As many of you know, in my day job I’m a journalist, and one of my colleagues is covering the tumblr changes and wants to talk to anyone who has been affected, creatively or financially, by the new policy, so that we can get your story out there. If that’s you, PM me or email her at kaitlyn.tiffany@vox.com.
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.
“Josh cried stupid tears at the beautiful display by the dancers. It was everything he’d wanted from this production, from the lighting to the costumes to the exquisite choreography. Martha had to suppress a fond smile at his reaction; he was always so sweetly emotional after the curtain fell.”
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.
No, this is a variation on a circle parry and a counter circle parry. Both are commonly taught in French and Italian style foil fencing.
A circle parry is when you avoid your opponents blade by moving your blade around theirs in a circle. A counter circle parry is circling around your opponents circle so that they can’t get their blade past to stab you.
When two fencers know each other well, this often happens. It becomes a game of chicken, it only ends when someone is willing to risk leaving an opening so that they can launch a different attack.
The foil version of this happens at least once a practice on my college fencing team. The only difference is that the blades are horizontal rather than diagonal.
Bolded for sadness
OUCH MY HEART
Okay I didn’t know this, and always thought this was them just being extra af and having similar fighting styles but THE FACT that it’s basically them playing chicken and not wanting to fight each other pains me so greatly. FUCK.
^ Good example of how to use fight choreography/blocking for character development and adding to your story instead of being perfunctory.
(Really, the whole sequence is golden and I love it.)
The other take I’ve heard on this (which totally supports this interpretation) is that lightsaber battles are as much mental/Force-based as they are physical. That is, in a fight where both combatants are closely tied to the Force (and therefore are used to anticipating the moves of non-Force users), there’s a huge amount of mental strain between the two fighters as they continually adapt to each other’s tactics, each informed by their Force sensitivity. The problem’s even worse when you know your opponent personally.
In a battle of two mind-readers (who are also precognitives), how do you win? By distracting your opponent and making the future unclear. And that’s exactly what we see in a lot of the lightsaber fight choreography in the prequels.
Tumblr was deemed too full of inappropriate content to be allowed to be downloaded from the app store.
It has this “inappropriate” problem because of rampant porn ad bot accounts. The old solutions were bots to detect image sets with nsfw content, the automatically enabled safe mode, tag filtering for mobile, and wide takedowns of nsfw bots based on words used (that’s why their messages are full of numbers and symbols, to evade this)
Tumblr released their own bot supposedly capable of wiping the ad bots, but it’s taking down many popular blogs, possibly due to sheer amounts of posting or sheer amounts of ad bots in their notes. This bot was likely rushed to be put out.
You are more likely to be accidentally flagged if you post external links, as well. If your acct is taken down you CAN get it back, but it’s a pain. E-mail tumblr support for help with this. It takes down side blogs with the main ones.
I’ll be halting posts for about a week or until this problem is fixed.
This. This is good fiction writing advice. I really appreciate how it was formatted as “this is a common problem, here is a solution to try in your own work” and not “oh god, don’t do that!” without any extra help. And I extra appreciated the “don’t rely on adverbs” bit, because they do have their place but they aren’t the only way actions can be emphasized.
