Why I Write the Way I Write | Falcon Talks
A little introspection on why I write my stories the way I do...
Hi everyone,
After last time’s highly-emotional Falcon Talks, the new Rapunzel two-parter, and… work (on top of the regular 9-to-5, I worked FIVE AND A HALF HOURS last Saturday, and I have to work this Saturday as well! 😭) - I’ve got nothing for you...
NOTHING!
And so, in an effort to give my dear readers something interesting to read before I take next week off, I decided to cobble together some of my introspections about my own writing. 😅
Quick Thank You
The genesis for this round of introspections began when I saw
’s question on Notes about getting over a fear of writing fiction, which got me thinking about how I write fiction and why I write the way that I do (you can read my reply here, but some of it will be reiterated in this post).I also read
’s piece on narrative distance, which furthered along the introspections.So, if you ever read this, thank you both for the inspiration for this article! 😄
Why I Write the Way I Write
As the readers of my fiction might have noticed, most of my fiction writing is done in first-person past-tense - it’s the POV that I’m the most comfortable writing in and it’s the easiest one for me to express what I want to express with the story.
Using the first-person past-tense POV also facilitates what I enjoy about writing fiction (this is about the actual writing of the story itself, and not the plotting, character creation, etc.) - for me, that’s mostly expressing the characters’ emotions, actions, and reactions to the plot. I like to dig into the characters, so I will usually be writing about what the characters are doing and/or feeling.
On the other hand, I don’t really enjoy writing world-building stuff or physical descriptions of characters. So in my writings, things like that only really come up when it’s important to the POV character and/or plot.
However, as readers of some of my stories might note, while I do primarily use the first-person past-tense POV, I will also jump around and use different POVs and narrative distances when it suits me - even in the same short story!
That, I believe, comes from me also valuing being clear and concise with my stories.
So that I’m concise with the story that I’m trying to tell, I will jump around and use whatever POV and narrative distance that I think is best suited to communicating the scene in mind. I won’t use more words than I need to in order to wrangle a first-person narrator into the right place and the right time if another POV and narrative distance will achieve what I want much faster. (For example, in the first part of Mirrors of the Snow Queen, I used a third-person past-tense POV for the prologue so that the main POV character doesn’t have to be there; and the narrative distance is a little bit wider so that two characters can be the focus of the scene.)
The different POVs then get clearly delineated, and that keeps the story clear and concise (I hope 😅).
(A trick that I use if I have two or more different first-person narrators in the story is to have someone say the current narrator's name in the first few lines soon after shifting the POV; though I usually don't have more than two first-person narrators in my short stories so far, so it hasn’t really been a problem. If I were to write a longer narrative with a lot more first-person narrators, then I might do what K. A. Applegate did for the Megamorph specials of the Animorphs series, where she had the narrator of the chapter listed under the chapter headings.)
And that… is why I write the way that I write.
Outro
Thanks for reading all that - I hope that you enjoyed a little peek behind the scenes! 😄
And if you’re a fellow fiction writer, did that trigger some introspection about your own writing style as well? Let me know in the comments!
As mentioned, we’ll be off next week while I prepare the next short story. So look forward to the next installment in The Red Riding Hood Saga, where Red will meet Mulan!
Yoooo! Thanks for the mention!
Thanks for the shoutout, EHL! I'm glad my piece got you thinking more about these sorts of narrative choices. I love seeing how other writers approach these same decision-points for their stories, since it tells you a lot about how they think of writing and the kinds of stories they want to craft.