: The Strength of a Symmetrical Plot

https://letswritesomenovels.tumblr.com/post/158897933093/the-strength-of-a-symmetrical-plot

One of my favorite studies of Harry Potter is that of the ring composition found both in the individual novels and overall composition. That very composition is what makes Harry Potter such a satisfying story. It’s a large part of the reason Harry Potter is destined to become a classic. 

And it’s an integral part of the series many people are completely unaware of. 

So what is ring composition? 

It’s a well-worn, beautiful, and (frankly) very satisfying way of structuring a story. John Granger, known online as The Hogwarts Professor, has written extensively on it.

Ring Composition is also known as “chiastic structure.” Basically, it’s when writing is structured symmetrically, mirroring itself: ABBA or ABCBA. 

Poems can be structured this way. Sentences can be structured this way. (Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.) Stories of any length and of any form can be structured this way.

In a novel, the basic structure depends on three key scenes: the catalyst, the crux, and the closing. 

• The catalyst sets the story into the motion. 

• The crux is the moment when everything changes. (It is not the climax). 

• The closing, is both the result of the crux and a return to the catalyst. 

In Harry Potter, you might recognise this structure: 

• Voldemort casts a killing curse on Harry and doesn’t die. 

• Voldemort attempts to come back to power

• Voldemort comes back to power.

• Harry learns what it will take to remove Voldemort from power.

• Voldemort casts a killing curse on Harry and dies.

But all stories should have this structure. A book’s ending should always reference its beginning. It should always be the result of some major turning point along the way. Otherwise, it simply wouldn’t be a very good story.

What’s most satisfying about chiastic structure is not the basic ABA structure, but the mirroring that happens in between these three major story points. 

To illustrate what a more complicated ABCDEFGFEDCBA structure looks like, (but not as complicated as Harry Potter’s, which you can see here and here) Susan Raab has put together a fantastic visual of ring composition in Beauty and the Beast (1991), a movie which most agree is almost perfectly structured. 

source: x

What’s so wonderful about ring composition in this story is that it so clearly illustrates how that one crucial decision of Beast changes everything in the world of the story. Everything from the first half of the story comes back in the second half, effected by Beast’s decision. This gives every plot point more weight because it ties them all to the larger story arc. What’s more, because it’s so self-referential, everything feels tidy and complete. Because everything has some level of importance, the world feels more fully realized and fleshed out. No small detail is left unexplored.    

How great would Beauty and the Beast be if Gaston hadn’t proposed to Belle in the opening, but was introduced later on as a hunter who simply wanted to kill a big monster? Or if, after the magnificent opening song, the townspeople had nothing to do with the rest of the movie? Or if Maurice’s invention had never been mentioned again after he left the castle? 

Humans are nostalgic beings. We love returning to old things. We don’t want the things we love to be forgotten. 

This is true of readers, too. 

We love seeing story elements return to us. We love to know that no matter how the story is progressing, those events that occurred as we were falling in love with it are still as important to the story itself as they are to us. There is something inside us all that delights in seeing Harry leave Privet Dr. the same way he got there–in the sidecar of Hagrid’s motorbike. There’s a power to it that would make any other exit from Privet Dr. lesser. 

On a less poetic note, readers don’t like to feel as though they’ve wasted their time reading about something, investing in something, that doesn’t feel very important to the story. If Gaston proposed to Belle in Act 1 and did nothing in Act 3, readers might ask “Why was he even in the movie then? Why couldn’t we have spent more time talking about x instead?” Many people do ask similar questions of plot points and characters that are important in one half of a movie or book, but don’t feature in the rest of it. 

Now, ring composition is odiously difficult to write, but even if you can’t make your story a perfect mirror of itself, don’t let story elements leave quietly. Let things echo where you can–small moments, big moments, decisions, characters, places, jokes. 

It’s the simplest way of building a story structure that will satisfy its readers.

If there’s no place for something to echo, if an element drops out of the story half-way through, or appears in the last act, and you simply can’t see any other way around it, you may want to ask yourself if it’s truly important enough to earn its place in your story. 

Further reading:

• If you’d like to learn more about ring theory, I’d recommend listening to the Mugglenet Academia episode on it: x

• You can also read more about symmetry in HP here: x

• And more about ring structure in Lolita and Star Wars here: x and x

• And about why story endings and beginnings should be linked here: x

Gamasutra - What did they do to you?: Our women heroes problem

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/219074/What_did_they_do_to_you_Our_women_heroes_problem.php

Lara Croft is a strange icon, and her recent arc in games is even stranger: We're going to legitimize this fetish object from the 1990s by battering her, and then taking her to therapy. I winced when I saw the 2012 trailer, the grunts of a woman being tenderized like a nice steak.

Yesterday at E3 it was announced that the "story" of Lara Croft is continuing, through Rise of the Tomb Raider -- we see the action heroine talking with her therapist about post-traumatic stress. And I winced again.

This, we are made to understand, is how you become a heroine, a tomb raider. Our lead characters have to be hard, and while we accept a male hero with a five o'clock shadow and a bad attitude generally unquestioned, a woman seems to need a reason to be hard. Something had to have been done to her.

"I know it's upsetting, what you've been through," whispers another treatment figure to the heroine of Infamous: First Light, another game with a ponytailed heroine shown at E3 2014 last night. Like Lara, she wears a cozy hoodie, curls in on herself. We like to peek through the windows and behind the shower curtains and into the doctor's appointments of our fragile heroines and voyeuristically thrill at their damage, looking forward to their moments of revelation and revenge.

It seems that when you want to make a woman into a hero, you hurt her first. When you want to make a man into a hero, you hurt... also a woman first.

Men in video games are frequently defined by their fridge maidens. A man's wife dies. Or his girlfriend, or his daughter or mother, and he is shattered, out for retribution.

I asked Twitter to help name video games where this happens, and my replies feed has been updating almost constantly since, across numerous conversation threads: Max Payne, God of War, Gears of War, The Darkness, Shadows of the Damned, Dante's Inferno, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Dead Space, Watch Dogs, and on and on.

A common reply: "all of them." It's very nearly true, even for games lauded for storytelling: Braid, Shadow of the Colossus and ICO feature characters whose purpose is a lost woman; The Last of Us, a game I love, opens by introducing us to Joel's stunningly-believable daughter, a drowsy kid with glow-stars on her ceiling, before taking her away. The intro is gut-punching. People keep doing it because it works.

One can't abolish classic structural tropes. Each instance taken separately isn't inherently wrong, and nobody is trying to erase it. But the picture of how we understand heroism in games is bizarrely unbalanced at a distance -- to some extent the games industry can clearly tell its audience is exhausted of the grizzled warrior staring sadly down at the torn photo of a dead girl and that it's beyond time to change things up, to offer something new. Now, they're giving us women who stare sadly down at their own trembling hands.

Tell me what they did to you, we croon, pupils dilating. We need, for some reason, to see that she can be vulnerable. We need to know how she can still be a bad-ass while she still looks so approachable, so hot, so much like we can have her.

I'm far from the first person to criticize the focus on "strong" when it comes to female protagonists. As Sophia McDougall puts it in this New Statesman piece, "Sherlock Holmes gets to be brilliant, solitary, abrasive, Bohemian, whimsical, brave, sad, manipulative, neurotic, vain, untidy, fastidious, artistic, courteous, rude, a polymath genius. Female characters get to be Strong." Further, we seem to have problematic ideas of how women become Strong -- men break them, we assume.

Abstracted ideas about post-traumatic stress disorder or the catch-all "mental health issues" are common in games -- apparently the logic is if we're trying to advance narratives in action games, we need to find nuanced rationales for why we're killing so many people with aplomb. "Mental health issues" are always why people shoot other people, if you believe the news lately (despite the fact that sufferers of mental illness are more likely to be at risk of violent harm than to perpetrate it).

And every time we have conversations about the traumatized protagonist, there's an understandable retort: "why can't games deal with trauma and disorder?" Of course they can. Arguably they should, as video games are nothing if not an elaborate way for us to self-manage, self-soothe. In this personal essay, Rhea Monique shares why it's important to her to see women who don't have to apologize for showing their wounds, and that perspective matters: No one is wrong for what they relate to.

But here's the unfortunate thing: We've really only got this one mode of approach. I don't think it's farfetched to theorize that video games are still largely populated by men who feel unsure about how to write and build nuanced women. These days we often discuss our recent year or so of dads in games, as, we assume, the majority-male game developers mature from young men who'd like to attain and impress a woman to older adults with kids of their own, and a vulnerable girl shifts from object of desire into something to protect.

That's an understandable reflection of the experience of those creators. But in all these Dad Games, where are their mothers? In The Last of Us, Joel's daughter Sarah's mother is absent; she just left, somehow. Clementine's mother in The Walking Dead is a distant figure, later revealed to've gone undead. Ni No Kuni and Brothers are both recent games about children whose mothers have recently died. The mother of BioShock Infinite's Elizabeth is shown at one point to be an actual evil ghost. Mothers are rarely heroic in games, but are literally peripheral spectres, distant and often frightening.

Well-intentioned men sometimes chastise one another about sexism: "She could be your wife. She could be your daughter. Think about if someone did this to your girlfriend or your mom." How about just "she's a human being"? It's all part of a bigger problem, in that media, especially geek media, still too often only understands women in terms of their relationship to men. The question is never who is she, but what did they do to her.

There is still little exploration of how heroic qualities -- not necessarily "strength", but relatability, motivation, complexity -- in women can exist independently. There are still few roles for them other than catalyst for male revelation or victim defined by male abuse.

All people exist in an ecosystem and are defined by their experiences and affected by the people in their lives. But when we want to know why our favorite male leads are the way they are, we don't just think about the women who happened to them or the trauma they endured: We think about their beliefs, their thoughts and feelings, their goals and desires. Their personalities, their habits, their quirks, their flaws.

This isn't to say that videogames' square-jawed, square-shouldered guy heroes always have a good infrastructure to answer those questions (nor always need one). Perhaps if we uncoupled the weird cause-and-effect relationship games seem to have between suffering women and men, we'd have more nuanced male characters, too. Why don't we see more men who get to be broken, for example? Many studies say men are less likely to seek help for mental health issues than women -- why reinforce that as correct?

And most of all, I'd like to see more games that see women as people, not the passive sum of what they endure until they're "done", ready to come out of the oven and fight.

Until then, the well-intentioned therapy sessions in games will keep making my skin crawl. "I can't help you unless you open up," someone croons to Infamous: First Light's squirming Fetch Walker. "A girl your age should be exploring new horizons," Lara's doctor tells her as she taps her foot anxiously. "I'd like to know you're taking care of yourself."

Right. I'm sure.

Let's Fix Your Fics — Worldbuilding: Things That Might Have Been Missed

https://lets-get-fictional.tumblr.com/post/164266245104/worldbuilding-things-that-might-have-been-missed

These are the miscellaneous questions I didn’t put anywhere else.  Things that didn’t get enough questions to have its own post, or things I didn’t think of too much until the end.  In this post, I have written a list questions of … . well, everything else?

Have fun, be detailed and creative, and by all means come up with questions that are not asked.

Because my computer ate everything, these questions are not directly taken from the NaNoWriMo website.  Some are asked from memory, some are questions that sounded like ones I had, and others are ones I came up with.

How is a funeral held?

*What happens to the body after someone has died?

*Do they bury it?  Place it in a tomb?  Cremate it?  Drop it to the bottom of the sea?  Send it down the river?  Toss it into a dragon’s lair?

How do people mourn?

What is consider an appropriate amount of time for mourning?

*What color is used for mourning and funerals?

*Black?  White?  Red?  Blue?  No specific color?  What does the color symbolize?

Are there any coming of age rituals?

What happens during a coming of age ritual?

What age is the child normally at when he or she goes the coming of age ritual?

Does it vary by gender?

What kind of jobs exist?

Which jobs are held in high esteem?

Which jobs are despised?

*How do people get jobs?

*Do they become an apprentice?  Do they need work experience?  A college degree?  How are they offered jobs?  Do they apply?  Talk with the owner?  Get recommended?

What jobs are influenced by magic?

*What is the most common way someone meets his or her future spouse?

*By growing with them?  Through connections?  School?  In the market?  At a dance?  Arranged marriage?

How technologically advanced is the world?

What is the latest piece of technology?

How does magic affect technology?

*How is new technology viewed?

*Is it embraced?  Are people apprehensive?  Do they outright spurn new technology?  Do people care?

*What does the average bed look like?

*Straw mattress?  Water bed?  A pile of blankets?  A wooden platform?  A chair?  A couch?

*What are some rules regarding sleep?

*Are mixed genders allowed or is that frowned upon unless they’re married?  Do people have their own beds or share with siblings?  Do the rules vary depending on where they’re sleeping?  Is everyone smooshed in together at an inn?  Can money get better bedding?

*What are the basic pieces of furniture found in an average house?

*Chairs?  Couches? Tables?  Beds?  Bookshelves?  How many are acceptable?  How many pieces of furniture would indicate lavishness?

What are some toys for children?

What do people use as a light source when the sun is not available?

*What kinds of dishes are used?

*Plates?  Bowls?  Cups or glasses?

*What kind of eating utensils do people use?

*Chopsticks?  Forks and spoons?  Their hands?

What materials are dishes and eating utensils made of?

*What kind of items are used for cooking?

*Pots and pans?  Clay pots?  Crock pots?  Skillets?  Wok?  A wooden plate?

Discussion: Fictional Disabilities

http://disabilityinkidlit.com/2016/03/17/discussion-fictional-disabilities/

Fictional disabilities are a staple in SFF. These can be invented disabilities; superpowers or magical abilities that come with disabling side effects; or characters who lack some ability that’s typical in their world. In other words, we’ll be talking about magical and science-fictional elements that create conditions or situations with disability parallels to the real world. We’re joined by three wonderful panelists for this discussion: Ava Jae, Andrea Shettle, and Logan W.

Kayla Whaley: Let’s start with some brief introductions! 🙂

Ava Jae: Hi! I’m Ava, author of Beyond the Red, a YA Sci-Fi that just released this month. *confetti* Probably relevant to this conversation: I have rheumatoid arthritis and undiagnosed anxiety stuff. I’ve also talked about chronic illness and disability rep on my blog a few times, and on my Twitter more frequently.

Andrea Shettle: I’m Andrea Shettle, I’ve written two reviews for Disability in Kidlit, both for books with deaf characters. I did publish a book way back when (1990), fantasy, [Flute Song Magic](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1996386.FluteSongMagic), no longer in print, but nothing recently. I also have attention deficit disorder.

Logan W.: Hi! I’m Logan, and while I’m not really a writer or anything, I’m always reading and I’ve gotten very into Disability in Kidlit recently. Also relevant: I have ADHD, sensory processing problems, and anxiety.

Kayla: As you all know, I’m one of the editors of Disability in Kidlit. I’m also a MG/YA (recently agented!! woo!) writer and a part-time essayist on disability stuff. Now, for our first question!

When people complain about the lack of disability representation in SFF, sooner or later, someone will ask, “But what about werewolves? What about vampires?” These are magical creatures who have some skills normal humans don’t, but these skills come with drawbacks. Sookie Stackhouse in [Dead Until Dark](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/301082.DeadUntilDark) even literally refers to her telepathy as a disability. Various abilities in sci-fi may also come with downsides.

Do we consider these characters to be truly disabled? Is there a firm yes or no, or does it depend on how it’s handled?

Ava: I actually ranted about this on Twitter back in December. In cases of vampires and werewolves, etc. where there are clear advantages, this is a firm no for me. While I get there are downsides to having those kinds of abilities, the good far outweighs the struggle to me. I don’t get any advantages to being chronically ill, for example, and to claim that a condition that gives a character a bunch of advantages (e.g., super speed, super strength, immortality) is a disability because there are also downsides to having superpowers is extremely frustrating to me. Like, not being able to go outside in exchange for immortality, and super speed, and enhanced senses, and super strength does not equivocate to being chronically ill.

Andrea: I think it depends … as one example, although there are tons of things I could criticize on how JK Rowling handles disabilities in the Harry Potter series, some of the adaptations that Dumbledore makes for Professor Lupin, back when he was a student and again as a professor, are kind of similar to how real-life disabilities may need to be accommodated at school. I do totally get Ava’s rant, though.

Logan: My answer for most questions like this is “it depends,” and very strongly in the case of this one because of how differently werewolves, vampires, and other such creatures are portrayed in different books and movies. Oftentimes people assume that werewolves and vampires were meant to be allegories for race relations, and that’s obviously not a perfect allegory, but neither is a disability narrative. I do, also, very much get Ava’s rant. Not being able to navigate everyday situations without a number of accommodations isn’t a superpower.

Ava: Yeah, I think Lupin is probably the closest to seeming disability-like as I’ve seen for supernatural creatures. But most werewolf/vampire portrayals I’ve seen (and I’ve seen a lot) focus much more heavily on the advantages.

Andrea: I think I am still mostly inclined to say, “no, these are not really disabilities” … I think many of the disadvantages of being a vampire, werewolf, having telepathy, whatever, are mostly disadvantages because society is not structured for having those abilities or for compensating for how they work. (As with disabilities, hmm …)

Logan: Yes, and because many people’s view of vampires today has to do with stories like Twilight, where the disadvantage is “you sparkle,” I’m very much inclined to say that it’s most often that these kinds of supernatural states aren’t disabilities.

Ava: Like I said, I feel personally that with these examples at least, the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. (Except maybe in Lupin’s case, which I could see. Then again, there’s Fenrir Greyback, who was also a werewolf and totally capitalized on his advantages, so, I don’t know.) Yeah, Twilight is a good example of no. Vampire Diaries is another example of no—even the werewolves have pretty decent everyday advantages, and they eventually learn to control the change to werewolf, which pretty much eliminates any disability argument to me.

Andrea: Most of the disadvantages you see are things like, the inconvenience of having to lock yourself up for a few days on every full moon, but not the everyday kind of disadvantages, microaggressions, and discrimination that disabled people experience. Yeah, Twilight is a great example of, nonono, not a disability at all.

If it were a vampire dominated world *shudder* then humans are the ones who would be disabled, not vampires.

Logan: Good point, Andrea. When people bring up the idea that supernatural creatures are inherently disabled, they seem to be playing off the idea that because the supernatural creatures are a minority, it must therefore mean they’re some sort of other minority too.

Ava: Yeah, I think that’s true, Logan. I’ve also seen people point to supernatural creatures as a way to claim there’s plenty of disability representation out there, which is frustrating.

Andrea: Of course it’s complex, because some of what makes a disability a disability (vis a vis social model) is the question of whether society is structured to favor people whose bodies, neurology, abilities, etc. are similar to yours or not. Most stories featuring werewolves, vampires, etc. do feature them as a minority (as Logan says) so society isn’t structured for them.

But, yes, even if you do decide to handle them as disabilities (meaning, not just, “Oh no, woe is me, I can’t go out in the day time anymore,” but, “Okay, are there workaround solutions similar to how there are work around solutions for real life disabilities”) … they just do not replace representation for deaf people or people with ADD. Just like representation for deaf people or people with AD(H)D cannot replace, say, representation for people with rheumatoid arthritis or people who are autistic or have cerebral palsy.

Logan: There’s so many subsets of “disabled” that neurotypical, able-bodied people seem to assume that if you’ve got one, you’ve got them all, and that’s another reason it doesn’t quite work to say “supernatural = disability.”

Kayla: I think the point about the social model perhaps lending some support to the argument for disability is an interesting one. It’s also interesting to think of it in terms of the medical model and how often vampires/werewolves/etc. stories feature a “cure” plot. Does that mirror or parallel the way that disability is often treated in narratives in a way that supports the supernatural as disability angle?

Ava: I mean, I honestly feel even with the social model it doesn’t apply to supernatural creatures nine out of ten times. Even with society structured against supernatural creatures, they still have very distinct advantages—immortality, super strength, super speed, enhanced senses, etc. It would have to be deliberately written as a disability, I think, for it to work.

Logan: I agree—the disadvantages of a superpower like that are a bug, not a feature, the opposite of the way we perceive most disabilities

Ava: Yup. I agree. And it’s the opposite of how we experience many disabilities.

Andrea: Absolutely … although society isn’t really structured to accommodate supernatural creatures, it still isn’t really structured in a way that really disadvantages or excludes them either.

Kayla: So, let’s talk about a slightly different category of “fictional disability” then.

A trilogy that’s gained a lot of positive attention in the past years is Earth Girl by Janet Edwards. In this world, nearly all humans have the ability to travel to other worlds. A small minority is unable to survive on other worlds, however, and is stuck on Earth. These people are called “Handicapped,” “apes,” and “throwbacks.” The idea of a world with superpowered individuals in which those without powers are considered disadvantaged also occur in many other SF stories. These characters would not be considered disabled in our world, but they might in this other setting.

Is this a question of disability depending on one’s environment? Is it a cop-out, or an interesting allegory?

Ava: I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I think in that setting where everyone has an ability and a minority does not, clearly puts the minority at a disadvantage, so I can see how it would be considered a disability. And if we were to imagine that was a real situation, with society built around people who have that ability, it would be a disability. But on the other hand, in terms of writing that kind of situation, it does feel like a reverse discrimination narrative—as if able-bodied writers have to make it about them. Again.

Andrea: I’ve read the full Earth Girl series now, and think that series could be great fodder for an article or dialogue all to itself! I do think it can be used to explore disability as being an interactive effect of the differences in our bodies/neurologies and the environment around us.

Ava: I can see how in terms of whether or not it’s a disability within the story, it can totally apply as a disability.

Logan: Earth Girl is one of my favorite books, and I’ve gone through an incredible number of phases with how I feel about it because the author does some amazing world-building but also props up a few problematic assumptions about disabled people (mainly that we all want to be cured). But my favorite part about the world-building is that there’s very obvious institutionalized ableism that affects the Handicapped in the books—but there’s also a lot of referencing that every single other disability has been cured, and everyone’s upset they can’t cure this one.

Andrea: I found the complete erasure of all other disabilities very problematic too. First of all, I don’t see how it is even possible to completely cure or prevent every single disability ever. New disabilities are always going to evolve just by changing expectations for things people should “all” be able to do. The problem is, many series like Earth Girl and other books like Freakling by Lana Krumwiede just don’t even try to explore those issues.

Logan: In general, I do think that books like this can be a good opening onto how the social model works in theory (the characters would not be disabled at all if they lived in a different time or place), but it needs to not be the be-all end-all of disability representation

Kayla: Having not read Earth Girl myself, it’s interesting to me that they’re actually called “Handicapped.” That makes the allegory explicit in a way that not many other similar situations do.

Andrea: The inability to go to other worlds itself is an example of a condition that probably always existed, but only became a disability when traveling between worlds became the norm. Dyslexia could be a real-world example—a thousand years ago, most people didn’t read or write, so dyslexia wouldn’t have been a disadvantage then.

Kayla: That is a really interesting point, Andrea.

Ava: Yes, interesting point, Andrea. I also agree with Logan. I haven’t read Earth Girl so I can’t comment on details about the book itself, but I know as a reader I would personally rather read about existing disabilities, or analogs to one, rather than completely made-up ones, especially made-up ones that put able-bodied people in the spotlight.

Logan: There’s actually a scene in one of the books where the characters discuss the use of words and how they hurt, and the main character comments that it’s not the words you use, it’s how you say them (in regards to them being called Handicapped).

Andrea: Yes, agreed with Logan … there is so much missed opportunity in how Earth Girl, Freakling, and other books like them handle disability issues.

Kayla: Do you think that in the right hands, these sorts of fictional disabilities could be an interesting way to explore actual disability issues then? Is there a way to mitigate the problematic elements?

Ava: I do think it has that potential, yeah.

Andrea: I do absolutely think that in the right hands they could be a way to mitigate these problematic elements. For one thing, don’t erase all real-world disabilities.

Logan: And definitely don’t go down the miracle cure route, because it’s so alienating to so many of us. Within the Earth Girl trilogy, there’s a lot of discussion about how they can’t cure this disability (but then there ends up being a miracle cure narrative that grates so heavily on what they’ve set up in the past books) that’s a good allegory for how fraught cure talk is in real life, but the execution fell far short of what’s needed.

Andrea: And yeah, like Logan, I’m not loving the miracle cure in Earth Girl, which just replicates the same miracle cure problem you see in the handling of so many real-world disabilities in fiction.

Ava: Uggggh, miracle cure. I’d be really angry if I’d invested in a series about disability and it ended in a Miracle Cure.

I personally just am not a fan of the reverse discrimination thing, so I’m not likely to pick up a book with this specific type of fictional disability. I think it could potentially be done well … I just take too much issue with it to read it myself.

Andrea: Like, if you’re going to finally give me a character “just like me,” don’t then yank them away from me at the end by giving them a cure. I’m not sure I would say that it is “reverse discrimination” per se. To me, that would imply disabled people discriminating against non-disabled people, similar to how “reverse racism” sci-fi has black people committing racism against white people.

Ava: I suppose that’s true; it just feels close enough to me because, like I said, people we would consider able-bodied are front and center. Which, again, could still be done well and I get that their society makes them disabled. It’s just not a narrative that I am attracted to, personally.

Andrea: Yeah, I see your point, Ava … maybe there’s another way to phrase it. I’m personally attracted to the idea of it because I think it could be fascinating if handled well; I’m just frustrated at the actual results which are so often done so poorly. Like erasing real-world disabilities—you can’t really have an exploration of what makes disability a disability without having at least some examples of actual, real-world disabilities.

Logan: Ava, I definitely feel the same way about many other disability allegories, especially ones that are set in close enough to modern-day that there very much are people with “traditional” disabilities, such as squibs in Harry Potter. But I’m inclined to agree with Andrea that I like the idea of it; the execution just tends to be very shoddy.

Kayla: Earlier, Ava mentioned that she would rather read about a made-up illness that analogous to a real-world one rather than the type we’ve been discussing. Authors will often either create those analogous illnesses/conditions, or make new ones up that have no obvious connection to the real world.

Is this a logical part of speculative worldbuilding? Even if it’s logical, is it problematic, too? If so, how? Are worldbuilding concerns enough to justify introducing fake conditions if this is indeed problematic? Are there specific factors that could influence your opinion?

