If the MC is different from those around them, and not all powerful, how do you navigate that?
Old folkloric rules and grounded magic.
Nothing comes from nothing. Everything has limits and cost, even magic. A degree of grounded realism even when applying it to mythological creatures. (E.g. sure the mc is a mermaid, but if mermaids were real, how would they probably function?)
Ok my question for everyone else because I was doing a lot of thinking about how and why I write things recently to get back into traditional prose.
What are your writer’s “fingerprints”?
It’s different to themes. They’re little tics you may not even know you do.
I had to really think about this one and I realised over and over again in my stories I ground the character within a story literally by what their feet are doing. For example: a character being startled out of a trance may stumble on broken pavement. My unicorn steps into a dream world and the first thing I do is describe is the what happens as the hoof lands (sound, softness, vegetation, smell). I often write how the character’s steps have altered, before anything else (face, voice etc) indicates mood (I guess its a feet decide your direction subconscious thing perhaps). The other I do a lot is temperature drops to herald the arrival of something uncanny or not quite right. (Hardly surprising to use it sometimes but it’s the most common out of a lot of potential options like smell, silence/sound change, pressure etc etc.)
I had never thought that much about writing “fingerprints” before recently, but you think about different authors and many have them.
The grubby ones I keep trying to wipe off, is my almost default reaction to write about eyebrows whenever anyone is reacting to something, and also where they are looking. I keep trying to tell myself there are other ways for characters to express themselves!
There are probably others (and more meaningful ones), but these are those which spring to mind!
That’s interesting. Sometimes I think that if I have a fingerprint like this, it must be something that’s incredibly obvious to everyone but me. Kind of part and parcel of the general social anxiety situation, I guess.
But if I had to pinpoint something, maybe weather. I like to ground stories in the physical environment, and weather is a big part of that. Especially wind, for some reason.
Kind of a reverse fingerprint? I read a lot of writing in English, and especially in works in US English people seem to constantly be rolling their eyes. I never write that, though. I simply can’t parse the gesture because there isn’t really an equivalent to that action in my native language. (Well, aside from the very archaic ‘de ogen ten hemel slaan’, but I’m not counting that one.)
There’ll probably be more of those kinds of language oddities in my writing stemming from English not being my first language.
Which reminds me, I love putting in bilingual puns and characters stumbling with language barriers, but I don’t know if that counts. Maybe it’s more of a theme.
Finnish has a direct translation, but I can’t be sure it’s not just created for translating English. I was very confused until I started reading English more, but now I’m kinda parsing it as a physical sensation (probably made easier because I’m kinda sorta stimming with weird eye movements).
When I have a group of characters talking, and one character who has been talking to a second character but starts talking to a third one, I sometimes describe the first character turning to face the third one.
Yes, this is what I meant earlier. Or glancing at the door, their watch, the juicy looking pie on the table. Those little tells which let you know what the character is thinking without saying it. Its just rereading some of my writing feels like there’s just pairs of floating eyes and brows having a conversation!
I missed September’s thread as COVID settled in for the long haul. But! I was successful in my August goal to not get anyone else sick. Victory! I also have good news on the writing front. Love in the Time of Earthquakes’ Chapter 9 is finished! I’m excited for Chapter 10, as it’s finally the Tournament Chapter. After all the messy feelings and political grappling, the player gets to be the earthquake, hahaha. My goal is to get the bulk of the Chapter done this month, and have a little of November for editing and de-bugging.
Thank you @raywilson, for setting up the thread! As for suspense in interactive fiction, I’m always a sucker for when the choice #options freak out, to simulate danger, panic, desperation, and feeling trapped. Like this in LTE Chapter 6:
*fake_choice #I wake up.
#I wake up.
#I wake up.
For the Deltarune fans, Chapter 5’s Snowgrave/Side B/Weird Route requires rapid, timed choice-making to reflect a highly stressful situation. Very, very interesting.
Unpurposefully, a lot of my works deal with grief; mourning over broken promises and could-have-been’s. If you can’t follow the path laid out, what do you do? More on purpose, I have a lot of theme-work with hope, love, and power. I keep making god-like characters and coming up with different answers on what to do with unlimited magical ability. Moonrise’s Ishara is very nicesy about it and wanders around helping people. Tara is SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER. One theme LTE refines is questioning how to make the world a better place. I look forward to exploring that more in the future.
Make outline rigid enough to be flexible later. Also, crying. Cry over scope creep. Players are going to be very happy, but oh my god, Tara and Ziya, you troublemakers.
Biting people.
I was editing and realized hey, that’s a lot of teeth. More than usual. What’s with that? Vampire: the Masquerade is with that. This is what Vampire: the Masquerade does to a writer.
Elaborate and unorthodox similes, usually for comedic effect.
A few examples from Shadow of the Eagles:
He waves a finger in your face, like a tavern drunk telling a child the ways of the world.
