SIMPLE YET OFTEN MISUSED WORDS - I always see you’re used improperly so I decided to make a list and tips for those kind of words like Their. A helpful guide for these simple words and tips so you can remember which one to use.

Keep reading

roleplaycritics:

Six Ways to Write Better bad Guys

1. Remember that Antagonists are people, too.

I stop reading novels in which the antagonist is obviously nothing more than a device to move the plot in a certain direction. If I can’t empathize with the antagonist, believe in her motives or understand why she’s dishing out evil, I put the book aside. Flesh out your antagonist. Give us an origin story (how she became the way she is) or show that she regrets something and might change if given a chance.

If working with a nonhuman antagonist, personify him at least a little bit. Think of Frankenstein’s loneliness, HAL’s (the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey) jealousy or Shere Khan’s hatred of the “man cub” (The Jungle Book). Show the antagonist doing something nice. Even villains love their mothers or cockapoos, volunteer at soup kitchens or help snow-stuck motorists push their cars out of intersections. Do this early on. Give him believable, even laudable, motives.

Inspector Javert from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is a strong antagonist because his obsession with finding Valjean stems from his belief that stealing is wrong. How many readers would disagree with that? Javert’s insistence that theft is always, without exception, wrong, however, turns his crusade into persecution. His inability to believe that good and evil can coexist in a single man leads him to suicide. His death is one of the story’s tragedies because he has been so thoroughly developed as a character and because we have, from the beginning, understood his motives and his flaws.

2. Eschew the totally evil antagonist (except, possibly, in some horror or monster stories).

Pure evil is dull, unbelievable and predictable. Readers cannot relate to it. Sometimes evil characters devolve into cartoons and become jokes, thus killing suspense or tension. Other times they’re boring:Yeah, yeah, the serial killer who tortured small animals as a child and is now stalking women that remind him of his mother…yawn. One way to prevent a truly dark character from becoming a caricature is to make her a viewpoint character—because no character is the embodiment of evil in her own mind. No one is the villain in his own story. George R.R. Martin did this effectively in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. In its first book,AGame of Thrones, Jaime and Cersei Lannister, the incestuous brother and sister, seem to be evil personified, the characters readers love to hate. In subsequent books, however, they become viewpoint characters, making it difficult not to empathize with them.

If your book’s structure makes it impossible to show the antagonist’s viewpoint, place one of the viewpoint characters in the antagonist’s position and have him try to understand his perspective. Perhaps your heroine is struggling to find day care for her infant while your villain is looking at nursing homes for his aging father. Or they could both lose something dear to them, or confront job-related problems. It could even be something small: Your protagonist could get stuck in a traffic jam, while your antagonist’s flight is delayed by the weather. The point is to show similarity, humanity and an overlap of feelings and experience between the protagonist and the antagonist. This will enlarge the reader’s perception of the antagonist, even if subconsciously.

3. If you’re tempted to say your antagonist is a corporation, disease or war—don’t.

Abstractions make for distant, unrelatable antagonists. If you think “organized religion” or “corporate greed” is your hero’s antagonist, your story might be more effective as an essay. Put a human face on the abstraction. A hypocritical pastor might make a good antagonist in the first instance, or a ruthless Wall Street type in the second (Gordon Gekko, anyone?). Those people can represent the abstraction and take action against the protagonist.

In Anton Myrer’s Once an Eagle, it would be easy to think of “war” as Sam Damon’s antagonist. Myrer thrusts Damon into every war from the early 20th century to “Khotiane” (Vietnam) and paints a grim picture of the suffering it causes him. Yet “war” does not act against Damon; it is war’s human face, Courtney Massengale, who maneuvers to defeat Damon and ensures he loses out on the promotion that might have allowed him to persuade policymakers not to get the U.S. involved in Khotiane. Without this human antagonist, Damon’s life (and Once an Eagle) would have less meaning; he would be fighting against uncontrollable, impersonal geopolitical forces with no hope of changing the outcome. His almost lifelong tussle with Massengale, however, is one every individual can identify with: the battle to live each day as a good human being, devoted to a higher cause than self-interest. If your work-in-progress features an abstraction as the antagonist, rework it to give the abstraction a Massengalian face.

4. Make your antagonist at least as smart, strong and capable as the protagonist.

There’s no tension in a story where the protagonist is a Mensa member and Delta Force commando and his foe is a wimpy dolt. Do you enjoy watching a football game when the score is 72–0, or a horse race when one thoroughbred wins by 20 lengths? No, such uneven matchups are boring. The same is true in novels. So, to heighten tension throughout the story, your antagonist needs to be your hero’s equal, or superior to your hero, at least in some arenas. Consider giving the antagonist complementary traits (he’s calm and detail-oriented if your heroine is impulsive; she’s a great team-builder or motivator if the hero is a loner).

In graphic novels, archenemies frequently embody the exact opposite qualities of the superheroes, and are more than a match for them. Whereas Superman’s strength is, well, strength, Lex Luthor’s advantage is intellect.

