Writers in the Storm

by James R. Preston

First person is alive and well in the twenty-first century.

For those of you who are newer writers, I'll start off with a brief review of the four types of Point of View with some examples of first person POV, historical and modern, as well as the limitations (myths) — perceived and real — of first person. And finally, a trip into uncharted territory where we look at the most modern iteration of first person. 

Defining Point of View 

Image by Leon_Ting from Pixabay

“You talkin’ to me?” Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver fame stood in front of the mirror and asked that over and over, and it’s a question you’ll have to consider for your story: Who does the talking?

Who tells your story? Well, you do, of course but there are at least four major ways of speaking to your readers. They’re easy to tell apart because of the pronouns.

• First Person — usually, but not always, your protagonist tells the story. “I suspected she was trouble the minute she walked into my seedy office, reached into her purse and pulled out a large, rusty machete.”

• Second person — The pronoun is “you.” Second person is rarely used for fiction, but fairly common in nonfiction, particularly self-help books. “You must always watch out for hostile women with large handbags.”

• Third person — the pronouns are “he,” “she,” “it,” and “they.” “She looked at the woman with the rusty knife and said, ‘Put the knife down before I have to hurt you.’”

There are two flavors of third person — limited and omniscient.

In the first case you follow only one character around, describing what they see and what they think about it. “She looked at the other woman and said, ‘Put the knife down before I have to hurt you.’ She knew she could get to the loaded Glock 14 in its holster hidden under her desk, but she wondered — was she prepared to shoot?”

Using third person omniscient we also look inside the head of the blonde with the machete.

“The only thing she could think of was that she had a chipped nail. Oh, well. The machete would distract the other woman from the bad manicure.”

This example illustrates not only third person omniscient but also a trap you want to avoid: getting inside too many characters’ heads in the same scene. For more on what is called “head-hopping” use the Search box. Several Writers in the Storm contributors have posted excellent essays on the topic. 

I’ve read that editors don’t like first person. Maybe that's true, but they sure buy a lot of it. This POV goes back a long way — all the way to Moby Dick — and continues to draw in readers. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, author of The Martian, is one of the best (IMHO), This recent best-selling novel is in first person. 

Does the narrator have to be the protagonist for first person?  No. Usually they are, but remember Dr. Watson, and the narrator of Stephen King’s brilliant Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption are not the main characters.

Myths About First Person

Myth #1:

Once you’ve picked first person you must stick to it all the way through.

Nope. It is true that most first-person stories stay that way from beginning to end, but that’s not a rule. Faulkner uses multiple narrators in The Sound and the Fury. Think of Stephen King’s Christine, where the first third of the book is the protagonist talking, then the middle veers off and follows several characters, and the last part is first person again. So, it can be done, but as I type those words, I think it’s one of those “Don’t try this at home,” things.  King is unquestionably some kind of mutant genius; he made it work, but I don’t think I could. 

Myth #2:  

First person is so confining. I’d like to use it but I feel like it’s a straightjacket.

Well, yes. Following one person around for 100,000 words can be a bit claustrophobic, but there are alternatives. Slipping in a journal entry or an email that your hero finds, allows another voice. And of course, dialog unstraps that straightjacket.

Myth #3:

Serious literary books are never first person.

I am a confirmed genre writer, about as far from literary as possible, but I would suggest The Henna Artist by Alia Joshi, as thoughtful and well-written a first person story as any I’ve read in years. (Full disclosure: I haven’t finished it, but, wow, this woman can write!)

Picking a Point of View

And now for the most important question:

How do you choose the POV for your story?

I could offer a bunch of questions to ask yourself like:

• How long the story will be?
• How many important characters are there who want to talk? And so on.

I’ve got a simpler way to at least get an idea — just look at your bookshelves.

Do you like huge novels with a hundred major and minor characters? If James Clavell’s Noble House is one of your favorite books, you probably lean toward third person. 

Or do you love fast-paced thrillers like James Lee Burke’s Another Kind of Eden, where the hero tells you what happened? Then first person may well be for you.

Kids Today

I’ve been thinking about this for quite a while, and it jumped out at me watching the Olympics, where the announcer said that 3x3 basketball had been invented for young people with short attention spans.

Give me a break. Old people have been complaining about kids since Plato. The generation gap is the theme of “A Hard Day’s Night.”

Modern kids’ attention spans are the same as yours and mine. I know because they love first person stories. Long, complex, first person stories.

I give you the uncharted territory of computer games. There are a lot of them, but Halo is the example I’ll use because I’ve played it (with a lot of help from a twenty-something gamer friend). It’s called a First Person Shooter (FPS) and if you think all computer games are simply running and shooting monsters, think again.