And in the case of obvious analogs, are you taking away representation from people by not just using and naming that existing disability, or are the symptoms more important in terms of relating to the character?

(Wow, there are a lot of questions in that. Feel free to just answer whatever sparks something.)

Andrea: … I think I’m mixed in this one …

Ava: I think this depends on the situation. It does make sense to me that there would be different illnesses in different worlds—or how an analog might exist because in another world, the way things manifest may vary. I think the important thing here though is how well it’s done. If it’s overly convenient (picking and choosing), then that to me can be problematic because the author is deliberately ignoring real things that real disabled people have to deal with because it would be too hard to incorporate it into the plot, which isn’t fair.

I think, if the analog or made-up condition has a full range of consequences for the affected character, and that character struggles with their disability in a way that is authentic to actually disabled people, it can be okay.

Andrea: In real life, new illnesses and conditions do sometimes emerge, and as Ava says, you wouldn’t expect every world to have the exact same conditions. But, similar to Ava, it depends on how you handle it. For one thing, please don’t erase real-world disabilities when introducing new/fictional disabilities!

Logan: Earth Girl is a good jumping off point for these questions too—the disability is portrayed as an immune system malfunction, somewhat analogous to autoimmune diseases that we actually have (which presents another problem with “how is everything else cured”), and the fact that everything else is “cured” is meant to be a block in the world-building of “we are so technologically advanced,” and I think we’ve already talked about the problems those kind of things can create.

Kayla: It does seem like authors sometimes think you can have fictional ones or real ones, but not both.

Logan: Yes, very much this idea that there must be a separation between the fictional world and the real world, and that both can’t coexist.

Andrea: Yeah, if you give us the fictional disabilities, give us the real ones too … partly because that’s a more effective way of exploring issues like what makes a disability a disability, but also because it kind of sucks to be told, “Well, okay, you can sort of have representation, but not really, we’re just going to give you pretend representation.”

Logan: Like Ava mentioned, there’s so much “picking and choosing” when writing about fictional disabilities or fictional analogues of real-world ones—people have sensory processing differences, but those are only ever portrayed in a good way and never shown to cause meltdowns or discomfort of any sort, or people walk differently but are never portrayed as tired or in need of a break.

Andrea: It seems like that might be one of the most damaging effects of this kind of “almost but not really rep”—that it reinforces and emphasizes the lack of actual disability rep we have.

Logan: Definitely agree about the “you only get pretend representation”—it’s like when someone storyboarding is asked to come back with an elf of color and comes back with a blue elf.

Andrea: I’m never a fan of erasure or invisibilization, but it is kind of an extra double slap in the face to have that erasure and/or invisibilization at the same time you’re giving us invented disabilities.

Ava: Right, exactly. If you don’t show the character struggling with their condition … honestly, what’s the point of even writing the “disability” to begin with?

Logan: Yes, you technically did what people wanted, but like Kayla says, you’ve only emphasized the fact that we don’t get to see ourselves and have to look through wavy glass to see anyone

Kayla: I love that wavy glass comment, Logan. So well put!

So, to sort of tie all this together: is the potential value of exploring disability issues through fictional disabilities worth the potential harm that also comes with them? Should authors (particularly abled authors) incorporate these into their SFF worldbuilding, or avoid them?

Ava: I think it is worth it … as long as it’s done with the right mindset and a commitment to do it well. That means research, and disabled betas, and listening to the community, and listening to critique, etc. If you’re going to half-ass it, though, then go write something else.

Andrea: I think authors (abled or not) who want to have fictional disabilities in their SFF worldbuilding need to firstly think why they need it, and secondly do their homework. Everything that Ava says.

Ava: I think you’re right, Andrea. Especially now with some writers translating the push for diverse narratives to mean that it’s a trend and just want to hop on the bandwagon which is … no.

Logan: I think there’s definitely value in fictional disabilities, but they have to be tempered with some sort of real-world explanation in order to provide the kind of story that will actually benefit disabled people. It’s so easy to just come up with something off the cuff and assume what you wanted to explain will show through, but there’s a lot of research and intensive effort that goes into making it good.

Andrea: Similar to the question of, “Should abled authors write disabled characters at all?” … Yes, please do, just please do your homework and get those beta readers with shared/similar experience.

Logan: Andrea, I’ve definitely had that experience. I wrote to an author once to explain to her why I didn’t like her explanation of a character’s sensory issues, and her response was “he’s not disabled, get over yourself.”

And talking about the need to ask why is really important—if you want to write about disability, write about disability. Not about something entirely made-up that doesn’t speak to people experiencing these sorts of things here and now.

I think that’s why it hurts less (for me at least) in something like Harry Potter with the squibs rather than in something like Earth Girl, which is meant to be a book about disability and disabled life … but missed the mark.

Kayla: And presumably, in this case, it would also be especially important to understand the many and varied disability tropes and the history of erasure in literature, because if you’re using fictional disabilities as a way to explore disability, you ought to be really well grounded in the real-world politics and context.

Andrea: Absolutely. You need to familiarize yourself with that long history of how disability has been handled elsewhere in fiction. I think sometimes authors may not even be thinking of real-world disabilities, or at least not about real disabled people; Harry Potter is problematic in erasing all real-world disability among the magical community, though.

Logan: That is true, Andrea, about Harry Potter—the difference for me was that it felt as if the erasure was secondary and/or accidental (which doesn’t make it okay, but somehow hurt less), instead of being central to the plot of the book. Be careful if you read the sequels to [The Adoration of Jenna Fox](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1902241.TheAdorationofJennaFox). 

Andrea: Yeah … kind of like, Earth Girl had deliberate active erasure, then there is passive invisibilization. Earth Girl alone (and ditto Harry Potter) are each worth their own series of blog posts!

Kayla: We could definitely keep talking about this for hours! There’s so much more here to cover, but this has been a fantastic discussion of a really complicated topic. The takeaway seems to be that authors need to be intentional and thoughtful when considering using these fictional disabilities—no matter which type—and to understand that there’s real potential for harm.

Thank you all so much for joining us! It’s been lovely. 🙂

you have the little one — Ways to un-stick a stuck story

https://firemoon42.tumblr.com/post/142175505856/ways-to-un-stick-a-stuck-story

• Do an outline, whatever way works best. Get yourself out of the word soup and know where the story is headed.

• Conflicts and obstacles. Hurt the protagonist, put things in their way, this keeps the story interesting. An easy journey makes the story boring and boring is hard to write.

• Change the POV. Sometimes all it takes to untangle a knotted story is to look at it through different eyes, be it through the sidekick, the antagonist, a minor character, whatever.

• Know the characters. You can’t write a story if the characters are strangers to you. Know their likes, dislikes, fears, and most importantly, their motivation. This makes the path clearer.

• Fill in holes. Writing doesn’t have to be linear; you can always go back and fill in plotholes, and add content and context.

• Have flashbacks, hallucinations, dream sequences or foreshadowing events. These stir the story up, deviations from the expected course add a feeling of urgency and uncertainty to the narrative.

• Introduce a new mystery. If there’s something that just doesn’t add up, a big question mark, the story becomes more compelling. Beware: this can also cause you to sink further into the mire.

• Take something from your protagonist. A weapon, asset, ally or loved one. Force him to operate without it, it can reinvigorate a stale story.

• Twists and betrayal. Maybe someone isn’t who they say they are or the protagonist is betrayed by someone he thought he could trust. This can shake the story up and get it rolling again.

• Secrets. If someone has a deep, dark secret that they’re forced to lie about, it’s a good way to stir up some fresh conflict. New lies to cover up the old ones, the secret being revealed, and all the resulting chaos.

• Kill someone. Make a character death that is productive to the plot, but not “just because”. If done well, it affects all the characters, stirs up the story and gets it moving.

• Ill-advised character actions. Tension is created when a character we love does something we hate. Identify the thing the readers don’t want to happen, then engineer it so it happens worse than they imagined.

• Create cliff-hangers. Keep the readers’ attention by putting the characters into new problems and make them wait for you to write your way out of it. This challenge can really bring out your creativity.

• Raise the stakes. Make the consequences of failure worse, make the journey harder. Suddenly the protagonist’s goal is more than he expected, or he has to make an important choice.

• Make the hero active. You can’t always wait for external influences on the characters, sometimes you have to make the hero take actions himself. Not necessarily to be successful, but active and complicit in the narrative.

• Different threat levels. Make the conflicts on a physical level (“I’m about to be killed by a demon”), an emotional level (“But that demon was my true love”) and a philosophical level (“If I’m forced to kill my true love before they kill me, how can love ever succeed in the face of evil?”).

• Figure out an ending. If you know where the story is going to end, it helps get the ball rolling towards that end, even if it’s not the same ending that you actually end up writing.

• What if? What if the hero kills the antagonist now, gets captured, or goes insane? When you write down different questions like these, the answer to how to continue the story will present itself.

• Start fresh or skip ahead. Delete the last five thousand words and try again. It’s terrifying at first, but frees you up for a fresh start to find a proper path. Or you can skip the part that’s putting you on edge – forget about that fidgety crap, you can do it later – and write the next scene. Whatever was in-between will come with time.

Guiding Your Writing — Hi, do you have any advice on writing prophecies?

https://thewritersguardianangel.tumblr.com/post/158922800986/hi-do-you-have-any-advice-on-writing-prophecies

“

Hi, do you have any advice on writing prophecies?

by seashade

Yes.

One of the most important things about writing “prophecies” is cliches. Prophecies have been so overdone with certain cliches that people are beginning to tire of the very idea of a prophecy- that doesn’t mean that prophecies are Now Very Bad. It just means that writers have to get even more creative when writing a prophecy.

First, some things to avoid when writing prophecies:

*** disclaimer: as with everything in writing, prophecy techniques are a gray area. Yeah, maybe you can pull it off if you are original enough. But generally, these are just some things that have been used tiresomely before.

1. The Perfect Poem:This means those prophecies you see sometimes that are super dramatic and usually rhyming. I don’t know where it came from, but there seems to be this idea that if something rhymes, it is all of a sudden a Very Important Thing. Additionally- the case of the magical prophecy that always rhymes. You’ve probably seen this before- an ancient prophecy is written on an Egyptian tomb or something, and then the explorer translates is aloud and it flawlessly rhymes in perfect English. If you want to do that, there had better be a reason, because rhymes don’t translate between languages since you are, you know, using different words. Also related: cryptic prophecies. The ones that are jumbled and poetic and it’s hard to tell what it’s saying exactly. These are bad when done just for the poetry and good when done with multiple interpretations in mind. I’ll get back to that.

2. The Delivery: Often when prophecies are delivered, they are delivered in the most dramatic way possible. Again, if done right, this can create a very intense and intriguing scene. But for the most part, people have gotten used to dramatic lighting and strange smelling mist and the seer going into a trance or something. If your prophecy is going to be delivered via Magical Ritual, make it an original magic ritual. Also, making a ritual scene runs the risk of misrepresenting and generally insulting cultures in which certain divination is sacred.

3. The Chosen One: Possibly one of the most popular tropes of all time, The Chosen One is the one the prophecies spoke of long ago, the chosen hero sent to save us all, and totally super done. Chosen Ones can be intriguing characters, but honestly? If you can do something different, do. Don’t jump to Chosen Ones. Really, really put work into avoiding your Chosen Ones. They cause trouble. As a somewhat off topic note, I personally love stories where the hero wasn’t chosen, where is was just coincidence or bad luck or good luck or whatever. The hero isn’t the person who was destined, they were just the one who happened to step up to the plate and swing, prophecy or no. It kind of shows how anyone can be a hero, but a hero isn’t just anyone. 

What You Should Do:

Do the opposite of what you don’t do. Yay, I’m so helpful. As a general rule, try to be original. Easier said than done, I know, but give creativity your best shot. As for random tips…

1. Clarity: If your prophecy is going to be poetically unclear, use that to your advantage. Make each line have a double meaning or different possible interpretations that could potentially be true. Surprise your readers and your characters and even yourself- it doesn’t always mean what you think it means. Explore the possibilities. 

2. Keep Track of Fate: If your prophecy mentions multiple people or events, make sure to follow through with your story. Don’t forget any details, it has to add up or it will all make no sense. Unless, of course, the point it that the prophecy was wrong. 

3. How Much Do They Know?: This one confuses me in a lot of stories. How much do your people know about this prophecy? If the prophecy is ancient or widespread, then there might have been plenty of opportunity to study it. Who knows, maybe they figured out a few lines in the time they’ve had to read it over and over before it became true. 

4. Being Cryptic: This is just a quick tip on how you can make your prophecies make less sense- maybe, originally, they made perfect sense. Language and culture is constantly evolving. Maybe the prophecy made perfect sense way back when it was spoken, but now it has been so long that nobody really remembers “brillig” or “slithy toves” even are.

5. Research: I kind of touched on this in point two of the don’ts, but I think it deserves its own spot here. If your method of prophecy is based off of something real, some real oracle or ritual, know your stuff and portray it accurately, or don’t do it at all. This goes from the Ancient Greeks to modern kitchen witchcraft and beyond.

Remember, this story is yours. Make your prophecy your own, too. There can be a million prophecies in the world, but this one is yours, so show how special is in the way only you can.

And thank you for the ask!

~Penemue

How to Write About Africa | Binyavanga Wainaina | Granta

https://granta.com/how-to-write-about-africa/

Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African’s cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with. The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He is an enemy of development, always using his government job to make it difficult for pragmatic and good-hearted expats to set up NGOs or Legal Conservation Areas. Or he is an Oxford-educated intellectual turned serial-killing politician in a Savile Row suit. He is a cannibal who likes Cristal champagne, and his mother is a rich witch-doctor who really runs the country.

Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good. She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering. Also be sure to include a warm and motherly woman who has a rolling laugh and who is concerned for your well-being. Just call her Mama. Her children are all delinquent. These characters should buzz around your main hero, making him look good. Your hero can teach them, bathe them, feed them; he carries lots of babies and has seen Death. Your hero is you (if reportage), or a beautiful, tragic international celebrity/aristocrat who now cares for animals (if fiction).

Bad Western characters may include children of Tory cabinet ministers, Afrikaners, employees of the World Bank. When talking about exploitation by foreigners mention the Chinese and Indian traders. Blame the West for Africa’s situation. But do not be too specific.

Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate something about Europe or America in Africa. African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life—but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.

Describe, in detail, naked breasts (young, old, conservative, recently raped, big, small) or mutilated genitals, or enhanced genitals. Or any kind of genitals. And dead bodies. Or, better, naked dead bodies. And especially rotting naked dead bodies. Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the ‘real Africa’, and you want that on your dust jacket. Do not feel queasy about this: you are trying to help them to get aid from the West. The biggest taboo in writing about Africa is to describe or show dead or suffering white people.

Animals, on the other hand, must be treated as well rounded, complex characters. They speak (or grunt while tossing their manes proudly) and have names, ambitions and desires. They also have family values: see how lions teach their children? Elephants are caring, and are good feminists or dignified patriarchs. So are gorillas. Never, ever say anything negative about an elephant or a gorilla. Elephants may attack people’s property, destroy their crops, and even kill them. Always take the side of the elephant. Big cats have public-school accents. Hyenas are fair game and have vaguely Middle Eastern accents. Any short Africans who live in the jungle or desert may be portrayed with good humour (unless they are in conflict with an elephant or chimpanzee or gorilla, in which case they are pure evil).

After celebrity activists and aid workers, conservationists are Africa’s most important people. Do not offend them. You need them to invite you to their 30,000-acre game ranch or ‘conservation area’, and this is the only way you will get to interview the celebrity activist. Often a book cover with a heroic-looking conservationist on it works magic for sales. Anybody white, tanned and wearing khaki who once had a pet antelope or a farm is a conservationist, one who is preserving Africa’s rich heritage. When interviewing him or her, do not ask how much funding they have; do not ask how much money they make off their game. Never ask how much they pay their employees.

Readers will be put off if you don’t mention the light in Africa. And sunsets, the African sunset is a must. It is always big and red. There is always a big sky. Wide empty spaces and game are critical—Africa is the Land of Wide Empty Spaces. When writing about the plight of flora and fauna, make sure you mention that Africa is overpopulated. When your main character is in a desert or jungle living with indigenous peoples (anybody short) it is okay to mention that Africa has been severely depopulated by Aids and War (use caps).

You’ll also need a nightclub called Tropicana, where mercenaries, evil nouveau riche Africans and prostitutes and guerrillas and expats hang out.

Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.

Originally published in Granta 92, 2005

‘How to Write About Africa’, by Binyavanga Wainaina. © Binyavanga Wainaina, 2005. Reproduced by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Ltd.

Artwork © Lost In The Island, Shift, 2019

Creativichee — Character Mannerisms

https://creativichee.tumblr.com/post/127754719550/character-mannerisms

• Here’s some considerations for the tiny little details that can add a lot to a character. Figuring out these mannerisms can do a lot for conveying character traits through their normal actions rather than just their thoughts, dialogue, etc.

  • How’s their posture? There are more options than just sitting up straight or slouching a lot. What’s their most comfortable sitting position? Do they have a consistent posture or does it change depending on situation / present company? 
    
  • How’s their etiquette? Do they hold the door for people behind them? How do they handle handshakes and other kinds of typical contact? Does their language change or become more formal when speaking to strangers? To their elders? To their superiors? 
  • In a crowded space, do they get out of people’s way, or do people get out of THEIR way? 
  • How do they point something out? Pointing their finger? Nodding their head? A flippant wave of the hand?
  • What are their comfort gestures or self-touch gestures? Common comfort gestures include rubbing the back of the neck or gripping their own arms. Can they suppress these gestures or do they do them often?
  • Also consider the character’s common reactions to common emotions. Do they whoop when they’re excited? Do they tremble when angry? 
  • What parts of the body are the most expressive? Do they shuffle and stomp their feet a lot when agitated or excited? Are they a hand talker? Do they have an impressive range of motion with their eyebrows?
  • How do they sound? Do their car keys jingle as they walk? Do they drag their feet? Do their heels clack resoundingly on hard floors? Do they breathe loudly? Do they fidget in ways that make a lot of noise?
  • How do they handle eye contact?
  • Any behaviors they reserve for moments when they’re alone? (Or possibly among family/friends that don’t care?) Do they pick their nose? Do they bite their toenails? Do they sniff their armpits? Or do they not care if people see behavior like this?
  • Apart from comfort gestures, what else do they do to comfort themselves in trying times? What’s their go-to self care? What’s their comfort food? Where’s their safe space?
  • What are they doing with themselves as they’re suppressing emotion? Lip biting, fist clenching, and avoiding eye contact are common methods of coping with strong emotions.
  • August 27, 2015 (9:38 pm)
  • 34773 notes
  • #characterization
  • #character design
  • #characters
  • #character traits
  • #writing tips
  • #writing advice

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Sometimes shit happens - Helpful things for action writers to remember

https://bamonnineties.tumblr.com/post/155664673295/helpful-things-for-action-writers-to-remember

ave-aria:

starforgedsteel:

berrybird:

• Sticking a landing will royally fuck up your joints and possibly shatter your ankles, depending on how high you’re jumping/falling from. There’s a very good reason free-runners dive and roll. 
• Hand-to-hand fights usually only last a matter of seconds, sometimes a few minutes. It’s exhausting work and unless you have a lot of training and history with hand-to-hand combat, you’re going to tire out really fast. 
• Arrows are very effective and you can’t just yank them out without doing a lot of damage. Most of the time the head of the arrow will break off inside the body if you try pulling it out, and arrows are built to pierce deep. An arrow wound demands medical attention. 
• Throwing your opponent across the room is really not all that smart. You’re giving them the chance to get up and run away. Unless you’re trying to put distance between you so you can shoot them or something, don’t throw them. 
• Everyone has something called a “flinch response” when they fight. This is pretty much the brain’s way of telling you “get the fuck out of here or we’re gonna die.” Experienced fighters have trained to suppress this. Think about how long your character has been fighting. A character in a fist fight for the first time is going to take a few hits before their survival instinct kicks in and they start hitting back. A character in a fist fight for the eighth time that week is going to respond a little differently. 
• ADRENALINE WORKS AGAINST YOU WHEN YOU FIGHT. THIS IS IMPORTANT. A lot of times people think that adrenaline will kick in and give you some badass fighting skills, but it’s actually the opposite. Adrenaline is what tires you out in a battle and it also affects the fighter’s efficacy - meaning it makes them shaky and inaccurate, and overall they lose about 60% of their fighting skill because their brain is focusing on not dying. Adrenaline keeps you alive, it doesn’t give you the skill to pull off a perfect roundhouse kick to the opponent’s face. 
• Swords WILL bend or break if you hit something hard enough. They also dull easily and take a lot of maintenance. In reality, someone who fights with a sword would have to have to repair or replace it constantly.

• Fights get messy. There’s blood and sweat everywhere, and that will make it hard to hold your weapon or get a good grip on someone. 

• A serious battle also smells horrible. There’s lots of sweat, but also the smell of urine and feces. After someone dies, their bowels and bladder empty. There might also be some questionable things on the ground which can be very psychologically traumatizing. Remember to think about all of the character’s senses when they’re in a fight. Everything WILL affect them in some way. 

• If your sword is sharpened down to a fine edge, the rest of the blade can’t go through the cut you make. You’ll just end up putting a tiny, shallow scratch in the surface of whatever you strike, and you could probably break your sword. 

• ARCHERS ARE STRONG TOO. Have you ever drawn a bow? It takes a lot of strength, especially when you’re shooting a bow with a higher draw weight. Draw weight basically means “the amount of force you have to use to pull this sucker back enough to fire it.” To give you an idea of how that works, here’s a helpful link to tell you about finding bow sizes and draw weights for your characters.  (CLICK ME)

• If an archer has to use a bow they’re not used to, it will probably throw them off a little until they’ve done a few practice shots with it and figured out its draw weight and stability. 

• People bleed. If they get punched in the face, they’ll probably get a bloody nose. If they get stabbed or cut somehow, they’ll bleed accordingly. And if they’ve been fighting for a while, they’ve got a LOT of blood rushing around to provide them with oxygen. They’re going to bleed a lot. 

• Here’s a link to a chart to show you how much blood a person can lose without dying. (CLICK ME) 

• If you want a more in-depth medical chart, try this one. (CLICK ME)

Hopefully this helps someone out there. If you reblog, feel free to add more tips for writers or correct anything I’ve gotten wrong here. 

How to apply Writing techniques for action scenes:

- Short sentences. Choppy. One action, then another. When there’s a lull in the fight, take a moment, using longer phrases to analyze the situation–then dive back in. Snap, snap, snap.

- Same thing with words - short, simple, and strong in the thick of battle. Save the longer syllables for elsewhere.

- Characters do not dwell on things when they are in the heat of the moment. They will get punched in the face. Focus on actions, not thoughts.

- Go back and cut out as many adverbs as possible.

- No seriously, if there’s ever a time to use the strongest verbs in your vocabulary - Bellow, thrash, heave, shriek, snarl, splinter, bolt, hurtle, crumble, shatter, charge, raze - it’s now.

- Don’t forget your other senses. People might not even be sure what they saw during a fight, but they always know how they felt.

- Taste: Dry mouth, salt from sweat, copper tang from blood, etc

- Smell: OP nailed it

- Touch: Headache, sore muscles, tense muscles, exhaustion, blood pounding. Bruised knuckles/bowstring fingers. Injuries that ache and pulse, sting and flare white hot with pain.

- Pain will stay with a character. Even if it’s minor.

- Sound and sight might blur or sharpen depending on the character and their experience/exhaustion. Colors and quick movements will catch the eye. Loud sounds or noises from behind may serve as a fighter’s only alert before an attack.

- If something unexpected happens, shifting the character’s whole attention to that thing will shift the Audience’s attention, too.

- Aftermath. This is where the details resurface, the characters pick up things they cast aside during the fight, both literally and metaphorically. Fights are chaotic, fast paced, and self-centered. Characters know only their self, their goals, what’s in their way, and the quickest way around those threats. The aftermath is when people can regain their emotions, their relationships, their rationality/introspection, and anything else they couldn’t afford to think or feel while their lives were on the line.

Do everything you can to keep the fight here and now. Maximize the physical, minimize the theoretical. Keep things immediate - no theories or what ifs.

If writing a strategist, who needs to think ahead, try this: keep strategy to before-and-after fights. Lay out plans in calm periods, try to guess what enemies are thinking or what they will do. During combat, however, the character should think about his options, enemies, and terrain in immediate terms; that is, in shapes and direction. (Large enemy rushing me; dive left, circle around / Scaffolding on fire, pool below me / two foes helping each other, separate them.)

Lastly, after writing, read it aloud. Anyplace your tongue catches up on a fast moving scene, edit. Smooth action scenes rarely come on the first try.

More for martial arts or hand-to-hand in general

What a character’s wearing will affect how they fight.  The more restricting the clothes, the harder it will be.  If they’re wearing a skirt that is loose enough to fight in, modesty will be lost in a life or death situation.

Jewelry can also be very bad.  Necklaces can be grabbed onto.  Bracelets also can be grabbed onto or inhibit movement.  Rings it can depend on the person.

Shoes also matter.  Tennis shoes are good and solid, but if you’re unused to them there’s a chance of accidentally hurting your ankle.  High heels can definitely be a problem.  However, they can also make very good weapons, especially for someone used to balancing on the balls of their feet.  Side kicks and thrusting kicks in soft areas (like the solar plexus) or the feet are good ideas.  They can also (hopefully) be taken off quickly and used as a hand weapon.  Combat boots are great but if someone relies more on speed or aren’t used to them, they can weigh a person down.  Cowboy boots can be surprisingly good.  Spin kicks (if a character is quick enough to use them) are especially nasty in these shoes.

If a character is going to fight barefoot, please keep location in mind.  Concrete can mess up your feet quick.  Lawns, yards, etc often have hidden holes and other obstacles that can mess up a fighter.  Tile floors or waxed wood can be very slippery if you’re not careful or used to them.

Likewise, if it’s outside be aware of how weather will affect the fight.  The sun’s glare can really impede a fighter’s sight.  A wet location, inside or outside, can cause a fighter to slip and fall.  Sweat on the body can cause a fighter to lose a grip on an opponent too.

