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Character Concept Picker – Creating Literary and Video-Game Characters

April 25, 2022

characters, fiction, javascript, narrative, programming, video games, writing

From Narrative Nods to Word Journey, I’ve made a lot of programs that one way or another revolve around words, writing, and fictional worlds. Character Concept Picker is such an app. It’s open-source, free for all, and it can help you come up with ideas for building characters for your next novel or video game.

It all started when, browsing LinkedIn, I discovered an Excel table with some character traits and other characteristics, meant as a guide for creating characters. It was the work of Jacob Conner Harris, a narrative designer.

I messaged him and asked whether he’d be interested in teaming up and creating a little app using the data he’d come up with. He said yes, and Character Concept Picker is the result.

character concept picker — The results generated by Character Concept Picker

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Multiple Endings: a How-to Guide

April 18, 2022

Fiction Writing Tips, Writing

affect, creativity, ending, fiction, literature, writing

Remember my post on narrative endings? I there argued that narrative endings and physical endings are not necessarily one and the same. In reality, there are more than one ways to end a novel. And having multiple endings is a great way to increase the affective impact of your narrative.

So, what do we I mean by “multiple endings”? Let’s start by what I don’t mean: A Clue-like style set of actual different endings (in the form of, say, different chapters). I’m not interested in that, and though I wouldn’t want to deter anyone from trying different things, I’m not entirely sure whether it’d work.

What I mean by multiple endings in a narrative is the presence of interpretatively more than one alternatives; open-endedness; allowing the possibility that things aren’t quite what they seem. Think of the ending of Inception, with the spinning top, and you’d have a simple, masterful example of how a single, mundane object can throw the entire narrative in disarray.

So let’s take a look at multiple endings: what’s their effect, how to gauge whether you need them, and how it all comes together.

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“Turtles All the Way Down”: The Problem of Infinite Regress

April 11, 2022

Philosophy

anthropocentrism, infinite regress, infinity, metaphysics, philosophy, truth

Forget about the existence of God, life after death, the meaning of life. There is only one real question in philosophy – and no, with apologies to Albert Camus, it’s not about suicide. It’s the problem of infinite regress, particularly in a metaphysical framework.

“Turtles all the way down” is a metaphor used to explicate the problem of infinite regress in metaphysics. There are many variants, but the basic idea is that someone (usually a member of a so-called primitive tribe), when asked about the origin or existence of Earth, argues that the world rests on a giant turtle. Faced with the question, but where then does that turtle stand on, he replies: “You don’t fool me, it’s turtles all the way down“.

To us modern Westerners, the problem of infinite regress usually appears when, as children perhaps raised to believe in the existence of God, we wonder: “But who made God?” We were never offered an answer, because there was none. “God was always there”, came the usual non-reply.

But even those of us (such as myself) who don’t believe in a supreme being, are still deeply troubled by infinite regress. It just doesn’t feel right, as we’ll see in this post.

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