I really can’t do a chapter. I haven’t gone over Elf Blood, that’s part of it. The other part is that I found the down-side of not taking decongestants. As in, by last night, any direction I moved my head in hurt. I’ve taken zyrtech and it’s helping some, but I suspect I have an infection and will need to see our family doctor before it’s fully resolved.
Meanwhile I’ve been noodling: How many of these things like POV violation, or the plot being “trite” or whatever do READERS care about?
Because it was an oligopsnoy, publishing needed to eliminate a great number of the suppliers, and thus came out with all sorts of rules, including, at a later date, “no first person.”
There were things like POV violations, for instance, which readers don’t care about, but writers and editors do, passionately.
And just saying “if it works as a reader” is a problem because as writers we have internalized what we were supposed to do, and we read like that.
But a lot of the new writers making it big are stomping all this under foot. So — what is good writing? Does anyone know? What rules do we follow as we head into the future?
Mad Genius Club 
40 responses to “At the risk of being run out of town”
Good writing entertains, does not sacrifice followability to “edginess” or being “ground breakingly literary,” and uses tricks in ways that make sense to the story. As far as PoV, if it is consistent and makes sense, then why not? (Although I agree with Marko Kloos and a few others that 2nd person singular, present tense probably should not be used unless you are writing a Twist-a-Plot (TM) book.) I do not care for constant cute asides or attempts to use current terms for older things (like the historian who talked about “fashion forward” members of Louis XIV’s court, and 18th century fashionistas.)
I read fiction to be entertained. To be pulled into a world not this one.
Example: With all the hoopla over the Hugos I down loaded a sample of the winner in the Novel category… OMG there was no anchor at all to help we visualize or understand what was going on. I’ll forgive lapse of passing or poor editing, that’s even if I notice, but I less forgiving on inconsistencies in charactor or plot that take me out of the story.
Minimize the things that will take me out of the story, and I’ll be happy.
Take care Sarah.
As for things “not to do in a story”, boring the reader should be high on the list.
A friend who took a writing seminar had POV explained to her as follows: The author is writing from Bob’s POV. Chris takes a sip of hot coffee. If the story is in Bob’s POV, he shouldn’t know that the coffee is hot (or tongue-burning, perhaps, to make it more difficult for Bob to tell).
So, here’s the question. If the reader is being told the coffee is hot, then doesn’t that mean the story is being told by an omniscient narrator? Only if the story was in first person would the tongue-burning coffee be illogical on its face. So, being told of the t-b coffee is somewhat akin to an oral rendition around the fireplace, a place where you can bug the storyteller. (“How hot was it, grandma?”)
I am a little crabby about this limitation because some of the charm of Georgette Heyer is that she talks about the other characters in a scene very intimately and amusingly. The observations are not obviously those of the POV character, yet no head hopping happens, no dizziness ensues, and the reader does not fall down. Likewise, another author’s caustic observations about James Taggart and Wesley Mouch are clearly independent of the POV character. Yet, strangely, it works.
This leads to the startling notion that if it worked before it could work again. Maybe it’s hard, and that’s why people stopped doing it. Then, it’s often good, if you are writing rules (and I know whereof I speak) to write a rule that encompasses things people are already doing.
Or, since that was way too long, what’s the difference between omniscient narrator and head hopping? And, don’t anyone say the former is ok and the latter isn’t. Even though it would be funny.
Omniscient Narrator: Somebody is telling the story and is not a character in the story who is able to “know” what all the characters are thinking and feeling.
Head Hopping: We see the story from the point of view of the characters in the story (including the character’s thoughts & feelings) with the author switching the point of view character from time to time.
The major difference between the two is that Omniscient Narrator allows the author to give the reader information that none of the characters know or could know.
IMO Head Hopping can work when the author makes it clear that he’s “switching POV” and sticks to a single point of view for several paragraphs.
Sarah’s use of different point of views in different chapters is IMO a good use of Head Hopping.
Oh, ho! Info-sharing. There is a useful distinction.
Otherwise, I feel tremendously dense. Those look the same. At one point I thought head hopping had to be just omniscient done poorly, and thus earned the pejorative “head hopping.”
For a more recent example, Michael Flynn’s Wreck of the River of Stars starts (3d person) inside the head of someone who isn’t with us but for a few pages. Then, IIRC, the POV switches in the same scene. I admit to being confused because when I read it I knew about this rule. Then I got used to the tactic.
