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Megs' Pre-writing Adventure



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Mon Sep 22, 2014 1:44 am
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megsug says...



So, I'm starting from scratch in preparation for what will most likely be a disastrous NaNo.

I've done a little society/species building and some character building as well... also a minimal amount of plot... I hate plotting.

Anyways, there's a female character who's name is Lalia at the moment and she has some curse/power/I'm-not-really-sure-yet-maybe-a-medical-condition that causes her to black out at times that seem to be rather random. Often she wakes up in the midst of complete chaos because she often does violent things because I really want her to be a beserker. She meets a changeling, and I don't know his name yet, but he's really great at illusion magic and also potions, but other than that he's a complete wimp. In an undetermined sequence of events, these two go off questing or something, eventually saving the world, I suppose. There are also all kinds of fun mythical beasts and tear wrenching histories and fun legends, hopefully.

As you can see, I have a lot of pre-writing to do xP
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Mon Sep 22, 2014 8:35 pm
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megsug says...



Working profile
Name: Lalia
Age: 22
Sex: Female
Eye Color: Brown
Hair Color: Curly Brown
Skin Color: Lightly tanned
Height: 5’9
Weight: 135 lbs
Memorable Features: Her gender paired with her leather armor/daggers; her muscled physique
Race: Human
Ethnicity: Lalia comes from the Eastern Plains (working name) which consists of small rural communities which don't interact much with other communities. These communities often focus around strict tradition and odd taboos. While most of the human society has accepted nonviolent races such as fey, dwarves, and elves as friendly allies, the communities from the Eastern Plains do not. Lalia does take some of this racism and superstition with her (like she won't mark her body with piercings or tattoos or sleep in a forest during a new, quarter, half, or full moon). However, for the most part, she's tried to rid herself of the Eastern Plains' influence. She's adopted the Northern coast fishing villages as her 'home place' though she was only there for a few months early in her banishment. She prays to their goddess (description/religion/worship practices pending) and uses their oaths. She especially likes how men and women are treated virtually the same there. Her clothing styles are adopted from the Northern villages.
Faults: She blacks out in times of high stress/emotional thing
She’s not very compassionate/empathetic
She’s quick to make decisions that aren’t always good ones
She’s a shameless flirt
She’s angry
She doesn’t process emotional upheaval well
Hiding her opinions or keeping her facial expression neutral just doesn't occur
Talents: Music
Dagger throwing
Being charismatic when she so chooses
Finding the humor in a situation
Recovering quickly from situations she didn’t expect herself to be in
Family: Father; mother; only child; several uncles, aunts, and cousins in her childhood village
Childhood: Lalia was a farmer’s daughter and lived happily, helping her father in the fields or her mother in their home, playing with the other children, and as she grew, flirting with the boys. When she was fifteen, she and one boy had ‘gone steady’ and were close to marriage. However, this is close to the time Lalia’s episodes began, and she was soon banished from the village.
Source of Income: Being a bard; selling herself out as a mercenary
Hobbies: Adventuring; making silly songs; picking flowers when no one’s looking; getting the shyest guy in the room to blush
Patience Breaking Point:When she is ignored for long periods of time; when the changelings’ experiments don’t work after several trials; when she realizes someone is lying to her; when someone continues to ask about her when she’s made it clear she doesn’t want to divulge that information.
In most cases, she gets over herself pretty quickly, but sometimes, especially if she feels her trust has been taken advantage of, she’ll stay angry for a long time.
Status in Society: vagrant
Biography: Lalia was born in an agricultural village that no one ever came to and those born in it never left. She had a perfectly content life until she started having her violent episodes when she was almost 16. She was put on trial as a lycan and would have been quartered with a silver knife if her parents hadn’t begged for her behalf. Instead, she was banished from her village and has been wandering ever since. She’s joined a few bandit troops, taken work as a part of a small group guarding a minor noble, and even been on an expedition. However, eventually she’d have an episode and be dismissed. Now, she travels alone, wanted in some areas for dodging fines for damage, playing a lyre for money.
Last edited by megsug on Tue Sep 23, 2014 3:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Mon Sep 22, 2014 9:10 pm
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megsug says...



