#now that Lili's around Soowon will have less time to angst so like. it'll be better for next time | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

sabraeal · 2 years ago

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You mentioned having to work at finding Soowon's voice for To All the Ghosts, and I believe you mentioned struggling with Shirayuki's voice in early fics, so my question: do you have a process for finding characters' voices?

Lots of screaming and crying 🤣

Mostly it's something I find through drafts. Some characters come easy (Suzu, for one, because he is such a weirdo), but new characters are always a process, some more than others. Lili was much easier, because she's a character you can KNOW through her dialogue. She wears her heart on her sleeve and so just by reading the manga you have her voice.

Soowon is a much more private character. No one truly know him, not even himself, so you have to piece it together from everyone around him. How he reacts to people. All the things he doesn't say. And so I'll use my first draft to get down lines and actions, stuff I'm generally solid on what he needs to do...and then really flesh out the internal narration in the second draft. Why is he doing this? How does he feel? And since he's incapable of looking an emotion straight in the face, how do i convey that without saying a word of it? 😅

Shirayuki was a similar challenge, because she's so nice. She might get sassy, but she's not snarky. So first draft was what I wanted to get across...and second draft was walking it back to be NICER.

#asks #carte blanche meme #actually i went back to see if I could find an example for soowon #and was surprised to find out that the WHOLE FIRST SCENE never existed in draft 1 #I actually started it right where he grabs her wrist but it required SO much backstory that I was like #he has to have a whole ass monologue about unloved kings #purely from coming up with the 'for a king so beloved xing mourned him very little)#because i felt like that encapsulates Soowon's problem in that fic. he is fixated on legacy #specifically the legacy of fathers. and so he needed to chew the scenery about it #i needed to remind the audience that he is both the boy thinking about how he wished kouka had rioted at the death of his father #and also can fake smile at this lady and thank her for sweet rice cakes #draft 2 went through like 3-4 different beginnings until I rearranged things to make it flow better #and then rearranged things AGAIN during a beta because it still wasn't like. punchy enough #Lili's first scene was literally added in during a round of editing and it FLEW out of me it was stupid #now that Lili's around Soowon will have less time to angst so like. it'll be better for next time

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