#eyescllsed

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Nancy Drew (TV 2019) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Ace & Nancy Drew & George Fayne & Bess Marvin & Ned Nickerson, Ace & Bess Marvin, Ace/Nancy Drew, George Fayne/Ned Nickerson, Odette Lamar/Bess Marvin Characters: Ace (Nancy Drew), Nancy Drew, Bess Marvin, George Fayne, Ned Nickerson, Everett Hudson, Celia Hudson, Ryan Hudson Additional Tags: Pre-Season/Series 01, Canon-adjacent, Time Travel, Light Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Found Family, Heist, Title from a Taylor Swift Song Summary:

The front page caught Nancy’s eye.

“I’m so sorry, sir. May I see that?” Nancy asked, mustering all the politeness in her question. He grunted, holding the paper out to her. She grabbed it, scanning the headlines, fear taking hold.

June 27, 1934.

Surely, this was just a bad dream — a hallucination — from the dust. She pinched herself, the pain searing through her. Well, shit.

---

…or, Nancy accidentally somehow time travels to the 1930s and needs to pull a heist with the Drew Crew to get back to her life.

hi, thank you so much! tbh i was actually more of a book fandom person in the 00s, I was very into the wizards (I posted my first fic on ff.net when I was maybe 11 or 12 which was Harry/Ginny but I also hand-wrote a lot of self insert/Ron Weasley fic in my middle school notebook 💀) and then moved on to twilight where I was originally a Bella/Edward normie who evolved into a Bella/Rosalie truther. ALSO I was big into like FOB et al rpf (lmao) and eventually one direction fic in the early 2010s

The other day in my D&D party, our hedgewitch (who learns his magic through intense study of books and nature) asked our sorcerer (who has innate magic powers and also sometimes just blows shit up on accident) if she could teach him how she cast fireball. Our sorcerer said "you, uh, you know -- " and she waved her hands around " -- you do. The spell."

I am kind of feeling like our sorcerer right now, because dialogue more than anything else about writing is the part that just sorta happens for me, and when I try to articulate how I do it, it is hard to say anything other than "the voices say stuff and I write it down real fast before I can forget."

I will say, because dialogue is often the first thing I am writing in a new scene or a new story, it gets written out in long chunks with very few other words popping up. I might note the emotions a character is having or the way a piece of dialogue is delivered, or jot down what the character is thinking that isn't getting said so I have it for frame of reference later, and I will write down an action that's essential to my understanding of what is happening in the scene, but it's really mostly just the dialogue. I'm not even doing tags or punctuation at this point. Without knowing your process, writing dialogue JUST as dialogue may help you find a flow, which generally results in more natural sounding lines. It's a theory I have, anyway.

The absolute hardest bits of dialogue for me are when I have a chunk of dialogue from the beginning of a scene, and a chunk of dialogue from later in that scene, and I have to connect them, because oh man it's so hard to force dialogue down a specific pathway. The dialogue wants to run rampant! It wants to be free! It doesn't WANT to go over there where the plot needs it to! Generally there's a way that I could stitch up the hole in these scenes in two lines that would take us LOGICALLY from point a to point b, but that just...doesn't sound good, and doesn't feel natural.

Sometimes I just literally can't get there from here, and either the earlier dialogue or the later dialogue needs to go, but usually what works is to just follow the last line I have with, "okay what's something that the character might say in response to that. What's something the other character might say in response to that. Is that line something that would evoke an emotional reaction from this character? Is it something that would make them think of another topic of conversation?" And just keep writing and seeing where the conversation goes until I find a more natural bridge to the later dialogue.

This may be helpful even if you aren't looking for a connection per se, but are just trying to make dialogue happen, or if you know the general beats your scene needs to be hitting but don't have anything laid out. We often know what we want a scene to ACCOMPLISH, in terms of the plot or the character arc or the relationship, and that can sometimes put pressure on the dialogue to address that. Asking yourself when you get stuck "how would he feel about that" or "what would she have to say about that" or "what mood or agenda or thought process is this person having that their conversation partner doesn't know about" can get you unstuck and ground the dialogue in what's natural for your characters.

