@AtomicBomb354

Yes it's annoying when authors seem to forget their characters have been badly injured five minutes before XD. It's so much more interesting when the characters have to deal with their broken legs or other injuries!
I think giving characters real injuries and make them having to overcome them is a good way to make character appearing more human.
When a guy appears to be too perfect and is severly injured and has to overcome this injury, it will show he has some weaknesses. When a character appears to be a bad guy, the way he deals with an undeserved injury can make him a way more likeable... And I think a badly injured female character having to deal with the sequels of an injury could be a great strong female character!!! (It seems that for many people strong female characters mean women who can fight without being injured... I would like to see more strong female character with inner strenght, and overcoming the sequels of an injury require a lot of inner strength than fighting. And at least it would be a more unique strong female character.)
I remember once friend told me she feared that one of her character was too perfect and that she may be a Mary Sue. The answered I gave her was "just cut off one of her limb!" x) She didn't think I was serious, but I actually kind of was!

And I think it's cool when in historical setting or in invented worlds with low or no magic but inspired by medieval times or any other time period to have the characters using the remedies real people have used in the past and to see what side effects they did have.
(Someone already mentionned that burning wounds could lead to infections, I'm thinking about things like that. Some "remedies" they had in the past didn't cure at all the illness they were supposed to cure but could instead poison someone, make someone becoming insane and even lead to death... While some people from the past did practice much more complicated surgery than what we think! I would advise anyone writing a story set in the past or in a pseudo-past to make at least a little bit of research about medieval and ancient medicine, this really can give plot point ideas!)


In the story I'm speaking about, technology is also equivalent now to the one we have in our world... In fact, I'm even still hesitating to make the story take place directly in our world or in a parallel but very similar world.
People who can do magic can do more things that people in science, because they basically don't need anything to do their magic (If they're naked in the middle of nowhere with nothing with them they can still practice magic while some people who is not able to do magic can't do much x) ), Magic can be lethal (some people can instantanely kill someone with their magic), but if the people with technology have the good items with them, they're are stronger. Using technology has a lot less side effect. During the same amount of time someone with magic can kill ONE person, someone with the right modern weapon could kill dozens of people. The magic is non-verbal, mind-based (though some people use "spell" or do some strange gesture with their hands they're more like concentration technics, they are not absolutely necessary. People (especially beginners) need concentration to be able to use magic, and magic can require a lot of energy and can be really tiring.


I didn't go into the "heroic sacrifice" territory :p
I don't mind it in itself (Because there are characters who sacrified themselves heroicly whom I absolutely love...
But you're right, not everybody is brave enough to sacrify himself (/herself). If a writer wants a character to sacrify himself, he needs to build up the plot and the character for that, and either the character need to be extremely courageous, proud of himself or stupidily lawful-good, or he needs to have nothing to loose anymore, to the points he doesn't even care about his life.
Now that I'm thinking about it, all the sacrifices which I don't mind and even love have in common that they didn't end the whole plot of the books, All of those characters whom I like who did sacrifice themselves have just helped the other characters by giving them more time, allowing them to escape from the immediate danger, but it didn't resolve EVERYTHING...

I prefer writing in 3rd person...and for some reason I really like (and always end up) writing biblically: "And so, it came to pass, that in the aftermath of the Great Conflict..."

I've tried my hand at 1st person and by the Gods that was awful. I really hated that: It felt like my whole vocabulary got strangled. It's doable but excruciating.

I haven't tried writing in 2nd person. I want to try it but haven't been inspired by anything yet.

For writing i've mainly stuck to sci-fi and fantasy.

Now for things that I cannot do or struggle with:

- endings
- character/people developing

@ enyo As for injuries...I have a tendency to give very powerful people emotional injuries, rather than physical ones.

e.g. a depressed or corrupted God, etc..

I like emotionally crippling God-like entities.

@ enyo forgot to ping. Look up

@Amarok

For the injuries, I was speaking here about physical injuries because the conversation was derivating from magical healing and authors who make their severly injured characters with broken doing things that nobody whith broken legs can do.

