I realize I've been thrown off my usual posting schedule, but that is because I have had a lot of things going on in my life. So, the time that I was absent from both my blogs was dealing with those things. Now that I am back, I should say that I have posts planned that aren't drawing related. I plan to do a book tag, as well as posts related to my novels, songwriting, and acting soon. While I normally would not do two drawing posts in a row, this was one post I had fully written, edited, and planned. So, I felt as if I should post it.
I will also be responding to comments from previous posts. I loved reading everyone's comments, they truly made my day during such stressful times. And thank you to Anno for the shout out. š
But let's get to the post:
Here is the official (optional) prompt list:
Day #10 Your Idol, I drew Dr. Crusher played by Gates McFadden from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Gates McFadden was the one who inspired me to be an actor, so I decided I should draw her for this prompt.
Day #11 Silhouette, I was a little more creative with this prompt. I wanted to draw the Wax Witch from my novel, Dolls of Wax, Eyes of Glass, but not only a shadow/outline of her. So, I drew her silhouette behind her.
Day #12 Facial Hair, I drew Gimli from Lord of the Rings for practice. I don't usually draw bearded characters so this was fun to draw.
Day #13 Furious, I drew Cheetah Girl from my super hero story for this one. I wanted to make her look as if she was furious. This is different, because I often draw her looking calm or thoughtful.
Day #14 Freckles, I drew Elm, one of my dryad characters. I decided since Valentine's Day was the day I drew it, that I would give her Valentine's Day accessories.
Day #15 Delighted, I drew Sebastian for this one. I have not drawn him a lot, so I wanted to draw him looking happy.
Day #16 in profile, I drew FiƔina talking to a dragon. Since dragons used to live in Dragons' Province (where the story takes place), I thought it would make sense for her to talk to one.
Day #17 poorly, Ferdinand Diggory from The Haunted Sketchbook is feeling his worst here (due to sleep deprivation, nightmares, and ghosts).
Day #18 Your Current Mood, I best describe this mood as "a million different emotions are going through your head and you're trying to process all of them, while keeping a straight face." So of course, I drew D.I. Elyerin Time experiencing this.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Which drawing is your favorite? Are you a fan of Lord of the Rings or Star Trek?
I figured it was time for another drawing post. I have a lot of new drawings to share.
Let's begin:
This is The Mother of the Elements, the mother of the gods from this post.
I had not drawn her before, and her design took me a while to figure out. I like how her dress turned out, and I decided give her a different body type than the other gods.
I figured it was time to update Detective Inspector Time's profile photo. In the original drawing, I had made his hair the wrong length, and it didn't fit the current version of him.
FiƔina and Mother of the Element doing each other's hair. This pose was tricky to draw, but I enjoyed drawing it.
A drawing of Ferdinand Diggory from the Haunted Sketchbook.This is the first time I've drawn the character, and I like how his appearance turned out.
You will be hearing more about his story soon...
FiƔina's hair changes depending on the season. Since she is the goddess of nature, I thought it made sense for her hair to change during the seasons. The idea came from this drawing I did of her in the past:
I was uncertain when I first created her, whether I wanted her hair to be red or brown. I wasn't sure I'd make her have red hair again, but thensomeone suggested I should have her hair change based on the seasons. So, that is what ended up happening.
This is what FiƔina's hair looks like in the winter. I wanted her to have icicle-like hair for the winter. She wears an evergreen dress during the winter seasons, rather than a leaf one.
A drawing of my dog, Toto. I'm almost done with the children's book about him. I thought I would draw this quick sketch, as a sort of "I'm almost there, yay!" celebration.
I decided it was time for another installment of Look Into a World. This post is centered around two gods, one of which I introduced in this post.
By the way, in the first installment of Look Into a World, I posted a song that inspired a part of the world-building. I should say this cover of a song inspired a part of world-building for this post:
You'll see which part when reading...
