page. But there's even more than that. Antiheroes are also written in a more realistic light than most of the other characters, especially if the antihe...

Has anyone else noticed how a lot of the new Disney and Pixar movies lately just don't seem to... sit right? I finish the movie and don't feel as satisfied and amazed as I used to be with Disney movies. Obviously, some of that could be blamed on me getting older and having higher expectations for movies than I used to, or being nostalgic about the older stuff. You could say that. But the more I think about it, the more I think it's the themes  of the movies that I'm not liking. Now THIS film was a masterpiece First, let's talk about themes. Themes are so important in every story. What's the takeaway you want the audience to have from this story? If you want the movie to be on their mind all day, what message do you want them to be pondering as they do? What mark do you want to leave on them? The theme is that message and mark. A good theme will impact the audience in a serious way, making them reconsider the way they think about something or sometimes even chang...

[If you haven't seen at least up to the Asokah episode of the Mandalorian, you're probably going to find spoilers. You've been warned.] So here's the thing, guys. For some reason with this season of the Mandalorian, people are causing controversy with almost every episode? I don't know if it's just people taking out their 2020 tension, or if there's actually something to cause a controversy about, but that's what seems to be happening. But we're not talking about all the controversies on a whole. Today we're just talking about one: the egg-eating controversy. And why I think people are way overreacting to it. So here it is: first of all, Baby Yoda himself. Even though I'm a little confused on how his obvious baby maturity and baby noises stack up against how he's been trained under many masters and seen the rise and fall of empires, the thing is that he's still a baby. Albeit a very confusing baby. The 50 years old thing and still bei...

Spare me your woodlands and your small villages. I got something better for you. Underwater Give me Little Mermaid aesthetic, give me people who have a city in a bubble on the bottom of the sea, give me trenches that are actually filled with the magic wielders that abandoned the world above, I'll take it all. In space Can we talk about how few and far between magic in space tropes are used? I get that people don't really want fantasy/sci-fi crossovers, but there is still so much potential aside from that! Ships(not spaceships, we're talking wood) that fly through the stars via fairy dust! Sirens in the center of black holes! Werewolves that have taken control of their situation by living on the moon and only going to the light side of it when they want to hunt! This can be done, people! The mountains There are ways to use the mountains that aren't your standard fantasy woodland settings. Give me a kingdom that only spans the mountain range and they have mortal enemies b...

 I've written very few girl protagonists. No, it's true. If you were to look at the list of all the protagonists I've written, the list of girls would be much shorter than the guys. Even when I think about my latest WIP, it's pretty guy-heavy. Let's take a look, shall we? Jack, Thief's Son : The protagonist is Jack, a guy, and the villain is a guy. Javi and the Boats in the Sky (2018), has a boy as the protagonist.  NaNoWriMo 2017, Spectacular:  Guy protagonist. Robbing Centaurs and Other Bad Ideas (2019): Not one, but 2  guys as the protagonists. In addition, the mentor is a guy, and most of the main characters are guys too, something that I'm trying to fix, because I want more girls in there. Why do I write so many boys, you ask? *scratches head* Honestly I'm not sure. That's what I'm here to explore. Honestly, I couldn't even figure out all these reasons by myself, so I had my sister discuss with me. Thanks, Rach, you're the best. <...

If NaNoWriMo isn't going well for you this year, then I'm here to tell you that you're not alone. I've heard a lot of people say this year that NaNoWriMo isn't going as well or feeling as good as it has in previous years. And I've been feeling the same way. Personally, I just thought that my hardcore, crazy, 14-day writing prep sesh in October had burnt me out a little bit. I thought I was just tired. And maybe that's still the case. (Isn't going to stop me from finishing, though!!) But having heard so many people say that they felt the same feeling as I did, I'm now realizing that it may be due to just the way the rest of this year has gone. Basically, all our brains are burnt out. Let's face it, we've all gone through a lot this year. I don't even need to begin the list. Everyone else is already done that. But the plain and simple truth is that all this stress and worry and anxiety and turmoil may be putting a huge strain on our minds a...

What's up! It's the first NaNoWriMo update! Overview: Overall, it's going pretty good! I'm finding I only really have enough time to write about 2k a day when I was hoping to do a little more because I'm hoping the novel will end up longer than 60k, but with work and other responsibilities and just trying to keep my life afloat, that's what we've got, and I'm grateful for that much! :) This post is late because it's the second one that I've totally forgotten about until the last minute! Isn't that fun! I really did mean to do better, but yesterday was a hectic day, and the last thing on my mind was this post, sorry. Current word count: Plot wise, we're currently sitting in the first half of the second act, which is probably where I should be considering that we're already a third of the way through the month! If you're nanoing with me, well done! You've made it this far! Keep going. As far as the word count, as of right now(th...

October 2020 was honestly a mess. A mess that is funny to look back on but definitely not something I would want to relive. You will get more information on what I mean below, because otherwise this is just going to turn into a long infodump, and who would want one of those when you can have the same information sorted into tidy categories?? Writing, I think, is where the worst struggles were. In the first half of October, I thought I was doing good. I had all the character profiles under control finally, and I pretty much knew everything I needed to know except for the plotting. I really wanted to get everything done in the first part of October so I could have some chill time in between prepping and starting NaNoWriMo. Easy enough, right? Wrong. I already knew that my family was going on vacation in the middle of October, and I was prepared for that. Sure, I did a little prep work on that trip because I needed to, and I was a little stressed because I was trying to do plot structure ...