A Ramble on Point of View ...

Point of View (POV or PV) is something a lot of beginning writers don't understand. As a manuscript appraiser and editorial consultant, it is one of the most common newbie writer mistakes - I think, because until you start writing, you don't even realise that there is such a thing as POV.

I used to do Editorial Consultancies for our state writers centre. These were 1.5 hour long sessions, where I read the person's work beforehand and then talked them through writing craft issues, made suggestions as to groups they could join, answered their questions about the industry etc. One person I worked with had 11 POV changes between 3 characters in 4 pages. And some of these POV changes were within a single paragraph. (Warning, extreme Head Hopping). So I spent the hour and a half explaining about:

When to change POV - when you want to reveal something specific.
How to change POV - preferably at a scene or chapter break. But if you do it mid scene, telegraph it by saying Character B felt ... As soon as you use a verb like 'felt' the reader knows you are in that character's POV.
How many POVs to use - Not too many or you dilute the narrative drive. (Of course if you are George RR Martin, it doesn't seem to matter. LOL).

When I wrote the King Rolen's Kin trilogy, I stuck to three POVs because I wanted the narrative to revolve tightly around those three characters. But there are many well known writers who don't follow these guidelines. Nora Roberts (a best seller) head hops all over the place and her readers love her. Either they don't notice, or it doesn't worry them, or the trade off is that they feel connected to the characters and swept along by the narrative.

What triggered this post was a Bernard Cornwall (another best seller) book set in the fourteenth century. I enjoy Cornwall's books. But I could not switch off the internal editor because he was head hopping all over the place. Again, I think his reader's don't mind because he delivers a ripping yarn. The character went from one confrontation to the next at break neck speed. The good guys are good (but not too good) and the bad guys are really bad, even if they believed they were doing the right thing.

That's the thing about POV, it can take you right into the mind of the villain and reveal not only his motivation, but his justification. I like to write what I call Deep POV. Imagine writing in first person, that immediacy and intimacy, but doing it from third person. That's what I try to achieve.

Currently, I'm working on book two of The Outcast Chronicles. I have four POVs. I needed the four character POVs because I needed to interweave four narrative threads. Because each book is around 150,000 words I need to keep track of what has happened in each scene, whose POV the scene is in and what page numbers it covers. So this is what I do, I colour code each POV.

This way I can see at a glance, how much time each character is getting on centre stage. Since I am slightly obssessive and suffer from synaesthesia, I colour code according to personality, because colours have personalities for me. (If the colour I choose for the character isn't quite right, it feels like a badly fitted coat).

By writing a quick line about the scene, I jog my memory. Then, if I get a sudden inspiration to add one sentence that plants a clue for a revelation 400 pages later, I can go to exactly the right scene in the right book and slip the clue in, without trawling through scene after scene trying to find the right spot.

Colour coding POVs also helps because, before I hand in the books, I do a read-through, following each indvidual character's narrative, to make sure that their story arc is satisfying. By colour coding their POV scenes, I can spot them at a glance. Being naturally lazy, this is very satisfying.

These are my little tricks when writing. What are your little quirks?

Just a conventional thing.

"Squids in Space" or "talking cabbages".

Yes that's sf, according to the public pronouncements of one of the darlings of the literary world -- who often writes what one could - to avoid argument - call speculative fiction set in an imaginary future. Absolutely not 'Science Fiction', which could never fit those parameters. Not exactly plausible or containing much that could be called great science, but definitely without a hint of extraterrestrial cephlopod (which of course obligatorily occurs in all 'Science Fiction', except for those books that have talking cabbages. Or both). (I can actually only think of two 'squid in space' books - one which I will avoid naming 'cause I didn't like it much, and the other, Mother of Demons, certainly better constructed, better science and with a very sociological slant - better than anything I've read out of modern literature for some time. And yes, I do read some. I learn. I try to harvest from other genres. There is something of value in all of them.) On deep thought, there is something of a pervasive note of used brassica about the non-cephalopod stuff - I am not sure if those noises were 'speech', per se... ah well. Anyway: What brought this to mind was a lady participating in a writer's group I belong to. Now she's intelligent, she has an attractive natural voice to her writing, a chatty, personal style. She has a good story to tell.