The War in the Sky
In the world where Arisias lives, the humans and elves believe that the sun and the moon are in a constant war, where each night/day one of the gods wins, temporarily.
The moon goddess represents strategic warfare. Mortals who worship her call upon her in battle or when they looking for a strategic way to win. The moon goddess does help people outside of war, as well, with philosophy and non-war related activities. In contrast, the god of the sun, represents bloody warfare, and doesn't care about strategy only blood-shed.
During the night, the moon goddess overpowers the sun god by using his own light against him. In the daytime, the sun god uses his light to overpower the moon goddess. Hence, while the moon may appear in the sky during the day, the moon goddess did not win that fight.
The times we would consider the winter and summer solstice, are the times when holidays around victory of a certain god are considered. If the day is shorter than the goddess of the moon won the battle for the meantime and is making the god of the sun weaker, if the god of the sun and it is the summer solstice and the day is longer, it is believed the god of the sun won the battle for the meantime.
And when there is a solar or lunar eclipse, it is believed the gods are fighting in closer quarters than usual.
(Salissah and a comet).
Salissah (the goddess of the moon) and god of the sun choose warrior spirits to fight alongside them. They are warriors who died in battle, and are chosen to fight. So they fall in a second battle for their selected god. When they fall, they are represented as shooting stars/comets and are then sent to the afterlife.
The war between the two gods was foretold by Karleon. However, the sun god did not believe this prophecy, for he believed Karleon was tricking them somehow. Salissah believed she could find a way to avoid the consequences. It is unclear what event exactly caused the war in the sky, however, one answer tellers like to say is that the fay and human war is what caused it. For every god had to pick a side in that war. Because of their opposing sides, the sun god and the moon goddess were destined to be enemies afterwards. It is often modified by the teller what the true cause was, depending on the place or time period.
Relationship Between the Devotees
(a devotee to the moon goddess (left), a devotee to the sun god (right).)
Interestingly compared to Karleon and the god of time, the devotees in this case are rather nice to each other. They have a hope that one day the war between the sun and the moon gods will be resolved. And while they don't agree on everything, and fights do sometimes happen, most devotees don't get into heated debates over this.
However, other devotees are not very calm about the human and fay war, and they always ask "which god are devoted to?" in order to gather what side that person may be on. However, because the war related to the humans and fay is so complicated that even knowing the gods that the person is devoted to, may not tell you their opinion on the war as a whole. This is especially true since the person may disagree with their gods' opinion.
It happened that Elyerin (aka Detective Inspector Time) fought in the fay and human war before becoming a detective. He was on the side of the fay during the war. And while he ended up being devoted to neither god (he instead ended up being devoted to the god of time), his side of the war strongly honored the goddess of the moon.
During this year's NaNoWriMo I am working on the 3rd draft of The Mystery of the Body Thief. So, here is some information about my project and my plans ahead for the 3rd draft (and other drafts) in general.
As a quick update, I'd like you to know that I've updated two pages. I've added a new character for Dolls of Wax, Eyes of Glass which you can see here. And, I've updated the page for the characters from The Princess Arisias mystery series here.
Synopsis-
Genre: Fantasy | Murder Mystery Series: First book in the Princess Arisias mystery series
Horatio wakes up from being in a coma, but he doesn't remember anything that happened before he fell into unconsciousness. All that he remembers is a name, "Arisias!"
Also... Detective Inspector Time finds himself having to solve a case without Princess Arisias. Murders have been happening throughout many different kingdoms, and no one knows who exactly is behind it all.
Characters-
A lot of things have changed about the characters since I last made a post about them, including some of their names, so here are the characters:
Horatio-
Horatio is a servant who works in the castle, and who has amnesia.
He is still discovering who he is, and wants to know more,
for he feels very lost and confused.
Princess Arisias-
Arisias is a princess, who never woke up from her coma, unlike Horatio.
Before the coma she worked as a detective part time, while also fulfilling her role as a princess.
