Posts by Kathryn Craft
photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Fresh perspective—it’s not just a New Year’s theme. It’s also what many of our readers are looking for in our novels.
To be clear, I’m not talking about what drove the structural decision to tell the story through first, second, third-person limited, or third-person omniscient. I’m talking about the way of looking at the world you intend to deliver through that point-of-view vehicle.
In the December 31, 2023 issue of the New York Times, Alexandra Alter wrote about a former financial consultant who had her first glimmer of an idea for a novel in 2013, after receiving this challenge in a fiction writing workshop: “Write a short story from an unusual perspective.” The writer, Shelby Van Pelt, came up with an acerbic octopus who was bored and frustrated by his confinement in an aquarium.
Encouraged by her teacher, Van Pelt began writing vignettes about the octopus, only writing the novel that would become Remarkably Bright Creatures in earnest during the pandemic. It was purchased by Ecco for six figures and hit the NYT list a few weeks after publication, in spring of 2022. Sales stayed steady, and as of December 2023, the title had already gone into 28 printings with 1.4 million copies sold. Why? Alter reports that Beth Seufer Buss, a sales clerk at Bookmarks, an independent bookstore in Winston-Salem, N.C., said, “Everybody who reads it wants other people to read it.”
Other book club darlings have benefitted from similarly bold perspectives. To name a few: The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein (7 million sold), told from the perspective of an aged dog who believes that once he’s reborn as a human he can better help his grieving owner; The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger (13 million sold), a behind-the-scenes look at the world of high fashion told from the perspective of a small-town industry outsider; Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (12 million copies sold), told from the perspective of a girl who raised and educated herself on the marsh she calls home; and Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (6 million sold), told from the perspective of a female chemist in 1970s who refused to take no for an answer when men continually tried to put her in her place.
Choosing a bold, unusual perspective comes with some risk. Stein fired his first agent (great story) when he expressed, in blunt terms, that he thought the book would never fly; re-agented, it went on to park itself on the New York Times bestseller list for three years. Garmus was also worried when Six-Thirty, the dog in her novel, started expressing his opinions to her. And according to Alter’s article, the editorial assistant at the agency that picked up Van Pelt said, “…it’s either brilliant or it’s bananas, because there’s a talking octopus.”
If handled well, though, the payoff may balance the risk. According to a 2022 article by Amy Odell in LitHub, agent Deborah Schneider said […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Last week, while looking for a new show to stream, I came across Doc Martin, about a socially-changed surgeon who, after developing an aversion to blood, leaves London to serve as a family doctor in a small village in Cornwall.
Socially-challenged protagonists, such as Sean Murphy (The Good Doctor) or Sam Gardner (Atypical) on TV, or like Eleanor Oliphant (Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman) or Don Tillman (The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion), are like self-contained story machines. Their outsider status and keen-yet-selective observation skills give them an interesting perspective through which to view a story, their social obstacles are heart-wrenching and never-ending, and their ability to think outside the box makes for many creative ways to “make do” when the needed supplies aren’t readily at hand.
So I was predisposed to like Doc Martin, and excited to see that it was such a popular show that there were ten seasons.
One problem, though: only seasons 8 through 10 were available via PBS. Watching the earlier seasons required yet another streaming subscription. What’s a woman to do if she wants to give Doc Martin a try and she does not care to add to her array of subscription streaming services?
She starts watching in season 8, of course. Because for all the difference it made to me, I was starting from the beginning.
How can that work, when I was entering this character’s story right in the middle?
We readers do it all the time, when we open the front cover of a novel. Starting in Season 8 is an example of what it means to start in medias res, a Latin term that literally means “in the midst of things.”
The season begins with Doc Martin running from his house in a suit and tie and through the middle of a bike race to get to the shoreline, where a fisherman has his hand caught up inside a winch. By insisting on helping, the handsome-yet-bumbling police officer on scene only makes matters worse. The Martins’ nanny quits precipitously because she is marrying the policeman after an eight-week romance. When the happy couple goes to meet with the vicar the day before the wedding, they learn that a substitute pastor has been called to the town on short notice and will be conducting the wedding the next day. The policeman doesn’t want this less experienced curate to officiate, and to make matters worse, Doc Martin has treated her with a medication that makes her nose bleed while counseling the couple, which does nothing to engender trust.
