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• Eyes flicking to someone’s mouth mid-sentence
• Forgetting what they were about to say
• Leaning in unconsciously
• Mirroring posture without realizing
• Smiling at something that wasn’t that funny
• Adjusting hair or clothes when the other person enters
• Noticing and remembering details no one else bothers to
• A pause before pulling their hand away
• Shoulders softening
• Looking away first and then back again
• Swallowing before speaking
• Voice lowering slightly
• Turning their body fully toward the other person
• A delayed reaction to a touch
If you're writing 18th century dialogue, this website lets you search words and phrases to double-check whether they were in use & meant what you intend. It doesn't include every period-accurate use of a word/phrase, but it certainly helped me separate genuine 18th century grammar from the vague tangle of 💬old-fashioned fancy-speak💬 I've internalized from TV and video games.
Cheek: a round dull pain that clocks your entire head in a different direction. It’s painful and throbs but the main effect of a punch to the cheek is how jarring it is. You feel it in your mouth, your teeth. And no matter how you position that punch the knuckles will always hit the jaw and cheek bones adding a frame of sharp pain in which the redness will be painted.
Temple: getting hit on the temple pushes your head to the side rather than turning it. It’s disorienting because it leaves you very off balance. It essentially feels like a bad pressure headache, like when you have a sinus infection on a plane, but in one spot and on the outside. It’s sharp in the middle and radiates outward and even after the initial impact it pulses like an earthquake epicenter. It easily causes long lasting headaches and is the most likely of these examples to cause a concussion.
Eye: this is a weird one. The fist doesn’t fit within the eye socket so either the knuckles on the brow and cheeks bones protect the actual eye or they don’t. The former option gives a full spreading pain below the eye which results in the classic black eye look and a sharp pain on your brow similar to hitting your shin on the couch. The latter option, well bad things can happen when a hard fast object makes direct contact with your eye but for the sake of this it feels like a vacuum bc the concave shape is being covered and pressurized. The eye feels pushed back and pulled forward all at once. It doesn’t necessarily hurt that bad for that long unless the punch was meant to do damage. I’m fortunate to say I don’t know what it would feel like then.
Nose: remember that prank kids used to pull where they’d line up their hands with their nose, push them in one direction and crack a knuckle at the same time to pretend to break their nose? Yeah that’s what it looks like when someone punches you from the side in the nose, except it’s someone else’s hand and your nose makes the sound instead of their knuckle. It’s just like breaking any bone where you hear it and feel the action if it being done but that moment of shock blankets you for a split second until all the pain comes rushing back. It’s sharp and needlelike and can give you black eyes just to add insult to injury. If you get hit in the nose from the front it’s like the uncomfortableness of when you have to sneeze but can’t. Except that feeling took all the steroids and is now using your face as a punching bag to express its roid rage. It crackles outward like static electricity under your skin, your eyesight gets fuzzy and you can’t tell if it’s because you’re tearing up, it’s hard to open your eyes, or you’re momentarily stunned and blinded. Just know it’s all three. I find that this one knocks the wind out of you the most. Gotta remind yourself to breathe just don’t try to do it through your nose.
If you really want to know what this feels like I’d suggest joining a mixed martial arts because they’ll teach you correct form and power distribution and you can spar with pads and actually hit each other.
I’d also recommend learning what it feels like to punch someone in the face. It’s much more fun and pretty damn cathartic when they deserve it.
(this came out of a conversation in the comments on a previous post about an author threatening to stop updating a fic because of lack of engagement)
So there’s this idea that fic writers should write for themselves and not care too much about stats or engagement,
and i totally get the sentiment behind that. if writing becomes entirely about stats and external validation, something important does get lost - creative freedom and joy, conviction in your own writing
but i also think:
“i write for myself, but i post for others.”
because posting fic is not only self-expression. it’s social. ao3 is called an archive, but emotionally it often functions as a community space.
people post for connection, for participation, for others to bear witness to their pain and trauma and grief,
and i don’t think most people are asking to be admired so much as acknowledged. there’s something deeply human about wanting another person to encounter something that mattered to you and go:
“ok, yeah, I see what you were trying to say. I see you.”
especially because fanfic is often people processing very real feelings through fictional characters at a safe distance, one step removed,
and then uploading that deeply personal thing into a shared archive and hoping somebody else might connect with it.
