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This article, from Susan K. Perry, PhD, originally appeared on the Psychology Today site on 5/7/09.

Create real memories, says sci-fi author Samuel R. Delany.

Flashbacks threaded into a novel are handy devices for dealing with past events. But many writers misuse flashbacks, writes science fiction author Samuel R. Delany in About Writing: 7 essays, 4 letters, & 5 interviews.

Delany, winner of both Hugo and Nebula awards, has written dozens of books, including science fiction novels, short stories, and nonfiction. That experience, as well as his 35 years as a creative writing instructor and critic, have convinced him that flashbacks are often constructed lazily and clumsily.

Here’s Delany on memory and fiction:

However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory-not on the order of actual occurrence. It looks like the writer is telling you a story. What the writer is actually doing, however, is using words to evoke a series of micromemories from your own experience that inmix, join, and connect in your mind in an order the writer controls, so that, in effect, you have a sustained memory of something that never happened to you. That false memory is what a story is.

As if to corroborate Delany, an article by Gary Marcus appeared recently about a woman who seems to have perfect autobiographical recall. That’s apparently a genuine oddity. Writes Marcus:

Ordinary human memory is a mess. Most of us can recall the major events in our lives, but the memory of Homo sapiens pales when compared with your average laptop. … it’s easy for us to forget things we’ve learned; and it’s sometimes hard to dislodge outdated information. Worse, our memories are vulnerable to contamination and distortion…. The fundamental problem is the seemingly haphazard fashion in which our memories are organized…. Human recall is hit or miss. Neuroscientific research tells us that our brains don’t use a fixed-address system, and memories tend to overlap, combine, and disappear for reasons no one yet understands.

Now back to Delany. It’s the fiction writer’s task, he says, "to make that unreal memory as clear and vivid as possible," which depends on the order of the words the writer selects. Delany, in fact, lauds the use of realistic flashbacks, the true-to-life flashes that last from half a second to 10 seconds at the most. "Thus, in texts," he writes, "they are covered in a phrase or two, a sentence, three sentences, or five sentences at most."

In my own novel-in-progress, I use a lot of momentary flashbacks, sometimes as a way of metaphor-making. Here are two examples:

 

1.  He could smell his own skin, the prickles under his arms, in his groin. A fear scent etched in memory from the first week he’d had his driver’s license and his car had skidded sideways on the freeway.

2.  My husband dipped his hands again and again into a bowl of curly orange-colored snacks, until his palms and fingers took on a putrid glow. His wedding ring was incongruous on those oversized little boy orange hands. The setting sun glinted off one of the ring’s small diamonds. A sudden image popped up of a glittery Cracker Jacks ring from when I was six, and me, in my bedroom, staring into the ring’s central bit of multi-faceted glass. A microcosm lay within: a sunny country setting, large leafy tree to the left with a person sitting under it, a meadow, a stream. A sense of this being a place you could walk into. I shrieked for my mother, but try as she would, she wasn’t able to catch a glimpse of it. Nor could I, ever again.

Realistically, explains Delany, when you try to concentrate on a past event longer than a very few seconds, the present always intrudes. So he refutes the logic of having a character walk down the street and run over the previous three months, say, in a relationship. Those stories simply start in the wrong place, he insists.

Read the rest of the post on the Psychology Today site.

 This post, from Henrik Edberg, originally appeared on his The Positivity Blog on 6/13/08.

“The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”

As you probably know Ernest Hemingway was a writer, journalist and Nobel Prize Winner. Some of his most famous stories include “The Old Man and The Sea” and “The Sun Also Rises”. He also participated in both World Wars and worked as a correspondent during for instance the Spanish Civil War. Now, here are 9 of my favourite words of wisdom from Ernest Hemingway.

1. Listen.

“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”

Learning to really listen to someone rather just waiting for our turn to talk can be a difficult skill to develop. Often we may have much on our mind that we want to say and so listening falls by the wayside.

