#creativity tips with sofie

(referencing the design found in this post)

Her name is Freya! She's the goddess of both life and death in her world, chained by her siblings to guarantee themselves immortality. She was freed from her chains by the Goat stealing her siblings' crowns and using their weapons to sacrifice himself in a vicious ritual that should have led to him being impossible to bring back from death's clutches. But Freya was terrified of losing him, and tried to stop him from slipping away as he died. She only managed to pin him between life and death, trapping him in the moments of his passing for what seemed like eons... Until a newly-crowned goddess from another world with an affinity for such things found and released him. (At least in the scrapped storyline / alternative AU where he appears!)

The main inspiration behind her design was that I wanted her to be an animal that's seen positively or negatively depending on the culture it's in, and has a connection with luck in order to contrast Narinder's being a black cat and fulfilling those requirements as well. So I made her a pig as a result!

I wanted her to contrast the Goat's very gloomy and dark design. She would have warm brown, bright gold, and vivid purple as her central colors as a result, though I didn't color her in the piece she appears in, so that's not clear at all, haha.

I'm not the best at conveying it in my art, but Narinder, at least in his updated design I never really draw, is meant to have diamonds as the main shape that his design is built around. He's supposed to have diamond-shaped eyes, ears, face, etcetera. And Freya has hearts to contrast that! A shape that has roundedness to its points.

I wasn't very inspired by Chinese motifs while designing Freya beyond the symbolism of pigs in that culture helping me choose her species. But her earrings were semi-inspired by furin wind chimes, which originate in Japan! You can read about those on their Wikipedia page here. I imagine that Freya would be the inspiration behind her world's lore for their version of furin.

Trying to plan one out for a character with a very TPiaG-like buildup with her lies crashing in around her in the end but I feel like I can't get any ideas for having stuff like. Actually Happen over more than 10 chapters without it feeling like I'm just stalling for time

Disclaimer: Not every story needs to be a slow-burn story. That genre of fanfic is put up on a pedestal everywhere you turn, but it's not automatically good, and my personal rule of thumb is that if a story is resisting efforts to make it longer as I write it, it's probably just not meant to be a slow-burn.

Double Disclaimer: In my corner of the world, TPiaG is actually not a slow-burn story! I'm actually a bit surprised people see it as one. In most genres of published fiction, it's actually wayyy on the shorter end. Especially for a "standalone" novel. What you read most influences your writing the most, and I've barely read any fanfiction to experience the efficiency of the medium— TPiaG is very much a case of "big fish, small pond" where it was written as if I was intending to publish it in a paperback instead of on Ao3. So the word count artificially appears large because of that, and the pacing seems slow when it's pretty dang speedy by most genres' standards.

Long story short, don't worry about making a fanfic like TPiaG in terms of buildup or anything. It's weird and exists in a strange in-between state betwixt fanfiction and traditionally published fiction. Anyhoo!

"How do you slow down the burn of your story?" Here are 3 handy hacks for just that!

That's the Sofie Signature: an absurd amount of AUs and alternate storylines + character interpretations! 75% of my original stories are just AUs and crossovers of the other 25%. Heck, I've considered making a family tree of my original projects just to prove to demonstrate how absurdly interwoven all those projects are.

My character design philosophy has evolved a lot over the years— for a long time, I was worried about making characters look "good" on a technical level and "accurate" to any source material. However, I've come to understand that unless your income relies on designing characters that fit that bill, accuracy and technical skills are both worthless. My philosophy on character design is now defined by the quest to make it fun to draw the character in question— and while what's fun for me will be different from what's fun for anyone else, the main factors of it for me are speed and storytelling.

As for speed, that usually entails streamlining details in existing character designs to simplify all the steps it takes to finish a rough sketch of them. The way I draw Ark is probably the most notable example of this, but Grovyle and Dusknoir have also suffered from my detail confiscation. It's a tricky line to walk between not streamlining a design enough and developing a headache when I want to draw it versus streamlining a design too much and sacrificing my satisfaction with a finished drawing, and I haven't quite figured out how to balanced it well. But as I learn and grow as an artist, details on designs that I would once omit to shave off an extra 30 minutes take 5 minutes or less.

Art from here and here. Dusknoir's come a long way in my art, and I'm still growing with every drawing I make!

As for storytelling, that's a subject I can go on and on about, but I’ll cool it and just say the three main questions for it are this: How does this character live? How do they express themself or try to blend in? How do those things impact each other? If you ponder those things for a bit, chances are you’ll have a solid bit of storytelling in your character design.

Some extra tips I have for myself are to use design tropes and concepts I personally enjoy looking at and drawing— stuff like blush marks, cat smiles, lil puffs of fur / hair, etcetera. Using shapes I enjoy is also a big boost in the fun factor of character design— swirls, hearts, and diamonds with circular cutouts are all motifs that frequently appear in my drawings! Though these drawings fail to showcase the lattermost example.

