#aka i didn't want to write any action or scene descriptions

[adultish-momma]

Bonus Scene: Pay the Price

Yuu is not going to fall into the trap of doing the work without the title and the benefits thank you very much.

Warnings: The whole thing is just dialogue. I didn't write a single thing that wasn't being spoken out loud. It's mainly two separate conversations between two characters, but there are like, five 'speech bubbles' at the very end that is four distinct speakers, so feel free to ask me for clarification on who is speaking if you get confused!

A/n: While not fully on the "slander-Crowley" bandwagon (thank you weird complicated relationship with management/direct authority figures), no one is safe from Yuu's wrath. So let's cook some carrion.

P.S. If you want to place this in a timeline, the first conversation happens right after the beginning of Book 2, and the last conversation would be occurring soon into the interim of Book 2 and Book 3

"Crowley, I'm going to say this in the most polite and respectful way I can, but what the hell?"

"Language! Such aggression against your poor Headmage! Whatever have I done to deserve this treatment from my own student?"

"Did you or did you not just get out of another housewarden meeting?"

"Why yes, the meeting was actually quite productive for once. We were able to clear up some final details on an upcoming inter-dorm tournament. All because of my gracious guidance of course."

"An inter-dorm... Crowley, how many times do I need to tell you to invite me to Dormleader meetings? There is a student registered under my care, I have to know things! Like an inter-dorm tournament!"

"Yes yes yes, I'll remember next time, for I am oh so caring about my poor students' desires and needs. But would you look at that, I must be getting back to work, busy busy, running a school full of such unruly - I mean! Such energetic young men. Run along now Prefect, shoo, shoo"

--------

"Ah Headmaster, welcome back!"

"What- Wh- Prefect just what is the meaning of this?!"

"Oh, don't mind me. I'm just updating my schedule with all of the Dormleader meetings you have planned for the rest of the semester. Oh! I hope you don't mind, I took the liberty to make a copy of last meeting's notes as well, since I was already here and all."

"Prefect, this is completely out of bounds. I let you get away with a lot, for I am ever so gracious, but breaking into my office to steal confidential information is beyond crossing the line. The Prefect of Ramshackle you may be, but you are not a housewarden. You do not have the same level of access, nor the same privileges that they receive. You would do well to remember this."

"Mmm. Is that so? Well, alright, message heard loud and clear. I'll be going now, good luck with all that paperwork."

"Paper- Prefect what is this stack of papers you're leaving behind!? This is nearly as tall as my beak is long!"

"Oh, all that? That's all the paperwork every dorm has to have completed for the school. Stuff like budgets and activity proposals and student reports. There's some extra in this stack since Ramshackle is being re-established, so some of this is things like drafts of the dorm code of conduct and mock-ups of uniforms for the Ramshackle students. At least 20 pages are just the building inspection "this absolutely needs to be fixed" checklist."

"And why have you decided to leave your paperwork behind on my desk?"

"Because that's all paperwork for the dorm leader to fill out. And I'm not a dorm leader. So when a dorm has no house warden or vice house warden, that dorm's assigned staff member takes on the duties of house warden until a student replacement can be assigned as the new dorm leader. And seeing as you're Night Raven's esteemed HeadMage, I'm sure you're well aware of the fact that you are the assigned staff member for Ramshackle dorm."

"O-of course I knew that. And as the esteemed HeadMage of this institution, I am much too busy to be doing so much paperwork for only one dorm. I would love to help my poor magicless student, for my heart is filled with such sorrow thinking about your tragic situation. But I am afraid that if I take on the house warden paperwork for Ramshackle, on top of all the ever-so-important duties I have as HeadMage of Night Raven College, I will never be able to search for a way to send you home Prefect."

"Are you trying to blackmail me into doing the work of a dorm leader, but receiving none of the benefits that come with that title?"

"Why I would never do such an outrageous thing! Me, blackmail a student? Why, I was just lamenting over how terrible your situation already is, and how much potential it has to get even worse."

"Speaking of my situation, I bet it would make such an interesting story to the news outlets and reporters throughout Twisted Wonderland. The magicless student from another dimension, brought here against their will, started as a janitor and is now the top student in their grade at the revered Night Raven College for the Arcane Arts. What an underdog story. Personally, I think Professor Ambrose at RSA will enjoy hearing about just how generous you've been to poor pitiful me."

"Yuu, are you blackmailing me?"

"Dire, do you want me to do the Ramshackle paperwork?"

...

...

"What exactly is it that you want?"

