#story help

Anonymous asked: Do you think a character HAS to be likeable for people to like them, if they’re the protagonist in the story? I’ve had a lot of conflict over this, as I myself enjoy having unlikeable/mean/“villainous” characters as the main character, but I’m unsure as to whether this would go well over with the majority. Do you think being likeable is a must-have trait for a popular, or enjoyable character?

Hi yeah okay uhm, no. Never. Nope. Honestly people just love a character they can connect with, and there’s a lot of people out there who look at themselves and are guilty that they have less-than-perfect responses to situations. Seeing someone who does similar, yet thrills and interests them, can give them that hook. Let them know they aren’t alone, and give them a fictional anchor to see themselves in. That connection, be it fascination, love, attraction, or reflection is the important part. Let’s examine a few of the ‘most popular’ characters from recent shows and see why they were popular, because surprise surprise, most of them were straight up villains yet everyone loves them. … I’m going to talk a lot about basically these two paragraphs ad nauseum as I explain, get ready for it.

So we’re going to jump right into some fandoms people have hashed back and forth to the point that, really, we want to gag. Yes. Let’s walk directly into hell and pick up BBC Sherlock, the MCU’s Avengers, Game of Thrones, and… you know what, let’s do it. Let’s go grab that Nolan version of Batman.

You probably realized who I was talking about first for each and every one of them, so let’s point at our targets. Moriarty, Loki, Joker, and Joffery come on down! Actually GoT has a lot of fucking targets let’s be real. We’ll leave that one for last because we can drain it of the most meat before we toss it aside. Anyways.

What do these characters have in common? They’re evil, yes, they’re strongly represented in their respective canons, and holy shit the fandom fucking loves them. Like everything about them, there’s fanart, and fanfics, and rewrites, and redemption arcs in every little fanish heart for miles. (peep TVtropes about this following phrase) They have more Leather Pants than Draco Malfoy, another fond favorite but we’re not gonna bother with him because he doesn’t have much hearty fulfilling canon meat on him. Fandom strongly wishes that these characters, despite their issues, were ‘good people’ and could care about another person. They want them to be a little bit goofy, and are completely willing to overlook everything they’ve done if they could get better now.

So my theory, and oh no I have a theory, is you can get away with a character being a total fuckface if you pick which part of Triumvirate of Attraction they fail at and keep the other two. It’s a triangle. The corners are: Attractive Looking, Witty/Sarcastic/Intelligent, and Relatable. So if you have a character who is relatable and funny, everyone loves them even if they are literally made out of goopy clay pasted onto some sort of twig framework. If they’re good looking and horrifyingly intelligent, no one ever has to bond with them or understand them on a deep personal level, because wow they’re funny and I can look at them! 

Seriously.

Each of these character has unlikable aspects, and I’m sure the fandom can give me a real debate about each so this is a minefield. Just remember, everyone has their own interpretations of the characters, and mine are not 100% correct, nor do I claim them to be. But my view is useful for breaking them down and explaining them as a POV to learn from, so bear with me even if I insult your favorite by accident because I’m using them for examples of assholes right now. (Hint: I’ve roleplayed most of them, so I love them too, I love them even if they’re horrific pieces of burning trashfire. )

So, Loki. He was raised as the second son to is King-God father and warrior son, tended towards trickery because of a rift between him and his family. He tended to be blamed for things, and then do other things. We know him as a character who has ripped people’s minds out to use them as pawns, murdered people by stabbing them through the gut, and seemed to quite enjoy warring with other planets. These, regardless of how desensitized to them we are, are not good things. That’s mind-control, murder, and murder on a team he tricked into it, and we aren’t even going to look at various things he may have done elsewise. This character is not a good man, he’s flawed, and yet people adore him. Why? Well, mostly it’s because he’s hilarious. The man turned into Captain America for a crack, he says those snappy little one-liners we all wish we could, and he’s brilliant when it comes to an extended master plan. He keeps things interesting. He’s also not bad looking, sure he might not be to your specific taste (especially after people have harped on it so long) but he’s got the kind of face that blends in with the bland circus of ‘handsome actors’ well enough. Not to mention we also identify with him, he’s got the triumvirate. The outcasts, walking in people’s shadow, who feel they’ve been pushed into being bad. Those people who want power to help others, even if it means destroying them in the process. People who need to prove themselves, and get the love they crave. They’re all seeing their reflections here, even if Loki is haughty, extremely intelligent, and out of reach as a bit of an Ice King.