Pressure points for a trained fighter are great places to aim for in a fight.  The solar plexus is another great place to aim for.  It will knock the wind out of anyone and immediately weaken your opponent. 

It your character is hit in the solar plexus and isn’t trained, they’re going down.  The first time you get hit there you are out of breath and most people double over in confusion and pain.  If a fighter is more used to it, they will stand tall and expand themselves in order to get some breath.  They will likely keep fighting, but until their breath returns to normal, they will be considerably weaker.

Do not be afraid to have your character use obstacles in their environment.  Pillars, boxes, bookshelves, doors, etc.  They put distance between you and an opponent which can allow you to catch your breath. 

Do not be afraid to have your character use objects in their environment.  Someone’s coming at you with a spear, trident, etc, then pick up a chair and get it caught in the legs or use it as a shield.  Bedsheets can make a good distraction and tangle someone up.  Someone’s invading your home and you need to defend yourself?  Throw a lamp.  Anything can be turned into a weapon.

Guns often miss their targets at longer distances, even by those who have trained heavily with them.  They can also be easier to disarm as they only shoot in one direction.  However, depending on the type, grabbing onto the top is a very very bad idea.  There is a good likelihood you WILL get hurt.

Knives are nasty weapons by someone who knows what they’re doing.  Good fighters never hold a knife the way you would when cutting food.  It is best used when held against the forearm.  In defense, this makes a block more effective and in offense, slashing movement from any direction are going to be bad.  If a character is in a fight with a knife or trying to disarm one, they will get hurt. 

Soft areas hit with hard body parts.  Hard areas hit with soft body parts.  The neck, stomach, and other soft areas are best hit with punches, side kicks, elbows, and other hard body parts.  Head and other hard parts are best hit using a knife hand, palm strike, etc.  Spin kicks will be nasty regardless of what you’re aiming for it they land.

Common misconception with round house kicks is that you’re hitting with the top of the foot.  You’re hitting with the ball.  You’re likely to break your foot when hitting with the top.

When punching, the thumb is outside of the fist.  You’ll break something if you’re hitting with the thumb inside, which a lot of inexperienced fighters do. 

Also, punching the face or jaw can hurt. 

It can be hard to grab a punch if you’re not experienced with it despite how easy movies make it seem.  It’s best to dodge or redirect it.

Hitting to the head is not always the best idea.  It can take a bit of training to be able to reach for the head with a kick because of the height.  Flexibility is very much needed.  If there are problems with their hips or they just aren’t very flexible, kicks to the head aren’t happening.

Jump kicks are a good way to hit the head, but an opponent will see it coming if it’s too slow or they are fast/experienced.

A good kick can throw an opponent back or knock them to the ground.  If the person you’ve hit has experience though, they’ll immediately be getting up again.

Even if they’ve trained for years in a martial art, if they haven’t actually hit anything before or gotten hit, it will be slightly stunning for the person.  It does not feel the way you expect it too.

Those yells in martial arts are not just for show.  If done right, they tighten your core making it easier to take a hit in that area.  Also, they can be used to intimidate an opponent.  Yelling or screaming right by their ear can startle someone.  (Generally, KHR fans look at Squalo for yelling)

Biting can also be used if someone’s grabbing you.  Spitting in someone’s eyes can’t hurt.  Also, in a chokehold or if someone is trying to grab your neck in general, PUT YOU CHIN DOWN.  This cuts off access and if they’re grabbing in the front can dig into their hand and hurt.

Wrist grabs and other grabs can be good.  Especially if it’s the first move an opponent makes and the character is trained, there are simple ways to counter that will have a person on their knees in seconds..

Use what your character has to their advantage.  If they’re smaller or have less mass, then they’ll be relying on speed, intelligence, evasion, and other similar tactics.  Larger opponents will be able to take hits better, they’re hits may be slower depending on who it is but will hurt like hell if they land, and size can be intimidating.   Taller people with longer legs will want to rely on kicking and keeping their distance since they have the advantage there.  Shorter people will want to keep the distance closer where it’s easier for them but harder for a taller opponent.  Punching is a good idea.

Using a person’s momentum against them is great.  There’s martial arts that revolve around this whole concept.  They throw a punch?  Grab it and pull them forward and around.  Their momentum will keep them going and knock them off balance. 

Leverage can used in the same way.  If used right, you can flip a person, dislocate a shoulder, throw out a knee, etc.

One note on adrenaline:  All that was said above is true about it.  But, in a fight, it can also make you more aware of what’s going on.  A fight that lasts twenty seconds can feel like a minute because time seems to almost slow down while moving extremely rapidly.  You only have so much time to think about what you’re doing.  You’re taking in information constantly and trying to adjust.  Even in the slow down adrenaline gives you, everything is moving very rapidly. 

Feelings will be your downfall even more so than adrenaline.  Adrenaline can make those feelings more intense, but a good fighter has learned not to listen to those feelings.  A good fighter may feel anger at being knocked down or in some way humiliated - their pride taken down.  Yet they will not act on the anger.  Acting on it makes a fighter more instinctive and many will charge without thinking.  Losing control of anything (adrenaline rush, emotions, technique, etc) can be a terrible thing in a fight.

Just thought I’d add in here.

YES. YES.

Tropes are Tools • When Diversity Is Bad

https://tropesaretools.tumblr.com/post/169970347759/when-diversity-is-bad

Sometimes, a work relies on having the privileged group as certain members of the cast. Diversifying those works/roles? A terrible idea.

Lord of the Flies is a critique on the assumption British boys are the panicle of civilized behaviour. Rebooting it with an all-female cast misses the point.

Heathers is a story of how a clique of rich white girls run a school. Rebooting it with an all-marginalized group of Heathers misses the point.

While my list of works that are super bad ideas is short, since 1- Hollywood has only recently decided to expand their cast away from white bread (let me know if you have more!) and 2- I tend to try and forget bad examples, these ideas point to a very, very troubling trend:

Taking works whose whole point is lampooning privilege and assuming they’d work the same way if you removed the core concept.

If we actually reached parity between marginalized representation and privileged representation, those types of reboots might be safe ground to tread on. But right now marginalized people are still very much marginalized, and as a result their cultural systems are different from the privileged group.

Rich white people have a wildly different frame of reference from rich black people. A rich black person will usually have a living relative who wasn’t allowed to own a house in a certain area because of skin colour, or whose parents weren’t allowed to. Meanwhile, even a new-money white person doesn’t have the recent historical racist barriers that actively tried to prevent their upward mobility.

The two groups are going to think about money differently. While both can flaunt it for the same reasons— it’s new, and they want to show it off— the sheer amount of ex-legal baggage a black person is carrying around is something I can’t speak about, but know is there.

If you’re starting to think about tossing in a little diversity into your cast, look very hard at the social structures you’ve put in place. Are the villains relying on wealth? Social power? How about the ability to act with impunity? All of those are highly tied to privilege— the type of privilege somebody marginalized simply would not have.

It’s different if you’re doing a single-marginalized-group cast. Black Panther doesn’t suffer from having rich and power-hungry black people as villains because there’s a bunch of rich heroic black people as protagonists, to name one example. In those situations, you’re dealing with equals. The same thing would apply in a secondary world fantasy where everyone in the cast is of the same or similar ethnic groups, or if you had a group of characters who all shared the same axis of oppression in general.

It’s also different if the power structures don’t rely on privilege. All female Ghostbusters? Awesome, because Ghostbusters was primarily about stopping ghosts. The amount of black girls and women in A Wrinkle in Time? Lovely, because we need more stories where the important figures are not white.

But if you’re recreating any sort of power imbalance where one group relies on privilege, and you have multiple ethnic groups in the cast? Take a good hard look at making too many villains marginalized, especially if they’re kingpins within the organization. Also consider what they can get away with, and if they have to use different tactics from the privileged villains; chances are, they’ll have to. 

This applies for both works set in the real world and in secondary world fantasy. Because secondary world fantasy is still read in the real world, and you can reinforce some extremely toxic ideals if you recreate real world marginalization.

Sometimes, diversity is a very bad thing. Keep that in mind when deciding what group plays what role.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this content, please consider supporting me on patreon. It’ll get you access to a bunch of cool stuff!

Super: Inhumans and the Sinister Gentrification of Otherness

https://comicsalliance.com/super-inhumans-vs-mutants/

The Inhumans used to be one of the more fascinating minor oddities of the Marvel Universe; ultimately only about as important as the Atlanteans or Monster Island, but just as pleasingly weird. With Medusa's magnificent hair, Gorgon's thunderhooves, and Black Bolt's mute power in a world of chatty heroes, they were deservedly called 'uncanny' back when the X-Men were still a preppy study group.

But the Inhumans have become the "fetch" of the Marvel Universe; the more Marvel tries to make them happen, the more certain it seems that they never will. What makes the Inhumans' rise especially hard to accept is that it seems directly tied to the fall of the mutants. Today's X-Men are comics' most significant icons of otherness, and treating them as interchangeable with another set of outsiders is dehumanizing on a whole new level.

Marvel has never officially confirmed that it wants to replace mutants with Inhumans, but it's certainly no coincidence that the number of Inhumans titles is at an all-time high when the number of X-Men titles is the lowest it's been since the '90s. On the one hand, there's a financial motive to demoting the mutants, since movie studio Fox owns a significant share of the X-Men licensing rights. On the other hand, mutants have a value to a superhero publisher. They're an easy origin story for major and minor characters, they're an engine for epic events, and they're a totemic underdog with a built-in appeal to angsty adolescents of all ages. Building up the Inhumans theoretically allows Marvel to retain the value of mutants without paying Fox a tithe. The Inhumans are mutant sucralose.

We now know that the Inhumans are replacing mutants in more than a theoretical sense. A preview for Jeff Lemire and Humberto Ramos's Extraordinary X-Men #1 shows that the same Terrigen Mist that awakens the powers of select Inhumans is also killing and sterilizing mutants.

Extraordinary X-Men #1

None of this is new. We've had a mutant plague before; we've had mutant sterility before; we've had mutants pushed to the brink of extinction before. Extinction has been the dominant X-Men story of the past ten years, from House of M to Avengers vs X-Men and beyond. But what's frustrating as an X-Men fan is that these stories aren't about villains trying to wipe out mutants; they're about Marvel editorial trying to wipe out mutants. And when you see mutants as a metaphor for otherness and queerness, that's troubling, and emotionally exhausting.

I've written before about why the X-Men resonate with me as a queer metaphor in a fictional world that didn't make room for LGBTQ characters. Mutants are outcast, transformative, and can be born from any family. That makes them powerfully resonant to LGBTQ readers. Queer characters are still marginal in the Marvel Universe, but even if they weren't, the value of the X-Men as icons of queerness is enormous.

When a publisher's editorial approach to its big queer metaphor is to keep finding new ways to sterilize them and wipe them out, that looks bad --- yes, even if motivated by that noble desire to make as much money as possible.

The Inhumans are a particularly poor substitute for the queer metaphor, because they represent something very different and dark. While the X-Men are all about celebrating people who are born different, the Inhumans are a society founded in eugenics; the idea that society can be improved by eliminating the socially deviant and the undesirable; the idea that we can engineer a superior race. Creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, two Jewish men just twenty years removed from the Holocaust, were not blind to the ideas they were exploring in this sci-fi invention.

The Inhumans had a caste system, and their own slave race, the Alpha Primitives. They have a royal family, with all that this implies about class and power and their willingness to wage wars. Unlike the 'found' families of the X-Men, the Inhumans are bound by blood. Where the X-Men are outsiders desperately clinging together, the Inhumans feel like cliquish insiders, like a Yale secret society. The Inhumans' history and ideology could not be more starkly at odds with the metaphor of queer identity.

Yet they're the ones being used to sweep mutants aside, and that's bad for the X-Men and for the Inhumans. Far from being the cool new quirky heroes that all the kids love, the Inhumans are the ones slaughtering queer underdogs by editorial mandate. They're an invasive species. They're colonizers.

Or they're the forces of gentrification --- in the form of actual gentry. The Inhumans are new neighbors, flush with capital, edging out the unwanted residents that built this community, and eroding the vibrant culture that made that neighborhood so special.

Oppression is part of the mutant story, of course. The X-Men should face existential crises. But their biggest existential threat shouldn't come from Marvel executives who are apparently insensitive to what these characters represent.

This is the second mutant genocide in just ten years, but this time Marvel's vibrant queer metaphor is being gassed to death to make room for the regal product of a social engineering program. So we're supposed to accept this glossy new product as the mandated face of Marvel's outcast heroes?

It's not going to happen.

Let's Fix Your Fics — Experiment with political systems

https://lets-get-fictional.tumblr.com/post/173459137250/experiment-with-political-systems

Sure, having a king/queen is simple, but have you ever tried:

• Democracy
• Multiple nobles and they all have the same amount of power (lot of conflict potential)
• You can become ruler by defeating the current ruler in a fight
• The merchants run everything
• A noble and a parliament rule
• The most intelligent people rule
• …

There are thousands of possibilities, be creative!

Older post, but I highly encourage it! Try out the weirdest stuff! Try things you think would never work in the real world because this is your world and if you say (insert political system believed to not work) works then it does

Here’s a list of Society and Government types I’ve stolen directly from the worldbuilding section of some rulebooks:

Anarchy: the social conscience maintains order, but there are no laws

Athenian Democracy: Every citizen can vote on every new law

Representative Democracy: Elected representatives form a congress or government

Clan: Pretty much whoever is older is in charge, traditions are strongly adhered to, and society as a whole is split cross many tribes that are generally similar (and usually allied) but with their own quirks and traditions

Caste: A lot like a Clan structure, but each clan has a set role in society that usually renders them co-dependent. These Castes usually follow a social heirarchy

Dictatorship: One person controls everything, and they will later pass the right to rule to someone else, whether by inheritance, election, duelling, or some other method. Not all dictatorships are bad, especially if they are formed in times of crisis or rebellion, but even those started with the best intentions may quickly corrupt.

Plutocracy: Whoever has money is in charge.

Technocracy: A group of scientists and engineers have complete control and do everything they can to run the country at maximum efficiency. The more competent they are, the more likely this is to be viewed as a good thing.

Thaumocracy: Like a technocracy, but run by a science-like form of magic (like wizards and arcanists rather than shamans and witches)

Theocracy: The Church controls everything, and their religious law is civil law. Whether this religion is real, is fake but knows it, or believes its own lies is up to you.

Corporate State: Powerful mercantile organisations have taken control of entire regions. This is a lot like a Technocracy, but with a corporate structure and a focus on maximum profitability (and no-one else is going to set them a minimum wage)

Feudal: A lot like a dictatorship, but subsidiary lords are assigned their own local power and can enforce their own law without notifying the larger state.

***VARIATIONS***

Bureaucracy: Government runs very slowly and the public has effectively no control. There is a lot of red tape and taxation is high.

Colony: Government is dependent on a mother society

Cybercracy: A computer system is the state administrator. Hopefully the programmers did a good job…

Matriarchy: Positions of authority are female-exclusive.

Meritocracy: Positions of authority require rigorous testing to qualify for.

Military Government: The Military control everything, usually but not always totalitarian

Monarchy: The person in charge may call themselves king or queen, but fundamentally this is either a dictatorship or a feudal society.

Oligarchy: A small organisation is in control, and it elects its own members.

Patriarchy: like a matriarchy, but for guys. what a novel idea

Sanctuary: A society that protects the people other societies hunt (that may be considered criminals or terrorists by other nations)

Socialist: The government directly manages the economy, education is easy to get, the government intervenes to get everyone possible a job. This is likely to collapse quickly without good technology or magic to assist it.

Subjugated: The society as a whole is completely controlled by an outside force.

Utopia: A perfect society where everyone is satisfied and nothing sinister is happening behind the scenes we swear.

The 'Good Role Model For Girls' Makes A Boring Superheroine

https://comicsalliance.com/female-heroes-good-girl-role-models/

Girls need role models. This is an old canard, though it’s tempting to see its genesis in 1990s girl power — it’s just that it hasn’t always meant warmed-over Gloria Steinem quotes and the Spice Girls. June Cleaver was a Good Role Model for Girls. The Virgin Mary is a Good Role Model for Girls. Their ranks have swelled with Buffys, Lara Crofts, and Wonder Women, but they stand, toned of arm and glossed of lip, beneath the same banner.

In response to a dearth of women, mainstream comics now turns to the Good Role Model for Girls as a panacea. Spider-Gwen! Spider Woman! Batgirl! Hawkeye! Black Widow! All the women in X-Men! She-Hulk! Even Suzie in Sex Criminals! And oh, how the little girl marooned in 90s comic dungeons within me sang! It’s a new age, I thought; a turning point. We’re getting somewhere. We’re really going to see a sea change across the most visible sector of comics, from the most mainstream companies. Sure, there are still very few female creators. But that’s coming, right? We’re moving forward. Even the hashtags say so.

Spider-Gwen; Jason Latour, Robbie Rodriguez, Rico Renzi

The first issues fly by, and I purchase every single one.

And I am bored.

Which isn't to say I don’t enjoy many of these books, or that I think they have no redeeming qualities. But these brave new heroines can, by and large, be summed up as “smart, nice, vaguely sassy.” There is individual conflict, sure — Barbara’s academic work, Gwen’s band, Kate Bishop’s desire for independence — but it’s rarely defining, and never truly risky. Certainly none of these books approach the kind of comedy, pathos, or danger that define the greatest male characters. They’re all a little safe, a little tame, a little quiet.

Sex Criminals exemplifies the dichotomy: While Jon struggles with mental illness, gender expectations, self-loathing, and love, complete with surreal looks into his mindscape and a brutal flashbacks in which he must reckon with childhood sins, Suzie…really wants to save her library. She has a brief tiff with her friend. It’s not a terrible story. But while the male lead is given the room to screw up, lie, fume, and lament, the female lead is given an exterior problem that no one would object to. Like Barbara’s crusade against her impostor. Like Gwen’s tangle with The Vulture. Like Diana’s war against the First Born. Like Kate Bishop’s California misadventures.

If a woman is to live through these characters, as we all love to argue the reader is meant to do with superheroes, she cannot plumb the depths of anger, sorrow, or joy. These heroines are too busy implicitly role modeling to become true characters.

Sex Criminals; Matt Fraction, Chip Zdarsky

The Good Role Model for Girls can be entertaining, and even inspirational. I have loved her, in certain incarnations, as a girl, a teenager, and an adult. But at her worst — and she is frequently at her worst — she is boring. At her worst, she is featureless beyond a few snappy catchphrases and factory standard martial arts proficiency. She isn’t flawed, funny, or notable beyond her purpose of good role modeling. She's smart. Nice. Vaguely sassy. Opposed to the kind of thing anyone would be opposed to.

In these failings, the Good Role Model for Girls is a manifestation of the patriarchy she claims to rebuke. Because the thing is, girls know how to be good. Good is waxed eyebrows, D-cups jiggling temptingly above hard abs, eyeliner techniques that might give you an infection but nail that “no-makeup makeup” look that guys just love. Good is AP Statistics and never complaining about the things the baseball team captain yells about your breasts from car windows. Good is always being down for a round of Halo and pizza, and always, unquestioningly, being the one to do the dishes and put away the controllers once the fun is over. Good is the unattainable ideal of womanhood — brilliant, sexy, empowered, but not like, a feminist — that we are fed from the day we are born. It isn't just the fact that girls are all too familiar with goodness; the crux of the problem is that girls cannot escape goodness.

What girls need — and what the Good Role Model for Girls rarely dirties herself with — is ugliness. Ugliness, in this sense, is what makes women human, rather than role models. "Ugliness" is bodies beyond Barbie, but also more than that; ugliness is a heart full of envy, hope, cruelty, anger, and fatigue. Ugliness is an interior life, and thus, an acknowledgment of women as independent beings.

Ugliness is not present in these comics. Nothing these heroines do is truly objectionable, none of their thoughts too dirty, none of their actions ill-considered. They might trip, but they do not fall, and they certainly never swear upon doing so.

Ugliness is beloved in men. We worship James Bonds, Walter Whites, Don Drapers, these (straight, cis, white) men who kill and connive. In them, it isn’t ugliness at all — it’s style and depth and daring. Comics love these men. They’re lovably crude clowns, like Plastic Man. They’re gruff malcontents with hearts of gold, like Bigby Wolf. They’re scarred avatars of justice, like Batman. They’ve been filling pages from the beginning, in superhero stories, Westerns, science fiction, crime, horror, and war comics. They’re the lions of the indie scene. They’re snapped up for Hollywood adaptation. These men — these cool, tough, fascinatingly twisted men — dominate.

Fables; Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham

For all that the past few decades have wallowed in grit and “realism” (as defined by teenage boys with a nihilism fetish), superhero comics are still, I would argue, best suited to telling stories that are heightened. Look at the classics: Simonson’s Thor, All-Star Superman, Batman: The Animated Series. These are stories that may deal in death and degradation, which tempts us into calling them “realistic,” but they are each and every one a melodrama — which isn’t actually something to run away from. “Subtle” is not a synonym for “worthwhile” or “intelligent.” That vivid emotions, broad symbols, and highly-colored tales of good and evil resonate with us is a sign of our humanity, not our inferior taste. We want to feel. We want to understand our world. We want to understand ourselves. And sometimes we want to do it in the big, emotional way that superheroes were explicitly created to do.

This is precisely what these tepid superheroine comics avoid. What creators need to indulge, then, is ugliness and melodrama. While the trail has not yet been fully blazed, positive examples exist. Emma Frost, for example, is the first female comics character I ever really loved. She wears her conflict — her big, emotional conflict — on her sleeve: she was bad, now she’s good, but she’s never going to be nice. After wading through a sea of smart, nice, sassy girls, her turmoil was a revelation.

Renee Montoya, especially as depicted in Gotham Central, is another beacon of storytelling: Rucka and Brubaker explored everything from alcoholism to police brutality through her eyes. I believe Harley Quinn’s popularity with women springs from a similar place: she’s a character. She’s goofy and tragic and full of story potential. Her heart is bruised and patched and too big to manage, but she simply cannot shelve it away. It's ugly. It's melodramatic. And there's no character I hear women cite more often as their favorite.

Astonishing X-Men; Joss Whedon, John Cassaday

These women aren’t role models. They’re not telling me how to be a good girl, for the benefit of everyone around me. They’re for me. They acknowledge that I am a human being capable of evil and virtue, sadness and joy. They are fantasy — the fantasy of adventure and superpowers, but mostly, a fantasy of emotion and humanity. And fantasy — unabashed, unfilitered, untethered — is the very soul of superheroics.

The Big Sexy Problem with Superheroines and Their ‘Liberated Sexuality’

https://comicsalliance.com/starfire-catwoman-sex-superheroine/

Yesterday, two new comic books from the "New 52" relaunch of DC Comics provoked some online controversy: Catwoman and Red Hood and the Outlaws. They were controversial in particular because of the way they depicted women, notably with the aggressively fanfictiony on-panel sex between Batman and Catwoman, and Starfire's transformation into a promiscuous tabula rasa who can't even remember the names of the men she sleeps with, and seeks out emotionless sex with both of the two male main characters while they essentially high five about it.

Since pointing out my issues with Starfire yesterday, I have received numerous e-mails -- from men -- accusing me of slut-shaming. Since there are a lot of people who don't understand the sexual dynamics that are in play here both creatively and culturally, I'd like to dissect this a little bit and explain why these scenes don't support sexually liberated women; they undermine them, and why after nearly 20 years of reading superhero books, these may finally have been the comics that broke me.I would like to say first and in the strongest possible terms that I absolutely support the right of women to embrace and act upon their sexual desires in whatever way seems right to them, within consensual boundaries. My sense of justice is inflamed by the double standard that tells us that every person a man sleeps with makes them more of a stud, and every person a woman sleeps with makes them a little less valuable and less respectable. I know this in particular because unlike all the guys who sent me angry messages last night defending the sexual honor of an imaginary character, that double standard is something l have had to live with and be judged by for my entire adult life.

And that is why books like Catwoman and Red Hood make me so goddamn angry.

Let's start with Catwoman. The writer and artist have decided that out of all possible introductions to the character of Selina Kyle, the moment we're going to meet her is going to be the one where she happens to be half-dressed and sporting bright red lingerie. That is in fact all we see of her for two pages: shots of her breasts. Most problematically, we are shown her breasts and her body over and over for two pages, but NOT her face. No joke, we get a very clear and detailed shot of her butt in black latex before we ever see her face looks like. Can't you show us the playful or confident look in her eye as she puts on her sexy costume? Because without that it's impossible to connect with the character on any other level than a boner, and I'm afraid I don't have one of those.

Like I said, I'm on board with the hot ladies; part of what got me into comics back in the day was being a 12-year-old girl who looked at strong, beautiful characters like Rogue and Jean Grey and Storm and wanted to be like them in large part because they were so sexy and confident and had exciting romances. Those books managed to offer characters that I'm certain appealed to men as well, but always felt like people instead of window dressing. I have long maintained that to bring in more female readers, superhero comics don't even need to specifically target women as much as they need to not actively offend them. This is not an insanely hard to thing to do, and yet here we are.

The money shot that most people have latched onto in Catwoman, however, is the one where Batman and Catwoman have sex on a rooftop. "What's wrong with Batman having sex?" You might ask. There's nothing wrong with Batman having sex. Or Catwoman, or Starfire, or any other hero. The problem isn't the plot point. If you're an adult, you've probably seen dozens if not hundreds of movies that included sex scenes. The mere fact that a piece of media depicts a sexual act doesn't tell you very much about how that scene is going to make you feel. You might be titillated, or bored, or grossed out, or any number of things. Your reaction depends not on the facts of what happens, but on the way it's presented. And while as with all aesthetic opinions your mileage may vary, this does not look sexy to me; it looks like a creepy fanfiction drawing.

Here's the question, though: Why? I know why Catwoman and Batman would have sex; there's nothing wrong with the idea. We saw him hook up with Talia in Son of the Demon and that was pretty cool. I mean literally, why is that last page a full-page splash of Batman actually penetrating Catwoman? Why do we need to see that? What does it accomplish or tell us about the characters that would have been lost if that page had been omitted?

