{ ＩＮＫＬＩＮＧＳ } LOCK! NEW THREAD

[Rekhyt]

I usually use past tense, third person.
I really hate reading/using present tense, and first person bugs me,
because your understanding of other characters is limited.
I only use first person when using an insane person in a story.
Like in my story "The Mentalist.".

Well, that's (to me) the reason that a lot of authors use first person. When you don't see everything the other characters are thinking, they're more like people. I also prefer first person because it add flaws to the view of the story. When someone writes in third person, yes, you know what the character is thinking, but you don't really know how they are thinking. In first person you understand how conflicted the person is. At least in my opinion <3
That isn't to say I don't like third. I think it's easier to write in third and it's also nice to use when you have quite a few characters, and the plot is bigger than just one quest/adventure. But I prefer first!

[rikkea.]

Previous Username: Rikkea.
New Username: hey, cutie ♥
What you'd like to be called now: Cutie or Rikki c;

[deansideofthemoon]

I would like to join Inklings ^U^
[size=85]Username: Itter
What we will call you: Itter or Otter
Will you critique other's work?: Possibly.
Links to your story if you have any:http://www.chickensmoothie.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=2145377http://www.wattpad.com/story/3629061-%E2%9D%A1%C7%9D%D0%B8%C7%9D%C6%A8%E1%8E%A5%C6%A8 (neither of these are complete by the way)
Anything you want us to know?: Eh...not really. I would love it if people critiqued my work though ^U^

[Solar Flare]

[size=85]Username: Celestial Thunder
What we will call you: Celest, Celestial, Thunder(a maximum of four.)
Will you critique other's work?: Possibly
Links to your story if you have any: None so far. :3 Up until now, I've been writing them all in composition notebooks. (I recently lost one too. /).(\ )
Anything you want us to know?: I'm available for assistance, ideas, etc. :3[/size]

[Rolly-chan]

Well its been a while since I've posted here. c:

I usually use past tense, third person.
I really hate reading/using present tense, and first person bugs me,
because your understanding of other characters is limited.
I only use first person when using an insane person in a story.
Like in my story "The Mentalist."

Does it bother you guys when someone is constantly switching between tenses in a story when they aren't meaning too?
It makes me want to punch them in the face, so.

Well, that's (to me) the reason that a lot of authors use first person. When you don't see everything the other characters are thinking, they're more like people. I also prefer first person because it add flaws to the view of the story. When someone writes in third person, yes, you know what the character is thinking, but you don't really know how they are thinking. In first person you understand how conflicted the person is. At least in my opinion <3
That isn't to say I don't like third. I think it's easier to write in third and it's also nice to use when you have quite a few characters, and the plot is bigger than just one quest/adventure. But I prefer first!

I prefer third person, simply because I have noticed that you're more likely to find a good quality story in third person than in first, and many other (older) readers have noticed this too, so it's easier to "sell" your story to more people (and more mature people) if it's in third person. Plus, you have a wider variety of what you can do with third person. I have no qualms writing in first person, though, and sometimes for some stories I enjoy it more than third person. I think the most important thing is which point of view fits the story best. If it's a deuce, I'd pick the one better suited for the genre.

I think you always need to know what kind of effects you're creating with what kind of writing element. First person is now mostly associated witch YA (young adult --> teens+) literature, literary fiction, short stories, romance and chick-lit, and the main target demographic of those genres are teenage girls and not very hard to please adult women (except for short stories). It's a sad fact that these genres are generally looked down upon (especially chick-lit and romance), because I strongly believe that all those genres can contain wonderful stories that can teach you a lot and touch your heart and be really interesting and complex. But sadly, most first-person stuff I've read was horrendous (and some of that stuff even got extremely popular *shakes head*). Thing is, this does affect people's opinions. They learn that bad fiction often comes in first person, and they learn to avoid it, unless they find fiction in first person that they love or unless they're a little more open towards different writing styles and do understand it's the authors' execution that can make or break the deal. But most of those more understanding folk are writers themselves. Just readers are way more picky about their likes in books.

That said, it's not true that you can only add flaws to the first person point of view (and third person also doesn't mean you have to spill everyone's thoughts o_O). You can do that just as well with third person limited pov - third person doesn't equal third person omniscient. What's purely my opinion is that you can just as well understand how conflicted a character is in third person, because I don't think it depends on how much of their inner monologue/dialogue with themselves is related, but by how they behave. To my mind, the behaviour, what the character does, how he reacts, is much more telling and taps my emotions more than them thinking about it would. When I read a character's mental whining, I'm more likely to get annoyed with them as opposed to seeing their desperate behaviour, which gets me to sympathise with them (you can do this in both first and third person). I don't need to hear the thoughts, they mean nothing to me unless there aren't that many and they're backed up with how it's really affecting the character. Is he drawing into himself, cutting everyone else off? Is he getting more aggressive and easier to provoke? Does he cry when no one's looking? Or punching walls? Or being self-destructive by seeking comfort in alcohol or gambling? A truly messed up character doesn't only think about his misery. He is affected in all aspects of his life. And that's not perspective-specific.

