Posts Tagged ‘characters’

1
Sep

Top Five Ways Raising a Baby Is Different from Creating a Fictional Character

   Posted by: rettstatt    in Uncategorized

Disclaimer: My blog posts may lean a little to the baby side for a few weeks.

5. Cliché. A writer is generally supposed to avoid cliché characters, but raising a baby seems to be a shroud of deliberate rituals. You want to give your detective some sort of quirk (a funny limp, a cute psychiatric anxiety disorder, or even a heart-warming addiction to over-the-counter medication) to make him stand out in the motley crowd of fictional detectives, but your baby you just want to be unabashedly stereotypical–fat and happy.

4. Character Arc. You have at least a vague idea of who your character will become when you start out. She starts out shy yet sassy, but after 250 pages of trials and tribulations, she has become confident and sassy. Your babies, you can only toss wild guesses as to who they will become.

3. Conflict. Conflict is drama, they say. You want your characters to face painful obstacles. You want them to suffer, so their triumphs will taste all the sweeter. Your babies, you want their lives to be smooth as a gosling’s butt.

2. Poop. Fictional characters don’t poop, usually. Not on the page. There are some notable exceptions, but for the most part you don’t get into that part of your characters’ lives. It turns out that babies, on the other hand, are about very little else.

1. Kill your babies, they say about writing. But please, not literally.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

1 Comment
23
Sep

my world of warcraft characters

   Posted by: rettstatt    in Uncategorized

Since I didn’t include these in my last post, here is a tour of my main World of Warcraft characters.

Leafgarrett

Leafgarrett was my first real character (the first one I spent any time on). He’s a Night Elf hunter. The bear (Shawn Cassidy) is his pet. I got him to level 23 and then got bored with the game and canceled my account. Blizzard didn’t delete him, though, and so he’s still there, waiting, stuck forever in Loch Modan at level 23.

Recently (about two months ago) I decided to give World of Warcraft another try. At some point at Star Farm I’m going to be working in some capacity on computer game and console game stories, and so I was determined to get at least one character to 60 and to start my own guild. I mean, I can’t say I understand this game world until I’ve seen how the upper half lives. So I created Monkifer.

Monkifer

Monkifer is a human Warlock. He joined a samurai-themed guild called the Shogunate, which suits my samurai-loving sensibilities. And the server (each World of Warcraft server is essentially a separate copy of the world) was focused equally on role play and player-versus-player, so I was able to see both in action. I soon got tired of samurai role play, though it was fun to see people altering their language into some stilted mishmash of Kurosawa film subtitles and Elizabethan English. So I recently moved Monkifer to a new server.

Monkbane
Monkbane is my most recent creation. He’s an undead Mage, and even at his low level, he’s already a proficient healer and pretty decent in mining and engineering (an awful fisherman, though). He’s a member of We No, though he’s not tough enough yet to participate in any of the big guild activities. But as of yesterday, he can make one heck of a Heavy Woolen Bandage, which should help out in even the most epic of scrapes.

More later on the adventures of Monkbane. And my perspective on the world of World of Warcraft.

Tags: , ,

32 Comments
Back to top