u/A_C_Shock

There are still two more chapters of the book that have exercises, but my morning is not compatible with thinking them through or typing them out.

The one is about changing POV (which a few people did in last week's exercise so it feels very similar). The other is about writing a scene between two people that's only dialogue (which we have a few experts at that floating around). The very last exercise is taking something you wrote for one of the exercises and cutting the word count in half.

[I woke up at 5, typed the word Weekly as the subject of a post, went back to sleep, somehow that first attempt at posting was gone, and now it's 10. You all feel free to do what you want.]

Ch 6

My friends, I have considered skipping this chapter because the exercise is so long. BUT. BUT. The point is to make you extra supremely self-conscious of what POV you picked and why and how that impacts your story. And I'm getting tired of all the fussing around explaining close third and how that's also not the only POV that exists. (Just the best, am I right?)

POV (Point of View) is one of two people: a character in the story or the author.

A note on unreliable narrators (because I like this point):

>Fictional narrators who suppress or distort facts or make mistakes in relating or interpreting the events are almost always telling us something about themselves (and perhaps us). The author lets us see or guess what "really" happened, and using this as a touchstone, we readers are led to understand how other people see the world, and why they (and we?) see it that way.

One of the more lovely parts of reading, that is.

Narrative POVs (the list):

1. First Person. I tell the story and you may only know what I know.
2. Limited Third Person. He or she tells the story and is an active participant. You still may only know what he or she knows.
3. Involved Author ("Omniscient Author"). No particular character tells the story. The POV may change from one to another character or to a view only the author could make. The voice of the storyteller may comment on what anyone is thinking and feeling, interpret behavior, and make judgments.
4. Detached Author ("Fly on the Wall", "Camera Eye", "Objective Narrator"). There is no viewpoint character. The narrator can only say what a totally neutral observer might infer of the characters from their behavior and speech. The author never enters a character's mind. (In this section, Le Guin admonishes us all for hoping that readers will cry because we're crying. Stop being so childish as to expect to move people with your emotions! OK?)
5. Observer-Narrator, Using the First Person. The narrator is a character but not the principal character. The main difference from (1) is that the story is not about the narrator.
6. Observer-Narrator, Using the Third Person. This is much the same as (5). The reader is usually safe in assuming this character is reliable.

Le Guin says this:

>In fiction, inconsistent POV is a very frequent problem.

For real.

>The POV exercises are intended to make you temporarily superconscious, and forever conscious, of what POV you're using and when and how you shift it.

Exercise.

Think up a situation for a narrative sketch of 200-350 words. It can be anything you like but should involve several people doing something. (Several means more than two. More than three will be useful.) It doesn't have to be a big important event, though it can be; but something should happen, even if only a cart tangle at the supermarket, a wrangle around the table concerning the family division of labor, or a minor street accident.

Please use little or no dialogue in these POV exercises. While the characters talk, their voices cover the POV, and so you're not exploring that voice, which is the point of the exercise.

Part One: Two Voices

First: Tell your little story from a single POV, that of a participant in the event---an old man, a child, a cat, whatever you like. Use limited third person.

Second: Retell the story from the POV of one of the other people involved in it. Again, use limited third person.

Part Two: Detached Narrator

Tell the same story using the detached author or "fly on the wall" POV.

Part Three: Observer-Narrator

If there wasn't a character in the original version who was there but was not a participant, only an onlooker, add such a character now. Tell the same story in that character's voice, in first or third person.

Part Four: Involved Author

Tell the same or a new story using the involved-author POV. Part Four may require you to expand the whole thing, up to two or three pages, 1000 words or so. You may find you need to give it a context, find out what led up to it, or follow it further. The detached author takes up as little room as possible, but the involved author needs a fair amount of time and space to move around in.

There is an optional exercise which I won't even include considering how long this one already is. Posting early this week.

Ch 5 Ch 4 Ch 3 Ch 2 Ch 1

>Telling a story in the third person remains the commonest and least troublesome mode.

Le Guin says, for all of you wondering what person you should write with. Throw first person out! Don't think you're special for writing in second! Stick with third...or like, don't. Do you.

Anyway, we're here to talk about verbs and not POV, so that was a digression.

>"The old dead writers lived in the past, so they couldn't write in the present, but we can."

This is interesting because I've certainly seen people declare they will set a book down as soon as they discover it's in present tense. But take this point from Le Guin:

>A story told in the present tense is necessarily focused on action in a single time and therefore a single place. Use of the past tense(s) allows continual referring back and forth in time and space.

I will say that seems a reasonable consideration when picking the tense of your story. Although are we in a completely different moment? She's insisting that most books use present tense, but I would say past tense is fairly healthy in the current market.