I love emotional injuries too (in characters I mean), especially emotionally injured powerful people =) !!!
I would definitely read something about a depressed and / or corrupted gods =D


I like to injure emotionally my characters too... (Is a boy who has lost his father when he was a child, who has seen his brothers and his mother being tortured and die, who has basically grown up being stalked by people wanting his death and thinking he would be the next to die and, who was forced to live during a few years with the person who he thinks he's responsible of the death of his family, who later loses his pregnant wife while she's giving birth to a stillborn child, and when he thinks nothing can happen to him anymore has the person he loves the most dying in his arms emotionally injured enough for you ;)? Of course at the end he becomes depressed and paranoiac, and kind of insane as he doesn't care about anything anymore because he thinks if he loves someone or something it will be taken away from him, and that he'll probably dye soon anyway...)



A biblical style 3rd person is probably very fitting for a story in which main characters are gods anyway :)!

I can write 2nd person, but 2nd person is mostly for short stories, I've mostly used it for RP-like things. Writing a novel using 2nd person would seem very weird to me...

@Enyo

Yeah, whenever I read something like that I always think of the time that I broke my toe and it wouldn't stop hurting for three days... I'm pretty sure breaking an arm or a leg would hurt for a lot longer XD And definitely! A character that just randomly is better is boring, and always makes me put a book down because I know that, from that point onward, that character is certainly not going to experience anything interesting, because 99% of the time they won't die if that happens.

I completely agree! Showing a character struggle always develops them a lot better than anything else. It can sometimes bring out the worst in them - a character that has otherwise been patient throughout the entire story could suddenly become really stressed and anxious, adding extra depth to their personality. It's especially important because it makes them a lot more realistic - people don't generally stick to one personality trait (e.g energetic) all the time, they have variation caused by moods.

I definitely agree with that too. There's too much in the mainstream media surrounding that idea that for a female character to be a strong character, they need to be skilled at everything. That's why I'm not really too keen nowadays on reading anything that can be easily found in a book shop or something that everyone is talking about - the female characters are all so similar that it becomes almost completely predictable. For example, just take Katniss Everdeen from the Hunger Games and Tris... whateverherlastnamewas from Divergent. I suppose if you wanted to reach a little further, video game female characters like Lara Croft from Tomb Raider follows the same 'your strong female character must be able to fight' thing. It is definitely something that annoys me, since I like to read books with a diverse range of characters, rather than the copy-paste clichs that people usually use. Male characters can be equally as bad in that sense too... seriously, what is it with modern books and love triangles involving two male characters that always have the same kinds of personalities?

Research always makes a story so much better. It always makes me feel like the author really cares about their narrative making sense. I read a piece of historical fiction on Wattpad recently called 'Pharoah's Bride', and the entire thing is written so well and with so much thought put into it. It may not be 100% accurate (I don't know very much about Ancient Egyptian culture. I haven't done a history class for 3 years lol), but it makes everything seem well fleshed-out, and, in fact, is very useful to help build a more convincing world.

I've never really written a piece of historical fiction yet where I've had to research remedies and stuff, but I have had to research some interesting things, such as how long it takes for a cut to get infected and the symptoms associated with it (along with several other diseases and stuff).Though I think it's especially important when trying to present a character with a mental illness - I've actually found that, if I had not researched the topic, then I probably would have portrayed them completely wrong.

Oh, ok. Personally, I would recommend parallel over our actual world - there's so much more you can do, but the main problem is that, to create something truly unique, it requires a lot of world-building (My current story and all its world-building has taken me 4 years, and there are still plenty of holes that I need to fix lol). Also, with parallel, you can be as close to real life as you want, or as far away as possible from what life is like (though if you set it in the real world and in the future, the possibilities are almost equally as endless).

Magic is really strange in my universe XD Basically, you can just cast a spell with your mind, but it can be made stronger with a word, or, even better, a full incantation. There is technically another type of magic which is more like something out of an anime (I was an absolute anime nerd when I came up with this - I think I was about 12/13) - powers that when activated, change the appearance of your eye(s), and then you have to look at the person, use your mind and BOOM! Magic! It only applies to vampires though, and oh boy, the complexity gets even worse when I start mentioning all the different types of those... Basically, my universe is just a mash of things I like, meaning that there are about 50,000 different variations of everything because I'm too indecisive to choose between all the types lol.

Yeah, I was just mentioning it, since it's something I don't generally like. But sometimes it does work. I can't honestly think of a character that I like that has sacrificed themselves for the greater good (it'll come to me later and I'll be like "Oh yeah, that one")... probably because I spend too much time rooting for the villains lol.

