Random Stuff For Your Story

20 Alternative Losses Your Protagonist Can Face That Don't Involve the Death of a Person.

In one of my recent posts, I talked about losses as a core principle in driving a plot forward.

It's recommended in almost all guides. But here's the thing: someone doesn't have to actually die to create that emotional rollercoaster.

Here are 20 different losses your protagonist can face without losing someone to the cold hands of death:

1. Loss of a dream job opportunity

2. End of a long-term relationship or marriage

3. Betrayal by a close friend or family member

4. Financial ruin or bankruptcy

5. Loss of a beloved pet (The pet could go missing.)

6. Rejection from a prestigious program or institution

7. Injury or illness leading to the loss of physical abilities

8. Destruction of a childhood home

9. Loss of custody of a child

10. Failure to achieve a lifelong dream or goal

11. Being falsely accused of a crime

12. Natural disaster destroying personal belongings and home

13. Loss of a valuable family heirloom

14. Experiencing discrimination or injustice

15. Being forced to move away from a beloved community

16. Losing a significant competition or contest

17. Loss of memory or cognitive abilities

18. Falling out with a mentor or role model

19. Closure of a cherished local business

20. Loss of one's reputation due to scandal or rumor

Thank you for all of your support. If you love my blog, consider gifting me a rose. Val's here, and I hope your characters are ready to paint the town red.

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I made these as a way to compile all the geographical vocabulary that I thought was useful and interesting for writers. Some descriptors share categories, and some are simplified, but for the most part everything is in its proper place. Not all the words are as useable as others, and some might take tricky wording to pull off, but I hope these prove useful to all you writers out there!

(save the images to zoom in on the pics)

money is such an underrated accessibility option.

like people want to think any disabled person who is after money is morally suspect some way, because they're not asking for "treatments" or "accommodations" like a lot of our issues can be fixed way more easily with money. can't drive? paying for a taxi is often one of the more accessible alternatives. can't cook? you can pay more to have prepared food delivered to you. food restrictions? that food straight up costs more money. can't clean? you can pay for someone to do that. house inaccessible? having (lots) of money can help with that, you get the gist.

having money won't make us abled. it also won't stop our symptoms from being distressing, painful, or debilitating. but there's a huge gap in experience between the average poor disabled person and someone who's actually wealthy. you can buy your way out of some of the difficult situations most disabled people are left to rot in. wanting money, needing money, asking for money is pretty natural when it's such a useful tool. why get so weird about disabled people wanting money like i'm pretty sure everyone wants money anyway

Hey, random writing tip: Instead of having something be a ridiculously unlikely coincidence, you can make the thing happen due to who this particular character is as a person. Instead of getting stuck on "there's no logical reason to why that would happen", try to bend it into a case of "something like this would never happen to anybody but this specific fucker." Something that makes your reader chuckle and roll their eyes, going "well of course you would."

Why would the timid shy nerd be at a huge sketchy downtown black market bazaar? Well, she's got this beetle colony she's raising that needs a very specific kind of leaf for nest material, and there only place to get it is this one guy at the bazaar that sells that stuff. Why would the most femininely flamboyant guy ever known just happen to have downright encyclopedic knowledge about professional boxing? Well, there was this one time when he was down bad for this guy who was an aspiring professional boxer...

I know it sounds stupidly obvious when written out like this, but when you're up close to your writing, it's hard to see the forest for the trees. Some time ago I finished reading a book, where the whole plot hinges on character A, who is 100% certain that character B is dead, personally getting up and coming down from the top rooms of a castle, to the gates, at 3 am, to come look at some drunk who claims to be this guy who died 17 years ago. Why would A do that, if he's sure that B is dead?

Because he's a Warrior Guy from a culture of Loyalty And Honour, and hearing that someone's got the audacity to go about claiming to be his long-lost brother in battle, there is no other option than to immediately personally go down there to beat the ever-loving shit out of this guy. Who then turns out to actually be character B, after all.

Write Characters Who Feel Dangerous (Even If They’re "Good")

╰ Make their unpredictability a feature, not a bug

A dangerous character isn’t just the guy with the gun. It’s the one you can’t quite predict. Maybe they’re chaotic-good. Maybe they’re lawful-evil. Maybe they’re smiling while they’re plotting the next five ways to ruin your day. If the reader can’t tell exactly what they’ll do next — congrats, you’ve made them dangerous.

╰ Give them a weapon that's personal

Anyone can have a sword. Yawn. Give your character a weapon that says something about them. A violin bow turned garrote. A candy tin full of arsenic. Their own charisma as a leash. The weapon isn’t just what they fight with, it’s how they are.

