So I've been trying really hard...

...to improve my writing.

Recently, I've been extremely interested in a POV known as "3rd person objective". It's mostly used in news reports and scientific journals, but when it meets fiction, I have found that it can create some really compelling and all around awesome stories that I aspire to write.

The basis is very simple: only convey to the reader what is evident. This means you can not write about what a character thinks or how they are feeling.

A very prominent example of this in mainstream literature is "Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway mostly wrote short stories and poems, and "Hills Like White Elephants" was the only (to my knowledge) of his works that were written in this perspective.

Another famous writer who used this was John Reed—except he was journalist. All journalists are kind of supposed to use this perspective for obvious reasons, but Reed stood out because of his prosaic yet still remarkably simple language and the fact that he covered large and interesting stories.

The difference between these two is that one is fictional, and the other is not. Reed tried to convey information about real life events in a simple fashion, where as Hemingway was trying to use the perspective as a literary device.

Hemingway was cool because he did subtle things that people might miss at first glance. He bent the rules of 3rd person objective, but not in an intrusive way. One of the last lines of the story is subjective*. This is world shaking! Breathtaking!

Not really, but the fact that he uses a subjective statement breaks away from the premise, and sneaks something in that I personally find really cool: Hemingway implies that the statement was the thought of one of the characters, and one might even be able to look at it deeper and say that said pseudo-thought was based on events in the story.

In any case, I try to get around this fact by using thought dialogue to enforce a belief that readers already know are held by the character, rather than interject something new. In my opinion, this adds a sense of suspension and makes readers look deeper into the context around a certain plot point to understand how characters feel or what's going on inside their heads. I will also try and use it as a lame gag if applicable.

I'm definitely not saying that I'm doing something right—honestly, I'm just trying to justify my own decisions to include "thought asides" by writing this post.

I'm also trying to focus on dialogue, and this poses a problem (kind of). I have found that there is simply not enough syntaxing in the English language to convey intonation and such in a simple way without dialogue tags.

And I dislike dialogue tags. Well, I like them, but in a dialogue driven story they can get old and clunky fast. I do find they are useful for creating pauses in tense situations.

In any case, that was just my two cents on pony words. Have a nice day.

*"They were all waiting reasonably by the train."