Now Moriarty. Once again, we have someone who is handsome and witty! He’s sarcastic as hell, uses his voice in a certain patter to draw you in for the punchline, and then lets it rip. He knows how to keep people pulled in waiting for him to say his next memorable line. He also fucking poisoned kidnapped children with mercury, paid men to kill other people with Russian Roulette style bets, caused several man hunts, and forced people to commit suicide for kicks. Wee bit of not-good there. Is he relatable? Maybe on some shallow level, but widely, he’s too smart for us, he’s doing things we probably wouldn’t do because, well, they’s a bit mean ain’t they? He’s a mystery in many respects, and we can’t so much as bond with him, as pretend to bond with him by trying to enforce the character of Sebastian into a world he doesn’t exist in as our ‘in’, or by using Sherlock to wedge in the same ‘mirror’ so we can understand the guy who is outside of our league. We fake understanding him because we like him. So, strike relatable, keep him attractive (bisexual jokes nab a lot of looks and he’s handsome) and witty! Add as much asshole as you want the fans are snagged. He could kick a puppy and fans would croon about how evil he is, an awful sinnamon roll they want to see more of. That’s how it works. (And as a reminder, our Smart/Pretty Sherlock over there isn’t much of a relatable person or nice either.)

Why not jump to Nolanverse’s Joker now. He’s one of the first who break the ‘Handsome and Witty’ pair up, because look at him. He runs around in unshaven legs in a nurse costume with soggy makeup. He’s not clean, he probably smells funny (get it, because clown), and he’s an abusive piece of shit out to murder half the city for kicks and to get Bat-Sempai to notice him. But we find him funny and relatable, he hates how the world is dependent on money and wants to change it. He considers the world one big nasty joke being played on the people. He’s got one-liners everywhere, and frankly good advice (never do something you’re good at for free). He’s against society, against money controlling people, and wants to ‘level the playing field’. Sure, he finds that graveyards are all remarkably flat as a playing field goes, but we get it. He’s miserable and wants to do something with his life. This is how cults start to be honest. He’s an angry ugly man with a funny way of looking at the world that makes you think he’s just like you, and maybe he does have a point? So people latched onto him, he became the figurehead of a movement. Anarchy, and chaos, something they could look up to even if it wasn’t a very good thing. He is beloved, whether or not you personally like him.

Then there’s Joffery. I want to make an agonizing groaning noise over him because he’s got one trait: he’s not bad looking. If he wasn’t a raging shitstorm of pubescent narcissism bent on destruction for kicks, he’d be kind of hot. He’s not very smart, he’s not witty, he’s just cruel. If he’s relatable, it’s not through direct relation. It’s through knowing that one little prick you had to deal with your whole life who was just like him but without the power. Or I guess, there’s a lot of power fantasy loving folk who probably just liked him for him. I’m not judging. … I’m judging a tiny bit. There’s some judgement. He’s a little shit okay, he’s a pretty nasty little shit. But was he popular as fuck? Hells yes! Everyone knows Joffery if they’ve watched the series! He’s bigger than life, people groan loudly at his name, he’s got a fandom supporting him and his tragic life. Tragic in part because he had one. People looked forward to episodes with Joffery to see what evil stunt he’d pull next, to see what happened to his victims, and most importantly to see the evil little booger meet the finger that picks him. We couldn’t wait for something to happen to Joffery, whether it was a slap to the head, a stabbing, being shoved off a building, being eaten by dire wolves… the list goes on, everyone wanted to see his comeuppance more than anything. He was also, somewhat, creative and stylish about how he went around shit. Not clever, but creative, and he made evil look descent. 

