Speak, Live, Write

Trolltunga, Norway

Tucked away between fjords, villages and towns, you will find some of the most beautiful and breathtaking rock formations in Norway. They have been here for thousands of years, shaped and battered by the Ice Ages and the elements.

Walking in the mountains gives you a feeling of freedom, a feeling of overcoming and conquering. Each mountain and each summit has its own personality, charm and identity. Trolltunga rock in Norway has all this in abundance; there is no other rock formation quite like Trolltunga, it is without equal.

For each step you take, it is as if you are getting closer and closer to a kingdom of the trolls, carved in stone and ready to welcome you. Mythical, majestic and with a magical atmosphere – far up in the mountains.

You do not need to travel for days to enter Western Norway’s mountain country. If you are looking for bigger challenges than you will find in the mountains around Bergen, we recommend a trip to the Hardanger region, and more specifically to the Skjeggedal valley, not far from the industrial town of Odda.

It is here that you start the hike up to Trolltunga rock, one of the most spectacular rock formations in Norway. It is situated at 1,100 metres above sea level and around 700 metres above Ringedalsvannet lake in Skjeggedal.

People come here from all over the world to go on the impressive walk to Trolltunga, a walk that has become world famous in recent years as a result of international media coverage. Roughly 40,000 people a year choose to hike up Trolltunga during the short summer season.

Read more here

Character Ideas:

Character creation masterpost

Character Alignment Chart

More character alignment descriptions

Muslim Character questions

Characters with magical powers

Building a new character advice

How to create a character for an online or tabletop RPG (also a good guide on creating characters in general)

Royalty/nobility TV Tropes page

Basic character profile

OC masterpost

Random character generators - (1), (2), (3), (4)

D&D Character Building Tool

Character Design Ideas:

How clothing affects a character’s personality

Character Design Inspiration blog

Concept art, fan art, cool art to be inspired by

Character design references and inspiration

Sources for POC character design ideas and models

Create your own character model using HeroForge

For horned characters

Body and hair types guide

Random outfit generator

Naming Help:

Amazing site with an endless amount of naming resources

General advice on avoiding naming appropriation

Hispanic Surnames

Gothic Victorian names

Huge master list for character things in general

Masterlist of names of all types - including but not limited to ancient/old world names, Celtic, African, Northern European, Southern and Central American Native names, Japanese, Chinese, Mongolian, Polynesian, and more

Another name masterlist

How to pick a character name guide

Yet another names masterlist

Creating Background/backstory:

Character Sheet/Development Sheet

Another character development list

In-depth character personality, motivations and traits sheet

320 talents and passions for characters

On writing likes and dislikes that aren’t frivolous

Why you should write non-human characters non-conforming to the gender binary

Stereotypes, tropes, and archetypes

Random backstory generator

Assassin and thief character tropes to avoid

Character Interactions and putting your character into your world/story:

Comparing character height/height references

Characters who are scientists and writing about them doing science

Describing what different voices sound like

Describing skin tones

Writing friendship interactions that are platonic

Why having one character knock their friend unconscious to prevent them from doing something is a bad idea

Advice on shipping OCs with canon characters and what to avoid doing

Sweet Polly Oliver and Sweet on Polly Oliver situations (think of Disney’s Mulan for an example)

How to write multiple viewpoints/juggling a main cast of more than 4 to 6 characters

How to make readers care about your morally gray hero/anti-hero

On platonic OC and canon character relationships

How to avoid Godmodding in RPs

When it’s cheap to kill off a character

Writing dialogue

Things you shouldn’t do to canon characters

Avoiding purple prose in writing and RPs

Slang resources

Dialogue tips

Websites to chart your story/plot/character relationships

Like. Look at the movement of the water. The color. They’re not in a tank. That’s the motherfucking ocean. Or at least, a large closed off area in the ocean. The man in the video is on some sort of raft.

