"once again, i am being forced to remind people how to use grammar in dialogue," said murphy, sighing. "it's a little confusing, but i pwommy it's shrimple as hell."
"when writing dialogue and finishing a line, you have to take into account your usage of a dialogue tag," they explained. "a dialogue tag tells your reader how that line of dialogue is being spoken. notice how when i use a dialogue tag, such as said or explained, i finished the spoken sentence with a comma and not a full stop/period."
"so you add a comma in this instance," it said with a sigh.
"but i use a full stop/period if i am not using any instance of a dialogue tag." murphy tapped the screen pointedly.
"this is because dialogue includes the dialogue tag as part of the wider sentence," murphy continued dryly, "and can even stretch past the dialogue tag if you're continuing the dialogue."
"if it's a new sentence, though, you end after the dialogue tag," they pointed out. "see?"
"wait," murphy added. "this would probably be a whole lot clearer had i used capitalisation. well, whatever. you get the gist."
a personal pet peeve of mine i have with fanfic that seems to be happening more often lately is when someone has a really good idea—a genuinely interesting take on an AU or a character or lore or worldbuilding or whatever—that, if taken seriously, would create a really engaging world and narrative... who then, perhaps because of a lack of self-confidence or because they think they can't do their own idea justice, makes the whole thing SUPER cracky. just going hard on weird shit and OOC stuff and trying to make the whole thing a funny romp.
but you read it and you can see the aspects of this cool concept and stuff they've made for it hidden away under all that crack and all i can think is that if you'd just approached this earnestly this would have been amazing!!! this could have been such a fascinating version of events!!! but at the last second you panicked and tried to intentionally fail!!!
crack is one of those things that you have to be 100% committed to. you cannot half-ass crack. so you end up with a story that has these glimmers of brilliance and interesting threads that go nowhere because the author is terrified of fucking them up. DON'T DO THAT! WRITE IT! IT DOESN'T MATTER IF IT'S BAD YOU JUST HAVE TO BELIEVE!!!
some fics really have a habit of over explaining in ways that would be better resolved by just not saying anything at all. like okay. there's This Fic on ao3 right now with an interesting premise. but to get to the premise they've chosen to skip over a LOT of the interactions needed to get to that point. all the talking and building trust and all of that shit is in the past. and the thing is that isn't a BAD thing! you CAN skip over the parts you don't need to get to the part you want to write!
the problem is that they instead choose to summarise the part they skipped.
see summaries, even ones with a lot of personality, are very dry to read, and more importantly they make the reader sit there and be told all this stuff that happened instead of letting them... you know, READ IT. i feel like i'm being cheated out of an entire story; you are effectively summarising a fic that doesn't exist! so don't!
you'd be better off not mentioning it. let the reader go 'wait, how did we get here? why are you two cooperating?'. readers LOVE to answer questions and it puts you in a great position by just... keeping it to yourself. then, over the course of the actual story, have characters refer BACK to those things you would have summarised! have them go 'hey remember when [event]?' and sprinkle all that backstory in over time. or, fuck it; flashback intermissions! take a pause in the downtime of your story to tell that other story. there's loads of ways to tell people all of this information without infodumping at the beginning, and it's a skill you SHOULD cultivate if you ever wanna go pro; in an actual novel or short or whatever, you can't just infodump and move on. you have to be able to give your readers information intelligently. this is a great way to practise it.
murphy's guide to uuuuuh writing objects/places/locations and things (because two whole people asked)
greetings. this guide may or may not help you, as is true of all guides and advice and tips and tricks. but it helped me, and since i'm the protagonist of this blog this is my definitive guide. it shrimply may not be yours. mileage may vary. that said, allow me to give you said advice in the hopes that it does, in fact, aid you,
so when i was a tiny tater tot you know what i hated writing? descriptions. a lot of people really hate it and so did i, because descriptions were just these big blocks of text that got in the way of the FUN STUFF. you know; the plot! the dialogue! the characters! and i see a lot of writers who, to this day, find themselves writing reams and reams of dialogue with no way of knowing where characters are or what they're doing/holding/interacting with, and even if they do explain, it tends to be a few lines like 'they're in the living room' or 'they're sitting on a chair' like we're directing a film.
