Morgan

THE RAVEN by Edgar Allan Poe. Published in 1883 with illustrations by Gustave Doré.

Paul Gustave Louis Christophe Doré (1832-1883) was a French artist, as a printmaker, illustrator, painter, comics artist, caricaturist, and sculptor. He is best known for his prolific output of wood-engravings, especially those illustrating classic books, including 241 illustrating the Bible.

They said a few times variously around their Discord server that they wanted to work on both but have had to focus on Nevermore because as you said, they work 60-70 hours a week to complete one episode alone. And that work is done after whatever outlining, scripting, and writing is done and completed for Flynn to draft the initial panels. The comic can’t be made without a written script. They’re not magically both made at the same time. There’s 4 seasons worth of outlines Red has to work with and adapt into seasons outlines, episode outlines, and scripts.

And as a writer, I can say that the only way you can be truly creative and free to write is to be fresh, rested, and happy. Dealing with stress, health concerns, mental health problems like depression and anxiety, or other distractions in one’s life only hinder your ability to focus on writing and sap away your energy and joy. And then if you pride yourself on your work? Because you want it to be the best it can be? And you’re NOT writing? Guilt sets in like a cancer. You don’t feel good so you can’t write, and you don't feel good because you’re not writing. The ONLY way to recover from that is to take a break and rest, lest you burn out of the story you want to tell itself and become resentful of it. Then no one is happy or wins. I had to take a 3 month break from writing entirely because of similar circumstances earlier this year, because I had been writing, editing, and outlining nonstop, every day, for an entire year. I read, I gamed, I went on walks. I did things that were fun and rejuvenating until I felt ready to write again. Thank God I didn’t also have an audience hovering at the edges, wondering when the next installment was coming out.

Red and Flynn can take as long as they need for the next season. A month or two delay is a drop of water in the bucket. Who cares? They should take as long as they want. Because that’s the only way Nevermore will maintain the quality it’s been at in the long run. And that’s what the audience and the story, and the creators trying to make it the best it can be, deserve in the long run.

              I edit as I go. I kind of have to—I can’t just leave a scene I know is subpar, or that I don’t think is the quality that I want it to be at. It’s like it haunts me, I can’t get it out of my mind. So I always hated the advice “don’t edit as you go” as a way of keeping you on track and productive. I guess the thinking there is that if you edit as you go, it’ll take way longer to get to the end of your draft.

              Maybe true, but I never really cared how long it took. It’s not like I’m on any deadlines yet.

              Now, I’m nearing the end of my draft and I’m starting to see a bit of wisdom in that advice, though not for productivity’s sake—but rather because I’ve edited about half of my novel in random scenes interspersed with all the others. Some scenes are on rewrite 4 or 5 while others are on 1 or 2 and none of it matters because I’ll just have to go back through and edit it all again to make it flow together anyway.

              Had I left all the editing to the end of the process, I would’ve had to go through to edit once or twice. Combined with all the time I’ve already spent editing, I’ve probably read and reread some of these scenes like 7 times. I’ve gone a bit blind to my novel.

              Will I learn from this experience and stop editing as I go? No, probably not. Like I said, I feel pretty incapable of not doing it, but still, that piece of advice looks a whole lot less stupid now.

LENORE by Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849. (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1886). Illustrated by Henry Sandham.

              Subplots are incredibly important in longer works as they assist in pacing out the main plot, develop your characters, and give you opportunities to explore parts of your world you might not get to in the main plot.

              So where do subplots come from? Often, they are the character arcs of your side characters (or connected to them). Today we're mostly focusing on side characters that are allies or close with the MC. Let’s talk about it.

1. Developing your side character

There’s as many ways to create characters as there are characters themselves, but for the purposes of this post, I’ll take you through my favourite way to do it.

              You’re going to need: A goal, an objective, a disrupting characteristic, and a formative event.

Objective: The actionable (your character can work at it) objective they want. It is likely the same as your main character’s if they are allies, such as Sam also taking the ring to Mordor with Frodo, or Flynn also working towards taking Rapunzel to the lights.

The difference is in their…

Goal: To what end are they working towards this thing?

Flynn’s goal changes throughout Tangled, but his goal in the beginning is to get back his crown because he wants to “be something” more than he is (rich). Rapunzel wants her life to begin so she works towards seeing the lights, he wants the crown so he works towards getting her to the lights. Same objective, different goals.

Disrupting characteristic: What internal reason do they not already have what they want? While characters tend to face external antagonists that keep them from their goal, it’s their internal conflict that is the thing they work through to provide change by the end of the story.

Let’s go back to Flynn—his disrupting characteristic is that he believes he has to be rich to “be someone”, so he’s turned to a life of crime.

A disrupting characteristic can be either a personality trait (selfish, self-destructive, naïve, relentlessly optimistic) or a belief about the world (I need to be rich to be worthy, I need career success to make my parents proud) etc.

