onlinecounsellingcollege:

1. Eliminate noise and other distractions from your environment. It takes approximately 15 minutes to reach a place of focused concentration. Thus, constant interruptions will stop you reaching that place.

2. Deliberately structure your environment so that the focus is clearly on studying – and not on doing, and seeing, other things.  That may mean changing the room you work in, moving your desk, and so on.

3. Clarify your goals for each piece of work. If you don’t know what you’re doing, or you’re hoping to achieve, you’ll likely go in circles, and simply waste your time.

4.  Break large areas of study down into smaller sections, and then plan how you’re going to work through each of these.

5. Set reasonable time limits for each portion of the task – and also for completing the final project. That should help to stop you wasting time on needless details, from wandering down blind alleys, and from procrastinating.

6. Be clear about the requirements for each task. For example, what are the guidelines you have to follow? What standard or quality of work is expected? How detailed does your knowledge have to be? If you’re writing as assignment, how long should it be, and what style and format is required?

7.  Isolate yourself. Often, it is best if we lock ourselves away, and avoid other people, when we really need to work. Find a place to hide away, or put a sign or your door – but refuse to talk to anyone until the work is done!

writeworld:

flieswithninjas: I’m working on my NaNoWriMo, and I can’t make up my mind what type of perspective I want to use! Any suggestions?

A catalog of articles related to point of view and perspective for your perusal:

• Describing a first-person-narrator (and the mirror cliché)
• Choosing a Narrative Point of View (be sure to take a gander at the “further reading” section)
• Multiple First-Person POVs
• Sparse POV
• Is your story YA, NA, or Adult?
• What’s Your Point of View?
• You, Me, and Xe – Points of View
• Which POV Is Right For You? : A How-To on Points of View
• Types of Point of View
• Narrative Point of View
• Writer’s Digest: Point of View

Thanks for your question!

– O

DON’T PANIC

thewritershelpers:

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

writeworld:

Anonymous asked: I need some tips on finishing short stories. I’ve been writing for a while and I really love it, but unless it’s for school I have never finished anything I have started…help?

The ending is the thing that can make you hold the book against your chest and start sobbing, or close it with a satisfied smile, or throw it across the room in outrage. All endings are valid endings, with one exception. This is the ending in which the reader casually closes the book, drops it on the table, and brings up their Facebook page without another thought.

We’re going to try to help you write everything that isn’t that. Although the original question was about short stories, we’re going to give some tips for endings in general, then for short stories, then for novels.

First, some general tips to keep in mind:

• Give some answers. You set up a story, so finish it. You don’t have to resolve everything by either killing off the main character or having her solve all of her problems and live happily ever after. There’s a lot of life in between those extremes, and that’s where your story will probably end. You don’t have to change the lives of your characters Oprah Special-style, but it’s suggested that you address the problem you laid out in the first place.
• Accomplish something. Just like the characters within them, stories have goals. If you’re trying to say something, say it. If you want your reader to feel something, make them feel it. Think to yourself, “Why am I really writing this story?” Whatever the answer to that question is, it should be implemented throughout the story and brought to fruition at the end. Tailor your story to what you need it to do.
• Avoid the Deus ex Machina. This Greek phrase literally means “god from the machine”, and it commonly refers to stories in which the ending comes out of absolutely nowhere. This is when the Love Interest’s fiancé chokes to death on a piece of beef jerky and your main character capitalizes on the availability of the Love Interest, culminating in matrimonial bliss within a couple of paragraphs. Don’t pull endings out of your butt. They come from your story. Pull them out of there.
• You will not please everyone. Ever. There will be people that will have a beef with your ending. There are probably a couple of ways that you could have done it, but it’s your challenge to rifle through those alternatives and figure out which one your story really needs, not your critics’. Don’t worry about pleasing your audience; worry about respecting the story you’ve told by giving it a proper end.
• Be careful with ambiguity. You might love those endings that make you think about what really happened, or make you fill in the blanks yourself. Those endings are great, but they should be approached and implemented with great care. If you want two readers to fight over whether your character decided to do something or other, give them a reason to fight over it. Make your character complex enough where it would have to go either way. The ambiguous ending can be magnificent if the story requires it, but it can seem unsuccessful and faux-artsy if done weakly. Tread carefully.

Now, on to the short story.

• Keep it short. While your short story probably has depth and complexity, it is  still limited because of its length. There is only so much you can do with a small word count. (By the way, please don’t try to cram a novel into the space of a short story. You will only do yourself a disservice.) Don’t look for a massive, grandiose ending if it isn’t there.

  “I have an aunt who thinks that nothing happens in a story unless someone gets married or shot at the end of it.”
  — Flattery O’Connor

  An ending can be small, like a change in attitude or direction for one of your characters. At first, it might not even feel like an ending, but if it resolves the problem, you’ve gotten the job done.

