This week on the podcast, I interviewed Seumas MacDonald about the importance of culture in the development of language, and about ConLangs (or constructed languages) in fiction.
Write a story where two or more characters come from different cultures and have difficulties understanding each other
How did you get on yesterday? Did you write a story?
Remember, set your own rules, and stick to them. If you miss a day, don’t try to catch up. Just keep moving forward!
Two Different Directions
Today’s story should feature two characters or factions who want to go in different directions. Lots of room for character desire and conflict, here!
You can take this as literally or figuratively as you like.
Go!
Check back every day for more prompts, and don’t forget to come back and leave a comment to celebrate your writing successes, every day!
How did you get on yesterday? Did you write a story?
Remember, set your own rules, and stick to them. If you miss a day, don’t try to catch up. Just keep moving forward!
Without conflict you don’t have a story, you just have a series of things happening.
Be sure to put your protagonist in a situation today, where they need to do something they really don’t want to do, talk to someone they really can’t stand, or run from something they’d rather stay and do.
Conflict can be car chases or it can be the story of an alcoholic trying to resist taking that first drink in 25 years.
Go!
Check back every day for more prompts, and don’t forget to come back and leave a comment to celebrate your writing successes, every day!
Last week we wrote about connections. This week, an interconnected theme: support. We need it in our writing lives, and our characters are looking for it, in our stories.
Write A Story About A Character Who Needs Support
Without conflict or friction in your story, nothing interesting will happen. Today we focus on making sure two opposing forces run into each other in your story.
Put your character in a mundane, everyday situation. Then introduce a strong element of conflict.
One of the biggest problems in fiction is when a writer creates nice characters and then doesn’t want to hurt them. Today, let’s make it hurt!
Torture your protagonist
This may come easily to some of you, so you don’t need to read any further. If you’re already good at torturing your protagonist. Just go and get writing!
For the rest of us, there’s a temptation to let our characters be funny and nice and lovable. We don’t want to make unsympathetic. However, if they’re too perfect, they’re not interesting.
Let’s think back to the earlier story, where I asked you to create a flawed protagonist. Wasn’t that fun? You can still have a sympathetic character by letting them be terrible at one thing, especially if they’re very, very good at a lot of other things.
You want the reader to root for your character and the won’t if she’s perfect.
Torturing your character doesn’t really mean doing terrible things to them. It just means separating them from their goals and desires.
Remember my story about the person who wants the chocolate cake? She’s witty and feisty and could be running around the world getting everything she wants, but the real story doesn’t start until she separated from her heart’s desire: the chocolate cake. I could write all day about my witty-and-feisty character and eventually you would stop reading, if I didn’t torture her little bit.
Think about your character’s desires their wants and needs. How can you separate them from the things they want, at least temporarily.
It can be their own internal demons that are keeping them from what they want. Or it can be an antagonistic force such as a natural disaster. Or it can be an antagonistic character such as an loving, but overbearing mother. Or it can be a straight-up villain.
Did you torture your character today? Leave a comment telling us what you did to your character and if it came naturally to you or if this is something new. If you are ignoring these prompts and writing your own stories, leave a comment and let us know how it’s going!
