A NOVEL Writing Site.com » Point of View

Writing Lesson 35 – Be an Invisible Author

naomi — Fri, 07 May 2010 09:00:27 +0000

Author Intrusion

I’d like to introduce you to a term, if you aren’t familiar with it already, called “author intrusion”. You have author intrusion when you’re reading a story and all of a sudden something is said in a way that pulls you out of the “zone” your imagination is in. It might be a really fancy or strange word that causes you to lose the flow of your reading. Flowery writing – the use of excessive adverbs and adjectives is also distracting. It might be a mistake in tense; an author may accidentally switch from past tense to present tense or word things in such a way that it sounds like they’re going from 3^rd person to 1^st person. Another blunder—which happens too often, strangely enough—is when an author suddenly changes point of view, giving us the thoughts of a character who’s head we’re not supposed to be in. We call it “head-hopping” (another term to know). And what I think is the most disruptive type of intrusion—when an author may suddenly dump a lot of information in the narration that sounds like he’s explaining something from a text book. (The term for that is called an Information Dump, by the way.)

Here’s an example of an information dump. Say you’re reading a story about a young person who is torn between accepting a scholarship to attend their dream college or taking two years off of school altogether to pursue another dream of making it to the Olympics. Suddenly, the author veers away from the meat of the story to insert a long paragraph or two about the important history of the college or what another individual had to do to overcome a similar situation. (He’s letting us know how well he researched his story and wants us to be proud of him. Blech!) Narration like this can suddenly make you disconnect with the story as you become immediately aware that the author is trying to teach you something.

…and How to Avoid It

All of the above are ways that the author intrudes into the story. There are several things you can do to avoid author intrusion in your fiction writing and remain invisible to the reader.

First, don’t set out to necessarily “teach” a lesson, or make a moral point in your fiction. You will likely have a lot of research and knowledge built into the topic you’re writing about, but you can’t include it all. That which you do include must come out as being natural to the telling of the story, or you will be in danger of creating information dumps. Most of the time, a lesson or moral will end up being innately ingrained in a story by its plot or how characters behave without the author pointing it out.
Don’t use extravagant vocabulary words where a simple, clear one will do. Otherwise you’ll be guilty of stepping into the spotlight, saying, “Look! I’m here. I wrote this. Don’t I have an expansive vocabulary?” You don’t want to be the reason readers become distracted from the story you’ve worked so hard on. Also, clean out as many adverbs and adjectives as you can.
Pay close attention to grammar. Be sure your verbs always agree with your subjects so that you don’t make the mistake of changing tenses mid-step. That can sometimes sound like the author is suddenly there in the story, mingling with the characters.
Always stay in only one character’s head (POV) per scene. Observe everything that happens through the filter of that one character.

EXERCISE:

Look through your manuscript for creeping author intrusion.

Does any scene suddenly sound like a Wikipedia description?
Are you watching those noun/verb agreements?
Is your vocabulary sufficient but not flowery?
Are there too many adverbs and adjectives instead of strong verbs and specific nouns?
Have you head-hopped in any one scene?

Edit for these problems.

Writing Lesson 32 – Let Me Show You How to Show

lynn — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 09:00:41 +0000

“Showing vs. Telling”

We’ve written much about this concept of using vivid action, description, and dialogue to show what’s happening in a story rather than simply telling readers about what happens.

It would be fitting, perhaps, to “show” you an example.

Below is the first paragraph of a scene in my work in progress (wip), More Precious Than Gold. Eliza is my heroine. The town’s doctor is in jail, and Eliza’s father has just been shot by an intruder who wandered into their home after a riot. Here’s how it appeared before the final edit.

Before:

A neighbor heard the shot. An eternity passed before he returned with a doctor, but Eliza understood. One was in jail and another in hiding as an accomplice. Who knew where the sympathies of the town’s other physicians lay? She didn’t ask, and she didn’t care at that point. Stanching the flow of blood was of paramount importance.