Ophelia-
Ophelia is a healer and a priestess (to the goddess of the earth and the god of air).
She is a quiet, but very kind person. Though she doesn't talk a lot, when she does she always has something thoughtful to say.
D.I. Elyerin Time-
He is called "Elyerin" by those who know him well, and "Detective Inspector Time" when he is working. He is an elvish detective with time related powers from the god of time. D.I. Elyerin Time is currently working on solving the case of murdered royalty.
Cerawen & Vonivera
Cerawen and Vonivera are Arisias's ladies-in-waiting.
Cerawen- is from another kingdom and was sent over to Dragons' Province for undisclosed reasons.
Vonivera- is a fay, who used to be close to Arisias before the accident.
Marigold-
Marigold works for the civil guard and is training to be a detective. She has not gotten there, but she is working towards it. She hopes one day to be a detective like her father.
My Plans for this NaNoWriMo-
I decided to take a long break before working on the third draft. When I finished the second draft, I took some time for reading to get into the mode of writing the third draft. One book I found particularly helpful was Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. I usually don't find self-help writing books useful, but this was really inspirational for me.
In fact one piece of advice King gave was to embellish references/imaginary. King referred to his book Carrie, where he used blood related imagery, which he embellished more in later drafts.
This made me think about the imaginary/references in my own work, that I plan to embellish more this time through.
Since I wrote my post about finishing the second draft, I've come up with fantastical names for the characters: Cerawen, Vonivera, etc.. At this point only one character still needs a fantasy name, and that is Marigold. She has two names, an elvish name and a human name. Marigold is the name she goes by as a human, but since she lives among elves and was raised by an elf, she also needs an elvish name.
I'm also rereading Lord of the Rings for inspiration, and I'm thinking about ways to describe my elves without immediately saying that their ears are pointed. They are pointed, but I don't want to just rely on that imagery to define them as elves. I need to capture that something which makes my elves different than humans, and I want to show that without directly saying that they are elves all the time to my readers. This is something that will take several drafts to figure out how to do, but it is something I've been thinking a lot about recently.
My fantasy world has been built much more, since I last wrote about it.
I'm actually working on a side project, a collection of myths involving the myths of the gods and goddesses of that world. I realized the stories and the myths are very important to that world. And while I have talked about the myths in blog posts, I want to steadily build a collection of short stories. I should add, I was partially inspired by Bardugo's Lives of Saints, for the Grishaverse series. While hers is much shorter than this is going to be, it definitely served as an inspiration.
I've found that it helps to understand the world, because the world will effect the characters' actions in ways, whether unconsciously or not.
So, those are my plans for this NaNoWriMo. I hope NaNoWriMo is going well for everyone else!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Are you doing NaNoWriMo this November? If so, what are you working on? If not, have you re-read any favorite books of yours recently?
Hailey Marshall Writes and I, decided to do a collaboration, that features our characters D.I. Time and Shadow, interviewing each other. You can check out Hailey's part here where Detective Inspector Time interrogates interviews Shadow. Here is my part, where Shadow interviews D.I. Time:
In doing this I learned a lot about my character, D.I. Time, that I hadn't known before, and it was really fun. Thank you, Hailey, for collaborating with me. One thing I noticed, is that D.I. Time does not like being the one who is being questioned (in this case interviewed), which I realize is why he felt so awkward in answering questions. When he was interviewing Shadow he behaved like he usually does.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Did you relate to any of D.I. Time's answers? Have you ever been interviewed?
This post will contain a mixture of old and new drawings.
And as an update, I will be posting the next part of Using Polls to Create Art sometime in the near future, but in the meantime you can still vote on the poll at the end of that post here.
Let's begin:
This was originally drawn for a Halloween post, however, that post didn't end up working. This is a drawing of Matilda in a wizard/witch Halloween costume. I drew this before I knew her very well, so thinking about it now she would probably dress up as a heroine from one of her favorite Gothic novels.
A drawing of Deet from The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.