[The One & Only Vapor]

AS Ciel stated, I do prefer third person, past tense.
Present tense happens to be very annoying for me. e.o
And first person just feels so...limiting. Like you are personally connected to the character, and that character only.
Although it does have its good points, like going more in-depth with the character, so when I find it advantageous I tend to use it.

Anywho, I joined once, long ago, a year actually, when I was WhiteWolfMoon and far less mature and a much worse writer. Saying such, I would like to introduce not only a name change but indeed an entire new form! <3

Previous Username: WhiteWolfMoon / Transparency.
New Username: The One & Only Vapor
What you'd like to be called now: TOAOV, Vapor, or Rency.

Username: The One & Only Vapor
What we will call you: TOAOV, Vapor, or Rency.
Will you critique other's work?: Yes.
Links to your story if you have any: None, but I am working on a few and have shared an excerpt from one of them below.
Anything you want us to know?: I love writing, and critiquing, so if you want ideas for a story, etc., etc. just let me know! I'd be happy to help. =3

And on yet another note, I would like to share the first few sentences of a new story I've been working on. It's a fanfiction of the Inheritance Cycle {amg, Eragon is a stunningly well-written book...!} and takes place after the 26 eggs that were protected and to be given to the new Riders have all been distributed. 8 have hatched so far, and the story centers around the 14-year-old Linnëa {yes, named after the woman who sang herself into the Menoa tree, if anyone remembers that} and her lavender dragon, Misaka.

Linnëa's gaze scorched the long, ovular stone in front of her, a tumult of emotions and thoughts whirling in her head. She had been trained a thousand times over in the knowledge of what its lavender depths concealed- a young dragon, ready to be hatched at the touch of an elf, or human- whichever it chose. Closing her eyes and trying to focus, the female elf took several long, steadying breaths, then snapped open her silver-blue eyes and quickly brushed the fingers of her left hand along the shimmering, glossy surface. She leaned forward and breathed gently on its iridescent surface, trying to glean an image of the hatchling inside. A tendril of fear touched her as the realization came, This is a dragon. A real, live dragon, that could hatch at any time. I could have hatched that dragon. Staring down in a mixture of fear and odd delight, she picked up the egg- heavy, but not surprisingly, considering that it contained a dragon ready to break free- and dashed back to her home in Ellesméra, delivering the egg to one of the older elves immediately.
Sharp gazes leaned over the egg, as though attempting to scry an image from its reflective surface as Linnëa had not long before. One elf, an ancient male with hair of starlight and eyes of a light, nearly sightless grey, reached almost tentatively for the egg, then stared back at Linnëa and asked in a grating, raspy voice, "You found her?"
Startled, Linnëa hesitated, then grumbled in an undertone, "I thought you would want a treasure such as this egg back, Vestarë-elda."
His reply was a long time in coming, then: "That is not the point, youngling. What I mean...is...you touched the egg. You should not have."
"You could not have expected me to do otherwise!" Linnëa flared, tears suddenly gathering in her eyes. "Vestarë-elda, would you have expected me to leave this poor dragon where it lay?"

Okay. I'm going to stop there. |D
But, any critique/suggestions? Please only offer if you've read at least one book {or even part of one} in the Inheritance Cycle/Eragon series c:

[Artesian]

There's a secondary aspect to perspectives, the limited and unlimited sides of them. You have a choice of how much to show, and how to show it... Hmm. How to put it.

Hunger Games was written in first person, and focused very tightly on Katniss. You got to read everything she thought and felt during the time-period, and no one else. The story was entirely told through her, and there was no part of it where you saw an inner part of someone else. Furthermore, it was very focused in time. Collins could have written it as, even in present tense, as looking back from some time in the future. (For instance, writing, "I have no clue that I will survive this and start a revolution," would be in present tense but not tightly focused, temporally.) She didn't. Due to that focus both temporally and emotionally, it was a much more powerful book than it would have been otherwise.

