I just found this article suggesting that for Rats, a social animal, helping a nest mate is more important than a slab of chocolate.  I’m sure Rat owners have known this for a long time that rules of the jungle don’t always apply.

Read the study and see the pictures here

Normally, this is a bad idea but there are times when the writer has no choice.  A story will call out for the marriage of arts and words.  It simply must be done.

There are two ways to bridge the gaps of your un artisty ways, learn how to draw or work with an artist.

I tried really hard to learn how to draw.  I minored in studio art in college.  I got to the point where I was at the edge of being decent at figure drawing, but I never enjoyed the process of making art. There was never a time where I started to creaeart for myself and not for a class.

Despite my failure to establish a Ménage à trois between my hand, the pencil and the paper, I still wanted to create a comic.

That left option number two.  Work with an Artist.

Over the course of Walking the Lethe’s lifetime I’ve worked with four different artists on Walking the Lethe, two of them have worked on the main story line, one has done a short story and another worked on a few concept designs before we parted ways.

Overall I’ve had a real easy time of it compared to many who have taken this route.  Everyone I’ve worked with has been very professional and I’ve never been left in the lurch.

Over the next couple weeks I want to share my process and experiences with you by tackling the following topics (and perhaps more):

• How you find a reliable partner to work with.
• How you maintain a healthy working relationship with someone who you probably have never met before.
• I’ll highlight the danger signs for communication break down and general dodgyness.
• Setting healthy expectations.

2.  Animals Being Dicks  Every thing from bowling for children with goats to baby panda tossing.

3.  We are the 99 Percent- inflicts depression on 99 out of a hundred people

4. ArmorGames- Two words: KINGDOM RUSH

5. Instructables- Because you must have your own flamethrower

6. Reddit/science- Find out what those wacky science guys have discovered/blown up this week!

7. Do an archive dive on a webcomic that has been in existence for over five years!

What?  Your still here?  After all that?  Okay okay let me find something else.  Oh I know!

8. Concept Art dot Org -  The Pretty!

9. Dubstep dance videos O.O

10. Alright.  You’re still here?  Thats it.  I’m bringing out the ultimate timesink that I personally lost a year or two worth of free (and not so free) time to.  WoW

Kuler

This addicting site lets you browse and create color palettes. I have to confess I learned more about analogous and complimentary colors here than I ever did from a textbook. If you make an account, you can share your palettes too.

Chromatron

I lost many hours of my life to this game during college and still wasn’t able to complete every puzzle. Looks like they’ve since made more levels to ruin my life. Manipulate colored lasers with mirrors and lenses to hit targets. A basic understanding of additive color theory is helpful:

red + green = yellow
green + blue = cyan
blue + red = magenta
red + green + blue = white

Color Theory

This short platform game has you hitting colored switches to progress through levels. There are also spikes and enemies to dodge and gravity reversers. Trial and error can get you through pretty well but again, knowing color theory helps.

Kaleidosketch

Here’s the obligatory mention of my husband’s awesome drawing tool. Any scribble is repeated to make invigorating, mandala-like images. The color tools are pretty robust for a javascript app and I recommend playing with them to make your image unique.

FM 100 Hue Test

I like to challenge myself with this test every couple years. Rearrange colors so they make a smooth transition from one end to the other. It’s pretty difficult for me, I’ve never gotten a perfect score.

If you have a favorite color site or game that I missed, please share in the comments!

What writers do, or at least strive to do, is take those mundane ideas, and make them magnificent. It’s not the size of the idea, it’s how you use it, and I’m here to show you how.

This month, I’m going to talk a bit about my National Novel Writing Month novel and where I got the idea for that: A single drawing.

Around these parts I’m pretty much known as just a writer, but did you know I used to draw too? My first webcomic, Jimmy and the Hammer, I drew it myself. Now, seeing as I had almost no art experience before I started, I would frequently do warm-up drawings and other practice work. Most of it was rubbish. But one day, I drew this:

(Click the image for the full version, may be NSFW, but pretty PG-13)

It was, at the time, the best thing I had ever drawn. And I had no idea who she was.

She was a character of contradictions. There was a childlike innocence in her eyes, a sense of wonder. At the same time, she’s wearing a VERY short skirt and flashing her underwear for the world to see. And why was she outside?

There was a story here. I just had to figure it out. I started to ask questions about the character, and the answers started to flesh out the story.

Why was she out in the woods, looking at the night sky? It had to hold some special significance. Maybe when she was younger, she would go camping with her dad and they would stare at the stars together. Good, but not quite there. What if her father had died, and she fondly remembers those camping trips; the night sky being symbolic to her of the life she lost.

