note: the pieces of art i’m looking at here are all books/television shows i consumed for the purpose of research. interestingly, i’ve found that seeing how a story has been formed (characters, world-building, plot, setting) is much easier to wrap my head around in a TV show rather than a novel.

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1/19/25

• from watching ONE PIECE (live action)
  • you have to hook your reader through an interesting character. you can hook your reader through the following ways
    • an able character. this means they’re competent at something and you, as the viewer can rely on them to win at this particular thing. some examples are: Harry Potter at Quidditch, Violet Baudelaire at being scrappy and creating machines out of nothing, and Zoro at sword-fighting. no matter what events unravel in the book and no matter what unfamiliar circumstance your character is placed in, they will always be good at this one thing which may help them out of a tight spot.
    • characters must be competent — not too competent that they escape the struggles of their environment easily, but not too incompetent that it’s impossible for them to succeed. there is a very fine line. (recommendation: Save the Cat! Writes a Novel – more on this)
• from watching A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS (live action) *current
  • a character doesn’t have to be likable for you to be hooked to their story. even if you don’t like a character (perhaps an antagonist), something about them (their story, their ways/tendencies) has you hooked. for instance, although we don’t like the antagonist Count Olaf who continues to hunt the Baudelaire children so he can steal their fortune, there is something about his persistence, nastiness and strange idiocy to rat himself out that appeals to the viewer. he also manages to escape from the clutches of justice every single time, which builds frustration in the viewer and makes us want to know what happens next.
  • it is often helpful to have a character fighting two antagonists at the same time. in other words, a character should be fighting an antagonist right in front of their face, while also fighting a bigger antagonist they can’t see that looms and threatens the stability of the entire structure of the book. an example of this would be: Harry, Ron and Hermione trying to uncover Snape’s plot (smaller antagonist), but also having to deal with the bigger antagonist, Voldemort, who goes unseen throughout most of THE SORCERER’S STONE.
    • another way to put this is a character should fight two plots at the same time, one smaller aggravating plot and a larger plot. the two plots may be connected in that the smaller one comes from the larger one. an example of this would be in A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS where the Baudelaire siblings have to fight Count Olaf (antagonist 1/smaller plot) but are dealing with solving the mystery of the secret organization that their parents were a part of (antagonist 2/bigger plot).
  • on world-building: learn the difference between soft world-building and hard world-building. ASOUE seems to be soft world-building. the series focuses more on character development rather than the world that they’re living in. the mood, atmosphere and tone is arguably one of snicket’s greatest achievements of the series, which is another quality of soft world-building.
  •  another tip for (soft) world-building: the world should serve your characters, meaning it should challenge your characters specifically. instead of including random aspects of your world, think of how a certain aspect of your world can make your character’s life more of a living hell. on the other hand, part of what makes strong (soft) world-building is that randomness: leaving gaps in your world for your reader to draw their own inferences so you don’t spell everything out. this is what gives soft world-building its quality of mystery.
  • aim to write for children. i struggled with creativity for so long because i was trying to write for adults. whether your genre is for young adults, new adults, or adults, you’ll break so many creative barriers if you stopped trying to write beautiful, complex sentences and inserting complicated world-building aspects and just started following what’s most entertaining for the story. children can be easily entertained by fantasy. to write for new or young adults is to be already faced with an audience who has read dozens, if not hundreds of books with complicated writing and settings. you’ll always fail if you try to impress adults— it is very rare to impress adukts because we’ve seen so much of it done before. write simply for children at first, then revise with a master’s eye.
  • diversify your characters. this means to diversify their mannerisms, their characteristics, their quirks. this is what’s truly fascinating about ASOUE. every time the Baudelaires enter a new town and have to deal with a new cast of characters, they end up being nothing like the ones Violet, Sunny and Klaus left behind in the previous one. not only does every town they enter seem to have its very own personality (i.e. the Ersatz Elevator, everything being “out” or “in” – how clever is that to make everyone obsessed with those rules?), but also the very set of characters we’re introduced to are literally never the same. in any way. they talk differently, one is obsessed with themselves, one is afraid of everything, one’s life work is herpetology, one is horribly inept at playing the violin etc… so, diversify your characters’ personalities. to have your entire cast of characters sound like they were all written by one person is boring, even if that’s the truth.
  • your main character’s world is one world out of eight billion worlds (or however many people reside on your planet). in other words, your character can be wrong about things they think they know. your character can be the main character of this story, but not the main character of the whole story. in ASOUE, Violet, Sunny and Klaus think VFD is a noble secret organization without having ever having access to all the facts. they are the main characters of the story, but what they know is only a fraction of what Count Olaf knew, and only a fraction of what Kit or Jacques or Gustav knew. other characters who might not get as much screen time know more than your characters do because they were present during the before. sometimes placing your characters in the after (after the important event has gone down) is useful to form them into unreliable narrators so they can mislead the viewers too.
• from reading BOTCHAN by Natsume soseki (novel)
  • even after some time has passed where the character should have learned their lesson, your character should sometimes fall back into old patterns and receive harsh consequences to show they have still not learned their life lesson (as every character should have that will fix their flaw). in the case of BOTCHAN, even though he’d been teaching in the countryside for several months and should have learned how to deal with the sneaky ways of the other professors, in the end he still has his burst of anger, clinging to his morals and righteousness even to his own detriment.

 

adding more as i discover them.