Mary Catelli's Erraticly Updated and Exceedingly Ill-Organized Journal

No people.

The heroine is telling a fairy tale, and I know she can't have the main character look for apples to cure the king. Or water to cure the king. Or a firebird which may or may not be needed to cure the king.

( Read more... )

On one hand, the plot element about a part of the forest is not developed well enough. It has to foreshadow the final danger, or it has to go.

On the other hand, going through a scene wondering what I was thinking, I realized what one boy would say at the end, and how it would give the heroine the motive to go do something I was wrestling with. And even what she could say and do that would provoke it, with a little initial impetus from another character.

Such is the whim of the muse.

A heroine sees the chapel where she can become a paladin. She runs away.

Timing is important. Not only does this develop character, it also ensures that two other characters will meet her at the dramatic moment when she goes back.

( Read more... )

When making a group of characters to lead your story -- when this group has all major if not main characters -- and giving them backgrounds --

It's probably wise to make them, while interesting, not quite so interesting as you could get away with a main character. Lower than "escapes Mary Sue level" even.

( Read more... )

Poking at the Gamelit story -- knew we had a sorceress/rogue and a rogue.  Let the other characters in the party emerge with the plot, so that they mold to what is needed by the story. . .

( Read more... )

What could be simpler for NaNoWriMo that plopping down the rogue, the wizard, the cleric, and the fighter in front of an entrance to a dungeon and having them go at it?

The small issue is that you may have slightly overdone the exuberant badness of the notion.

( Read more... )

I had a brilliant idea for a story that was pretty stuck: the other girl didn't have to be the heroine's cousin, and her own age. She could be her aunt! Whom I didn't need to marry off, or kill off, in the backstory!

Brilliant! And then -- it whacks me with the adult problem.

( Read more... )

Was poking at a story again, trying to work out the climax.

Then I remembered the earlier incident I had put in, where the hero had spotted a nasty piece of blood magic.  Which I left dangling.

( Read more... )

So the hero and the princess heroine are sitting around talking between the tasks he has to do. . . .

( Read more... )

thought up a new in-universe motive for the masquerade where the mundanes are unaware they are surrounded by magic.

The mundanes dun it.

( Read more... )