My characters used to be clean cut bad or good. Now I’ve tried to make them more nuanced, with flaws and redeeming qualities; even if said character is overall a truly despicable person
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I used to really like giving my bad guys tiny redeaming qualities.
Or at least excuses.
Now though I go back and forth.
For the main villains of my game I decided to make them abslutely evil in their actions but with the caveat that they do it because they have been tormented for millenia by the Bales.
As for the Bales. They are intended to be 100% evil without excuse and without reason.
That’s not me trying to reduce effort or be edgy. I want to use how Polarly different they are as a major plot point.
Other “bad” characters in my game have varying levels of “evilness” and often they are merely bad by situation rather than just plain bad.
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Originally I just wrote what happened and that’s it.
Now I have to add emotion into it. 
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So, from 2012-14, I went to public school, and I stopped really working on stories for a while and decided to do comics instead (even though I suck at drawing). The English teacher was really good, and when I got out of high school, and finally returned to writing, I found that my writing skills had improved immensely. Sure, not every story I make is good, but at least it looks god. As I put it, I’ve always been able to make good stories, but my writing made them look bad; now, I can still write bad stories, but at least they’ll be well written.
I can tell what stories I wrote before this change and which ones came after, simply from the writing. It’s sorta jarring, since I improved during a time when I wasn’t actually writing stories, I didn’t have a slow transition.
But yeah some of the things I have changed in:
Emotion: I don’t know why, but I really like emotional stories. Gut punch scenes, tragedies, and the like… I have a weird liking for sad things, which honestly saddens me. Okay, dumb jokes aside, I never really had any impactful emotion in the past, and often strayed away from it. I hesitated to killf off a few minor characters in the past, but now I won’t think twice about killfing off even main characters if my ploft demands it.
Personality: I’mma be Kahi here for a second: in the past, you could swap out most of the characters in my stories and it would make little difference. There were two characters I made stories about frequently in my younger days that had actual personalities, but usually my characters were rather cookie-cut. Now, I can’t even make a story without first coming up with personalities for my characters first, mainly due to my next point of improvement:
Getting in someone’s head: I used to just tell you what happened. Now, though, I have to get inside my main character’s brain and see what they think about what’s happening. This means I can write things that we already saw, but with the added benefit of a different perspective. Case in point, I recently wrote a story about the ending of the second movie, but from a POV we never got to see: Makuta’s. That fight was shown in both a movie and a book, but with a new POV, it made a new story out of something we’d already seen twice. Of course, this does come with a drawback: I can’t show scenes from the POV of people like Vezon, for example, because I cannot get into the head of a crazy person. Although, I guess the alternative is going back to just saying what happens, and it’s generally better to portray insanity through the eyes of the beholder anyway.
OP heroes: Okay, I didn’t have my characters have OP abilities like Invulnerability or healing. My flaw was that my characters had regular abilities that somehow allowed them to do anything they needed to do. You’d be surprised how much I can have a character do with just “superior climbing skills” as their supposed powerset. I say ‘supposed’ because all of my characters are able to perform feats no regular person could, particularly jumps.
smell: my stories used to stink, mainly because I kept my writing paper in the bathroom.
Humor: I used to think that dumb jokes like the above line were funny. Or worse. Nowadays, I realize something: you can’t force humour. Good humor has to just happen, naturally. Think how many times someone on TTV (usually Eljay) makes a joke and it flops, vs. how many times you find yourself laughing at the tangents the cast has fallen off on just by having a normal conversation. I suppose this is why comics can sometimes be hit-or-miss, while a good comedian can make a rock laugh: comics force the writer to com up with constant, new punchlines, while comedians roll with the thought they start with and let the humor happen.
I use parentheses a bit too much (case in point).
~W12~
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Oh, boy, where do I start? Well, I suppose I can start how one of the greatest stories of my childhood started.
