Sanderson 2013.7 - Viewpoint, Tense, and Style

before I just jump into election I've been gone so long do you guys have anything you like burning to know like about one of the other lectures or something but you know one of the guest lecturers said or how you know what wait questions you guys got for me how are things going what do you what is you having trouble with in your writing just once you throw a few questions at me and we'll do that for just a few minutes here along Chris is your first published book but you've written five yes I had exactly what yeah I said that's an excellent question so shows you're really paying attention that's work for me I really think it was a mixture of two things first off launches um when I sold that I figured out revision early in my career is much more of a one drafter I still had the one draft that's another term for a for an architect I don't use it as often because it kind of misleads people but I thought it myself it is more like a one drafter which meant that once the book was done I had real trouble doing their visions I didn't want to revise if I felt I'd learned stuff during the book I felt like I want to just write a new book that incorporated all that rather than going back to doing revisions I got bored of books too easily in other words and about the elantra Sarah's when I really started digging into revision and figuring out how to revise and how to take a good book and make it great that's that's more of a problem for someone like myself that has that inclination that when you finish something you want to set aside and go on to something else a lot of my my friends like you know Dan who I wish I could had to come talk to you but you know he's living in Germany right now his is very much a gardener he's very good at revision it has been from the beginning his problem is always getting a project off the ground or getting a good ending that sort of stuff like getting the pieces that come together is like he can revise a chapter to make each chapter brilliant but giving the whole thing to come together is is much harder for him and for me the whole would always snack together and every come together but it would all just be okay rather than being awesome the other thing that that made the difference was a lot of my early books were experimental I did write a cyberpunk I wrote a science fiction just action-adventure space operas what'd you call it um I wrote a comedy and I wrote two epics and it was settling on I really do want to do epic that that you know launchers is the first four I'm like all right epic fantasy is what I do this is and I wanted to make sure that's what I did and I would kind of nudge you guys that direction just a little bit meaning experiment early on in particular with some different styles and genres but Dan to bring him up again started an epic fantasy because you've read a lot of epic fantasies but his natural inclination is toward shorter stranger books or or thrillers or kind of what will you just call regular fiction but kind of new weird and stuff like that and that's what he was really good at writing and really excited him and writing even though we've read a lot of epic fantasy a lot of people like come into a class like this thinking that their epic fantasy writers just because you know they happen to like my books or during the era earlier you know when I was thinking it because we liked Robert Jordan or something and lighting that doesn't necessarily mean that's your voice Jancy another one of my first student could get published she came in and talked to you guys if she was writing an epic fantasy when she took the class from me and you know it turns out that her voice is why a even mainstream mainstream or you know or why a kind of fantastical but you know she found that that those were the stories that really worked for the spy although she told you that but she started writing epic fantasies it's kind of like that's what you do right and so try some different things really read more broadly now that you're experimenting with writing and try some stories like the ones you read and see if you find a voice somewhere else unexpected thank you for me I found it was epic fantasy and that might just be what happens with you but yeah all right anything else yeah yeah you just do it the same way that when you're you don't want to paint the rest of the fence or you've got one code on it done and it looks okay you just do it anyway and I say that to you because if you're like me the revision is never what I want to be doing even still I don't you say yep II I get to revise now that is the that is the the actual work part of my work you know doing them the world building and things like that is just pure fun I love doing I could do that all day the writing gets to be work you know but not as much as the revision so if it's not a natural thing for you I still think you probably need to learn how to do it there are some authors out there who are anti revision they say learn how to write it right the first time and then leave it alone this is a school of thought I don't subscribe to it I've never met a writer personally who I thought could get it right on the first try even the most brilliant ones I'm sure there are people out there who can do it but I find that at least a few solid drafts will always improve the writing don't go on eternally it is good advice not to just you know keep tweaking things you you gardeners stop tweaking eventually but a few solid revisions I found helped everything so we might be past it now but Howard when he was here said a couple times that his the way he thinks about going through stuff when he's kind of bored with it he says just keep chopping wood and carrying water until the river and the forest yeah yep yeah it's it's got to happen and you may have to figure out your own whether it's a carrot or a stick you know for me early on it was the stick it was if I don't do this I'm gonna end up doing a job that I hate because I will hate anything that is not writing because I fall in love with writing so much and so I better figure out a way to make a living off of it and that means doing what I don't want to do for other people it is the carrot hey I get you know I will buy box of Lindner truffles or whatever and you know every page I revise I get in trouble whatever it is you know pack of magic cards I've done that before yeah and whenever you know figure out what works for you figure out your psychology all right that's part of what this class is about figure out your psychology and learn how to exploit it there was a question over here some bit somewhere I think right yeah all right yeah well yes correct I am just curious maybe because you've written in both short stories as well as the yes my shorts are all novellas or novelettes meaning I write short novels I don't actually write short stories I've written one decent short story armored is even I think a novelette the decent short stories for a collection of Charlene Harris's that she's putting together called games dead people play and it's actually like 5000 words I'm so proud of myself I might be shorter but I think it strays in the novel and if it's novel that's over 7,500 words novella is 17,000 and when I'm writing those I think like a novel just shorter rather than a short story which Eric talked about which is a very different scholar yeah I'm just asking what method you use transition from I need bigger novel looking or lady yeah shorter stories fewer viewpoints fewer locations are your bait your big friends for writing something shorter like a novel if you want to write true shot stories go listen to Mary Robinette Kowal talk about the mice closure it's Rob Orson Scott Card's my explosion listen to his lectures and read about a murder plot listen to the right excuses where she talks about it she says some brilliant stuff about writing a short story but basically if you want to go short you pick character setting or plot and do one idea for them like a novella like I do I will pick one character element one setting element and one plot element and that