And i think that’s why it hurts so much when you summon up the courage and post a fic into the void and you get nothing back,
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ID: A screenshot of tags left on the tumblr post. They read "#it's actually kind of a reverse Chekhov's Gun #Chekhov's Gun says "If there is setup there must be payoff" #Asimov's Tail says "if there is payoff there must be setup" #and I think the tail is also important #a tail is not something you'd expect to see on a character unless explicitly pointed out #someone stepping on the tail not only reveals its existence but also tells us things about it #eg it's floor length sensitive and the character either can't or won't keep it out of the way of foot traffic #the upshot seems to be "acclimatise your audience to things they don't understand before you use them" #you don't need to explain how a gun on the mantelpiece works in the same way you need to explain how your protagonist's tail does" End ID.
you can kinda tell when a writer has spent a lot of time around kids bc they avoid most of the pitfalls that come with writing children. namely, not giving them a too cutesy or twee voice but making them sound more like extremely weird little adults. kids playing pretend will almost never cutely slot into some romantic scenario for the adults' benefit bc the adults are usually too busy cleaning up or wondering what the fuck is wrong with their child. kids also have surprisingly stringent hangups ranging from very petty grievances to downright chauvinist gender roles, more often than not the result of a tragic education but sometimes far surpassing what they were taught in intensity. what im saying is there's nothing inherently wrong with treating fictional kids as stock characters but it's always quite nice to see when they aren't
It's extremely common for very young children to suddenly say something extremely cogent and articulate, that's jarringly inconsistent with their normal speech. This is usually something that they heard an adult say recently. A kid will spend ten minutes telling you a story about how they fought a wolf yesterday using simple sentences of fifty cent words, then nibble a snack, wrinkle their nose and say something like "I feel like Mum was overenthusiastic with the salt today, and not for the first time either" before going back to their clumsy story. (They do understand what they're saying when they do this. Kids' communication is usually held back by their vocabulary and pronunciation, not their understanding.)
Young kids are also a lot more socially aware than people give them credit for. Young children are perfectly aware that adults don't take them seriously. They know when their parents don't actually like them. They listen and remember when adults talk about them while they're in the room. Kids will develop basic abilities to charm etc. from babyhood and will begin experimenting with social norms and concepts of deception, appropriate information, and acceptable language and attitudes in toddlerhood. By the time a kid is five or six, they have solid social strategies for relating to adults and separate ones fr relating to their peers, that they'll continue to refine for the rest of their lives. They will also say completely off the wall shit because they don't have the context to know what is and isn't considered super fucked up yet.
By the time a kid is eight or nine, their main difference from adults is in experience, interests, and ability for long-term focus. An eight year old can think as intelligently and coherently as a thirty year old, they just have less experience and information to draw from, and are likely interested in very different things. They're also likely still slightly hamstrung by vocabulary and literacy, though much less so than a younger kid.
Teens will behave like adults who have little power (a teen is often at the mercy of their parents and the state and rarely taken seriously, which is extremely frustrating) and who are high stress and mid-crisis, because they're going through a transitory period where their bodies and moods are changing and are having to constantly learn and adjust; a fourteen year old in a stable situation will act pretty much like a thirty year old with an oppressive boss who's just left a tumultuous relationship.
#oh is *that* why i feel 14 again after my fiance broke things off with me and i had to move halfway across the continent back in with my ma?
Yeah that's just what humans feel and act like when they're unmoored and powerless and unpredictably changing. Teenagers are pretty much constantly unmoored and powerless and unpredictably changing, and react reasonably to those circumstances.
What with bucket hats, bare midriffs, and flared jeans having been resurrected by some irresponsible necromancer with frosted tips, I figure there’s no better time to resurrect some of my favorite Y2K fonts. I typically only see the same three or four pop up in discussions on the subject, so maybe this will be helpful to nostalgic designers. Click though for links.
