Faith Kindred

@kate-flournoy Yep. He’s pretty much the classic bully-villain type. Everyone has to do what he says NOW. Or else.
And he has wonderful respect for everyone around him. Fall under his slightest displeasure and you are deemed a “butthead”. XP

Exactly, @kate-flournoy. The arc of the story needs to have a slow rise to a lesson. Not just wandering along as a flat line and then a sudden lesson spike up right at the end.
Also, both those movies were pretty good, conceptually. But when you aren’t able to root for the characters, it’s a big hole in the storytelling.

@hannah-krynicki I was actually in the middle of writing, despite not know what was going on. Now I’ll have to figure out how the new idea works in the rest of the story.

I haven’t seen Megamind, but I have seen Over the Hedge, and I totally get what you’re saying @writefury. Delaying anything for too long will turn me off— development in relationships, development in situations, etc.— like if they’re just going on and on and on and literally getting NOWHERE I start to get tired. There has to be at least a…[Read more]

When you come up with a solution to a big problem in your story without trying.

One thing I’ve heard is that you should treat some kinds of people as normal and others as different. Most of us have a tendency to default to what we used to and describe foreign characters differently. Either they are the only ones described in detail or their race can be used as the description.

Does he have the same whiny, braggadocios, bullying insecurity problems @writefury? That would be something… almost a direct copy. 😛

Oh yikes. 😛

Totally. Right down to the casino owner bit. 😛
Lookit this:

No @writefury I haven’t— is he a Trump type, then? 😛

@kate-flournoy In retrospect, it’s sort of already been done. Have you ever seen Biff Tannen from Back to the Future? XP

You know you’re a writer when you find yourself seriously considering modelling a villain after Donald Trump.

“Defenestration. There’re only two ways to do it. There is the right way and the wrong way. The wrong way is the sign of a political greenhorn. The wrong way is blue eggs and beef. That is what my opponents do. The right way is what I practice and will continue to practice.”

A rich but cheesy male voice boomed from the television, “This…[Read more]

You are never late to KP parties!

Thanks for pointing that out! I’ll see what I can do. 🙂

I think there is.

If ethnic minorities present a challenge to an author who is not familiar with that group, they also present a fascination to the reader who has probably been as uninformed as we have.

As a side note, there are often certain cliches that people unthinkingly fall into for ethnic minorities. For instance, there are gazillions of…[Read more]

@the-happy-bookaholic Did you contact me through my blog? Because if you did I didn’t get it…which means my contact form isn’t working again. Which is strange, because I did test it…but I might need to go fix or change it.

A lot of the time, the actually authentically diverse books include diversity in part of the concept. Like, it’s a detriment to the story that these people don’t fully understand each other… or have certain prejudices against each other… stuff like that. But then there are the books that just sort of squeak them in there because they can.
I…[Read more]

Nice work, @bluejay. I would have probably gone with some alien story. 😛

Chattering noises fill the air, jolting me uncomfortably into wakefulness. I frown, but don’t open my eyes. It was a truly exhausting day yesterday. I toppled two whole kingdoms and killed about five heroes and it really took it out of me. My minions should know better than…[Read more]

Absolutely right @Ivy-Rose. It’s not a big deal. Skin is skin. I might even go so far as to say if we are ‘shamed’ into including minority groups when it wasn’t originally part of the story, it would hurt the story. Just like randomly inserting any story element would.

As for a good way to use diversity in a story, @wordfitlyspoken, I would say…[Read more]