becomes a novella for a novel I'm doing you know usually a dozen of each so yeah alright so if you point intense this is us going to maybe be surprisingly important to some of you meaning that you it's something you may not have thought a lot about but is one of the most important aspects of transitioning from from amateur to pro and learning how to control your viewpoint attempts and make it work for you will elevate you very quickly above the rest of the writers this is one of those things I talked I've talked about other ones before but this is one of those things that the editors and the reader can tell and like the first five paragraphs you know like the pianist and the metaphor I gave you you can tell the difference in a pianist who practice for 20 years and won in practice for two years you could tell in a matter of minutes for for writing the stuff you see on the on the first page the things that are gonna jump out i've netted or reader are how well you manage your learning curve and your info dumps which we talked about last time I was here and how well you made your viewpoint intense because those are the things you can really get in a few paragraphs that really jump out of you let's talk first about the viewpoints and then we'll talk about the tenses and what they do for you and how you can use them as tools there are two main tenses or two main viewpoints types used in fiction today can anyone tell me what they are which third third limited and first-person are their defaults and third we'll talk about the weird ones as well so you have them as arrows in your proverbial quiver but those are arrows that should be rarely rarely used okay we'll talk about how to do these well first can actually be there's several different breakdowns and first them and we'll talk about it the most common is actually I've had to define these myself just so I can understand them these are not standard definition someone else will have standard definitions but it's kind of like the movie camera first this is the first person that you get the impression that even though they're telling you the story they're telling it to you as it happens not after the fact it's not a flashback if you want an example the story that does this well go read uglies by Scott Westerfeld an actual an example of something that uses the first-person time the movie camera I've known how to out stick it explain it but it's not like you know some first-person which is the reflection first-person this is the first person and if you watch my lecture last year I probably have different definitions for these I just haven't grouped in my head so don't treat these as like but this is the one where where you get a first-person something like as anyone here read us an assassin's apprentice by Robin hobb excellent book brilliant use of first-person is a reflective first-person another one of these is wise there's a name of the wind by Pat Rothfuss these are the first person that you get the sense that the person is actually telling the story to you at some future point and that's going into kind of this flashback first-person yeah yeah these are the two main ones there is kind of another one that I see used very rarely and this is the storyteller and this one blends into a third omniscient this is the the kind of where you have a storyteller who's telling you a story and they reference themselves as I they may not even be a character in the story but they're telling it to you and so it's kind of a blending between this this was actually fairly popular in the older days you don't see it as much anymore I can't even think of a really good example of this Chronicles of Narnia okay yeah yeah and The Hobbit is kind of feels like this though I don't know if you ever uses the first for it I think The Hobbit is just true third omniscient yeah okay okay yeah so yeah I haven't read read wall I know I feel like a doofus that I haven't read read wall but we will use that as an example that so yeah but you've got this sort of thing it's used it's used much more rarely but it is kind of this blending between the two and it's actually one of the ways the third omniscient does work that I've seen it work so these are your your um your your different breakdowns there we'll talk about what each of them do I will mention that this is kind of I found it's hard because I don't read enough I do read in the genre but don't read enough to tell it feels like this has become the default in why a recently first person using the eyes yeah first person definitely either one of these two but it feels like this one's kind of taken over a bit like you don't get the sense that this is happening that someone's sitting after the adventure and tell you to you you feel like you're getting almost a stream of consciousness formed into a first person as it's happening alright so keep that in mind if you're writing your writing ye that this is the kind of the default it doesn't mean you have to do it but it is something it is something that that's very popular in the genre right now so third limited it is your basic third-person viewpoint but third you could say is split between limited and omniscient but they're so different that you really want to kind of think of them as two different two different viewpoints third limited is where a given scene is from a single characters viewpoint and in that scene you describe everything through that character's lens so to speak okay and so if they can't see something then you can't describe it through sight for instance if you're in my viewpoint and the door slams you say you heard a door slam you can say a door slam but you don't show the door slamming you show I'm hearing it or you you talk about him hearing it you don't want to you know the course you want to use shows that rather than tells B you'd also don't want to imply things happening offstage that the character can't see you also stay away from information the character doesn't know and when you give a description you try to give a description through this through the character's eyes and their lens so that you are giving characterization at the same time this kind of blends into lecture we had last time where we talked about info dumps and how really awesome storytelling is going to do your info dump by way of the character well this is an extrapolation on that okay so the tenses are basically past and present and freaky future that's your freaky one that you're only allowed to use if you take an experimental writing class or if you want to get published and like some experimental magazine or something like that I suppose there could be uses for it otherwise but you really you know stay away from this one it's scary stay away particularly from second person future tense down here second person second person like yeah it's a choose your adventure books are in second person and there are some very experimental stories they can do cool things the second person the thing about them is it kind of just gets old after like 2,000 words unless it's like and it's use your own adventure or something which is why you got to be really careful with both second person in future past and present surprisingly are surprisingly similar if you're used to one the other one will jar you for a little while and then your mind will switch over and by the time you're about a third of the way through the book you won't be noticing anymore is what we find that said there are some people who really feel that present is more immediate in past is less immediate so they love present that said past is the default for a lot of the mainstream adult science fiction and fantasy in Y day is split between present and past right now I would say that if you go into a bookstore and randomly pick up a popular why a book there's a pretty good chance it's this first person in the present tense but but it switches between the two you'll find you'll find everything in NY a show do you guys know the difference between these Susan anyone who don't feel embarrassed is confused by the idea of past versus precedents okay yes okay so with past versus present tense you