[INT. CAFE]
they are sitting in some chairs by a table. i'll let the props department decide what kind.
the reality is, you are trying to weave a world in which your reader can step into, and a big part of that is writing the uh. the world. and a few years ago i had a revelation that made writing scenes and descriptions so much fun that it's honestly now my favourite part of writing, and a huge part of this realisation comes from my work as a visual artist. so, i'm going to explain The Box.
now, i want to stress that The Box was not my creation. rather, that honour goes to eric hibbeler and his tutorial eric's thoughts on drawing backgrounds and props, which i'll add a link to in a reblog/reply so tumblr doesn't cast this post into the shadow realm (thanks, tumblr!) but the guide he made also applies to writing with just a bit of tweaking, and i'm gonna explain how.
this cardboard box is just a cardboard box, and it's likely the sort of box you're imagining if i say the words a cardboard box. it's nondescript and pretty generic, and in a scene that calls for a cardboard box, it'll do the job! when we write, describing stuff like the chair or the window or the carpet is vague enough that the reader will, usually, just fill in the visual gap with what their interpretation of the chair or the window or the carpet is. for all you know, their mental image of the scene uses the carpet from the shining! but the thing is, YOU, the writer, may have a WILDLY different vision on the carpet (or chair/window/box etc.) and that's where you need to step in and get SPECIFIC about details.
here is a different take on the same box. we've gotten much more specific about the box's history here; it's been used in a move or for storage at some point, it's been kicked around, taped up, taped down, put a in puddle at one point, had a cat give it a few scratches... it's not that many changes, not really, but the box has--say it with me--character.
character, by definition, means the aggregate of features and traits that form the individual nature of some person or thing. what some writers tend to do, however, is forget this word applies just as much to inanimate objects as it does to the people in their stories. we give characters a lot of, well... character, and forget entirely about the things around them having just as (much if not more) to define them.
in essence, what changed my approach to writing places and locations and backgrounds was the realisation was these are also characters in my scene, with just as much contribution to the plot and the information being provided as any individual person in the same instance. it was only when i realised how important adding such character in visual art was that i realised the same applied to writing!
let's take, for instance, a bedroom in which two characters are holding a conversation. you may be tempted to keep your details sparse except for things that are directly plot relevant because you want to get on with the good bits, i.e. the talk itself, but what you can use the bedroom for is to tell information about the owner or resident without having to outline it in exposition. this is where getting good at giving character to spaces becomes very powerful as a tool.
Velvet's bedroom wasn't much to look at; a double-bed, a desk to edit her photos at, and a few pictures of her family and friends on the walls. Still, she sits down on her bed and invites Blake to do the same.
In this instance, a reader gets the general gist of the location--it's a bedroom with bedroom-typical things in it--but the room lacks any characters or specificity, which sticks out for narrative reasons because velvet is full of character; her bedroom would be the same! so, we have to build on what her bedroom would actually be like in order to build its character and define velvet without directly saying what she's like as a person:
Velvet's bedroom was in disarray, as ever; she hadn't made her bed because she wasn't really expecting guests, and her desk was littered with all her photography gear from SD cards to lenses to all her cleaning supplies. A few last-ditch attempts to make the place look a little more organised took the form of straightening out all her framed pictures of her family and friends that took up all the wall space she could spare, dusting off her big pride flag over her bed before she plopped herself down, straightening out her duvet before inviting Blake to sit next to her with a smile.
now, the bedroom has prominence as its own source of information: we understand that velvet isn't really a tidy person by nature; photography is a big enough part of her life to dominate her personal space; her family and her friends are important to her; her identity is also a large component of her personality; she likes to try and give her guests a better impression even if it's half-assed. and we covered all that without velvet actually having to say any of that information out loud! wow!
