Quick And Dirty Tips For Creating Subplots

Writing great friendships

Some of the best chemistry/relationships in fiction exist between characters who are/become friends. Here are some tips for making friendships come alive on the page:

1. Banter

One of the most interesting aspects of fictional friendships is the way the characters interact with each other whilst important plot points are occurring.

If your characters have easy banter, teasing one another without missing a beat and managing to bounce off each other even in the toughest circumstances, it will be clear to the reader that these two are/should be good friends.

Friends know each other well. They know the other’s character so well that they can easily find something to tease each other over. However, this also means knowing which topics are off-limits.

If you want to write a good, healthy friendship, your characters shouldn’t use humour/sarcasm as a way to hurt the other. It should be good-natured and understood as such from both sides.

Different friendships will have different types of chemistry. Some friends may tease each other with facial expressions. Others may already anticipate a snarky remark and counter it before it’s been spoken. Others will have physical ways of goofing around. 

Some friends might not tease each other at all. Banter isn’t necessary; it’s just a good way to make your characters come alive and make their friendship one that is loved by readers.

What’s important is chemistry - the way they automatically react to each other.

Think Sam and Dean in Supernatural or Juliette and Kenji in the Shatter Me series.

2. Mutual support 

Unless you purposefully want to write an unhealthy/toxic friendship, your characters should both be supportive of the other. 

This means that, even if one is the MC and the other the side-kick, both should be cognisant of the other’s feelings and problems, and should be considerate in this regard.

Few things will make your MC as likable as remembering to check in and be there for their best friend even when they are in the thick of a crisis.

You need to show your characters being vulnerable in front of each other and being supportive in ways that are tailored to the needs of each friend.

So, if one of the characters really responds to physical comfort, the other should know to give hugs/rub their back when they’re not feeling well. Similarly, if one of them doesn’t like being touched and responds to material comfort, have the other bring them ice cream and join them for a movie marathon. Whatever works for your characters.

What gets me every time is when a character is falling apart and won’t listen to/be consoled by anyone but their best friend (but this is just personal preference).

3. Knowing the other’s past/family life

This really only applies to characters who have been friends for quite a while.

Good friends know each other’s backstory - the highs and lows and mundane details. They know they layout of their family home and they probably know their family members well.

Friends will often talk about these things, only having to mention a few words for the other to know what they’re talking about i.e. “The ‘09 Thanksgiving disaster” or “You know how Uncle Fred is”

This will instantly make it clear that your characters are close and have come a long way together. 

Perhaps there are issues at home/trauma from the past that the other character will immediately understand. So, if one character appears with a black eye, their friend might know that the father was probably drunk the night before and got violent. Or if the character has a nightmare, the friend might know that it was about childhood abuse etc.

This can also apply to good things i.e. if one of the characters gets a nice note in their lunchbox, the other might know that their grandma is in town.

Whatever works for your story should be used to indicate the level of unspoken understanding the friends have.

4. Being protective

Few things will make your readers love a friendship more than the friends being fiercely protective of each other (in a healthy, non-territorial way).

Has someone hurt one of the characters? The other should be furious and want to exact revenge. Does someone say something demeaning to one of the friends? The other should defend them immediately and vehemently.

This can also take on a humorous twist if one of the characters starts dating someone. The friend can make extra sure that said date is sincere and promise to exact vengeance if their friend is hurt.

This can also be a great plot device, since it could explain why the MC’s best friend joins the quest/goes along on the journey. Perhaps this is the main plot point: a character seeking to protect/avenge their friend.

If you want to go in a toxic direction, this can be taken too far i.e. a friend who never lets the other spend time with anyone else/stalks the other/is patronising etc.

5.  Common interest(s)

Even if the two characters are vastly different, there should be something that keeps them together besides loyalty.

This is especially important for characters who become friends throughout the course of the novel.

This doesn’t have to mean that both of them go hiking every weekend or want to become pilots one day. It could be something small, like a love of cheesy movies or a shared taste in music. Maybe they both enjoy silence/don’t like other people. Maybe they are both social justice warriors, but for different causes. 

This could also be common characteristics instead of interests. Perhaps both are very ambitious/funny/social.

There should just be some factor that ignited the friendship and brings the two of them together.

This doesn’t necessarily have to be a big part of your story, but you should at least have it mentioned to make the friendship appear more authentic.

