Hi! Sorry to bother you again, I'm the one who asked you a while ago if it was okay to ask for some tips on writing dialogue. Thank you so much for your availability and time 🙇♀️
I'm mostly curious about how you structure your dialogues and how you manage to build chemistry between the characters through banter. Do you follow a particular set of rules or does it just come natural to you? You write so many ideas and cool dialogues, how do you manage to come up with so many?
In general, if you have any tips for a fledgling "writer", they are super welcome. No pressure, of course, I really don't want to intrude/steal your time.
P.s. I forgot last time to tell you that I also really loved your AU fic, Party Favours. I was hooked from the first lines and I had so much fun reading it. It was a really comforting and entertaining read, like drinking a hot chocolate in winter. Honestly, thank you so much for gifting us with such a warm and funny story. 🥰☕
Hey! Thank you for being so nice about my writing and the strengths you think I have - I didn't know I had them, so it was interesting to see my work from someone else's perspective.
And also don't worry, it's not a bother to answer this question. Although I'm not sure how helpful I'll be as I have no formal training and that might mean my explanations aren't useful!!
I'll try to answer as best I can :)
I don't really have rules for chemistry, I'll be honest, but my favourite dynamic (as is fucking obvious from many a fic I've written) is overconfident flirt/straight-laced practical killjoy. Luckily for me... there are a lot of these in media (Howl/Sophie, Tamaki/Haruhi, certain flavours of Buffy/Spike, Jude/Cardan from The Cruel Prince, Labyrinth fanfiction, whatever was going on with Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries)! So I guess, if I was to give advice on that... I'd say if you really like a certain dynamic, go and look for examples of how they work elsewhere. Work out what it is about the pairing that makes your brain itch, or examine how these characteristic interactions play out, if there's any kind of formula to them -
for instance, in Party Favours, the bit where Astarion is actively and overconfidently faking while talking to Threnn while Rose gets more and more flustered, was based partly on a fake relationship episode of Buffy lol. Like I didn't copy it word for word or anything, but it was an idea I saw elsewhere that I knew would be good for the pairing.
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Coming up with ideas... again, idk how idiosyncratic my process is. I maladaptive daydream a lot, and I really like scripting arguments (see above about what dynamics in fiction work for me, lmfao). i just love to hallucinate bickering, apparently. If I have any lines of dialogue that occur to me in any situation, I tend to put them into my notes app on my phone, to revisit later. If I have a scene with a particular purpose, I might look through my dialogue on my phone and try to find a series of quotes that work. Other times the maladaptive daydream for a few days might be the scene, and I'll write down any notes on what I want to happen and let it percolate for a few days before I actually write it. Sometimes pieces of dialogue will come to me before the scene does - Astarion's speech in chapter 7 of pieces happened before any of the rest of the fic, and then I was like "fuck. well. now i've got to get myself there."
Mostly, this seems to just be a result of having these people live in my head rent free, but I'm also pretty autistic and so I script conversations a lot in social interactions anyway.
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Dialogue. I think dialogue comes naturally to me (see above comment about autism) and as such, I don't really follow any strict rules, I'm afraid... but these are some things I do formally try to do-
If a person is talking at someone (again, see how much I fucking love writing people bickering), you need to make sure it's not just a wall of text. Adding in paragraph breaks, even if it's a monologue, is kind of essential (speaking as someone who did not do this in the beginning, and it shows, particularly when you're reading my earlier fic on mobile rather than desktop). Often I will break it up with a one sentence interjection, a false start from the other person trying to get a word in edgeways, or a stage direction. I had a problem with one pairing I wrote for where one of the characters just would never speak... I needed to engineer lines for him to say even if it was completely superfluous. Sometimes, now I look at my writing, I feel like these are obviously fake and unnecessary... but they help break up the text and give the reader pauses. So they must be helpful, even if they're kind of just... there. it makes the dialogue a dialogue, with two people involved and reacting to each other.
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Similarly, speeding stuff up can be useful when creating banter, to keep pace and avoid people monologuing at each other. The key ways I tend to speed stuff up is usually a) characters finishing each other's sentences (derogatory or affectionate), b) interrupting each other (you'll notice my repeated 'Astarion-' is often used to get Astarion to just talk quicker and at more length and in more detail until Rose loses her goddamn mind), c) quicker back and forth where you don't need dialogue tags or stage directions bc characteristic voices will make it clear who is speaking.
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I read everything aloud as I post. This is how I proofread. Reading aloud helps me find spelling errors/sentence errors, but it also means that I have to speak all my dialogue aloud to my own wall like a crazy person. If I'm speaking it aloud in a different way, like the phrasing changes subconsciously to what's more natural in my mouth, I will often edit the dialogue to reflect that. I speak it, to see how it is spoken.
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Second to the above point, if you have a character who's voice you struggle with, listen/watch clips of their voice. I do not think I can write Lae'zel (or Gale tbh, and I'm now writing a whole fic from his pov so I clearly hate myself). I watch back clips of them all the time, and then I go to my dialogue, and see if I can hear it in their voice. If I can, I keep it.
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...Be brave enough to tell jokes. I genuinely can't tell you how much I don't think I'm funny. Every joke I write in my fic, I have no idea if anyone else will enjoy it, or if it only makes me laugh. But I put it in there, for me. I'm lucky, bc now some people tell me they found a joke amusing, and I'll know it landed with someone else other than me. But you tell jokes with your friends, presumably, and you're playful with them. So allow your characters to joke with each other, even if you're scared that no one else will 'get it'. If no one else finds it funny, at least the characters are having fun!
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Anyway, those are my main 'tips', I don't know if any of them are helpful!!
My other one main piece of advice is... read. Seriously. Even if the media you want to write for isn't a literary novel, read other people's writing, and I do mean both fic and published books, because published books (if they're good) have an editor. I read a lot of books/webtoons/manga before I ever wrote a fic... like for 12 years or something. I was a big reader, and reading good writing is useful - it's inspiring, it's also just technically helpful. These writing tips might be useless, because lot of what I've done in my own writing I've learned through osmosis - just by reading a fuck tonne of books, good and bad. I'm not saying you have to read 60 books a year or w/e, but read like, a few good books!
(also, just write a bunch. I am only becoming a 'read' fic author on my 11th project??? basically??? so I've had a lot of practice at this point, and grown in confidence. The more things you finish, the more ambitious you get. I couldn't have conceived of Pieces when I was writing my first fanfic, bc I thought plot was my main weakness... now I'm writing an almost entirely original premise and that's bc I've learned a lot since I started writing!)
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Emma life update:
I will be returning to my blogs soon! Sorry for the long and sudden hiatus I’ve been very busy!
On the bright side by the end of the school year I will be looking into Publishing my first piece! Yay! Woo! (Wolf whistles)
That’s largely why I’ve been gone so long as I’ve been setting myself up academically and occupational-wise.
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