Now here’s where we turn on GoT In full force, gimme a second. So we have Cersei, and her twinsie-lover Jaime. Both assholes, but we love them too. They’re pretty, and immoral, and actually witty as fuck honestly. We watched fervently to see what would happen to them, but were they specifically likable characters? Hell no! Especially not at the beginning when they started really being massive tossers. How about Littlefinger? Oh no, he was nice once. But he’s witty, and pretty, and relatable, but a total fucknard too. The Mountain? We love his rude, violent, smouldered off face. He’s not pretty, but he’s his kinda street-smart, and he’s relatable. See how this is working out? My triumvirate of interest is proving out in our illustrative pudding. It doesn’t even have to be bad guys, look at Tyr. He’s fucking smart as hell, hilarious, people adore the shit out of him. He’s not supposed to be that pretty, but he is. He’s a total cock to people a lot, but he’s funny, and relatable. Everyone relates to Tyr. This is why Tyr is so beloved.

… now that I’ve nattered uselessly on that for a while, let’s look at the other reasons these characters were delightful. Because believe it or not there are totally other reasons beyond my theory.

If you look at everyone I’ve suggested here, there’s another reason people watch shows with them. Morbid, or entirely reasonable, curiosity what the fuck is going to happen next. So you need to set up a story that draws people in not with your characters, but with what their future holds. Is the testy little jerk going to die? Are the demons going to eat him? What horrible thing is he plotting next? God, I just want to see if it gets worse actually… These are the thoughts in the back of people’s heads. This is why Clockwork Orange went over so well, the surrealist batch of malarkey, sex, and ultraviolence that was. This is why Neil Gaiman’s American Gods has so much pull, when the protagonist was drawn on by events, rather than being an excessively fleshed out and interesting character. He was surrounded by interesting things and characters, he didn’t need to take that away from them. Sure he had interesting moments, but he wasn’t in and of himself extremely out-there and trying to take the spotlight and yet he was the main character. And I still couldn’t put the damn thing down. Thank you Neil.

So if your character is lacking in ways for people to be attracted to them, if they’re mean, ugly, horrible little people, who want nothing more than to hurt others, who aren’t funny, or even very smart. Who are disgusting wastes of flesh, who are too violent to live, and empty hollow unrelatable characters– you have to compliment them with the most excessively interesting plot anyone as ever made, with fantastic background-characters and a shout-outloud-at-the-library ending. Something’s gotta be palatable if your characters aren’t, but do they need to be? No. Not at all. 

Can you think of any characters that have had a complete failure even though they’re marketably pretty, supposedly witty, and but-we-made-them-relatable? You’re probably, through no fault of your own, going to think about lots of mass produced strong women characters written by people who don’t ‘get it’. They assume that prepackaging the deal will instantly catch them views, I mean, she’s got sex appeal right? That’s what sells! That’s all that matters! We gave her little quips, and made her fall in love or out of love or something to do with love or the usual standard ‘I’m just as good as the guys!’ storyline, so why aren’t you falling for her yet? Because, consumers (that’s you readers!) know when something tastes like plastic. It’s fake. 

So yet another thing to keep in mind is making sure your characters steam with realism. Balance your traits, good and bad. Make sure that their reactions aren’t forced or canned or seen in every version of that character ever. It’s surprisingly easy to write characters once you treat them as 3D human beings with entire lives we’re just dipping a tow into, rather than a 2D story helper to act out our little head play and then go away. Hint at their lives, draw people in. Make them realistic. Give them reasons to say the things they do, and show those reasons if you can instead of just telling them. Avoid serious stereotyping and handwaving characters as unimportant because they’re fictional.

You are a writer have one job. Make them real. If they’re real enough, it doesn’t matter what kind of a person they are. You’re telling a story, telling something that should feel real and thick like some sort of reality soup you’ve made special. Unlikable protagonists tend to be plastic cutouts, that’s the real big issue writers face. So, even if they are horrible, make them. Tell their story. Tell all their stories. Express them like the finest of anal glands. It’ll touch someone, in their heart we hope, and it’ll grow their vocabulary. People read to expand their horizons, not to fall for the same cookie cutter good guy everyone’s afraid to break the mold of.

Remember, you can write anything. Anything. Everything. It doesn’t matter if someone will find it offensive. It doesn’t matter if it grosses someone out, or someone hates it. It doesn’t matter if it looks like a first grader should have written it in crayon. Nothing matters except getting it down on paper. After that, you can pick through it with a fine tooth comb and clean it up. Then leave it alone for a while, reread it later. If you love it and feel like it’s something that can be shared without people throwing a fit? Share it. 