Reblog if you found these tips useful. Comment if you would like a Part 2. Follow me for similar content.

Writeblr (re)introduction - I’ve moved blogs!!

Hello! I’m Z, and I was previously found at @zwritesstuff. This is going to be kind of a messy blog, but I’m hoping to reblog a lot of advice posts and maybe post some of my own (I’ve already made one on characters and one on the first draft) as I find inspiration/a need for them. But you’ll also find a bunch of writing memes on here as well, because writing is hard and we all need a laugh sometimes

Some things about me:

23 years old

being bullied by several mental illnesses (so i’m distant sometimes)

can’t stop coming up with new wips (seriously i have 4 original wips rn and like 12 fanfics)

i really love world building and establishing characters but i struggle a lot with plot and actually. writing

the reason i remade my blog is because i wanted to separate this content from my main blog so that i can get on more tag lists 

i am absolutely going to be on the lookout for new wips to follow, so please feel free to let me know what wips you have going on right now and i’ll check them out!!

please reblog and say hi in the tags so that I can start following people !!

Are You Using Too Much Stage Direction?

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, we don’t need to know that someone crossed the room, reached for the coffee cup, turned sideways, took a step forward, or glanced to the left.

Visual writers have an especially hard time with this (fiction writers who “see” their story in their head, and write down the images blow-for-blow, as though narrating a movie).

There’s nothing wrong with this writing process, of course. Just know that you’ll be more prone to adding excessive, pointless movements to your novel or short story.

Then, when revising, ask yourself if they are important to the story (sometimes, it is important that someone took a step forward!) and take out the ones that aren’t. Or, better yet, delete them all, then put back only the ones that have left holes in their absence.

Remember, stage direction is different from meaningful gesture or action.

Meaningful gestures and actions can orient the reader or give information about character or plot.

Stage direction, by my definition, is pointless movement.

Here is an original excerpt from Haruki Murakami’s Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World to illustrate my point.

“See anyone milling around in the hall?” I asked. “Not a soul,” she said. I undid the chain, let her in, and quickly relocked the door. “Something sure smells good,” she said. “Mind if I peek in the kitchen?” “Go right ahead. But are you sure there aren’t any strange characters hanging around the entrance? No one doing street repairs, or just sitting in a parked car?” “Nothing of the kind,” she said, plunking the books down on the kitchen table. Then she lifted the lid of each pot on the range. “You make all this yourself?”

Here, we get just enough to orient us–we know the woman was outside the apartment, she walked into the house, went into the kitchen, and the narrator followed her there. But Murakami doesn’t actually say that. He allows us to infer those movements from the dialogue and the light peppering of action and description.

Now, here is the same excerpt re-written with way too much stage direction:

Lees verder

My Personal Character Files: The 6 Box Method

This is for my science fiction WIP, so some things may need to be added/modified depending on your genre. I will also include a screenshot of an example at the bottom so y’all can see how I set it up in my Doc.

1. The Quick Ref

I use this as the first page of my “Character FIles” Doc.

I put all my important characters in a list, then add their height, age, and the page their complete file can be found on. This is helpful when I need to know if a character would have to crane their neck upward to look another character in the eyes. Comes up more than I’d have guessed.

2. The Individual Profile: 6 Box Method

I add and subtract stuff based on how important the character is. Without further ado…

Box One: Reference Photo

This is where I add in any actor, model, drawing, etc that I base the look on. When I don’t need one, sometimes I’ll put in a picture that represents the character’s style.

Box Two: The Introduction

Full Name

Nickname(s) 

Age 

Occupation 

Current home 

Situation: How do they enter this story?

Motivation: What do they want?

Favorite quote/saying

Biggest strength

Biggest issue 

Strongest trait 

Box Three: Behavior

Personality

Habits

Ambition/Short and Long Term Goals

Greatest fear(s)

Phobias

Biggest secret(s) 

Social skills

Interior talents

Box Four: Background

Home moon/planet

Important history

Family

Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Colleagues

Finances

Education

Phys. Health/Mental Health

Religion

Romantic/sexual preference

Interests/Hobbies

Box Five: Appearance & Physicality

Height

Body type

Skin tone/Ethnicity/Species

Facial description

Prominent/distinguishing features

Dress 

Mannerisms

Physical talents

Box Six: Speech

Normal tone

Language & accent

Favorite phrases

3. The Example

Rey from The Force Awakens. Made in Google Docs.

