👁️

one of my worst writing sins is abusing my power to create compound words. i cannot write the sentence "The sun shone as bright as honey that afternoon." no. that's boring. "The sun was honey-bright that afternoon" however? yes. that sentence is dope as fuck. i do not care if "honey-bright" is a word in the english dictionary. i do not care if the sentence is grammatically correct. i will not change. i will not correct my erred ways. the laws of the english language are mine.

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*

I'm re-reading this story I wrote back in 2022 and... foone, do you think you get your "one phone call" even if you're in a medieval fantasyworld jail? because I don't think that's how it works

J. R. R. Tolkien: no, my books aren't about the war I experienced. It's just a story

J. R. R. Tolkien's works: you cannot go home, war ends entire bloodlines, you are mourning the death of your brother alone, you dug into the earth and permanently scored the land, you cannot explain what you have been through, you cannot go home, "that wound will never fully heal. He will carry it the rest of his life", leaving the women behind does not save them, the young die first, you cannot go home, the parent will bury their child, you have lost the wives and you will never connect with them again, "how shall any tower withstand such numbers and such reckless hate?", you are not the same, you cannot go home, you can never go home, your father will only side with those he sees as worthy bloodlines and you cannot change his mind, it is more meaningful Not to kill, sometimes your sacrifice accomplishes nothing, you cannot go home

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:

Here are some thoughts about dialogue tags while I have my editor hat on:

It's fine to use said as a dialogue tag. 'Said' works the way jeans do. Jeans are so ubiquitous that they function as a neutral colour in an outfit despite the fact that they are blue. Said is so ubiquitous in fiction that it functions as a neutral tag to indicate the speaker in much the same way

Using 'said' where necessary will stand out much less than elaborate attempts to avoid it

It is possible to reduce the use of said by reducing the number of dialogue tags overall.

Other dialogue tags are not neutral; you can use them to get various effects. One of these potential effects is '4th grade English class exercise'. Sometimes that's what you're going for and I would not dream of stopping you.

"You can use dialogue tags in the middle of speech," they say, "to affect the perception of the pacing."

"Or," they add, "to give an impression of delivery and tone without resorting to direct descriptions."

"You can even..." They pause to consider how to convey this, toying with their water bottle while they think. "Break dialogue up with actions instead of tags to avoid having blocks of dialogue in which everyone stands stock still and speaks in a monotone. This also contributes to conveying tone without describing it and can add to characterisation."

yup, it's all a joke to me...

among the most enduring lessons i have ever received in screenwriting stands this one from glenn gordon caron…

(glenn created and ran the wildly successful, long-running “medium” - on which i worked for two seasons as co-executive producer - as well as one or two other things that have… you know… shaped the very face of popular culture as we know it)

…a legendarily tough grader who likes to do his master-level work without a lot of noisy fuss and bluster (and probably dislikes being singled out for public praise like this) glenn would set the table for every one of our story pitches to him with a single, and deceptively simple, request:

“tell it to me like it’s a joke.”

now, “medium” was several things - among them, one of tv’s best portrayals of a messy but functional marriage, as well as a crime procedural dotted with representations of unspeakable violence, usually perpetrated by serial killers in the psychic visions of its lead character - but “barrel of laughs” is most likely not in the top ten descriptors for that series…

…so how did “tell it to me like it’s a joke” fit into the equation?

a joke - for my money - is to storytelling what haiku is to poetry: the shortest possible distillation of formal intent. a set-up, brief development, and a punch line…

…short, sweet — and, if successfully told, climaxing in an explosive, involuntary emotional response.

for a story to work in any genre, every successful element from the macro to the micro - from the sweep of the story, to the shape of individual scenes, the arcs of the characters, and the very structure of individual lines of dialogue - should be reducible to the specific outlines of a joke.

set up, development, punch line.

as you have guessed by now, the punch line doesn’t have to be funny - it can be horrific (as it often was on “medium”) or tear-inducing, or a twist that sends the story into an unexpected direction - but it is the nexus toward which the set up and development need to work in absolute concert - there’s no room for fat on a joke, only specificity of purpose.

to this day, the “tell it to me like it’s a joke” principle guides me through story and scene development like a trusty compass: if you can tell your story in the most concise way possible and still deliver your emotional punchline, then all the adornments will fall into line as needed.

“tell it to me like it’s a joke” is neither a formula nor a cure all - it’s a test: if your concept survives on the “tell it to me like it’s a joke” touchstone, then at least you know that the gross anatomy is in place… there are still a thousand ways to mess it up, to be sure, but the airframe will fly - so long as you outfit it with all the necessary equipment.

you wanna know my favorite joke?

an aimless young artist is recruited by an organization that fights monsters… while at first she dislikes her employer and considers him a stuffed shirt, she ultimately finds in him the father she never had.

you know you’re a writer when…

you spend 30 minutes choosing the perfect synonym for “said” only to change it back to “said.”

you google “how long does it take to bleed out” at 3 a.m. and now the FBI is probably watching you.

you write one sentence, stare at it, rewrite it 14 times, and somehow end up back at the original version.

“this scene is so important” but you have no idea what the scene actually is or why it’s important.

you come up with the best story ideas… in the shower… with no way to write them down.

your characters feel like real people but also you’re like “who are these guys and what do they want from me?”

your brain says “start writing!” but instead you reorganize your desk, reread your notes, and spend two hours naming a side character who shows up once.

you’ve cried over your WIP exactly 67 times and will do it again because the pain is the point.

you reread something you wrote and think, “wow, did i peak as a writer three months ago?”

every writing session begins with the sacred ritual of scrolling social media, opening unnecessary tabs, and procrastinating until panic sets in.

you have no idea how long a chapter should be, so you just… vibe.

you can’t watch tv or movies without mentally critiquing the plot, dialogue, and pacing.

your writing playlist is 98% vibes, 2% songs you’ll actually listen to while writing.

you keep a “murder notebook” but swear it’s not suspicious because it’s for your novel (probably).

the phrase “just one more draft” is your eternal mantra, even though you’ve rewritten this thing more times than you can count.

Well this bell could be tolling for anybody

marie howe, in an interview with krista tippett of on being