She could have told almost exactly the same story in third person past tense. Third person limited can be very tightly focused like that, so that the story is still being told exclusively through Katniss' eyes. Harry Potter is written a bit like that, as for the vast majority of the books, we're only seeing what Harry feels and thinks (and we're seeing it through his eyes as well. It would be a very different story, if told through Ron's eyes, for instance). You can write past-tense that's tightly focused in time too, it's just more difficult, because you have to pick a time that doesn't spoil anything to tell it from (or not pick one at all, which can end up reading kinda weirdly). The Dresden Files are written like that, and there's a lot of immediacy in those too.

Then there's widening the focus and showing several characters or several times at once (as in the Book Thief, with the narrator of Death who doesn't seem to be very well anchored as far as time, place, or people go), or jumping from character to character (like the Bartimaeus trilogy or Game of Thrones). Usually, third person is used for that sort of style, but stories written in letter form by multiple people are first person, and you can get an emotional distance in first person by making it sound like a report ("I was not pleased when the double-agent shot me, and thus I yelled loudly, though I am aware that my orders were to keep silent.")

So I guess my point is that the tenses and perspectives aren't nearly as important as the focus is. Whose story is it? What is the world like through their eyes? Are they experiencing the story as it happens, or are the remembering it?

It's a question of distancing yourself from the characters. How far are you from this story? How close? Are you close enough to feel every jolt of pain or fear in the character? (like Hunger Games) or is this just an interesting bit of history? (like I, Robot from Isaac Asimov) or is it somewhere in between?

I don't know if that makes any sense at all.

(To conclude, the only tense I don't regularly write in is future tense, and the only perspective I don't regularly write in is second person. I usually use third person when there's a large number of character whose perspective I want to write from, and I use first person when there's one character that I could use exclusively to tell the story. I use past-tense for stuff when I'm writing in a formal style or when I don't want to remark on generalities or go off on tangents at times when it wouldn't make sense for people in the moment to think about. And I love present tense for any story with a lot of emotional impact and scenes that move fast.)

(And another PS because I can't seem to stop typing, I find third-person omniscient to be a little lazy and a bit baffling. This is, admittedly, coming from someone who used to write in nothing but that, but I can't imagine using it in most circumstances now. For me, when you are peeking into your character's heads, it's far less jarring to stick with one person's perspective for a section, then hop to another's, and then another's. Actually, if you look at most books with third-person omniscient (except for the Book Thief because that's an oddball), you pick out, section by section, which character is serving as our viewpoint. *shrug* Anyway. I'm probably just being silly, but I really don't get it.)

[Kodabomb]

I'm thinking of writing a new book.
See, basically the ONLY thing stopping me is the fact that the characters from Jewel Empire are too far developed and loved by me that I can't put my mind into making new, unique characters that aren't ponies in a COMPLETELY different story.
I have some ideas and I'd really love to... UUUUUUGH I'M DYING *rolls dramatically everywhere*

Go for it. If you feel like you're stuck writing certain characters, you have to break out of that and write new, different characters. It might feel strange, but you made characters you've liked before. You can do it again. Try not to just copy your old characters - really try something different, with completely different personalities, goals, backgrounds. Try writing a character with traits you don't like, or one who's opinions are in contrast to your own. The more you try and experiment with different characters, the better you'll get at writing new characters in general. Maybe try generating a couple of ideas - what if you wrote a Sci-Fi story, with aliens as the main characters? Or maybe write a story about bears, or cowboys, or scientists, or bears who are also cowboy scientists. XP Get out there and explore new characters! New settings! New stories! Just dive right in to your ideas. Forget about your other book and those characters. This is a completely new and different story. You should be excited about that!

You have nothing to lose. Your old characters will always be there for you. But you won't be able to grow as a writer if you only write them. Good luck. ^^

Thanks Silverhart! Now, I know what characters I'm creating, and for this book I have decided to put my heart into making them far developed BEFORE they go into the story, sort of similar to Jewel Empire, which became very popular because the characters were different and people could really take 'sides' with them all.
I discussed my book last night with 42., my best friend irl. We're both SUPER excited and she's doing a different book as well!
With the whole bears, or cowboys, or scientists, or bears who are also cowboy scientists, my stories are slightly more normal. XD Just saying lol. The wasn't even relevent.
I'm a very irrelevent person.
Oh well. xD Imma go plan my characters now! =D Thanks again! *hugs*

[A*Viola*Named*Steve]

Hey guys, I have a question for everybody.
When you write, do you tend to write it first person, third person, or both? And if you write in first person, is it always from the same person's point of view? And do you write from present tense or past tense?

I prefer to write in first person. It just sounds better to me that way. I tried writing a new story of mine in third person. Didn't work out. I might switch to third person limited in a few chapters within a book, but generally I write in first person. I don't always do it from the same person's point of view, I've switched between two or three characters, one narrating most of the story, and the other one(s) narrating a small part. I like writing in present tense. Not sure about past tense-haven't tried it yet.

