Why We Do This

"So just how far down d'you wanna go? Or we could talk it out over a cuppa joe, and you could look deep into my eyes like I was a supermodel"-The Refreshments, Banditos

Alright, a brief sidetrack this week away from point of view, because I watched the Banff film festival last night, and in-between thrills it made me remember why it is that I write, and more specifically why I write what I write.

Quite simply, it boils down to this: Art moves people.

Last night I saw it in the form of documentary film--I saw people doing incredible things, like backflipping off of cables into thousand foot vertical caves and climbing hundreds of meters off the ground without ropes. I also got to hear them explaining why it is they do what they do, and it moved me.

The feeling you get when you experience someone else doing something incredible, the shiver that runs down your spine, the way you can empathize with them, is an inextricable and extremely important part of what makes us human. And whether you get that feeling from reading about an elf's desperate last stand or a drug addict's against-the-odds recovery doesn't matter to me.

What matters is that you feel it, and that's why I write.

Point of View pt. 1 (the basics)

"Thanks for the memories, even if they weren't so great."--Fall Out Boy, Thnks fr th Mmrs

Today I've been inspired by some of the revising I've been doing to talk about point of view. One of the most basic tools of the author is point of view (who is telling your story--literally, the point of view it's from). You have a few basic options that anyone who's ever taken a creative writing class is familiar with: first person (I), third person limited (He), or if you're crazy, second person (You). Each of these has advantages and disadvantages.

In first person, the narration comes entirely from the point of view of one character. This method means that every sentence, every word, develops character. From the tone and voice of the narrative you learn how the narrating character speaks and tells stories. From its content you learn what they find important to relate. Hopefully at some point you learn why they want to tell the story they're telling. The list goes on. At no point can you escape from the character's head, so every little detail gives a subtle touch-up to their character.

Unfortunately, it's extremely hard to pull off and takes a lot of practice. To make a character sound convincing in the first person while telling an interesting story at the same time is not an easy task, and not every story can be told from first person anyway. In the first person, every fact is suspect, and sometimes you don't want that.

When that's the case, you'll most likely want a third person limited point of view. The third person limited point of view is told in the third person, with the narrator having access to the thoughts of one character. For instance, "Her eye was twitching. He could see she was nervous." is a third person limited point of view passage. We have access to "his" thoughts (in the second sentence), but not hers. In the first sentence, we have an objective fact. He does not think her eye is twitching--it is. (Compare this to "Her eye was twitching in nervousness"--a third person p.o.v. sentence from "her" point of view).

Third person limited point of view is a very useful point of view to work from, and most novels are written in successive third person limited p.o.v. chapters (especially in sci-fi/fantasy). The difficulty in this p.o.v. lies chiefly around navigating which thoughts belong to which characters and keeping a consistent point of view throughout a section. How easy would it be to write "He looked like her dead uncle. He could see she was nervous. She felt uncomfortable."--whose point of view is this? It's unclear. Either of them could have access to the knowledge that he looked like her dead uncle. The second sentence could either be a report of him observing her or of her observing him. The third could either be her reporting her emotions or him analyzing his observation in the second sentence.

Second person point of view is told in the second person, but implies a narrative character anyway. "You open the door and step through. You're free." is a second person point of view passage. It involves the reader directly in the story, and since the reader knows that they didn't actually have anything to do with it, it tends to lead itself to "What if?" scenarios. What's interesting about it is the development of the invisible narrator. Who is it that is claiming I walk through this door? Why do they think that there is freedom on the other side? Why are they commanding me, anyway?

Obviously, there's some fertile ground to work with there, but second-person point of view is rare and off-putting to readers. I've never encountered it outside of literary fiction, and even there it's unusual.

Those are the basics, as I see them. Point of view is infinitely complicated, and there are professors who make their living studying and writing huge, convoluted papers on it and writers who make their living stretching its boundaries, but for a start, this will do. In my next post I'll cover some more advanced techniques to consider when using it--the ones I've been playing with that prompted this post in the first place.