Honorable mention to Yeoman Jack, an excellent free modern face by Iconian that looks more like it’s from the early 2000s than many of their actually 20 year old fonts. I tried to stick to fonts that I was pretty sure were not based on an existing typeface. I only left out Typodermic because Ray Larabie’s work is already so popular and well known, but Neuropol is obviously a classic. Check out his stuff if you’re nor familiar.
I had to explain suspension of disbelief to someone recently. Not in an academic context. Not as part of some obscure narratology deep-dive where you'd expect to haul out the terminology. As a concept. As in, I had to explain that it was a real thing, with a name, that fiction has depended on since fiction existed. I then had to sit with the fact that I'd had to do that at all, which was its own particular flavor of psychic damage.
That conversation is what finally made me write this, because it confirmed something I've been stewing over for a while: we are losing basic craft vocabulary. Not in some slow, graceful erosion — in a landslide, and the way we talk about fiction is getting measurably worse because of it. People are not engaging with stories anymore. They are performing autopsies on them, and they are somehow still getting the cause of death wrong.
If you've been around my blog for any length of time, you already know I talk about this constantly. Critical thinking, media literacy, art history, the works. I am not positioning myself as the authority on fiction. What I am is someone who has spent a long time studying, consuming, and making art across mediums, centuries, and several increasingly unhinged academic papers, and I have gotten tired enough of watching foundational concepts vanish from the conversation that I'm going to start putting them back. Field notes. That's all this is.
So. Suspension of disbelief.
The term comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817, though the tradition of thinking about belief in fiction — what scholars call 'belief talk' — goes back to Aristotle and has never really stopped evolving.
The idea is not complicated: if a writer puts enough human truth into a story — real emotion, real stakes, real psychological texture — the reader will voluntarily set aside their skepticism about the implausible parts. That word is doing all the heavy lifting. Voluntarily. The reader chooses to believe. The writer earns that choice. It is not a trick and it is not a con. It is a contract. The story says meet me halfway, and the audience says fine, but make it worth the walk.
Suspension of disbelief is not "this must be realistic." It is "this feels coherent enough that I am willing to emotionally buy in."
Nobody promised anyone a logistics simulation.
Now — and this matters — the contract does not look identical across mediums. Film has the advantage of image and sound working simultaneously; a score, a camera angle, a performance can accomplish in seconds what prose needs entire paragraphs to construct. Games have agency, which is functionally a cheat code for immersion, because the player is far too occupied with the immediate business of not dying to conduct a thorough audit of the supply chain. Prose, meanwhile, has what I'd argue is the most powerful tool of the three: interiority. Direct, unmediated access to psychology. To the full contradictory mess of a person thinking, wanting, rationalizing, and lying to themselves in real time. That kind of intimacy is an enormous deposit into the trust account, and it is why character-driven fiction can survive structural imperfections that would be fatal in any other medium.
The principle, however, is the same everywhere: the story makes promises, and the audience agrees to believe for as long as those promises hold.
Here is what people miss when they flatten this into a binary of "it broke" or "it didn't." It is not a switch. It is a bank account. Genre sets your opening balance. Every choice the creator makes either deposits or withdraws. And the currency is not realism.
It's trust.
Take Fallout. Two-hundred-year-old Salisbury Steak sits on a shelf in pristine condition. Fancy Lads Snack Cakes have survived nuclear holocaust with their packaging intact. Blamco Mac and Cheese waits patiently in a kitchen cabinet as though the apocalypse were a minor inconvenience it chose not to acknowledge. Nobody — and I cannot stress this enough — is running a functioning agricultural system in the Commonwealth. If you approach this setting as a logistics problem, the entire world collapses before the player has finished leaving Vault 111.
But Fallout is not asking you to believe in its food distribution network. It is asking you to buy into the aesthetic: a retrofuturist satire of American consumer culture so grotesquely resilient that even nuclear annihilation could not kill the branding. The preserved food is not a plot hole. It is the thesis. The tone is internally consistent, the satire is coherent, and frankly, the Blamco Mac and Cheese is performing more thematic labor than most prestige dramas manage across an entire season. You do not need the agriculture to make sense. The world has already told you what it is. If you weren't listening, that is not the story's failure.
