Jan 23 Meeting

Jan 23 – Story Elements
POV

First Person

“We must distinguish between the author and the narrator…, and between the narrator … and the character….” (1)

“The first-person POV in fiction does not represent the author. The first person is a persona; persona, as discussed in chapter to, means “mask.” This POV should be different from you; he should be free to have his own religion, politics, aesthetics, that may, but need not, coincide with yours. You as the author should not be blamed for what your persona does. If your persona is a serial killer, nobody should assume that you are a serial killer. If your fictional “I” performs acts of kindness surpassing Mother Teresa’s, this will not qualify you for the Nobel Pease Prize. E.L Doctorow says that “a novelist is a person who can live in other people’s skins.” Writing in the first person helps you identify and empathize with characters who are very different from you.”(1)

First Person Multiple POV

-Use many first person narrators, start a new narrator with a new chapters

Pros & Cons of First Person POV

Pros
“1. It’s technically the least ambiguous. The reader always knows who is seeing and interpreting the narrative action. No artificial objective knowledge is assumed. If the first person makes faulty inference, the reader will accept them as part of the narrator’s unreliability.
2. In our era, subjectivity – even in the sciences – seems to be the prevalent mode, so we need an option for telling a story subjectively, and first-person POV certainly gives you that option.
3. In first person, you can choose a voice most freely. While third-person narrative basically restricts you to standard English, in first person you may use slang, bad grammar, everyday language to arrive at an authentic narrative voice.
4. First person offers smooth access to a character’s thoughts. You don’t have to worry about awkward switches in pronouns, like “He opened the door and thought, I better thaw the chicken.”(1)
Cons
“1. We can’t take an outside look at our carrier of POV, unless we place a mirror somewhere, and mirrors have been overused in fiction. Avoid them unless you find no other solution. (Compensate for the inability to look directly at your character by reporting her thoughts about her appearance”
2. From the first-person POV, faithful reproductions of diverse dialogues may be implausible. Your first person may appear to be a theatrical genius with an amazing ear. On the other hand, to render almost every dialogue in one or two voices may be monotonous. Generally, it’s better to err toward the interesting side – good reproduction of dialogue.
3. That an “I” tells the story implies that the “I” is still alive. Thus, one source of possible suspense – whether the character will survive – vanishes in the first-person.
4. It’s hard to create a compelling new voice for each story. Many productive short story writers find it easier to write in the third person because they don’t have to invent voices so frequently. Once you create a strong voice, you might want to stick with it for a series of short stories or a short novel.” (1)

Second Person

“The author makes believe that he is talking to someone, describing what the person addressed is doing. But the “you” is not the reader, though sometimes it’s hard to get rid of the impression that the author is addressing you directly.” (1)

Third Person
Third Person Omniscient
-“In this POV, which is used infrequently in contemporary writing, the author knows everything about all characters, places and events involved. Since not everything can be presented simultaneously, the author jumps from inside one head to another. We observe from many angles. The ‘camera’ is conveniently set wherever the action is, akin to television coverage of a basketball game.” (1)

Third Person Limited
Subjective – “This POV resembles the first-person POV except usually it’s done in standard English rather than in the character’s voice.” (1)
Objective – “We observe what our “she” is doing without entering her head, and we don’t attribute the observation to another character. You don’t reveal the viewer – the way you don’t see the person holding a camcorder.” (1)
Omnipresent – “This combines the objective and the subjective approaches…. Although a narrator is not revealed, there must be an incognito. It’s hard to distinguish between the third-person POV narrator and the author.”(1)

Tense

Present, Past, Future
“Again, be aware of them, don’t switch between them in mid-paragraph, and if you do switch between them in mid-paragraph (of even mid-story), be damn well aware of it, do it for a reason, and make sure it works.” (2)

Active vs passive

“Active voice tends to work better. Again, be aware of the differences and switch only if there’s a reason.
Passive present tense: The book about insanity in cats is being taken home.
Active present tense: I’m taking home the book about insanity in cats.
Passive past tense: The book about insanity in cats was taken home.
Active past tense: I took home the book about insanity in cats.” (2)