Kind of off topic but with the excuse I'm trying to make a character in mind to this question-
_{does anyone happen to know what that weird sleeve thing is called that people put their arms into and hold in front of themself?}

It's like a cylinder sleeve thing, I'm almost certain it's real and not something I imagined up but if I did happen to somehow invent this in my mind that's cool too

I cannot find the answer on google

Usually associated with rich people in cartoons combined with them smoking from a twig sized pipe
On that note I think Cruella(that how you spell her name?) may have worn one

*pops in*

Kewl! A writing thread!

I love writing fantasy and sci-fi, although fanfiction and historical fiction I do write sometimes too. When you have writer's block, having characters with fully fleshed personalities and backstories can be easier to write. I feel like before you finish fourth grade, you tend to favor first person. I personally write in third person most of the time, and would love to try out second person soon.

I can't write horror, romance, or comedy without puns that enrage people to save my life. I have no ideas for horror, comedy is just bad puns, and romance is just cheesiness and staring at my hands like they are monsters.

I also tend to make my favorite characters either have waaaaaaaaay too much screentime, too powerful, or just end up showing bias towards them. I'm trying to fix that by writing in the perspectives of less-favored characters, and so far, it's working.

My characters also tend to have either plain backstories, or just absolutely insane ones. It's... Um, interesting to write them and try to make my characters bond when they just can't relate to each other. Or me, as a matter of fact. At that point, I make them either A) laugh together or B) realize something/overcome an obstacle together.

_{Also, anyone have a backstory about a teenager who went insane? Like bonkers, sadistic, asylum insane? I want to make an insane character so bad}

hello,
I believe you are referring to a "hand warmer" --I also saw it called a hand warmer muff. Below are to links to pics, to confirm if this is what you were meaning... I am not sure about the pipe combination--these seemed common for high society types or worn/carried with a fancy dress, by ladies not usually men...


https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/11/5b/46/115b462961b6c4edab79175e851aa3c1.jpg

https://img0.etsystatic.com/043/0/5660569/il_570xN.530245684_295y.jpg


I hope this helps... :-) sks

@Sks,
Thank you so much!
This was what I was looking for ^^

Also thank you for the links :)

@Dunno,
I relate to the liking the character too much thing oh dear

I don't personally know anyone who's gone insane but I've been using a lot of sources online to reference from and A Beautiful Mind is something you could watch too(the movie depicts the life of a man with schizophrenia)
(he wasn't a teenager though)
Referencing from A Beautiful Mind, a lot of the time you and the person involved wont know they have the disorder at first and if people notice they might not take it seriously till months or even years later
-continuing to reference from the above, the main character who has schizophrenia actively fought with people who were not actually there and it was literally impossible to tell if they were real or not to him besides actively asking others around him if they too could see them
Since insanity itself is the term used by the justice system for the mentally ill I tried to find some sources about mental disorders
http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-craziest-mental-disorders.php
_{(If there is anything specific you're looking for your character to have from this list look more into it?)}
http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/mental-health-causes-mental-illness#1
I personally have been looking into schizophrenia so have 3 links atm in my tabs bar
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/this-is-what-developing-acute-schizophrenia-is-like-009
http://www.medicaldaily.com/what-does-it-feel-have-schizophrenia-outside-and-inside-chronic-brain-disorder-270889
https://braindecoder.com/post/what-its-really-like-to-have-schizophrenia-1316426827
Maybe this was helpful?

@99egchosong99
And hence, the Mary Sues and Gary Stues are born.

Thanks for the links! They helped a lot. I always felt like disorders were something to explore. They just seemed to make plot arcs of their own, and it feels like as an author, you could easily make anything happen and just declare that in character. As for now, I'm settling for a kidnapping thing, in which my insane characters was kidnapped, and in solitude with nothing but books for five months at the tender age of 7. However, the links made me think more of what type of behavior would come from that, and other things that could have possibly contributed to my character's madness.

Right now, I'm imagining him with a sadistic and nerdy personality. Like the 'I really want to disect the last living specimen of this species to find out about it' kind of way. He's an albino, and I feel like giving him pet robots that can shoot electricity and hover -.- _{See, he's one of the characters I love to much and will have trouble making life hard for him.}

This is set in a fantasy world, which makes it a heck of a lot more open to the character's backstory and his abilities. I like fantasy because you can explore so many options, and I like realistic fiction because a lot of the time, it's meaningful and chock-full of emotions.