Writing and the like

Head-hopping generally happens in third person limited, i.e. a narrative filtered (we use the term focalised) through the perspective of a specific character. So using third person (he, she, it, or they if you're punchy) and keeping the perspective tightly focused on (limited to) what that person knows. It's the most commonly used perspective in contemporary fiction.

Head-hopping is when the narrative shifts from being focalised through one character to another character in quick succession, by which I mean between paragraphs or even sentences. It's the most common technical issue I see in narrative prose. NB I'm not talking about having multiple povs within an extended piece, where individual scenes or chapters have a new pov. I'm talking about rapid shifts, sometimes back-and-forth, within continuous scenes.

Why does this matter? Well, as I say, if you've got the chops, go ahead and polyphonically knock my socks off. But it's not easy. I did write a piece once that did this, to prove to a friend that it could be done - yes, proving someone else wrong is a great reason to write a piece of fiction. It was very tricky, and the pov only shifted a handful of times, after each character had had a few paragraphs to establish their perspective. The story, which was called "The Lost" (thematic link to form) was about two people bringing their understanding of each other closer and closer together (content linked to form). My friend didn't notice until I pointed it out. And then she was furious with me. Yay friendship!

But this isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about those sudden shifts, where the reader is left uncertain whose perspective they're following, and is thrown out of the text. It generally happens in scenes where two or more characters are in conversation with each other. I think it occurs for two reasons, both of which ultimately come down to control over point of view.

The author is visualising the scene as if it's a film or piece of TV happening in front of them. This means that they are not themselves anchored in the perspective of one of the characters. They've not decided through whom the scene is focalised.

This means that they're not fully immersed in the experience of the pov character - which means in turn that they're not fully immersed in the reality of the scene.

Basically I'm saying that the scene is not yet fully imagined. What's most likely happening in this stage of writing is that the author is establishing the dramatic parameters of the scene, i.e. what are the beats in the conversation; how is power shifting around; what individual character trajectories are being followed, and so on. Because the scene is in the process of being imagined, the pov shifts around to help with this work.

The solution is to realise that the scene is effectively still in draft. You need to be clear on whom this scene needs to be focalised through; fully immerse in their perspective; and rewrite the scene filtered through that consciousness. (This doesn't usually involve much rewriting. It does mean more thinking, and more craft.)

I nearly wrote "filtered through that lens" there, because it's a good way to get the message across. But I consciously decided against. Because head-hopping often arises when the writer is operating a camera on the scene. And narrative prose is not primarily a visual medium. The recording device you're operating when you write narrative prose is not simply visual. It is a means to record consciousness, which implies all that a character experiences, not just what can be seen (and excludes what a character does not or cannot experience, hence suspense, irony, etc.).

Your task, as a writer, is to come as close to that consciousness as possible. This is why, as I wrote the other day, so much of the actual work of writing takes place in the thinking. Once you're solid on that ground, then you need to understand that the medium by which you represent this experience in narrative prose is language. Not paint or film or colour or light, but the sounds and rhythms and structures and syntax and intertextualities and all the rest of it that language offers. (I'm leaving aside experimental narration here; as I say, in the end, anything goes. Flick through Ulysses to see what happens when the visual elements of prose - the materiality of the book - are exploited for narrative effect. But then Joyce did love the cinema.)

Third person limited, particularly when it becomes close to free indirect discourse, is one of the most effective tools we have to do this. So my advice is to be aware of hopping between heads. Observe the head-hopping, ask yourself what this means for your immersion in your story-world, and, if necessary, push that further into the character's pov. The more you are immersed, the more the reader will be immersed.

And the more you are immersed, the more your technical choices are guided by that immersion. It's a true delight when the words seem to be coming from the made-up person in your head, rather than from your own clumsy brain. Sometimes you find yourself using words you weren't entirely sure were within your vocabulary. That's fun!

Act out a short scene from your character's perspective. Choose one that involves another character. (You can do this in your head or get up and block it out if it helps.) In other words, don't have the camera up front, have the camera on your character's shoulder. Then, try to ease yourself away from using the imaginative metaphor of the camera. Experience the scene not only in terms of what your character sees, but what they feel, sense, think, know, and so on. Think of it as a consciousness recording device, if that helps. You're trying to embody the experience of this character in this moment. How does it feel to move like them, react like them, be in the world like them? In this moment?

Write this up in first-person. This should pull you more closely into the consciousness of the character, making you expand the field of language by which you represent them on the page (and what's available from on screen). Your focus could be on what they are thinking and experiencing about the other character: their doubts, their certainties, their conscious and unconscious desires from this interaction. When you've got a good chunk, take a look through this and try to work out what's idiomatic about their language: look at sentence structure, sentence fragments, tone, style, etc.

