To The Person At The Bus Stop Holding A Bouquet Of Red Roses By Jordan Bolton

here are some interesting surnames I have seen on old graves:

*they’re not inherently “weird” or “rare”, they’re just names I noted for possible future use in my writing

ohsweetcrepes replied to your post: Also. ALSO.

This essay. I would like to read it.

“Incremental Perturbation: How to Know Whether You’ve Got a Plot or Not” by John Barth. I don’t know if it’s available online, but I read it in Creating Fiction (ed. Julie Checkoway), which is a book I highly recommend after having read about a third of its essays.

And here comes my plug for this book, because I’ve been arguing with every book but this one this semester, and I feel like it deserves some love.

Creating Fiction also contains the essay “The Lingerie Theory of Literature: Describing and Withholding, Beginning and Ending” by Checkoway, which uses Victoria’s Secret catalogues to demonstrate how much detail you need in a story, and “Icebergs, Glaciers, and Arctic Dreams: Developing Characters” by Kim Edwards, which is just an all-around fantastic examination of characterization. I think it’s out of print, but you can get it for under $10 used or as a Google ebooks download. 

Bones isn’t xenophobic toward Vulcans, he just roasts Spock, specifically, for being Vulcan the same way my siblings roast me for being gay. They’re both in on the joke, and if Spock asked Bones to stop, he would. Instead, this sassy motherfucker insults humanity as a whole and Bones’s abilities as a doctor in retaliation.

Putting books on hold at the library has the same thrill of ordering books online, but with the added benefit of not losing any money over titles I might not enjoy.

10/10 would recommend.

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:

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.

It’s uncanny how similar Trump is acting like Hitler. People are now doing the Nazi salute. They’re drawing the symbol. The KKK was seen in Kentucky asking people to join them. ICE has been ripping families apart. Companies have pulled back Diversity Initiatives. We’re no longer part of WHO and there won’t be any communication from the CDC at least until February 1st. We’re being censored and the news can’t be trusted. Thousands of Americans didn’t know there were protests against Trump yesterday outside the U.S. Quotes from The Handmaid’s Tale and Anne Frank have been compared to what’s going on right now.

According to The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Studies and Prevention the U.S. has officially been given a red flag alert for Genocide.

I’m exhausted but I will never stop being angry.

I’m writing scenes which are good, and I don’t know where they are going to fit in the book. But it’s what I call ‘The Valley Filled With Clouds’ technique. You’re at the edge of the valley, and there is a church steeple, and there is a tree, and there is a rocky outcrop, but the rest of it is mist. But you know that because they exist, there must be ways of getting from one to the other that you cannot see. And so you start the journey. And when I write, I write a draft entirely for myself, just to walk the valley and find out what the book is going to be all about.

-- Terry Pratchett - A Slip Of The Keyboard: Collected Non-fiction

Fantasy writers should be more anthropology brained. More theology brained. More wacky intellectual history brained. You should be giving out interesting and novel but believable social structures. Oh they don't have monogamy they have some other thing and they're just as violent about it? Perfect. There should be religions that aren't just gods of x y z. Folio gods are out! And the theology shouldn't fall apart from a moderately intelligent person thinking about it for 4 seconds. Of it falls apart in five econds that's fine. Like just crazy enough to think that a real human society could get down with it. There should be like bizarre new architecture that ye oldifies modernist movements. Oh amd the thing where every city and region is somehow completely homogenous is crazy; do something else. Put people living together with a complicated history. Oh and you can just give them a completely different conceptual scheme for talking about gay and trans people. That would be fun. I should be saying "I never thought of it that way." Make up norms and then think what are all the ways in which this can go wrong. Tell me how people disagree on the interpretation of some doctrine. Create a parodying spectre of some constitutional arrangement. Go crazy

seeing a cover i drew at the library is so wild lmao

WAIT 3 PEOPLE IN LINE??? Feeling a lot of pressure ;0_0 sorry to the people in the queue behind me. im reading so slowly rn