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How to Write SIBLING Relationships
If you're looking to write a sibling relationship but don't fully understand how a sibling relationship actually works, this is for you! As someone who has a younger brother, here are some points you'll want to consider when writing siblings!
Oldest, Middle, and Youngest
First, let's talk about the three types of siblings and explore their general roles, expectations, and characterization within a family!
*Oldest*
Starting with the oldest child, oftentimes, the eldest child is expected to act as the most responsible and as the role model. This doesn't mean they will go out of their way to set an example, but typically, no matter their personality and relationship with their younger siblings, they will have an innate sense of duty and protectiveness over their siblings. They want their siblings to enter the right path.
As the role model, the oldest child normally feels the most stress and anxiety, yet they also try not to show it to avoid worry from others. They highly value independence.
*Middle*
I'm sure you've heard of the jokes that the middle child is invisible child, and while those jokes are often exaggerated, the truth isn't terribly far off.
Between the eldest and youngest child, the middle child has a more difficult time standing out, which may lead to more reckless behavior for attention. They are characterized as more free-spirited and might act as a mediator between the youngest and oldest.
They will likely be more responsible and experienced than the youngest but can act similarly to the youngest.
*Youngest*
The youngest child can look like many things. Sometimes, you'll see the youngest is the most spoiled because they're the parents' favorite, and sometimes they're ignored because they have the least experience. Despite that, they have their fair share of pressures and burdens because they are often expected to meet, if not surpass, the achievements of their older siblings.
The General Dynamic
A sibling relationship differs from a typical friendship. They WILL find each other more annoying, but that doesn't mean they can't get along.
Siblings are also more honest and nit-pickier with each other. For example, if a friend changes the radio without asking, the character might not think too much of it. However, if their brother changes the radio without asking, then the character will likely feel irritated and call them out for it.
And when I say honest, I don't mean that they're super honest with each other emotionally, because that's not always the case. When I mean honest, I mean they're rather honest with each other at a surface, verbal level. They hardly hesitate to say their thoughts and can be pushy about them.
They will have an opinion on everything.
Personalities
If you've ever had some friends that have siblings, I'm sure that you're aware sometimes siblings can be similar and sometimes they're total opposites.
However, this doesn't mean that a pair of "opposite" siblings are ying and yang. While they may seem visibly different, such as fashion sense, and introvert or extrovert, there are still shared traits that they hold. This is especially true if they're biological siblings and/or raised in the same environment together.
They influence each other, so there's bound to be some similarities in personality or values no matter how distinct each one is.
Love, Even If Unseen
No matter what, siblings love each other. They might not say it, they might not express it, or they might show it in a toxic and unhealthy way, but there's always an underlying sense of familial love. These are the people that your character has (or was supposed to) grown up with, after all.
There's going to be attachment, they will defend each other, even if they claim to hate the other.
Parents
Okay guys, now let's move on to parents and how they might play a part in sibling relationships!
*Comparisons*
Regardless of whether you have a sibling or not, you've likely experienced what it feels like to be compared to someone else. I'm not saying people with siblings have it worse, but they do have a wider range of people to be compared with.
It's not uncommon for parents to compare their children to each other, and it's not uncommon either for a child to compare themselves to their siblings. Sometimes, outsiders and/or distant family members will also compare the siblings, causing feelings of inferiority and envy.
When siblings have a poor relationship, it can sometimes be because of the parents.
*Fighting and Arguments*
Siblings fight and argue a LOT. However, you'd be mistaken if you thought a parent resolves all of these fights.
The truth is, after a certain age is reached, parents won't step in or resolve a fight unless it's right in front of them. They expect their children to be mature enough to solve their issues out, and honestly? They were tired of breaking up conflicts years ago.
Bonus point: yes, siblings can fight often, but the quarrels are usually forgotten pretty quick too. I've had several fights with my brother in which we were back to normal literally a few hours later the spat. Will I remember it for the next year? Absolutely. But do I care anymore? Not really.
Conclusion
This post may not apply to all siblings--everyone has different types of relationships--but here are some good points to start at!
TL;DR: The eldest sibling has the most responsibility, the middle sibling is a blend between the oldest and youngest and often strives for attention, and while the youngest sibling may look like they have it the easiest, they have their pressures too. Sibling relationship does not mimic a friendship, and they will have similar traits despite distinct personalities. They love and care for each other, even if it doesn't look that way. Having siblings sets up for many comparisons between them, and parents won't always resolve sibling spats.
I'll likely release some posts detailing how to write specific sibling relationships, so let me know if you want to see one in particular! Thank you for making it here!
Happy writing~
3hks <3
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.
Tysm!
Derin, you once said that posting consistently in a web series is very important for the growth of audience. But how do you keep yourself motivated to create stories on schedule? Whenever I try to do it, I just lose motivation and get stressed out or bored with my project
My answer is to have a big buffer. I aim to have a buffer of at least one year's worth of chapters. That way, I can take a month or two off every now and then to avoid burnout. It is also far, far less stressful. Not having a buffer is the most stressful thing a writer can do, do not do that.