Now, for the other half of her personality. Why is she wearing that? Remembering back to my high school days, the only people who dressed remotely like that were the popular class. And thinking back to my high school experience, the typical popular girl was vapid, shallow, and not super nice. Not exactly a likeable protagonist. So what we needed was an atypical popular girl.

What if, she started the school year as a quiet, nerdy type. Kindhearted, but shy. By circumstance, she spends some time with the popular girls, and starts to become friends with them. As she spends more time with them, she constantly has to make choices between alienating her new friends or doing what she feels is right. A proverbial battle for her soul. Now THAT could be interesting.

So now, we have the barebones of a character, and with it, the barebones of a story. Since the plot is basically “How Aubrey became that girl in the picture I drew”, it’s going to be VERY character driven. And since it’s character driven, defining the character can give you a huge headstart on the plot.

But you need more than just a series of thing happening (a plot). You need a story. There needs to be a REASON these things are happening, a story you are trying to tell. You need a theme. So what would my theme be? I decided (again, going back to the character designs) that the theme would be “actions have consequences” The theme drives the central conflict, and based on theme alone, you can get a pretty strong barebones story outline going

• She starts at the school, ostensibly a “good person”
• She makes some mistakes, because it’s easier than doing the right thing, hurting those she cares about in the process
• After a series of smaller mistakes, she makes one, really big mistake, sees how much she’s hurt those she cares about. She hits bottom and swears to change
• Redemption?

And then, with an idea of character and plot, you just start to flesh that out into a story.

I’m already going long, so I’ll try to keep this brief, but I want to touch on one more thing while I’m giving the full overview here – personal experience, and how it can influence character decisions and tone.

When I was in high school, I was kind of a nerd. I still am! But if you watch TV or movies, you get a very clear view of what high school life is for nerds – a constant stream of being bullied by the popular kids. Nothing but namecalling, wedgies and swirlies. Life is pretty miserable for nerds in TV and movies. I’m not saying that never happens, it does, and it’s a very real problem. But it never happened to me. My high school experience was one of ignored exclusion. I basically blended into the background, and the popular kids and bullied paid me no attention as though I wasn’t even there. Now, I’m not looking for pity, my past shaped me into who I am today, but it happened.

I decided here that when I was writing this story I would try to match the tone more closely to my high school experience. Rather than exploiting stereotypes and focusing on big, traumatic experiences like bullying, I’d focus more on the day to day despair of being ignored. A much lower-key personal tone, not so much about big events that change your life, but on how life is affected by the smaller events that happen to all of us. And matching that tone, there probably won’t be some big event causing a “happy ending”.

Wow! That sounded depressing. It’s not as depressing as I described, I promise, but there is a definite tone to the piece that was inspired by my high school experiences.

Another place personal experience comes into play is when you are making character decisions. Remember how I decided that Aubrey had gone backpacking with her dad when she was younger? That’s influenced by the fact that I went backpacking with my dad when I was younger (though my dad is very much alive).

Is my experience backpacking interesting on its own? Nope. Incredibly boring. But you can use that experience as a jumping off point to write something interesting. A story about a girl who had a very special relationship with her dad that was ripped away, that’s the story, it’s just told through my experience.

You’ll notice almost all of Stephen King’s stories take place in and around Coastal Maine, and many of them feature Writers as main characters. That being said, I doubt that he’s ever lived on a cursed Indian burial ground or had blood dumped on him at the prom. You take what you know, and use it to tell a story about something else. You take the mundane and put a twist on it.

I’m more than a thousand words deep at this point so I’ll wrap it up, even though I barely skimmed some of the things I wanted to talk about. I’ll probably go into more detail on them in future posts. But here’s what I want you to take away from this: I’ve laid out here a pretty solid framework for a story: Character, theme, tone, and plot. And where did I get all of these ideas?

• A picture
• My boring life

It’s all about elaborating on your ideas, not having great ones. Seriously, if I can make a story out of nothing more than a picture and life experience, anybody can make a story out of anything.

This is how I learned to colors are relative. For example royal blue can feel bright and vivid or it can feel dull and tired depending on what’s next to it. The key to building effective color palettes is to pay attention to how all your colors are interacting. Most of the time I rely on plain, old intuition to decide on colors but when I’m stumped there are two techniques I use to jump start the process.

One Crayon Short of a Rainbow

This trick works really well when there is one color I know I don’t want to use. For example, if I’m designing a warm, homecoming scene I may not want any blue since it’s a cold color. Starting with every other color I change the lightness and darkness of the some of the hues, maybe make two lighter and two darker. Then I blend some of them into each other a bit so they look more unified.

