I've come to realize the major difficulty in trying to write my novel. Over the last three years, I've grown and matured quite a bit. I struggle with the younger point of view that exists in my earlier drafts of my novel. Where I once lamented the death of innocence and decried the minor injustices…
The Dangers of Learning How To Write
I started out writing my novel as a relative novice. What I had learned came through my own self-study. Because I hadn't taken any courses on writing, I was able to produce a relatively large amount of raw content. I wrote 89,000 words of my novel this way. However, I don't believe that I could…
Mixing the First and Third Perspective: Journal Entries
I have been playing around with the idea of adding journal entries into my novel to provide the reader with a first-person perspective. I would be able to use the third-person limited omniscient narrator to create a more objective and distanced experience, while giving the reader glimpses into the intensely lonely and emotionally tumultuous inner…
Shaking Writing Stagnation with Forrester's Insights
I awoke this morning with nothing to do, so I flipped on my television to Starz. Much to my delight, Gus Van Sant's Finding Forrester was playing. The stagnation in my writing habits were quickly lifted away when Forrester began speaking to Jamal about writing. Of the process, he says that a writer must just…
The First or Third? A Return to the Question of Perspective
My training as a writer and storyteller came from watching movies, which is a third-person format. It's why I naturally gravitated towards the third-person perspective. Like a camera, I conveyed the story through an objective lens, with limited access to the characters' minds. But I suppose that, upon reexamination of the nature of the strengths…