In a FPS you actually look out through the eyes of your character. It’s as if you were inside Sam Spade’s head — literally — watching as the events of The Maltese Falcon unfold. And if you talk to gamers like I do, you will hear over and over what makes a good game.

Not graphics.

Not weapons.

Not slimy aliens.

Its story. One common denominator between almost every award-winning, best-selling computer game is the tale it tells. You’ve got to have a good, complex, story with complex characters (the artificial intelligence named “Cortana” in Halo comes to mind) if you want to find an audience.

Halo is set in the far future, where a super soldier called the Master Chief is created — think Steve Rogers being rebuilt into Captain America — and then later put into cryogenic storage.

Hundreds of years after that he’s thawed out because humanity is fighting some nasty aliens called the Covenant. Then a really nasty alien parasite called the Flood attacks both Covenant and humanity, which results in an uneasy truce because the Flood eats anything — human, alien, pets, you name it. Master Chief makes friends with a Covenant alien, all the while knowing that someday he might have to kill him. It’s way, way more than running and shooting despite the FPS categorization.

It’s a story, one that you see literally through the eyes of the Master Chief.

Story is what has made this game and its sequels bestsellers. It doesn’t look like a novel, but it has chapters, dialog, characters you root for, and ethical decisions that have consequences.

Attention span? I’ll give you attention span.

Another twenty-something gamer friend got a new game — the story is too complicated to go into here, but it’s post-apocalypse, set in the subways under Moscow — and got to the end after seventeen hours straight. That’s right. You start at 6:00 pm and at 6:00 am you’re going strong.

I’ll close by adding a word to your vocabulary. When my friend was guiding me through Halo, much of our dialogue was,

“James, look behind you!”

“What?”

“Too late!”

In gamer talk, he was my Sherpa, like Tenzing and Sir Edmund Hillary. It’s called Sherpa-ing.

Side note on Sherpa-ing... That’s what Writers in the Storm does. We Sherpa new writers and each other as we navigate the landscape of the writing world.

Fun suggestion: Find a gamer and ask them if they’ve Sherpa’d anybody lately. They’ll be impressed.

Do some research. Look into games like Dead Space, or my personal favorite, Half Life. Arma III is excellent, but I advise against playing this one if it’s your first game — it’s hard! All these games have great stories. I’m not listing some others that my friends don’t play because “the stories suck.” Those developers needed better writers. Hint, hint.

Experiencing first person in this new world might inform your own writing, or at least you’ll have something to talk to twenty-somethings about. (If you are a twenty-something, you probably already know all this.)

Homework

Search Writers in the Storm for Point of View. There’s a wealth of information.

For games, check out www.steam.com.

Ok, it’s your turn. Tell us what point of view you used in your current manuscript and why you chose it. Have you ever had to change your POV part way through the book?

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About James

James R. Preston is the author of the multiple-award-winning Surf City Mysteries. He is currently at work on the sixth, called Remains To Be Seen. His most recent works are Crashpad and Buzzkill, two historical novellas set in the 1960’s at Cal State Long Beach. Kirkus Reviews called Buzzkill “A historical thriller enriched by characters who sparkle and refuse to be forgotten.”

His webpage is www.jamesrpreston.com. He can be reached at james@jamesrpreston.com.

Top image is a Semmick photo via Shutterstock.

By Janice Hardy (@Janice_Hardy)

When your technical writing skills are at a professional level, but you're still not getting bites from agents, editors (or readers if you self-publish), it's time to look at the story itself.

One of the more frustrating aspects of being an author is the sheer unfairness of publishing. There’s a strange and unfathomable ratio between good writing and good storytelling that sends some manuscripts to the reject pile and others to the bestseller list.

And nobody knows what that ratio is—worse, it’s different for each person, and even each genre.

“Great writing” isn’t enough, and we’ve all read books that aren't well written but still sold millions of copies.

Now, I'm certainly NOT saying that good writing skill isn't something to worry about or work toward. Just that these “badly written best sellers” resonated with readers on such a deep level that they didn't care about the technical craft of the text. They didn't read them to marvel at the skills of the authors, they read them for the stories.

A beautifully written, technically perfect, yet boring story will not grab readers.

A generically written, technically average, yet amazing and gripping story will grab readers.

If your writing skill is clearly not the reason your manuscript is getting rejected (for example, you’re getting "while this is well-written it’s not for me" type letters or reviews) shift your focus to the story. Odds are high that's what's holding you back.

5 possible ways the story is hurting your novel

There’s little to no conflict.

Conflict is at the heart of every great story. A good protagonist needs an equally good antagonist to struggle against, be it a person, inner demon, society, or force of nature. The challenge that needs to be overcome should be worthy of the person trying to overcome it. If the struggle isn't worth fighting for (either literally or metaphorically) readers probably won't care.