Now consider Jurassic Park. The raptors are too large. The dilophosaurus did not, in fact, possess the charming neck frill, nor was it in the habit of spitting venom with what can only be described as theatrical conviction. The entire premise of the T-Rex's motion-based vision is scientifically dubious at best. People have been cataloguing these inaccuracies for thirty years, and I need those people to understand that they have entirely missed the point.
Not because accuracy is irrelevant. Because immersion is the operative standard here, and Spielberg met it. The trembling water in the glass. The pacing. The sound design. The escalating, sickening sense that hubris has purchased itself a very expensive catastrophe. You are not conducting a paleontological compliance review while watching that film. You are thinking about whether those children are going to survive. The internal logic is airtight: a rich man mistook control for mastery, the systems failed, and nature reasserted itself. The dinosaurs do not need to be correct. The story needs to be coherent. It is.
Then there is Stephen King, and I say this as someone who has been personally and repeatedly victimized by the man's body of work for the better part of her adult life: he gets dragged for his endings, and he frequently deserves it. IT. The Stand. Under the Dome. The catalogue of grievances is extensive and not entirely unjustified.
And yet people read a thousand pages of Stephen King and then immediately pick up the next one as though they have learned nothing at all.
Because his character work deposits so much into that bank account that by the time the ending wobbles, it barely matters. That is prose doing what only prose can do — you have been living inside these characters' heads for eight hundred pages. You know how they think. You know what they fear. You know the specific small humiliations and private losses that made them who they are. By the time the cosmic clown situation devolves or the dome turns out to be what it turns out to be, you were already in. Emotional investment subsidized structural imperfection, and you will do it again next book, because you are a fool who apparently enjoys this. As am I. We are not here to discuss my personal failings.
That is suspension of disbelief working exactly as intended.
The mechanism is not accuracy. It is investment.
And here is where I want to extend some grace, because I understand why people have started engaging with fiction like hostile witnesses at a deposition. I do it too. I catch myself doing it more than I'd like to admit. We live in a culture where credulity has genuine consequences — where "I believed something that turned out to be false" is not a harmless embarrassment but a material danger. The reflex to fact-check, to interrogate, to distrust the frame — that is a survival skill in 2026. Of course it bleeds into fiction. Of course people bring the same adversarial posture to a novel that they bring to a headline. The muscle is the same. They cannot turn it off.
But fiction is not journalism, and reading fiction well is its own skill. It requires the ability to modulate your expectations across genres — to understand that a retrofuturist satire, a gothic romance, a courtroom procedural, and a film about a billionaire's dinosaur park are not making the same contract with you. They do not succeed or fail by the same criteria. I spent years studying art history, and one of the first things the discipline teaches you is to read a work within the terms it is actually setting. A medieval painting does not fail because the perspective is "wrong." The artist was not attempting to simulate three-dimensional space for the eventual approval of someone on the internet. They were mapping spiritual hierarchy. The contract was theological, not literal. A Baroque altarpiece is not bad because the anatomy is exaggerated — the exaggeration is devotional. It is the point.
You learn, if you are paying attention, to ask what a work is doing on its own terms. Not whether it would survive cross-examination by the most determined pedant in the room.
Which brings me to the irony I find most exhausting. The same people who insist on total procedural fidelity in fiction — who will derail an entire discussion to point out that a speculative world's legal system does not perfectly mirror real-world municipal code — are often producing the least coherent critique in the conversation. "That's not how it works" is not analysis. It is an observation dressed up as insight. It tells you nothing about whether the story succeeds on its own terms, whether the tone holds, whether the characters earn their arcs, whether the thematic architecture is sound. It is the critical equivalent of checking someone's bibliography without reading the paper.
A story does not break because it departs from reality. It breaks when it departs from itself.
Fiction is not asking for submission. It is asking for trust.
