/lit/ - Literature

>>21897945
This terrible "passive voice is slow" opinion again. And added a second and even more hilariously wrong claim that passives "defocuse" a scene.

At a paragraph level passive voice is wonderful for making things go faster since you can skip obvious or unknown information and better control reader focus. For example assume we're reading about people who have already arrived at Lord Fitzlebottom's Manor and are already described as surrounded by servants, which line is better?

>Food was served after midnight. (passive)
>The waiters served the food after midnight. (active)

I would argue the passive clause serves you better in many cases here because 1) we probably already know there are servants around so redundant to keep bringing them up and 2) the servants are presumably not the focus of the story - by using passive here we are sort of shrouding them and keeping the focus on the event of food arriving. Passives in general emphasize WHAT OCCURED/STATE OF BEING, whereas Active sentences tend to emphasize the Verbing/Doer of the Action. Neither is incorrect, but it is a powerful tool to know what you want your reader to focus on each sentence.

I agree a good rule of thumb is to keep your protagonist active and more often obscure less important details/background characters with passive. Everyone must read and watch Pullum on Passives, sometimes a passive sentence adds 1 or 2 very small words but it is not really a pacing consideration.

>>20489841
Beautifully written, completely immersed me in the scene and I'd be very interested I'm reading on. Only notable suggestion is that paragraphs need breaking out for flow/clarity. Also I'd add a smell to the butchering but otherwise ignore le show dont tell pseud. Is this historical fiction?

>>20490112
Agree regarding character showing up clearly and first sentence being weak. Disagree regarding inventory check though - fits fairly well in context of killing the animal but open to being wrong depending on context of story.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_MKyWcWEkfpVZwFDrkaAajQErS8O-4j3QI6vEOF6MRY/edit?usp=sharing

Historical Fiction: Copper Age Europe
3700 words
I just posted it in in that anon's fancy new discord but as it's unproven I'll putting it here too in case nobody actually ends up going on there (I'm not getting burned by discordites again).

>>20141109
Therde is no escape for me but I'm more than happy to rambe about my theories, so keep firing any questions. The book I'm cribbing off of is 'The Horse, the Wheel, the Language' by David Anthony, I believe it was the second chapter specifically where he talks about several different linguistics concepts that were used to estimate how the daughter languages of IE drifted, which they used to estimate what the "original" language sounded like. Definitely an enjoyable read (skip the forward) and the concepts are way easier to grasp than their obscure word charts.

In terms of how I'm trying to use it I keep it sloppy - I think it applies to whatever sounds of a word gets the emphasis (and that often is the first word sound which is why I also call it "loose alliteration"). The heart of it is realizing that all consonants are either Front Mouth Consonants or Back Mouth Consonants, and trying to keep words dominated by those two categories segregated with each other in sentences when it's reasonable to - remember this idea is a current to guide your word choice, not an iron rule to follow at all costs and risk hurting clarity of your prose. Also I do this during editing, but not during drafting when just getting ideas out is key.

So as an application say I need to describe a character making golden jewelry. I would consider "golden" a "back mouth word" because as I say it aloud now the "g" sounds feels most prominent, so I would prefer not to say the golden thing was "made", "manufactured", (both "m" heavy front Mouth feeling words) and would favor using "crafted", "created" (heavy on rear mouth "k" sound) if those words made sense in the context.

So on my edit of my draft I may change something like "Father made golden jewelry in his workshop for wealthy ladies." To "He crafted golden lockets and chains for the towns richest women." Notice how I even divided the sentence into a rear mouth heavy beginning and front mouth heavy end in the example.