#writings tips

the best advice i can give, and stay with me here, is to talk to yourself outloud

essentially act out the dialogue you're trying to write, it will help it flow better and more naturally and find naturally bumps on where you might get stuck; alongside helping with tone and even movements during it!

pretending your the characters can work wonders, not just for dialogue but just for general charactersation!

you can put yourself in the shoes of the characters and kinda work out what comes next if you're stuck too, what feels natural to say next etc. and the improvisation can help you think in character! it can help give an idea into your characters cadence, tone, emphasis, things to slot between dialogue to help flesh out things

ultimately dialogue is just a series of objectives; what are you trying to say, how are you trying to say it, and how do you want to say it; it helps to maybe be a bit nosy and listen to people around you speak. It can give insight into how people talk, the intonations, the way they structure sentences (not everyone is waxing lyrical poetry or monologuing)

Ah, interesting question! 💚

Angst in itself is just tension and conflict in a scene, right? So it can be heartbreaking, confusing, broody, frustrating conflict, but I don't typically think of it in terms of themes surrounding a character when I'm writing.

Angst/conflict comes based on what kind of story I'm trying to tell, and the pacing of it. It comes down to what situation is driving a scene, and how the characters involved respond to it, given their personalities.

Soldier Boy/Ben can create angst just by being himself (arrogant, narcissistic, callous, etc.). All the less than charming facets of his personality are good places to start when it comes to creating angsty situations: his misogyny, drug abuse to cover his trauma/PTSD, his lack of care for collateral damage, his bravado, his pride and selfishness, the way he props himself up based on a sham career, how difficult it is for men like him to show any kind of vulnerability or emotional intimacy -- and the biggest conflict of all -- trying to create humanizing moments for Ben, despite his powers, and all of these major character flaws.

How he acts based on his personality is often the source of tension in any scene I write him in, or even the unpredictability of it.

Not knowing how he's going to respond to something already keeps readers on the edge of their seat. And when he does act or speak, whether it's what you expected or not, you can either up the ante on that tension, or relieve the tension.

That said, I'll give you two examples of ways I've written angst with Soldier Boy:

1. Lost on You (Soldier Boy x F. Supe!Reader)

*The Manly Man*

Featuring: Victor

You can go for just a horrible person with 0 redeeming qualities, OR we can use fiction to imagine what it would look like if people had feelings.

Just to preface, this isn’t excluding anything other than realistic fiction, or even if your story doesn’t involve a school at all, because bullies exist everywhere and I’ve seen them all. 🥲 

This post will be focused on the more ‘manly’ form of bullying, the whole pushing people into lockers, swirlies, and everything Biff does from ‘Back to the Future’. Boys and girls have different ways of bullying, and even though guys tend to be more physical and pushy while girls break your self confidence down and give you scars that last a lifetime, you don’t have to follow those ideas. Bullies can break gender norms too. 

Regardless of setting, you need to ask yourself why your bully isn’t expelled, kicked out, or punished in any way. Does the whole school know that your bully is super physical? If so, the situation on the bottom is the most likely to happen. 

(teachers/authority figures will 100% know because most of them follow gossip and drama as much as the students)

But what if the MC or any of the other victims don’t  say anything, so their close friends/relatives don’t think anything’s wrong? Now, this could just be peer pressure, but again, we don’t have to do everything based on reality! What if Victor finds out that the straight A+ student has been cheating the whole time and threatens to expose them if they tell absolutely anyone about how they’re being used as a living punching bag? This secret can differ on your setting, so if it’s not a school setting, what about their work credentials? Are they not what the MC claims they are, or is the truth even darker?

Either way, congrats! You gave the bully a single personality trait other than ‘didn’t get a healthy amount of attention as a child’. You’ve officially done more work than most people.

 But what if we can take it another step? Is the bully being bullied themselves? Lots of people take their insecurities out on others, and we’re much more likely to do it if we think doing so will impress people around us. Keep in mind, this is more useful if you’re trying to humanize them, or if they’re a main character in their own right. Do we get to see how terrible they feel before and after they push and shove people around, or have they become almost numb to it and try to bury their feelings? This also allows you to showcase the toxic environment that led to the behavior in the first place, and watching the bully leave the harmful environment and apologize is something that can lead to an incredibly satisfying end to their development.

What if you don’t want your masculine bully to portray the same physically aggressive and abrasive tropes you’ve seen a hundred times? Well then the simplest (and shortest because this post is a really long) answer is to give them the more traditionally ‘feminine’ bullying style. Gossiping, weird looks that make you feel worse than anything else in the world, rude comments that give you anxiety—to name a few. You can give the audience a really simple but fun switch of the roles, because I personally want to see a 6’4 muscly football boy fuel the rumors that will ruin someone’s entire life in the middle of a sleepover. This can be done as humorously or as seriously as you want.

When writing/drawing mermaids. Merdudes. Merfolk. Just. God, the gills.

I mean. I understand why people would put the gill on the neck, like, fish have gills behind their head, sharks have them a bit lower, but. The human body, or at least a anthropomorphic body, cannot have gills on the neck. Now I know it’s not supposed to be real, because it doesn’t exist, and you made it up, and that’s valid. Yeah. It is. But science. Logic. The necessary space for a body to function. Gills aren’t just holes in the skin where water magically change in oxygen, they’re organs. Like. Space-taking organs.

Like that. Yeah. And you notice here that the gills are quite big for the fish’s general size. So imagine for a human being. Anthropomorphic being. Whatever. We breathe a lot more than fish. Our lungs are big like, two or three of this one fish. And I’m talking about three fish each lung. Yeah.

Here’s the human respiratory system:

The diaphragm separates the lungs from the digestive system, but there’s a large space under the lungs, right? And it perfectly follows the curve of the ribcage, right? When the lungs expand, they press on the diaphragm, but the flat area stays, right?

Now, the throat:

Where’s the space? There’s the trachea, the oesophagus, the fRicKiNg spine???? Where are you putting the gills? Where do those blades-like organs go? How many are you supposed to put in there? How does you character eat? Drink? bReAthE AcTuaL aIR????? I’m having doubts here.

In conclusion: the underside of the lungs. One on each side. Smooth transition from air to water, the gills close when your character is out of water and open when their airways get immersed. When they come out, the water flow down out of the body by the gills (soaked clothes possibilties, hello???). The lungs expel the air by the classic breathing water and breathing out air method if the character doesn’t think about emptying their lungs before entering water (or falls in it, duh), plus it can create subplot for, I don’t know? Different properties of gills for saltwater-breathing merfolk, mildwater or freshwater-breathing merfolk? That could be nice?

Another potential place to put the gills, of course, could be an enhanced back of the jaw, under the ear, but it does look weird and might not follow the aesthetic you’re looking for. By making your character look funny. Yeah.

Hey, hey writers! We've got a new post on our blog! You can read all about showing vs. telling by Jennifer Osuna right here!

Excerpt:

The concept of showing and telling in writing changed my life. I remember sitting in a creative writing course in community college—my very first—when the professor brought this up. It was a tool completely foreign to me, but now it’s something I use regularly!

Showing is, simply put, dramatization. This could be expressed through dialogue, actions among characters and how they react to them, and basic description of people, places, or things through an objective lens (don’t get too personal, folks!).

On the other hand, telling is basically narrating. This includes analysis or commentary (whether through a character’s perspective or an omniscient narrator), background information, explanations, altering time or scene changes, and when thoughts or emotions of characters are specifically stated.