T/P/S – New Visuals, New Teacher, and New Characters
From JP | 06.05.2025
It’s always great to find things you can improve on. But it’s even better when you find someone who can show you how to improve.
Thorns – Lightshow-Deficient
I recently realized that my magic system has no visual component other than the actual effect. No glowing eyes, no arcs of lightning, no energy beams. That’s quite a problem because it’s my goal as a fantasy author to deliver a particular vision for my readers to get immersed in. And since I also want to be sure that I write a story that I would enjoy reading, striking visuals are incredibly important. So really, this is a me-problem, but I’m willing to bet that there are others who might benefit from this being brought to their attention.
In Avatar: The Last Airbender, bending has a martial art aspect to it. In the Stormlight Archives, the skin and eyes of surgebinders glow when they use their powers. In Dragon Ball Z, they have those energy auras that grow when they charge up their ki. Whenever I encounter scenes where these things happen, it’s almost always guaranteed that I will spend at least a couple minutes over the next day picturing how those effects would look on me. That lingering effect—the “Damn, I wish I could look like that” thought—is what I want my magic system to generate for my readers.
Petals – Good Teachers Use Shrek
New teachers are wonderful, and I’ve managed to find a great one in the Youtube channel of novel editor, Ellen Brock.
I’m still new to her channel, so I haven’t been able to watch all of her (MANY) videos just yet, but the ones that I have watched and studied have been so unbelievably helpful. She presents comprehensive information in a way that is incredibly clear and applicable. She guides you through her examples in a way that happens to cater to my desired learning style exactly.
One good example is her video for writing character arcs. I want to write a longer article about these concepts and my own spin on them, but her explanations are plenty helpful as-is. She walks through the concepts of The Motivation, The Goal, The Belief, and The Lesson using the example of Shrek (she’s a writing-advice channel, but she usually uses movie examples since more people would have seen those). I definitely recommend checking her out if you’re interested in walkthrough-like lessons on plot and character construction.
Ellen Brock’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/@EllenBrock
“How to Write the Character Arc”: https://youtu.be/1JEBfmAJ1YI?feature=shared
Seeds – Misery Loves Company
One of my protagonists is a bit of a broody guy, which can get pretty heavy a lot of the time. Thankfully, I had the idea to somewhat lighten his scenes by giving him an unconventional scene-partner with which he can share some of his hardships. Between now and next week, I want to write a scene or two where they unpack some of the thoughts that are going to drive his behavior through the rest of the story.
That’s all for this week!
May you find teachers that really get you,
JP Violet
The Path Behind — A postscript
This is a bit of a two-parter.
For my goal from last week: I didn’t quite meet it, but I did get very far into Six of Crows. In fact, I believe I’m just about to hit what I expect to be the last big climactic event, and I’m very excited for it. All of the characters are fantastic, and the romantic tension is freaking everywhere. I’m a sucker for teen drama.
For my goal from the week before: I tried the animation-inspired writing mindset that I talked about. I think the true value in it comes from the way it encourages you trim away excess from your scenes. When you only think about what the character would directly interact with/think about, any rambling or exposition-dumping gets heavily reduced if not outright removed.
JP Violet 