Better late than never though.

When it comes to character development, one of the stupidest things I ever did was ignore backstory. (Head, this is wall. Wall, meet head.)

I’m still not an expert at it though, so I wanted to ask: how do you develop a character’s backstory? Along the…[Read more]

If you checked our guild war calendar recently, you’d know that this is the date for another story prompt competition. I know our story (and we as writers) will benefit a lot if everyone participates and shares their input.

Here’s the prompt for this guild war:

Write any story you choose with the most original and creative p…[Read more]

Lo, guilt is fascinating.

I totally love it. The Scarlet Letter, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov.  These are like butter on bread to me.

Guilt is something we don’t see a lot these days. About the only times it’s used in fiction, it’s used poorly. The guilt isn’t fully built up to, doesn’t feel authentic, and leads t…[Read more]

You are the ice, and I am going to break you to pieces.

Sorry…I don’t know where that came from.

Anyway! You all look like fun people and I really want to meet you. Here are five questions that will unveil your very soul.

1. Tea or coffee? (The world breathlessly awaits…

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I just held a planning meeting with the other guild masters and we were talking about how to improve the guild experience so we can all safely say the guilds are the most awesome place for writers to be.

Based on these decisions, we’ve decided to make a few changes. (PLEASE PAY CAREFUL ATTENTION).

First and…[Read more]

Let’s do something different this week. We talk about characterization a lot, now let’s put it into practice.

For this to work, we’re going to need one or more volunteers. If anyone has a character who isn’t behaving quite how they want them to, post about it here and we’ll have fun dissecting them together and learning from our…[Read more]

Look out! I’ve got a silver bullet for you today.

This is one of my top favorite articles on character development ever: https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/boba-fetts-guide-writing-cool-characters/

Why? Because it teaches you how you can pack tons of characterization into as small a space as a single s…[Read more]

Could you help us guildmasters out? We launched the guilds to be fun, tight-knit groups where you could inspire each other, keep each other accountable, form great friendships, and improve your craft.

We’ve seen some of these benefits for sure, but we know that there’s plenty of room for us to improve and we want to offer you…[Read more]

Sorry I missed a week, but I’m back with our annual theme discussion on characterization, trying to dig deeper and cover a lot of ground so at the end of the year you’ll be better at characterization than when we began.

Since we just had our competition to write the best story featuring a five-year-old’s POV, I thought that…[Read more]

@raemarie @mcnoggin @cindy @kate @elizabeth @girlsetfree @theresa-play @r-m-archer @literatureforthelight @livgiordano @lady-iliara @m_corinnemusic @j-parkhurst @gabbyj @sierra @cassandraia @chalice @samuel @noahlittle @julianne @corissa

We’re still a few dozen words over the limit, but that shouldn’t be too hard to fix with some more clipping. Right now I’m just going to open the floor for general thoughts on the point of the prompt—…[Read more]

I call this “that one thing”.

What is “that one thing”? TOT is a single item, habit, etc that is so often associated with a…[Read more]

Also, @corissa I think we could do the same kind of thing with his moral dilemma. Give both choices enough weight to leave the audience wondering if he made the right choice. Whatever he…[Read more]

(Apparently…[Read more]

We could give him a sort of hallucinogenic schizophrenia, or whatever you call that, where you see and interact with people/things that aren’t real. Then we could make the fact that…[Read more]

If my memory serves me, we have two main ideas on the table now.

Chimneysweep is sweeping chimneys with the aid of happy fire pixies whom all other chimneysweeps mistreat, when the pixies discover a plot to…[Read more]

@kate I absolutely love that idea!

What would we do with the ending then? Would he still go back to his chimney sweep life, and if so what would that make the theme? Or would we give it a warmer, happier ending, where he does get…[Read more]

@Corissa I love the idea of him being kind to the fairies. Great way to spin it.

But guys, guys— before we go any further I had a thought. I’ve been trying to think how we can better fulfill the prompt, moving on from the story and developing an engaging voice…[Read more]

I just got caught up with the conversation, let me recap what we have so far (disclaimer: as I understand it):

We have two story lines here.

The first (which I think we scrapped already, but just in case):

Kid, the chimney-sweep, 5, is happily sweeping chimneys for his chimney-sweep master, when he finds out about a plot to kill a…[Read more]

I’m thinking we could do this not as a typical ‘London chimneysweep’ deal, but actually have it be a chimneysweep ring in a fantasy city. What difference does it make? At heart, none, but it could do two things. One, allow us to get really creative with the way chimneys are swept (do the boys…[Read more]

Okay guys. We need to get organized.

