Cyrus

Lecture 04 Viewpoint and Q&A

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Lecture #4: Viewpoint and Q&A

  • finish the intro slightly earlier than you are comfortable with
  • write your own story and take risks, get some “red marks”
  • marvel movies are different genres, ant man comedic heist, Thor is epic fantasy etc
  • how to make side plots relevant?
    • make sure engaged with viewpoint characters.
    • signpost what the main objectives are and don’t leave unresolved promises by going on a side quest
    • make sure the reader is invested in the promises and progress
    • make each character the protagonist of their own story, write like a series of books interconnected
  • don’t add unnecessary twists without emotional impacts
  • secret to making episodic writing a page turner:
    • make twists and promises at the END of episodes
  • there does not necessarily have to be a twist, but there must be an escalation:
    • romantic comedies usually have a break up scene at the 3/4 mark even though we know that they are going to get together
    • revealing that Darth Vader is Luke’s father is a perfect twist/escalation in the plot and conflict
  • how can I tell if my character or plot needs to change?
    • when you encounter a problem, simply continue writing. At the end you will see how the finished product is broken, and you will instinctively start to fix it in your head. Then go back and rewrite it the correct way.
  • how can a very character driven story work?
    • bruh

viewpoint

there are three standard view points

  • omniscient
    • present narrator - Bilbo writing the hobbit and giving glimpses into other people’s thoughts even though he didn’t know it at the time, use of the phrase “they didn’t know it at the time but…”
    • true omniscient - no necessary narrator but the author has access to all characters thoughts, feelings intentions - example in Dune the doctor says “I’m going to betray them”
    • limited - for a given scene you see through a certain character’s eyes and see other’s intentions through their frame of reference
      • eg. stormlight archive
      • hard to have an unreliable narrator
      • everything is painted through the perception of the character however it is more trustworthy and slightly more objective than in cinematic form
  • first person
    • epistolary - told through letters, journal entries
      • eg. the martian, epigrahps of mistborn,
      • it has mystery, its not a flashback so you don’t know if they survived
      • immersive fully
      • can be used in the epigraphs (in mistborn)
      • can hide information without feeling like your cheating
      • big limitation is the rigid form
      • can stretch your belief: how did they remember this verbatim
    • flashback - classic first person, someone is telling you a story, they are two people: the character now and the character in the past who would become the present character
      • disadvantage: you know that they survived
      • benefit: you have the promise of how they got to where they are now
      • deep characterisation, understanding the voice and development of the character
      • are allowed to signpost, “pay attention to this’ “i didn’t know at the time”
      • can have an unreliable narrator
      • biggest reason to jump back to limited is to create objectivity and trust
    • cinematic - just a first person told in the present tense, while the others are usually past tense
  • second person - this is for choose your own adventure, very strange

In the first person you can get away with a lot because of the style of the character, ie they are funny so you can do an info dump without it being boring.

you can encode a promise into how the narrator got from their past self to their current self

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