Close third - the cheating POV

Writing is tough.

Even when you've got your plot figured out, your characters, the arcs, all that good stuff.  How do you actually tell the story?

First person?  Third person?  The rarely-used second person?

And beyond that: past tense?  Present tense?

These things can greatly affect the way in which your text is received, the way the human brain processes and interprets the words.  The way the reader experiences them.

And if you're like me, you fall back on the easy one.  Close third.


Actually, I'll admit that I'm exaggerating here for effect.  Someone a while back wanted me to write this blog post, and I finally am getting around to it now.  If I get any comments below, they are sure to be angry ones!  But let me explain.

Third person is more... removed.  Obviously.  You - the writer - are not sitting in the character's head the way you are in first person, where everything is a direct translation of the character's thoughts.  Instead, you are the narrator, describing what the character sees, thinks and feels.

But "close" third: that is somewhat different.  In this POV, the writer is close enough to the character's head that he/she almost conveys it in first person - but not quite.

In essence, it's a way to get the benefits of first person POV without actually having to mess with the

headache that brings with it.  It's cheating.

No, no it's not really cheating.  It's my favorite POV to use - and usually to read, truth be told.  But it sure is easier than being restricted to first person, and can convey more immediacy and relatability than a strict third can.

Plus (and here's where I really rely on the crutch) it allows me the freedom (which I abuse mercilessly) to use my natural tendency toward lengthy, wordy sentences in my role as narrator - while also writing punchy, snappy text in character as the protagonist!

Best of both worlds!

Except in rewrites I always have to tone down this disparity.  At times I can even tell on reading back when I stopped writing for one day and took it up again the next.  One day I may have been extra flowery, the next super-slangy.  Editing is partially about fixing this.

But I still have that leeway.  That flexibility to incorporate my writerly inclinations with my character's more off-the-cuff, stream-of-consciousness way of thinking.

Is that a cheat?  It is the way I do it.

And then I have to fix it.

Killing Your Babies With the Bathwater

For writers, the phrase "kill your babies" is something we are used to hearing over and over.

No, not because we're part of some freaky, Manson-like cult.  This piece of advice is to remind us that sometimes an idea, a character, a sub-plot, can be holding back the work as a whole but we are too fond of it to (as Elsa would urge us) let it go.

A lot of the time you have to "kill your babies".  Throw out the trash that's hurting your fiction, regardless of how much you might have grown attached to it.

And yet, a part of me resists that advice with all of my strength.  Is it just my petty attachment to my (obviously wonderful) ideas getting in my way?  Or is there something wrong with the famous advice?

Probably the former, I'll admit, but allow me to explore this idea somewhat on the page here.  You see, if a writer is unduly attached to a particular aspect of his or her writing, perhaps that "baby" is not holding the story back but is the one part giving it life.

Look, I understand the aphorism.  And I'm sure most of the time it's right.  But sometimes - just sometimes - we might find ourselves throwing out that baby with the bathwater.  What was intended to save the story, by cutting out the parts fighting against it, instead gets rid of the very heart that beat at the center.

A (possibly poor) example, if you will.  Many years ago I was (for the sake of writing practice) attempting to condense five books of David Eddings' "The Belgariad" into one screenplay of 120 pages.

Madness, sure, but it was an exercise.  As I pared it down, and down, and down, it resembled the source material less and less.  Fine then, I said, let's change it to an original work instead, if I'm altering it to that extent anyway.

So I turned this into that, nipping and tucking and snipping until I had a story that resembled "The Belgariad" no more than, say, "The Lord of the Rings".

And yet.  And yet...  One scene remained.  The part where Garion and Ce'Nedra bathe together in the stream.  I couldn't get rid of it, I loved it too much.  But with that piece intact, it was very clearly a "rip-off" of "the Belgariad".  No matter the name changes, the source material shone through.

So the scene had to go.  But I couldn't.  That one scene (small as it is) in one of the 5 books was everything to me.  The lynchpin, the centerpiece, the pivot on which the entire story turned.  To remove that was to pluck the heart from its chest Temple of Doom style, and I could not do it.

Thus I abandoned the screenplay entirely.  Leaving in the bathing scene would make it too reliant on the source material, taking it out killed the entire story stone dead.

For me, in that instance, the baby that needed killing was the story.  It couldn't be done.

I faced a similar issue with "Straw Soldiers" - my first novel.  A mistake (I'll admit it) early on hampered the experience of the book.  And yet getting rid of it would destroy the presentation and development of the main character in the book.