Boxes 1 and 2

Boxes 3 and 4

Boxes 5 and 6

Best of luck on your writing journey!

how to make a story file

As I am preparing for Camp NaNo*, I have been working on my story file. It occurred to me this might not be common or popular practice. “Story File” is a name I gave it and maybe some of y’all have a different name with the same contents. 

*There’s still time to apply to join my Camp NaNo cabin!

My Story File contains everything about my story that doesn’t go in the outline.

It’s broken up into major categories and specific templates. So without further ado, here is how I structure my Story File. 

Intro

Title

Logline

Synopsis

Genre

Estimated Total Length (word count)

Draft Length Goal (word count)

Character Bank

Main characters and brief, one-sentence descriptions with ages

Themes and Character Development

Central Question

The Yes/No question that is being asked through the whole story

Should have objective qualities, rather than subjective

i.e. “Will they fall in love?” (subjective) vs. “Will they leave their partners and become a couple?” (objective)

Thematic Questions

These are the internal conflict questions that reside in your character(s) and your story

ex. “Can there really be a successful government?”

ex. “Does grief excuse bad actions?”

Themes at a Glance

Words or phrases that relate to the themes of the story

ex. person vs. nature

ex. isolation

ex. grief

ex. first love

Motivation / Stasis State / Final State

for each main character, you should write a sentence or two pertaining to these three things

Motivation: What is the drive behind this character and their past, present, and future actions? What part of their background makes them the way that they are? What are they looking for? What do they want out of this/a situation?

Stasis State: What are they like before the inciting incident? What problems and questions do they have?

Final State: What has changed about them and their outlook? What questions have they resolved? What has happened to their internal conflict?

Relationships

I usually make a little web of the MCs and their relationship to one another. One for the stasis and one for final.

Stasis: How do these characters see each other? How do they act toward the other? (All before the inciting incident)

Final: How do these characters see each other now? How has their idea of one another shifted? 

Even if a character dies before the end, include the most recent relationship status in the Final web.

ex. this is how I organize it, using the Draw feature of Google Docs

Character Bank

This is just a very preliminary character bank. If you prefer a more in-depth one, check out my 6 Box Method.

Per (relevant/important) character:

Name

Nickname/preferred name

Age

Field/Occupation

Personality

Personal History

Education/Occupation History

Extra Notes:

Worldbuilding Bank

(Check out my worldbuilding posts on Categories Pt. 1 and 2 for better context)

Seasons and Climate

Languages

Other Cultural Pockets

Folklore and Legends

Fine Arts

Dress and Modesty

Classes

Jobs

Currency and Economics

Shopping

Agriculture and Livestock

Imports and Exports

Literature, Pop Culture, and Entertainment

Food and Water

Holidays and Festivals

Family and Parenting

Relationships

Housing

Religion and Beliefs

Government

Health and Medicine

Technology and Communication

Death

Transportation

Plants, Animals, and Human-environment Interaction

Education

Beauty Standards

Gender and Sexuality

—————————

I hope this helps y’all and supplements what you’re probably already doing. I know it’s helped me tons to have everything in a central place.

Best of luck!

Building an Unforgettable Character

Character building is one of my favorite parts of writing a novel. I love seeing where they’re going to take me and where their journey is going to end up. Even though I plot extensively before starting a new novel, I always leave room for the characters to lead me somewhere new.

So, what’s the secret to building an unforgettable character? Here are some tips to lead you in the right direction:

They need to be relatable

If your audience can’t relate to your character, that’s usually a huge problem. We relate to characters like Harry Potter not because we’ve been to Hogwarts and practiced magic, but because we can relate to his pain and to his connection with his friends. He represents emotions that a lot of us have struggled with and he doesn’t quite feel like he fits in. His struggle to find himself is relatable.

Take some time to figure out what your character ultimately represents and don’t be afraid to bring emotion into it. We want to feel connected to your characters and we want to find something in them that matches something in us.

They need to be realistic

It’s important that your character’s actions should remain realistic. Not in the sense of remaining true to our world, but to theirs. Their actions should make sense in context to what they’re going through. If you’re constantly questioning why a character would do something because it just doesn’t make logical sense, you’ll have trouble respecting that character. It’s important that we understand their actions.

