brainless physical activity is so much easier than mental. So the important cleaning tasks like organizing get thrown to the side for dishes, clothes, vaccuming, etc
Nice list! I’ve had a similar experience as you, and many of your bullet points would overlap mine. (And the ones which don’t overlap I might learn/steal from you!)
I tend to value dialouge and character interactions over narration to tell a story.
I tend not to reread once I hit a character threshold, it just becomes nit picky to me and I find if I’m constantly rereading I’m constantly having new ideas I try to shove into this small section of story, so if I just read only as much as necessary to get back into the mind space, I can focus on expanding the whole rather than detailing something smaller.
I have a process where I assign actors to characters to better help with a character gaining a bit of autonomy. I prefer to pretend I’m just recording something happening rather than creating it, and it helps if I can have a base for characters when I first create them, it seems to just make mannerisms and dialouge appear out of thin air.
I feel like I’ve seen paragraphs end with quotation marks and then pick back up with more quotation marks on the next paragraph in serious literature, so I’d say write how you want. That said, it is good to break up walls of dialogue every now and then to set the scene with small details like that.
From the same character’s speech (as opposed to switching talkers)? Well, supposedly that’s against the rules, but it generally feels better to insert a bit of minor movement anyway :)
I’d say it depends on the length of the dialogue. If we’re talking about 2-3 lines, then yeah, it should only be done on switching. If we’re talking about a speech that lasts several pages, I would think that it should be clear from context clues who is speaking.
Anyway, don’t get hung up on rules! Write how you want! Have a style!
This may add a longer pause than is wanted in some situations, like in the middle of what’s supposed to be a speech or a breathless ramble. I think sometimes uninterrupted paragraphs of dialogue are warranted.
But otherwise, yeah, action beats with the dialogue is a good tool to have in the box, and to use often.
It’s also handy for people who don’t want to write “said” all the time, since you can indicate who is speaking with an action beat followed immediately by otherwise unmarked dialogue, or by context alone (e.g. there are only two people in the convo and they’re taking turns.) It can add variety to your sentence structures.
Attempted example:
He sat back and sighed. “That’s quite a story. But I can’t say it’s an especially believable one.”
“Well,” she said, pulling a sheaf of papers out of her purse. “Have a look at this.”
He took the papers and shuffled through them slowly, frowning. Halfway through the pile, he paused. Reread something. He looked up and met her eyes.
She held his gaze, then nodded. “I think you can see why this might be a problem for both of us.”
It’s important that the action means something besides just the pause, imo. You can use actions like that to show something about the character or how they’re feeling - like, in OP’s example, a character leaning back and looking up like that would imply they are relaxed and casual. If you had them in a different situation or wanted to show a different personality, you might have them do a similar but different thing, like leaning forward and steepling their fingers, or fiddling with a knife (will there be stabbing?!), or taking a slow sip of water, or interrupting themself to make a comment about the food, or clearing their throat. It can be a way to multitask and show something about the character even while they’re having a conversation about something else. Whereas not thinking of it as anything but a pause in dialogue might lead to accidentally implying something about the charactee you don’t intend to, like making them appear relaxed when they’re supposed to be tense, or interested in a conversation when they’re supposed to be bored or distracted.
Outside of combat, I have very little that needs to be described in that much detail. I do have one specific mechanism in my Living Dungeon story that I felt needed that level of detail, and the description went through a few edits to fine-tune it to communicate the idea accurately but keep the writing clean enough to not be jarring to the reader. I am fortunate enough to be able to get some feedback to help me in that process. I felt that this mechanism needed to be accurate because it is relevant at several points in the story.
The less relevant it is to story beats, the less I am worried about specific details. I have a second mechanism involving large colored, glowing crystals in a ceiling. I described the basic layout and the colors, because they were relevant to events in that room, I did not describe the shape of the crystals, because it doesn’t matter.