Lastly, the formative event: An event in your character’s past (usually childhood but depends on how old they are) that has inspired why they are they way they are. The beginnings of backstory.

2. Building an arc

From this character development, we can figure out what the arc is. Take your character’s disrupting characteristic—what do they need to internalize or figure out in order to get past it?

              If your disrupting characteristic is, like Flynn’s, that he believes to be rich to be worthy, his arc is going to be discovering self worth separate from monetary gain—which we see throughout the story as he falls for Rapunzel, and caring for her becomes his new purpose.

              Your character’s selfishness keeps them from forming the close connections they crave with others—so they need to be thrown into a situation in which caring for another person over themselves forces them to be unselfish.

              That gives us an A to B.

3. Add conflict

To get from A to B, characters go through a whole lot of conflict. The conflict your side character will go through relates directly to their goal and objective—so the subplot is intertwined closely with the main plot while still exploring this side character’s internal change and journey. The conflicts they face on their own will likely be internal—typically side characters don’t have separate external antagonists from their main characters, but that’s not a hard and fast rule.

              Speaking of, check out my posts on antagonists and conflicts here, here, and here.

The last thing I'll say is that subplots that don't necessarily revolve around the MC but are kind of their own journey until they come crashing together with each other (such as the two POV characters that only meet halfway through the book) should be created as their own MC--so essentially two plots.

Questions?

              Transitions are important in any work—they’re used to skip time or to another scene in order to maintain a good pacing and momentum, and hold the work together so it flows naturally. In order to properly pull off a transition, you need a set up and a payoff.

              The set up is the line before the new scene that places it in the context of the scene it is leaving. It will weave an element of the scene before into the scene to come.

              The payoff, then, is the scene that comes afterwards.

              Transitions can be as short as a sentence (or even one word, if you’re skilled like that) and guide the reader from one context to the next as though they are the same thing.

              Okay that all sounds really vague, so let’s do an example:

              Mary licked at her icecream cone, watching the boats sail across the horizon beyond her. Before long, her icecream was finished, and the sun dipped below the sails of the last boats to enter port. She found herself shivering subtly in the evening air, but ready to make her move.

              The icecream is the scene before—notice how the set up brings both the icecream and her eyes on the ocean (elements) into the next scene, which is that night has fallen and she’s moving on to the next thing.

              Without a transition sentence, this would read:

              Mary licked at her icecream cone, watching the boats sail across the horizon beyond her. Then, she found herself shivering subtly in the evening air, but ready to make her move.

              Without the guidance, this transition comes off as abrupt and surprising, and you’re left wondering what happened to the elements of the scene that came before.

The most obnoxious thing my writing teacher taught me every story needed, that I absolutely loathed studying in the moment and that only later, after months of resisting and fighting realized she was right, was something called the causal chain.

Simply put, the causal chain is the linked cause-and-effect that must logically connect every event, reaction, and beat that takes place in your story to the ones before and after.

The Causal Chain is exhausting to go through. It is infuriating when someone points out that an event or a character beat comes out of nowhere, unmoored from events around it.

It is profoundly necessary to learn and include because a cause-and-effect chain is what allows readers to follow your story logically which means they can start anticipating what happens next, which is what is required for a writer to be able to build suspense and cognitively engage the audience, to surprise them, and to not infuriate them with random coincidences that hurt or help the characters in order to clumsily advance the author's goals.

Lenore: *Proposes to Annabel*

pov: you're waking up and it's june 1st

Let’s put Annabel’s situation prospective here

You are a wealthy woman in the Victorian era, your father sends to go make nice with the “mad” daughter of a very prominent railway Empire family to gain her father’s favour, you go into this expecting it to be another boring chore requested of you, but you find the daughter to make for rather pleasant company. Un judging and carefree in behaviour, you grow fond of her and her mischievous unladylike behaviour. BUT NOT IN LIKE A GAY WAY OR ANYTHING, but alas you know you must leave her when the social season arrives, and when you bid her goodbye you tell her sour lies of your intentions with her that may have been at once true but no longer to make it so that she finds your leaving to be less painful, and as you leave she sees through all your lies and she screams at the top of her lungs calling you a coward and a liar. You do not look back for if you do you will weep.

You try to continue with life as it was before her. And then she dies. Violently in a burning fire, alone.

You are haunted.

A few weeks past perhaps a month or two.

A young man, her cousin arrives to your manner, your father is ecstatic for you to meet him, you play the part of a perfect lady again you smile and you bow offering him your hand and once you look up, you see the face of the woman you are wearing black for.

She is still mischievous and carefree and behaviour as she was before but you are bitter for you mourned the loss of the maiden named Lenore, and here she stands, still playful and full of bite.

So not only does this woman fake her death show up to your house unannounced she then asks for your hand and marriage, like yeah yeah that is the face you make for the situation 

Can you tell I hate coloring and backgrounds? I hope not 😭