#witty characters

Writing witty characters is hard. Being witty is one of my biggest writing challenges. It was one of the things I was most concerned about when I took on one of my own muses from a canon, though I think I’ve done pretty well when I write as him. I can’t really tell you how to be witty. I still haven’t figured out how to articulate that. It just kind of comes to me when I step into his “shoes” while I write him. But I can tell you one thing--- Be original. If you are trying to write a witty muse but their “wit” is very blatantly ripped off from others, it will fall flat, IC to other characters and OOC to readers. For instance, if your character calls Loki “reindeer games” it’s. .  .not really funny or witty, because Tony Stark already did that. It’s not clever for someone else to do it. It’s not going to make anyone laugh. And it comes off as especially. .  .cringey, might be the word?. . .if your character is written as NOT being intended to ICly be imitating Tony, but as having come up with it by total coincidence on their own. It’s not to say it’s impossible someone else could invent that insult---his helmet has horns, horns are like antlers, ergo reindeer---but for readers, we KNOW where you the writer got it. So it does not come off as your character being clever even if technically she is being totally original in her own universe. Here’s another example. I had an arrogant jerk muse, and I like for people to insult him, I’m down with that. So a lot of my mutuals would say insulting things about him IC and OOC. One of my mutuals on made a really funny remark about him OOC, and I reblogged it to tell them how funny it was. And then one of my OTHER mutuals soon after had their muse insult my guy with. .  .the exact same insult, phrased the exact same way. It was not funny at all THAT time. Because it was obvious they had copied it from the first person who said it. Even if the first mutual said it OOC and the second person said it IC, the fact is that I as the reader could still see they were just ripping off someone else’s cleverness, and it made it fall flat completely. This isn’t to say you have to make absolutely everything out of your own head from nothing. For instance, I have a character for whom it would be IC to make some rather clever and unusual insults about how people look, so I browse Reddit’s “RoastMe” subforum and keep a list of the good roast comments I see so I can tweak them for her use at a later point if I ever have an opportunity; I do a lot of other similar things for various forms of inspiration for various muses. But directly word-for-word ripping from something your audience/mutuals have definitely already seen or read, is a guaranteed way to make your character’s “cleverness” come off as anything but. (Also: “you have a small dick” is not, in fact, the ultimate clever comeback that some people think it is)