Deet was one of my favorite characters from the show, and I hope someday someone decides to bring the TV show back. I am still sad that it was canceled. I drew this around the time that the show first came out.
This is one of two drawings I created for a prompt on NaNoWriMo which was "what would your character's zoom background be?" However, I took this a step further and decided to draw how my characters would react if they had Zoom.
This comic is for my novel, Dolls of Wax, Eyes of Glass. In the comic Matilda is talking to her mother about the haunted estate that she and her brother just moved into. Since this is Matilda at the beginning of the story, she is enjoying the idea of living in a haunted castle, without realizing what dangers it will hold... Also Matilda's and Felix's mother, sadly, is having a bit of difficulty with Zoom, so can't turn her video on.
Side note, I feel as if the horrible things that happen in my story would be prevented if my characters had modern technology and long distance communication that didn't take a long time to deliver.
Here's an old drawing I did of Kira from The Dark Crystal. She was really fun to draw.
This second response to the prompt was inspired by this video.
This is for my other novel (though I have many I'm working on), The Mystery of the Body Thief.
Basically, this woud happen if Ophelia and D.I. Time had Zoom:
D.I. Time would accidentally turn on a dragon filter, and since shapeshifting exists in that world, he does have to clarify that he didn't get magically turned into a dragon.
I realize I haven't made many posts on my blog relating to Sebastian. He only has a few posts in which he's featured, which were a drawing of him included in a tag post, and posts I made all the way back in 2016. To give you some background on the character, Sebastian is Oak's twin brother (like her, he is a half dryad). He works as a healer, and gets his healing powers from the Greek god, Apollo. And if you're interested, here is his profile page.
This is a drawing of Iris I created a while ago, but I really like how her veil turned out.
And lastly, here is a recent portrait style I made of Riona "Fire."
I like how her hair turned out.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Which drawing is your favorite? And how would your characters react if they had Zoom?
Often, a thing I see new writers struggling with is giving their characters well-rounded abilities or powers or making their characters human-like.
Giving your character well-rounded abilitiesWhether they be magical or mundane.
(Oak in 2016-17 (left) VS. Now (right))
It can often happen that you end up with an overpowered character. This happened to me a while ago with my character, Oak, who I made invincible in battle because she could turn any weapon against its user. That meant all weapons including arrows would be unable to touch her. Given that Oak is a half dryad, I started from the idea that Dryads can turn an axe on a wood-cutter. But I turned this into an invincible power. Also, in her backstory, Oak survived a forest-fire with no injuries (and seemingly no personal trauma). I've fixed those issues with her now (she now has vulnerabilities and psychological complexities), but it was a problem when I was first starting out.
Balancing Out the Abilities
While a character can be made uninteresting or invincible with something like superpowers, a writer can also make their character's single ability too powerful too even if it is something mundane like sword-fighting. In reality even when someone is good at something, they always have weaknesses. No one will ever be perfect at anything; they will always have something to work on, and having them be absolutely perfect causes problems.
For example, you could be a really good artist and painter but have difficulty drawing hands or eyes. And while you would be a good artist, there would be still things you would need to work on. Those would be your weaknesses or flaws, maybe even something someone would notice if they looked at your artwork. But sometimes when you create characters you have a desire for them to be perfect at everything.
One of the reasons I like Dungeons & Dragons as a writer, is that it forces you to make well rounded characters and not to make them overpowered. Here's an example of what I mean:
(Part of Jinx's character sheet (for Level 4))
If you notice there are skills that the character is really good at (the higher the number the more you add to your roll), and some things the character is not good at (the lower numbers). But even if there is a higher number, there are still skills that aren't as fine-tuned as those with the highest possible number. My character is naturally good at skills that require charisma, but not good at skills related to survival.
