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| My friend told me about a simple idea for communication that has for some reason been given a name that sounds like an energy drink with electrolytes in it: "E Prime." As far as I can tell, you just don't say things like "I am" or any variation of "to be". The idea is to remove the ego from the message, and as a byproduct, your mind is "rewired" to some extent to think of the subject and not oneself. Any author who is writing with a third-person omniscient perspective in fiction is already using E Prime, provided that the narrator never refers to himself. If you think about it too hard, there has to be some character we might never meet who is telling us the story, but that character also knows how to shut up and do their job as a narrator. Few are those truly selfless individuals in real life who would ever want to be a narrator and talk in E Prime all the time. It is a nice idea though. If adverbs are weeds as Stephen King calls them, then the pronoun "I" should probably be trimmed back as well and at the very least. It's unavoidable in the first-person perspective, obviously, but in that case, the narrator should be a fully fleshed out and active character in the story. We like first-person narratives because the character telling them has something to add to the story that would be missed when told by a selfless, passive, impartial and omniscient third-person narrator. It can also build tension by obscuring the information the narrator might know, and thus what the reader might know, through the course of the story. The balance to all of this is that any author writing in the first-person perspective is prone to use that as a self-insert to promote their own views, and this has been so for hundreds of years (e.g. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe). |
| I had a hairy helmet on a hedgehog named Dave His daily dose of Devil's Spit sent him into a rave He'd say you shouldn't last-word rhyme or else you'd be a noob I said "Come on, lighten up," so he called me a big boob "Technically in poetry you can do as you please in reason, But really people want to hear something deep from someone seasoned." I said to Dave, "Hey man, that's nice, but I'll tell you what I think. I think poetry as practice helps to prime your pump to write." "You didn't last-word rhyme there," he said. "I know, it's prose now." I said with a devilish grin. |
| I can trace my American ancestry back to an Englishman born in 1621 who later died in the Plymouth colony, so he must have arrived some time after the Mayflower. A century after he died, his great grandsons fought in New York, Bunker Hill, and one even served as a general. A century later, one of their great grandsons married a nice girl who came to America from England during the Pursuit of Happiness, a girl born "on the other side of the cloth" from a nephew of John Wesley. She liked Lincoln so much that that she named one of her sons after him in March of 1865, in Missouri of all places. A century later, one of his great great grandsons was on a US Navy Destroyer in the Philippines during the Vietnam War, where he was exposed to chemicals that would destroy his firstborn son. All things considered, I am thankful for the history that has led to my birth, most of which I had to discover on my own or else it would have been completely lost. My life is contingent, not independent as much as I would like it to be. Woven into this history is a lot of pain and remorse, happiness and abuse. I don't wish to change it. Were that possible, who would I be then? |
| I judge my worth as a person on my daily word count. Lorem ipsum, here we come... |
| "Lorem ipsum, here we come" - sounds like the beginning of a song (to the tune of "California here I come") Anyhoo, welcome to the party. This link might help you get started figuring out the site. "Note: I just registered on writing.com, so today is very..." |
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