Exercise. This is a long one.

This should run to a page or so; keep it short and not too ambitious, because you're going to write the same story twice. The subject is this: An old woman is busy doing something--washing dishes, or gardening, or editing a PhD dissertation in mathematicsphysics, whatever you like--as she thinks about an event that happened in her youth.

You're going to intercut between the two times. "Now" is where she is and what she's doing; "then" is her memory of something that happened when she was young. Your narration will move back and forth between "now" and "then".

You will make at least two of these moves or time jumps.

Version One PERSON: Choose either first person or third person. TENSE: Tell it all in the past tense or all in the present tense. Make the shifts between "now" and "then" in her mind clear to the reader--don't two-time us--but be subtle about it if you can.

Version Two Write the same story. PERSON: Use the person of the verb you didn't use in Version One. TENSE: Choose: a) present tense for "now", past tense for "then" OR b) past tense for "now", present tense for "then".

Don't try to keep the wording of the two versions identical. Don't just go through it on your computer changing the pronoun and the verb endings. Write it over! Changing the person and tense will bring about some changes in the wording, the telling, the feeling of the piece, and that's what the exercise is all about.

Where is u/umlaut? It's his favorite quote!

>When the quality that the adverb indicates can be put in the verb itself (they ran quickly = they raced) or the quality the adjective indicates can be put in the noun itself (a growling voice = a growl), the prose will be cleaner, more intense, more vivid.

Le Guin proceeds to call me out (specifically, I feel) for using language softeners (rather, a little, kind of, sort of) and for other various ticks we might not realize make it into our writing. What is the ummm of the written word? Apparently, fuck.

>The bakery shop of English is rich beyond belief, and narrative prose, particularly if it's going a long distance, needs more muscle than fat.

Exercise: Write a paragraph to a page (200-350 words) of descriptive narrative prose without adjectives or adverbs. No dialogue. The point is to give a vivid description of a scene or an action using only verbs, nouns, pronouns, and articles. Adverbs of time (then, next, later, etc) may be necessary but be sparing. Be chaste. If you're currently working on a longer piece, you might want to try writing the next paragraph or page of it as the exercise. You might want to try "chastening" a passage you've already written. It can be interesting.

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3

The week in which we learn I don't know how to spell the word thesaurus. Why is it spelled like that? That's not the point.

Le Guin makes the point that adjusting your words because you're afraid of repeating them is going to stand out more than the repetition.

>She'd had enough cream, an ample sufficiency of sugar, and a plenitude of tea.

vs

>She'd had enough cream, enough sugar, enough tea.

There are plenty of ways that repetition can serve the narrative. Beyond words, some scenes repeat and the contrast is the point (a different POV, a different dynamic, etc). An echo can be used artfully and they come in all shapes and sizes. The structural ones are usually done so sneakily that you miss them.

This week's exercises:

1. Verbal Repetition: Write a paragraph of narrative (150 words) that includes at least three repetitions of a noun, verb, or adjective (a noticeable word, not an invisible one like was, said, did).

2. Structural Repetition: Write a short narrative (350-1000 words) in which something is said or done and then something is said or done that echoes or repeats it, perhaps in a different context, or by different people, or on a different scale. This can be a complete story, if you like, or a fragment of narrative.

Chapter 3 is all about sentences.

>In a narrative, the chief duty of a sentence is to lead to the next sentence.

Le Guin makes the point that a sentence that draws attention to itself is not the kind of sentence you want. She seems to have something against poets because this is the second chapter where she's compared the novel writer to the poet (and poets are here to give us pretty sentences!). If you do have the book, she covers some of my favorite topics on the mechanics of individual sentences: misplacement, danglers (as in the weekly title), and conjunctivitis (calling out you lovers of polysyndeton and asyndeton).

If anyone else saw the article in the Atlantic about the decline of reading, I thought this quote from Le Guin was apt (shoot, am I writing bad sentences):

>And the pity of it is that people not only can't write complex sentences, they can't read them. We are losing our literature to a dumbing-down process.

Anyway. She includes some examples of complex sentences and how authors have achieved some very long ones. Worth a read to see how it's done if you struggle with long sentences.

For the exercises:

1. Write a paragraph of narrative, 100-150 words, in sentences of seven or fewer words. No sentence fragments. Each must have a subject and a verb.

2. Write a half page to a page of narrative, up to 350 words, that is all one sentence.

Suggestions for topics: (1) has some kind of tense/intense action. (2) is something that would generate powerful emotion or sweep a lot of characters in together.