The answer is nothing. They just wanted to see Catwoman and Batman bang on a roof. And that is the whole problem with this false notion of "sexually liberated" female characters: These aren't those women. They're how dudes want to imagine those women would be -- what Wire creator David Simon called writing "men with t*ts." They read like men's voices coming out of women's faces. Or worse, they read like the straight girls who make out with each other at clubs, not because they enjoy making out with women but because they desperately want guys to pay attention to them.

This is not about these women wanting things; it's about men wanting to see them do things, and that takes something that really should be empowering -- the idea that women can own their sexuality -- and transforms it into yet another male fantasy. It takes away the actual power of the women and turns their "sexual liberation" into just another way for dudes to get off. And that is at least ten times as gross as regular cheesecake, minimum.

Here is what it looks like just before Starfire tries to initiate sex.

Why is she contorting her body in that weird way? Who is she posing for, because it doesn't even seem to be Roy Harper? The answer, dear reader, is that she is posing for you. News flash: Starfire isn't being promiscuous because this comic wants to support progressive notions of gender roles. Starfire is being promiscuous so that you can look at pictures like this:

If you really want to support Starfire's "liberated sexuality" like she's somehow a person with real agency, what people should really be campaigning for is more half-clothed dudes in suggestive poses to get drawn around her, since I'm sure that's what she'd like to see. But people don't really want that, do they? Because it's not about what Starfire wants. It's about what straight male readers want. And they want to see Starfire with her clothes falling off. And hey, hey -- there's nothing wrong with that specifically, but let's be honest about what's happening and who we're serving (or not serving) and at whose expense. And let's be honest about the fact that this treatment happens almost exclusively to women, which is a huge part of what makes it so problematic.

Incidentally, while the Starfire here wants emotionless, casual sex with people whose names she can't remember, that's very much a departure from her previous incarnation, where she came from a culture that was primarily about love, not being available for joyless hookups with random dudes:

Conversely, if you would like to see an example of an extremely well-done superhero sex scene, check out the Spider-Man/Black Cat hookup from Amazing Spider-Man Present Black Cat #1 by Jen Van Meter and Javier Pulido, where Felicia is presented as a tough, sexy lady who knows what she wants sexually and unapologetically goes out to get it. Visually, the morning after is presented on a level playing field with Spider-Man hilariously hanging out in his boxers. Note: This is also a scene where the two superheroes have sex without knowing each other's real identities, and yet it couldn't feel more different from how that happens in Catwoman.

There's lots of room for these books and I welcome them, the same way I welcome Empowered, which I think is particularly successful at having fun with cheesecake in a very self-aware way. It's good for comics to have well-executed sexy books just like it's good to have well-executed sci-fi comics and well-executed horror comics and good comics in any genre. The only reason there might be a problem with a sexed up superhero title like Empowered was if that was the way women were depicted all the time. And the problem is that in a lot superhero comics, it kind of is.

Below on the left, I submit to you one of the starkest visual differences between men and women in superhero comics. On the ground, we see how the editors and writers and artists have chosen to dress a male Lantern, and standing above him we see how they have chosen to dress a female Lantern. These characters didn't appear out of thin air one day; someone designed them to look the way they look, and designed it for a very specific reason. And those design choices shape the way that the universe treats women generally. And on a more personal level, it also plays a big role in how DC Comics tells me they see people like me. Because I know that institutionally, they don't treat men like that; we're never going to see a major hero like Hal Jordan in a costume like one on the right as imagined by Deviant Artist Bionarri.

But the problem isn't Star Sapphire. Or Catwoman. Or Starfire. Or Dr. Light raping Sue Dibny on the Justice League satellite or that stupid rape backstory Kevin Smith gave Black Cat or the time Green Lantern's girlfriend got murdered and stuffed in a refrigerator. The problem is all of it together, and how it becomes so pervasive both narratively and visually that each of these things stops existing as an individual instance to be analyzed in a vacuum and becomes a pattern of behavior whose net effect is totally repellent to me. As an anomaly, maybe Starfire could be funny, the way the big-breasted, over-sexed Fritz (who even got her own porno comic, Birdland, which is pretty good if you're into that) is often funny in Love and Rockets, mostly because the series is already packed full of incredibly diverse, fully-realized female characters. But as the 5,000th example of a superhero comic presenting female sexuality in tone-deaf ways, it's just depressing.

In Red Hood and the Outlaws, this is DC Comics tells me a male hero looks like, and what a female hero looks like:

In Catwoman, this is what DC Comics tells me a male hero looks like, and what a female hero looks like:

This is not an anomaly. This is the primary message that I hear. And it is one that I only hear about the people who are like me -- the women -- and not the men.

And the problem is that when I look at these women, I would very much like to see confident ladies who enjoy sex and are having a fun sexy time. But what I see instead are women who give me the same impression as creepy dead-eyed porn stars mechanically mouthing "oh yeah, I want it." And that feeling of coerced sexual enthusiasm is the creepiest, saddest, most unerotic thing I can imagine. And if I were able to have a boner, seeing something like that would make me lose it every time.

When I read these comics and I see the way the female characters are presented, I don't see heroes I would want to be. I don't see people I would want to hang out with or look up to. I don't feel like the comics are talking to me; I feel like they're talking about me, the way both Jason Todd and Roy Harper talk about Starfire like two dudes high fiving over a mutual conquest (left).

I've heard people citing everything from Starfire's cultural background to her recent experiences with slavery(?!) as reasons for her promiscuity, the same way I've heard that it is totes cool for the debut issue of Voodoo, the first black female character to get her own DC ongoing series, to open with her stripping on her knees while men throw money at her, because she has a previously established history of being a stripper. But let's be honest -- they didn't make her a stripper because they really wanted to create a positive and well-rounded portrait of sex workers and how they exist in our culture. And you want to know how I know that? Because this is not what that looks like:

This is not the picture of that. And honestly I don't care if the final art next week reveals that she's reciting the Vagina Monologues or long excerpts from books by Gloria Steinem; it is not going to change the way looking at the image makes me -- or a lot of women -- feel, or the message it sends about how that comic regards ladies.

Female characters are only insatiable, barely-dressed aliens and strippers because someone decided to make them that way. It isn't a fact. It isn't an inviolable reality, especially in a comic book universe that has just been rebooted. In the end, what matters is what you choose to show people and how you show them, not the reasons you make up to justify it. Because this is comics, everybody. You can make up anything.

Most of all, what I keep coming back to is that superhero comics are nothing if not aspirational. They are full of heroes that inspire us to be better, to think more things are possible, to imagine a world where we can become something amazing. But this is what comics like this tell me about myself, as a lady: They tell me that I can be beautiful and powerful, but only if I wear as few clothes as possible. They tell me that I can have exciting adventures, as long as I have enormous breasts that I constantly contort to display to the people around me. They tell me I can be sexually adventurous and pursue my physical desires, as long as I do it in ways that feel inauthentic and contrived to appeal to men and kind of creep me out. When I look at these images, that is what I hear, and I don't think I even realized how much until this week.

In many ways, the constant barrage of this type of imagery (and characterization) is not unlike the sh*tty neighborhood I used to live in where every time I walked down the street, random people I didn't know shouted obscene comments about my body and told me they wanted to have sex with me. And you know, maybe a lot of those guys thought they were complimenting me. Maybe they thought I had tried to look pretty that day and they were telling me I had succeeded in that goal. Maybe they thought we were having a frank and sexually liberated exchange of ideas. I'm willing to be really, really generous and believe that's where they were coming from. But in the end, it doesn't matter that they didn't know it was creepy; it doesn't matter that they "didn't get it," because every single day I lived there they made me feel like less of a person.

That is how I feel when I read these comics.

And I'm tired. I'm so, so tired of hearing those messages from comics because they aren't the dreams or the escapist fantasies or the aspirations that I want to have. They don't make me feel joyful or powerful or excited. They make me feel so goddamn sad that I want to cry, because I have devoted my entire life to comics, and when I read superhero books like these I realize that most of the time, they don't give a sh*t about me.

I have been doing this for a long time, now. I have lived in the neighborhood of superhero comics for a long time. And frankly, if this is how they think it's ok to treat me when I walk down the street in a place that I thought belonged to me just as much as anyone else who lives here, then I'm not sure I want to live here anymore.

'BoJack Horseman' Season 5 Tackles Hollywood—And Itself - The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/09/bojack-horseman-season-5/569710/?utm_source=feed

The show’s fifth season shows how protecting abusive, famous men is a tangled and corrupting process that touches everyone.

Sep 14, 2018

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This story contains spoilers for Season 5 of BoJack Horseman.

There’s an episode early in the new season of BoJack Horseman that condenses a famous actor’s ugly past with an efficiency so ruthless, the story line would seem cartoonish were it not so familiar. A few minutes of screen time chronicle a decade’s worth of vile behavior: A fictional celebrity named Vance Waggoner bounces from scandal to scandal, whether it’s the news that he beat a prostitute with a bat, or that he called his teenage daughter a slut and threatened to kill her. After each story breaks, Vance does what men accused of such acts often do: He goes on TV to explain himself, to offer an excuse, and to insist that he’s changed.

But Vance’s reputation is exactly what makes him an attractive candidate for a role in a new prestige drama called Philbert, starring BoJack Horseman (voiced by Will Arnett). After it’s revealed that Vance once choked his wife, BoJack finds himself tasked with defending the actor on a talk show. But his efforts backfire—simply acknowledging that it was bad for Vance to choke his wife earns BoJack a standing ovation from the show’s all-female audience. So BoJack decides to lean in, declaring, “This is just old BoJack talking, but—how about we don’t choke any women?” To which the crowd starts chanting, “Don’t choke women! Don’t choke women!”

As is typical for BoJack Horseman, the episode is surreal in its presentation but more literal in its message, as it goes on to condemn Hollywood’s perverse eagerness to forgive abusive men. If the show had continued to follow Vance’s return to the spotlight, it might’ve made for a timely arc. But it wouldn’t have been particularly daring. After all, BoJack Horseman is already about a messed-up, middle-aged actor waging a comeback, a man who’s spent much of his adult life using, mistreating, and hurting women. In Season 2, he nearly had sex with his friend’s teenage daughter. In Season 3, he coaxed a young woman, who saw him as a father figure, out of sobriety and into a month-long bender that killed her.

BoJack Horseman, of course, knows all of that. So this year, the show turns its lens on itself, asking what society gains and loses when artists tell relatable stories about men who do terrible things. For years, the show has been a master class in empathetic TV. When the series takes its ensemble, especially BoJack, to morally alienating places, it does so with nuance, seeking the humanity beneath its characters’ acts of selfishness or cruelty. But in Season 5, the show refuses to take for granted that empathy is a good thing. It also knows better than to hinge a story line about redemption on someone that viewers don’t care about. Which is why, seven episodes after leading a crowd in a chant about not choking women, it is BoJack himself who is captured on camera, strangling his co-star and girlfriend in a drug-fueled rage.

BoJack Horseman is as much an incisive satire about Hollywood as it is a colorful, wordplay-obsessed sitcom filled with human-animal hybrids. So it’s unsurprising that much of Season 5 seems to resonate with the biggest story of the entertainment industry in the last year: the sexual-assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein and the resulting rise of the #MeToo movement (both of which, coincidentally, unfolded after the new BoJack season had already been plotted out). Hollywood has since seen a slew of powerful men—whether top executives such as Weinstein and CBS’s Les Moonves or performers such as Kevin Spacey and Louis C.K.—lose their jobs or fall out of the spotlight following extensive reports of inappropriate or violent behavior. There’s also been a growing awareness of the way sexism, sexual misconduct, and misogyny is systematically perpetuated at every level of the industry (and, indeed, across industries).

Lately, the broader discussion around the #MeToo movement has converged on the subject of “redemption”: what it looks like, who deserves it, and whether it’s possible. As a theme, redemption has always been central to BoJack Horseman. The show ends each season by asking, implicitly or explicitly, whether there’s hope for its troubled protagonist to change his ways. In the penultimate episode of Season 1, BoJack pleads with his friend Diane (Alison Brie): “I know that I can be selfish and narcissistic and self-destructive, but underneath all that, deep down, I’m a good person, and I need you to tell me that I’m good.” Crushingly, the scene cuts to black; BoJack gets no easy reassurance (and neither do viewers). It wasn’t until the end of Season 4 that the show offered a genuinely optimistic answer. After confronting his family’s history of mental illness and emotional abuse, BoJack started to form a real bond with his new half-sister, Hollyhock. He also agreed to help his manager and ex-girlfriend, Princess Carolyn (Amy Sedaris), after years of taking her for granted, by agreeing to star in a new TV show she’s producing called Philbert.

A send-up of gritty antihero dramas like True Detective, Philbert is at first a way for BoJack to see his flaws—alcoholism, abrasiveness—reflected back at him. But more broadly, Philbert serves as a vehicle for BoJack’s ambitious meta-critique of how Hollywood consistently glorifies, humanizes, enables, and forgives bad men—fictional or otherwise. This critique operates on a few different levels, and only grows more complex as the season wears on. One level of this assessment is institutional and doesn’t initially focus on BoJack. The episode “BoJack the Feminist” does a remarkable job of illustrating how executives, agents, publicists, and entertainment media mobilize to address a celebrity’s misdeeds and engineer his comeback—if there’s money to be made doing so.

In a clever move, BoJack has two women play key roles in reviving Vance’s career: Princess Carolyn and Ana Spanakopita (Angela Bassett), BoJack’s former publicist and ex-girlfriend. After BoJack’s botched TV appearance, Ana has her client Vance announce that he’ll no longer be part of Philbert, because he’s a feminist and the show is sexist. With her plans to hire Vance ruined, Princess Carolyn uses similar language to wave away questions about trying to cast him in the first place: “I got blinded by my desire to see myself succeed, which, since I’m a woman, is actually very feminist.”

On the one hand, such plot points recognize how feminism has been diluted into a vague PR term, a cheap virtue-signaling tool. On the other, they acknowledge that there are very real incentives for women who want to rise in the industry to protect the status quo, even if it means burnishing the reputations of men like Vance in the process. It’s story choices like these that deepen the show’s critique of Hollywood’s redemption machine: Again and again, well-intentioned, smart characters make decisions that defy simple ethical calculations.

In fact, BoJack underscores the seemingly immutable nature of sexism in the industry by weaving Diane, the closest thing the show has to a moral center, into the Philbert plot line. In one scene, Diane confronts Princess Carolyn about hiring Vance. “We both know the industry is screwed up,” Princess Carolyn sighs. “I’m not talking to the industry, I’m talking to you. Take some responsibility,” Diane says. In another scene, Diane challenges Ana about working for Vance:

Ana: Vance has a troubled past. All he’s asking for is a fresh start.

Diane: No! Why does he get that? Over and over?

Ana: He’s reformed! … Let’s say you can make him do anything you want to make things right. What would you make Vance Waggoner do now?

Diane: (Pauses.) Nothing. I don’t think he can make things right.

“When you as a woman give awful men the cover of your friendship … you are then complicit, no, you’re culpable for the terrible things they do,” Diane continues. Many viewers will come away from these scenes wholeheartedly sympathizing with Diane. She even manages to convince BoJack that Philbert is a sexist mess (“It’s posing as a deconstruction of the edifice of toxic masculinity, but it’s just using that as an excuse to relish in its own excesses”), and so he hires her as a consultant to help make the show better.

But, of course, BoJack doesn’t let Diane keep the moral high ground for long. At the end of the fourth episode, Ana plays for Diane an old tape recording in which BoJack admits that he would’ve had sex with his friend’s teenage daughter if her mother hadn’t walked in. “How do you make something right when you’ve made it so wrong you can never go back?” BoJack says in the tape. As the episode ends, Diane’s words from earlier hang in the air: I don’t think he can make things right. It’s here that what began as a clinical dissection of Hollywood’s amoral tendency to launder the misdeeds of awful men morphs into something far trickier and more personal. The show segues into a self-aware exploration of the myriad reasons that otherwise good people might have for not holding perpetrators accountable for their actions—and the role art might play in that process.

At the start of its first season, BoJack Horseman was exactly the kind of show it appeared to be. As The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum wrote, “It was the hundredth series about a middle-aged man—well, a horse, but still—who did bad things.” But the series soon proved it was more than that, and Nussbaum distilled what elevated the show: “It was sympathetic to BoJack’s depression and the sources of his pain, but it didn’t glamorize his solipsism as a special sensitivity.” BoJack Horseman brought new depths to the story of a pretty terrible man in a way that made for fascinating television.

In other words, it was good art. In other words, it was the kind of show that Diane helps turn Philbert into. After first being told by the show’s creator that she’s just there to make the project look less sexist, Diane takes a more active role in fleshing out Philbert’s character, partly in an attempt to get BoJack to admit to the actions described on the tape. But after Philbert receives rave reviews, Diane comes to a sobering realization. In a speech at the show’s premiere, BoJack tells the crowd that he thinks the message of Philbert is that “we’re all terrible, so therefore we’re all okay.” Afterward, Diane confesses her concerns to the show’s creator. “I made [Philbert] more vulnerable, and that made him more likable, which makes for a better TV show,” she says. “But if Philbert is just a way to make dumb assholes rationalize their own awful behavior, well, I’m sorry, but we can’t put this out there.”

By extension, BoJack puts pressure on the sort of extensive praise it has received as a show: If the goal of creating flawed, relatable protagonists is to tell better, more resonant stories, then might not those stories influence the way empathy is collectively cultivated and demonstrated in real life? Might not all the beloved shows about “difficult” or “bad” men have something to do with the way Hollywood—and even the general public—has become accustomed to forgiving and forgetting despicable and even criminal behavior? Certainly the cycle is more of an ouroboros, with the ugliness of fiction feeding on the ugliness of reality feeding on the ugliness of fiction. (Even BoJack notes how much TV has shaped his own morality: “All I know about being good, I learned from TV.”)

BoJack Horseman makes the abstract question about the relationship between fiction and reality more concrete in the penultimate episode. By then, BoJack’s addiction to painkillers (which began as a way to treat a back injury) has left him unable to distinguish between his own life and Philbert. His paranoia builds to a nauseating incident where he goes too far in a scene with his co-star and romantic partner, Gina Cazador, and actually chokes her. It’s with the character of Gina (played beautifully by Stephanie Beatriz) that BoJack reaffirms its commitment to never be a show solely about the woes of bad people.

In truth, the Philbert arc is less about BoJack’s career than it is about Gina’s. “I do one of these shows every year,” she tells BoJack at the start of Season 5. “And I keep getting hired because I show up, do the work, and keep my head down.” She accepts shallow roles like her Philbert character (who “hates bras, loves cold rooms”), because she knows women in the industry must play a longer game. “Maybe, if I’m lucky, when I’m 60 I can get a juicy season arc on the right cable show where everyone goes, ‘Who’s this 60-year-old woman? She came out of nowhere,’” Gina explains to BoJack. But to her surprise, her work in Philbert finally earns her the love of critics and viewers alike.

If BoJack Horseman understands that the path to forgiveness (and sustained employment) in Hollywood is often a foregone conclusion for abusive men, it also knows their victims can’t expect that their careers will be similarly spared. Which is why Gina opts to not press charges for the assault and to keep working with BoJack, who doesn’t remember the attack and only learns of it when Princess Carolyn shows him a video later. As the two actors prepare to go on TV to say that footage of the choking isn’t real, Gina tells BoJack why he needs to go along with the story:

If there were any justice, you’d be in jail right now … People know me because of my acting, and all that goes away if I’m just the girl who got choked by BoJack Horseman … I don’t want you to be the most notable thing that ever happened to me.

It’s a devastating monologue, one that allows Gina a degree of dignity and agency: It amply illustrates how people, particularly early in their career, stay silent about abuse or assault because there’s a penalty in Hollywood for speaking out. But Gina’s words are also painful because they deny both BoJack—and the audience—the catharsis of seeing him pay for his actions.

And so while both Gina and producers like Princess Carolyn want to prevent a scandal, BoJack is desperate to come clean. He asks Diane to write a takedown of him, but Diane refuses. “I’m asking to be held accountable,” BoJack begs. “No one is going to hold you accountable. You need to take responsibility for yourself,” Diane answers. The two then have an exchange they’ve had many times before: about whether BoJack is a good guy and whether he can change. “There’s no such thing as bad guys or good guys … All we can do is try to do less bad stuff and more good stuff,” Diane says. It’s a notably different sort of conversation than the one she had with Ana—one more tolerant of the idea that someone like BoJack can ever “make things right.”

And so Season 5 ends with a sequence that’s both completely logical and a little underwhelming: Diane drives BoJack to rehab. She tells him that, even if she hates him and can’t forgive him, she’s helping because he’s her friend. She waves goodbye with a smile, but once he’s gone, a strange expression crosses her face. It’s an inscrutable look that could mean anything: that she truly believes BoJack can change but is afraid he won’t. That she doesn’t believe he can change, but that she’s obligated to help him anyway. Or that she’s only taking him to rehab because part of her knows that, much like Gina, being associated with a known abuser could damage her own career. It’s a look that makes plain how one man’s sins have stained everyone around him.

In some ways, BoJack Horseman concludes that there are limits to how Hollywood generally conceives of “redemption”: as something that has to be negotiated primarily in the public eye, that has to satisfy the moral demands of a crowd of onlookers. Redemption, as practiced by men like Vance Waggoner, can be an empty exercise—an opportunity for performative self-flagellation, or for self-pardon, that centers the ego of the wrongdoer. But this approach also tends to sideline the more difficult, unexciting, and private work of making amends to the people you’ve hurt, of being honest with yourself, and of trying to be consistently good.

The show knows that letting BoJack take this quieter route could lead to dramatically inert territory. “You can’t have happy endings in sitcoms, not really,” BoJack says at one point. “Because if everyone’s happy, the show would be over, and above all else, the show has to keep going.” But perhaps the next season will try to imagine what the space between perpetual self-immolation and happiness might look like for BoJack Horseman. Perhaps the show will, as BoJack must, find another way to deal with the pain.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Lenika Cruz is a senior associate editor at The Atlantic, where she covers culture.

Writing with Color — Words to Describe Hair

https://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/post/113627509260/words-to-describe-hair

This began as a guide to describing Afro/curly hair but of course, I got carried away. From look and texture of hair, colors and various styles, this guide serves as a thesaurus of sorts for hair, as well as pointers for use in your writing.

*Culturally Significant Hair Coverings:*

• Know the meaning behind head wear and why it’s worn, when and by whom, such as a Native Nation’s headdress, before bestowing a character with it.

Head Coverings Resources:

• More on various head coverings.
• See here for more Islamic Veils. 

• See here for more on the Nigerian gele.

• See here on African American Headwraps. 

• View our hijab and headscarves tags for discussion on these topics.

Afro - Curly - Straightened

There are many varieties of braids, twists & Afro hair styles; have some more!

• African/Black Hair: Natural, Braids and Locks
• African Hair: Braiding Styles 10 African Types

Describing Black (Afro) hair:

• Appropriative Hairstyles: Keep in mind that Afro styles should be kept to those in the African Diaspora, such as dreadlocks, cornrows + certain and many braided styles.

• Tread carefully describing Afro hair as “wild” “unkempt” “untamed” or any words implying it’s unclean or requires controlling.

• “Nappy” and “wooly” are generally words to stay away from, the first having heavy negative connotations for many and the latter, though used in the Holy Bible, is generally not acceptable anymore and comes off as dehumanizing due to Animal connotations.

• There are mixed feelings on calling Black hair “kinky.” I’m personally not opposed to the word in itself and usage depends on the person’s race (I’m more comfortable with a Black person using it vs. a Non-Black person) as well as their tone and context (if it’s used in a neutral or positive tone vs. negatively/with disdain). Get feedback on your usage, or simply forgo it.

• See our tags “Black Hair” and “Natural Hair” for more discussion on describing Black hair.

Texture - Look - Styles

*Hair Colors and Style

*

Writing Tips & Things to Keep in Mind:

• Combination Words: Try combining words to illustrate look of hair. A character with springy coils that dance across her shoulders with every movement, the man with thick silvery hair slicked back into a ponytail…

• Mind Perspective: Depending on POV, a character might not know exactly what cornrows or a coiffure style is, at least in name, and it might make more sense if they described the hairdo instead. More defining terms might come from a more knowing source or the wearer themselves. One book I read described a girl’s afro puff as “thick hair pulled up into a cute, curly, poufy thing on top of her head and tied with a yellow ribbon.”

• POC & Hair Colors: People of Color’s hair comes in all shades and textures. There are Black people with naturally blond and loosely-textured to straight hair, East Asian people with red hair, and so on. Keep that in mind when coding characters if you tend to rely on hair color alone to denote a character is white vs. a Person of Color.

• Related Tropes: There are tropes and discussion related to People of Color, colored hair, and light-colored hair and features. 

• Check out these posts on the topic: The East Asian Women + Colored Hair Trope - Black Characters & “Wild” Hair Colors - POC w/ Supernatural Colorful Features. - ‘Uncommon’ Features & POC Characters

~Mod Colette

1. Show more notes

Wheat is wheat - ON HIATUS

https://brynwrites.tumblr.com/post/162531161729/all-about-writing-fight-scenes

@galaxies-are-my-ink asked,

“Do you have any advice on writing fight scenes? The type of scene I’m writing is mostly hand to hand combat between two experts. I’m definitely not an expert so when I try to write it, the scene ends up sounding repetitive and dull.”

Fore note: This post is coauthored by myself and one of my amazing critique partners, Barik S. Smith, who both writes fantastic fight scenes and teaches mixed martial arts, various artistic martial arts, and weapons classes.

I (Bryn) will tell you a secret: I trained MMA for seven years, and when I write authentic hand to hand fight scenes, they sound dull too. 

The problem with fight scenes in books is that trying to describe each punch and kick and movement (especially if it’s the only thing you’re describing) creates a fight that feels like it’s in slow motion. 

I write…

Lowering her center of gravity, she held her right hand tight to her face and threw a jab towards his chin. He shifted his weight, ducking under her punch. His hair brushed against her fist, and he stepped forward, launching a shovel hook into her exposed side.

But your brain can only read so fast. In real life that series of events would take an instant, but I needed a full eight seconds to read and comprehend it, which gave it an inherent lethargic feel. 