So far as long-term sticking to projects goes, there's a few skills involved here and all of them involve a lot of practice. The first thing is what I call the Shiny New Fruit problem. This is something you see pretty much every newbie writer doing -- they get a great idea for a story, they know how it's gonna start, they have a cool premise and a twist that's gonna BLOW EVERYONE'S MIND, it'll be great! They start writing! Their first chapter is cool and unique and full of promise, and they get great feedback, and they move onto the second chapter and it's also great, and...
Quite quickly, they run out of "great chapters". Most of the time, the start of your story is low hanging fruit, so far as writing goes -- it's where you get to introduce all your cool concepts and you're not weighed down by anything established yet and all the Cool Stuff That's Gonna Happen is still in the future, it's your perfect imagined version of it and not the (usually worse) version that ends up on the page. Then you run out of low hanging fruit, and it gets slower and harder, and you have to do a lot more actual work and it doesn't feel so new and exciting any more, and a newbie writer thinks, "oh, this isn't as fun, the story feels more boring to write, that part didn't come out as well as I'd hoped -- this story must be bad". And sometimes they might give up right away. Or instead they might continue... but they're distracted, because solving the issue of how to get those two guys out of prison in chapter 6 just gave them the BEST idea for a different story, it's gonna be so much better, the characters are great and they can already feel the words pouring out of them and...
So they run off to pick the low-hanging fruit for their new story, and before they know it, they have nine unfinished stories on their hard drive and not a completed story to their name.
Every writer will get distracted and enthused about new ideas for projects. This isn't a newbie problem. The newbie problem is letting them tempt you away from the viable projects you're already working on so that nothing gets done. My solution to this is very simple -- I am not allowed to write my future projects until I finish my current one. This way, all that enthusiasm for the future project is transmuted into motivation for the current one -- I can write that cool story about a bug alien who adopts and astronaut but first I have to push through the slow part of this story and get this story finished. This has always worked really well for me.
The second reason that you might lose motivation for a story you're working on is that the story is indeed bad, or at least, the version of it incubating in your mind isn't ready yet. The problem with this is that every story feels bad when you're bored or frustrated with it, and it takes a lot of practice to tell the difference between a genuine dud idea and one that your brain is lying to you about because it wants to play computer games instead. My advice on these is to push through anyway -- it almost certainly isn't a dud idea, and if it is, you'll learn way more by completing it than abandoning it.
The third reason is burnout. Now, it's important to note that everyone is bored and frustrated with their stories sometimes. I got sick of writing space intrigue and took a month off to play Subnautica (I could afford to do this with no stress because of my massive chapter buffer), then came back when I felt like it -- that isn't burnout. I've procrastinated for weeks before because I'm up to a really complicated scene with a lot of emotional beats and new information and it's hard to write so I don't wanna -- that isn't burnout. Burnout is what you get when you don't manage these things properly for way too long and grind your brain to paste. I have a lot of tips for avoiding burnout, but they'd take a long time to explain, so all I'll say here is that learning to recognise and avoid burnout is a skill that you will gain with experience.
The fourth reason that people get bored and frustrated is that writing is a skill, and it's a lot harder to do than it looks. Writing when you're not in Full Inspiration Mode is exhausting. It's difficult. It almost always looked worse on the page than you expected; your favourite authors do so much better than this, why doesn't your work look like theirs? It's just words! You know words!
This one trips a lot of newbies up, because in Full Inspiration Mode, writing is easy. someone can have five chapters pour out of them in that mode, and then look at their page two days later and go, "huh, writing is so much harder today". then they'll call that "writer's block" (that is NOT writer's block) and decide to write again when they "feel inspired".
Do not do this. It's a trap. If you only write when you're inspired, you will not succeed as a writer. Take advantage of your periods of inspiration, obviously, but writers must learn to forge ahead without them, because they're going to get fewer and smaller as the low hanging fruit all get picked and you simply will not keep up with a schedule relying on them, whether it's a web serial update schedule or a deadline given to you by a publisher or simply the desire to have a manuscript ready to pitch to an agent before you die of old age. The world is full of people who are "writing a book" and have been doing so for thirty years with almost no progress. If you want to finish, you need to write when it's a bit tricky, when it's a bit boring, when you're not inspired at all and aren't entirely certain where things are going. Fortunately this, like everything else here, is a skill that is honed with practice.
So, yeah. That's my advice. Have a chapter buffer, the bigger the better. Make sure that your writing pace is faster than your publication pace. Avoid these quitting/stopping pitfalls. That's pretty much it.
as requested by quite a few people - a masterpost of educational podcasts. links go to either the site or the itunes podcast store. an excerpt of the description is included with each.
