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You hear that?
That can only mean it’s time for TWA to finally cover writing about dinosaurs!
Oh look.
A man with an old meme face talking about dinosaurs.
How appropriate.
Now why am I writing about dinosaurs which is a very niche topic?
The better question is why aren’t you writing about dinosaurs because dinosaurs are cool.
How cool are dinosaurs?
Dinosaurs are so cool that a story with dinosaurs doesn’t even need a love triangle!
I mean I’m still going to force a love triangle into the story anyway.
Rest assured, there will always be people like me who will throw money at anything that
has dinosaurs in it no matter how stupid, goofy, cheesy, gross, or full of garbage grindy
game mechanics it has in it!
Just throw some dinosaurs in and I’m basically forced to give my money to it.
As such dinosaurs can be seen as a good investment even though the age of dinosaurs has long
since past millions of years ago when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, also known as the 80s.
Dinosaur obsession may no longer reign over pop culture, but that doesn’t mean their
popularity is extinct either.
So let’s take a Jurassic sized bite out of this topic as I spare no expense to teach
writers how to write about dinosaurs!
The key point to understanding how to write dinosaurs is that they are so cool that they
automatically absolve a writer of any writing sins committed.
Is the story a mess of stale cheese with an idiot plot so stupid it makes Stegosaurus
brain look big in comparison?
I’m sorry, but my story has dinosaurs in it, therefore your criticism is invalid!
Dinosaurs generate a natural coolness aura that switches off most people’s brains when
a dinosaur enters the scene.
A writer can take advantage of this effect to save effort on things like plot, character,
or other frivolous things like having the story make and kind of sense.
This effect increases the more dinosaurs a writer adds to a scene and becomes exponentially
more powerful when the dinosaurs fight each other or start eating their way through the
extras and minor characters.
That’s what we are here for after all and so why not take advantage of people’s love
of dinosaurs to hoodwink and distract them from my complete lack of storytelling skill?
And man do I love dinosaurs to the point that I’m going to include all of the most popular
ones in my story!
I am going to have Brachiosauruses, Brontosauruses, and other sauropods wading through waters
with their long necks.
Let’s add in some triceratops fighting allosaurus, Carnotaurus charging with their horns to stab
their prey, little Dilophosauruses with their neck frill and poison spit, scaly pack hunting
super intelligent Velociraptors the size of humans, and even other dinosaurs like Pterodactyls
and Dimetrodons, and even the super fast and sleek Tyrannosaurus Rex that had motion sensitive
vision.
Man I love dinosaurs so much that I would totally throw them a parade!
Wait?
What’s that rumbling in the distance?
Oh no!
It’s a storm of angry internet dinosaur fanboys, ‘well acktually’ guys, and long
suffering paleontologists come to rain on my dinosaur parade!
Let’s go through this quickly.
As it turns out, Brachiosauruses, Brontosauruses, and other sauropods were not primarily aquatic
dinosaurs using their long necks like a snorkel and were instead mostly land based.
Also, good luck trying to figure out if it’s okay to even use the name Brontosaurus or
if you are going to start another dinosaur nerd fight just by uttering it.
Triceratops wouldn’t have fought allosaurus since Triceratops was from the late Cretaceous
and Allosaurus lived in the late Jurassic so they missed each other by millions of years.
Carnotarus’s neck vertebrae wasn’t strong enough to absorb the impact of a full charge
and wouldn’t be useful for stabbing prey and were probably used for shoving matches
with other Carnotarus, maybe.
We don’t know for sure and the whole horn thing is kind of strange since we don’t
have many contemporary predators that have horns to use as a model to guess Carnotarus’s
behavior.
And as it turns out Dilophosauruses were actually pretty big, had no fossil evidence of a neck
frill nor is their any evidence of it spitting poison.
And I guess we should address the feathered dinosaur in the room and point out that Velociraptors
were actually shorter than humans and had feathers.
They might have hunted in packs, might not, we don’t know.
The larger predator most people think of is actually Deinonychus or the even larger Utahraptor.
As for their intelligence, who knows?
They may have been really smart, but I meet plenty of humans with a brain equally as big
as my own, but they don’t seem use it much.