They need to be proactive

A good character is a go-getter. I’m not saying they will always make the right decisions or that they’re all good people, but all main characters/protagonists should be able to do things on their own. I’m also not saying they don’t need help, but they need to overcome the big challenges on their own or through what they’ve learned. They can’t just stand around waiting for everyone else to finish things. They need to take initiative at some point, and this should be due to their personal growth throughout the story.

I understand that this point does depend on the story you’re writing. Maybe your character is an unmotivated person. Maybe they’re lazy.  This usually doesn’t matter because a story isn’t interesting if that person remains inactive. They can have periods of inactivity and become unmotivated during parts of your story, but ultimately that does need to change at some point.

They need to have flaws

Flaws will humanize your character and are usually what stands in your character’s path to success. A character that does everything right all the time and doesn’t have any growth because they’re already perfect is VERY BORING. They should fail and they should learn lessons. I’m not saying all their flaws should be fixed by the end of the novel because that’s not how people operate in real life, but character flaws should help build interesting layers.

-Kris Noel

Isn’t “complex, nuanced, morally gray villain” and “villain who is just evil with nothing more to it” a false dilemma?

I contend that villains don’t have to be morally gray to be complex. Your villains can have complex reasons for what they do, and internal conflicts, and still be completely vile. Their motivations can be nuanced and still be fundamentally twisted. Their internal conflicts can be between multiple awful, fucked up, selfish sides of themselves. Villains can be complicated by differing drives and motivations and viewpoints even if none of them are good.

Give me a villain who is like...for example, conflicted between killing his son to eliminate a threat to his power, and keeping him alive so he can continue to exercise his abusive, fucked up control and twist his son into what he wants. He’s stuck between hating his son and desiring him as a possession and puppet, but neither of his conflicting motivations are The Good One.

Give me a villain who has to choose between the ideology of the violent, corrupt organization that groomed and trained him and the desire to betray everyone, strike out on his own with no support, and begin his own genocidal terrorist group. There can be a lot of complicated, shifting emotions over this, but it’s far from being a battle between an evil path and a good path.

Idk. “purely, disgustingly evil villain” is not the same as “one dimensional villain”

Underwriting: ways to boost your word count

I wrote a fic recently and the word count for the first draft came to about 40,000 words – roughly the length of a novella or ficlet. And that’s fine because I wasn’t striving for a novel or a 100K slow-burn coffee shop AU.

But coming to edit my first draft I realised something about myself. I am an underwriter. My fic could actually be at least 10k (maybe 20k) longer. Of course it’s not all about word count, it’s about the story, but in this case a smaller word count isn’t because I’m a fantastically efficient storyteller it’s because I’ve missed out a lot of stuff. Like, Important Stuff.

So as I set out to add muscle to the skin and bones I’ve already created in draft one I thought I’d share five tips for my fellow underwriters to help you flesh out your writing too.

1)     Make sure to describe the place and space in which the action happens.

There are quite a few places in my first draft where there’s no indication as to where things are taking place– or there is, but it’s the bare minimum and not really enough to build up a clear picture. This probably because as the writer I know exactly what the place looks like so I make the assumption that a bare minimum description will mean the reader knows too.

Now I’m not saying go into masses of detail about what your settings look like. In some cases it’s not useful to describe setting in a lot of detail (e.g. during really fast paced action sequences) but doing a verbal sketch of the space is essential for putting your characters in context and reader understanding.

I really is a fine balance (which is why beta readers are your friend!) But definitely go back to your setting descriptions if you’re an underwriter, they might need some work.

2)    Make sure to describe your character’s appearance.

Similar to the above point – you know what your characters look like, but unless you describe them, the reader won’t.

It’s fair to say that descriptions are open to reader interpretations, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t describe them in a healthy amount of detail. So you might try to nail down some of the interesting quirks about your characters to help the reader build a picture – not only will it help the readers understanding, it’ll boost your word count too!

Note: This one functions a little differently in a fic because the readers are probably familiar with how the character looks, but there is nothing wrong with adding your interpretation (or even reminding them, especially if the characters are from a book.)

3)   Include character reactions outside of what they say out loud.

Real life conversations aren’t just about the stuff that comes out of our mouths. So much of human interaction is about body language – so include it in your writing! Saying that the character covers their mouth with their hand when they talk suggests shyness. While another character crossing their arms shows they’re defensive -perhaps because they’re feeling threatened. In real life we don’t always say what we mean – but a lot of the time our actions give away what we’re really thinking. By including these actions around dialogue writers can influence how we as readers view characters and how we interpret interactions between characters. And it can boost your word count too.

