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Put your characters into hostile situations to create tension and interest for your story.
If nothing ever goes wrong for them, they don’t have very interesting lives.
Follow the natural consequences of the setting to make problems for your characters to overcome
The more organic it is, the more depth the fictional story will carry with it in a natural way.
We hope you are enjoying our series on bad settings that make interesting stories. Look around for more settings that could spark your next best seller!
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5 Powerful Words that Show Surprise + Writing Prompts
1. Shock
I was utterly shocked! I had never seen anything like it. It walked up to and I stood deathly still. It smelled me. I thought for sure my life was over. But then something very strange happened that I still have a hard time explaining to this day.
2. Startled
“Hey, Jane!”
“Ahhh!”
“What?!”
“Oh, nothing! You just startled me is all!”
3. Bewilderment
I was dumbfounded. Struck by complete bewilderment. What had led him to do that? And today of all days.
Did he not know that would be the dumbest thing he could do today? And yet he did it anyway?
After all, it was Valentine’s day. Who does that on Valentine’s day?
4. Disbelief
I stood there in disbelief. How could I have known the events that would follow? How could I foresee the monumental change that about to befall our entire town?
5. Astonishment
As the pie slowly dripped down my face, I couldn’t hide my rage and astonishment. I didn’t want to. All I wanted to do was find another item of sticky dessert and smush it all in her hair and face and dress. The stickier the better. Oh and the stains, I wanted to find one that would stain everything she owned. I wanted to dump a truckload of pie into her new car and house, but what I did next surprised even me.
5 Powerful Words that Show Surprise + Writing Prompts
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If you enjoy Powerful Words that Show Surprise, Storytelling and writing in general, you might love owning a domain of your own where you can write about it? Ever want to own your own domain name (Yourname.com)?
Bluehost hosts your blog so that you can own your domain and make money blogging. Check them out only if you’re interested in making money blogging; otherwise, go for a free blog instead 🙂
5 Powerful Words that Show Surprise + Writing Prompts
Use power words to take your reader’s attention.
Draw their eyes and attention to where you want it the most.
Wake the reader up from zoning out while they are reading your piece.
Use power words strategically to get them from idea to idea.
Use simple power words that are easy to understand but that pack a punch compared to other boring words.
Write powerful words to keep your sentences interesting to your reader.
Don’t lose them by not drawing their attention back from losing focus.
When doing freelance writing projects use power words to write better-converting headlines and subject lines.
In blogging use power words in the titles and subheadings.
In emails use them in headlines and subject lines.
Don’t overdo it. Don’t try to force many into any one sentence unless it calls for it.
Hopefully, this fast short post helps you think through some of your own writing and where you can incorporate simple power words in a meaningful, natural, and effective way.
Hope this helps!
Happy writing!
5 Powerful Words that Show Surprise + Writing Prompts
If you enjoy Powerful Words that Show Surprise, Storytelling and writing in general, you might love owning a domain of your own where you can write about it? Ever want to own your own domain name (Yourname.com)?
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If you enjoy Powerful Words that Show Surprise, Storytelling and writing in general, you might love owning a domain of your own where you can write about it? Ever want to own your own domain name (Yourname.com)?
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Why nations give politicians so much power is beyond understanding, but with that much power and money up for grabs greedy and power-hungry people come out of the shadows to take their place in the hierarchy.
Unjust Laws
In the series “Reign” the King is pressured into creating a law that the citizens of France have to declare publicly what religion they hold. The Catholic church uses this public knowledge to abuse and torture people that proclaim to hold a different faith than the Catholic church holds.
Limited Rights
In history, the U.S. citizens that had recently left England were being demanded to pay taxes to a government that wasn’t representing them, which was limiting their rights because it took their wealth and gave them nothing in return.
Violent Extremist
History is full of violent extremists who took the law into their own hands to try to change history by the shedding of blood.
Violent Mobs
Any peaceful protest has tension. This tension can easily spill over into a violent mob if provoked.
Violent extremists often look for ways to provoke and manipulate the mob into becoming violent for their cause.
Write about abhorrent world settings in your fictional story to keep your reader intrigued and on the edge of their seat. Writing story settings that are in turmoil is a good way to keep your reader interested in what will happen next.
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If you enjoy 5 Abhorrent Settings for Your Fictional World, Storytelling and writing in general, you might love owning a domain of your own where you can write about it? Ever want to own your own domain name (Yourname.com)?
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If you enjoy 5 Abhorrent Settings for Your Fictional World, Storytelling and writing in general, you might love owning a domain of your own where you can write about it? Ever want to own your own domain name (Yourname.com)?
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10 Great Fantasy Writing Prompts To Help Inspire your Writing Today
Write about a family that is magical but after 400 generations of magic, they birth one unmagical child.