As an aside, I hadn’t thought that changes in POV in different chapters or scenes counted as head hopping?
Head Hopping is basically multiple people “telling” the story. I think “Head Hopping” is the term used when the author blows it. [Wink]
And Bob could know that the coffee is hot from external clues (steam, other guy acting like he burned his tongue).
I usually think of head-hopping as switching POV without a clear break… with a clear break such as a scene break it is just switching POV.
Easy way to tell the difference is that with head hopping, the story should normally be told as first person, while omniscient should be third person.
I like to know everything that’s going on, so I tend to prefer omniscient, but good first person, with or without head hopping, works for me, too.
I’ve had the PoV character comment on another person’s reaction, “Still a little hot, huh?” after the guy’s fanning his tongue and cussing, for example. I the work just finished (WJF) has a character who describes everything by smell, sound, or feel, and so she cues into vocal tone to pick up emotion and what people are thinking about, even tough she’s not “inside their head.” ( I think that was the hardest character for me to write thus far.)
That makes sense. The POV character is able to see the fanning and hear the cussing.
I have this very important character in my series that I want to use as a POV character, but three books in, haven’t been able to succeed.
It too four books in to conquer my problem with female POV’s. That was tough. But add feline to the mix? Tough. Haven’t been able to do it, and it’s too late now. The first book has been edited, working on cover, etc.
But I so wanted to have Sylvie’s point of view as she slunk through the underbrush, and jumped on the werewolf’s back, and crushing his skull.
About a year ago, I saw a U tube video where a young male jaguar swims across a still bit of water, leaps out onto a sand bar, and crushes a caymen’s skull, then carries the corpse off. I wanted to use that, and incorporated that into my series this last winter. But I haven’t been able to do a POV for my shape changing female jag character.
I would find the hot coffee thing extremely annoying. There’s all sorts of ways that a person knows that someone else’s coffee is hot. If it’s from Bob’s POV and the description is of Chris’s internal landscape, that would be different. “Chris sipped his scalding coffee and thought about the phone call he’d got the night before.” OTOH, from Bob’s POV… “Chris’s about face made sense when Bob saw the brunette behind the counter, looking so much like Chris’s ex that Bob had to look twice. Chris was still hurting after four years.” Obviously that’s a picture of Chris’s interior that Bob can’t actually *know*… but actual human people make those sorts of determinations and judgments about others all the time. Disallowing empathy would be unnatural. Of course Bob knows that the coffee is hot and that Chris suffered a painful breakup.
Which also introduces the fabulous tool of being able to lie… Bob has been explaining Chris’s erratic behavior as a sore heart and giving him space for four years, not pressing him, but in truth something else entirely is going on. It wasn’t the brunette behind the counter at all, but the odd little man in a raincoat and fedora behind the potted palm that had Chris bolting from the lobby.
Head-hopping, in my mind, is doing the sort of close limited 3rd where Bob can’t know that Chris’s coffee is hot, so we skip from Bob to Chris and back again, usually getting actual thoughts. “Bob slid a sideways look at Chris as he sipped his coffee and wondered when Chris would first mention Susan or if they could please discuss something manly for once, like fishing. Chris saw the brunette behind the counter and set his cup down before he risked spilling the tepid brew.”
Omniscient would be something closer to (and I sucketh at omni), “Friday noon Bob and Chris met at their favorite coffee shop, Bob resenting the good manners that didn’t allow him to cancel and Chris, as usual, ready to unload yet another week’s worth of post-breakup drama.”
Ha. I volunteer if you ever want a beta reader.
They do head hop ALL THE TIME in Romance.
I thought that was head bopping?
And I wish they wouldn’t. Oh, for a certain story it’s fun and interesting and appropriate that we “see” that the heroine thinks one thing and the hero things another. (This is one of the funner things about the early Honor Harrington books… you see the decision making on the one side, deciding what the enemy *might* be intending, and then you see the actual real plans on the other side and they’re actually trying to get away to warn the invading fleet *not* to invade… and then they get blown up and the invasion begins… excellent use of multiple POVs.) But most of the time in romance, all it means when both primary person’s thoughts and feelings are revealed is that there is never any true uncertainty. I seem to remember romances that were 100% from her point of view (and a couple very rare ones that were 100% from his!) where they never knew how the other person felt *at all* and neither did you. So when they confessed their love *your* heart was in your throat, instead of thinking “oh fer pities sake, will you doofuses just get together already?”
