My latest writing class gave me a great tip recently that I’ve been trying to put into practice. I had a bad habit of describing a character’s facial reactions vaguely with terms like “they made a face” or “they showed X emotion” but without many specifics. This leads to a blurry image in the reader’s mind and misses an opportunity to make the body language of a character distinct and memorable.
In an exercise, the instructor pointed out how everyone in the classroom had a different facial expression they associated with an emotion. “Disgust” might be a stuck out tongue, or a pinched mouth, or a frown, or recoiling from the source of disgust. “Amusement” might be a big grin, or an open laugh, or it might be a shy person covering their mouth to hide their reaction.
The point is, think about how your character expresses a particular emotion. Pick a real person like a tv show character or a real-life person like a friend as a model for them in your mind if you don’t have a specific image yet. Describe how they react to emotions facially and use unique specifics for every character. In general in writing it’s best to be specific whenever possible to sharpen the image in the reader’s mind, and this will help to create a distinct and memorable character instead of a visual blur.
I endlessly admire fic authors who have betas and write chapters and chapters ahead of what they post because you best believe my needy ass is slapping just-finished, mildly edited and typo-laden fics onto AO3 the moment they’re done so I can get that sweet sweet validation
I’m developing a theory that after attending a writing workshop or class, the best thing a writer can do is write something REALLY self indulgent. Just ignore every lesson you learned and go for the soppiest, most cliche, kink-driven thing that makes you happiest and revel in it. Have a ton of fun. Totally ignore EVERYTHING you learned.
This is for two reasons.
1) It’s really easy to freeze up after a workshop. You’ve got too many voices in your head and too much advice you’re trying to apply all at once. This can lead to months if not YEARS of writerly gridlock in your head that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy on your own belief that you suck and you sucked before the workshop and you’ll suck forever after and that voice isn’t just an asshole it’s also WRONG because
2) It takes time for the lessons you learned to sink in. Not to mention they’re ALL better applied to a second draft. Advice has very little place in most first drafts, that’s where you get to have fun and tell yourself the story and let the creativity flow.
If you keep writing and keep the creativity flowing, including if not ESPECIALLY with super self indulgent stuff, the lessons you learned WILL sink in and begin to show up in your writing. But the only way that’s going to happen is if you avoid getting blocked in the first place.
So thank you for coming to my TED talk, now go forth and write whatever soppy angsty h/c self-indulgent happy fic you’ve been DYING to write. Be free!
the best part of that story in context is that before they pull out their dicks, hemingway spends the better part of a chapter physically describing fitzgerald in great detail, claiming to be grossed out by him but obviously, obviously uncomfortably attracted
oh my god, it got better. I just went to find an excerpt and
Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty. His chin was well built and he had good ears and a handsome, almost beautiful, unmarked nose. This should not have added up to a pretty face, but that came from the coloring, the very fair hair and the mouth. The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.
ernest hemingway calm down and control your thirst a little
“The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more“ is a hell of a line
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.
but like who started the idea that fanfiction writers are somehow bothered by enthusiasm for their work???? cause i see posts all the time like “do writers really want to talk with us about their fics? Do writers really want long comments? I dont want to bother them” and i just think its absolutely ridiculous????
ofc i want to talk to you about it, and would love to hear you go on about it. i took time out of my real life to write this stuff down so we could all share these characters!!! the idea that you’re bothering a fanfiction writer, a fellow nerd, is absolutely crazy
Personally I attribute at least part of this to the shift of fandom onto Tumblr platform. Because of the way Tumblr works, multiple replies and reactions can get cluttered and overwhelming really fast, so leaving replies and feedback can be awkward. I have actually seen ‘tumblr etiquette’ posts going around scolding people for adding commentary onto posts when they reblog it! Actually discouraging people from reacting and adding their own words! If any of this attitude spills over onto fanfic posts and reblogs, no wonder readers are shy about adding their own words to an author’s posts.
Dear fans on tumblr:
WE, THE AUTHORS, REALLY WANT TO HEAR YOUR COMMENTS.
As a writer, I second this, call the motion, get a unanimous response from all writers and it’s carried. To be clear, there’s pretty much nothing worse than feeling like you’re writing into a vacuum or black hole where no one reads your stuff and nothing much better than a long enthusiastic commentary about what a person liked and why and could they ask a question and maybe discuss a perspective – and I’ve made a LOT of GREAT friends all around the world that started out just like this, with a comment on a story. If you don’t want to reblog, then send a note or an ask to the writer to share your comments. We live for these kinds of comments, this feedback that what we wrote touched someone. Tell us we made you laugh or cry and we’ll be thrilled and forever grateful. But if leaving a long comment is too much, takes too much time, a simple ‘I really liked this,’ or ‘thanks for writing this’ is also treasured.
I also think part of the hesitation comes from the massive stigma the outside world places on fannish enthusiasm. Readers are hesitant to talk to creators because they’re afraid of being seen as overenthusiastic or somehow weird.
I noticed this when I started writing and getting comments like “not to be weird but I love this” or “I didn’t comment on the other works in this series because I didn’t want to seem creepy,” and I realized that readers were intimidated by me. ME. HAVE YOU EVEN SEEN ME. But it’s exactly the way I’ve felt with authors whose works I admired.
So let me say this loud and clear:
AUTHORS ARE FANS TOO.
ARTISTS ARE FANS TOO.
ALL FAN CREATORS ARE FANS TOO.
We are the LAST people in the world to judge you for how or how much you like something and the first to understand and appreciate your enthusiasm. Because the way you love things? That’s the way we love things too. And if the things you love are the things we made, that is the greatest compliment in the world.
• interrupt a line of thought with a sudden new one
• say ‘uh’ between words when unsure
• accidentally blend multiple words together, and may start the sentence over again
• repeat filler words such as ‘like’ ‘literally’ ‘really’ ‘anyways’ and ‘i think’
• begin and/or end sentences with phrases such as ‘eh’ and ‘you know’, and may make those phrases into question form to get another’s input
• repeat words/phrases when in an excited state
• words fizzle out upon realizing no one is listening
• repeat themselves when others don’t understand what they’re saying, as well as to get their point across
• reply nonverbally such as hand gestures, facial expressions, random noises, movement, and even silence
Excellent sticky note for dialogue writing in fiction.
All of this. I get a lot of compliments on my dialogue and this list pretty much covers what I do (but some of it, I didn’t even realize I did, lol). I highly recommend reading your dialogue aloud (or imagining it in realtime like a movie scene) to see if it feels natural, which is what I do when editing.
First, let me put on my transcriptionist hat and say you’re damned right they do all of that (and it’s annoying as fuck when you’re trying to transcribe an interview).
Second, let me put on my editor hat and say that this kind of thing should be used very carefully in writing. A little for characterization is good. But dialogue in a book (or TV show, or whatever) is not at its best when it’s 100% naturalistic exactly as it happens in real life, if for no other reason than that 90% of conversations in real life are, frankly, pretty boring.
ABSOLUTELY read your dialogue out loud to hear if it sounds natural. Absolutely listen to how people really talk and try duplicate that in practice pieces. Then dial it back at least a few steps when you’re doing writing that you actually want people to read, because a lot of ums and uhs and repeated words or phrases are totally realistic, but also super annoying to dig through while you’re reading dialogue in a book. Use it for effect, not just to be realistic.
Avelera 