@literatureforthelight an unreliable narrator is when the narrator believes something untrue about the circumstances in the story and tells it from a skewed perspective, and this is obvious to the reader. For instance, if we had the story of a lazy, neglectful, abusive…[Read more]

It being Monday, we’re back to our annual theme discussion on character development. (If you’re new here, check out the previous posts. There were some really good ones.)

Today, I wanted to do something different. This is not so much a discussion as a challenge.

It can be easy for us writers to develop our own personal cliches, but…[Read more]

I want to start by pointing out the difference between an antagonist and a villain. An antagonist is anyone who resists your character’s goals, while the villain is an evil antagonist…[Read more]

For this week in our annual theme discussion, I wanted to review a book I just read by Orson Scott Card called Characters & Viewpoint.

The short of it: this is a good solid book, not really brilliant or a game changer but still a worthy read for anyone but advanced professionals. Personally, I didn’t learn much new, but I re…[Read more]

This is actually one of my favorite topics, so you might get a long lesson.

When you really master…[Read more]

I hope your swords, er, pencils, are sharp because the next guild war is here!

This time we have two weeks so it won’t be so rushed and helter-skelter. 😉 I think we’ll do great.

The prompt? You’ll love it. We need to write the most emotive death scene we…[Read more]

It’s late, but it’s still Monday. We’re back to talking about character development.

What I want to do here is open up the floor for you to voice the struggles that you’ve been going through with character development. We’ll either gather round and help you with them here in this thread or I’ll create a future thread…[Read more]

Today’s Monday, so we’re back to out yearly theme discussion of character development. I wanted to share something I’ve picked up recently that has been hugely impactful in my writing.

Longer chapters.

I used to write chapters that were about 2,000-2,500 words long on average. 800 was my lowest. 4,000 something was my…[Read more]

@livgiordano @r-m-archer @j-a-penrose @lady-iliara @mcnoggin @literatureforthelight @ethryndal

I thought I’d touch on one of the best character development tools I’ve discovered: bondage.

Every character has faults, right? Their faults build our sympathy. Bondage goes farther. Bondage is something your character can’t get out of, can’t escape from, is…[Read more]

While we took a break from it last week, the guild wars are starting up again. This time, instead of competing to see who can write the best prompt, we’re competing to see which guild can be the most productive during the week.

Basically, anyone in our guild who writes over 1,000 words this week can submit their word count at…[Read more]

I’ve been working on a short story for a competition that is coming up fairly soonish (not the SE one) and was hoping for some feedback. If any of you could just look at this doc and leave comments and suggestions, that would be amazing.

I’m mostly trying to deal with character development, preachiness, theme, and the…[Read more]

Hey guys,

Just wanted to give you an update on the next guild war. We’re taking a break this week for the guildmasters to figure out how this guild war is going to be judge…[Read more]

I barely made this post in time before Monday ended. *blushes*

Along the lines of our annual discussion of character development, I thought it would be worthwhile to camp out on the assassin stereotype for a week and take a deep look at him.

This character type has a definite aura built around them. There are a few different…[Read more]

Monday is here.

Last week, I almost completed my goals. I wrote a little over 5,000 words and I drafted my email but haven’t sent it yet.

My goals this week are to writ…[Read more]

I’ve gone through and made a couple edits. I’ll be going through and finalizing them later today, but I wanted to give you a chance beforehand to take a look at them. You can let me know if there’s anything you disagree with and with some of the edits I’ve included explanations which I hope will be helpful to you as you go off…[Read more]

@mcnoggin Ooooh, looking nice! I’ll go and make a few suggestions on the doc.

I’ll get to making some edits to this tomorrow (hopefully others can add their improvements today), but I just wanted to go ahead and share a couple of my initial thoughts.

• I generally prefer opening a scene with the POV character as opposed to anything else that’s going on…

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My thoughts…

• I’m super impressed you managed to pack that amount of punch in so few words.
• I feel like the main character is a teenaged boy instead of a little girl, but I’m not entirely certain it matters too much.
• I would take out the MC’s first line of dialogue: ‘The beginning of the…

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So… guys. I made a thing. What do you think?

@daeus-lamb @ethryndal @elizabeth @mcnoggin @grace @livgiordano @j-a-penrose @theresa-play @everyone else I missed