POV

Quick Links: Everything You Need to Know About Writing a 3rd-Person POV

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

It’s all about your Point of View.  Over at Helping Writers Become Authors, K.M. Weiland goes in depth about writing in third person pov, with links to articles on omniscient point of view, and first person point of view. I know this is my weak area, and my focus for this years NANO in November.

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Sometimes your point of view can be terrifying...
Sometimes your point of view can be terrifying…

Chances are good you’re using a third-person POV (or Point of View) in your story right now. If not, then you likely used it in the past or will give it a try in the future. It’s a nearly universal writing technique and the most popular of all the POV choices. But are you using it correctly?

Not everything in writing comes easily. I often talk about how most of storytelling—particularly structure—is surprisingly instinctive for most writers. We understand it on a subconscious level, to the point we’re often on the right track with our books long before our conscious brains catch up.

But not everything’s like that. For most writers, POV isn’t like that. The gist of one of the questions I most frequently receive is: “POV????!!!!”

I’ve written primer posts about omniscient POV and first-person POV, but I realized I still needed to do one on the most prevalent of all POVs—the third-person POV.

This is the POV of choice in more books than not—everything from Emma to Ender’s Game. It’s arguably the least complicated of the POVs, so it’s a good choice for beginning writers. But it’s also arguably the most flexible of the POVs, which means it’s also a good choice for the most advanced and complicated of stories.

Read the full post on Helping Writers Become Authors

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Quick Link: Getting in Character—Deep POV Part Two

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

How can you not love Kristen Lamb, she wears a viking helmet! On her blog, she write a humorous but well thought out post on improving your writing by going deep into your character’s point of view. You know the whole “show, don’t tell” thingie but taken to a different level.   This is part two in a series, but can be read alone. You can find part one here. And don’t worry Kristen, I loved Tropic Thunder too!

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Getting in Character—Deep POV Part Two

March 13, 2016

KnowledgeKristen Lamb

Yes today is odd. Posting on a Sunday. We are headed into Spring Break and yeah…hard to maintain my usual schedule. Today we’re going to dive deeper into deep POV and then, later in the week, I am going to bring you guys an expert on deep POV 😉 .

Will be fun.

To accomplish “deep POV” yes, there are style changes we can make, like removing as many tags as we can and ditching extraneous sensing and thinking words. But deep POV is more than just tight writing, it’s also strongly tethered to characterization. Good characterization.

It is essential to know our cast if we hope to successfully write “deep POV.”

KNOW Your Cast

There are all kinds of ways to get to know our characters. I often write detailed character backgrounds before starting a story so it doesn’t become a fish head.

Why we need to know our characters is that deep POV is a reflection of the inner self, how that character sees the world, responds, evades, processes, etc. It is also a reflection of personal history and relationship dynamics.

*cue brain cramp* *hands paper bag*

It’s okay. Breathe. We’re going to unpack this.

Reflection of the Character

Back when I used to run a weekly workshop, I had writers do a little exercise to help them learn POV and also strengthen character-building skills. I gave this scenario:

We have a family of four—Mom, Dad, a grandparent (either gender) and a teen (either gender) who has spent a year saving for a family vacation. On the way to their destination, the vehicle breaks down. What happens and tell it from the perspective of EACH family member.

Every week, writers showed with the perspective of one of the four. We had ASTONISHING creativity.

Read the full post on Kristen Lamb

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Thoughts On The Unreliable Narrator

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This post by Susan Crawford originally appeared as a guest post on Writer’s Digest on 5/15/15.

Dana is the main character in my book, The Pocket Wife. She is bipolar and off her medication; she’s also going through lots of “stuff,” and this toxic mixture is beginning to bring on a manic episode. In Chapter One, Dana is poised for flight. Still, she is quite lucid. In fact, except for a few oddities–reading a novel in two hours, feeling the “offness” of things in the air– she is a fairly normal housewife, bored, missing her son who has recently left for college, and annoyed with her workaholic husband.

Many stories told from the unreliable narrator’s point of view are written in first person. The Pocket Wife is told in third person, so Dana isn’t speaking directly to the reader. Nonetheless, we are often in her head and privy to her thoughts and conversations.

I think it’s important not to open a story or novel with the unreliable narrator already obviously a bit wonky because then the reader is less apt to really invest in him, or, for the sake of simplicity and because Dana is a woman, in her. If she’s too bizarre right off the bat, we’re far less likely to relate to her, and relating to a character, at least for me, is necessary if I’m going to climb inside her life for the next 300 or so pages. For me, this has very little to do with age or race or gender. E.T. was one of the most popular movies of all time. Its main protagonist, for whom the film was named, is a very short, mud-colored alien. But we can relate to him!

 

Read the full post on Writer’s Digest.

 

9 Tips for Writing an Insane Character

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This post by Tiana Warner originally appeared on Indies Unlimited on 9/30/14.

Nothing beats a good insane character. They’re unpredictable, obsessive, totally spellbinding … and hard to write. Their arcs and motivations can differ completely from ordinary characters. Saying you’re going to write an insane character, however, is like going to a steakhouse and ordering a beef and a wine. You need to get specific. There are about a million types of crazy.

I spent two years studying some of the best crazy characters in order to understand what works best. I even took a university class on abnormal psychology. (Yeah. I went there.) Through it all, I came up with nine ways to intensify the character. For those of you looking to lose your fictional marbles, let me share what I’ve learned.

1. He is a man-vs-self conflict

This character is his own antagonist. Take everything you know about the relationship between protagonist and antagonist, and apply those rules to the sane and insane parts of the character.

For example, we know the antagonist should share a lot of qualities with the protagonist, except for a key moral difference. What flaw is splintering your character’s sanity? Is it alcohol abuse, as in The Shining? Jack’s descent into madness literally changes his character from protagonist to antagonist.

 

Read the full post on Indies Unlimited.

 

The Craft of Voice: Part 1

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This post by JJ Marsh originally appeared on the Vine Leaves Literary Journal on 9/8/14.

In this section, I’m looking at choices: person and tense, distinctive character voices, Point of View (POV) and how to make the reader take sides.

I assume you have a Work-In-Progress (WIP) or some material you can use to practise the exercises below. If not, use the exercises to create some, or play with an existing work.

 

Person

The most popular ways of telling a story are in first (I) or third person (s/he), although second person (you) has occasionally been used to powerful effect in such novels as Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. Some books make a feature of switching the person. For example, in Complicity by Iain Banks, the readers only know we’re in the killer’s head by the change to second person narration. Many writers have strong opinions on which is best and why. First person aficionados cite intimacy and identification with the narrator. Those who favour third quote the freedom of being able to change characters or observe things the narrator cannot see/know. (WARNING! See POV points below*.)

Publetariat Editor’s Note: asterisk refers to another section in the full post, linked below.

 

Tense

 

Click here to read the full post on the Vine Leaves Literary Journal.