“Look.” Jack Murmurs Quietly, Pointing At The Lights Above Them. “Big Dipper.”

davey jacobs keyed his ex's car. davey jacobs texts that ex begging for them to come back every once in a while. davey gets really drunk those nights. davey jacobs is unhealthy. don't let the proper academic shell fool you. davey jacobs is a mess. can davey jacobs understand complex nuances in literature? can he do university-level physics? yes. davey jacobs is smart, but he's certainly not much else, at least in his own eyes.

HI!! i am SUCH a massive fan of your work and your writing style and the way you write javid ... do you have any tips on making description and dialogue/switching between the two not sound clunky?? im having trouble 😭 im eating all your fics rn btw ... gnawing on em

oh!! goodness that is high praise - well first of all thank you, that is so sweet of you to say, and i'm so flattered you felt like you could ask me for help on that. but i gotta be honest, i'm very much an amateur and i really don't feel like i have much right to give 'advice' as it were - i'm still figuring out a lot of stuff myself tbh. but something i can definitely do is tell you what i do, why i do it and how i try to improve my own writing, as it's something i think about a lot and therefore something i feel very comfortable telling people about - but again, disclaimer, this is just what works for ME. i used to be really hard on my writing because compared to the work of other people i've seen, i felt like i was being way too flowery, overstaying my welcome on a lot of passages, being overly preachy, etc etc - but trying to emulate other people's writing entirely just doesn't work and completely sucks the fun out of it. so this is just what works for me. anywhore lets get to it

so i focus on a few things when i'm writing dialogue, the biggest one being 'Do People Talk Like This?'. now that's not always the most helpful question to ask yourself since everyone talks differently and there's really no point trying to categorize it, but where i find questions like that help the most for ME is when i'm thinking about what the character's thought process would be in saying this. for example if i'm writing oscar and morris, it just doesn't feel right to have them say shitty things for the sake of being cartoonishly shitty, because what's the thought process there? 'haha i'm gonna humiliate this kid because i'm just evil!!' no one. no one does that. they have their own reasons for wanting the newsies to feel beneath them, and even if i'm only writing them for a line or two, i want that to be the thing i get across, rather than just 'the delanceys are assholes' (even if their purpose in my fics is usually to be assholes).

i also try to draw from reality a lot, conversations i've had, things i notice when people speak to me. it's difficult since i'm autistic and therefore misread things or miss things entirely, but i try to do my best from my own experiences. a lot of my scribbles so far have just been casual little snippets of javid conversations 'cause that's a really fun way for me to get to know the characters and how they'd behave in casual conversation. i really like looking into davey's weirdness and so i draw from a lot of the weird things i do, the weird jokes i see other people make that i find so damn funny, weird body language that i love, etc etc. and it's fun to see how the characters react off one another when they're just being silly. sometimes i just need to lock two characters in a room together in your mind and see what they do - it doesn't really accomplish anything in terms of fic, but it helps me get to know them and how they interact with each other.

as far as descriptions go, the thing that helped me the most was (and you're going to laugh here) going outside. i know, touching grass actually did improve my writing, it's shocking. i'm pretty lucky since i live in a seaside town with a lot of forest areas so i spent a lot of time last spring/summer just walking around with my head fully empty, and if i had any thoughts come to me that i liked, i put them straight in my notes app the moment i got them. it felt pretentious as hell at first, and yeah, some of them aren't GREAT, but it's better to have my thoughts written down somewhere i can access them again rather than just not have anything to work off of at all. i've started just carrying a notebook around with me so that if i ever have a thought that feels worth keeping i can just jot it down right away. it can literally be any thought, i think i have a line in there about a can of redbull. anything that keeps the thoughts coming. i also keep a little list of quotes my friends have said as well - it's mostly funny stuff like "adren says: FUCK CHARITY!!!" and "i love his seven year old boy swag" but every so often i get something like "time is irrelevent, the sun will still be up in the afternoon", which i think of every time i feel like shit for needing more rest.

also something that people told me to do a lot which i HATED hearing but fuck if it's not true, is to just read. like when i was in my contemporary lit class and i could just chew over alys conran for a week or two it was like a factory reset in my brain. holy fuck i love alys conran she is a goddess she IS the blueprint. she completely redefined how i look at and interpret my surroundings. and ali smith - i wouldn't say i'm a huge fan of her stuff but the way she does dialogue and character voice is SOOO special to me. i hated being told 'just read!!' because i KNOW i should be reading but unfortunately my energy is dogshit and taking in new informaton is hard, but honestly it doesn't even need to be a whole book. it can be anything. i've had my shit rocked by tumblr posts and fanfic drabbles. anything that can make me go 'huh i like how they did that' or 'hm no i don't think i like how they phrased that' is helping my understanding of how i want to write.

(and in a similar vein to that - having character tags is so helpful for me!! like i'll see the vaguest thing and be like 'yeah davey would say that' or 'oh that's jack energy' and even though it's small it still improves my understanding of the characters and how they interact/think/speak)

in terms of switching between the two, i think i have a pretty obvious pattern when i write dialogue; "the first part of dialogue", then we look at the character again, how they're saying the words, what their body language is like, what they're thinking, "and then we finish what they're saying." that works for me because i'm a chronic overthinker and i like being able to focus on the little things the characters might be trying to say without saying them outright, like if davey's stimming for a specific reason or if jack's body language is more stilted than it should be because he's hiding something, or if the narrating character is focusing on something specific that the speaking character is doing for whatever reason. but i've also been trying to notice when i'm overdoing that pattern and when it feels right to change it up a bit. i want to try and improve my pacing, since sometimes i'm spending waaay too long slogging over prose when i want a scene to feel fast-paced and intense, and sometimes i feel like i'm glossing over something that would be important to the character. so sometimes (like when jack first appears in run boy run) i want the character to go into bullet-time to emphasise the weight of what's happening and what they're experiencing, and how the character FEELS about things when they're given time to properly experience it, but other times (like in their argument at the end of the chapter 4) i want things to snap and crash into each other very quickly to emphasise a character's fight-or-flight response, how they react to conflict, what they do when they don't have time to properly think about what they're doing.

and,,, yeah i think that's everything i can think of. again i'm not gonna act like any of this is gospel, i don't even know if this is even helpful to anyone besides me, i just know that this is what goes through my head when i'm trying to write effectively. whether or not it works is up for debate - i'm still in uni and i'm still trying to explore what works for me and what doesn't. but honestly i'm very proud of the progress i've been making and it was really fun to just talk about that for a second, so thank you roman, this was very lovely! have a wonderful day :)

*makes an original post and checks the notes every two minutes*

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the fact that there are so many american psycho memes on pinterest is so funny like do you guys even realize thats strike leader jack kelly

teehee this was super fun !!

no pressure :) @ethereal-bumble-bee @toffyrats @carmineskiesandspidereyes @coircus-aceman @getyourpaybackwithsomepayback and anybody else!!!

Make yourself into a spooOoky ghost or ghoul

tagging: @postwarlevi @chaotic-on-main @darlingheichou @humanitys-strongest-bamf and everyone else who's interested!

holy fuck every newsies opinion is so correct. i LOVE you guys

my theatre company's snr prod next year is into the woods!!!!!! THE FULL LENGTH MUSICAL!!!!!!! IM SO EXCITED!!!!!!

ok google how to finish a one shot??????

Pfffft. Okay. If this gets 1k notes I’ll come out to my teacher at school and ask to be called my preferred pronouns :)