Desiderius Price

A name is something the reader needs to keep track of, so the role itself might be alright, but context is usually everything. Having a full character workup on that character can certainly help in giving non-standard reactions to what your primary characters are up to. “Reminds me of my sister” or similar. However, that might be overboard for the needed role, so you could instead mention “They paid.” and simply move on, even cutting out that minor character all together. Of course, you can still have a character workup for them and never drop the name too. If you’ve got two or three minor characters interacting in a slightly more significant way, now you have to differentiate them, so you could always go “blond” vs “black” haired, or use names or their roles or something else; though names require a way to get them, or fast nicknames (as I did in one scene where Hermione “nicknamed” them in her head, just to keep them straight).

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I’ve done both good and bad flashbacks. The bad one is why I split up my first original story, because I was using them to cover backstory that was better to split off to other stories (ie, I was confusing myself). The good is a quick flash “forward” of a future suspense point (ie Voldemort exclaiming the potion in his cup is the “Elixir of Immortality”) with a “two years earlier….” as the fast move back in time point. Which ever way it’s done, flash-forward or flash-backward, that scene should be kept relatively short. If it needs to span chapters, then consider a separate backstory, and snippets for the flash back itself.

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42724 and a palindrome

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Spotted this on AO3’s reddit, an alignment chart for work titles, maybe it’ll help? Link to post (to credit the artist) https://www.reddit.com/r/AO3/comments/16plpw3/i_made_an_alignment_chart_for_ao3_work_titles/

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42704 Gives me hope of actually being able to … gasp … FINISH the thing (still years away)

42702 Well, the progress on my story is freaking awesome… 98k so far this month.

42700 and it’s worse for me, gotten into a habit of really early rises, so I’m already up, writing before work.

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Finish? That’s heresy… 🤪 More seriously, been trying to focus on finishing things too, so far resisting the urge to start new stories. Do need to consider if I want to break my writing streak to write up a Halloween story or not.