This set up plenty of dramatic and comedic complication for the episode—and while watching, I felt perfectly oriented to it.
A story, after all, doesn’t begin with the Big Bang and end with the Total Annihilation—the reader will always enter, and leave, in the midst of something.
Story DNA at play
We can orient mid-story because every scene that belongs in your book will carry your story’s DNA. Scene structure ensures this: If each of the scenes in your novel marks your protagonist’s difficult yet well-motivated progress toward his […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
I’d told the story too many times, that was the problem.
At first it spilled incessantly. It was as if the horror reflected on my listeners’ faces was the only way I could get it through my head that my experience had been real: my husband of fifteen years, dead, by suicide. But over time, like a river taking its same, inevitable course, my story grew predictable, tumbling over obstacles so familiar their edges had smoothed. I learned where to pull back so as not to make my listener quite so uncomfortable. Where to breathe so I could make it through to the end without sobbing.
I suspected this was why, once I novelized these events, my trusted first reader told me I’d skimmed over the emotional depth of the story’s ending. Her critique of the dark moment, in particular, told me I’d defaulted to this verbal telling mode instead of using the full power of literature to evoke my character’s experience.
“This is what the reader has been waiting for,” she said. How many times had I said the same to my own editing clients? “The very reason you wrote this story. Give us more emotion. Go deeper.”
With these words, I suddenly felt unequal to telling my story.
Of course that’s nothing new either. About three-quarters in, I’d hit this point with every single creative endeavor of my life, whether in choreography or academic writing or fiction, so I was able to recognize this despair for the critical role it plays without abandoning the project. In the story of writing this novel, I had hit my own dark moment. To prevail, I had to learn what I was made of.
I sat with the uneasiness this caused.
And almost let myself off the hook. I mean, I was writing fiction. Who would blame me if I refused to bathe in the blistering tar of memory to explore how my character felt? I thought of the reader willing to plunk down their money for my novel, and yet in the end, would not be served.
The subject was thorny, to say the least. In real life, as I was about to learn how the day-long standoff ended, the emotions I felt were conflicted and shameful and very personally mine. And oddly fractured—when I heard the news that day, the words pierced me through even as I was also somehow watching myself react, in that dissociative way that can be the result of shock. Those emotions had the potential to hold a world of story.
If, on the page, I dared to give them life.
As a reader, I laud the author who is willing to rummage deep in the basement of their psyche, identify the deeply personal emotions stored there, and then lend them to their story. Here’s how I tapped the vulnerability that allowed my conflicted characters to show their messy human emotions.
I leaf through sympathy cards and letters—those drawn by the classmates of my 8- and 10-year-old sons just about unglue […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Rituals can hold deep significance in our lives, which is why they can be so powerful in stories. Because weddings and funerals can indicate an important moment of change, many novels open or end with them.
The emotional nature of such moments in real life can result in the misperception that the reader will be automatically moved by the inclusion of any such ritual. Take the backstory of a married character’s wedding, for example. In manuscripts I see, it usually goes like this:
We’d met at college, some twenty years ago now, and married the year after graduation. Everyone stood as I entered the sanctuary; tissues were pulled from evening bags. My father’s arm steadied me as he walked me down the aisle, the train of my white dress collecting rose petals scattered by my adorable niece. My rock, my husband-to-be, waited for me at the front of the church, his smile drawing me forward, step by step.
Take it from someone who cannot possibly get through a live wedding ceremony without tears: on the page, the wedding just described will be of zero interest to your reader for several reasons.
Likewise, writers hope that readers will be moved by the tears of the protagonist and any number of other characters at a funeral. But not all funerals are inherently sad. Without added context, your reader won’t know how to feel.
As a novelist, you aren’t a borrower of story anyway. You are a builder of context; the emotional significance of any included scene must be mined. You will not find that significance in the ways such rituals are similar, but in the ways the scene is personal and unexpected.
