thepenspointofview:

hope-andtears asked thepenspointofview: How would one show sarcastic side comments from the narrator?

There are plenty of ways to go around this, but the most professional way to go around writing sarcastic side comments would either be directly through either their dialogue, their thoughts, or in the case of 3rd person, even right in the text. The point of view of your story can alter the best answer to this story. 

1. If you are writing in First Person Perspective:

This is the easiest way to add sarcastic side comments to your story, seeing as the story is told though the main character’s perspective. Because people are sarcastic all the time, slipping a sarcastic comment in dialogue or even directly into the text as a thought can actually add realism to your character. (This rings especially true if your character is a teenager.) 

Side comments would be best placed in thoughts, as they don’t create a certain emphasis on discussion that dialogue often brings. In showing thoughts in a first person perspective story, you can either italicize it, or leave it be as a part of a natural piece of text. This choice matters heavily on personal preference and the tone of your piece.

2. If you are writing in Second Person Perspective:

There is no real “good” way to write  sarcastic side comment in this view, because the reader might not be sarcastic in any given situation. While I wouldn’t recommend it, it is possible you could slip it in within the text. However, be aware that unless there is another “person” speaking, it is better to avoid making directly opinionated statements in the text.

3. If you are writing in Third Person Perspective: 

Although it is also generally better to avoid opinionated statements directly in the text, depending on the tone, sarcastic side comments can work in a third person piece. Such examples are often seen in more childish works, such as “The Series of Unfortunate Events,” where the narrator occasionally pauses and talks directly to the reader. However, this is also often frowned upon, and is easy to mess up and can seem unprofessional. 

Sarcastic side comments, in this scenario, might work better if a character says them. An example of this could be seen in a situation where there are a group of friends entering a potentially dangerous scenario. One of the friends could reply, “Oh this will be safe” or something of that nature. 

I hope this helped! If its unclear anywhere, please don’t be afraid to ask clarification or for more information. 

~Ashley 

keyboardsmashwriters:

Or, semi-mini. Characters can elevate what might otherwise be a simple plot, or even an overdone plot, and make it into something entirely unexpected. Characters are impactful. They collide with the prose and leave craters.

When writing, communicating character voice is pivotal, whether it’s a cast of first person POVs or a removed third person omniscient narrator. Voice and style humanizes the characters and leaves a lasting impression, giving a unique feel to a writer’s story that can’t be found in any other story, or that separates one similar story from the next.

So, how can we build up the voice in our narrative? How do we infuse that soul into the words and really bring the story to life? Here are a few things to consider:

• Personality.

Imagine two characters picking up a photo. They’re not going to see the same photo – or, at least, they’re not going to see the photo in the same way. When we observe things, we tend to assign traits, such as, “The light was warm and inviting,” or, “The ridges of the shoe cut into my flesh, as if the shoe refused to fit,” as two basic examples. The way we assign traits depends upon our personalities, which impacts the overall mood of the writing and, consequently, the story.

Imagine that, of the basic examples I used above, I flip-flopped the personalities. Instead of the light being “warm” and “inviting”, the character might think, “The light stung my retinas. I turned my face away.” Instead of the shoe refusing to fit, the character might think, “The ridges of the shoe cut into my flesh, as if to tell me I’d have to survive breaking in my feet before I was worthy enough to wear it.”

So, how do we get a grasp of how a character’s personality will affect the narrative? That question leads us to –

Read More

ceruleancrescent:

conquerorwurm:

erinthesails:

catbountry:

fieto:

griff-kendu:

moraniarty:

shelivesin221c:

I DON’T KNOW THIS JUST FEELS LIKE THE MOST USEFUL THING IMAGINABLE RIGHT NOW

this is one of the most beautiful things on the internet

DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MANY TIMES I HAVE BEEN WISTFULLY DAYDREAMING ABOUT SOMETHING LIKE THIS EXISTING

DO YOU KNOW

I LOVE YOU

GREAT

Oh, this is gonna be useful.

