Some resources for those writing medieval-type stories:
Ideas for your character’s home
One of the things I enjoy doing when writing a story is to think of the places my characters live in. The fun part is drawing them out because most of the time, there just isn’t a house that goes well with my characters. Besides, I like creating everything from the get go instead of taking a picture and saying that’s my character’s house.
Here are the links I’ve bookmarked to get ideas for homes and such. It’s not exhaustive. I do get ideas for homes and buildings in other places but I hope the following’s helpful enough for now.
Types of houses
- Modern Houses
- List of house types
- Houses in England
- Know Your House Styles
- 8 Most Common Types of Houses
Places
- Buildings where people live or stay
- Places - Buildings People Live In
- Places - Buildings People Live In
Types of apartments
Strange houses
- 10 unusual places to live
- 10 Weirdest Places to Live
- 23 Houses Built In Odd Places
- Homes In The Most Unusual Places
- 6 Weird Places Where People Actually Live
- 9 Houses You Won’t Believe People Actually Live In
- 18 Weird and Wonderful Places To Live: Churches, Bunkers, Water Towers and Caves
Obviously, not all characters have a place to live so I’ve included information on homelessness.
Clothing references
I have to reblog this
“world of averages” - composite images culled from thousands of individual portraits resulting in symmetrical average faces.
this was too cool not to reblog
To All Writers of Everything Ever
I need to rant about this:
Also known as the best writing program ever! It’s a full-screen writing program!
So you open it up, and it looks like this:
You’re thinking, “Ok, so what? It’s a screen with a picture. Whoopdie do.” But it get’s better! It’s customizable!
See that “appearance”? Click it.
You can also use custom fonts that you have installed!
See that “music”? Click it.
If you drag your own music into the folder, like so:
You get this!:
But wait! It gets better!
See “typing sounds”? You can change those too!
Perhaps the best is - YOU CAN USE ANY PICTURE FOR THE BACKGROUND. It will automatically fade it for you!
Seriously, guys, this tool is wonderful. You can use it for:
- Research papers
- Novel writing
- Play writing
- Short stories
- Homework assignments
- Ranting about your friends when they piss you off
- Writing your shopping list
It auto-saves. It exports to .rtf. Hotkeys from Word for italicize, underlining, and bold work. You can print RIGHT FROM THERE.
And the seriously best thing ever?
It fits on a flash drive. The entire thing with added music is maybe 131MBs.
The bestest thing ever.
It’s free.
A good website for characters
My best friend showed me this website. You can post characters with basic facts and descriptions about them and group them into categories you make. They also have a page of deep questions you can answer for each character. The only downside is there’s a 100 character limit but otherwise I love the website. You can also follow your friends and read all about their characters! You can also set everything to private if you want it all secretive.
Wow.
The human body is fascinating
I keep telling people this shit in real life and they don’t believe me.
I’ve seen it from multiple sources, and this just adds another (albeit usually unreliable) source.
This is actually legit, guys. This is how your eyes move when you’re thinking about something. It’s actually a good way to tell if someone is lying or not, because they’ll look to their left (your right, durr) when they’re constructing false memories, and to their right when they’re actually remembering them.HOLY CRAP. SAVING THIS FOR FUTURE REF.
How to write a scene (via How To Write a Scene: A Step-By-Step Infographic - GalleyCat)
How to make a story based around a character
- Pick an emotion to be your character’s default emotion.This will help color your character’s voice and make them more of a complete, congruent human being than a list of traits.
- Give them something you’re insecure about. This will be your character’s internal conflict. Avoid balancing it by giving your character a trait of yours you’re proud of. The idea is to make a character you can relate to the issues of, not an author avatar.
- Find traits, hobbies, and quirks that other people have that are interesting, but not really your thing. For example, I’m not a scuba diver, but I do think it’s an interesting thing for people to do. Those kinds of things make your character unique.
- Figure out two things your new character wants. One should be a concrete motivation, like “the girl he loves” or “the magic spheres of Punco.” The other should be a motivation that by its nature can never be completely fulfilled, like “more happiness” or “more power.”
- Give your character at least one major flaw. This should be something readers won’t think is adorable. Shallowness, megalomania, self-hatred, and indecisiveness are good examples of flaws. Clumsiness, ugliness, being “too heroic,” and being “too much of a dreamer” are not good examples of flaws.
- Take your character’s concrete motivation and put it as far away from your character as possible. Make it so hard to get that your character seems to have no chance. Other characters can arrive to help or harm your main character on his or her journey.
- Be sure to change your character during the story. Watch out, though, when altering your character’s abstract motivation and default emotion, because you can make them an entirely different person instead of a different version of the same person. Make sure that by the end of the story, your character still has flaws.
- Bam. Instant story. Proceed to rake in the
millionstens.A post I submitted to The London Magazine’s Tumblr a few days ago. :)