That is not to say that your character can't be skilled in more than one thing. They can be, but you should figure out how skilled they are compared to other skills. I'll give you an example of that with three characters from my own novel (who are skilled in more than one thing in different ways). While I don't normally use my own characters as examples, I feel that showing you what I have done with my own characters could potentially help you with yours:
My character Annabelle is proficient in three skillsets (detective work, magic, and fighting), but I figured out how skilled she was in each. The thing that it the easiest for her to do, because she has been working on it for so long, is detective work. She has been working on fighting for quite some time (not as long as detective work), so she can engage in combat and won't be easily defeated (when using a sword or dagger). However, she is unskilled with a bow and arrow. She is slightly skilled with magic, but she is still learning, so her magic (at the moment) is likely to be out of control at times.
So, Annabelle is not invincible as a fighter; however, she is skilled enough that it would be hard to defeat her in battle. But you could get at her weak points if you knew what they were. And as a detective, she would know what she was doing if she walked into a crime scene. However, like I said before, just because it comes easy to you doesn't mean you're perfect at it. At times Annabelle has been wrong about a case.
(D.I. Time (left) Ophelia (right))
Then I have two different characters who have similar abilities, but have different levels of skill. D.I. Time and Ophelia have their own abilities. D.I. Time is like Annabelle, skilled with detective work, however whereas Annabelle is more skilled with sword-fighting than magic, he is more skilled with magic, and he uses it more often than he would a weapon. He finds magic to be more useful to interrogate criminals than brute force.
Ophelia is a healer (and priestess) so has no idea how to use weapons like swords, and she spends most of her time healing people with her earth and air magic. While she is skilled with it, she still has a lot to learn. Also her magic can double as a weapon if she wants. She can make vines and plants grow and cause a small wind storm. However, those take a lot of energy to do, and since she is a healer she cannot hurt people, so she has to use her powers when fighting carefully, so as not to hurt someone.
As you can see, your character can be skilled in many different abilities, but still find some easier than others.
Using Their Mistakes to Propel the Plot-
Then, we come to the other issue: how much does your character being right or wrong influence the plot? If it is a story with an ensemble cast you may want to think about this for each of your characters, but if it is a story with a single main character, think about how their successes and failures influence the plot. It is much less interesting to see someone succeed every time.
In some well-known stories, the mistakes of the characters are important. In A Midsummer Night's Dream for example, Puck's confusion as to who the correct Athenian man was-- that is the one Puck was supposed to lay the love potion on the eyes on--plays an important part in the rest of the plot because it causes confusion and drama. Or, in the myth of Oedipus, Oedipus mistaking what the oracle told him about killing his father, and thinking the oracle meant his (adoptive) father is essential. He ends up running away only to kill his actual father and accidentally fulfilling the prophecy.
But then what about a character succeeding? Isn't that sometimes interesting to watch? Yes, but the success shouldn't happen every time. Your character is mimicking humanity, even if they are not human, and humanity isn't perfect at anything. Even in detective stories, like Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie's stories with Mrs. Marple or Poirot, the characters are not always right. And sometimes when they are right, right away, it is show their ability as a detective.
In BBC's Sherlock, this happens when John meets Sherlock. Sherlock is able to deduce what John is like what he has been through, and then he asks John whether he had been in "'Afghanistan or Iraq?'" (A Study in Pink) --
John is of course confused by this, because how does Sherlock know this information that John never once told him? Later, Sherlock explains how he knew the information, "when I met you for the first time yesterday, I said Afghanistan or Iraq? you looked surprised [...] I saw, your haircut, the way you hold yourself says military, the conversation as you enter the room [...] you said trained at Bart's, so army doctor, obvious, [...] wounded in action, suntan, Afghanistan, Iraq" He doesn't simply know the information, he figured it out through deduction. However, he got one piece of information wrong, and he adds "and there's your brother, your phone's expensive email, enabled MP3 player, [...] you aren't going to waste money on this, it's a gift then" (The Study in Pink) he thought the phone was a gift given to John by his brother when in reality it was his sister.
