http://the-writers-lab.com Where Writing and Role Play Meet Fri, 04 Apr 2008 08:56:26 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://the-writers-lab.com/tools/instant-image-resizing/ 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 ... http://the-writers-lab.com/character-development/are-you-suffering-from-writers-block/ 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 ... http://the-writers-lab.com/character-development/keep-your-bad-from-being-just-bad/ 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 ... http://the-writers-lab.com/character-development/story-building-basics/ 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' ... http://the-writers-lab.com/skills/back-to-basics/ 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 ... http://the-writers-lab.com/character-development/playing-the-good-bad-guy/ 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 ... http://the-writers-lab.com/general/size-does-matter/ 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 ... http://the-writers-lab.com/skills/sharpen-your-writing-skills-with-free-online-courses/ 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 ... http://the-writers-lab.com/general/coming-up-short/ 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, ... http://the-writers-lab.com/tools/hosting-your-own-chats/