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Hey y’all I have an announcement! My web app that I’ve been working on, Afro Index, is now live! It’s a visual reference library of Black hairstyles, for artist, animators, writers, and anyone who wants to learn more about them!
Check it out at afroindex.org! 💛✨
A reference library for Black hairstyles with accurate naming,
structured filtering, and curated reference images.
I want to talk about policing the use of AI in creative writing fan spaces any why attempting to investigate and punish people this is a terrible idea.
Now let me be clear - Gen AI is awful and most people agree that it has no place in creative spaces, but that's besides the point. I'm not here to debate AI in creative spaces, I'm here to talk about the moderators who feel the need to investigate and punish writers who they believe use AI.
I'm going to start by reminding people of two important things:
There is no way for anyone to know for certain if someone is using AI to write - unless they tell you they are. The common "tells" that are cited online are found in the work of people who have excellent control of functional grammar, good vocabularies, and an excellent control of sentence structure. AI is trained on the work of talented writers.
There is no way for an author to defend themselves against a claim that they are using AI, especially in an online environment. Nor should an author have to. The rule should not be "prove you are innocent or we will find you guilty!"
I feel very passionately about this and have for quite some time. I've seen fandom witch hunts before, and I know how easy it is for some people to climb to moral high ground and punish those they believe are doing the wrong thing.
My friend recently chose to leave a discord server after the mod team contacted them to announce that there had been reports made by people who wished to be anonymous who suspected their work was AI generated. The mods explained that they had investigated these claims by looking over their writing, and although they admitted they could not be 100% certain the work contained AI, they were issuing a strike/warning to them in accordance with their discord rules because they believed they might have.
The investigation involved them reading some of their work.
That was it.
They read their work and decided that, in their own words, they thought it might be AI so they were issuing a strike. They then proceeded to delete the writing they had shared on the server without any opportunity for this person to retrieve it.
There was no communication prior to them issuing a strike. My friend was not told about these accusations ahead of time, the moderators did not talk to them about the accusations or raise concerns, and did not stop to ask themselves why the people making these claims wished to do so anonymously.
Perhaps if they had, they would have learned that members of their discord had been harassing this person via Tumblr anons about this issue. Instead they chose to give the bullies anonymity, to deny a writer a chance to have open communication, and issued a punishment for a rule infraction that they themselves admitted they could not be certain had been broken.
When my friend gave the names of beta readers and editors who had worked with her in real time, these moderators chose not to engage with them or seek clarification, and instead doubled down and tried to justify their decision.
My friend asked for the evidence they had that their work contained AI content, and it was not provided to them. Instead they supplied a generic statement about how they had made their decision based on their use of syntax, grammar, tone, and word choice was rolled out. But again, they did not give examples or explain this.
As someone who admins and mods several creative spaces, this kind of behaviour worries me. Actually, it terrifies me. Because anyone can be next: you, me, the brand new writer eager to share their work, or the fandom oldie.
It sets a dangerous precedent for fan spaces and the policing of creative works, because it leaves writers in these spaces open to harassment, bullying, intimidation, and censorship under the guise of keeping fan spaces "AI Free". Anyone can accuse someone of using AI to write, and this can be used to bully people out of fan spaces.
Moderators are supposed to keep fan spaces safe for members, not take it upon themselves to play detective and police creative works in case someone is using AI. In fact, mods taking it upon themselves to police writers in fan spaces by handing out warnings and bans are making fan spaces unsafe and encouraging social exclusion. This kind of behaviour will actively scare and intimidate writers into simply walking away - because who wants to hear an accusation that their work is AI?
Facilitating AI witch hunts is killing fan spaces.
Attempting to police the writing of others is alienating writers.
And if you think someone is using AI to write, don't try to be a detective, just click away and stop reading their work.
This is such an important topic — and I want to help recontextualize it in a way that might make why this behavior is so problematic really hit home for people. Because I've seen a lot of these same arguments on reddit and other creative spaces of "guilty until proven innocent."
So putting aside the not-so-gentle slide the argument of "guilty until proven innocent" is into fascist thinking (which is honestly another good reason to sit and re-evaluate this position if you have it), here we go.