Working profile
Name:
Age: 24
Sex: Male
Eye Color: Iridescent
Hair Color: Black
Skin Color: Gray
Height: 5’2”
Weight: 110 lbs
Memorable Features: His skin color; the hoops around the rim of his left ear; the colorful feathers he wears in his hair
Race: Changeling
Ethnicity: He's from the cities in the center of the continent where style and manners are key. While he is still finicky with the way he dresses and appears, he's abandoned everything else. Because he knows it will upset people, particularly humans, and because he finds their culture fascinating, he's adopted the goblins' hair style and earring tradition. However, because he'd be killed if he tried to actually live with them, his information is sadly lacking, and if a goblin ever saw him, he'd definitely be attacked. He's taken quite a bit from fey mythology which focuses on nature and nature beings and worked it into his own philosophy though he's certain that there's no greater being.
Faults: Weak
Too passive
Easily distracted
Makes off color jokes at the wrong time
Doesn’t really understand/fit into human or fey culture
Talents: Incredibly smart
Strong illusion magic
Observant
Stealthy
Family: Well… It’s a little complicated. His fey mother likes to stay in touch at any inconvenient moment, often peering at him through the water in his water basin; his human parents have basically disowned him, but he visits home when he’s in the area to see his little human brother.
Childhood: He was supposed to be a fey, but a city was expanding, cutting down trees while they were doing so and creating absolute panic in the fey that were living there. As pregnant fey are prone to do when under stress, his mother transferred him from her womb to that of a woman in the forest alone at night. He still isn’t clear if his human mother was pregnant before that or not. He hopes not. Childhood was… awkward. His youth was filled with abuse as his human parents tried to send him back to the fey in an attempt to gain their own child back though he has never heard of a human child living with the fey. As the abuse proved futile, his parents soon stopped because they weren’t truly mean spirited people. He was still an outcast, however, and left as soon as he could.
Source of Income: Street magician and potion maker
Hobbies: He collects herbs and enjoys identifying wildlife of all kinds.
He takes a particular interest in disease, especially if an ailment doesn’t have a cure.
Patience Breaking Point: It takes a lot to truly anger him. He was very protective of his little brother and still is when he’s around. He’s angry at his human parents for never accepting him as well as his fey mother for abandoning him. He gets touchy when someone questions his abilities and can’t stand it when someone he thought was a friend rejects him, pushes him away, or blows him off.
Once he’s angry, he’ll stay that way until a sincere apology is offered. He’s fantastic at holding grudges.
Status in Society: Vagrant
Biography: When he left his home at 14, he fell into the company of a blind wizard who instructed him for three years. The entire time, he told the wizard he was a dwarf-human mix, but on his death bed, the wizard revealed that he recognized a changeling when he heard one. This restored the changeling’s faith in humanity for a while. Turns out, no one really wants a changeling to be an employee. Since he left the wizard, he’s been wandering.
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Wed Sep 24, 2014 5:07 am
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Rosendorn says...



Why hello there.

Lalia's profile

You contradict yourself a lot in here. Let's list them.

- Her gender is a memorable feature yet men and women are treated the same, indicating she is not the only woman in leather armour.
- She doesn't process emotional upheaval well yet she adapts to new situations; new situations often cause emotional upheaval.
- Being a shameless flirt is listed as a fault, yet men and women are treated the same and usually men can get away with flirting when women can't.
- Being charismatic and finding humour in a situation can be ways of hiding your own emotions
- Gets over personal slights against her quickly but is an angry person

My general critique of this is you're trying too hard to balance "bad traits" with "good traits" and making her fit various DND slots; people are not so cut and dry, with some of those faults being fantastic assets and some of those talents being huge downfalls. Recovering quickly can actually mean you don't process what in the world is going on, finding humour in a situation can be highly offensive, and being charismatic when she chooses could mean people mistrust her because she appears manipulative (and she might very well be). Similarly, being angry isn't necessarily a bad trait because anger is fuel that gets problems fixed and means you actually have a reason to change things you hate. Lacking empathy and compassion can mean you follow a moral code of understanding others, and/or you can make far more objective choices because you're not influenced by who you're told you should have empathy for.

