Things That I Like: What Homestuck and a random generator taught me about writing

This article originally appeared at The Oak Wheel on April 24, 2014. 

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Or what a random generator taught me about writing, and Homestuck reinforced and Homestuck fanfiction prompted me to write about today.

Things That I Like: You are about to read an article about second-person point of view

This article originally appeared at The Oak Wheel on March 27, 2014. 

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As your eyes move from the title to the body of the article, you commence reading it. You quickly determine that the article is self-demonstrating, and you think that it’s kind of awkward. You hope that the author will cut it out with the crap.

I’ll acquiesce, dear reader. As the preceding self-demonstration mentioned, this article is about the second-person point of view, not self-demonstrating works. For that, you will want to read David Moser. I shall wait patiently till thou hast wetted thine appetite for self-demonstrating literature.

Are you back? Wonderful. As it happens I had a sudden attack of the King Jameses, as you may have noticed, so it was good to have a moment to handle that. You’re back, I’m back, we’re all back to back to back and we’re back to the actual article, alright?

Thank you.

Second-person point of view gets a bad rap most of the time. I don't think that I was ever told anything on it except "Don't." It took seeing other people disregard that rule, and a certain amount of contrarianism, for me to begin experimenting with it myself. Besides a whole lot of fanfiction, where it leads a very fulfilling life, however, it's still not quite yet in vogue in these modern times, the biggest example of it today probably being Andrew Hussie's Homestuck.

I'm a big fan of the second-person point of view now. I'm currently using it in The Buddha on the Road (which could possibly be described as "Andrew Hussie writes a sidequel to Herbert West: Re-Animator) and previously played with it in Sedatophobia, which is cast as a mostly-but-not-entirely one-sided discussion between the narrator and yourself, much like Lovecraft's Pickman's Model (what do we call these conversational blends of first- and second-person? first-point-five points of view?).

Second-person is not a gimmick, though. Like the choice between first-person and third-person, the decision to use the second-person shouldn't be made haphazardly. Melissa Tydell states that there are three benefits to using the second-person pov in her Write Practice article advocating, unusually, for writers to use it more often:

1) Second person pulls the reader into the action

2) Second person gets personal

3) Second person stretches your skills and surprises the reader

There's a reason that Choose Your Own Adventure books are generally in the second-person. For all the technical difficulty that it poses, it makes the action that much more real and penetrating. To grossly oversimplify the mechanisms at work, your sense of empathy is based on an ability to mirror others' emotions in yourself, asking "How would I feel under these circumstances?" By using the second-person point of view the line between yourself and the Other is blurred.

Consider this excerpt from the novelization of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, by Matthew Stover. For context, this takes place at the very end of the movie when Anakin has returned to consciousness and has found himself in the Vader armor. Read, and pay attention to how it makes you feel.

This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, forever:
The first dawn of light in your universe brings pain.
The light burns you. It will always burn you. Part of you will always lie upon black glass sand beside a lake of fire while flames chew upon your flesh.
You can hear yourself breathing. It comes hard, and harsh, and it scrapes nerves already raw, but you cannot stop it. You can never stop it. You cannot even slow it down.
You don’t even have lungs anymore.

Do you have a good handle on your state of mind right now? Can you set it aside, acquire a couple of others, and pick it back up relatively unmarred? Good.

Let's read the same passage again, this time in the first-person point of view.

This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, forever:
The first dawn of light in my universe brings pain.
The light burns me. It will always burn me. Part of me will always lie upon black glass sand beside a lake of fire while flames chew upon my flesh.
I can hear myself breathing. It comes hard, and harsh, and it scrapes nerves already raw, but I cannot stop it. I can never stop it. I cannot even slow it down.
I don’t even have lungs anymore.

And again, from the third-person:

This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, forever:
The first dawn of light in his universe brings pain.
The light burns him. It will always burn him. Part of him will always lie upon black glass sand beside a lake of fire while flames chew upon his flesh.
He can hear himself breathing. It comes hard, and harsh, and it scrapes nerves already raw, but he cannot stop it. He can never stop it. He cannot even slow it down.
He doesn't even have lungs anymore.

If you're anything like me, the second-person point of view cuts to your heart more deeply than the other two do.

The second-person point of view also opens up the room to tricks that you can't utilize in quite the same way, if at all, in other points of view. Secret Life, which also uses the first- and third-person points of view in supplementary fashion, is able to hide important facts in the second-person that would be revealed much sooner, if not immediately, in either of the other possible points of view.

