My editor rang me with my revisions to the current novel on Tuesday: nine pages of changes, some of them structural, and every suggestion is a gift. I love the moment where you see your work through someone else’s eyes and suddenly the weaknesses become clear—but also the solutions become clear, and all at once you see how what you wrote can become so much better, so much more like what you meant it to be in the first place. In this case, there were two major problems with the novel (actually there was only one—it was all about characterisation and techniques of revealing it, but it presented in two different ways). One issue was something I’d thought about and wrestled with, because it’s the core of the book, and my editor suggested I handle it in a different way than I’d chosen to. She’s totally right, of course. I couldn’t see it myself, because I was too close to the story, and too convinced that I’d thought about the issue and come up with the correct solution.

Anyway, I am now in the Revision Cave, and although it’s hard work being here, it’s an extremely exciting place to be. I really like tearing apart my work and making it better, and when you have lovely clear instructions and suggestions from your genius editor, it’s just wonderful.

With this book, there are actually two different scenes I wrote originally and cut, and which now need to be re-instated. Fortunately I was able to find them. Never throw anything away, that’s my motto. Though I quite often do throw things away, by mistake. Then I spend a lot of time swearing.

I took a break from the Cave on Thursday, to go to London to the Romantic Novelists’ Association meeting. There was a panel of editors and agents talking about the newest trends and what they’re looking for (and NOT looking for) and as always, it was very interesting. Then we went to the pub afterwards. It’s always funny when a group of romantic novelists take over a pub en masse. Wine suddenly appears on tables and other punters suddenly look a bit bemuddled. Afterwards, Biddy and I went to our favourite bonding restaurant for some calimari and bonding. And more wine.

Needless to say, Friday I felt a bit delicate.

But today I’m back in the Cave, and I’m going to be here for a little while.

I’ve started to do a little bit of work on my next book. Some people love starting a new book; I find it terrifying. That being-on-the-brink-of-a-precipice-that-could-end-anywhere feeling makes my stomach all churny. It’s like going into a new city without a map, and without knowing a word of the language they speak. Anything could happen, which means there’s a horrifying possibility of it all going WRONG.

But. On Tuesday I bought a new notebook and went into a cafe and sat and brainstormed for an hour. I’ve had the idea for this particular book for a long time; in fact I tried writing it four years ago and I didn’t have much success at it. But it hasn’t let me go and I think it might be time for me to pick it up and start again.

Thinking about it has made me change it somewhat; I’ve re-thought the heroine and her job, and who the secondary characters should be. I’ve invented a completely new hero, and changed my notions about how to structure it the story. But there was one big, major problem. See, I had this little mystery in the story. And I had no idea about its solution. Someone sends an email to the heroine, which propels her into action. But who sent it?

I’ve been thinking about this little problem for four years now. And never found a solution. The same few answers kept on re-occurring…and I’d consider them, again and again, and every time I’d find another reason why they wouldn’t work.

So I sat in this cafe with a cappuccino and did a little brainstorming trick that I learned some time ago. What you do is this:

Write down every possible answer to your question, as a list. Try to think of as many as you can. Don’t worry if they’re stupid answers. Stupid answers are fine. Don’t stop to consider whether they’ll work or not. Just write, and write, and write.

The first few answers will be the obvious ones. Once you’ve written them down, they’re out of your brain and you can discard them. Then you’ll start coming up with more interesting ones. (Usually, with me, aliens will figure in some way.) And eventually, you will find the right one. It will probably be out of left field. It will be something you never thought of before. And you will absolutely know that it’s perfect.

I’ve done this a few times before—for example, the climactic scene in Girl from Mars was a result of my brainstorming in this way. I wrote down a dozen ideas before coming up with the final one, and as soon as I wrote it down, I realised that not only was it the perfect solution, but that I’d unconsciously foreshadowed it in my draft of the book up to that point.

This time, I wrote down a list of eight or nine people who could have send that email to my heroine, and when I wrote down the name of the tenth, I KNEW. I actually gave a little excited squeal. Suddenly a whole dimension of the story opened up to me. Suddenly I could see themes and structure. Suddenly, I was excited about writing this book, instead of being scared.

It was amazing.

Try it.