Let’s look at some examples that work.
Unusual setting details
Abraham Verghese’s Covenant of Water, an Oprah’s Book Club pick, features a wedding in the second chapter. The setting is rural South India, in 1900. The groom, a 40-year-old widower, is late. Verghese did not waste time describing his 12-year-old bride’s visceral sensations; he let the setting do the work.
Light from the high windows slices down, casting oblique shadows. The incense tickles her throat. As in her church, there are no pews, just rough coir carpet on red oxide floors, but only in the front. Her uncle coughs. The sound echoes in the empty […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Honoring the burst of back-to-school spirit that always invigorates me at this time of year, I thought I’d share this highlight reel of the things I say most often in my manuscript evaluations. They may sound obvious, but it’s easy to overlook foundational skills as word count accumulates. These can—and should—be addressed in a self-edit before submitting your manuscript for developmental help. Let’s see if any of them sound familiar to you.
Nothing is more disorienting to a reader than not knowing where the action is taking place, when it is taking place, and whose perspective is delivering the story. Excuses for burying this information run the gamut from simple forgetting to an attempt to be highbrow or artsy. But in this WU post I wrote, using examples from Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House, one can see that it’s not beneath an author of many bestselling literary novels to do so. The answers to who, when, and where—placed right up front—create the most basic context for following the story’s events.
While drafting your story, rather than ask, “What will happen to my protagonist next,” ask instead, “What will my protagonist do next?”
This one shift will address a host of interrelated problems. It will energize the scene with your character’s agency. It will organize the scene, because now you have a goal that can be complicated. Because the character will want to prevail despite these complications, the stakes for achieving that goal will become apparent—and “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” (to borrow from ABC sports) will be more profoundly moving than any reaction you can describe.
Instead of telling the story, think about building it. Scenes driven by a point-of-view character’s goal are your building blocks.
While drafting scenes, writers (at least those who understand that last point about scene goals) will utilize the other characters in the scene to cause problems for the protagonist as he tries to achieve his goal. That’s great—but don’t stop there. No one wants to be thought of as a tool in someone else’s life. If you asked her why she’s in the scene, what would she say? Ascertain her motivation. Think beyond “because she’s nosy and wants to find out the scoop.” If she is nosy, why? How did she become that way? What exactly is she hoping to find out, and how does that complicate the protagonist’s scene goal? What are the stakes if this secondary character can’t find out what she needs to know? All of that material may not end up on the page, but your commitment to getting to know your major secondary characters will help them appear more relatable and nuanced.
In this interview, Brett Goldstein, a writer and actor in the Apple+ TV show Ted Lasso, says, “You have to write all of your characters with love, even those who deliver only one line.” This became both a joy and a challenge for the Lasso writers as […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Twenty-some years ago, while reading a published crime novel for enjoyment, I encountered a first sentence similar to this:
I marched through the restaurant at 5 a.m. Tuesday, ignoring the stench of the dead body and the unhinged sous chef who’d found it.
This sentence immediately popped me from the story. New at the time to story analysis, it took me a while to determine that my problem was with the word “ignore.” Instead of reading on, I sat and wondered, If our first-person POV character is “ignoring” something, why did she mention it? and Does one ever get to a point when one can simply “ignore” the stench of a dead body? and How do you ignore an unhinged sous chef? In the next line, when I learned she was a police detective, I thought, Would a police detective really “ignore” aspects of a crime scene, especially a stench that might inform her that the body had been decaying there since Saturday night, when the restaurant was last open? And if she can ignore these details, should we trust her to have the instincts to solve this murder?
Make no mistake, you do want to raise questions with the opening of your novel, but these were the wrong kind. You also want your opening to be memorable, but not for these reasons. I concluded that the author was implying that this character wasn’t really a very good detective. Having lost faith in the protagonist after just one sentence, followed by a paragraph that did nothing to salvage the situation, I set down the book.
Since then, I’ve learned that creative writing doesn’t have a lot of “rules,” save one:
Give the reader no reason to put down your novel.
