#unfitting

You have characters that you don't know how to include into your story? You don't know if they're going to be friends or lovers? Well... Here's my advice:

- Imagine in your head how they'd fit in each role, e.g. the villain, the lover of another person or the mentor.

- Write it down and play with the different ideas. Have a chapter you have to decide what will happen to them? Try to write from a different POV about them, let them do different things/ decide otherwise if they face a decision. Just write it differently.

- Design a third person. If you still can't figure out who what is missing, or who or what needs to do it differently, design a third party guest. Maybe they are the lover of your first character or they should go on the mission, not another character.

- Think of another background of the character. Maybe they don't fit in your plot because of an event of their past. Like a parents death, a relationship that ended, a battle they've lost. If you have mentioned that now wrong detail, don't forget to change it in the story. Maybe you solve some other problems with it.

- Have another person look at your story, or just the problem. Another pair of eyes mostly sees things you don't.

- Leave the story for a few days. Do something else, don't think about it. Meet some friends, go outside, but don't think of your problem. It's likely it will solve itself or you come up with different ideas.

- Also you can put their appearance later into the story. But this doesn't work in every plot.

And in case even that just won't help you, here is the ultimative super tip:

- Just forget the problem for a while. Continue writing and you'll find yourself including that little bastard in a way that fits them. All unintended.

st:tng - uniforms

From: Much Ado About Nothing, by William Shakespeare

Genre: Comedy

Topic: Men, love, unfit

Character: Female

The final stanza of Anna Letitia Barbauld’s “The Rights of a Woman” says, “Then, then, abandon each ambitious thought. / Conquest or rule thy heart shall feebly move, / In Nature’s school, by her soft maxims taught, / That separate rights are lost in mutual love” (49).

This passage confuses me. The rest of Barbauld’s poem feels like it is a rally cry preparing women for the battle of obtaining their rights. Her third stanza even includes references to artilleries, canons, and war. Then she ends her poem with a surrender saying men and women’s rights aren’t important when you’re in love. This seems as if Barbauld doesn’t feel the pressing need for women’s rights because her husband may treat her well and she doesn’t see the need for anything else. She wrote this battle cry to make fun of the women who are saying they need these rights. She’s saying that they’re turning their request for equality into a war-like battle that is entirely unnecessary. The footnote for this poem says that she wrote this in response to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which Wollstonecraft critiques how Barbauld follows the established gender codes in her writings. It could be that she felt called out, so she felt the need to respond in (what I hope is) a sarcastic manner.