Відео

I actually just finished reading LOTR for the first time (long over due), and I've certainly considering making a video on his prose, which I love. However, I'm currently on the home stretch of finishing my own novel (an epic fantasy), so I've taken a break from making videos. And when I do return to UA-cam, I intend on narrating some of my own writing first so I can analyze some of the techniques I implement in my own style. That being said, Tolkien did have a significant influence on my writing, so when I discuss techniques that I learned from reading LOTR, I'll be sure to mention where I learned them. So in an indirect way, I will touch on Tolkien's style :)

Thanks man, I really appreciate your compliments, and I'm always glad to hear my videos have helped someone out. I've never been one for social media, so I've no doubt that my innate disinterest in "acquiring followers" and lack of presence on other social media platforms is at least partially to blame for my channel size, but I also post videos pretty sporadically, so that probably factors in haha. I've been taking a break from making videos recently because I've been busy trying to push my own novel to the finish line, but I should be returning to UA-cam shortly with an analysis of my own writing I think people will find useful :)

@coreyhuffman7607 That's awesome! I can't wait to read it. I'm sure you'll have tons of insightful information to share with us about the joys of finding a line editor & copy editor, as well as if you went the route of traditional publishing or self publishing.

I'm glad you're finding my channel helpful! I've taken a break from making videos lately because I've been so nose-to-the-grindstone working on my own novel, but I should be making my return to UA-cam shortly :)

Your gratitude is enough :)

@coreyhuffman7607 well, know that I have a lot of it.

Hey, sorry it took so long for me to get back to you, I've been taking a bit of a break from UA-cam while I finish writing an epic fantasy of my own. I should be coming out with a new video sometime in the near future where I'll take everyone through some of my own prose, and I expect I'll answer some of your questions therein. I don't currently have any official service where I coach or give critiques, although it's something I've certainly been thinking about doing, so if you're serious about improving your writing let me know! Send me an email: cwhuffmanprose@gmail.com.

I'm certainly considering doing so in the future. I love his prose, but I couldn't finish Lolita because of the subject matter, so I'll have to pick a different novel. My upcoming videos are going to be a bit different (analyzing some of my own writing instead of published work, because there are certain things I can only teach by taking people through the process itself), but when I come back to analyzing the writing of famous authors I'll be sure to give Nabokov another go.

​@@coreyhuffman7607"speak, memory" could be the next book to try - written with the same brilliance as Lolita, but it is his autobiography.

I appreciate your insights, @loveofdanteandbice2697. Personally, I was surprised by the content of the story having gone into it blindly, so my use of the word "disgusting" was directed more toward my own experience of reading the book than the book itself (although I can't recall exactly how I phrased it). That edition I grabbed was also pretty weird, and had the quote at the back from Vanity Fair calling Lolita "The only convincing love story of our generation." I do intend to read some of Nabokov's other novels, though. His writing is certainly wonderful, which is why I still made a video about it, even though I found the content of the story so disturbing.

@@coreyhuffman7607 For me it was that I went in with a preconceived notion, and found myself surprised. I found the story disturbing as well, I hope that's clear, however having read many a classical novel the public perceives as disturbing but morally upright such as Dostoyevsky's works and those of others, some of them even dealing with this subject matter, and found them rather less insightful than I had hoped, and sometimes even deeply troubling in that they lacked self-awareness and self-reflection that now in retrospect vastly failed to anticipate our present. Be that as it may, I was actually surprised to find "Lolita" nothing as I was told it to be, namely not a "disgusting" novel, but a mirror to the public, because it's those who come out of it perceiving it not a story about abused Dolores but a story about a prepubescent seductress and those who complain about the second half of the novel being not as exciting as the first half (where the story gets vague instead of continuing to be voyeuristic) that one has to worry about. That's extremely clever on the part of Nabokov. There are so many layers that one has to look out for. What I was disgusted by is with publishers, who went against Nabokov's wishes and literary critics to perceive it as a "love story". It would be helpful if a proper publisher published according to Nabokov's wishes and ended it with the quote of Nabokov saying that there are no nymphets outside of Humbert's mind. Nabokov was such a huge figure in literary circles of his time that his comments provided valuable context to his works, which is nowadays sadly missing for the most part only found by those who look for it, and the work of a proper publisher would be to rectify that with a foreword or an afterword or quotes written by normal people, who don't see nymphets. Anyway thank you for reading my comment, I should have said earlier that I liked your video and your channel in general. I love Nabokov's prose, and appreciate great prose in general. I just wished to provide context for the novel. His other works are fabulous as well by the way. His biography is also written with more enchanting prose than almost all novels ever published. I also read "Strong Opinions" by Nabokov, where he expresses strong opinions on the merit of writers rather hilariously and savagely, which may be interesting.