Heyer does it. And I bet you don’t notice….
In Kiwi, I had chosen to stick to one character’s head (Alex) and so the one time I wanted to make a statement about Aniti’s reaction to something, it had to be written as Alex taking a guess at her reasoning. I couldn’t let the story get inside her head, (although she was doing a fine job of getting inside his). I think some people who read it missed out on the implications, and the fact that it made Alex an unreliable narrator as well, since his mind was being messed with the whole time.
Georgette Heyer was exactly the author who leapt to mind with regard to shifting POV, who did it well, and enhanced the story. She even did it with minor characters, who knew the main characters well enough to comment and elucidate their, well…character. I didn’t know it was “wrong” until my publisher got a hold of my story.
Now the first “Castle” book jumped pov so often, without any finesse, that I couldn’t even finish it. The folks who write the show are much better than whoever turned out the NIkki Heat book.
I’m still not sure if I agree with the no-head-hopping rule carte blance… As a reader, if it’s well done, it’s well done, and allows me to relate to the characters as I do to my friends, sharing their different perspectives on the same conversation/event. But as a writer, I find it hard to shake off the lesson of the editor’s woodshed. I find myself making more disciplined pov choices by asking, “who’s got the most at stake in this scene? Who is the reader most invested in?” I’ve re-written several scenes on this basis, and always been happier with the result.
We are in the process of grinding the traditional publishing houses beneath the wheels of our chariots. The lamentations of their auditors shall be music to our ears.
There is but one rule, the golden one, them that has the gold makes the rules.
Screw all the pompous ass hat critics and their oh so literary pretensions. The only true measure of an author’s worth is green and folds nicely, hopefully into a wad that would choke a horse.
Now that does present us with a dilemma. How to explain all that very popular extremely remunerative dreck that sells so disgustingly well? We have to reluctantly and sadly accept the simple fact that good writing isn’t enough and in truth isn’t even the most important factor.
What then is? IMNSHO literary stardom rests in through luck or design tapping into the whim of the public. Take an interesting or clever idea, hit the public with it at exactly the right time, and you collect a bunchaton of coin. Mistime, or try to copy someone else’s discovery and you quickly turn yourself into a copycat and hack, something most movie and TV executives never seem to be able to wrap their pointy little heads around in the different yet somewhat related venue of visual media.
Now we do see authors fortunate enough to find that attractive niche then coast on their laurels, milk the public perception for all it’s worth. Sort of explains what were excellent series done to death and destruction from not knowing when to quit. But the public strangely enough has an amazing inertia of loyalty once it’s been won. I will leave as an exercise for the student to list at least a handful of authors who fit that category quite nicely.
So, what to do? The only real answer is to polish your craft, produce the best stories your intellect and life experience can manage, and throw them out there for cruel fate to do what it will. Write a good and entertaining story and you’ll do OK, and you never know when some scrap of an idea crawls out of your brain and manages to blossom into the latest new thing, darling of the buying public.
Learning the rules that the current buying editors are looking for really isn’t a bad idea. But, to paraphase Larry Correia, story should come first.
Of course if you ignore so many of the rules that your story is unreadable, that’s not going to work.
A perfect job of following the rules? Louis L’Amour really didn’t, but he was maybe America’s leading story teller in the 60’s and 70’s.
I could mention a few other others that weren’t considered “great writers”, but were successful. But I think the point’s been made.
Always like to remind myself that Willy the Shake was in truth writing the raunchy gory equivalent of modern soap opera, and that most of his audience got in for a single old English penny, or triple that for a balcony seat.
Point being that he was writing sensational stuff for mass entertainment, not as most English professors would have us believe, to create great literature.
Even his sonnets were, as far as I can make out, written as highly commercial exercises in brownnosing possible patrons. You know, grant applications.