THANK JESUS OH MY GOD THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER

Holy wow what

writingadvice1:

Finding the information you need as a writer shouldn’t be a chore. Luckily, there are plenty of search engines out there that are designed to help you at any stage of the process, from coming up with great ideas to finding a publisher to get your work into print. Both writers still in college and those on their way to professional success will appreciate this list of useful search applications that are great from making writing a little easier and more efficient.

Professional

Find other writers, publishers and ways to market your work through these searchable databases and search engines.

1. Litscene: Use this search engine to search through thousands of writers and literary projects, and add your own as well.
2. Thinkers.net: Get a boost in your creativity with some assistance from this site.
3. PoeWar: Whether you need help with your career or your writing, this site is full of great searchable articles.
4. Publisher’s Catalogues: Try out this site to search through the catalogs and names of thousands of publishers.
5. Edit Red: Through this site you can showcase your own work and search through work by others, as well as find helpful FAQ’s on writing.
6. Writersdock: Search through this site for help with your writing, find jobs and join other writers in discussions.
7. PoetrySoup: If you want to find some inspirational poetry, this site is a great resource.
8. Booksie.com: Here, you can search through a wide range of self-published books.
9. One Stop Write Shop: Use this tool to search through the writings of hundreds of other amateur writers.
10. Writer’s Cafe: Check out this online writer’s forum to find and share creative works.
11. Literary Marketplace: Need to know something about the publishing industry? Use this search tool to find the information you need now.

Writing

These helpful tools will help you along in the writing process.

1. WriteSearch: This search engine focuses exclusively on sites devoted to reading and writing to deliver its results.
2. The Burry Man Writers Center: Find a wealth of writing resources on this searchable site.
3. Writing.com: This fully-featured site makes it possible to find information both fun and serious about the craft of writing.
4. Purdue OWL: Need a little instruction on your writing? This tool from Purdue University can help.
5. Writing Forums: Search through these writing forums to find answers to your writing issues.

Research

Try out these tools to get your writing research done in a snap.

1. Google Scholar: With this specialized search engine from Google, you’ll only get reliable, academic results for your searches.
2. WorldCat: If you need a book from the library, try out this tool. It’ll search and find the closest location.
3. Scirus: Find great scientific articles and publications through this search engine.
4. OpenLibrary: If you don’t have time to run to a brick-and-mortar library, this online tool can still help you find books you can use.
5. Online Journals Search Engine: Try out this search engine to find free online journal articles.
6. All Academic: This search engine focuses on returning highly academic, reliable resources.
7. LOC Ask a Librarian: Search through the questions on this site to find helpful answers about the holdings at the Library of Congress.
8. Encylcopedia.com: This search engine can help you find basic encyclopedia articles.
9. Clusty: If you’re searching for a topic to write on, this search engine with clustered results can help get your creative juices flowing.
10. Intute: Here you’ll find a British search engine that delivers carefully chosen results from academia.
11. AllExperts: Have a question? Ask the experts on this site or search through the existing answers.

Reference

Need to look up a quote or a fact? These search tools make it simple.

1. Writer’s Web Search Engine: This search engine is a great place to find reference information on how to write well.
2. Bloomsbury Magazine Research Centre: You’ll find numerous resources on publications, authors and more through this search engine.
3. Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus: Make sure you’re using words correctly and can come up with alternatives with the help of this tool.
4. References.net: Find all the reference material you could ever need through this search engine.
5. Quotes.net: If you need a quote, try searching for one by topic or by author on this site.
6. Literary Encyclopedia: Look up any famous book or author in this search tool.
7. Acronym Finder: Not sure what a particular acronym means? Look it up here.
8. Bartleby: Through Bartleby, you can find a wide range of quotes from famous thinkers, writers and celebrities.
9. Wikipedia.com: Just about anything and everything you could want to look up is found on this site.
10. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Find all the great philosophers you could want to reference in this online tool.

