Posts by Mephistopheles
Subverting expectations and suddenly aborting plotlines was a no-go zone for me for a while. The only time I could successfully abort a plotline was in a thought train. After watching How To Tr...
Misinformation is an important element of my story as is pretty much kicks the plot in motion: Gyvaris, a young dragon, steals a sheep from a large flock since he's really hungry and just couldn't...
So, I was doing a writing excersie, I came up with, to help me with sentence structuring and developing my style. One thing, I ran into, however, was that I couldn't describe pain very well. Th...
Changing is an important aspect of every character and is what makes them believable. Yet, if you remember the ending of Game of Thrones, people weren't too happy about Dany going from "don't...
So, the problem is that I can't make conflicts based on a misunderstanding that wouldn't resolve in five paragraphs. My chars are too smart for that, I'm too smart for that (and also have all the t...
We all know the spiel: We have an insufferable jerk who is a jerk/annoyance for 95% of his "screen time". In the remaining 5%, he sacrifices himself to save everyone else. The fans dance around a...
Similies are like the Reddit 50/50 challenge: you either get something very good, or your eyes will melt off. I mean, you can ruin the mood with a bad one and make yourself a laughing stock. Metaph...
My antagonist is a "strategic mastermind", similar to the one discussed in How to prevent seeming like a Marty Stu-ish villain is cheating? Proceeding from this kind of antagonist, my question is h...
A novel's tone/atmosphere is typically established within the first few chapters of the book. So, let's say, we establish the story as a light-hearted, over-the-top fantasy deconstruction, with hu...
In my fantasy novels, I don't want to kill anyone off, I just want to get them injured, like badly. I made up numerous believable excuses for this (low-violence, a genuine will to live on the enemi...
I have an idea for a story: My setting is reminiscent of some computer games, in that Player Characters (PCs) are essentially immortal - they reincarnate indefinitely, and can continue to kill the...
Training montages and arcs are typically viewed as backstory, something that ends in the prologue, or shows up in flashbacks. They show us a piece of information about the world or a character. Th...
Even though discovery writing is about letting the story go without interference, you still don't want the characters to get killed in the first chapter. For this exists safety nets, people, objec...
So, we established that we can lose many more valuable things other than our life, and to make stakes out of them effectively, we have to make it nothing personal. One thing we haven't discussed i...
So, I think I might just have turned my fantasy setting into a Saturday morning cartoon. I just, don't want people to die within the world. There are monsters, with unlimited reserves of course: zo...
Oh, this one's a classic. You have a character with an ego so large, it's on the verge of collapsing into an intellectual black hole. You want to make it into a comic relief but instead, end up wit...
As a certain character from Zootopia would put it: "Fear always works." I soon explain it, but first, as per the universal guideline we found here: Because, unlike, Hitler, we can understand...
I feel I've got a huge obstacle, whenever I'm pretending" to be a character and trying to make out how he/she would react. I feel strongly that the mentality of the creator is reflected in his wor...
[Not a Lawyer, nobody's a lawyer here] Double, triple and quadruple down, make them Creative Commons. I don't think said person have copyrighted them, but if she did, that's already grounds for ex...
So, due to a smaller miracle, a scrapped concept, a badly timed Eragon review from Nostalgia Critic and the SAO abridged came together and created a good "filler" episode concept and a character i...
So, I was writing a test story to see if my tools can work together in the way intended. Few paragraphs into the first chapter and there is a problem: Character A is a scaredy-cat, and I based the...
I often hear the word thrown around, but I don't have any idea of what it is, or how can it be avoided. So, what does "juvenile tone" mean and how can I prevent it?
Hold Your Hippogriffs: A (more often than not) cringeworthy version of a saying (though can be invented on the spot), that is prone to cause Fatal Death in most readers. But it sounds fun, who wou...
If I have a hard time dissecting showing directly, then I just simply ask about the end result: What showing wishes to create in the readers?
Proposition: Stories are information packets aimed to "entertain" people, and just like every other form of communication, they have: A basic and lasting knowledge for interpreting the informatio...
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