👻Saphira👻

bestie boo, let me fill you in on something: if you're going to take any part of 'good grammar' and randomly assign it to She's A Witch! AI, you might as well give up. It's over. You're cooked. Anyone who has spent the last decade or more learning to type properly, anyone who has spent any time writing articles/papers/essays that require you to use 'good grammar' is going to fall into that 'oh no it might be AI' trap.

I'm going to try it.

First, let me preface this with something very important: you can treat all of this advice as SECOND-DRAFT ADVICE. It is so much easier to rewrite this kind of stuff once you have words on the page. Telling yourself the first draft is totally appropriate and acceptable.

What we’re talking about here are FILTER WORDS (and to some degree verbs of being). Yes, “thought” words are included. But so are “heard, saw, looked, tasted, smelled” etc.—most words having to do with the senses.

This isn’t black and white advice; sometimes you’ll use these words and that’s okay. They’re not WRONG. They’re just weaker. And they’re weaker because they create distance between the reader and the experience of the character.*

If you want your reader to feel like they’re experiencing the story right alongside the character, you want to cut down on filter words.

*This is particularly important with first person and close third POVs. The reader always knows whose eyes they’re seeing through and thoughts they’re privy to. So you don’t need to tell them “I saw X.” Or “I heard X.” Or “I thought Y.” You can just jump into the action/observation as it’s happening.

This is also where you want to pay attention to verbs of being.

you want to pay attention

to verbs of being.

That means that when you read a line like

John saw that the curtains were open.

It immediately takes you OUT of the character's perspective and instead tells you what they experience as a secondhand observation.

You don't have to get fancy or purple with how you rephrase things like this. Not everything needs a ton of breathing room.

You wanna know what's perfectly impactful while keeping a tight POV?

The curtains were open.

Warden: I made tea

Paige: I don’t want tea

Warden: I didn’t make this tea for you. This is my tea.

Paige: Then why are you telling me?

Warden: It’s a conversation starter

Paige: That’s a lousy conversation starter

like… the severus snape we see in the flashbacks in the books is…

jittery and tense, constantly on guard

as soon as james even said anything, he was already reaching for his wand, and i imagine he was kind of forced to be that quick for his guns at any point

“he walked in a twitchy manner that recalled a spider”

like… my point here is that not only are his clothes il-fitting, but so’s his body - he doesn’t know how to move in it, doesn’t know how to exude any kind of presence

no control to his speech at all, from what we can see?

he just throws out desperate curses and profanity when james disarms him and has him tied up

an even shorter temper than he has as an adult

the ill-fitting clothes only add to this idea that he’s like, an object of scorn rather than something to be feared

i know they give child snape a posh boy accent in the movies but british movies always give everyone a posh accent, and it would actually make sense for him to have a northern accent, given that he came from slap bang in the middle of the black country with a working class da

people absolutely look down on regional accents like this, and people are p much automatically looked at as uneducated if they don’t sound like a posh twat

but when we see him later on, he’s collected and controlled, walks with a smooth confidence and an easy grace. much of his speech is delicately poetic and very carefully measured, and almost rehearsed

almost rehearsed? no. i feel like he spends a lot of time working on scripts for himself and then working with them, rehearsing what other people might say to him and how he might respond, making little speeches for some things

and he’s very careful about his presentation and how it comes across, how he seems, the energy he exudes

like… he rebuilt himself, ripped himself apart and then kind of put himself back together, because he knew that he wasn’t good enough, that people looked at him and were disgusted with him, so he wanted them to feel something else instead. this kind of like… complete overhaul doesn’t come without work? 

he probably spent hours and hours walking up and down in front of a mirror so that his gait came across in the right way; probably read out loud and forced his voice and his accent into something else, and then read it more, and more, and more, and just changed the whole thing. 

LIKE.

the upgraded xenonite suit was invented shortly after

honk shoo