How can you become a better listener? Here are three tips:

• Forget about yourself. Focus your attention outward instead of inward in a conversation. Place the mental focus on the person you are talking and listening to instead of yourself. Placing the focus outside of yourself makes you less self-centred and your need to hog the spotlight decreases.

• Stay present. This will help you to decrease the bad habit of thinking about the future and what you should say next while trying to listen. If you are present and really there while listening then that will also come through in your body language, which gives the person talking a vibe and feeling that you are really listening to what s/he has to say.
   
• Be open. Keep your mind open to the possibility that whatever the person is about to say will actually be interesting. If you have already made up your mind that he or she will say something boring then it will be hard to pay attention.

Also, if you really listen then that alone will often provide you naturally with a better and more genuine answer than the clever response thought up while trying to listen simultaneously.

2. Take the first step.

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

The thing is if two people or more are waiting for someone else to take the first step then that step may never be taken. Or you may at least have to wait for a very long time.

If you after some time realise that, like in this example, you couldn’t trust the person then at least you have learned that.

By not taking the first step you’ll perhaps never know. So instead of waiting around and trying to figure things out just take first steps of different kinds in interactions. Be proactive.

3. Keep your eyes on where you are going.

“Never mistake motion for action.”

It’s very easy to get lost in busy work. You may spend much time in your in-box or filing and organizing things. But at the end of the day or week, what have you accomplished?

Just because you’re moving doesn’t mean that you are moving in the direction you really want to go. To do that you have to do the things that you know are really important and in alignment with your goals. And not getting lost in busy work.

So, improve your effectiveness and productivity. But, more importantly, never lose your view of your big picture. And take the action and do the things you need to do to get yourself where you want to go.

4. Just do.

“The shortest answer is doing the thing.”

How do you get things done? You take action and do them. You may need to do some planning, but don’t get lost in that stage or in over thinking things. Planning or thinking won’t get you any results in real-life if you don’t take action too.

So take action and just try something. Maybe you’ll succeed. Maybe you’ll fail, but if you do then failure can always teach you a bunch of things. The worst thing is not failure, it’s to just sit on your hands and do nothing.

Developing a just do it habit – where you learn to do what you know you want to do despite how you feel or what your thoughts are telling you at the moment – can be difficult. But it’s rewarding not only because you’ll get actual results and – sooner or later – success. It also builds real confidence in yourself, in your capabilities and in your own personal power to achieve what you want in life. 

Read the rest of the post on The Positivity Blog. 

This post, from Maria Schneider, originally appeared on her Editor Unleashed site on 5/28/09.

The “should I start a blog” topic popped up on the forum yesterday, and I want to offer my answer to this question once and for all: Yes, of course you should start a blog!

Why wouldn’t you take advantage of this fabulous, free opportunity to not only practice your craft, but also start actively building your readership.

Every writer circa 2009 should have a blog. It’s free and the technology is accessible to all. Don’t worry yourself over things like SEO and RSS or HTML. You don’t need to know any of that to start a blog, although your knowledge of these things will naturally grow as you become more comfortable with blogging.

I’ve written many posts on website building and blogging. I highly recommend starting out with a simple WordPress.com account for the most user-friendly, free service. Then, when you’re ready to expand into a full-fledged multi-page website, it’s easy to transfer those files onto WordPress.org, which is a more flexible and powerful platform.

The most important thing is to start and stick with it. That puts you ahead of the pack in more ways than you realize.

Here, I’ve assembled a number of the posts I’ve written on blogging/website building in one handy post. If you’re just starting a blog, this will be more information than you need, so you may want to skim the information and come back to specific topics when you’re ready. 

Choosing a Domain
Since I’m a writer and no techno-wiz, I’ve just gotten past a steep learning curve to build my website from scratch, and I wanted to share what I learned in a weeklong series here on Editor Unleashed.

I’m going to start from the very beginning, because I wished several weeks ago for one reliable resource to take me through all of the steps in a very basic way. Read more…

Website Software and Hosting
OK, so you’ve got your domain registered and you’re ready for the next big step in building your website. Now it’s time to figure out software options and hook up with a Web Host (aka server).

