Learn Writing with Uncle Jim, Volume 1

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neddyf

Re: Thousand Cranes

James

My recent post was:

I'm still on catch-up. Page 49 now.

Could you post a short example of 1st, 3rd and 3rd Omni for me (us) please. This will help me make sure I am doing it right.

Thanks again for a great thread.

Ned

---------------

What I mean, is a short scene, but from the 3 different angles (POV).

Is that possible ?

Thanks

Ned
 

sc211

Re: Thousand Cranes

Hi Ned,

Maybe this will help with your POV question.

1st Person:
I picked up the rock, felt the cool weight of it in my hand, and threw it at Jane. Jane swore at me and ran off.

3rd Person Limited:
Dick picked up the rock, felt the cool weight of it in his hand, and threw it at Jane. Jane swore at him and ran off.

3rd Person Omniscient:
Dick picked up the rock, felt the cool weight of it in his hand, and threw it at Jane.
Jane stumbled back, a hand to her head. That little twerp. She swore at him and ran off to get her pitbull.

There's lots of books that cover POV in detail, with the pros and cons and examples of each. One you might want to check out is Orson Scott Card's Characters and Viewpoint.
 

James D Macdonald

View, Point of

Something you really don't see a lot of is second person:

<BLOCKQUOTE>You picked up a rock, felt the cool weight of it in your hand, and threw it at Jane. Jane swore at you and ran off.</BLOCKQUOTE>

Consider that there may be a reason why you don't see second person too often. Aside from the Choose Your Own Adventure books, a fad that has happily run its course, I don't recall pure 2nd ever being published at book length.
 

James D Macdonald

Re: Thousand Cranes

Another thought:

A thousand would take six minutes a day for a year... I suspect that it would take more time than that to improve me much as a writer.

If you type 40 words per minute, in that year you will have typed a novel.
 

D James

Choose Your Own Adventure

"Aside from the Choose Your Own Adventure books, a fad that has happily run its course, I don't recall pure 2nd ever being published at book length."

Alas, Jim, they've been back for some time now.

James
 

maestrowork

Re: Thousand Cranes

I don't recall ever reading any 2nd person. But I know they're out there.

There are also variations of 3rd person limited:

1) single POV -- Dick picked up the rock and felt the weight in his hand. He threw it at Jane. She swore at him and walked away.

2) shifting/rotating POV -- Dick picked up the rock and felt the weight in his hand. He threw it at Jane. She swore at him and walked away.
***
Moments later, Jane became very upset with Dick. She called his mother and complained to her.


3) objective (we sometimes call this fly on the wall or camera) -- Dick picked up the rock and bounced it a few times in his hand. He threw it at Jane. She swore at him and walked away.
 

James D Macdonald

Re: Choose Your Own Adventure

Alas, Jim, they've been back for some time now.

Aieeeee! Run away! Run away!

You see a door before you. Do you:

A) Open it (go to page 57)

B) Turn and fight (go to page 96)

C) Throw the flippin' book out the window (go to the bookshelf and get something where the author figured out the best ending for the story)
 

drgnlvrljh

Re: Choose Your Own Adventure

Oh! The Humanity! The Horror!

Shouldn't there be some law against that? :eek
 

Dancing Wombat

Re: Second-person POV

Hi all,

De-lurking to mention one novel written entirely in the second person—Tom Robbins's Half Asleep in Frog Pyjamas (Bantam, 1994). It worked for me when I read it, but it did take some getting used to. Assuredly not a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.

That's all. I'll re-lurk now.
 

Kate Nepveu

Re: Question about 3rd Omni POV

I have a suggestion--decide if you're going to have an explicit omniscient narrator or not.
 

sc211

Re: Choose Your Own Adventure

Another second person point of view novel, and perhaps the most successful of all, is Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City.

"You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy."

In this case I thought it actually worked.

And as for the "Choose Your Adventure" books, the reason I hated them as a kid is 1) I always ended up locked in some cave for eternity or with my head cut off or some other pointless fate, and 2) it made the books so dang short.

