HAVE I MENTIONNED RECENTLY THAT MY SISTER IS THE MOST AMAZING PERSON ON THE FUCKING PLANET?????? 😭💕
She went to see the new Lupin III kabuki play on my behalf, called me on the phone for an entire hour to give me a detailed report and listen to me nerd out about the anime references, and then she sent me official merch of the play for Christmas all the way from friggin' Japan. She is amazing, I do not deserve her 😭
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Been thinking about Percy Jackson recently and let me tell y’all
To an undiagnosed neurodivergent kid who was going through rough shit at home and losing all her friends bc her whole deal was less socially acceptable now that she wasn’t 5, finding Percy Jackson, a book series about neurodivergent kids with rough home lives, was life changing
Like I went from thinking something was wrong with me and hating myself to being amazed bc Percy Jackson was like me and everyone loved him. It made me feel a lot better about myself during all that, it was nice :>
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Phullo there, I’d like to ask you a question! I hope I won’t be such a bothersome.
So, I’m planning to write a story about Laughingstock and since I find your storytelling very pleasing I figured it’d be a great idea to ask for your advice about the writing!
My Idea in general for this story is just Howdy taking a day off from working in his bodega. And basically, he’ll be just wearing normal clothes.. shocking truly.
And thennn, Barnaby and Howdy accidentally stumbled into each other’s path. They later then of course had a very long conversation that lasted until evening maybe.
Of course there’ll be some fishy moments like them looking at each other with goggly eyes and other cheesy romantic nonsense- but it’s just mainly them having their usual conversation with a ‘couple’ of jokes here and there. It’s supposed to be a sweet memory for them to remember basically.
So, what I’m really trying to ask you for is- how the heck do you start a story exactly and not make it into just the dialogues? Like, I want my story to be kind of long but I’m afraid it’ll be just them, y’know, talking and I really don’t want it to be boring.. therefore, I really need your help.
I am so sorry if it’s such a bad timing considering the fact that you just had an interview which I am very proud for you for that! Even if it didn’t go as expected at least you did good half of it.
Soo, yeah! I’d very much appreciate your advice and I am sooo sorry that this was soo long!!! And again, a bad timing too.. but hey if you got any time, please consider answering. Thank you..
Also any response yet? On the interview of course.
hmmm... in my experience and Knowledge Accumulated Over The Years via reading And writing... the best place to start is to just drop in. no story introduction, no "it was a dark and stormy night", just Start. it sounds like your story begins with Howdy taking the day off, so maybe kick off with him getting ready / choosing an outfit, or w/ him reflexively almost opening the store before he stops and chides himself for almost forgetting that he's taking the day off
to combat the dialogue, maybe detail him leaving the bodega to go into the neighborhood. what does he see? hear? feel both physically and mentally? is there anyone else out and about? set the scene! ive been struggling with this too lately since i haven't seriously written in a while and i haven't been reading actual books
WHICH! IMPORTANT TANGENTS!! read well-written books, Not fanfic! im not saying dont read fanfic ever or i'd be the world's biggest hypocrite, but also read actual books. it's important to study how published authors write, how stories are structured, dialogue and action. because these books have more often then not gone through a Rigorous screening process. multiple drafts, beta readers, publishers reading it with great scrutiny before agreeing to publish - of course there are exceptions, but a lot of books are the highest quality they can be, and will outshine most fics.
because, and i say all of this as good things, fics are unregulated. most dont have beta readers. a lot are from amateur authors new to the scene. there will be spelling mistakes, weird grammar & sentence structure, etc - most fics have Entirely different writing styles from each other. so if you only read fanfic, That is what your brain will learn, and it's gonna be harder for you to write.
published books have less variation in styles, and the styles are subtler. there's less spelling mistakes if any, so your spelling will improve. your internal vocabulary will expand. even if you don't consciously study what you read, your brain will pick up on & internalize patterns, how action works, how dialogue works, how to structure a story, all that good stuff.
if you want, i can recommend well-written books! i've been an avid reader since... like, ever. i've got recs galore! you can tell me your preferred genre & literary interest and i'll probably have something for you! and if you're not big on books, well... get out of your comfort zone lmao, books are fucking awesome and i guarantee there are plenty out there that you would love.
and when you're writing dialogue, intersperse it with little actions or the main povs' internal dialogue. if there's a natural lull in the conversation, explore that lull! what do the characters do in this moment? what's going on around them? sprinkle bits of setting in so that your reader knows where they are and what's going on.
plus, exploring the non-dialogue sections of your story can, and often will, spark inspiration in your brain for scenes and actions to fill out the story if you want it to be long (but also! if you just want to write the scene of their conversation, that's the beauty of fanfic - there's no requirements. do whatever you want lmao). when Howdy is going into town, maybe Wally calls him over for a quick pose - does Howdy say yes or no, and how does that decision change the story? maybe Julie invites him to join her in a game, or Eddie stops to talk to Howdy about him being out and about. maybe there are some complaints over the bodega not being open. what's the lead-up to Howdy and Barnaby running into each other? do they literally run into each other? what happens when they do? those are just a few possibilities of many!
remember, when you're writing, you're that story's god. you can do literally fucking anything. you decide what the characters do, where they go, what happens in their world. that mindset should help you bolster the plot instead of just "these two characters have a conversation", yk?
i hope this helps!
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Alright uninformed rant time. It kind of bugs me that, when studying the Middle Ages, specifically in western Europe, it doesn’t seem to be a pre-requisite that you have to take some kind of “Basics of Mediaeval Catholic Doctrine in Everyday Practise” class.
Obviously you can’t cover everything- we don’t necessarily need to understand the ins and outs of obscure theological arguments (just as your average mediaeval churchgoer probably didn’t need to), or the inner workings of the Great Schism(s), nor how apparently simple theological disputes could be influenced by political and social factors, and of course the Official Line From The Vatican has changed over the centuries (which is why I’ve seen even modern Catholics getting mixed up about something that happened eight centuries ago). And naturally there are going to be misconceptions no matter how much you try to clarify things for people, and regional/class/temporal variations on how people’s actual everyday beliefs were influenced by the church’s rules.
But it would help if historians studying the Middle Ages, especially western Christendom, were all given a broadly similar training in a) what the official doctrine was at various points on certain important issues and b) how this might translate to what the average layman believed. Because it feels like you’re supposed to pick that up as you go along and even where there are books on the subject they’re not always entirely reliable either (for example, people citing books about how things worked specifically in England to apply to the whole of Europe) and you can’t ask a book a question if you’re confused about any particular point.
I mean I don’t expect to be spoonfed but somehow I don’t think that I’m supposed to accumulate a half-assed religious education from, say, a 15th century nobleman who was probably more interested in translating chivalric romances and rebelling against the Crown than religion; an angry 16th century Protestant; a 12th century nun from some forgotten valley in the Alps; some footnotes spread out over half a dozen modern political histories of Scotland; and an episode of ‘In Our Time’ from 2009.
But equally if you’re not a specialist in church history or theology, I’m not sure that it’s necessary to probe the murky depths of every minor theological point ever, and once you’ve started where does it end?
Anyway this entirely uninformed rant brought to you by my encounter with a sixteenth century bishop who was supposedly writing a completely orthodox book to re-evangelise his flock and tempt them away from Protestantism, but who described the baptismal rite in a way that sounds decidedly sketchy, if not heretical. And rather than being able to engage with the text properly and get what I needed from it, I was instead left sitting there like:
And frankly I didn’t have the time to go down the rabbit hole that would inevitably open up if I tried to find out
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