In combat, how much detail I go into depends on the fight. Less important/low-stakes fights get more of an overview. A duel or spar with setup and some emotional charge? I am getting down to blow-by-blow, especially if I want to show the progression of a character’s skill or power, and when getting that detailed I often need to specify which hand a person is using to do what, so that I can line up the action properly.
A right-handed person has a shield in her left hand, and therefore deflects a creature’s charge to her left, and is thus spinning left to slash her axe across the back of its leg. I could have described it as her spinning counter-clockwise, which would be more technically accurate but would pull the reader out of the story more to think about. ‘spinning left’ suffices.
So, I would mostly just try to be sure that it needs to be described in detail.
This is great advice, thanks for sharing! I find that adding actions also improves the flow of dialogue and makes it feel more alive, since you can have movement around a scene or reactions between characters.
Tell me more about your serial! I’ve only wrotten serials for r/WP when I was still on reddit 🥲
Well, for the story itself, it might just be easiest to quote my blurb:
An ancient, dreadfully powerful dungeon core that had once been sealed away to slowly fade into oblivion is revived by a chance encounter, though in a much-reduced state.
A temple monk on her way home for a vacation is distracted into exploring a newly born dungeon due to the cuteness of its rabbit monsters, leading to an entirely unexpected chain of events.
A kitsune whose death caused a goddess to pity her fate and revive her as a reincarnated dungeon.
These three quickly form bonds of necessity and convenience, but then have to navigate a complex relationship and build their own rules to live by.
And for my particular world-building, Living Dungeons have avatars, which is very important to the core story.
I’m writing over on Royal Road (And cross-posting to Ream right now, I may add scribblehub), so each chapter is being published on the website. This is not a direct income maker, the website is free, but Patreon for early chapters is getting me a small monthly amount and there is the possibility of getting a deal with something like Amazon Unlimited (I would prefer to avoid that specific publisher, but we will see what the future holds).
Anyway, I got drawn to RR thanks to a Reddit serial that linked there, and that was my introduction to the Living Dungeon concept. And after a few months of reading various stories on Royal Road, I felt the itch to write my own. :) I had at one point been intending for it to also be a trope-subverting ‘harem’ story where everyone had good cause to be involved in the relationship and were well-fleshed-out people, but the core relationship stabilized at a triad, and I dropped the harem idea. I would have had to force it in, it no longer fit.
Bonus though: That meant I got to drop the age of one of the future characters, which felt better for her general concept, and that in turn generated the opportunity to touch on another aspect of the world that I hadn’t had reason to describe yet. And I get to have another woman get involved in a romance with interesting dynamics, though I am not quite there yet.
I also have several more ideas waiting in the wings, but I am trying to get my backlog a bit more robust before I divert some of my attention to building those up.
WOW almost 400k views and over a thousand pages! 👏👏👏 Well done!
Your concept is great, I can see why it’s found success as a serial! Hearing how your plans changed and evolved as you went through the story is really interesting, thank you for sharing 😄
The views are cumulative across all chapters, so 1k readers x 100 chapters would be 100k views, before getting into things like my editor-in-wife and I revisiting pages as we slowly clean up my early chapters.
But overall, I do feel very good about my story, and most of my other story ideas take place in the same world (if mostly on different continents), so each time I work on any of these ideas, I am fleshing out the world as a whole.
Nuclear Radiation almost killing people is probably the most problematic, there will be all sorts of long-term damage.
The sci-fi disease at least has the exact properties you want it to have, and the Alien Creature option simply gives you physical damage which comes in your choice of severity. I’d lean toward that over all, but it really depends on what fits the story best.
And might I recommend Royal Road as one of your publishing platforms? Pure fantasy tends to do better than Sci-fi, but at least it is a point of traction. I know a lot of people post across multiple platforms.
i tend to put my protagonists on at least one of the covers, so for my latest mage college book series here she is: bit.ly/45KWjnt (i blanked out the book title so this doesn’t come across as advertising or something)
I would probably not do a disease unless you are are trying to evoke feelings related to covid, or it’s very, very different in symptoms. (and maybe not even then) - only because I feel like that’s carrying a lot of baggage right now for some folks.
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