Random craft question! Because your style with Adella is so reflective of her inner world, and you are so intentional about crafting that sugary, hazy, dreamy, fairytale aesthetic, do you have any sort of personal style guide that you've built out over the years?
ahhhh. this is such a cool question and so sweet of you to ask! i got really happy when i saw it cuz the fact that you wanna ask and know i just !!! SDBFHSF. ; __ ;
i tried to think as carefully as possible on what i do and the best way to describe it in a way that's actually meaningful and not me rambling abstractly for paragraphs and paragraphs. so i thought bullet-point style might be best.
i follow a certain 'beat' for words and sentence flow and when a sentence feels off in that beat, i try to correct for that until it hits the right 'sound' for me. most of the time it involves swapping words around, or adding a few more 'builder' words leading up to a certain thought or idea (like an adjective or adverb or adding another long and winding thought) -- i do this because it gives the same effect as a crescendo in music to me !! i say this all btw at the risk of sounding self-important but plsss know that i'm not. it's not like i think i'm writing anything close to good or masterpieces by any means... i just wanna write in a way that SOUNDS right to ME. that sounds like how adella talks and narrates mingled with a narrator that is both endeared to her AND critical of her... and somehow trying to make that all harmonious. i can't exactly explain what that rhythm or sound is at this point because it's just a matter of what my personal style is... but if i had to describe it, i would say that i try to make the ideas feel 'tight' and 'bouncy', like how @lunarscorching and @archaeval describes my writing as. @koschyei once said i'm tapped into the soul of words and i never forgot that bc it stuck with me so much and made me feel really happy. ; _ ; also @flamesofavernus said that it flows like iambic pentameter with complimentary sounds and that also really helps illustrate to me the narrative choices i am trying to make for my partners ; o ;.
if i feel like there's not a word close enough to describe the feeling i wanna give the reader... i just... make one up!! in a recent reply to @azarathian i wrote '... a teensy, gupsy tadpearl...' tadpearl is something i made up sooo long ago (it was the name of my aes. sideblog at some point!) (same as pearlywog) but obvs it's a mixture of tadpole + pearl... a baby fish, and adella was hatched from a pearl. gupsy is a mixture of guppy + eensy, like eensy weensy spider... so like. do you see how my thoughts kinda come together in this? i'm describing her when she was a baby, so i go for nursery rhyme words and sounds because we subconsciously connect that to baby talk + baby feeling. so i rack my brain ... and then i find teensy and eensy in there. but teensy and eensy isn't specific to adella enough. teensy is grounded in more human understanding so you start there. to ground the reader in something they understand more inherently before introducing something slightly newer (otherwise it's tooooo purple and abstract and that can make you lose reader comprehension fast). so i was like ... i need something in between teensy and tadpearl, to build on BOTH ideas and be a bit of a transition (because i follow the rule of threes a lot). i choose guppy because it's like ... bubbly, cute, babyish like most double consonant words are (i started off by thinking ideally i want a double consonant sound bc it's typically cute sounds associated with those words like bubble, puddle, etc. and then i rack my brain for that). then adding 'sy' just... idk man. feels right. you know what i mean? it just fits for adella. it fits for her LORE. that's how she talks. very airy and inventive and whimsically. again, in order to have a particular style and have it really be coherent with the character and have it resonate as a full package to the reader they have to match the character's personality and LORE. like you really do gotta be thinking that detailed and deep. i don't just use pearl bc it's a pretty word, altho that helps!!, i use it bc it's so attached to my worldbuilding and magic system and cosmology. also, i don't write like this at all on phillip -- his tone is a lot more grounded, but still fairytale, and more romantic. sorry this is so long but i'm trying to explain how the word math works in my head skdmf. it really just look like math in my head sometimes. which explains a lot considering that's how i taught myself instruments + how to read music!
not always, but just highlighting again that i love the rule of three. but i don't think rule of three applies well all the time esp. if you're going for less of a fairytale / whimsy style.
get really funky weird with the prose and imagery, but say it convincingly. i feel like so much of the tricky stuff with writing comes down to remembering a lot of words and your judgment call on what the right words are tbh. that's like the nugget of it. if you're pushing a weird idea or imagery, you NEEEEED to ground it / surround it in understandable human language and concepts otherwise the prose will just float off the ground and nothing will make sense. if it sounds too abstract but pretty, just either kill the darling, man, or make sure the concepts you're building around it are understandbale. choose words based not only have aesthetic impact but also cultural meaning and context that people passively load into will get you sooooo much mileage in terms of ppl understanding your narrative choices and CHARACTER. think about the words you're using and how ppl understand it colloquially, the other interpretations people load onto it because of how that word is used throughout certain stories or news or even social media. re: word choices, i said a while back that my vocabulary is pretty extensive cuz i read and study a LOT, and english was my greatest discipline, but i don't use too many scholarly words here and it's something i actively hold myself back on bc my natural inclination is to get very academic with it. sometimes it works, esp. when the narrator wants to break in or fight with her voice in the prose, but most of the time it doesn't. it just doesn't fit adella. she has crazy weird language barriers and it takes the fairytale tone away from it. fairytales are pretty simple structurally, and that should be found in the language too!
DON'T BE AFRAID TO BE FUNNY !!!!!!!!! IN THE PROSE !!!!!!! DON'T BE SO SERIOUS ALL THE TIMEEEEEE !!!!!! (if it fits your character, but most of the time you'll find that it actually works with a majority of characters). unless you're doing total grimdark all the time, it really does help to lighten the tone with humor that's not always sarcastic or ironic. think about it knight of the seven kingdoms for example -- the reason why it's taking so much with people is bc it's such a refreshing tone that balances the heavy stuff with lighter stuff. why? BC IT'S HELPS YOU keep the reader's palate stimulated !! COMMIT TO THE BIT MANNNN.
i realize i did just end up rambling a lot sldkmf and should probably stop here cuz idek if i'm being really helpful. but if anyone wants me to keep yapping i totally can in a part 2 maybe !!
