History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

The Character Secret Thesaurus

| April 28, 2025

If you’re writing a character with a secret, how might you portray that through your writing? The Character Secret Thesaurus from Writers Helping Writers is a great place to start! The Character Secret Thesaurus is a database in progress that presents a number of secrets a character might be keeping, along with specific details that […]

The Non-Player Review of Video Games: Hey, I Know That Voice (Brutal Legend)

| April 23, 2025

Several years ago now, Jeremy picked up a copy of Brütal Legend, and as per the usual, he played it while I was doing other things. This game caught my attention in part because of the music, but my main focus was “hey, I know that voice!” I have an uncanny talent for recognizing actors across […]

Internal Character Conflicts

| April 14, 2025

Last Monday, I talked about external character conflicts, and how those are the sort of “conflict” that many authors are thinking of when they talk about the subject. At the end of that post, I started to dip a little bit into internal character conflicts, which is what I’m talking about today. Most people have […]

External Character Conflicts

| April 7, 2025

When most authors talk about the need for “conflict” to drive a story, they’re talking about external character conflicts. Most often, this is distilled down even further to a protagonist vs. an antagonist. And while that’s certainly one way to generate conflict to drive a story, it’s not the only option! External character conflicts can […]

Collaborative Storytelling

| March 31, 2025

During the gaming convention I was at recently, I played in a couple of games that involved a lot of collaborative storytelling. It was fun for me to get to stretch some of my writing muscles in a setting where I wasn’t writing down the results, but rather working with other people to shape the […]

The Non-Player Review of Video Games: Cyberpunk 2077

| March 19, 2025

Jeremy has been a cyberpunk fan for years, so of course he picked up Cyberpunk 2077 when it came out. I was excited, because Keanu Reeves voices one of the characters in the game. I was not prepared to hate a character voiced by Keanu Reeves. But man, Johnny Silverhand is a DICK! He’s grumpy […]

Fun for Friday: Seasons as Characters

| September 22, 2023

In connection with Monday’s post about seasons in worldbuilding, I’m thinking about seasons as characters. How would you write a character based on spring? Which elements of that season would you emphasize? You could write a character who’s all joy and rebirth and growing things, or you could write a character who’s like torrential downpours […]

Writing Advice from Sherlock Holmes

| December 27, 2021

I like to share interesting author advice that I come across, and this post about 10 Elementary Tips for Writers from Sherlock Holmes struck me as a neat approach. Because it’s not writing advice from Arthur Conan Doyle. It’s what authors can learn by emulating Sherlock Holmes (definitely with less of the opium and breaking […]

Cool Name Matching Tool

| June 16, 2021

When you’re working on coming up with names for characters, particularly characters of a specific ethnic group or age range, you could poke around a bunch of baby naming books or sites to find other names that go along with ones you’ve already picked out. Or you could check out the Name Matchmaker site. This […]

Falling Off the Map

| May 21, 2018

Last week, I talked about getting stuck in the middle of a story. A similar, and yet different problem can be when your story takes on a life of its own, and somehow falls off the edge of your map. Many folks who fall into the “pantsers” camp of writing insist that they just let […]