#i know it's just authorial accidentally writing a deep character but not having time to acknowledge it

[lord-squiggletits]

As much as I'm a Pharma apologist he is genuinely an asshole who acts completely unrepentant so something I think about for an eventual Pharma redemption fic is like. How do you write a redemption for a severely traumatized guy whose coping mechanism is to act like he doesn't care and the people who need to accept him don't like/care about him enough to go "hey it's okay everyone gets a second chance" and/or "wow Pharma is so radically different what caused that change."

But also like it's really hard to help someone who has no desire to/refuses to be helped and makes himself deliberately unpleasant to be around so like idk

[mittensmorgul]

OMG. California scenes. I'm a SoCal girl and I just realized that this... is true. I think of myself as guarded, but wow. I think I've actually sat down and opened up to a relative stranger over lunch and then coffee. But I don't do it to seem centered! Anyway, gotta go back and look over my unpublished fics and make sure that I don't accidentally put too much of myself into them...

hi there! I swear I’m gonna write a bit about your message, but for reference, for others reading this, I think I need to provide a bit of context first. :) This is regarding this post about writing exposition:

https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/190756281185/cthonical-gallifrey-feels-fanfic-authors

Disclaimer time! I reblogged it specifically for that highlighted bit at the top:

And my specific intent in reblogging this was every complaint I ever read about why Dean and Cas don’t just ~talk to each other~ and deal with their issues. Every single “but they could’ve dealt with this years ago and been together!” I will counter “No, they really couldn’t! Because that’s not the story they’ve ever been telling!” 

But, I’ve heard argued, if they really wanted to, they could change the story they’re telling. They could so easily make it obvious, explicit, textual between them. And of course they could! If they had zero authorial integrity, they could do whatever they wanted.

The way they have set up this story for the last decade and a half has established-- through the slow unfolding of more and more important facts, of gradually uncovering details, as above in purple, that become necessary for comprehension of the characters and their progression through this story-- that Dean’s relationship with Cas has been established in an ever tighter orbit around their mutual most deeply buried and tightly guarded secrets.

For reference, I’m not pulling this line of thinking out of nowhere. This is literally a rephrasing of something Davy Perez said in an interview when he first started with SPN back in s12. I never finished transcribing that podcast, but the relevant bit of the two hour conversation is included in this post:

https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/160988290690/12-while-i-do-not-ask-this-to-be-negative-at

but the tl;dr of the handful of paragraphs of full context from that post:

Television is about a character that you become invested in, and that you fall in love with. That character grows in incremental ways. Not only do they grow in tiny little increments, and sometimes don’t even grow, they go backwards. You don’t close the loop. You keep the loop open, so that hopefully when you know that okay, this is our final season, this is our final run of episodes, that’s when you can find those landing points, and that’s when you can sort of say this is the end of this journey.

And Supernatural has been narratively riding around on that loop, on that spiral, for 15 years. And this is now the final season, and they’re gliding toward those landing points now. They’re homing in on those “painful truths the characters don’t want known,” those huge personal issues they’ve all been grinding down over the last 15 years and inching ever closer to unveiling. Because that’s how stories work when authors are writing to the narrative rather than writing instant gratification for a fickle audience. If one thing has been consistent over the years, it has been this progression of character. And Dabb era has chosen to lampshade all of this in text, through Chuck the Original Author.

And that is effectively the exact writing advice from this random post about how to write a believable and engaging story that has been all over my dash over the last few days. Like... the irony, right?

So now that I’ve explained my vagueing with this post, I’d be happy to address your actual question, from the rest of that page of writing advice. Thank you for bearing with me... :’D

I’d venture to say that the description of that sort of “identity info dump” that the article described as “California scenes,” where characters just spill their deepest secrets, isn’t always a negative thing. And it’s not a phenomenon exclusive to California, or borne of a need to prove someone’s authenticity, or angst cred, or whatever. Because it’s something we see happening on the internet, too.

And it’s absolutely something you can USE in your writing. I find it hilarious because it’s actually a major theme of my pinefest fic this year, which will be posting in April. Sorry I can’t point everyone to it yet, or really give too many spoilers... other than trying to explain this phenomenon.

Social media creates a weird sort of culture of identity. There was a post on tumblr years ago that explained it rather well. It said something to the effect of “in real life you meet people and slowly feel them out and reveal your deepest secrets only to a select few people after they already know your whole life story, but on the internet you’re just a screen name and an avatar and you might reveal your deepest secrets without any of the people who read them even knowing your NAME or what you look like or anything else about you.”

Because it’s not about complete open honesty, you know? It’s about understanding what carefully selected bits of information you present in a given circumstance. It’s social engineering.

Revealing your deepest desires or darkest secrets is an entirely different prospect when, say, sitting with a new acquaintance over a cup of coffee face to face or with a coworker in the break room than it is in an anonymous internet chat room. And it can be fascinating to understand what we’re willing to reveal about ourselves in these very different circumstances.

And once you sort through that sort of character analysis, you can write a truly believable and entirely in-character info dump like that without it feeling like an info dump. Because what the character chooses to reveal about themselves in a given situation can be as informative of the character and their relationship to the other characters as the details of what they say.

So, I guess the takeaway here is the reminder that you should still take all writing advice with a grain of salt, and remember that it’s not a blanket rule and all these “California scenes” should be excised in order for your story to be good, you know? If you know your characters well enough, they can be strategic moments of character insight, or even a complete misdirect. The key is to be aware you’re writing one, and then use it to illustrate a character’s weakness, or strength, or the dynamic of the relationship being exposed, rather than being a strict infodump of facts. Because infodumps are always boring if that’s actually the scene you’re writing and there isn’t a deeper layer of understanding going on or a deeper insight for the reader to gain.

Lol, this reminds me of another quote about writing that’s perfectly related:

“If the story you’re telling, is the story you’re telling, you’re in deep shit.” Robert McKee

If the only thing the reader takes from a scene is the words coming out of the characters’ mouths, you done screwed up... That’s why so many of these California scenes are just bad writing. They serve no other purpose than telling the reader a series of details about the characters’ backstories and fail to provide any deeper insight. The key to writing a GOOD scene is make it less a backstory catch-up bit of filler text, and more about what the characters aren’t revealing, or why they’re revealing any of this information in the first place. Because “to inform the reader of these facts” is never a good enough reason for a character to spill their guts like that.