First Post

[hoisinsauce]

A space to chat fandom! Anon!

Got a WIP you're excited about? Want to rave about your fave? Or is your fandom absolutely in love with a character who detracts from every scene they bumble into, and you need somewhere to vent? You're in the right place!

(start a comment thread by replying to this post)

Comments

Re: How's it going?

[(Anonymous)]

Haha, yeah. I have deep thoughts about Friendship and Community and Inclusion and the Meaning of it all, but at the end of the day I have to write a dialogue scene between two characters, showing the state of their friendship, and that's hard.

Re: How's it going?

[(Anonymous)]

Yeahhh, if it helps at all I normally build anything on the symbolism side up over time, and I approach it kind of... clinically? Like, I start with the dialogue, then invent some kind of prop and add that in, tracking its journey as a metaphor over the course of the conversation (this is another thing easier in fanfic because characters tend to already have props associated with them)... but I do think of it in terms of 'props'. And I try to pick weird things so that it doesn't come across as too cliched (I daresay nobody past the age of 16 wants to read something with a teddybear as a metaphor for a child character, but you can make the child character obsessed with a household item or some random junk that was never intended as a toy and use that as a metaphor, and it feels a lot more natural imo). I think I write according to formulae that I had to consciously invent and then use automatically with practice. Though it's still really annoying when you don't really have a concrete mental image you're trying to convey, just a sense of motion or a feeling. Or a sound. :P