want to probably default to past debts he went to the store and picked up a bag of groceries rather than saying he goes to the store and picks up a bag of in your narrative stick to saying everything in the past tense and stay very far away from present tense even if you know it gets kind of tricky if you're writing in the first person and it's still the case and you're writing like this one this gets really this gets really problematic because for instance if I say you know I was I was a detective on the streets of Chicago my best friend was Willie Willie is a because he still is does that make sense you've got this sort of weird transition thing where you can transition into into present tense because Willie is still your best friend and he's still this I would suggest stay away from that and just thinking completely the past tense if this sort of thing is it's confusing for you or if it's just just go ahead you will never go wrong writing everything in past tense even say Willie was a because it's all taking place in the past and you don't have to worry about present okay third person present yeah a lot first book of the recluse series is third person present so if you go pick that up and you want to see it's badly modest it eliwood asset jr. I guess is how I should say it because we're on camera I should say properly he's a good guy and I think the first book is in present tense you see it a lot more in the past because once science fiction fantasy science fiction fantasy as genres are relatively new the novel as a genre is relatively new but you know you've got sci-fi books taking off in the Golden Age really in the 30s and 40s and things like that and then fantasy really is starting to establish itself in the 60s and 70s that's like just a blink of time when it comes to you know storytelling and things like that and so it took a while before we really settled on what it is we do and this could all shift maybe across the next 20 years everything will shift back to going to Bob to present-tense who knows but you'll find a lot a lot to find things different and um and all their books for instance a lot of the older book are not as are not as strict on viewpoint as the newer ones are for instance you go back and read the original Ender's Game I think they've an he's actually updated it and changed some of the tense things but you would occasionally slip into beans tents just for like no reason and you'd like to have a to paragraphs of being and things like that because you know it wasn't a standardized back then and nowadays if you pick up one of Scott Card's books every time there's a viewpoint shift there's a line break and you shift to someone else's scene like you give an indication we are now swapping heads and that's that's what we do right now you give a light light like and brick and in your manuscript you put a pound sign alone on its own line Center it and that means line break and then really your trick right here so you've got your tax in this first 72 you want to establish whose viewpoint we've moved to and if it's if it's a new character you the first character mentioned people are gonna default to assuming that's the viewpoint unless you can you can draw us out of it very quickly so that's how you want you do third person limited is you you do a line baked break or a chapter break to switch to a new character tad Williams is very good at this if you go read some of his books he's very good viewpoint shifts Robert Jordan did it quite extensively and I think he was a master of the third person limited despite starting his book with a paragraph of omniscience so let's talk about you now know unlimited is at least you've got you've got a handle on it so everyone have a handle on what first and third limited are any questions about that you know what they're we'll talk about what what they do in a few minutes omniscient is this weird beast where you are in everyone's head at the same time this is easiest if you're doing the storyteller right an omniscient with the storyteller with the out even sometimes the first person first perspective I mentioned The Hobbit it's like this it is hardest to do in the true omniscient style which is basically every paragraph is a new viewpoint and you're gonna show everyone's thoughts in the same scene and you're not going to withhold any of them I feel that the master of this was Frank Herbert and doun is the great science fiction/fantasy omniscient book and if you want to learn how to write write omniscient you should probably look at dude one thing you'll notice they does with omniscience he doesn't live hold any information if someone walks on stage with the other characters and they are secretly a traitor they think well it's I'm so sad I have to betray these people you see immediately what's going to happen he does not hide secrets from you he shows what everyone's thinking and feeling so the point that David Lynch when he made the movie decided to give everybody voice overs so you could get the omniscient viewpoint and it was really creepy but I still not very fond of that movement you guys seen the old movie staying staying in the movie yep and in what like black leather or something like that yeah yeah yeah it's it's it's got Scott Patrick Stewart in it as gurney it's got Patrick Stewart with a mullet I mean come on it's actually a very fine movie but it does weird things like that one of them is they try to convey the omniscient viewpoint of the books by having people's thoughts as you as you zoom in on them it is very hard to do very hard I would recommend you could you not do it except as experimenting unless it's something you're passionate about and it's something you're passionate about go for it but understand this is really hard and you may want to practice with this or this first all right keep that in mind but we will talk about how to do omniscient as well so the bulk of our conversation is going to be about choosing between third limited and first person and why you would make it a choice between one or the other anyone who's not taking the class before cinema cheating tell me why would you why would you want to pick one or the other what do you think that the difference is between these what do they do we talked in the past about having characters that don't start off being relatable if you have that character and a first-person view point it will turn more people off because they have to put themselves get that person yeah yeah that's true you could first person tends to be let me just say this you tend to want to keep too many fewer viewpoints okay so let's put a poll up here if you were why would you want to keep the fewer viewpoints people that are trying to put themselves in the character it really breaks the magic if they have to keep switching okay yeah that's that's reasonable yeah because they're all gonna be saying I and because of this a lot of times when you read first-person narratives you don't know the main character's name right like I couldn't tell you the main character's name from from uglies if I thought about it maybe but it's because they're you know did you use a lot of eyes yeah yeah you know that's just the thing so fewer view points is usually the suggestion on that and because of that this is a legitimate thing if you're gonna have a really nasty viewpoint you could not maybe want to do first person because of that the immediacy and the closeness yeah one interesting voice so we're gonna do this as first this is the worst table ever okay one interesting voice can just really be shown off in a first-person because if you've got a character voice that's just engaging and fun and interesting I bet the why a group can point out some examples of books that do this because it's something that Y attends to do really well you've got you just want to read about their voice of a single first-person narrative from them can be just charming yes so to dig into this first person can be more unreliable a third can still be unreliable but it's trickier first it's much easier to have a nun Radha this is a character's withholding information from