It may well be that you’re such a mystery lover that you would have skipped right over this issue and continued on. Reading is subjective, after all. Even so, this one sentence offers up several aspects of craft worth thinking about.
Focus on what your character is doing instead of what she isn’t
I heard this advice early on in my creative writing journey and it has proven to be a worthy guide: Rather than write about what your character doesn’t do, identify what she does do. This will help the reader accumulate details pertinent to her characterization (as opposed to ruling out who she isn’t), while also prompting you-as-author to determine what your character wants in any given scene.
[If that feels like a challenge to your creativity, I too can picture a literary novel beginning with, “Leon Adamzcyk went out to feed his birds at the crack of dawn because he was not the kind of man who wanted to talk to his neighbors.” This could begin a list of other things that Leon Adamzcyk is not, ending this opening with the line, “Problem was, Leon Adamzcyk didn’t know who he was.” Thing is, your readers would know something: he cares about the birds.]
If the detective in the opening story is assigned to this case yet she immediately ignores its specifics, show us why by giving […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
If a stranger standing beside you on a train track simply blurted that they loved you, you wouldn’t believe them, would you? You’d want substantiation. Some clue that they weren’t a stalker, or that their emotions had been building over time. That’s because true love, ideally, is specific to the personhood of the two individuals involved—and something that both participants would like to be in on.
In stories, readers want in on it too—and like everything else in fiction, that requires showing. Yet so often, in the manuscripts I see that feature a romance, the writer has basted together a relationship with the thinnest of threads, while at the same time asking that readers buy that what they’re selling is love.
Since a well-developed romantic thread can keep readers of any genre turning pages, let’s look at some of the ways authors have successfully convinced readers that their characters are falling in love. Maybe one (or more!) of them will work in your story.
1. Show that love changes the character.
In A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman, Ove first sees the woman he’ll marry on a train platform, just as in my silly example above. But Backman convinces. Ove is compelled to follow her onto her train, which takes him two hours from home in the wrong direction. After sitting across from her to chat, Sonja tells him she takes the train back each day at 5, so maybe they’ll cross paths again—inciting him to loiter in the town where she’s attending school just so he can sit with her again on the way home. He does this for three weeks. She has a profound effect on him:
He had never heard anything quite as amazing as that voice. She talked as if she were continuously on the verge of breaking into giggles. And when she giggled she sounded the way Ove imagined champagne bubbles would have sounded if they were capable of laughter.
2. Show that the character wants to support their beloved in being the best version of themselves.
In Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, a young man named Tate teaches self-raised protagonist Kya to read, opening her mind to the science behind the marsh she loves. One day he brings her a wrapped gift—a second-hand Webster’s Dictionary—and tells her to look inside.
Tucked in the P section was a pelican feather, forget-me-not blossoms pressed between two pages of the Fs, a dried mushroom under M. So many treasures were stashed among the pages, the book would not completely close.
3. Show that the character can’t stop thinking of their beloved—even beyond death.
In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, protagonist Anne Elliot allowed her family to persuade her that the sailor she loved was not a prospect who could secure her future. When the story begins, she has been pining for him for almost eight years‚ so when they meet again, the stage is set for sparks to fly.
From their beginnings on the train in example #1, Ove and Sonja stay married almost four decades until Sonja dies. Six months later, at the opening of the novel, Ove is suicidally depressed; he still […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Ah, the dreaded cliché. It sneaks into our writing with nary a noise, and yet is received by readers with a resounding clunk.
Most writers go to great lengths to avoid them.
In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, on whose wings Janet Fitch’s debut White Oleander found its well-deserved audience, Fitch said she approached her work like a poet, replacing any combination of words that she’d ever heard before. While this is more effort than many of us are willing to expend, it makes sense from a business perspective. Why should a publisher pay a wordsmith to regurgitate combinations so recognizable that readers are numb to them? We need to do the work of creative writers and come up with word clusters that will snag the reader’s interest and inspire fresh thought.
