Omega Update Fan Adventure Discussion Thread

Good to see you're still around!

Despite being a million pages long, Cult Following IS actually using acts. I'm coming close to the end of Act 1 right now!
As for ending them, I definitely agree that an act should end with a bang. It doesn't necessarily have to be a big cliffhanger, but it's got to be something that makes people want more.
I think intermissions are pretty great too. Since they're usually not part of the coherent story, you can do whatever you want with them - backstory, sidestory, or maybe something entirely different.
And it ties in with people wanting more at the end of each act, since it makes it all the sweeter when you get back to the actual story.

Yeah, I'm doing acts, but mostly fit the purpose of having an excuse for intermissions. It's an easy way to say "we're going to put the main plot on hold for a bit to some groundwork fire something that isn't relevant quite yet" and as a result, I don't have a specific page number per act, I'm defining them more by "when do I have enough stuff happening at once to justify an end of act bit".

Basically I'm using acts as a tool. It makes for a nifty segregation of parts. I haven't read Oceanfalls yet, although I'll probably give it a shot now that it's going to be a thing again, but if you didn't already have doing acts in mind, I'd probably recommend against it. If you don't have your plot set up to come to clear crescendos every so often, I doubt acts will work well for you.

Yeah, I was going to say that the danger could be a mini-boss fight with like, a pack of giant forest ghoul wolves or whatever

But that's probably never going to happen

Don't discount the value of ending your acts or chapters or whatever you end up using on more closed notes as well. Especially if you intend on liberally using intermissions. If you run the risk of losing your dramatic tension by the time you get back to the main plotline, it might be better to consider giving parts a more definitive conclusion. I actually end the first Part of Rootborn at a fairly low-risk moment of relief for the Player Characters so that the readers can process and contextualize the significance of all the PC's encounters up to that point. Because even that first Part, almost more of a Tutorial or Prologue, took almost 3 years and ~40 forum pages of posts to get to.

Well, it takes longer to load larger images, so that's a con. Even longer if it's a PNG file. I guess the only thing you'd have to worry about is bandwidth. It may be fine if the reader could read every panel one at a time, but on a thread, ooh wee, you gotta wait a minute for the page to load

Oh yeah, absolutely. It's extremely awkward to write a conversation between several people with distinct personalities and opinions. Pretty much everything I write sounds like nonsense to me for the first week after I wrote it.

I think the thing to do is just remember that, at the end of the day, you're a good writer and it just sounds weird to you because it's new. Go back and read some of the early stuff you've already forgotten writing and it'll probably be pretty good!

Characterization is not easy. It's something I seriously struggle with, and the reason why writing four pesterlogs for Omegasplit has taken a week. It takes practice, and I'd honestly recommend you look around for tips and tricks. It's hard.

Personally I like writing dialogue the best, and it comes easily to me. What I do is first write a rough outline of the conversation that includes the commands I want to use in that part. I do this fairly quickly, using whatever lines that come to mind. Then, I start refining and redoing the text. I put in jokes or clever turns of phrase, check that the vocabulary used matches the character who is talking, and do overall polishing so the dialogue flows naturally and conveys the information that I need pass to the reader. It usually takes me two, three passes before I'm satisfied with the text.

Hope this helps!

Edit:
Oh also, considering editing: don't be afraid to delete entire lines or passages (you have to kill your darlings after all). The first thing that comes to your mind usually isn't the best, and if something feels clumsy or clunky you're better off without it. Also, unless the character is known for their verbosity using less words is almost always better than more. 

Thanks everyone for the advice. I thought I would have a upper hand writing dialogue for these characters as I incidentally based most of them off of real people, but it's not as easy as teenaged fan fic writers make it seem

I don't know, what do you guys think? Is there room for improvement, or did I hit the nail right on the head?

On a side note, I've recently started to add a commentary of sorts to my panels:

I think in an interveiw hussie once said that he feels like he doesn't actually characterise characters. He just gives them a voice and then people say "wow, thats some good characterisation".

I really like this was of thinking about characters. Trying to give them raw data just leaves you with less options and often doesn't make sense, but if you give your character a voice, with some veige perspectives and alignments, its easier to write.

Think about Rose, while she is brought up in her first page as a gothic nerd, that doesn't define her voice at all, she's sarcastic and a little blunt, with maybe some taunting and teasing laid in there. This fits the "gothic nerd" idea, but its not something you could get from her introduction page.

I really think DnD is the best way to help with these kinds of things. There's a reason Wizards of the Coast use such a veige alignment and backstory system. Because it's easier to play an interesting, better and more realistic character without being strapped down. Same for DM's, its not unrealistic for a DM to do upwards of 16 characters in a single session, but it's done because the DM doesn't worry about the characters raw personality but their voice, and how it makes the most sense for the character to act in the moment. Even the part of the Players handbook that literally asks you to "personality" is much more focused on perspective "I was raised in the temple, with its lavish food and comfort, so I expect as much", "I know a story about every situation", "I often take the more complex solution over the simple one", "The common folk love me for my generosity", etc.

Focus on a characters voice and perspective, not their "personality" and writing becomes a lot easier.

For my own characters, Sarah is optimistic to a fault and doesn't really worry about things unless they are getting directly in her way, in which case, she will simply denie that they are allowed to happen and gets back to optomism. Eliot hates himself and blames himself for everything, he doesn't see how things can not be his fault and how the world can't hate him. Kaira is realistic and beleives that focus is the way to succeed, she cares about making friends and tries her hardest to get people to like her, but again, knows when to give up. Aleta cares about people, but doesn't understand them, wrapped up in her own world, she wants people to be happy, but is too different to have that happen. "Aleta" doesn't understand caring about people anyway, it's all about herself and Aleta and what will help them the most. Hugo is logical and observant, he thinks through things as far as he can and beleives in these skills of his.

With this, I have had a fair time writing diolouge, with the only real problem I find, sometimes feeling like i'm not making my diolouge as interesting to read as it could be, and having to read it tommorow to edit it.

The character voices come out well, and establish the nature of their relationship - they must be good friends, one has trouble at home, the other seems rather gullible. You use hyperbole quite a lot, making it's hard to tell whether they really think his mother is a horrible person or if it's just them being snarky.

That's one reason why I personally dislike chat logs and don't use them - the characters often wear their online persona in them instead of speaking genuinely. You could shorten the exchange to a third by cutting out excess banter and posturing, it's not really necessary and I hate reading long, meandering logs that take forever to get to the point (especially when catching up on an adventure, I just tend to skip those completely). Remember that you're not being paid by the word, so there's no reason to have characters talking just to fill space!

I feel I have the opposite problem: I'm good at making sentences segue into each other, but when it comes to dialog I fear that I might be a bit too good. Dialouge is supposed to be a natural interaction between two (or more) people, and while, granted, dialouge in any work of fiction tends to be less awkward than conversations in real life, I still worry the dialog I write is a bit too streamlined to seem realistic. Furthermore, I feel like when writing dialog, I tend to put things in my own voice, but when I try to go away from that I worry that I'm making the dialog seem fake or exaggerated. Though in fairness, that's not a problem specific to dialog, but rather an overall problem I have with making characters in general. I'm much better at making settings and storylines than I am at making the actual characters.



Actually, that seems like a very good way to make dialouge, as it mimics the way conversations happen in real life!