The lovely and glamorous Lisa Bodenham-Mason asked me some questions for my blog via email, which I haven’t been able to get to until now, what with all the angst and celebrating around here. Lisa has written the first draft of her first novel, and she’s had some critiques on it from professionals, and she also took the Cornerstones commercial women’s fiction course that I led. So now she’s ready to revise her first draft into something that she can send to agents. She’s really eager to learn and improve her craft, and she received editorial feedback with great happiness. But now it’s time to get to work. Her question is about the sort of bewildered feeling you get when you look at the big mess of your first draft and realise you need to DO something about it:

I think the suggestions I’ve received are good ideas but in following them – along with all the character analysis I’ve been preparing – I realise that it isn’t so much a case of revising the story now but more or less rewriting it. I’m not daunted by this; the journeys my characters need to go on are fundamentally the same but I understand now where this isn’t clear to the reader or where I wasn’t clear myself really. I just wondered if this is quite normal for a novice writer?

In a word: Yup. Yup, it’s totally normal.

The first draft of your first novel is a journey of discovery. You’re discovering your style, your voice, your story, your characters, your structure. You may even be discovering your genre. And that’s how it should be. You’ve never written a novel before, and when you do anything for the first time—especially anything as difficult and complicated as writing a novel—it’s going to be a learning process.

You may not be clear on the characters’ arcs, for example. Or you may decide halfway through that you want to change the story, or that someone else needs to be the heroine. Your storytelling voice will most likely be quite different at the beginning of the story, where you’re tentatively dipping a foot in, than at the end, when you’ve inhabited it for several hundred pages and it’s become nice and comfy.

Even if you’ve got the story just the way you want it, the first draft is quite likely to have pacing problems. It’s quite likely to be stylistically uneven. It may be structurally flawed. And it’s everyone’s instinct to take that first draft and revise it, preferably as lightly as possible. You know—change a word here and there, maybe put in a few references to the weather, and then send it out into the big world where it will instantly become a best-seller.

But in my experience, it’s more likely that you’re going to have to rewrite it. Or at least you’re going to have to rewrite big chunks of it.

Some people may be lucky enough to get their first novel right the first time. I don’t know anyone personally who’s done that, but I hear they exist. More typically, you’re going to get some of it right, mainly through the process of doing the hard work. And then you’re going to have to change the rest.

Sorry. But it’s true.

Lisa continues:

I still really believe in the story, in fact I know (or hope anyway) it will be a better paced and succinct story if I carefully plot the highs and lows and weave all the threads of story lines together but part of me thinks oh crikey what a waste! On the other handsit’s all a learning curve and I’m sure I will use some of what I’ve already written but what I don’t want to do is try and shoe-horn bits together just because I don’t want to waste what I’ve already written.

Okay, what I said above about needing to do the work might have sounded a bit harsh, but I’m going to say something now which is equally true, and true for everyone, all the time, and is not harsh at all, but instead rather inspiring.

No writing is ever wasted.

That’s not to say that no writing is ever bad. Some writing is really bad. Some of it might even be yours. But it’s not a waste of time to write it. You had to write the bad stuff to get to the good stuff. You had to go in the wrong direction to go in the right one. You needed to do all that discovery to learn what you had to learn, and even to learn what it is that you haven’t learned yet.

It feels really awful to write something you know isn’t right. It feels equally awful, if not worse, to look at something that you wrote and thought at the time was right, and to realise now that it actually sucks. But those awful feelings are there for a reason. It’s because you made the mistake, and now you’ve learned from it, and now you can make it better.

And you will make mistakes. You have to.

It might make you feel better, though, to know that those mistakes are necessary.

My first draft of my first novel was so crappy that it will never, EVER see the light of day. It really did suck. My NWS reader had one compliment to give me, which was on a two-word piece of imagery, and I was encouraged enough by that to grab that piece of praise and use to to build my writing voice. Otherwise, there was no way I could’ve rewritten that draft into anything near publishable.

But I needed to write it; I needed to know I could finish a novel, I needed the experience and the bravery and the know-how to submit. I needed to know what didn’t work, so I could figure out what would work.

My second novel (which was much better, but still not very good) was rejected, and I thought that I would do a light rewrite and re-submit it. I didn’t want to change too much, you see. It would be such wasted effort. I thought I could maybe tweak a bit here and there, and it would be good enough.