In Things Unsaid, one of the stories in my Babylonian Medley cycle, the narrative even turns a little meta through the use of the second-person. At the end, for example, the protagonist struggles to find the words to describe a particular incident which happened in xir past but fails and fails again. The reason for this is that the particulars of the incident are unknown to you, so of course you don't know the words to convey what really happened. By taking the state of mind of the reader and mirroring it in the protagonist, the line is blurred that much more.

Your turn: What are some unusual literary devices that you have used in the past or want to employ in the future?

R. Donald James Gauvreau works an assortment of odd jobs, most involving batteries. He has recently finished a guide to comparative mythology for worldbuilders, available here for free. He also maintains a blog at White Marble Block, where he regularly posts story ideas and free fiction.

Things That I Like: Some ways to draw out a fight scene

This article originally appeared at The Oak Wheel on March 13, 2014. 

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In my last post on the Oak Wheel I established a problem with fight scenes, namely that the longer they are the more unrealistic they become. Like any good problem it’s a solvable one, and I’d like to suggest some possibilities. A lot of these will draw on examples from my own writing because, after all, other people may know us better than we know ourselves but we don’t know anybody better than we know ourselves (at least, we shouldn’t, but luminosity is a discussion for another day). I don’t expect all of them to be immediately applicable to your story but hopefully they should be able to give you some ideas.

There are a few different things that I’ve done. The first one is make both parties very, very skilled but just as lucky. This is very contrived, and I don’t think that I’ve ever managed to do it well, but in the right hands I think it’s possible. I don’t think that it’d be possible to do more than once a decade, let alone more than once a book, though.

Another possibility is disregarding some of the other shortness advice and zeroing in on every detail. Second to second, what is being felt, physically and mentally? Give us the panic, give us the adrenaline, give us the waves of pain from a broken rib, and the will that keeps someone moving despite internal bleeding. Lavish us with it as if we’re watching the scene in bullet time with an MMA commentator. Take the sensory detail and stab us in the heart with it.

It won’t work every time, but it’s possible.

For SF writers there are a few more options. In one story, maybe i’m just tired, people like the main character couldn’t die until they lost the mental strength to keep regenerating. Battles between such beings were long, hard slogs that were as psychological as they were physical, fought with the intent to stab, crush, beat, and chop the limbs off your opponent until the pain and the effort of regenerating were too great to summon the strength to heal themselves anymore. In fact, pure psychological attacks (such as when another character was taunted about her mother’s death, which she hadn’t known about until then) could be as deadly as anything else if they made it harder for your opponent to find the mental strength to keep going.

Similar to this, The Buddha on the Road features characters who, by dint of being zombies, are trying to make each other nonfunctional rather than, um, dead. Brain trauma matters to them as little as torn jugular veins (well, maybe a little bit more, but not by much), so the intent of each one is to take the other guy down into so many pieces that he’s no longer a threat. Both of these ideas are pretty similar to each other (i.e. characters with superhuman toughness) but the details are enough to make them and their fights distinct from each other. Whether you take these mechanics or come up with your own spin on superhuman toughness it should still result in something that smells fresh.

Fighting on some other plane is also great stuff. In Lost Girl the actual physical combat is presented but ultimately takes a backseat to the real conflict being fought between the two characters as they wield a kind of story magic against each other. Each one of them was trying to fit themselves and the other character into a particular archetypal story where their victory was inevitable, nay, required, and drew on incidental details to force the other character to fit the role that had been chosen for them.

This brings up magic in general. Perhaps there are enchantments at work which must be penetrated or used up before anyone can actually be hurt. Something like a mix of this and maybe i’m just tired was done in Her Body Moves, whose characters benefited from a regeneration system that can be overtaxed by suffering too much over too small a span of time. Or they have but one weakness which must be exploited in order to kill them (remember, one of the reasons that real fights end so quickly is because there are so many ways to kill a person).

Before you start to figure out how to justify a long fight scene, though, make sure that you should. Is it something that you can write well? Do you even need it? Many times the tension in the build-up to the fight, and even the aftermath, can be more interesting than the fight itself. Like everything else, you should only bother with a long fight scene when it’s going to serve the story to begin with. And most importantly of all, don’t forget the implications: Your justification, whether it could only exist in a fantasy novel or actually does have some realism to it, will undoubtedly have an effect on the rest of the story and its world. Even zeroing in and slowing down, as described in the third paragraph, will at least have an effect on the style of the rest of the story, which needs to be one that this technique can reasonably fit into and complement.

Your turn: How do you handle action scenes?

R. Donald James Gauvreau works an assortment of odd jobs, most involving batteries. He has recently finished a guide to comparative mythology for worldbuilders, available here for free. He also maintains a blog at White Marble Block, where he regularly posts story ideas and free fiction.