As for Pterodactyls and Dimetrodons, well as it turns out those are not even dinosaurs!
Dimetrodons missed the entire dinosaur party being Permian boys and all while Pterodactyls
were reptiles.
Yes, I’m sorry to inform you that your entire childhood was a lie.
And while we’re at it, 80s cartoons were mostly 20 minute toy commercials, Coca Cola
invented Santa Claus’s look, and you suppressed all of those memories from those kids movies
that always had at least one really weird, really scary scene it in.
Hey, remember in Land Before Time when Littlefoot ventures into dinosaur hell near the end of
the movie?
Yeah.
That happened.
We need to form a support a group or something.
Speaking of ruining childhoods, the T-Rex probably had good vision, and rather than
being sleek was a bit of a chunky boy.
Also a human could probably out run a T-Rex, which is a bold statement for most fast-food
addicted Americans to make since the word cardio summons up more fear from them them
than facing an actual T-Rex would.
Okay.
Now that the no-fun brigade has finishing stampeding over my scientifically inaccurate
depiction of dinosaurs, what’s left?
Did I miss anything else?
Well don’t worry, I’m sure some noble soul in the comments will point out how everything
I just mentioned is also wrong and they’ll probably be some ‘paleontologist reacts’
videos pour over every word.
This puts a writer in a difficult position when it comes to writing about dinosaurs.
They must either basically ignore the entire field of paleontology when it comes to depicting
their dinosaurs and just do whatever they want or the writer can make a documentary.
If sticking with accuracy, just be sure to obsess over future proofing the dinosaurs
with as much dino facts as possible and never worry that even the most scientifically accurate
depiction of dinosaurs is one fossil discovery away from being completely wrong.
Science works best when it is treated like unchanging dogma.
See!
I’m a defender of paleontology and science by gatekeeping new harmful ideas even when
those ideas come with overwhelming evidence.
It’s not like treating science like a religion misses the entire point.
And if all that sounds like too much work then just ignore it and turn your dinosaurs
into fantasy monsters.
Make all of the theropods stand up straight and drag their tails on the ground behind
them even though writer has to break their skeletons to pose them that way!
Call every large theropod a T-Rex even if it has three fingers per arm and a sail on
its back while every sauropod is called a bronto.
And the sizes are all over the place, but mostly on the large end.
Just stick to pre 80s pop culture as a writer’s primary source of dino data and they should
be fine!
Dinosaurs can be treated just like monsters.
They attack people and each other on sight and they never retreat.
What if the dinosaur in question was a herbivore?
They still eat people and rampage around destroying everything in their path.
Big predators in particular always fight to the death and never seek easy prey.
They do use ambush tactics though, but the showing up out of nowhere like a movie slasher
rather than the one found in nature where they blend into their surroundings and wait.
Hunting is all about nosily rampaging around and roaring rather than patiently waiting
for an opportunity to strike like a clever girl.
Just treat dinosaurs like action figures to be smashed together while making roaring sounds
and then expect to be taken seriously.
Never strive for more when writing about dinosaurs.
It’s either no fun killjoy serous business or brainless monsters fighting for the entertainment
of an equally brainless audience with nothing that might make people actually think or engage
in an emotion other than “Ha ha!
That guy got eaten!”
“Rawr!
You are too late, Optimus Rex!
The Autotheropods will never defeat the Deceptisaurs.”
“Roar!
It is you who are wrong, Megasauarus.
The Autotheropods will always fight for justice!”
*AHEM* Sorry.
I got distracted for a second.
Where was I?
Oh right!
Sadly there is no wiggle room at all for a writer to come up with unique and interesting
interpretations of dinosaurs while using current paleontology as a foundation.
Yes there is a massive amount of stuff we just don’t know about dinosaurs given the
limited number of fossils we have recovered with many not even having a complete skeleton
to work with.
What most dinosaurs looked like, how they behaved, and many other things are mostly
guess work that can easily be filled in with a writer’s creativity so long as it is tempered
by a reasonable understanding of contemporary theories and a bit of research.
But see, the problem is those two words, ‘research’ and ‘creativity’.
I kind of struggle with both of those.