Short sections of the book she's trying to work on read very well.

But go beyond the 1-2 paragraph limit and you become hopelessly confused and eye-glaze.

The reason for this came out in about the first thirty seconds of conversation. "I don't actually read much."

On following this up it turned out that she'd read occassional magazines since leaving school, which was probably the last time she'd actually read an entire book. And those were not things she'd found entertaining. Now I'm an appalling teacher, as I am still learning myself. But I absorb a little by imitation of good examples, which is why I try to read something of everything, and work out just what the author is doing. This dear lady had her experience of magazines (ergo some good paragraphs) and high-school English essay-writing to go on.
She has, in other words, no idea of the conventions which have evolved from generations of the art of writing a story so that audiences 1)follow it. 2)enjoy it.
Now, all these are not 'rules' - they get broken and books still sell, still are loved. On rare occassions not knowing them may result in something fresh and new. But generally these conventions (and they vary from genre to genre) exist for one simple reason - to make the reading experience better and faster for readers.
For a simple example: if you are writing third person there are conventions governing the point of veiw. You can only write from one point of veiw (know what is going on in one character's head) at a time, without a clear and distinct 'hand over'. So my wannabe, not knowing this, had 4 points of veiw, within the protagonist's own head - which were not divided in any obvious way, and several other walk in characters, all talking, and all telling us (the reader) what they thought when they said that. The dialogue was good... the result... I had no idea just what went on there. So to make up an example:

"Jane you're being a fool," she reasoned.
"I have to be." There was no give that attitude.
"She could be right," I tried to mediate with them.
Fred put his head around the door to speak to me. "Time to go," he said. He thought Jane was flipping out...
Henry was sitting in the truck in a really bad mood, thinking about his wife in Pennsylvania. He grunted at Fred and Jane.


This is a simplified version of what I am talking about, which sounded like five people, but was actually three. And as more and more characters arrived and each spoke as the point of veiw character, I became hopelessly utterly lost. If I'd bought the book, I'd have been mad and TBAR -ed it. What? Oh TBAR. 'Throw book across room.' It's something 'everyone' knows... a convention on the meaning.

The author needed to have the POV (Point of Veiw) convention explained to her. The purpose of those three *** or blank line had just not registered back at school. Once it was shown to her (in one of those things she'd not read much of, called a 'novel' which was intended to be read for pleasure) the section improved vastly.
She's a quick learner, and will get there, but it makes thing very hard for her.

The trouble is, that's only the start. I don't actually think anyone has codified the conventions ('cause they are not rules) that help to make reading easier and more pleasant and effortless. They change and evolve, but readers learn to read comfortably within them. For this reason you have to learn them the hard way, by reading and absorbing. By learning that no, instrospection mid-action will not work.

The same thing, of course, occurs at a genre level. It helps to make books flow, and it helps to make the subtext far, far deeper, because you work on the basis of common knowledge and don't have to repeat that. 'Everyone' - well, everyone who reads sf, knows what FTL travel is, and what implies. Everyone knows the 'laws of robotics'. Everyone knows what a Waldo is. What a tractor is. And that is barely the start of our list of shared terms and background that form the conventions of sf.

If you've ever bothered to read HG Wells or Jules Verne... even aside from the dated language, you'll soon realise just how clunky sf without the conventions is. Of course for the non-sf reader without the shared background, it might make more sense. If you want modern versions of the same but without quite the skill or story-telling, try cephlopod free stuff. The cabbage stench is your imagination. And that is what you get for not reading in the genre you're trying to write in. Perhaps as an outsider, you'd learn just what needs to be explained so that newcomers can enjoy the books, and the established audience don't think you're an incompetant idiot.

So that was my bag for tonight. If you're writing for an audience used to reading, you need to write in ways which they accept and understand - or at least not stretch them too far too fast.
What are the conventions of writing novels (so they are easily followed, and entertaining) that you have picked up on? I've offered a couple of mine.

And what is it about sf that sets it apart: what are the things we assume are common knowledge? FTL, Waldos, the three laws of robotics, tractors... what others? And am I right in assuming that 'everyone' knows what they are, and probably where they came from.