Write a character who is a kleptomaniac (compulsive thief). One day they wake up to realize every object they’ve ever stolen has come to life.
Write about a child who has always blamed their mistakes on an imaginary person. On the child’s 30th birthday, they awake to find this imaginary person they blamed everything on has come to life.
Write about a character who picks up a book written in a language they’ve never heard of before. Strangely, they can read and understand every word.
Write about a country that hasn’t been discovered yet.
Write about a species of bugs that only come above ground once every 1,200 years. Their arrival is completely unexpected, and their intentions are truly sinister.
Your character’s sister mysteriously vanishes. The quest to find her is one that reveals many secrets about the family’s dark past.
The country is in a panic. The reason? Magic, an art lost over 600 years ago, has been discovered in the slums.
While walking in an unknown part of the forest, your character discovers a cave with a strange egg inside. When they visit the egg again, they instead find a baby beast they never knew existed. Now it’s up to them to raise it.
Write about a character that makes a wish on a star. The next day they realize their wish has come true. The bad part? They worded their wish wrong… very, very wrong.
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Great fantasy writing prompts can help you flex your creative skills and improve your writing style. By stepping out of your comfort zone, you may discover that you have found your new passion! You can expand your wheelhouse of imagination by starting with a simple idea and expanding on it. You are the captain AND the navigator and can steer your story in any way you please 🙂
Fantasy writing gives you the freedom to make the story as wild as you want. There are no rules and no limitations. You can create the perfect world, or take the opposite approach and build a world no human could ever survive.
Finding daily writing prompts like these can help overcome writer’s block and get the creative juices flowing!
As long as you can follow your imagination and let your words flow then there is no telling where you and your characters might end up. Half the fun is going on the journey with your characters and no one will help them get there without you. So grab your pencil or laptop and take that first step out their front door that ends with a world of possibilities.
Whether it’s non-fiction or fiction writing prompts, either can work to help a writer break out of the same toolbox they may be working in. Sometimes it can be helpful to find a good writing prompts generator but google and Pinterest work just as well, and Reddit writing prompts too.
Take your time, look up some fun writing prompts, and take the leap. Start writing your own fantasy story today. You can start with one of these prompts, or combine a few. Who knows? You just might be surprised with where you land.
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Common! I don’t have all day! Pick up your weapon and face me!
He hates me! I knew it!
I didn’t know what to do so I hid in the bathroom and prayed!
I had never seen anything so beautiful!
The treasure glimmered in the firelight and reflected in her eyes.
Where were you last night?
Why am I the only one that thinks this is insane?
Tell me again, were there two of you or four of you?
I told him I could only give him a ride a couple of miles down the road, but when he pulled a gun on me I said, where do you need to go? He was pretty polite after that.
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If you enjoy Writing Prompts, Storytelling and writing in general, you might love owning a domain of your own where you can write about it? Ever want to own your own domain name (Yourname.com)?
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One of the best ways to develop your characters and reveal who they REALLY are deep down to your readers is to put them into specific situations and then allow your readers to see who they are without just telling them boringly.
Case and point: Instead of saying he is mean and arrogant, you write that “he yelled at his sister for leaving the roast in too long and he bragged to everyone, he got the chance to, about making varsity this year and took up the whole conversation talking about his football throw and how far and accurate he could throw. He wasn’t interested in hearing anything about them at all. In fact, any time they would try to chime in, he would interrupt them or zone out until he could say something else about himself.”
By writing a scene and dialogue that shows who your character is, you never have to actually talk about their personality at all.
Your readers will be able to see it. Your readers will love you for this and they won’t even know you’re doing it. It gets amusing figuring out how to write their actions or inactions into scenes that show what you are desiring to tell.
Just a Tip before getting started: Take a few minutes, sit down, and write out specifically what you want to reveal about your character through these scenes. For example: arrogant, funny, secretive, aloof, gruff. You can use these scenes on your protagonist, antagonist, secondary characters, villains, pedestrians, temporary characters, any character you can think of.
Now on with it.
# 1 Write The Action Scene
The action scene is an easy setup and an easy way to reveal character quickly.
The key secret to a well set up action scene that reveals character is putting the character against a problem where they must take action or decide not to take action but either way their action or inaction reveals who they are deep down as a character.
Important note: It’s not only the action they take that defines to the reader what their true nature is as a character.
It’s also the actions they don’t take.
Not only that, but you can also reveal character by how they make the decision as you write.
Are they meticulous and plan everything out?
Or are they quick to action and don’t plan anything out?
Does this lead to further problems by taking too long to plan things out?
Or by acting to rashly to quickly do they create self-destructive problems?
Does the character learn as they go and approach problems differently based on past events you took them through?
Or do they keep making the same mistakes?