Workshopping a Novel

"We ran like vampires from a thousand burning suns, but even then we should have stayed." -Rise Against, Audience of One

I've gotten a lot of advice on workshopping a novel before, mostly as I submitted portions of my novel for workshops. They usually ran like this, "It's difficult," "It's not always a good idea," etc. etc. etc.

The rationale runs like this: first, your workshop group won't read the entire novel. Thus they won't be able to comment on whether or not the things you're setting up in the beginning work in the end. You will always be able to say, "Oh, I'll explain that in chapter 23," and there's not much they can say in return. Second, you may become discouraged by the feedback you get from your workshop and give up on the project entirely.

After my experience in workshop today, I can say that neither of those fears are very well founded. In workshopping my own novel, I ran into the first problem. There are questions being asked by some of my workshopmates that will be resolved later, and some things that are striking them as odd are meant to strike them as odd, because they're setting up later revelations.

As of now, I don't have a ton of useful feedback on those issues. But they will be workshopping more of the novel, and as they do, I'll begin to see whether these things are working or not. By coming to the workshop of each new chunk with a list of the questions they had that should have been resolved in that chunk, I should be able to tick off what is and isn't working---it just won't all happen in one workshop.

I also got a lot of useful information out of just today's workshop, about what was working in my beginning (Most of the things I had focused on---booyah) and some of the things that weren't (surprising things, like some comments that my antagonists weren't pure evil enough for people).

Either way, I think that as long as I continue to move forward in the novel and don't worry about implementing any changes they've suggested until I can work out whether or not they're warranted, the experience should only be positive.

As far as the second fear goes, I have to admit I was worried about that going into today--not for myself, but for another writer, whose work I had barely been able to get through, and had had trouble not tearing apart.

That writer's work had a lot of fans in the workshop. Whether these people read completely different than me, are interested in different things, or are simply willing to let the author get away with more than I am (my main problems were grammatical), I don't know, but it certainly wasn't the awkward, quiet, "Umm...maybe try this?" affair it would have been if there were fourteen of me critiquing it.

So don't be afraid to workshop your longer work---just remember to move forward, and only come back to the feedback on your beginning once you've finished your end.

Shifting the Narrative

"Who needs sleep?"- Barenaked Ladies, Who Needs Sleep?

Apparently, writing a novel is exhausting. Someone should have reminded me. Upside: Four chapters of my novel cranked through in the past two weeks. Two of them get workshopped on Wednesday, which should be an interesting and blogworthy experience. Downside: Zero blog posts cranked out in the past two weeks. A thousand apologies, honored reader, for my slackness.

That said, in honor of Heroes, which I hope to catch up on shortly, before the new season leaves me completely and utterly left behind, I'm going to talk today about something I call shifting the narrative.

Shifting the narrative is, in short, taking characters and settings both you and your readers are already familiar with and changing the type of story that they're participating in. Serialized stories often do this, because it's a good way to keep a series going without it getting too stale. Heroes has a pretty good handle on it.

In Season One, Heroes was, fittingly, a hero fantasy. It was a story about people discovering they could do things they were unaware of, coming to terms with that, and then using those abilities to save the world. Season Two was a travesty, except for Hiro's story (a coming of age, face-your-illusions narrative), so I'm going to ignore it and pretend it never happened. Season Three was a family drama, in which sons were forced to choose between their parents (neither of whom was a particularly lovable character, which was one of the season's better points). Season Four we'll see about it, but it sure looks like the family drama story has been abandoned.

What Heroes has done particularly well is flowed from one narrative into the next, without it becoming too obvious that that's what it's doing. When Peter comes back from the future to kill his brother at the beginning of Season Three, you have no idea that it's setting off a family narrative (though in retrospect, it seems like that should be obvious). It doesn't begin with the father versus mother dilemma, it works its way into it in an interesting way.

It's an interesting technique to keep in mind, and for writers who dream of writing novels in series, it's an important one to remember. There are ten million different types of stories out there, and if you try to stick with just one you'll get boring fast. Figuring out how to change between them, how to position your characters so that as one narrative ends they're already at the beginning of a different one, is the great trick in writing sequels.