Questions to ask:

• Is there a problem your protagonist has to resolve or their life comes to a screeching halt (again, literally or metaphorically)?
• Do challenges (conflicts) get harder to overcome as the story unfolds?
• Do the problems and conflicts of the overall novel tug the protagonist in different directions?
• Does the protagonist have to make tough choices or is the path always clear (and thus predictable)?

A strong conflict will draw readers into the story and make them want to know what happens next and how the protagonist will solve this problem. This problem is probably why they picked up the book in the first place.

There are no real stakes.

Without consequences for failure, it's hard to care about the conflict. For example, a character might have their heart set on getting a job developing computer games, and they might have huge competition for the position, but if nothing happens to them beyond the usual disappointment if they don’t get the job, readers won't care.

This is even more problematic if there’s a lack of conflict, and the protagonist gets everything they wanted without really trying. It’s no longer a story, but a lengthy description of how a character was rewarded for not doing much to get that reward.

Questions to ask:

• Are there consequences for both failure and success that fundamentally change the life of the protagonist?
• Do the stakes escalate as the protagonist struggles to overcome their challenges?
• Are these stakes personal to the protagonist or could they apply to anyone in the book?

Stakes make readers care about the outcome of the story. If there's no prize for winning or punishment for losing, what happens between page one and the end of the book doesn't really matter.

There’s a reactive protagonist.

When there’s a lack of conflict (nothing preventing the protagonist from getting what they want) and no stakes (no consequences for failure), you often wind up with a reactive protagonist, because they have no reason to act in the novel.

The protagonist should be the person driving the plot. They should make it happen through their choices and the results of those choices. If all they do is react to what's happening around them, they can feel pointless as a character. Since they never do anything for personal reasons, the story feels aimless at best, contrived at worst. You can take a reactive protagonist out of the story and nothing really changes, because they weren’t making the story happen anyway.

Quick note here: Reacting is different from reactive. All protagonists react to what happens to them, as those reactions drive the plot. But a reactive protagonist has no motivation or agency to act. They have no goal, and don’t actually care about what they’re doing. They often have no reason to act besides from “plot says do this now.”

Questions to ask:

• Does the protagonist make choices that affect how the story unfolds?
• Do these choices cause events or situations to happen that would not have happened had they not made that choice?
• Is the protagonist planning and acting on plans to achieve a desired result?
• Does the protagonist have goals or do they just deal with whatever problem is in front of them at the time?

The choices the protagonist makes and the actions they take are what create the plot for the novel. Without those choices, the protagonist is just along for the ride.

There’s little to no character motivation.

This is frequently found with a reactive protagonist, because the character has no actual reason to pursue the goal of the book. Their decisions are made solely because the author needs the scene to unfold that way.

The protagonist needs to make decisions for plausible reasons that make sense to that character and that problem. Their motivation for why they’re willing to do whatever the story requires them to do needs to be believable, or they’ll feel like actors in a stage spouting lines, not characters faced with a real problem they must solve.

For example, in Die Hard, would John McClane have risked his life to stop the bad guys if his wife hadn't been held hostage in the building? Probably not.

If your protagonist is risking their life for no plausible reason, readers will call you on it.

Questions to ask:

• Are there personal reasons for your protagonist to do what they need to do in the story?
• Do they have a personal stake in what happens?
• Do they care about the outcome or are they doing it because plot says so?
• Do their motivations hold up under questioning or do they fall apart after one or two questions about why they’re doing this?

Characters need good reasons to risk themselves for the plot or they can feel like cardboard cutouts just acting out a script. Give them solid reasons to act.

And the final kicker holding your manuscript back (and one that takes an honest, subjective eye to see):

It’s not very original.

Sometimes a writer has done everything right and the book still gets rejected, because the story is one agents, editors, and readers have seen dozens of times before. This is probably the hardest snag to fix since the novel is working—it's just not fresh enough to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

A “common story” novel feels predictable since readers have seen it before. It needs a fresh twist or different angle to capture a unique aspect of a familiar tale.

Questions to ask:

• What's unique about this story vs. others like it?
• Does the plot unfold in predictable ways that readers can see coming?
• How many books like it can you name?
• Is the fresh angle just a twist at the very end or is it woven through the entire book?

Being unique doesn't mean the entire book needs to be unique—it just means one (or more) aspects of the story should handle the tropes or elements in a different way so readers view the story from a new perspective.

Novels are all about stories, and sometimes in our pursuit of publication we forget how important those stories are. It's easy to get scope-locked on craft and let the story flounder. If you're feeling stuck, try taking a hard look at your story and see if you can make it stronger.