(I see that one all the time. Character B asks question. Character A reflects on that question and the options available to them as answers. Character B prompts Character A to respond. Reader ("U") thinks: Aha, the real-time issue... Because we think much more quickly than we write or read. So in fact, all those thoughts will have happened in a split-second, rather than the time it's taken you to write them or me to read them. So don't sweat it, unless the time taken to respond is making Character B feel something, and Character A is registering this.)

Shifting away from thinking you're a camera operator to a prose writer helps solve a lot of problems with time management within scenes. You don't, in fact, have to faithfully represent visually everything that happened. You can just crack on with the narration. Say a character's getting out of a car. Yes, you can faithfully describe this and the time it takes. Or you can say. "He got out of the car." Job done, on with the story. Time's bendy in prose, because time is bendy in our heads. You'll be surprised at what you can cut, and how much more effective it makes your prose.

I emphasize: DOES NOT mean that it is poorly written.

It does not mean the story is bad. Or the concept is bad. Or the words themselves are bad.

It means it is rough. It is unedited. It is not submittable, saleable, ready for publication. It's raw and messy and needs work.

As all first drafts do.

Even professionals at it for decades, dominating the industry, do not write a publishable piece of fiction when they sit down to write.

If you've seen videos of artists working from rough sketch to final piece you can compare the two.

Your first draft is bad because it is a draft.

Reminding new authors of this is a way to lessen the fear of perfection. To get out of your head and just write. To let them know it doesn't have to be perfect it just has to be written. You can fix whatever you hate in revision. You're going to be revising anyway. No matter how great the first draft reads you will be revising it. Probably more than once. So don't worry if it isn't perfect first time out.

It is not meant to be an aggressive and cruel expectation or condemnation of beginners or some declaration that your first draft must be terrible or you've failed somehow.

That is asinine.

The START of your story - how fucked up flawed is your premise/character at the start? what do they have to change? why are they HERE?

The END of your story - How do you want your main character/theme/universe to change after your story? Does it get better or worse? THIS SETS UP THE TONE DRASTICALLY.

What you want to happen IN BETWEEN - the MEAT of it. What made you start writing this WIP in the first place. Don't be ashamed to indulge, it's where the BRAIN JUICE comes from. You want a deep dive into worldbuilding and complex systems? Then your start and end should be rooted in some fundamental, unique rule of your universe (what made you obsess over it?). Want to write unabashed ship content? Make sure your start and end are so compelling you'll never run out of smut scenarios to shove in between scenes (what relationship dynamics made you ship it in the first place?).

The ANTE - the GRAVITY of your story. How high are the stakes? Writing a blurb or interaction? start with a small day-in-the-life so you can focus on shorter timelines and hourly minutiae that can easily get overlooked in more complicated epics. Or you can go ham on it and plot out your whole universe's timeline from conception to demise. Remember: the larger the scale, the less attached your story may get. How quickly time flies in your story typically correlates with the ante (not a hard rule, ofc, but most epics span years of time within a few pages, while a romance novel usually charts out the events of a few months over a whole manuscript.)

Sometimes where writing, particularly dialogue, can feel funky is the problem of voice, of that just doesn't sound like him, which can come down to individual words used. What's really interesting is this sense can ping even for characters you don't know at all, NPCs and background characters, not just the big main canon favorites that everyone knows intimately.

For example, I was writing a fic recently where I had typed out a character saying

"He was lucky he wasn't more seriously hurt."

And immediately had to backtrack because the word lucky felt wrong. I knew exactly what needed to go there instead without really thinking about it, but let's break it down a minute first.

Okay, so imagine you're me and lucky feels off, so what do you do? You turn to the thesaurus. This is what you get:

[alt text added to image; should pull through]

These aren't... wrong. (Well, some of them are.) Most of them are synonyms of lucky in various contexts, but they're not one-to-one by any means. So first you have to know that, in this spoken context of describing a person who avoided a potential negative outcome, only some of these will work, because it needs to be an adjective that has to address a moment of good luck (as opposed to a pattern or a lifetime) and avoiding that potential negative outcome by chance. Most of the time, you can sort these out by saying them out loud in your chosen sentence.

"He was lucky he wasn't more seriously hurt"

✅ Original sentence, construction works.

"He was serendipitous he wasn't more seriously hurt"?

🚫 No. That doesn't make sense at all.

"He was blessed he wasn't more seriously hurt."

✅ Yeah, that works, in a vacuum, too.

