Being A Writer Your Brain Is Either

Troubleshooting Your Plot

                Plots are such complicated things that often when something doesn’t work, we can tell that it’s falling apart, but we can’t really tell where. I’ve spent many hours picking apart my plots and looking for the loose thread, so here’s some ways I’ve noticed plots most commonly go wrong.

The character transformation isn’t believable

Very likely whenever an arc goes wrong it’s not because of the circumstances the character went through, it’s because the character didn’t have enough agency. If your characters are never forced to make tough decisions, they’re also never forced to change. I’d go back to their goal and motivation and look through your plot to see which ways they are actively choosing it again and again.

2. It feels rushed

Plots that meander or feel rushed are usually not due to the plot itself, but pacing issues within it. Before you touch your outline, look into your scenes and see where you could be adding more description. Are you using all five senses? And if you are, are you getting into your character’s head? Sometimes all a rushed scene needs is a moment of reflection, a little “check-in” with your protagonist.

                Look through your work and mark down what the pacing of each scene should be. Fast-paced action scenes should have shorter paragraphs and less reflection than say a deep discussion between two characters.

3. It’s too short!?

When it’s not an issue with pacing the problem might be with the scope. Is the transformation you’re writing large enough for the word count you were expecting? Lord of the Rings couldn’t have been written in a novella, and an episode of Spongebob couldn’t have been turned into a novel. Consider the stakes of your story—if it’s too short, the inciting incident might not have turned the world upside down enough.

4. The character dynamics aren’t coming together

Ah the friends that just don’t seem to want to be friends, the group that’s constantly falling apart, the attractive strangers who stay strangers. Characters are really good at ruining our plans. In cases like these, it often comes back to the goals and motivations of every character involved. When groups don’t come together maybe not all of them have a reason to want to be there—how will it help each one of them achieve their goal?

                Good luck!

Saint John’s water or Faery Water is made with specific herbs such as: hypericum (Saint John’s Wort), yarrow, rue, verbena, fern, wild fennel, marigold, elder, laurel, lavender, mugworth, mauve, mint, rosemary, sage, chamomile, rose, poppy, cornflower, and wildflowers. According to the tradition, these herbs must be gathered at sunset by fasting women and infused in spring water for an entire night. During the night it’s believed that gods and spirits of nature are going to put their blessing to the water giving it magical properties. This magical water is used to bring love, prosperity, luck and health.

"The magic system is never fully explained" yeah that's how life works. Imagine having a story set in modern day America and the characters have several pages of exposition on combustion engines and telecommunication networks before we get to the plot

The Druids’ Temple | GarettPhotography

How to keep making ttrpgs? I just made my first one+ a couple game jam entries and i feel like i hit a rock , all i have is a vague idea, what do i do?

aw well i'm so happy you made a bunch of games and want to keep making them!

there are multiple answers to this, but mine is: take a break! i had on-and-off ttrpg burnout last year, and forcing it never helps. so i used that burnout time to get into a new hobby i've been meaning to try for forever: fighting games! now i go back and forth between writing my games and getting better at guilty gear! i'm even trying to learn a new type of controller?? it's real fun. on top of that, seeing other types of game formats is a great way to get new ideas!

and some days i just chill with my partner and my pet reptiles. REST is so important. not as a way to work more in the future, but just for its own sake.

the ttrpg design flow will be back soon enough. after HEXFALL and Caltrop Core, i was like 'idk what other kind of games i wanna make. have i done everything i can do here?' but sure enough, i got the idea for EMERGE8, an entirely new SRD, then got the idea for TANK!, Decadent Salvo, and more.

tl;dr don't force it. take a break and your brain will be itching to give you fresh new ideas soon enough!

This is important, also might help avoid procrastination as leaving a project unfinished does not equal abandoning it, you can always come back to it

Friendly reminder to all the writers on here:

You don’t owe anyone good writing.

You don’t owe anyone a complete storyline written in order.

You can jump around. You can abandon projects. You can write really shitty stories! Writing is about telling stories and creating worlds. Not about what makes your followers happy.

I have to remind myself of this a lot, because in most of my stories I’ve gotten stuck and don’t know where to go. But you can jump around. You can skip parts. It doesn’t matter.

Write what makes you happy.

uh oh time to meet the parents prompts

i love this request so much! please feel free to use :)

“what are the chances that you’d let me not meet them, then tell them i died or something and we can run away together and—” “breathe.”

“mom, this is [name].” “……… you’re joking, right?”

“mom… what would you do if i said i was getting married?” and a response like “omg!!!!! to that guy you were dating before??? when is it???? what’s the color theme????? WAIT DONT MOVE IM FLYING OVER”

^and a contrasting “dad… i’m getting married” and a response like “oh ok congrats”

introducing them in that awkward stage where they’ve been dating for like a couple months and they’re eating dinner tgt and the parents are just humiliating them

“whether you like them or not, i love them. you can respect that or you can uninvite yourself from the wedding.”

“thank you for loving my daughter. you were one of us from the moment you started taking care of her.”

they hit it off so very well that the parents are like F my child can i adopt u instead

^afterwards like “so what did you think of them?” and the parent(s) are like “i think i like them more than you.”

“i’m gonna be honest my love. watching you guys together made me glad because i know you have someone when your dad and i leave this earth.”

“give her a chance.”

if the parents don’t like the love interest: have scenes displaying how it feels for the love interest to have to see their partner scramble to convince their parents to like their partner. that cannot in any way shape or form go untalked about as the live interest probably feels humiliated, inferior, etc… also consider why the parents would dislike the love interest

“i don’t like him.” “good thing i’m the one dating him then, right?”

a lot of people don’t have parents/good relationships w their parents so what if they broke the news to their friends :)

one of your characters doesn’t have parents to break the news to but their partner’s parents take them in as their own

“i need them to love me. because you love me, and you love them, and if they don’t love me i don’t know what i’ll do.”

“i want them to love you.”

“i need you guys to love him because i love him.”

“i finally realized that i don’t need your permission as much as i thought i did.”

I apologize if you’ve been asked this question before I’m sure you have, but how do you feel about AI in writing? One of my teachers was “writing” stories using ChatGPT then was bragging about how good they were (they were not good) and said he was going to sell them. To put aside any legal concerns in that, I’m just trying to talk him down from that because, personally, I would not enjoy dream job being taken by AI.

The poor man.

Many magazines have closed their submission portals because people thought they could send in AI-written stories.

For years I would tell people who wanted to be writers that the only way to be a writer was to write your own stories because elves would not come in the night and do it for you.

With AI, drunk plagiaristic elves who cannot actually write and would not know an idea or a sentence if it bit their little elvish arses will actually turn up and write something unpublishable for you. This is not a good thing.

wishing all artists a very sincere "get weirder with it" this coming year