But to sidestep clichés at all costs is to miss out on a handy tool that’s available to all writers. After all, when we need to drive home a nail, will we refuse the hammer just because it is a simple and easily recognized tool? Consider the following arguments in support of the lowly cliché.
1. Clichés are true. Why else would they be overused? Even the claim that “fiction writers make things up to find out what is true” may now be a cliché, but it rings the bell of truth loud and clear. (“Loud and clear”—I’m on a roll!)
2. Clichés make a convenient placeholder while drafting. If your first draft lacks sparkle due to an overuse of clichés, this simply proves their ubiquity: finding clichés conveniently lined up on the nearest shelf, your mind made good use of them while laying down your story. This is smart. Further innovation at this point would impede the story as it flows from mind to virgin page.
The time to replace worn-out phrases with more evocative language is in later drafts, as Fitch did, when you’re sure that sentence is needed. If the cliché conveys just the right meaning, try refreshing it with a twist. As you would with any edited prose, demand that your twisted cliché create voice, deepen characterization, and/or further plot.
Here’s what Mark Z. Danielewski did to spiff up his prose in an excerpt from the cult classic, House of Leaves. My guess is that this exchange between his narrator and the woman he just met began with inspiration from the Supremes hit, “(Whenever You’re Near) I Hear a Symphony.” (And let’s face it—any song Motown produced in the 60s is probably a cliché today).
“Thank you,” I said, thinking I should kneel.
“Thank you,” she insisted.
Those were the next two words she ever said to me, and wow, I don’t know why but her voice went off in my head like a symphony. A great symphony. A sweet symphony. A great-f***ing-sweet symphony. I don’t know what I’m saying. I know absolutely sh*t about symphonies.
I don’t know whether Danielewski wrote this way from the get-go or if it was in revision that he waxed symphonic. But it was entertaining, right? Even out of context, this riff perfectly evokes the effect this woman has had on the protagonist.
3. Clichés provide a recognizable jumping off point […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Thwump-thwump-thwump. The state police helicopter hovered low overhead. Its pilot radioed below that my husband, known to be drunk and armed, was nowhere in sight; the officer standing in the basement beside me was cleared to pick up my eight-year-old son and rush him down the hill to a waiting police car. My son was wearing shorts and the sight of his pale thigh pressed against the officer’s holstered handgun ended all denial: the peaceful farm life I’d thought I was leading had been swapped out for a surreal, high-stakes plot that would forever change me.
Even at this fraught moment, I was aware I’d become a character within the unfolding of a potentially powerful story. The events of my husband’s suicide standoff against a massive police presence on the day I’d asked him to move out had an arc of their own, and would one become the bones of a novel.
More often a writer finds herself in a situation that falls short of life-changing story, yet which still offers up dramatic or entertaining material. It’s the sort of thing you might tell the guy in line in front of you at the post office because you won’t have to cough up your heart to do so. He might chuckle and respond, “You should write a book.” So you try—and fail—because you don’t yet appreciate the difference between an anecdote and a story.
Here’s an anecdote. One morning, some dozen years ago, I threw my back out at the gym. I’d love to tell you that this was the result of an Olympic-level weightlifting mishap, but truth was, after working out, I’d bent over to pick up a scrap of paper that sent fire zapping down my spine, seizing every muscle in its path. The owner of the gym had to scrape me off the floor and drive me to my chiropractor for an emergency adjustment.
(I hear you saying, “Okay. And?”)
This will not a novel make. In that moment pain may have consumed my world—I could hardly breathe—but the sudden onset of back pain is exceedingly common among humans due to the stresses of gravity, postural deviations, and repetitive motions. The chiropractor did his thing, putting me on a roller table to loosen my muscles so he’d be able to set my spine to rights.
The effect an anecdote has, at best, is akin to the moral of an Aesop’s fable: “Let sleeping paper lie,” perhaps—or in the case of an anecdote I overheard in an actual post office line one time, after which a listener urged the raconteur to write a novel, “Don’t drop an extension ladder into a hole before measuring its depth if you want to see that ladder again.”
