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khiemtranAfter learning to write in Tight Third, it's easy to assume that some of the workarounds and limitations that Tight Third involves are just a part of normal writing.
For example, in the story at hand I've just had to write a chapter in which the viewpoint character, seeking help in a forest, comes across a house where a woodcutter and his family live and has to convince the woodcutter to offer assistance. In Tight Third, this deceptively simple outline can be surprisingly hard to do well. For starters, the viewpoint character has no way of knowing the woodcutter's name until at least some of the ice has been melted. Even "the woodcutter" as a tag is not necessarily a given, without a bit of contrivance. If I go too long describing him just as "the man", the text soon starts to get awkward, and, worse, if I delay the revelation of detail for too long, it starts to build an expectation that the information is important, when in fact it's largely trivial to the story. If I put in too much conversation in order to supply the detail, I run the risk of having lots of flat dialogue - chatter that doesn't add to the story or hold the reader's interest. And, if the woodcutter is not the first person in the family that the viewpoint character meets, the problem is magnified - I have to go through "the girl", "the woman", "the man", etc.
Now, in Tight Third, there's a whole slew of tricks you can use to get around problems like this. You can set things up so the character's observations are enough to supply the detail straight away (carried to extremes, the "man" is carrying an axe and chopping down a tree while singing The Lumberjack Song when first seen). You can have the viewpoint character assign him a "tag" (like Pock Face or Black Beard or Axe Dude) until a better name becomes available. You can give him a distinctive voice so that the "chatter" needed to establish background serves double duty - it entertains or establishes character or worldbuilding at the same time. You can subvert some of the clichés and have him say something really unexpected to make the fact that he's a woodcutter seem interesting. You can even, depending on the tone of the story, use fairy tale style dialogue and have him openly state who he is and what he does regardless of how realistic it would be.
It's important to remember though, that these are all just workarounds to a particular problem in Tight Third and they don't necessarily apply to other perspectives. It was something of a shock when I went over the chapter again and invoked my licence to use Past Omni in the memoir voice.
"The house turned out to be occupied by a woodcutter, his wife and their daughter. It was the daughter I encountered first. She was filling a pot from a small stream..."
And we're away...
For example, in the story at hand I've just had to write a chapter in which the viewpoint character, seeking help in a forest, comes across a house where a woodcutter and his family live and has to convince the woodcutter to offer assistance. In Tight Third, this deceptively simple outline can be surprisingly hard to do well. For starters, the viewpoint character has no way of knowing the woodcutter's name until at least some of the ice has been melted. Even "the woodcutter" as a tag is not necessarily a given, without a bit of contrivance. If I go too long describing him just as "the man", the text soon starts to get awkward, and, worse, if I delay the revelation of detail for too long, it starts to build an expectation that the information is important, when in fact it's largely trivial to the story. If I put in too much conversation in order to supply the detail, I run the risk of having lots of flat dialogue - chatter that doesn't add to the story or hold the reader's interest. And, if the woodcutter is not the first person in the family that the viewpoint character meets, the problem is magnified - I have to go through "the girl", "the woman", "the man", etc.
Now, in Tight Third, there's a whole slew of tricks you can use to get around problems like this. You can set things up so the character's observations are enough to supply the detail straight away (carried to extremes, the "man" is carrying an axe and chopping down a tree while singing The Lumberjack Song when first seen). You can have the viewpoint character assign him a "tag" (like Pock Face or Black Beard or Axe Dude) until a better name becomes available. You can give him a distinctive voice so that the "chatter" needed to establish background serves double duty - it entertains or establishes character or worldbuilding at the same time. You can subvert some of the clichés and have him say something really unexpected to make the fact that he's a woodcutter seem interesting. You can even, depending on the tone of the story, use fairy tale style dialogue and have him openly state who he is and what he does regardless of how realistic it would be.
It's important to remember though, that these are all just workarounds to a particular problem in Tight Third and they don't necessarily apply to other perspectives. It was something of a shock when I went over the chapter again and invoked my licence to use Past Omni in the memoir voice.
"The house turned out to be occupied by a woodcutter, his wife and their daughter. It was the daughter I encountered first. She was filling a pot from a small stream..."
And we're away...