Read the rest of the post on Editor Unleashed.

This post, by Henry Baum, originally appeared on the Backword Books blog on 6/18/09.

I’ve been thinking about how I’ve gotten to this point and why I’ve become such a zealot for self-publishing.  I have to say that self-publishing was an absolutely last resort for me.  I was trying and trying to make it in the world of traditional publishing.  And I’ve had some luck.  I mean some people can’t even get an agent, and I’ve had four of them, each representing different novels.  I’ve been translated into French, had a book put out in the U.K. Random House, et al, though, have not come knocking.

My first novel, “Camera Shy” (a lead character and title I used for a story put out in an anthology), was me trying to rip-off my favorite writer, Richard Yates.  Namely: The Easter Parade, which is about two sisters, so was mine.  It was a failure of a novel, but at least I wrote 200 pages in a row, and enjoyed it.

Second novel was called “Dishwasher,” my attempt at writing a first-person Bukowski/Kerouac-inspired novel, with the slacker generation replacing the Beat generation.  It was better and I got an agent for it.  She wanted to call it “Dishboy” because it was “funkier.” She sent it out and it had a nice reaction, but no takers.  “Boy can this guy write,” I remember, which is nice, but no book deal.

Wrote my first novel that was published next: first titled Oscar Caliber Gun (now titled The Golden Calf).  My agent hated it, and reluctantly sent it out. An editor said, “I cannot see a market for a novel that is slight and lacking in any meaningful message.”  I’ve memorized that.  The agent sent it to me sort of gleefully (I thought) as vindication for her distaste for the novel.  Ultimately we had a falling out because I made the mistake of asking her assistant if I could see the cover letter she was sending out with the novel.  Jay McInerney said he liked the book and I wanted to know if she was mentioning that in the letter.  I couldn’t reach her on the phone, so I just asked the assistant to send the letter.  The agent went ballistic.  Said I was doubting her skills as an agent.  Really, she just wouldn’t return my phone calls.  But I think she was looking for a way out because she didn’t like the novel.

And so I went to St. Mark’s Books in NYC looking for small presses to submit the novel to myself.  Got a bite from Soho Books.  Not much else.  And then I discovered a VERY small press, Soft Skull, that had these little handmade books printed at Kinko’s.  I sent in my novel along with a demo tape of a band I was playing drums in called Montag.  The editor, Sander Hicks, accepted the book, and was especially taken with the tape and that I’d begun my query letter with, “Dear Freakshow.”

So, finally, I was published.  I remember walking up First Avenue and my girlfriend at the time calling down to me, “Hey, published writer!”  Such a nice moment.

 

Read the rest of the post on the Backword Books blog.

The Publetariat Vault will officially open to all authors on Monday, 6/29/09, but it’s actually already open for any early birds reading this who want to get in on the ground floor. To get the ball rolling, the Vault is offering a special promotion: the first 300 published listings will be free of charge for 90 days from the day the Vault opens for publishing pro and producer searches. And beginning with the 301st published listing, all listings will have the first 30 days’ listing fee waived as well, to provide a free trial period. Read all about it here.

This post, from Jason Sizemore, originally appeared on the Apex Books Blog on 6/10/09.

Even in the best of times, making a small press successful is a tough maneuver that few have accomplished. The current economy exacerbates the difficulty level, as well. All the small presses are hungry for your dwindling spare change. That’s why I find the common notion of many authors to believe that once they sell a book to you, their obligation to the publisher is done, to be confusing and irrational.

From my perspective, this almost feels like the author is saying “Okay, buddy, you’re lucky none of the big publishers grabbed my collection/novel/novella/anthology and paid me the five-figure advance I deserve, so you are granted the right and privilege of publishing my work. Have at it.”

