Writerly Ways

[cornerofmadness]

I was going to write about mining dreams but a) I'm having one of my exhausted days b) rewatched the Emma Fielding on Hallmark Mysteries and it suggested another theme: not making your characters look like morons. What prompted my interest in this well in rewatching episode one of this series, where Emma is an archaeologist and the potential love interest is in the FBI, art fraud division.

So someone turns up at Emma's dig buried under a few inches of dirt with wounds to the head and both Emma and FBI dude are like 'do you think this is murder?' on more than one occasion. Nah, I think he bashed in his own head and then burrowed six inches under the ground to die. How am I supposed to root for these people when they're saying nonsense like this?

I think one way to avoid this is to read it out loud. It's not just a good way to catch awkward sentences, it's also good to listen and ask, would anyone actually talk like this? If you have beta readers, hopefully they'll catch you saying something weird before it gets out there (and you'd hope some editor would catch it) but since I know that tv shows often are doing last minute rewrites, idiotic stuff slips in. How many times have you sat there and thought 'why didn't the actor just refuse to say this.'

Have you seen this in stories before? Did you continue on? (if I hadn't been listening to the tv as background noise, I might have simply moved on) How do you avoid having characters say stupid things?


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This editor popped up on YT and I liked his presentation and his topics so here have a few

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Comments

[kitarella_imagines]

Oh yes I read a fic of mine at least 5 years later. One character was asking a question or something, and I had absolutely no idea what he meant or what I meant by that. So I rewrote the dialogue to make more sense! lol.

[cornerofmadness]

Oh lord, I know that pain so well

[kitarella_imagines]

Quite funny but embarrassing. Easy to fix though 😅

[cornerofmadness]

that's good

[spikedluv]

I watched that series of movies and generally enjoyed them. I don't recall if I noticed that or if there were other things that bothered me. But yes, characters saying stupid things is annoying.

[cornerofmadness]

I didn't catch it the first time (I was probably writing) but yeah I'm like really? You're not sure it's murder when he's UNDER the ground. What? Did he burrow like a ground hog?