brynwrites:

The Stuff In Between The Dialogue.

You don’t usually need a lot going on outside the dialogue itself, but you’re right —

dialogue often feels static or otherwise unnatural if you have a entire conversation with dialogue, a few tags, and nothing else. 

But we never want to add extra words for the sake of just having words. Everything we write should contribute to the story in some form or another.

So how do we make dialogue feel more natural by adding useful words outside the dialogue?

First off, we have to remember a key point about dialogue: Dialogue needs to have emotion and intention. There should be something the characters want to get out of the conversation, whether that’s an external plot objective like ‘learn why the birds are dying’ or ‘get Liz to ask me to the dance’ or an internal, even subconscious, desire like ‘feel better after an argument’ or ‘convince myself I have friends.’ The more personal the goal and the more emotionally invested in it the character is, the more impact the dialogue will have when you include these concepts:

1. Setting and activity. 

Giving your characters something to do or interact with while they talk is a fantastic way to both flesh out the scene in the reader’s mind and emphasize the character’s emotions.

An angry character might wash the dishes so hard they chip the side as they set a plate down. A frustrated character might pick apart a leaf as they walk through the woods. A nervous character might refold the same clothing over and over again. A happy character might balance along the length of a small wall (and then fall when their companion says something alarming.)

Keep in mind that it’s the portrayal of the emotions through the characters interaction with the setting that makes these non-dialogue segments feel like a natural part of the scene. What you’re essentially doing is binding the setting to the dialogue through emotion. 

2. Internal monologue.

When we have everyday conversations, we tend to one of two things: focus on the person talking or think about when we’re going to say next. Characters in stories should not be doing these things very often because they should not be having everyday conversations very often. Characters should spend the majority of their dialogue time pursuing difficult to achieve external or internal goals. 

They should be having the sort of conversations that force them to:

• Shift the way they’re talking.
• Re-evaluate what they want.
• Experience heavy emotions.
• Learn overwhelming information.
• Dive out of their comfort zone.
• Hide their own thoughts and emotions.
• (And an array of other challenging things.)

These kind of conversations force people to start thinking as they talk, either rationally to work through problems or through the sort of intense emotion that  bubbles out or

shuts the speaker down. 

The end result of internal monologue should not be to recap anything being said, but to show a fuller picture of it

— a fuller picture from our pov character’s perspective, anyway.

3. Expression and body language.

Not only should your point of view character experience emotion, so should the other characters present in the conversation. Unless these characters are skilled at hiding their feelings

—

which is worth describing all on its own

—

that emotion filters into their expression and body language. 

Many writers tend to overdo the same few expressions and body movements in the rough draft stages (if I don’t watch it, my characters will nod their heads clean off), but it’s much better to pick and chose these strategically, to determine which expressions and body language contribute to the reader’s understand of the conversation and the characters involved, and leave the others out.

4. Physical emotional sensations.

Whenever you have high emotions within a scene, your characters will feel the physical manifestations of these emotions. These are not your bread and butter of anything though. They should be nicely spaced out and not too repetitive

—

if your pov character alternates between a feeling something in their stomach and their heart every other page of the story then they don’t have emotions, they just have indigestion and heart palpitations. 

But physical sensations brought on by emotions should still exist, even in dialogue segments, so don’t forget about them entirely!

5. Exposition… or should we say, expositionot. (That’s not even a real pun, I’m sorry.)

What we don’t want to be doing is halting the progression of the dialogue to suddenly explain something that was mentioned within the dialogue itself. 

Instead of Mai telling Joon that the Council of Eves is meeting tonight and the scene pausing to explain what the Council of Eves is, we want to imply the information through the dialogue and show Mai and Joon’s personal frustration with the council.

You can learn more about conveying world building without relaying on exposition here.

There is also an art to writing the kind of dialogue where the dialogue speaks for itself. Some masterfully done books thrive off this kind of tag-less back and forth dialogue.

The reason they work is often that the writer takes all the emotion and action that would naturally happen along with the dialogue and builds it like layers into the words themselves. In order to become truly good at that kind of dialogue, most writers have to master the inclusion of other variables first.

For more writing tips from Bryn, view the archive catalog or the complete tag.

Want to read about a bloodthirsty siren fighting to return home while avoiding the lure of a suspiciously friendly and eccentric pirate captain? You can purchase Bryn’s debut novel, Our Bloody Pearl, today! 

artist-helping-association:

Art things u shouldn’t feel bad about:

-not getting your art right 100% in one shot

-making mistakes in a new medium (or even in a medium you have experience in)

-drawing self insert art

-drawing you oc’s with characters from a show

-drawing what you love

zuzartii:

I’ve been getting quite a few asks about the process for the patterns in my stylized artworks, so I decided to put together a couple of tips regarding them. 