So, we have two primary problems:

1. How do we describe this fight in a way the reader can understand and keep track of? 

2. How do we maintain a fast paced, interesting fight once we’ve broken down the fight far enough for readers to understand it? 

(We will get back to these, I promise.) But for now, let’s look at…

Different types of “fight scenes:”

Because “fight scene” is a broad term, it can be helpful to break it down into different types, each having their own strengths and pitfalls. Some are better to use more frequently than others, but each has their own circumstances to shine, and figuring out which one feels most natural for the part you’re writing can be very helpful for gaining direction.

 Type A – Movie Epic

• Spells out what’s happening in a more step-by-step fashion.

• Doesn’t progress the plot during the scene (usually).

• Doesn’t develop the character during the scene (usually).

• Has well thought-out fighting choreography.

• Highlights the “awesomeness” of the fight.

Personally, I am not a fan of these in books, and generally find them to be slow and rather boring to read, but since some people do really like them, I won’t tell anyone not to write fight scenes this way.

This is usually the sort of fight scene you write when you just have to write a fight scene, even if you couldn’t integrate character growth or development into it, because the plot simply demands two or more characters duke it out. For instance, you might have written yourself into a corner, and your climax ended up being nothing but a final battle. You can use these to create some really awesome scenes with memorable set pieces, choreography, and powers, but have to be extra engaging, as action like this can never quite come across on paper as well as it can in a movie.

The most important aspects of this type of fight scene are well described settings, understandable individual actions, and a fight with goes from ‘least threatening situation’ to ‘most threatening situation.’

Type B – Dramatic Tension 

• Progresses the plot and/or characters.

• Has lots of dialogue. 

• Does not have a lot of fighting.

• Focuses on a few key actions instead.

A well-known example of this “fight scene” is the good old fashion stand-off, where characters are pointing guns at each other’s head while they argue something out. 

This is a great type to use to get the tension and threat of a fight scene even if a long, drawn out duel doesn’t make sense for the story at that point. It’s all about the drama of what’s happening here, and nailing the buildup is generally key for these types of scenes to work.

The most important aspect of this sort of “fight scene” is to build the character’s emotions, and/or the information being revealed by the plot so that the characters become more emotional and the reveals more shocking as the scene goes. The suspense should be highest in the moment just before the climactic quick burst of action and/or resolution.

Type C – Parallel Conflict

• Physical confrontation is mirrored on an emotional level.

• Usually only spells out a few key fighting moves. 

• Mixes combat with dialogue and/or internal conflict.

• Focuses on the connection between emotion and action.

This is the most difficult fight scene to get right, but in my experience, it is generally the best combination of action and drama, and should (usually) be used most frequently. Each moment of the fight should be a crucial moment within the scene, because the point of the fight is how it effect the characters – how they interact, react, develop, and adapt. It can be the most rewarding by far once you make it work.

The most important aspect of this type is how the physical conflict parallels the emotional conflict. Characters should have their beliefs or resolves challenged, come to revelations about themselves, or be forced to make hard choices that help define who they are.

In order to accomplish it properly, however, you have to solve the two problems we touched on earlier:

How do we describe this fight in a way the reader can understand and keep track of?

Setting. First off, you want to make sure you’ve described every part important of your setting. You can find out how to do that and why it’s important in this post.

Research. Before you write fight scenes, you should decide what style of fighting you’re trying to mimic (if one or more characters have combat training) and do a bit of research. There are videos of basically every type of fighting style which exists. Trying (easier) moves yourself (slowly and carefully) gives you a new perspective.

Keep in mind: Many martial art styles practiced today are for show, and not much use in combat unless against either someone of the same style or an unskilled opponent. If you’re trying to write a style of martial arts, make sure you know the reason that particular style was developed and what it’s most used for.

Don’t use too many technical terms. Now that you’ve done all that research, don’t actually write about it. The point of researching fighting isn’t to wow your reader with how many little facts you know, but to create a cohesive, broader picture. Words like attack, block, swing, kick, stance, stab, punch, etc, are all solid words which every reader will understand no matter their own personal experience.

Keep POV. If you’re writing is first person or limited third person, then your pov character won’t always know everything that’s going on. Maybe they’re reading their opponent well, and can block everything that’s being thrown, or maybe their focus is split or they aren’t skill enough to do that, and they don’t see a kick coming or a knife drawn until it’s sinking into their stomach.

Keep character. Everyone fights a bit differently. What tweaks does your character make to their fighting style in order to adapt it to fit them? Are they quick and mobile? Do they hunker down and take the hits? Do they like unusual combos? Feigns? Do they have honor or do they cheat? Have they brought in skills from another style of fighting or physical activity? Do they laugh and smile while fighting or are they stoic? Which hand do they use? This is especially important if you’re writing a Type C fight scene, because you can really characterize the turmoil with how your combatants fight. For example, a character who is enraged or desperate might attack viciously with no heed for their own safety, whereas a character who is timid or calm might fight in a much more cautious, reserved fashion. This kind of subtle characterization goes a long way to sell the emotions.

Feel the burn. Fighting hurts. It hurts as your muscles tire, it hurts when you get hit, it hurts when you block (especially in certain fighting styles of hand to hand combat). You sweat, you stink, you injure yourself when you get sloppy, and, depending on what you’re doing, you get blisters and burns and bruises. Don’t forget to let your characters feel these things too!

Realism is best. Know what unrealistic tropes are popular in fight scenes and learn how to avoid them. Some random things to keep in mind:

• Most weapons are made to fight against themselves.

• The ways you utilize your stance and environment, as well as how you “outplay” or counter your opponent, are more important than how large or strong you are and how many attacks you know.

• The large majority of close combat fighting styles require just as much defensive training as offensive. (Let your character block attacks! No real human can take solid blows all day long.)

• The basics are the most important part of fighting. When two highly skilled combatants battle, the winner is often decided by who has the best mastery over their fundamental skills. No matter how long they’ve trained, they can always improve on these fundamentals. 

• Hitting people with your bare fists hurts, especially if you hit other bones/hard surfaces. 

• Adrenaline only helps you if you finish the fight in the first 20 seconds. After 20 seconds, it actually exhausts you.

How do we maintain a fast paced, interesting fight?

In most cases, a fight scene filled with interesting moves and well described action is still just a dull series of actions played out in slow motion. You can combat the slow-motion feel by alternating between action-by-action and conceptual sections.

Action-by-action, in which you see each move as it’s thrown:

(This was used already in the introduction section.)

Lowering her center of gravity, she held her right hand tight to her face and threw a jab towards his chin. He shifted his weight, ducking under her punch. His hair brushed against her fist, and he stepped forward, launching a shovel hook into her exposed side.

Conceptual, in which the basic idea is more important than any individual move:

For every block he threw, she attacked all the more viciously. Moving like a serpent, she sprung from the directions he least expected. His arms ached and he stumbled as he took step after step backwards. He would not win this. That truth weighed him to the ground like lead.

But fight scenes should be more than simply the fighting. Every scene, paragraph, and sentence in your book should have a purpose for being there. If you can skip through most of the fight scene without consequence, the fight scene is nothing but a fancy bit of useless words.

A good fight scene should include (as many of) these core concepts (as possible):

• Character emotion: The feelings and thoughts your characters have throughout the fight.

• Character development: The character’s actions, conclusions, and choices, especially as they relate to and differ from those the characters previously believed or acted upon.

• Plot growth: The information revealed, actions made towards directly achieving the character’s primary goals, and changes in those goals.  Most importantly, all components of the fight scene should (like in every part of a story) build on each other.

Action creates emotion,

which creates character development, 

which creates more action, 

which changes the plot, 

which creates action,

which creates more emotion… 

And the whole cycle runs again.*

This cycle of growth should help you choose which actions to cover action-by-action because they will be the ones which either result in a non-action development, or which came as the result of a non-action development. They are the snapshots throughout the fight scene that have to be specifically shared with the reader. If you don’t have to share it for the reader to get context or understand the character, it’s generally best left summarized.

* The cycle of growth can run in any combination so long as one aspect is building off a different aspect, and none are left out for any huge length of time.

TL;DR -

For the best results when writing fight scenes, alternate between specific, necessary action-by-action portions and summarized portions, and revolve the entire fight scene around key points of emotion, character development, and plot growth in a way which forces that each aspect of the scene to be dependent on every other aspect.

How Not to Write a Book - Terrorism Breakdown, Part 1

https://elumish.tumblr.com/post/161144828111/terrorism-breakdown-part-1

All of this is from the Global Terrorism Database, and unless stated otherwise, everything is from the 2015 numbers, because the 2016 dataset isn’t out yet.

Countries with at least 100 attacks

• Iraq (2743)

• Afghanistan (1926)

• Pakistan (1235)

• India (882)

• Philippines (717)

• Yemen (668)

• Ukraine* (637)

• Nigeria (637)

• Egypt (582)

• Libya (542)

• Syria (485)

• Bangladesh (465)

• Turkey (416)

• Somalia (407)

• Thailand (277)

• West Bank and Gaza Strip (247)

• Sudan (158)

• Democratic Republic of the Congo (141)

• Colombia (135)

• Mali (120)

• United Kingdom** (115)

• Saudi Arabia (103)

Attacks in the countries with the most attacks

Iraq

Attacks in Iraq are predominantly bombings. Of the 2743 attacks in 2015, approximately 2200 were bombings. Baghdad, which sees close to half the bombings (over 900), has primarily bombs that are categorized as unknown explosive type, many of which are set off in shops, markets, or other crowded areas. A lot of these are what people would often term generally as IEDs, even if they don’t fit any technical definition of that term.

Al Anbar has almost as many vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) aka car bombs as Baghdad, so a much higher proportion of the bombings in Al Anbar are VBIEDs. The other governates in Iraq that faced more than 100 attacks in the year are Babil, Diyala, Kirkuk, Nineveh (Ninawa), and Saladin (Salah ad Din). Nineveh is particularly notable because its capital is Mosul.

Relatively few (<10%) of the attacks in Iraq are projectile explosives (rockets, mortars, RPGs, etc.), except for in Al Anbar. There are also relatively few (<10%) gun attacks there, though about a third of the ones that do happen do so in Baghdad.

Afghanistan

Bombings make up about 40% of the attacks in Afghanistan. Of those, by far the highest number (>200) are from landmines, in large part because Afghanistan was seeded with a huge number of landmines, particularly during the Soviet invasion. The Taliban frequently moves landmines from those minefields to roadsides, occasionally blowing themselves up in the process.

While there are VBIEDs in Afghanistan, they make up a much smaller proportion of the bombings in the country (about 13% as opposed to about 23%). Proportionally much more common in Afghanistan (almost a third of the attacks) are armed assaults, primarily perpetrated using firearms. Kidnappings are also much more prominent.

The provinces in Afghanistan that faced more than 100 attacks in the year were Ghazni, Helmand, Herat, Kabul, Kandahar, and Nangarhar.

Pakistan

About half of the attacks in Pakistan are bombings. While about half of those bombings are of unknown explosive type, the remaining ones are primarily remote triggered, landmines, grenades, and projectile explosives. There are very few VBIEDs in Pakistan. The projectile explosives are centered heavily in Balochistan, while grenades are more spread.

About a quarter of the attacks are armed assaults, primarily perpetrated using firearms. While armed assaults occur with relative frequency in Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Sindh, bombings occur most frequently in Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Overall, those four provinces are the ones that have the bulk of the attacks (over 100 in each), with virtually no attacks occurring anywhere else except Punjab, which had 63.

India

Approximately 45% of India’s attacks are bombings. About 25% of those bombings were grenade, with the majority remaining being of unknown explosive types. Many of the remaining attacks in India are armed assaults perpetrated using firearms. Of the other remaining attacks, most are split between attacks on facilities/infrastructure and kidnappings. Facility/infrastructure attacks are mostly done through arson, while kidnappings are primarily perpetrated using guns.

In India, only Chhattisgarh, Jammu and Kashmir, and Manipur had more than 100 attacks in 2015. Over a third of facility/infrastructure attacks happened in Chhattisgarh, while bombings happen primarily in Chhattisgarh and Manipur, with a slightly lower number occurring in Jammu and Kashmir and Jharkhand. Jammu and Kashmir had nearly a third of the armed assaults. Jammu and Kashmir, however, had nearly zero kidnappings, with those split primarily between Chhattisgarh, Manipur, and Meghalaya.

*It’s complicated whether you count any of the fighting in Ukraine as terrorism.

**103 of these 115 attacks were in Northern Ireland.

How to Write Stuttering – Write for the King

https://writefortheking.wordpress.com/2017/07/10/how-to-write-stuttering/

As I worked to develop some of my minor characters, I decided to give one a stutter. Then I had to figure out how to write a stutter. Fortunately for me, I have a lot of resources to tap into for my research– one of my biggest resources has been my father who had a stutter for all his life.

But before we beginning talking specifically about stuttering, there is one very important rule for writing any dialogue that we need to remember:

Don’t go overboard with phonetics

It is a basic rule for respecting your reader’s tolerance level. You should never write speech exactly as it is pronounced if you are writing a character with an accent or a stutter because it will kill your reader’s brain. I stumbled across one blogger who enthusiastically declared, “I r-r-recom-m-mend you wr-write st-st-stuttering like th-this,” and then proceeded to write the entire article in that fashion. I almost hired an assassin (either to take him out or to take me out– after reading his article, I did not care which.)

Your reader is smart, so just occasionally remind your reader of the stutter. Readers will fill in the blanks spaces, and no one wants to read something that reads exactly like a stutter sounds.

So how do you write the actual stuttering? Our overly-enthusiastic friend r-r-recom-mended dashes, but is that the best way? Is that actually how a stutter sounds?

There are actually three different types of stuttering: Repetition, Prolongation, and Blocks. Since most writers will only need or use one, I want to focus on writing blocks since I have a man on the inside. My father’s stuttering takes the form of blocks, and after sitting down with him and pestering him with questions, we combined perspectives and came up with a punctuation for stuttering:

S…s-ample

Punctuation needs to be simple, and dashes (s-s-ample) also can work, but my dad liked this option best because the ellipsis (…) draws out the first sound and then the dash throws you into the full word. This phonetic depiction represents the sound of stuttering pretty well. However, there is some compromise for our readers here. More often than not, stuttering actually occurs several times before the word actually comes out (s…s…s…s-ample), but this is going to frustrate readers, and I think the one ellipsis and one dash gets the point across in the most effective way.

Rules for Stuttering

1. Stuttering occurs on the first sound of the word— stuttering will not occur midword
2. Stuttering happens on the first sound– not the first full syllable (s…s-ample NOT sam…sam-ple)
3. Do not write a stutter more than once in a single sentence or three times in a single paragraph (in a situation with high stress, you might be able to get away with two stutters in one sentences and up to five in one paragraph, but don’t do this often)
4. Chose 3-7 sounds for your character to struggle with: People who stutter consistently tend to get blocks on particular sounds (For my dad, these particular sounds are b, p, k, w, the soft g, and ah as in audio)
5. People who stutter often back up and try to get a “running start” when they reach a block (ex: “I would like you to g… like you to g-go to the park.”)
6. Another strategy for stuttering is to use another (often imperfect) synonym for the word they are struggling with (ex: “You look g…g… really pretty tonight.”)
7. Under higher stress, the stutter will be more frequent; under low stress, many don’t stutter at all, so don’t feel obligated to have your character stutter in every single conversation
8. If you use the dialogue tag, “he stuttered,” do not write the stutter in the quote: If you write the stutter in the dialogue, don’t say “he stuttered.” Your reader is smart– you don’t need to beat them over the head with a stick for them to understand that your character stutters
9. Do not write a stutter in thoughts: This is major– people who stutter think normally and many are extremely smart. Some people automatically assume that slow speech means a slow mind. This is not true in the slightest, but the misunderstanding is something that many people who stutter have to deal with, and it is extremely insulting.

Also, in my interview with my dad, I learned that you cannot join the military if you have a stutter. I think that fact could be really interesting for character development or motivation, so I’ll leave it here.

So have you ever written a character with a stutter? Would you consider it?

God bless,

Gabrielle

Published by Gabrielle Massman

Knight of the One True King. Rebel for truth. Writer. INTJ. Hunter. Tomboy. Dragon Lover. Explorer of the Wide Reaching Realm of Thought. View all posts by Gabrielle Massman

ScriptMedic — Your Character’s Been Shot. Bullet In or Bullet...

https://scriptmedic.tumblr.com/post/160492516003/your-characters-been-shot-bullet-in-or-bullet

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I’ve gotten a lot of variations of this ask.

Does the bullet stay in? Does it get taken out? What are the consequences? What are the after effects?

“Lead poisoning” is a common ER and EMS term for someone getting shot. “What happened?” “Lead poisoning.” is a conversation between a medic and a nurse that would make 100% sense, even though the character is bleeding out on the stretcher.

But does leaving a bullet in lead to lead poisoning? As in, actual elevated levels of lead in the blood?

It depends!

First, the myth that the bullet must come out! is a Hollywood trope, based off of Civil War medicine. So let’s look at where that comes from.

The idea that the bullet has to come out typically comes from a mindset that the bullet is, by itself, inherently dangerous. And back in the Civil War, that was true, not because of the bullet but because of the wadding that stuffed the bullet into the musket.

See, it was infection, not lead poisoning, that made those gunshot wounds more dangerous, because the wadding was typically covered in bacteria – and injected directly into a wound. Removing the bullet would also allow the physic to remove the piece of cotton, and remove the source of the infection. (In the modern day we would call this source control.)

But these days, our typical GSW patient doesn’t have a wadded-up piece of cotton in the wound, and if they do, it’s something pulled in behind the bullet. It’s superficial, and easily picked out with tweezers forceps. So the infective risk of leaving bullets in place is actually pretty low.

In fact, in the modern era, doctors actually tend to leave a lot of bullets in place.

The typical process looks like this:

• The character gets shot (owies!) and goes to the hospital.
• The doctors (read: trauma team) will examine the wound and get x-rays or, more likely, a CT scan (NOT an MRI!)
• Actually, further research indicates that MRIs are safe with most bullet types, but docs tend to be conservative about this. 
• The wound itself will be explored surgically, especially if it’s in the chest or the abdomen. If the docs happen to find the bullet along the way, they’ll remove it, but removal isn’t the goal, it’s repairing significant bleeds and organ damage, finding other things that might have been in the wound and evaluating the underlying tissue. 
• If the bullet is in a location that’s risky to perform surgery to get to, such as the chest or the abdomen, the bullet will likely actually get left in place. The theory is that the risk of surgery outweighs the risk of leaving the bullet in place.

Similarly, if the bullet is in an extremity where surgery would be easy, but the bullet is close to a nerve or significant piece of vasculature, the bullet is likely going to be left in.

Really, removing the bullet is a matter of convenience, not of necessity.

But what about lead poisoning?

Ahhh, yes, lead poisoning. Where we started. Where we’ll finish.

Lead poisoning is surprisingly rare with gunshot wounds, even if the bullet is left in place.

The reason is this: the tissue will actually grow a capsule around the bullet and prevent the lead from leeching out into the bloodstream.

The only significant risk is if the bullet is lodged in the bone, and even then, it can take years for symptoms of lead poisoning to develop.

And if that DOES happen? Here’s the symptom list:

●Abdominal pain (“lead colic”)

●Constipation.

●Joint pains.

●Muscle aches.

●Headache.

●Anorexia. (Decreased appetite)

●Decreased libido.

●Difficulty concentrating and deficits in short-term memory.

●Irritability.

●Excessive fatigue.

●Sleep disturbance.

●Anemia.

●A “lead line,” a bluish pigmentation seen at the gum-tooth line, is the result of a reaction of lead with dental plaque.

●Confusion, seizures, and encephalopathy (brain swelling) can be seen with extremely high levels of lead.

And that’s all she wrote!

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xoxo, Aunt Scripty

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For the love of god, make sure that you eat. Heavier meals might be unpalatable at first for someone used to lighter nutrition, but maintaining bodily warmth in a cold climate takes up a lot of energy, and you will feel tired and drowsy for a long while shile your metabolism adjusts to producing more heat than Mother Nature ever intended. The skinny people in your party are especially vulnerable, ensure their well-being on a regular basis.

If you have a smartphone/other essential technology on your body, keep them close to your body to keep them warm. They were not designed to be frozen any more than you were.

Sleep is death. SLEEP IS DEATH. Never, ever stop to rest in the cold, if you do not have the means to make a fire/otherwise produce heat. The cold tires you out because keeping warm takes energy, but taking a rest will not return your energy. If you feel the need to sit down and rest because you are tired because of the cold, call for help. This is not a hyperbole, if you feel like you are too tired to go on in a cold climate, CALL A FUCKING AMBULANCE. If you fall asleep in the snow, you will not wake up. Hypothermia can and will literally kill you.

Avoid skin-to-snow-contact if you can. It hurts because you were not supposed to do it. Consider ice to be like acid. Touching is bad for you.

If you have a pet reptile, and the power goes out and the temperature inside your house is very cold, don’t feed them, and don’t leave them in their tank. Take them out, put them on your chest, and wrap yourself in a blanket with them. The best way at this point to keep them alive will be to share the body heat you have.

If you have a fireplace, utilize it, but don’t set a fire inside your house that you can’t control. And don’t use fucking gasoline. That’s how you blow shit up.

If you’re stuck out in the cold and you start to feel tired and strangely warm, you have hypothermia. Get the fuck to a place with actual warmth. Leave your clothes on. The cold is lying to you. You’re not hot, you’re slowly freezing to death. If you can, call a fucking ambulance. Remember that extremities freeze first. That means your toes, your nose, and your fingers. Layer the fuck UP.

If I have to go out in the snow, I usually wear a pair of knit/fleece gloves under a pair of snow gloves. And then I duct-tape that shit to the sleeves of my coat. It looks silly but it keeps moisture from getting stuck in there and freezing my hands off. For shoes, wear boots and like, 3 pairs of socks. The warmer and fuzzier, the better. Your feet will thank you. If you have a ski mask, use it. If not, wear a scarf and wrap that shit as tight around your face as you can.

On the topic of moisture, if any part of you gets wet while you’re outside, locate the nearest warm place you can go to and take the wet garment off and dry that shit. I don’t care if it’s your socks, your shirt, or your undies. Get em off and get em dry. Wet clothes are a fast way to get yourself frozen to death.

IF A CHILD IS IN THE SNOW, THEY WILL FREEZE A WHOLE FUCKIN LOT FASTER THAN YOU WILL. This doesn’t mean be chivalrous and give them your coat. It means you pick their tiny ass up and shove them IN your coat or hold them as close as you can while you try to get to a warmer area. The smaller they are, the faster they freeze. Time is absolutely critical. And if your kid is out in the snow, you need to be out there with them and keep your eyes on them at all times.

Finally, invest in a blow dryer. If your hair gets wet and you gotta go back out in the cold, you’re going to be miserable as fuck. Blow dry your hair so it can be nice, warm, and voluminous when you go back out to punch Jack Frost in the face

A few further points from me, having grown up in Canada’s coldest major city: The wind can be even more dangerous than the cold, and if your skin is exposed to it, it can freeze and even necrotise. Frostbite is a serious medical problem. So bundle up; wear a touque, wear your hood up, wear a balaclava or hike your scarf up over your nose because you could lose it otherwise. If the wind gets in your face, walk backwards. That’s not a prank; walk backwards.

If it’s really cold, your gloves aren’t going to do shit; you’ll want mittens and handwarmers. It’s not convenient but at least you won’t be dropping fingercicles on the frozen pavement.

There is no such thing as winter chic. Not in a place with a real winter. You’re going to look like a bundle of cloth if you dress properly anyways, so there’s no sense in trying to be stylish about it. There is no fashionable/unfashionable, there’s only practical/impractical

If you fall through ice into frozen water and can’t climb out, allow yourself to freeze to the ice - someone might see you and save you, even if you pass out.

Snow is a great insulator and if you need to, you can build shelter out of it. A quinzee is fastest. It can keep you alive if you are lost.

In a blizzard, do not travel. I know you’d rather be home than stuck at work overnight. But low visibility in a blizzard is not the same as low visibility in fog. You can get easily twisted around in areas that you know like the back of your hand, and no one will be able to see you to help you if you need it. Do not travel in blizzards.

Related to this: the normal rules do not apply in the cold. You can knock on a stranger’s door for help; you can take strangers in to warm up. You can approach a stranger in the cold and offer them rides if they look like they need help. Children should know that if forced to choose “talking to strangers to ask for help” and “freezing to death,” they are to choose “talking to strangers.”

If you ARE too warm in your many layers, but it is still deathly cold out, DO NOT unzip your coat. Lowering the temperature of your core is dangerous. You can easily cool down by removing a mitt or glove. You can lose fingers and toes if your extremities aren’t protected, but if your core gets too cold you can die.

if you have fish and the power goes out cover the tank with space and wool blankets right away. Every once in a while check the temp, if it is falling below ideal scoop out some of the water and warm it over a camp stove, not too hot, then gently pour the water back in. This will also help aerate the tank a little. plus it gives you something to do if you’re bored.

Also, if you know the powers is likely to go out you should fill the tub/buckets with as much water as you can. You can boil it for warm drinks and bucket flush the toilet, which you’re going to want.

Get a backup battery for your phone. When traveling, keep it in a pocket against your body. Your phone is your only lifeline in an emergency, when you need help you will need it now, and cold eats batteries for breakfast. Having a warm battery can make the difference.

Do not drive faster than the locals, unless you have no particular will to live. Ever. Of particular note, 4WD/AWD doesn’t make a single fucking bit of difference on ice. Every year in my area a couple people get killed because they forgot that.

Layer with different materials. Wool is a great insulator, but knit wool in particular is extremely porous; you want something tighter either below or above it.

Do not cross running water without a bridge, or still water without an experienced guide or a clear manmade trail. (Do not drive across a body of water period. This is an advanced skill, and failing will kill you. You are not a local.)