If you want the whole challenge, she optionally suggests writing part 1 again but switching the voice you use. If you tried colloquial voice, switch to a more formal voice and vice versa. For part 2, if you heavily used ands or ors to string your sentence together, try working in some fancier clauses. Or, if you already did that, try it the other way! And for the added bonus for people who like writing exercises, if you did two different stories across the two parts, try telling the same story and see what happens.

As always, weeklies are free to post. Don't worry about critiques. Drop in and see what everyone else makes of the challenge. I've found that just as useful as doing it myself.

I linked the first chapter last week which is available for free online. She gives examples of other works (in the public domain) that use language in a fun way. I actually have a copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God that's moved across the country with me multiple times and I've only read once. The interesting part about some of the authors that are picked out here: they're not afraid to use dialect. Modern writing says NO ACCENTS WRITTEN PHONETICALLY because it makes it hard to read. But then you have someone like Nora Zeale Hurston who writes

>"At dat she ain't so ole as some of y'all dat's talking"

Or

>"Don't keer what it was, she could stop and say a few words with us. She act like we done done something to her," Pearl Stone complained. "She de one been doin' wrong."

And there's a way in which that dialogue feels a lot more real to me. If I'm reading out loud in my head, I can hear these women discussing. Maybe that's an art we lost and everyone wants things to be in clean English nowadays.

But the point being made in this first chapter is:

>A story is made out of language, and language can and does express delight in itself just as music does.

The two exercises for this chapter are:

1. Write a paragraph to a page of narrative that's meant to be read aloud. Use onomatopoeia, alliteration, repetition, rhythmic effects, made-up words or names, dialect--any kind of sound effect you like--but NOT rhyme or meter.

2. In a paragraph or so, describe an action, or a person, feeling strong emotion--joy, fear, grief. Try to make the rhythm and movement of the sentences embody or represent the physical reality you're writing about.

As always, there's no fee to participating in the weekly so save your crits. If you try the exercises, leave a top level comment and just let us know which one you did. Everyone is welcome to comment on how successful they think the attempt was (unless the author says they want no comments).

But remember: READ THEM OUT LOUD TO YOURSELF. Make a vocaroo and send it directly to u/glowylaptop. Flood him with sound.

I'm going to add a few more top level comments for discussion. Feel free to participate in those as well.

Well, I was going to do a poll but that's unavailable unless I download the app. No thanks. I collected all the book titles that came up in last week's weekly. There will be a comment for each one. Please upvote the one you'd prefer to do. I need a winner to help organize this, so probably best to pick one.

As always, any other topics are welcome in the weekly. Posting is free so save those crits!

My update: I'm right around the 50% mark of my long work in progress and do things make sense anymore? Impossible to know. But my beta reader who told me I forget about the POV character whispers in the back of my head, so I don't get as distracted with all the other fun side characters! Probably.

Mods - take this down if it's not appropriate.

In the search bar, if you look up r/Fantasy, reddit now tags this community for recommendations riffing on Tolkien and flawed heroines. (AI is making the tags, probably.) I'm so sad about this. I see a lot of great content and reviews coming out of this subreddit that are more than just Tolkien. And I also don't understand how they got the flawed heroines. Is that really the defining topics for this subreddit? I feel like it's not.

I had two requested topics for the weekly. I'm taking up the first one: outlines. The second one, I'm wondering if anyone else would be interested: book club where we discuss a writing craft book. If there's interest in the second, let me know in the comments and suggest a book.

Alright. This is my process for organizing my writing. Please share what you do in the comments!

On the first draft, I start with a high-level outline. I like to at least know my destination, so when I pants half my stuff, it's hopefully not that obvious. Here's one for a WIP that I'm not actively working on right now:

---

Act 1: the exam

Intro to the World

Inciting Incident

Moral Dilemma

Act 2: the laboratory

The Experiment

New Requests

The Ultimatum

Act 3: revelation and escalation

Uncovering Secrets

Major Setback

Act 4: climax and resolution

Final Plan

Climactic Showdown

Resolution

---

There is a brief paragraph for each of the sections, not enough to create a whole chapter but enough to give me a checklist of things I want to accomplish. I might then write a short sentence for the next 3-6 chapters saying what I think needs to happen. Those are typically things like 'Character A and B have a fight'. I have also started doing quick summaries before I start writing chapters where I'll go through what has happened up to this point and where I think the chapter needs to end up, so I can figure out what scenes I need. I keep this brief because I don't like to plan too much, but if I ignore these steps, my characters never end up where I need them to be.

