semi-pro heartbreaker

okay so i have been Ruminating on this for like... a month now... because i truly do believe most craft conversations have already occurred they just might not always be like a hit post right. but salad passed me this post a few months back and i think it really encapsulates a lot of what i like to touch on: this post by andthepeople. most specifically:

if the scene is in a bathroom you don't have to tell me there's a toilet. i assume there's a toilet. if there's NOT a toilet in the bathroom, this is strange and you must tell me.

and it is a little funny i am using their post to make a Writing Tip Post (but this isn't really that... i feel... or am i a hypocrite? very possible. many such cases.) but we move on. i think all of this comes back to my very ardent love for close third person point of view. whenever i write i am always thinking: would the character whose POV i am writing in notice this? and if the answer is no, they wouldn't think about it unless they are actively interacting with (object/character/weather/whatever) then the way i will include it is by staging that interaction. this is how i try to ground the world in a very close third perspective, on top of sort of forgoing more standard "character has a thought" formatting. (thought in italic or thought ended with he thinks. et cetera.) instead of writing a paragraph about what ilya's room looks like, i am a lot more likely to write him moving through it while trying to hit the specific beats i need to: like, is he picking up laundry off the floor with an offhand comment about the terrible schedule he's been on, is he wiping a lipstick stain off the en-suite bathroom mirror, does he think maybe it's time to buy blackout curtains because his head throbs and he wakes too easily. i like inserting these details by having my characters actually relate to the world around. i would be less inclined to write five sentences about ilya's room this way: it was messy, laundry strewn about, curtains doing a shoddy job at keeping it dark at night which was making it hard for him to sleep, and he needed sleep badly right now. though that kind of writing also has time and place. again, it's about balance.

this is why my dialogue is, for better or worse, usually riddled with characters drinking something or touching each other or themselves or fiddling with something and wandering about the space. i am always always thinking about how characters exist physically in the world and how i can use that to convey personality and desire and other things necessary for # my narratives. shane is probably not going to describe the metros locker room to great extent in my fic because he has spent so much time there and as humans we tend to get hung up on what's new, not what we're used to, but if there's suddenly a new paper on the wall, well, he would notice! and i can use that.

to maybe extrapolate further. in salad's words: "what a character does or does not notice says something about them. how observant they are is a characterization choice." i think this is helpful to keep in mind and also plays into what i've been harping about above. i like unreliable narrators and by being in really close third person, by really committing to not telling the reader everything, by forcing both myself and a reader to have to make do with only what my character can reasonably observe and provide, i think i can create a lot of tension and "aha!!" moments, which is what i love experiencing personally.

sunday blue relies entirely on obscuring what shane knows. shane can't know how that scene will unfold because as the writer i have taken away everything but the crucial information. shane can only tell the reader what he knows about the world based on previous scenes (as in kink scenes) with ilya. that's why in the bathroom scene he doesn't say "ilya is offering me his jacket because this is a point where i can choose to end the scene or use a safe word" he just calls ilya's action "a white flag" and you, the reader, have to make assumptions about what shane means by that because he's not going to go into a long tangent about how their safe word system works. he doesn't need to. he knows how it works. basically, the internal narration is not acting as a vehicle of information. it's there to immerse you in a singular character's lived experience. (again—balance. you will need to give information to your reader! but there's tons of ways to do that which doesn't involve 3 paragraphs of exposition.)

Shane’s jacket hangs over Ilya’s arm. A white flag. (...) Ilya doesn’t ask if Shane’s fine: instead he holds his jacket out. The corner of his mouth twitches. Shane shakes his head. He’s not there yet, is barely drunk, barely—his chest lurches. He spits in the sink.

i'm always writing stories HOPING that they will be read a second time around. i love leaving little bread crumbs for someone to pick up on a second read and go oh!! that's why there's that one sentence two chapters from now that i didn't one-hundred percent get the first time around. that to me is part of the fun.

i'm not sure this is a very helpful tip but it is something i AM very conscious of in my writing. so you know. i hope this maybe sparks some thoughts in people whether this is something you vibe with or not in writing.