the reader because they're telling the story they can choose not to say certain things and they can tease you with certain things I built a whole series doing this the Alcatraz series where I made fun of the fact and that helps that cell with third you can dole out information and a much more interesting way or not more interesting more like you can jump to all the characters around a character knows the information and you can give little secrets so that the perspective jumps perspective jumps can help you dance around that unreliability you can withhold the information by who you show whose eyes you show so it's it can be an advantage depending on what type of story you want to do do know that you can do an unreliable third person and you can do a third person who withholds information it feels like cheating every time I do it okay because if the character knows something you've really got it here's a screen riding trip where you got to hang a lantern on it right if the character knows something that the reader isn't supposed to know yet you've got to have a reason the characters and thinking about that and the more you do that the more the more the more strange it's going to be on the reader like if you have that the character that no I can't think about that too painful the reader will generally go along with that a little bit if they're doing it too much they're just gonna be like oh come on get over it but if it's first-person and they're saying I don't talk about this this is private to me that actually goes across a lot more easily to a reader if that makes sense but you can hide information and third a great example if anyone's read bad The Wheel of Time boats Matt Cawthon is an unreliable third person limited character meaning that he thinks certain things that convinced of butter but deep down he actually doesn't believe them but he thinks them and so it's like his third surface boss and his deep thoughts are contrasting each other and so in the third person perspective Robert Jordan will throw show his surface thoughts and that will allow then his actions will show his deep thoughts and you can get across the idea that he's a bit unreliable and some of the ways he sees the world and that's just that's less you know in this one being directly unreliable and more being a character who has a another Lyle perspective unreliable perspective on the world they see the world in a way that that you say okay this is this is how they see the world they're not lying to me but they're wrong and they show that they're wrong about what they do you know like they said number one don't do too much number two find a mechanism like I said you hang a lantern on it were you specifically cellular reader yes I'm not telling you this but I promise I'll tell it eventually for instance I used kelsier was a bit unreliable and miss Warren first Mistborn book and this is this is expanded by making him a character that from the get-go you understand is a character who is flamboyant who has a lot of impulsive behavior and you can follow in his thoughts when he says I'm not gonna I'm not gonna worry about that that's something for later on whereas another character for instance say said would not do that and you wouldn't buy it because say says reflective and he ponders on things and he digs deep into them and so though one character because of how I established the character to be unreliable where another one couldn't be unreliable I'm and then when Kelsey will think about because I had to I had to shadow the plot his true plot for what was happening at the end of the book which I won't tell you I don't want to give the spoiler for anyone hasn't read it but he has a deeper plot but he what I would I would do that the mechanism is when he got close to anything no that's only the see contingency plan I don't want to have to do that let's not dwell on it which again is what we call hanging a lantern on it word that's basically me saying promising you is the reader Hey yes I'm withholding some information you will find this out eventually yes you're smart for noticing pay attention and you'll be rewarded which makes readers more likely to accept it but again if you do it too much they're not gonna like it okay and it's legitimate that they're not gonna like it because it's kind of a dirty trick all right so I would say personally the two biggest biggest things to think about it's the number of viewpoints you want to use between the two third person limited tends to be much stronger at a ton of different viewpoints and first-person tends to be stronger at a single or maybe two very dynamic viewpoints the other thing is if you have one central character and your story's really about that person and who they are first person can be pretty awesome one thing that is a consideration is that first person by its nature even if you're doing this one which does minimize it there's a sense of lack of urgency a little bit because the person is telling you the story so you think they must be okay right now this could be totally mitigated you could that the best first-person stories will will not make this a hindrance they'll make it part of it for instance you know that quoth lives in name of the wind because he starts telling his story it's all a flashback but the urgency is not whether his growth is gonna live but it's like oh no he's setting himself up for a major failure I you know the whole series is basically about how this hero becomes a broken innkeeper who you know who's having it was a very different person right the same thing is basically what happens in assassin's apprentice where you get to see him years later you like how did you end up in this place poor fits and that allows you to build some urgency that's only used by this one and this one right here there's just a slight twinge in the reader that yeah they're telling me a first-person story so they're probably going to survive through it so keep that in mind that said the the twist that it's first-person but there are ghosts telling the story that's been done a lot doesn't mean you can't do it but every time I tell this you know if I ask the question someone usually says oh I had a ghost it could be I could trick them as first person they are dead but yes that has been done I think the lovely bones is that isn't it it's like a first-person story what's that okay it's not a twist that's that's good because the twist it their ghost is done a lot our has done a lot in the past what's that and I said nothing new Under the Sun yeah I don't think that said you know so vampires have been done a lot and stuff in my religion books don't yeah but just just to understand where you're coming from when you do some of these things third-person because it's inherently a little more reliable does allow you to kind of set a narrative tone for the book alright so this lets you this lets you cheat on voice a little bit meaning you can use your voice and yes you're going to try and show everything cue characters a viewpoint but it'll all be tied together because you've got basically you know this third-person narrator who who is telling you the story that's just telling you through the eyes of the various characters that's why something like The Wheel of Time has set sort of narrative cohesion despite having 120 different viewpoint characters because even though in each scene you will show you know that it's that character by that how they respond to things and by the descriptions there is a narrative voice for at all particularly in the descriptions and things like this which allows you you can you can get away with for instance using words in the narrative that the character wouldn't necessarily use when describing things right this however let you let you cheat on info dumps the reason that you can cheat on infinitely anyone I guess what you can cheat on info you can put so many info dumps in the first person person's telling the story and you can stick it in their viewpoint and you can make it a riot to read you can hide the info dumps so much more easily in this because if you imagine you're very dynamic