Oh and can anyone think of a talking cabbage book? The best I could think of were the Kanten in Brin's Uplift books, which are more like talking broccolli

Being the Evil Overlord

Two weeks back I promised a piece on writing the Evil Overlord from the Evil Overlord's point of view - specifically, a character who is not merely opposed to the hero's goals, but is actively, deliberately evil. This is a heck of a lot more difficult than you'd think, not least because many of us were raised in an environment where no-one truly believes in evil.

Unfortunately, there's no shortage of examples of people who not only know damn well that what they're doing is evil, they choose to do it anyway. Usually the emergence of someone like this is accompanied by flurries of excuses ranging from the banal - "His mother dressed him funny" - to the bewildered - "But... he seemed so normal." That, or the all-purpose, "He's insane" comes out, allowing people to slide back into comfortable normality and forget that yes, evil really does exist. After all, there are plenty of insane people, and plenty of people whose mother dressed them funny, and even insane people whose mother dressed them funny, and very few of them are evil.

Mostly, they're rational, normal-seeming people, with one exception: I have never yet seen evidence of a truly evil person who does not consider his (or her, although so far most of them have been male) desires and needs more important than anyone or anything else.

Okay, so having got the generalities down - I'm not going into psychological diagnoses, since the goal is to write someone like this convincingly, not perform remote psychology - how do you write someone like this? What are their motivations, their goals?

In a word, power.

Everything I have seen and read indicates that an evil person always wants some kind of power. This doesn't necessarily mean political power, but it always means the ability to control what people do. For the purposes of this post, I'm going to work with the fantasy standard of the Evil Overlord ruling a large chunk of the landscape and trying to get hold of the rest. I'll even throw in all the usual cliches: the dark beasts that ravage the countryside, the armies of ferocious monsters, the works.

Okay, so. You can't convincingly write someone's point of view unless you understand how they think, and you can't do that without becoming them, in a sense - which is why I describe it as channeling the character. This is why some authors can do a wonderful build-up with a shadowy, distant evil, but as soon as said evil is brought into the open, it turns out to be a nonentity that leaves readers wondering why people spent so much of the book frightened of it. It's also why others never bring the evil on-stage at all, or simply opt not to have evil.

If you need the Evil Overlord, though, here are some ways to make him convincingly evil. First, you need to decide whether he's a pragmatist or an idealist. Yes, evil can be idealist. There is no rule that says ideals have to be good: as a rough guide, if it claims that any group of humanity is in any way inherently of less worth than any other group of humanity, it's probably not a good one (this is distinct from the achievements or actions of those groups - it's talking about the value of people as fellow human beings and nothing more or less). From "People with blue eyes are less human than people with brown eyes", the steps to "People with blue eyes aren't really human" and from there to "talking animals", "beasts", and finally, "need to be exterminated" aren't really all that large. (Some interesting commentary on this point can be found over at http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2010/03/29/the-man-in-the-mirror/)

An idealist Evil Overlord is likely to be utterly certain that his purpose in life is to guide people to the Truth, even if he has to kill them to do it. His Truth will include a perfect world, and an enemy group that isn't really human. It doesn't matter what the enemy group is: there has to be one to provide an external unifying force and a reason why the world isn't already perfect. Usually he will portray himself as an almost godlike figure leading the chosen few to paradise - and in fantasy, he may well be a godlike figure.

If he is able to empathize with others - which is possible - he will empathize with them no more than normal people empathize with animals, at best. Regardless, he will take intense, sometimes even sexual pleasure in the knowledge that their lives are entirely in his control. Their knowledge that he controls them and that they have no escape merely increases his pleasure. Should they fail to worship him appropriately, he will lash out with what seems disproportionate rage: disagreement, however mild, brings the same response. His will and his alone is the only thing that matters. If reality fails to meet his expectations, then reality is at fault, and must be changed to match his desires. Killing hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people is at best a minor inconvenience - because he is the only person that matters. Everyone else is by definition of lesser value, and therefore expendable.

The true believer Evil Overlord is often intensely driven, using his kingdom as a proxy for his own status. Nothing less than conquest of everyone and everything that dares not to worship him will satisfy him - and probably not even that, although there aren't any examples of anyone getting quite that far to extrapolate from.

