As I mentioned in my last post, I recently did a huge website overhaul to make sure my blog was appropriate for a fancy author sort of person. Also, since a lot of you seem to like my blog post about author business card designs, it seems that sharing a few tips from my research here might be helpful. There are three main elements to any web design — hosting, the design itself (the way it looks), and the content (what’s on it + the way it’s organized). I’m going to address them all below, and give you some ideas...
Continuing on in my (somewhat infrequent) story graphics series, let’s talk about one of my favorite things to make: Theme collages! These can be a fabulous way to visually brainstorm your project from all angles (character, setting, conflict, you name it). I particularly love to make collages for my fantasy stories, because there are so many pretty pictures to choose from. For maximum brainstorming effectiveness, I recommend putting on your story playlist (or a playlist of fitting music), getting a cup of tea, and snuggling down to put all this together. The music in particular really helps! Full credit where...
I’m very visually oriented, if you haven’t guessed from the graphics series that appears periodically on this blog. I brainstorm and process stories best through tactile exercises. This is one reason my character sheets are a little bit ridiculous, but also very thorough. My friend and partner in crime, Annie, is much the same way — and at any given time you should assume that these blog entries were created by our hive mind because we steal each others’ stuff constantly. Anyway. Today I’m going to walk you through making your own character sheet! What’s a character sheet? It’s all the...
I was recently telling someone I’ve been novel-mentoring about creating graphics, and how it can be a great way to break writer’s block. She was like, “Huh?” And I was like, “Oh, I guess this isn’t the most obvious.” So, we already talked about visualizing characters with photo collages. Today we’re going to talk about assembling our casts. This used to be something I just did for fun, but it’s become a necessary part of my drafting process. In fact, for Eleventh Trade I had to stop writing and take a day just to pull together my cast. Making a cast...
Story graphics are one of my favorite parts of productive procrastinating, and one of my favorite types of story graphics is creating character concepts. I got this idea from my sister, Laura Hollingsworth, who uses it sometimes to brainstorm ideas for her webcomic, The Silver Eye. Though I’ll be using Photoshop for this tutorial, you can really use any photo editing program that lets you adjust layers and occupancy. (GIMP is a good, free alternative to Photoshop!) Step 1: Find a Base Image Find an image that basically looks like your character. This image will be at the base of your...
I’ve just published a post over on The Great Novelling Adventure about creating influence maps for your creative writing. I thought I’d take the maps I made for myself and expound on them here, in case anyone is curious. No story (or writer) is created in a vacuum. Everyone has threads connecting their creation to the wider world. Having other forces influence you doesn’t make you unoriginal–in fact, I think the way we interpret the things that influence us is what makes us unique. (more…)