But those dolphins know the dude well enough to beach right next to him, and while I’m no expert in dolphin-ese, I know enough to make a pretty solid guess that those dolphins are trying to communicate with that clarinet (dolphins have their own languages! And I think the fast, lilting notes of the song combined with the clarinet’s natural sound mimics a dolphin’s clicks and chirps pretty well, all things considered)

I tried to make this brief, but I think I failed.

Today on Twitter and Tumblr, I posted about piracy and the effect it had had on the publishing side of the Raven Cycle. Several readers lashed out at me and asked why I did not merely release an 11,000 word story for free if the publisher had decided not to release it — further, they noted, other “big name authors” released “loads” of free content and since I didn’t release “loads” of things for free, surely this meant I just was in it for the money.

I don’t have a lot to add to the piracy commentary that is already up, other than the fate of the Raven Cycle and all its extras are up to my U.S. publisher and so therefore the discussion is weighted toward U.S. buyers. 

And I’m not going to speak to the giving away art for free business. The internet has discussed this a lot already, and the fact is that if you take away a paying-for-art model, you end up only getting art from people who can afford to work in their spare time or art that is supported by patrons — both models that we have seen before, both models that end up giving you art produced by and for a homogenous and upper class group. So moving on.

What I will speak to is the “loads” of free content business, because I haven’t addressed this before. I know there are authors who do release loads of free content. Stories of all lengths. Still other authors release loads of extra content available for a low cost, stories and novellas, etc. I can very much see how this is thrilling to readers. However, this will never be me, for four reasons:

1. I am bad at thinking episodically. I think of my novels in novel-shape, and it is difficult for me to think of stories that do not exist within that plotline. Just write Gansey and Blue going grocery shopping, urge readers, but I can’t think of how to make that into a satisfying story shape that will not diminish the original novels, introduce world-building that I will later regret, and be satisfying in one sitting. So ideas come to me very rarely that fit the idea of an extra. 

2. My deleted scenes are 99% bad versions of scenes that exist in the novel. They are not me deciding to cut a scene of Gansey and Blue going grocery shopping. They are me trying five different settings for the same conversation. They’re not extra, they’re less. 

3. I have always been a slow or at least very exclusive writer. I have a year between books and it takes me all of that time to write them, to think about them, to conceptualize them. I hear about some writers who write their contracted novels and then, in addition, write 10,000 word fanfics. HOW. I am not that person. If I try to write any faster, or write two things at the same time, all that happens is that I have to delete bad words twice as often, or end up writing the same story with two different titles. 

4. I am even slower now. I had not posted about my health crisis, because I didn’t want to be that person who talked about their gout at a party, but here it is. Folks who follow me on the internet may have noticed over the past several years that I was posting with increasing frequency about migraines and brain fog. In June, I grew rapidly ill at a seminar and collapsed (I think there’s still a photo of me lying on pavement behind the scenes). I had to be shipped home, canceled a tour for the first time ever, and then spent several weeks trying to get better. I did, sort of — but even weeks later, I wasn’t really better. I had hives all over my body. My hair was falling out. I was weirdly missing abstract thought — some days I could remember my home address, but I couldn’t say it out loud. I also couldn’t stay awake. I had to sleep every four hours, and every time I ate food, I got even more tired. And when I did sleep, it wasn’t real sleep. A drugged, enchanted, dreamless, sick sleep. There are photos all over the internet of me pulled over by the side of the interstate to sleep because when a reaction hit, there was no option. There is also a photo of my crumpled Mitsubishi that happened when I was too tired to avoid the tractor trailer that ran into me on the highway. I should’ve realized sooner that I was having an immune reaction, but it snuck up slowly. Bloodwork ruled out cancer and lupus, but showed that I had no immune system left whatsoever. Since then, I’ve been on a low-histamine diet of about six foods (hence the photographs of the groceries I carry with me on tour) and I’ve slowly become brighter and more like the self I remember from way back when, 2015 self. I can write again, without words looking like foreign intruders on the page. Migraines have vanished. I still have to be incredibly cautious — every time my body is exposed to or creates histamines (dog hair! limes! plane travel!), it still produces hives or puts me into an instant drugged sleep. But I’m getting better. I just can’t do anything stupid. I also just can’t write fast. I will do anything to keep from going back to June 2017 Maggie. 

