Random things I've been thinking about

I've been thinking about some things lately, but since I haven't come to any conclusions about any of them, I'm just going to put them in bullet points.
 

*The craft task for my critique group recently was to write a single really long sentence (250-300 words) from my main character's point of view, then a second long sentence, still from their point of view, but about their imagining what someone else is thinking.  I didn't like the long sentence part for a lot of reasons--mostly because there needed to be a short sentence between the two to break it up and release some tension.  But it got me thinking: my characters often assume what other people are thinking, because I always assume what other people are thinking (usually in a self-conscious kind of way).  Apparently, from both the book my group is using and from the other people in my critique group, this is not a common thing.  I do it a lot, and it always always always gets called as for a point of view error.  So I go back and add something like "Steve supposed Betty was horrified" or "It looked to Steve like Betty was horrified," but then I'm giving Steve way too much credit, because Steve isn't self-aware enough to think "I'm making an assumption that Betty is horrified."  No, he's thinking, "Betty's horrified!" and takes it as a fact.  So putting that qualifier in there changes Steve's characterization.  So I usually end up taking the sentence out altogether or changing it to a description of Betty's face.  But!  Maybe there's something to this long sentence idea as a way to get everything in there.


* The Bechdel test is a really simple test that asks if a work of fiction has two female characters who have a conversation that's not about a man.  I've been thinking about how a story can pass this test if it's written in close third person or first person from a man's point of view.  So let's say it's from Steve's point of view, so he's in every scene and every scene is filtered through him. 

• He can overhear two women talking, either by eaves-dropping or because the women don't care that he's there, they're having their own conversation and ignoring him.
• He can be involved in the conversation.
• There can be a story in a story.  Steve watches TV or sees a play, where two women are talking.  A female character tells him about a conversation she had with another woman.

Even though none of these are cheating, they all feel insufficient.  Steve is horning in on some women's conversation or he's listening in and violating their privacy.  On the other hand, two characters having a conversation in Steve's story about something that's not Steve or Steve's problems has its own problems (like that it'll get cut in editing). The truth is, having a male perspective just structurally is going to remove the reader a step from female interaction.  That's just how it is.  So the way to have the female characters have a substantial impact is to work more on how each of them is portrayed and how each of them comes off as flushed out, dimensional, and possessing agency.  They need to have relationships and motivations beyond men, which is what the Bechdel test is getting at in a surface kind of way, but by nature of how the narrative is set up, those won't be front and center.