Diabolus ex Nihilo

Levi's said yes, actually. Assless chaps and a biker vest. Happy Pride.

Your action hero just got shot in the shoulder, stitched it up in a motel bathroom, and is now running through a forest. I need you to know that a shoulder wound severs muscle, nerves, and sometimes bone, and the human body's response to that is not "mild wincing followed by full range of motion." here is what injuries actually do to peoplee...

⊹ Adrenaline is REAL and it does allow people to do extraordinary things immediately after injury, BUT it is a loan, not a gift. you borrow the function and you pay it back later with interest. Your character might genuinely be able to run for twenty minutes after being stabbed. and then the adrenaline drops and everything the body was delaying arrives all at once. the collapse is NOT weakness. it's biology collecting its debt. write the debt collection. it's more interesting than the heroic sprint anyway.

⊹ Blood loss changes cognition before it drops you. you don't go from "fine" to "unconscious." you go through a whole middle stage of confusion, poor decision-making, emotional dysregulation, a strange calm, tunnel vision, difficulty forming sentences. Your injured character making a bad call, saying something they normally wouldn't, becoming suddenly and inexplicably gentle--that's blood loss. use the middle stage. it's dramatically rich and almost nobody writes it.

⊹ Recovery has a timeline and the timeline is long and boring and inconvenient to plot. a broken rib takes six weeks and during those six weeks sneezing is a genuine emergency. a concussion means no screens, no reading, no bright lights, and symptoms can persist for months. a stab wound to the abdomen means weeks of infection risk, limited mobility, and a specific kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with sleep. Your character being sidelined and frustrated and useless for a long time is not a narrative problem. it's the story.

Hiya, a couple of friends recently expressed their frustrations with writing 2nd person POV and I promised to share a couple of tips. I’m sure there are other people out there who might benefit from these so here goes:

The biggest pitfall with 2nd person is that you are forced to use the word ‘you’ a lot, and this can feel very unnatural (both to read and write). 3rd person allows you to use all sorts of different words for your subject and object in a sentence, e.g:

The blonde yawns as she takes a seat by her brother. She picks up her book, turning it towards a dogmarked page. The girl begins to read. 

However, when you take this into 2nd person it becomes:

You yawn as you take a seat next to your brother. You pick up your book, turning it towards a dogmarked page. You begin to read.

Oooh nooo… taking even the most basic sentence into 2nd person strips a lot of colour from the language and adds unintended rhythm in the form of you you you. And this is just one sentence! Now you have to make every single paragraph like this—yikes!

So what do we do? Well, there are a couple of techniques we can employ to add variety to a sentence, both in and out of 2nd person, by playing with sentence structure and interiority.

The first, most important rule is to avoid having the word ‘you’ at the beginning of consecutive sentences.

Let’s rearrange the sentence a bit:

Yawning, you take a seat next to your brother. You pick up your book, turning it towards a dogmarked page. Then, you begin to read.

Already this is a bit better, but we can abolish a few more you’s by messing around with unnecessary the possessive pronouns.

Yawning, you take a seat next to Michael. You pick up the book, turning it towards a dogmarked page. Then, you begin to read.

Neato. Right, so, that’s the most basic way to trick the brain into finding 2nd person more palatable, but it’s still a bit sterile. 

But! Hold on!! There is another important lever we can pull: interiority. When I say interiority, I am talking about abstract statements that forgo ‘you’ as a subject, because it is already implied by the POV we have chosen. That sounds a little complicated so let me show you what I mean:

Yawning, you take a seat next to Michael, book in hand. The page is still dog-eared from yesterday—its upper corner slightly torn. Setting it on your lap, you begin to read.

We use interiority here to imply a lot of actions that would normally have ‘you’ as the subject. By making the subject the page instead, we are telling the reader that the POV character is interacting with the book without saying it directly. We are also adding padding between the first ‘you’ and the ones that we are putting together in the final sentence. Having that nice big gap followed by a tiny one creates a pleasing rhythm.

So let's look at our starting sentence and our final sentence again together, side by side:

You yawn as you take a seat next to your brother. You pick up your book, turning it towards a dogmarked page. You begin to read.

Yawning, you take a seat next to Michael, book in hand. The page is still dog-eared from yesterday—its upper corner slightly torn. Setting it on your lap, you begin to read.

By which I mean, asks used to be WAY more of the tumblr economy. They used to be more common to send, and receive, and see. They were integral to the collaborative, forum-like behavior of old tumblr communities, not even to speak on the HUGE number of ask-blogs that used to exist to only be interacted with in ask-form.