The greatest detective, Sherlock Holmes, like anyone else is able to make mistakes is able to be wrong even though his mind works faster than most people's. But, him being right (most of the time), is to show how skilled he is, and if he makes a mistake that doesn't make him less of a good character. In fact, it makes him more life-like.
Fixing Overly "Perfect" Characters
Sometimes an author writes an overpowered character because the author cannot fathom their character doing anything wrong. However, this can lead to a type of bad characterization. Everything (literately everything) the character does is golden and good--even if they commit murder or do something morally wrong. Not that every character is going to commit murder of course, that is not a given. But let your character make mistakes and let it be shown as bad, it makes for a more interesting character.
The Perfection is Merely an Illusion
One way to turn the problem on its head though, would be to create a character who appears to be perfect but under the surface isn't. Or have your character's story be told by an unreliable narrator. For now, we're going with "the perfection is merely an illusion" as a way to fix it.
(Image from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray#/media/File:Doriangray.jpg)
For the first approach, I am going to bring Dorian from The Picture of Dorian Gray into this. While Dorian is not perceived as being completely perfect by society, he does appear to be perfect in a sense: he never ages, and he is handsome. However, despite the fact that he seems perfect, he is not. He has a painting that absorbs all of his sin and all of his age. The painting itself is a conflict for Dorian, for when he commits murder, he doesn't want anyone to view the painting as evidence against him so **spoilers (highlight to view)**he destroys it and by destroying it kills himself too .**end spoilers** So, Dorian's perfection is merely an illusion that is hiding something much darker.
Now, when it comes to applying something like this to your character whether it be Fantasy, Contemporary, Horror or Historical, it is important to think about what flaws your character is hiding and why they are keeping up the illusion that they are perfect. If it's Contemporary and your character is in a high school, is it because they want to be popular? If so, are they successful in that endeavor, or do their flaws come creeping in? This same thought can be applied to any social situation where there are competitions about being popular and not just a high school.
If it is Fantasy, Science Fiction, or perhaps Historical, if your character has a background that is bad, perhaps they are a criminal of some kind or they possess magic (or technology) that is frowned upon in the society of your world. If so, then it would make sense for them to keep up a seemingly perfect presentation of themselves to the public even if they are doing something that may be questionable.
Of course, if it is Horror (or Gothic), you can go the route of them hiding a curse of some kind. Perhaps it is not the same curse as Dorian, but maybe they are a vampire or a werewolf, or have a long-running curse in their family that they cannot get away from.
Of course, these are just suggestions, and there are many ways to do this that I haven't mentioned.
The Unreliable Narrator
(Image from Wiki Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aubrey_Beardsley_-_Edgar_Poe_2.jpg)
Moving on to unreliability: what if your character is supposed to be shown as good to the audience even if they committed something horrible like murder and and they don't feel any guilt whatsoever about it? There is of course a way to write a sympathetic murder or have your character do illegal/immoral things in a sympathetic way, but since we're going off the case where they feel no guilt of having done these deeds, we're going to unreliability for now.
One good example of an unreliable narrator is the narrator in the Tell-Tale Heart. The narrator tells the audience about his objective behind murdering the old man, that "[o]bject there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye!" (Poe 1). The narrator wants us to known that he loves the old man, so therefore his plotting to murder and murdering of the old man was justified. However, we as an audience know better and know there is something off about the narrator, from the way in which he speaks the opening lines: "True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am;" (Poe 1). And also we know that his unreliable from his insistence that he is not mad at all, and telling us (the audience) that he is more clever than a mad man when it comes to murdering the old man.
So when presenting a character who is viewed as good by themselves even though they committed horrible deeds whatever they may be, think about how they will be unreliable about it. Do they think that it is good, even heroic that they did this? Do they do it for (unsympathetic) reasons such as that it was easy for them or because they wanted to? If it is told in first person, do they lie to the audience about what they have done or tell them and expect the audience to sympathize and agree with them? Once you have that figured out, you can figure out how to portray your unreliable narrator in your short story or novel.
