did i do this right

2020-03-27

Canon EOS M2 + EFM32mm f1.4

https://www.instagram.com/hwantastic79vivid/

some notes on POV

I wanted to type up a little rundown of quick n dirty writing tips based on things I see a lot in fic/ amateur original manuscripts, and, uh, it turned out that they all revolved around POV. Nailing point of view in fiction writing is both crucial and one of the least intuitive building blocks of writing to learn: an understanding of POV has been the only useful thing i took from my college creative writing classes, and god knows how long I’d have stumbled along without it otherwise.

So! I am saving you, baby writer, the trouble of slogging through a miserable writing class with a professor who’s bitter as FUCK that genre fiction sells better than his “sad white man drinking” lit fic novels. Here are some assorted writing tips/ common mistakes and how to fix them, as relating to POV:

(this turned into a WALL OF TEXT so i will be using gifs to break it up)

> “I watched the ship tilt” “he saw the sky darken” “she noticed flowers growing on the rusted gate.” no. If the character who felt/saw/noticed etc is your POV character, whether in first or third, then this is called filtering and it takes the reader out of the story by subtly reminding them of the separation between the POV character and themselves. in most styles of writing, this is bad, not to mention it unnecessarily complicates your prose. try again: “the ship tilted.” “the sky darkened.” “flowers grew on the rusted gate.” Readers will instinctively understand that the POV character is witnessing the story happen, they don’t need to be told it.

I’m not telling you to never refer to your character “watching” something, of course: “I watched the birds dart around for hours,” isn’t filtering because watching is a notable activity, here, rather than an unnecessary obfuscation of the “real” thing happening. But understand how phrasing can jar readers momentarily apart from the character viewpoint, and use it with intention.

> Close Third Person POV still requires you to be mindful of your POV character. this is a rookie mistake i see allllllll the time. “Josh cried stupid tears at the beautiful display by the dancers,” is a sentence in Josh’s POV. “Stupid” tells us how he feels about the tears, “beautiful” tells us how he feels about the display. ok. all good so far. BUT.

Do you see what’s wrong with this paragraph? The first two sentences are Josh’s POV, and then the third one suddenly becomes Martha’s. A lot of amateur writers don’t even realize they’re doing this, which in its most egregious form is called “head-hopping,” but it’s disorienting and distracting for the reader, and makes it harder to connect with a single character. In multi-person close 3rd POV story, the POV should remain the same for an entire chapter (or at least, for an entire scene/ segment,) and change only between them. If you’re new to POV wrangling, watch your adjectives/ interiority (we’ll get to that in a second) and think “which character am I using as a lens right now, and am I being consistent" every once in a while until you get the hang of it.

> Related: let’s talk about interiority. Interiority is a more sophisticated way of thinking of a character’s “internal narration,” IE bits of prose whose job is not to advance the plot, set tone, or describe anything, (although it CAN do any of those things as well, and good prose will multitask) but to give us a specific sense of the character’s internal life, including backstory, likes, dislikes, fears, wants, and personality. In the above example paragraph, the middle sentence “It was everything he’d wanted from this production, from the lighting to the costumes to the exquisite choreography” Is interiority for Josh. It tells us that not only did he love the show, he’s very familiar with this art form and thus had expectations going in; likewise, listing the technical components is a way of emphasizing his enthusiasm while pointing out that it’s informed, implying that Josh himself is intellectually breaking down the performance even in appreciation.

“That’s a lot for a throwaway sentence you made up for an example.” Well, yeah, a little interiority goes a long way. Interiority is what creates the closeness we have to POV characters, the reason we understand them better than the non-POV characters they interact with. It’s particularly key in the first couple chapters of an original work, when we need to be sold on the character and understand the context they operate in.

If readers are having trouble connecting to or understanding the motivations of your character, you might need more interiority; if your story’s plot is agonizingly slow-moving (and you don’t want it to be) or your character is coming off as melodramatic, you might need less. It’s not something you should necessarily worry about; your amount of interiority in a WIP is probably fine, but being able to recognize it for what it is will help you be more mindful when you edit.