I’m not sure why authors feel this way. Why wouldn’t you want to promote your work? Everybody knows that most small presses pay little to no advance. Apex pays an advance, but it’s about 1/4th professional rates. Any noticeable amount of money you’ll earn will come through royalties. To earn royalties, the book has to sell.

Many small presses have little to no budget for advertising. We advertise in Cemetery Dance, Weird Tales, Albedo1, Fangoria, Rue Morgue, Space and Time, Electric Velocipede, Shimmer, on the ProjectWonderful banner system, on SFScope.com, and on any surface that we can slap our beloved Apex alien head on. Many publishers never get out and run the convention circuit to promote their authors. Not so for us on both accounts. We actively travel to promote our books. We have dealer booths in the halls of at least a half-dozen conventions a year, almost always done at a loss because you (the publisher) have to sell a lot of books to compensate for the costs of the tables, food, gas, lodging, etc.

Read the rest of the post on the Apex Books Blog.

This post, from Angela Slatter, originally appeared on her The Bones Remember Everything blog on 6/10/09.

I once had to present a faux writers festival presentation as part of an assessment piece. As someone who doesn’t like speaking in public, interacting with strangers, or even being seen, I was quite happy pitching that writers should be read and not seen. That the golden days were when we didn’t have to be performing monkeys.

I was wrong.

I was wrong because there never was a time when we didn’t have to sing for our supper. From the troubadours and travelling storytellers to Chaucer, from Oscar Wilde to Mark Twain, we’ve always had to perform in public if we wanted attention. Hell, even Bram Stoker schlepped across the US giving readings. If we don’t perform, we don’t eat; and most of us like eating.

A lot of writers (myself included) can be described as ‘anti-socialist’ – we’d refer to be at home, on our own, just writing and spending time with people who don’t actually exist outside of our own heads. It’s like a game of Extreme Imaginary Friends. We don’t like to talk to anyone (except the furry familiars and the pretend people), and we just put the pretty words on the page.

You can get the words in the right order, you can get them to shine and dance on the page, but this doesn’t prepare you for the other part of your career: the talking to people part. If indeed you do want to be published, you will need to interact with other human beings: agents, publishers, publicists, booksellers, the marketing and sales departments, and most terrifyingly of all, readers. These are all categories staffed by humans. A writer needs to know how to talk with them, interact with them, in short, network with them.

Read the rest of the post on The Bones Remember Everything.

This post, from Kristin Bair O’Keeffe, originally appeared on the Writers on the Rise blog on 6/15/09.

Growing up, our family played a lot of backyard baseball. My mom was usually the pitcher. “Keep your eye on the ball,” she’d say before unleashing a pitch. When I followed her instruction, I usually hit a line drive or on a good day, a homerun (sending my sisters into a wild scramble in the outfield); when I didn’t, I either missed the ball completely or hit an embarrassingly lame foul tip.
 
Throughout the years, I’ve discovered that in this particular way, writing fiction is not so different from hitting a baseball. If I follow my mom’s instruction when writing-keep your eye on the ball-I am able to create a compelling plot in a story.

 
Take, for example, Audrey Niffenegger’s novel The Time Traveler’s Wife. In it, the plot (the ball on which you must keep your eye) is “time-traveling man falls in love and wants to stay put in the present with his woman.”
 
In the book, all action and events speak to this plot in some way. As the story moves forward, Niffenegger keeps her eye on the ball. If she didn’t, the story would wander, and readers would get frustrated, give up, and move on to another book.
 
As you can see, plot is not a list of events in a story. Plot is the purest description of a story.
 
Another good example is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Of Love and Other Demons. Here the plot (ball) is “rabid dog bites girl; girl may have rabies.”
 
And again, throughout the book, Marquez keeps his eye on the ball. Never do you, the reader, lose sight of “rabid dog bites girl; girl may have rabies.”
 

Read the rest of the post on Writers on the Rise.

This post, by Vérité Parlant, originally appeared on her Whose Shoes Are These Anyway blog on 6/9/09.

You know that song "Dinosaur" by Al Jarreau? Lately I feel just like that.

