I’m using “TV” as a shorthand for any visual narrative art from feature length films to video games. A lot of fiction these days reads as if—as I saw Peter Raleigh put it the other day, and as I’ve discussed it before—the author is trying to describe a video playing in their mind. Often there is little or no interiority. Scenes play out in “real time” without summary. First-person POV stories describe things the character can’t see, but a distant camera could. There’s an overemphasis on characters’ outfits and facial expressions, including my personal pet peeve: the “reaction shot round-up” in which we get a description of every character’s reaction to something as if a camera was cutting between sitcom actors.
[…]
My theory is that we live in the age of visual narratives and that increasingly warps how we write. Film, TV, TikToks, and video games are culturally dominant. Most of us learn how stories work through visual mediums. This is how our brains have been taught to think about story. And so, this is how we write. I’m not suggesting there is any problem in being influenced by these artforms. I certainly am. The problem is that if you’re “thinking in TV” while writing prose, you abandon the advantages of prose without getting the advantages of TV.
[…]
When I talk with other creative writing professors, we all seem to agree that interiority is disappearing. Even in first-person POV stories, younger writers often skip describing their character’s hopes, dreams, fears, thoughts, memories, or reactions. This trend is hardly limited to young writers though. I was speaking to an editor yesterday who agreed interiority has largely vanished from commercial fiction, and I think you increasingly notice its absence even in works shelved as “literary fiction.” When interiority does appear on the page, it is often brief and redundant with the dialogue and action. All of this is a great shame. Interiority is perhaps the prime example of an advantage prose as a medium holds over other artforms.
Listen to me. Listen to me right now. Two years from now people are going to tell you to vote for Democrats in the midterms. And you’re going to shut the fuck up and do it.
The setting of a novel - where and when the story takes place. As you know, most novels have more than one setting.
Usually, the author decides to have one large setting.
Example: Los Angeles in 1995
and then many smaller settings
Examples: The laundromat where the characters hang out on the weekends, or the classroom where they get in a fight
Settings do more than serve as a backdrop to the action in your novel. They can also create or enhance the mood of your novel.
Example
If you wanted to create a creepy mood for a scene in your novel, you could start with something like:
“A dead tree stood alone in a dark field. Its branches creaked in a cold wind, and in the distance, something howled.”
These images remind us of dark, disturbing things, and show the reader that the scene of the novel is “creepy” without having to tell them directly.
Describing the Setting: A Sample Exercise
Describe the settings that would help create each of the moods listed below.
Try to write 2 or 3 sentences for each mood.
Include specific details about the sights, sounds, sensations (and maybe even smells) of the settings you choose:
Creepy, Joyous, Suspenseful/tense
Now make up 2-3 of your own moods and describe a setting that would go along with each one.
The last step is to apply your new skills to your upcoming novel.
Think of a scene from each section of your novel.
Then, write or list details to describe a setting that will help create the right mood for each scene.
Example: You might set your climax on the edge of a crumbling cliff at sunset in the middle of a thunderstorm.
A setting from your set-up:
A setting from your inciting incident:
A setting from your rising action:
A setting from your climax:
A setting from your falling action:
A setting from your resolution:
Now you have settings to enhance the different moods that will be in your novel.
PART 2: Settings That Reinforce Characters
Another advanced writing trick is to show things about your characters just by putting them in specific settings.
Examples: If you were writing about a mysterious person, you might place them in a dark mansion on a hill outside of town; if you were writing about a musician, you might place them in a messy room filled with instruments, speakers, and microphones.
Sample Exercise
For each of the following characters, try to come up with a setting that will reflect or reinforce what you imagine about them.
“writing fanfics is something I do in my free time for fun. I will not treat it like a job and will instead treat it like a hobby because that’s what it is.”
my dream as a fanfic writer is to write a story which people want to talk to me about and send asks about afterwards and discuss things the characters did and the symbolism and meanings behind certain lines and I’ll be all “hehe thanks” but irl I’ll be in literal tears because I wrote something that means something to someone
Please give me feedback! :)
I got an AO3 comment once which summarised said, ‘I’ve been reading this fic for years and I keep coming back to it over and over because it’s so amazing and I feel guilty that all this time I never commented, so this is me letting you know how much it’s meant to me for so long.’ And that was incredible, because five minutes before I didn’t know that person existed and then they tell me that I’ve made such an impact on them.
