I see your Point of View

I mean, what's left to write about this?  I suppose in many ways, it's like teaching the historical event of Washington crossing the Delaware.  It's covered in 5th grade, 8th grade, and 11th grade and yet, still, some people aren't familiar with it.  Maybe there is something left to dig into or reinforce.

When a book is written in 1st person point-of-view (POV), the narrator is a character in the novel, and is using first-person pronouns like "I" or "me" or "my" or "we" or "us"... you get the idea.  This is a fun way to write, because the author can do so much like have an unreliable narrator.  The storyteller is involved, and is thus biased, and may even be trying to deceive the reader. The narrator can even be dead, and telling their story.  The challenge is the author must always be asking, "Would my narrator know this?"  The narrator certainly would not know the thoughts and feelings of others, so the words "seemed to" and "seemingly" come in often.  As in:

"She seemed to be angry with me, but I couldn't be sure."

The narrator can't see someone slipping poison into tea in the next room.  The narrator can't know anything that happened while the narrator was sleeping, unless someone explains it later.  Even with these limits, it can be a fun POV because the reader inhabits the character, although this can be off-putting as well.  First-person character needs to be a bit more sympathetic than others, and by sympathetic, I don't mean the reader has to feel sorry for them, only that the reader would be interested in learning what happens to them.

In 2nd person, the pronouns are "you" and "your" and "yours" and this is incredibly hard to do.  There is no story that the reader is accessing, peeping into, it's in the reader's face.  It is author-to-reader jujitsu, and it is incredibly hard to do well.  Most often, you find this POV in self-help books, e.g. "You need to get in touch with your inner child" and it is rugged to use it in fiction.  A young author from Australia used it particularly well, her name is Bruna Gomes, in her novel How to Disappear, but it is challenging, and honestly, I warn you against it.

In 3rd person limited, some of the constraints from 1st person still apply. The narrator is anonymous.   The pronouns switch to 3rd person, like "he, she" but the reader is only inside the mind of one person, and that's why it's limited.  We the reader can only see inside the mind of a single character throughout the entire book.  None of this:

"Caroline thought that Benjamin was handsome, and Benjamin thought Caroline was a genius."

Nope.  You can't write that in 3rd person limited.

Neither can you do that with 3rd person multiple.  In 3rd person multiple, you have all the same rules as 3rd person limited, but you switch which mind the reader can see into, usually at chapter breaks, otherwise the reader will become confused.  

A chapter where we can see only Caroline's thoughts and actions, and then a chapter where we can see only Benjamin's thoughts and actions.  This can be a lot of fun to write and to read, because as the reader we know the thoughts of the characters, but they do not know each other's thoughts, and we can see the Three's Company-esque misunderstandings coming a mile away, or we can be tense because we are aware of the trap the other character is walking into.  With three characters, each getting a turn each chapter, a nice braided story can occur, and the three characters needn't be living in the same century, or even on the same planet.  The trick is tying it all together, the braiding, but it can be great fun to write, and three 90-page stories combine for a nice 270-page novel.

That brings me to 3rd person omniscient.  My initial advice- don't do it.  Leave that POV to God.  It's a POV where the reader can hear the thoughts and see the actions of every character in the same scene.  It's takes much of the narrative tension out of the story, like a police detective's court testimony, it's virtually impossible to do well, and no one likes a know-it-all anyway.

Remember that, except in 3rd-person omniscient (again, don't use it), if the POV is through a character who becomes unconscious, asleep, or dead-dead (not Lovely Bones dead), the character and thus the reader cannot know what is happening.  Once you learn this, you'll spot it happening as a glaring error.

The movie Groundhog Day is TERRIFIC.  I love it, but it makes this gaff once.  Bill Murray's character, though whose POV we have been experiencing everything, is dead in the morgue, and his colleagues from the TV station go and identify his remains.  He is dead and insensate. We have been in his POV the entire time, and suddenly we're in someone else's.  Maybe the coroner's, maybe the woman's?  Who knows?  It's jarring.  If you watch the movie with me, when we get to that very short scene, you'll hear me say, "POV issue" every time.  I know it annoys people, but I can't help it.

Once you learn these things, it's not as if spotting these errors is like being a middle-school hall monitor, saying, "You broke the rules!"  It's more like watching a puppet show, and the marionette's strings suddenly shift from invisible wires into 1-inch black rope.  

I don't want to sit and watch a great movie, or read a wonderful book, or even go to a decent puppet show, and suddenly get slapped in the face with POV issues that yank me out of the story.

Pick one of the POVs above (not 3rd-person omni, and I caution you against 2nd-person) and carefully stick to it.  Breaking the rules is always a choice, but you won't look clever.  You'll only look like you didn't know the rules.  

