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Hello, folks! The purpose of this exercise is to delve deep into a character's mind and tease out interesting eccentricities about them, the bits and pieces of unique information that make them special. Each question is designed to help think about the character more and understand them. Whether you're responding to one question or all of them, hopefully your character speaks to you all through it! PERSONALITY PROFILE    1. People don't behave the same way all the time. In fact, they generally have a mask for every social group -- friends, family, business. Sometimes they have a different mask for different groups of friends. How does your

Introduction First things first, a quick introduction coming from myself. My name is Jade Choung, but I am better known as mzzazn / mzzy on the world wide web. I am an artist that primarily focuses on digital media. My art work produced for income is of the anime/manga genre. A majority of my publicity is derived from deviantART.com. I have held the position of Community Volunteer (CV) on this popular art website in the past. A community volunteer is pretty much a moderator. This means, there's a handful of tasks given to a CV on this website, but one that last a huge impact on me was selecting Daily Deviations ('spotlights' for art pieces t

Please copy and paste this into a Word document or deviation. Then highlight the information after the colons and type over it. Setting Time/Era: Exact year or approximate time Name of Country: For fun, you could alter the name of an old country to amuse more educated readers. For example, I altered the Assyrian Empire's name for a conquering people to evoke images of brutality and Mesopotamia. Geography: Keep track of all the places you mention and their approximate locations. I find it handy to draw a rough map of the area. Landscape: Trees, soil, water, buildings... Imagine you were flying over the place in an airplane. What would you

How to create or improve your species – An Unconventional Tutorial Disclaimer: If you are a seasoned species owner, some sections of this tutorial may be blatantly obvious to you. However, to make sure that new species owners understand these principles they have been included in this tutorial. Feel free to skip over these parts if you wish. What this tutorial is not going to outline is 'How to pick a unique species name' or 'How to modify a real animal into a species', or other topics in a similar vein. Those popular tutorials were the ones I read when I first started creating species. However with some insight and a lot more experie

- - - - - - - - - - UPDATE for January 2020: I created this guide in 2011, so you'll have to take it with a grain of salt since dA has updated a bazillion things since then LOL. It now looks like many codes don't work in Literature submissions anymore,  (or disable the "Eclipse" version of the site and show the old site instead), so some of the demonstrations here only look like regular text.  But they should display properly if you copy/paste them in the comments.   I'm so glad to see how many of you wonderful people still utilize this resource, so I wish you the best and encourage you to go ahead and experiment to see what works and what do

Basic Statistics Name: Nickname: Meaning of name: Origin of name: Age: Sex: Blood type: Nationality: Ethnicity: Race: Sexual Orientation: Current status: Political Party: Police/Criminal/Legal record: Socioeconomic level as a child: Socioeconomic level as an adult: Birth date: Birth place: Current residence: Occupation: Title/Rank: Hobbies/Pastimes: Talents/Skills/Powers: Past History Hometown: First Memory: Most important childhood event that still affects him/her: Why/How? Other memories/events that still affects him/her and why/how: Past failures s/he would be embarrassed to have people know about and why: Bigg

1. Know what you're writing. It's easy to get off track while you're writing. Thus it's always a good idea to know what you're writing. As soon as you have a good grasp on what your story is about, you'll find yourself writing quicker. This includes the main plot, a majority of the subplots, and where all the vital plot points are going to be. 2. Know what inspires you and stay around it. Now this doesn't mean that you should go through an entire personal evaluation. It just means to keep track of where you get inspired and what caused the inspiration. For some, it could be listening to music of some sort, while for others, it could be w

Basics Name (& pronunciation): Date of Birth (& age): Place of Birth: Gender:   Species/Racial Origin: Social Class/Community Status: Language: Family/Friends/Pets/Etc: Physical Description Height: Weight: Hair: Eyes: Limb Dexterity: Detailed Physical Description: Typical Clothing/Equipment: Personality/Attributes Personality/Attitude: Skills/Talents: Favourites/Likes: Most Hated/Dislikes: Goals/Ambitions: Strengths: Weaknesses: Fears: Hobbies/Interests: Regular Routine: Philosophy of Life: Attitude Toward Death:   Religion/Beliefs: Fetishes/Strange Behaviors: Most Instructive/Painful/Mem

I recently solicited my watchers to ask me writing questions that I would then attempt to answer in a writing guide such as this. This article is my first response, and there will be many more to come. I've been asked to give advice on ways a writer can begin to put words on a page. The bottom line is as simple as this: sit your butt down and write. Duh, right? It's the only way I know to actually write. Sure, sitting your butt in a chair is easy, but getting your fingers to move and stay moving is a challenge. Here are three things that have helped me. 1) Have a goal. Your goal can be as simple as "describe the person in this picture" o

Note: I wrote this after reading a similar article in The Writer magazine about a year ago.  Hope it's helpful! Not all characters are created equal.  Here are some steps to make yours superior. 1) Desire Figure out what your character wants, needs, desires.  A closer relationship with God?  A place to belong?  Just to survive?  Figure it out.  You can’t move on to number 2 until you have. 2) Fear Now that you know what your character most desires, you should be able to figure out what he/she most fears.  Doing the wrong thing, being alone, death?  They are the polar opposites of your character’s desires. 3) History Go back i

Because the question seems to come up with a lot of regularity (not unexpectedly I might add), and because it's just easier to make this once than to type it out each time it gets asked, here is my answer to the general question of "How do I draw better", and any one of the variations of the same. First of all, put the cartoons, manga, and other stylized designs on the back-burner of your priorities until after you master the fundamentals of understanding line, form, shape and perspective.  If you have some down-time you want to kill with some cartoons, spend a few minutes warming up first on some real life gesture drawings. Don't copy cart

The Trackless Wasteland known as: The MIDDLE -----Original Message----- The middle (of a story) KILLS me. I freeze when I have to decide which way things are going to go, and how, and that happens during the middle for me. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ -----Original Message----- Middle, middle, middle... It's the Slough of Despond! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ -----Original Message----- The Middle is where I usually fizzle out. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The middle is DANGEROUS territory. Why? Because the Middle of a story is where you have a million-and-one options, a million-and-one directions to choose from, and a million-and-one ways to really sho

dA Literature Tutorial: reading and submitting Reading Literature on DeviantART Each literature deviation is displayed within a box (there may also be a preview image displayed above it). The first line in this box is always the deviation title, as a first-level heading. The second line has the word "by" followed by the author's username (as a link). The rest of the deviation has been written by the author. At the top, right-hand corner of a literature deviation, you may see five buttons, depending on the category. These buttons will be my main focus for this part of the tutorial. (at the moment, I think the categories are a bit buggy - a

The tips that really work... It's been a while since I wrote one of these guides and, since V1.0 and V1.5 proved to be so popular, I feel it is about time I update my guide to getting noticed on deviantART. :la: So, you want to get noticed on deviantART but you're not sure where to start? You've come to the right place; pull out your note pad and pen, you'll need them. WHY? Before beginning to read this article, ask yourself why you want to get noticed on deviantART. Do you want to play more of an active role in the community or do you want to raise attention to your commissions and make a living? Do you want to get noticed to meet more de