Tagged: POV

Specter-Vision

Our WIP is a ghost story (perhaps we’ve mentioned that) and as it happens some of the scenes are ghost-character POV. Our take on being a ghost is that it has a definite effect on one’s outlook, and indeed upon the physical reality of one’s surroundings. Dying changes a person’s entire take on life.

Of course we always remember that when we’re doing their scenes. (Eye-roll)

Okay, there’ve only been a couple of times that we actually had to go back into the text and account for that. It tends to happen when the locale has been previous rendered in ordinary human terms, which would make another detailed description feel redundant (if the current POV character had ordinary human perceptions). It’s just one more aspect of “wearing the right head” to tackle a given character. Likewise if one member of the cast were a dog, meaning they can’t see what’s on the kitchen counters but they can smell and hear lots of stuff that the human characters can’t. So even though it’s the same house everyone’s living in, it can feel like a whole different world for certain characters. (Spoiler: the ghost POV character is not a dog.)

We don’t do real spoilers around here, so we can’t say anything too specific about what it’s like to be a ghost in our story. We asked one of the specters to sum it up for us, and here’s what we got back: “There’s some interesting scenery, but overall it’s kind of a hassle.”

A writing partner is someone whose point of view helps you express your characters’ POV.

The Rune Skelley Theory of POV

We like to tell big stories, with lots of characters. And we like to give lots of those characters point-of-view. And by “lots” we mean, like, eight or so POV characters in a novel. We don’t do first-person or omniscient, but a very close third. We let the personality, diction, and knowledge of the POV character seep into the narrative.

Not every cast member gets that honor. Of course someone needs to be interesting to be considered for the job, but all of our characters are interesting. (Honest!) So, that’s no help in narrowing things down.

One of the few actual rules we stick to is that nobody’s allowed to have just one POV scene in a book. Once we take a ride in someone’s head, we’re committed to doing it at least once more. Having this rule has seldom been an issue, but sometimes it seems convenient to slide into some secondary character’s thoughts just for one particular thing. This is a temptation that must be resisted. It’s lazy, and leads to too much head-hopping and a disjointed narrative. If you have only one scene revealing someone’s interior, how can you craft a journey for them?

When a singleton arises, we have two options. We can find a way to convey the info from one of the established POVs, or we can write more scenes — legitimate scenes that earn their wordcount — from this new one. Over the years, we’ve taken both approaches. It all depends.

Just because we have a rule doesn’t make it the only right way to do things. There are surely fine books out there that break this rule. None come to mind, but YMMV.

A writing partner is someone who doesn’t let you take shortcuts.

You Think Italicized? You Should See the Other Guy!

r-avatarIt’s easy to decide when to put speech in quotation marks. For us, it’s much less obvious when to put characters’ thoughts in italics. You’re probably saying right now, “Direct thoughts go in italics, and indirect thoughts don’t.” Duh.

Helpful as that is (and here’s a great writeup on the direct/indirect thing), it still leaves Rune Skelley at loose ends. One of the telltales for direct thought is viewpoint. We write in a very tight third-person, deliberately blurring the distinction between the POV character and the narrator. With that line blurred, we have a judgement call about when something should get italicized.

If that sounds like it’s a problem of our own creation, that’s only because it is. We do it on purpose, and we do it to ourselves. And before you ask, it’s not that we just haven’t realized it should be in first person. We’d typically end up with eight or ten first-person narrators, and that’s not how we roll.

So, okay, you think this is how it needs to be, and it makes the decision hard. Fine, it’s hard. Just make the decision and move on. Well, you’ve just gotten to the heart of the matter. (Thanks!) Making the decision.

This is one way that working with a partner becomes more complicated. A soloist author needs to fret (maybe) about where to draw the in/direct line, and then just go forth and make it happen. Whereas for us, in addition to the fretting, there’s debate and sometimes disagreement. We struggle to agree on where the line should be drawn, and then we struggle over where it actually winds up. Mostly, this problem is Kent’s fault. He admits it (that’s the first step, so maybe he’s not beyond help). He really dislikes the appearance of italicized text, and finds it very distracting. He also wants to point out that, unlike quotation marks, italics are used for multiple things — foreign words, titles, emphasis, excerpted text — all of which come up in Rune Skelley’s fiction often enough to make it an issue. Jen has a far less complicated relationship with oblique letterforms and is a paragon of patience. She just wishes we could settle on a technique and stick to it.

Feeling Bad for Neil

r-avatarWe give our characters a rough time. They’d probably all feel like taking a swing at us, were we to somehow meet. Some of them inspire no sympathy, while for others we do spare a regretful thought now and then for what we’ve put them through.

At the moment, we’re feeling a little sorry for Neil. He’s a secondary character (and it feels unkind just pointing that out — “thanks, now you’re marginalizing me, too?”) in the music novel. Not quite 10% of it is from his point of view. He’s probably the nicest person in the cast, at least top three. He’s a sweetheart. And we’re cruel to him.

The latest ignominy to be visited on Neil is that we cut one of his scenes. Not just any scene: this was his Emmy Moment, a cathartic, self-revelatory monologue. It’s tranquil, but not boring. Peaceful. Stuff that we kept includes some truly brutal events, things Neil might have voted to cut instead.