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed my videos. It's hard to say whether or not I'll come back to Rothfuss. There's more techniques of his that I could look at, of course, but I've taken a bit of a break recently from making videos, and in my next videos, I'm thinking of taking you guys through some of my own writing, as it's hard to teach certain things while looking at published prose. But we'll see.

I agree with you; I think combining description with action/consequence is a great way of captivating the reader. Although like any technique, whether or not you can implement it depends a lot on the context/situation your writing about. Exposition gets a lot of hate, but I find it has its place, so long as it's not over done and conveyed in an interesting/relevant manner. You bring up a great point though!

Lol. Are you referring to how I lumped the perfect/imperfect tenses with the active/passive voices? Or was it something else? I was just trying to give aspiring writers a more practical/easily digestible framework, instead of getting too technical.

@@coreyhuffman7607 Yeah but you could have used your own creativity to come up with better fitting terms instead... Instead of helping, this is really confusing and teaches wrong information. Besides, using different tenses doesn't give a feel for activity/passivity, active/passive voice does imho. Simple tenses in active voice rather give a feel of immediacy and directness.

@@EleiyaUmei I can see how my use of these terms would be confusing to a linguist, but all I can say is that this simpler dualistic framework has helped me in my own writing, so I thought that it might help others as well. I think I made it clear in the beginning of the video that I'm deviating from the normal terms, and I did so in order to split all potential sentence structures into two distinct types, as "two" is always very manageable for people's brains. You may still disagree, but just know that my aim is to help aspiring writers write novels, not teach lessons in linguistics. One understandable point of confusion I see now is that when I was saying that these tenses give an active/passive feel to a given sentence, I was using the root meanings of the words active/passive, in the sense that a given sentence might be either an immediate/impactful description (active), or a more distant/soft description (passive). Again, I'm just trying to help people get a "feel" for different sentence structures, as opposed to getting too stuck in their heads.

In the fantasy genre (which makes up the majority of what I've been reading over the last few years, given that I've been writing an epic fantasy of my own), my favourites (unsurprisingly) are probably the authors/books I've made videos about, such as George R R Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire, even though the story is incomplete), Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind, series also incomplete lol), and Terry Pratchett (Disc World series); but I'm also finally getting around to reading Tolkien (Lord of the Rings), and have an appreciation for series like The Wheel of Time and Malazan (though I haven't finished them yet). I'm not likely to offer any suggestions for niche or lesser-known novels, unfortunately, because I've been making my way through all the most well known first, and I'm a rather slow, methodical reader. In the realm of literary fiction, the authors that stand out to me (given my limited sampling) are Ernest Hemingway (Old Man and the Sea), Herman Wouk (whose prose I've made videos on, in his novel The Winds of War), and Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov).

​@@coreyhuffman7607 thank you, i'm getting back into books again and also want to write, feel i need more depth for it; there's a lack of words for the images in my mind. all are on my list now. i'm finishing Count Zero and will read ASOIAF next :) do you read in parallel or one at a time? waiting for your release!