normally, of course, i'd lace that information in a little more subtly and over a few paragraphs rather than in one big dump, but the effect is the same; when a space has character, you can treat it as a character that has just as much importance to a scene as the dialogue or the interactions two people have.
this concept can be applied to a single prop, like a box or a camera or a desk or the like, and can also be applied to a much bigger location, like a park or a school or a house or more. the idea is that often, things are never just in their generic form, but have history that impacts the way it looks or defines the person or people who interact with it.
you wouldn't write these two playgrounds in exactly the same way; they both have a swing, a slide, a bench, a sign, and a tree... but depending on how you write it, one has a kind of character for a setting, narrative, or larger location that's way different to the other! this ends up defining your wider world, too; maybe one playground is nice and new because the council got the funding they asked for, but the other is in an area known for having little investment? in the end, were these two parks humanised, they'd likely be people with very different personalities; that's the sort of approach you should have!
the TL;DR of this whole thing is that description is not the part where you start listing off items in the room or the building or the location just so your reader has a vague idea of where they are, but an opportunity to turn that space into a person who has a whole bunch to say about the people who are frequently present. you can even see this in action by writing the differences between, say, your bedroom and the bedroom of your sibling/parent/friend; chances are, they're VERY different spaces that represent two very different people! this is also true of a kitchen, your home, your school, your campus, or your workplace; the office of someone who works in IT won't look like the office of someone who works in accounting, even if they share a lot of qualities and items.
ultimately, think of the humble Box; sure, a regular cardboard box might suffice to give the reader an idea of what's in a scene, but when we give that Box a personality of its own, suddenly that Box has a lot to say about the person who owns it--and not all of them may be good!
hey!! sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this-- but you seem to submit fiction writing pieces to magazines a lot and i was interested in doing it too, but i'm not sure how it works. if youre up to answer- do you get paid if you get accepted? do you have to pay to submit? what magazines are good choices to submit to? (thank you i love your stuff lots!!)
HELLO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (ilu!!!!!!!!!!!!)
okay so. i must confess that i never went in totally blind ‘cause the magazine i’ve submitted to most is one a friend from my university course founded after we graduated! because at least one of us had to have our life together. so i knew about it well in advance, and also have the benefit, i guess, of knowing OTHER ppl from my uni years (including my lecturer) who run magazines/websites and thus are like wink wink nudge nudge please submit a thing. so These People Know Me And I Know Them and theres that. THAT SAID you can technically get the same effect just chatting to Writing Twitter/Tumblr/w/e because from one writer to another, we love 2 talk abt writing, and ppl, love 2 listen, and if you Network(tm) [ugh i hate that term] enough then you’ll know people who’re making things and know what they want and know how to best write that they wanna publish!
on that note, tho, the ones im submitting to are also free!!!!!! and therefore i am not paid. but i do it mostly because it has a TON of benefits, such as getting used to the publishing process: what are the editing timeframes like? what’s it like to get back edits and return them in a timely manner? can you work with an editor to clarify stuff? can you write to a prompt? can you fit the style of the magazine yr submitting to? also, you get a nice portfolio of polished work to show off, which is neat!
that said, there are. a BILLION MAGAZINES. my GOD. theres magazines for THE MOST NICHE STUFF UNDER THE SUN. i cannot even begin to describe how many exist out there. there are ones that want the MOST particular content, and others that go ‘fuck it, send whatever’. so i can’t really recc any particular ones because what you like writing might be a completely different set of magazines than the ones i might submit to! but there’s sci-fi ones and queer ones and ones entirely about body image and body positivity and ones about travelling and others about FOOD and some about WITCHY STUFF and others about WOMEN’S STUFF and honest to god if you write a niche theres a magazine for it. and if there isnt? you can MAKE a magazine about it.
