And I’m in contests now · 8:37am May 22nd
So it wasn’t the fic I was talking about last post but I did decide to hop into the contest going on. I’ve been eying the dialogue only thing for a while and I’ve been scratching my head over it. At first it seemed like an interesting challenge, but then I thought about how I’d actually do it and i realized just how much depth of expression gets lost when all you can use is dialogue, internal or external. I wasn’t sure I could come up with something that wasn’t just a script with no notes, and that sounded so dull. I wouldn’t enjoy reading that, so I could I expect others to get much out of it?
So I got creative with it and went with the angle of having it be texts. I realized at some point that I could possibly mimic the style of Discord, which I’ve done a lot of talking over and could emulate the text dialect fairly well, and while I was writing it I realized, wait, shit, I could totally mimic the layout of Discord messages too. I had way too much fun recreating the Discord message aesthetic in the fimfiction text editor, and I’m delighted with the results. It’s actually really close! In particular when I viewed it on preview, it looked exactly like Discord if it had a dark blue background, because every message had that bubble around it from the text blocks. It didn’t get saved into published versions, but I’m still super happy with how it came out. I think it looks pretty authentic!
I’m not actually sure the story is legal for that contest, though, because I guess in a way it completely sidesteps part of what sort of looks to be a challenge that the judges were kind of leaning into. Discord messages have usernames over every single message and, you know, of course you can recognize who’s who in that. On top of that, both girls in the texting type with their own distinct style, which is depicted as a no-no, but like, I kinda had to do that, you know? It’s Discord. More than that, it’s typing, and everyone types differently over social media. And of course Rainbow and Sunset are gonna type quite differently from the other.
Will that get me disqualified? Maybe. Frankly, though? I don’t really care. I had a great time writing that little story and I’m tickled by how I got the layout to look, so as far as I’m concerned, I got everything and more that I wanted out of it. Chalking that up as a win.
Makes me want to do other contests now. That was great. I don’t know if I’ll have time for the May shipping contest but I guess we’ll see how that goes.
I'm pretty sure that this type of fic isn't even allowed on fimfiction per se:
5782287
I had asked one of the mods on the Discord if it would fly and they said yeah, it was fine.
Not quite sure. It’s kind of hard to not end up with a story like this given the contest currently in play, so it would be a weird line to draw if it’s gotta be dialogue only but not dialogue in that way specifically because it’s illegal.
I dunno. I put it in front of a bunch of moderators so if someone intends to raise a fuss about it, it’ll happen, but I’m of the opinion that it would be a little weird to punt it off the site for that reason alone. It’s an artistic choice for a challenge story, not a low-effort thing thrown together haphazardly.
5782342
Weird, another fic written as several Tumblr posts was removed. Not that I care that much, tbh. Just giving a warning that a mod might decide it's against the rules
5782346
Would definitely be annoyed if that turned out to be the case.
I get why that rule exists, but I like to think the spirit of it would supersede the words of it.