Of the above, in the sentence of dialogue I created, the following work:

Blessed

Fortunate

Lucky

Only three. (If I changed the sentence structure to "It was ___ he wasn't more seriously hurt," I could try out a few more, maybe, like fortuitous and providential, but I'm not going to.)

Even with only three options, especially in dialogue, you have to be able to parse out what kind of person would use which. That was why lucky pinged as off to me, even though it works perfectly well in this context in a vacuum.

In my scenario, the person speaking was a highly educated, upper socioeconomic middle-aged man of authority for whom American English is a first language speaking to another man with whom he has only a professional relationship, a reason to worry about his standing within the state of said relationship, and a vested interest in maintaining a healthy level of respect and trust.

That is not a man who is going to say lucky.

I knew immediately and instinctively that he would say

"He was fortunate that he wasn't more seriously hurt."

He wouldn't say blessed unless I wanted to imply something about his religious and/or spiritual background and beliefs, which I did not. Lucky has a more common feel to it, a little more casual, and just wouldn't be the word of use for this kind of character in this situation. Reaching for the three-syllable word instead of the two, the one that echoes with a tiny bit more pomp.

You'll notice, too, that a that appeared as well, because a man like the character I described would be more particular about the formalities of grammar, even in cases where his meaning is clear without them.

A different character, someone of a lower socioeconomic status and/or in a much more casual situation might even say

"He got lucky he wasn't more seriously hurt."

Do you see how those four ways of saying the exact same thing sound and feel different?

"He was lucky he wasn't more seriously hurt."

"He was fortunate that he wasn't more seriously hurt."

"He was blessed he wasn't more seriously hurt."

"He got lucky he wasn't more seriously hurt."

The exact same sentiment, just tweaked to match the speaker.

It usually feels really bad. Because this is the point it becomes real craft. It's so, so difficult to really be able to identify if it's truly not going to be anything or you're just in the hardest part of the process, and really the only way to know is to... write through it. Write it badly. Or, if you really can't, put it in a drawer and come back to it after a few months of breathing space. Remember, you can fix so much in the edit, but you can't fix nothing!

https://www.patreon.com/posts/writing-advice-1-82451675

Second of all, I realised as a writing weakness of mine as I never really thought about it but how do you naturally mention physical features in a way that isn’t jarring? Sorry if you have been asked this a lot T~T

Love ur work btw its some of my fav pieces of writing 🖤🖤

Oh, it was purposeful. I was there that Christmas eve. I remember.

As for writing physical features...take my advice with a pinch of salt. You might notice I spend a lot of time writing characters who are not described in detail online, thus letting the reader fill in whatever gaps they would like.

Anyway. Caveat out of the way.

When is description jarring?

When it's not woven into a scene. (E.g. description dump at the beginning, never mentioned the rest of the scene.)

When it's a tonal/mood shift. (E.g. grim metaphor in a comedy).

When it's not something your POV/narrator would think or notice.

Basically, if you can figure out why it's jarring, you can normally reverse engineer the solution to the problem when editing.

Thoughts and tips (short version, long under the cut)

Focus on key details. We need a sense of the character, at first, we don't need everything about them.

Use situational context. What is relevant to what is happening at that moment in the novel?

Use your protagonist. How do they filter the world? What is important to them to notice?

Compare and contrast to illuminate two characters at once.

Avoid long-descriptions in a mirror (some exceptions, if plot relevant).

Don't be afraid of imagery/metaphor/simile, but don't feel like you have to use them if it doesn't fit.

(None of this advice really applies to dialogue. If it’s in your character’s voice, they can use whatever words they like!)

Suddenly

                This one usually makes people’s list for things to cut. “Suddenly, the door opened.” Turns into, “The door slammed open.”

                As always, we want to make the readers think wow that was sudden! Instead of just telling them so.

Saw/Heard + Felt

                I already explained this in my post here!

Seemed

                There’s a use for seemed in writing when your character is surprised, assuming, or guessing at something. “It seemed impossible.” “The noise seemed to travel for miles.” Etc.

                However, when guessing at someone’s emotions—or a group of people—it’s better to just describe what those people look like. So “He seemed happy” turns into, “he grinned, bouncing on his feet.”

Really/Very

                Instead of “The really big house” try, “the huge house.” Or “His hair was very dark.” Turns into “His hair was inky black.”

That

                If you can take ‘that’ out of a sentence, it usually is stronger than if you don’t. “It was the best cake that she’d ever had!” turns into “It was the best cake she’d ever had!” It reads a bit less clunky.

Then

                Then can be used sometimes, but it’s one of those words that’s easy to overuse. To cut out a lot of your ‘thens’ you can replace them with “and” such as, “He left the house, then got into the car.” Turns into, “He left the house and got into the car.”