“In the time before time…”
I was nine years old when I wrote my first story; ironically, it was BIONICLE-themed. Now, let me explain something: in my elementary class, we had dedicated writing folders, as well as a Language/Writing class, or as I saw it, 45 minutes of Mind-Erupting, Hype-Inducing Creative Time (I was a very optimistic kid. Now look at me 
). My very first written work worth mentioning was a continuation of the 2008 storyline where Teridax never took over the GSR, and the Toa returned to a victory celebration in which they were given new armor by Tanma, the newest member of the High Council (I didn’t actually remember the existence of Turaga Dume in the writing of this ). It also sparked the appearance of a new Toa Team from an entirely different dimension, which could eventually flower into my self MOC Toa Jalon’s team (Or rather, his direct brother, Artuhrenn’s team). Aaaand then I proceeded to retcon the existence of Artuhrenn’s team. Maybe I’ll bring them back, one day…
Fast forward a few months, and BIONICLE has been cancelled. Before the mess that became mine and my brother’s Great Universe War between BIONICLE and Hero Factory (don’t deny it; ya’ll did it, too ), I had a school project to write a story of some sort, and you best be sure that I wrote about BIONICLE. This time, my story was a continuation of the end of G1, as it pitted a team made up of Tahu, Ackar, Gresh and Jalon (who was in a phase–read, he spent some time as an Av-Toran build with a Photok mask, which was actually kind of cool until I broke the mask. Oh, how things might have been…), as well as others, against a trio of shadow clones of Tahu, Gresh and Takanuva. It had the potential to be a good story, if I didn’t bite at writing good rising action and climaxes. Unfortunately, I only finished the very beginning. I wish for the life of me that I knew where it was, because I’d love to re-write it now.
I got an A, if you’re curious. 
(Speaking of that BIONICLE vs HF war, that could’ve been the basis for a good story, too. Characters stronger than Toa and more or less resembling Egyptian gods known as Bionicle Spirits were introduced, as well as an army of mechs created by the Great Beings to wipe the universe clean once and for all (which were represented by Neo Shifters). Also, Tahu dies. Yeah.
There was a Shadow the Hedgehog fan fiction somewhere in there that I started umpteen years ago and steadily improved over two years to make something Wattpad-worthy, but that’s not the point. It’s your standard fanfiction fare. Anyways, you might have noticed my big writing issue by now. I was good at writing characters that had pre-existing personalities, and I was good at setting the stage. But I couldn’t take that anywhere. My stories didn’t give the characters emotion; all they did was talk from a piece of paper. However, as I began to encounter things and characters on a more personal level, I began to correct that mistake.
Next, I’m in the sixth grade, and it is Christmas time. Our assignment in Language and Writing class? You guessed it: write a Christmas-themed story. Well, I wasn’t content to write some lame, run-of-the-mill story, and I was pretty into Hero Factory at the time, so I wrote a story where Alpha Team (Stormer, Bulk and Stringer) have to go on a mission to fight XPlode and Thunder on Christmas Eve, and Furno, Surge and Breez work together with the HF staff to prepare a Christmas party for the Heroes on mission. This is the first story that I actually felt accomplished. At around 10,000 words and containing a solid plot and climax, this was my first good story, at least for my age. However, new problems in my writing began to emerge, and they were conflict and romance. My combat scenes had details, but they were short and over in a flash, which was okay in this case because it wasn’t the main point; however, this would have to be rectified for more action-oriented writing. The second is romance. I cannot write romance without it either sounding forced or awkward. So I don’t. 
This was around the time I started writing non-fiction, opinionated essays in school. They were fun and different, but they weren’t my style. In seventh grade I started a new superhero to replace the one whose story I ended the previous year (which was a very unclear story), and I’m still coming up with this character’s story as I go through life (he’s more or less as strong as Goku by now ). In eighth grade I started a Lord of the Rings continuation story following characters based off of myself and my best friend at the time. My character was more or less a Mary Sue in everything, but he had one thing previous characters of mine didn’t: emotional turmoil and anger.
This was my turning point in writing, I think. My elementary school superhero had been an egotistical character who had no emotion other than cockiness and justice, and though he had not actual superpowers, he was more or less Batman. The new hero I wrote as well as my LoTR character were new ground for me despite them being based off of me; the new hero, a modern day elemental knight descended from Merlin, started off arrogant and kind of a jerk before developing into a good person and a leader. My LoTR protagonist was, as stated, a Mary Sue, but he had two emotions that I feared in real life: the fear of loss and anger.
Move along into high school, and I’ve come a long way. A lot of my characters are still based upon me, and most if not all of them are quite powerful in their own rights. But at the same time, they aren’t perfect; unlike my characters of old, these ones face moral dilemmas that they sometimes choose the wrong answers to. I also no longer fear killing off my characters as I used to, either.
Now here I am. I’ve got an Assassin’s Creed story coming along nicely, a collab story with a friend of mine that’s on the grittier side (if only she’d get motivated to work on it again!!), and, of course, a new BIONICLE story featuring the Toa Inika as villagers on the island of Okoto, and the return of a beloved character. And who knows? Writing this shpeal has gotten me thinking about the potential for a story following Artuhrenn’s Toa Team…and their untimely shattering.
If you read this whole thing, I love you. Have a cookie. 
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