@@haxmonk Six years ago when I started writing seriously, it had also been many years for me since I'd read any books (being too busy with school), so I too felt like I had some catching up to do. If you're lacking visualization when writing, I find the best thing you can do is practice visualizing while reading: read every single word (don't skim), and as you do so, use those words to paint a picture in your head. I almost always read one book at a time, but I will alternate reading books in different series. In fact, I've read just the first book in several series because I've also been writing the first book in my own series, and I wanted to sample many different writing styles (instead of, say, reading all 15 books in the Wheel of Time and nothing else lol). I'm glad you're excited for my release! This book has been a long time in the making, with countless rewrites and revisions, and I'm hoping to have it 95% done by the end of this year.

Lol (thank you?)

Really? That's surprising to hear. I picked up on some comedic undertones, but attributed it more to the character's personality, as opposed to the story as a whole. If it were any other subject matter, I could see how it could be a tragic comedy of sorts, but it's hard to look past his perverse obsession.

@@coreyhuffman7607 I agree.

Before putting the book down for good, take a look at page 190 - the paragraph begins with ""by putting the geography of the United States into motion". The following couple of pages is simply the greatest writing I have ever read. The way he describes the countryside is staggering! He is a virtuoso at the peak of his power, and those few pages are him flexing his muscles and showing off. I've spent years trying to emulate the writing on those few pages.

"Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roofs, there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-gray cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist. There might be a line of spaced trees silhouetted against the horizon, and hot still noons above a wilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain clouds inscribed remotely into misty azure with only their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutral swoon of the background. Or again, it might be a stern El Greco horizon, pregnant with inky rain, and a passing glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer, and all around alternating strips of quick-silverish water and harsh green corn, the whole arrangement opening like a fan, somewhere in Kansas. Now and the then, in the vastness of those plains, huge trees would advance toward us to cluster self-consciously by the roadside and provide a bit of humanitarian shade above a picnic table, with sun flecks, flattened paper cups, samaras and discarded ice-cream sticks littering the brown ground." It doesn't get any better than that! The next couple of pages continue in that style...what I would give to be able to write like that!

Thanks for the recommendations! I got to page 90 or so in this book and just had to stop haha. I wasn't even aware there was a "tip" button (I'm actually pretty illiterate in the realms of social media), although I've been considering offering my services as a writing coach, as that might be the best way to help people directly, and also earn a bit of money to support my own writing.

@@mikesmithz Is this a different excerpt than the one you mentioned on page 190? Or the same one? I've certainly never read anything quite like Nabokov's prose. It's definitely quite impressive, although for my own personal preference, it's at times a touch wordy ; but that being said, all those words (often adjectives) do add a lot of life to his writing, so I can see how it might grow on me the more I get accustomed to his style.

@coreyhuffman7607 take a look in your UA-cam settings - there should be a superchat option and a subscriber option - this way people can either make a 1 off tip to you, or a monthly subscription, this way you can offer different tiers depending on what you want to offer (the most common one is subscribers get to watch your videos first). It shouldn't take you too long to set up - I always tip the creators who make great content, and I'm a monthly subscriber to a couple of channels. You may as well set it up - it's free money lol, and you definitely deserve to make some cash. Yeah, I've spent way too many hours dissecting Nabokov's prose - if you look at his writing, he uses so much alliteration. He writes in strict meter, with certain vowels always hitting the stressed beats; he reverses the assonance so the rhyme alternates, he uses synesthesia (a "loud color" or a "melody of relief"). Since you are so interested in poetry, I imagine you must like all the tricks he uses in his writing. I just can't believe he did it - to write one line of strict meter, have every stressed beat have the same assonance sound, and use synesthesia, and play with reversing all the vowel sounds...I mean, doing one line of that is hard - to write an entire book like that!!! It's almost impossible! The more you dig, the deeper the Nabakov hole goes.

Since making this video, I myself may have shifted my preference to em dashes as well (in many cases, at least; semicolons are still an incredibly versatile punctuation). I've seen writers use semicolons in so many different ways.

@@coreyhuffman7607 Do you have a Discord if I may ask? I want a sentence-crafting bud! Most writers I encounter on there don't seem to care so much about this stuff and just focus on world-building and characters.