When in Doubt, Gray it Out

I turn to this technique when I have one or more colors in a palette that aren’t working well with the rest. For example, I want to tweak this palette to look good on a rainy street but the brown and green are too warm and bright. They’re competing with the magenta. Mixing neutral grays into them to quiets them down and helps the colors that are working take center stage. Again as a last step I mix some of the colors into each other for a bit more harmony.

I hope from these quick sketches you can see how easy it is to come up with colors that work together. Whether using digital painting tools or crayons, mixing and trying things out are the best ways to find your picture’s perfect palette.

I created a video game that you play BY WRITING.

It’s called RPG Write!, and it’s pretty straightforward.
You type in a box, and it keeps track of how much time you spend writing and how many words you write and assigns you XP accordingly. Get enough XP and you level up!

Now, that experience we’ve all had where you play “just a little bit more, until I level”, can be used when WRITING, instead of to avoid writing!

It’s a little barebones at the moment, but I’ve got a lot more features planned, including: goalsetting, profiles and friendslists, editing, achievements, social network sharing, leaderboards, and much more!

Check it out at rpgwrite.com!

This one is pretty great because at some point you’ll certainly run out of character ideas you’ve been wanting to do and be left with no course of action but to throw down some shapes on a page and try to make something new out of them. I’d recommend at least taking a stab at it if you’re in to design and have the time.

Its an impossible question to answer. The question-asker is looking for something out of the ordinary, some magic vault of ideas that writers have access to, that they can pluck ideas from fully formed and just write them down into a story.

Sadly, there is no idea-vault. So where do ideas come from? Writers get their ideas the same place everyone gets ideas: experience, thoughts, conversations, other stories, dreams, and those are just a few.

But the other piece of that question, “Where do you get your ideas?” is an unspoken admiration of your ideas. The asker is essentially saying “I think your stories are creative and want to have good creative ideas like you.” But since everyone has the same mundane ideas, what makes the writer’s ideas different?

A writer takes those mundane ideas and forms them into story elements. It’s not the idea itself that has any inherent value, it’s what the writer does with it that makes it special. And I’m going to attempt to peel back the curtain on this “magic” process and give you examples of how this is done.

Idea: I forgot my cell phone.

Today at lunch, I realized that I had forgotten my cell phone. It was sitting on my desk back at the office on the charger.

I know what you’re thinking: “THAT IS AN AWESOME STORY WHY IS THERE NOT A MOVIE OF IT WITH A 100 MILLION DOLLAR BUDGET.”

No? Actually, I bet you’re thinking: “That is an incredibly mundane event that could happen to anybody and is not interesting at all.”

Well, it worried me, because I have, in the past, had the bad luck of having my car break down during the 1% of my life when I don’t have a cell phone on me. Since then, every time I realize I forgot my phone (or even just forgot to charge it), I get nervous that my car will break down again, or worse, I will get in an accident. Not having a phone is scary!

Evan, enough about you – what does this have to do with building a story? Well, think of pretty much any horror move from the last 15 years. There’s always one throwaway line about how cell phones don’t work because there’s “no signal” to explain why the characters can’t just call for help. Seriously:

Inability to call for help is more than just a plot hole that needs to be plugged with a line of dialogue – it’s the crux of these people’s problems. So why gloss over it? Address it!

It’s like watching a tightrope walker. Watching a dude walk on a rope isn’t tense, Watching a guy walk on a tightrope 60 feet in the air IS tense, especially if the announcer points out that there is no net – failure means death. The cell phone is a safety net – and by pointing out early that the characters don’t have it well before they need it, it’s much scarier.

How do we apply this? Have a character on her way to a camping trip realize that she forgot to pack her cell phone, but have her friends tell her its no big deal, she won’t need it anyway. Foreshadowing! Or have a group of businessmen go on a trip somewhere but make a pact to not bring any laptops or smartphones so business cannot bother them while they are away. Cut off – by their own design! Or have a kid on the first night of a camping trip spend all night playing Angry Birds until the battery dies and the phone is unusable.

By setting it up early, tension slowly builds until they do finally attempt to call out and realize they can’t. Sure, cell phones on their own aren’t the scariest plot point, but any additional tension in a genre that thrives on it is definitely a good thing.

So don’t wait until the helpless victim tries to make a call – let the viewers/readers know right away that they are on their own.

And see my examples up there? None of them are fully formed plots, but any one of them could be the basis of one. This idea didn’t come from the magic idea vault – it came from me forgetting my phone like an idiot. Ideas are everywhere. It is what you do with them that matters.

And since everyone else seems to be doing themed columns, check back next month for another “Where Do Ideas Come From”!