I will also write the dreaded query letter. I like to ensure I've thought through the main conflict and given my POV character some stakes. I'll go through the main points of a query (what do they want, what are they willing to do, what happens if they fail) for major side characters as well. I think this helps me flesh them out more.

So for the above outline, here is my very very early draft query (that is to say, if it sucks, of course it does. I haven't written enough to flesh it out.) I used the online query generator for this and seem to not have edited it into something more formal.

36-year-old lifelong academic Florence Spalding just wants to pass her qualifiers, but when a voice starts speaking in her head giving her the answers, Flo cheats on her exam and passes. Now, Flo is given a new top secret research project because of her excellent scores.

As Flo integrates into her new research lab and develops a romance with one of her labmates, she discovers the voice in her head is making increasingly dangerous demands. Flo is put to the test when the professor threatens to kick her out of the lab if she doesn't complete the experiment, and when the experiment requires her to sacrifice her new romantic partner, she has to earn her place in the lab and scientific history or lose the only person who cares about her.

Wow, that one is not great. As I write, I would work to give more specifics to Flo's romance and the dangerous demands from the voice in her head. It's pretty fluffy right now. I've only written the first chapter of the first draft. Usually, I polish between the first and second draft and let this be guidance for how I tackle draft two.

After the initial drafts, I do a process called reverse outlining. You read the chapter you've already written and write down what happens. I break it down into scenes. Each scene also gets a single sentence for the takeaways and any notes about what I think isn't working and why. I also might brainstorm ideas as I'm working through the parts that aren't working because I tend to get stuck when I'm in writing mode.

Here's one of mine for a scene that's been reviewed here:

Scene 1

Zara goes into the intake ward, makes a mental inventory of the patients for Marc, and adjusts the medications on the patients there. Rachel comes to warn her about Harper who shows up and reprimands Zara for not doing her job well. Zara and Rachel argue about the treatment of magic users. Zara searches for charts and argues with the head nurse Deb about how they’re missing. Scene nuggets: This scene should establish the diseased patients and the mystery around why asymptomatic people are being treated and disappearing. Deb can be cut and Rachel/Zara should receive a harsher punishment.

On revision, I ended up moving this to Scene 2 because there was too much going on to track the scene nugget I called out. The rewritten scene is more focused, I think. I also ended up cutting Deb entirely and drastically diminishing Rachel's role. Marc gets introduced differently and later. Harper also gets introduced differently and later.

That's my larger organizing process. I do something similar on a smaller scale for short stories. Flash fiction, I just write. It's short. I don't need plans.

Is that recognizable from Casablanca? Because I always think of Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart when I hear that, but apparently it's attributed more to some sports type person. You see where my priorities lie. Very old movies.

Anyway.

We were talking about chapter endings and scene endings and strategies as it relates to either of those things. And then I realized I have no strategy at all with anything and stuff falls out of my brain in a random fashion that occasionally happens to work. But maybe everyone else has a strategy? Are there rules? There can't be, right?

Anyone have some kind of epic ending they want to share? Or have you figured out the secret to really phenomenal endings and you're hoarding it like a dragon?

Also any other random things can go here in the comments.

This is a different thing. Like a purge piece for my thoughts.

Feel the need to note: this is a fictional creative writing piece and not an indicator of my personal mental health. Thanks for the concern to those who expressed it! Helped me understand I got the voice I was going for right.

1570

I can’t close my eyes because that’s when the nightmares come. Someone is waiting for me, in the dark, though it isn’t always dark but that’s not the part that matters, not when my feet start moving on their own and then I’m propelling myself forward even though all I want to do is turn around and run. It’s just…you know that feeling when you’re not supposed to want something but you do and you know you should stop but you don’t? It’s kind of like that but without as much guilt or conscious thought. Well, no conscious thought really, when I’ve closed my eyes. The someone never turns. I’m not even sure who they represent but I can feel them. They reach through the blank space between us somehow and the pressure of them aches down my side and latches around my ankle and drags me closer though I always stay far enough away to not be able to touch or hit or kick. And then, the nightmare follows me into waking and I am filled with holes in the spots where that someone grabbed me. So, I don’t close my eyes. I’ve been working out the best ways not to close them. After the first day, it got easier. But I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up and, I probably shouldn’t say anything, but the nightmares are starting to filter into my waking moments. I press my fingers into my eyes and press until, when I pull them away, the world is covered in spots of various colors and, in those spots, lurks that someone. If I blink quickly enough, the image fades and I’m left with the grit that’s built up from days spent trying to keep my eyes open in a world devoid of someones. And yet, when I run my hands over my body and prod the various crevices, I find new pieces going missing. New gaps I can’t account for. And I’m starting to think there’s something I haven’t quite puzzled out just yet waiting in the corners of my mind that might reveal itself if I embrace the nightmare, stop resisting, let myself reach that someone. That maybe I should let my eyes close, just for a minute, and see if the nightmare is as bad as I’ve been imagining. Maybe I’ll be fine…

One of the fun things about moderating is explaining to people what AI writing sounds like and then wondering what is going on when they come back with 'You don't understand! This is my life!' OK, calm down. It's just reddit.