The Sympathetic Approach
(Image from Wiki Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Play_Scene_in_Hamlet.jpg)
And the final way to do it, is to make your character's actions sympathetic. Don't change that it happened, but change the way in which it happened. Returning to the example that I've been using, where a character has killed someone, a sympathetic approach would show that perhaps it was because they were forced to, did it in self defense, or had to make a hard choice and the only "good" option was killing someone.
After you change the way in which the deed was done, you also then have to make the character feel guilty in some way, even if they do not express it outwardly. Do they have nightmares? Or constant thoughts about what they have done? If their guilt is expressed outwardly, do they try to fight against what they have done, for example by helping the family of the person they murdered?
Also, think about why they had to do this. Was it for revenge? Do they want to kill someone who had hurt them, but then end up hurting themselves by killing them? Was it because they were forced into it? Are they a gladiator who was forced into doing it, and have to kill people in order to survive but feel guilty about it and want to escape? Or, is it something else?
Either way, if your character kills someone, in order for them to be sympathetic their first reaction shouldn't be "oh cool!" or "that was so good of me." There should instead be a feeling of dread: "oh no" and "what have I done?" If your character's first reaction is a problem, either change your character to be unreliable, or change the reaction completely. This will help the audience sympathize or just want to watch your character from afar.
Here are some things to think about...
1. If your character is skilled in more than one ability, make a list with #1 being something that comes easy to them and the largest number being the thing they have to work the hardest on.
2. If something comes easy to your character, how do they feel about losing or being wrong when it comes to that ability? Do they make a fuss about it or are they all right with it?
3. If they make a fuss about it, how do your other characters feel about it? Are they less likely to want to be around your character or do they compete against your character for this reason?
4. If your character doesn't make a fuss, how do they feel about teaching others about their abilities? Or helping others learn to hone their own skills? Would they be a good mentor?
5. How does your character view themselves? Do they think they are the hero? If so, do you agree with them? Or are they being unreliable?
6. What is the most selfless act your character has done? And what is the most selfish act they have done?
7. What are the most positive attributes of your character and what are the most negative ones?
8. Regarding the most selfless act, would your character selfless if they got nothing (but perhaps a smile, a hug, nothing substantial that is) in return?
9. Regarding the most selfish act, what did your character do? Was it illegal (stealing, murder, etc.)? Or was it simply mean or hurtful to someone else? How guilty about this do they feel?
10. If your character had a painting of themselves that took every selfish action and negative action they have done and presented it in the painting, what would the painting show? (Write or draw this).
11. In the reverse (once you've figured out what the first painting looks like) if your character had a painting of themselves that took every selfless act and positive action and presented it in the painting, what would the painting show? (Write or draw this).
12. If your character turns out to be told by an unreliable narrator, is your story told in the first, third or second person? If it is told in the third, do the audience and the other characters know this character is unreliable? If it is told in the first, how do you present the unreliability of your character? Do they speak in a way that comes off as being unusual (ex. in broken sentences)? Do they say something that alerts the audience that they are untrustworthy?
13. What is one part of your character's ability that they are the most good at it, whatever it may be that they still need to work on? And how do they go about working on that?
14. Suppose your character enters a competition related to their strongest ability, and they end up losing. Do they try to do anything to change the results? Do they feel it is unfair? Attack the winner? Or do they congratulate the winner of the competition and act like a good sport.
15. If you're taking the sympathetic approach, how do the other characters feel about them? Do they still trust them (even with what they did)? Does your character feel hurt by this?
16. How kind is your character to their friends (if they have any)? Do they push them around? Or are they generally nice to them?
17. What is one skill your character wants to learn and hasn't yet for whatever reason? Why haven't they tried to learn it yet?
18. What is one time within your story where your character fails? How important is their failure to the story as a whole?
19. What is one time within your story where your character succeeds? How important is their success to the story as a whole?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------What are your own approaches with dealing with overpowered characters?
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