#avaaalien

[prince-liest]

Hi (I almost never use tumblr so lmk if I’m doing smth wrong!!) I’ve read a few of your Hazbin Hotel fics on AO3 and I just have to ask, how do you manage to post things so quickly?! I’m trying to start my own Hazbin hotel fic and I’m so fixated on getting their characterization correct that it’s taking me like 3X longer than normal to write lol!! If you have any advice or tips that would be amazing but of course, no pressure. I was just so curious. You’re very talented!!

Definitely not doing anything wrong! :D I wish I had a better answer for you, but the honest truth is that it's a combination of me having a lot of writing experience AND that I just had a fuckton of free time the past four weeks. It's kinda funny that you sent this ask now, because I just started a rotation for school that is going to consume very literally like 90% of my waking life on the days I have shifts for about three weeks, so you're about to watch me write BARELY ANYTHING AT ALL, hahaha.

That said, I relate to you very aggressively on the matter of worrying about characterization. That was the number one thing stopping me from writing fanfic for years and a lot of how I got over it was practicing characterization in OC RPs where I had to work with various characters but didn't have to be so afraid of missing something and getting them wrong because they were my characters so I already knew everything about them.

I think for Hazbin Hotel in particular, a lot of how identifiable and zany the characters are comes from their dialogue and their physicality, so personally I've frequently been rewatching little bits of the show to take point on how the characters genuinely talk and act! For Alastor, for example, I actually frequently have to un-fancy his dialogue while I'm writing by referencing canon conversations he's had because it's so easy to code switch into making him as prim as his general vibe conveys when in reality he actually does not talk like that. For Charlie and Lucifer, a lot of their vibe comes from the lack of smoothness in their speech - they stutter, hem, haw, backpedal, etc. For Angel, I think the way he poses himself and when he chooses to make sex jokes and touch people (or respect their space!) says a lot as well.

Practice makes this a LOT easier, but for my very first fic, I ended up taking a lot of notes on what I felt like captured the vibes of a character! I don't really do this anymore, but it was very helpful initially for giving me an understanding of what goes into my perception of any particular characterization.

#ask #personal #avaaalien #writing advice #I hope this helped!!