https://authz.ca/notes/Recent content in Visual Notes on AuthZHugoen-CAhttps://authz.ca/notes/a-scene-is-a-pressure-system/Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0700https://authz.ca/notes/a-scene-is-a-pressure-system/<p>A scene is not simply a place where characters stand and speak.</p> <p>It is a pressure system.</p> <p>Someone wants something. Someone or something resists. The resistance changes the available choices, and each choice changes the pressure again.</p>https://authz.ca/notes/an-unreliable-narrator-can-fail-in-four-ways/Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0700https://authz.ca/notes/an-unreliable-narrator-can-fail-in-four-ways/<p>An unreliable narrator is not simply a narrator who lies.</p> <p>The account can become unstable at several different points between event and reader.</p> <p><strong>Misreporting</strong> changes what happened. The narrator gives a false account, whether through deliberate deception, faulty memory, limited knowledge, or a desire to control the story.</p>https://authz.ca/notes/good-sentence-wrong-place/Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0700https://authz.ca/notes/good-sentence-wrong-place/<p>The strongest sentence in a draft is not always the sentence the draft needs.</p> <p>A writer may love a line because it is vivid, balanced, surprising, or difficult to produce. That pleasure is real. It records a discovery and may even reveal what the piece is capable of doing.</p>https://authz.ca/notes/the-gothic-setting-is-not-just-atmosphere/Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0700https://authz.ca/notes/the-gothic-setting-is-not-just-atmosphere/<p>A Gothic setting is not merely a dark room, an old house, or a landscape in bad weather.</p> <p>It is a system of pressure.</p> <p>The architecture controls movement. A corridor delays arrival. A locked door turns knowledge into a risk. A window offers a view without offering escape. The house remembers what its inhabitants would prefer to bury, even when the memory is carried through objects, routines, or unexplained absences rather than ghosts.</p>https://authz.ca/notes/when-the-camera-lies/Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0700https://authz.ca/notes/when-the-camera-lies/<p>Film and television do not replace the literary narrator with an objective camera.</p> <p>An image is selected, framed, timed, edited, and joined to sound. Each decision controls what the audience can see, when it can see it, and what it is encouraged to assume.</p>https://authz.ca/notes/who-speaks-who-sees/Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0700https://authz.ca/notes/who-speaks-who-sees/<p>A narrator and a focalizer are not necessarily the same thing.</p> <p>The narrator answers one question:</p> <p><strong>Who speaks?</strong></p> <p>The focalizer answers another:</p> <p><strong>Who perceives?</strong></p> <p>This distinction becomes useful when a passage feels inconsistent even though its grammatical point of view has not changed.</p>