Intro: I occasionally teach a writers’ workshop at our local Camosun College on how to write a mystery novel. The students eat it up, telling me that they’re learning lots of practical and usable tips and techniques, so I thought I’d offer bits and pieces of the workshop in my Friday Mystery Writing blog posts.
The information is gleaned from my little non-fiction e-book primer called Youdunit Whodunit! How to Write Mysteries and offers my tips, techniques and information suitable for crafting of all types of genre writing.
So, even if you write romance, sci-fi, fantasy or horror, please keep reading and learn with us crime writers.
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT (Part 14)
The last group of posts have concentrated on the story structure of a mystery novel. Been there; done that. Now we’re onto developing characters or as I like to think of it: Ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.
In the initial post on character development, I introduced an essential question: Who’s telling your story? You can have more than one storyteller but for our purposes, we’ll stick to one.
You need a point of view (POV) from which to tell your tale. There are two common POVs in fiction writing: First Person, which we discussed in a previous post, and Third Person.
LEMME TELL IT MY WAY: In this Point of View, the writer chooses to tell the story from more of a distance by narrating with “He said” or “They said”. Today, I’m finishing my discussion on POV by offering a couple of cautionary notes.
In the most recent posts, I offered some reasons to choose Third Person POV; and introduced all of the three main viewpoint types: the Limited Multiple POV, the Limited Detached POV and the Know All/Omniscient POV.
Dueling POVs
If you wish to tell a scene from another player’s POV, go ahead; just make sure that the reader is witnessing each chunk of the story from a single POV at any one time.
How NOT to write Multiple Third Person Point of View
Consider the following example:
John stared, unable to take his eyes off Emily’s disfigured face. Her nose was deformed, her eye sockets bulged and puckered skin twisted her cheeks. He swallowed, trying to gain time.
Emily stiffened. John’s reaction wasn’t new but how does one get used to that look of horror? With an effort, she held his gaze, concentrating on his gray eyes, willing him to break away first. And when he did, she felt a beat of power and then the heat of shame.
So, what’s wrong?
Our point of view changes within the same scene, that’s what. First we are in John’s head, seeing and feeling from his outlook and then we immediately switch to Emily, watching and reacting from her perspective…all in the same paragraph. This POV mishmash is a major no no and will have agents and editors after your head.
I know, I know, a number of best-selling authors break this rule but if you do, understand that you do so at your peril.
Like the old adage: you’ve should first follow the rules before breaking them.
If you found this of interest, you may wish to see the previous How to Write a Mystery posts.
…Of course, there’ll be MORE how-to write a mystery tips and techniques continued in the next Friday post as we move on to developing the three types of characters that commonly populate genre fiction in Haven’t We Met Before? Part 15.
Find out further information or how to purchase my mystery-writing primer e-book, jam-packed with ways to immediately improve your writing, by clicking Youdunit Whodunit (only $2.99US!).
