#so i just scrape off the surface and reword it

[artificer-real]

anxiety anxiety, go away, come again never

[wristic]

All of your stories are so well plotted, the descriptions are vivid, and the dialogue flows beautifully! Do you have any writing advice?

I am loaded with anything anyone wants to talk about all the time ever. So I'm gonna break this up and limit myself in hopes it doesn't turn into a ten page essay.

(Heads up it's only three pages!)

On driving a Plot

While I would disagree that my stories are well plotted, (because I totally just write as I go and hope for the best, and then painstakingly edit afterwords) I do have a small key to making it sound like you know what you're doing.

In each piece you write, start with a conflict and by the end, solve it.

This of course is super broad. The conflict can be as simple as a 100 word bit where the protag wants a kiss but the love interest is being teasingly aloof. Conflict: want kiss. Solved by: got kiss.

It can even end with you hanging chapter after chapter. Conflict: Why is this person missing? Solved by: I still don't know where they are, but my partner is acting awfully strange and I've found a handwritten note from the victim. Next conflict: this person is missing and they knew they would be kidnapped. Solved by: My partner is being payed off to hide evidence and I now have the key to the stash they hid from me.

Conflict is what pushes a story to the end. You'll hear in English class Man vs Nature, Man vs Self, Man vs Man. This is what they're going on about and why it's important. If there is nothing to go against or question or desire, there is nothing moving. If nothing is moving than what is the purpose of telling this story? Sometimes it's to delve into mental anxieties of Capitalism and self worth. Other times it's really really wanting that kiss from an absolute cutie.

Vivid Descriptions

The most common advice is to just read, read a lot and bookmark favorite styles. I agree, it helps you gain insight on different methods and inspire you, but in my opinion look into poetry. 

Poets come up with awesome mixes of words and clever descriptions because they're trying to do more than tell you a story. They're trying to paint you a picture that physically moves you with words alone. Where as a writer you can get distracted with just telling a story, and start to blank out the emotional color from fulfilling the quota of conflict. Poetry is where you really start to taste the salt of the ocean and twist roughened leather, the sound echoing the ache in your chest.

Romantic poetry is a personal favorite of mine cause they will have you a blushing mess in two sentences.

It can also get you in the mindset and making the words flow almost musically, either to soothe or excite. It’s a very pleasing way to read.

Flowing Dialogue

This one is a bit harder to give tips on. I'm a big maladaptive dreamer. When people aren't looking I act out the scenes I'm writing about 90% of the time. I have been caught a few times and yes I totally look insane while doing it. But after explaining people usually get it and walk away no prob. It's a habit hard to break but it helps me round out what I'm writing. 

So if dialogue is stumping you, put it into the real world. (I mouth the words but hearing it aloud might help others). Be the characters and start the conversation till you get where you want. You'll hear where it drags and even come up with something better the fifth repeat. You'll notice a natural body motion or facial expression you give as you say it that you can incorporate into your scene. Btw I've made myself cry many a time getting way too into the part so, warning.

Also, every spoken word needs to serve a purpose. Even if it's one and only purpose is to make someone laugh (that's what comedies are all about!). It must push the story or shine a characters attribute in some way. Don't waste two pages of your protag sitting down with a friend for lunch just to talk. UNLESS this lunch sets something up or accents who these characters are and how they will play out in the rest of the story. If the reader feels this serves no purpose, they will grow bored.

A few more tips

Avoid your sentences starting with the same entry word multiple sentences in a row.

���She ran to the door and swung it open. She didn't gasp. She knew he would be here but it still stopped her heart. She still felt the pain of shock he would dare show his face again.”

And avoid using the same word in the same sentence.

“Getting up and getting ready was the worst part of my day. To roll over to no one and to open my eyes left me too empty to move some mornings.”

Too much repetition and can lull you to sleep or confuse the eye. Now nothing in any creative form is concrete. Obviously some sentences are unavoidable in starting the same, sometimes you gotta use that second or third “to”. It can even add flare and emotion to a scene. So don't get overly focused on how you'll reword every sentence before you even start writing it. It's a critical thing to worry about in your editing phase, not your writing phase.

Often times when I want to write but don't have the energy, I throw every caution out the window and the page is the absolute bare bricks.

Victoria flopped in the chair. “I'm tired of being a warrior.”

Mada nodded. “Yup.

When I go back, when I have the energy, the scene it vastly different.

Exhausted, she ran her scraped fingers on the table before dropping into the seat. It gave a loud whine like it might crumble under her, yet it didn't, and her body slouched to the stained and weathered surface. “I can't…” she swallowed hard as the words struggled to get past the lump in her throat. “I can't do this anymore.”

Mada had sat there a while ago, drink in hand. The flagon was still full despite having been there for well over an hour. She was staring into it, but her eyes gazed far far beyond it. Hearing Victoria, those eyes drifted up. The longer they saw the world in front of her, the more red around the rim they grew, till water built and threatened to spill. In a shaking breath she sighed, “Yeah.”