Despite the success stories I keep hearing about people who’ve published their own books, despite knowing exceptional writers who have, due to the blindness of publishers, had to publish their own books to prove that their work is marketable, I still struggle with the notion that self-publishing is a legitimate route to book publication. This hang-up is about me, I think, internalizing old media messages.

Maybe it’s that self-publishing is also called vanity publishing. After many years of Sunday School, I know vanity is a sin. Perhaps my mind is equating self-publishing with sin-publishing. Hmm. I need an exorcism!

If you look at this poll on self-publishing that I think I created in 2003 or 2004 at a site I rarely visit now but for sentimental reasons am still a member, you’ll see that my apprehension about self-publishing is not a new affliction. When I say afflction, I mean torment. The debate keeps me confuzzled.

I can tell you why self-publishing, especially for people for color, is viable and reasonable. I know the history, how many well-known African-American novelists had to publish their own works first because white publishers wouldn’t do it and black publishers were nearly nonexistent. I concede that even today, good poets in particular, still have to step out on faith and publish their own books of poetry first.

At the same time, I applaud writers who finish their books because it’s something I have yet to achieve. Grrrr! And I cheer them on when they send them to press themselves. "Oh, you go girl!" I say, gesturing thumbs up, weeping on the inside that my book still isn’t done.

Furthermore, I know as the African-American Books Examiner, I will be reading novelists who are either self-published now and will be big names in the future or who used to self-publish and are big names now. And yet for myself I don’t think I will feel published until I finish a book and sell it to a publishing house.

Even if I wrote a book, couldn’t sell it to a publishing house, then turned around and sold millions after publishing it myself, I think the devil on my shoulder would still needle me and say, "Ah, but you didn’t really publish a book, now did you?" Clearly I suffer from giving "authority figures" too much power over my value as a writer.

Read the rest of the post on Whose Shoes Are These Anyway.

This post, by bestselling mainstream author Joe Nassise, originally appeared on the Genreality site.   

In which Mr. Nassise deconstructs the economics of publishing and gives many of us all the more reason to be glad we’ve gone indie.

Let’s say you’re a stock boy at the local supermarket.  You put in twenty hours of work during the week.  You are paid at a rate of $10 per hour.  At the end of the week, you’d expect to walk away with a check for $200 (minus a bit for taxes and such.)

Now, for the sake of argument, let’s say that your boss decides not to pay you that way this week.  “I’m going to pay you a third of the money I owe you at the start of the week,” he tells you, “and a third roughly eight months from now, and then the final third somewhere in the next two years.”  As you begin to protest, he remarks, “and by the way, if you want to keep working here, you’ll be happy to get that.”

Welcome to the wonderful world of publishing economics.

Alright, maybe it’s not as bad as all that, but it’s close.  You see, a writer is paid for their work in an often varying scale of increments and understanding the hows and why of it all can be confusing to the newcomer trying to figure it all out.  I know it was for me.  So for the next few minutes, let’s take a stroll down the road of economics publishing style.

Let’s start with two very key terms – advance and royalties.

An advance is the money a writer is paid up front for the time, energy, and effort that goes into writing a book.  Just in case you were wondering, the typical advance for a first time fiction writer is usually in the neighborhood of $5,000 to $15,000, give or take a few thousand.  (In other words, a single book a year will earn you somewhere in the neighborhood of poverty wages.)

Now that advance is just that – and advance against future royalties.  A royalty is the percentage of the cover price that you get for every copy of your book that gets sold.  Again, things vary, but this is usually in the neighborhood of 5%-10%, depending on number of copies sold. 

The advance is money given upfront against money you are expected to earn by selling copies once the book is published.  Now a writer doesn’t get the advance money all at once – oh no, that would be too easy.  More often than not it is broken down into three, sometimes four, payments. 

This usually means you get 1/3 of the advance when you sign the contract, a 1/3 when you turn in the completed manuscript, and a 1/3 when the book is published.  Given that the time frame from sale to publication date can often be anywhere from one to two years, you can wait a long time for that money to come in.

