this should be a tweet but I don’t want to deal with people on Twitter. everyone stop having every character in your fiction talk like their goal is to get an A in therapy.
I love cathartic conversations too and that is why I am begging you: stop hunting them to extinction by making them constant, characterless, and corny as hell
YES
Here is what you do:
1. Find the thing the character wants to say, their deepest and most fundamental truth.
2. Congratulations! That’s the one thing they cannot, under any circumstances, say. Imagine they’re under a fairy curse if you have to.
3. But they want to. They want to so bad. So it’s going to bleed into everything they do say, everything they do. What would you do for someone if you couldn’t say you loved them? That you hated them? That you love them but the things they do remind you of their father?