You don't have to get it perfect the first round. Just getting it down will help you think of other scenes in your story and well, it's nice to know you have it out there and won’t lose it.

Writing it down just because is also something to do with scenes you haven't connected yet, scenes you haven't fleshed out an entire story around. You're creative and have this wonderful story in your mind that the world wants to see. But don't wait till you have the whole novel in your mind before writing it out. Don't wait on the in between or beginning or end to happen before you start writing at all.

Don't get caught up thinking it isn't a masterpiece or that it isn't unique before you write it. Self-doubt it the number one cause for writers block, you’re judging your work before it’s even down on paper. Be aware of that, overcome it knowing it’s an obstacle to crush and WRITE THE DANG STORY.

I hope all this helps in some way! Thank you so much for asking me and thank you for enjoying my work!

[calleo-bricriu]

Opinions on Acolytes?

(( Over on Twitter, someone asked FB era Calleo what his thoughts on Grindelwald’s Acolytes were. Not surprisingly, he has opinions. ))

This really is the Aurors opinion reworded.

Oddly enough, the two are related to a degree.

The thing is, it’s the policies put into place and upheld by Magical governmental bodies, including the International Confederation, that allow movements such as his to start and gain traction in the first place.

You take large groups of people and shove them to the fringes of society, telling them they’re corrupt, they’re evil, they don’t belong, they aren’t welcome, they’re an example of failure and shame, and that doesn’t do anything useful or productive except give people--in this example, you’re very clearly taking aim at Grindelwald--an amazingly easy opportunity to recruit people to their cause.

And it doesn’t matter what that cause is, it doesn’t matter what it is under the surface, what matters is it’s offering large groups of people who are either openly marginalised or who fear being marginalised, thrown into prison, or executed for having an interest in or practising forms of magic that the government has deemed ‘wrong’ regardless of whether or not they ever injure anyone else or even themselves in their studies, or people who have had family or friends harmed or killed by those policies a place to belong, a group in which they’re told they’re not broken, they’re not damaged, they’re not corrupt, they’re not wrong and that they’ve been treated poorly by the same society and same governmental bodies that were allegedly designed to include and protect them along with everyone else.

That’s tempting. Most people wouldn’t think twice about being offered a place where they won’t be looked down upon, where they’d be readily accepted and told they’re fine exactly as they are. Once they have that, it’s still something society at large never offered and actively denied them so they’re willing to overlook a great deal or justify a great deal because the alternative is worse: The alternative is being thrown back into the gutter, only this time it’ll be two ‘societies’, as it were, that rejected them. The majority of them will stay, regardless of any personal misgivings they may develop along the way, because of that alone.

When you have laws in place that treat addiction as a crime, that treat even so much as casual socialising with Muggles as a crime (one you can be executed for in some areas), when you’re expected to cut off family and friends because it turns out someone in your circle can use magic, when you’re viewed as a violent criminal by default regardless of what you do or do not do, when you’re repeatedly told you have to hide a large part of yourself if you want to continue living outside of a prison or living at all, and someone comes along and tells you that there’s nothing wrong with you, it’s the laws and the people who blindly and brutally uphold them without question that are the problem, very few people are going to be in a position to even want to resist that, and just as many will be pleased and eager to be able to make the same people who went out of their way to make them feel worthless feel even a fraction of what it did to them--so they’re not going to bat an eye at a little death and destruction here and there.

It’s also easy to recruit from the more conservative aspects of Wizarding society, and to do so with not nearly as much effort: Simply tell them that their way of life is under attack, aim it at whatever it is you want to take down, tell them the nasty little things you dredged up from the gutter--that would be everyone described above--are only there as fodder (and make no mistake, that is what they are, every last one of them) but please do keep quiet about that as if they knew those on the upper tiers of the power structure thought just as poorly of them as the rest of society it’d all fall apart very quickly, and there’s where you get the majority of the political and economic power.  Nobody is easier to spook about “their way of life disappearing” than old money Pureblood families.

Give them the illusion of a position of power, and they’ll follow you right off the edge of a cliff without batting an eye.

If you were asking what I think of them personally, that’s not a question that has a blanket answer; they’re not one large person, they’re any number of individuals. On an individual basis I may like or dislike them based on a number of factors.

In general, I get on just fine with the three who work under me in the Archives but I certainly wouldn’t consider them anything other than work friends; we never speak outside of work and never really have.

The ones I’ve met have been all over the place in terms of what I think of them; some of them are absolutely dreadful and the human equivalent of scraping a fork down a blackboard, some are incredibly dull and forgettable, others are a great deal of fun, and some I’ve known for decades and know exactly how and why they ended up where they are--and it’s usually not that they’re “old money Purebloods”.

If you were looking for somebody to blame for the lot of them, look to the governments and laws that spawned the movement and gave it what it needed to grow the way it did, because they’re nothing more than the result of it.

They’ll get what they deserve in the end.

So will the rest of you.