​@@coreyhuffman7607 From a pure reader standpoint (although I also want to learn how to write more in accordance to my reading preferences), I always enjoyed authors who used a wide variety of punctuation -- periods, commas, semicolons, colons, parentheticals, em dashes, possibly even brackets for the likes of editorial comments and footnotes -- and varied simple/compound/complex sentence structures. I'm not always a fan of prose that only uses periods and commas unless it's quite simple in its subject matter (not drawing connections between many interrelated ideas). The way I perceive it is that commas already serve so many overloaded functions (using programmer-style terminology): to separate subordinate/dependent clauses from main/independent ones, to separate items in a list, to explicitly distinguish between coordinate adjectives and cumulative/compound adjectives, to further separate dialogue from narration, as an alternative to the colon when beginning a list, etc. Especially when such a writing style makes liberal use of commas with connective conjunctions omitted (as in the case of asyndeta or intentional comma splices), I find that strenuous to read since I have to figure out what the comma means in each context given the multitude of uses it has in such writing favoring almost exclusively periods and commas. It's typically a very minor increase in parsing effort on my part, but begins to add up if entire novels are written this way. Although I do like asyndeta a lot (less so splices), it helps me a lot when authors favor them to vary their punctuation and limit their uses of the comma to fewer contexts.

@@darkengine5931 I agree. Over the years, I've become well-acquainted with how/when to best use each of the major punctuations, and as you said, being consistent with how you use each one really helps the reader anticipate the flow of the sentence, thus making the reading experience more seamless.

​@@coreyhuffman7607 That ability to anticipate and quickly dissect a sentence's structure seems to be the ultimate key to a smooth reading experience. Much of what initially drew me to study creative writing -- with your videos being among the most insightful -- was less so with a desire to write and more so with a desire to be able to understand why I seem drawn to certain styles of prose over others. Above all else, I quickly fell in love with Nicholson Baker's writing in university after encountering books like _The Mezzanine._ What perplexed me so much is that I find his prose near-effortless to read, but it ranks as "extremely difficult" post-graduate level literary fiction. Most literary fiction I encounter ranked so difficult is quite challenging for me to read and comprehend (especially coming from an ESL background), but I find Baker an exception; somehow his prose is really easy for me to read and I've always wanted to be able to better pinpoint why. He tends to write monstrously-long Proustian sentences connecting many loosely-related ideas in the lengthiest sentences/paragraphs. An excerpt: >> But my mother’s informal punctuation in the op-ed letter came as a complete surprise; and the fact that my immediate instinctive response to it was to point out the misplaced commas so harshly that she wept (the only time, as far as I remember, that I ever hurt her feelings - for she understood and was even amused by my teenage request that whenever the two of us walked down the street together, she would please walk at least three yards ahead of me, so that people wouldn’t know we were related; and she even played along in her compliance, whistling, walking with a theatrical solitariness, checking her pocketbook, pausing abruptly to glance at a window display), as if these faulty commas called into question our standing as a family - the fact that I had been instinctively so cruel, made me double up with misery when, after I was married, I came across some sentences in Boswell that were punctuated just as hers had been. Boswell (and De Quincey, Edward Young, and others) had treated the sunken garden of a parenthetical phrase just as my mother had - as something to be prepared for and followed by the transitional rounding and softening of a comma. >> And such hybrids - of comma and parenthesis, or of semicolon and parenthesis, too - might at least in some cases allow for finer calibrations between phrases, subtler subordinations, irregular varieties of exuberance and magisteriality and fragile conjunction. In our desire for provincial correctness and holy-sounding simplicity and the rapid teachability of intern copy editors we had illegalized all variant forms - and, as with the loss of subvarieties of corn or apples, this homogenization of product was accomplished at a major unforeseen cost: our stiff-jointed prose was less able, so I now huffily thought, full of vengeance against the wrong I had done my mother, to adapt itself to those very novelties of social and technological life whose careful interpretation and weighting was the principal reason for the continued indispensability of the longer sentence. Despite looking like such an intimidating wall of text, I find it surprisingly easy to parse and comprehend. Another thing that impresses me so much about many of his books is that they have the most boring plot imaginable. For example, _The Mezzanine_ ultimately boils down to an office worker taking a lunch break and purchasing a pair of shoelaces, yet I find his books far less boring to read than I would have expected from the plot summary (and no doubt owed in large part to his writing prowess).