In this process, I've started to gather some hilariously bad things AI has come up with. New favorite:

"he sank the way dead men sink--not dramatically, not slowly, just down."

I was a theater kid. We used to get to go to a fancy adult Shakespeare theater every year and perform our mini versions of the great plays. They'd call kids up on stage to do mini-challenges during the intermissions. My favorite was taking the line "And thus I die" and being assigned very ridiculous ways to die. It was the era of JNCO jeans. One girl's death was being consumed by her pants.

Now I'm wondering if everyone here has epic death scenes just waiting somewhere inside their brains. Or hilariously bad. What's a better version of sinking neither dramatically nor slowly? Give me your best death scenes.

Glowy and I have been chatting about when and how to reveal information. You have this cool backstory in your head where the character who is keeping secrets is really, I don't know, a drug trafficker who is dating a cop. You let the reader suss out that there's some kind of secret but you don't want to tell them what it is. When does that get frustrating to read?

I've seen this workout a few different ways. The author drops many cryptic hints that are consistently related but never quite enough for you to understand until the very last hint and you piece it together right before the reveal. That's fun for me. I also like ones where the secret is easy to guess as a reader and I've figured it out but the character hasn't figured it out. Then I'm waiting to see what happens when the ball drops. But less fun is when I know where everything is going and the characters do too. Then I'm just slogging through to the end because I can't DNF. I'm looking at all the books that have some kind of prophecy.

I have also read ones where the author was doing a great job building tension and then got to a point where they blurted out all the secrets but there was still a quarter or more of the story left. It can make an exciting story go to a boring story in a few pages.

So, what are everyone's strategies for handling big reveals? Do you like a Gone Girl style twist? Or must you give away everything up front?

Of course, it's the weekly so anything goes in the comments. I don't have a writing prompt but if you wanted to show us something about information reveals, I'm all for it.

Before the regularly scheduled programming: we've had some reports of people getting unsolicited emails with critiques instead of reddit comments. When you share a Google doc, anyone can get your email by looking at the Shared page in their account. That's why we recommend using an account that's not linked to you irl so you don't get doxed. I suspect most of the email people are using AI for whatever critique they sent you and trying to get you to pay for some kind of service. The mods over at r/betareaders tell me they get a lot of people from Brazil doing this. Ours are Italian. I can't really do anything to stop people from emailing you. I can ban people who are interacting on Reddit, but that doesn't stop them from seeing your content. Best bet is to ignore them, just like any other scammer, if they email you.

I don't care about rainbows. Someone tell me why there are so many stories about frogs this week. Or maybe the better question is this: why are there not more stories about frogs? So, I'm up for another writing weekly.

This past week, I've left a few comments for people saying I think there's a lack of specificity that kills immersion. I'm now wondering what would happen if I gave a vague outline of a story and asked all you writers here to fill in details. I suspect that I'd get a bunch of very different versions of the same story. Let's try!

Non-specific story:

One day, a boy walked out to a pond where he found a frog hopping around. He was excited to find a new friend, so he scooped the frog into a bucket and carried him home. His mother didn't like frogs very much. The boy snuck the frog up to his room and hid it in the closet where he was keeping a fish tank.

That's the outline. I'd like to see what kind of character you all can bring to my very flat short piece.

As always, you do not have to critique to submit to the weekly. If someone is open to critique of something they post, they can indicate that in their comment (and you're welcome to declare you only want people to say nice things!). Respect the requests.

If there's anything else anyone wants to discuss (like what's so interesting about frogs), go ahead and comment that too.

I finished a book yesterday. Well, two this week. I went to look at the reviews and was surprised by the rating being lower than I expected. I guess the author wandered into some controversy about her attempts at diversity being less than favorable to some of the other cultures she was depicting. I mean, I didn't think any of the cultures were depicted favorably but I guess that doesn't matter.

Anyway.

I clicked on the one star reviews because I was curious what it was I liked that other people hated. Long sentences. Info dumping. Telling rather than showing. And I didn't notice any of that! Those are comments I've made about other books I've read recently but not this one.

There's not really a formula or anything that says this writing is good and this writing is bad.

I guess I don't know. That's what I was thinking about this week.