Read the rest of the post on Genreality.

This post, by Scott Esposito, originally appeared on the Conversational Reading site on 6/20/08.

I tried very hard to take seriously Nicholas Carr’s article in The Atlantic, which has the provocative, and lately rather fashionable, thesis that the Internet is changing the way we read. Google is making us all info-snackers in search of the quick answer; there’s so much content at hand that we can barely stand to get halfway through something before we’re jumping off to the next thing.

I’ll admit, certain aspects of Carr’s argument feel intuitively correct. And I’m seeing an awful lot of books lately about how dumb Americans are becoming.

But when an idea becomes this popular, when it begins to develop that plasticized reek of conventional wisdom, it’s almost begging to be refuted. This is an oblique way of saying that, at this stage in the Google-is-ruining-information debate, someone looking to write an article on how the Internet is killing our attention spans needs something more substantial than the bland assertions Carr brings to the table.

Or to take on this essay from another angle, when someone gets a basic fact like this incorrect, it’s an indication that he’s not being especially rigorous in his theorizing:

Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet.

One problem: Chinese doesn’t consist of ideograms. No, it consists of characters that stand for morphemes, which are similar to syllables found in languages formed with the Roman alphabet. That this small fact completely subverts Carr’s example is emblematic of the problems confronting the essay a whole. For more on this, just wait till we get to Nietzsche’s typewriter.

I picked up the information about the Chinese language while reading a book (one about the deciphering of ancient Mayan, another character-based language that doesn’t consist of ideograms), and the fact that I read said book all the way to the end makes me a sort of rarity, at least according to Carr’s anecdotal research into his friends’ Internet-ravaged reading habits. I maintain the ability to read lengthy texts despite regular exposure to the Internet, and among Carr’s circle that makes me pretty special:

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether.

Okay, a confession: I’m not special. I’m just normal, or maybe a little too smart for my own good. I’m not sure, but what I will state with full confidence is that anyone who uses the Internet regularly retains full capacity to read a book. It’s not very hard. What’s hard is leaping from Carr’s stories about his friends to any meaningful warning about the Internet’s effects on our reading habits.

Read the rest of the post on Conversational Reading.

This post originally appeared on the HELP! Educational Blog on 3/11/09.

Let’s get right to the point. Misusing words makes you look less intelligent than you really are. If you misuse words in your writing, it can damage your credibility and diminish the point you’re trying to make. Even worse, it could completely change the meaning of the sentence.

What follows is a list of the 32 most commonly misused words and phrases.

1. Accept/Except- Although these two words sound alike (they’re homophones), they have two completely different meanings. “Accept” means to willingly receive something (accept a present.) “Except” means to exclude something (I’ll take all of the books except the one with the red cover.)

2. Affect/Effect- The way you “affect” someone can have an “effect” on them. “Affect” is usually a verb and “Effect” is a noun.

3. Alright- If you use “alright,” go to the chalkboard and write “Alright is not a word” 100 times.

4. Capital/Capitol- “Capitol” generally refers to an official building. “Capital” can mean the city which serves as a seat of government or money or property owned by a company. “Capital” can also mean “punishable by death.”

5. Complement/Compliment- I often must compliment my wife on how her love for cooking perfectly complements my love for grocery shopping.

6. Comprise/Compose- The article I’m composing comprises 32 parts.

7. Could Of- Of the 32 mistakes on this list, this is the one that bothers me most. It’s “could have” not “could of.” When you hear people talking, they’re saying “could’ve.” Got it?

8. Desert/Dessert- A desert is a hot, dry patch of sand. Dessert, on the other hand, is the sweet, fatty substance you eat at the end of your meal.

9. Discreet/Discrete- We can break people into two discrete (separate) groups, the discreet (secretive) and indiscreet.

10. Emigrate/Immigrate- If I leave this country to move to Europe, the leaving is emigrating and the arriving is immigrating.