------------------------------

"Oh! Prefect, I didn't expect to see you here. Crowley hasn't arrived yet if you were looking for him. But you'll have to make it quick, for we should be trying to start our House Warden meeting fairly soon after he gets here."

"Oh thank you Riddle, but I'm here for the meeting."

"Oi, Herbivore, your ears are working, right? House Warden meeting. As in, not for cubs like you. So move along, before that crazy crow comes. Can't get a moment of peace if he sees his 'precious Prefect'"

"Ah well you see, the thing is-"

"Amazing! I see everyone is here and ready for the meeting to start. First order of business. I'd like you all to meet Yuu, the new Ramshackle House Warden."

[alex-wrtng]

How to avoid boring dialogue

HINT: It's not actually about the dialogue.

We've all heard about making your dialogue sound natural and all that, but that doesn't really work on its own, does it? An English teacher once told me to use the five senses, but that advice felt extremely weird to me because I don't go about smelling and tasting people when I talk to them. I made up my own method which is flexible enough to be used with any scene and genre. 

Let's start with a random dialogue:

"I'm sorry for your loss," he apologized.

"It's okay."

"I swear I meant to be there, but..."

"I said it's fine," she said.

Yeah... no. That ain't it, chief. It's boring. The sentences are short and lack depth. It's nothing we haven't heard before in other stories. So what should we do to fix this WITHOUT messing with the base dialogue? We write around it, beef up the boi, give it everything a story needs without info dumping. 

Here's a list of things to keep an eye on:

Setting description

Items (optional)

Actions and expressions

Tone

Motive

Crowd control

And here's some questions to ask yourself as a writer when you run out of things to describe, but need more meat in your narration:

Who initiated the conversation?

Do they all want to stay in this conversation?

Does the reader know what happened before the conversation or is there a need for exposition either in the narrative or within the dialogue?

Let's add every single item on the first list and answer every question to fix our short little dialogue as an exercise:

"I'm sorry for your loss," he apologized with a vaguely concealed smirk and a half-empty beer bottle in hand. 

This was not the face she wanted to see seconds after a humiliating defeat in the arena. Not when her new partner didn't last a second longer than the last one. Failure after failure fell on her shoulders. She clutched the dog tags tighter as if hiding them would make the situation dissappear and walked away, fully aware that the feet of her first partner would follow her like an imprinted duckling.

"It's okay."

But the dried tear tracks said otherwise, shameful as they were. Even in the dark, they were clear to see and the salty smell wouldn't be missed by someone like him.

"I swear I meant to be there, but..." but nothing. His kind wasn't welcome in the stands and they both knew it very well.

Despite that, his tone was bordering on humorous if slightly lazy. An I-told-you-so that would haunt her waking dreams. 

"I said it's fine," she said, wanting nothing more than to smash that beer bottle against his too sharp teeth. 

Now that we got some spice in there, let's analyze what we added and how it answers our questions and leaves some gaps to hook the reader.

Setting description

There were only two words used to describe the setting "arena" and "stands". It doesn't tell you what type of arena and that's great because now the reader wants to know more about where they are and why they are there. The rest of the setting is brought on by the items and the characters themselves. There's no need to info dump the setting's description in one go, make the reader work for it a little bit.

Actions and expressions

First we have to remember that characters have faces and bodies. They need to do something with both or otherwise the character is just standing there characters on a 2-bit RPG game. Of course, less is more so a writer should only focus on the most important movements and expressions and let the reader fill in the blanks with hints from the dialogue and narration. We have "smirk" and "dried tears" to put a face on our characters. Easy and simple. 

Items (optional)

This is somewhat like a crutch when it comes to keeping your character from just standing there. In animation, this is called "business" aka giving the character something to do like fiddle with their clothes, wipe down counters, gesture with pencils or other items, etc. Here we have the dog tags as an active item (the squeezing action) and the beer bottle acting as environmental storytelling (it's just there). The militaristic vibes and the tipsy attitude could've been described with exposition but this is quicker and sneaky.

Tone

How are things being said? Think of what's in between your dialogue as voice acting tips, but not as obvious. Yes, you can get away with some adverbs here and there, but overdoing it is a big no-no so I didn't use any in the example. There's no need to spell out "mocking" or "smug" when the character is smirking in the face of foreign loss. In the last line, I used visual imagery to spell out aggression. You can do the same with other types of emotions. 

Motive

What do they want? No idea, but that's not my problem at the moment. Motives guide conversations. What the characters want will color their actions. Writers won't introduce villains as "this is the villain", but they point out by throwing in some crumbs. Since motive is in everything, I'm not gonna point it out.

