Invisible Ink
Conflict of Interest: One Portion of Conflict, Please!

Time for a topic shift. I have a plan for a long-form post on Friday, so I’m going to try and cover all the groundwork before that’s ready to be published. The first thing I need to do is talk about what makes a conflict, and just how much can the concept be broken down to its simplest form.

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A Certain Point of View: The Opinionated Narrator

First person, second person, third person, limited, omniscient: that’s all we need to know, isn’t it?

Of course not, and I’m going to kick off with something I mentioned in yesterday’s formal review: the opinionated narrator.

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Invisible Ink
Conflict of Interest: Controlling Intensity

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Invisible Ink
Conflict of Interest: Agency

I was thinking that I really needed to talk about this now, but as I considered what was worth saying about it, I realised just how much of a clever – and insufferably smug – bastard I am.

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Invisible Ink
Conflict of Interest: Abstracting Conflicts

Like all things in writing, there’s knowing the rule, understanding the rule, then knowing when to throw it straight out of the window. As such, I want to focus on when most of what I’ve said about narrative conflict can take a long walk of the proverbial short pier.

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Invisible Ink
Conflict of Interest: Narrative Mood

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Invisible Ink

Sentence Sophistication: Active, Passive, or Just Weak?

One of the roads to tight, streamlined prose is to minimise wording and always use the active voice. Today, I want to talk about a kind of writing that I see an awful lot of authors use, and I’m not just talking the newer ones, that I think needs the gentle caress of a little sophistication.

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Invisible Ink
Sentence Sophistication: Backfilling

Following on from yesterday, I made a connection so something I was warned about a long time ago: backfilling.

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A Certain Point of View: First or Third?

So, the comments on my last post successfully predicted where I was going next, so let’s just dive right into that (he says, already a day late).

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Invisible Ink
Sentence Sophistication: Chicken vs Egg

Knowing how to write good prose is one thing, but sometimes it is just as important to make sure that barriers to good prose aren’t of our own making.

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Invisible Ink
Conflict of Interest: Interlude

Just a quick drive-by post as I’ve been out all day today:

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Ladies and gents, it's that time again. The Pleasant Commentator and Review Group got about 90 stories submitted this time, and I'll be attempting to tackle one per week – at least until I run out of relatively short ones that fit this format. As always, I will reproduce all such reviews here.

I'm hoping to have a few words on what I call the 'opinionated narrator' up here tomorrow to resume my Invisible Ink posts.

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A while ago, a pretty cool dude called Invisible Davis made some fun videos of the Barcast being dumb. These actually helped us kinda get on the map, and we still use them as examples of what our podcast is like. Hell, his song is still the opening music for all of our podcasts! He didn't ask for money. We didn't ask him to do it. But he did, because he's wonderful.

A few days ago, his mother passed away.

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Because why the fuck not, that's pretty damn hot.

[Adult story embed hidden]

Give it a read, and feel free to let me know what you think!

I've read a lot of Dickens' work, but I haven't actually read the story referenced in the title of today's post. One day. For now, let's have a little shat, shall we?

The Snake memes of late have me really into this song.

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OK, so I was watching a video on fan theories and thought I'd share one of my comments here. One theory is that Harry's Invisibility Cloak was a piece of the Veil... which really makes no sense to my way of thinking. They were also speculating on the connection between the three hallows.

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Invisible Davis is actually a genuinely pretty cool dude. He hates us. So you know his taste is decent.
Anyway, we're going to be hanging out with him today on the Barcast at 4PM PST, asking him questions and getting a little of our own abuse thrown back at us for a change. Get your drinks ready, you probably won't want to set them down.

See you there shortly!:
https://www.twitch.tv/mikesnipe

-Pencil

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So, that little test survey I put out got some responses... I will now list the question and the responses to it.

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