HA! Fool, thy name is writer who only wants to tweak a bit here and there!

The second version was rejected, too. I did eventually sell that novel, but only after I’d written two novels that I’d sold. And I ended up rewriting it completely. I actually put it in a drawer and didn’t look at it at all, the whole time I did the rewrites, because I knew if I looked at it, I’d be tempted to include things I’d already written because I liked them, and they wouldn’t fit, or I’d end up twisting my new story round so it would fit the old bits of the old story. The only things that survived were the general concept, the idea of some scenes, and the characters’ names and jobs. And the rampaging chicken. I kept the chicken.

So…yes. You probably will need to rewrite your first draft of your first novel. And you may well end up jettisoning a lot of what you’ve written already, even if you think it was good at the time, because it simply doesn’t fit any more.

But that’s okay. Almost everyone has to. You can do it too.

For the past three weeks, I’ve been failing to write a synopsis. It really has been the most pathetic thing and I am going to tell you about it in hopes that you can gain some pleasure from my pain.

I’ve written the book already, of course. It’s 130,000 words long and it has two major plot threads and several sub-plots and about a gazillion characters, most of them with two identities. I can’t write a synopsis before I write a book, for the simple reason that I don’t have a clue what’s going to happen, but in this case, I had to write a short, clear synopsis for my agent, so she can send it to foreign markets to sell the rights. I think my publisher would also find it quite handy, for briefing cover art, marketing, etc.

Now, I thought this was going to be a piece of cake. I mean, I’ve written loads of these things before, right? I had my post-it plan for the book, right? So I figured all I had to do was to transcribe this plan into words and hey presto—a synopsis.

I realised my error when I was midway through writing page 5 of the synopsis and hadn’t even reached halfway on the post-it plan yet.

So I scrapped it and started again. This time, I remembered that actually, I teach writing workshops sometimes, and actually, I have a simple and easy formula for writing a synopsis, which I should have been following from the beginning, except I was far far too stupid and had been using my post-its instead. Here is the formula.

A SIMPLE FOOL-PROOF SYNOPSIS FORMULA
Paragraph One: Set-up, necessary backstory, the main character and her conflict, as concisely as possible.
Paragraph Two: Inciting Event.
Paragraphs Three to Five: Three Main Turning Points of the Story (including their emotional impact).
Paragraph Six: Climax.
Paragraph Seven: Dark Moment.
Paragraph Eight: Resolution.

Right. Easy. I wrote these headings down on a new document and wrote each paragraph underneath the headings. This, finally, resulted in a structurally sound synopsis. I sent it to my agent. She phoned me and pointed out, tactfully, that a three-page synopsis is not exactly concise, and that I had included far, far too many secondary characters and subplots, and therefore, the thing was as confusing as hell.

Oh, yeah.

So I scrapped it and started again. Even more simplistic. Cutting out all but the most necessary characters, all but the main plot. Dividing my two story threads and dealing with them each separately, signposting as clearly as I could which thread I was dealing with in each paragraph. Then I colour-coded it, highlighting each story thread to see if I’d achieved an even balance. Then I colour-coded it again, to make sure I included emotional arc as well as plot.

Finally, I had one and a half single-spaced pages, 1000 words. It’s more than eight paragraphs, simply because I split some of the paragraphs for ease of reading. It includes six characters.

After three weeks of work, producing the final synopsis took about an hour. I sent it off this morning. Keep your fingers crossed I’ve got it right this time.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I had an email asking me what books I’d recommend to an aspiring writer. I know there are a lot of good ones out there, but here are the ones on my shelf near my desk…and a chance to win a copy of one of them!

Style and Punctuation

The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr and EB White
Getting the Point: A Panic-Free Guide to English Punctuation for Adults by J Haddon and E Hawksley

Craft

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King
How To Write a Blockbuster by Helen Corner and Lee Weatherly
Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maas (though I have to admit I’ve never read this one; I’ve just heard him speak)
Kate Walker’s 12-Point Guide to Writing Romance by Kate Walker

Writing life

On Writing by Stephen King
The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes
Is There a Book in You? by Alison Baverstock

Inspiration

The Pocket Muse by Monica Wood

Speaking of Kate Walker’s 12-Point Guide to Writing Romance—the publishers have a free copy of the new updated version to give away to anyone who leaves a comment on this blog! Just tell me you want to win it, and I’ll put you into a draw. It’s essential reading for anyone who wants to write romantic novels.