Thanks for the note! This video was also one of my older ones, so I was still learning how to edit.

That's a great observation with regards to the foreground vs background. The passive/active voices definitely give the narrative that effect. You make some good points about the "closeness" of the POV and the sensory verbs, too, and since making this video, I've found myself including the odd sensory verb in my own writing (sometimes it just provides a bit of clarity for ease of reading). I noticed the lyrical flow of Martin's prose as well, as I tend to do the same. My brain naturally pays a lot of attention to rhythm, so when something's too far off with the syllable count it bugs me. But it can be a detriment if done in excess.

​@@coreyhuffman7607 Cheers! I tend to be borderline obsessed with rhythm coming from a musical background. Learning more about poetry and practicing rhythmic scansion over the past month has actually been a major timesaver for me, since if I can't stop obsessing about rhythm, I'm at least gaining a better and better understanding of why something doesn't sound right to me. That said, I have a very disrespectful opinion: I really think the orthodox approach to English scansion -- focusing purely on syllables -- is entirely wrong! 😅 I've been going back and back a lot with multiple English poetry teachers on this (civilly), and they just keep telling me that poetic rhythm and musical rhythm aren't the same thing. To me there's only one type of sound-based rhythm based on how our ears and psychology works, and that's based on hearing certain sounds at steady time intervals. Anything else to me doesn't qualify as "rhythm" from a sound-oriented standpoint. But English syllables (unlike my native Japanese language) vary wildly in length: a monosyllabic word like "spawned" takes much longer to pronounce than "sat". This isn't factored in properly in orthodox English scansion. So if we take an example like this: >> Jim had flown today [...] This conforms perfectly to trochaic feet by orthodox scansion. However, it has a lot of rhythmic tension between "Jim" and "flown". Readers will generally want to insert a brief pause or draw out some syllables before/during "flown" to adapt to the rhythmic shift of "flown". Meanwhile, consider this as an alternative: >> Jimmy had flown today [...] Now we've broken the tight syllabic conformity to trochaic meter by introducing a dactyl in the beginning, but it actually smooths out the rhythmic tension and sounds "more trochaic" to my ears -- not less -- with this disruption. And I suspect that's often why a lot of poets like Shakespeare broke their meters a lot (even in original pronunciation); sometimes it's clearly an intentional disruption but I suspect at other times, it's to smooth out the actual rhythm (which is different from the syllabic accentual patterns). So I'll hope you'll forgive my long-winded tangent (been on my mind all day), but to me, true rhythmic understanding of our poetry/prose shouldn't be focusing on stressed/unstressed patterns so much as just how time is distributed between stressed syllables (if it's more evenly distributed, it'll sound more rhythmic and flow -- if not, it'll create tension and slow readers/speakers down: very subtly but noticeable if we listen at 0.25x speed or look at the resulting sound waves).

@@darkengine5931 Those are some great insights, and I think we're in agreement. As a mechanical engineer (in degree only, I'm not currently practicing), and as someone who has dabbled in music in the past (playing clarinet and a bit of bass guitar in the concert band in high school lol), I myself often have a mathematical way of thinking about things (math and music being closely related), and am always paying close attention to the rhythm/ cadence of words. Writing as much as I have, I seem to have developed a sort of intuition for it (I can tell when it sounds right or wrong), whereas you seem to have a more technical understanding of this topic (as I don't know much about different rhythmic meters), but I understand exactly what you mean. It's also very interesting for me to hear you discuss the contrast between English and Japanese, as I only speak/write one language with any degree of coherence.

