by Atwood » Sat Sep 04, 2010 2:47 pm
The donations for this round have been gathered up and will be posted fairly soon. :3 There are a few points I want to bring up about form-writing based on certain trends that have been showing up over the last few rounds:
- Keep in mind that the word limit is 2500 words for the background portion and about 3000-3500 for the entire form including Personality, Likes/Dislikes, Background and anything else you might put in. While I'm not going to ding people for being a few words over, I've been seeing a few forms that were significantly longer than they should have been (like 1000 words longer), and those forms lost major big points. Remember: going over the word limit always means your form will score lower than it would have otherwise. The average length of winning forms is somewhere around 2000 words in total, and often they have Personality sections that are equal to or longer than the Background section.
- Try to avoid adding unimportant information to the form. Unless your character's exact height or weight is somehow important, you really don't need to add it in, and the same goes for listing the order, family and genus, birthplace, friends, offspring, etc. A lot of forms have been doing this lately, and it adds a whole extra page to the form of essentially useless information that adds nothing to the score. I'd really hate for people to spend a lot of time debating over whether their character belongs under Felidae or Mustelidae and then not have time to expand on the character's personality, which is where big points can be made. *hint hint* ;3
- The background should focus on the character, not its parents, friends, enemies, siblings, etc. The main point of the history is to show what events have shaped the character's life and personality, how they react to situations, how they think, and in general be a showing of the character in action. The story itself isn't the really important thing, although it certainly does help to have a creative and well-thought-out storyline. If your story is spending a lot of time on the lives of characters other than the one you're trying to adopt, it's probably going in the wrong direction.
- Characters don't have to have a tragic history. XD