Guppy Poem

Fish are playing a rather large part in my life at the moment.
So I've written a fishy poem.
(There's a little bit of rude wordiness in it.)

-Guppy Poem-

I went into the pet shop
And I bought myself a guppy
And I put it in a bowl and went to bed.

When I woke up in the morning
All excited at my purchase
I was horrified to find my guppy dead.

It was floating on the water
With a terrible expression
And a twisted mouth that made me feel quite sick.

So I showed it to the shop man
And he said 'It's little wonder:
'That's a puppy, not a guppy, stupid dick.'

guppy


fangtooth

A Greater POV

The neighbours didn't take kindly to Edward's new shed.

So we're in first-person and we're limited to what this character knows and to how this character experiences the world about him right ..?

Hokay, take a look at this simile used by my first-person narrator/protagonist to describe the sound of the rain on his umbrella:

... like a bonfire of tuneless glockenpiels.

Given that his quest is a musical one, I chose for him an auditory PRS. Note that this is a Primary RS and not an exclusive one. (By choosing a Primary RS, I am siding with the likes of Hemingway. The argument here might go something like: Because we each have a PRS, by giving one to our characters, they become more like real people, and we can use their PRS to characterise. However, by choosing to prioritise one RS over the others, we jeapordise our chances of forming any rapport with those readers whose PRSs are different to any given character's.)
So my protag hears the world about him - his map of the world is defined primarily through an absorption of sounds.
The associated word palette would reveal itself like this:
I hear you; that rings a bell; sounds like a good idea, etc.
His love of music - his PRS - would influence every observation.

In NLP, Representational Systems are referred to as modalities. Modalities are our means of experiencing the world.
The building blocks of such senses are called submodalities. Here are some examples:

Visual: colour (or b&w), brightness, contrast, movement, speed, size.

Auditory: words/sounds, volume, tone, timbre, duration, speed.

Kinesthetic: intensity, pressure, texture, weight, temperature, duration, shape.

In expressing our thoughts, each of us works up from a Deep Structure - the abstract stuff prancing about in our minds. As this stuff makes its way out, it is pruned and jumbled (generalised), and the resulting expression is revealed.
For a simple example, imagine a forest and then describe it. Note the things that you choose to mention and those things that you choose to omit. Note too how accurately (or not) your description reflects what is in your head. And, if you can't imagine how different your description of a forest would be to everyone else's, get some pals to join in. We can see how varied multiple interpretations are of the same word: forest.

We do just this with our chosen style: we mention some stuff and not other stuff.
But a first-person narrator dictates the style.
In order to control the style, we would need to understand this narrator - his RSs and his psychology - the way he maps the world and the influences born from his experiences.

This works to our advantage in plotting.
At any one moment in our plot, we mention some stuff and we suggest some stuff and save some other stuff for later.

So let's imagine that my protag is already making some destructive plans in his head. It's just this kind of internal conflict that seeks to reveal itself, through words and body language and so forth. Rather like those police training videos in which the audience is invited to spot the tell-tale signs of guilt. (I remember the drug search in which the villain simultaneously professed his innocence whilst backing towards a cabinet. Can you guess where he kept his stash? :-)

Our first-person narrator isn't necessarily going to confess his guilty thoughts (or any other of his private and clandestine thoughts). Indeed, they may not be fully formed in his head. But, they are likely to edge out of his consciousness.
This could be regarded as a first-person form of Chekhov's gun - a subtle bit of foreshadowing.

The point of a palette is that an entire scene or, more probably, chapter is painted with it.
Therefore, the theme would be repeated. In this way, Chekhov's gun is dismantled into many parts and spread across the prose such that the foreshadowing is ingested subconsciously.

In these ways, we can link the reader not just to the first-person narrator's conscious musings, but to something much deeper within him: just as we impart knowledge at strategic moments in order to give a plot momentum and changes in direction, we can connect the reader to the narrator in the past, the present, or the future - we can allow the reader to consciously understand things beyond the narrator's understanding, just as we can allow the narrator to withhold information from the reader.
There are things even within a first-person narrator that he himself is unaware of.

So we're in first-person and we're limited to what this character knows and to how this character experiences the world about him right ..?

Note to Self

Things to remember to blog about soon when I have time:

* First person narrator dictating style through psychological word palettes;
* From Deep Structure through omission to resulting words - importance of omission stage and its effects on style (and its importance in defining first person narrator) - choosing what to observe and what to omit.
* Descriptions: How word palettes can imbue a potentially static (momentum-less) passage with anticipation (again!) - word palettes as concealed foreshadowing devices.
* Plot vs emotional topography - prioritising and observing interactions.
* How all the above points work together!
TBC ...

Swelling the River

Water good opportunity for a pun.

I'm sure you'll agree, there are plenty of these milestone moments for the writer: moments of clarity when yet more puzzle pieces fit together (and there is a veritable armada of pieces!). I call them blue banana moments.
I wrote of blue bananas some eighteen months back, of a desire to investigate, to poke at povs and pacing, to prod at characterisation and nvc, and so forth. Let's never forget, though, (and I suspect that I did) that these are simply tools.
Tools to what end?
The last 10,000 words have gone without a hitch, and have been extremely enjoyable to write.
What has inspired this transformation?
Clear scene structure derived from motivation: connecting every paragraph to either goal, obstacle or means; fixing the protag's motivation steadfastly at the centre of the novel.

Sure, each paragraph is chiselled with the tools, using each tool to bond and emotively engage the reader. But when the functionality of each scene is clear in the writer's head, everything else becomes a technique that may be chosen to extract the most from the scene's purpose.
It's a bigger picture.

Practically, what this meant to me was that every thread flowing parallel to the protag's motivation thread has now fed into that thread. The motivation thread takes precedence over everything, and everything feeds into it, like tributaries feeding into a river. And, as each tributary feeds into the river, the river grows and becomes more powerful. Some threads would not tally with the motivation thread, and so they have been cut. (Q. Why would a writer want to include a thread that makes no/very little impact on the protag's journey, especially when that thread could be replaced with one that does?)
Each confluence becomes a magical event. That thread which seemed so disparate - a capricious aside - suddenly transforms the protag's journey in some way at the moment it connects, perhaps as a reversal or a reveal. And the remainder of the journey will bear this thread, will be coloured by this silty union.