But before that, you have to write it, and you don’t need anybody else at all to tell you what’s good enough’ when you’re trying to birth a word baby at 3AM in a mad dash of typing. Story now, let the true thing out even if you’re embarrassed, guilty, ashamed, threatened, and upset by it. You know it will hurt others, but you’re already thinking it. Get it out of you, like a poison and onto the paper so it stops bugging you. 

You aren’t breaking your morals, or doing something that anyone else matters in by letting a story out, if you don’t share it with anyone you know it will hurt. You’re just helping yourself. It already exists in your head, and once you accept it and let it go on the page, finally, you can pick to delete it, or just save it and never share it and die off before it gets published, whatever. Think about the details and fixes later, let the story flow, and do not let the judgement or enjoyment of some other fucker ruin that flow by making you second guess everything. 

You got this. Write that less-than-stellar character, and see where they lead you. Good luck.

How to plan plots, come up with genres, and basically hack and cheat your way through making a book like it’s suddenly the darkest jungles of your brain and you got handed a machete. To be honest, this is just a bunch of crap thrown together to help you plan for NaNoWriMo or even just writing up that fanfic you wanted to do. Entirely based on my own experiences and method mind you, so if you don’t like anything, then pooh on me. Do what makes sense for you. Maybe I’ll give you ideas for what you do want to do while you’re pointing at this and yelling, “NO.” 

Itis though created with NaNo Writers in mind, even if it can work for anything, so be aware that it’ll be fit around a lot of goals NaNo writers will need leading up to November. Like time (and the lack thereof), continuing writing no matter what (even if it sucks), and developing/daydreaming/prepping before you sit down to actually start writing like a mad man for a month. So if you know that’s how it’s been written, you can pick out the shiny bits that’ll work for you. 

SO. Writing a book is hell. I’m gonna be upfront here, but nothing awesome and talented is easy right off the bat. Writing is… a meandering path through pitfalls and you’ll have to drag your broken leg through some glass later on, but when it’s done you’ll feel accomplishment. Ask Neil Gaiman, the guy apparently calls his editor halfway through every book to mourn his ability to write, and to tell them he’s never going to finish, and they just tell him ‘oh you’re at that point in the story.’ and he makes a face and keeps going. I love him, he’s my hero.

So now you know it’s coming, you won’t be blindsided by how much you hate writing. This is good. This means you can prepare for it. This could be, like, setting up a stash of chocolates or an hour in your favorite video game to give yourself every time you finish 500 words until the hard part goes away. Maybe you set up smaller goals to meet over the course of a day, or learn about pomodoros. If you set up things you can do instead of the hard shit, that will also take you towards your goal, it’ll help you out. Like worksheets for what you’re planning on doing, and how to open up the ideas instead of leaving them as big massive blocks you never get through.

Prepped for trouble? It may be the worst opening ever, now you’re all like AUGH NEVERMIND, but honestly I just weeded out the folks who can’t stand the idea of tough spots. Still here? I think you feel like you can do this, you’re a challenger, I like that. Let’s start setting up a novel concept now. For you folks who prefer a by the seat of your pants method, hang on, I’ve got shit for you too. But I’m a combo planner/pantser depending on mood SO I GOTCHA, BABES.

So, good idea to start with, what genre are you writing? What general concept is gonna buoy you up this month? What world are you using? Picking a “material” to work with can give you a really solid base. What do I mean material? When you build an arts and crafts project you usually pick things like, say, sculpting in clay or wax, or drawing with colored pencil of markers, even mixed media, or soldering a metal rod to the bones of a deer or something. You gather the shit to make it, or at least an idea of what you have lying around, before you jump into the project. Would this not make sense for writing? Sometimes it’s hard to do the big pool jump into a book because it’s such a big open expanse that we need to give ourselves some rules to break down the endless “anything” down to “something in the vein of these things” otherwise we can’t pin down where to start.

So what is a book made of? Words, certainly, language, a concept of some sort. Characters, and worlds are important too, and so are the tropes that form a story. I know the word tropes makes some folks cringe. Some of you have no idea what I mean even, so let’s take a second here to grab your hand before you panic: a trope is something that’s been done, done, and “overdone” enough to have a name! They are something you can see in other stories, and recognize it! God, how unoriginal– but wait!  Tropes are not evil, they are a generalized description that fits many original and unique things to categorize them. For example: Alice in Wonderland is a growing up story, but so is Star Wars.

