I’m not officially on social media, but I do peek at non-civilization-destroying venues from time to time. I see a lot of writer games, of which WordWeavers seems the most fun. Per the official Google Doc:
WordWeavers is a writing game on Mastodon created by Branwen OShea and Alina Leonova. The hosts post daily questions for each month.
Start anytime, answer any questions you want, skip as many as you feel like. Use the hashtag, talk to other writers and have fun!
The only rules: be respectful to others and use CWs (content warnings) for posts that might be triggering.
Everyone is welcome to participate 🧡
I can’t participate there, so I’m going to participate here!
Have you ever written for other age groups?
My soulless corporate writing gig has a target audience of 8- to 10-year-olds, and the “life-changing” publishing experience that made me say “fuck it, I quit” was for teens.
How do you settle on character appearances?
1. Do I vibe with cover art that depicts a person with physical characteristics that are beyond my image manipulation skills to alter? That’s what they look like.
2. Practicality. Does the character need certain physical characteristics to perform their role?
3. Avoidance of samey-same. I’m not writing a monoculture, so there shouldn’t be a “default.” What established characters are in the scene, and is there any reason (refer back to “practicality”) a newly introduced character should have any physical similarity?
With the exception of cover art, I can’t visualize any of this (hi, aphantasia), so if the form isn’t crucial to the function, physical description is to appease my editor and readers.
How often do your characters think of death?
Constantly? Danger abounds: predatory animals, crumbling infrastructure, dead-or-alive bounties. Many threats have to be killed in order for the MCs to survive. There’s a huge, no-good-choices decision about death in the middle. Hero is grieving his mother.
Do your MCs have comfort objects they carried as a child/now?
Heroine often has a copy of a book her mother gave her as a child, but she doesn’t keep them because they are a tell.
Hero is currently wearing his father’s coat, and he reluctantly gives Heroine a toy from his childhood that reminds of him of his mother.
How would your MC handle finding a spider in their home?
Tell any companions present, “For every spider you see, there are a hundred you don’t. Watching. Scheming.”
Beyond that, depends on the spider. Poisonous? That’s a tool in her line of work. Audibly galloping across the walls? That’s gotta go because it will make her hypervigilance twitchy. Quietly catching bugs out of her way? Leave ’em be.
Are you comfortable writing from the POV of a child?
The aforementioned soulless corporate writing gig demands it.
It’s not any different from writing from the POV of an adult that isn’t me, or a cat, or an alien cube. The child isn’t real. The job is not portraying a realistic child but conveying the idea of a child to the reader in a way they are willing to read. Child characters can and should be as extraordinary as any other character worth writing about.
Also, a lot of people have very bad ideas about how simple children are, like they’re dolls for adults to play with and not sentient beings, and those people will say real-world children with personalities are “unrealistic.” Satisfying them means making lumps of child characters, and screw that.
I think that’s the real reason writers kill the parents so often—they were among those who don’t believe children are important enough to have a story, which can’t coexist with telling the kids’ stories. Gotta free the fictional children from the inanimation imposed on them by adults before you can get down to showing real children someone does believe they’re extraordinary.