Writing Badly

I was once married to a brilliant singer, and while we were on our way from our apartment in Pacific Grove to Carmel-by-the-Sea, we were listening to a Beach Boys cassette tape.  As we drove along, we were singing, and of course she was hitting every note.  I was missing one here and there, but she was kind, and found something nice to say like, "Nice breath control."

But then, on the topic of missing notes, she said something I hadn't considered before. She pointed out that it took considerable talent to intentionally miss every single note, because you'd have to know what the right note was, and then assiduously avoid it, while singing another note, preferably a real clunker.  She was right.  Try it sometime.
The same can be true of writing.  One of my grad school mentors was a terrific Maine author and playwright named Mike Kimball, and he once wrote a humorous story about squirrels, intentionally missing every note when it came to writing craft.  
The room was filled at the reading, mostly MFA students and faculty, and we hadn't recovered from the last belly laugh before the next came.  He crushed it.  Most of the clunkers were because the prose was so over the top, and so repetitive in its repeating of what had already been said...plus throw in rodent love...
Anyway, there is an event called the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest which is looking to award a small prize for the worst opening line.  Known to many as the "Dark and Stormy Night" contest, it's run by San Jose State University, and writers attempt to miss all the notes while crafting a horrible opener, and then submit it.
The contest is named for the novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, author of the well known first line, "It was a dark and stormy night," from his 1830 novel Paul Clifford. Snoopy, when he was crafting his novel, often used it. 
The whole of that stinker of an opener goes, "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
P-U, but the contest attracts over ten thousand entrants annually, and has been broken into subcats like mystery, romance, western, YA, etc.  
There comes a point when one more stroke of the brush diminishes the painting.  Bulwer-Lytton took a roller to his painting in the opening line.  
It's important to be detail-oriented when writing, but in my opinion it's hugely important to be economical as well, and to trust the reader for Heaven's sake.  Let the reader do some of the work, which sounds like a fortune cookie at a writing seminar, but it's true.  
For fun, here are some of the winners and runners-up from a recent Bulwer-Lytton contest:

2020 Grand Prize - Lisa Kluber, San Francisco, CA

Her Dear John missive flapped unambiguously in the windy breeze, hanging like a pizza menu on the doorknob of my mind.

2020 Crime & Detective category winner - Yale Abrams, Santa Rosa, CA

When she walked into my office on that bleak December day, she was like a breath of fresh air in a coal mine; she made my canary sing.

2020 Romance category winner - Julie Winspear, Washington D.C.

In Gertrude’s experience lovemaking was always bittersweet, or at least it had been until one fateful night when Chaz, the seductive man behind the concession stand blessed her with the salty-sweet bliss reminiscent of both true romance and quality kettle corn.

2020 Historical Fiction category winner- Edward Covolo, Menlo Park, CA

When Sir John of York fought in the crusades, he killed many Saracens with great dispatch, and was likened unto a whirling dervish of steel and Christian might—minus the dizziness from constantly spinning in a circle, and the fact that he was on a horse that couldn't do that.

Here's my advice.  Just write, in as natural a voice as you can.  Don't try to sound like someone you once heard, but you were reading, so it was the voice in your head, or one of them, with words being put in its mouth by another writer.  

Relax, and write.

Describing Characters, Revealing Characters

Sometimes writing workshops/seminars/whatevers sound like you've found yourself trapped in some hoity-toity cult of writers trying to sound deep, speaking author-speak in the most exclusionary way.

Advice like, "Don't simply tell us about the character, allow it to be a revelatory, transcendent-but-earthy experiencing of the character's inner..."  ack, I'm gagging and can type no more.

As always, I'm just sharing my thing.  It could be wrong and awful, who knows, but it's how I do it.  My first rule when introducing the reader to a character is to avoid being corny if I can help it.  Worse than corny is cheesy.  I'm not sure why the connection to food in those expressions, but I try to avoid them both.  Not in real life, though, because cheese is magic. 

While many say that describing a character's attire is a great way to give insight into the nature of the person, their societal status, their likes/wants/personality...I generally try to avoid it.  There are some exceptions, in my opinion, but describing an entire outfit as if the readers might want to order it for themselves is tedious.  It takes me out of the story, and I suddenly feel like I'm trapped in the author's living room, the author's voice drowning out the story.

I have to side with Mr. King on this one, and say that the less said about the character's clothing, the better.  Some clothing items I don't mind?  A hat with a sports team logo, shoes with stiletto heels, a crown, wellies.., these are examples of minor additions that do a lot of work.  But "he was wearing a tux, Tom Ford, with structured shoulders and a swooping shawl lapel" takes a lot of space and does so little, except insert the author's voice into the story with all the finesse of a bandsaw cutting through sheet metal.