Traits are complicated things, and my personal belief is everything your character does should be able to get them into trouble and out of trouble in equal measure, depending on the situation.

You also seem to only have a semblance of gender equality, saying "men and women are treated the same" but making her faults very much on the... modern side, when it comes to what women are condemned for. Change the name to "Lee" and I doubt you'd make many of those the actual faults. Quirks/things that could get him in trouble, maybe, but not actual faults that are seen as a detriment to character. Shameless flirt often ties into being charismatic, as well, because charismatic people use flirting as a way to gain favour and/or manipulate.

Think more about what being in a gender neutral society means. To give you a head start: women warriors wouldn't be unique, nor would muscular women, nor would flirtatious women (unless men are equally condemned for it), nor would angry women... the list goes on. Dagger throwing might not be really that much of a talent, because a ton of people learned it.

If she's a mercenary, where are all the skills that help her as a mercenary? Dagger throwing is a hugely ineffective method of killing somebody, and you do require certain skills to kill other people. What type of mercenary is she? Silent assassin who relies on sneakiness or the person who'll directly confront you before killing with sheer strength?

What is her motive? What's her inner life like? How does she relate to people, how has she coped with all the bad stuff happening to her? What is her default reaction to situations? What emotion dominates her life, and how does that emotion impact who she is and how others see her? How does she mesh with people— honestly, truly mesh, not just "she's liked then she's hated".

She has no true history. I can't look at one thing in her background and line it up with a trait saying "oh, I see why she's like this." Right now everything about her is floating in mid air, and I can't fill in a single element of her personality in this slide show. Heck, I can barely fill out any of that slideshow when it comes to character creation, meaning I don't know that person at all.

Work on inner things. Work on making her connected to her past, and work on that past having consequences to her present and future. Right now this is just a list of Things and doesn't breathe.

Changeling's profile

Iridescent is not a colour. It is a trait of colours. To properly define the iridescent, you need to establish the base colour (black, pink, green, purple— all common colours), then establish the sheen colours and how those other sheens show up depending on how he moves and the light changes.

Memorable features being appearance based in an area that's already appearance obsessed makes me think that many people will have similar interests and fashion tastes, making it likely other people find troll fashion fantastic.

Again, the faults/talents thing. Being physically weak isn't necessarily a fault (it can have some massive advantages, such as high pain tolerance if a person is still going out and doing things), nor is being too passive (sometimes, that's the best way to placate people). Meanwhile, being observant can come off as creepy and stealth can make people jump all the time. Extreme intelligence can be very alienating and not fitting into any one place can make you extremely empathetic.

His family/history thing is really disconnected from his modern day presence. Abuse leaves a massive impact on you, even if it is temporary. There's a book called toxic parents that deals with how abuse can impact a person. Also, when it comes to abusers, most of them are not actually mean spirited people. They can, in fact, be very loving people with high levels of empathy and compassion, adored by most people around them (even, potentially, their victims). Most of them do their abuse fully believing they are in the right, that they are being "helpful" or they've somehow determined that the person they're abusing is wrong. I would seriously consider them continuing to be abusers, at least emotionally, because you know how Mother Gothel behaves in Tangled? How she loves Rapunzel and wants to protect her and uses all sorts of scare tactics to keep her in line? How she does it all out of love for her "fragile" daughter? Yeah, that's day to day life with abusers, especially parental.

Patience breaking can take other forms of anger, therefore you're really limiting yourself with describing it only in terms of what makes him angry. For me, personally, when I lose patience with a person I will often cut them off and/or stop giving them extra advice. I'm not necessarily angry, I'm just tired of them.

Again, I don't really feel like I have a sense of him as a person. Inner life, motive, how he relates to people, grudges, if he puts on a front or not, what he cares about, what he'll do above anything else. Every part of him feels disconnected from everything else, and nothing's meshing so nothing's breathing.