It's not possible to coexist with him: the mere existence of something outside his control and his ideals is sufficient reason to destroy it. No matter what ethical framework he uses, it does not apply to the enemy - and anything he does not control is the enemy. To the true believer Evil Overlord, "If you're not with me, you're against me," is the cry of the wuss. His belief is "If you don't worship me, I have to destroy you."

He won't think much, if at all, of his family. Every real-world case of this I'm aware of the family includes an absent father, a disinterested or marginalized mother, and minimal input or abuse from the rest of any extended family. That doesn't mean that everyone with this background will become an Evil Overlord - it does mean that the character flaws typical of a true believer Evil Overlord are not mitigated in any way. I know people who have had to remind their children that just because other people are stupid (these are children whose intelligence is literally unmeasurable - while IQ is a reasonable 'rule of thumb' measure of computing capacity and strengths in particular processing areas (spatial vs verbal vs logic and so forth), the IQ of someone who aces the test is unmeasurable. Someone who almost aces it is also off the chart - they aren't accurate more than a couple of standard deviations off the test norm, so when a 13 year old aces or nearly aces a test normed so that most adults will correctly answer approximately 25% of the questions, well... You might get one or two of those in a generation, and as far as that kid is concerned, everyone else in the world is dumb. If the kid is also short on empathy, you've got the makings of everyone's nightmare, the genius Evil Overlord. Fortunately, most people at that level don't want anything to do with other people - they're like Leonard of Quirm and will be perfectly happy with unlimited time and space to play with ideas) doesn't mean they aren't human.

If he's married, chances are it's mostly a marriage of convenience or politics, and any children he has are mostly raised by his wife (obviously if the Evil Overlord is an Evil Overlady, it's her children raised by her husband - it's just that almost all the examples in fiction and life are male). He will probably see them more as symbols and tools for his goals than as people to love, and if they disagree with him, he will see that as betrayal, and act accordingly.

He will be reasonably intelligent and perceptive - able to see the weaknesses of the people around him and use them to advance himself and his cause (though the true believer Evil Overlord says otherwise it's always in that order). Often the cause he follows will be something that has broad appeal, particularly to those without power when he begins his campaign. No matter which society you look at, those who have power are always a small minority. Something that attracts even a moderate percentage of everyone else will be able to topple or white-ant the ruling system, especially when led by an Evil Overlord who doesn't care who he sacrifices in the process. They can always become martyrs to inspire the next generation and remind them how much they owe to him.

Perhaps the biggest flaw of this kind of Evil Overlord (who is probably more difficult to portray well than the pragmatic sort who will use any ideology needed to gain and keep power) is that he can't understand why anyone would disagree with him. He knows that he's doing evil things but his goal justifies that - so any disagreement with him must be disagreement with his goal which is, to him, by-definition-good. Anything is justified in pursuit of it, so anything that is in the way must be The Enemy and destroyed. He thinks in broad sweeps of generalization: in his world there are no individuals other than he himself.

Is there enough to portray a believable true believer Evil Overlord yet? It's not a task for the faint-hearted. Writing them from the inside means thinking like them, albeit for a limited time, and that always leaves me feeling like I need to shower from the inside out. I'm still not sure whether I feel dirtier because being in the Evil Overlord's mind doesn't sicken and disgust me, or because I've been in the Evil Overlord's mind. It's a dark place to be.

Of course, me being me and having the hotline to evil bastard central in my head, a lot of my heroes tend to true believer Evil Overlord types with enough overrides that they don't or won't take that last step to true evil, and hover just this side of it in what turns into a quest for redemption. This may be why I can write the ones who are evil.

I'd give examples of well-written true-believer Evil Overlords, but right now I can't actually think of any. I can't even think of any good examples of the pragmatic type. Pratchett has quite a few characters who come close, like Lord Hong (pragmatic) and of course Lord Vetinari (also pragmatic and oddly likeable, which kind of disqualifies him). Who can give examples of really well written evil characters who take point of view?

Antagonist Viewpoint

How far should a writer journey into an antagonist’s mind? How far should they go in presenting this on the page?

