Thoughts on Writing

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Writing about people can be hard, especially when they are boring and seem incapable of doing anything interesting. In terms of writing this should seem like something that can easily be avoided and for the most part it can, however something cannot be exploding nor can someone pull out a gun every time you’re stumped for dialogue. Your characters need to be vibrant enough than even when they aren’t fighting fallen deities and ransacking millennia old tombs you should care about what they are saying. Certainly you shouldn’t always do this, but you should be able to.

The more things you have packed into a small amount of space the more you and your characters are compensating for not being interesting. Don’t hesitate to take a couple pages here and there to delve into the minds of your characters. While finding the right places can be tricky when done correctly it can increase the amount of heart the reader has invested into the characters so when they fight their battles the reader will feel they are there with them and actually care when everything goes pear-shaped.

An important way of doing this is dialogue. While it is all well and good to have an omnipotent narrator tell us how a character is feeling (Thanks again romanticism!) the trend has given way to the far more involving process of having the characters expressing it themselves through subtlety and tact.

This is the thing that most writers, including myself, struggle with constantly. You have attempt to capture two different voices simultaneously and understand why they are saying what they are saying and why they are saying what they are saying the way they are saying it.

Take the following comic as an example:

Wrong

We are given two characters having a ...

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...can never be taught. Picking up verbal cues and personality traits that are attached to them are best learned by understanding and watching those around you and noticing how they walk and talk.

To see this at its best read anything that Garth Ennis has written. Ignoring the plot, look at the dialogue. The guy’s good. Too good. Any voice he decides he wants; he has, and can use at the drop of a hat. One of his favorite things to do is impersonate his friends and those around him. He also carries a notebook and pen with him wherever he goes where he writes down actual conversations he overhears (or variations thereof so he can use them later). I recommend all of these things, unless you like having friends and abhor being called nerd and given swirlies. (Ennis is Scottish, he can get away with it).

Once again it all comes down to characters. Damn things, anyway.

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