“these Stars Are For You, Child.”

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 you 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.

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this is almost certainly a post ive made before but when a character's grief is so strong it fully alters the form of the narrative itself... moby dick being so much longer than strictly necessary because ishmael's grief made him stall for time in the telling of the tragedy... harrow the ninth being in second person because harrow was so grief-stricken that she herself was not capable of making narrative sense of the events of the novel and so someone else had to do it.... do u know what i mean

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97 character motivations

Here’s our masterlist of 97 character motivations that you can use in your novel to spark an idea for a character arc!

Saving a family member from capture

Saving a sibling from disease

Saving a pet from danger

Saving the world from ruin

Saving a friend from heartbreak

Saving the town from financial ruin

Saving friends from dangerous deadly situations

Saving a love interest from dying

Saving themselves in a dangerous world

Saving a community from falling apart

Saving a child from a potentially dangerous circumstance

Saving a place or location from evil forces

Saving a ghost from limbo

Overcoming a phobia

Overcoming an addiction

Overcoming marital struggles

Moving on from loss

Finding a significant other

Finding a new family (not blood-related)

Finding true biological family

Finding out an old secret

Finding a way home

Reconnecting with long-lost friends

Getting out of a dark state of mind

Finding peace in life

Beating a disease

Beating an arch nemesis

Forming a peaceful community

Transforming a location

Bringing someone back to life

Winning a competition

Going on an adventure

Getting a dream job

Keeping a secret

Escaping a location of capture

Proving a moral point

Proving a political point

Winning a political campaign

Betray someone

Ruin someone’s life

Find a suspect or killer

Find the answer to a mystery

Discover ancient sites & secret histories

Perform a successful ritual

Summon the dead

Save a country from dictatorship

Become the most powerful in a community

Outshine a family member in business success

Prove someone wrong

Win prize money to help someone in need

Get revenge on someone who wronged them

Find the person who wronged them

Develop significant scientific progress

Gain respect from family

Get over an ex-lover

Move on from a painful death

Keep their community alive

Lead their community

Heal people in need

Preserve a species (animal, alien, plant…)

Discover new world

Get recognition for hard work

Become famous

Get rich to prove themselves to people who doubted them

Break a long tradition

Challenge the status quo of a community

Defeat a magical nemesis

Take over a location to rule

Find out truth behind old legends

Help someone get over their struggles

Prove their moral values

Prove their worth to an external party

Become a supernatural creature

Keep something from falling into the wrong hands

Protect the only person they care about

Start a revolution

Invent new technology

Invent a new weapon

Win a war

Fit in with a community

Atone for past sins

Give top-secret information to an enemy as revenge

Kill an ex-lovers current partner

Reinvent themselves

Raise a strong child

Make it to a location in a strict time period

Find faith

Find enlightenment

Find out more about the afterlife

Confess love to a friend

Solve a moral dilemma

Have a child of their own

Avoid being alone

Run away from past struggles

Reinvent themselves as a new person

Impress a colleague or boss

Avoid a fight or war breaking out

If you need a hand getting started on your novel, we have 3 coaches at The Plottery who can work with you intensively for 4 month to skill up your writing and help you finish your first draft.

Apply through the [link here] or below!

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Word Counter - Not only does it count the number of words you’ve written, it tells you which words are used most often and how many times they appear.

Tip Of My Tongue - Have you ever had a word on the tip of your tongue, but you just can’t figure out what it is? This site searches words by letters, length, definition, and more to alleviate that.

Readability Score - This calculates a multitude of text statistics, including character, syllable, word, and sentence count, characters and syllables per word, words per sentence, and average grade level.

Writer’s Block (Desktop Application) - This free application for your computer will block out everything on your computer until you meet a certain word count or spend a certain amount of time writing.

Cliche Finder - It does what the name says.

Write Rhymes - It’ll find rhymes for words as you write.

Verbix - This site conjugates verbs, because English is a weird language.

Graviax - This grammar checker is much more comprehensive than Microsoft Word, again, because English is a weird language.

