(˶˃ ᵕ ˂˶) .ᐟ.ᐟ

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

As writers, we want our work to hold weight — for our characters’ actions, emotions, and desires to resonate with and impact our readers. But how do we make that happen?

The most helpful advice, in my experience, has been to:

Make the internal become external, and

Make the external become internal.

Let’s talk about what that means and how these tips can help you add emotional weight to your story.

1. Make the internal become external

To “make the internal become external” is to take the interior aspects of your character (their fears, desires, pains, and epiphanies) and find ways to express them with external actions. For example:

If Marcos realizes his girlfriend doesn’t truly love him, don’t just make him mope; have him throw the engagement ring he purchased into the river.

If Amelia feels overworked and stressed at her new job, don’t just show her exhausted in bed; show her bailing on plans with the people she cares about or giving up her favorite pastimes.

If Kara is afraid to get onstage and perform as Lady Macbeth, don’t just have her wait in fear; make her run out on the show on opening night.

By expressing your character’s emotions and realizations through clear external actions, you add weight to what they’re going through.

2. Make the external become internal

The goal here is similar, but reversed. Where before you were taking an internal emotion and accentuating it with action, now you’re taking the external elements of your story (plot, character actions, external conflicts, etc.) and making them have internal ramifications for your characters. For example:

If Thomas gets slapped by his older sister during a disagreement, don’t just move on like it never happened; make it change the dynamic of their relationship for the rest of the story.

If Davy’s new boyfriend excessively dotes upon him, don’t just have him awkwardly brush him off; make Davy tentative and uncertain because he’s never been in a healthy relationship before.

If Anna loses the championship match of a tennis tournament, don’t just have her grudgingly accept defeat; make her feel crushed because of her impossibly high expectations for herself.

By taking external actions or events and tying them to your character’s deepfelt emotions and, when possible, their core struggle, you add weight to what happens in your story. Everything starts to matter, and that makes for captivating storytelling.

A Final Word

I want to clarify that I’m not telling you to make your characters act and react in ways that don’t make sense for them. Always stay true to your characters. 

But I do encourage you to always look for opportunities to merge the internal and external aspects of your story — because that’s the key to telling stories with true emotional weight.

Good luck, and good writing, everybody. :)

— — —

⟢ PEOPLE DON'T FINISH SENTENCES! IMPORTANT! they interrupt themselves, they trail off, they start talking about eggs and somehow end up confessing their deepest fear about becoming their mother. Your dialogue should derail like a drunk train conductor took the wheel. "I was thinking we could—no wait, did you feed the cat? Because last time you said you would but—actually never mind, what I meant was—" SEE? HUMAN. Beautiful chaos.

⟢ Contractions exist??? USE THEM. Nobody says "I am going to the store" unless they're an alien spy or your grandmother leaving a voicemail. It's "I'm gonna" or even "gonna hit the store" or if they're really casual "store run, back in 20"

⟢ LISTEN TO ME! Said is NOT dead but said is also boring sometimes. Yeah yeah, "said is invisible," the writing teachers chant while burning incense. But you know what? Sometimes people mutter, snap, whisper, drawl, bite out their words. Your character just found out their partner sold their vinyl collection? They're not "saying" anything, they're HISSING like a Victorian ghost

⟢ People repeat themselves when emotional!!! "I can't believe you. I just—I can't believe you did this." Not poetic. Real. That's the point!!!

⟢ Subtext is doing heavy lifting, what people DON'T say matters more than what they do. "Fine" is never fine. "Whatever you want" means "I will remember this betrayal forever." Your readers are smart; let them read between the lines

Hi! Thanks for writing, and your English seems totally fine to me!

Slowing Down the Pace of Your Story Without Boring Your Reader

Firstly, I think that due to Hollywood movies we’re all a bit brainwashed that a novel needs to be a fast-paced nonstop action ride… or we risk boring the ever loving fuck out of our readers. But here’s the truth:

What holds a reader’s attention is not constant action but doubt and unanswered questions.

Let me repeat that.

Suspense is not about action (”something’s happening!”), it’s about doubt (”what’s going to happen?”).

So, how do you keep your readers from getting bored when your story’s pace slows down? Make them uncertain. Give them something to wonder about. Foreshadow the next major plot point. Sow the seeds of doubt. If you sprinkle in enough “clues,” readers will stay engaged even when the pace slows down because they don’t want to miss any important information. 

Also, you can show that although the pace may be slowed, your characters are not out of the woods. Use interior thought and emotion to reveal that even if things seem fine right now, your protagonist has concerns about the future.

If done well, these “slow” times can actually be very engaging to a sensitive reader who knows (because you’re guiding them toward this belief) that things can’t stay like this forever.