Repeat this with me: Just because it has been done before, does not mean it was done the way youwant to do it. Simplified concepts are a blanket, they smother out the fine details to make it easier to find a story similar. So when someone says “a hero saves the princess” we go “oh that old yarn.” Because it’s been done, they kind of shrug it off. But wait, what if the hero is a young lady dragon knight who is going to save the human princess from the king dragon that thinks he’s a great pet? What if the details, like having the guy hit by something after getting her out of the tower, forces her to protect him from the woods and it turns out she’s quite the little survivalist. Doesn’t that change the game? What if the princess doesn’t want to be saved? What if it’s perfectly boringly the guy saves the princess, but they have wide engaging personalities, the things they do on the trip are heartwarming, and they both get to know each other through snark and humor, and laugh about the situation? Oh, hi Shrek. Heroes can still save princesses. (Or princes.) Just because it happened in someone else’s story doesn’t mean the way you write it can’t make it a whole new story. Remember that. Remember that and go waste the rest of the month trawling TvTropes for triggers and ideas that can inspire you to new heights and concepts, before it’s considered procrastination and not planning and research.

Now that we know that tropes are like genres but smaller, let’s go look at genres again. What is your writing like? When picking a genre you might want to look at your typical writing tone. Do you like to write cheery happy stuff? Joke a lot? Maybe a creepy horror serial murder novel is not exactly going to mesh perfectly. Dissonant tone can be used to make things different and interesting, but if it jars with you as an author it can make it hard for you to continue. Pick something you feel like you can write an important scene for without having to buckle down and change yourself. At least at first anyways, when you get into the habit of writing it’ll be easier to challenge yourself to new genres and stuff. Give yourself room to grow, but maybe don’t take on 50,000 words in a language you don’t speak, even if it’s an emotional language instead of a linguistic one.

Finding it hard to pin down a genre? Maybe ignore that and come up with a super generalized one sentence plot, you can pick the genre that fits it later, and pay attention to the story now. “I wanna write a story where this kid turns out to be a monster of some type, and has to deal with all the wacky things that come with it… in a summer camp!” Okay awesome, that’s an idea! Now what’s important about this idea is you basically built in a bunch of shit you can expand on now. You have a character, you have a mode of transportation for the story (following the kid’s mishaps), you have a tone (wacky hijinks imply a comedy/young adult tone) you have a setting, and you have something to learn about (re:monster types to pick from). A hundred people could pick up this prompt and they’d all do it differently. But the point is you have a god damn idea and I am so proud of you I could screech like a raptor.

So now, expand on ideas. This is the Snowflake Method, far as I can tell. You take big shiny chunks of the plot that is inferred by the statement (There’s gotta be a scene showing the monster type. Gotta get them to the summer camp, explain the summer camp. I guess come up with some hijinks. Let’s make them a good old standard werewolf, no wait! They turn into a border collie. There, awesome. Now the kids at the camp catch a border collie stealing food. Going doggy paddle in the lake. Stuff like that. Maybe make up some rules, this is a shapeshifter type, they can turn at any time, but the full moon FORCES a change. So they change based on emotions.) basically go through and think of every scene you’d wanna see if this were an episodic TV show.

Then write it down. I’m sorry, this is the mean part for you pantsers. Making you scribble notes. I mean, planners probably sit there doing this perfect timeline of every scene that needs to be written with notes about what should happen… but don’t let school style stuff get you down! Just… jot stuff on grocery lists and shit. “Oh I want a scene where they get fleas.” Okay see, it’s a scene now. Great. If you write them on index cards with characters and what the scene is about you can neatly reorder them until you find your zen with the story. Or you can rip a bunch of paper into chunks and play jigsaw puzzle. Or just write it in notepad and copy paste or drag shit around. Look, whatever works. Even if it’s just “werewolf, lake, whine at cabin door, ghoul romantic interest, fleas, gets into trash–” it’ll give you an idea of what to do when you’re lost.