I mean, leaving clothes out of it, in Twilight, the author never even describes the Bella kid, except to say she's bad at volleyball.  Bella is our vehicle in the story, and if you describe her clothes, height, weight, hair color, nose shape, eyes, teeth, etc...every item you add you make it more difficult to slip into the character's skin.

Those of you who curled a lip at genre fiction, no matter how much more money she's made than you, we can find the same sorts of examples in literary fiction as well.  I've never been a fan of The Great Gatsby. Yeah, I said it, and yeah the book outsells my books, so what.  But here's the thing...Daisy is such a 2-dimensional character that the most we really know about her is what she's wearing, and that she is an affront to feminism everywhere.  

Which maybe was intentional, because all the women in that novel are basically furniture that the men, portrayed as much smarter and more decisive, fight over.  Daisy is a clothes rack with a two-color floor-length gown, with a collar like flower petals, and she wears white gloves. F-Scott-F even describes her earrings as large and flower-shaped, but there is no real understanding of who she IS.

You know the whole "show don't tell" thing? When it comes to revealing a character to the reader, I think listening is better than seeing.  What a character SAYS is far more important than what they look like, clothing, body, etc.  It's just as true as it is in real life.

Give the characters stuff to say that reveal who they are.  Then we get to hear the character's voice, instead of the author's voice, and we'll get to know them.

Speaking of Speaking

You know dialogue can be the favorite part of writing.  The pacing is swift, a lot of information and characterization can be delivered quickly, and dialogue presents all sorts of opportunity to surprise the reader.  It's also a chance to take on perhaps the hardest part of writing, and that is attempting to be funny, but we'll tackle that in another post.

Writing dialogue is also full of traps, and just as I'm doing with this entry, there are countless people who are more than willing to tell you the rules.  

So, my first rule is look at all the rules as if they are only guidelines.  Dialogue is like music.  What is wonderful in one person's ear is pure clunker in the next.

Second, dialogue is the most human thing you'll write- meaning culture, ethnicity, education, socio-economics, generation, region, and individual personality all come into writing it.  Furthermore, it's all filtered through the POV of not only the narrator, but the author.  I'm a 50-something man, and so what a 12-year-old sounds like to me is different than what a 12-year-old sounds like to his 10-year-old sister.

The leads to a believability curve.  Someone may tell you, "This 12-year-old doesn't sound like he's only 12."  First, keep in mind that the reader is looking through a different life-lens than you are.  Second, the reader might not have had a 12-year-old in their life in 35 years.  The 12-year-old they are using as a model is now 47-years-old.

People resist changing these mental models.  If you write a story about a 12-year-old who speaks like a physicist, or an 85-year-old grandmother who speaks like a longshoreman, that character can become a really interesting feature, but some readers will reject it. 

For me, I write dialogue in three steps.  Step 1- get it down on paper.  Just write it, knowing you'll improve it later.  Step 2- streamline it.  Go through and economize.  For example, you'll almost never need the word "yes" or "no."  In 2000, I spent a month in China, and my Mandarin was never great, but my driver told me that they really didn't use a word for "yes" or "no." If someone asked, "Are you tired?" you could expect someone to simply answer, "I am" or "I am not."  

A mentor of mine pointed out early on that when a character asks, "Are you hungry?" better than answering with "yes" the second character could reply, "I could eat."  As is said so often, dialogue is not transcription of speech.

Step 3- make it more realistic with misunderstandings.  Almost no conversation goes smoothly, and the miscommunication is almost as revelatory as the communication.  Also, let some of it go.  Don't fix everything.  When humans talk, they let a lot of the stuff they didn't understand go without comment, until it becomes obvious that they missed a crucial bit.  All this is tough, but give it a try and practice.

This isn't a step, but it is another bit of advice...try to be fair.  Make an effort to not give all the best lines to the character most like you.  It's a nice way to resolve some conflict from your middle school years, maybe, but it shows, and if the reader detects the one-sided nature, they might take the side of the verbal punching bag.  Keep it balanced, if you can.

I'm one of those who writes dialogue with attributions "said" and "asked," almost exclusively.  No adverbs, no groans-shouts-sighs, etc. Occasionally, I will use "reply" or "answered" but rarely.  As many have pointed out, it's difficult to convey whispering with punctuation or context, so "whispered" makes sense, but keep in mind that whispering can be really creepy, especially when it's deadpan whispering by a child.  

Years ago, I wrote about accents, so I'll avoid it this time, except to again beg you to go easy.  There is a brilliant author, I love the work, but one novel was basically unreadable because the Scottish accent within is so overwrought, so heavy-handed, that it carries all the gravitas of Pepé Le Pew and Foghorn Leghorn.  Signal the accent, with a word here and there...do not try to recreate it.

To sum up, in my opinion, whenever you get stuck, have a couple characters say something.  It'll boost pace, it'll refresh the reader, and it will almost certainly put fresh choices before you as the author.