When you sober the next morning with a hand that looks like a plate of well-done sausages, you instantly regret your decision
The General smiles proudly, like a teacher who has just watched a pupil grasp a particularly difficult lesson.
In practise, he has been forced into the position of a cuckolded husband, forced to watch from a chair in the corner as another man makes love to his wife.
There’s more, obviously, but this is just from a cursory skimming of my current draft.
My characters are always nodding, sighing, or pausing. I made another post in another thread mocking people for having characters always smirking, but I’ll be honest, I reuse the same physical actions a lot.
I really like perspective shifts a lot in every form. I have 25+ parser-based games and almost all have some sort of perspective shift where a villain turns out to be a good person or you literally have flashbacks where you play as different characters. I had one this year where you have a job to do but you beat the game and find out you were undercover the whole time and were supposed to do the opposite of a good job.
That doesn’t show up too much in my Choicescript writing (especially since my last two games has been as a co-author), though.
That’s interesting to think about. There’s probably things I don’t notice. I know I used to use some outdated English words, just because they’re closer to the word used in my native language. Living in an English speaking country for years, that’s less of an issue now (I’m sure it still happens here and there).
I regularly do rereads for filler words I overuse (maybe, though, well,…). It’s not Shy Girl levels bad, with the author using ‘sharp’ almost once a page, but there’s always lots I can remove or replace.
I use rhetorical questions a lot. It’s not something I dislike about my writing necessarily, but I still have to make sure not to overdo it. The line between having your own voice and sounding obnoxious can be awfully thin.
Fascinating inquiry . . . Don’t know that these are going to be as unique as actual fingerprints, but I’d wager my characters always seem to end up starring at one another one way or another. Yup, plenty of head nodding, shifting about, low key body language stuff as well. While I’m now trying to get away from it, transitions words might be a bit over used, and I tend to think I have a good amount of direct “perhaps” this or that to try to key the player into their prot. Plenty of whirling, dancing, etc. about for bits of hyperbolic bursts here and there and color words as well. Again, definitely not unique to just my writing, but I think these are always in there. Also, the never ending abyss of grammar dithery - do’s as well.
I should probably add in that I also tend to toss in some alliteration and assonance from time to time and love to occasionally add a rhyme here and there for a little razzle dazzle. Light, dark words are also omnipresent.
On examining my list I tend to think a writers finger print is probably an evolving organism. Rough areas can be mended though sometimes strengths do fade — in my twenties I’d say my imagery was top rate while now a days I tend to think sometimes it’s a bit more of a chore than a strength. And I’d say my writing has lost some of its pathos and energy over the decades, but what can you do?
Some things yes. For example punctuation fingerprints can change with deliberate practice. I’m awful with commas when required after names, but I’m trying to be be better. But it’s often write stuff down, then go back and add them, it’s a blind spot. But I used to be really bad with leaving run on sentences in which I have scaled right back with practice and gotten a lot more conscious with using sentence length deliberately. So given enough time and focus I will probably eventually correct that particular quirk (but it’s hard!)
It’s surprising though, some of the themes and other fingerprints are there even in things I’ve written almost10 years ago. The actual writing style and skill level has changed a lot to the point where I wonder whether people would pick they were written by the same person, but some of the underlying themes and tics are there to one extent or another if you look carefully enough for them. But yes you’re right, author fingerprints are subject to change over time.
It’s actually really interesting. It can be distinctive enough that they sometimes use “writeprints” in forensics to help determine who wrote something they need to identify.
Huh, I wouldn’t have guessed that rolling your eyes isn’t common. It’s a literal feels so natural, if didn’t occur to me that it wouldn’t be natural for other people.
It’s a literal rolling of the eyes, in case anyone wasn’t sure. Usually used to show irritation. Or mock irritation.
Moving your eyes is natural. There’s nothing inherently more natural with moving them in eyeroll-direction than any other direction. I remember asking a family member what “rolling one’s eyes” means, and all we could picture was moving them in a circle (like a clock; the Finnish verb is also used for clock-like movement), and I was very confused as to why anyone would do that because trying it made me nauseous.
Yes, the phrase “rolling your eyes” is a bit of a misnomer, which creates a disconnect with its connotation in writing and in general speaking. No one on planet Earth executes a literal, circular rotation of the eyeballs unless they’re, uh, immune to such discomfort. It’s moreso a brief look directed heavenward.
I think the movement itself is neutral, and the actual meaning relies almost completely on the accompanying expression. Without a sigh, an underlying note of sarcasm and exasperation, a deadpan stare, etc., rolling eyes is just looking up dramatically.
Hm… now that I’m overthinking about it, I wonder if it’s a form of gaze aversion, like an ‘I can’t even bear to look at you’ that evolved from our instinct to reject unpleasant stimuli?
I remember asking a family member what “rolling one’s eyes” means, and all we could picture was moving them in a circle (like a clock; the Finnish verb is also used for clock-like movement), and I was very confused as to why anyone would do that because trying it made me nauseous.