(that said, if you buy the Artist’s and Writer’s Yearbook, it’s a huge compendium of all the publishing houses, magazines, websites, weird places, niche corners and magical wizard shops that WANT YOUR CONTENT!!! i highly recc picking one up -- there’s a new one every year, but the one i have for 2016 still slaps. also, they have online listings for £25/year, so u can pop in any time and see what catches yr eye.)
anyway. back on track. so yeah, i’ve not been paid for my content, nor have i paid to get published: most magazines ive considered submitting to have NOT asked for a fee, but have offered money in exchange for publication, but that might be in my corner of things? again, magazines can vary. i probably wouldn’t go for one that wants a fee for nothing in return, though, because there’s plenty of other places that will either pay you or let u have 8000 words published for the heck of it (also i feel like. a lot of places that do that. r skeevy. i dont trust like that). in the end, it’s up to you: i know people who submit to magazines that pay them literally every month, some of which work their way into helping edit the dang things, and ppl like me who do it every now and again because its nice to rly flex those Creative Juices and get yr name published somewhere!
so my advice is: go on twitter and find a magazine that appeals to you! find out their submission dates and their guidelines - any magazine worth its salt will make their guidelines ABUNDANTLY clear - and just go for it! even if its not perfect, plenty will happily run over edits to clean it up. i also highly recommend finding some anthologies to join: i’ve been published in those, too! and again, anthologies have subjects and genres in every niche under the Sun. follow the guidelines, draft yr work, send it off, and stick to the prompt! it’s super fun and rewarding, and even if you don’t maybe fit what they want, it’s great to have a body of work you can bounce from. it’s all abt having fun, baybee.
(also sorry this answer is long i have a lot 2 say lmao)
Hey so... How do you like... Find character voices, tones and speech patterns or mannerism for your characters? Especially with so any variations on the same cast members? I really admire it, and am having trouble doing it for a story I've had outlined and a cast I've had set for years, but now the writing time cometh and I cannot for the life of me put dialogue to any of this.
WOOF this is a Big Ol Question but i will do my best to explain how i work 😞🤙 the art of dialogue is a careful one and entirely too much practice BUT we will push on
as such, stickin this under a cut
so i’m opening up with a quick flex on y’all: my dialogue is the one of very few things that was always very Good abt my writing (to the point that in uni it was one of those things ppl never even bothered commenting on cause they were like ‘idk i cant make it better lmao’) SO ive been doing dialogue for YONKS and at this point i dont rly have to Think abt it so much as just. do it. lmao
but one of the reasons i got Good was because an a monotone autistic kid i spent a lot of my early years like... listening to how ppl spoke and mimicking it because yall i used to talk At The Same Speed In The Same Tone At One Hell Of A Lick for years and tryna sound normal took me just shutting tf up and having a good listen to how other people spoke, which is my first tip: listen to people!! sit in a discord chatroom!! listen to convos in a coffee bar!! be nosy and listen in on convos!! humans r VERY GOOD at talking and we love 2 do it and theres so many types of dialogue to listen out for that will help u get better!
the other tip is thinking a lot abt personality and how that shines thru; every person i write is a very different person to the character next to them, and how they are effects how they verbalise shit; let’s take, for instance, yang and weiss, yeah?
YANG comes from a backwater island off the coast of vale; it’s a rural, outdoorsy farming community that’s very tight-knit and quite remote, which means a few things for yang’s speech patterns. ONE is that she talks in a dialect native to patch, which is a more drawl-y (yet surprisingly staccato) version of vale’s accent. it’s also SLATHERED in local slang and terms that any valian will be thoroughly unfamiliar with. we’re thinking of a mix of rural southern america and also somehow californian/australian surfer dude stereotypes??? it’s a WILD mix.