(Fanfic as a medium revels in interiority: that’s how you get 10k fics where nothing happens but two characters lying in bed talking and having Feelings. Or coffeeshop AUs that have literally no plot to speak of but are 100k+ long.)

> try not to describe the facial expression of a POV character, even in third person. rather like filtering, it turns us into a spectator of the character when they’re supposed to be our vessel, and since it’s *their* POV, there should be other ways available to communicate their emotion/ reactions. There are ways of circumventing this, (the example sentence where “Martha had to suppress a fond smile” is an example) where their expression is tied up in a physical action, or something done very deliberately by the character and therefore becomes something they would note to themselves, but generally, get rid of “[pov character’s] eye’s widened” and “[pov character] smiled.”

so that’s what i got! go forth and write with beautifully deliberate use of POV.

Some really useful advice here.

I made this instead of studying

Oh my god, I've just seen this story on instagram about this guy that filled his bathtub with waterbead...except he didn't think about how he was going to empty it.

So he unplugged the bathtub which was apparently the worst idea he could possibly have because this happened

So he panicked and started asking people on the internet what he should do. Which was also a bad idea.

First suggestion: flush the toilet

This caused a smelly overflow that flooded the whole bathroom.

Second suggestion: vaccum the beads

His vaccum caught fire.

At this point it had actually spread to the neighborhood and people came to ask question but he denied knowing anything about it. He then discovered that it's invaded the whole sewer system.

And yet, he continued to take suggestion from the internet.

Third suggestion: put salt in

It actually worked. Well, until.

Poop apprently started flooding his house.

And then the streets.

It all happened yesterday so we're still waiting on an update on the situation but I hadn't laugh like this in a while.

You should go and watch the whole story (it's in 4 parts)

It's in french, but you get it even if you don't speak it and his screams of panic are hilarious

Word of warning: don't fill your bathtub with waterbeads. Just don't.

Хочу 100 процентное зрение.

Me, the writer: "I should write the whole story before I post it."

Also me, the writer: "Let's post the first chapter now although I don't how to continue the story."

Interspecies lesbianism

It’s cute guys

nothing but respect for MY lesbian big cat couple

Butch/Butch couple

This is actually hella interesting, bc in simple terms, tigers are extroverts and lions are introverts. There’s more to it, but that’s the gist.

Whenever zoo’s tried to put lions and tigers in the same enclosures, the tiger would eventually try to groom the lioness and play constantly. The lioness would lose patience and snaps at them

So basically what I’m saying is that you have a regal and refined gf who stands at the edge of a balcony during parties, sipping champagne

Then you have the other girl who drank all of the little flutes on the servers platter, and is now drunkenly pointing at her gf and telling everyone that that’s her gf and doesn’t she look beautiful I love her so much

So I had to draw them in human form???

You drew them in the corresponding ethnicities for their Geographic locations!!! Bless you, you have no idea how sick and tired I am of white human lion king characters.

This post is deemed culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant as certified by the National Shitpost Registry.

This is some of that top-shelf, straight-up, good shit. Bless these big cat lesbians.

This post needs more notes

Writing Advice Posts: A Handy Reference Guide

(Updated 8/6/19) Hey all, I’ve got quite a few writing advice posts & answered Asks on my blog at this point, so I’m making this reference guide to make it easier to find what you’re looking for. Hope it helps!

Free Resource Library Downloads

All of these PDFs are available to download in my Free Resource Library.

General

The Writing Process, Writer’s Block, & Inspiration

Character Development

Story, Plot, & Pacing

Description, Setting, & Worldbuilding

Point of View

Dialogue

Publishing & Sharing Your Work

Editing

…if you find any broken links please let me know and I will fix them! xo

*I recently changed the name of my blog. All of these links should work, but if you come across a “Bucket Siler has moved!” page when clicking on a link inside an old post, there’s an easy way to find what you’re looking for: In the url, delete “bucketsiler,” write “theliteraryarchitect,” then hit return. Also, let me know about it & I will fix it :)

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The Literary Architect is a writing advice blog run by me, Bucket Siler. For more writing help, check out my Free Resource Library or get The Complete Guide to Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. xoxo

2019-03-24

Biology

Constructed Language (Conlang)

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