#writeblor

I don’t think your protagonist has to be relatable. I don’t think they have to be an unproblematic person (or that this even exists). I don’t think they need to be morally correct. I think they just need to be interesting. They need to be someone the reader wants to read about. They need to be doing things that keep our attention for some reason, and this can include being horrified by their actions, or enjoying what a piece of shit they are and laughing when they get their comeuppance. I can only speak for myself, but my favorite characters in a work are typically awful assholes and gleefully so; I have a real “type” in that regard. And again, while I can only speak for myself, I don’t think I’m the only one. There’s surely other people out there who like reading about happily terrible people being happily terrible and doing terrible things without remorse, and not having some noble sympathetic reason behind it at all. Just as I’m sure there are people who like characters that are so unrelatable that they’re totally alien to them, or characters that are “problematic” and still manage to do good in the world or just have an interesting story, or characters that just make shit decisions and have to deal with it. In fact, I know there are people like this, otherwise series like Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles wouldn’t be so incredibly popular, and for so long at that. And while I have never read ASIOF, I understand most of the characters there aren’t angels either. I personally have really enjoyed what I’ve read by Nabokov and Rushdie, but I can’t say I “related” to characters in their works, I just found the stories super interesting and their writing styles really enjoyable. This isn’t to say being relatable is bad in a character. It’s great, actually. It’s just not the only thing that can make a character compelling. And while being sure that you avoid things like, say, racist stereotypes and the like, the idea that your protagonist (or any character at all, in some cases) must never have a bad opinion or action, regardless of their circumstances or upbringing, and especially can never do anything bad if they’re any kind of minority or else it is Bad Representation is not only not what terms like “problematic” or “bad representation” were ever originally meant to have meant, it’s also limiting and, in its own way, actually dehumanizes your characters—-our shitty parts, after all, are a big part of our humanity! And in many cases, they’re what make us interesting!

A VERY basic rule of writing is to challenge your protagonist. A story is only as good as its antagonist at the end of the day. The antagonist doesn’t need to be a person—it can be a situation, the environment, or the protagonist to themselves—but whatever it is, it has to challenge the protagonist. If a hero just overcomes everything with little or no effort, there’s really no tension or stakes, which makes for a poor story. When I read a book or watch a movie, I know LOGICALLY that the hero is going to survive and win (unless it’s a tragedy) but I need to wonder HOW. Even children’s stories understand this. Let's say I'm writing a story about Little Timmy entering a boat race. He builds the best boat and he wins. That's technically a story, but it's not very gripping, because it has no stakes. There's never a moment I'm really wondering if Little Timmy will win, or how he will pull it off. When I go into watch most movies, I know the good guys are going to survive/triumph unless it's a tragedy. But a good movie makes me wonder, holy shit, how? How can they get through this? That's what keeps me there. I know how it will end, but I'm there to see the journey. So, Little Timmy enters the boat race. But the store is out of materials to build his boat! So he has to hunt through junk heaps to find materials. The time he spends doing this gives him less time to build his boat than the other kids, so he's at a disadavantage. Then on the day of the race, his dog gets sick and he's in a time crunch to get his pup to the vet AND get to the race in time to start. He manages that, and once the race begins, another kid's boat rams into his!  That kid is trying to sink him! See how it gets more exciting when things go wrong for Little Timmy? And in order for these stakes to exist, the antagonist has to be competent. If a master martial artist is attacked by a common street punk, the fight isn’t really interesting or impressive, because the master doesn’t have to do much to win in a second. If the master martial artist has to face another master, then we get to see them struggle, and they’re forced to display their best moves, which is far more impressive. You can certainly have a comical antagonist, but unless you’re actually writing a comedy where the joke is the antagonist constantly failing, they still need to present a threat. Like, Don Karnage in TaleSpin is funny as hell and really ridiculous and I love him, but he also genuinely has the heroes on the ropes a few times. I have to wonder how they’re going to get out of this, and in order for me to have that concern, Don Karnage has to be competent enough to warrant that concern. If he’s weak and stupid and ineffectual altogether, and presents little or no real challenge to the heroes, there’s no concern, no tension, no stakes, and thus no satisfaction when the heroes best him, because it’s not impressive that they did so. If Little Timmy’s boat is never under a threat that seems genuine, I’m not really invested in his win, and it’s not much of a story if he does win. This not only means making your villains competent, it also means letting them get one up on the heroes. Think of the climax scene in any movie or book or show, the big showdown between the hero and villain. The moment of truth. In order to get to that point, the villain has to have gotten a few wins in. How could Will and Hannibal have ever gotten to the cliff scene if Will had bested Hannibal every step of the way from the start? How could A Series of Unfortunate Events have lasted past a single book if everyone believed the Baudelaire children and Count Olaf was successfully captured? This is where a lot of writers mess up; they do a good job building the villain up as being a real threat in theory, but they’re so against letting their darling protagonists so much as struggle or, gasp, LOSE for even just a moment, that in practice The Big Bad is barely an annoyance, no matter how menacing they originally seem. In the Anita Blake series, Marmee Noir, The Mother of All Darkness, is a great example of this. She’s presented as being the originator of both vampires and wereanimals, an ancient pre-human who has been in hibernation for thousands of years, and a being of immense power and terrible intentions. When the characters realize she’s begun to stir, it’s a huge Oh Shit moment, and there’s a lot of buildup over the books about how bad this is. But when Anita is actually up against this supposedly all-power supernatural force, she just. . .absorbs all Marmee’s power and kills her, lickety-split. A great many fans understandably found this terribly disappointing and anti-climactic. Let your bad guys be threatening, and let them make good on at least some of that threat potential before being defeated. Let the villains get some wins in. Which, yes, means letting your protagonist lose sometimes---and have to WORK for their ultimate win, become their best selves to triumph, pull out all the stops and everything they’ve got so that the audience sees what they’re really made of. It makes both your hero AND your villain look cooler to the readers, AND makes for a better story!

whhere is an in depth description of how it feels to die from nitrogen hypoxia when you need one :((

Okay! A few weeks ago I took all (all) my story notes and deleted bits and ideas, and went through the story chapter by chapter, inserting bits where they would be just perfect ::chef's kiss::, and creating draft chapters for/around other bits. It's fleshed out the story considerably, but yikes!!! but yay!!! but yikes!!!