I don’t think anyone is going to dispute that fact we need to know the antagonist’s backstory and motivations in order to construct the story. But how much to present?

I personally love writers who give you the full viewpoint of the bad guy. That was one of my frustrations with writers such as Tolkien, where the ultimate bad guy remains little more than a dark cloud on the horizon over Mordor, and the menace of a floating eye glimpsed for a moment from an old stone chair. Can you imagine LoR where you get to see inside Sauron’s mind?

David Gemmell loved to get inside the villain’s head. I always enjoyed his exploration of the bad guys thinking process, where evil acts were often rationalized as the sensible choices made by any rational man -- how there was no good or evil, no ultimate morality, only power and weakness, and those with the strength to do what the weak feared. The sort of reasoning that appeals to psychopaths. Great stuff.

For me it always heightened the final conflict, to see the good guy and the bad guy coming at each other, both inside their minds, and also in the story. An inevitable pair of tangents that had to intersect spectacularly. And when the bad guy took his last gasp and uttered a few fateful words – you knew exactly where these sat in terms of his thinking.

I tend to always give my bad guys a good slice of PoV, not too much -- usually around 5% of the story – but a like to get inside their heads. I like to think this increases the sense of menace and raises the stakes for the good guy.

What are your thoughts on writing the antagonist’s viewpoint? Is the Evil Overlord better as an unknowable mystery? Or do you like to see the dark mechanics of his twisted mind?

SuperGlue on the toilet seat

....Or you will not move from this place without acetone or surgery or possibly both.

It’s been my problem (metaphorically speaking, so far) with various books. And they -- and I -- might still be in that place had it not been for intervention. For me, at least problem occurs if and when I feel the book is... um... in the toilet.

And many of the same practical solutions apply. For me at least, being stuck is usually a sign that the inner editor is unhappy. He does not see _why_ the characters -- who are well developed individuals with lives and minds of their own would even contemplate going on with this ridiculous charade-of-a-plot. You are stuck there, you total plonker, until you do something about it (and in future make sure you examine the situation before you stick).

The first step is to call for help. If I’m co-authoring that’s easy enough and Eric is good plot structure. I’ve found this is -in my case - my subconscious telling me something is wrong and missing. It’s often (from close up) very hard to see. Wood from the trees stuff, if you know what I mean. You - the author - know what is going on, you know the background, you know where it’s all going. That ‘this is confusing’ and ‘huh?’from another reader have been great at helping to choose the direction to pull free. Sometimes it’s as simple as inserting another point of veiw.

If that fails, or only helps a little by showing the problem but not what to about it: The second step is apply acetone. And the acetone of story writing is stuff called whyo which is gathered by unscrupulous dealers from small children who exude the stuff every time they open their little mouths. If they take too much the children are doomed to become non-reading-square-eyes, but, despite its rather unsavoury origins it is of vast value to me anyway. Because being stuck very often means I have failed to establish sufficient motive for the character to take the actions required for the plot. Asking why (and sometimes hows and whats) the character will take the steps in the direction I want them to go, often means that I need to go back and insert these motivations... and hey presto, I’m free.

But sometimes that doesn’t even work. On a couple of occasions -- and it is usually quite specific -- the way forward is surgery. This can be minor or drastic. But it usually means at a decision point in the story a little earlier, you took your character/s down the wrong path. Cut. Move off down the other tangent. (And this is usually accompanied by a feeling of freedom and relief, as well as considerable pain at losing what could be some good prose.)

The final possibility is just to pull the seat off and move on to get help. Seriously. Just jump ahead to a scene where you are free again. Very often the intermediate bit will resolve itself.

Ok - anyone else got any other suggestions to free the stuck writer? Back off with that dynamite, Bob!

Oh BTW - Amazon is shipping DRAGON'S RING. There is no SuperGlue in it at all.

Reverse Sexism

My sons loved the Tank Girl movie and had no trouble identifying with a female protagonist.