So vital was this element (an element which held back the book quite obviously) that I strongly considered changing the entire premise of the six-book series to accommodate it, to make it no longer a flaw.

When I realized just what I was proposing, I decided this was a baby that could not be killed.  Yes, keeping it in hampered the impact of the novel - I know it did - but taking it out would be worse.  So much worse.

Is killing your babies a good piece of advice?  I'm sure it is.  Just, when you're working on that, make sure that what you're excising is not the heart and soul of your book, your screenplay, your poem.  Maybe sometimes, it's the bathwater that needs changing instead.

My Journey to Self-Publishing

How does one get started on self-publishing?  Well, I'm sure there are many different paths to that.  Sit down around the campfire, folks, and hearken to my own tale.

It all started with reading; it usually does.

Unfortunately, I shall have to be somewhat vague here as there is still the possibility of something happening with this property, but suffice for now to say that there was an incredibly fun series that I was a big fan of.  It was a pulp-style, 70s-set, series of e-book-only novellas starring an entertaining character in a crazy world where it seemed like anything could happen.

They were fantastic, and a lot of fun, but unfortunately a lack of interest caused the series to come to a close eventually.  This disappointed me, but it was not unforeseen.  A niche product like that will be limited in its appeal, but if it - by chance - finds that target audience then it can really take off.  This one didn't (quite).

Some time later, I (who have always been a writer since my youth, even if I had never sought out publishing in any way before) contacted the creator of this series and wondered if he would be amenable to me sending a spec manuscript over to him.  I knew the likelihood of the character making a return was low, but I figured I may as well give it a shot - I had a couple of vague ideas for what I would like to do if given the chance.

To my surprise, the creator messaged me, saying that he was actually considering a hardcopy collected version of the stories, and would like some new novellas to be included so as to make the paper version appealing even to those who already owned the stories electronically.  And he was willing to take a look at my submission!

Energized by the possibility of being published even by a small press like this one (especially one whose works I had been such a fan of) I set to writing straight away, using the concept that most interested me out of the few I had conceived.  I finished a 20,000 word story quite quickly, and sent this first draft off to the man in charge.

And this is where things fell apart.  For various reasons, the project was now not a priority in any way - and although he was enthusiastic about the parts of my story that he read, he never finished it or got back to me with any notes.  The book was dead in the water, and took my story with it.

(Or so it seemed: there remains the possibility - I am told - that the book could still happen, so watch this space for news.)

I had fun writing it, though.  A lot of fun.  Indeed, I had so many ideas for subsequent stories in this property that I would have loved to have taken over publishing the stories myself - even at a schedule of one novella per month (I thought).  Despite having had a couple of ideas for novels in my head for a few years (which will be written... eventually) I had never seriously tried to write something for publishing.  Or self-publishing.  But now...

The existing IP was something out of my hands; I knew this.  But what if I invented my own pulp novella series, that I could put out there myself.  Would such a thing be possible?

Indeed it was (a quick bit of internet searching later on showed me) and I spent the idle hours of one day at my job thinking about the possibilities.  Immediately, my love of old-fashioned pulp SF made me think of a concept involving a Victorian gentleman having adventures in outer space.  Perhaps it could be called Josiah Kensington: Space Adventurer?  Or maybe The Star Journeys of Dr Jeremiah Fotherington-Smythe?

Very quickly, this became The Star Travels of Dr. Jeremiah Fothering-Smythe, and I set about giving myself a target of 18,000-22,000 words per story, at a rate of one per month.  I would give it six months to have a chance of catching on, of finding an audience, and if after that it was going nowhere then I would end it.

Anyway, fast forward to six months later (during which I had also written a couple of other novellas or short stories) I completed the series with Book 6: "The Free World".  As expected, it had not found its audience and, much as I adored the character and his world, I wrapped up the story.  I had ideas about where the story could go later on, should it unexpectedly find a late following, but for now it was done.  (A paperback and eBook collected version was later released.)

Quite disheartened, I decided to treat all of the previous time as warm-up.  Like it didn't happen.  I wanted not to think of that as wasted effort, but instead as little more than rehearsal.  The real writing, the real career, would start now.

Looking for something that could theoretically be commercial but that I would still be just as in love with, I devised a series of Young Adult novels called The Sleepwar Saga.  In it, a group of six teenagers who don't know each other would find that, when they slept, they were together in another part of the country.  Fighting evil, questioning their reality, learning to work together.