Not to mention, is he the only Changeling to ever exist? You say stressed pregnant fairies are "wont" to transfer their pregnancies, but if they're prone to doing that, why hasn't he found changeling culture and immersed himself in it? Why is a group that probably has more than one member treated like he's the only Changeling ever?

General critiques

You're checking off an awful lot of Author's Darling points:

- Their tragic backstories don't affect them in ways that feel any way realistic; abuse, abandonment, prejudice, and all these things they're facing change who you are as a person. These two don't act like it.
- Their faults seem to be there simply to say "look! I have faults! I'm a good character!" instead of being things that will actually impact the story's plot in a profound way, either positive or negative.
- Their skills and talents don't seem to reflect their professions, making it look like they take those professions simply because that's what's cool.
- Their memorable features are physical traits that, when I actually read the profiles, don't sound all that unique. Many women in a gender neutral society will have armour, a few men probably have hoops in their ear because I'm sure humans in an appearance-focused area will take on whatever flamboyant fashions they like.
- A lot of the prejudice and hate seems to happen "just because it makes their lives harder" instead of being logical in the world's workings.

I'd suggest meshing things together, figuring out the reason why behind a lot of the prejudice, and letting these characters feel the impact of what happens to them. Look up people's reactions to trauma, abuse, abandonment, neglect, systematic discrimination (aka the various isms, in particular sexism, ableism, and racism) to get an idea how they'll have been impacted. Also important inner life things like motives, loyalties, and quirks. Otherwise, they'll never be breathing characters and will remain flat lists.
A writer is a world trapped in a person— Victor Hugo

Ink is blood. Paper is bandages. The wounded press books to their heart to know they're not alone.
  





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Wed Sep 24, 2014 11:46 am
megsug says...



:O An unexpected critique. How exciting! I'll admit that a lot of this is word vomit of things I think I want. These profiles will definitely be going under renovations as I decide where the heck I want to take this xD
The one thing is that these characters are no longer where their ethnicity is, so Lalia is no longer in a gender neutral area, but once in her history she was. The same for the changeling with fashion forward people. That may not be clear when people who aren't inside my head are reading it. X)
Other than that, your questions and concerns are valid and constructive. Thank you! I should be changing my profiles in response soon~
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Wed Sep 24, 2014 5:12 pm
Rosendorn says...



Knowing they're currently not in those areas doesn't change as much as you think. Namely, it leaves me wondering whether or not other people have left those areas, how much trade exists, what all the other areas are like, and what the prejudices are across the country. Added critiques:

- How did being in those areas vs the areas they're in now impact them? Had they been temporarily accepted in those areas and must now face prejudice again? How did that impact them, did they ever get used to an area where they were more accepted, or were they constantly mistrusting? Remember, they might not have the same reaction.
- Did their behaviour change once they left that area?
- Did they develop their skills/traits inside or outside that area? If inside, why did they keep them once they left? If outside, what changed once they got into that area, and did anything at all revert back once they left?
- How has traveling that much impacted them? How well do they adapt to new situations?

My comment about their memorable features being what they are also applies to how they sometimes won't always have that. I doubt Lelia always wears armour, or wears clothes that show off her muscular physique. Feathers can fall out, and hoops can be taken off. The changeling's skin colour is a genuinely unique feature... unless he uses makeup to cover it up and blend in better.

What is it about their personality that's memorable? You haven't told me that at all.
A writer is a world trapped in a person— Victor Hugo

Ink is blood. Paper is bandages. The wounded press books to their heart to know they're not alone.
  





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Wed Sep 24, 2014 5:35 pm
megsug says...



Aaah. I'm still discovering most of this myself, but this clears your point up.
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Wed Sep 24, 2014 7:31 pm
Rosendorn says...



Tl;dr for basically my whole thing:

- Why do they do this
- What impacts the plot
- Who are they
- What do they live for
- How do they do it
A writer is a world trapped in a person— Victor Hugo

Ink is blood. Paper is bandages. The wounded press books to their heart to know they're not alone.
  








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