WEISS comes from the very high-class, very technologically-advanced and Strict society of atlas, which has scandinavian/germanic origins! her speech is very measured and very articulate, given the high standard of education she’s been subjected to, and her atlesian accent (again, very german-esque) can be suppressed very well in the right crowd to better fit in (tho it shows when she gets Angery). she rarely uses slang, she’s speaks very clearly, and it’s all very... prescriptive, yeah?
so yang and weiss have literally two OPPOSITE ways of speaking, built in entirely different communities for very different NEEDS and personalities. of course they dont sound like each other; it’s not just a change of location, but a change of person. even if weiss had lived on patch and yang in atlas, what you could guarantee is that weiss could still be a stickler for grammar and yang would still learn all the slang that’s used in atlas/mantle/solitas, right?
this same process can be done for any character; ruby’s manic and talks REALLYREALLYREALLY QUICKLY CAUSE SHE HAS SO MUCH TO SAY AND IF YOU STOP HER SHE’LL FORGET WHAT SHE WAS SAYING AND THEN SHE WON’T REMEMBER AND IT’LL BUG HER ALL DAY SO PLEASE LET HER JUST JUST THIS ONE REALLYREALLYREALLY LONG THOUGHT OUT FIRST PLEASE HANG ON JUST A MOMENT--
but blake is very sort of. laid back and chilled and brooding and considering revolution so for them, they speak less often, and usually in much more succinct thoughts: we’ll see a lot of one-word answers, a lot of bluntness. of course, this backfires when theyre trying to be genuine because sometimes it gets in the way! of course, compared to, say, tribelands blake, who is chieftain and is REQUIRED to be more articulate, we see a blake who is still calm and collected and therefore they speak rarely with error. all very thoughtful, a lot more like weiss.
of course, thats not even going into how they TEXT as seen in frapp logs (since how someone speaks and how someone TEXTS is like, two diff ways for speaking) which is a whole other kettle of fish that’s still impacted by a BUNCH of other factors!
dialogue, when boiled down, is basically just an extension of a character’s personality -- and it’s an IMPORTANT aspect of their personality, because speaking is how we impart a lot of our ideas and thoughts into a space that other people can, uh, interpret! a character is, ultimately, a bunch of concepts that form a person, and when they speak is when those concepts are on show for everyone to see! so WHAT those ideas are and HOW they envision those ideas informs the way their dialogue will function. are they like ruby, who thinks twice as quickly as she can get the ideas out of her mouth? are they like blake, who likes to mull things over before jumping to conclusions (unlike theyre impassioned, of course)? are they like weiss, who had her way of speaking beaten into shape by academia? or are they like yang, who speaks in a way that best allows her to connect with her community and her people? these are all distinct people and ideas!
a good way to test if theyre distinct in your writing is to write down a transcript w/o any tags or names, and see if people can tell you how many characters are in that conversation. the most distinct their voice (even if they use similar words or one another), the better chance you have at having characters with distinct speaking methods. consider every word! consider every phrase! everybody approaches speaking differently!
After making my previous post, it suddenly clicked for me why I feel like the depiction of Blake’s trauma/healing in canon is lacking! As a result, though, this following mini-essay can be taken as RWDE, if you want, and can also be taken as... whatever the heck negative thoughts on bumble/by are called???
Just to clarify, this is the tidied-up essay I sent to my Discord server, and isn’t meant to be an attack on any ship or anything. This is just me going ‘oh THAT’S why I write Blake like that’. Anyway. Here’s that.
Okay, I think I’ve figured out why the presence of Bees in RWBY keeps annoying me, and it was so deeply intertwined with my work that it’s no wonder I just didn’t realise it! And, like, you can actually track why Bees annoys me based on how I’ve been interpreting Blake’s trauma.
See, like, RT have Blake with trauma that’s incredibly multidimensional in terms of how it affects everyone around them; this isn’t just an aloofness that comes with the whole 'I don’t make friends’ territory, but in that Blake has not only lost trust in the people surrounding them, but has broken their trust in Blake in turn. For example, Blake's parents: I write a lot of them checking in on Blake in my fanfiction because they’re slowly restoring trust in the fact that Blake is okay on their own, and is able to cope, whilst Blake is rebuilding their trust in the fact their parents love them unconditionally regardless of their prior mistakes.