Just like the concept of geological time which I struggle with as much as the T-Rex struggled
to hunt the Stegosaurus.
I mean the Stego had the Thagomizer, named after the late Thag Simmons so of course the
Rex had trouble with stegos.
In addition to stubbornly refusing to use my creativity when it comes to writing dinosaurs,
book writers should also fail to use the unique medium of books to explore these ancient species,
like writing from the dinosaur’s perspective.
I mean who would want to read a dinosaur Watership Down?
Hang on a second…
gonna save that one for later…
Anyways, as I was saying, a writer wants to avoid their creativity almost as much as they
should avoid giving the human characters in a story anything interesting to do other than
to run from the dinosaurs.
Remember that when dinosaurs are the main draw of the story then the best practice is
to bore the audience with a bunch of petty human centric drama that has no payoff and
exists only to stall the audience until we get to the dinosaur action.
Basically just like a Godzilla film.
Ah yes, the ideal dinosaur story is one where the humans spend all of their time running
away from one cool looking dinosaur after another and occasionally punctuated by a dinosaur
fighting another dinosaur.
Don’t mess with a winning formula especially when the brain power cost involved in this
formula is next to none.
Why dig into dinosaur behavior when instead I can have dinosaur battles?
Time spend understanding and exploring the possibilities of how these ancient creatures
survived, communicated, interacted with one another, and lived, truly lived is a waste
of time and will go against audience preconceptions that all dinosaurs were murder machines.
Yes real life animals fight and eat things, but they also socialize, play, explore, hide,
and even try to understand their surroundings.
They adapt and showing that adaption and wide array of behavior can be engaging and generate
new and unexpected conflict in a story.
Dinosaurs need characterization too.
But it’s really better to run away from that just like the human characters in the
story will run away from one dinosaur after another for the entire story with no other
interactions taking place other than getting eaten.
If the story is just one dino massacre after another then could the story at least build
up to the reveal of the dinosaurs?
That requires patience and a degree of impulse control that just won’t work with my perception
of modern audiences having brains smaller than the dumbest compy in the Jurassic.
Be sure to rob these creatures of any sense of narrative weight by strolling them out
at the first opportunity and without preamble or foreshadowing.
Just like a writer should never write characters, but instead stick to broad archetypes, a writer
should write dinosaurs as a faceless murder monster and not a character.
All because dinosaurs are cool.
Because when it came to adding dinosaurs to my story I was so preoccupied with whether
or not I could that I never stopped to think if I should.
GREED: Your choice is simple.
Side with me and enjoy endless wealth and success or get paved over like anything else
that gets in the way of progress.
CONSPIRACY GUY: Not if we all stand together against you!
If none of us break ranks then we can easily-
CEO: What’s your orders, boss?
CONSPIRACY GUY: Megacorp sold out.
Should’ve have seen that one coming.
CEO: Know when fold ‘em.
GENERAL: The Federation will never yield to greed!
EMPEROR: The Empire will never yield to greed!
BOTH: Hey!
BARRON: My Emperor…
Greed sends his regards!
EMPEROR: Again?
How many betrayals is that?
AI: HOW MUCH MONEY ARE WE TALKING?
GREED: NFTs… at their height!
AI: I’M IN!
REBEL: Do we get to keep our branding?
GREED: There will have to be a few changes to make things more profitable.
REBEL: The rebellion, and its slick branding, will never sell out to you!
CULT LEADER: Thank you for the offer, Greed, but when the ancient horrors rise up to devour
all reality, I’m afraid there really won’t be much use for money.
Thank you for including us though.
Would you like a pamphlet?
GREED: Well there you are.
Now let us go and make some money!
But first, a parting gift.
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Look how handy Campfire is!
I just used it to call up an entry to the Intergate.
Farewell.
See you after the conquest is done.
DARK LORD: Intergate?
KNIGHT COMMANDER: The Intergate is the backend of TWA universe that connects it to YouTube.
It’s where the ads seep in from.
We placed seals to keep out the ads on most of the videos.
He’s going to break those seals and flood every video with ads.
CONSPIRACY GUY: I don’t follow.
KNIGHT COMMANDER: With that many ads, he’ll be able to conquer the entire TWA expanded
universe in a single stroke.