deertiger replied to your post “One of my biggest bad habits/annoying tendencies as a fiction writer...”
Great respect for this very articulate self call-out post and, perhaps unsurprising, but still interesting to me, is that the second version actually feels more intimate because that is exactly how much time someone spends on it inside their own head. Which is possible what you already said but helps me process the insight you just gave me about _why_ this works so much better :) thank you!
Thank you so much! And I really appreciate your insight about how the amount of time someone spends on a setting-related thought in their own head plays into all this. That’s very illuminating for me, because I’d been thinking about this issue in terms of the immediacy for the reader, but it’s also true that applying an unnecessary POV filter makes things less immediate for the character, too!
Like if I point out that it’s Grace who’s thinking the room is noisy, it takes longer to say, and the reader is forced to remember that this is a story about a character. And you’re also forced, maybe just a bit, for a distracting moment, to think about Grace being aware of her thoughts instead of just living in them. But if the room’s just noisy because the narrator says it is, it’s actually easier to imagine that Grace is thinking about it without even realizing that’s what you’re imagining, and the reader gets that information without being asked to add a layer of distance between themselves and Grace’s actual thoughts. Especially if those objective observations occur in close proximity to the appropriately POV-focused internal narrative.
When I write I always have a lot of feelings about settings, especially houses and homes and homecomings and water and roads and blah blah blah <3333, and I have a lot of feelings about settings on behalf of my characters, and it can be overwhelming to figure out how to illustrate the facts of a setting with all that going on in my head. All day I’ve been looking forward my next writing session because I’m so excited to write with this new consciousness about explicit vs. implicit close third POV. I honestly think this is going to help a lot with the moments when I feel blocked because the perspective I want to convey (which I’ve always thought a ton about, to the point that I always know exactly how a character’s sensing or perceiving the spaces they’re in) feels disconnected from the facts I want to provide about a setting.
It also occurs to me that descriptive issues might be part of why I really enjoy writing sex, because a bed is a bed is a bed, and the really interesting setting of sex is the body. And bodies--the self, the other person--are a very natural site for a very close third-person perspective. The immediacy I’m striving to improve upon forms a very natural marriage with my observational filtering tendencies.
(And thank you again, @deertiger, for the very insightful response. There was no way this was gonna fit in the character limit of a post reply, so I hope you don’t mind I just made a new post out of it.)
