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.  

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.

Some writing stuff

Okay, some stuff I’ve picked up along the way. Some people will disagree, some people will sigh because they knew it all already, but I’ll throw this out there anyway.

Your “search” or “find” function in whatever word processor you use can be a super asset when trying to improve your writing. First, do a search for the word “very” and get rid of every instance of it. The word “very” is an indicator that your descriptor is too weak. Instead of writing “very hungry” you should be using something like “famished.” You get the picture.

I know there are those that think ALL adverbs are evil, but that’s arbitrary and I don’t believe in rules without exceptions. Except for the “very” thing- of that rule, I am very sure…um, I mean, I’m certain.

Don’t begin a book, story, or even a scene with a line of dialogue. Yes, it has built-in questions for the reader, such as “Who is speaking?” and “To whom is he or she speaking?” Still, don’t do it. It’s not against some set of rules carved into the oak of knowledge or anything; it’s just powerfully uncool. Like openings or endings built around dreams.

Oh right, don’t open with a sequence, get the reader all interested and then reveal that it was all a dream. The reader, if already drawn in, will be disappointed. If not drawn in, will wonder why she should give you a second chance. Further, if you are older than 12 years old and I have to explain why “…and it was all a dream!” is a terrible ending, perhaps you should take up some hobby other than writing.

Exclamation points or marks should not appear in anything you write except within dialogue, and one of the damn things is enough. This!!! is not any louder than this! An exclamation mark is used SPARINGLY to indicate that a character has shouted, if we can’t get it from context. One other thing…don’t combine them with question marks. That looks as stupid as a question mark combined with a period. Don’t you think.?

Employ no cavalry characters. What I mean is you cannot resolve the problem(s) faced by your characters by introducing someone new at the end who solves everything. Deus ex machina and Deus ex historia and stuff like that. Your reader will be trying to solve the problems and predict the outcome, in order to feel smart, but if you finish the puzzle with pieces the reader did not have, that will make the reader feel cheated. Reveal a truth? Yes. Reveal a new character who saves the day? No. No new characters after the first 2/3rds of the story or book.

Mikey K taught me that dialogue that begins with “Yes” or “No” is on the nose and he is right. For example:

John asked, “Are you hungry?”

Mary said, “Yes. I could eat.”

Is stronger when written as:

John asked, “Are you hungry?”

Mary said, “I could eat.”

If you would argue that the original form is how people actually talk, you are confusing transcribing conversations with writing dialogue. They are two different tasks. Also, when attributing dialogue, just use “said” and “asked.” Avoid these sorts of things:

John sighed, “Are you tired?”

Mary growled, “I have a toothache.”

I suppose it would be okay to use “whispered,” but only once.

Watch out with accents. They become tedious in a holy hurry.

Lise said, “Me der, I want go to de ‘ospital in one h-our.”

That’s too much. Try this:

Lise said, “Me there, I want go to the ‘ospital in one hour.”

That’s enough to let the reader know that the speaker has an accent. Maybe one sentence could be really heavily accented, but then afterward you can just drop small reminders into the line.

In general, don’t worry too much about grammar, but understand that it does change the meanings of what you write. Even teachers are now instructing students that the Oxford comma is no longer needed, but it does change the meaning. Compare these two:

I went to Hollywood and met Leonardo DiCaprio, a plumber and a bed-wetter.

I went to Hollywood and met Leonardo DiCaprio, a plumber, and a bed-wetter.

In the former, I met one actor with a sideline job and a nocturnal problem. In the latter, I met three people. Learning this sort of thing in the younger years would be far more important than learning how to write in cursive.

So, don’t get too hung up on grammar. End sentences in prepositions and start them with conjunctions if you like, and understand that grammar conveys a tone and may confuse meaning. But do what you want to.

Next thing, round out your characters. A single dad raising a little girl, we see him brushing her hair in the morning before school, is a nice character. A crack dealer working a dangerous neighborhood, we see him beat the snot out of someone who tried to rob him, is a solid character. However, combine those two, and now you’re cooking.

Last bit is an oldie but a goodie. Even when you’re alone, or maybe especially when you’re alone, proofread your work aloud. You’ll find SO much more that needs fixing that way than doing that work silently.

Okay, that’s enough for now. Go write something.