​@@coreyhuffman7607 Cheers! I find Japanese prose much easier to write due the relatively fixed-length timing to enunciate syllables (it's like working only with quarter notes in music, although it lacks the rhythmic richness), and because we have so relatively few unique syllable sounds. But it comes with the downside that all but the most common words need to be 3+ syllables in length, or else we'll have too many homonyms with like 100 different possible definitions. So in exchange we have to be more verbose with the number of syllables words contain to compensate for how relatively few syllables we have. Then we end up with the horrible system of Kanji which tries to capture unique words and ideas into a single character to save space in writing, except we have thousands and thousands of them (and the average Japanese person needs to learn around 3000+ and often requires a high school education just to read a newspaper). Something I've noticed is that stretchy English syllables that can be phonetically elongated in sound ("cart" vs. "cat", e.g.) seem much more rhythmically forgiving. We can probably insert "dawn star" anywhere where it makes sense without much of a rhythmic disruption, since readers will tend to round out timings in stressed beats by smoothly elongating syllables in a legato fashion as needed: "dawwwn star", "dawn starrr", etc. Meanwhile harsh staccato syllables jammed next to each other like "dog digs" will probably create some tension no matter where we place this pair of words.

I suppose it depends on what type of writing you typically do. Being a novelist, I find I get the most practice whenever I'm describing something that is slightly abstract, because then I have to think of something that is comparable, but more relatable to the reader. Think of metaphors & similes as simply drawing comparisons. You can even practice this in your every day life: whenever you experience something unique, try to describe it in words, and if you can't seem to find the right ones, try and compare your experience to something that is easier to describe yet still gives a similar impression.

@@coreyhuffman7607 Thank you for your reply! Are there any books you recommend to improve descriptive writing/prose?

@@rhfig Funnily enough, I've never read any books on writing. Everything about writing that I've learned from others (meaning aside from my own writing/reading) has been via the internet and people I know personally. So unfortunately, I'm not a great person to ask about this, although I'm sure you could find people with such recommendations on UA-cam somewhere.

The question of how to write compelling prose is definitely complex/nuanced, and the cultural differences you mentioned add even more layers. The more I've thought about it, the more I've come to realize that whether the writer is showing or telling, what it comes down to is this: is the writer using the best tool for the job? "Showing" has its place, as does "telling", and the trick seems to be understanding which technique is most appropriate for a given situation, and why. I think Hemingway had it right when he said (and I'm paraphrasing): "Don't describe the emotion, make it." Or, in other words, describe everything (setting, actions, introspection, conflict, etc.) in such a way as to make the reader adopt the character's perspective as their own, because if this is done successfully, the reader will naturally feel what the character does. But, of course, this level of immersion is easier said than done. FYI, your writing is at a pretty high level (especially if it's your second language), so it seems like you're well on your way to understanding the topic at hand!

​@@coreyhuffman7607 Cheers and thank you! I love what you said here as well, as it's in perfect alignment with my preferences as a reader: >> Or, in other words, describe everything (setting, actions, introspection, conflict, etc.) in such a way as to make the reader adopt the character's perspective as their own, because if this is done successfully, the reader will naturally feel what the character does. I'm one of those types of readers where I can't engage so much in a fairly objective and empirical description of a scene. I want to know what things feel like to a POV character. I don't want the weather forecast; I want to feel what our character feels against it. My favorite fiction in all media (books, comic books, movies, TV shows) always move me when I'm empathizing this way. I tried a little 2-min writing prompt today to describe an old man who's tired. I admittedly cheated and went well over the 2 min mark, just halfway through drafting when the alarm rang, and kept writing and editing for over 10 mins. I'm curious what you think about it as a real writer. It might be a bit too purple (I love adverbs and adjectives) but this is the type of "feely" stuff that I like if I could learn how to write it. >> The biting rain stung as needles against Bob's wrinkly skin. The harsh winds blasted his exposed face like a wall of ice. Although his heart pounded furiously against his chest, he was tired -- so tired. Grasping the letter with trembling fingers, he struggled against the merciless landscape. As he squinted and scanned the horizon, he realized he had such a long way to go. _I must deliver the message. I must... I must. I promised Jane, I promised..._ The promise he made to his dying daughter echoed in his mind while his muscles grew weak and his arthritic joints reminded him of a thousand previous injuries. >> Bob collapsed in the dirt. The dying leaves started to gently fall on his shriveled body, cocooning him from the icy torrent for the briefest of moments, only for them to be swept away by the relentless gusts of wind.