Sorry, Neil.

In a previous draft of the book there was substantially less Neil POV, as in one scene. Rune Skelley doesn’t have a lot of rules (not strict ones, anyway) but we really do try to avoid giving anybody exactly one POV scene. In this case, it was a really good scene that performed important functions in the story, and it worked because of Neil’s POV specifically. Our solution was to find at least one other beat that could be shown from Neil. We knew we were already bending our “rule,” so we took special care not to create a pointless scene just as an excuse for the POV. That’s how he got his chance to grow as a human being right before your eyes.

swish pan!

Now we’ve made huge revisions (resulting in a borderline-huge manuscript!) and, in this draft, Neil gets point of view several times. That cathartic moment of discovery we set up for him is still a lovely scene, but, well, there’s pacing to consider… A good writing partner offers suggestions for what to cut as well as what to add. Suggesting cuts is easy when the material in question is shoddy, but that wasn’t the case here. Sometimes it has to come out even though there’s nothing wrong with it. Those are the difficult choices.

It’s not that we suddenly decided Neil was slowing things down, rather the story beats had shifted due to all the restructuring. We no longer wanted the stillness of Neil’s big scene in that particular spot. So, Neil loses out in pursuit of the greater good for the book overall. The events still take place, just not on the page. (See, Neil? It’s not so terrible.)

We also cut a short scene from one of the other secondary POVs, but we have no sympathy for Darren.

Yoink!

During our read-through of Novel #4 we diagnosed several problems, and have been working to fix them ever since. Unfortunately for one of our characters (we’ll call him Mr X), the prescribed remedy calls for him to longer be a Point of View character. He’s still in the story, and (sad to say) suffers through pretty much the same series of unfortunate events, it’s just that now we don’t get to hear his side of it. He’s a bit miffed at us for silencing him.

A potential upside, from Mr X’s perspective, is that his plot line is now slightly less complicated, which will make his time in the story a smidgen less unpleasant. For Rune Skelley characters, that’s really the best they can hope for: a smidgen less unpleasant.

One of the reasons X got the rug yanked out from under him is that he only had a couple of POV scenes to begin with. We determined that the reader needed more insight into another character (to highlight our creativity we’ll call him Mr Z), which meant making him a POV character. X and Z shared most of their scenes, so it made perfect sense to simply shine the spotlight in the other direction.

That doesn’t mean it was easy, though. Before we could make Z a star, we had to get to know him better. Firstly he got a new name. His original name was “borrowed” from an unpleasant person we dealt with long ago. In the years since, our anger at this person faded and it became less important to do horrible things to his effigy. We also thought better of name-checking an actual living person. So, Z got a new name, and then he and Kent spent some quality time together, discovering what it was like inside Z’s head. Kent emerged unscathed, and now the novel is all the richer.

Swapping Messrs X and Z on POV-duty will make the novel better, which is good because it’s making a lot of extra work. It was among the discoveries we made by retroactively laying out a rainbow for this book, because it showed us in living color that we hadn’t made proper use of Mr X and also highlighted how important Mr Z’s state of mind was to the climax. Even so, it took walking a few laps around the neighborhood to really make up our minds that it was the right move. A writing partner helps you through tough decisions, so you know that all the rework entailed by a major change is really taking you in the right direction.

Papercuts

r-avatarWe definitely have our work cut out for us on this revision pass. Many scenes will be moved around, and although that doesn’t really impact their substance it does raise concerns about their tone. If something that used to fall in the third act is now going to be very near the start of the novel, we might want to make adjustments for the fact that readers don’t already know all the background. And, vice versa; moving early scenes to a later stage means we’ll need to be careful that we don’t introduce a lot of review and repetition, as those scenes no longer need to introduce all the ideas.

Probably the most significant change is due to reassigning POV. We realized that one of our characters needs to be fleshed out a lot more, because of the role he must play in the ending, and developed a bunch of great ideas for him. Too much stuff to get across without going inside his thoughts. At the same time, we identified a weakness with another character’s thread. He had point-of-view in several scenes, but nothing essential would be lost if we showed those events from someone else.

Meanwhile, we have our whole manuscript’s Scrivener file marked up with critique comments (our own and our group’s), on matters large and small. Project management consultants would be saying to leave the little stuff and concentrate on the big tasks first. After all, that missing comma will be irrelevant if the whole sentence — or the whole scene — gets cut. But Rune Skelley likes to do things Rune Skelley’s way, and here that means checking off as many of the dinky little things as possible first. The main benefit of that is decluttering the comments column when the text is on the screen, which is invaluable for both Jen’s and Kent’s ability to focus. We don’t like bleeding from a million papercuts, and even if the block of text where we fixed that comma does eventually get chopped, well, fixing the comma only took a few seconds. Totally worth it to us for the peace of mind.

Fortunately, we were able to agree on this order of business. There are many different ways to divvy up the work, and the optimal strategy might be different in every situation. But, in a collaboration, if the partners disagree on how to proceed they’ll likely trip over each other’s changes and generate friction. Get on the same page about your revision workflow before either of you starts editing.