Creative writing is one hell of a creative capital you can develop, but as long as you are not only describing what you are seeing you have to develop stories and characters populating your scenes. Writing is not easy, actually it is easy as you just need a pen and paper… and a good amount of nosebleed training. Developing characters with depth are a bit harder though. For many writers the question on how to develop a good and solid character, whether it be for a game, book, comic or as a mascot. The main character is usually no problem as most people tend to have a pretty clear cut image of that person, but there are always ways to improve

What do you need the character for?

Which intention do you have for the character, should it be a main character, an opponent to your main character or just an innocent bystander? Or do you need a character as a logo-mascot for a company? Determine your character and which traits such a character needs. A mascot usually has to be highly like-able and should make it easy to identify a company.

Pretty easy, just check out those 5 different approaches to get you started.

1. the autobiographical approach

An easy approach to create a character is to simply pick someone you know, yep I mean yourself, and work a story around that person who runs by your name. It does not have to be true, just use that person as a starting point. Character traits, flaws, strength, weakness, enemies, friends, job, surroundings… Following this approach usually leads to real world characters that you could find in a Nick Hornby novel. Someone who is probably like-able, has his problems, but after all manages to live his life. Or who enters one ridiculous situation after the other. It’s great for both, comedy and drama, as drama is just like a comedy without the funny moments.

2. sketchy identity theft

This one is pretty easy as well, just get to know the people around you. You can sit on a bench for a few hours and simply write down what kind of people you see. Now it’s time to get really shallow and give them friends, skills and flaws. Sometimes it’s great to do something shallow, but you can get some deep and twisted things as well. Here is an example for this process.

old man, grey hair, limping with his right leg, wearing old man clothes, seems to be sad and a bit ill

Now after you have outlined the appearance of your character it’s time to add some depth to it.

Jack “The Razor” Trent is a former Mobster who just had to bury his first son due to a murder. Now he is wandering around in his garden and planning his revenge. His limping relates to a shooting where his younger son Mario saw his father being shot. Mario decided to join the feds and tries to find the murder before his father does, as he is sick of all those crime related violence. They both love each other, but can’t show it.

3. by attributes

Creating a character through attributes is a good way to build up someone who has to play an important part in your story. The character evolves around certain traits and attributes that are either strength or weakness and play an important role in transporting your character. Making up a solid character takes some tweaking, but it’s easy to develop a character around a special trait and simply work everything else around it. You can go with contradictions to improve the depth, as there are no perfect people in real life and there has to be a way to related, or to hate/love those characters.

strong, violent, huge, not giving jack about anyone, sociopath

Very simple character that will usually get in the way of a main character to simply fall victim to the usually smaller but smarter hero and his friends.

small, timid, womanizer

Working with contradictions can be very useful, as for example someone who is small and extremely timid, yet so attractive that every woman falls for him and he has more affairs than the alpha male.

4. from influences

Everything is influencing you, weather it be nature, TV, a Movie, take all those influences. It does not matter if your plan is to create something wicked that has never been done before, or simply use an idea and spin it to another level. There might be a quote, although it’s not really attributed, by Pablo Picasso “Good artists copy, great artists steal”, you only have to please yourself, after all creative writing is about creating pieces of art.

• an action movie inspires you to write a comedy
• a love story turns into an action packed roller-coaster
• a spy/crime story helps you to picture a small encounter in your book
• you pick a the movie name of an extra and add him to your story

5. to match someone else

Developing 1 character is easy, adding others becomes even easier. You can simply think of people this guy/woman would befriend, would avoid, would call an enemy, and so on. The more you work on the surrounding and the supporting cast of your main characters the more vivid your story can become. Make that at least you can visualize every character before you add him to your story.

• two brothers – one successful, the other failing
• inner demons, trying to do good, always doing bad
• a teacher living at home with his dominant mother
• a boy teaching his parents how to live happy

6. pain and pleasure

There is no story without pain and pleasure, especially if you want to create a comedy. Writing fiction is great, you can let your characters suffer as you like. Pain, tragedy, laughs, your goal in a story should be to build an emotional connection with your reader.

• let a love-able guy break down from society, just to build him up later.
• let your hero suffer a tragedy and let him get back at his opponents.
• your main character is dropped by dozens of women, each time more painfully, just to find his love.

7. the law of flaw’s & skill’s

You usually want to go for well rounded characters, as those are the most appealing and give your audience the best chance to enjoy a story. As a well rounded character is usually far away from being perfect you have to learn to give your character flaws that will match up the weakness, or the other way around. The audience has to like the character, otherwise it will simply not care about it and all your writing efforts are spilled in the gutter.

advanced reading

Actually I always have problems with books by people who have just published on book, and that book is about creative writing. It pretty much says you all you need to know about that author, he was either not good enough to get his novels published or he uses a pen name. Just trust people who have some solid references if you are going to invest a few bucks into a book. Here is my favorite book about writing comedy.
The Comic Toolbox: How to Be Funny Even If You’re Not

Written by one of the writers of Married with Children, this is a book that I can recommend to everyone who wants to get into writing comedy and drama. There are plenty of exercises that will help you develop comical skills, while being a quick and easy read.

