#like I saw that uncharted movie a few months ago? It sucked btw as someone who’s familiar with the games

[waywardsalt]

23, 27, and 31 for the fanfic ask game! 🌟

hi! Thanks for the ask!

23: Best writing advice for other writers?

I’m not too sure what kind of advice I’m qualified to give… when I write, a lot of the time I just go with what feels right, so… some advice I suppose I can give is to pay a bit of special attention to dialogue. In my experience, if dialogue feels just a bit off or comes off as straight up unnatural, it can kill a scene for me. When writing dialogue, I’d recommend imagining the conversation or sentence being said out loud, or even say it out loud. 

It comes fairly easily to me, so I’m not sure how easy it is for others to pick up on dialogue that’s just a bit off, but a good way to make dialogue feel natural is to just think… if you heard the conversation you’re writing in real life, would you think it sounds strange? Not context-wise, but in flow or wording. Again, for me at least, unnatural dialogue can kill a scene for me, so I recommend really taking some time to make sure that it’s natural, unless you’re trying to make it sound unnatural. This can be hard if you’re trying to slip in some exposition via dialogue, but just pay a little extra mind to it and make sure every part of the conversation reasonable connects in some way. 

I could go on a little more about this, but for me at least, it just comes down to imagining it as a real conversation and not just information between characters.

27: What is your most and least favorite part of writing?

I’ll start with my least favorite… editing, probably? Writing can get boring and even stagnant for me at times, but I don’t really dislike it unless I’m not interested in what I’m writing. Soy least favorite parts are probably going back and editing (mostly) and writing something or some part I’m not all that excited about.

As for my favorite, probably writing character moments and conveying information about characters. It feels like a sort of puzzle, figuring out what information you want to convey, how to naturally do it, and what purpose that information serves. I love… characters. Some more than others, but I like piecing together what makes them themselves and then using and communicating that through the story, even though my own writing skills are still on the rough side overall.

31: Do you start with the characters or the plot when writing?

Carrying over from the last question… I start with the characters! As far back as I can remember in my writing ‘career’, I’ve always started with character before plot. When writing fanfiction, if it’s something like an in-universe fic, I will usually want to use that fic to explore something with certain characters or have certain characters do something, and once that’s been established, the plot is created from that. 

With aus that I write and plan to write, specifically in Zelda fics (and I’m pretty sure I mentioned this in my other fanfiction asks post) every au always starts with the idea of ‘hey what if Linebeck was in this specific situation’ or some variation of that. It’s incredibly rare that he’s not the root of all of my aus and wilder fic ideas. Most of my plots are based around him, at least at the start, then I need to branch out and obscure my very obvious favoritism.

Even outside of fanfiction, the characters come before the plot; all of my current original ideas stemmed from the creation of its main characters. My oldest idea started with a fun concept for a character. I have a story that is inspired by and is about two old dungeons and dragons characters of mine. That snippet of original writing I posted a bit ago (this) I started with a vague idea of a character made from a handful of inspirations. 

Since I’m big on characters and enjoy writing them, I put a lot of importance on my characters and then create worlds and plots around them for me to use them to their full potential, or to explore and expand a specific trait or concept related to them.