I'm a labor organizer. I've not been terribly vocal about that on tumblr, but that's been my job for the last 10 years, and so I'm approaching this through a lens of workplace justice to highlight just how fucked up it is to "do an investigation" that never involves asking the accused a single goddamn question.
Just imagine for me showing up to work one day, and your boss pulls you into their office. You sit down, maybe a little nervous, and your boss slides a piece of paper across the desk stating you have been formally written up and this is your first of three strikes. Three strikes and you're fired.
The offense? A coworker claimed they felt like you were eating someone else's lunch.
No one ever stopped to ask you, "are you eating coworker's lunch?" The person who's lunch was being eaten was also never asked if their lunch was being eaten. All the mattered was the feelings of the person who reported it, and the boss who decided well, you could have done it and so they issued you formal discipline, and now you are that much closer to being out of a job.
But the thing is, you never ate anyone's lunch. You make your own lunch, it's clearly labeled "my own fucking lunch" — yet none of that mattered, and no one even bothered to ask.
You'd be furious, right? That's not what a proper investigation is. The standard in any space should not be: we are presumed guilty and must, therefore, prove our innocence. But in my fictional scenario — and in the real life scenario above — the accused was never even granted the chance to prove their innocence. In my fictional scenario, I'd be writing up the grievance yesterday and I would fight that case all the way to arbitration and I'd fucking win in five minutes.
The notion that we must police other people's creative works in creative spaces and issue strikes (especially without doing any actual fucking investigation that is an actual fucking investigation) is harmful and you know what, fuck it, I'm not gonna go soft on anyone's ass — it promotes fascist thinking. If you engage in this type of behavior, if you believe that people must prove their innocence to you (while denying them the opportunity to do so), you are that much closer to being a fascist. You're not saving creativity, you're not a champion of what is just and good in this world.
I got another spam comment today on AO3, and I want to share it as a PSA. But before I do, I want you to understand that you SHOULD NOT DO what this comment is asking. Ok? Ok.
See that bit at the bottom? Don't do that. Insert ParamedicGuy.gif going "Don't."
Other malicious spam comments I've gotten seemed designed to make an author question their writing, or outright encourage them to delete their stories from AO3. This one is different, in that it tries to get you to destroy the work on your own computer.
If you ran that command, it basically locates your Documents folder, then deletes everything in it, including all subfolders. It also does it without any prompt, so you have no chance to second guess your actions.
This is just fucking trolling.
Coincidentally, we just did training on a cyberattack similar to this, called a ClickFix attack. You can read about how that works here.
As a general rule, if ANYONE or ANY WEBSITE tells you unsolicited* to do anything in Powershell, CMD RUN, command prompt, shell command, or something similar, DON'T.
*There are legit reasons for running commands in PowerShell or the command prompt, but in those cases you are likely seeking out a solution to a problem you are already experiencing. Don't just run random commands on your computer as recommended by some unlogged-in guest on a fan fiction site.
Always think and consider before taking action, and get a second opinion from a trusted source. When I got this comment I was pretty sure what the command would do, and it took me about three seconds of googling to confirm it.
I'd like to add: This kind of attack also relies on you saving everything to the folders that Windows sets up for you (the folders Documents, Pictures, etc. for your user). And I just want everyone to know.
You don't have to use those.
You can set up your own folder system anywhere else on the hard drive.
I know thanks to smartphones and tablets obscuring its existence, people don't generally know about the folder system anymore, but everything on any computer system (including smartphones, tablets, consoles, cloud servers etc) is organized in a system of nested folders.
And you can be the master of that system.
And also make it so any attacker (including e.g. viruses) trying to delete or even share your files will have a hard time finding them.
