Putting Books On Hold At The Library Has The Same Thrill Of Ordering Books Online, But With The Added

Me: *writes an amazing chapter*

Me: Ah yes. That is amazing. Can't wait to begin the next one. So many possibilities!

Me: *turns off my laptop and goes into a month-long depression*

one of my favorite things to do in limited perspective is write sentences about the things someone doesn't do. he doesn't open his eyes. he doesn't reach out. i LOVE sentences like that. if it's describing the narrator, it's a reflection of their desires, something they're holding themselves back from. there's a tension between urge and action. it makes you ask why they wanted or felt compelled to do that, and also why they ultimately didn't. and if it's describing someone else, it tells you about the narrator's expectations. how they perceive that other person or their relationship. what they thought the other person was going to do, or thought the other person should have done, but failed to. negative action sentences are everything.

I think we should take gothic horror away from people until they earn it back

i love characters who are always like fear not, i shall take care of this problem for you….. by sacrificing myself!! and everyone else is like i swear to god if you pull this shit again i’ll kill you

via @swatercolor [insta]

Hello! I’m a horror & dark whimsy writer/content creator, and I was just published for the first time a couple months ago with my environmental horror short story “HAUSTORIUM.” It’d mean a lot if folks checked it out! Keep an eye on this space, more to come 👀👻🌲

devour-journal.com

Haustorium | 𝔇𝔢𝔳𝔬𝔲𝔯 ☙ 𝔐𝔬𝔯𝔰𝔢𝔩𝔰 𝔬𝔣 𝔊𝔢𝔫𝔯𝔢 𝔏𝔦𝔱𝔢𝔯𝔞𝔱𝔲𝔯𝔢

A dying lumberman joins a logging crew for one final job, only to face a supernatural nightmare when an ancient tree resists its felling.

Procrastination!

I’m trying to do my homework, but I keep looking at the syllabus and going, “UGH, HEMINGWAY!” and then retreating to Tumblr. So. Gonna blather about POV a bit more here instead of reading “Hills Like White Elephants” for the eleventy-billionth time.

sheffiesharpe said: Oh. Hell. Yes. Keep talking point of view. I wish you’d been in my classes. Have you read Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds? Her discussion of point of view, particularly free-indirect discourse (more or less limited 3rd), rocked my world pretty hard.

I haven’t, but I’ve added it to my Amazon wishlist. Mmm, craft books. Third person is one of my weak points, so I’d love to get another perspective on it! (Outside of fanfic, I usually default to first person; in fanfic, I use third person but always feel a little clunky with it.)

So, here’s a thought that I’ve been mulling over: In class last week, my prof pointed out that inserting a character’s thoughts in italics is a POV switch and, in general, is kind of a lazy trick. Any time you switch POVs, she’s been telling us all semester, your reader notices and you risk pulling them out of the story - so only switch POVs for a good damn reason. Suddenly listening in on a character’s thoughts directly when the rest of the story is told from outside their head? Not a good idea.

My gut reaction was “WHAT? NO” because I do that a lot and some of my favorite stories do as well. I always like to be inside a character’s head and know what they’re thinking - I’m a very character-oriented reader and writer, and I love that narrative intimacy. So something like this:

Good god, look at that arse, he thought, eyeing Sherlock from behind as they left the flat. 

…reads as a neat little porthole into the character’s inner workings. But my professor’s right in that, if the rest of the story has a POV that’s a bit more distant, it doesn’t read as well. Something like this would work better:

He eyed Sherlock from behind as they left the flat, admiring one of his few consistently charming assets.

(For some reason I read this in Karen Eiffel’s voice. Oh, Sherlock/Stranger Than Fiction fusion, someday I’ll get around to you!)

Meanwhile, if the POV is closer, right up in the character’s head anyway, you can get a similar effect by just ditching the italics and thought tags:

He eyed Sherlock from behind as they left the flat. Good god, look at that arse. 

…Which reads more fluidly to me than the original example. There may be something to this. 

I went looking through the fic I’ve always felt was my best example of a successful third person POV, The Apocrypha of Chuck, and figured out that I’d been doing that very thing for much if not all of that fic. The narrative distance between Chuck and the narrator is so close that the narrator may as well be munching on popcorn in a viewing room in the back of his head. There’s no need for the “he thought” tags because the narrator is just spouting verbatim what Chuck’s feeling, pop culture references and all:

Chuck was frozen. His head rang like someone had pounded it on the inside of the Liberty Bell, and it was starting to ache. He wanted to ask aloud, “What do I do?” but the last time he asked that, Dickface told him to write. Chuck was pretty sure that writing wasn’t the proper response to a dead angel on the floor. He was also pretty sure that doing a “Replace All” in The Winchester Gospel to substitute “Dickface” for Zachariah’s name wasn’t the proper response to being told he was Heaven’s butt monkey, but hey, everybody copes differently with stress.

This could’ve easily drifted into internal monologue territory, but the narrator said everything Chuck could’ve, in his own dialect, using the references Chuck himself would’ve used. But this narrator, while being sympathetic to Chuck and sharing all of his pop culture references, has the ability to put Chuck’s thoughts into words when Chuck himself can’t - generally at dramatically appropriate moments.  

That’s the really cool thing about third person narrators: they can carry on telling the story coherently even when your POV character is too overwrought to explain what’s happening. I love my first-person narrators and all, but they take a kick in the ass to explain what’s happening sometimes. 

I’m just rambling at this point and have no good conclusiony point to make, so I’ll just leave this here:

To The Person At The Bus Stop Holding A Bouquet of Red Roses by Jordan Bolton

Part of Scenes From Imagined Films Issue 3 - Order now on Etsy

I have the best friends lol. Look at this lovely cross stitch piece a friend made me!

Dear friend, if you are a writer — particularly a young writer — who is reading this right now, I want you to promise me something. Are you ready? l want you to promise me that you will stay away from epithets when you are talking about characters who know one another’s names.

You do not need to say, “the blond man.” You do not need to say “the older man,” or “the taller man,” or “the smaller man.” You definitely do not need to transform adjectives into nouns and say things like, “the older,” “the younger,” or lord forbid, “the other.” (Unless you are writing the kind of academic paper that cites Lacan or bell hooks, in which using the other/Other is allowed, and also important). 

I know it might seem repetitive, but using names and pronouns is enough. They are the kinds of words that fade into the rhythm of your writing, and they will never stand out to your reader. They are the words that make sense.

When you look at your friends, you’re not thinking of them as “the red-headed woman,” or “the shorter person.” You’re probably thinking something like, “Natasha’s hair is getting so long,” or, “she looks beautiful today,” or “Jamie’s got a great shirt.” You think of people’s pronouns. You think of their names. And that is what your character does, too.