Blake’s recovery is found in that trust, especially in the reformation of a found family (even more so when we consider that to Blake, it was Adam and Ilia who formed the backbone of a new found family in the wider White Fang, which got lost in which Blake lost trust in Adam, and when Ilia lost trust in Blake). However, RT have approached the recovery by having Adam injure Yang, tying together Yang and Blake’s recoveries in terms of the mental healing of scars (PTSD, depression), the physical healing of scars (stomach wound, lost arm), the rebuilding of trust in each other (Blake left, Yang doubted, Blake returned), with the togetherness of their relationship as being a metaphor for healing.
Yet, doing this means that they’ve gone and focused solely on the Bees as the representation of healing, providing the distinct impression that Blake’s healing lies in Yang and that Yang’s healing also lies in Blake, and this has resulted in the budding relationship that will certainly become - for better or for worse - canonical Bees. As such, Bee fans (very understandably) like this because it’s a great system for writing Blake’s trauma in parallel with Yang’s, which is, like I said, fine and valid, ‘cause we all do that in fanfiction and stuff! Relationships that emerge as part of the healing process!
Except, during my time writing Blake, I’ve come to believe that Blake’s trauma needs healing not in the presence and trust of one, but with the restoration as their place as a trusted person who can also trust the family they’ve recovered and built, whilst maintaining that family to generate a space in which to process their trauma safely. Therefore, it would not be via repairing their relationship with Yang that would be our metaphor for healing, but Blake’s reparation of their entire network of friends and family. So, basically, when I’m writing Blake and their trauma, we see a gradual healing in the form of building friendships, drawing lines and boundaries, and creating trust with the people they meet. Because, I mean, think about it; in the show, Yang didn’t just lose an arm. Ruby also watched her almost-mom-figure lose an arm and become clinically depressed. Weiss lost a team, her family, and was taken to Atlas without them and their support. And whilst these things aren’t entirely to blame on Blake, of course, they do require Blake to understand that their trauma has an impact that requires acknowledgement (but not always apology, to clarify). Which Blake, in the show, doesn't, because Yang is our focal point. Ruby and Blake never speak. Blake and Weiss certainly don’t discuss it. Blake’s history lies solely on Yang’s shoulders, which is troublesome when Blake needs to communicate to their entire newfound family!
Therefore, Bees annoy me when they appear because I, personally, think they’re blocking the way for Blake to re-establish their trust and healing with other people around them, such as the literal other half of their team, their friends, their mentors, and their family
SO YEAH THAT TOOK ME YEARS TO FIGURE OUT! I mean, you can take this to mean Bees is “trash” or not from a writerly perspective/how you personally interpret Blake’s trauma, but for me, I think it’s that Bees is actively blocking the way for more interesting Blake development with their team and wider family.
(For the record, this is just me writing down a bunch of messages I sent in my RWBY server, and that I wanted to keep track of when writing Blake in future. I’m ambivalent about Bees, but I dearly love Blake, which is why this is something I’m butting heads with.)
so whilst @subw00f3r was drawin’ me a cinder, i sent them a very shitti tutorial on how 2 draw a good Murphy Brand(tm) cinder which they asked me 2 post, so here’s cinder fall in 10 easy steps:
1) draw three circles
2) add a wooshy line across the face
3) add a second curli line to wooshy line to make a piece of hair
4) add another curvy line to make the parting??? ig??? of her hair
5) and then make THAT a lil piece of flicky hair by the ear
6) make the back of her hair big fluffi
7) and then make the fluff,,,,, LONG
8) uuuuuuuh add a hairline. woosh.
9) add eyebrows that could kill a man
10) bastard nose, bastard mouth, bastard scar, bastard moles. u did it!
bonus steps for a goat cinder:
bonus step 1) add Whatever The Hell those are
bonus step 2) make em jaggedy
bonus step 3) add some lines for Definition or smthng idk
bonus step four) make the pupils Long but Sideways and then erase the hair behind the horns. u did it! x2!