Many writers try to stretch anecdotes into novels, and then, sensing they’ve fallen short, hire developmental editors like me to make them publishable. The problem is, they haven’t yet found a story worth developing.
Is this an anecdote or a scene?
An anecdote is a simple retelling of something that happened. It is a self-contained unit (beginning—> middle—> it’s over) that puts forth a […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Seeking publication is often compared to the rigors of mountain climbing for good reason. The journey demands uncanny endurance, spiritual fortitude, and more rigor than you at first think.
Kelly Simmons (The Shortest Years), author of eight published novels, has said she wrote eight other manuscripts before selling one. Jenny Milchman, author of five published novels, wrote eight before her debut, Cover of Snow, won the Mary Higgins Clark Award for best suspense novel. The first novel that earned author Kelli Estes the offer of representation and then publication, The Girl Who Wrote in Silk, was her sixth completed manuscript, and it went on to become a USA Today bestseller. [I’m not outing anyone here—if you click on the links, you’ll see that these authors have written and spoken about their writing journeys in public.]
“Even though those first five will likely never see the light, they were necessary,” Estes said in an interview. “I consider that time to be my “apprenticeship” in writing because I learned so much from every manuscript and every writer and industry professional I came in contact with.”
My journey was just as long, but took a different route. My debut was only my second manuscript. But because I had no fiction credentials to speak of, I was convinced that my work as a dancer, choreographer, and dance critic gave me a relevant background that would help me sell The Art of Falling. My stubborn adherence to the notion meant that my debut’s journey was nine years long, from start to offer of representation.
We tend to forget the preponderance of intentional effort that goes into a writing career when a star like Sarah Penner blazes across our path. She quicky received offers of rep from five agents on her second manuscript, The Lost Apothecary, just four years after beginning her fiction-writing journey; that novel debuted at #7 on the New York Times hardcover list and is now in development as a TV series. That’s the stuff dreams are made of.
More common is a story like Sadeqa Johnson’s, whose novel The House of Eve, released this year, was billed as “an instant New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club pick.” Like most “overnight sensations,” Johnson didn’t get where she is today in one huge leap. Her success was a step up from a foundation already elevated by hard work, both as a creator and a businessperson. In a previous life as a public relations manager, she spent several years working with well-known authors—you may have heard of J.K. Rowling and Amy Tan—before becoming an author herself. Eve was her fifth published title and her third award-winning historical.
Instant success isn’t always a boon. It was eleven years after he started writing fiction that Oprah Winfrey chose Wally Lamb’s debut, She’s Come Undone, for her book club, rocketing that title and his follow-up, I Know This Much is True, to the #1 slot on the New York Times […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Over many years of attending writers’ conferences, I’ve heard agents share the opinion that a background in journalism is not necessarily a strength in a query letter. As a dance journalist whose intended debut novel was set in the dance world, I questioned this opinion. I thought of my background as a strength.
For two decades I’d been honing my professional writing game while accumulating bylines. I worked well with editors and copyeditors. Tracking down resources? Producing on a deadline? Writing tight? No problem. I’d developed an eye for relevant detail and I understood the value of exploring a story from all angles.
Besides, a legion of writers from Dickens and E.B. White to Stieg Larsson and Geraldine Brooks had parlayed their mad journalism skills into successful fiction careers. Geraldine Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March, said in a 2022 interview at the National Book Festival in Washington D.C. that she leaned on her experience as a journalist to help her meet the responsibility of conveying, through her historical fiction, “how the decisions that are made in foreign policy [here in Washington, D.C.] play out in the ordinary lives of people all over the world.” Where’s the problem in that?
It wasn’t until many years later, after evaluating novel manuscripts as a developmental editor, that commonalities among certain manuscripts made me see a background in journalism as a trip wire. It’s not that an agent or editor will turn away a former journalist, but that knowledge can forewarn them of predictable pitfalls.
Let’s look at a few.
Too much psychic distance
The problem: The story is reported from afar, as if looking down on the characters. This demonstrates a lack of understanding of the way perspective can drive story. In fiction, objectivity is not the point. Fiction readers want to understand the protagonist’s decidedly subjective take on the unfolding story as he negotiates obstacles and suffers setbacks while seeking a deeply desired goal. They want to feel the unwanted consequences of failure like a hot breath on their necks.
