For Once In Your Life… just Listen.

“I tried writing about you but the person that I wrote about was someone I wish you were.”

— lovelymisadventure (via wnq-writers)

““What can you possibly achieve by seeing someone else miserable? What kind of a sick person do you have to be to get a kick out of someone else in pain? I don’t care how badly you were hurt. The second you think that someone else deserves the suffering you went through, you too become evil. And just like every other evil in the word, you need to be destroyed.””

—

Aequus

Building a character from the ground up

Method of determining personality: Quote 

Type of Character: Antagonist

Main or Secondary: Main Villain

Main Purpose: Challenge the way the protagonist views the people around him

Plate Etiquette 

Keep reading

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories … ” - Anne Lamott

According to psychological facts, the inability to fall asleep at night means you’re awake in someone’s dream.

The Legend Of Zelda, 1986 ->

I shit you not, the hardest part about creating a character is coming up with their last name

How to make a scary villain

Nobody hides under their blankets when they see Snidely Whiplash or Jesse and James.  Here are a few tips on how to make an effective villain that makes your readers sleep with a nightlight. 

Give them an unusual, unsympathetic reason to hurt or kill.

If Lord Skulsanstuf kills for revenge, because of bigotry, or to prove how cool he is, he’s not as powerful. Readers hear about people in real life killing for those reasons all the time.

Instead, make him kill because he wants beautiful people never to have the experience of growing old and ugly. Make him kill because he thinks the only way to stay pure is to drink a glass of blood every morning. Then do a chapter from his perspective and show how delighted he is with his way of thinking. Instant chills.

Allow them to kill fully developed characters.

Nobody cares that Lady Lotsoblood burned an entire village to the ground and tortured all the children to death if nobody in that village is important enough in your story to have a name. Look at all your characters and figure out which ones are the most expendable. Then let Lotsoblood work her magic.

Go in detail about the strange deeds they commit.

I would never want to be stabbed, but I especially don’t want a knife to run down the side of my cheek, lifting parts of my skin so my assailant can brutally rip them off later. That sounds a lot worse because I can imagine it better in my head.

Don’t bog them down with too many evil traits.

A vivisector who kicks puppies and burns down buildings in his spare time is silly, not scary. Good, nice traits can drive in the fact that your villain is human and therefore anybody could turn into them, which is a scary thought.

Don’t make them annoying.

Professor Umbridge hits almost every point on this list, but she’s too annoying to be truly scary. 

Give them control of every situation.

Until the very final battle, the villain should know more about what’s happening than the heroes. The heroes should have a hard time keeping a secret no matter what measures they put in place.