* indicates a podcast that i listen to regularly
entertainment
*welcome to night vale - twice-monthly updates for the small desert town of night vale
*muggle cast - everything harry potter
general information
radiolab - investigation told through sounds and stories, and centered around one big idea
*stuff you should know - about everything from genes to the galapagos
*stuff mom never told you - the business of being women
tedtalks
good job, brain - part pub quiz show, part offbeat news
news
no one knows anything - the politics podcast from buzzfeed news
wait wait…don’t tell me - weekly current events quiz
college
*college info geek - the strategies and tactics the best students use
*getting in - your college admissions companion
math
math for primates - a couple of monkeys who decided that arguing about mathematics was a better use of their time than throwing poo at one another
math mutation - fun, interesting, or just plain weird corners of mathematics
science
60 second health - latest health and medical news
the naked scientists - interviews with top scientists, hands-on science experiments
60 second science - the most interesting developments in the world of science
startalk - astronomy, physics, and everything else about life in the universe
nasa science cast - science behind discoveries on earth, the solar system, and beyond
history
*myths and legends - myths, legends, and folklore that have shaped cultures
stuff you missed in history class - the greatest and strangest stuff you missed
the podcast history of our world - from the big bang to the modern age! …eventually
witness - the story of our times told by the people who were there
the history chicks - two women. half the population. several thousands years of history.
entrepreneurship & finances
practical money matters - better managing their finances
the internet business mastery - learn how to create an internet based business
social triggers insider - the fields of psychology and human behavior
listen money matters - honest and uncensored, this is not your father’s boring finance show
writing & literature
professional book nerds - it’s our job to discuss books all day long
a way with words - words, language, and how we use them
grammar girl - short, friendly tips to improve your writing
classic poetry aloud - recordings of the greats poems of the past
language
esl (english) - improve english speaking and listening skills
language pod
coffee break
search in your podcast app for specific languages!
art
99% invisible - exploration of the process and power of design
tips and tricks photography
the arts roundtable
hobbies & other
stash & burn (knitting)
practical defense - staying safe in our increasingly dangerous urban environments
zen and the art of triathlon - a triathlete’s view on living the multisport life
the art of charm - make you a better networker, connecter, and thinker
the indoor kids - isn’t just about video games, isn’t not about video games
rationally speaking - explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense
the dice tower - board games, card games, and the people who design and play them
motivational & inspirational
back to work - productivity, communication, work, barriers, constraints, tools, and more
personal growth podcast - classic and contemporary self development audio
what it takes - conversations with towering figures in almost every field
here be monsters - exploring the dark corners of the human mind
on being - the big questions of meaning with scientists, theologians, artists, teachers
hello guys 🌻 so, i just finished my A-levels *cheers* and basically i have not the slightest idea what to do with my free time but i’m determined to stay productive, hence this is the reason for this masterpost. hope you all enjoy it too!!
stuff to do after exams
GET THAT SLEEP YOU MISSED OUT ON FOR AGES
treat yourself!!!
get into a bath and chill
play your fave songs
get back to watching that series you stopped watching before exams
meet up with your friends and do something fun [and try to avoid talking about exams as much as you can]
get back to doing that hobby you loved doing
plan a trip [even if it’s just in your own country, have fun and act like a tourist!]
organise a sleepover with your friends + play some board games [be safe if you’re drinking please!!]
check out local events, there is bound to be something you like [for example, we have a nature festival soon here + i’m rly excited to go!!!]
GO TO THE BEACH AYYY
download some new apps yay!!!
do new things! [read new books, watch new tv shows, find a new hobby, do anything]
spend time with your family and friends
exercise maybe idk!!! find a new workout you like + try to stick to it
meditate
try finding a job [check my job tag for tips + resources]
try out new restaurants + coffeeshops + so many other things!!
volunteer omg!!
help out around the house
visit relatives you didn’t have the chance to visit during exams
cute june quote!!
academics + learning
start a bullet journal?
plan, plan, plan!!
learn a new language
learn how to cook + make fun snacks
learn photography [or a new hobby in general tbh]
find an online course on something you don’t have to study for school
watch some documentaries
check your school syllabuses for books you should read before starting the next school year
prepare for uni
take some summer classes
review some of your notes from time to time if they’re useful for the next school year
where to get motivation
motivation masterpost
motivation tag
my study instagram [which i really should update soon]
study inspiration
how to study in summer
staying on track during the summer
+ my masterposts
notes, studying, and self-study resources
self-study resources
supplies
igcse resources
literature masterpost
organisation
aesthetically pleasing notes
annotating
studying a foreign language
really great apps
math
college + uni
motivation
biology
space!!!!
chemistry
physics
summary writing
the discursive/argumentative essay
the narrative essay + the descriptive essay
the ultimate english masterpost!!
stress relief
what i’ve learnt throughout my years of being a student
how to stay productive during holidays
bullet journals
melodic studying
philosophy
stay sated whilst you’re motivated
shakespeare
+ more
hope this helped you guys, enjoy your summer!!
- helena xx
image credit (x)
I wanted to make a revision printable for myself now that I’m in VCE, so I based it off the curve of forgetting in order to combat it. :) Usually I do a bit more revision than this, but I like use this sheet as a minimum for revision and also as a way to keep track of what to revise.
Here’s a downloadable link for anyone else who would like to use it too!
“Overcoming the Curve of Forgetting” Printable
HOW TO USE:
one subject per printable
tick boxes for what tasks to do each revision session (there are two blanks to add any other unique method you like to use)
sub topics to revise in each subject
a tick & the date in each box for completion
Good luck revising!
november 23 / i’m starting to make some review sheets since finals are in three weeks.. i’m not crying, you’re crying