What books would you recommend?

Note: I’ll choose a winner today (Monday 29 Nov) so comment quickly if you wanna win!

Well, apparently tomorrow I see a hand specialist. It’s the fastest referral I’ve ever had—exactly one week. I’ve been trying hard to get my hand to twitch, so s/he will have something to look at, but it stopped immediately after I saw the GP, and it’s staying resolutely normal. Anyway, I figured I should do my next blog post and answer some more questions, in case the specialist forbids me from typing ever again.

Johanna asked (via email, and edited to remove spoilers for Nina Jones and the Temple of Gloom):

I wondered, can’t 3rd person have the same effect as 1st if you only show that character’s POV and if you go deeply into their thoughts/feelings? In the M&B books which don’t show the hero’s POV (I know there aren’t many, but some exist), we follow the heroine’s journey through her eyes and mind, but it’s all told in 3rd person. It could just as easily be 1st – aren’t the two are interchangeable in these situations? Doesn’t it just become an author’s preference for 1st/3rd person, with the same story being told whatever their choice?

Eg, in Nina Jones (which I seem to remember was 1st person present tense), you showed the heroine moving from loving X to loving Y. Very crudely put: “I love him” develops in the book to “”I realise now I don’t love X. I love Y.”
Wouldn’t it have the same effect in 3rd person?: “She loved him” —> “She realised then that she didn’t love X. She loved Y.”

This is a really, really good question and I’ve been struggling with it since you asked it, Jo. I agree, that deep third-person POV, centring on only one character, can be nearly as intimate as first-person. I’ve read so many books that use that technique, and I’ve loved them. I think the thing is, for me, that first-person is even more intimate. You have to use the character’s voice. You have to include only what the character thinks and feels and knows—absolutely nothing else. (Especially in first-person present, which is even more intimate and immediate.) You cannot have any authorial voice at all, except very subtly, for example through the use of dramatic irony, or in things such as chapter headings.

Third person, even very deep third person, is still just that one degree of separation from the character. You can still, if you want, zoom out slightly to include things like descriptions of appearance, or more objective backstory. With first person, you’re there, right in your narrator’s head.

Also, I really enjoy the notion of an untrustworthy narrative character, and I think you don’t get that with third person. If you’re talking about “she”, there’s an objectivity implied there, that the focus character is more or less accurate in what she perceives, or at least she’s not trying to deceive the reader, because how could she? She’s not telling the story. The author is. A first person narrator, on the other hand—she can tell you whatever she likes. She can tell you lies. Even if she’s not out to deceive you, she can still only perceive half the story, and give you a warped view.

So, for example, in Nina Jones, Nina’s portrayal of X, her first love, is seriously skewed, but she doesn’t know it. I really wanted the reader to perceive him just as she did, as perfect…even though he wasn’t. Likewise, when she does meet her true love, I wanted the reader to doubt him, just as she did.

There are all kinds of untrustworthy narrators in fiction, and as far as I can remember, they’ve always been first person. I’m thinking Notes on a Scandal, or Wuthering Heights, or Rachel’s Holiday, or even that Agatha Christie first-person novel where the narrator is the murderer…

You can tell that the whole idea gets me all excited.

Anyway, I think it’s a matter of degree, rather than something enormous. Kate’s comments to these posts have been really good—she’s said that some characters just choose first person. And that sometimes, with some characters, first person feels way too intimate. You can get very, very intimate with your characters using third person, and you can know them extremely well, and indeed write in their voice the entire time. But there’s that little bit more in first person, which has more restrictions and conversely more possibilities.

What do you think?

After a week’s rest, a visit to the doctor and a reacquaintance with yoga, my hands are better today so I’m going to start to try to answer some of the questions I’ve been sent about point of view. First, though, if you haven’t read my previous posts, this one is about what point of view is, and this one is about how I’ve chosen the points of view for my novels.

Lisa asked:

In the novel I’m writing for NaNoWriMo I’ve decided to go without the hero’s POV because I think it’ll make him more intriguing but in my first novel I’m dithering over whether to get rid of the Hero’s POV or keep it in. He’s not a traditional hero but he deeply loves the heroine. It’s just that he doesn’t always show it. I’m not sure that I can show his true feelings through actions alone. Any advice? I’m writing in third person.