11. Elicit/Illicit- Some people post illicit things on message boards to elicit outrageous reactions from others.

12. Farther/Further- Farther is used for physical distance, whereas further means to a greater degree.

13. Fewer/Less- Use fewer when referring to something that can be counted one-by-one. Use less when it’s something that doesn’t lend itself to a simple numeric amount.

14. Flair/Flare- A flair is a talent, while a flare is a burst (of anger, fire, etc.)

15. i.e/e.g- I.e. is used to say “in other words.” E.g. is used in place of “for example.”

16. Inflammable- Don’t let the prefix confuse you, if something is inflammable it can catch on fire.

Read the rest of the post on the HELP! Educational Blog.

This article, by Marg Gilks, originally appeared on her Scripta Word Services site. In it, she discusses how to tell when your point of view has shifted, and how unintentional shifts in POV can undermine your characters and make your work difficult to understand. 

Dalquist was shaking with rage, tears streaking down her face. "Get out," she whispered. Then she lunged for the other woman, shrieking, "Get out! Get out!"

Tamlinn managed to hide her surprise at the doctor’s reaction; she’d expected an angry denial, not near-hysteria. With an exultant laugh, she dodged Dalquist and ran for the door to the head. It hissed shut behind her.

Shaking uncontrollably with the roiling emotions the other woman had dredged up, Dalquist collapsed onto the bed, sobbing, and covered her face with her hands.

Yikes! Reading this excerpt from my first novel now, I’m not surprised that agents bounced it back to me so fast, the glue was barely dry on the stamp.

If you can see what’s wrong with this excerpt, congratulations. You understand point of view (POV). If not, don’t feel bad; of all the skills a writer must learn, maintaining point of view seems to be one of the hardest. As a freelance editor, I see POV slips in almost every manuscript I work on. Once attuned to it, a careful reader will even notice subtle POV switches that slip past editors to wind up in published novels.

What’s wrong with the above excerpt?

Paragraph one is ambiguous. Who’s the POV character? The tears streaking down Dalquist’s face could be either felt or seen. Referring to "the other woman" implies that this scene is from Dalquist’s POV. But then, in paragraph two, we are inside Tamlinn’s head, privy to her thoughts. There is no way that Dalquist can know what Tamlinn had expected, so Tamlinn must be the POV character. However, in paragraph three, our POV character, Tamlinn, has left the room; the door has shut behind her, leaving the reader behind to see what is impossible for Tamlinn to see. More, the reader knows not only that Dalquist is shaking — something Tamlinn could have seen, had she stayed — but that she is shaking because her emotions are in turmoil. Tamlinn may have suspected rage, but "turmoil" suggests more. This is Dalquist’s POV.

Every scene should have only one POV character, and everything must be filtered through that POV character’s perceptions. Only the POV character can know what he or she is thinking — he can’t know what anyone else is thinking, so the reader can’t, either. The POV character can’t see what’s going on behind her or what the person on the other end of the phone line is doing while they are talking, so the reader can’t know what’s going on in those places, either. Keep that in mind — stay firmly inside your POV character’s head — and you’ll rarely have trouble with point of view.

But, isn’t it so much easier just to tell the reader what character X is thinking, rather than trying to show it in ways the POV character (and thus, the reader) can see and understand? Why stick to the one-point-of-view rule?

Let’s look at that again, and we’ll see a hint: isn’t it so much easier just to TELL the reader what character X is thinking, rather than trying to SHOW it in ways the POV character can see and understand?

Yup: "show, don’t tell."

"People become, in our minds, what we see them do," says Orson Scott Card in his book, Characters and Viewpoint. We believe what we see more readily than what we’re told. And what are readers learning, watching through our POV character’s eyes? They’re learning about the characters. Firstly, they’re learning what character X is like by viewing his actions, and secondly, they’re learning about our POV character by how he perceives character X’s actions.

Yup: characterization.

Read the rest of the article on the Scripta Word Services site.