Oh my--wait, what?

When it comes to writing, there are some facts that are concrete and indisputable.  Namely, the ones you establish.

True, you need logic to establish your facts, but they are still yours.  As stated before, it is your world, your vampires, your elves, your magic.  This includes your gods.

Whatever god or gods you believe in, I don’t care.  It’s none of my business and peace, love, joy, and kindness are something everyone is capable of.  People are wonderful for being wonderful and any loving god would see the goodness in that.

What I’m talking about is how the gods you write act.  You make this world and you can decide the deities.  That means, like your mortals, you get to decide their minds.

When your deities affect the world, some motivation for the reader is needed.  Something high and beyond our comprehension needs to give readers a hint.  Gods that think like us are no less powerful or even divine, they just give readers more hints.  Gods don’t even have to be good; they can be horrible, have their own desires and designs.  They can have no cares whatsoever for mortals.  They can be all powerful weasels.

These are not all possible purely because you use the category fiction.  If you want to write about the great and powerful horse that watches us from above, do it.  It’s your horse.

They can do these because all rules that apply to mortals apply to gods when it comes to the written word: be consistent.

A skeleton eating a cookie has been far more profound than God in Heaven when met by a Vulcan.  

Who is this 'we' anyway?

‘If you can’t write better than Tolstoy, we don’t need you’

For some reason, this was posted and defended as a quote to encourage writing.

For starters, no one should be told they have someone they have to compare themselves to.  They shouldn’t even tell themselves that.  Your work should be judged by your work. You choose who you trust to ask if it’s good, including yourself.  You do not have to be better than Tolstoy or anyone else.

Second, saying ‘we don’t need you’ is never encouraging. We readers and authors do need you.  You change how people see us and make us react to it.  If you’re bad, it makes us more determined to be good.  If you’re good, it makes us more proud.  If you’re awesome, it gives us something to read and be inspired by—but not to measure ourselves against.

If you say things like this, we don’t need you.

A flawed idea

A flaw is considered essential to writing a character.  Justly so.  Everyone talks about how characters are flawed and thus it means they are well-written.

But how does one make a flawed character?  That’s the hard part. 

It is, right?

The problem with this logic, is that it treats a character as if existing in a vacuum.  An author wants to define everything important about a character before applying them to a setting or plot, similar to a child dressing a Barbie before acting out what she does.

The easy solution is to remember at all times that you are writing a story.  A story, very basically, is conflict and consequences.  Without conflict, there is no actual story—or character flaw.  Whatever makes the conflict is your character flaw. 

A flaw can be not being able to cross a room to get water.  A flaw can bee needing to travel, even a short distance, to get water.  A flaw can be not having immunity to poison in the water.  They all define the character; they all keep the character from being perfect; they all are essential to the story; and they are all something the reader can understand.  They are fine flaws.  They can be turned into complexities.

The fact that one can stress about a character flaw being best for them if a flaw itself, though one you can do without.  Over thinking keeps you from the most important part of writing: actually writing.