I think the question you have to ask yourself here is, how do you want to affect the reader of your story? Does the reader need the hero’s POV, or will they enjoy the book more without it? Sometimes, it’s not a good idea to give the reader all the answers. She might enjoy the book more if she’s wondering the whole time, “What is that guy really thinking?” and “Who is the heroine going to end up with?” She might like the bit of mystery, or enjoy learning about the hero’s true feelings along with the heroine. If that’s the case, maybe it’s best to leave out the hero’s POV. (That said, you as the author should always know how he’s feeling and what he’s thinking, even if you don’t spell it out!)

On the other hand, maybe you want the reader to see that the hero and heroine are perfect for each other, and be rooting for them to get together the whole time. In that case, it might be a good idea to have the hero’s POV in there so that the reader can see he’s a better guy than he seems to be.

In the end, it’s your choice, about what kind of book you want it to be. The only hard and fast rule is that you shouldn’t include the hero’s POV if it’s just going to repeat or confirm information that you’ve already conveyed in another character’s POV. But you already knew that, right?

Maybe you want to experiment with both ways. It’s no hardship to cut a POV thread if you feel it doesn’t work.

Carol said:

So the age old discussion on POV is head hopping. I’ve recently read some debut category romance authors who jump in and out of the h and H’s POV within the same scene very frequently. It’s been done well, so again down to the execution of it, but I would love it if you could reiterate your opinion on this.

Head hopping is when the narrative jumps from one point of view to another quite quickly, and then back again, within a single scene and indeed a single paragraph. Sometimes it’s just between the hero and heroine; sometimes it’s between several characters on the page. Lots of people say that there are hard-and-fast rules about this, that it is wrong and you should never, ever do it. To them, I say—read To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf and then tell me that head-hopping doesn’t work exactly as Woolf wants it to.

Like anything, it’s all down to what you want to achieve. Some novels can take multiple points of view, with the perspective hopping hither and thither. Some can’t. (Series/category romance, by the way, nearly always has only two POVs to hop between, if you’re going to hop.) There are two rules about POV, as far as I’m concerned, and neither precludes head-hopping. The first is, try to be in the POV of the character who has most at stake. And sometimes, the stakes hop between characters; the heroine might have more at stake at one moment, and then the hero at the next, or maybe they have the same amount at stake at the same time. There’s a case for head-hopping between them in scenes like that.

The second rule is, don’t repeat yourself in different POVs. And there’s no reason that would preclude head-hopping, either. Even with the same events, two people can interpret them very differently. There are whole novels based on this idea.

For me, I find it can be distracting in commercial fiction when the POV hops around a lot—like more than once or twice per scene. The author needs to have really good control in order to make quick POV switches. My personal rule in my own writing is only ever to have one POV per scene. I like the restrictions this imposes, and I find it easier to delve into my character’s emotions if I stay with them for as long as it works. I might, very occasionally, switch POV mid-scene in story time, but I always do a scene break to do it, to separate the POVs.

Head-hopping, or not, is again, an individual author’s decision. Do you have the skill for it? Does it help you achieve what you want to achieve? Those are the questions to think about, not any general “rules” for or against it.

Thanks for your questions, Lisa and Carol. I’ll look at some more questions tomorrow or Thursday. Meanwhile, how would you answer these questions, and do you have any more?

Thanks to everyone who’s left a comment or question on my previous post. Because I don’t want the discussion to get lost in comments, I’ll talk about the questions in later posts. Today I’m going to talk about how I choose the point of view for my novels. The answer is, in every case, by thinking about the reader.

When I was writing for Mills & Boon, I didn’t have much choice: the vast majority of their novels are in third person limited POV, from the heroine and the hero only. Most of the story is in the heroine’s POV. There’s a really good reason for this. The reader of the story is supposed to identify strongly with the heroine; that’s why readers pick up a M&B novel. They also want to fall in love with the hero, and it’s easier to fall in love with the hero if you can understand what he’s thinking. In a M&B novel, it’s all about the romance, and it feeds into the fantasy if you can witness the hero falling in love with the heroine. Also, it’s all about the conflict keeping these two people apart, and at its best, the dual POV can heighten this conflict. Heroine has a reason she can’t be with the hero; hero has a whole different reason he can’t be with the heroine.

