Diane Duane has recently posted three fascinating essays on the craft of being a writer. Neither of these is a "quick read"; settle down with plenty of time, and maybe some scratch paper.
- As a writer, it helps us increase our skill in many ways to widely read many genres and topics outside our own primary specialization -- and some works that overlap us. At the same time, we do not want to plagiarize others, not even by accident. Here's how DD manages that: reply to a question posed by Tumblrine "systembomb"
- DD's post from 9 November 2025 is a useful guide for writers of many sorts, and also for gamemasters in TTRPG creation and the players of TTRPG characters. She gives advice for writing a character undergoing change -- particularly, a character discovering in an engaging yet natural-feeling way that some of their core beliefs were wrong: reply to a question posed by Tumblrine "finwe77"
- My final pick for what feels to me to be a set of Important Study Texts: DD starts with a fellow Tumblrine's reblog of a Twitter conversation on creating memorable characters. (For people with whom I've been nattering in voice chat about this: I'm finally citing a link to the thing with the Three Questions.) Again, I feel that this post on the 11th of November, 2025 is the most universally applicable to all word-based creative efforts here on World Anvil. If I as a player do not know the answers to these three questions in regard to my Character, then I do better to only play them in one-shot adventures -- not in Campaigns.
I do also think that the experiences of #2 and #3 can, and maybe should, change outcomes over time. If the target character experiences the same "need to change" and result over and over, why do they keep showing up?