Maybe the way the conversation goes when you do that is not where you thought it would or where you need it to. That's awesome! I love letting a conversation wander and just see where it goes. I used to watch one of those shows with a giant ensemble and a dozen story lines every week, and I noticed after a while that there would be scenes where a character would walk into a room, say all of the things that were important to the plot, and then leave, without anyone reacting. Obviously that's a pacing problem, they just had too much story to tell and not enough time, but it was SO WEIRD. And it was boring. The little moments in a conversation where the characters are talking about something "unimportant" are the best moments, I love those! So if you're worried your dialogue is getting off point, maybe follow it, it might lead you to a really authentic moment.

Obviously, don't just have your characters talk for five minutes about, like, the latest Marvel movie, just for the sake of saying something off topic. But this is a really good way of incorporating other elements from your story. Is there something that's thematically relevant to the story even if it doesn't have anything to do with the plot? Is there a side character who's not in this scene that your characters might be worried about, or annoyed with, or making fun of? Is there something that exists in the space because you created it with your descriptive imagery, and now that it exists the characters might comment on it or be affected by it? Is there something that happened earlier in the story that has been dealt with on a plot level but that your characters might still be having some residual emotions about?

I do realize that this tip for writing dialogue basically turned into "write more dialogue," but maybe in and of itself that would help! Practice makes perfect?

I will say, keep each character’s turn with the talking stick SHORT. Speeches rarely sound authentic. You want back and forth. Short lines are good. Short sentences within lines are good, too, although I fully admit to having a weakness for stupidly long sentences. But dialogue lets you bend the rules, go ahead and break out the sentence fragments.

Dialogue also sounds better if it has a chance to breathe; this is something I do actively work at, because it's the part of dialogue that isn't dialogue. If one character says something kind of heavy, or something unexpected, or something that puts a pin on the current topic of conversation, there's probably going to be a beat before anyone else says anything. Sometimes the character needs to take a beat FOR THEMSELVES before they continue with the thing they were saying! Screenwriters have it so fucking easy here, man, because they just get to write (beat) and then the directors get some close ups of actors' faces and the editor cuts that moment to breathe in for them. Prose writers gotta do it for themselves.

For a little beat, sometimes just placing your dialogue tag where you need it to be -- e.g. "he says" before the dialogue instead of after -- can do it. Sometimes you gotta get creative. This is where you can get cliched things like characters constantly raising their eyebrows or shrugging or smirking, which, cliches become cliches for a reason, they work, but you don't want to overdo it. Sometimes it helps to draw on the surroundings and the set up. Put your characters in a setting where things are happening around them, then you can take a beat while you describe one of those things that’s happening. Give the characters an activity to do, and intersperse that action through the dialogue. For the "this is a place that hurts" conversation in it all will fall, fall right into place, I knew I was going to want to have LOTS of beats in that conversation, so I made them go get lunch, and every time Adam wasn't able to say something one of them would eat some pizza or pick up a napkin. I am not a very visual thinker and I write all my dialogue first, so I have to find ways to fill these beats after the fact, and sometimes I struggle with it. This might be something that you can do a great job with, if descriptions and imagery are happening in your head anyway! Put them to work!

The flip side of "keep it short" and "let the dialogue breathe" is don't write superfluous lines. Look for places that you can condense. If you have a conversation where one character isn't really saying anything of substance, but is just kind of interjecting questions like a sidekick asking the late night host "no, I don't know, who was it?" that's probably a place you can crunch your back-and-forth down into one (not too long) line delivery.

my roots are mine; to upheave and to plant

sweet dreams of home my heart may fill,

that home where I am known and loved:

it lies beyond; yon azure brow

parts me from all earth holds for me

the teacher's monologue by charlotte brontë

a playlist (bess' pov. a twist on nancy's "i'll grow where i've been planted" from 3x01) for nacesdaylight, happy sleuthmas!💗

It starts with a dusty cardboard box of decorations that Bess digs out from the shelves in the back room. Filled with the festive spirit and the urge to counteract George's impersonation of the Grinch on Christmas Eve, Bess sets out to throw the Drew Crew and the Fan sisters the best Christmas party ever. Only she didn't bargain for a Mistletoe Gremlin and a whole lot of kisses...

a gift for @eyescllsed written by @reviewdiaries