AverusBlack
AKA Aisling
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- Jan 26, 2019
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Personally, I don't like to write "Verbing, Person otherverbed." sentences, especially for action scenes, where the most important information at any given moment is "who's doing what?"
Generally speaking, I try to reserve "-ing" words for phrases that are treated as nouns on their own (EG "mountain biking"), or something the subject is doing simultaneously with the "-ed" verb in the first clause. (EG "He leans away, forming a gun, and...")
And if I'm going to start a sentence with "Verbing, Person otherverbed.", the Person is gonna be the last person mentioned in the previous sentence. Or else the reader has to waste brainpower going "Oh, I guess a new person's acting now."
There's also "As", which means I can avoid non-noun "-ing" entirely;
One might argue that starting two consecutive sentences with "As" is still awkward. That's a fair criticism.
I really need to finish that tutorial I've been writing about this stuff.
Posts from Ainsley's POV are... from Ainsley's POV. You don't name people constantly in your head. Ainsley does Nemesis does Ainsley does Nemesis does Ainsley does Nemesis does Ainsley does Nemesis does Ainsley does Nemesis does. If there's only two characters relevant to the scene at any given moment, the importance of naming them constantly diminishes. Honestly if you're having trouble keeping track of who is who in a two person situation that's... what?
The point made earlier about characters needing a declaration to prompt the reader to know who's POV they're experiencing made sense and there's lots of stuff I've left unresolved because my whole style is throw story hooks around like dollar bills in a strip club and randomly pick them up later with no warning. But in action scenes, constantly naming people only makes sense when one person does a thing, then another person does, then another person does, then two people together, etc. If it's only a couple characters, constantly naming them over and over and over and over just makes the writing bland. There has to be some margin for the reader to figure things out on their own, if I spell everything out all the time it just comes off like the author thinking they're idiots.
One of the things I've noticed in writing is that there's a lot of "Blahblahblah", Soandso said. Which makes sense in a multi-person conversation. But I don't want to treat my readers like they're stupid and I'm learning as I go along too. This story is the first attempt I have ever made at writing anything longer than 2000 words and I've never taken classes in writing, never done a literary course or anything. I've just read a lot of books. Thousands of books. I don't even know how many anymore.