╰ Let them choose not to strike and make that scarier

Sometimes not acting is the biggest flex. A truly dangerous character doesn’t need to explode to be terrifying. They can sit back, cross their legs, sip their coffee, and say, “Not yet.” Instant chills.

╰ Layer their menace with something else, humor, kindness, sadness

One-note villains (or heroes!) are boring. A dangerous character should make you like them right up until you realize you shouldn’t have. Let them charm. Let them save the kitten. Let them do something that makes the eventual threat feel like betrayal.

╰ Show how other characters react to them

If every character treats them like a nuclear bomb in the room, your reader will, too. Even if your dangerous character is polite and quiet, the dog that won’t go near them or the boss who flinches when they smile will sell the danger harder than a blood-soaked axe.

╰ Make their danger internal as well as external

It’s not just what they can do to others. It’s what they’re fighting inside themselves. The anger. The boredom. The itch for chaos. Make them a little bit scary even to themselves, and suddenly they’re alive in ways pure external "baddies" never are.

╰ Don't make them immune to consequences

Even the most dangerous characters should get hit—physically, emotionally, socially. Otherwise, they turn into invincible cartoons. Let them lose sometimes. Let them bleed. It’ll make every moment they win feel twice as earned (and twice as scary).

╰ Tie their danger to what they love

Real threats aren't powered by anger; they're powered by love. Protectiveness can be feral. Loyalty can turn into violence. A character who's dangerous because they care about something? That's a nuclear reactor in a leather jacket.

╰ Remember: danger is a vibe, not a body count

Your character doesn’t have to kill anyone to be dangerous. Sometimes just a glance. A whispered rumor. A quiet, calculated decision to leave you alive — for now. Dangerous characters control the room without ever raising their voice.

Excellent tips and habits for writers

The advice I've given before is to write every scene you think of, no matter if it gets used or not. Its always a great idea to go back every once and a while and edit these scenes, or revise them.

Never force inspiration or a scene. If it isn't coming naturally, take a break and come back later or the next day. it's important to give yourself time to think. use your break to day dream about your story and what could come next. if your brain is happy, this should be relatively simple. If your brain isn't happy, then you need to take a longer break, stop writing for the day all together, or write something else.

if you're a pantser, like me, and it's hard to plot. You can practice reverse plotting, and plot your story as you go. make notes of things that happen in your story, changes in a character, changes in the plot, changes in the setting, dates for events, timelines, important information that's been revealed, anything you deem important to your story.

always reread what you've already written. don't try to edit it. turn off your editor brain and reread your story so far before you resume writing, so you can get into the voice and tone that you've already established.

if you're finding it difficult to start writing or keep writing. try turning off your internal editor and free write. it's good practice to be able to write down your unfiltered thoughts or daydreams without having to stop and edit while you're writing. it helps with your writing flow, getting the scene down onto the page, and increases your writing intuition.

before you write, always take time to daydream or think about your story beforehand. it helps things go much smoother in the long run.

if you've been working on something for a long time, don't pressure yourself into confinement. if you want to work on something new but you're worried about what you've been working on, don't. stop worrying and write what you want. forcing yourself to keep writing something when you don't want to is just going to make you burn out faster.

don't be afraid to create visuals or playlists that help you with what you're writing. It's an enviable talent to be able to write something off a photo you saw on pinterest, or a song you really like.

if you find yourself in a mood where you want to write really badly, but you have no idea what you want to write, and none of the prompts you find are appealing enough. find an activity you use to destress, whether its listening to music, listening to asmr, doom scrolling on social media, or browsing pinterest. go do that. chances are, you'll find something that will inspire you what to write when you're not looking for it.

Rage, Grief & Other Quiet Explosions

(Emotional meltdowns that don’t look like meltdowns, but absolutely are)

 The “Smiling Too Much” Grief Your character’s entire world is on fire, and they’re asking if anyone wants more wine. That’s not denial, it’s an effort to hold the damn pieces together. Smile like a glue gun. Watch them crack.

The “Not Crying At the Funeral” Breakdown They don't shed a tear. They organize everything. Perfect speech. Perfect outfit. But a week later, they scream into the laundry basket over a missing sock. That’s the moment. That’s the eulogy.

 The “Silent Dinner Table” Fight No yelling. No slamming doors. Just chewing. Clinking silverware. The kind of silence that tastes like metal. Let the reader feel the air shrink.

 The “Polite but Dead Inside” Apology They say “Sorry” because it’s expected, not because they’re ready. Their voice doesn’t crack. Their eyes don’t meet yours. This isn’t healing. This is a peace treaty with no peace.

The “I Don’t Want to Talk About It” Detour The one where they ask about your day mid-sob. Redirect. Deflect. “Let’s not talk about me.” That’s rage choked by shame. Write it like it’s shoving itself into a smaller box.