Linear vs nonlinear

“A linear plot goes forward in time. It begins at the beginning and goes through to the end. It’s chronological progression.
A nonlinear plot jumps around a lot. It can employ flashbacks, concurrent plots, parenthetical concentric stories, or something even weirder, like going forward and backward at the same time such as in the movie Momento. This can make a story a lot more interesting, but it also can risk confusing the reader or viewer. A lot of stories, especially movies, intentionally attempt to confuse the viewer. It’s that hoary old “surprise ending” where everything is not what it seems.
If you do this, again, be aware of it, do it intentionally, and make sure it works. That’s pretty much the rule of breaking rules.” (2)

“NOTE : Learn the rules first. Then break them with confidence to achieve a desired result that cannot be reached within the boundaries of those rules.” (2)

Tone/Voice

“As a writer, you must be in command of at least one voice: yours. If you write in the first person, nonautobiographically, constructing personae, you must be able to create different voices, like an actor. For each persona, you might develop a different voice. But when you write in the third person, most likely you’ll need only one narrative voice. In dialogue, of course, you must create many voices. But the most important voice will be yours, something that will carry the narrative in a confident and confiding manner.
Of course, you may have a “literary” voice, different from you daily conversational voice, but unless you are driven by some kind of theory or ideology (minimalist, maximalist or whatever), I don’t see much reason for creating a dichotomy between what goes to your tongue and what goes to you fingers. Some writers do stiffen when writing, as though they were at a formal party or a job interview.” (3)

“Since metaphors can be interpreted in several ways, I’ll give you one more : Voice is a metaphor for a writer’s vigor. To make sure that it’s you speaking, take out all the tapes surrounding you. No dubbing. The tapes in your mind, something that sounds like someone else, are mostly clichés. Get rid of them. There’s nothing new that you need to discover about your voice. Discover means to uncover something that exists. Simply take the first and the lid off, and you’ll see the precious earthenware. Get rid of the static in your writing, which hides your voice. Static: excessive use of adjectives, adverbs and passives, imprecise word choice, clichés. (Later you might like to muffle your voice and achieve a smokey sound with choice modifiers, but first make sure you can be loud and clear.)” (3)

“The other consideration with tone is “your tone versus your character’s tone.” They can be the same thing or two different things. An example of the writer’s tone being the same as the character’s is Hubert Selby, Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. ….In that book, both the narrator and the characters have a very street way of speaking. An example of the writer’s tone being different than the character’s is when John Grisham does dialogue for uneducated hicks (which he does a lot). The tone of the writing is educated, but when he does the dialogue, it’s pure bumpkin in tone.
If you use slang, keep in mind that it changes with time. It can make your book seem really dated really fast. I tend to avoid it, to give my novel a fighting chance at longevity.” (2)

Foreshadowing

“Foreshadowing is a hint early in a story at something that will come up later. A good example is in the movie Demolition Man, when Wesley Snipes’ character says something like, “I’d lose my head if it wasn’t attached.” Of course, near the end of the film, he is decapitated.
Foreshadowing is a good device to give continuity to a story. Just don’t overdo it.” (2)








(1) Novakovich, Josip. Fiction Writer’s Workshop. Stone Press. 1995. pp 99-111.
(2) Dean, Michael W. $30 Writing School. Thomas Course Technology. 2004. pp 75-78.
(3) Novakovich, Josip. Fiction Writer’s Workshop. Stone Press, 1995. p 201.

From Jan 9th Meeting

Jan 9th – Picking your topic

“Coax new stories from classic plots by setting them in a different time and place; search through the timeless motifs of myth, fairy tale, and folklore; scour the expanses of your own experiences to spark new ideas. Let your memories come alive!
Some memories inspire us, other haunt us. Some memories cling to things we own, others hover around places we’ve been. Start with what you have, then nurture that fragment of memory: your teacher’s face, the smell of your grandmother’s cookies, the charming way your father used to whistle, the chill in your soul as you rushed to the hospital, the taste of salt spray that summer at the ocean, how it felt to hold your daughter’s hand for the first time. Turn those memories over in your mind, flesh them out, allow them to breath.”