Sorry for how short this is! I wanted to only include things I genuinely find useful. p>

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27.08.19|| Botanischer Garten, München

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music for your moods part 2

a live band is playing in a bar, you haven’t slept for two days we aren’t strangers when we hold champagne chutes in our hands  white bedsheets and spilled hair  the lights casted on the ceiling are spinning just as we are the 10th person i’ve slashed my sword against theres a big tree in the middle of the room windows rolled down, sharp sting of the wind against my hands here comes… another one of them  locked in with moving rides and flickering lights  part 1

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articles and essays I keep coming back to:

“joy” by zadie smith (about, well, joy)

“roaming the greenwood” by colm tóibín (ostensibly a book review of the history of gay literature but actually just very incisive thoughts on…the history of gay literature)

“the murder of leo tolstoy” by elif batuman (about exactly what it says in the title)

“the love that dare not squeak its name” by david rakoff (about, i swear to god, stuart little)

a room of one’s own by virginia woolf (I mean, you know)

the entire lingua franca archive but in particular “bio hazard” by fred kaplan (about writing a biography of gore vidal) and “the stand” by daniel mendelsohn (about the role of a philosopher (martha nussbaum love of my life) in a colorado gay rights case in the 90s)

“the professor of parody” by martha nussbaum (about judith butler)

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Writing Tip Index

So I realize most of my Tumblr followers just follow me on Tumblr, which I’m cool with, but since I’ve been working really hard on updating my website, I still wanted to share it with everyone. If you have visited it recently, you’ve probably noticed quite a few changes. You can check it out here.

One of the new features is that I’ve compiled an almost complete list of my writing tips by topic. I’ll be updating it regularly here.

Below is the list as of my posting this. There are also a couple of articles that aren’t mine (noted) that I refer other writers to.

​

Beginning

Coming up with a Good First Sentence

Tips on Starting a Story

How to Start Writing When You Have No Idea Where to Start

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Brainstorming

The REAL Key to Brainstorming: Restrictions

Flipping Story Stuff

Stacking Your Brainstorming Ideas

Coming up with a Plot (from scratch)

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Breaking Writing Rules

Breaking Writing Rules Right: “Show, don’t Tell”

Breaking Writing Rules Right: “Don’t Use ‘Was’”

Breaking Writing Rules Right: “Don’t Use Adverbs, Adjectives”

Breaking Writing Rules Right: “Only Use ‘Said’”

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Characters

Complex Characters and the Power of Contradiction

Making Unlikeable People into Likeable Characters

Character Traits that Hike Up Tension

Creating Stunning Side Characters (and Why They Matter)

Relationship as a Character: Crafting Duos, Trios, Groups that Readers can’t Resist

Pairing Behaviors with Odd Demeanors for Originality

“The Emotional Range of a Teaspoon”: Your Characters’ Spectrum of Emotions

Considering the Irrationality of Your Characters

How to Pick the Right Character Names

The “Twins as Clones” Writing Epidemic

What You Need to Know Most About Character Voice

​

Conflict

Coming up with a Plot (from scratch)

Are Your Conflicts Significant?

Keeping Conflicts Unresolved

The Oft Forgotten Conflict and How to Make it Work: Man Vs. God

​

Context

Context vs. Subtext (Context Should Not Become Subtext)

Making Strengths into Weaknesses (and Vice Versa) through Context

​

Description

Picking the RIGHT Details

Three Tweaks that Keep Details Interesting

Breaking Writing Rules Right: “Don’t Use Adverbs, Adjectives”

​

Dialogue

Writing Realistic and Complex Dialogue

Kicking “Great” Dialogue up to “Killer” Dialogue

Breaking Writing Rules Right: “Only Use ‘Said’”

Generic Dialogue—Staaaahp

(Don’t) Tell Me How You Really Feel

Emotion

Writing Empathetically vs. Sympathetically and Sentimentally

Let Your Reader do the Work

Raw vs. Subdued Emotions: Getting them Right in Your Story

“The Emotional Range of a Teaspoon”: Your Characters’ Spectrum of Emotions

Gaining Incredible Emotional Power by Crossing Opposites

Choosing Relatable Descriptions to Power up Empathy

Selecting the Right Sentence Structure for the Right Emotion

Dealing with Melodrama: What it is, How it Works, and How to Get Rid of it

The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi

Feedback

The Real Reason You NEED to Give Positive Feedback!

Feeding us Criticism

​

Foils

Playing with Foils

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Grammar and Punctuation

Dangling Modifiers and How to Correct Them (Purdue OWL)

Punctuation in Dialogue (The Editor’s Blog)

​

Humor

15+ Tactics for Writing Humor

Guardians of the Galaxy and the Art of Constructing Jokes (Film Cit Hulk Smash)

​

Micro-Concepts

Writing Micro-concepts

​

Mystery

The Mechanics of Rendering Mysteries and Undercurrents—How to Withhold Info Right

Keep reading

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so remember that worldbuilding website, notebook.ai, that was goin around and everyone was so excited, but it turned out you had to pay a (frankly outrageous) subscription to access any of the best tools? 

well i have exciting news: World Anvil. 

here’s what you get for free: 

yeah. all of them. double what notebook.ai offers for pay. yeah baby.

i’ve only been using this site for like half an hour, but i am in LOVE. please check it out and consider supporting the creators if you can! 

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Forever indebted to @mostlysignssomeportents for this one. 

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