character and you know you want to give this info dump of you know everybody has to go and learn the magic materially I hate this stuff okay we've got to go and we've got to like go I get painted up and throw mud at each other or whatever you know whatever you can have the character go off on how much they hate the magic things like that you know like I I eventually want to tell a story about someone who has to go shovel dragon pail it's like dragons are awful i hate dragon see I got a shovel the dragon poop you can you can do this cheating which which keeps your learning curve actually a little bit lower as you info-dump which is another advantage to an nya it's more immediate it's faster and it allows you to tea on this this tends to be more grand this tends to allow you to have kind of those slightly out of character moments where you know you describe the beautiful vistas as you pass them even though the character may not be able to form words that would put that all together you still try to keep it with you point though try and break the point but like I said you can cheat on it a little bit and so you can kind of see what these two things you're doing that said you can steal one from another for instance I think that that that Pat Rothfuss you know name of the wind has some grandness to it but if you read that book it's really about one character right and who that character is it's not even about the plot and that's why the first-person narrative that works so well if you read some of the great epics the third person the third person or third person omniscient allows these kind of big sweeping moments in these grand cast of characters which allow you to do some different things in your storytelling you can adapt either tool to what you want to use but those are kind of what they naturally do questions comments thoughts if you prefer one of the other go for it honestly just home using that one end up like yeah well the thing about it is horror is different from slasher when we say horror most people think slasher because of the slasher films in the 80s and 90s what Scott is talking about there is actual work actual Marv dying is the easy end for an actual horror and if you go read the great classic like Lovecraft they're all in first person and they're about someone discovering something awful generally about themselves that they don't want to discover and you don't want them to have to discover and have them to listen to them discover it and talk about it is excruciating horror tends to be a very character driven genre the Jon cleaver books by by Dan are in first person they have this one captivating interesting person you point and the horror of them is you know that the boy in them is more of a monster than the monsters he hunts that's the horror the horror is not is the monster gonna kill me and so that's why first-person works so well for a good horror story would be what I would say yeah it does it does right now don't use that as an example because Pat is using a frame story he actually didn't start with the frame story in place it's the last thing he added for that book and he's doing something kind of I wouldn't say gregarious but definitely non-standard if you haven't read the book he starts in the third person narrative and then jumps into the first person soon as clothes starts telling a story and the bulk of the story is in the first person so yes you can blend them and you can do cool things with blending them but don't use that as the standard use that as somebody who's taking both tools and using them in interesting ways now you do touch on first-person whenever you go into dialog and third-person yes you do we're talking mostly about the narrative suffering out the dialogue we'll talk about how to write good dialogue and things like that but this is we're separating that out right now and just saying we're talking about the narrative in the viewpoint yeah yeah okay so you've got two characters trying to achieve the same being aware of what you're doing is seem like what you're doing there as I say you were taking like in that second one you're taking a bit of our mission and you're using what omniscient can do and bring it to the table and kind of combining it in like Pat combined first and third but yeah be aware of what you're doing and be aware what your tools accomplish and why you want to use them in certain ways and for them well majority of you my suggestion is that you pick one of these two for a given project don't you know try the bolt but pick one of the two and get good at it now if you want to experiment go for it just know what you're doing the whole point spots is know what you're doing do it intentionally all right because most of the time you're going to be doing one of these two and I would suggest that you you stick to one of them are you at least practice on my order sit back up on it do you practice both of them I'm going to talk about kind of how to do some of these and I'm gonna focus a little bit more on the third limited because I think this one is done poorly more often when people do first they don't generally make mistakes you don't accidentally make I somebody else for a paragraph right that's not to say that this one is easier because doing a good voice is hard but what it is is if you're gonna do this you laughs out of an accident less often you tend to stick in your your your your viewpoint much better though there is that that temptation to lapse in between past and present and a first-person which you can do you can switch back and forth between them but I'd say it's it's a headache so I would suggest not doing that too much does anyone does The Dresden Files ever do that does he ever talk about the Sabres talkin present or was it straight yeah yeah yeah yeah he and so he lapses in the voice even though the idea is that he's like do it I think the idea is that he writes these things down after their reflection even though he doesn't have a frame story for him so so that's a you know you can set a time for when it's being written like right after the adventure Harry sits down and writes this down and at that point the eases can be present tense if they still are and things like that but it's really tricky y'all just mentioned that you it can give you a headache but Dresden Files does first-person very well so let's talk about how to not great viewpoints I mean you're very person limited and let's talk about what's awesome about third person limited because it has become the default for most of the books that most that you guys will be writing I would say the majority 70/30 of you and this class are probably gonna be writing third person limited just because I know what genre is your writing actually I would honestly say that one third of your doing that one thirty view during first one-third if you don't know and so you're doing a bad version of this just kind of by wandering through it you want to use this intentionally the reason for this is if it's intentional it allows you to evoke character in every sentence and really good third-person particularly the beginning of a scene all right at the beginning of the scene you want to have Hughes whose viewpoint it is beyond saying it's the character you want to have women have descriptions that are in viewpoint the easy example is I always use is I used the real time because I love the wheel of time you could tell in the wheel of time there's a group of characters from a desert culture they view water very differently and so when grabber Jordan will jump into one of their viewpoints he will do often do a description that says I couldn't believe how you know how much water this person was drinking or that they would use it to wash their face or think something like that that would that would be in viewpoint as a description not he walked over to the bucket and dump some water on his head he walked over the bucket and wasted a bunch of water on his face right that's a different description you can see right there how that description would change your viewpoint you have respect as a reader and you you sometimes just need the