It took some 8 months before the final draft of Straw Soldiers was ready, but it is the work I am most proud of, and I'm ecstatic about it and the rest of the series to come.  Whether this find its audience or not I cannot yet say, but even if it does not I will be thrilled to write the rest of the installments, so in love am I with this series and these characters.

Other books fight for idea space in my head, however.  There's the fun Lawyers vs Zombies: The Legal Dead which I can't quite forget about, ever.  The Universe Device was actually plotted out to a great degree and ready to be written, until I decided that I needed more novels under my belt before I could attempt that one.  (The structure is more complex than I feel I can do justice to yet.)

I also have a Christian thriller in mind, a sci-fi murder mystery, and a few horror shorts that I began but lost track of when I didn't feel I was quite hitting the mark.  (I'll get back to them later.)

I love writing.  I love self-publishing.  I hope someday I can focus on it as a career, instead of that thing that takes up all of my time when I'm not at my "real" job.

But it never would have happened if I hadn't been inspired to contact the creator of a book series I loved and asked about writing for his characters.  I'm so glad I did.



Some links for people looking into self-publishing:
Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing
CreateSpace for the paperback version
Draft2Digital or Smashwords (which I haven't used, but are important if you don't want to be Kindle-exclusive)

Defining Characters by Groups

A little trick I taught myself when writing screenplays was not to rely on defining a character as himself or herself, but to define each person in relation to the others.

To some extent, this applies to prose as well - not as much to POV characters as to others, but even then it can be helpful.

But let me back up a little.

In print, the reader has access to the POV characters' innermost thoughts and feelings. What this means is that it is not only their actions that define them, but what goes on inside their heads.

On screen, this is not so.  Nor is it for characters on the page whose thoughts the reader is not privy to.  What does this mean for the writer?  Allow me to explain my thoughts.

No matter what work you put into a character's design - their backstory - what matters to the reader is what they see.  If the things you invented do not impact the story, the reader sees none of it and your detailed character bio results in nothing but a 2D stereotype that the eye merely glances over and forgets.

An example: your main characters stop at a sandwich shop three days a week for lunch.  You have a beautiful bio drawn up for the guy behind the counter.  He fought in Operation: Iraqi Freedom - two tours - but when he came back he was a changed man, tortured, haunted, and his wife left him.  Since then, he has become a Buddhist and is seeking inner peace and enlightenment.  His father back in Idaho is dying of cancer, but the sandwich man can't leave his job to go and take care of Dad because he needs the money.

How does this manifest on the page?  "Here's your sandwiches, ladies.  Enjoy!"

That's it.  None of the backstory you devised, the intricate personality you worked out in detail, shows itself to the reader, because the story being told has nothing to do with any of it.  In practical terms, he is not any of those things in your bio: he's just the guy who says, "Enjoy."

So what if you define him in relation to other characters.  Maybe he's like the Soup Nazi and is combative with your leads.  Or perhaps he owns the sandwich place with his sister who is a flake and sleeping on his couch, and so every time we are in the sandwich shop there is some nice conflict happening between them.

Even if it's just a little color, it is something.  He's no longer just the guy who hands your MCs their sandwiches; he is a character.

Your other characters can benefit too; it doesn't have to be just bit-parters.  If you have decided that Jack's younger brother was bitten by a poisonous spider and almost died while vacationing in Brazil, unless your plot is about spiders then the most we will see (unless you shoehorn in some dialogue to explain it - which is itself problematic) is Jack staring suspiciously at a spider in the corner of the room.  Not compelling drama.

So start again.  Make Jack a control freak, and Betty a free spirit who is offended by structure.  Together they spark, and will create drama simply from the way they respond to every situation.  This particular example is a cliche, but there's a reason for that: it's a good one.

The point, though, is that while backstory is not a bad thing, if it doesn't show up on the page then it isn't a good thing either.  Define your characters against one another, make it so that the way they behave is in direct contrast to everyone else.  How they respond should not only be about the events of their past, but about how other characters will respond to the same stimuli.

If you want drama, if you want entertaining characters, if you want depth, then that bio sheet alone is probably worthless.  Think about they way every character relates to, and contrasts with, the others.  Know their alliances, their clashes, their romances.  Define the group together, so you know they complement and contrast.

Make good drama that doesn't just exist in theory.  Then write it.

Perfection Minus One

Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott once wrote an article called "Crap Plus One".

In it, they expounded that one of the problems with screenwriters trying to make it in the industry is seeing a terrible movie that got made, and thinking: "Well, I can do better than that!"

The problem is that a bad movie can happen for many reasons, but Hollywood is filled with amazing unmade scripts, and anyone aiming for the level of "crap plus one" will end up with a massively substandard script that will get them nowhere.