Firstly, what you need are

—  CUSTOM BRUSHES  —

Most of the patterns I use are custom brushes I made, such as those:

For the longest time I was convinced making brushes must be super extra complicated. I was super extra wrong. All you need to start is a transparent canvas (2500px x 2500px max):

This will be your brush tip. When you’re satisfied how it looks, click Ctrl+A to select the whole canvas and go to ‘define brush preset’ under the edit menu

You will be asked to name your new glorious creation. Choose something that describes it well, so you can easily find it between all the ‘asfsfgdgd’ brushes you’ve created to be only used once

This is it. Look at it, you have just created a photoshop brush. First time i did I felt like I was cheated my whole life. IT’S SO EASY WHY HASN’T ANYONE TOLD ME 

Time to edit the Good Boi to be more random, so it can be used as a Cool Fancy Pattern. Go into brush settings and change whatever you’d like. Here’s a list of what I do for patterns:

– under Shape Dynamics, I increase Size Jitter and Angle jitter by 5%-15% 

– under Brush Tip Shape, I increase spacing by a shitload. Sometimes it’s like 150%, the point is to get the initial brush tip we painted to be visible.

– If I want it to look random and noisy, I enable the Dual Brush option, which acts like another brush was put on top of the one we’ve created. You can adjust all of the Dual Brush options (Size, Spacing, Scatter, Count) as you wish to get a very nice random brush to smear on your  backgrounds

The result is as above. You can follow the same steps to create whatever brush you need: evenly spaced dots that look like you painted them by hand, geometric pattern to fill the background, a line of perfectly drawn XDs and so on. 

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

—  PATHS  —

But what if you want to get lots of circles made of tiny dots? Or you need rows of triangles for your cool background? Photoshop can do all of that for you, thanks to the magic of paths.

Typically, paths window can be found right next to Layers:

Draw whatever path you want, the Shape Tool has quite a bit of options. Remember, paths are completely different from brush strokes and they won’t show up in the navigator. To move a path around, click A to enable path selection tool. You can use Ctrl+T to transform it, and if you move a path while pressing Alt it will be duplicated.

Now, pick a brush you wish really was in place of that path you’ve drawn and go to layers, then choose the layer you want it to be drawn on. Then, click this tiny circle under the Paths window:

Then witness the magic of photoshop doing the drawing for you while you wonder how tf have you managed to forget about this option for the past 2 years 

You can combine special brushes and paths for all sorts of cool effects. I mostly use them in backgrounds for my cards, but you can do whatever you want with them.

I hope that answers the questions for all of the people who were sending me inquires about the patterns. If you have any questions regarding this or any other Photoshop matter feel free to message me, I’m always up for complaining about how great and terrible Photoshop is C’:

my-words-are-light:

nightowls388:

roane72:

sarahtaylorgibson:

audacityinblack:

sarahtaylorgibson:

Writing a novel when you imagine all you stories in film format is hard because there’s really no written equivalent of “lens flare” or “slow motion montage backed by Gregorian choir”

You can get the same effect of a lens flare with close-detail descriptions, combined with breaks to new paragraphs.

Your slow-motion montage backed by a Gregorian choir can be done with a few technques that all involve repetition.

First is epizeuxis, the repeating of a word for emphasis.

Example:

Falling. Falling. Falling. There was nothing to keep Marie from plunging into the rolling river below. She could only hope for a miracle now, that she would come out alive somehow despite a twenty-foot drop into five-foot-deep water.

Then there’s anaphora, where you write a number of phrases with the same words at the beginning.

There were still mages out there living in terror of shining steel armor emblazoned with the Sword of Mercy.

There were still mages out there being forced by desperation into the clutches of demons.

There were mages out there being threatened with Tranquility as
punishment for their disobedience, and the threats were being made good
upon.

Mages who had attempted to flee, but knew nothing of the outside
world and were forced to return to their prison out of need for
sustenance and shelter.

Mages who only desired to find the families they were torn from.

Mages who only wanted to see the sun.

This kind of repetition effectively slows the pace of your writing and puts the focus on that small scene. That’s where you get your slow pan. The same repetition also has a subtle musicality to it depending on the words you use. That’s where you get the same vibe as you might get from a Gregorian choir.

Damn I made relatable reblog- bait post and writer Tumblr went hard with it. This is legitimately very good advice. 

Anaphora is my most favorite thing to use ever. EVER.

😲😲😲

Anaphora is something I also really like.

But yeah. The way words are physically arranged on a page can really alter how your stuff is read. Ending your chapter on a shocking sentence is just the start of it. The turning of a page gives the reader—and the characters—a moment to breathe.

Video games do this too; text games without voice acting may vary text speed to emphasise the way words are spoken and such.