Also, even when you flipped back and tried to find the right way through the book, to like learn where you made your mistakes, there wasn't any real point to it. Just random events. And we get enough of that in life.
 

James D Macdonald

2nd POV

Thanks for those two references. I've not read either book.

Something for me to do....
 

Fillanzea

Re: Second-person POV

If you type 40 words per minute, in that year you will have typed a novel.

Good point!

Typing a novel is not the same thing as writing one...I'd guess that I go at about 10 words per minute when I actually have to think about what I'm writing. But I could probably, in the course of a work day, sketch out a 240-word scene segment in enough detail in my mind that I could type it out without much thought when I sat down to write.

By way of introduction, incidentally...let's see. I've been seriously writing fantasy for three and a half years, have written three and a half and a third novels (the half will remain unfinished--hard drive failure and lack of enthusiasm--and the third is in progress), and have a couple of very small press publications. And I have read all 127 pages of posts since about the time they started; I'm a lurker by nature, though.
 

pianoman5

2nd person POV

Another 2nd person novel is Ian Banks' A Song of Stone.

I couldn't finish it. Apart from being a nasty, bleak bit of work in many areas, the device of a first person addressing a kind of memoir to his lover - with 'you' figuring in too many sentences as well as many long, windy monologues - was very distracting, and felt like the experimental device it is.
 

sc211

Found Out in Fantasy

I’m in the midst of my first sci-fi/fantasy. It actually started out as a regular adventure tale, but due to geographic and cultural necessity, it has to take place on another planet.

What I’m having difficulty with is what I can refer to with Earth language and what needs to be given new names.

I thought I’d have to rename everything, but when I sat down and flipped through some fantasy novels from my shelves, the only unique words were those of wizardry, as with vrondi for elemental spirits, or words borrowed from another culture, as with ashke from the Tylandras people in Mercedes Lackey’s work.

It’s like you see the story from within the culture of the main characters, so that only cultures alien to them are seen as with their own unique language, which is used only for items unique to that culture. (Just as we westerners have adopted the terms spaghetti, katana, and algebra.)

I think what threw me, and the core of the matter, is that it’s a lot different to write fantasy/sci-fi than read it. In reading, you willingly suspend your disbelief to enjoy the tale. In writing it, though, you’re trying to pull stuff out of a hat to make it seem believable. And are checking and re-checking it at every turn. In fact, you could even say you go from being a listener to a liar. And the bigger the lie – “This happened on another planet…” – the more you sweat that you’ll be found out.

Is this an accurate look at writing fantasy/sci-fi? And how have you gotten through it - that feeling of "they're not gonna believe this"?
 

dblteam

Re: Second-person POV

I have that problem when writing SF, but not fantasy.

Probably because I have a master's in aerospace engineering ('aero' more than 'space'), I'm constantly second-guessing my science when I write SF. I end up thinking, "Yeah, that could work, but I'll bet there's new research in the field," or "This was a cool theory a few years ago, but don't I remember an article about why it can't work?" and so on. I could sit down and do the research, but I'd spend so much time learning all the cool new science I'd never put words on paper.

So, fantasy. I'm comfortable inventing my science because I have enough background to make it "work", but I don't have to put it up against the work of real experts who know a whole lot more about it than I do. :D

Valerie
 

James D Macdonald

Re: Found Out in Fantasy

Is this an accurate look at writing fantasy/sci-fi? And how have you gotten through it - that feeling of "they're not gonna believe this"?

You're in my world there. I write mostly SF/Fantasy (with excursions into technothriller, horror, and non-fiction).

Okay -- first, if you're going to lie, only tell one. And make it a big one. Your readers will allow you one whopper.

Second, tell the truth as much as you can. Your readers will be willing to believe in dragons, but they won't stop believing in oxygen. Make the dragonfire work with the physics and chemistry of reality.

Third, you have to be absolutely dead-accurate truthful in the psychological realism. You're telling stories about people. Make those people real.