On my ROR blog we've been talking about the whole gender thing, male authors writing female characters, female writers writing from a male Point of View (POV). Can men write convincing female protagonists? Is it reverse sexism to say they can't? Can women write believable male protagonists? This raises some interesting questions. Does a mystery writer have to kill someone to write a great serial killer? The Unapologetically Female Blog quotes Karen Healey. She provides a list of things to watch out for when writing female characters, if you're a male. I particularly liked this one. Is she the only girl in the group?

‘Is her position within an ensemble cast "the girl"? As in, you have "geeky guy", "strong guy", "goofy guy" and "the girl"?

Having only one female within a group of characters sends the message that male is the norm, and that female is something else.’

At the Lipstick Chronicles they've invited a guest blogger, a male by the name of Jason Starr, who's written a female protagonist and apparently done it well. He says:

‘In THE FOLLOWER, I enjoyed getting into Katie's head, exploring the mind set of a young woman in her early twenties who's just moved to Manhattan. It was also fascinating for me to look at my male characters from the female point of view. The guys in the books have images of themselves thar are so wildly different from how Katie sees them, that this led to a lot of opportunity for humor and satire. And, I must admit, I enjoyed writing sex scenes from the female point of view. It was a blast putting myself in that position. Er, um, so to speak.’

The Modern Matriach quotes Heilbrum :

'... suggests that female authors often use male narrators or incorporate a more masculine voice in an effort to avoid the stigma of writing “chic lit”. Some even attempt to conceal their gender using initials and anomalous pen names:'

And if you are really worried that your POV character may not read as if they are the gender you meant them to be try using the Gender Genie at the Book Blog. Just paste in some text from your manuscript and see what the result is.

Bad characterisation is going to throw your reader out of the story, whether the protagonist is male, female or an alien from Alpha Centauri. Readers of SF and F must be elastically minded to accept the concepts that are tropes of our genre. It shouldn't worry them if the narrator is an AI without gender.

One of the things I find annoying about the English language is the lack of an intelligent non-gender specific pronoun. Everyone has to be either 'she' or 'he'. 'It' lacks intelligences and makes it hard to empathise with the character. I have come across stories where the writer invented a non-gender specific pronoun, but this seemed mannered and tended to throw me out of the story. I once came across a story where the writer managed to give all the characters non-gender specific names and structured the sentences so that they avoided pronouns. This made for slightly clumsy writing. But it was interesting how the visual pictures of the characters changed as I read, depending on what they were doing and saying.

In the book I'm currently writing one of the characters is a gender-less creature that is a human gone wrong, a Twisted. In the chapter that are told from this character's POV I use first person. In all the other chapters I use third person, he/she, depending on whether I have a male or female protagonist. The tricky part comes when the threads of the narrative join up and the Twisted meets the other two characters. Then I have to juggle the sentence structures so that I avoid using a pronoun for the Twisted character, while in the POV of the male or female protagonist. So you see writers of SF and Fantasy have a whole lot more to worry about than whether they can write a convincing male or female protagonist.

Which male writers create great female characters and conversely, which female authors write convincing male characters?

Point of View/ View Point

Sarah's post on VP got me thinking.

I read an awesome chapter on VP in Ursula Le Guin's 'Steering the Craft'. She wrote the one scene from several different points of view and I don't mean simply first person, third person and omniscient. I came away feeling I had really grasped the nuances of VP.

I thoroughly enjoyed George RR Martin's Fire and Ice, even though there were so many narrative threads that the story spread out like a carpet and the momentum slowed down to a crawl. As I remember, he kept it simple sticking to third person POV for each short chapter.

Completely different, but also enjoyable, was Jim Butcher's 'Storm Front', written from the first person VP of a wizard detective.

There was one fantasy book I read which used a mix of first person narrative and third person. All scenes from one certain character's VP were told in first person. Looking back, I could not see why the author had done this. Why not use two third person VPs or two first person VPs? Neither of these would have worried me. But why use intimate first person VP with one narrative and deep third person with the other?

Currently I'm writing my King Rolen's Kin fantasies for Solaris. I've deliberately kept it simple with only three narrative VPs, and no change of VP within a scene. But I like to embed assumptions in the narrative while in a particular POV, so that only later the reader realises that the character has misinterpreted something.

I suspect all writers are frustrated actors, immersing themselves in a character, then filtering events in their invented world through that character.

Cheers, R.