The Writer's Lab

Most forums and other online communities allow you to upload an image to your profile, and for most role-players these images give visual representation of their characters. The problem is, there is usually fairly tight size requirements on these avatars or portraits, both in file size and physical size.

If your image is too big physically (as in number of pixels wide or high), one quick solution to resize that image is My-image-Size. My-image-Size is a simple, straight forward, single-page site that lets you either upload an image or link to one already online and resize it to the width you need. It keeps the overall proportions, so if the original was 300pixels by 200pixels and you set the resize to 150pixels wide, it ends up 100pixels high.

Resizing couldn’t be easier, after linking to your local file or entering the web url of the image just drag the slider bar or type the actual number in the text box provided and click the Go >> button. Your image is uploaded to their system, resized, and a window slides open with your resized image that lets you view and download the finished product.

It uses cookies and a cache or something and will remember your recently resized images, but it does not actually store them. It is a good idea to download them right away, because you can not link to them.

Anyone that writes for any period of time goes through moments of ‘writer’s-block’. A time when you just can not seem to find the motivation or inspiration to come up with anything worth while. That creative spark can be fleeting at times, but here’s an idea on how to jump-start it.

For now, forget everything you know about how to structure a story. Forget that a plot needs a beginning, middle and end. Forget that description should be interwoven with narrative. Forget that dialogue should be realistic, not real. Here’s a way to set the creative storyteller in you free.

This, according to Jennifer Jensen of suite101.com is the first step to a Freewriting exercise that will help your character almost develop itself, which can help provide that motivation needed to get back in there and work on your latest storyline, or maybe even help you develop whole new characters.

Jennifer goes on to describe some basic freewriting exercises you can do, and even suggests getting away from the computer to do so.

Freewriting consists of writing without stopping: no editing, no re-reading, nothing. You may set some guidelines, but only within the above definition. Freewriting in longhand makes it easier to resist editing, and most writers will admit that they write differently in longhand versus on the computer.

One of the goals in freewriting is to let your characters evolve through their ‘voices’, letting them decide the directions things take as you write. As you continue to freewrite, a story will come out on it’s own. These stories that develop may never be seen by anyone but yourself, but they can be great material in the backstory of your characters, or provide material for ideas that can be refined at a later time. The main point to remember at the time is to just keep writing, and never edit.

Let Characters Reveal Themselves [suite101.com]

A little bit ago we posted about Playing the good, bad-guy, now here’s another take on the venerable villian type. The folks over at io9 take a look at the upcoming seson 3 of Heros, which is going to focus on the villians, and they had a couple interesting takes on how their bad-guys are getting rather sucky…

Over-exposure. We’ve seen way, way too much of Bob the Company stooge on Heroes. But there are even worse examples. The Master on classic Doctor Who comes to mind: He appeared in one story and was awesome. So why not have him appear in every story after that? Always hatching one daft scheme after another, always not quite managing to kill the Doctor. And then in the 1980s, the show had Anthony Ainley on contract to play the Master twice a year, like clockwork.

and…

Draggy, saggy storylines. Sylar has many powers, but the power to hold our attention while he seduces the inky-eye woman isn’t one of them. It took him like twenty hours to get to first base with her.

Check out the rest of their thoughts with the jump below.

How To Create The Most Boring Villains In The Universe [io9]

The player behind LdyBelial has put together a very good posting on the basics building a story, along with some tips on fleshing out a character. A couple of the points are noted below, see the link for the complete write up.

1:
The most interesting characters tend to have a firm concept behind them.

We don’t need to know everything about our character/s to play them; but some basics won’t hurt. (See “Flushing Out Character/s” below for details.)

Characters with some kind of motivation are easier to play; without it they have no direction, no drive, no ambitions. Hence the player has left themselves little to nothing to play off of.

2:
Characters should grow and evolve just like real people.

Storyline/s can offer growth for the character/s involved. Conflict and resolution are key ingredients in creating venues for character/s growth.

Playing off character weaknesses or flaws allows them a chance towards resolution of the same or, if a player wishes otherwise, creation of new ones. Adding such nuances to the stories also adds depth, not only for the character(s) but to the stories as well.

In free form role-play there are no points assigned, no levels to move up, the only way our character/s advance is if we create it for them. Challenging storylines are great for accomplishing character growth and advancement. The meat of the story confronts the character/s in ways that allow them to overcome their own fears, opening the character/s to change and/or evolve. So, when designing stories, don’t forget to create opportunities for growth.

3:
Be careful not to over structure the stories. If a sl is so rigorously structured down to what scenes are required to advance the story, then one may find their sl stalling quite frequently. And any IC interactions may derail the original concepts. Leave sls open for random encounters, let others help and inspire in the telling of character/s stories. 