SF/F are a little bit tougher than the mysteries and romances and such set in the modern every-day world. Not only do you have to tell the story, you have to build the world. And you have to do both at the same time.

My advice -- take some recent award winners and some recent best-sellers, go off somewhere quiet, and analyse the heck out of them. You aren't reading them as a reader now, you're reading them as a writer. See how the author achieved the effects.

<HR>

I found this just today,in one of my magic books (Hugard & Braue's Complete Guide to Card Tricks and Techniques), and thought of y'all:

<BLOCKQUOTE>Amongst card conjurors there is the belief that the expert achieves his results by means of prodigious skill, that his methods call for extraordinary application and tedious practice. The authors cannot stress too strongly that it requires no more practice to perform a sleight correctly than to perform it badly. Where the expert shines is that he has gone through the hard work of thinking out the correct method; he has experimented by the hour in searching for the easiest and best technique. For him it is a labor of love, rewarded by the inner glow which comes when at last he sees how to improve the sleight, or when he devises a clean-cut method of attaining a result in a given trick. It is this secret knowledge which makes him the craftsman he is.
</blockquote>

Substitute the word "writers" for "card conjurors," and "story" for "trick"; the rest falls into place.
 

Fresie

Straightening the story

Hello, Uncle Jim, hello, everyone.

Sorry I haven't been around much lately, but it's because I use every spare moment to work on this WIP of mine... it goes really fast, it seems to work for a couple of beta readers, but I think I've developed a problem which I can't solve on my own.

I did write it from an outline, but as it's the first draft -- or even rather, a "zero draft", I also tried to write down everything I could think of about the story, every little idea or a plot twist. As a result, I'm faced with lots of scenes and characters that are relevant and move the story forward, but are sort of... motley. My hero meets all sorts of story-appropriate people and does all sorts of plot-related things in all sorts of believable settings, and now I'm facing the task of straightening it all.

For example: the fact that my hero is an actor is determined by the plot. But what on earth possessed me to give him two young physicists as friends? Why physicists? -- I really don't know, has to be some trick of my subconscious. Why can't I decide which one of three possible settings I should use for the second half of the book? In fact, I realise now how many things I should have preplanned in the beginning. I mean, it's all logical, the story isn't a mess of irrelevant things, it's all going in the right direction and characterising people in all the right ways -- it's just that, motley. I realise I'm in need of some core idea (not premise, premise is different) or some common denominator to keep the story going, otherwise my next scene will be on an iceberg between two polar explorers--and sure, for a plot-related reason!:)

Please, please help...:(
 

sc211

Re: Found Out in Fantasy

Thanks, Uncle Jim. That bit on conjuring is not only dead-on accurate with what we're doing, but what you said reminded me of this quote from Shelley Winters: "Fooling people isn’t enough. It’s the ability to move them that matters."

The part I’m still having trouble with, though, is time. As on other planets. Ones that have never had any contact with Earth.

For instance, Jupiter has a day of just nine hours, and a year that’s equal to twelve of our years. One couldn’t write from the perspective of a planet like Jupiter and say “We walked for a full day” or “I was married for a year” without us, reading from our own perspective, misunderstanding it. It’s also not likely other planets would have a single moon or that their moon will have a 28-day cycle, so their weeks and months would be different as well.

I guess the answer lies in how I can’t think of one novel that uses an altered time frame. Maybe Arthur C. Clarke or some hard sci-fi writers have done it, but mostly it seems that every author creates some planet that acts just like our own (even with the same gravity and atmosphere), and then uses the same terms of minutes, hours, weeks, months, and years. Summer and winter as well. (Though not Tuesday and October.)

It makes sense in that readers most likely don’t want to be bothered with learning a whole new system of time, and it’s true that I always thought it was distracting when on the old “Battlestar Galactica” series they’d say stuff like “Meet me in ten microns.”

But now that I’ve been studying up on ancient time-keeping to set up something real for this world I’ve created, it’s kind of frustrating to see that others (at least in my limited reading) haven’t addressed the issue. People travel from planet to planet and there’s never any mention of adapting to different lengths of day, even though here on Earth we have to adjust going from one coast to another.

