Author: Yzabel

Yzabel / September 21, 2005

A little problem I ran into not so long ago, as I was introducing a character in my novel: what to do with those that are, technically speaking, “people from the street”, and who’re supposed to talk in slang at best, and with much swearing at worst? A street urchin raised to be a thief in a medieval-fantasy town setting sure wouldn’t talk like a noblewoman, nor a beggar like a king (unless they’re exceptions resulting from social descension, and in this case, they need to remain just that—exceptions).I don’t want to fill entire dialogues with cursing, as it is is rude and not especially pleasant to read anyway, but it is also evident to me that not every character in my book can talk in a nice manner, not when they’re from a social origin that wouldn’t fit this at all. Same problem with slang, which very nature is to make it less understandable to “those who don’t get it”. Simply looking at nowadays’ slang, always changing, is a good enough proof of this. The slang I used to talk at school ten years ago isn’t the same 16-years old talk today, and for them, I’d probably be considered and old schmuck already. This is why I can’t focus too much on detailed slang, else the readers would just not understand my characters’ speech patterns. “Immersion” sure doesn’t mean “being left clueless”.So what to do? I’ve been mulling over a few solutions, although I haven’t settled on any for the moment, and am still left pondering:Read More

Yzabel / September 17, 2005

Triggered by the tidying of a still unexplored room in our house and finding some old “classic” French books, I remembered a belief I had when I was younger. Although I can’t exactly recall why I had it, I suspect it had to do a lot with studying a certain amount of said classic books at school.It could be summarized as follows: “description is better than dialogue”.That’s it, I thought that the longer and the more detailed descriptions were, the better the book would be, too. Dialogue? Some puny thing, used only to provide some relief to the eyes among heavy blocks of text. In fact, I’m more and more certain that our teachers had told us at some point that dialogue was “easy”, and that it denoted a lack of talent in writing.Tell you what, twelve years later, I’m not convinced of this anymore, at least not when it comes to fiction works, and frankly, where else would dialogue wield so much importance anyway?Read More

Yzabel / September 14, 2005

Today, this particular question came to mind again (I had already wondered about it when I was reading “No Plot? No Problem!”, a few weeks ago): does anyone use the second-person point of view? I mean, for real? Or is this just a joke? Come to think of it, if I hadn’t remembered these well-known “choose your own adventure” books, I would indeed have be tempted to think no writer in his right mind would ever use that.However, this very morning, as I was broswing through old archives (not mine, fortunately), I realized that some people use, or has used it. In technical documents nonetheless. Oh, the horror.It’s not about addressing the reader, no: it’s clearly a second-person point of view, and the result is very awkward sentences sounding much like “you see a window in which you click…”. I’m not kidding, and it’s a good thing that I’m decent at writing English, else our current manuals would be really icky.Someone please tell me that it’s not the way technical writers are supposed to work in English…documents, writing

Yzabel / September 13, 2005

I know, I know, I should stop thinking so much… I simply happen to very often ponder writing matters, these days. This time, I found myself wondering about points of views in stories. There are many questions attached to these, after all, and it’s not always easy to know how to write, and at what moment.I’m not sure whether first person or third person is better to tell a story; it probably heavily depends on the story itself, and on the author’s ability to use them to their full efficiency. For instance, I know that instinctively, I tend to use the third person one from my character’s perspective, rather than its omniscient version (it’ll happen, of course—just not that often).Read More

Yzabel / September 12, 2005

I don’t think there’s an absolute answer to this question, as there very likely are as many solutions as there are writers out there. Therefore, I’m going to consider this from a subjective point of view only: drafting a precise plan and outlines for a story before writing it, is it an effective method for you, or not?Weirldy enough, I’ve always worked with a plan for non-fiction writing, such as school essays or technical documents later on. For fiction stories, on the other hand, I work much more loosely, not even writing chapters in order. These days, I’m trying to use both methods, so that I can compare them and see which one is more efficient for me. It’s not that evident to define.Read More