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: 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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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
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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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
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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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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