But that brings up an important thing! A goal. An end goal. A finish the novel goal. Let’s face it, writing endlessly can be the best thing anybody ever did if you’re really into it, but you should probably have something to aim for, for an end, so you can build up to it. Let’s call this dumb little fake story Werewolf Canyon because I’m lazy and we can change the title 30,000 times in a weekend, and it doesn’t matter. I want it to end uh… happy. Main character gets a romantic angle. They end up learning to be yourself because the whole camp turns out to be monsters, and their parents were sent as kids too. It’s just tradition for them to figure it out themselves. A coming out story.

That’s pretty to the point. I like that ending. The character happy with their new ghoulfriend (HAHA, A PUN, THIS STORY WILL SELL MILLIONS) and I know what I’m writing for. To slowly reveal him and the other camp folk and band them together until the end. What a heartwarming story. Now it’s not aimlessly going ‘puts off figuring it out’ the whole time it’s me writing ‘puts off figuring it out as I make it a richer background until the reader goes OH, and then the character gets to go OH.’

An ending pretty much fucks me every time I write though. I got 48 unfinished fanfics because I went “I WANNA WRITE ONE WHERE BLANK DOES THIS” and then I write the “THIS” and don’t have any idea where to go from there to make a decent ending. Fuck. That’s okay! Write what you want. But it so helps to have one. So really, give yourself goals you wanna see even if it’s not the end. Be it something happening, or a character maturing to a certain point, or getting something they need or grow into. Maybe someone dies, or gets brought back to life. For example someone dies and someone else is magic and keeps the soul locked into the body. The ending is hella different if the death being solved is the goal, or finding out why that guy has magic and solving a crime with his new psychic powers is the goal. The dead body can either be a catalyst for finding themselves, or an end goal for using their powers. Spooky.

So now you have a genre or a plot, an ending, all the middle bits like settings and characters and events (or nothing at all, it’s okay, you’ll figure it out). That sounds like a story. That’s all I generally need to start a story. So unless you wanna go really in depth and plan out everything to a sharp looking timeline, or detail the ideas a little more without actually writing the story, you’re golden. Until in the middle of it it changes gears and your character drag you into a wasteland, but the original effort counts. Even if you end up with an entirely different story, at least you tried and A+ Gold Star for that, most people never try. If you never try you can’t get better, you’ll always be the same level. Sure you never fail, but you also never grow and you end up gazing at others wishing you could do it: hint, they started doing it and after a while they learned how. The longer you wait, the more time you could have been learning how.

So what do you do now that you have a story outline? Well, one thing that screws me over while writing is the very special notion of knowing what I’m doing for explicit scene ideas. This means researching so I know about the subject and don’t later on have someone come out of the woodwork snarling, “VAMPIRES DON’T SPARKLE”. I mean” vampires don’t work like that”. I mean… You know what I mean. A story comes to a standstill if I hit a subject I don’t know about because I want to write it well and for NaNoWriMo which is all about quantity and speed, this can hurt. So that’s what you can work on now, groundwork for ideas and background. Research things that will come up in the story now, before you have to start, so there’s nothing to run around fixing at the last second so you can keep going. Learn about the monsters, or automobiles, guns, character names, the setting, the age. Design the world, or learn about it. All the little weird things like say, how TF2′s Respawn might function in-world, or how Batman’s gadget-of-the-night works, and which chemical or drug is best for that one scene, or even the weather at some time of year in a region. Stuff that is interesting and related to an idea. All these little things you can think of that later on have you researching a very special species of newt that only appears in the sub-tropics of Madagascar during springtime rains every 4 years? These are procrastination traps. Spring them early.

Learn everything you can about the subjects or genre you’ve decided to write. Absorb shit. Go read novels from the genre, from many different authors. Go look up other fanfics. Enjoy the original series a few more times. Read critic articles, and reviews of the movies, and books that are from the general concept. The trick to writing is never let anyone spot your sources, because really, all stories are an amalgamation of what we’ve already seen tossed together in a brand new salad. If people can’t see your crusty old camp cook is actually an expy of Long John Silver, they certainly won’t catch the curveball that he is actually Dracula Himself hanging around to teach the little ones. But you got inspired from it, and no one can blame you for that, ever. It’s good. Just hide it among all the other things you mix in and give it your own flare and spin and some new ideas of how it could have been. No copy paste, only squint at, sketch freehand, turn a little, add some extra costuming, and your own design.