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Advice and tips on how to make your character feel more genuine/real
- Pettiness and shallowness. Obviously it can manifest in different ways, but IRL everyone has at least one or two little things that they're a bit surface level and "Just because!" about. Be it clothes, how they do certain rituals, what color m&ms they prefer ect ect. It can be little details or even major characteristics, and depending on which (and what) they are, it can be really telling about the character! Plus, it just adds a little extra depth and fun. Some examples including but not limited to: Being fussy over getting their clothes wet or dirty, only preferring some items because they look good, insisting on doing some action or tradition exactly a certain way, disliking an aspect of a thing or a person because they just don't like it, and so on. Obviously the big worldview points like morality and beliefs are very important, but when you've figured those out, take a moment to think about the smaller, everyday things your character feels about the world around them. No matter how good or wise a person is, they'll still always have some little thing that they can't give some profound noble answer to. Use this to your advantage to explore your character's shortcomings or flaws!
(In the same vein, Pet peeves is another detail that can flesh out a character!)
- How does your character perceive things? What do they notice about people first? How would they talk about, or describe another person to someone, if asked? How would they describe themself? And why? Just some things to consider. If your character maps out all the little details and deeply analyzes everything they see, it'll show in their interactions very differently than, for example, if they have the perception of a cabbage and are more oblivious than the love interest in a teen drama that the writers are stretching out for five seasons for no reason. Ykno.
- Additionally: what's their opinion of the people around them? Or if you've already mapped that out, what's their opinion of people they've never met before, or people who aren't in their immediate bubble, friends of friends, relatives of relatives, neighbours, or celebrities, mythical/historical figures and so on. Delve into hypotheticals sometimes, it can help you exercise your knowledge of the character. Even if none of these encounters or situations would happen in Canon.
- I'm sure you've already figured out what your character is most passionate about, ykno, whatever drives the story and impacts their relationships with other characters. But how about stuff they really don't care to think about? Just shrug? Not interesting? Doesn't pay attention to this? What is low on their priorities? It doesn't have to be negative (but can be!), it can just be "Meh", or something your character hasn't even noticed before, simply because it's not in their thoughtscape to think about.
- Does your character have any of those "What? I thought everyone did that/thought that/was like that!" - things? What do they take for granted, or weren't aware isn't a universal experience? Did they have a wildly different experience with something that most other characters hadn't even thought of? And yes I understand this is good for exploring trauma and other angsty things, but besides the obvious, think about maybe something that could be related to your character's species/living environment/abilities/opinions ect. This is great for exploring cultural differences, and anything that takes place in a fantasy setting. Very useful for villains and heroes alike! It's insightful. Everyone has small little perceptive differences or big and small thoughts that for some reason just haven't been properly challenged yet. Or brought up even. For whatever reason. Explore maybe what that reason could be, and figure out why it's been unchallenged for so long.
- Imperfections. Little divergences. It's fully possible to write a compelling and genuine feeling character using just archetypes, if you really explore them deeply. And whether you're doing that or not, think about the lines and molds you've set your character into, and let them spill out of them a little bit. Can be one huge aspect or one teensy detail, but make some diversion. Some crack in the picture. Doesn't have to be a flaw but can be! Just have some little aspects that set them apart and make the character themself. Get weird with it. Getting weird is one huge way you can truly make a character stand out and feel more unique and, oddly enough, genuine and real. Actual people have little oddities or things that don't line up with everything else about their person. And again it doesn't necessarily have to be anything big or shocking, in fact I'd argue it's even better if sometimes it's just a small, very ordinary, humanizing detail. Maybe unexpected, or maybe just something that doesn't factor into the surface image your character has. Think about characters similar to yours that you see often. What traits do they all share, or most usually have? Think about the kinds of people your character is inspired by. What are they often like? Make a diversion from that. Make multiple even? It can be the most random thing but think about it, even if you threw a dart at a wall of sticky notes, really chew out what this little thing says about your character. And focus on little cracks, imperfections, diversions and other odd details of your character. Over time they can grow bigger, or maybe not.