The fix: Take the camera out of the Goodyear blimp and install it in your protagonist’s mind, where we’ll gain access to the thoughts, feelings, sensations, beliefs, and experiences that drive his perspective.
Author goals at play
The problem: The former journalist wants to tell you about the characters, how their world works, and what brought them to this moment. When what the fiction reader wants is to experience how the characters’ choices, chosen setting, and story situation are driving the narrative.
The fix: Give your POV character a goal for each of their scenes, and let their choices in pursuit of it inform the relevance of what characteristics and setting details need to be brought forward. Character goals are always more compelling than author goals. The author telling you to buy what they’re selling can be met with “you can’t make me”; the character driven by desire, motivation, and desperation to avoid negative consequences to achieve his goal will be as hard to resist as a riptide.
Disordered paragraphing
The problem: Journalists learn the inverted triangle method of structuring a story. This […]
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From the moment a reader opens the cover of your book, she is looking for a protagonist to latch onto, a setting to sink into, and some clues as to the nature of the journey ahead. And whether or not this reader realizes it, knowing whose perspective will deliver the story will boost her ability to grasp its significance.
For writers hoping to explore many facets of a complex story, employing multiple third-person perspectives is a popular choice. By allowing the reader direct access to the inner thoughts of multiple characters, the author can clue the reader in on the train wreck to come while characters keep secrets, broker deals, and shift alliances.
Yet those same writers don’t always spend enough time figuring out how they will organize those multiple points of view so the reader can track them. Doing so is important. Assuming that omniscience allows you to dip into anyone’s perspective whenever you feel like it can result in “head hopping,” which refers to a fluid manner of accessing the thoughts and sensations of two or more point-of-view characters in one scene, one paragraph—or sometimes, even within the same sentence. This can leave the reader wrestling with unclear pronoun references at a time they hope to be learning what each character will add to the story.
Rather than provide the deep dive you were looking for, such brief POV dalliances can skip across the surface of your story, leaving conflicts underdeveloped—especially in an opening, when readers are trying to get to know the characters. For your sake and your readers’, it’s worth giving further consideration to how you’ll organize the perspectives through which you’ll tell your story.
Here are a few ways to do that.
1. Assign chapters
The easiest way to do organize multiple perspectives is to assign each POV character their own chapter. Each chapter could deliver a different point of view from the beginning, or you could just drop in an additional POV chapter when needed (for more on this technique, see my 2019 post about how Bryn Greenwood brilliantly pushed perspective to the max with sixteen POVs in her New York Times bestselling novel, All the Ugly and Wonderful Things). This will organize your approach even if its effect on your readers is subliminal.
At a writing retreat I attended while making final pass edits to The Far End of Happy, a bestselling author told me that the negative reviews for one of her novels were all from readers who were unclear as to which POV each chapter was being told from—despite her leaving copious clues. Since I was writing from the third-person points of view of three different women, this author advised me to stave off potential confusion by titling each chapter with the POV character’s name. I was lucky to trip across this advice—no author wants the hunt for a POV identity to pop the reader from the tension she’s worked hard to build.
2. Give your reader a break
A line break is another commonly accepted and easily recognizable way to signal a POV switch.
Let’s take a look at an excerpt from the 1978 novel Read More
photo adapted / Horia Varlan
A story launches when something happens to a character that lands him in a troubling predicament. Life as he knew it can no longer continue on in the same way. He needs to do something, and his progress toward his goal will be defined by a desire he hopes to achieve.
But lurking beneath his hopeful journey is the threat of engaging with circumstances he hopes to avoid. Those circumstances are what we call stakes.
Like electrified wires that guard the edges of your protagonist’s path—and which, after he passes, seem to grow closer to each other and strengthen behind him—the stakes for failure drive the protagonist ever forward. Why are such stakes necessary? Because when we humans decide that a goal is demanding too much of us, we can easily convince ourselves that we never really wanted to achieve that goal in the first place. The negative repercussions in those stakes remind the protagonist: Want to turn back? Zzzzt! Wrong answer.