I guess I’m being too scientific about it, in trying to make everything seem totally real and accurate, when all one need do is make the characters and their motivations clear and believable.

Any thoughts on this, or how you resolved it with your own worlds, would be greatly appreciated.

P.S. I just re-read this, and what popped into my head were three valuable words: Keep It Simple. If there's no need to complicate matters of time, as for the plot, then don't. Just like you wouldn't complicate matters with gravity on that planet if it wasn't needed. In fact, like any kid who's trying to deny he broke a window, in trying too hard to lie, you give yourself away. Just act like it's normal and people won't even think of the matter of time.

Methinks my muse is right.
 

sc211

Re: Straightening the story

Hi Fresie,

Can't say as I can give any pertinent advice for your book, except to say that when I get that frazzled I find that a long walk can help clear out your head. Just something to give you some distance and perspective and a quiet mind, where some key to your story can come in.

And hey, there's nothing wrong with physicists. I was a physics major myself. If nothing else, they can ponder things too deeply and go on about nothing in irritating ways. But really - you could have them comment on your actor's life in interesting ways, or keep pestering him to do a one-man performance on the life of Neils Bohr, and he snaps back, saying, "Oh yes, I can see it now - A Bohring Evening."
 

Fresie

Re: Found Out in Fantasy

And hey, there's nothing wrong with physicists.

<img border=0 src="http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/smile.gif" /> <img border=0 src="http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/smile.gif" />

Oh, looks like I said something stupid again. No, all I meant was that there had to be a particuar reason why his friends were physicists. As it went, after the fact I invented an additional plot complication, something about stolen research data, and got my hero (who's an actor-turned-secret agent) involved with it, simply to justify his friends being physicists.

Or is it how one is supposed to work? No, that's why I post this in Uncle Jim's thread, because his method is logic, and I got myself stray too far away from it. I know there should be a certain idea, and everything in the novel should work on it, but how do I determine this idea?

Thank you!
 

Nateskate

Re: Straightening the story

Amazing!

I'm jumping in with a question from one of the earlier chapters regarding The Golden Word Syndrome.

Honestly, I think my problem is that I'd let someone else write my book for me if they wanted to. That's pretty pathetic, in that I think I have much to say.

I think I'd like to know where you'd draw a line for us who might be a pushover for an over eager editor who would simply want to make a clone of themselves.

Being that you have so much experience, do editors always cut you the benefit of the doubt, or are there times where you would butt heads?
 

James D Macdonald

Re: Found Out in Fantasy

But now that I’ve been studying up on ancient time-keeping to set up something real for this world I’ve created, it’s kind of frustrating to see that others (at least in my limited reading) haven’t addressed the issue. People travel from planet to planet and there’s never any mention of adapting to different lengths of day, even though here on Earth we have to adjust going from one coast to another.

You might enjoy my own Mageworlds books, where you'll find two clocks side by side, with local time on one and standard on the other, and terms like "local apparent north."

We assume that everything is in translation anyway, so the use of terms like day, week, month, is fine. We don't use Tuesday and October because they have Earth-specific references -- to the god Tyr, to the eighth month. (Note: Even Tolkien, who was keenly aware of language, slipped up on this from time to time.)

When we, here, on earth, say "I walked all day," we don't say "I walked three Jovian days." The characters refer to their own experiences. One of the ways SF builds worlds is through showing what the characters assume to be true. The readers compare that assumption with their own assumptions.

<HR>

Why are the hero's two friends physicists? Well, were they college roommates? Was the hero stranded overnight on a broken down bus with a bunch of guys coming back from a Physicist convention? Did they shop at the same all-night supermarket? Do they sing in the same choir? Did they serve in the military together?

Why are you friends with the people you know? How did you meet?

Here's advice -- put the book in a drawer for a month. Work on something else. Then read your story aloud, with a red pencil in your hand, to make notes in the margins.
 
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