Anything related to Mahotou's comic Child's Voice

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.

Ever since I first tried DM’ing, I have jumped from one method to another of creating maps for my D&D games. Recently I was using a Google Doc spreadsheet for something and it occured to me that I could use these to make maps.

What it is

I basically set the spreadsheet to be a small squared grid and apply conditional formatting to the entire grid along with a key of what means what. So once it’s set up, if I type a letter ‘T’ in a square, that square turns dark green and now represents ‘Trees’, same as ‘M’ means mountains and turns grey, ‘V’ means village, ‘C’ means city and shows as orange, and so on.

On top of the basic auto-colour coding mentioned above, you can right click any of the squares and ‘insert notes’ which gives you a text box to include any notes you have about that map-space(like a town name and who lives there)

Why it’s awesome

Super simple, hassle free You can do it anywhere you like without needing any special software or apps (all browsers run google sheets i’m fairly sure). And it’s as easy as typing letters into a spreadsheet.

Can be shared easily You can share it with friends thanks to the great sharing functions of google, you could even work on it at the same time as someone else(if you’re brave enough to try co-DMing).

Customisable You can use the same method for world maps, town maps and dungeon maps. You could even make multiple pages of the documents for different levels of a dungeon.

Template/Example

I know not everyone is as into making spreadsheets as me, so below is a link to an example world map and city map (tabs down the bottom for different pages)

Example spreadsheet mapping

You should be able to click ‘File >> Make a copy’ to copy it and edit it yourself.

Other things you could do

- Hyperlink the letter to a google doc or another page in the spreadsheet - Use symbols instead of letters, works well for dungeons, you could have slashes for up/down stairs etc.

Let me know

Art I did for patrons last month in a stream! I very much enjoy the variety of things to draw I’m given.

the third one. c:

name-brand spell materials come about and are required by academic magic classes just like specific non-resellable textbooks, and people start flea-market style things to swap unused materials after the semester ends, and people finding alternatives to these but the professors won’t let them in class because it’s not approved by whatever government agency/corporation regulates this stuff for safety

people learning how to do magic at home from their parents and communities and coming to school to learn how to do exactly the same thing but less effectively and for more money

we have politicians playing games on the regulation of magic use and people being divided on how much power mages get on systems and the price fixing and the stereotypes

lets talk about backwoods magic in middle of no where where people have developed spells so specific to the area and their own culture it would be impossible to bring outside 

west coast cities having a different lazier form of spell casting with longer reaching ability and more power in the base of the spell where as the upper east coast cities like new york have quick sharp spells that get the jobs done

native language affecting the outcome of spells in a second language just slightly, despite perfect pronunciation

you can enhance your powers by practicing lots of different spells for a long time, but some people have to work and don’t have the time or energy to practice spells other than everyday things like calling their kids and pets home remotely or fertilizing their window gardens or keeping mold out of their fridge or warding burglars away from the window with the broken inside lock

https://picarto.tv/mahotou

As mentioned before I’ll be trying to focus on getting my manga-in-progress fleshed out and started up. 

Child’s Voice ( the tumblr where i dump random things about or to help said comic: http://childs-voice.tumblr.com )

and some reference sheets:

it was a long stream tonight. a good friend of mine helped iron into my notes and ideas and i’m a lot closer to starting now lol 

i’m my own worse enemy. i need friends to keep me from drowning my own comic in self-pity and self-consciousness. x3

kids tend to hypercorrect — this means that they tend to say things like “sleeped” instead of “slept,” “writed” instead of “wrote,” “goed” instead of “went,” etc

kids tend not to make errors such as omitting verbs (“i hungry”)

kids also tend not to make errors in the i/me, she/her department (“me am hungry”)

simplification of difficult sounds — consonant clusters especially, so things like st, sp, ps, etc., as well as f, v, th-sounds, ch-sounds, etc.

“babbling”-type utterances (“apwen” for “airplane,” using one babbly word for multiple objects, things like that) generally occur in children under the age of three and a half

say it with me: an eight-year-old child is not going to be saying “me hungwy”

do not confuse child speech with stereotypical learner english mistakes, that’s not only incorrect but also gross on the stereotypical learner english front (“me love you long time,” anybody?)

Past the age of about five or six years old, children can have deep, intellectual conversations about the most bizarre of things. I HAD A CONVERSATION LAST WEEK WITH FOUR THIRD GRADERS ABOUT THE GAS PRICES AND TAXES IN HAWAII.

Were they entirely correct in the facts they were giving? No, because it was all from what they had heard from parents or on the news. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that I was having a genuine conversation with four eight and nine year olds about taxes.

Just about the only speech problems most kids have, unless they have a speech impediment, is not being able to pronounce certain consonants (replacing ‘th’ with ‘fw,’ for example, and some letters are harder to form with your mouth than others) and doing exactly what the person above said: using the English language the way they know how, which isn’t always the way English works.

If you need (plotwise) to emphasize that the child is specifically childish … have them tell the same joke to everyone they meet, cracking themselves up before they get to the punchline … have them ask “Why?” incessantly … have them fidgeting and possibly breaking things (”Oops.” “What?” “Nothing!” “WHAT?!”) … and if you have more than one kid, even of the same age, you don’t have to write them at the same intelligence level or emotional maturity. Some kids are messy and some are obsessively neat. Some are quiet, some loud. Some giggly, some surly. They basically come in the same range of personalities as adults.