Intro: I’ve been teaching a writers’ workshop at our local Camosun College on how to write a mystery novel. My students are eating 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 new 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 11)
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 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 our last post, and Third Person.
LEMME TELL IT MY WAY: Today, we’re continuing our discussion on Third Person POV.
Multiple Lion POVs (credit E. Polinsky)
In the last post, we offered some reasons to choose Third Person POV; now, we’ll move into the first of the three main viewpoint types (Limited Multiple, Limited Detached and Know All) provided by this flexible POV.
1) Limited Multiple: where the action is intimate and immediate when seen through the eyes/experiences of one or more characters.
As in these two characters, whose individual viewpoint is used in separate chapters, from Peter Robinson’s AFTERMATH:
Inspector Banks’ POV: “No, what got to him most of all was the pity of it all, the deep empathy he had come to feel with the victims of crimes he investigated. And he hadn’t become more callous, more inured to it all over the years, as many did, and he once thought he would. Each new one was like a raw wound reopening…”
Jenny’s POV: “Jenny was no stranger to denial, either as a psychologist or as a woman, so she made sympathetic noises and gave Pat the time to compose herself…”
Both characters are speaking in the third person; however, in each of those examples, we are seeing/hearing the story from a single person’s point of view, thus the POV is multiple but limited to what the character sees/hears/does.
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 continue exploring character development in Ready for my close up, Mr. DeMille, Part 12.
Find out further information or how to purchase my mystery-writing primer e-book, jam-packed with ways to immediately improve your writing, click Youdunit Whodunit (only $2.99US!).
) to announce that I’m again teaching a half-day course on e-book publishing at Camosun College, Victoria, BC. The course is on Saturday, September 25th. 
