Sprokat

JENNIFER'S BODY

I’m at the executive management level for my very small company and I have 4 people who report directly to me. I am a nice boss. I’m friendly with my employees, I treat them like professional adults, I actively try to create a positive work environment, and I mentor them and make sure they’re advancing in their careers. I do my best to shield them from the rest of management doing stupid shit. My employees like working for me.

The other day one of my employees came to ask if she could change her hours on Mondays. I said yes immediately because it’s helpful for me to know when she’s here and when she’s not, but as long as she gets her work done I don’t care when and where she does it. She then proceeded to tell me that it was so she could attend therapy and like … I will never use this information but … as a general rule don’t fucking do that.

Do not tell your employer shit about your mental or physical health except for the bare minimum needed to request a reasonable accommodation. Even your nice boss can fire you, even your nice boss can unfairly change your working conditions, and even your nice boss at some point is probably going to face pressure from their superiors.

Your characters are allowed to be bad people. Your story is allowed to have no moral lesson.yyour ending is allowed to be sad. The villain can win. The good person can do something unforgivable. The lovers can destroy each other. You are allowed to write the thing that no one asked for and everything that everyone told you doesn’t work and you are allowed to not explain yourself.

⊹ What do they want vs what do they need. these should not be the same thing. what they want is the surface goal ( the job, the person, the revenge, the answer.) What they need is the thing underneath that they can't name yet. The story is what happens in the gap between those two things. if they're identical your character has nowhere to go.

⊹ What are they wrong about. Not morally wrong necessarily. just. what belief do they hold that the story is going to test. What assumption do they make about themselves or the world that turns out to be incomplete? A character without a wrong belief is already finished. They have no arc, give them something to learn even if learning it hurts them.

⊹ How do they talk when they're nervous. Do they go quiet or do they talk too much? do they deflect with jokes? do they get weirdly formal? do they ask questions instead of answering them? the way a person behaves under pressure is who they actually are. And it should be different from how they behave when they're comfortable.

⊹ What do they find funny. this one sounds small and it is not small at all. Humour is worldview. What makes someone laugh tells you what they value, what they're afraid of, how they handle pain. A character with no sense of humour is just flat. even the gravest person finds something absurd. find the thing.

⊹ What are they ashamed of? not their tragic backstory. their actual shame. The small ugly thing they would never say out loud. The time they were a coward. The feeling they pretend not to have. The desire they think disqualifies them from being a good person. Shame is where the most interesting character work lives and most writers skip straight over it :(