I had a lot of fun with this dual POV sometimes, especially in All Work and No Play… (aka Mistress in Private in the US) because at the start of the book, the heroine doesn’t know who the hero is, but the hero does know who the heroine is, and he thinks she’s pretending not to know who he is, so there’s all this misunderstanding and conflict being built up. I loved balancing that, and it would have never worked with a single POV or in first person. You would have lost half the fun, and also probably thought that the hero was a jerk because you wouldn’t know why he was behaving as he was.

When I started writing my Little Black Dress books, I started playing around with the possibilities of first person POV, and to me, first person achieves a whole different set of things than third person POV. Limiting the perspective can help you tell the story. For example, in One Night Stand, the heroine doesn’t know the hero’s feelings for her, for most of the book. If I’d given Hugh’s point of view, I think it would have diluted the effect of Eleanor’s journey, the way she gradually comes to understand that her best friend is something much, much more. However, even though Eleanor doesn’t see that her best friend Hugh is in love with her, I expected the reader to understand that he was, fairly early in the book. One of the pleasures of that book, for me, is watching Eleanor being clueless, while the reader can understand what’s really happening from how he was behaving, and the clues I’d planted.

This is called “dramatic irony” (when the reader knows something the character doesn’t), and for me, it’s one of the biggest joys of writing in the first person. Dramatic irony all over the place. Of course, there are limitations to first person POV. You can’t write about anything that the viewpoint character doesn’t know, or at least not directly. But then you have to do all this delicious figuring out of how to get around those limitations, or even better, how to use them so that the reader is as deluded as the heroine, and you can bring in a great twist or surprise. I love that stuff.

But sometimes you can’t use it. In Honey Trap, for example, I went back to third person limited, from the heroine and hero’s POV. There was a simple reason for this: the hero, Dominick Steele, is a former alcoholic and serial adulterer. He’s an asshole. But I needed the reader to love him, to understand that while he was still struggling with his darker side, he’d truly reformed by the time the book began. I couldn’t do that from the POV of my heroine, who hated him for the sins he’d committed years before.

Getting Away With It was another case in point. I wanted the story to be in first person, because it’s so, so important that the reader sees the world through Liza’s eyes. Her perceptions of everything, including herself, change so much as the book goes on, and I wanted the reader with her on that entire journey. However, there’s a whole story strand about her twin sister, Lee, who disappears. Since Liza isn’t with her, I couldn’t keep it in Liza’s POV. And I didn’t want to have another first person POV; I thought it would be confusing, and also I wanted the book to emphasize the difference between these two sisters. That they were really two separate people. So I chose to narrate Liza’s story in first person past tense, and Lee’s scenes in third person present tense.

It worked out pretty well, I think, because Liza’s story is about identity and who that “I” really is. Whereas Lee, for most of her story, is feeling isolated from herself, distant from her life, yet feeling the immediacy of taking risks. Having the two points of view also let me, at key moments in the story, offer a bit of perspective on Liza’s life and story, which she never sees herself.

Whew. I think I’ve babbled long enough. It’s your turn now—why have you made the decisions you’ve made, about which POV to use in your book?

I haven’t done any craft posts in ages and with my book gone I have a little bit of time. So I thought I’d write a little bit about point of view, especially as two fellow writers have asked me some questions about it recently. I’ll start with the basics and work my way up.

What is point of view (POV)?

POV is whose eyes you’re looking through as you tell your story. The simplest POV to define is first person, when the main character(s) tell their story in their own words, referring to themselves as “I”. Some books use multiple first-person POV, where several characters tell their own story.

You can also have a variety of third person POV techniques. There’s third person omniscient, where there’s a narrator who knows all the characters’ thoughts and feelings, and dips in and out of them at will. (Sometimes the author’s voice comes in to comment on the story, without being an active character in it.) Thomas Hardy uses this POV, and it’s often employed in literary fiction.

There’s third person limited, where the story focuses on one character’s thoughts and emotions at a time. Many books have third person limited POV from only one character’s POV; many others use third person limited POV for two or three or many characters, focusing on one character at a time. This is very popular in commercial fiction.