- most timeloops can be categorized with a string of the following letters -

First : is it supernatural (S), or is it mechanical (M)

Note that mechanical loops don’t need to abide by real-world science. If there’s a techno-babble explanation, a machine, a wormhole excuse, or multiverse explanation, it’s likely mechanical

Supernatural loops are either unexplained phenomena, or in-universe magic such as curses

Second : is it a typical timeloop (T), a deathloop (D), or an event-triggered loop (E)

Typical timeloops are a set amount of of time, such as a day, an hour, or a few minutes, and always reset at the end of that time. They may also reset upon death.

Deathloops do not have a set amount of time that they last, and only reset upon the death of the looper.

Event loops reset when a specific action other than the looper’s death occurs. The death of somebody other than the looper is included in this.

Finally : is it escaped via physical means (P), a correct series of actions (A), character growth (C), or is it inescapable (X)

Physical means of escaping a timeloop are methods such as finding an exit point or destroying a machine

Series of actions is essentially the trope of ‘living the perfect day’, or achieving a particular goal, Similar to physical means but less direct interaction with the cause of the loop

Character growth, self explanatory. Grow as a person, escape the loop.

WHY YOU SHOULD LET YOUR CHARACTERS JUST SAY THINGS

If you’ve spent any amount of time in the writing advice circles of the internet, you’ve almost certainly come across a post telling you, “Don’t use said! Instead use...”

On the surface, this seems like good advice to avoid bland or repetitive writing, but many writers have taken it too far. It’s like they’re scared to use said now and they bend over backwards to use any other word. It almost feels like they did a universal search and just went down the list on one of these posts to replace every instance of said in their writing.

The result is an awkward reading experience and the impression that this is a new writer who isn’t confident in their ability.

Said is an important tool in crafting a compelling story. It’s a foundational building block that doesn’t dazzle on its own, but it allows the other, flashier descriptors to stand out. And it forces you to add interest to your writing in other ways.

when you’re writing a conflict between two characters or factions of characters, you need to consider whether their disagreement over the premise or over the methods. put another way: do they disagree on the problem or the solution?

this is a genuinely tricky thing to identify, especially in very complex narratives, so let’s do some very simple examples.

the situation: pacifist nation X is about to be invaded by empire Y. the laws and cultural practices of the Xians make violence and death so abhorrent that even accidental death is as minimized as possible. the Ylings, on the other hand, are totally cool with straight up murder and think diplomacy is for wimps, but are also pragmatic enough that they won’t waste troops if they don’t need to. the king of X calls in his council and asks for their opinions.

character A: It is more noble to die for one’s beliefs than to live having broken them. We should allow the Ylings to invade us and if we die, we die. character B: If all life is sacred, then our lives are also sacred. We must fight back against the Ylings, even though that means we’d be committing violence.

A and B agree on premise but not solution: they both acknowledge that the Yling invasion is a bad thing that will lead to their deaths if unopposed and that the nonviolence code is important; what they disagree on is priorities and methods.

character C: We should invite them into our nation as honored guests. Maybe they’ll spare us or at least kill us more mercifully. character D: We should propose an alliance and intentional annexation in exchange for our lives. Being part of the Yling Empire is a pretty sweet deal, actually.

C and D agree on solution but not premise: they’re both okay with just letting the empire walk in and invade, but C thinks the invasion would be a bad thing and is just trying to minimize the damage, and D thinks it would be a good thing and wants to maximize the rewards.

character E: We should fight the Ylings and stay a sovereign nation; the nonviolence code is stupid and holding us back. character D: We shouldn’t fight the Ylings and try to be peacefully part of their empire instead; we’d be true to our code and reap the rewards of an alliance.

E and F disagree on both premise and solution.

Now, all possible permutations of this argument are fine. “Is this the best way to solve the problem?” and “What actually is the problem?” are both great sources of conflict. Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s entire plot is an argument over the methods to prevent death and crime, but everyone agrees that crime is bad; one of Zuko’s big character development moments is when he realizes that the problem with the world isn’t the other nations ungratefully rejecting the prosperity and unity offered by the Fire Nation, but that the Fire Nation routinely commits genocide in their quest to colonize the rest of the world.

The issue is when a disagreement over methods is treated like a disagreement over premise. The characters are positioned like one side’s entire worldview is correct and the other is wrong, but it turns out they actually disagree with what the other does rather than what the other believes.

A big giveaway that what you’re seeing is about methods and not underlying beliefs? If at any point it is said or implied that one character “goes too far.” “Too far” implies a point before that cutoff that the other characters or the reader would be okay with. You can’t go too far if going any distance in that direction is wrong. “Frollo in the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame goes too far when he tries to kill all the Romani in the city” implies that the problem isn’t racism in general, but mass murder specifically, and that if Frollo was only nonviolently racist, that would be fine!