Now that you’ve done some prep work, talk about it to friends. Roleplay a little maybe. Draw your characters, or write down their histories. I like to fill out my Character Creation Sheet so that when I’m mid-story I can go “how old is he” and then look back and go “oh okay” and not lose my flow. It’s helpful. It also lets you catch weird little inconsistencies that’ll make things a mess later. Like ‘she’s supposed to be his mom but she would have been 12 years old when she had him, crap’. Or neat little fun things like ‘oh!! they were both around for this world event! I bet this is important to them because no one else was there, THEY CAN BOND ABOUT IT!!!’ 30 pages of chatting later they’re best friends and you have a couple thousand words buffering your wordcount. Nice. 

Never underestimate how much little things change your character too. Ethnicity can give them a heritage to be proud of, and depending on how close they were raised with it, either a longing to be closer or just idiosyncrasies like preferring a certain brand of car because their mom did, or being tired of a certain faith because it was dogged on their whole lives. What about how they were looked at or treated? What kind of stereotypes did they have to deal with being thrust at them? What kind are they proud of having ‘cause they’re awesome anyways like screw you, mate, this is a celebration of my culture first. Or shit, what’s their religion, or money situation? That rich club kid is gonna have some life issues here soon if he gets cut off from daddy’s card lemme tell you. Building a character can really help you find out how those characters will relate to each other, and their environment, and what happens to them in it.

So, you’ve done all this in prep and the novel is actually here now. Jesus the month went quickly. What do you have in hand? Well probably a concept, some goals, research, maybe a neatly plotted set of note cards you rearranged until they made sense. Get your pretty writing music playing, set up your snacks, add your alarms for your pills, remember to drink and eat and rest your eyes… and now you’re sitting down with all your guns loaded, to type on your keyboard, you’ve got a writing program up, and… and…

… Fuck. Blankpageitis.

Quick! How do you start?!!? When do you start?! Oh god, do I start in childhood or do I start later or– Ahhh! AHH! No shh, calm. Here’s some ideas to get you thinking:

• Start with a setting, describe the world. Let the reader soak into wherever you are. You can trash this later, but it can help YOU get into the world too.
  
• Start with a BANG! My favorite suggestion for any time you get stuck is to throw a monkey wrench or a loud noise into your plot. Kill someone, slam a door, knock something over, get jolted out of a dream, have sex, crash the car, have the ghosts begin making noise. Just let BANG! happen.
• Write the word “The” then describe the main character’s main attribute, then add what they are doing in your mind at that moment. There, first sentence, go from there.
• Write a prologue from the perspective of someone unrelated to the story. Redwall loved doing this. “I am Miss Greenbriar the 80th Recorder of our beloved Abbey and the following tale is the Heroism of Sedge Blackclaw, my father.” There we go.
• Introduce your characters! Make them have an argument, or have them stand up in class and say hello. Name role call. Something awesome, just throw them into the middle of something and see what they do!

The trick to remember is, it doesn’t matter what you write now, so long as you write something. Have a scene in mind you want to get down before you forget it? Scribble it down! Have a concept you want for later? Write a line about it approximately in the order you want to see it and expand on it later. Just leave a note if you have to: “Put opening here, remember he’s not a pirate yet.” Great, now go on and do the other stuff. 

If you are like a great many people you instantly cringed and said “but I like doing it linear.” So you assume you just sit down and write a story from beginning to end. That’s awesome if you have done it, or can do it. If you say that, and have 30 started stories and have never gotten anywhere, but swear up and down this method is your only method and refuse to try any other even though they feel a little weird… you might just be fooling yourself.

I have a ton of friends who say this, but then they very sadly tell me they can’t write, or they’ve never finished something, or that writing is too hard. They’ll sit there and type up summaries for me about this plot idea, or this concept, but because they feel they have to write one way (Beginning, Middle, End) that this somehow doesn’t count. That this is not real writing, or they simply cannot write because they cannot get to the point where they are, absently and without realizing it, writing this amazing story. Maybe you’ve done this, explained to a friend something you want to write but then sighed about being bad at stories.