• Leave early. Don’t volunteer to clean up. You haven’t been at the party for that long. Your readers don’t need to know every detail of the ending and ever little thing that gets tied up. The ending should have some emotional impact, and if you keep writing once that’s delivered, it’s going to get stale. Your reader hasn’t been able to establish very involved relationships with the characters over the course of your short story, so be aware of that in writing your ending.

What about novels?

• Stick around. Help out and clean up. You know the people that threw this party pretty well. The least you can do is to help put everything back in place. Unlike the short story, the reader of a novel has spent loads of time with these characters and probably isn’t averse to finding out what happens to them when the dust clears (assuming, of course, your reader liked your story).
• Plant. In many stories, the ending is the coming-together of many elements, characters, and ideas from earlier in the story. Many stories use plants, or things that are mentioned earlier in the story for the purpose of being used later, to impact the ending (this is a good way of avoiding Deus ex Machina). The ending should develop from the rest of the story and follow logically. While it may surprise and astonish your reader, it shouldn’t make them cock and eyebrow and wonder where it came from.
• Pivot on your climax. The outcome of your climax is going to be the material that you have for your ending. In dealing with the post-climactic world, take a look at the rest of your story and figure out what’s fundamentally changed during the climax. The ending, whatever it may be, lies in those changes. After you’ve excited your reader over the climax, resolve what’s happened. A resolution is not inherently happy, but it does end the story.

It is very tricky to pull of the perfect ending. Rely on your story and keep to your goals. If you got them reading up until now, they’re going to want something good. Trust yourself to not disappoint.

Further Reading:

• Four Ways to End a Short Story
• A Strong Closer
• How to Write Successful Endings
• A Novel Ending

Thanks for your question! If you have any other questions about writing, feel free to hit up our ask box!

– O

writeworld:

writeworld:

anthony-fucking-stark asked: Hello, I’ve been following this blog for months and it has helped me very much. But now I have a question: do you have anything on how to write/roleplay a crazy -or insane- character?

You are gonna be so proud of me. I found you some awesome links!

WriteWorld is inexplicably deficient on articles by our admins on mental disorders (a term which, for the purposes of this article, will encompass personality disorders and all other serious mental illnesses), but I do have a few general words of advice for you regarding writing characters with disorders of this kind:

1. Mental disorders are not for funsies. They don’t make your character cooler. There are actual people out in the world right now that live with the mental disorder you’re using to give your character some extra pizzazz, so try to bear that in mind as you write.
2. Pick a mental disorder and write to it. That is seriously all there is to it. Just do that to the best of your ability with as much respect to your character and the disorder as possible and you will have achieved something that pretty much every writer screws up. Once you’ve chosen a mental disorder…
3. Research the specifics of the disorder you have in mind. So many writers mix and match their favorite symptoms from different mental disorders to create a disorder that suits them, and that’s okay, it’s just not true to life. It also makes things more difficult for you, because getting your way all the time isn’t particularly good for a writer. We need our ego tamped down every so often, and we need our research to help us create conflict. If we bend the rules to allow for every little thing we want to magically come true, there is zero believability and zero credibility. Do research. Set boundaries. Give some credit to reality for being plenty messed up on its own without any help from you (dragons and nanobots are, of course, excluded from this criticism).
   Don’t worry, I’m going to give you some resources for researching mental disorders.
4. With all of that said, there is more to a character than their mental disorder. I am begging you to please give every other aspect of your character as much weight as the mental disorder he or she has. The mental disorder may take over your character’s life, but notice that they have a life to take over. A life that (maybe) existed before their mental disorder as well as during and after.
5. And one more thing: The mental disorder your character has does not equal the plot of the story. There is more to the story than the mental disorder just as there is more to the character than the mental disorder. Plan and write accordingly.
   Also, mental disorders are not convenient plot fluff. Mental disorders do not come and go as you see fit. If a character has PTSD, they have it every minute of every day and even if it’s a sliding scale of intensity for them, they still have the disorder. This is what I meant when I talked about rules. A good rule to have is that if your character has a mental disorder, then they have it 24/7, not just when you think it would spice up the scene (not that you would do that) (but you might) (so don’t). 

I really strongly recommend that your check out our tips on writing depression and amnesia (below) as well, since much of the advice we give in those articles carries over into every other type of mental condition.

• Brief Advice on How to Write Depression: Imagination and Research
• Remember, Remember: The Basics of Writing Amnesia

On to the links I found you!