Down/Up

                “He sat down” is redundant. “He sat” means the same thing. Same with “She stood up.”

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

2. Try things out. You don't have to show them to anyone. Sometimes a stylistic idea will get stuck in my head and I just have to write freeform for a couple of thousand words to see how it feels on the page. One time in college I was possessed by the urge to write the vilest, foulest, most unsympathetic and filthy first-person narrative just to figure out how it would actually read, so I scribbled out a couple of pages until it was out of my system. I never did anything with those passages, but they're in my repertoire now, I know how that material hits. I'm always comparing writing to chefing - not everything you cook is a restaurant meal. You can experiment with flavours in your own kitchen, where you are free to make something completely unpalatable and then toss it right out with a better understanding of the process.

[ID: An image of the main character from Eragon, a white teenage boy with blond hair in silver armour as he sits, with his hand outstretched. On his hand is a glowing blue mark. He is visibly straining as he attempts to heal a large creature in front of him. /End ID]

I'm a massive fan of the fantasy genre, which is why it's so incredibly frustrating when I see so much resistance to adding disability representation to fantasy works. People's go-to reason for leaving us out is usually something to the effect of "But my setting has magic so disability wouldn't exist, it can just be healed!" so let's talk about magic, specifically healing magic, in these settings, and how you can use it without erasing disability from your story.

Alright, Tumblr writers. Sit down. Drink some water. I’m back with more writing tips I learned the hard way, usually at 2am while questioning every life choice I’ve ever made. Take what helps. Leave what doesn’t. Argue with me in the comments if you must.

1. Your tone doesn’t have to stay consistent to be good. You can be funny and devastating. Soft and brutal. Whiplash is sometimes the point. Life doesn’t stick to one genre — your writing doesn’t have to either.

2. Trauma shouldn’t only explain behaviour; complicate it. If a backstory only makes a character quieter, sadder, or “stronger,” it’s underused. Trauma creates contradictions: wanting closeness but flinching from it, craving stability but sabotaging it. That tension is the point.

3. If you’re exhausted by your own story, take that seriously. Burnout while writing isn’t a sign that your story is bad — it’s usually a sign that something is off in the process. You might be editing while drafting, forcing the plot to go somewhere it doesn’t want to, or circling the same emotional beat without letting it change. Before you delete anything or decide you “hate” the story, step back. Distance fixes more drafts than starting over ever will.

4. If you suddenly lose all motivation halfway through a scene, don’t push — jump. That drop usually happens right before an emotional beat you haven’t figured out yet. Instead of forcing filler, jump past it. Write the aftermath. Write the reaction. Once you know where the scene lands, going back to fill in the middle is way easier.

5. Don't be afraid to kill your darlings. Sometimes, you write a line or a scene that you love, but it doesn't fit the story. It's okay to cut it. Maybe it can be used elsewhere, or maybe it just needed to be written to get you to the next part. Your story will be stronger for it. But make sure to save it somewhere else for later.

6. Let characters surprise you. Sometimes, a character will do something unexpected. Don't fight it. Let them surprise you. Maybe they'll reveal a hidden side or take the story in a new direction. Trust your characters—they might know where they're going better than you do.

7. If your dialogue sounds stiff, check how the character answers. Real people dodge, deflect, misunderstand, and answer questions with different questions. If one character asks something important and the other responds clearly and honestly on the first try, it can feel fake. Add friction. Let them avoid the point. That’s usually where the tension lives.

8. If you get a sudden burst of inspiration for a totally different scene, write it immediately. Don’t worry about continuity. Don’t worry about spoilers. Don’t worry about “doing it out of order.” That excitement is your brain handing you something important. You can always stitch it in later — you can’t always get the feeling back.

9. If you ever catch yourself thinking, “I should probably explain this,” pause. That urge usually shows up right after you’ve written something subtle and start worrying the reader won’t get it. Before you add explanation, ask: is the clue there? If the emotion, action, or detail already points in the right direction, trust it. Over-explaining often flattens moments that were already working.

10. If you don’t know how to start a scene, start a few seconds late. Writers often open scenes too early — characters entering rooms, greeting each other, settling in. Skip that. Start where something is already happening: mid-conversation, mid-thought, mid-tension. Readers will catch up faster than you think. (A LOT of my writing starts like this, but lots of people like it... so it works I guess.)

11. If you write your main character as “normal,” don’t abandon that the second they're thrown in a difficult situation. If you establish a character as ordinary — awkward, untrained, unsure — they shouldn’t suddenly start moving smoother, or reacting like a seasoned fighter the moment things get hard. Stress doesn’t usually make people cooler or more competent; it makes them messier. If you want them to survive a difficult situation, let it be through panic, luck, instinct, help from others, or small, clumsy decisions. The moment they act like a different person, they stop feeling real — and readers will notice.

