The "Right" Amount of Social Media

"Part of being creative is learning how to protect your freedom. That includes freedom from avarice." ~ Hugh Macleod

I don't watch news anymore.

I know, that sounds silly, especially from a college professor. Shouldn't every human being living in the modern world care about what are happening around them? That seems to be an argument hard to dispute. If I were younger I wouldn't have been strong enough to say otherwise.

Before I had my first child, yes, I watched news everyday. By the way, I watched movies, and I played computer games. (I never ever occupied myself with cell phones, though; I'm still using a dumb phone). Even during the time both my husband and I were occupied by a baby, we still tried to catch up with the world. Now if I tell you, I don't have time for that, you may say, you can't work all the time. Right, every day after work, I do have certain time to spend at my discretion, but I want to save it for something more meaningful, something more important to me.

News are about others, unless we are celebrities. I care about other people, and I care about mankind, which is often a theme in my books. Meanwhile, I'm approaching 40. However optimistic, there are only that many years left ahead of me. I have a demanding day job, and I love it. Apart from that, I'd like to see something staying and growing with time, such as more books on Amazon and more readers following my books. And there are only that many hours each day.

Time is not the only reason for me to cut from social media. How many happy news do you watch every day? Scientific discoveries might be the only exception. The majority is about tragedies, and I'm a sentimental person. It simply messes up my mind, disturbing my writing as well as my work. It makes me feel that I live in a world that lacks security. Bad things can happen to me at any time. Well, that's not untrue, but it makes harder for us to live a happy life with that notion in our minds.

Even forums that are highly related to work and writing can be disturbing, because we are constantly comparing ourselves with others. Yes, there are a lot of writers, a lot of researchers ahead of us, but they are also in the senior and established stages of their lives. Everything has a beginning. We learn from people who can serve as our role models, but that exposure has to be limited so that we don't intimidate ourselves at the same time.

During the five years I wrote my first novel, The Starlight Fortress, I had no contact with any of those forums. I didn't refresh my Amazon Author Page every few minutes to find out how many more sales had been generated. I didn't wake up at midnight fretting about work unfinished. I simply wrote the story at night. I simply conducted research during the day. I might have been slow, but the progress was steady. There was little disturbance, and rarely did I blame myself. Why should I? I was working hard, doing the correct things, and that should be satisfactory enough.

We get so many goodies from the social media. I love it, but I also know that too much sugar will ruin a cake. Everything has to be the right amount. As technology develops, we could safely predict that the amount of social information will continue to explode. Shall we let others determine what we do, what we think, and how we feel? Shall we let a few high-tech companies choose our lifestyles? I know what I want, and make choices for my life.

The Power of Multiple Point of Views

In fiction, the Point of View (POV) determines whose mind and eyes you choose to perceive and observe a story. Novice writers tend to write in a single POV, which provides intimacy and consistency. However, if you have the skill to use multiple POVs, it can bring you great advantages.

1. Multiple POVs speed up the story. No matter how busy your protagonist is, he or she can only do that many things in a day. There will be ups and downs, and readers really don't need to know all the details. Of course, you can leave out the boring moment (and you should!), but a better way to handle this is to switch to a different POV during the main character's down time. Normally, stories with multiple POVs will have more actions and a faster pace, which is preferred by "the modern impatient readers".

2. Multiple POVs allow you more freedom in telling the story. For example, in my latest book, STRANDS, there is a teenage girl who knows little about space, just as some of the readers. Then when she gets exposed to novel ideas such as neutron stars and dark matter, she can ask for clarifications. This way, scientific background necessary for readers to follow the story can be introduced in live conversations, rather than info-dumping. She can be surprised by the sheer mass of black holes. She can wonder "What if I run on the surface of a neutron star?" She can also observe the main character and make comment on his action. Sometimes you may want to hide certain information regarding a character, or you may even want to mislead the readers to believe otherwise. This can be easily achieved by switching to the POV of another character.

3. Multiple POVs make it easier for you to portrait the characters. When a character appears, of course you can, and should, describe his/her physical look. But when you do it too much, especially when you add too many subjective judgments, it feels unnatural. This will not be an issue when you are speaking from another character's view. You can even beef it up by adding discrepancies between your, the author's, description, and a character's description. This way you can reveal valuable information about the personality of the observing character, and his/her relationship with the other character. Then you can let the other character describe the appearance of the first character.

4. Multiple POVs create drama and contrast. If you write solely from the view of a busy husband, it is difficult for readers to grasp the loneliness of his wife, although this can be a desired effect sometimes. You can write about the cocktail party held in the husband's company, followed by resentment of the wife who's left alone right before the husband enters home. Or about the husband as a successful worker, and a grudging co-worker who plans to bring him done. Now here you have to be careful in choosing the amount of "overlap" between the events experienced by individual characters. Normally, to keep things going, you don't want any overlap. In rare occasions, when two characters have drastically different views of the same event, you can have some overlap, but remember, you have to keep the ball rolling or readers will be tired reading the same thing twice.

Okay, just one last tip: do not jump from head to head too frequently. Stay with a fixed POV at least throughout a scene, and better throughout a chapter, unless the location is changed. For short stories, I try to end them with the POVs that I started with. It adds a feeling of completeness.