he walked over and took a ladle and dumped water on his face you do you know the majority of descriptions are honestly gonna be that because you don't want to draw too much attention to it but I would say every couple of paragraphs and particularly at the beginning you want some of these descriptions to be very and viewpoint even if it's not you know they Revere the water it's like they grabbed a little water and dumped it on his head man that would feel good as I stood there holding his towel to wipe him off but I didn't dare right that's going into for third person but you just put he didn't dare you know it thought it watched the water dribbled down the head and just almost wanted to lick it off those are different ways to describe it right different characters different descriptions so use your descriptions others are jargon jargons with a junior right now lethargy Gargan jargon is another thing this is very useful in science fiction or fantasy to use jargon don't overload us on it particularly you know weird jargon but again if we're using the ideal example they call people wet Landers or they call people foreigners you could have you know the foreigner did this rather than calling them by the name you you call them by something that's that's local to their culture and sprinkling things like that through again stay resist the urge to come up with too many really weird ones this is a problem with fantasy particularly in your first chapter that learning curve remember if everything is jargon your readers eyes are gonna cross and then we like wow everything is like an X in the Z the best forms of jargon are gonna feel alien but be immediately understandable such as wetland ER right that's a good one and sprinkling in a few terms from the culture are okay a few new words and things like that but you know try to use ones that are gonna be immediately recognizable isn't it kind of a sign of success that at the climax of the book you can have a sentence pretty much weird most of the words are jargon and yes yes that's kind of a it's kind of a gold medal but it's like yeah I don't want to say it's like you get you get points if you can sneak that in and by the end they say character says something that would be completely unintelligible for you start at the book and now it makes perfect sense to you but you've got to be really careful about how you do that that goes back to the learning curve and description stuff that we talked about last time right so these things blend together but the idea is to do stuff like this I prefer to frequently not actually really but use thoughts in italics stolen from the first person narrator right actually going directly in the first person narrative for a cow's eyes paragraph some people prefer to not do this it's there's kind of division among writers the the opposing perspective is too say you know instead of I wonder what he's having for dinner just saying what is he having for dinner and both those have arguments have something till one's more immediate one is kind of a hanger lantern on oh by the way we're in this viewpoint remember because you will say you know I wonder what he's having for dinner right now you know Mary thought it's kind of a hey do you remember we're in viewpoint but it's less immediate and it's a little bit more of a tell than just saying what was he having for dinner or what was he doing over there which you can do directly in your narrative and you'll kind of want to intentionally decide what your style is for thoughts okay which of those you want to do or what blend of them you want to use this is probably stuff you haven't thought about a time maybe some of you have but it's actually very useful to spend some time developing your style and deciding how am I going to indicate what viewpoint we are in and how am I going to cement that in the character in the readers mind one of the biggest criticism against new writers fiction is that we lose viewpoints right you have this great like action sequence or something like that and throughout the action sequence we never know what's happening in the character like you know like a car drives off a cliff and that in viewpoint you should be your first Direction should be how does the viewpoint character activist you know his head slammed back against the chair everything shook and it was chaos that's the the better way to do it a lot of newer writers will say the car went off the cliff flip three times smashed into the ground there's you see the difference between those two one is strongly in viewpoint pulls us into the character the others tried to write the book like a movie with some camera off distantly showing what's happening this one generally and unless you're doing this one intentionally this one generally is where you want to be guys because your stories are about your characters and with we're in the in the character mind if we're feeling what the character is feeling it'll actually be a lot more immediate to us and it'll feel cooler to us van tumbling off the cliff right you don't need to use them just keep that in mind develop your style intentionally some people do not like fuss because they feel too much like they're they feel like those are a break of you point I think in thoughts in my head some people don't and it feels alien to them when I have my characters construct complete sentences I always have talked to myself and blue senses my head and it may be appropriate you have some characters you thoughts and not other ones because depending on you know how how how the character thinks if you're having trouble putting it in first see if your readers are losing viewpoints if they are you've got a problem if they're not you may be doing these other things or these things well enough that you're holding viewpoint the trick is we really do generally want to try and invoke emotion we want to you know we want to let us without going into a few sickness without overloading us on on these things you know where any character is important we want it as readers know how they feel if they go off the cliff and they and they're excited that's a different character than the one who goes off the cliff is terrified like the rest of us or the one things not again right like the whale those are different things yeah they do very different things and we wanted you want to be a vocal emotions in your reader and you want to be doing that by the way the characters are feeling about the actions again don't give these big long descriptions of what they're feeling but do give us emotional cues having someone scream as their head gets smashed back and and then like you know and you describe it in a chaotic way and evoke this sort of sense of terror that's good it's gonna keep us in the characters head okay so third person try it be intentional about it and make your focus in your goal on getting everything across through the character's eyes and legs in fact practice this this week when you're writing if you're doing first-person either one try and do your descriptions to the character's voice and first-person you can do it a little bit more easily you work on you know the what character voices its character sarcastic his character is his character depressed is this character a pessimist you know the character said it says and then we drove off the cliff as I knew was going to happen you know you can put it into the characters you point there and you can see right there how the first person this one is going to be a little less immediate sometimes because of the way I just described that but anyway try and do this don't have much time to keep going on this because I want to talk a little bit about word choice because next week we're gonna have to jump to plotting and so we have to lose we use some of this prose stuff behind but but yeah hopefully this has you at least thinking about it there are more resources online by writers talking about viewpoint intense and I think if you can do this and you can do info dumps really well your first page will get read then you have to do character and plot really well the reason I focused the