How do you get the Hollow Knight dialogue so beautifully perfect? I am imagining Team Cherry themselves writing the fic
Thank you for the compliment! The dialogue takes at least as long to write as the pages do to draw, so I'm glad that it's working for people!
In truth, I don't think I've quite nailed the writing style yet. The game's dialogue is very... economical? Where some characters you maybe get five lines of conversation, and yet you walk away feeling like you have a good grasp of who they are, what they want, and why. It leans heavily on its environmental art direction and character design to convey these things. There's also this rhythm to the writing that makes it feel poetic, without coming across as Fake Shakespeare.
There's lots of little tricks for this (i.e. avoiding anachronisms like "hours" or "days" as measurements of time; limiting the number of contractions; using words precisely; and monitoring the use of passive vs active voice); however, the basic technique is to communicate as much information with as few words as possible.
The writing process for this comic specifically essentially has three steps:
I come up with a very high-level overview of the dialogue for the entire chapter, identifying who is talking to whom, what the emotional tone is, and what needs to be communicated to the audience. That last point is very important, because what needs to be communicated is oftentimes very different from what characters end up saying.
For example, the start of Chapter 6 was blocked something like this:
Lace is upset about how Hollow revealed their identity, and bullies them into trying to speak to her without realizing the strain this puts them under. Hollow attempts to talk, even though it is physically painful to do so. Lace stops them, feeling genuinely guilty for pushing them.
This is the phase where I start hashing out the actual words that are spoken. One of the major goals of this stage is to establish an overall flow to the conversation, and the script is often accompanied with stage directions or descriptors (i.e. indicating a character is startled, or using sign language). One of the most important things to emulate from the game's writing is communicating things without explicitly stating them.
For example, when Lace shuts down Hollow's attempts to talk, she states: Stop! Just... stop. If harm befalls you, the spider will unstitch me thread by thread.
This single segment is designed to communicate several things at once:
Hollow's attempts to talk are causing them significant distress that Lace believes might escalate into genuine harm to their person, if allowed to continue
Lace can tell when to end a conversation, and is willing to let the topic drop despite her earlier determination to get answers (demonstrating a degree of empathy or maturity we haven't seen from her before)
Lace does not apologize, framing worry for Hollow and guilt over causing them upset as a hyperbolic threat to herself (she's shutting down the conversation for selfish reasons, see?)
Lace is not afraid of Hollow; she doesn't worry that they're going to lash out at her for causing them distress, despite how powerful they are in comparison
Lace is not particularly afraid of Hornet, but understands that Hornet is protective of her sibling, and that Hornet would take Hollow's side over her own
Lace refers to her own hyperbolic death as "unstitching," a term we usually associate with inanimate textiles, showing once again that she doesn't see herself as a real person
This is where I integrate the dialogue into the comic pages. This comic is hand lettered, so I have to physically write out every word, and plan out how they will be integrated into a page's overall composition--including the "font" and speech bubbles. This is a very, very slow process (not efficient at all lmao), but it gives me plenty of time to refine the dialogue.
For example, the scripted version of the Green Prince's Dialogue was:
I have already once witnessed the encroachment of beings pale, how their appetites leeched the vitality of my home caves 'til they were naught but bile and bone.
Versus the finalized version:
I have witnessed before how the ceaseless appetites of beings pale leave naught but bile and bone.
When combined with visuals of Sinner's Road and Greymoor, it communicates the same amount of information in half the number of words.
Hollow Knight Fanart Masterpost
