Documentation – Ellis Morning's Blog

Defining The Rules Of Your World

March 23, 2015 Ellis Morning Comments 0 Comment

Worldbuilding is the process of developing a setting for your story, mostly by gradually revealing that setting to the reader. Even if your story takes place in present-day Earth, there may be things about the setting that will be unfamiliar to the majority of your audience. Maybe you’re writing about a foreign country or culture, for instance. Outside of present-day Earth, things get more complex. With historical fiction, for instance: you’ll want to do your research, then figure out how…

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Outlining: The Key To Finishing That Story

March 16, 2015 Ellis Morning Comments 0 Comment

So, one day you’re going along your business when BOOM! It hits you: a great idea for a story! Awesome! Full of excitement, you launch right in, with tons of momentum behind you. Entire chapters fly from your fingertips! …then, about 50 pages down the line, it all peters out. The motivation goes away. Ideas dry up. You’d rather barf than return to that hideous thing. What were you thinking? Your work in progress gets deleted, or shoved aside for…

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Friends and Foes: Stay Track Of Who’s Who With Relationship Tracking

March 9, 2015 Ellis Morning Comments 0 Comment

All right! Let’s assume you’re plotting your characters for a full-length novel. You’ve used the character sheet to form a baseline idea of where everyone comes from and what they’re capable of. You’ve plotted out character arcs to figure out how the story’s plot is going to affect each character, and how they’ll react in turn. As you might realize while arc-plotting, these characters don’t exist inside glass bubbles, totally separate from other characters. They (gasp!) interact with one another…

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The Arc: Character Change Tracking

March 2, 2015 Ellis Morning Comments 0 Comment

(Image credit: Imagebase.net) When you create a character, you start with a collection of attributes. Then a story happens- and if it’s a complicated story, it affects the character. Their attributes change, for better or worse. Actually, there are two types of character change you may track as a writer, depending on how much upfront planning you like to do. There’s the anticipated character arc you plot out before getting started, and then there are the unanticipated changes that come…

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Writers Use Character Sheets, Too: Tracking The Present State

February 23, 2015 Ellis Morning Comments 0 Comment

You may need a few… hundred of these… Anyone familiar with pen-and-paper roleplaying games (RPGs) has spent a few hours, and plowed through a few packs of cookies and soda, to set up character sheets. Character sheets define the starting state of a character, and allow a player to track how that state changes throughout the roleplaying campaign. Most character sheets are daunting to the first-time player, because there’s so much to track. What does the character look like? What…

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