Niche Writers

If you’re focusing on writing in a particular niche, these tools can be a big help.

1. PubGene: Those working in sci-fi or medical writing will appreciate this database of genes, biological terms and organisms.
2. GoPubMd: You’ll find all kinds of science and medical search results here.
3. Jayde: Looking for a business? Try out this search tool.
4. Zibb: No matter what kind of business you need to find out more about, this tool will find the information.
5. TechWeb: Do a little tech research using this news site and search engine.
6. Google Trends: Try out this tool to find out what people are talking about.
7. Godchecker: Doing a little work on ancient gods and goddesses? This tool can help you make sure you have your information straight.
8. Healia: Find a wide range of health topics and information by using this site.
9. Sci-Fi Search: Those working on sci-fi can search through relevant sites to make sure their ideas are original.

Books

Find your own work and inspirational tomes from others by using these search engines.

1. Literature Classics: This search tool makes it easy to find the free and famous books you want to look through.
2. InLibris: This search engine provides one of the largest directories of literary resources on the web.
3. SHARP Web: Using this tool, you can search through the information on the history of reading and publishing.
4. AllReaders: See what kind of reviews books you admire got with this search engine.
5. BookFinder: No matter what book you’re looking for you’re bound to find it here.
6. ReadPrint: Search through this site for access to thousands of free books.
7. Google Book Search: Search through the content of thousands upon thousands of books here, some of which is free to use.
8. Indie Store Finder: If you want to support the little guy, this tool makes it simple to find an independent bookseller in your neck of the woods.

Blogging

For web writing, these tools can be a big help.

1. Technorati: This site makes it possible to search through millions of blogs for both larger topics and individual posts.
2. Google Blog Search: Using this specialized Google search engine, you can search through the content of blogs all over the web.
3. Domain Search: Looking for a place to start your own blog? This search tool will let you know what’s out there.
4. OpinMind: Try out this blog search tool to find opinion focused blogs.
5. IceRocket: Here you’ll find a real-time blog search engine so you’ll get the latest news and posts out there.
6. PubSub: This search tool scours sites like Twitter and Friendfeed to find the topics people are talking about most every day.

writingbox:

This piece gives some clear, simple examples and explanations of different literary techniques using Disney movies.

keyboardsmashwriters:

keyboardsmashwriters:

iimbrogliio asked you:

Hi! In my current WIP I’m having trouble worldbuilding. My main character has recently woken up from cryo-sleep and knows little about the new world he is surrounded by. Do you know effective ways I can go about getting in the important information without people sounding like broken records? Or am I being too self-conscious about him learning about his new world? Thanks in advance for your help!

WELL. As a forewarning, I love world building and I’m pretty darn okay at building the world itself, but if I have an Achilles heel, it’s conveying all the information that I know and the reader doesn’t. So, I mean, this article might help me as well.

Firstly, what you’re talking about is establishing setting. By this point, you should have already done all or most of your world building (lots of writers discover their worlds along with their characters, which is cool, and I do it sometimes, too, but it’s always good to have a foundation to begin with).

Waking up in an unfamiliar world is a very natural opening. It’s a good starting point because it’s like you’ve got a white canvas, so it’s easy to build layers from there. Your character’s knowledge of this world is limited, perhaps as or nearly as limited as the readers’, and he’ll learn as the reader does.

Your setting is all about the time and place of your story, but what the heck does that even mean? Here’s about the gist of it:

• Environment and surroundings. This is all the immediate visual design. The city, the building, the room, the bed, the annoying alarm clock, the window that overlooks the vast expanse — or just the wall of the neighboring building.
• Geography and weather. These are the lesser immediate visual designs. Where is this place set? What sorts of native plants grow there? What’s the terrain like? What are the seasons like? Does it rain or snow? How often and how does it affect the environment and surroundings?
• Culture. People. Languages. Customs. Viewpoints. Family structures. Fashion and style. Basically, how people interact with each other and why it is the way it is.
• Religion. This very often goes hand-in-hand with culture, but religion also impacts history, and it can dictate political systems and architecture and other things. Religion (or perhaps the lack of) plays a huge active part in society and government.
• Political system and law. How the people organize themselves, how they’re ruled, how they allow themselves to be ruled, what laws they’re willing and not willing to obey, how officials come into power, how crime is dealt with, so on and so forth.
• Natural resources and commerce. If rain is scarce, water has to be imported, and if water has to be imported, workers are hired to design and build the technology to import water, and water would be taken from other places, which means other places are getting less water, and – well, you get the idea. The availability of resources will dictate classes, jobs and wages, food sources and types, ad infinitum for your world’s entire history and future.

(In fact, everything I listed in the Researching Steampunk post also applies here.)

Dialogue is an excellent way to reveal setting, but your setting should be revealed beyond what people tell your main character about it. Your character should be able to see and hear things and connect dots, because your reader will, too.

Here are some additional ways to reveal setting:

• Characterizations. The setting and your cast of characters are not two separate entities – they reflect each other. A character is part of your world and your world is part of your character. Settings show in mindsets, actions and reactions. The setting dictates how your characters were raised, where they went to school, what their parents/guardians and siblings/relatives (if any) were like. They are the way they are because of how they oriented themselves in your world.
• Language. Big cultural hubs tend to boast a whole variety of languages, even if there’s only one designated official language of the country (or state or world or what have you). But, additionally, how your characters use the language paints a greater picture about what their lifestyle was like. Do they speak eloquently? Do they curse? Do they eloquently curse? Accents? Slang? Modern? Traditional?
• Fashion. What people wear not only reflects the availability of resources of the world, but also wealth and class. Other bits of the world can be revealed as well, such as climate, religion, supply and demand, style tribes, sumptuary laws, expensive labels and counterfeiters.
• Mindsets. What do your characters believe in? And are they allowed to believe this? How rigid or flowing are mindsets, and how does this reflect government control, societal uprisings, religion, and so forth?
• Backstories. Instead of a character explaining, “This is how the political system works,” give your characters an example of their backstory that puts the “telling” into perspective. Show them how it has worked for your characters, then it’ll sound less like a technical how-to manual.
• Action. When your main character interacts with the physical, tangible surroundings, it’s also showing the reader and grounding them in things that they can also touch and feel and understand.
• Visuals. Think of the architecture. Think of the fashion and the technology and even the media. Think of how the law is reinforced and how much of a presence it has in the public. Think of how political figures assert themselves in the public as well, if their names are on posters or if their faces are plastered on walls – or, if it’s the future, dominating huge screens.
• Mood. This is atmosphere and how you’re writing what you’re writing, your word choice and how it reflects the viewpoint of your main character, or the attitudes of other characters. This grounds your reader in how to perceive your world.
• Clincher details. Certain things remind us of certain eras. The fashion styles of the 80s, the old gaming platforms of the 90s, the attack on American mainland soil in the turn of the millennium. Things like this tell us the time without ever telling us the time. What sorts of details breathe the freckles and the scars into your world?

If ever you’re unsure about whether you’re doing too much or too little, don’t fret. First drafts, by design, aren’t meant to get it right on the first try. Neither are second drafts (oh man, trust me on that one). Once you have critique partners, you can always ask them to focus on how the setting unfolds for them. If they have questions about it or are confused, know that there’s something you need to add or change. If they felt the pacing dragged, think of how to pare down the description.

Also, practice. You can try our World in Words exercise, or you can try writing passages of your story with different approaches. Choose which one works best, or find the best pieces in each passage and sew them together. Writing is often cut-and-paste.

Revealing setting is definitely a form of art. I still have wobbly ankles, and only through actively adding in bits of setting during revision do I see how it’s supposed to look when I’ve made it better. So, if it takes a few (or many) tries to get it right, don’t worry. You get smarter and better with every try.