L.I.F.E. – Literature, Imagination, Folklore and Experience

“Creativity isn’t seeing what no one else sees; it’s seeing what anyone else would see – if only they were looking. Ideas come when we peer at the world through another set of eyes.
So, look at your story from another person’s perspective. Step into the shoes of your main character and write a journal entry, a complaint letter, or a love note. Switch your point of view. Write a few paragraphs in first or third person. Think of how you would respond if you were in the story. Walk through the action, stand on your desk, crawl on the floor. And keep your eyes open for the doors no one else has noticed.”

“If you are drained of ideas, you might be trying too hard. You can’t make happy chance discoveries until you step away and stop worrying. Relax. Worrying about problems is like looking at bacteria through a microscope – it doesn’t help ‘em go away, t only makes ‘em look bigger.
So work smarter, not harder. Break your routine. Go to a movie. Have a cup of coffee. Abstain from octopus. Try writing in a different place or at a different time. Lift weights. Get up in the middle of the night. Place yourself in situations where you’re not at ease – risking and responding to new challenges forces you to think creatively and opens the door for serendipity.”

“Writers don’t have a viewfinder. The lens we look through is as large as our imagination. And when we can’t think of what to write next, we often try generating more ideas when we really need to set more limits. Skilled photographers carefully frame their shots just right. Skilled writers carefully fence in their ideas.
Nothing stalls writing more effectively than lack of focus. Freedom to write anything usually ends up as an excuse for not writing anything.”

“Question where you’re going. Don’t assume that you’re heading in the right direction just because you’re picking up from where you left off yesterday.”

Edited by Meg Leder, Jack Heffron and the editors of Writer’s Digest. The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing. Steven James. "Pumping Up Your Creativity". Pp 204-208



“Write about what you know. On the other hand, some writers advise: Write about what you don’t know because you will be free to imagine; knowledge will constrict you. James’ method of writing from a glimpse- so that you don’t know much about the people in particular but do know about their world (James’ novelist knew a lot about French Protestantism)- should give you a perfect compromise: enough knowledge but also enough ignorance and darkness to guess and imagine.”

“I must say, however, that I have seen many people blindly follow an outline of an event in a story (they say, “But that’s what happened!”) even when some simple, made-up adjustment might lead to a better more rounded story.”

“How much one needs to know about what one writes varies from writer to writer and from story to story. As you write, let that be a constant assignment: Find out how much you need to know about the raw material from which you make a story. If you find out that you persevere in reconstructing events from memory as faithfully as possible, without following impulses to make up anything, or even to exaggerate and beautify or uglify details, you are a natural nonfiction writer. You might still call what you write fiction, if you like, though the term will then be the only fiction in your writing. If you can with a straight face tell people that what you write is fiction, you will often find yourself in a precarious position to explain how you made something up. I would then advise you to acknowledge that you write nonfiction, and enjoy the apple of that tree of knowledge. There’s no reason to consider fiction more glorious than nonfiction.
The reverse also can occur. You might want to become a nonfiction writer, and yet at every turn you distort things, exaggerate and embellish them, and even introduce characters, places and events that had nothing to do with the original material. In that case you are a born fiction writer, which is nicer than saying you are a born liar. Fiction is a lot like lying. You start from something real, but for some specific purpose (not to get caught, to trick, to get money or whatever) you change at least one key element of the account.”

“Robin Hemley (author of The Last Studebaker and All You Can Eat) says he works from dreams. One impression from a dream is enough to inspire a story. For example, he awoke with an image of a man digging a hole in his ex-wife’s yard. He wondered why one would do something so bizarre, and in trying to answer the question he wrote a story about a man and a woman whose baby dies, who divorce, and now the man, haunted by guilt and love, digs in the yard.”

Get ideas from your childhood, your ancestors, and books

Novakovich, Joship. Fiction Writer’s Workshop. Story Press. 1995.

Good Morning To Everyone

Ok So here is the blog for Spilt Ink Writers Group. I hope that this will be helpful for people.
I'm going to post the notes I give out at the meetings here.