There’s also third person objective, where the events are reported, but we don’t see into the thoughts and feelings of the characters. You’re just presented with what happens. I think of this as being like a film, where you can’t see into the characters’ heads, just see their acting.

And some authors use a mixture of two or more of these styles. For example, in Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen uses a mixture of third person limited (focusing on only her heroine Catherine’s thoughts and no one else’s) and third person omniscient (commenting on Catherine’s actions and the structure of her story, from the author’s own point of view). Some books use first person for one character’s sections of the novel, and third person omniscient for another character’s. (A recent example is L. A. Weatherly’s recent YA novel Angel.) Some books might use third person limited POV to show their hero’s actions, but third person objective when showing what the villain does.

What point of view should I use?

I always think carefully about my point of view choices before I use them. Some authors make their choices more instinctively.

Sometimes, the genre you’re writing, or the publisher you’re targeting, determines your POV choices for you. Traditional romance novels, for example, are usually in third person limited, from the heroine and the hero’s POV. You have to have a pretty good reason to break that convention. I’ve noticed that children’s picture books are more often than not in third person. Chick-lit in the tradition of Bridget Jones is often in first person. There’s a publisher who requires all of their books to include the hero’s POV, as well as others.

At other times, your story might determine your POV choices. One of the strengths of the Sherlock Holmes stories is Watson’s first person POV, which lets the reader discover the clues and mystery as he does. On the other hand, your main character might not be present for certain scenes, and you might have vital information that you can only impart to the reader by going into a different POV. In Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen sticks with Catherine’s viewpoint because she wants the reader to discover the truth about the creepy house and its inhabitants along with her. But she zooms out into omniscient POV because she wants to make statements about her society and the popular novels of the time.

Whatever decision you make for your whole book, a good rule of thumb for individual scenes is generally: The scene should be in the POV of the person who has the most at stake at the time.

In my next post, I’ll talk about some of the POV decisions I’ve made, and why I’ve made them. Then I’ll discuss some questions, so if you have any, please post them below!

(Meanwhile, Novelicious has put up an article bout my Post-It plotting method. And my lunch yesterday was absolutely divine. And nobody called me a fraud!)

I’ve spent the last two mornings outlining my entire novel with six different colours of Post-It notes.

At this point of the process, I find outlining like this to be both necessary and immensely satisfying. Some people plan out their novels in detail before they write the draft; I find it more useful to diagram out my novel in detail after I’ve written the draft. For me, writing the crappy draft is a discovery process, to find out what happens where and why, and it’s only when I’m done that I know what I really should have put in. But then I’ve got this big sloppy 500+ page manuscript, and it’s almost impossible to deal with.

So I sit down with the post-its and a pen and the manuscript, and I produce a detailed outline of each scene in the book—not necessarily how I originally wrote it, but how it should be. I do it on Post-Its because you can move them around. I use different colours for each major story strand. (Six colours is a record for me, and is probably one of the reasons why this book has been a little tricky to write.)

After two days of work, this is what I’ve come up with:

It’s rather beautiful, isn’t it? (I mean the colours, not the story, which is impossible for anyone but me to understand from these notes.) You “read” it like a comic book, starting at the top left of each sheet of A4 and reading across then down to the bottom of the page, then onto the next page. 18 panels per page, which is (in total) 126 scenes or scene sections (the more important scenes have whole series of Post-Its, one for each major bit of action). Here’s a closer view of one sheet:

You can see that some Post-Its have other Post-Its of different colours underneath them. That’s when a single scene or scene section contains two or more major plot threads in it.

This is such a useful thing for me to do. I can see the entire novel at a glance, and make sure I haven’t neglected any plot threads. As this novel is constructed around weekends (every bit of pink you see, happens on Saturday or Sunday), it also means I can count how many weeks it takes up and understand what happens where. I knew I had several scenes I’d left out, but didn’t know where to put them; seeing it this way, I could slot them in immediately, sometimes replacing a lacklustre scene with something I like better, or changing the focus of what’s already there to something more relevant.

These sheets are my maps for revisions now. I’ll go through the file scene by scene, amending, cutting, and adding new stuff to fit this plan. Or, if the plan doesn’t work, I’ll move the Post-Its around and replace them if necessary.