Building a Story [Dragon’s Mark]

With the tremendous growth of IMs, email and even text messaging, written communication has become decidedly more casual the last few years. Sometimes it can help all of us to go back to the basics, sort of in the say way professional baseball players may spend time on ’simple things’ like fielding grounders or catching pop-flys.

So, to that end, here are a few articles from our friends at Daily Writing Tips that do just that;

English Grammar 101: Sentences, Clauses, and Phrases
Punctuation Errors: The Comma Splice
Introducing the Comma
Five Frequently Misused Verbs
Simple Sentences, Period.

Here’s another interesting post from Eve over at the Garden of Eden.

Conflict is the key to making roleplay fun, engaging, exciting, interesting, and real. This is true no matter what your playstyle is. And villains, and the conflict they inspire, are necessary for roleplaying.

She goes on to expand on three points she feels are key to developing and playing/writing a good villain type character;

• The interest and time to build a three-dimensional “dark” character.
• Players of villains need the ability to separate In Character and Out of Character.
• The commitment and understanding to avoid god-moding and steam-rolling.

The Necessity of Villany [Live in the Garden of Eden]

Free Form Role-Play is still alive and well, and downright thriving in the world of online forums. With the easy ability for just about anyone to host their own phpBB set up, or join a site like freewebs, play-by-post and the creative writing side of FFRP may actually be bigger than ever.

Eve, the player behind Alysia Skye on Dragon’s Mark and other sites has a fairly new blog, Life in the Garden of Eden where she gives her take on a few different things, including FFRP. She recently made a posting on a topic that I think most folks just don’t bother to think about, forum signature.

The rest of the roleplaying intarwebs probably don’t think that edgy bit of lyric, quote rendered in rainbow-glow colors, or over-sized photoshopped JPG of a popular actor/actress is quite as cool as you do.

Particularly not once they’ve seen it fifty times.

Her basic tips include watching the size, and keeping it simple.

Play By Post Pet Peeves - Signatures [Garden of Eden]

Education Portal, a web portal about degree programs, career information, school reviews, and education news has a list of 10 online university programs offering free writing courses.

Whether you are a current writer or looking to break into the craft, formal writing courses can help you hone your skills. If you don’t have the money or the time for a campus-based course, there are plenty of universities that offer free writing courses online.

Some of these are places you’ve probably never heard of, such as E-Zine University and Wikiversity, but there are also free course opportunities from MIT and Purdue.

10 Universities Offering Free Writing Courses Online [Education Portal via Life Hacker]

In many ways, writing various scenes based on your role-playing character can be more like writing a short story than a novel.  And writing effective short stories takes a different approach than writing a novel.

Leo Babauta has a new blog, Write to Done, and recently posted an article about writing an effective start to a short story;

One of my favorite things to read is a good short story. A great one is perfection: you can read it in one sitting, and it achieves its effect in a short amount of time and words.

And the best short story grabs you immediately, yanks you like the a gamer snatching a fresh Nintendo Wii as soon as it hits the shelves.

From there Leo goes on to give about a dozen tips to help write an effective short story.

Short Stories: The Art of the Start [Write to Done]

Do you need a way to host a chat so you can get together with others? Maybe you have a group of role-players that want to play out some scenes in a live rp session. Or maybe you want to talk about how to approach issues in an on-going storyline, or just BS and brainstorm.

Sure, there are chat options with most instant messenger clients such as AIM and Yahoo! And there are even programs like Pidgin that let you access multiple accounts at the same time, but it can still be tough to get everyone on the same page. Not everyone has the ability to set up their own FlashChat (our current favorite private hosted chat program), and most the javascript or php based chats are just… well… not worth the effort.

Enter ChatMaker.net - just go to the site, enter a room name and click GO. Then, email or IM the link to the page to your friends and they can come join you. You can change your ‘nick’ once you enter to be what you want, use the /me action command, and even do limited formatting with HTML tags. All in all, it’s a simple, but pretty decent set up. You can even break it out as a separate pop-up window if you want, or leave it in the main browser.

A few things to be aware of (I’ll leave it up to you to decide how they rank as disadvantages or advantages), the rooms are NOT private, though I’ve heard they are working on that. So if you create a common room name, someone could wander in on your conversations. Also, it does seem to hold a back-log of the conversation, even after the room has emptied. Someone could come in that same room name and see what was discussed. I haven’t had a chance to test how long and how much it saves. And since you don’t need to register, and instead can change your nickname at any time, it could get confusing if two people want to use the same name.

But overall, for an easy to use, always there when you need it chat option, this is a site worth bookmarking.

[chatmaker.net]