The same is true for self-publishers like me.  It is so easy to see a bunch of lousy indie books that have had unexpected success, and to think: "Well, I can do better than that!"

Success happens for a bunch of coincidental and unfathomable reasons.  Sure, it is very possible for a bad book to make a lot of money.  But more often than not (much more often) a bad book will just sit there making nothing very much at all.

You need to aim for the best you can possibly manage.  Only by writing a truly excellent book can you be reasonably in with a shot at hitting that magic cross-section of quality and marketability and chance that creates the hit novel.

But (and here's where I get controversial) there's just as much of a problem the other way.  Aiming for "perfection minus one" will lead to nothing but frustration and eventually giving up.  Unless you're a truly gifted author of the like the world rarely sees, your work will never live up to the standard you demand of yourself if you want "perfection minus one".

The number one reason for my despondency and desire to pack it all in is my failure to write prose the way Vladimir Nabokov did.  Or to create whimsical characters as well as Paul Magrs does.  Or construct immersive, enthralling worlds the way George R.R. Martin does.

I can't do it.  I want to, but it doesn't happen.  And when I refuse to accept anything less than the soaring standards of the world's best writers, I become so fed up with the level of my own talent that I almost decide to just give it all up.  Do something else, something less demanding.  Something where I don't feel like such a freaking failure every single day.

Ben Burtt, sound designer and sometime editor of the Star Wars movies had a saying posted at his work area: "Films aren't released, they escape."  A movie is never 'done'.  It is put out into theaters only because the release date is up and the filmmakers have no other choice.  They would fiddle with it endlessly if given half a chance.

Aim for the best that you personally can possibly do.  Accept your limits - strive to break them - and don't hate yourself when you fail to live up to impossible standards.  Improve every day.  Reach for the sky; just stay grounded.

Be amazing.  But know that you will never be the best, and that's okay.  'Great' is a lot better than 'decent' - even if it isn't quite 'perfect'.

Memorable Supporting Characters

I don't mean necessarily your host of secondary characters.  Sure, you want them to be memorable and full of personality too, but this article is about something else.

I'm talking about the little guys.  The two-liners.  The people that fill out the world your protagonist inhabits.  In most cases, you're going to have a lot of bit-parters who don't have much to say.  But if none of them are interesting to read about, all of those small lines here and there add up to an awful lot of space being filled up by stuff that nobody cares about.

And it's not even a matter of creating a fleshed-out role for each of these either.  Let's face it: no matter how detailed a bio sheet you create for these guys, if the person just sits in an office and contributes an expository line once every hundred pages, that background you invented for them just isn't going to come across to the reader.  At all.

Something I've been thinking about lately are colorful characters in some of my favorite TV shows that were invented just to be these amusing bit-part characters who instantly draw your attention even if they have only one line of dialogue (or no lines).

I think about Starburns on Community.  Just a guy who shaves his sideburns into star-shapes to give himself a visual hook.  Nothing else, but he became a recurring guest character just on the strength of the kooky appeal of this gimmick.

Or the first full-length episode of Nickelodeon classic The Adventures of Pete & Pete.  One of the Petes encounters an antagonistic bully by the name of "Open Face", who only eats open-faced sandwiches.  His cohorts with the meager dialogue include "Gravy Breath" and "Butt-Stripe" (whose bike saddle leaves an identifiable mark).

These are the kind of quirky, colorful extras that can really bring your story to life.  I'm not saying your Steve Jacobs and Jill Watsons have no place - but when all of your characters are such lifeless, dull creations, much of the story's atmosphere is robbed of color.

So yeah.  Why not have that man who points your protagonist in the right direction be a purple-haired punk in an Edwardian suit?  Why not have that office co-worker be nicknamed "The Voice" because she spends all day rehearsing to herself for that reality-show audition she has coming up?  A kid with a raccoon for a pet, a man who only wears fur coats, a teenage girl who only wears teal...

Be creative.  Let your minor characters pack a quick punch.  Fill out your world with people that lend it life, not a thin fog of characterless line-feeders.

Entertainment is your job, writers.  Do that!

Book 2: The Difficult Second Album

Just as with musicians, the sophomore release is in some ways the hardest.

It's partly the artist to blame, and partly the audience.  The first book/album is the culmination of possibly years of creative percolating.  After that, it's time to just get the next product in the assembly line out, and it's likely to be a letdown.