All of this is to say that I wish I could be one of those authors that could surprise and delight with extras. But for many reasons, I can’t be. I’m continually delighted that readers love my books, and I hope those will continue to be enough.

urs,

Stiefvater

“This is the human way, she thought. On the edge of destruction, at the end of all things, we still dance. And hope.”

“To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee

“Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen

“The Diary of Anne Frank” by Anne Frank

“1984” by George Orwell

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone" by J.K. Rowling

“The Lord of the Rings” (1-3) by J.R.R. Tolkien

“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White

“The Hobbit” by J.R.R. Tolkien

“Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott

“Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury

“Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte

“Animal Farm” by George Orwell

“Gone with the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell

“The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger

“The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak

“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain

“The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins

“The Help” by Kathryn Stockett

“The Lion, the Witch, and the Wadrobe” by C.S. Lewis

“The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck

“The Lord of the Flies” by William Golding

“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini

“Night” by Elie Wiesel

“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare

“A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L'Engle

“Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck

“A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens

“Romeo and Juliet” by William Shakespeare

“The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams

“The Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett

“A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens

“The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” by J.K. Rowling

“The Giver” by Lois Lowry

“The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood

“Where the Sidewalk Ends” by Shel Silverstein

“Wuthering Heights” Emily Bronte

“The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green

“Anne of Green Gables” by L.M. Montgomery

“The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by Mark Twain

“Macbeth” by William Shakespeare

“The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larrson  

“Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley

“The Holy Bible: King James Version”

“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker

“The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas

“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith

“East of Eden” by John Steinbeck

“Alice in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll

“In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote

“Catch-22” by Joseph Heller

“The Stand” by Stephen King

“Outlander” by Diana Gabaldon

“Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” by J.K. Rowling

“Enders Game” by Orson Scott Card

“Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy

“Watership Down” by Richard Adams

“Memoirs of a Geisha” by Arthur Golden

“Rebecca” by Daphne du Maurier

“A Game of Thrones” by George R.R. Martin

“Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens

“The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway

“The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” (#3) by Arthur Conan Doyle

“Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo

“Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” by J.K. Rowling

“Life of Pi” by Yann Martel

“The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Celebrating Silence: Excerpts from Five Years of Weekly Knowledge” by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

“The Chronicles of Narnia” by C.S. Lewis

“The Pillars of the Earth” by Ken Follett

“Catching Fire” by Suzanne Collins

“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” by Roald Dahl

“Dracula” by Bram Stoker

“The Princess Bride” by William Goldman

“Water for Elephants” by Sara Gruen

“The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe

“The Secret Life of Bees” by Sue Monk Kidd

“The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel” by Barbara Kingsolver

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

“The Time Traveler’s Wife” by Audrey Niffenegger

“The Odyssey” by Homer

“The Good Earth (House of Earth #1)” by Pearl S. Buck

“Mockingjay (Hunger Games #3)” by Suzanne Collins

“And Then There Were None” by Agatha Christie

“The Thorn Birds” by Colleen McCullough

“A Prayer for Owen Meany” by John Irving

“The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls

“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot

“Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy

“The Things They Carried” by Tim O'Brien

“Siddhartha” by Hermann Hesse

“Beloved” by Toni Morrison

“Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut

“Cutting For Stone” by Abraham Verghese

“The Phantom Tollbooth” by Norton Juster

“The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I put together an image set with quotes from @maggie-stiefvater. She made this list originally in response to a question from @rikkari. The post is here.

(Images from X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X.)

shakespeare: macbeth