Justanothergirlsblog - =A Weird Girl=

Any advice on writing someone who's got a crush? I don't want to make it sound too "omg I think they're perfect" every other sentence.

Writing a character with a crush...

When you’re writing a character with a crush, tension is created through action and reaction. Every time your character acts, hesitates, speaks their mind, holds their tongue, makes a move, get’s discouraged, etc. builds the tension and encourages the reader to become invested. Crushes in storytelling should be shown through the character’s actions and the world’s reactions, not through dialogue or narration. 

Show the reader the character taking 20 minutes to build up the courage to walk up to their locker, where their crush has one right next to theirs because they’re worried they’ll blurt out the wrong thing if the other person shows up. Don’t just tell the reader that the character feels nervous around them or gets butterflies. Show the butterflies threatening to erupt as their crush sits at the only available seat left in homeroom, which happens to be next to them. 

Types of Romantic Tension

Tips On Writing Skinny Love

Guide To Writing Friends To Lovers

Guide To Writing Enemies To Lovers

Resources For Writing YA Fiction/Romance

Guide To Writing Will-They-Won’t-They

Rivalry vs. Abuse

Guide To Writing Forbidden Love

20 Mistakes To Avoid in YA/Romance

Best Friends To Lovers Resources

How to develop an Enemies-To-Lovers story

Prompts

Skinny Love Writing Prompts

Study Date Prompts

Best Friends-To-Lovers Prompts

Enemies-To-Lovers Prompts

Tol & Smol Couple Prompts

Romantic Prompts

Soulmates Alternate Universe Prompts

General Romance Tips

Resources For Romance Writers

Creating A Love Interest For An Introvert

Writing Opposites Who Attract

Describing Heartbreak

Balancing Fluff and Conflict

Writing Great Fanfiction

How To Write The Perfect Kiss

On Romantic Subplots

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Masterlist | WIP Blog

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Writing Tip #200

When writing short stories, imagine them as the last chapter of a novel. You want to feel like your characters have been in existence for a while. Your story is just the point of heightened emotion.

every writing tip article and their mother: dont ever use adverbs ever!

me, shoveling more adverbs onto the page because i do what i want: just you fucking try and stop me

“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”

— Aldous Huxley 

New Editing Features in Writing Analytics

A few days ago, I posted a preview of a feature I was working on. I’m happy to announce that highlights are now live and ready to use 🎉.

Just choose which words or phrases you’d like to be highlighted, and Writing Analytics will do that as you type. This has a number of use cases, particularly when you’re editing something and want to target specific issues in your draft. 

Stuff like weeding out adverbs, cleaning out unnecessary words, passive voice etc. You can also use these to highlight the names of your characters and their pronouns to visualise better how much space they’re getting in the narrative. 

You can do anything you want — that’s the best part!

How it Works

1. Click on Highlights in the main menu.

2. Add some highlights. You can also click on them to choose a different colour.

That’s it. You can close the widget and go back to writing.

One cool thing is that star works as a wildcard. It will match any word or part of word. So if you want to highlight problematic adverbs use *ly like so:

Colour-coding and visualising what you’re looking for in the text makes revisions so much easier —instead of having to read the whole thing over and over again, you can focus on specific areas and issues.

The highlights show up as you type so you can also use this to break down bad writing habits. Just set up highlights for words or phrases that you’d like to stop using, and you’ll be alerted when it happens.

It took me a while to build this, and I’m very excited to finally see it in the wild — one of my favourite features for sure.

Wanna give it a go? Sign up for a free, no-commitment 14-day trial.

how to determine whether your characters are developed enough or not

There’s a fool proof way to determine whether your characters has been developed enough or not. Ask yourself:

‘’Would my story still work if I removed this character from it?’‘

If your answer is:

“No, my story wouldn’t work, because this character is intertwined into the story to such an extent that if I were to remove them, the story is feels incomplete, and certain storylines won’t work.”

You’ve got yourself a well developed character.

If you can’t remove a character without causing inconsistencies to the plot, you’ve got a character that is dimensional enough to work on their own.

Hence, by removing said character, you’re removing a fundamental piece of the puzzle, which in turn forces certain storylines to be incomplete.

But let’s say the answer to the question above is yes. 

Let’s say, that you could easily remove a certain character from your story, without the risk of screwing with any current storylines. Let’s even go as far as saying that you could replace said character with another character, and it still wouldn’t make a difference to the story. 

In a scenario like this, your character has not been developed enough to stand their own ground. If you can give your character’s storyline to another character, or simply replace them with another, without noticing a difference in your story, you need to go back to the drawing board.

Your character is not fleshed out enough. They don’t bring personality to your story, because their departure from it is not noticeable. 

For a character to be dimensional, or developed properly, their loss needs to recognized, and if they’re not part of the narrative, the story should feel incomplete, because a fundamental piece of the puzzle is missing. 

“A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.”

— Susan Sontag