Are you working on your writing skills, your storytelling skills, or both right now? What do you feel your weak areas are? Your strengths? Please share your answers with us down in the comments!

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About Janice

Janice Hardy is the award-winning author of the teen fantasy trilogy The Healing Wars, including The Shifter, Blue Fire, and Darkfall from Balzer+Bray/Harper Collins. She also writes the Grace Harper urban fantasy series for adults under the name, J.T. Hardy. When she's not writing fiction, she runs the popular writing site Fiction University, and has written multiple books on writing, including Understanding Show, Don't Tell (And Really Getting It), Plotting Your Novel: Ideas and Structure, and the Revising Your Novel: First Draft to Finished Draft series. Sign up for her newsletter and receive 25 ways to Strengthen Your Writing Right Now free.

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Top Image by TimKvonEnd from Pixabay

Since the beginning here at Writers in the Storm, we've been all about spreading the love. And every so often, we throw the doors open for some shameless self-promotion opportunities for our readers. Our only requirement for those glorious days -- formerly called "Pimp & Promote" -- is that they double the love and promote someone else's work alongside their own.

New Name - Same Awesomeness

As of now, we're officially changing the name of this event from "Pimp & Promote" to "Double The Love." First of all, it has a nice ring. Also, the world could use a whole lot more love these days so why not rebrand one of our favorite things here at WITS?

Today's event will give us all the opportunity to share great resources and celebrate our own successes. So get ready to double the love!

How DO you "Double the Love?"

For many in the States, school is back in session. In that same spirit, let's get out our pom-poms and cheer for ourselves and other writers! Down in the comments section, we ask that you:

• Heap love on somebody else’s work – a favorite author, blogger, post or book you’ve read, a wonderful teacher or just someone who had profound influence on you as a writer or a person. Please limit your comments to one work.
  AND
• Promote one of your projects that you’re excited about – a hobby, a blog, a book, or a new direction your writing is taking you. You decide. Just tell us about it in the comments! (Please restrain your enthusiasm to just one of your WIPs.)

The rest of us will shake those pom-poms, and “ooooh and ahh” (with a side of rah-rah). Full disclosure: our to-be-read piles and our resource lists double in size on days like these, which is always a cause for both celebration and nail-biting.

We'll lead off the love fest with some of the WITS Team!

Ellen Buikema

New Love:

Thomas Davis has written a fantastic, epic poem in blank verse, The Weirding Storm. The story contains magic, dragons, witches, dire wolves, malicious spirits, community unrest, and some interesting transformations, all woven into a dance of words.

A wonderful Young Adult Fantasy.

Self-love:

If you are looking for a young readers chapter book series, take a look at The Adventures of Charlie Chameleon. I wrote these stories to help encourage empathy and cultivate insight into children’s lives.

These multicultural stories cover situations children typically encounter like getting lost, moving, starting a new school, making friends, family vacations, working in a team, and dealing with bullies using positive methods. Each chapter ends with one or more activities for children and parents or teachers to do together, related to the actions in the stories. These books are filled with humor to make the stories more engaging for children (and more fun for parents to read to their kids).

The first three chapter books in The Adventures of Charlie Chameleon Series are New Beginnings, School Days, and Summertime.

Jenny Hansen

New Love:

If you've been around WITS for a while, you've seen some of the gorgeous posts by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi, the co-authors of the Emotion Thesaurus series of books. Perhaps you know about the labor of love they created called "One Stop" for writers.

They've kicked it up a notch recently with the Storyteller's Roadmap. Frankly, I love it. I love that it meets you where you are as a writer, and that there are three different paths you can take, based on your own writing challenges. For example, I have friends who get hives at the thought of plotting so they happily write away like the pantsers they are. Then they get stuck or get lost in revisions. There are roadmaps for all these scenarios!

Below is a screen capture of the main page.

And here is a snippet of the Planning Roadmap:

So, to summarize, if you haven't checked out One Stop for Writers with their thesaurus cheat-sheets, character builders, checklists, timelines, and now, their Storyteller's Roadmap...why not?

Self-love:

Writers in the Storm is looking for new blog hosts and contributors. We like to change it up every few years and hear from some new voices and viewpoints. And we like to spread out the hosting over 4-6 people so no one has to do more than a dozen hours of work throughout the year.

Let us know in the comments if that's something you'd be interested in or send an email to writersinthestorm(at)gmail(dot)com!

Okay, now it's your turn!

What do you think of "Double the Love?" Do you like the new name? Spread the love all around the comment section, and we'll chime in and cheer you on!

Top Photo by Frantisek Duris on Unsplash