The big stuff:

4)     Check your pacing.

When you write it feels like your scene is taking place over hours, days, weeks because when you’re writing it takes time. Reading, on the other hand, is much quicker. A seasoned reader can fly through a 100 page novel in a few hours – a seasoned writer can spend hours writing a 100 words.

When you read back your writing, make sure to check your pacing. You might just find that the Impossible Task you set for your characters at the start of the story is suddenly resolved within the next fifty pages. To boost your word count you might want to start by adding more obstacles between the character and their goal.

For example; your character has to find an object such as a precious jewel. Sounds relatively easy, right? But what if the jewel is lost in the mines of an ancient people, amongst thousands of other treasures that look very similar? What if no one has found this jewel because it’s guarded by a fire breathing dragon? What if the ancient mines and dragon are located in a mountain which is miles and miles away across dangerous lands? What if your characters need to enlist the help of someone with a very specific skill set?

You take one simple objective (finding the jewel) and you put into play a series of obstacles that must be overcome in order to complete the objective. Your underwriting tendencies, like mine, might just mean that there aren’t enough metaphorical (or real) dragons in your story!

5)    Sub-plots.

A sub-plot is a smaller scale plot - often involving the supporting characters - which runs secondary to the main plot. It can be directly linked to the main plot, i.e. the info provided in the subplot directly influences events in the main plot. Or it can simply be linked through place, time or themes of the overall story (e.g. Hermione’s elf rights campaign ‘S.P.E.W’ in Harry Potter and the OoTP is linked to the overall theme of oppression.)

Sub-plots are great because they can serve as some respite from a traumatic main plot; your character is fighting a war (main plot) but also fighting and failing (in hilarious ways) to win the affection of their love interest (sub-plot).

Plus, sub-plots can also help with characterisation, can cause your main character to have the moment of realisation which allows them to overcome the obstacles they face in the main plot and is generally a better reflection of real life! Sub-plots often centre on side-kicks and other characters – people who might not be as devoted to the end goal as the protagonist is. In fact, well written side characters seemingly live their own lives with their own goals. You might choose to showcase this in your sub-plot by letting the conflict of interest cause more problems for the protagonist to overcome.

Either way you could find your word count sky rockets as soon as you add in a few clever sub-plots.

I hope this helped!

Got any questions? Send me an ask

Hey I love your blog, it helps me a lot and now I've a question myself. How can you write about older people while you're still young yourself? The main character of my story is 43 years old but I'm 17... I try to pay attention to how her life experience has shaped her personality but sometimes I feel like she seems too much like a teenager. Have you ever written about characters older than you? And what helped you the best to make them realistic? Do you have any general tips on writing adults?

Thanks for asking, this is a good question, and I like that your MC is much older than you. You'll learn a lot by writing them.

I've written for a number of ages, and aside from some extremely minimal research online, I just started paying attention to other people. I watched films about X age group, read books by/about X age group, listened to interviews of adults with certain fields and backstories, listened to people older than me at work, listened to customers, neighbors, relatives, my own parents. Kids are tougher since I don't know many little kids, but just asking questions of teachers and family friends gave me insight into the lives of people older than me.

Once you know what a person is like on the inside and why, writing their dialogue and behavior is a piece of cake. Surely you know some adults or can look up some public figures and study their lives, dialogue, and behavior. Base your character off several real people and they will come across as more authentic.

anyway most writing advice is frequently contradictory to other writing advice you might receive from people who have just as much/more writing ~expertise~ and a lot of writing advice is just flat-out terrible even if it’s coming from an ~expert~ so if you’re a writer consider this post a reminder that

writing advice that comes up on your dash should be looked at as tips you can choose to follow or discard as it suits you, not hardline rules you MUST abide by or else you’re a ‘bad writer’

you’re allowed to look at a piece of writing advice and say, “wow, that’s a shit idea and i don’t want write like that” and forget about it – even if the post has thousands of notes full of other people agreeing with it

there is no One True Right Way to write, your writing does not have to be just like everyone else’s – if all stories were written the same way and with the same style, reading would be a much more boring thing to do

if you try to write in a way that pleases everyone, you will fail because pleasing everyone is not possible – your own satisfaction with your work, your own desire to write a story, and your own enjoyment of writing are more important than that