#but when writing the chaos and action between a huge group... dear Lord

[riacte]

Some thoughts about writing dialogue (coming from someone who basically transcribed the Blue9 MCC stream for fic purposes):

Real life dialogue is messy. People make mistakes, voices overlap, it gets unintelligible, people repeat themselves instinctively (even if they get their point across the first time)

And this is about Blue9 - four streamers (people who talk as a living) with effective communication / chemistry. It's still messy at times because that's simply how people communicate, especially in fast paced / stressful scenarios

Which makes it a bit tricky to translate to text, because if you repeat dialogue too much, it looks tacky even though it sounds perfectly normal.

Juggling between character voices in tense moments is also annoying because in audio form, you instinctively know who's speaking. But in text form, you have to add indicators so you just can't have paragraphs of dialogue (unlike speaking scenes between two characters)

^ although that could work if your characters have distinctive speaking styles (or mentioning characters by the name in the dialogue), but that also relies on the readers' knowledge of their speaking styles

^ even worse when it's a group and the voices are overlapping. The more characters you have to juggle in a scene, the more it feels like "[Character A] said" then "[Character B] said" and on it goes. It's already difficult to transcribe when it's a group of 5/6 and they're all talking.

At least there's one set of she/her pronouns in the Blue9 team. Actually this is partially why I like writing about men and women - it's easier to juggle pronouns (my skill issue lol)

I tried to keep it as close to canon as possible, but sometimes you have to edit down and add bits of exposition for clarity's sake. Like if you watch the stream, it makes sense. The repetition and messiness adds to the experience, honestly, But if you read the transcript, it doesn't work the best.

Tone is such a big thing. It comes instinctively in audio format, but it really is difficult to describe it in text sometimes, especially when it's a tense moment and you have to keep pushing forward instead of spending words to describe tone.

The good thing about writing about streamers is that if you use the right cues, readers can pick it up and picture that specific tone in their head. The bad thing is that this depends on the readers' knowledge and how good you are at describing. (The bad bad thing about this personally is that my OCs have weak character voices because I don't have canon basis.)

^ Bits of informality like stretching syllables and italics help. Like "oooh" is fundamentally different from "oh" and that is different from "ohhhh". And sometimes irl people do stretch syllables or pronounce them differently for humorous effect, but it can look unprofessional on text. (Like Scar's "a-maize-ing".) <- actually this can create distinctive character speaking styles and it's a cue to let readers immediately know who's speaking

Back to the action thing. These streamers are playing in a vc and they all hear each other, but realistically in action scenes, characters are gonna be in different places. There's volume to care about and voices getting lost in the chaos. But when writing, your focus is to push the story forward sooo realism is definitely not the priority

... Yeah. I'm giving my characters high quality communicators. And excellent hearing.

Dialogue in text is... intentional? You can see it in people snarking movies for having unrealistic dialogue. Its purpose is to convey something clearly. Dialogue in everyday life can contain a lot of blunders but that doesn't translate well in storytelling because we expect to learn something from dialogue. That's why it's there.

Transcribing videos and turning them into text based stories is an interesting exercise (and one that I keep on doing lol). It makes you more aware of the gap between irl and written dialogue and why there's a gap.

Godspeed to people who write dialogue between a group during an action scene. We all praise comms in MCC but it does give me a headache to write hahahaha.

[hinge]

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