#miniimae

Oh honey, I’m so sorry, you have my sympathy and condolences. And no not weird at all. I’m 31 and I still find myself in situations where I wind up looking around going “I need an adultier adult” and if ETD, who is my adultier adult, doesn’t know what to do, we ask google.

We all learn by experience, either by being taught or through direct exposure. Sometimes I feel like I spent nearly two decades of my life in educational institutes, only to have learned nothing of value. Which isn’t entirely true, but is often how it feels. Truthfully nothing really prepares you for life, hopefully certain things will give you valid learning and adaptive skills and the people you need to get through, but we’re all just trying our hardest. Even if it doesn’t feel like it.

What might help first is to really try to nail down why you don’t think she fits her role in the story well.

Is it because her stakes aren’t high enough? Is it because her family history isn’t strong enough? Does she not feel fleshed out or whole? What kinds of details are missing to make her feel whole? Is she lacking a sense of humor or stories that she references from before all of this began? Is she missing particular skills that would help her be a better fit?

Try to see if there are ways you can go back and boost her within the framework of the story you have already. Maybe it’s as simple as tweaking her backstory to give her a stronger reason for being there, or giving her a skill set that makes her fit better in her role, or changing a couple of scenes so that the stakes involved for her are more dire/more meaningful/more personal. Those structural changes are often minor tweaks here and there.

If you don’t think that will work out, then stripping down the character to rebuild her from scratch will also mean you will have to rewrite whatever chunk of the story you had drafted. This will no longer be the same character aside from what she’s like in a conversation.

I find that it helps to write out a couple of bullet-point lists of what I know already of the story I want to tell in regards to this character. Think of her not as the character from before, but take your mindset all the way back to “I have an idea, and now I need a character.” It’s further back than you might default to.

Think about what kinds of things she’ll be facing and what skills she needs to have to have a chance at combating them. Think about what emotions the antagonist will be toying with so that you can start her emotional journey out at a point prior to that. Figure out what kinds of things are at stake so that you can build her history in a way that those are still relevant. What kind of a person would your story most likely entail and impact most?

Then begin building a character as you would for any story. Think about her history and how she grew up, what kinds of things are important to her, her core values, what she fears most, who her friends are and how she came to meet them, who her siblings are and what they’re up to these days. Where does she have ties reaching out to? Who does she care about? What kinds of dreams did she harbor growing up, and are they the same now? How far would she go to attain those dreams, and what kinds of tactics would she use? Why does she care about what’s going on now, and why her? Why not somebody else? What makes this her responsibility to take care of, and what would happen if she failed? All those standard character-building sorts of questions would then be your next step.

Silver and Nova

Commissioned by 

@miniimae

How Many Plot Points Are Enough?

This is a tricky question, because every single book is different, and ever plot point takes a different amount of words to cover. But if you already have your beginning and end, then you’re off to a great start.

My advice would be to turn those smaller, character developing plot points into something larger. Every plot point (and scene) needs to have a direct effect on what comes after it, and on the book’s ending. Which is to say that if you take out anything in your outline, the ending should be changed drastically. 

I’m assuming that if you have an ending, you have an antagonist, and if you have an antagonist, you have a Big Bad Thing your protagonist wants to prevent. Every plot point should be a step your protagonist takes in the processes of preventing that Big Bad Thing, in which the antagonist subsequentially makes that Big Bad Thing more Big or more Bad and harder to prevent. 

Sometimes the protagonist knows all the steps ahead of time (like in a heist or a quest), though most of the time they only know the next step they’re going to take, which they may believe will be the final step. But you as the writer should know the entire process already.

If you’re struggling with not having enough meat in your book, try taking a couple of these steps, and throwing a wrench into them. How does your protagonist deal with having their plan utterly fail? What happens when you take away all the resources they were counting on? If they sacrifice everything to try to accomplish what they think will prevent the Big Bad Thing, but still fail, what do they do next? How do they recover, to come back harder and stronger the next time?

You don’t want to push your protagonist to their breaking point until the end of the story, just before the climax, but you still want to fracture a few bones along the way. Every time you hit them with something that throws them off their path, they have to find a new and better method of getting to the next step. 

(night of musing)

Alright folks, so this is a general message to everybody, particularly the new folks coming in expecting something from me, and to the folks trying to contact me to give support and condolences. I appreciate you all to heck, but here’s the scoop:

I’m working on 5.5 days without air conditioning in a place where the daily temps are up into the 92-95 F range, no breeze, and the house is keeping pretty steady at 84 during the day, dropping only to 76 overnight. That’s… really hot, and there’s not a hell of a lot I can do about it except what I’m already doing. I’ve had to board my cat due to concerns about his age, his established kidney disease, and the lethargy the heat put him into. So all in all, the two deaths of friends within 48 hours of each other from this weekend has not been nearly as hard as the sleep deprivation and constant edge of heat exhaustion I’m living with at the moment. Worse yet, if the repair group and my property managers don’t get/give approval and the part they need doesn’t get shipped into town on time AND they don’t get time in their repair schedules to get over here to install it by tomorrow, I’m looking at spending the weekend in this. I’m sorry to say, my friends, all my focus is gone, and I’m not even turning lights nor my computer on in the evenings when I get home from work because I don’t want to add to the heat.