Tim: Trying to help your dead dad and making everyone around you think you’re insane, including your ex that you were kinda shitty to, is something that can be so personal–
The rest of his remedial English class: Hey are you good?
Writing advice #?: Have your characters wash the dishes while they talk.
This is one of my favorite tricks, picked up from E.M. Forester and filtered through my own domestic-homebody lens. Forester says that you should never ever tell us how a character feels; instead, show us what those emotions are doing to a character’s posture and tone and expression. This makes “I felt sadness” into “my shoulders hunched and I sighed heavily, staring at the ground as my eyes filled with tears.” Those emotions-as-motions are called objective correlatives. Honestly, fic writers have gotten the memo on objective correlatives, but sometimes struggle with how to use them.
Objective correlatives can quickly become a) repetitive or b) melodramatic. On the repetitiveend, long scenes of dialogue can quickly turn into “he sighed” and “she nodded” so many times that he starts to feel like a window fan and she like a bobblehead. On the melodramaticend, a debate about where to eat dinner can start to feel like an episode of Jerry Springer because “he shrieked” while “she clenched her fists” and they both “ground their teeth.” If you leave the objective correlatives out entirely, then you have what’s known as “floating” dialogue — we get the words themselves but no idea how they’re being said, and feel completely disconnected from the scene. If you try to get meaning across by telling us the characters’ thoughts instead, this quickly drifts into purple prose.
Instead, have them wash the dishes while they talk.
To be clear: it doesn’t have to be dishes. They could be folding laundry or sweeping the floor or cooking a meal or making a bed or changing a lightbulb. The point is to engage your characters in some meaningless, everyday household task that does not directly relate to the subject of the conversation.
This trick gives you a whole wealth of objective correlatives. If your character is angry, then the way they scrub a bowl will be very different from how they’ll be scrubbing while happy. If your character is taking a moment to think, then they might splash suds around for a few seconds. A character who is not that invested in the conversation will be looking at the sink not paying much attention. A character moderately invested will be looking at the speaker while continuing to scrub a pot. If the character is suddenly veryinvested in the conversation, you can convey this by having them set the pot down entirely and give their full attention to the speaker.
A demonstration:
1
“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.
“What?” Drizella continued dropping forks into the dishwasher.
2
“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.
Drizella paused midway through slotting a fork into the dishwasher. “What?”
3
“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.
Drizella laughed, not looking up from where she was arranging forks in the dishwasher. “What?”
4
“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.
The forks slipped out of Drizella’s hand and clattered onto the floor of the dishwasher. “What?”
5
“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.
“What?” Drizella shoved several forks into the dishwasher with unnecessary force, not seeming to notice when several bounced back out of the silverware rack.
See how cheaply and easily we can get across Drizella’s five different emotions about Anastasia leaving, all by telling the reader how she’s doing the dishes? And all the while no heads were nodded, no teeth were clenched.
The reason I recommend having it be one of these boring domestic chores instead of, say, scaling a building or picking a lock, is that chores add a sense of realism and are low-stakes enough not to be distracting. If you add a concurrent task that’s high-stakes, then potentially your readers are going to be so focused on the question of whether your characters will pick the lock in time that they don’t catch the dialogue. But no one’s going to be on the edge of their seat wondering whether Drizella’s going to have enough clean forks for tomorrow.
And chores are a cheap-n-easy way to add a lot of realism to your story. So much of the appeal of contemporary superhero stories comes from Spider-Man having to wash his costume in a Queens laundromat or Green Arrow cheating at darts, because those details are fun and interesting and make a story feel “real.” Actually ask the question of what dishes or clothing or furniture your character owns and how often that stuff gets washed. That’s how you avoid reality-breaking continuity errors like stating in Chapter 3 that all of your character’s worldly possessions fit in a single backpack and in Chapter 7 having your character find a pair of pants he forgot he owns. You don’t have to tell the reader what dishes your character owns (please don’t; it’s already bad enough when Tolkien does it) but you should ideally know for yourself.
Anyway: objective correlatives are your friends. They get emotion across, but for low-energy scenes can become repetitive and for high-energy scenes can become melodramatic. The solution is to give your characters something relatively mundane to do while the conversation is going on, and domestic chores are not a bad starting place.
I luckily haven’t had to deal with much chronic pain or hand pain yet, especially with regards to baking (crochet is another story). That said, these look like some pretty solid tips! There’s also some in the comments section.
As this link nears five hundred notes, I’m just… very quietly touched at how many people are sharing it. Whether they need it themselves (or think they will someday), or know someone else who might need it, the fact that all of them are sharing the sentiment of “I want the people who love doing this thing to be able to keep doing the thing that they love” is… yeah. It makes me happy.
no offense but scott lang did not break into the vistacorp headquarters, hack their systems, pay back all of the customers that that corporation stole from, and then drive the ceo’s car into a pool for y’all to be calling steve rogers the anti capitalist king of the mcu
scott has been an anti tony this entire time, has a business that employees ex-cons, AND raised cassie fuck blue lives lang but you all want to pay him dust for characters like dr straight??? i don’t think so!!! keep up the good work comrade lang i support you
it’s important to me that tim drake is just Some Guy but i think he is also deeply weird. when you pull back the skateboarding teen underlayer there should be a freakish little guy inside. like how elementary school girls are.
#everyone he loves dies and he has a breakdown and starts cloning people #and then when they all come back he just snaps back to normal #and everyone who watched him descend into madness is like UH SIR #like he’s the normal one but ALSO the closest to being a supervillain
Nice thing about Brandon Sanderson’s absolutely batshit book scheduling is I can fall out of a series for years and come back to find the book I assumed was out years ago is coming in September.
I’m honestly tired of nonblacks critiquing rap. A Black boy on tik tok remixed a pop song and it’s trending right now, and some nonblack hoe was bitching about how it’s “mID” and honestly, who asked her? I’m glad that his shit is trending, I hope he’s getting several bags. Like damn tik tok thrives off everything niggas do, but hates crediting those niggas.
In Vaulted Halls Entombed scared the fuck out of me, because the edibles chose to kick in during that episode. And afterwards I was staring at the credits all fucked up and disturbed.
ALT