Since in real life most of us have been socialized not to electrocute our friends if they stray from their goals, you have to have mad respect for a writer who is willing to be so harsh with characters they have come to love. But their stories will benefit, because strong stakes for failure can create a gripping read.
In every scene of your book, the point-of-view character should face negative consequences if he or she is not able to overcome the obstacles standing between them and the successful attainment of his scene goal. It isn’t enough for the reader to know of the menace that’s always lurking beneath the plot. Sometimes, the menace must gain the upper hand.
This is how readers will know that your protagonist’s striving matters.
Today I want to look at three key moments when engaging with the stakes will help shape your novel.
While forming the story goal
The power of an inciting incident is found in its mandate: the character must take action (create a story goal) in order to set things right, or else. If he fails to act, he’ll have to engage with highly undesirable consequences. Delay is not an option. He must move forward into the story.
As much as Dorothy might want to hang around and dance with the creepy-yet-colorful Lollipop Guild when she lands in Oz, L. Frank Baum made sure this was not an option. Dorothy’s house had landed on a wicked witch, whose ruby slippers had magically transferred to her feet. The Lollipop kids deem her a hero for killing the witch, but the deceased’s evil sister wants the shoes back—and Dorothy can’t get them off her feet. When she hears that the Wizard of Oz might be able to help her, she must follow the Yellow Brick Road to find him.
Introducing the witch early provides impulsion to Dorothy’s journey, but it also tells us something about her. She didn’t mean to kill the witch and she doesn’t want to mess with this one either. Now, with stakes as high as her physical death (and her little dog’s, too!), she wants to get […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
It is 2002 and I am sitting in a packed audience at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference listening to Margot Livesey read the first chapter from her work-in-progress, Banishing Verona. We are almost 30 minutes in, and although that’s long for a public reading, I am entranced.
So far, we’ve learned that a pregnant woman has shown up at the door of a home being renovated by Zeke, an autistic handyman. Claiming to be the niece of the house owner, this woman charms her way into the house, dons a pair of coveralls to earn Zeke’s trust, and eventually shares his bed. He has gotten up early to go out and get them breakfast, and because he has given her his only key, he has to climb back in through a window. As he returns to the bedroom, he decides that however stupid it will sound at this point, he is going to ask her name.
Livesey has me. I’m hanging on every word.
Then she reads:
The bed was unmade, empty and cold to the touch, the suitcases gone. At the foot of the bed the rug was rolled up, and spread-eagled on the bare wooden boards lay the coveralls, neatly buttoned, arms and legs stretched wide, like an empty person. Only when he knelt to pick them up did Zeke discover the three-inch nails that skewered the collar, pinned the cuffs and ankles to the floor.
What??? Judging by the audible gasp—followed by groans when Livesey then closed her folder—I wasn’t the only one in the room who had questions.
Conclusion #1: Don’t sate the audience; readings that raise questions earn readers.
Once I got home from the conference, I looked for that novel in every single bookstore I entered until 2004, when Banishing Verona finally came out.
I had a similar reaction when hearing Ann Patchett read from her then-newest, Bel Canto, at the same event. I leaned toward the woman beside me and whispered, “This reading is extraordinary.” She leaned back and said, “And this wasn’t even one of my favorite parts.” After the reading, I went right to the campus bookstore and bought the novel.
And here I am, still talking about both of those readings 20 years later.
Such can be the power of a public reading.
Conclusion #2: A memorable reading can result in sales—even if the author hasn’t yet finished writing the book.
The Sewanee Conference is big on readings by novelists, poets, playwrights, and short story writers; they have a space devoted to it that’s fully booked. I was surprised to see there was always an audience and I aimed to find out why. After listening to as many readings as possible over the course of the conference’s 12 days, I came to understand more about myself as a person, a reader, a listener, and a writer. I learned what kind of opening tends to beg my interest. What makes me laugh, what doesn’t. What can, in rather short order, move me to […]
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