Which point of view produces the greatest intimacy between the reader and the character? Watching this debate between two writing friends led me to ask what they meant by intimacy. I propose (invoking the liberty of blogging) that there are at least three modes of intimacy between reader and character: avatar, friend, and shrink. There may be more, but these will do for now.
Category: Writing
Posts on writing.
Really pleased to say that my first novel has been accepted for publication by Chrism Press and will see the light of day toward the end of 2021.
The Rules of Trade (The Peaceweaver, Book One), is an historical novel set in eighth-century Northumbria, just weeks after the great Viking raid on the rich monastery of Lindisfarne, which was the 9-11 of the Anglo Saxon world.
Writers sometimes worry about overthinking their writing. They should be more worried about under-imagining it.
One should always prefer the active voice over the passive, they tell us. Baloney. Active and passive are technical grammatical terms that have nothing to do with how active or passive your writing is. The distinction between the two forms actually has to do with whether the focus of your statement is the actor or the recipient of the action, the doer or the done-to. Sometimes the doer is more important than the done-to. Sometimes it is the other way round.
I am puzzled by how imprecise writers sometimes are when they talk about their craft. If any craft should be precise and lucid in the description of what it does, it should be writing. But it’s not. A case in point: the distinction between “present tense” and “past tense” narratives.
Hi. I’m a novelist. You’ve never heard of me. Read my blog.
Because that’s the game here, isn’t it. Writers set up blogs because we are told we need a platform. We need followers We need to be someone. It’s the same Catch-22 as looking for your first job. You need experience to get a job. You need a job to get experience. A writer needs readers to get published, and they need to be published to get readers.
This post originally appeared on my other blog, Every Page is Page One.
I’d like to float the notion that the essential ingredients of drama are tension, texture, and tenderness. I’m not advancing this as a robust theory of story or anything like that. Nor am I suggesting that there is some brilliant new insight here. Drama is a complex thing and like any complex thing it can be analyzed a hundred ways with equal validity. But this notion of tension, texture, and tenderness has been bouncing around in my head for a while and I find I like it. So here is the beginning an an exploration of the idea.
This post originally appeared on my other blog, Every Page is Page One.
The world is full of silly writing rules. One of the silliest is the very silly war on very.