It’s Sunday again, TEXTURE TIME! Today you can download 4 high resolution [4288*2856 px] poker chip textures. Enjoy!

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School very often forces people to learn for tests and forget everything afterwards. That’s not only bad, it’s the totally wrong approach towards learning. Just to make people comparable to each other does not give someone else the right to judge whatever you are doing. Here are some important principles that school usually undervalues throughout your education.

improve your strength, quit fixing the weakness

The most important lesson in life is to quit running after your weakness. Every human has loads of strengths, it’s important to build on those. You can always be something else, but it takes a lot of hard work and dedication to get through stuff that you don’t want to do, or are simply not your strong sides, than going for what your skills tell you to do. Some people are great at math, others rock as artists. It’s not important to be perfect at everything, just do what you do and focus on it. And even if your biggest skill is to multitask, simply focus on that

Positive Psychology these days tries to fix people up with improving their life rather through positive feedback rather than simply fixing flaws that are not necessarily worth fixing at all. To lead a happy & fullfilled life we have to be challenged, which is perfectly proven through the flow effect, how else is it explained that we don’t recognize time when we are perfectly challenged?

the Pareto Principle & Batching

Pareto’s Prinicple just tells us that most of the time when we work, we are simply not productive and that everything boils down to a 80/20 rule. This means basically 80 percent of the value you receive will come from 20 percent of your activities, friends, co-works, training habits, basically everything can be reduced to this. At least when it comes to productivity.

Most of the stuff we are doing each day is usually not as productive as it could be, leaving us doing either a lot of stuff we don’t have to do and could cut out, or that is simply put a leisure of us.

We can drop – or rather decrease time we spend on – almost everything, whether it be through outsourcing, batching or optimizing your time. Tim Ferriss and his 4 hour workweek concept are a good example for this whole idea of reducing your workload to do something fun. It’s important though, that not everything is wasting time, a lot of stuff is simply not being productive. Never forget we are all only human and don’t have to be perfect, it’s ok to not get everything done perfectly.

Batching is simply doing things that you are doing far to often and take some time each day to cut down the actual time you spend on it. Rather than check stats or email 50 times a day create automated systems for email telling everyone that you only check at a special time. Check stats every week, as you can’t influence them that much anyways and it’s just an ego trip.

Parkinson’s Law

We can do things quicker than we think.

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Parkinson’s Law says that a task will expand in time and seeming complexity depending on the time you set aside for it. The more time you give yourself to complete a task, the more difficult it will become.

Reduce the time you spend, the level of your output might drop a bit, but your Cost-benefit will allow you to work more effective. The less time you have available the more your mind has to focus on the solutions and action, instead of doing more research and cluttering.

Whenever you think “Productivity instead of Activity” remember Parkinson’s Law and add the perfect addition of Pareto’s Principle with the 80:20 rule to the mix, 20% of your actions determine 80% of the results.

be aggressive, not passive

We are all living a more or less passive life, television or internet surfing, wasting hours away without really doing nothing. At least when we are passive consumers. Step out of this vicious cycle and start being aggressive about what you are doing. If everyone is passive and only reacts when someone approaches him, very little will get done. Simply do what you have to do instead of relying on others to help you. Don’t be passive aggressive, be actively aggressive

Trying to be an alpha male/female and making decisions while taking actions will help you in several ways….

1. You don’t have to wait for others to make a decision.

2. People look at you in a different way, as there are far less people taking action and responsibility.

3. You can determine your life how you want it to be.

4. You are rarely at the fate of others who will tell you what to do.

As you can see, it can really be hard to be an alpha male/female and take a stand. It takes an opinion, you have to be settled and know what you want to achieve. It’s far easier to be passive, but it’s less rewarding and will only get you to a certain point.

failure counts as done

Mistakes are good.

You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.
—Wayne Gretzky

Eighty percent of success is showing up.
—Woody Allen

If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake.
—Frank Wilczek

No matter what we do, we usually make mistakes and fail every once in a while. There are so many empty phrases around this whole idea, it’s better to use less of them. Just remember, first of all failure means learning and try to avoid making the same mistake over and over again. Usually it does not matter if you fail, it should not prevent us from doing something, it’s part of a learning curve and where we simply have to adjust what we are doing. It’s far worse to never fail, because you have probably never really tested yourself and your skills.

positive feedback loops are everything

Stimulate your inner demons and learn to talk in the right way with yourself. Don’t ask yourself how you could fail, ask yourself how you can improve, which steps can help you to clean up with life. You can file this under some wussy bollocks and go to the next step, but the mind is one of the strongest tools we can access and use to our advantage. Imagine yourself how you want to be, write down how to improve yourself. I am by no means I shrink, but if you are interested in evolving your inner game you should check out the whole NLP movement, pick up some books and maybe find a coach.