site focus on these ones up front is these are kind of the things that you should be practicing each day as you're writing plot is something you will have to work on mmm it's almost less consciously right you'll get an instinct for it but your prose you can be like alright let's make this this passage more in the viewpoint let's try and say what would this character do and you can do these sort of things they'll be hallmarks of the profession writer the thing you want to be working on with your prose in conjunction of this is you generally want to be more concrete and you want to be more immediate and you want to be more precise all right this one means fewer words this one means the right words all right this one means using words that evoke a sense and words that um that have a concrete impact I can't use concrete in the description of concrete though and tangible there you go excellent this Angela this one means active rather than passive okay this one means that you are cutting out the fluff so these are generally considered by most writers to be the hallmarks of strong prose particularly in the type of prose we're doing now there is something else over here nebulous which is beauty aesthetics yeah this is this is the sort of thing that taking a class from one of the poets on campus can talk to you about better than I can we do want to have beautiful language we do want to have good prose I subscribe to more of no Orwellian theory for my own writing George Orwell said that he wanted his writing to be like a windowpane through which you saw the story and the ideas the prose if it was too cluttered would be like a dirty window pane and if the prose was too flowery and beautiful he felt that you would end up looking at it instead of the story and some books are about the flower and prose there are some stories where the prose is like a stained glass window and you can see stuff on the other side but it doesn't matter as much as the stained glass window itself I feel there are a lot of of writers that are doing them that's perfectly reasonable and it's alright even science fiction fantasy there's some writers to do this they do a good job I have heard Dave Farland talk about the idea of uber prose which is a combination of these two concepts that when you sit stop and look at it you realize that it's beautiful but if you're not you're just getting the story he usually uses Tolkien as an example of someone who is capable of doing this and I would say that that does work I find that Pat Rothfuss one of his good things is he's really good at this but I don't find myself distracted by it very often and some people have a natural talent for this other people like Pat just spend hours and hours and hours on a single sentence trying to get it right you'll have to decide where you want to be on this but even in this type of prose generally these are the things that are that are kind of pushing you toward this all right you had a question it is the character he gets away with having a poet basically as a main character who wants to describe things like this maybe hates poets but you know he is a poet that's the that's the irony of it yeah do what the story demands Pat is really good at this he's probably the one of the best ones writing China is very good at it too there are some other people who are very good at this if you're capable of doing this go for it if if it's not I mean you know I don't try for this very often I want my stories to be windowpanes I will try a paragraph here and there to do something more beautiful I like to have cool metaphors some of these things that work really well but my focus is almost always on the character and making things clear and it's one of the big differences between my writing and Pat's writing so depends on what you guys want to do so concrete language try and make things more concrete and what I wish I could do is pull out one of your writings and put it up on the screen and go through it with the class and show you what I mean by this but I don't think I want to do that and embarrass any of you too much but that's the way to learn it you want me to do it to you all right all right let's let's Apollo that's that's that's doing I don't know how much time we have we really need to be ending here do we want to do this for like a few minutes to see if I can do it yeah okay let's let's let's try and do this all right let's see if we can if I can do anything to this as if I were writing it to try and focus on these three things with prose or oh--this decided not to change his robes before entering because she used video he was the leader of a group of refugees from insane Maine they thought if he looked the part it might help switch cause that's actually trying to tele but it's a it's okay we we've just certainly we start off in someone's viewpoint right we know whose viewpoint we are well done for mentioning it in the first sentence let's see as he and as he stroked other Creators throne he slightly noted he was having he was having his attendant effect okay this one is yeah that's okay too okay so he's wearing blood-stained robes was ran the door and watched with Nelson gave to them he had a courtyard filled with immigrants he was stretched all the way all right so let's say we wanted to knock up the concrete level of this a bit now one thing you're gonna have to keep in mind is when you make things more concrete you're generally adding words okay any place you can make something one more of these things without adding a word you generally want to do it so let's look right here for instance here's an example of what I was talking about before orthis knew we needed to strike the perfect balance when confident desperate now a lot of people would say got that the reason being that this was what I was just talking about a little bit ago you'll have to decide do you want to be using those tags for it for for when someone's thinking something or observing something Harriet the editor of The Wheel time always cut when I did that because we're in the character viewpoint you've already established it the first paragraph or the first the first paragraph so we don't need that oh this new odd and overwhelmed that no partners planned demeanor susp it-- the amazing opulence the surroundings kept his eyes fixed forward um if you were trying to make this more immediate this is kind of a very I mean this is an abstract Center what does this even mean odd never well that no part of his plan I mean I'm having trouble figuring out what that even means and it's drawing us away from what's happening right and so what I would say here is you want to go right into the Cathedral right here and I would cut that one because yes that's in viewpoint but it's this weird abstraction we want to keep and head now what we want to do right here let's look at this one how can we make this more in his viewpoint do you have any suggestions look at this sentence right here this is a sentence that it's a nice description cathedrals immense widen up the edges the walls are only visible through the fog and long enough he could only see about halfway down it mentally yeah I agree somewhere else you can compare and contrast there you go that would be a wonderful way what else could we do what can we do to put this more in viewpoint could he be more this could he be dismissive or could it be like wow this one's so much better than mine or yeah does this make sense well yeah well he could like have his eyes catch a particular thing that seems to draw his attention right and concentrate on that's where we're going with the concrete thing like the cathedral was immense is okay this one is much better you could only see the UM you know it was long enough they could only see about halfway down it see that's a concrete sensory experience the cathedral was immense means a lot of different things to a lot of different people let me um let me talk about something here with this concrete with the concrete we do something sorry if I can't see this is I just drew a triangle we go do something called a pyramid of abstraction which the idea of a parallel