Like, you know the joke about the guy who offers a woman a million dollars to sleep with him, then ten dollars after she accepts the million dollar offer, and when she’s offended and says she’s “not that kind of woman,” he says, “Oh, we agreed you were that kind of woman, now we’re just haggling over price”? If your characters are arguing about the best way to solve a problem, they have already agreed about the existence and nature of the problem. Now they’re just haggling over price.

Again: that kind of storyline is okay if you actually do want to discuss extremism v. moderation of the same basic principle. It’s okay for two characters to argue over the best way to free all of their country’s slaves. It’s also okay for two characters to discuss the best way of practicing slavery, if you want to show how ingrained it is in society or how even the character you think is a moderate is still evil or something. What doesn’t work is if your intention is to say how awful slavery is, but then the entire conflict is over the treatment of slaves rather than whether slavery is okay.

There is the problem, the end, and the means, and those are all things that can be disagreed with in different ways.

Let’s take a very basic scenario. Two people live together. There is a bookshelf full of books and there are books all over the floor.

Disagreement on the problem:

Person 1 thinks there are too many books on the floor. Person 2 likes having books on the floor because it makes the house feel lived-in.

Disagreement on the end:

Person 1 and 2 have agreed that there are too many books on the floor. Person 1 thinks the ideal end is that the house has exactly one bookshelf worth of books in it. Person 2 thinks the ideal solution is every book remaining in the house but simply being somewhere that is not the floor.

Disagreement on the means:

Person 1 and 2 have agreed that the ideal solution is every book remaining in the house and being on a bookshelf. Person 1 thinks they should buy more bookshelves to fit every book. Person 2 thinks they should double- or triple-stack their shelves rather than spend money on new bookshelves.

would you perhaps have any advice on how to stop getting caught up in details when writing? It’s always so frustrating because I can’t continue until I feel like everything I’ve written is perfect :(

Thank you for ur time!!

You have to put a pin in it and move on. Tiny mistakes or researching authentic details are for the second draft. Several drafts after that you'll finally recognize the big mistakes you can't even see right now, and they will make the tiny mistakes seem so miserably small you'll stop worrying about them as much.

I'm being flippant, but it's true, whatever imperfections you see will go right over a reader's head. Finish the story so you can see the whole picture. It is MUCH easier to edit a large piece of work later than the same paragraph eight times right now. Why? Because you'll be a better writer by the end and know better how to fix those mistakes. It will just irritate you to undo your amateur fixes.

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

And this is fine. Move on past it and edit what you wrote.

Then write some more crap.

My cousin in Thoth, this is how it goes. This is how it will always go. Even when you become a career writer—thirty, forty, fifty novels along—it will still be crap when it first comes out.

AND THIS IS OKAY. The essential imperfection of the Universe makes it impossible for your initial emission to be perfect either.

(And if you think it is... wait till your betas or your copyeditor get at it.) :)

in place of a period: link two independent but related clauses, without a coordinating conjunction (eg. and, but) → Sara lost her glasses; she needs them to get around.

in place of a comma: when a long sentence has several clauses, a semicolon can help distinguish meaning, including if there is a coordinating conjuction → As Sara attempted to navigate public transport, with her eyes squinted and using her phone camera’s zoom to read the display, she tried to call her optometrist to make an appointment; but his number and office hours had only recently changed, so she had little luck.

in relation with adverbs and short phrases like however, indeed, thus, in that case, as a result, on the other hand, for example, that is → Her friend, Teddy, spotted Sara from across the hallway and tried to get her attention; she, however, didn’t recognize him and kept walking. 

before introductory expressions (for example, that is, namely) → Teddy and Sara agreed that they would go to the museum before the new exhibition ended; that is, if she would be able to see again by that time.

to separate phrases or items in a list that contain commas within themselves or are particularly long → When Sara got home she wrote a to do list for the week: get in touch with her optometrist, Dr. Wallace; maybe ask her mother for some money, considerign the unexpected cost of the glasses; and text Teddy about the museum.

Note: unlike with commas and periods, a semicolon is placed outside of quotation marks → For her 20th birthday, Sara got a shirt reading “2020 vision”; she said it was funny, but has not been seen wearing it since.

The Beauty of Imperfection: How to Write Character Flaws That Truly Resonate

We all know them. The flawless heroes and heroines, the ones who never make a mistake, always say the right thing, and possess an almost supernatural ability to overcome any obstacle. While they might seem aspirational, let's be honest: they're often a little… boring.

In the real world, perfection is a myth. And in the world of fiction, embracing flaws is what elevates a character from a cardboard cutout to a living, breathing individual we can connect with, root for, and even see ourselves in. But writing character flaws isn't just about ticking a box on a character sheet. It's an art form, and like any art, there's a right way and a wrong way to do it.

So, how do we craft characters whose imperfections make them more compelling, not less? Let's dive in.