“You live in your own reality”, this may sound like some joke phrase, but the one who has the strongest reality is either insane or someone very powerful

don’t fear the fear

Fear is something natural and it’s probably far too easy to say that we should not care about it too much, but actually it’s important to learn to accept that fear is just a chemical process and social conditioning. Nowadays most fear is overrated, it’s not that we are a the brink of death every time it pops up. It can be everything from failing a test, to talking to a women or something else, that’s actually not that dangerous at all once we come to think of it.
The first step to mastering fear is to be rational about it. What can be the worst outcome of what is causing us fear? What will happen if we fail this test? What will happen if we get burned by approaching someone we don’t know? How will it change our life? After all life will be pretty much the same and we will adapt. Our society fuels all those fears and tries to sell us illusions of safety, but be real about it, life will never be save and that is a good thing. Just as George Carlin or Tyler Durden said we give up far too much and get attached too just as much, “and all for the illusion of safety”. Let the chips fall where they may and let’s evolve.

don’t wait for things to happen, make them happen

In pretty much any experience there are always things that you can learn from it and things within the experience that can help you to grow. Negative experiences, mistakes and failure can sometimes be even better than a success because it teaches you something totally new, something that another success could never teach you.

Whenever you have a “negative experience” ask yourself: where is the opportunity in this? What is good about this situation? One negative experience can – with time – help you create many very positive experiences.

The online world is one big hub of information and tools, easy to understand once you are inside, but hard to figure out from the outside. How do you explain the different services, toys and tools to outsiders? How do you describe how you are spending your time online to the family or friends who are not into this whole tech stuff? Educate your relatives in an easy, non confronting way on how we spend our hours using the following list.

Blogging

• “I am keeping a log on things that are important to me / I am interested in / I share experiences with other about my interests.”
• “I write about stuff that others are interested in so I can earn an extra buck with my expertise.”
• “I am trying to earn a buck besides my work, but have to click on the adsense advertisments all by myself to get some money.
• “I like to spread my word, but nobody listens to me in real life.”
• “It’s like keeping a diary, without a lock, public for everyone to read, and it makes me warm and fuzzy if people know my secrets.”
• “I need attention, and can network with others who need attention as well.”
• “I think I can do this professionally and quit my job. In about 10 years.”
• “It’s a marketing tool. Even though I don’t have a product to sell.”

Multiplayer games

• “I am playing with my friends online just like meeting for a pickup game in the park.”
• “I train my social behavior and networking skills by taking part in the community and being in a Clan.”
• “I love to create things and create multiplayer modifications for my favorite game.”
• “Killing things was always one of my hobbies, but I ran out of cats and dogs.”
• “I heard gamers are good with girls, so I gave it a try.”
• “I love insulting newbs and banning people from my server who are better than me. You heard me mom?”
• “Don’t you think ogres are sexier than humans? Could you wear an ogre costumne next time we make out?”

Twitter

• “Twitter is like a public SMS.”
• “I can connect with friends from everywhere else.”
• “Twitter is one of those timesuckers I just can’t keep my finger off.”
• “Twitter enables me to broadcast interest findings to my friends without having to tell every single one.”
• “I can pretend to have more than 50 friends who actually care about what I tweet.”
• “It’s easy following all those celebrities, it’s easier than nordic stalking, I’ll visit their windows anyways.”

Life Hacking

• “I try to optimize my life to have more time for fun & important things.”
• “I batch everything to be able to waste more time on something else.”
• “I hate my work and want it to get done as fast as possible.”
• “I can’t stand clutter and chaos and have found loads of people who share my fetish.”
• “I thought hackers was da shit, but I am not good at math or coding.”

Affiliate Marketing

• “I do telemarketing, on the internet.”
• “I sell stuff from others through my web projects to get a share of their profits.”
• “I drive traffic to products that are popular and spend the money on Bling Bling.”
• “I sell this diet shit that people are so pissed off about.”
• “Want some snake oil?.”
• “I know how you can make a few bucks in between, just sign up for those networks under my affiliate link.”
• “No that’s not a snowball system. You would have to be a fed to call it something like that.”

Creating photoshop brushes is a lot fun, but once it came to sharing them I ran into a problem I knew how to save them, but I did not know why the hell all my brushes were 200MB big, then I understood. First of all you, if you don’t know how to save your photoshop brushes… here is a simple instruction how you can save your photoshop brushes…

You simply have to click on the spot marked in the above picture and pick the tab save brushes. Now you have saved all your existing photoshop brushes. Sounds to easy to be true, eh? You are right! It’s not that super duper easy if you actually want to share only a few custom brushes. I thought it’s possible to save single brushes simply by clicking on them. Oh poor me, how was I wrong

There is one problem, you have to actually delete all the brushes that you do not want to use save right now! Go ahead and save your whole set of brushes before deleting them all! You only have to keep the brushes you want to share. Now save those remaining brushes and you have a brush set!
You can simply reload your old brushes by double clicking on your previous brush save. Tadaaaa!

After reducing my brushes to the handy set of brushes I posted yesterday, the size was down to 7 MB, which is a very shareable size nowadays. At least compared to those 200 MB it had before. Always remember to save your stuff before you delete it, otherwise it’s, well, …lost. Now go and share those brushes you have created