12. If your redemption arc starts with instant forgiveness, it isn’t redemption. Redemption requires effort, discomfort, and time. The character should change before they’re accepted again — not after. Forgiveness is a result, not a starting point. Saying the character did some bad things but the second they apologise everything is forgiven (or to an extent) not only sounds unrealistic, but simple too.

-

Okay, that’s it. No more tips. I’ve run out of wisdom and it’s past the hour where good decisions are made.

If even one of these made you go, “oh. that explains a lot actually,” then this post did its job. You don’t have to use all of them. You don’t have to agree with me. Writing isn’t a checklist — it’s trial and error and accidentally discovering your best scenes while doing something “wrong.”

So write out of order. Let the tone shift. Let your characters be complicated and a little inconvenient. Skip the boring parts. Trust the moment before you explain it to death.

And if your draft feels messy or unfinished or emotionally confusing?

Good. That usually means you’re close.

Go write something that surprises you. Something that hurts a little. Something you’ll reread later and realise you were braver than you thought.

You’re not doing it wrong.

You’re writing.

by writingwithoutconfidence (you all make me more confident <3)

Writing Tips

My Writing (very long though)

Symbolism works best when it sneaks in sideways.

1. Repeat an object or detail — not the meaning. Don’t explain the symbolism. Let it build. “Every room in the house had a clock with a crack down the middle.”

2. Tie symbols to emotion, not plot. A raven doesn’t have to foreshadow death — maybe it shows up every time your character lies.

3. Pick something small and let it haunt the story. Examples: • matches that never light • the sound of a kettle whistling too long • a single glove always left behind

4. Reveal the meaning late — or not at all. Readers love the “OHHH” moment, even if it comes chapters later.

5. Use symbolic opposites for character conflict. Fire vs ice, silence vs noise, locked windows vs open roads. Internal tug-of-war, external world.

Subtle romance tension without the cheesiness

If you don’t want cheesy YA romance, try these.

1. Let their emotions leak through contradictions. “He refused to look at her — but passed her the warmer mug.”

2. Use body language like dialogue. • brushing hands • standing too close • pretending not to notice

3. Create micro-moments of choice. Do they reach for the door… or wait for the other person to catch up? Do they touch their shoulder… or pull back?

4. Let silence do emotional heavy-lifting. “She didn’t answer him. She didn’t have to. The way she held the blanket was enough.”

5. Play with pacing — slow burn, fast heart. Long sentences for swelling emotion. Short ones for impact. “He swallowed. She noticed.”

Dialogue tricks because dialogue is 90% subtext

1. People rarely say what they mean. Not: “I’m scared you’ll leave.” But: “Are you going out again tonight?”

2. Cut hello/hi/bye unless the rhythm needs it. Open in motion: “You’re late.”

3. Let characters talk in their own ways. Nervous: fragmented, apologetic. Angry: clipped, sharp. Tired: fewer words, softer ones.

4. Add quiet gestures between lines. “Yeah, sure.” He kept folding the same corner of the map. This gives tone without telling.

5. Interruptions = realism + tension. “I said I didn’t—” “Didn’t what? Care?”

Little ways to build emotional weight without being overdramatic

Emotion doesn’t need violins!!

1. Show the aftermath, not the moment. “The letter lay open. She hadn’t moved in ten minutes.”

2. Let small details break the reader. “He set two plates out. Then put one back.”

3. Guilt speaks through habits. “He checked the locks twice tonight.”

4. Don’t explain the emotion — show the fracture. Instead of “She missed him”: “She kept reaching for a second mug.”

5. Use long sentences for grief, short ones for pain. Grief lingers. Pain hits.

Scene description that doesn't overwhelm

Description is seasoning, not the meal.

1. Pick two details that define the space. “A crooked picture frame and a single, flickering bulb.”

2. Filter everything through the character’s mindset. A paranoid character notices shadows. A romantic notices warm colours.

3. Let the environment influence behaviour. “The cold tiles made him fidget.”

4. Use description to hint at conflict. “The chairs were too close together.”

5. Sprinkle details throughout — not all upfront.

Tension-building without action scenes

Tension isn’t violence — it’s expectation.

1. Give the character a secret the reader knows about. Instant anxiety.

2. Break the rhythm. One sentence too short. One beat too long.

3. Make characters behave too normally. “He smiled. Too easily.”

4. Use the wrong detail in the right moment. “Why were the keys in the freezer?”