5. Keep the tension strong when the antagonist is a friend, ally or loved one.

If your protagonist’s dream is to return to college at 40 and her husband tells her she’s too old, he’s the antagonist, even though they love each other. This “beloved antagonist” scenario happens frequently in women’s fiction and mainstream literature. A husband might act, sometimes unconsciously, to keep the heroine from reinventing herself. Or, an adult child might be convinced that the aging protagonist would be happier in a nursing home. Think of any character who ever uttered the phrase, “It’s for your own good.” When writing this kind of antagonist, capitalize on the conflict inherent in the relationship and on the drama that arises when someone with our best interests at heart—someone we care about—stands between us and a goal. Our protagonists don’t want to destroy beloved antagonists or see them jailed or rendered impotent. They want to change their minds and maneuver around them. It can be challenging to keep the tension high in such a story, because you may not want to inflict pain on either the protagonist or the antagonist. Bite the bullet—make life hard for both of them.

6. If your antagonist remains hidden for much of the story (as in a mystery), give him proxies or let him work behind the scenes.

Forcing the protagonist to defeat proxies in order to reach the final battle with the primary antagonist is an excellent way of raising the stakes. One of the best examples in recent literature is the Harry Potter series. In the first book, the ultimate antagonist, Lord Voldemort, receives scant mention; Rowling gradually reveals his importance as the series progresses. Harry and his allies must confront an array of proxies throughout the series, including a basilisk, Death Eaters, dementors and a host of others before coming face to face with Voldemort for the climactic battle. Voldemort is, of course, working against Harry from behind the scenes even before the first book opens, but he must use the proxies to carry out his schemes until he regains a body and his strength.

In most fiction, bringing the antagonist and protagonist face to face on more than one occasion will heighten the tension. When this is not possible for plot reasons, proxies can work, as can behind-the-scenes machinations such as anonymous threats and indirect attacks against the protagonist’s reputation, family or self. Rowling enables mental contact between Harry and Voldemort before their physical confrontation; that type of “mind meld” won’t work for all stories, but it reminds us to be creative in the ways we structure protagonist/antagonist interactions.

Credit to: Writer’s Digest

thewritershelpersdeactivated:

I dunno about you guys, but I hate cliches like ‘emerald green’, ‘obsidian’, or ‘sky blue’ when describing eye colors. Here are a couple of places I’d like to share to help prevent cliches in writing descriptive characters:

How To Describe Eyes

Eye Color List

List of Colors (Wikipedia) - Goes into shades of colors in lower links

A Guide on how to NOT write a Mary Sue

Please Like or reblog if this helped that would be appreciated 

Keep reading

avajae:

How (and When) to Give Yourself a Break

We writers tend to be really good at working ourselves to the bone. We spend much of our free time writing/editing/rewriting novels and researching/web stalking/querying/crying over agents and marketing/preparing e-books/researching the market and let’s not forget writing super-fun synopses, and drafting blog posts, and brainstorming new works. We worry constantly about whether we’ve written enough today (or this week, or this month), and whether we’re making enough progress on that WIP, and let’s not even think about what happens when we miss a day—apocalypse.

Truth be told, sometimes we’re a little too hard on ourselves. 

This may come as a surprise to some of you, but even writers deserve breaks every once in a while. The key is knowing when the right time to take a short hiatus is. 

Here are a few signs that you deserve a break: 

• You just finished a draft of your WIP. One of the absolute best times to take a break is between drafts—not only do you deserve to rest after working hard to complete a draft, but you need time to develop some distance to your work so that you can edit it more efficiently later. Win-win. 

• You’ve been working on your WIP non-stop for a long time and now you feel stuck. What a “long time” is depends on you, but sometimes the best way to get unstuck is to distract yourself with something unrelated to your work. This is also known as taking a break. 

• You’re tired of your WIP. Now, when I say tired of your WIP, I don’t mean that you’re in the middle of your novel and the shiny new novel glamour has worn off—that bit is pretty near inevitable. What I mean instead, is that you’ve lost the excitement, the love for your WIP. You dread sitting down to write and quite frankly, you’re not really sure you even want to finish this WIP. When that happens, sometimes the best thing you can do is step away from your WIP and take a break. This doesn’t mean forever, but it does mean you might need to distract yourself with some non-WIP goodies to recuperate. 

Once you’ve decided that you’re ready for a break, you now face a new dilemma: what to do? Remember that the point of this whole taking a break thing is to actually take a break. Put that WIP away and try some of these things: 

• Read ALL the books. Ok, maybe not all the books, but now’s a great time to catch up on that growing to-be-read list (you do have a TBR list, don’t you? Of course you do). Reading isn’t optional for serious writers, and as a bonus, it’s a pretty enjoyable way to spend some free time. 

• Spend time with your friends and family. Chances are they haven’t seen quite as much of you as they might like—after all, you’ve been busy working on that book of yours. Now you have time to catch up with friends and sit down with your family, so use it! 

• Do something you enjoy (other than writing). Watch a movie. Play ridiculous hours of Assassin’s Creed. Bake. Catch up on your Hulu queue. Whatever it is you really like to do, make sure that you spend time to rewarding yourself with it. You deserve it (seriously). 

• Get some fresh air. This works particularly well when the weather is nice, but we writers have a tendency of spending a lot of time on the computer and very little time doing outdoorsy things—I’ll be the first to admit this is something I succumb to quite often. But fresh air is good for you. I promise. 

Sometimes taking a break is all you need to jump-start your inspiration and writing, and sometimes it’s just a nice little luxury that we deprive ourselves of too often. Whatever the case, make sure you reward yourself with a hiatus every once in a while—then get back to work. 

What do you like to do when you’re on a writing hiatus?

If you really want to write and you’re using a computer. Write on a computer that has no Internet connection so You do not get distracted.