Author

LATRAME

@latrame

1w ago

Two clocks run in every story, and they're never in sync.

There's story time : ten years, one night, three generations. And there's narrative time : the number of pages you, the author, decide to spend on it.

A text's whole breathing lives in the gap between the two. "Twenty years passed", five words for two decades. Then three full pages to describe the four seconds his hand hesitates above the phone.

The reader doesn't notice it consciously, but the body feels it : when you slow down, they hold their breath ; when you speed up, they understand those years didn't count. You don't narrate time. You decide which of its seconds deserve to weigh a page, and which evaporate into a comma.

Popular science

narrativetime · pacing · narration · writingadvice

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

4w ago

A novel in which a character writes a novel. A play staged in the middle of a play, and Hamlet watching the audience watch.

It could be just a hall of mirrors. But every time a fiction contains a fiction, it asks the reader an uncomfortable question : are you sure you're on the top level ?

Popular science

storywithinastory · narration · theoryoffiction · reading

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

4w ago

There is an art to not telling.

She closed the apartment door, dropped the key in the mailbox.

Three years later, she came back for the box that was still in the cellar.

Everything that matters just happened between those two sentences, and you read it, even though it was never written. That's the ellipsis : the story keeps going while the text stays quiet.

Popular science

ellipsis · narration · writingcraft · writingadvice

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

5w ago

The narrator is lying to you. Not the author : the narrator. He polishes his role, forgets whatever suits him, swears he was calm that night.

And the strangest part is you love it. Because by the third inconsistency, you're no longer reading a story : you're running an interrogation.

Popular science

unreliablenarrator · narration · writingadvice · reading

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

5w ago

The same door opens three times.

"I opened the door. My hand was shaking, I think." — The reader is locked inside. They know only what the character knows ; they doubt when the character doubts.

"She opened the door. Her hand was shaking." — The reader sees the shaking, but from outside. Watching someone who can't see themselves shake.

"Across the hall, someone opened a door." — The reader no longer even knows who's shaking. Just a silhouette, and maybe that's exactly what's needed, for now.

One door, three cameras. And it resets with every scene : nothing forces chapter twelve's camera to be chapter one's.

Popular science

pointofview · narration · writingstyle · writingadvice

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

1w ago

You know the ending from page one. He's going to die. It's there in black and white, line one.

And yet you read the three hundred pages that follow. Why ?

Because a story doesn't hold only on its "what next ?". It also holds on "but how ?", "but why ?", "at what moment did it tip over ?". Starting from the end isn't giving up suspense. It's changing its nature : you're no longer watching for the event, you're watching its mechanism.

Some of the greatest stories are built this way. You're shown the body, then time runs backward. The tension doesn't come from what will happen, you know that, but from the weight piling up on every page, because every smile, every promise, you already know what they lead to.

Popular science

storyorder · narration · suspense · writingadvice

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

1w ago

Focalization is the answer to a very simple question : through whose eyes ?

Take a plain scene. A man walks into a café, sits, orders. A woman, two tables away, watches him.

Tell it from him : he has no idea he's being watched. He's thinking about his meeting, about what he'll say, about the rain that ruined his shoes. The woman is just a shape at the edge of the frame, if he notices her at all.

Tell the same scene from her : suddenly everything he does becomes a sign. He glances at the door twice, so he's waiting for someone. He kept his coat on, so he doesn't plan to stay. She reads a whole story into gestures he thought were meaningless.

Same café, same minute, two stories that don't resemble each other. And you changed none of the facts : you only moved the camera behind different eyes.

The classic trap is thinking you choose a focalization once and for all. In reality, every scene asks again : whose gaze is this ? Sometimes the strongest answer isn't the main character. A murder is more terrifying seen through the witness who doesn't understand what he's looking at than through the killer who already knows everything.

A small test, next time a scene resists you : ask who's telling it. Then try handing it to someone else in the room. Often the scene that was stuck didn't have a writing problem, just a point-of-view problem.

Popular science

focalization · pointofview · narration · writingadvice