In other news, here's a thingie for a new book, which I may or may not post on CS.

The scientist is most likely trying to find the keys to my cell, I think, smiling to myself. Too bad he won't find it.

Neko was 13 when the Apocolypse hit. It wasn't zombies, or fire, or ice. It was, ultimately, the stupidity of the world's leaders. Being paraniod about nuclear weapons being developed in certain countries, the UN decided to make the first move. They created a bomb-called the Radioactive Defence Device, or RDD for short. Unlike nuclear weapons, this bomb did not kill people with a mushroom cloud and tons of poisonous gasses and acids. What it did do was alter the chemical compisition of humans. However, the mutations were too much for some, and there were many casualties. Enraged, the countries that had been struck waged war on the countries allied with the UN. Now with RDDs in both sides' artilleries, the world erupted into World War III. Within a year, the war came to a sudden halt. Not because of a peace treaty, but because all the leaders involved were dead. All of the RDDs created a new world. Half of the Earth's population died, not including those who were killed in the First Wave. Most of the ones who survived had some sort of genetic mutation. Most of them were considered minor-different colored hair, becoming geniuses, or extra limbs. The "major" mutations were considered to be such things as DNA spliced with other people or animals, phsycic abilities, telephathy, empathy, or making things appear out of thin air. The only humans who did not have any genetic mutations were the scientists, most of which who had participated in the making of the RDD or were working for the government. With the help of them, the human race started building up again, making buildings out of the somehow thriving trees that were now retaking the planet in earnest, replanting what they could, and finding clothes, which had somehow survived the war.

It had been five years since that event. Neko, now 18, is locked in a previously abandoned prison. Unlike most of the people who were trapped here, who were all in the "major mutation" category, he remembered excactly where he was when the Apocolypse struck, and he remembered Before. After a successful escape, he, Vermillion, a girl spliced with a chameleon, and a disrespectful adolescent who is secretly a physic, race to figure out about the scientists before the scientists find them. Along the way, friendships will die, sparks will fly, and Neko's heartstrings will be tied into knots. Will the trio survive? Or will the sinister scientists get to them first?

Please give feedback! I want to know if people will actually read this.

And Vapor: I thought that was pretty good. I've read a bit of the first Eragon book. ^^

[Crystal Gems]

The scientist is most likely trying to find the keys to my cell, I think, smiling to myself. Too bad he won't find it.

Neko was 13 when the Apocolypse hit. It wasn't zombies, or fire, or ice. It was, ultimately, the stupidity of the world's leaders. Being paraniod about nuclear weapons being developed in certain countries, the UN decided to make the first move. They created a bomb-called the Radioactive Defence Device, or RDD for short. Unlike nuclear weapons, this bomb did not kill people with a mushroom cloud and tons of poisonous gasses and acids. What it did do was alter the chemical compisition of humans. However, the mutations were too much for some, and there were many casualties. Enraged, the countries that had been struck waged war on the countries allied with the UN. Now with RDDs in both sides' artilleries, the world erupted into World War III. Within a year, the war came to a sudden halt. Not because of a peace treaty, but because all the leaders involved were dead. All of the RDDs created a new world. Half of the Earth's population died, not including those who were killed in the First Wave. Most of the ones who survived had some sort of genetic mutation. Most of them were considered minor-different colored hair, becoming geniuses, or extra limbs. The "major" mutations were considered to be such things as DNA spliced with other people or animals, phsycic abilities, telephathy, empathy, or making things appear out of thin air. The only humans who did not have any genetic mutations were the scientists, most of which who had participated in the making of the RDD or were working for the government. With the help of them, the human race started building up again, making buildings out of the somehow thriving trees that were now retaking the planet in earnest, replanting what they could, and finding clothes, which had somehow survived the war.

It had been five years since that event. Neko, now 18, is locked in a previously abandoned prison. Unlike most of the people who were trapped here, who were all in the "major mutation" category, he remembered excactly where he was when the Apocolypse struck, and he remembered Before. After a successful escape, he, Vermillion, a girl spliced with a chameleon, and a disrespectful adolescent who is secretly a physic, race to figure out about the scientists before the scientists find them. Along the way, friendships will die, sparks will fly, and Neko's heartstrings will be tied into knots. Will the trio survive? Or will the sinister scientists get to them first?

Please give feedback! I want to know if people will actually read this.

And Vapor: I thought that was pretty good. I've read a bit of the first Eragon book. ^^[/quote]

This looks super interesting, I'd definitely read it