Crowd control

We don't need the reader to play mental gymnastics and end up with a pile of bodies on a twister map. I used two people in the example and used two actions "walking away" and "follow" to place them somewhere in the reader's mental map. I didn't describe their pace, but the tone (and later the words "humorous" and "lazy") hint at how they move.

And there you go! That's it for my dialogue scene guide. 

Have fun writing, 

Alex.

[transsexualhamlet]

Moriarty the Patriot + The Final Problem

aka another unecessary essay from ya boy on how yuumori, instead of taking away from the original text, adds meaning and depth to it

So I finally got around to reading the final problem after wading through all the memoirs of sherlock holmes and yes, I am in fact reading these because of yuumori. I wanted to see how it was portrayed, what the differences and influences from the original source were. I did end up getting incredibly attached to the original series too, so yeah... I'm glad to report that the original and adaption get along well.

And yeah, I have a lot of thoughts, most of them being just me generally praising yuumori. I think it was straight up genius how they pulled so much content from... well, frankly. The Final Problem was a 15 page short story tossed off by Doyle in order to have an excuse to be done with sherlock holmes, told from the perspective of someone who wasn't even there. And yuumori still managed to make it generally very accurate and complementary to the original, while still being, uhhhhh really fucking different, let's say that.

Read more because again, long essay

Just my observations on the final problem itself is that it is so underdeveloped and told from an outsider perspective. Because of that, so many questions go unanswered, and the reader gets a sense that they are only witnessing a very small part of what actually happened. Sherlock can't afford to go into detail on what Moriarty was even involved in, Watson isn't privy to what's honestly even happening most of the time, and Moriarty just... has this extensive network of organized crime that just isn't even talked about other than Trust Me It's Bad Bro. We don't know Moriarty's intentions, most of who he is, and more questions are honestly brought up than answered within the story. Sherlock knows, oh that's for sure, Sherlock knows what's going on and he has no fucking time to tell Watson. You get a sense that Watson himself isn't even telling all that went down.

So yeah, I can see where there's so much room to expand upon here, not even to change things or make it different because it would be cool, but there's so much that could be happening just within the realm of plausible deniability in the canon.

And I think that it's amazing how Yuumori chose to market itself that way- not as an adaption or reimagining- but that this was in fact the Real story, with Doyle's final problem being... honestly a bit of a cover up, a purposeful misrepresentation of a small slice of the full story. It lends itself completely to that, and I think that's amazing.

(One thing I do find funny is that in Yuumori the story "the final problem" is depicted as a full novella that could be published on its own... man it's not nearly long enough for that but I find it funny in any way)

Of course, there are elements of yuumori that are yknow, simply not realistically something that could have happened, but most of the story is actually within that range of plausible deniability since the canon is so vague and sparse. And since they state that things were changed on purpose to protect people and the moriarty plan, it basically covers that all as simply The Truth. It's well done, and very interesting, especially with the new anime ending taking them to Reichenbach itself.

Like, yuumori didn't even truly change the appearances of the characters, from the descriptions. (we're not counting the illustrations lol) like, Sherlock was never stated (as far as I can tell) to have a specific hair or eye color, hairstyle or such.... he was described as tall, thin, eccentric, messy, with like... long fingers and stuff. Man, yuumori did not go against that. With Moriarty it's different, though he was also reportedly Tall and Thin and Built Like A Yaoi Protag for some goddamn reason, he... you know, has these weird and unattractive features as well, which... in the context of Watson trying to portray Moriarty as unmitigated evil in order to protect the plan, were in this situation made up specifically to further the idea that he was just that.

Because of this situation, the Moriarty that is portrayed as yeah, a smart guy and a threat but seriously just A Bad Dude who seems to have no particular reason behind his actions save being A Bad Dude actually make more sense as a cover up behind a more dangerous secret of him having Real Feelings than the only stated reason being "he inherited being evil from his family". (like... watson, really?)

It explains the vagueness and the events and the weird connection between those two better than the original does, and that's really cool to me.

On their own, without yuumori to back me up on these things, reading this would have left me confused and depressed. But as a half truth immortalized as the real story, you get so much more out of it.

Especially these certain scenes:

When Moriarty just pops into Sherlock's house and they proceed to have a basically wordless conversation amounting to

"you know why I'm here" "you know how I'm going to respond" "well then" "here's date and time of our mutual destruction" "thanks I'll be there" "well I'll be off nice knowing you" "wow it sucks that we're enemies he's such a civil guy"

It just really adds something to that, don't you think?

