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Tips from a Beta Reading Writer

This one's for the scenes with multiple characters, and you're not sure how to keep everyone involved.

Writing group scenes is chaos. Someone’s talking, someone’s interrupting, someone’s zoning out thinking about breadsticks. And if you’re not careful, half your cast fades into the background like NPCs in a video game. I used to struggle with this so much—my characters would just exist in the scene without actually affecting it. But here’s what I've learned and have started implementing:

✨ Give everyone a job in the scene ✨

Not their literal job—like, not everyone needs to be solving a crime or casting spells. I mean: Why are they in this moment? What’s their role in the conversation?

My favourite examples are:

The Driver: Moves the convo forward. They have an agenda, they’re pushing the action.

The Instigator: Pokes the bear. Asks the messy questions. Stirring the pot like a chef on a mission.

The Voice of Reason: "Guys, maybe we don’t commit arson today?"

The Distracted One: Completely in their own world. Tuning out, doodling on a napkin, thinking about their ex.

The Observer: Not saying much, but noticing everything. (Quiet characters still have presence!)

The Wild Card: Who knows what they’ll do? Certainly not them. Probably about to make things worse.

If a character has no function, they’ll disappear. Give them something—even if it’s just a side comment, a reaction, or stealing fries off someone’s plate. Keep them interesting, and your readers will stay interested too.

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good dynamic: character who’s too deeply rooted to a fault + character who’s never been able to form roots anywhere before

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Trying to write Dumbledore without bashing and actually trying to improve his mentor-mentee relationship is SO hard because in my heart I WANT to write an old man who cares and is sentimental but I NEED him to still be manipulative and treat people a little too much like objects. For the plot.

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worlds slowest fanfic author tries really really hard

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Aeolian Grains

My Harry Potter WIP where 23 y/o curse breaker Harry is sent 10 years in the past (technically to a different dimension as well to avoid any paradox issues because I’m lazy) and he teaches DADA, essentially adopts his younger self, and kicks Voldy ass. Basically, the most self indulgent time travel fix-it fic I could dream up.

Featuring delightful moments such as:

-Both adult and kiddo Harry being sassy asf to, well, everyone tbh.

-Adult Harry making his DADA students learn basic physical self defense and playing muggle music while teaching takedowns to ‘culture’ them.

-Hermione and younger Harry being feral gremlins in two VERY different directions

-Ron somehow being the responsible one, and occasionally feeling like a mother with two leashed backpack children. He appreciates his parents so much more now, because how did they wrangle 7 of these?

-Adult Harry wanting to pull a Bruce Wayne but all of these children except for 1 (one) have parents, damnit!

Here’s the real Summary though:

In the desert, sand grains are shaped gently by the wind, smoothed and rounded until they flow, frictionless, on their journey through the desert. Students, too, need to be shaped gently. Nurtured by their caretakers, protected from harm and picked up when they fall. They deserve to be cared for, and loved. They deserve to be safe until they come of age.

Harry knows the importance of this better than most. So when he’s sent to a parallel universe where it’s still 1993, he doesn’t squander his chance to give himself the childhood he never had. After all, he still wishes that he had the chance to act his age at hogwarts. If he’s lucky, he might even get the chance to feel like a kid again while he’s at it.

Poll about snippets under the cut:

Basically I wanted share the premise and summary to gauge if anyone would want snippets posted here in the meantime? Otherwise I will just continue writing the full chapters and will write them as chronologically as possible. The snippets would NOT be chronological but should be fun to read, I hope.

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AEOLIAN GRAINS

I finished my first chapter or my current HP WIP last night!! Yippee!!!!

I’m planning to build up a backlog of chapters before I start posting on ao3 again, if only because I know that if I don’t, I’ll burn myself out attempting to keep to a legitimate update schedule. But I feel good about it so far!!!

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hyperfixation please stay with me long enough to complete the project. hyperfixation do not fade. hyperfixation finish what you started for the love of god

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Hello and welcome to

Pretty Pickle Nation 🥒✨

We serve fanfics and fanart of one of the best ships of the Maribat fandom: Timari

We’d love to have you to plot, plan, post, and promote yourself and other members! We’d love to inspire more fics and fanart and creations for our lovely community!

We host plenty of events, channels dedicated to other ships and fandoms, encourage other ships as well, host polls for important server decisions, authors channels for everyone’s personal use, promotion zones for your favourite events and servers, and fun roles!

We hope to see you there!

Join Pretty Pickle Nation Today!

Artist Credit: @duskyashe

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INQUIRING BITCHES WANT TO KNOW!!!!!!!

INQUIRING WHORES WANT ANSWERS!!!!

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Pondering my orbs.

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Jason Todd the character ever pt 7

Reclaimed his autonomy by volunteering to get punched to death by a robot

Broke a pimps' collarbone as Robin

Tazed a nazi in the eye

Put a taser in his logo- a titty taser, if you will

Used being in the nightmare realm as an excuse to slap Tim

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you might bethinking "its so over" but the sun will rise tomorrow and youll be like "omg. its so back." remember this

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sad reality of the fanfic-to-published work economy is that the weirdest people are willing to do it. that's why there's now hundreds of shitty no plot cishet hate-to-love enemies-to-lovers books that are ex reylo fanfic. and it's not even good. that's because the people who wrote book-quality steve/bucky and kirk/spock fic are too normal to think to themselves "i should get this porn published". they're too busy working in local government offices

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I made these as a way to compile all the geographical vocabulary that I thought was useful and interesting for writers. Some descriptors share categories, and some are simplified, but for the most part everything is in its proper place. Not all the words are as useable as others, and some might take tricky wording to pull off, but I hope these prove useful to all you writers out there!

(save the images to zoom in on the pics)

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Writing Tips

Punctuating Dialogue

✧

➸ “This is a sentence.”

➸ “This is a sentence with a dialogue tag at the end,” she said.

➸ “This,” he said, “is a sentence split by a dialogue tag.”

➸ “This is a sentence,” she said. “This is a new sentence. New sentences are capitalized.”

➸ “This is a sentence followed by an action.” He stood. “They are separate sentences because he did not speak by standing.”

➸ She said, “Use a comma to introduce dialogue. The quote is capitalized when the dialogue tag is at the beginning.”

➸ “Use a comma when a dialogue tag follows a quote,” he said.

“Unless there is a question mark?” she asked.

“Or an exclamation point!” he answered. “The dialogue tag still remains uncapitalized because it’s not truly the end of the sentence.”

➸ “Periods and commas should be inside closing quotations.”

➸ “Hey!” she shouted, “Sometimes exclamation points are inside quotations.”

However, if it’s not dialogue exclamation points can also be “outside”!

➸ “Does this apply to question marks too?” he asked.

If it’s not dialogue, can question marks be “outside”? (Yes, they can.)

➸ “This applies to dashes too. Inside quotations dashes typically express—“

“Interruption” — but there are situations dashes may be outside.

➸ “You’ll notice that exclamation marks, question marks, and dashes do not have a comma after them. Ellipses don’t have a comma after them either…” she said.

➸ “My teacher said, ‘Use single quotation marks when quoting within dialogue.’”

➸ “Use paragraph breaks to indicate a new speaker,” he said.

“The readers will know it’s someone else speaking.”

➸ “If it’s the same speaker but different paragraph, keep the closing quotation off.

“This shows it’s the same character continuing to speak.”

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Shout out to all the Black ppl that can no longer participate directly in the fandom they love because of the stresses of racism 👍🏾 you contain multitudes of value and I'm sorry that the color of your skin and the power of your voice makes people not want to acknowledge that.