#use commas tho make’s this harder to read than it needs to any way i lost my capo for like the third time my desk isn’t even that messy but

[omotelie]

WHERE’S MY FUKING CAPO

[sharkneto]

hi! could you perhaps give some writing tips for writing angst or short stories? i want to start writing and since i love tua i wanted to try some short stories about five during the apocalypse. tho i also kinda want to learn how to portray characters correctly <3

So, knowing me, this will probably get long. So Part 1: Short Stories and Angst and Part 2: Writing In-Character

Part 1: Short Stories and Angst

Idk how qualified I am for giving advice on writing short stories. I just, sit down to write and stop when it's done. Sometimes that's 1k words, sometimes that's 40k. A quick google says a short story is under 10k words, so that's what we'll work with. Writing a couple thousand word fic isn't actually all that much of a different process than writing a thirty thousand fic - it's just a question of scale. A short fic is going to have a simple premise, that's straightforward and you can set up in a couple hundred to a thousand words (the Umbrellas found a horse, Five is drunk and cut his finger, Klaus and Five are having a bad day and go to the zoo). Don't get hung up on if your premise is "big enough", is enough of a plot - slice of life is my bread and butter and is popular for a reason. None of the above premises are anything big or have particularly high stakes (come back to this in a second). Simple plot means simple structure which is how short stories stay short. Set up, problem, solution. Honestly, you don't even have to solve the problem as long as you still wrap it up in some way (in Lonely Drunk, Luther solves the problem of Five being Too Drunk by getting him to bed, but doesn't have any solution for the overall problem to stop future drunkness). Tell the scene/story you want to tell and get out (or don't, but then you're not telling a short story anymore, which is also fine and happens to the best of us).

Now, up there I hedged that short story = low stakes, which is not true and is where ~angst~ comes in. How much and which emotions you bring into a story is all about word choice and pacing. Take my Lend a Hand vs... Simple. Both are about 4.5k words. One is a fic in which Five destroys his hand to save Luther from vivisection. The other is Five and Diego walking in a park and talking about how to make friends. Different Vibes in the same number of words.

So, how do you use words and pacing to write angst, as that is what you're specifically asking about. For angst to work, you need your readers to 1) empathize with the character getting whumped and 2) hurt because of it. Fanfic helps with 1 because we already care about the characters coming in as we're looking to read more about them. You can help up the empathy in the Set Up by putting them in danger, giving them a difficult situation, etc. For 2, some of the best writing advice I ever got is from This Post on how to write pain - you don't just say "they hurt", you describe how they hurt. Ye old Show vs Tell. Write around the pain until we can see the shape of it anyway. Save hard-hitting synonyms for peak action/emotion so they hit harder in contrast to more subdued word choice before it. Play with pacing. Short, choppy sentences read faster and are good for fights, shock, and pain. Long, descriptive sentences are good to build tension and making those fast sentences faster by contrast. Alternatively, run-on sentences for effect work similarly to fast choppy ones - no periods and no commas mean readers don't get a chance to take a breath. Paragraph breaks slow your reader down, so use that to pace them. A series of short action sentences go fast in one big paragraph together. Single sentences in paragraphs by themselves slow the reader down for shock or realizations or emphasis on a particular action. Mix all these basics up to craft the exact speed and emotion you want to hit. It's a fun lil puzzle.

Part 2: Characterization

Writing characters is just practice. When we're reading, especially fanfic, we have an idea of when a character would or wouldn't say or do something they're doing in the fic. So, break down why you know that and you can start writing the character in the right shape on your own. When reading or watching the source material, pay attention to how a character talks, what motivates them, when they're nice versus when they're mean, how they interact with other characters, etc. You can't drop a character into a completely new scenario you made up and have them act in-character until you understand why they're going to do what they're going to do in that situation.

This takes practice, and there's not necessarily one correct way to write a character - different people pick up on different things, have different angles of emphasis for their understanding. There's also canon-interpretation of characters vs headcanon and fanon-interpretations. The older a show and the larger the fandom, the more prevalent the headcanons and fanon-interpretation is going to be. Personally, I prefer to stay as close to canon as I can, but I'm definitely not immune to fanon and I definitely have my personal headcanons. And, there isn't anything wrong with accepting fanon, just recognize it's a specific interpretation of the character. If you feel like you're falling more into a fanon-interpretation than you'd like, you can always take a dip back to the source material for a character and characterization refresher.

But, what does this breaking down of a character to understand them look like? Let's do it with Five, my favorite guy. Five is a fifty-eight-year-old man who's stuck looking thirteen. He lived for four decades alone in the apocalypse with his plastic wife and then became the Commission's best assassin. He's trying to stop the apocalypse. These experiences shape how he talks - he uses old-timey phrases, both because he's old and because he's not familiar with the modern world. He's not polite and he's quick to snap because he has little social practice and is under immense pressure to stop the apocalypse. How do they shape how he approaches problems? He resorts to violence relatively quickly, because he was an assassin and (again) has little experience in talking to diffuse situations, but he will choose trying to diffuse over violence when he can. What motivates Five? Stopping the apocalypse is the surface answer. Why does he want to stop the apocalypse? Because he found his whole family dead in it when he was thirteen years old. He is actually motivated by his family. Five is a genius but dumb (because lacking social and real-world experience and his ego). He loves an insane amount (chosen survival mechanism was to create a person to love, survived the apocalypse to save his family). Etc, etc, etc...

You just keep breaking characters down like this until you've hit the level you feel like you understand them. And then it just comes down to practice. It took me a good 15 fics before I was comfortable writing Klaus. Imagine characters saying your dialogue, doing what you're making them do, and see if it feels like they would do that. If it's out of character, it might still be in-character, depending on what pressures you're putting them under. If a character is acting out of character, it could be you have a hole in your plot you need to fix - the plot should be pushing the characters to get to the climax and resolution, they should not be walking there by themselves unprompted. If rewriting happens, rewriting happens. I had to rewrite the alley-dumpster fight in HIT because I forgot to destroy the briefcase in it and I realized if there was a briefcase floating around, Five would immediately break my plot (I have a grudging empathy for TUA writers in how easily Five can break plots - it just means you have to get more creative). It's a fun mental dance that I enjoy quite a bit.

At the end of the day, though, the whole point is to have fun. The best way to get better at writing and figure it out is to just do it.

Happy writing :)