“Look! His entire outfit is a spike puzzle!” It is INSANE how accurate you are with these characters. I like to think I’m good at knowing what they’d do, but man, I wish I was on your level :0
eheheh, thank you! tbh, i feel the same whenever i go back and look at their original dialogue--i always do my best to capture every character's speech, but i'm just glad folks think i do it well ^^
papyrus is honestly the hardest for me to write and feel like i really get him, but i try to remember that he tends to phrase things in grammatically strange ways, always tries to see the positive (which isn't always the obvious) and generally speaks with a lot of enthusiasm and likes to announce what he's doing.
But, my main tool for keeping characters in-character is muses, which is something that kind of sounds crazy unless you're also a writer who uses muses XD It basically boils down to devoting a portion of your imagination to being a mental version of the character you want to write; a well-constructed one will mirror the behaviors and speech of the character they're supposed to be such that they basically provide dialogue for you without you having to put a lot of active effort into it. They have a bit of a will of their own and can be difficult to work with as a result--one reason Chapter Seven of Unexpected Guests is so long is because my Sans muse abjectly refused to talk about his problems unless i wore him down into it. XD But, in general, because they can react on their own, you can stick them into any scenario you want to write and let your imagination do the rest for you--all you have to do is describe what happens.
It's kind of how i've always written fanfic, so i don't know how hard or easy it is to develop as a skill--but it's kind of a cool trick, and i know plenty of other writers use it as well, for fanworks as well as original content. You're basically using your brain's innate ability to remember how people act and make predictions of their behavior accordingly and applying it to fictional people, and that's pretty neat ^^