- Keep a clear picture of who your character is. Sounds obvious but I'll elaborate. Your character will obviously change and develop over the time you're working on them and whatever story events take place but I think it's very important to keep in mind who they fundamentally are. Basically I'm saying that try to keep them in character, yes even if you did drastic character development, you can still show that it's the same person in other ways even if one of their core traits was flipped. Be aware of what things will never change about your character no matter what they'd go through. Keep some consistency. Consistency matters alot in making a character seem genuine and, ykno, a good character. Even if that consistent trait is that they're inconsistent! The character can be that, yes, but as their creator, you should still keep sights of what's consistent for this character, you feel? If your character is a glunk of slime that slips out of it's container constantly and subsequently molds into whatever situation it gets put in, that's not really a character, that's.. Idk, plot device..? I know this may sound contradicting to my previous point but I fully think that, and this one can and should coexist.
You need to simultaneously be aware of the ways your character will differ from something and be fluid, and the ways your character will not bend, and cannot become. It's simply a matter of knowing their boundaries and restrictions, knowing which way they can lean and which way not. Obviously this'll be up to you as their creator, bc yeah you're allowed to drastically edit your character if you feel like it's for the better, but try to commit to that change then. Don't let the character slip from your hands, or let the story bend them into whatever shape it needs to make the plot go forward. Your character, and more importantly you, should be in control of that.
I emphasize the point of you controlling your character and not the other way around also. I've seen some character owners slip into "Well it's just what the character would do! I can't help it, it'd be out of character if they didn't do x!" even if the thing is completely awful, doesn't fit, or would ruin an aspect of the story. A smart writer will know how to work with your character's traits in a way that prevents them from running off the tracks and becoming their own little gremlin, while also complying with the story. Respect your character's.. Character, while also respecting yourself and the point of the story. This is even more crucial if it's a roleplay character, by the way..
I'm just saying, find ways to write the story in cooperation with your character. That means knowing what situations to avoid and which ones to steer for, in order to keep your character functioning with the plot and other characters. Sometimes you simply have to prevent some event from happening, or some characters from ever meeting, for the sole reason that it wouldn't make the story work the way it should. Or the way you want it to. You hold the pencil, be aware of what that means
It also ties neatly into the simplest version of the formula for getting people emotionally engaged with your characters: or how to build the moment in which your character starts moving from their initial state to the state in which they'll start changing their own lives.
First, you figure out the one important thing the character believes that they're wrong about. There's usually a core misperception that they haven't examined. Once they're forced to engage with it, it'll start to change everything about their perception of the world they're inhabiting and/or the people in it.
Then, as V.E. says, you identify the character's great desire and their great fear: the thing that character wants more than anything, and the thing or situation that terrifies them, and that they'll go to any lengths to avoid.
And having identified these two objects or situations, you build a situation in which the two forces will be in close, direct opposition to one another... then drop the character down in between them, and squeeze. Those two opposing forces become the jaws of a vise... and you crank the vise more and more tightly closed until the character has no choice but to acknowledge those opposing forces, and start (even in a small way) to deal with the pressure being exerted and push their way through.
This does not have to be, initially, a great climactic moment. In fact, it works better if it's not. It's more effective if your character has a brief low-intensity brush with these conditions-in-conflict early on. That way, when your big resolution scene comes along about two-thirds or three-quarters of the way along through the story arc, you'll have set up a resonance between that earlier hint or intimation of what's to come, and the really big blowoff. Your readers will recognize the resonance—the throb of tension between the two occurrences, like the vibration of a plucked string—and will find satisfaction both in the true resolution having been partially telegraphed earlier, and in how it's now being experienced and resolved in full.
This approach also allows you to set up more minor resonances between the realization of the conflict and its final resolution. These can serve to bind the structure of the work more closely together: to make it look (and be) less like a series of loosely strung-together plot events, and more like a unified whole, in which ripples of story business flow backwards and forwards, interpenetrating and influencing one another, and hinting at the big one to come.
But none of this can happen until the paired and opposing what-do-they-most-desire, what-do-they-most-fear axes have been defined. So that's a subject it's smart to spend some while thinking about (and for all your characters, not just the major ones), to be sure you're getting it right.
It's not unusual to get the wrong answers, or merely superficial ones, while you're still working out what's actually going on with the characters. So take your time. Eventually you'll find a set of answers that feel unquestionably right... and you can then nail those down in your notes and get on with making the kind of "good trouble" for your characters that will see them made complete.
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