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hung-like-epstein · 1 year

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On Backstory

Anonymous asked fuckyourwritinghabits:

I have a huge chunk of backstory (ie boring but necessary stuff) in the first chapter, but the story I’m writing needs the audience to understand the situation before getting into the story. I can’t think of any way to solve this (other than maybe putting it in a prologue, but a lot of people tend to skip prologues). Can you please help me?? Thank you.

I’ve been editing and reediting, trying to splice backstory into appropriate scenes, so I feel your point here, anon.

First: on your first draft, put it where you want to put it, and go from there. Don’t let it hold you back from moving forward because you need it down and in the open in order to get where you’re going

Second: Hold back as much as you can. Backstory is a tool for you to make a scene more effective, a dramatic reveal, or a mystery solved. The more you hold back for latter scenes, the more powerful you can make those scenes. This is not something you’re going to perfect on the first draft, or the second, or the third, but it is something you should keep in mind. Keep tweaking as you go.

Third: It is okay to leave your reader questioning. Some backstory is going to be on the cutting room floor, sadly. You need to decide (or get a second opinion!) on what’s important and what’s not. The writer is always going to know more about the character than the reader will, and that’s good, because it gives the reader room to imagine.

Fourth: Consider alternative ways to dump backstory. Backstory told through a conversation can be very powerful, if done right. It can be told through letters, dreams, or media. Zoo City does a really cool thing with news story clippings inserted between chapters. Don’t hesitate to be creative with your backstory!

Most books rely on backstory to move the story forward, certain genres over others. You could check out The Reapers Are The Angels for zombie horror, God’s War for sci-fi, Beknighted for urban fantasy. Swamplandia deals with the backstory straight-off, hooking the reader in with where it will go from there.* Mostly, though? Go with what feels right, and write from there. You’ll have plenty of chances to make it perfect. Good luck, anon!

*(Swamplandia contains a sexual assault, which I wish books would warn more about, but don’t.)

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hung-like-epstein · 1 year

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Hey! I have a lot of trouble when it comes to writing dialogue (it doesn't matter if it's canon characters or OCs, I'm just really bad at it) and was wondering if you had any tips for how to work on that.

Dialogue can be really hard so don’t fret! It takes a lot of practice to pick up and articulate speech patterns in writing. When I first started getting into writing it was in one of my high school drama classes and we were writing screenplays. Obviously dialogue is a huge part of that so I, personally, have always felt that my dialogue is stronger than my prose.

I think– and this is probably obvious– the biggest thing with writing a characters voice is understanding how they speak. When I’m trying to get into character or get muse for a specific character its about voice for me and finding that voice. What helps me do that is listening to them speak or if you have an original character even finding a vocal reference that you feel sounds closest. Like find interviews of an actor or actress, etc. whose vocal pattern and cadence most closely resembles the voice of your character and listen to that to get a hold of just that sound and their pattern of speech.

Another thing that helps me with dialogue is remember that people say dumb things, that is a fact of life. Sometimes they say things that don’t make any sense, or things that absolutely have nothing to do with the current topic. People get off track, people bounce around topics. It’s okay if your character is not 100% coherent 100% of the time.

Also, people’s vocal patterns tend to change based on how they’re feeling. If they’re angry, they may be prone to raise their voice or stumble over their words more than they would when they speak normally. When they’re sad, sick, tired, upset, they’re not going to speak or sound the same way they would when they’re just fine. Their speech might be more slurred, lower, choked, throaty, garbled. Finding different patterns for different moods or states of being is another part of writing dialogue.

I always find it easier to write dialogue when I mouth it or even read it out loud to myself after I write it. That kind of just helps to solidify it and how it’s spoken. It’s okay to rework dialogue a couple of times until it flows properly. Just write it the way a person would say it.

Another important thing is that your characters speech doesn’t necessarily have to reflect how smart they are. Some people want to beef up their character’s dialogue with big words and terms to express their character is smart… you don’t necessarily have to do that. If that’s how they speak, more power to you, but a lot of intelligent people don’t use gigantic words all the time in their daily vocabulary. To use my own OC as an example, Chris is really incredibly smart, but he’s also a fucking nerd and half the time is dialogue is… what you’d expect from a teenage boy living in the 80s. He’s a geek, he’s a dork, he says ridiculous things that aren’t always 100% sensible. That reflects in his dialogue and his intelligence in dialogue is generally only tapped into when relevant to the conversation and even then he has his own specific pattern of speaking that doesn’t necessarily SOUND like he’s intelligent. I don’t know how to explain that properly, but you don’t always have to reflect your characters smarts in dialogue. The point is, intelligence does not always impact how your character articulates something.

Dialogue is really hard now that I’m actually trying to explain it oh gosh. It’s a very abstract thing when it comes to articulating how it works. The biggest thing is just practice, listen to your character speak or find a vocal reference ( it could even be someone you know, so long as their voice matches how you imagine your character speaking ) and then translate that pattern into writing.

Some things to think about when writing their dialogue are things like:

Do they have lapses in their speech?

