Character Development

  1. It Began in a Tavern - Ravenna's Themes

    Because I have too many songs now that I started looking. Ravenna's main theme is: I heard this song and it screams Alisso: And this one, too. Oddly, I was looking for this one when I remembered the one above: Finally, for Nari: And for overall character plot, I felt like this song was pretty relevant to Ravenna's story arc:
  2. Videos on Writing Craft

    Every now and then I run across a video I really like about writing and I try to figure out where on the board or my blog I can post it. So I'm making this thread. Ok wow, I guess that covers it. Here: Three verbs per sentence, and contrast: Spend Five Thousand hours revising your novel??! To become a better writer you must change your life: A lot of these are going to be his videos.
  3. The Stanislavski System and Method Acting

    One of the most important tenets that led to Chris Claremont's success as a writer was the fact that he was trained in acting. I've been trying to find anything online where he talks about what type or style of acting he studied, but so far haven't been able to. But I believe it must be some variation of the famous Stanislavsky System (which in the US has a variation, taught by Lee Strasberg, called Method Acting). This is deeply psycholgical, character-driven stuff. Most of the powerful and...
  4. Logan Analysis

    Scuffed shoes in closeup tell almost the whole story—things are very much 'run down at the heels' for Logan these days, Plus the way he holds his feet and walks, more a pained shuffle than the spirited gait we expect from his earlier appearances. This is not the Logan we’re used to. His hair is all messed up, and he seems to be drunk or half asleep. Plus right here at the very beginning we see one claw won't come out all the way. Going into a fight and he can't get it all the way up. It's...
  5. The Superhero Mega-thread

    I'm doing research now on the Logan and Jessica Jones analyses, and I've read a bit of the book detailing the connection with mythology. I'll use this thread just to talk about general ideas concerning superheroes as I work through all of this. I don't know the origin stories of many superheroes, but the ones I do all began with trauma. Superman and Batman both lost their parents as children (Superman lost his entire planet). At first I thought Spiderman didn't really have much trauma—he...
  6. The Nature of Human Nature

    Since a profound Humanity turned out to be the connecting factor in all of my favorite superhero stories, it only makes sense to move to the next question—what exactly is it that makes us human? It just so happens this morning YouTube dropped both of these videos into my feed:
  7. Netflix Daredevil Analysis—The Dual Self

    The Dual Self At the simplest level a superhero is two different people because they have a secret self (the superhero). They live as an ordinary human being, and also as a crusader for justice who has special abilities. In the eighties, like many aspects of superhero comics, this idea got upgraded. I don’t know where it first happened, but I noticed it in the Tim Burton Batman movies—the idea of Bruce Wayne and Batman being two different people had become more complex and psychological. It...
  8. LocalScriptMan videos

    I already posted several of his videos on the topic of Character Web, but he frequently puts out great videos I want to collect where I can quickly find them. So here's a place to do that, no particular topic. What if Character Sheets weren't awful? He says he used to talk about theme (he sure did, it was all over his character web videos), but now he's moving away from that. It seems like he's working up his concepts into some kind of grand overarching narrative, a sort of universal...
  9. Writing From Life Experience

    Often when people hear you should write from your own life experience, they think of it on a very surface level—like if you played a lot of football you should write about football. In one sense this is what it means, or rather it's one aspect of it, but there's a much deeper, broader, and more universal aspect that this understanding misses. This is the aspect I want to write about—not the external things you've done (play some sport, live in a particular region or neighborhood, work on a...
  10. Getting all Emotional

    Almost a year ago I made this post: A few really good articles on Deep/Close POV A recent post on the First Three Sentences thread made me look back into it, and I read through some of the articles again. My opinion of deep POV changed several times as I learned about it, but eventually I realized it's one of those things that can be good or bad depending on how it's handled (isn't that everything related to writing?). From the second link I discovered a course. She has two modules that...
  11. Looking into the Creation of the MCU

    Don't be put off by the name of the channel (It Was a Sh*t Show)—this guy actually does a deep dive into the making of various movies, and he's extremely fair in his reporting. I think the name is mostly clickbait, though when you look deep enough, the making of most movies really is a shit show, even the ones that come out excellent. It's basically a miracle when Hollywood is able to make a good movie. He gives plenty of praise where it's due, and Marvel deserves a lot up to a certain...
  12. The Altered Self

    I hadn't heard of a sci-fi genre called The Altered Self before, or of Evolutionary Horror. And yet some of the most powerful books and movies I know of fit into one or both. I guess it's because I never really looked into sub-genres. But honestly, I don't think truly evolutionary horror would be frightening at all, since evolution takes like millions of years and affects, not you directly, but your very distant descendents. The reason these movies and stories are so intense is because it...
  13. Examining the writing in Sail and The Man Who Liked Dogs

    These are my two favorite hardboiled stories I've run across so far, both of them in the same book—The Hard Boiled Omnibus, published in 1952 and edited by Joseph T Shaw. It's a collection of some of the best stories from Black Mask magazine. I've already linked to Sail twice, but I feel I should include links here for both stories: Sail by Lester Dent The Man Who Liked Dogs by Raymond Chandler I find the beginnings of both stories to be the strongest parts. With Sail the main body almost...
  14. World building

    I am continuing to go back through the "Wandering inn" Series by Pirateaba. This series is a fascinating case study in world building. Since the genre is fantasy, the author has multiple races to deal with. There is a detailed profile for each race, Drakes, Gnolls, Goblins, Antinium, Humans which are the main races on the main continent in the story. Each race is detailed in culture and politics. Things are gradually revealed using an ignorant character, learning about the world. The culture...
  15. The world as a character

    This is likely more of a genre item, for SciFi and Fantasy, but it is something worth considering. How much attention do we authors pay to crafting the worlds we write in? I ask this going beyond simple logical continuity. I occasionally run across works that the world itself is almost another character in the story the way it engages the reader. It is well fleshed out and engaging, in such a way that it has the reader wanting to learn more about the world itself. Granted this gets deeply...
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