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Character Development : A Collection of Resources

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Resources

Resources For Creating Characters

Resources For Describing Characters

Resources For Writing The Mafia

Resources For Writing Royalty

Commentary on Social Issues In Writing

General Tips

Guide to Character Development

How To Fit Character Development Into Your Story

Tips on Character Consistency

Designing A Character From Scratch

Making characters for your world

Characters First, Story Second Method

Understanding Your Character

Tips on Character Motivations

31 Days of Character Development : May 2018 Writing Challenge

How To Analyze A Character

Alternative Method of Character Creation

Connecting To Your Own Characters

Interview As Your Characters

Flipping Character Traits On Their Head 

Character Driven vs. Plot Driven Stories

Traits

Tips On Writing About Mental Illness

Giving Your Protagonists Negative Traits

Giving Characters Distinct Voices in Dialogue

Giving Characters Flaws

Making Characters More Unique

Keeping Characters Realistic

Archetypes

Writing Good Villains

Creating Villains

Guide to Writing The Hero

Positive Character Development Without Romanticizing Toxic Behavior

Tips on Writing Cold & Distant Characters

Balancing Multiple Main Characters

Creating Diverse Otherworld Characters

Foreshadowing The Villain

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PSA: "Shaxpir" AI writing software: AVOID!

The tl;dr: A guy is selling subscriptions to a software tool to "help you write better novels." And to train it, he's used tens of thousands of novels from authors you know, without those authors giving him permission.

...Sometimes things seem to blow up with unusual speed. This particular shit seems to have hit the fan yesterday, primarily on Twitter, when various authors discovered the guy's website, prosecraft.io, which featured "clippings" of the authors he'd stolen from... and the revelation that he had scraped their entire books, not just excerpts, to train his AI. ("2,470,720,986 words," his website bragged, "from 27,668 books, by 15,622 authors." The only authors who were off limits, apparently, were people using [or paying for] his software.) Though the website is offline now, if you take a look at this Google search, you can see the covers of just some of the books the entire contents of which he exploited for AI training.

This usage goes well beyond the "fair use" defense that he belatedly (and ineffectively) attempted to employ. It's straightforward copyright infringement, on a massive scale: good old fashioned theft.

The guy took the website down within hours of this news starting to blow up all over Twitter... which is no surprise. But this ain't over yet.

Gizmodo has a goodish breakdown of the broad situation here.

If you search here on the #prosecraft tag, you'll find local reaction, and numerous furious (and sometimes quite funny) responses imported from Twitter. Plainly, at the legal end of things, this guy is about to get nuked from orbit. (Among the authors he made the gross tactical error of stealing from: Stephen King, James Patterson, the Pratchett Estate, and Nora Roberts. This... is not going to go well for him.)

Leverage's John Rogers sums it up succinctly:

Meanwhile: the guy who created this whole mess is still selling subscriptions to his Shaxpir software (I'm not adding the URL here) that he trained using stolen goods. So (until someone stops him) you might like to reblog this info for the attention of others here who prefer their writing to stay human-made as well as -fueled, and not to support the seriously ethically-challenged.

And on a side issue: I'm idly wondering how long it'll take somebody to DMCA his still-live site's webhost or his domain registrar with an eye to taking down that down too. Granted, it'd be a temporary solution at best until the big hitters' lawyers can get more permanent solutions in gear. But enjoyable...

don't forget, "damn, girl, you wrote this? (horrified)"

rereading my own writing is just a constant fluctuation between “damn, girl, you wrote this? (affectionate)” and “damn, girl, you wrote this? (derogatory)”

Ah, a person of taste. I was considering rioting if Honey Mustard wasn't the natural choice.

I had yet another amazing idea for a poll, so get ready for this super divisive question that WILL tear families and friendships apart.

the year is 2023, marie kondo holds j*ff b*zos by the skin on the back of his neck in front of a public gathering

“does this one spark joy?” she shouts at the restless audience, they boo in response

she snaps his spine like .5mm mechanical pencil lead and throws his lifeless corpse to the crowd, they cheer in response

Guide To Plot Development

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Where To Start

Start with the zero draft. Honestly, the only thing you need to know about your story in order to complete a solid zero draft is the basic timeline of events and 2-3 main characters. Zero drafts don’t need to include any minor characters, backstory, world building, subplots, anything. They’re just a rough estimate of what your story is going to be and where it’s going to go. 

This way, you have something to work with when you do approach the task of maturing your story, which is a lot easier to do when you have already gotten the garbage ideas onto paper, seen them, realized they’re bad, clipped out the good parts, and developed a better understanding of your story’s trajectory. 

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I’d lose interest if I found out it wasn’t about horses too

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