Do they pause a lot to think?

Everyone has an accent, what is theirs? ( It can be a neutral accent, American neutrals are still accents, they’re just… neutral, you can google these for reference ).

Do they speak their mind or do they tend to filter themselves?

Do they act differently or speak differently around different people?

What is their mood and how does that impact their speech?

How would they respond to this situation?

How would their response to a situation impact their speech?

Do they sometimes have trouble expressing their own thoughts?

Do they get tongue tied a lot?

Do they speak slowly, quickly, average?

What is their vocal pattern?

How can you translate that pattern into writing?

One other thing you need to keep in mind is that sometimes characters genuinely don’t have anything to say. Sometimes dialogue is most effective to articulate how they’re feeling / thinking when they don’t say anything to reflect that. Your character doesn’t always have to say something in response to something else if it’s in their nature not to. In the event that happens, you can write something in its place.

Example:

A character is in a fight with someone and they’ve just dealt a low blow, they don’t know how to respond so they don’t say anything.

What you could write for this is something along the lines of:

“She was seething with rage, no words forming as tears trailed down feverish cheeks. There was nothing left for her to say.”

It’s about articulating what your character is thinking or feeling. Sometimes there’s nothing left for a character to say and that’s okay! It’s more realistic to break it off in silence than to have your character continue. That’s okay. You don’t need to over do it.

Don’t info-dump with dialogue unless the story and your character absolutely call for it. Info-dumping is when you character reveals a ton of information about themselves in one piece of dialogue. It can become easily contrived and difficult to follow and you have to tread carefully when you do it. There are obviously times when that’s appropriate to do, but sometimes you can lose the audience so you have to be careful. It’s best to have your character begin with dialogue and then cut it off with something like “She explains the rest of her situation.” obviously that’s just an example, but it’s okay to articulate that your character is speaking while not writing out all of their dialogue. That avoids info-dumping and retains the real, true to life feel you want with dialogue. Just don’t give the whole thing, you can give a part of it and then break back into prose and explain what your character articulated in prose.

Another thing is, if it’s not in your character to say too much, don’t say too much. Real people in real life don’t tend to drag on a situation or a conversation longer than it needs to go on. It’s okay for sentences to be terse or for your character not to answer all of someone’s question. For example if another character has just asked your character a lot of questions all at once, it’s okay for your character to only answer one or two of them. It is all dependent on what they would do and what they would say.

It’s also okay for you to write dialect. I know there’s a lot of controversy about that, especially in the RP community but it IS okay to write their accent if it’s thick and heavy. If it’s a more general, neutral, or easily understandable dialect or accent you can write it normally. But lets say, and this is from an artistic point of view just as much as it is a writing point of view, your character has a very thick accent or dialect… It’s okay to write it that way. And inversely if your character is speaking to a character with a heavy accent or dialect, it’s okay for them to be confused or to have not heard them properly. You can have your character respond in a way they would if they haven’t understand it. Some characters might ask them to reiterate, other characters might go along with it and pretend they understood it, the point is dialects and accents are fine to write and it’s even okay if you don’t understand what’s been written. In a roleplay setting if you’re writing with someone who writes a character with a heavy dialect and you don’t understand what’s been written because it’s heavy, you are at liberty to ask what they said and what it meant, and it’s also okay for your character to ask what was said or what they meant, it’s also okay for your character to mishear them or misunderstand them which brings me to another thing.

It is absolutely okay and true to life for characters to misunderstand something another character has said, to mishear, to interpret it wrong, and it’s okay for them to respond appropriately to that misunderstanding. A lot of the time that keeps things fluid and realistic, it helps build tension and development among characters. It’s okay for your character to not understand or mishear something and react the way they’d react to that.

Some characters talk a lot, other characters keep it terse, that’s something to keep in mind. Where does your character fall and how does that impact their interaction with other characters?

With dialogue, ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS begin on a new line for each new person that is speaking, and if your character stops speaking for a while and then you have your prose, but then your character starts speaking again, if it is a new thought, it’s okay to start that on a new line as well. Everything doesn’t have to be contained to one paragraph and it makes it easier to read and understand when you break it up appropriately.

That’s about all I can say, this got longer than I even expected but the biggest thing is practice and picking up patterns. Practice a bunch, practice patterns of speech you’re not used to, patterns that you have the hang of, it’s all about understanding and getting into that mindset to be able to articulate a pattern in writing what they’re saying. I know that’s kind of vague and not very helpful, but that’s what I did and that’s how I got better about writing. It’s about flow while retaining a pattern. That’s it. It’s a lot easier said than done, but I think knowing what you have to do and then going from there is really helpful.

Unfortunately I’m probably not the best person to explain that because I’ve always had a really easy time writing dialogue and how characters thing. If you need clarification on anything feel free to message me, and if you want you could message me off anon and I could explain individual things if you’re confused or need help with, because I honestly think a back and forth discourse might help explain what you need explained better. I’m not that great at explanations LOL but a personal back and forth might help with specifics, so feel free to contact me.

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