Surprise! You were just writing like I write! A bunch of jumbled ideas, that I stick together later and after NaNoWriMo I edit them. Heck, if I’m writing and I want a plot to go either this way orthat way, I write both. Then I take the more likely one and keep writing. It’s a first draft. It does not have to be coherent. It does not have to be perfect. It does not have to fluidly go from one end to the other as if flowing from a tap. It’s just expanded notes, followed by more notes, followed by “wow that’s pretty good I think I’ll keep that.”

Try it. You don’t have to tell anyone, or even tell yourself it’s your novel, but everything you write about it from November 1st til November 30th is novel writing, and totally counts. (Hell, I write up this biiig summary, a ton of lines of plot, then just rewrite each scene for NaNo. A sentence usually becomes about 500-5000 words, so if I write 100 clipped little sentences, usually I can spit out an entire novel just making them bigger during the competition.)

Okay so, what programs are you using? I personally am using FocusWriter this year. It lets me save to Dropbox, and then I use Jotterpad on my tablet and phone. That way I can add to my story whenever. About 15k words starts slowing it down though, so I break it into 3 parts I can work on while out and about. Last year I used Zenwriter, but that’s become a paid program. Try it out, there’s a free trial, and maybe 25$ is worth it for you! I switched (although I had an early unupdated copy before it went paid) because FocusWriter lets me save as .TXT instead of .RTF which means no extra step between it and Jotterpad. Last year ywriter saved my ass, because I had a complex plot and I had to reorder things. It lets you write scenes in handy “notepads” and then move them (by summary) around within the story without having to fight anything to copy paste and maybe lose stuff. It was a fantastic resource, highly approved. 

I love 8tracks for musical accompaniment. Selenne on there writes this whole group of writing-helper music lists that I just ADORE, but look around! Follow the collections! Try mynoise.net for all sorts of subtle white-noise and enviromentally appropriate noises. It’s so great. Just remember no matter what you use, BACK UP. BACK EVERYTHING UP. PUT COPIES EVERYWHERE. SAVE CONSTANTLY. FocusWriter and Jotterpad both save automatically, which is another reason why I am in love with them. Zenwriter does too. Need a boost to MAKE you write? Write or Die 2andWrite or Die original are my favorites. Mostly the original. Kamikazi mode erases words, which can make you rewrite them and jump from there, or force you to take a sudden leap trying to get to the word count you want. It’s great. To keep track of your wordcount try wordcounter.net. It can even remember whatever you paste in it for you, so you don’t accidentally delete it forever during a freak accident. Always nice to have an extra copy juuuust in case, even if it’s not one you can rely on.

Remember to take breaks, indulge in creative outlets and stuff and chatting. You are not a one-way machine, you need input to give output. Drink, eat, take your meds, charge your phone, chill and relax to TV or whatever. Draw sketches of your characters. Take a walk. Read horrible customer stories. It’s good for the soul and for the writing. Leave yourself alarms if you’re the kind of person who gets WAY too caught up and needs a reminder to stretch your legs and take a sip of water occasionally.

Also cool to push yourself towards your goals, try keeping a calendar with “Daily Par” on it. First day’s par is 1,667, then it’s 3,333, then 5k, 6,666 and then it just repeats the last 3 digits over and over. 666, 555, 000, over and over all month long. Write down what you get per day to see your goals. Obviously you can do that by signing up at The NaNoWriMo Site itself.It keeps track of everything, gives you a helpful community who can answer questions, and keep you going. You can join word wars and see who can write the most in 15 minutes, or just hang out and help people figure out where to hide the dead body. The site is an invaluable resource, don’t underestimate the value of updating your wordcount every 5 minutes and seeing the numbers, and your little chart, go crazy. Plus, prizes! Like a winner’s certificate you can print out!

Have fun though. Writing is… a thing. It’s hard sometimes, but if you write what you love it shows through. If you write what you find interesting, then there’s a good chance you’ll find someone who agrees. Stick to the cool stuff. Rewrite in December, or January, or in 3 years, or never. Just try, and then you can maybe win this little game, or at least get things down for when you have to adapt it into a screenplay or a comic later on because Novels aren’t your forte. You got this. You can do this. You can write.