extraction is you use a lot of concrete language to earn your abstract language abstract language is language that people everyone who reads the book is going to think of something different so for instance a dog is a dog concrete or abstract oh good god a dog is very abstract you've listened to my lectures I explain a dog is way up here because a dog everyone thinks of a different dog an immense Cathedral it's very different probably right about here so if you want to pull it down if you want to you need to make these decisions are not telling you I'm saying if you want to pull it down instead of describing the Cathedral has an immense Cathedral you say he strode past stained-glass windows depicting this thing from the world is all the Dhamma that he loved so much oh man it was so hard to see this that was in all these array of colors that shined across of them as he strode through vats of image right that shows us grand Cathedral if you want to say you know if you want to highlight something more country yes you don't see halfway down you can say torches lined it and got smaller and smaller until the distant ones were just pin pricks that's even a little more concrete than what you did but you can see each one I'm doing is adding more words almost always pulling down on the UM the pyramid of distraction adds more words so you try to compensate that by cutting out the Vega T's like this they don't really tell you anything so that you can then get rid of vague terms and you can use those words right here to make the cathedral was immense and there's something of a powerful image that we are imagining where there at the character and it has something about his emotions tied to it so that as we're going along yeah and I see you're actually doing this a little bit a little bit more down here on but again this one is less vague then this one if you see that and so you may want to say you may want to you know try and cut down stained glass windows led so much like its brightest day you know he passed the stained-glass window and the light shone in his eyes almost blinding him or the silent years something like that that's boring him rather than this which is kind of just to tell now the thing about this is once again guys sometimes you just want to use this I can't tell you I can't tell you when to use them and when not to I can tell you what to do if you want your language to be more cos concrete and more in character but sometimes if you do this you will end up with these enormous paragraphs and these enormous pages that you don't want to have because you want to move on to the action so your job as writers is decide when you're going to be doing things like this and when you're going to be transitioning into more character-driven moments and when you're going to go into the action okay don't know how much time we have to do more but this is the idea I would like to do this with more of your writing in the future if some of you are brave enough as Brennan was to do this so let's just go here is there a word for half ran half walked jog that's what we mean by being more precise I mean by the way most of these things are not things I do in first draft this is all stuff I do in second draft well I asked you about earlier yeah so don't worry about it what I'm doing here is if I were looking back at this so this is what we mean by burning more precise if you can use a word that is a specific word that means four words that you've put in it you want to try and use it jogs is probably or trotted you may want the half one half walk but see here we're talking about a lot of times the better writing is going to be the single word that does everything that you want so let's see - is there a continuing to walk forward that we can do proceeding yes proceeding past the man or striving past the man and you striding past man there oh you do striding already so yeah for seasoning yeah yeah proceeding see there you go you've got a precise word that has taken the place of four words so what you're doing is you're trying to make this more precise and concrete so the places where you really want to pull out a description and just clobber us in the face with this awesome two or three sentence not two or three paragraph but two or three sentence paragraph of something just a vote pocket of emotion and power you can't you have the space for it does that make sense when I was talking to you said it was a good exercise to cut out about a third of the words from your initial draft is this the way that you're doing it this is the way I'm doing it exactly how I'm doing it wondering um and I cut I kept 15% a third is a bit much for most people I cut 15% and I will often do as an exercise I'll go like this say okay that is 463 words let's cut 60 of them and I will just go through and I will work that page until I've cut out 60 words and one of the things I'll be looking for places where I repeat myself and we do this a lot you get it a little bit up here with this one just a little bit here where you describe the light and maybe to describe the light better does that make sense yeah do that a lot we do like the topic sentence which is a good idea but then slightly more descriptive topic sentence and then really good description I kept 15% for basically everything so yeah okay here's a quick way for you guys be wary of said book isms because I just talked about using the more precise word a lot of people jump to the assumption that using said book isms which you know maintained is a more precise word than set this is kind of usually considered an exception to the rule where in the dialog you don't want the attention to be on the tag you want it to be on the dialogue itself and so because of that you want to try and evoke these things in the dialogue and just you said and stay away from using the more precise terms there and try and get it across here the reason for that bang is that most people will skip these and so they'll lose it if you put it here and if you put the set book ISM there and put one that's really kind of weird it'll draw their eyes and they'll focus on that instead of what it was actually said I mean so that's weird and consistency with this right here when people may have told you before just you said the reason for it is that we want your focus to be on that and I think that he just maintains it already by what he says another big point by is to try and move the tags as close to the front as possible this is a clarity issue we want to know who's speaking as soon as possible tags are invisible but they'll snap who said it and so putting something at the end of a sentence is much worse than working it in the very first place that it's reasonable to put it in so these are just little prose things that we can do that we can try and push the language to be more precise to use the right words I don't see a lot of passive voice in here so the third one is not a problem for you we'll have to find somebody else is using the passive voice that we can just destroy it but yeah all right I can probably spend more time on this this is actually pretty good your prose is solid it reads like a first draft that I would do so so yeah this is this isn't terrible but you know what this is what this is what I do for everything is I would go through and I'd be like do I need this sentence do I need this sentence what's a word that would replace this so there you go thank you we'll try to do some more of that in in future weeks I wish I had a little more time for it but I do want to get to writing groups I'm sorry I was I was late but I did get a drive up to the like little stall that they like let you past a pair of teacher in my car service with the tinted windows that pulls up and drive put some window down says mr. Sanderson would like to proceed that was pretty cool

Channel: zmunk

Views: 12,677

Rating: 4.9242425 out of 5

Keywords: Brandon Sanderson, BYU, creative writing, viewpoint, first person, third person, POV, tense, mistborn, stromlight, fantasy

Id: 8EWMSD2xt40

Length: 75min 49sec (4549 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2017