Do you see how this paragraph “tells” you about what’s happening? You can almost hear the writer (um…that would be me) narrating the story. I “tell” you that the neighbor heard the shot. I imply that he went for a doctor and “tell” you that it took a long time. While there’s nothing particularly wrong with that, it’s just not very interesting. There’s lots of potential tension in this scene. It would be so much better to “show” the action as it unfolds, allowing readers to see through the POV (point of view) character’s eyes. Look what I did with it.

After:

Eliza snatched a shawl from the hall tree and pressed it to Papa’s wounds as she cradled his head in her lap. The door creaked open, squeezing them against the wall. She stifled a cry and leaned forward, shielding him with her body.

It was only a neighbor. “I heard a shot. Do you . . . oh, Lord! I’ll get help.”

An eternity passed before he returned with a doctor in tow, but Eliza understood. One was in jail and another in hiding as an accomplice. Who knew where the sympathies of the town’s other physicians lay? She didn’t ask, and she didn’t care at that point. Stanching the flow of blood was of paramount importance.

There are still some “telling” sentences, but they center on Eliza, setting the scene for new sentences that play up the action (snatching the shawl, pressing it to the wound) and emotion (trying not to scream, shielding the victim) or the sensory aspects of the scene (the creaking door, feeling squeezed).

The vilest offender in the early version of this paragraph was the first sentence where I “told” you the neighbor heard the shot. If I’m writing from Eliza’s POV, she could only assume this, at best. Look how much more interesting it is to convert that sentence to dialogue that shows the same information, Eliza’s relief, the neighbor’s alarm.

Exercise:

Use my original paragraph of choose one of your own that seems to buffer the action by “telling” it. Using vivid action verbs, sensory elements, and dialogue, experiment with ways you could “show” the story unfolding.

p.s.—Papa doesn’t die, so you can breathe easy.

p.p.s.—I have done so many edits on this wip that I have lost count. This isn’t unusual for a professional writer. Hemingway rewrote the last chapter of The Old Man and the Sea 40 times before he was pleased with it! Writing is a tedious job, but every improvement moves the story from “good” closer to “excellent.”

Writing Lesson 20 – Get Inside Their Heads

michelle — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 09:01:05 +0000

Point of View Makes All the Difference

When you and your sibling have a disagreement and tell your stories to a parent, you learn firsthand the difference someone’s point-of-view can have on the way he or she sees the same basic set of events. Your brother’s version of how grandma’s prized antique vase got broken may not be the same as yours – even if the two of you were practicing football tackles together in the living room where the vase was displayed.

Using the power of point of view can make your writing jump off the page – and may give you an “ah ha!” as you dig into your characters’ motivations. Here’s a great point of view exercise you can try to explore the “why” behind a sibling conflict of Biblical proportions.

Read Genesis 37 several times in order to become familiar with the flow of the story.
Choose one of the three primary characters in the story (Joseph, Reuben or Jacob/Israel) and list the things that happened in the story from his perspective. Pay close attention to what your character knew and did at this point in his history. For example, Reuben didn’t know that Joseph had wandered looking for them from Shechem to Dothan. Joseph, of course, had no idea that his brothers were going to jump him and dump him into a pit. Jacob, also known as Israel, never would have imagined that his brood was capable of such treachery.
Use your outline to write a first-person account of the events of Genesis 37, having your character (Joseph, Reuben or Jacob/Israel) tell the story from his perspective. Make sure he is only telling about the events in which he was directly involved in the chapter. Remember, these characters didn’t know at this point how this story was going to turn out like we do!

This exercise is even more useful if more than one person does it. If you have a sibling, a friend or even a co-op group each willing to do take different characters from the Biblical account and write about the events of Genesis 37, you’ll have an opportunity to hear the difference a point-of-view can make in a story.

Writing Lesson 6 – A Change of Perspective

lynn — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 09:00:42 +0000

Choose POV Characters to Make the Most of Conflict in a Story

“It was a sunny day. Nothing happened.”

Boring, right? Stories are about conflict. Unless your characters have obstacles to face, there’s just not much to tell.

It stands to reason, then, that for maximum interest you’ll want to tell your story from the point of view of the character who has the most at stake. Which character has more to lose?