Just curious on how it was while writing your story (since it reached such a character limit lol)

And I was wondering if you had any advice for those who wish to write a story like this? (Not the exact same, just how to write characters interacting lol)

(Referencing this ask game)

🥀 An answer to a question:

It's been difficult— this year's NaNoWriMo didn't go even half as smoothly as last year! Midway through November, I decided to give up on reaching 50k words for the sake of my health. Things shook out in a way that I could take up the challenge again, but by then I had fallen behind on my target word count, and getting back on track was no small task to accomplish. But I've kept at it, and even though I don't like the way this draft is going as I write it, I don't need to. Rough drafts exist to be edited, not to be published! :>

My top pieces of advice when it comes to writing character interacting are to find a way to know how they think, know what they want (and sometimes what they're afraid of) in a given scene, and to give them more depth than the story you're writing explicitly requires.

To write character interactions well, it's important to know how your characters think as well as how they feel. Being aware of what makes them tick is something vital to making them feel like actual people as you write them interacting with others.

In Better the Wool, Narinder is extremely haughty and proud— it's a trait that he's always had, but sank into much deeper after his imprisonment, and defines a lot of his interactions. He looks for ways to boost his ego and will readily belittle others to do that. If you hurt his pride, he'll lash out in response. He always has to get the last word in an argument. He doesn't accept criticism well at all. Egotistical behavior is his bread and butter, and it's largely rooted in shame. He has to act like nothing is his fault, or if it is then it was justified, because it's how he distances himself from his problems. Knowing that makes writing him both in and out of scenes with other characters much easier, and also allows me to recognize that a scene where he strays from his stubborn pride and is undignified and vulnerable will need to have a significant reason for him to behave atypically.

The Lamb, where Narinder is defined by his pride, is defined by her need for control. She is desperate to maintain the peace and unity amongst her followers, and perceives any bump in the status quo as reflecting poorly on her own worthiness as a person. Her need to control people is rooted in a need to keep people around her, as well as herself, safe. She might delegate tasks to others on occasion, but it's a struggle that she only survives out of necessity. Her giving up control of a situation, or even worse, passing it off to someone else entirely, is a choice she would not make lightly, and that's something I keep in mind during every interaction I write for her.

On the subject of knowing what the characters want, knowing what they need in contrast is a great help when writing interactions. Even if Narinder doesn't accept that what he needs is to set his pride down and make amends instead of getting back the Red Crown like he wants, it's always going to be needling away at him in the back of his mind during every interaction he has. This is a method of character development I learned from K. M. Weiland's blog, Helping Writers Become Authors. If you want to learn more about writing a Want vs. a Need, I recommend checking her stuff out!

My heart bleeds stories, and I accepted the gory ugliness necessary to allow such beautiful viscera to be seen.

On a more concrete note: My motivation to create has been rooted in many different things over the years. Genuine love of the act of creation, anger at the world and a need to vent that anger, fear of my own humanity, self-loathing, hatred, sorrow, joy, love, gratitude, rage— many different things. I'll be the first to admit that at this moment, it comes from a need to entertain and a fear of disappointing the audience. Admittedly not very healthy! But it does sit me down with a pen when I have an idea. I'm working on pivoting to better motivations :>

As for overcoming perfectionism in creative work, I find that this tends to be a symptom, and not the disease, if that makes sense. You can follow the line of perfectionism on the page back to self-loathing in the soul. My recommendation for overcoming creative perfectionism is to treat yourself like you're roommates with your past and future selves. Future You has a lot on their plate and really appreciates it when you do some extra chores so they don't have to worry about folding the laundry in top of doing homework and going to the shift they've been dreading at their job. Past You is really going through it and could use some forgiveness, maybe even encouragement. All of You are doing your best with what resources you have at your disposal, and while the living situation will be uneasy at first, eventually things will get easier. Past You will bring up funny jokes and happy memories more than they agonize over your previous missteps. Future You will be so proud of you, more and more with every passing day, and eager to live up to your dreams.

(Referencing this)

4.) A piece you wish got more love?

I didn’t expect it to get that much engagement, especially when its meaning wasn’t immediately apparent at that point in Better the Wool’s fanfic, but I wish I had waited to drop Black Sheep’s Lament at a better time so that people could have enjoyed it more.

10.) How do you deal with artblock?

I tend to just try and brute force things when I have art block (I'm actually in the middle of a bad case of art block right now!)— but when I'm being smarter about things, I take a deliberate step back from my projects. A set amount of time of zero work on the ones worst affected by the block, usually just a few days, but maybe a week or two if it's especially needed, paired with exercise, touching grass, and general self care is usually the best remedy!

24.) What's a compliment about your art that has always stuck with you?