From fuckyeah-char-dev:

• Antisocial Personality Disorder
• Avoidant Personality Disorder
• Depressive Personality Disorder
• Paranoid Personality Disorder
• Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder
• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
• Psychopathy
• Sadistic Personality Disorder
• Schizoid Personality Disorder
• Schizophrenia
• Schizotypal Personality Disorder
• Self-Defeating Personality Disorder
• Their “Character Development” Tag

Other Tumblrs/Tumblr Articles:

• Writer’s Tip # 5 – Avoid glorifying characters with serious mental illness/personality disorders and express these with negative behaviors.
• FuckYeahCharacterDevelopment’s Discussion of Suicide and Depression
• The Tumblr Mental Health Directory
• Mental Illness Directory

Outside of Tumblr:

• WebMD’s Mental Health Subsite
• Symptoms and Treatments of Mental Disorders
• Wikipedia’s list of mental disorders
• Medlineplus: Mental Disorders
• NAMI: About Mental Illness

Videos:

• Elyn Saks: A tale of mental illness — from the inside
• Ruby Wax: What’s so funny about mental illness?
• HealthGuru.com’s YouTube Channel

And I just want to say that nothing is more useful than actually talking to someone who has the disorder you’d like to write about.

Thank you very much for your question, and I hope this helps!

-C

Got more links or resources for mental illness? Submit a link to us here!

DON’T PANIC

thewritershelpers:

Here’s some places to go if you’re tired of using the words ‘brown’, ‘black’, ‘blonde’, ‘redhead’, etc. Also good places to get a more definite idea beyond the generic and get a better feel for your character!

List of Hair Colors (ObsidianBookshelf)

200 Words Describing Hair

Human Hair Color (Wikipedia) ~ With extra links

(Above source: http://www.latest-hairstyles.com)

—-

BONUS!: Describing A Person – Adding Details (covers hair, skin, face shape, etc)

writeworld:

blueboxcompanion asked: Hi there! So I’m doing NaNoWriMo for the first time and I’m already petrified. Got any tips to help me out? I have the beginnings of a plot line but I’d like some tips on how to expand it?

First off, here’s our post on Advice for First-Time NaNos!

Now, I have an overwhelmingly huge amount of links to resources on the subject of thinking about and beginning and developing a plot line:

• In the Beginning
• For the Architects: The Planning Process
• Rough Drafts
• How do you plan a novel?
• The ABCs (and Ds and Es) of Plot Development
• Originality Is Overrated
• How to Create a Plot Outline in Eight Easy Steps
• Finding Plot: Idea Nets
• The Story Goal: Your Key to Creating a Solid Plot Structure
• Make your reader root for your main character
• A Beginning from the Middle
• The “Plot Theories” Tag
• The “Finding Plot” Tag
• Plot Development: Climax, Resolution, and Your Main Character

Okay, those were the top results I found in the area of your question. If I were to boil all that down into four quick and dirty tips to expand your plot, I’d suggest:

1. Make your character’s life suck. And I mean suck magnificently. Put your character in a scene and think of the very worst thing that could happen to him or her (right up to or maybe even including dying) and write that. A life that sucks is a life with conflict, and conflict is the crazy ‘splodin’ star nursery of plot creation.
2. Don’t leave your character alone. (This is super dirty.) If your character is never alone, he or she is always interacting with someone. Interaction breeds conflict, and we know what conflict does. Another plus: dialogue moves the story forward. Characters by themselves have a hard time selling dialogue, you know? Anyway, you know how, in sitcoms, characters by themselves are either very happy/silly or very sad/angry, then the scene either fades to black or someone comes in and catches them at the height of their emotional state? Yeah, that’s pretty much spot on for dirty plot development. Only allow your character to be alone if he or she is:
   • Being curious and/or sneaky 
   • Being extremely angry or sad
   • Being extremely silly (i.e. funny) or happy

   Then have another character come in and catch them at the height of their emotion/sneakiness. PLOT!

3. Something that has never (or very, very rarely) happened before happens. Newness is the foundation of a good plot. Something new or unexpected needs to happen to the main character, and often. He or she should experience new emotions, new circumstances, new meetings. The audience often likes to discover things right along with the main character, so do that.
4. Fudge it. It’s NaNo. It doesn’t have to be perfect. If you’ve got a section in there that’s underdeveloped, you can work with it more later, or put a placeholder in there and skip to the next scene. Above all, never write anything boring (and I don’t mean boring like this). If you think your scene is boring, leave it out, because you have a vested interest in the story. If you’re bored by that scene, chances are others will be, too, so don’t waste your time. Find some other way to muck about with your characters’ lives!

Remember, these are not suggestions on how to write every-plot-ever-no-exceptions. These are super dirty tips to create some plot now. Notice how the tips are pretty character-driven. That’s how I roll. I like to let my characters push my plot, and I encourage you to test drive these tips to see if that method works for you as well!

Thank you for your question and happy NaNoing!

-C

DON’T PANIC

thewritershelpers:

Having trouble finding synonyms for ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘tan’, etc? Have any clear idea what tone you’re going for? Here’s some web pages for skin tone description and references:

Words Used To Describe Skin Color

Handy Words for Skin Tone (Includes palettes and comparisons)

Describing Characters of Color

More Tone Synonyms w/ Pictures

7 Offensive Mistakes Writers Make (includes more than just skin color)