If you need to take a rest while out and there is deep snow, MAKE A SNOW CAVE. Snow is airy. It will insulate. Make sure the entry is BELOW THE SPACE WHERE YOU WILL REST as warm air travels upwards. The smaller the cave, the less air for you to lose body heat to. MARK THE CAVE with skis, branches, anything tall. Call for help. It helps to know where you are - a GPS is useful, your phone will do. BRING THE SHOVEL INSIDE. You might need to re-open the entrance if it’s windy. You can always use your skis to dig a cave if needed be.You can make a sitting/laying place inside the snow cave from twigs or branches to avoid contact with the snow.

When dressing, ALWAYS layer:innermost layer is wool. Always.outermost layer waterproof. Windproof inside of that one. remember that clothes will not keep you warm. AIR KEEPS YOU WARM. Make sure your layers are not too tight - you want your clothes to TRAP AIR between you and the environment to minimise heat loss.

no one who speaks 2+ languages ever “randomly” switches in the middle of a sentence. like that just…….. doesn’t happen?

the only times people will get confused and mix them up is when:

a) they’re in an environment where they have to alternate between speaking two languages often/quickly, and the brain can’t keep up and messes up.

b) they’ve been in an environment where they have to speak/hear one language for a long time, and when they change settings it takes them a moment to not instinctively go for the other language.

c) they’re hearing one language (music, radio, background chatter) and trying to speak another

Instead

Forgot a word in Spanish, while speaking Spanish to me, but remembered it in English. Became weirdly quiet as they seemed to lose their entire sense of identity. Used a literal translation of a Russian idiomatic expression while speaking English. He actually does this quite regularly, because he somehow genuinely forgets which idioms belong to which language. It usually takes a minute of everyone staring at him in confused silence before he says “….Ah….. that must be a Russian one then….” Had to count backwards for something. Could not count backwards in English. Counted backwards in French under her breath until she got to the number she needed, and then translated it into English. Meant to inform her (French) parents that bread in America is baked with a lot of preservatives. Her brain was still halfway in English Mode so she used the word “préservatifes.” Ended up shocking her parents with the knowledge that apparently, bread in America is full of condoms. Defined a slang term for me……. with another slang term. In the same language. Which I do not speak. Was talking to both me and his mother in English when his mother had to revert to Russian to ask him a question about a word. He said “I don’t know” and turned to me and asked “Is there an English equivalent for Нумизматический?” and it took him a solid minute to realize there was no way I would be able to answer that. Meanwhile his mom quietly chuckled behind his back. Said an expression in English but with Spanish grammar, which turned “How stressful!” into “What stressing!” Only being able to do math in their original language. “Ok so that would beeeeee … mutteringocho por cuatro menos tres…” Losing words and getting mad at you about it. “Gimme the - the - UGH, ESA COSA AHI’ CARAJO. The thing, the oven mitt. Christ.” anyone who has ever picked up another language has been pissed at specific vowels and pronunciations and this is the gospel truth [forgets a word] [attempts to explicitely describe the thing they’re trying to say] [forgets a word while trying to explain themselves] “oh jesus christ nevermind” will know how to speak a language but not know any of the mathematical/scientific/biological terms because they went to school in a different language and no one learns, like, algebra in a second language unless they studied in multiple languages. [knows a word but they’ve only ever read it and they have no idea how it’s pronounced]**__****__****__****__****__****__****__****__****__****__****__****__****__**

scriptAutistic — Masterpost: Meltdowns

https://scriptautistic.tumblr.com/post/156413299997/masterpost-meltdowns

One of the most obviously recognizable autistic traits are meltdowns. Stimming can often be done in subtle ways, allistic-type social skills can often be learned, but meltdowns are simply beyond control. Unfortunately, they’re frequently misunderstood and mishandled by others who don’t realize what they’re seeing.

As always, we want to emphasize that meltdowns are different for everyone. Some autistic people have regular meltdowns. Some experience them rarely or not at all. And they can be caused by different things and experienced differently by different people.

Meltdowns are caused by an overload in the brain. This can be sensory overload, extreme anxiety, emotional distress, or stress: basically, there is too much or something and the brain can’t cope. Whatever the cause, the brain is in a state where it can no longer handle further input.

Many autistic people, especially adults with a lifetime of experience, are able to recognize when they are getting overloaded and are headed for a meltdown. Some people are able to leave the situation which is causing their overload and give themselves time and space for their brains to “catch up” so they can calm down and avoid the meltdown. Sometimes, however, it’s not possible to leave a situation - and sometimes, it’s not clear to the person what is happening. For example, alexithymia might prevent them from being aware that they are getting overloaded. If the person remains in the overload-inducing situation, a meltdown can occur (The person can also experience a shutdown - we’ll get into this in a minute.). Sometimes the meltdown is also caused by internal reasons (anxiety, emotional distress) which can hardly be avoided.

Once in a meltdown, the person no longer has normal control over themselves. The brain goes into “fight or flight” mode. The brain perceives a threat - the cause of the sensory overload, or stress, or whatever people happen to be nearby when it happens. It can also be a vague sense of danger / pain that’s not directed at anything. Logic and reason go out the window, and the person is gripped by a tremendous sense of panic and danger. For some people, their brain is saying: YOU ARE NOT SAFE. YOU NEED TO GET AWAY. Picture a cornered prey animal preparing to fight for its life. That’s the state the brain is in.

The person will then react to the situation as though they are in extreme danger - even if they are logically aware that they are not. Common reactions include:

• They may physically run away, or try to run away.
• If they are unable to run away, they may try to hide: behind doors, under tables and chairs, behind curtains, anywhere that presents itself. (Mod Aira has been known to try to hide on the couch, under the cushions.)
• If approached by other people, they may respond as though they are being attacked (because the brain feels as though they are). This may include screaming, yelling insults and threats, and lashing out physically, punching, kicking, scratching, or even biting.
• The character may shout things they would never normally say, including threats, slurs, curse words, etc. Alternatively, they may beg for help, to go home, for their mother, etc.
• They may thrash around and/or stim in extreme ways, or in ways that are out of character for them. This can include self-harm: scratching or biting one’s skin or slamming one’s head against the wall or floor are not uncommon. This is an attempt to calm the nervous system.
• They may scream, whimper or cry because of the pain they’re in.
• They’ll probably have trouble thinking clearly or at all.

Throughout this experience, the person may feel physical pain as well as panic. Common descriptions include having bees in your head, feeling like your skin is trying to crawl off of you, feeling like your chest is trying to implode, or having nerve pain that shoots up and down your body.

In addition to panic, the person is quite likely to feel profound embarrassment and/or shame, especially once the meltdown is over and the person is calming down, and especially if it happened in public. They are often aware that what they are doing is irrational, and they know how awful they look while it’s happening, but they cannot control it in any way.

This is an important thing to note: Meltdowns cannot be controlled or stopped once they begin. They are not related to temper tantrums, which they are commonly mistaken for. A temper tantrum is someone behaving in an extreme way in order to get attention or to manipulate others into giving them what they want. A meltdown is in no way voluntary. It is more like a seizure: a neurological event which cannot be controlled or stopped (though it might be shortened in some situations, and can definitely be made worse).

If a character in your story sees the meltdown happen, there are ways to help, and there are ways to make it worse. If the person knows what is happening and what to do, they can help make the meltdown as short and painless as possible in the following ways:

• Do not attempt to talk to or touch the person melting down unless they have explicitly requested that you do so. Some people may find comfort in pressure, for example, and ask friends and family to give them bear hugs when they melt down, but this doesn’t work for everyone and will make some people worse.
• If the meltdown is caused by sensory overload, remove as many sources of sensory stimulation as possible. Turn off music (even quiet music, since the person may be extremely sensitive), turn off or dim lights, stop all conversations, etc. If they are able to walk, moving the person out of an overloading setting can be more feasible if the meltdown happens in a public place (supermarket…).
• If the meltdown is caused by stress, anxiety or emotional reasons, anything which can help reduce these can help shorten the meltdowns. What can and can’t help depends on the person. Asking someone how to behave if they ever have a meltdown in a moment when they’re NOT having one is a good thing to do, as they won’t be able to tell you when a meltdown has already begun.
• Give the person space and keep bystanders away. Ideally, create a situation where no one is looking at them (seeing eyes looking or staring can increase the sense of threat). Explain that they are fine, the situation is under control, and keep them from gawking. If police are around, explain if necessary that the person is autistic but that they will be fine in a few minutes, and that you are taking care of them. Make sure the person does not perceive any extra threats from people approaching them, which might result in a worsening meltdown and possibly even violence.
• Once they have calmed down and are ready to talk, don’t make a big deal out of it. Make it clear that you understand this is something beyond their control and that they have no reason to be embarrassed or ashamed.
• If possible, give the person an escape route. Do not stand between them and the door. Make it clear that they can leave if they need to, and provide a safe space for them to be alone.

Naturally, such perfect “meltdown companions” rarely exist in most autistic people’s lives. Your average well-intentioned friend or family member, and certainly your average stranger, are likely to react in the following ways, and with the following results:

• Trying to calm the person down by approaching them, trying to soothe them with gentle touches, stroking their hair, rubbing their back, etc. Aside from the potential panic they might feel from being approached by someone (threat!) which can result in violent outbursts, physical contact and hearing someone’s voice can lead to increased overload which can worsen and prolong the meltdown.
• Trying to force the person to talk about what’s happening. Demanding that they explain what’s going on, asking lots of questions, wanting them to “talk it out”, or just rambling on about how they’re here to help and everything’s going to be okay, etc. Again, the noise can increase overload. Also, the person might be totally unable to process speech and be unable to understand what’s being said, in which case they just hear “I’m not leaving you alone! I demand that you accommodate my need to understand you!” and increase stress.
• Yell at the person for “throwing a tantrum” or “being dramatic”. It is extremely common for meltdowns to be misunderstood and mistaken for a willful tantrum. Verbal attacks like this will increase the sense of being threatened, worsen and prolong the meltdown, and might provoke violent behavior which the autistic person feels is self-defense.
• Block exits and prevent the person from running away. If allowed to leave the situation, a person experiencing a meltdown might be able to calm down fairly quickly, but when prevented, the threat level increases - instead of running, they are cornered, and have to resort to other methods to try to get the “threat” away.
• Making them the center of attention. The person melting down generally needs to be left alone. When everyone is looking at them, trying to “help” them or calm them down, even if all the people around have good intentions, it can make the situation far worse.

The amount of time a meltdown takes to pass depends greatly on the individual and the situation. They can pass in a minute or two, or they can last for upwards of an hour, especially if the person is forced to remain in the situation which triggered it. On average, they tend to end within 15-20 minutes. If left alone under ideal circumstances, they can be shortened dramatically.

When the person feels that the threat has passed and the brain has calmed itself down sufficiently, the meltdown can end. The character can gradually calm down and regain control of themselves. Aside from potentially feeling embarrassed and ashamed, they are also likely to feel exhausted, as meltdowns expend a lot of energy. Some people will even curl up wherever they are (under a table, inside the sofa, wherever) and immediately take a nap. Their cognitive functions (ability to think clearly) might take some time to go back to normal.

That’s all for meltdown. A masterpost about shutdowns will follow shortly, as well as some posts describing the mods’ personal experience with both type of reactions so you can have a concrete example. Happy writing! (Here we are, giving you more options to make your characters suffer. Do you really need that.)

Script Shrink — Manic Episode - Demystifying the DSM-5

https://scriptshrink.tumblr.com/post/161331537856/manic-episode-demystifying-the-dsm-5

Manic Episode - Demystifying the DSM-5

Man, it’s been a while since I made one of these posts! I’ve changed the structure of these criteria a bit from the DSM-5, but it’s all there.

Manic episode:

There needs to be a distinct period of time where the character experiences at least one of the following moods most of the day, nearly every day, for at least a week:

• Elevated - the character feels euphoric or excessively happy

• Expansive - there’s a lot of definitions for this. It can be shown through the character overly expresses their feelings, to the point that they disregard the reactions of others. The character may feel that they’re more important or significant than they actually are, seeming grandiose or superior to others.

• Irritable - the character is easily angered

The character also needs to be consistently energetic OR increase their level of goal-directed activity most of the day, nearly every day, for at least a week. Goal-directed activity means that the character frequently takes on ambitious new projects without necessarily thinking it through or completing previous projects first.

While the character is in this state, they have to show at least three of the following symptoms (4 if their mood is irritable), which have to be a significant change in behavior from how the character usually acts:

• Inflated self esteem or grandiosity (see expansive mood above).

• The character has much less of a need for sleep.

• The character is more talkative than usual, and feels a pressure to keep talking.

• Flight of ideas or racing thoughts (Will be the topic of a future post).

• The character is easily distracted.

• The character either has an increase in goal directed activity (see above) OR psychomotor agitation (see link here) .

• The character becomes excessively involved in things that have a high risk of painful consequences (such as reckless driving, maxing out credit cards on shopping sprees, foolish business investments). 

These symptoms have to be one or more of the following:

• Be severe enough to cause the character great difficulty in their occupation or in interacting with others.

• Require the character to be hospitalized to prevent them harming themselves or others.

• Note - if a character has to be hospitalized, you can ignore the requirement for the symptoms to last at least a week.

• Cause the character to become psychotic (ie lose touch with reality)

These symptoms cannot be the result of a drug (such as meth) or a medical condition.

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Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers

1. Everything she does is deniable. There is always a facile excuse or an explanation. Cruelties are couched in loving terms. Aggressive and hostile acts are paraded as thoughtfulness. Selfish manipulations are presented as gifts. Criticism and slander is slyly disguised as concern. She only wants what is best for you. She only wants to help you.

She rarely says right out that she thinks you're inadequate. Instead, any time that you tell her you've done something good, she counters with something your sibling did that was better or she simply ignores you or she hears you out without saying anything, then in a short time does something cruel to you so you understand not to get above yourself. She will carefully separate cause (your joy in your accomplishment) from effect (refusing to let you borrow the car to go to the awards ceremony) by enough time that someone who didn't live through her abuse would never believe the connection.

Many of her putdowns are simply by comparison. She'll talk about how wonderful someone else is or what a wonderful job they did on something you've also done or how highly she thinks of them. The contrast is left up to you. She has let you know that you're no good without saying a word. She'll spoil your pleasure in something by simply congratulating you for it in an angry, envious voice that conveys how unhappy she is, again, completely deniably. It is impossible to confront someone over their tone of voice, their demeanor or the way they look at you, but once your narcissistic mother has you trained, she can promise terrible punishment without a word. As a result, you're always afraid, always in the wrong, and can never exactly put your finger on why.

Because her abusiveness is part of a lifelong campaign of control and because she is careful to rationalize her abuse, it is extremely difficult to explain to other people what is so bad about her. She's also careful about when and how she engages in her abuses. She's very secretive, a characteristic of almost all abusers ("Don't wash our dirty laundry in public!") and will punish you for telling anyone else what she's done. The times and locations of her worst abuses are carefully chosen so that no one who might intervene will hear or see her bad behavior, and she will seem like a completely different person in public. She'll slam you to other people, but will always embed her devaluing nuggets of snide gossip in protestations of concern, love and understanding ("I feel so sorry for poor Cynthia. She always seems to have such a hard time, but I just don't know what I can do for her!") As a consequence the children of narcissists universally report that no one believes them ("I have to tell you that she always talks about YOU in the most caring way!). Unfortunately therapists, given the deniable actions of the narcissist and eager to defend a fellow parent, will often jump to the narcissist's defense as well, reinforcing your sense of isolation and helplessness ("I'm sure she didn't mean it like that!")

2. She violates your boundaries. You feel like an extension of her. Your property is given away without your consent, sometimes in front of you. Your food is eaten off your plate or given to others off your plate. Your property may be repossessed and no reason given other than that it was never yours. Your time is committed without consulting you, and opinions purported to be yours are expressed for you. (She LOVES going to the fair! He would never want anything like that. She wouldn't like kumquats.) You are discussed in your presence as though you are not there. She keeps tabs on your bodily functions and humiliates you by divulging the information she gleans, especially when it can be used to demonstrate her devotion and highlight her martyrdom to your needs ("Mike had that problem with frequent urination too, only his was much worse. I was so worried about him!") You have never known what it is like to have privacy in the bathroom or in your bedroom, and she goes through your things regularly. She asks nosy questions, snoops into your email/letters/diary/conversations. She will want to dig into your feelings, particularly painful ones and is always looking for negative information on you which can be used against you. She does things against your expressed wishes frequently. All of this is done without seeming embarrassment or thought.

Any attempt at autonomy on your part is strongly resisted. Normal rites of passage (learning to shave, wearing makeup, dating) are grudgingly allowed only if you insist, and you're punished for your insistence ("Since you're old enough to date, I think you're old enough to pay for your own clothes!") If you demand age-appropriate clothing, grooming, control over your own life, or rights, you are difficult and she ridicules your "independence."

3. She favoritizes. Narcissistic mothers commonly choose one (sometimes more) child to be the golden child and one (sometimes more) to be the scapegoat. The narcissist identifies with the golden child and provides privileges to him or her as long as the golden child does just as she wants. The golden child has to be cared for assiduously by everyone in the family. The scapegoat has no needs and instead gets to do the caring. The golden child can do nothing wrong. The scapegoat is always at fault. This creates divisions between the children, one of whom has a large investment in the mother being wise and wonderful, and the other(s) who hate her. That division will be fostered by the narcissist with lies and with blatantly unfair and favoritizing behavior. The golden child will defend the mother and indirectly perpetuate the abuse by finding reasons to blame the scapegoat for the mother's actions. The golden child may also directly take on the narcissistic mother's tasks by physically abusing the scapegoat so the narcissistic mother doesn't have to do that herself.

4. She undermines. Your accomplishments are acknowledged only to the extent that she can take credit for them. Any success or accomplishment for which she cannot take credit is ignored or diminished. Any time you are to be center stage and there is no opportunity for her to be the center of attention, she will try to prevent the occasion altogether, or she doesn't come, or she leaves early, or she acts like it's no big deal, or she steals the spotlight or she slips in little wounding comments about how much better someone else did or how what you did wasn't as much as you could have done or as you think it is. She undermines you by picking fights with you or being especially unpleasant just before you have to make a major effort. She acts put out if she has to do anything to support your opportunities or will outright refuse to do even small things in support of you. She will be nasty to you about things that are peripherally connected with your successes so that you find your joy in what you've done is tarnished, without her ever saying anything directly about it. No matter what your success, she has to take you down a peg about it.

5. She demeans, criticizes and denigrates. She lets you know in all sorts of little ways that she thinks less of you than she does of your siblings or of other people in general. If you complain about mistreatment by someone else, she will take that person's side even if she doesn't know them at all. She doesn't care about those people or the justice of your complaints. She just wants to let you know that you're never right.

She will deliver generalized barbs that are almost impossible to rebut (always in a loving, caring tone): "You were always difficult" "You can be very difficult to love" "You never seemed to be able to finish anything" "You were very hard to live with" "You're always causing trouble" "No one could put up with the things you do." She will deliver slams in a sidelong way - for example she'll complain about how "no one" loves her, does anything for her, or cares about her, or she'll complain that "everyone" is so selfish, when you're the only person in the room. As always, this combines criticism with deniability.

She will slip little comments into conversation that she really enjoyed something she did with someone else - something she did with you too, but didn't like as much. She'll let you know that her relationship with some other person you both know is wonderful in a way your relationship with her isn't - the carefully unspoken message being that you don't matter much to her.

She minimizes, discounts or ignores your opinions and experiences. Your insights are met with condescension, denials and accusations ("I think you read too much!") and she will brush off your information even on subjects on which you are an acknowledged expert. Whatever you say is met with smirks and amused sounding or exaggerated exclamations ("Uh hunh!" "You don't say!" "Really!"). She'll then make it clear that she didn't listen to a word you said.

6. She makes you look crazy. If you try to confront her about something she's done, she'll tell you that you have "a very vivid imagination" (this is a phrase commonly used by abusers of all sorts to invalidate your experience of their abuse) that you don't know what you're talking about, or that she has no idea what you're talking about. She will claim not to remember even very memorable events, flatly denying they ever happened, nor will she ever acknowledge any possibility that she might have forgotten. This is an extremely aggressive and exceptionally infuriating tactic called "gaslighting," common to abusers of all kinds. Your perceptions of reality are continually undermined so that you end up without any confidence in your intuition, your memory or your powers of reasoning. This makes you a much better victim for the abuser.

Narcissists gaslight routinely. The narcissist will either insinuate or will tell you outright that you're unstable, otherwise you wouldn't believe such ridiculous things or be so uncooperative. You're oversensitive. You're imagining things. You're hysterical. You're completely unreasonable. You're over-reacting, like you always do. She'll talk to you when you've calmed down and aren't so irrational. She may even characterize you as being neurotic or psychotic.

Once she's constructed these fantasies of your emotional pathologies, she'll tell others about them, as always, presenting her smears as expressions of concern and declaring her own helpless victimhood. She didn't do anything. She has no idea why you're so irrationally angry with her. You've hurt her terribly. She thinks you may need psychotherapy. She loves you very much and would do anything to make you happy, but she just doesn't know what to do. You keep pushing her away when all she wants to do is help you.

She has simultaneously absolved herself of any responsibility for your obvious antipathy towards her, implied that it's something fundamentally wrong with you that makes you angry with her, and undermined your credibility with her listeners. She plays the role of the doting mother so perfectly that no one will believe you.

7. She's envious. Any time you get something nice she's angry and envious and her envy will be apparent when she admires whatever it is. She'll try to get it from you, spoil it for you, or get the same or better for herself. She's always working on ways to get what other people have. The envy of narcissistic mothers often includes competing sexually with their daughters or daughters-in-law. They'll attempt to forbid their daughters to wear makeup, to groom themselves in an age-appropriate way or to date. They will criticize the appearance of their daughters and daughters-in-law. This envy extends to relationships. Narcissistic mothers infamously attempt to damage their children's marriages and interfere in the upbringing of their grandchildren.

8. She's a liar in too many ways to count. Any time she talks about something that has emotional significance for her, it's a fair bet that she's lying. Lying is one way that she creates conflict in the relationships and lives of those around her - she'll lie to them about what other people have said, what they've done, or how they feel. She'll lie about her relationship with them, about your behavior or about your situation in order to inflate herself and to undermine your credibility.

The narcissist is very careful about how she lies. To outsiders she'll lie thoughtfully and deliberately, always in a way that can be covered up if she's confronted with her lie. She spins what you said rather than makes something up wholesale. She puts dishonest interpretations on things you actually did. If she's recently done something particularly egregious she may engage in preventative lying: she lies in advance to discount what you might say before you even say it. Then when you talk about what she did you'll be cut off with "I already know all about it…your mother told me... (self-justifications and lies)." Because she is so careful about her deniability, it may be very hard to catch her in her lies and the more gullible of her friends may never realize how dishonest she is.

To you, she'll lie blatantly. She will claim to be unable to remember bad things she has done, even if she did one of them recently and even if it was something very memorable. Of course, if you try to jog her memory by recounting the circumstances "You have a very vivid imagination" or "That was so long ago. Why do you have to dredge up your old grudges?" Your conversations with her are full of casual brush-offs and diversionary lies and she doesn't respect you enough to bother making it sound good. For example she'll start with a self-serving lie: "If I don't take you as a dependent on my taxes I'll lose three thousand dollars!" You refute her lie with an obvious truth: "No, three thousand dollars is the amount of the dependent exemption. You'll only lose about eight hundred dollars." Her response: "Isn't that what I said?" You are now in a game with only one rule: You can't win.

On the rare occasions she is forced to acknowledge some bad behavior, she will couch the admission deniably. She "guesses" that "maybe" she "might have" done something wrong. The wrongdoing is always heavily spun and trimmed to make it sound better. The words "I guess," "maybe," and "might have" are in and of themselves lies because she knows exactly what she did - no guessing, no might haves, no maybes.

9. She has to be the center of attention all the time. This need is a defining trait of narcissists and particularly of narcissistic mothers for whom their children exist to be sources of attention and adoration. Narcissistic mothers love to be waited on and often pepper their children with little requests. "While you're up…" or its equivalent is one of their favorite phrases. You couldn't just be assigned a chore at the beginning of the week or of the day, instead, you had to do it on demand, preferably at a time that was inconvenient for you, or you had to "help" her do it, fetching and carrying for her while she made up to herself for the menial work she had to do as your mother by glorying in your attentions.

A narcissistic mother may create odd occasions at which she can be the center of attention, such as memorials for someone close to her who died long ago, or major celebrations of small personal milestones. She may love to entertain so she can be the life of her own party. She will try to steal the spotlight or will try to spoil any occasion where someone else is the center of attention, particularly the child she has cast as the scapegoat. She often invites herself along where she isn't welcome. If she visits you or you visit her, you are required to spend all your time with her. Entertaining herself is unthinkable. She has always pouted, manipulated or raged if you tried to do anything without her, didn't want to entertain her, refused to wait on her, stymied her plans for a drama or otherwise deprived her of attention.

Older narcissistic mothers often use the natural limitations of aging to manipulate dramas, often by neglecting their health or by doing things they know will make them ill. This gives them the opportunity to cash in on the investment they made when they trained you to wait on them as a child. Then they call you (or better still, get the neighbor or the nursing home administrator to call you) demanding your immediate attendance. You are to rush to her side, pat her hand, weep over her pain and listen sympathetically to her unending complaints about how hard and awful it is. ("Never get old!") It's almost never the case that you can actually do anything useful, and the causes of her disability may have been completely avoidable, but you've been put in an extremely difficult position. If you don't provide the audience and attention she's manipulating to get, you look extremely bad to everyone else and may even have legal culpability. (Narcissistic behaviors commonly accompany Alzheimer's disease, so this behavior may also occur in perfectly normal mothers as they age.)

10. She manipulates your emotions in order to feed on your pain. This exceptionally sick and bizarre behavior is so common among narcissistic mothers that their children often call them "emotional vampires." Some of this emotional feeding comes in the form of pure sadism. She does and says things just to be wounding or she engages in tormenting teasing or she needles you about things you're sensitive about, all the while a smile plays over her lips. She may have taken you to scary movies or told you horrifying stories, then mocked you for being a baby when you cried; she will slip a wounding comment into conversation and smile delightedly into your hurt face. You can hear the laughter in her voice as she pressures you or says distressing things to you. Later she'll gloat over how much she upset you, gaily telling other people that you're so much fun to tease, and recruiting others to share in her amusement. . She enjoys her cruelties and makes no effort to disguise that. She wants you to know that your pain entertains her. She may bring up subjects that are painful for you and probe you about them, all the while watching you carefully. This is emotional vampirism in its purest form. She's feeding emotionally off your pain.