It is never too late to leave a comment - the author will always be thrilled.
people who let me wake up to this get a special place in heaven. firefly_fox how does it feel to hold my life in ur hands….
my favorite thing about this post is that a handful of people have gone “oh wait! this is tangible proof that i don’t need to be embarrassed about leaving a lot of comments!! i’ll stop being so ashamed!” YES!! ao3 authors basically universally will die for people who comment spam. we love to see it and we do not find you weird or annoying At All.
think about it this way: we ourselves are weird enough to have spent several hours, days, or Months writing down this story. we are weird enough about the content to do that! why on Earth would we be mean and judgmental toward people who care enough to get excited about reading it?? we shared it Specifically For You To Get Excited About!
people who let me wake up to this get a special place in heaven. firefly_fox how does it feel to hold my life in ur hands….
my favorite thing about this post is that a handful of people have gone “oh wait! this is tangible proof that i don’t need to be embarrassed about leaving a lot of comments!! i’ll stop being so ashamed!” YES!! ao3 authors basically universally will die for people who comment spam. we love to see it and we do not find you weird or annoying At All.
think about it this way: we ourselves are weird enough to have spent several hours, days, or Months writing down this story. we are weird enough about the content to do that! why on Earth would we be mean and judgmental toward people who care enough to get excited about reading it?? we shared it Specifically For You To Get Excited About!
“What I assume my teachers were trying to teach me”
Huck Finn is about a white Southern boy who was raised to believe that freeing slaves is a sin that would send you directly to hell who forges a familial bond with a runaway slave and chooses to free him and thereby in his mind lose his salvation because he refuses to believe that his best friend and surrogate father is less of a man just because he’s black. Yes it features what we now consider racial slurs but this is a book written only 20 years after people were literally fighting to be allowed to keep other human beings as property, we cannot expect people from the 1880s to exactly conform with the social mores of 2020, and more to the point if we ourselves had been raised during that time period there’s very little doubt that we would also hold most if not all of the prevalent views of the time because actual history isn’t like period novels written now where the heroes are perfect 21st century social justice crusaders and the villains are all as racist and sexist as humanly possible. Change happens slowly and ignoring the radical statement that we’re all human beings that Twain wrote at a time when segregation and racial tensions were still hugely prevalent just because he wrote using the language of his time period is short-sighted and foolhardy to the highest degree.
I’m really kind of alarmed at the rise in the past few years of the “and we do condemn! wholeheartedly!” discourse around historical figures. it seems like people have somehow boomeranged between “morals were different in the past, therefore nobody in the past can ever be held accountable for ANY wrongs” to “morals are universal and timeless, and anything done wrong by today’s standards in the past is ABSOLUTELY unforgiveable” so completely, because social media 2.0 is profoundly allergic to nuance
please try this on for size:
there have always been, in past times as today, a range of people in every society, some of whom were even then fighting for a more just and compassionate accord with their fellow man and some of whom let their greeds and hatreds rule them to the worst allowable excesses. the goal of classics and history education is to teach you enough context to discern between the two, not only in the past but in the present
My mind just boggles at the “There’s Racism In That Book” argument. Yes, there is racism in that book, because that book is ABOUT RACISM. The message is that it is BAD.
My high school English teacher, who was a viciously brilliant woman, used to say that when people banned Huck Finn they said it was about the language, but it was really the message they were trying to ban, the subversive deconstruction of (religious) authority and white supremacy.
it’s kind of alarming to see YA authors so wholeheartedly signing on to the idea that all books should be even more straightforward and moralistic than huck finn, i.e Racism Is Bad 101.
like, if you’re really out to teach teenagers shit, maybe you should teach them the concept of NUANCE.
Okay.
Okay.
Let’s start off by saying I am not in favor of banning books. Books, no matter the content, should be available, in schools, in libraries, in stores. Critical reading is an important skill to have, and you must always look at not only what stories are being told, but who is telling them. You must question why this story, at this time, by this person.
But also? The Western Literature with a capital L canon as taught in schools is a problem.
So we all agree that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic work of fiction in which a Southern white boy comes to the radical conclusion that, huh, maybe black people are PEOPLE! Know who needed that story? Twain’s white, upper class readers at the time when he was writing.
Know who doesn’t need that lesson? Black kids in today’s classrooms.
Because they know they’re people. They know this country is codified in racism, in systems that still affect their world and their lives to this very day. They know their history, and having to grit their teeth through a white dude explaining the RADICAL IDEA that ‘racism is bad’ is… Not a good use of their time. Honestly, reading a book about a pre-teen white boy deciding the fate of a grown man because he HAS THAT POWER due to the color of his skin? It’s insulting, and symptomatic of a larger issue with the education system.
And it’s the same for whole swaths of students, of humanity at large. Western Literature has little to offer them, and before you go, ‘Well, some stories are universal!” then great. White boys can learn to find that same universality in Toni Morrison or Charlotte Perkins Gilman or Sherman Alexie or James Baldwin.
The canon needs to change. The canon needs to expand to other viewpoints, other stories, other concepts. And if it doesn’t, if we continue to let a bunch of white dudes from the 1800′s determine what is and isn’t a good story, then be prepared for people to continue to disrespect that.
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