 The “Obsessively Productive” Meltdown New projects. New hobbies. Suddenly they’re running marathons, baking sourdough, fixing the garage door. Because if they sit still for one second, they’ll break. Keep the camera on them when they finally sit.

The “Unsent Letters” Grief They write it all down. Every damn emotion. Then burn it. Or delete it. Or hide it in a shoebox under their bed. It’s not for closure. It’s to let the ghosts know they were seen.

The “I’m Fine” That Echoes Delivered too fast. Too sharp. You could bounce a quarter off it. “I’m fine” isn’t fine. It’s the dam cracking. Listen to the echo. Let another character hear the hollowness.

The “Hyper-Logical Rant” Rage They argue with spreadsheets. With perfect bullet points. Cold rage—like ice, not fire. “I’m not mad, I’m just saying…” But that’s a lie. They’re volcanic under that clipboard.

 The “Laughing in the Middle of the Breakdown” Moment That bitter, hysterical laugh. The kind that sounds more like sobbing with teeth. Let it come at the worst time. Let it shock even them. That’s emotion refusing to stay boxed in.

"Absolutely no one comes to save us but us."

Ismatu Gwendolyn, "you've been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress)", from Threadings, on Substack [ID'd]

Tips for writing those gala scenes, from someone who goes to them occasionally:

Generally you unbutton and re-button a suit coat when you sit down and stand up.

You’re supposed to hold wine or champagne glasses by the stem to avoid warming up the liquid inside. A character out of their depth might hold the glass around the sides instead.

When rich/important people forget your name and they’re drunk, they usually just tell you that they don’t remember or completely skip over any opportunity to use your name so they don’t look silly.

A good way to indicate you don’t want to shake someone’s hand at an event is to hold a drink in your right hand (and if you’re a woman, a purse in the other so you definitely can’t shift the glass to another hand and then shake)

Americans who still kiss cheeks as a welcome generally don’t press lips to cheeks, it’s more of a touch of cheek to cheek or even a hover (these days, mostly to avoid smudging a woman’s makeup)

The distinctions between dress codes (black tie, cocktail, etc) are very intricate but obvious to those who know how to look. If you wear a short skirt to a black tie event for example, people would clock that instantly even if the dress itself was very formal. Same thing goes for certain articles of men’s clothing.

Open bars / cash bars at events usually carry limited options. They’re meant to serve lots of people very quickly, so nobody is getting a cosmo or a Manhattan etc.

Members of the press generally aren’t allowed to freely circulate at nicer galas/events without a very good reason. When they do, they need to identify themselves before talking with someone.

In the past fifty years, fantasy’s greatest sin might be its creation of a bland, invariant, faux-Medieval European backdrop. The problem isn’t that every fantasy novel is set in the same place: pick a given book, and it probably deviates somehow. The problem is that the texture of this place gets everywhere.

What’s texture, specifically? Exactly what Elliot says: material culture. Social space. The textiles people use, the jobs they perform, the crops they harvest, the seasons they expect, even the way they construct their names. Fantasy writing doesn’t usually care much about these details, because it doesn’t usually care much about the little people – laborers, full-time mothers, sharecroppers, so on. (The last two books of Earthsea represent LeGuin’s remarkable attack on this tendency in her own writing.) So the fantasy writer defaults – fills in the tough details with the easiest available solution, and moves back to the world-saving, vengeance-seeking, intrigue-knotting narrative. Availability heuristics kick in, and we get another world of feudal serfs hunting deer and eating grains, of Western name constructions and Western social assumptions. (Husband and wife is not the universal historical norm for family structure, for instance.)

Defaulting is the root of a great many evils. Defaulting happens when we don’t think too much about something we write – a character description, a gender dynamic, a textile on display, the weave of the rug. Absent much thought, automaticity, the brain’s subsconscious autopilot, invokes the easiest available prototype – in the case of a gender dynamic, dad will read the paper, and mom will cut the protagonist’s hair. Or, in the case of worldbuilding, we default to the bland fantasy backdrop we know, and thereby reinforce it. It’s not done out of malice, but it’s still done.

The only way to fight this is by thinking about the little stuff. So: I was quite wrong. You do need to worldbuild pretty hard. Worldbuild against the grain, and worldbuild to challenge. Think about the little stuff. You don’t need to position every rain shadow and align every tectonic plate before you start your short story. But you do need to build a base of historical information that disrupts and overturns your implicit assumptions about how societies ‘ordinarily’ work, what they ‘ordinarily’ eat, who they ‘ordinarily’ sleep with. Remember that your slice of life experience is deeply atypical and selective, filtered through a particular culture with particular norms. If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing – because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.

We... need worldbuilding by Seth Dickinson