And so, at last, my SatAMlebration comes to a close! I’ve had a real blast making these pics, not least of all because it’s been so much fun revisiting these scenes and seeing them with a whole new eye (case in point, I’d never noticed ‘til now how Sally is giving Sonic a playful shove in reaction to his swaggering wink at the audience), and it’s been a real learning experience trying to replicate the show’s specific style while keeping true to my own. I hope you’ve all enjoyed getting to celebrate this Way Past Cool series right along with me!
Quick question, what is Dusty’s favorite food? Also I’m sad to see him leave the tournament but I think he’s a great character! Love this uncle rabbit!
Of course! We were all so focused on pushing that truck, we never realized Mew was hiding in a claw machine this whole time! Congratulations you mad genius you!
You’ll be able to make a custom feed to follow blogs, webcomics, social media feeds, podcasts, news, and other stuff on the web all in one place. To follow something, find its “feed URL”– often marked by an icon that looks like this ↓– and paste it into your reader of choice as a new feed.
Some feed URLs for social media:
Twitter: Feedbro can use Twitter profile URLs as feed URLs. Otherwise, use nitter.net/username/rss (or other Nitter instance) (You can get a CSV file of all the accounts you follow using “Download a user’s friends list” on Tweetbeaver)
Tumblr: Use username.tumblr.com/rss or username.tumblr.com/tagged/my%20art/rss to follow a blog’s “my art” tag (as an example)
Cohost: Use username.cohost.org/rss/public (WIP feature)
Instagram: Feedbro can use Instagram profile and hashtag URLs as feed URLs. Otherwise, Instagram doesn’t have RSS feeds, and due to aggressive rate limiting on their part, it’s not so simple to generate a feed URL.
Facebook: Feedbro can use public Facebook group/page URLs as feed URLs.
(If you know an artist who exclusively posts to Instagram, you may want to gently suggest that they crosspost elsewhere…)
me: oh a message, I should reply in a timely manner
akashic fae I mingled the concept of my being with: it is time to go to the woods for hours
me: it is time to go to the woods for hours
Hi! I’ve noticed these days that my writing is struggling between sounding very formal and proper versus sounding casual. On one hand, I’ll have a sentence that looks like it came straight out of a 1940s British series, but two lines later there’s some casual dialogue that’s closer to an American teen novel. I grew up with both types of books tbh, so maybe that’s why? How do I stabilize my writing style and make it a little more consistent? Thank you!
There are three types of “voice” that play a role in how your writing sounds… authorial voice, narrative voice, and character voice.
Authorial voice is your writing style as an author. In many ways, it’s your “writer personality.” It’s what makes your writing distinctive from another writer’s. While authorial voice tends to be consistent across all stories, it will evolve with time and may even change slightly for particular projects–especially when crossing genres. Authorial voice includes things like how much/little description you use, how simple or ornate that description is, how you use word play, and the types of words you use.
Narrative voice is the “voice/voices” with which the story is told. This is made up of point-of-view (the perspective from which the story is told, for example, first-person or third-person limited), as well as your writing style and use of language. Anything the narrator says falls under narrative voice.
Character voice is the way a character’s personality comes through in the things they think and say. It includes things like whether they’re concise or wordy when they speak, slang and catchphrases, quirks of speech like saying “um” or “uh” a lot, how their attitude is reflected in what they think and say, accent, and the kinds of words they use.
When you have a first-person narrator, narrative voice and character voice are combined, because the character’s voice IS the narrative voice.
So, there are several quick exercises you can do if you want to stabilize the voice in your writing:
1 - Do a little analysis of your own writing style (so far). Remember: writing style is something that evolves over time, so you might not have a fully established writing style yet, but you should be able to look at what you write and start to see some patterns. In your case in particular, do you gravitate more toward formal speech than casual speech? Can you think of any writers whose style matches what you’d like your writing style to be? Try reading more of their books, or read a chapter an analyze the writing style to see what you can mimic.
2 -Think about the narrator of your story… Even if it’s a third-person omniscient, faceless narrator, it can still help to assign a sort of mental picture for who this person might be and who they’re telling the story to. Is this someone who experienced it telling the story in third-person long after the fact, with 20/20 hindsight, to someone who might be interested? Is this a god who watched it all unfold and is retelling the tale to an audience of other gods? Is it an old grizzled storyteller telling the story to a rapt audience around a campfire? Try to choose something that makes sense as far as who might be telling this story, who they’re telling it to, and why. It’s not that you’re including this as part of the story, but rather as a sort of placeholder for your brain any time you’re in narrator mode. If you can slip into this narrator’s shoes as you write the narrator parts, it sometimes helps you “get into character” and stick with a consistent, relevant narrative voice.
3 - Establish character voice… Character voice does have an impact on narrative voice, even if the story isn’t told in first-person. In third-person stories, who the characters are can tell you a lot about who your narrator might be (so it might help to do this step before #2 above…) For example, if your characters do happen to be a bunch of 1940s Brits, you can start to think about who they are and what they experience to figure out who the narrator might be. In this case, it probably wouldn’t make sense for the narrator to be a god telling the story to other gods (as that feels too mystical for this narrator), but a grizzled storyteller recounting the tale around a campfire might make sense.
If your story’s being told in second-person (You walked to the window… Like a Choose Your Own Adventure) or first-person (I walked to the window…) character voice relates even more to narrative voice, because in second-person, even though the narrator is not the POV character, the narration is still being filtered through the POV character’s personality, knowledge, and experiences. And in first-person, the narrator IS the POV character, so the narrative voice and character voice are one and the same.
By doing these exercises, you can start to hone each of these voices to find some stability. Happy writing!
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I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!
In which I reblog stuff I like on tumblr and post my fan-works. Writer of the "Sonic the Hedgehog" Fan Comic "Sea3on": www.sonicsatam.com/sea3on My Art Blog: erictmason.tumblr.com COMMISSIONS OPEN: gojira007.tumblr.com/post/168682813032/yup-finally-diving-into-this-wide-wacky-world
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