Hope that helps! Good luck!

goddamnitkate:

aniamra:

writeworld:

by Charlie Jane Anders

Worldbuilding is an essential part of any work of fiction. But especially for science fiction or fantasy, it’s the lifeblood of storytelling. But when worldbuilding fails, it can wreck your whole story, and leave your characters feeling pointless. Here are seven deadly sins of worldbuilding.

1. Not thinking about basic infrastructure.
2. Not explaining why events are happening now.
3. Creating fictional versions of real-life human ethnic groups, that never go beyond one dimension.
4. Creating monolithic social, political, cultural and religious groups.
5. Inventing a history that is totally logical.
6. Not really giving a strong sense of place, like what it smells like after it’s been raining.
7. Introducing some superpower, like magic or insane tech, without fully accounting for how it would change society.

Read More →

These are all the things I tend to ask questions about when people want to World Build. It’s a good list! You should read!

Great article! I love putting myself through tests like these to make sure I’ve made something solid.

setavulos:

irrhythmic:

referenceforwriters:

thewritershelpers:

Some everyday things you can include in your writing to make your character more beliveable:

    •    Most knives and scissors have the edge on the opposite side. We use ‘blunt’ or customized blades most of the time. May sound as a little thing, but really annoying. This also goes for swords, bows and some other weapons.

    •    Left handed people need left handed music instruments (guitars, violins…)

    •    Left handed writers tend to ruin fountain pen nibs, because they have to push them instead of pulling it on the paper. They also have to write in a weird postition because otherwise they’d smudge the ink. Some of them write from the top to the bottom, even if they use european languages.

    •    being left handed was considered ‘devil’s mark’ or ‘wrong’ and people were forced to use their non-dominant hand until very recently. Keep this in mind if you writing historical fiction.

    •    Left handed people tend to do circular movements in the opposite direction. If they have to draw the circle or seasons, they mostly draw it in a mirrored way. This also cause small everyday issues with locking or opening doors or using analog-style clocks.

    •    In swordfights or fencing, left handed have an advantage because most people train against righties.

    •    Left handed people put the computer mouse on the opposite side, and we have to switch the button settings.

    •    Left handed people normally eat with their left hand, so they make the table the opposite way and they may accidentaly bump elbows with right handed at the table.

________________________

I, S am left handed. Although a lot of those points make sense to me, I think I need to make a point. Not everyone is this extreme with their leftieness. For example I write left handed but I do everything with my right. I throw a ball with my right, play cricket with my right. It depends on the person.

The most annoying thing is can openers. I can’t use them, it takes me ages to open the hotdogs as they don’t seem to work for me. Knifes aren’t a problem for me as I use my right hand.

Followers? Any experiences to add?

I’m the same as S here. While I’m a left handed, I do most things with the right side of my body. And the mouse of my computer is on the common side. 

Something that really annoys me is handwriting. I don’t like having to write in a weird, awkward position, so I just don’t, and the left side of my hand gets dirty as hell. 

I’m also able to write from right to left, that way you can only read things while holding them next to a mirror.

-Alex

of course, the pen-nib thing isn’t a problem for people who are writing in e.g. Arabic.

I’ve noticed a lot of lefties are more prone to turning images upside-down while drawing/ inking.

also I only know two lefties who put their mouse on the other side, and none who change keyboard shortcut configurations (+edit: or mouse setup, wow i misread that, anyways point still stands). 

other than that though yeah I’ve noticed a lot of these haha

My stepfather is a leftie, so I can confirm from observation that a lot of these are true. We always have problem with eating arrangements because he has to be on the outside of the booth whenever we go out to eat. I did notice that he uses scissors with his right hand, though, but that might be because we don’t own any left-handed scissors?

But it’s nice to note that even if someone makes their character dominantly left-handed, mixed-handedness is also a thing. I, for one, am left-handed (or I guess some might prefer if I said left-preferred?) in certain tasks, even though I grew up writing using my right hand. Although honestly in the first grade I just chose a hand and stuck with it and, according to my parents, had been using both hands before then. So YMMV.