@@darkengine5931 No obvious critiques jumped out at me when I read your passages, which means you've succeeded in many different aspects. I don't think it's purple, either. The last bit of your second passage could be cut short (either put the period after "swept away" or "gusts", as the rest is redundant IMO), but nothing else seems excessive (which is how I identify purple prose). Essentially, your writing is at the level where any improvements you could make would be subtle. For example, the first two sentences of the first passage have a very similar sentence structure, and both begin with the word "the". This adds a slight repetitiveness to the prose (emphasis on the word "slight"), but you could remove the "the's" quite easily, writing something like, "Sharp/biting droplets of rain stung as needles against Bob's wrinkly skin. Harsh winds blasted his exposed face like a wall of ice." I could delve deeper into little stuff like this, but this level of revision takes quite a bit of time and attention. Hope this helps!

​@@coreyhuffman7607 Awesome, thank you!

​@@coreyhuffman7607 I've noticed now when combing through these exercises that I have a bad habit of repeating "The" a lot for the beginning of a sentence. Somehow I didn't notice until you pointed it out despite being conscious of it for subject repetition and other determiners like "A/An"; "The" seems to fly under my radar more easily for some reason. Thank you again for drawing my attention to this habit! I also dug up this passage last night which I love from _The Blade Itself_ by Joe Abercrombie: >> Logen gawped, amazed, as a huge vessel ploughed through the water towards them, shining spray flying from its prow. A mountain of wood, floating by some magic in the sea. While the narrator blatantly told us that Logen was amazed, the metaphorical camera switched to see things through his eyes as a primitive who has never encountered a ship before. So we get to experience how the world appears through his eyes and feel what he feels, seeing a mountain of wood magically floating over the sea rather than simply a "ship". I did get a bit confused about how he can identify a "prow" without understanding the concept of a "ship", but no big deal. I love this style when the narrative descriptions start to give us a strong sense of what a character is feeling. I've never been the biggest fan of the most detached and distant type of third-person narrators with a very neutral tone; my favorite is when they seem to be taking on the feelings of a POV character or are very much a distinct storytelling character in their own right.

I remember being confused as to what a "zither" is, but it's been a while since I made this video, so if you're trying to point out something specific, I'm afraid I don't know what you're referring to.

I might do another video on Rothfuss in the future, but I wanted to diversify a bit between different authors, given how I'm only able to put out one video a months these days.

@@coreyhuffman7607 I see! Take your time with it!

Hey yourself, Audry. Sorry for the late reply. As of now, I haven't yet published any novels of my own, but I've had one in progress for a while now that I'm hoping to finish this year. I'll be sure to let everyone know when it's ready!

​@@coreyhuffman7607 Let us know when it's ready. I would like to read what you write. I love the story about the crazy dentist. It was spectacularly funny, and it played out in my head as you read it, like a movie. Do you offer coaching? Or Can you offer an opinion - not necessarily a review or critique - for other writers' writing?

@@audrywickham glad you liked that dentist story lol, it was a fun one. I've done some writing coaching/critiques for subscribers in the past, so I'd be more than happy to take a look at something for you. I can analyze one or two paragraphs free of cost, although given the number of requests I get these days, I'll have to charge an hourly fee if you want me to look at anything larger.

@@coreyhuffman7607 That's great! How can I contact you outside UA-cam?

I'm glad you're enjoying the videos. I thought the same thing back when I first started scouring the web for writing advice, finding a lot of "Favourite Tropes" videos and not a lot about how to actually put words down on the page.

"More conversational", that's a good way of putting it. You might say "more casual" as well.

I'll be sure to remember the honorific in the next video!

@@coreyhuffman7607 It's all good. I don't think he'd really mind that much. Even if he wasn't gone.

Yes, you're right, I could have elaborated a little more on the satire of that phrase. I didn't spend as much time unpacking that last example as I did the previous two, not wanting the video to go too long, but the script I wrote must have been deceiving, because the video didn't end up being long at all lol. Great analysis!