Are they cowardly and take no action at all by running or leaving the problem for others to solve?
Writing task: Take a few minutes to develop a problem and write out how the character works their way through the problem or problems and be sure to write character traits you want to portray to your reader by showing how the character would or wouldn’t take action.
# 2 Write The 1-2-3 Punch Scene
The 1-2-3 Punch scene is called “the 1-2-3 Punch Scene,” because it happens REAL fast. If you blink you might miss it. (So don’t blink…Okay, do blink)
Your reader won’t know that you’ve done it but all within one paragraph usually you’ll have divulged very specific character traits that run down through your character’s core in a matter of a minute or two.
Let’s use the movie “Guardians of the Galaxy” as an example, and we’ll use Ronin the antagonist.
It happens really fast but in the first few moments, we see Ronin as he is going through ritualistic ceremonies.
You can tell they happen daily.
In an instant, we see that he is dedicated, determined, no-nonsense, and disciplined down to his core. And then immediately following we see him harshly judge a man and execute him with his own hammer. We watch his victim’s blood flow into his bathing chamber.
We see his cruelty and how he judges an individual based on his ancestor’s actions without any thought to see how the person is individual.
We see that he’s determined, extremely cruel, and prone to violence, and desires genocide. In a matter of minutes, we know this character.We know that he is cruel and that he will stop at nothing to carry out his cause of vengeance.
This is, in essence, the 1-2-3 Punch. In as quick as a paragraph you can have your character carry out 1-2 or 3 quick actions that display who that character is down to their core and it all happens as quick as a punch and your audience suddenly has a large sense of who that character is. To execute this type of scene well you need to decide a couple of character traits you want your character to have.
Let’s make an example: I have a Protagonist named Jim. I want to portray that Jim is kind, caring, and charitable.
Let’s say Jim’s widowed Aunt stays with him and his son.
She comes home one day and realizes she forgot the butter. Jim hears her exclaim her disappointment and he quickly jumps up and says “Don’t worry about it Auntie, I’ll run out and get your butter for you so that you don’t have to run back in town.” He says it with a big smile of course and a great attitude about the whole thing whistling as he’s off on his way to the store.
While waiting in line to buy the butter the person in front of him is a dollar or two short. Jim quickly says “Oh, let me get that for you” and smiles at the distraught stranger while digging in his pocket for two dollars.
In a short paragraph, we have seen that Jim is kind, caring, and charitable. We didn’t have to SAY “Jim is kind, caring, and charitable.” We used a scene to let the reader see it for themselves.
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# 3 Write The Vulnerability Scene
Have you ever been reading a short story or novel and you start to notice that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the main character or their antagonist?
If you notice, you’ll see that you start to lose interest and resonate less and less with the “perfect” character. This is because, in real life, we know there no such thing as a perfect person. And if their life was perfect, it would be boring. This is why it’s important to have the Vulnerability Scene.
This scene is exactly how it sounds. You have to make your character a little vulnerable in some way. You can go as far as you want with it, but you have to show that the character isn’t perfect and that they have consequences just like people in the real world. Most often it doesn’t have to be some big unheard-of thing. In actuality, this can work best if it is some quick notice of something that could be considered “normal” or small.
For example: Our Sheriff drinks most nights when he’s off duty (and sometimes on duty.) The mailman sometimes reads our letters before delivering them. The DMV worker has an expired license but drives anyway. It could be anything and it could be small or a big deal, but if your characters are going to be believable you have to show some vulnerability so that readers can relate to them a little.
Another way to write a scene that shows who the character is is to put your character through loss. The loss doesn’t have to be a big deal to you, but whatever it is that they lost, it MUST be a big deal to them. The more strange the loss is and how much it hurts the character you write emotionally the more readers can see what is actually important to the character and see what they are like as you write.
If you write your character losing a family member and is only a little sad, but they lose an animal and sob for weeks we can see what is important to this person. Another good example you can write would be a character losing their job and not caring, but their car gets a scratch on it and you write them going into an unforeseeable rage. As we see what the character doesn’t care about and what they care most about in their heart we can see their heart and the core beliefs of the character as we write.
Like I said the loss doesn’t have to always be something that most people would see as a big deal. It could be something you write that you don’t consider to be a big deal, but the fact that it is a big deal to them helps the reader see more and more of who this person is at their core self.
On the flip side, you can use the BIG loss scene in reverse. Write them through a scenario where they experience a loss that most of society would consider a big deal but the fact that you write the character doesn’t, shows who they are as a person and a key part of their character and maybe even an important part of your plot. Make them lose a father, mother, brother, or sister and make them not care and your readers will be lead to curiosity why they don’t care.
Play with the big loss scenario and use it both ways to show what is and isn’t important to your character.
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