In today’s Journal
* Quotes of the Day
* Welcome
* Switching PsOV Inside Chapters, Redux
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quotes of the Day
“I did not want to leave her in the sea. In Acapulco, that might have been all right. Even the mightly Pacific Ocean would take a very long time to whisper an atrocity all the way from Acalpuco to my little part of the sea at Mazatlán.” The POV character considering a harsh thing she will soon have to do in Blackwell Ops 18: Soleada Garcia: Settled
“He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.” Muhammad Ali
Switching PsOV Inside Chapters
Back on December 29 2023 I posted POV and POV Indicators. Probably few people read it after the point where I started talking about Blackwell Ops 16. I did that because I only use my own work as an example of my topic.
Yes, other instructors use others’ work as examples, but that feels less than genuine to me. They can only guess at the intent of that author as s/he wrote the work and applied the craft technique the instructor is talking about. What they’re really conveying is not why the author used a particular technique, but how the technique affect them as readers.
You (and I) do the same thing when we study another writer’s work to learn from it. But we’re looking at the work from the perpective of a reader, not a writer. What effect did a particular passage have on me as a reader? Maybe I can use that same technique to create a similar effect in my readers.
As I’ve mentioned before, I often study passages in King’s fiction to learn new techniques or new ways to do things I already know how to do.
For example, I’ve always been fairly good at conveying characters’ emotions, but only after reading King did I hit on the “secret” that enabled me to convey those emtions with much greater depth. I’ll talk more about that in the Journal tomorrow.
I don’t want to hear why an instructor “believes” a writer did a particular thing in a story. I want to see the instructor’s own story so s/he can speak to WHY s/he did what s/he did. Facts, not theories and suppositions. That’s why I use examples from my own work of whatever technique I’m trying to explain.
In the post I linked to above, I explained in some depth about how and why I use POV indicators to indicate switching PsOV in a novel or inside a chapter of a novel. (You can use the same thing in a long short story.) So the post was the explanation.
Then I prepared an actual example you can look at. For some reason I used Blackwell Ops 15 (not 16) for the example, but it still works.
I even uploaded the example to the Free Archives & More page at the Journal website, HEStanbrough.com. The title of the document is How to Indicate Different POV Characters to the Reader (an example). It’s a free PDF download. All you have to do is click it.
All of that said, if you have specific questions about points of view, please email me and ask. I’d be happy to respond.
But don’t ask about omniscient vs. limited omniscient etc. None of that matters except after the fact to critics.
Every word of the story you write should come through the POV character(s) and his or her physical and emotional senses. Every word, dialogue or narrative.
If you run through the story with the characters, write down what happens and how the characters react in word and deed, you’ll get it right. That is the creative process.
And if you don’t, you won’t. If you outline, plot, plan, and force your characters into prestructured roles, that is not the creative process. That is a construction process.
I’ll talk with you again tomorrow. The topic will be The Number One Thing I Learned from Stephen King. Or something like that.
For those who follow my numbers—I failed to add my fiction numbers to my spreadsheet on the day I skipped writing the Journal, so the overall numbers below jumped today by an extra 3017 words.
Of Interest
Nada
The Numbers
The Journal……………………………… 530
Writing of Blackwell Ops 18: Soleada Garcia: Settled
Day 1…… 4078 words. To date…… 4078
Day 2…… 4194 words. To date…… 8272
Day 3…… 4277 words. To date…… 12549
Day 4…… 4916 words. To date…… 17465
Day 5…… 4613 words. To date…… 22078
Day 6…… 3017 words. To date…… 25063
Day 7…… 6560 words. To date…… 31623
Day 8…… 3213 words. To date…… 34836
Fiction for January……………………. 64174
Fiction for 2024…………………………. 64174
Fiction since October 1…………… 367219
Nonfiction for January……………… 16260
Nonfiction for 2024…………………… 16260
2024 consumable words…………… 80434
2024 Novels to Date……………………… 1
2024 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2024 Short Stories to Date……………… 0
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………… 83
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 9
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)…… 238
Short story collections…………………… 31
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Disclaimer: I am a prolific professional fiction writer. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Unreasoning fear and the myths of writing will slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.