I suspect a lot of the “rules” were, as the pirates are wont to say, really more guidelines 😉 As in, you will be *less likely* to screw up in a noticeable way if you avoid $_WritingBadThing. I had this epiphany reading a beginning-to-good writer’s work, which featured head-hopping/POV violation. He did it not to be edgy or avant-garde, but because he didn’t know *how* to indicate a third character’s reactions and feelings without being in the character’s head. As in TXRed’s example above, that’s just one of the tools of the trade you need to learn. In real life, you know how to tell when someone says “everything is JUST FINE”, and it isn’t. Learning how to describe that on the page is the key. (In the hot coffee example, I would add things like eyes widening, face turning red, etc to the cussing and tongue fanning) So then head-hopping becomes a sign of a beginning writer, even though we all agree a *good* writer can pull it off.
Your Mileage, Variance, Probability of.
Yes I think that is exactly it. Some POV options are easier to do so it makes sense to stick to them until you have the expereince to know when to not stick with them. For example, the first person narrative is harder because you have to deal with only getting what that character experiences/can know about, hence it becomes easier for a reader to be jarred out of his trance when the writer screws it up. But I think many of the books I rememebr best are in fact first person narrated so it probably makes sense to do it when you have the technical writing bits sorted out.
I wrote my first short story in first person PoV. That was just how the story worked best.
Tastes differ, and good enough writing can cover a multitude of ills.
Two obvious sources outside the New York oligopsnoy are fanfic, and Korean/Japanese/Chinese etc… media.
One of my peeves is an excess of numbers that don’t add to the story. Like might be the case for a story that talks about the tolerances, surface finish, and quality control for ammunition.
MaxFic’s “Naruto: The Gamer Files” seems to fairly well represent something where this problem isn’t so bad as to make it unreadable, but is still significant enough that I’m sometimes annoyed, and probably wouldn’t want to reread the parts I’ve already read. While rgm0005’s “The Games We Play”, another The Gamer fanfic, crossing RWBY instead of Naruto, uses the stat blocks with a lighter hand. I’m fairly interested in seeing more of the second story.
As for extreme length, POV weirdness, and other things go, I’m very found of the “Maybe I’m A Lion” Prototype/KnK story.
Some of the audience for fanfic is new enough to reading that they might be easily satisfied by something that hits the right buttons, and some are jaded enough that they would like to see all sorts of bizarre things in a story.
I second Uncle Lar:
“There is but one rule, the golden one, them that has the gold makes the rules. Screw all the pompous ass hat critics and their oh so literary pretensions. The only true measure of an author’s worth is green and folds nicely, hopefully into a wad that would choke a horse.”
There’s also the timeless wisdom expressed by the late Douglas Bader in approximately these words (sources differ):
“Rules exist for the guidance of wise men and the blind obedience of fools”.
None of us here are fools (except to the glittery hoo-ha brigade, and their judgment is… ah… shall we say ‘impaired’ by the mental, emotional and spiritual baggage they drag around behind them like an anchor?)
Thanks for the support Peter, but I really could have gone all day without the visual of a glittery hoo-ha anchor. The mind boggles.
Who says I’m not a fool!
Mark Twain. Everything written before him was highly formal, and frankly, for me it’s a real pain to read that stuff. “Huckleberry Finn” manages to be great propaganda, satire, and a bodacious good read, and if there is a literary convention of the time that it urinateth not upon, I know not of it.
Sarah, I hear you. It’s a fight between meds that mess with the writing, and for me, meds that let you breathe and get a good night’s sleep.
For loosened rules . . . at some point you hit the “irritating” level and pull the reader out of the story. Then it’s a short trip to the “never got around to finishing the last book, so what’s the point of buying the next.” So I stick to the rules, in as much as I notice, and hope my transgressions are overlooked by the readers, even though an editor might zoom in on the errors.
I think the “no first person” rule was like speed limits. Most people only obey in the known radar trap areas. Now we’re speed ticket exempt, and drive at whatever speed feels right for the conditions.
Is there a list of these rules?
in the old how to write books? Sure.
I find all these “rules for writing” quite amusing. There was a discussion on one of the Sherlock Holmes groups just in the last few days, where they took the ACD stories and compared them against Elmore Leonard’s rules for writing well. (Don’t use adverbs. Don’t use any dialogue tag except “said.” Don’t use prologues. Et cetera.) Doyle failed miserably. I note that Doyle would have failed the “no first person rule” too. As would Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Thomas Mallory, and let us not even mention James Joyce. Oh my, these classics of literature must not be very good writing. *SNORT*
Well, James Joyce is very much not my taste.
My favorite Elmore Leonard rule: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”