A peculiar form of this emotional vampirism combines attention-seeking behavior with a demand that the audience suffer. Since narcissistic mothers often play the martyr this may take the form of wrenching, self-pitying dramas which she carefully produces, and in which she is the star performer. She sobs and wails that no one loves her and everyone is so selfish, and she doesn't want to live, she wants to die! She wants to die! She will not seem to care how much the manipulation of their emotions and the self-pity repels other people. One weird behavior that is very common to narcissists: her dramas may also center around the tragedies of other people, often relating how much she suffered by association and trying to distress her listeners, as she cries over the horrible murder of someone she wouldn't recognize if they had passed her on the street.

11. She's selfish and willful. She always makes sure she has the best of everything. She insists on having her own way all the time and she will ruthlessly, manipulatively pursue it, even if what she wants isn't worth all the effort she's putting into it and even if that effort goes far beyond normal behavior. She will make a huge effort to get something you denied her, even if it was entirely your right to do so and even if her demand was selfish and unreasonable. If you tell her she cannot bring her friends to your party she will show up with them anyway, and she will have told them that they were invited so that you either have to give in, or be the bad guy to these poor dupes on your doorstep. If you tell her she can't come over to your house tonight she'll call your spouse and try get him or her to agree that she can, and to not say anything to you about it because it's a "surprise." She has to show you that you can't tell her "no."

One near-universal characteristic of narcissists: because they are so selfish and self-centered, they are very bad gift givers. They'll give you hand-me-downs or market things for themselves as gifts for you ("I thought I'd give you my old bicycle and buy myself a new one!" "I know how much you love Italian food, so I'm going to take you to my favorite restaurant for your birthday!") New gifts are often obviously cheap and are usually things that don't suit you or that you can't use or are a quid pro quo: if you buy her the gift she wants, she will buy you an item of your choice. She'll make it clear that it pains her to give you anything. She may buy you a gift and get the identical item for herself, or take you shopping for a gift and get herself something nice at the same time to make herself feel better.

12. She's self-absorbed. Her feelings, needs and wants are very important; yours are insignificant to the point that her least whim takes precedence over your most basic needs. Her problems deserve your immediate and full attention; yours are brushed aside. Her wishes always take precedence; if she does something for you, she reminds you constantly of her munificence in doing so and will often try to extract some sort of payment. She will complain constantly, even though your situation may be much worse than hers. If you point that out, she will effortlessly, thoughtlessly brush it aside as of no importance (It's easy for you... / It's different for you...).

13. She is insanely defensive and is extremely sensitive to any criticism. If you criticize her or defy her she will explode with fury, threaten, storm, rage, destroy and may become violent, beating, confining, putting her child outdoors in bad weather or otherwise engaging in classic physical abuse.

14. She terrorizes. For all abusers, fear is a powerful means of control of the victim, and your narcissistic mother used it ruthlessly to train you. Narcissists teach you to beware their wrath even when they aren't present. The only alternative is constant placation. If you give her everything she wants all the time, you might be spared. If you don't, the punishments will come. Even adult children of narcissists still feel that carefully inculcated fear. Your narcissistic mother can turn it on with a silence or a look that tells the child in you she's thinking about how she's going to get even.

Not all narcissists abuse physically, but most do, often in subtle, deniable ways. It allows them to vent their rage at your failure to be the solution to their internal havoc and simultaneously to teach you to fear them. You may not have been beaten, but you were almost certainly left to endure physical pain when a normal mother would have made an effort to relieve your misery. This deniable form of battery allows her to store up her rage and dole out the punishment at a later time when she's worked out an airtight rationale for her abuse, so she never risks exposure. You were left hungry because "you eat too much." (Someone asked her if she was pregnant. She isn't). You always went to school with stomach flu because "you don't have a fever. You're just trying to get out of school." (She resents having to take care of you. You have a lot of nerve getting sick and adding to her burdens.) She refuses to look at your bloody heels and instead the shoes that wore those blisters on your heels are put back on your feet and you're sent to the store in them because "You wanted those shoes. Now you can wear them." (You said the ones she wanted to get you were ugly. She liked them because they were just like what she wore 30 years ago). The dentist was told not to give you Novocain when he drilled your tooth because "he has to learn to take better care of his teeth." (She has to pay for a filling and she's furious at having to spend money on you.)

Narcissistic mothers also abuse by loosing others on you or by failing to protect you when a normal mother would have. Sometimes the narcissist's golden child will be encouraged to abuse the scapegoat. Narcissists also abuse by exposing you to violence. If one of your siblings got beaten, she made sure you saw. She effortlessly put the fear of Mom into you, without raising a hand.

15. She's infantile and petty. Narcissistic mothers are often simply childish. If you refuse to let her manipulate you into doing something, she will cry that you don't love her because if you loved her you would do as she wanted. If you hurt her feelings she will aggressively whine to you that you'll be sorry when she's dead that you didn't treat her better. These babyish complaints and responses may sound laughable, but the narcissist is dead serious about them. When you were a child, if you ask her to stop some bad behavior, she would justify it by pointing out something that you did that she feels is comparable, as though the childish behavior of a child is justification for the childish behavior of an adult. "Getting even" is a large part of her dealings with you. Anytime you fail to give her the deference, attention or service she feels she deserves, or you thwart her wishes, she has to show you.

16. She's aggressive and shameless. She doesn't ask. She demands. She makes outrageous requests and she'll take anything she wants if she thinks she can get away with it. Her demands of her children are posed in a very aggressive way, as are her criticisms. She won't take no for an answer, pushing and arm-twisting and manipulating to get you to give in.

17. She "parentifies." She shed her responsibilities to you as soon as she was able, leaving you to take care of yourself as best you could. She denied you medical care, adequate clothing, necessary transportation or basic comforts that she would never have considered giving up for herself. She never gave you a birthday party or let you have sleepovers. Your friends were never welcome in her house. She didn't like to drive you anywhere, so you turned down invitations because you had no way to get there. She wouldn't buy your school pictures even if she could easily have afforded it. You had a niggardly clothing allowance or she bought you the cheapest clothing she could without embarrassing herself. As soon as you got a job, every request for school supplies, clothing or toiletries was met with "Now that you're making money, why don't you pay for that yourself?" You studied up on colleges on your own and choose a cheap one without visiting it. You signed yourself up for the SATs, earned the money to pay for them and talked someone into driving you to the test site. You worked three jobs to pay for that cheap college and when you finally got mononucleosis she chirped at you that she was "so happy you could take care of yourself."

She also gave you tasks that were rightfully hers and should not have been placed on a child. You may have been a primary caregiver for young siblings or an incapacitated parent. You may have had responsibility for excessive household tasks. Above all, you were always her emotional caregiver which is one reason any defection from that role caused such enormous eruptions of rage. You were never allowed to be needy or have bad feelings or problems. Those experiences were only for her, and you were responsible for making it right for her. From the time you were very young she would randomly lash out at you any time she was stressed or angry with your father or felt that life was unfair to her, because it made her feel better to hurt you. You were often punished out of the blue, for manufactured offenses. As you got older she directly placed responsibility for her welfare and her emotions on you, weeping on your shoulder and unloading on you any time something went awry for her.

18. She's exploitative. She will manipulate to get work, money, or objects she envies out of other people for nothing. This includes her children, of course. If she set up a bank account for you, she was trustee on the account with the right to withdraw money. As you put money into it, she took it out. She may have stolen your identity. She took you as a dependent on her income taxes so you couldn't file independently without exposing her to criminal penalties. If she made an agreement with you, it was violated the minute it no longer served her needs. If you brought it up demanding she adhere to the agreement, she brushed you off and later punished you so you would know not to defy her again.

Sometimes the narcissist will exploit a child to absorb punishment that would have been hers from an abusive partner. The husband comes home in a drunken rage, and the mother immediately complains about the child's bad behavior so the rage is vented on to the child. Sometimes the narcissistic mother simply uses the child to keep a sick marriage intact because the alternative is being divorced or having to go to work. The child is sexually molested but the mother never notices, or worse, calls the child a liar when she tells the mother about the molestation.

19. She projects. This sounds a little like psycho-babble, but it is something that narcissists all do. Projection means that she will put her own bad behavior, character and traits on you so she can deny them in herself and punish you. This can be very difficult to see if you have traits that she can project on to. An eating-disordered woman who obsesses over her daughter's weight is projecting. The daughter may not realize it because she has probably internalized an absurdly thin vision of women's weight and so accepts her mother's projection. When the narcissist tells the daughter that she eats too much, needs to exercise more, or has to wear extra-large size clothes, the daughter believes it, even if it isn't true. However, she will sometimes project even though it makes no sense at all. This happens when she feels shamed and needs to put it on her scapegoat child and the projection therefore comes across as being an attack out of the blue. For example: She makes an outrageous request, and you casually refuse to let her have her way. She's enraged by your refusal and snarls at you that you'll talk about it when you've calmed down and are no longer hysterical.

You aren't hysterical at all; she is, but your refusal has made her feel the shame that should have stopped her from making shameless demands in the first place. That's intolerable. She can transfer that shame to you and rationalize away your response: you only refused her because you're so unreasonable. Having done that she can reassert her shamelessness and indulge her childish willfulness by turning an unequivocal refusal into a subject for further discussion. You'll talk about it again "later" - probably when she's worn you down with histrionics, pouting and the silent treatment so you're more inclined to do what she wants.

20. She is never wrong about anything. No matter what she's done, she won't ever genuinely apologize for anything. Instead, any time she feels she is being made to apologize she will sulk and pout, issue an insulting apology or negate the apology she has just made with justifications, qualifications or self pity: "I'm sorry you felt that I humiliated you" "I'm sorry if I made you feel bad" "If I did that it was wrong" "I'm sorry, but I there's nothing I can do about it" "I'm sorry I made you feel clumsy, stupid and disgusting" "I'm sorry but it was just a joke. You're so over-sensitive" "I'm sorry that my own child feels she has to upset me and make me feel bad." The last insulting apology is also an example of projection.

21. She seems to have no awareness that other people even have feelings. She'll occasionally slip and say something jaw-droppingly callous because of this lack of empathy. It isn't that she doesn't care at all about other people's feelings, though she doesn't. It would simply never occur to her to think about their feelings. An absence of empathy is the defining trait of a narcissist and underlies most of the other traits I have described. Unlike psychopaths, narcissists do understand right, wrong, and consequences, so they are not ordinarily criminal. She beat you, but not to the point where you went to the hospital. She left you standing out in the cold until you were miserable, but not until you had hypothermia. She put you in the basement in the dark with no clothes on, but she only left you there for two hours.

22. She blames. She'll blame you for everything that isn't right in her life or for what other people do or for whatever has happened. Always, she'll blame you for her abuse. You made her do it. If only you weren't so difficult. You upset her so much that she can't think straight. Things were hard for her and your backtalk pushed her over the brink. This blaming is often so subtle that all you know is that you thought you were wronged and now you feel guilty. Your brother beats you and her response is to bemoan how uncivilized children are. Your boyfriend dumped you, but she can understand - after all, she herself has seen how difficult you are to love. She'll do something egregiously exploitative to you, and when confronted will screech at you that she can't believe you were so selfish as to upset her over such a trivial thing. She'll also blame you for your reaction to her selfish, cruel and exploitative behavior. She can't believe you are so petty, so small, and so childish as to object to her giving your favorite dress to her friend. She thought you would be happy to let her do something nice for someone else.

Narcissists are masters of multitasking as this example shows. Simultaneously your narcissistic mother is

1. Lying. She knows what she did was wrong and she knows your reaction is reasonable.
2. Manipulating. She's making you look like the bad guy for objecting to her cruelties.
3. Being selfish. She doesn't mind making you feel horrible as long as she gets her own way.
4. Blaming. She did something wrong, but it's all your fault.
5. Projecting. Her petty, small and childish behavior has become yours.
6. Putting on a self-pitying drama. She's a martyr who believed the best of you, and you've let her down.
7. Parentifying. You're responsible for her feelings, she has no responsibility for yours.

23. She destroys your relationships. Narcissistic mothers are like tornadoes: wherever they touch down families are torn apart and wounds are inflicted. Unless the father has control over the narcissist and holds the family together, adult siblings in families with narcissistic mothers characteristically have painful relationships. Typically all communication between siblings is superficial and driven by duty, or they may never talk to each other at all. In part, these women foster dissension between their children because they enjoy the control it gives them. If those children don't communicate except through the mother, she can decide what everyone hears. Narcissists also love the excitement and drama they create by interfering in their children's lives. Watching people's lives explode is better than soap operas, especially when you don't have any empathy for their misery.

The narcissist nurtures anger, contempt and envy - the most corrosive emotions - to drive her children apart. While her children are still living at home, any child who stands up to the narcissist guarantees punishment for the rest. In her zest for revenge, the narcissist purposefully turns the siblings' anger on the dissenter by including everyone in her retaliation. ("I can see that nobody here loves me! Well I'll just take these Christmas presents back to the store. None of you would want anything I got you anyway!") The other children, long trained by the narcissist to give in, are furious with the troublemaking child, instead of with the narcissist who actually deserves their anger.

The narcissist also uses favoritism and gossip to poison her childrens' relationships. The scapegoat sees the mother as a creature of caprice and cruelty. As is typical of the privileged, the other children don't see her unfairness and they excuse her abuses. Indeed, they are often recruited by the narcissist to adopt her contemptuous and entitled attitude towards the scapegoat and with her tacit or explicit permission, will inflict further abuse. The scapegoat predictably responds with fury and equal contempt. After her children move on with adult lives, the narcissist makes sure to keep each apprised of the doings of the others, passing on the most discreditable and juicy gossip (as always, disguised as "concern") about the other children, again, in a way that engenders contempt rather than compassion.

Having been raised by a narcissist, her children are predisposed to be envious, and she takes full advantage of the opportunity that presents. While she may never praise you to your face, she will likely crow about your victories to the very sibling who is not doing well. She'll tell you about the generosity she displayed towards that child, leaving you wondering why you got left out and irrationally angry at the favored child rather than at the narcissist who told you about it.

The end result is a family in which almost all communication is triangular. The narcissist, the spider in the middle of the family web, sensitively monitors all the children for information she can use to retain her unchallenged control over the family. She then passes that on to the others, creating the resentments that prevent them from communicating directly and freely with each other. The result is that the only communication between the children is through the narcissist, exactly the way she wants it.

24. As a last resort she goes pathetic. When she's confronted with unavoidable consequences for her own bad behavior, including your anger, she will melt into a soggy puddle of weepy helplessness. It's all her fault. She can't do anything right. She feels so bad. What she doesn't do: own the responsibility for her bad conduct and make it right. Instead, as always, it's all about her, and her helpless self-pitying weepiness dumps the responsibility for her consequences AND for her unhappiness about it on you. As so often with narcissists, it is also a manipulative behavior. If you fail to excuse her bad behavior and make her feel better, YOU are the bad person for being cold, heartless and unfeeling when your poor mother feels so awful.

http://parrishmiller.com/narcissists.html

Celebrating Atypical Minds, adhd-community: philosophium: Do I have any...

adhd-community:

philosophium:

Do I have any followers with ADHD? Or does anyone have some really good information on it? I want to write a character who has ADHD but I don’t know anything about it except the basics so I’m looking to educate myself. Any help beyond a wiki article would appreciated! 

Friends, what would you like to see in an ADHD character?

One thing I gleefully identify with is the level of restless frustration experienced by BBC’s Sherlock during boredom (not that Sherlock is necessarily ADHD - let’s not open that diagnostic nightmare of a discussion please!).

I would like to see more of a struggle with internal noise shown in media. Often I see the bouncy, silly outsider view of the disorder and I would greatly appreciate seeing a wider range of symptoms/experiences, including the ones that make us want to pull out our hair. For me, off medication, being in a room where I am required to be silent, still, and focusing is basically my own personal hell.

It doesn’t at all need to be all doom and gloom, just not squirrel-chasing-8-year-old-boy-stereotype so much please!

First of all, philosophium, thanks for asking!

I’m glad ADHD community replied, because they’re a good source of facts about ADHD presented from an ADHD perspective. So, you learn some of what you’d get in a psych textbook, but also what it feels like from the inside.

If you’re really starting from zero, this Buzzfeed article is a nice place to start. 

Here’s some miscellaneous information about ADHD that will hopefully help you write more accurate, and less stereotypical, characters.

1) We’re Not All Extraverted, Hyper, Happy Go Lucky Males. We can be male or female, child or adult. I’d love to see an introverted, non-hyperactive ADHD character, ideally a male one. Or an ADHD character who obsessively overthinks, and is prone to anxiety and perfectionism.

2) Look at Both Extremes. In real life, some people with ADHD can only multitask while others can only hyperfocus. Some people with ADHD can focus on the details while ignoring the big picture, others see the big picture brilliantly but miss all the details, while others can bounce back and forth but can’t see both at the same time. Some of us are laid back and prefer to go with the flow, while others react to their disabilities by becoming extremely perfectionistic and trying to plan everything ahead of time (me). Some of us have IQ in the gifted range (see “need for stimulation”), while others have low IQ or severe developmental delays (children who are born prematurely, have lead poisoning, or who have fetal alcohol syndrome often have ADHD). Almost all the people I know with ADHD are artists, scientists, or both.

3) ADHD Is a Disability of Executive Function. Executive function is a confusing mess of tasks performed by the frontal lobe that allow us to control our behavior and respond flexibly and optimally to a changing environment. Some executive functions include working memory, inhibition (i.e., stopping oneself from doing or thinking something), task switching, sustained attention, planning, decision making, prioritizing, prospective memory.

4) We Can Pay Attention, We Just Can’t Regulate It. We can focus for hours on something that interests us, or on procrastinating. We’re not good at focusing on things that we find boring or that don’t matter to us. We also aren’t good at controlling the amount of attention we pay. This is how our attention works:

5) ADHD is a Production Problem, Not a Learning Problem. A lot of us excel at getting information into our brains, especially when it interests us. The difficulty is producing something that shows what we’ve learned by a deadline–be it a paper, a presentation, or a project. For some of us, the hardest part of any assignment is finishing it and turning it in on time in the correct format. If we can do these things, we’ll probably get an A; if we can’t, we’ll probably fail. As a result, the idea of “gradating your effort” doesn’t apply well to us (telling us to “stop being so perfectionistic and do the minimum” makes no sense to us), and our achievement can be all-or-nothing.

6) We Don’t All Get Bad Grades, Or Misbehave in School. Those of us who are smart, learn easily, and are interested in school can get good grades until the demands for organized, well-formatted, and on-time work overwhelm our abilities to produce (see #5). Those with inattentive ADHD, when bored, tend to daydream, look out the window, or draw rather than misbehave. Teachers might not notice these students at all–or might even see them as well-behaved and a joy to teach.

7) Need for Stimulation. As ADHD community said, an ADHD character who is wildly intelligent, and when bored, feels as if they’re in a sensory deprivation tank. Boredom is Chinese water torture. Each second is a drop of water. How we react to this varies. Some are constantly bored and highly aware of their search for stimulation. Others, like me, think they’re never bored because they’ve become very good at keeping themselves occupied. I always carried a book to read and a sketchbook to draw in with me, and I would read even while crossing the street. Only when I needed to learn to cook did I realize I can get bored within literally 10 seconds.

8) Sometimes, what’s “hard” or “complex” is easy for us, and what’s “easy” or “simple” for others is hard for us. Especially if we’re also gifted. See: http://neurodiversitysci.tumblr.com/post/12568168808/the-complex-is-simple-the-simple-complexif

9) Memory Problems. I’d like to see an ADHD character who has a terrible memory, and struggles with the psychological/identity consequences of that and not just the academic ones. They’re constantly writing things down, and constantly worrying about how to organize the record of their life, or about what would happen if it were destroyed in a fire/flood/other accident. The most impaired form of memory, though, is prospective memory, the ability to remember what you are going to do. Memory problems are some of my worst ADHD traits, yet I rarely see them discussed. 

10) Paradoxes of Reminders and Clutters. Because of our memory problems, you might think the answer is simple: just put post-it notes everywhere. And indeed, even other ADHD-ers often advise us to use colorful post-it notes and put them everywhere. However, visual clutter shuts our brains off, so we stop looking at these post it notes and reminders–or even look right at them and don’t register their existence. Another version: if items aren’t visible, I forget that they exist. (For example, I forget about food in the back of the refrigerator until it goes bad; I forget about clothes in the corner of the closet). But if too many things are visible, I stop being able to see them. They just look like clutter, an undifferentiated “bunch of stuff” to me. It would seem like the answer is to get rid of as much stuff as possible, but the decisions involved take hours and leave me exhausted.

11) The Paradox of Routines/Habits: Habits help us function despite our inability to remember what we’re supposed to be doing and our tendency to get sidetracked in the middle. That’s because habits require no thought, attention, or memory–we do them automatically. 

The problem is, it’s almost impossible for us to make the habit in the first place because we can’t consistently remember to do it. So, you get people with ADHD who forget to take their medication for the very reasons they need it in the first place.

12) Inconsistency. An ADHD character whose functioning is inconsistent from day to day and so feels he/she can’t rely on him/herself. There’s a lot of research on this “intra-individual variability” and indeed, it ranks among the most consistently-found traits found in both children and adults.

13) When we’re exhausted or overwhelmed, or a life crisis happens, we can stop being able to do basic things we used to be able to do. Maybe we used to be able to get to work/school on time, remember when assignments were due, or have a consistent morning routine. Now we’re no longer able to get out of the house on time, remember our assignments, or remember to take our medicine or brush our teeth in the morning. When this happens to me, I realize how much energy and attention I’m putting into doing “basic” things and wonder when I’ll ever “get them under control” so I can focus on learning new things.

14) Slow or Inconsistent Processing Speed. We don’t always talk fast and display high energy (I wish!). Some of us struggle with fatigue and slow processing speed (see: Sluggish Cognitive Tempo, a proposed subtype of Inattentive ADHD). For example, I usually feel mentally and emotionally tired–I feel after a full night’s sleep the way most people do after three or four hours of sleep. The more tired I feel, the more difficulty I have concentrating, multitasking, remembering to do things, and making decisions. This is one reason why stimulants and even wakefulness medications can help. Some people, like me, have inconsistent processing speed. Sometimes I think and talk so fast it irritates others, I find what’s happening around us boring (think of the world’s longest meeting), and I interrupt others. Other times, I am just about to answer someone’s question when they irritably repeat themselves or ask why I’m taking so long to answer. It feels like I’m  thinking and talking at the normal speed, but others’ reactions make clear that we’re going much faster or slower than they are. Our relative strengths and weaknesses can affect when we think faster vs. slower than normal. For example, I finished the verbal portion of the SAT and checked my answers multiple times halfway through the time limit. I then had to sit there, bored, until the time was up. On the other hand, I ran out of time on the math section before I could check my work.

15) Some of us are socially awkward penguins, not graceful adrenaline junkies. There’s a stereotype that we’re adrenaline junkies who perform surgeries and jump out of planes. Or, we’re social butterflies who compensate for our school difficulties by playing class clown or making friends with everyone. But some of us are physically or socially awkward. Socially, lapses in attention can make us say things that come off as awkward or rude. Our poor sense of timing and inconsistent processing speed can throw off our conversational rhythm, making us interrupt–or just appear odd. Many of us also have motor coordination delays and difficulties (and research bears this out). As kids, we might have had difficulty using scissors, writing, tying our shoes, throwing or catching a ball, or riding a bike. We can have social and/or motor difficulties without meeting criteria for autism spectrum disorder. (Although a lot of people with ADHD have autism, too–see below).

16) Anxiety. Most of us develop anxiety, for all sorts of reasons. We’re prone to overthinking, to begin with. We have to worry about others misunderstanding us and calling us lazy, stupid, flaky, or rude. Some of us develop an exhausting habit of “constant vigilance” because we know of no other way to avoid making ADHD mistakes (losing things, forgetting things, math/writing errors, running late, etc.).

17) Co-occurring conditions. ADHD rarely rides alone. People with ADHD often have dyslexia, math disability, sensory processing disorder, dyspraxia, autism spectrum disorder, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or allergies. Immune system or digestive problems might make us even more inconsistent.

18) Our family members are likely to have ADHD or autism–diagnosed or otherwise. Many people report being diagnosed with ADHD after their own children were diagnosed. Like autism, dyslexia, and other disabilities, ADHD is highly heritable, meaning that it’s highly likely that someone with ADHD traits will have children with the same traits (and their parents probably have them, too). I have a younger brother on the spectrum, and have met a number of other older ADHD sisters with younger autistic brothers. While the gender thing may be a fluke, I have read that ADHD and autism share genetic causes and can run together in families. 

19) We have a variety of attitudes towards our ADHD. Some of us see ADHD as uniformly disabling, preventing us from using our talents and passions Other people see ADHD as a gift. People with each of these viewpoints sometimes see the opposite as harmful to people with ADHD. Still others view ADHD as a trait like any other, which can have positive or negative effects depending on how one chooses to use it and what environment one is in. (Personally, I see ADHD, in general, as a set of traits. However, I see mine as mostly negative because they have been impairing me recently and preventing me from pursuing a longstanding dream. I view my ADHD traits as preventing me from using many of my talents and passions. However, there are environments where they’d be less disabling, and I’m currently trying to find them).

20) Being diagnosed and labeled can have good effects, too. There’s a sense of relief, of understanding, of not being broken, of having words for one’s experience. The book title “You mean I’m not lazy, stupid, or crazy?” captures the feeling pretty well, I think. I’ve also written about the benefits of diagnosis and the crappiness of growing up without diagnosis a LOT–see this, this, most of all, this:

“…that sense that there was some mysterious thing wrong with me. (Do you know what it feels like, to carry around a sense that something is wrong with you, always ready to erupt, and not know what’s wrong or why? To have people constantly pointing out when you do something wrong but never acknowledging that mysterious brokenness–pointing out the elephant dung and squished sofa in your living room but never mentioning the elephant or offering to help get it out of your living room? And since no one will talk about the elephant, you have no idea how to get it out of your living room, so you’re just stuck with it there. No one can tell you how to fix what’s broken).”  

