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First Person Observer-Narrator: Garrett Morton
We reached the center of the warehouse, and there we saw the strangest room I’d ever seen. It was dim but I could make out skulls — hundreds of them — lining the walls.
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Eight Points of View: First Person and Limited Third
In my last post, I observed how first person and limited third are the most commonly used POVs. Because of this, I’m not going to spend too long on either of them. Yet I still want to talk about them — for the sake of completion and to establish a basis of comparison.
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Limited Third: Professor Matthew Ellar
At last, Professor Ellar, Garrett and Dora reached the heart of the facility. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, Ellar found himself in one of the most confusing places he’d ever seen. Hundreds of human skulls lined three walls. It reminded him of the catacombs beneath Paris. Then there was that unavoidable pentagram drawn…
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First Person: Dora Marcel
We made it to the heart of the warehouse. The room felt different from the rest of the building. As soon as I saw that white pentagram drawn on the floor, I knew why. This was the source of the evil that radiated from this place. The arcane symbols surrounding the huge sigil. A portal…
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Eight Points of View: An Introduction to Point of View in Fiction
Pull a novel from your bookshelf, or open your favorite one in your e-reader of choice. What point of view is it written from? Who’s telling the story? Chances are that a main character is telling the story themselves in the first person, or the author is telling someone else’s story in the third person.…
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The Fundamental Difference Between Fantasy and Science Fiction
You’d be forgiven if you didn’t know the exact boundaries between fantasy and science fiction. Fans of one tend to be fans of the other, resulting in a lot of cross-pollination and blurring. It happens so often that they’re commonly grouped under the umbrella term “speculative fiction.” Any fan will tell you that science fiction…
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We Stress Reading Too Much
So I have a confession to make. I can’t remember the last time I read a novel for pleasure. The last book I chose to read was nonfiction. According to some fiction writers on the internet, I’ve failed at one of the first rules of being a serious writer — reading. Writers are supposed to…
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Goethe’s Three Criteria
If I learned nothing else from Professor Todd’s classes, it was Goethe’s Three Criteria. Though Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is best known as a poet and playwright, he also wrote criticism and is credited with developing a three-part critical framework. Professor Todd drilled these into our heads in his History of Theater classes. The written…
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Should Critiques Be Objective?
So I’ve been thinking about critiques lately, specifically whether or not these things can be objective. Is there an objective measure for how good a piece of art is? What this measure is will vary from medium to medium, but does the presence or involvement of this measure make the critique objective?
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How Do I…? Dialogue
We’ve been talking about macro-level stuff on this blog so far, but I’ve yet to dive into some of the craft of writing — the wordsmithing part that all writers should know. So I’m starting this series of posts on craft. I hope this will become a regular thing. Today’s topic is dialogue. I assume…