Ah, but that’s not always an easy question. Let’s consider a few simple stories.

In The Three Little Pigs, we hear the story from the oldest pig’s point of view. He certainly has a lot to lose. Because his brothers are lazy, most of the work falls to him, and if the wolf succeeds in blowing his house down, they may all be eaten. BUT are there other possibilities? The mother pig may lose all three of her children if they fail to make wise choices, and the wolf might starve if he does not find a way to “bring home the bacon.” How would the story be different if told from the perspective of the mother pig or the wolf?

From Cinderella’s perspective, life was full of obstacles. Her father died. Her stepmother and stepsisters abused her. She had no hope of going to the ball. Then she lost her glass slipper. How would the story change, though, if we considered one of the ugly step-sisters’ perspectives and obstacles? She moved to a new neighborhood when her mother remarried, and her new stepfather promptly died, plunging the family into poverty. Cinderella is amazing–so amazing that the step-sister’s self image is devastated. Worse, her own mother seems ashamed of her, always pushing her to be someone she’s not. Her mother is counting on her to get the prince to fall in love with her at the ball in order to save the family’s fortunes, but she knows there’s not much chance of that. Might she even have a love interest of her own? Someone her mother doesn’t know about or doesn’t approve of?

Can you see how you could change the point of view of a story to emphasize other aspects of the conlict?

Exercise

Choose a story you are familiar with and analyze the point of view. What does the POV character have to lose?
Now pick a different character in the story. Think about what that character might have at stake.
Rewrite the story from the new point of view.

Be prepared for some surprising twists!

Writing Lesson 4 – Building Beginnings

naomi — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 09:00:39 +0000

Start Your Story with a Writing Hook

“Where do I begin…?” That’s the opening line of a famous song. It’s also a big question we face every time we sit down to write. It doesn’t matter if it’s a story, play, poem, essay, or a letter to a friend. Whatever the case, beginnings matter, and they are one of the most difficult parts of a project to determine.

Many writers simply sit down and speel off the first opening that comes to mind and go with that. It’s like they’ve been trained by Facebook to just dump any old thought. But really good writers rarely keep the first beginning they write. They cut it, shape it, replace it, hammer and chisel it, and in moments of complete exasperation, they stomp on it and burn it. (Kidding! I hope…)

Really, without the right beginning, no one may ever read any further.

Beginnings must have “hooks”, something that’s going to suck a reader in. The beginning of a story you’ve written may inspire you a lot, because you know what’s coming on page 43, but will that beginning inspire someone who doesn’t know and doesn’t yet care?

Readers (and editors) get bored by long, picturesque beginnings describing scenery and weather. And they despise beginnings that try to fill us in very quickly on background information that took place before the story even starts. “He was very young when he was born…” (Ha Ha). That’s called an “information dump”, and just like a garbage dump, an editor will think it stinks! Information dumps tell us all sorts of things about a character’s history that doesn’t have to be told. It’s important that we know their history, but we shouldn’t try to give it all to the reader at once, especially not at the beginning.

Beginnings should introduce us to the main character right away, and we should be able to very quickly sense that they are in a crisis. It can be a big, obvious crisis, like being captured by pirates; or, it can be a more subtle crisis, such as a character learning that her family is going to be moving across the country, and she happens to be terribly afraid of drastic changes.

It is important that beginnings actually start in the right place. Sometimes writers complete an opening chapter, then cut off the first third of it and start there, where it really should have opened to begin with.

EXERCISES:

Select several favorite books off the shelf and read the first page or two. What does the writer do to hook you in? How is the main character introduced? What is the first line? (Copy down opening lines or paragraphs that strike you as a reader. It’ll train you to think about your own opening lines.)
As you read, note any opening passages, paragraphs, or sentences you feel like skipping over. Why do you?
Take a story you’re working on and re-write the beginning another way. It could be from a different character’s POV (point of view), or from a different moment in the action. –Or– Start a new story, and come up with at least two entirely different beginnings. Which one works best and why?