Back when I was still working on my first novel, I mentioned it to a bibliophile acquaintance who had been in academia for many years. She cheerfully turned to the woman next to her and said, “Did you hear that? Pat’s working on a novel! And it’s
Read more →Head-hopping is a mildly pejorative term for a writing technique that is usually summed up as “switching viewpoints within a scene,” followed by the strong recommendation that one should never, ever do it. The reasons given for never, ever head-hopping range from the blanket assertion that it
Read more →Voice and viewpoint are inseparable, no matter what viewpoint the writer is using. This is true of all viewpoints to some extent, but it is most evident in first person. In first person, the viewpoint character is the putative storyteller, so that character’s voice is the narrative
Read more →Creating a novel – or anything, really – is like taking a trip around the world; no matter how much preparation you’ve done or how carefully you’ve planned things, the places you visit will be strange and surprising. Things will happen that you didn’t anticipate – some
Read more →In one sense, all narrators are unreliable. Whether first-person, tight-third, or omniscient, every narrator (like every human being) has his, her, or its own worldview and personal biases that affect the way they tell the story. Even if all of them were totally objective, the author, also
Read more →As I said last week, multiple viewpoint is most commonly used these days for writing ensemble cast or braided plot novels, and for these, one usually ends up with a more-or-less balanced word count for each POV character. The most obvious case of this is the alternating-viewpoint
Read more →Let me start by defining “multiple viewpoint.” A multiple-viewpoint story is one in which the scenes, chapters, or sections are written either from the point of view of different characters, or using different types of viewpoint (e.g. first person for the first scene/section/chapter, tight-third for the second),
Read more →Picking a viewpoint character seems to be one of those things that writers either have no trouble with at all, or else struggle with for weeks and/or multiple drafts. It seems to be a particular problem for people who are writing multiple-viewpoint structures, where there are several
Read more →So, you have a story in which you have two characters in a scene, and each of them has information that you want your reader to know, and which you think (at least initially) that you can only let the reader know by being in that character’s
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