That was a separate point you horb.
Also I now have to answer questions including:
What tone will I go with? It's shifted from light to dark and back again as I experiment.
3rd person? yeah probably it's the easiest afaik.
How the hell do I describe a character when introducing them without it becoming wordy and unwieldy?
How do I properly utilize the passage of time without sidestepping important events? I accidentally made basically everything ever happen in a week, but putting time in the middle would make the events themselves confusing ugh what.
I need to learn not to set a story "in december" and later mention HOW WARM IT IS, WHAT.
Thankfully I seem to be pretty good in keeping the world itself consistent, there's 3 main regions in the story and they all have their own feel and the distance between them has been kept consistent.

>>How the hell do I describe a character when introducing them without it becoming wordy and unwieldy?

You don't necessarily have to unless their appearance is important for the story; let their actions speak for themselves.

>>How do I properly utilize the passage of time without sidestepping important events?

Make it obvious that these events have transpired from the rest of the story?

>>I accidentally made basically everything ever happen in a week, but putting time in the middle would make the events themselves confusing ugh what.

If everything happens in a week, it happens in a week. If it happens in two weeks, then so be it. As fiction tries to emulate life, events don't "just happen". Think of the most the most plausible scenarios in the context of your story and adjust accordingly.

>>I need to learn not to set a story "in december" and later mention HOW WARM IT IS, WHAT.

That's just carelessness.

>>Thankfully I seem to be pretty good in keeping the world itself consistent, there's 3 main regions in the story and they all have their own feel and the distance between them has been kept consistent.

Like others said, concentrate on the story.

You might want to check if you have some conflict there as well to make it more interesting to read & make sure that every character wants something.

All good points.
I have plenty of conflict, every chapter has it's own climax as ~something~ happens resulting in an action sequence, sometimes several, and each flows into the greater plot. Doing this I learned a lot about multiple perspectives and culminating actions.
I came up with a personal idea for character motivation, posted here for your enjoyment.

Motiviation, Will, Resources. Each character should have all three.
Hitler- Motivated to take over the world, willing to destroy nations to do it, has a giant army and industrially powerful nation. This character would have to be balanced out with a character of equal status of all three things to balance out, so in essence it would require Stalin to make it interesting or else he would just realistically roll right over the opposition.
A white collar worker- Wants a boat, is willing to save some of his pay check, has a job with a somewhat good pay. Opposing this guy wouldn't require much, his boss firing him would probably put a stop to his plans.
I have outlined my characters with relation to this idea, and balanced them out with opposition that equals them, for the longer plot, or is lesser- and having the character beat them.
In essence this provides me a way to easily understand a character, and ensure they're actions make sense. White collar worker isn't going to kill his boss if he's fired, and Hitler isn't going to give up and go home if things go badly.


E: I just hit 45,000 and realized that the story is only around half complete, woah.
E2: Geez this chapter reads like the part of LOTR where gandalf and co talk in Rivendell about the ring for the first time, it's dry but important for the plot. I hope the little bits of humour I added help, w/e that's for me to think about in the second draft for now write write write post post post
E3: For the first time, I produced a paragraph that I felt truly proud of.
E4: Wow I really need to storyboard or something my chronology is shot straight to hell. Easy enough to fix in a second draft.

Oh, just remembered. Since you were asking for advise on dialogue, read some Elmore Leonard. His books are pretty much all dialogue, hehehe.
Cheers.

Ya. Here is a decent & brief (!!!) article with some hints on how to do this: http://www.creative-writing-now.com/how-to-write-fiction.html

I think I'm getting better at as I go on. Thanks for all the continued resources.
If anybody ever reads this draft they'll be hella confused- I change around working names for certain characters constantly, and a few background elements have appeared and disappeared as I experimented with them.

Re: dialogue, you should try to use "said" for pretty much everything, don't use stuff like "shot back" or "whined" or "muttered" cause that's cornball stuff. Try to make it clear from the dialogue itself how it's being said.

That may have been mentioned already but I didn't read the thread very closely because because. Good luck!

Or just skip the whole "said" anachronism for every line all together, abuse new lines and use passive cues to suggest (and embrace the possible uncertainty of) who said what in dialogue between more than two people.

WRT last two posts.
I don't, thus far I basically either use. "Said." or "Asked/replied." when somebodies... asking something. Shouted, yelled, ordered, directed, instructed, has been basically my entire dialogue vocabulary.

I've experimented with that a bit when it's two people, taking a que from how it's done in Discworld. I've also experimented with italicized pov thoughts, it's all experiments.

Every time I get stuck, or feel like the thing I just wrote was ****, I fudge it together and force myself onwards, soon enough I'll write something I think is brilliant, or have a brilliant idea to tie something together, or accidentally do something smart, and then poof I'm a few thousand words closer to a finished draft. It's magnificently relaxing. I also found that I often, seemingly without thinking, foreshadow an event that I don't even realize has been foreshadowed until it happens, then I basically sit back and am like "Is my sub conscious working ahead of me or something?"

I also seem to have developed three separate stories with chapters organized almost like episodes of a TV show, with the stories themselves being seasons. Each chapter has it's own "point", and it's own major event- exception being one chapter that's basically just a meeting between leaders for 20 pages to set up the next act of the story- and each story highlights a specific part of the protagonists journey. The stakes raise slowly throughout to the point where he goes from "oh god how do i find my place in this new, unknown, world." to "how do I make this world better." to "I GOTTA SAVE THE WORLD NOW".

I had to slap him in the face for narrative and plot reasons and it made me sad, I had to balance it with a separate lighter event or I started to get depressed for the guy. It gets better soon protagonist just hold on!

i drew a map and diagramed the power structure of the world oh god I'm dorking at a new level now
did i just write a paragraph about how i think magic would work if it was real in the TES sort of way- IE spell tomes magically containing some sort of information that allows you cast spells without yelling an incantation or whatever? yes, yes I did. I think my take on "magic" might actually be unique, woah.

I doodled the outline of three of the four major areas in da story, and then changed a few names and plot elements because that's what a first draft is for, bithc.
Also I wrote an entire chapter that was originally unplanned by it does well in foreshadowing future events.
73,000 words