And the subject of their fall itself, simply the fact that Watson wasn't even there. No one witnessed it. No one found even Moriarty's body. No one found evidence of anything at all.

All Watson could say was that Sherlock and Moriarty had gone up to the mountain together, Moriarty told Sherlock of his plans, let Sherlock write and leave a letter to Watson, and that they never came back down. So he came to the conclusion that they must have fought and both fallen off.... like, holding each other. Not really sure how they reached that conclusion, to be honest.

It doesn't even make sense, exactly told how it is. If Moriarty wanted to kill sherlock and survive, he would have just... brought a fucking gun. Or just pushed him off on the way up. As soon as he got him alone just fucking stab the man. It would have been that easy, but no, he had a whole ass convo with the man, they went up civilly side by side, and they stayed on the cliff a long time while Sherlock wrote that letter. Even then, Sherlock could have just waited to catch Moriarty off guard and pushed him off. But he didn't.

Why would they even have fought, if it was so scheduled? You telling me to believe that after this letter was written and moriarty stood there watching him sipping tea or whatever he was suddenly like "ok im ready to fight now", knowing they would both probably die, and if they were genuinely trying to kill each other and survive, that would even make sense?

Of course, these problems in the original stem just from Doyle no longer giving a shit and slapping this together after losing motivation for sherlock, he was obviously, not hinting at some great conspiracy in the slightest.

But damn, Yuumori really does change that all for you, huh. It adds a whole new layer of context to it. And I like it a lot, I like what they've done on their own, I like what they've done for the original stories, and I especially like what they've done telling the "real story" of this short, vague, mystery that otherwise leaves you feeling unsatisfied and confused.

[fincalinde]

For the latest meme, 23, 24, 36, and 30? 👀

23. Dialogue or description? Why is the other one so hard?

Hmmm I actually quite enjoy both. Lengthy and detailed description doesn't suit my style and I find it difficult, but I also find it difficult at times to differentiate between 'voices' for different characters. Sorry I don't have a more interesting answer. As a freebie: what I really find difficult is action sequences of any kind.

24. Thoughts on flashbacks/flashforwards.

Nothing against either though it's not something I'm drawn to. I'm not an adventurous writer and while I've experimented with analepsis and prolepsis in the past it doesn't come naturally to me and therefore doesn't crop up much in my fanfic. I think I've only done two fics with a flashback structure: the garden we find inside and the NMJ sidestory for weakness. But both are still quite straightforward.

An example of a fic that moves back and forth in a clever way is my perennial favourite darkness and fears to appease by welcome_equivocator. One that really rewards multiple readings.

36. How do you come up with fic titles? What's the one you're most proud of?

Oh almost always lyrics, I'm awful at titles and have absolutely no illusions about how inadequate most of my choices are. My rule is just that the song as a whole should more or less work for the fic or at minimum the pairing. My best title is probably old enough to be yours though I'm also very fond of the weakness of falling in love. And the whimsical working title a study of the urban fridge deer I ended up keeping because a certain raccoon and possum are enablers. If I ever manage to finish the sequel the file is named 'further study of the urban fridge deer' which I'm sure won't confuse anyone at all.

30. Describe a fic that almost happened, but then it didn't.

I dream constantly of the Wangxian Temple Fix but it's not going to get written because describing it is the joke. Probably the best serious example is the Orphan AU @xiyao-feels (aka you lol) and I devised where LXC and JGY end up at the same foster home. There's lots of cute little scenes like JGY getting a part time job as a barista and then LXC getting a job there too. Oh and they share a tiny room with a very small single bed each, so that makes it easy to be secret boyfriends but not that comfortable for all the very necessary spooning, so one of the many things JGY dreams of achieving when he's a rich and successful adult is buying the Biggest Bed Possible.

Maybe I'll be nice and share a tiny bit since it's never going to be a fic unless someone wants to pay me to write Xiyao all day:

They each have a single bed, on opposite sides of their very small room, and every night Meng Yao fantasises about shoving the bedside tables out of the way and pushing the beds together. He dreams about having enough space.

Tonight they talked after lights out, whispering to each other in Cantonese until Lan Xichen got quiet and not in a way that meant he was falling asleep. So Meng Yao had slipped out of his own bed and joined him, hugging him and letting him hide his face against his shoulder.

What Meng Yao remembers is falling asleep with one arm thrown over Lan Xichen and his nose pressed to the nape of Lan Xichen's neck. What he discovers when he wakes is that his arm is still over Lan Xichen's waist but his face is now hidden against Lan Xichen's back, his nose and forehead rubbing the clean-scented cotton of Lan Xichen's pyjama shirt.