21) Stimulants don’t necessarily turn you into a zombie. They aren’t necessarily a cure-all, either, and some of us choose not to take them. I have yet to find a medication at a dose I can take daily, because it makes me completely lose my appetite. I only take it during emergencies–high-stakes days where I’m not able to function, and/or due to other health problems acting up, I can’t drink coffee. This isn’t the only side effect. Some people get migraines from stimulants. These medications can also slightly stunt children’s growth.

22) ADHD can be seriously disabling. ADHD looks on the surface like something “everyone deals with,” but as the experiences I’ve described above suggest, it can cause serious problems in school, work, and relationships. The large-scale MTA study, which followed hundreds of girls and boys with ADHD into adulthood, found some poor outcomes, including higher rates of self-injury and mental illness; adolescent substance use; eating disorders; and poorer relationships with peers in adolescence and parents and partners in adulthood. ADHD has also been linked to lower test performance, poorer education and work performance, greater risk of accidents, and obesity. Researchers and the media tend to describe these problems as a result of the ADHD traits themselves, especially impulsivity. But the way we treat people with ADHD probably has a lot to do with the bad outcomes. One contributing factor: many, especially those diagnosed late in life, develop crippling shame and self-hatred. 

23) We’re also awesome! People with ADHD can be creative, energetic, passionate, thoughtful, academically skilled, empathetic, entrepreneurial, and more. Famous people in every walk of life have diagnosed ADHD, and many past geniuses have traits. Like other disabilities, ADHD colors how we experience and act in the world, but it does not diminish us or make us less human.  

24) Bonus point that doesn’t fit anywhere: I’ve noticed that smart women with ADHD have a very distinctive style of talking. We talk fast, crowding as many ideas into a sentence as possible before we forget what we’re saying. We are trying to pack a lot complicated thoughts into a short amount of time. We veer off on tangents whenever someone says something interesting. If two of us start talking, we can go on for hours and never run out of things to say–and also never return to the topic we started with. To those who do not have ADHD, we sound rambling or incoherent. To other women with ADHD, we make perfect sense and the conversation feels exhilarating, with the energy building increasingly as we talk. We sound incoherent to others but not each other because our thoughts are arranged in a very dense and logical web, but we move through the web in a zig-zagging pattern based on associations instead of a straight line. The zig-zag pattern happens in part because with our short working memory, our span of awareness is extremely short. So we operate on associations; everything reminds us of something else. Other people’s words, objects in the room, and music we hear reminds us of something, but then then we forget what we were talking about before. We’re constantly forgetting what we were talking about or what we were doing in the middle. As a result, some of us have a bad habit of interrupting others in order to get our message out before we forget it. 

If you have any more questions, feel free to ask! Sorry this was so long…

https://neurodiversitysci.tumblr.com/post/139769513631/adhd-community-philosophium-do-i-have-any

See, the problem with people who aren’t in wheelchairs writing about and/or drawing people who are in (manual) wheelchairs is that the people who aren’t in wheelchairs tend to think that there’s only like four movements that you do in a wheelchair. You can either push forward, push backwards, turn left, or turn right. And the characters do it all while sitting up straight or bending forward so that their noses touch their knees.

But the amount of motions that I go through on a daily basis are actually amazing. And the body language…you could write an entire book on the body language of someone in a wheelchair.

Like right now, I’m more relaxed, so I’m slouching slightly. I’ve got my right foot on its footrest and the left foot on the ground. Every so often, as I stop to think of something to say, I’ll push with my left foot to rock the chair slightly.

But usually, I sit mostly upright with my upper-half slightly leaned forward. When I’m wheeling across the campus, especially if I have somewhere that I need to be, I’ll lean and shift my weight in whichever direction it is that I’m going. It helps make the wheelchair glide that much more smoothly. How far/dramatically I lean depends on how fast I’m going, the terrain, if there’s a turn, etc.

Plus people who don’t use wheelchairs don’t understand the relationship between grabbing the wheels, pushing, and the chair moving. Like I’ve seen things written or have seen people try to use a chair where the character/that person grabs the wheel every single second and never lets go to save their lives. Which isn’t right. The key is to do long, strong, pushes that allow you to move several feet before repeating. I can usually get about ten feet in before I have to push again. It’s kind of like riding a scooter. You don’t always need to push. You push, then ride, then push, then ride, etc.

And because of this, despite what many people think, people in wheelchairs can actually multitask. I’ve carried Starbucks drinks across the campus without spilling a single drop. Because it’s possible to wheel one-handed (despite what most people think), especially when you shift your weight. And if I need to alternate between pushing both wheels, I’ll just swap hands during the ‘glide’ time.

I’ve also noticed that people who don’t use wheelchairs, for some reason, have no idea how to turn a wheelchair. It’s the funniest thing. Like I see it written or, again, have seen people ‘try’ a wheelchair where they’re reaching across their bodies to try to grab one wheel and push or they try to push both wheels at the same time and don’t understand. (For the record, you pull back a wheel and push a wheel. The direction that you’re going is the side that you pull back.)

Back to body language. Again, no idea why most people think that we always sit upright and nothing else. Maybe when I’m in meetings or other formal settings, but most of the time, I do slightly slouch/lean. As for the hands…A lot of writers put the wheelchair user’s hands on the armrests but the truth is, most armrests sit too far back to actually put your hands on. There are times when I’ll put my elbows on the edges of the armrests and will put my hands between my legs. Note: Not on my lap. That’s another thing that writers do but putting your hands in your lap is actually not a natural thing to do when you’re in a wheelchair, due to the angle that you’re sitting and the armrests. Most of the time, I’ll just sort of let my arms loosely fall on either side of the chair, so that my hands are next to my wheels but not grabbing them. That’s another form of body language. I’ve talked to a few people who have done it and I do it myself. If I’m ever anxious or in a situation where I want to leave for one reason or another, I will usually grip my handrims - one hand near the front , one hand near the back. And if I’m really nervous, you’ll find me leaning further and further into the chair, running my hands along the handrims.

Also, on a related subject - a character’s legs should usually be at 90 degree angles, the cushion should come to about their knees, and the armrests should come to about their elbows. You can always tell that an actor is not a wheelchair user when their wheelchair isn’t designed to their dimensions. (Their knees are usually inches away from the seats and are up at an angle, the armrests are too high, etc.) Plus they don’t know how to drive the chair.

Let’s see, what else? Only certain bags can go on the back of the chair without scraping against the wheels, so, no, your teenagers in wheelchairs can’t put their big, stylish, purses on the back. We don’t always use gloves since most gloves actually aren’t that helpful (as stated above, wheeling is a very fluid motion and gloves tend to constrict movements). Height differences are always a thing to remember. If you’re going for the “oh no, my wheelchair is broken” trope, nobody really has ‘flat’ tires anymore thanks to the new material for the wheels but it is possible to have things break off. We use the environment a lot. I always push off of walls or grab onto corners or kick off of the floor etc. Wheelchair parkour should really become a thing.

Let's Talk About: Minor Character Development | I Am Not An Expert

“Creating one interesting character is hard enough — but when it comes to writing a whole novel or series of books, you have to create dozens of them. How can you keep your supporting cast from seeming like cookie-cutter people? There’s no easy answer, but a few tricks might help you create minor characters who don’t feel too minor.” [x]

10 Secrets to Creating Unforgettable Supporting Characters

1. Give them at lease one defining characteristic. "…lots of people have one or two habits that you notice the first time you meet them, that stand out in your mind even after you learn more about them.“
2. Give them an origin story. ”…Your main character doesn’t necessarily need an origin story, because you’ve got the whole book to explain who he/she is and what he/she is about. But a supporting character? You get a paragraph or five, to explain the formative experience that made her become the person she is, and possibly how she got whatever skills or powers she possesses.“
3. Make sure they talk in a distinctive fashion. ”…you still have to make sure your characters don’t all talk the same. Some of them talk in nothing but short sentences, others in nothing but long, rolling statements full of subordinate clauses and random digressions. Or you might have a character who always follows one long sentence with three short ones.“ ”…One dirty shortcut is to hear the voice of a particular actor or famous person in your head, as one character talks.“
4. Avoid making them paragons of virtue, or authorial stand-ins. ”…People who have no flaws are automatically boring, and thus forgettable.“ ”…Any character who has foibles, or bad habits, or destructive urges, will always stand out more than one who is pure and wonderful in all ways. And nobody will believe that you’ve chosen to identify yourself, as the author, with someone who’s so messed up. (Because of course, you are a perfect human being, with no flaws of your own.)“
5. Anchor them to a particular place. ”…A huge part of making a supporting character “pop” is placing her somewhere. Give her a haunt — some place she hangs out a lot. A tavern, a bar, an engine room, a barracks, a dog track, wherever. It works both ways — by anchoring a character in a particular location, you make both the character and the location feel more real.“
6. Introduce them twice — the first time in the background, the second in the foreground. ”…You mention a character in passing: “And Crazy Harriet was there too, chewing on her catweed like always.” And you say more about them. And then later, the next time we see that character, you give more information or detail, like where she scores her catweed from. The reader will barely remember that you mentioned the character the first time — but it’s in the back of the reader’s mind, and there’s a little “ping” of identification.“
7. Focus on what they mean to your protagonists ”…What does this minor character mean to your hero? What role does he fulfill? What does your hero want or need from Randolph the Grifter? If you know what your hero finds memorable about Randolph, then you’re a long ways towards finding what your readers will remember, too.“
8. Give them an arc — or the illusion of one. ”… You can create the appearance of an arc by establishing that a character feels a particular way — and then, a couple hundred pages later, you mention that now the character feels a different way.“ ”…A minor character who changes in some way is automatically more interesting than one who remains constant…“
9. The more minor the character, the more caricature-like they may have to be. ”…This one is debatable — you may be a deft enough author that you can create a hundred characters, all of whom are fully fleshed out, well-rounded human beings with full inner lives.“ ”…some writing styles simply can’t support or abide cartoony minor characters. But for your third ensign, who appears for a grand total of two pages, on page 147 and page 398, you may have to go for cartoony if you want him to live in the reader’s mind as anything other than a piece of scenery.“
10. Decide which supporting characters you’ll allow to be forgettable after all. ”…And this is probably inevitable. You only have so much energy, and your readers only have so much mental space. Plus, if 100 supporting characters are all vivid and colorful and people your readers want to go bowling with, then your story runs the risk of seeming overwritten and garish.Sometimes you need to resign yourself to the notion that some characters are going to be extras, or that they’re literally going to fulfill a plot function without having any personality to speak of. It’s a major sacrifice they’re making, subsuming their personality for the sake of the major players’ glory.“

—

Questions to Ask (& Strengthen) Your Minor Characters

What’s the character’s internal motivation; what does he or she really want?

How might you locate a character’s internal motivation and conflict if they seem to be absent?

What peculiar traits might you highlight about the character to make him seem fuller?

Are you playing both with and against type?

How is the heart of the character, the motivation, evident in a work you admire?

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”Minor characters who have been involved with the protagonist for a long time are carriers of their own history with and memories of the protagonist. Minor characters can reference the past in handy ways that serve the development of the story. They can make observations about the protagonist’s character or predictions about her future.“ [x]

"Minor characters can serve as symbols of the protagonist’s own shortcomings that she must overcome in order to achieve the story’s goal.

Likewise, you can use minor characters in a way that represents the protagonist’s own potential – characters that the protagonist looks up to or wishes to emulate in some way.” [x]

“A minor character can double the protagonist in some way: they start out in a similar situation, pursuing a similar fate….but then the minor character veers off in a different direction, usually negative, that serves to emphasize just what’s at stake for the protagonist or how she, too, could end up if she’s unable to overcome the challenges she must confront." [x]

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Character Development Tips for Fiction Writers (Part 1) | (Part 2)

Edward Norton on Developing a Character

Character Development Lesson (This is from Melissa M. Williams, a Children’s Author & Public Speaker, developing a character with a class full of children. Adorable & surprisingly helpful.)

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Xx

https://anomalously-written.tumblr.com/post/105017945653/lets-talk-about-minor-character-development

Greatest fear. Speaks for itself; what do they fear most?

Relationships with other characters. Who do they like? Who do they not like? Who opposes them? Who helps them? Who are they related to (by blood, or circumstance)?

Main personality traits. Positive ones, and negative ones.

Moral limits. What will they absolutely not do? What would they consider doing to meet their goal?

Attitudes/Opinions. What are the main issues in your story’s world, and what is this character’s opinion on it? How do they behave towards other characters, based on their opinions of them? Who or what do they consider to be below them? What behaviours do they choose to do or not do, which gives them a sense of importance/self-esteem (i.e. being tee-total, going to church every Sunday w/o fail, always adopting pets, rather than buying them, etc)?

Abilities. Either magical, or non-magical depending on your setting. What are they best at? What are they not so good at?

Speaking skills/conventions. How do they sound when they speak? What is their vocabulary like? How do they manage/behave in everyday conversations?

Education. According to your world’s standards, how educated is the character?

Friendships. Which friendships do they value the most? How many friends do they have? How easily can they make friends?

Sexual/romantic relationships. How many relationships has the character committed to? Can they commit to relationships? How do they behave when in a relationship? How do they feel about other people’s relationships?

Work. What do they think about work? What kind of work would they like to do? What kind of work are they doing? If the character is a student, then consider their work ethic, their favourite subjects, etc.

Sense of self. What is your character’s self-image like? How do they feel about themselves? What do they think about themselves in relation to other people (i.e. how do they compare themselves to somebody else?).

Housekeeping. How do they live, in an everyday setting? Are they tidy, or messy? What things do they consider to be necessary to a daily routine, and what things do they consistently forget about/deem to be unimportant?

Politics. How they view society, and what should be done in a ‘civil’ society. What they think of their world’s politics. How they might ‘class’ themselves.

Religion. Their views on life, death, and creation. Their understanding of their ‘purpose’, or their beliefs in how everything came to be.

Tastes. In fashion, food, and anything else you might think of.

Does your character have siblings or family members in their age group? Which one are they closest with?

What is/was your character’s relationship with their mother like?

What is/was your character’s relationship with their father like?

Does your character feel more comfortable with more clothing, or with less clothing?

In what situation was your character the most afraid they’ve ever been?

In what situation was your character the most calm they’ve ever been?

Is your character preoccupied with money or material possession? Why or why not?

Which does your character idealize most: happiness or success?

Is your character more likely to admire wisdom, or ambition in others?

What is your character’s biggest relationship flaw? Has this flaw destroyed relationships for them before?

If something tragic or negative happens to your character, do they believe they may have caused or deserved it, or are they quick to blame others?

What does your character like in other people?

What does your character dislike in other people?

How quick is your character to trust someone else?

How quick is your character to suspect someone else? Does this change if they are close with that person?

How does your character behave around children?

How does your character normally deal with confrontation?

How quick or slow is your character to resort to physical violence in a confrontation?

What did your character dream of being or doing as a child? Did that dream come true?

What does your character find repulsive or disgusting?

In the face of criticism, is your character defensive, self-deprecating, or willing to improve?

Is your character more likely to keep trying a solution/method that didn’t work the first time, or immediately move on to a different solution/method?

How does your character behave around people they like?

How does your character behave around people they dislike?

Is your character more likely to remove a problem/threat, or remove themselves from a problem/threat?

How does your character treat people in service jobs?

Does your character feel that they deserve to have what they want, whether it be material or abstract, or do they feel they must earn it first?

Has your character ever had a parental figure who was not related to them?

Has your character ever had a dependent figure who was not related to them?

How easy or difficult is it for your character to say “I love you?” Can they say it without meaning it?

What does your character believe will happen to them after they die? Does this belief scare them?

Being Poor – Whatever

Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.

Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV.

Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they’re what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there’s not an $800 car in America that’s worth a damn.

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.

Being poor is knowing your kid goes to friends’ houses but never has friends over to yours.

Being poor is going to the restroom before you get in the school lunch line so your friends will be ahead of you and won’t hear you say “I get free lunch” when you get to the cashier.

Being poor is living next to the freeway.

Being poor is coming back to the car with your children in the back seat, clutching that box of Raisin Bran you just bought and trying to think of a way to make the kids understand that the box has to last.

Being poor is wondering if your well-off sibling is lying when he says he doesn’t mind when you ask for help.

Being poor is off-brand toys.

Being poor is a heater in only one room of the house.

Being poor is knowing you can’t leave $5 on the coffee table when your friends are around.

Being poor is hoping your kids don’t have a growth spurt.

Being poor is stealing meat from the store, frying it up before your mom gets home and then telling her she doesn’t have make dinner tonight because you’re not hungry anyway.

Being poor is Goodwill underwear.

Being poor is not enough space for everyone who lives with you.

Being poor is feeling the glued soles tear off your supermarket shoes when you run around the playground.

Being poor is your kid’s school being the one with the 15-year-old textbooks and no air conditioning.

Being poor is thinking $8 an hour is a really good deal.

Being poor is relying on people who don’t give a damn about you.

Being poor is an overnight shift under florescent lights.

Being poor is finding the letter your mom wrote to your dad, begging him for the child support.

Being poor is a bathtub you have to empty into the toilet.

Being poor is stopping the car to take a lamp from a stranger’s trash.

Being poor is making lunch for your kid when a cockroach skitters over the bread, and you looking over to see if your kid saw.

Being poor is believing a GED actually makes a goddamned difference.

Being poor is people angry at you just for walking around in the mall.

Being poor is not taking the job because you can’t find someone you trust to watch your kids.

Being poor is the police busting into the apartment right next to yours.

Being poor is not talking to that girl because she’ll probably just laugh at your clothes.

Being poor is hoping you’ll be invited for dinner.

Being poor is a sidewalk with lots of brown glass on it.

Being poor is people thinking they know something about you by the way you talk.

Being poor is needing that 35-cent raise.

Being poor is your kid’s teacher assuming you don’t have any books in your home.

Being poor is six dollars short on the utility bill and no way to close the gap.

Being poor is crying when you drop the mac and cheese on the floor.

Being poor is knowing you work as hard as anyone, anywhere.

Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually stupid.

Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually lazy.

Being poor is a six-hour wait in an emergency room with a sick child asleep on your lap.

Being poor is never buying anything someone else hasn’t bought first.

Being poor is picking the 10 cent ramen instead of the 12 cent ramen because that’s two extra packages for every dollar.

Being poor is having to live with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old.

Being poor is getting tired of people wanting you to be grateful.

Being poor is knowing you’re being judged.

Being poor is a box of crayons and a $1 coloring book from a community center Santa.

Being poor is checking the coin return slot of every soda machine you go by.

Being poor is deciding that it’s all right to base a relationship on shelter.

Being poor is knowing you really shouldn’t spend that buck on a Lotto ticket.

Being poor is hoping the register lady will spot you the dime.

Being poor is feeling helpless when your child makes the same mistakes you did, and won’t listen to you beg them against doing so.

Being poor is a cough that doesn’t go away.

Being poor is making sure you don’t spill on the couch, just in case you have to give it back before the lease is up.

Being poor is a $200 paycheck advance from a company that takes $250 when the paycheck comes in.

Being poor is four years of night classes for an Associates of Art degree.

Being poor is a lumpy futon bed.

Being poor is knowing where the shelter is.

Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so.

Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.

Being poor is seeing how few options you have.

Being poor is running in place.

Being poor is people wondering why you didn’t leave.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/

ISTJ - The Duty Fulfiller

Serious and quiet, interested in security and peaceful living. Extremely thorough, responsible, and dependable. Well-developed powers of concentration. Usually interested in supporting and promoting traditions and establishments. Well-organized and hard working, they work steadily towards identified goals. They can usually accomplish any task once they have set their mind to it.

Click here for a detailed description of ISTJ.

ISTP - The Mechanic

Quiet and reserved, interested in how and why things work. Excellent skills with mechanical things. Risk-takers who they live for the moment. Usually interested in and talented at extreme sports. Uncomplicated in their desires. Loyal to their peers and to their internal value systems, but not overly concerned with respecting laws and rules if they get in the way of getting something done. Detached and analytical, they excel at finding solutions to practical problems.

Click here for a detailed description of ISTP.

ISFJ - The Nurturer

Quiet, kind, and conscientious. Can be depended on to follow through. Usually puts the needs of others above their own needs. Stable and practical, they value security and traditions. Well-developed sense of space and function. Rich inner world of observations about people. Extremely perceptive of other's feelings. Interested in serving others.

Click here for a detailed description of ISFJ.

ISFP - The Artist

Quiet, serious, sensitive and kind. Do not like conflict, and not likely to do things which may generate conflict. Loyal and faithful. Extremely well-developed senses, and aesthetic appreciation for beauty. Not interested in leading or controlling others. Flexible and open-minded. Likely to be original and creative. Enjoy the present moment.

Click here for a detailed description of ISFP.

INFJ - The Protector

Quietly forceful, original, and sensitive. Tend to stick to things until they are done. Extremely intuitive about people, and concerned for their feelings. Well-developed value systems which they strictly adhere to. Well-respected for their perserverence in doing the right thing. Likely to be individualistic, rather than leading or following.

Click here for a detailed description of INFJ.

INFP - The Idealist

Quiet, reflective, and idealistic. Interested in serving humanity. Well-developed value system, which they strive to live in accordance with. Extremely loyal. Adaptable and laid-back unless a strongly-held value is threatened. Usually talented writers. Mentally quick, and able to see possibilities. Interested in understanding and helping people.

Click here for a detailed description of INFP.

INTJ - The Scientist

Independent, original, analytical, and determined. Have an exceptional ability to turn theories into solid plans of action. Highly value knowledge, competence, and structure. Driven to derive meaning from their visions. Long-range thinkers. Have very high standards for their performance, and the performance of others. Natural leaders, but will follow if they trust existing leaders.

Click here for a detailed description of INTJ.

INTP - The Thinker

Logical, original, creative thinkers. Can become very excited about theories and ideas. Exceptionally capable and driven to turn theories into clear understandings. Highly value knowledge, competence and logic. Quiet and reserved, hard to get to know well. Individualistic, having no interest in leading or following others.

Click here for a detailed description of INTP.

ESTP - The Doer

Friendly, adaptable, action-oriented. "Doers" who are focused on immediate results. Living in the here-and-now, they're risk-takers who live fast-paced lifestyles. Impatient with long explanations. Extremely loyal to their peers, but not usually respectful of laws and rules if they get in the way of getting things done. Great people skills.

Click here for a detailed description of ESTP.

ESTJ - The Guardian

Practical, traditional, and organized. Likely to be athletic. Not interested in theory or abstraction unless they see the practical application. Have clear visions of the way things should be. Loyal and hard-working. Like to be in charge. Exceptionally capable in organizing and running activities. "Good citizens" who value security and peaceful living.

Click here for a detailed description of ESTJ.

ESFP - The Performer

People-oriented and fun-loving, they make things more fun for others by their enjoyment. Living for the moment, they love new experiences. They dislike theory and impersonal analysis. Interested in serving others. Likely to be the center of attention in social situations. Well-developed common sense and practical ability.

Click here for a detailed description of ESFP.

ESFJ - The Caregiver

Warm-hearted, popular, and conscientious. Tend to put the needs of others over their own needs. Feel strong sense of responsibility and duty. Value traditions and security. Interested in serving others. Need positive reinforcement to feel good about themselves. Well-developed sense of space and function.

Click here for a detailed description of ESFJ.

ENFP - The Inspirer

Enthusiastic, idealistic, and creative. Able to do almost anything that interests them. Great people skills. Need to live life in accordance with their inner values. Excited by new ideas, but bored with details. Open-minded and flexible, with a broad range of interests and abilities.

Click here for a detailed description of ENFP.

ENFJ - The Giver

Popular and sensitive, with outstanding people skills. Externally focused, with real concern for how others think and feel. Usually dislike being alone. They see everything from the human angle, and dislike impersonal analysis. Very effective at managing people issues, and leading group discussions. Interested in serving others, and probably place the needs of others over their own needs.

Click here for a detailed description of ENFJ.

ENTP - The Visionary

Creative, resourceful, and intellectually quick. Good at a broad range of things. Enjoy debating issues, and may be into "one-up-manship". They get very excited about new ideas and projects, but may neglect the more routine aspects of life. Generally outspoken and assertive. They enjoy people and are stimulating company. Excellent ability to understand concepts and apply logic to find solutions.

Click here for a detailed description of ENTP.

ENTJ - The Executive

Assertive and outspoken - they are driven to lead. Excellent ability to understand difficult organizational problems and create solid solutions. Intelligent and well-informed, they usually excel at public speaking. They value knowledge and competence, and usually have little patience with inefficiency or disorganization.

Click here for a detailed description of ENTJ.

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What does in-depth tagging look like?

To give y'all an example of what this kind of thing looks like, I’ve collected the full list of content warnings I’ve accumulated in the book series I’ve written / am editing. I tend to over-warn rather than under-warn - you don’t necessarily have to be this thorough, but I would rather someone be excessively warned than not at all.

• Graphic Violence
• Gore / Blood
• Major character deaths
• Child death
• Clone death
• Physical abuse
• Torture (psychological & physical)
• Self-mutilation / self-injury
• Brainwashing / mind control / gaslighting
• Domestic violence
• Emotional abuse
• Sexual abuse / Rape (implied, not shown)
• Pregnancy from rape
• Past child sexual abuse (mentioned, not shown)
• Suicidal ideation
• Attempted suicide
• Completed suicide
• Eating disorder (bulimia - mentioned only, easily skippable)
• Euthanasia
• Alcohol abuse
• Drug abuse (mentioned)
• Eye injury
• Cancer (mentioned, easily skippable)

Things you should ALWAYS tag:

• Child abuse (of any kind)
• Physical abuse / Torture
• Emotional abuse
• Domestic violence
• Rape / Sexual Abuse
• Incest
• Major Character Death
• Suicide / attempted suicide / suicidal ideation
• Self-injury
• Graphic violence / gore / death
• Animal Cruelty
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Eating Disorders