Why is the audience to blame?  Well, in some ways the expectation of something just as amazing as the first installment is impossible to meet.  The consumer is not privy to the long history that first work had prior to its release, and can't fully accept that the sequel is simply not going to have the same creative weight behind it.

But let's face it: it's mostly on us.  The writer, the musician, the movie director.  If we experience the old Sophomore Slump it's because we haven't put the work in that we needed to.

Yeah, it's difficult.  You want any second installment to be the same, but different.  In exactly the right ratio.

It's very easy to make the second book too similar to the first.  I call this the "Chamber of Secrets" effect.  An installment that serves only to reinforce what the author intends to be the "pattern" of the series, and not to add anything artistically new to the pot.  It has a purpose - to say "this is what the series is" - but to the reader this is merely dead space.

And yet, going the other way is even worse.  When the second book is too different to the first, the series loses all cohesion and you lose all of the readers who wanted more of the kind of thing they liked so much about that initial book.

There's a line there.  A very narrow, fuzzy, hard-to-find line.  And that's where I'm walking right now, plotting and inventing, trying my darndest to pull the story of Book 2 out of the mire of swirling possibilities it exists in currently.

If you fail at the second lap, you've lost the race.  This is no time to get complacent.  This, right here, this is the biggest challenge.  And I have to be ready for it.

Putting Together the Puzzle Pieces

I've talked before about being a "Plotter".  I don't write without knowing everything that's going to happen in the story (but leaving room for surprises to happen along the way).

So what does that look like?  Well, for me, in many ways it's like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

First, you have to decide what difficulty level you're going for, what length of project.  Is it a 200-piece puzzle, or a 550-piece?  Then: is it the picture of puppies, the sailboat, or the bridge of the Enterprise?

After that is the hardest part: starting.  You see, it's not just a puzzle.  It's a puzzle that has been knocked over.

Because you don't have any of the pieces to begin with.  Here and there on the floor you can see a couple of puzzle pieces, but on their own you have no idea what they are or how they fit into the bigger picture.  But following the trail of pieces leads you to more, and eventually you find the motherload: the stash of all the puzzle pieces somewhere underneath the coach.

Of course, the work isn't over yet.  Oh no.  You have to sort through the pieces, find which goes where - tossing out any pieces that you think belong to another puzzle altogether.

It's hard work, this, but satisfying.  You get to see the picture come together.  And it's a fascinating experience, at times, to find that what you thought was a bird's eye is actually a black shirt button, and that edge piece is really an odd-shaped center-piece.

But once the picture is complete, you can start the actual writing, knowing in full what you're going for, what the actual story is.  Because if a character isn't heading for a specific destination, they really aren't headed anywhere at all.

Right now, in planning Book 2 of The Sleepwar Saga, I'm at the early piece-collecting stage.  I have a handful of disparate segments, but I'm just on the verge of them leading me to the main pile of spilled pieces.

And soon will begin the main planning of the book.  And then, the writing.  I just can't write about the basket of puppies without seeing what the completed jigsaw puzzle looks like in the first place - writing about a few loose puzzle pieces just leaves me with a mess of purposeless prose.

My Struggle With Adverbs

Hello.

My name is Doug, and I am an addict.

It's been four days since my last adverb.  Already I find my fingers itchy, desperate to type that beautiful "-ly" at the end of of a word.

Adverbs are not inherently bad; I know this.  Used in moderation they are descriptive and poetic.  But I know I can never use just one.

Sure, it starts with a "softly" or a "wryly".  But before you know it the adverbs are spilling off of the screen and I wake up in a pile of my own vomit, staring at the page I have written in my stupor:

"Hi there," said Fred breezily.
"Hello," Jennifer replied flatly.
Frowning, Fred delicately inquired, "Is everything okay?"
She sighed.  "I guess," Jennifer answered despondently.

Friends don't let friends abuse adverbs.  I need your help.

It's a struggle, but if I can get through today without an adverb, I know maybe I can do the same again tomorrow.  And then the next day.  And the next.

One sentence at a time, my friends.  One sentence at a time...

Independent Authors Cooperative Press

Hey guys.

If you've noticed a couple of new logos on the blog, it's because I have joined a new group called the Independent Authors Cooperative Press.

Basically, it's a group of indie authors like myself, who are banding together to support one another - both in a creative sense and a marketing one.  It should, in theory, allow us to increase our visibility, as well as improve our skills in writing.

I'm very happy to be in on the ground floor of this venture, and hope that everyone involved in it commits totally to the concept, as it could really be a great thing for everyone.

Of course, the actual writing still needs to be done alone - which reminds me:  better get back to it.