And I know I have a last scene to write, which should somehow, involve all six colours. Not sure about how to do that bit yet…

Writing category fiction taught me several lessons, and one of the strongest was to never have any extra characters in your book. I’m not talking about walk-on parts, which aren’t really characters; I’m talking more about strong secondaries, people who should be important to the story, but don’t live up to that importance. Characters who just sort of sit there, and don’t move the story forward, or don’t cause any emotion to happen.

In real life, we have a lot of people in our lives who don’t have much relevance. They’re there because they have to be, but they might not change us in any real way or have much impact. Neighbours, relatives, acquaintances, work colleagues—they might be important to us, they might not be. Real life doesn’t centre around one person, and all of these people are their own heroes.

But fiction centres around your heroine(s) or hero(es). Everyone in their story should have some reason for being there, for (however briefly) taking centre stage. And yes, I know this isn’t always true. There are plenty of great books out there that have lots and lots of extraneous characters, who don’t have their own arcs or any purpose in the story and are just there because the author thought they probably would be, in real life.

But me…I’m anal. I need a reason for people to be in the pages of my book. If I find a character isn’t pulling his or her weight, I try to cut them and give their role to a person who does need to be there. Even the really minor characters need to have some point, even if I’m the only one who knows it. Generally, if the story works without a character, that character has to go. And preferably, every character who stays, has more than one reason for being there.

I make my characters justify their existence.

Which was why I’ve been struggling today, because I have a character who absolutely has to exist, in order for the plot to happen. However, she also has to leave almost immediately, and not reappear for the rest of the book. To me, this screams “PLOT DEVICE” in a big way and I was struggling with how to make her pull her weight more, and therefore have a more satisfying role in the story.

It occurred to me, finally, that I was bothered because this character (let’s call her X) only had one purpose in the story. I was trying to give her extra purpose by making the heroine have some issues with her, but the issues weren’t really working because X just wasn’t there, and besides, the poor heroine has enough frickin’ issues for one book, thank you very much. So I began thinking about this.

It seemed to me that as long as X had several reasons for being in the story, she could stay. And that I could revise the story so that I made more use of X, but not in ways that would pull the story out of kilter. Here are some of a reasons a secondary character might be in a story (any character, any story):

A) To further the plot
B) To create emotion
C) To reflect an aspect of the hero/heroine (similar, or contrasting)
D) To make the hero/heroine grow and change
E) To make another major character grow and change
F) To create conflict
G) To create pace
H) To provide a setting
I) To echo or further a theme, trope, or recurring imagery
J) To create a twist
K) To provide humour or pathos
L) To act as a stand-in for the reader (an example of this is Lockwood, in Wuthering Heights)
M) To be a sounding-board for the heroine/hero
N) Verisimilitude (that is, they just would be there in real life; this, to me, is the least convincing reason)

It seems to me that if a character can tick two or more of the boxes above, then s/he can be allowed to stay in the story, and the more boxes s/he ticks, the better. That is, s/he can further the plot and provide verisimilitude, but it’s better if she also provides humour and makes the heroine grow and change.

In this case, I figured out a way that I can revise my story so that my character X, who is necessary to the plot, and would be there in real life, can also create emotion, provide a setting, be a sounding board and echo a theme. So X, who once only ticked boxes A and M, now ticks A, B, G, H, L and M, and maybe even D, too.

Maybe this is a weird way of thinking, and it’s certainly very analytical and not something I’d go through for every single minor character. But it seems to have helped solve my problem of what to do with the extra character when I absolutely can’t cut her.

What do you think?

PS The marvellous Sarah Duncan has just put up a blog post about the opposite problem, when minor characters get too important. Check it out.

Today is Start Revisions On Book day.

I’ve been putting it off all morning, by doing other work-related stuff like research queries and course planning. But now it’s time (as soon as I finish blogging, obviously). Here is what I’m going to do:

Starting revisions is really scary. I give myself permission on the first draft to write crap, but as of today, that permission is over. I have to give this shapeless piece of prose a shape. I have to make it readable and interesting and coherent. And I actually enjoy all of that process, but the scary part is, I HAVE TO READ THE DAMN FIRST DRAFT FIRST. In all its crapness and wrongness and horror.

I’m firing up the printer. Will keep you notified.