Nyxie's Quick List of Writing Resources

Quick list of links to some specific writing tips and resources I've put together over the years.

Screen To Pen

Over the years, I've collected dozens upon dozens of YouTube videos analyzing story-telling elements in movies, television, and video games (as well as some writing videos as well).

To be clear, I do not think a writer can learn how to write purely from audiovisual media. But, I do think a lot of story-telling principles are applicable across a variety of story-telling mediums. I've collected videos on:

  • Theme and Story (subtopic: Thematic Character Design)

  • Showing Over Telling (subtopics: Action and Combat Scenes, Weight of Cinema's Case Study: Lord of the Rings, "What Not To Do" Case Study: The Last Airbender film)

  • Character (subtopics: Empathizing With Characters, Character Development, Weight of Cinema's Case Study: Avatar)

  • Plot and Craft (subtopics: Writing Craft and Plot Tools, Plot Structure, Sagging Middle and Pacing, Intertextuality and Adaptation, Twists and Subversions, Why the Hobbit Sucks Case Study)

  • Setting and Worldbuilding (subtopics: Magic Systems, Exposition, MCU as a Worldbuilding Case Study)

  • Starting Your Story (subtopics: Character Introduction, Starting Your Story)

  • Developing Antagonists (subtopics: How Your Antagonist Relates to Your Protagonist)

Some Prose Tips

Body Language Outline

When I feel like a scene is too "script like" (just characters talking, not doing anything), I outline or try to rewrite the entire scene using absolutely no dialogue whatsoever. How much of the story can I still convey using nothing but body language and environmental details? Then I combine the two versions of the scene back together. Below is both my brief explanation of the process, as well as an example of the first scene I used this process in.

Quick Details Tool

I'm very much a dialogue and action person, so I tended to have very sparse settings and descriptions. My way of combatting that is to figure out those 15 details my character was experiencing in a scene, and try to incorporate as many as possible into my writing.

  • 5 Things Your Character Can See

  • 4 Things Your Character Can Hear

  • 3 Things Your Character Can Feel

  • 2 Things Your Character Can Smell

  • 1 Thing Your Character Can Taste

Granted, not all of them can be incorporated (i.e. if my characters aren't eating something, they'll generally not be tasting anything). But when I use it, it has had a marked improvement on my writing.

Creating Character Emotions

This is currently more of a placeholder. I found the book Creating Character Emotions by Ann Hood to be very helpful. I took notes and still refer to them. That said, my notes are by hand. I keep meaning to type them up (and who knows, maybe one day I actually will). In the mean time, here's a PDF of photographs of my actual notes:

Book Rec: Show, Don't Tell

There are a lot of books about writing out there. I recommend this one because:

  • It's a short, fast read.

  • The examples used in the book made it very easy to understand, and to identify the weak spots in my own writing.

  • The exercises were easy to utilize on the spot, so I often just used them on whatever WIP I was working on at the time.

  • The author's explanations are very accessible.

  • Most of all, the e-book is free or as cheap as possible on multiple platforms, as well as pretty widely available in libraries with e-book services.

Because the book was so cheap, it's been pirated many times and it's pretty easy to find PDFs or other ebooks of it. Out of respect for the author who has helped me so much, though, I'm linking only to their website with the official links to get the book:

Plot Structure Analysis from Lessons From The Screenplay

At a point when I struggled with the plot for a story of mine, I ended up intensely watching videos from YouTuber Lessons From the Screenplay related to plot structure. Obviously, these are analyzing the plots of films, but understanding and internalizing the principles behind these movies' plot structures helped me come up with a better plot for my actual book. This is also a PDF of handwritten notes, and my not be easy to read.

Writing Tag On Tumblr

Just my Tumblr tag for posts about writing, or about some story-telling convention which I found helpful to my own writing. Very disorganized, though.