Happy (early) birthday ~🙂 (i'm terrible at actually remembering birthdays so i thought i'd say it now since i swear i saw you mention it the other day) I know it probably sounds dumb but your writing means a lot to me and I'm glad I looked up your stories when someone mentioned them in passing to me years ago. (I do also have a question. How do you maintain Loki's diction? I always find speech patterns and the like difficult to keep up so I was wondering if you have any words of wisdom.)
Thank you! :D Early birthday wishes are always welcome. (I, too, forget peoples’ birthdays all the time, despite having a chart somewhere.)
And also thank you so much for the compliment about my writing. I’m always so touched when people tell me it means a lot to them - it doesn’t sound dumb at all, there are many writers (both published and fanfiction) whose work means a lot to me.
As for your question: that’s a good one. I’m not sure I have a super good answer, though. I definitely develop my character “voice” the more I write them, and get a feel for it over time. For Loki specifically it’s a lot of structuring my sentences in ever so slightly archaic ways (it’s always interesting trying to alter his voice for, say, roommates!verse). I’m trying to think of what key things are for me when writing Loki’s diction.
He’s a little verbose, especially when his emotions are high (specifically when he’s angry). He’ll use ten words instead of five to convey the same idea.
Making things sound archaic isn’t necessarily a matter of using archaic words or trying super hard to stretch vocabulary so much as it is thinking about word order. I’m probably helped here both by reading a lot of Latin. Also Milton. If you want to read someone who does some really interesting things with word order, I do have to recommend Paradise Lost.
Listen to some of Loki’s lines. Not just the words he uses, but the cadence and sentence structure. Try to keep that in mind.
Character voices and how I manage to keep them is something that’s hard for me to describe in a lot of ways. A lot of it feels - and this feels super pretentious to say, rest assured that I know that - kind of intuitive, and I think that largely springs from the way that I sink myself into a characters’ headspace when I’m writing them, trying to arrange it so I’m thinking how they would think, and from there it’s a step to writing how they would talk.
