Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

How do you know when you should be writing your novel in first person? And how much of that pesky interior monologue is too much? We’ll look at those questions today.

Glen posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I’m currently working on my first, first draft of any novel. I’m finding that I’m using an awful lot of interior monologue for the one point of view character that I will be using for the entire book. Is that normal? Also, should I seriously consider if whether the book should be told in first person? However, I’m wondering if the plot of my story is too complex to be written in first person. Is there a good way to determine what might be the best perspective to use when telling a story?

Randy sez: Let’s take these questions in order. Is it normal for a first draft of a first novel to have a ton of interior monologue? Yes, that’s pretty common for a beginning novelist. It’s also common to use a ton of narrative summary, to throw in a boatload of backstory, and to hop heads faster than Hollywood stars hop beds.

But none of those are a particularly good idea. What’s wrong with interior monologue? Nothing’s wrong with it. It’s a good tool. As I mentioned yesterday, it’s one of the five tools you have for writing a scene. Here are all five of your tools:

• Action
• Dialogue
• Interior Monologue
• Interior Emotion
• Description

Each of those is good, in the right proportions. If you want to think of these as ingredients for your novel, Action and Dialogue are your meat and potatoes. Most of your novel should be Action and Dialogue. Description is the dessert. Interior Emotion provides the spice.

Interior Monologue is the salt. A little salt goes a long way. Yes, it’s true that some people like a lot of salt, but “a lot” is a relative concept. I don’t know anybody who could make a meal out of just salt. You need something to go with it, preferably something shaped like a chip or pretzel.

Glen, if you think you have too much Interior Monologue in your story then you do. Trim it down. Way down. Interior Monologue is great for helping your reader understand your character’s motivations. Interior Monologue is one of the massive advantages we novelists have over screenwriters. Use it well but use it with a light touch.

Now let’s talk about writing in first person. Glen, you’re worried that your novel is too complex to be told in first person. That is actually not possible. Any novel, no matter how complex, can be told in first person — if you’re willing to have enough viewpoint characters. Yes, you can write in first person from more than one point of view. If that’s what you want to do, then do so.

Usually, of course, a first-person novel has only a single viewpoint character. The hazard there is that one person can only be in one place at a time, so if you have action going on in multiple venues at the same time, you really have to use multiple first-person viewpoint characters.

Should you write in first-person? That depends on a lot of things. Do you like writing in first-person? Can you do so with a strong voice that is recognizably your character and not you? Are you not trying to conceal things from your reader that your viewpoint character knows? Do your first-person scenes work? If the answer to all of these questions is “yes,” then writing in first-person is probably a good idea.

There is no exact science to choosing a particular point of view for your novel. Of course, you do need to choose a point of view, and you have a number of choices. There isn’t an official list of a standard set of viewpoints. My own classification is as follows:

• First person
• Third person
• Third person objective
• Second person
• Omniscient
• Head-hopping

I discuss all of these in my book, WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES. Let’s summarize: Head-hopping is generally frowned on, but it also seems to be pretty common in the romance category because readers like knowing what both the heroine and hero are thinking. Second person is extremely rare, but it can work. Third person objective has a very cinematic feel when done well, but it’s not so easy to do well because it eliminates Interior Monologue and Interior Emotion, two of the novelist’s five tools for writing scenes. Omniscient can be done well, but it can also be done extremely badly, so you should know how to handle sharp tools before you tackle omniscient.

That leaves first person and third person as the two most common viewpoints. Each of these is easy to learn and allows you to put your reader fully inside your character’s skin. There are some readers who don’t like first person and refuse to read a book in that viewpoint. I can’t imagine why, but it’s so. Personally, I love books written in first-person.

The bottom line: Use the viewpoint that you find comfortable and that works for your story. Generally, that will be either first person or third person. If you insist on writing in second person, you are either one sick puppy or a literary genius (probably both). If you are bent on using head-hopping, at least learn to do it well and make sure you’re writing in a category where that’s accepted practice. If you must tell your story in third person objective, get a second opinion from an experienced writer to make sure you’re doing it very well. Ditto if you can’t help exercising your God-like powers as a novelist by writing in omniscient (nothing is more tedious than badly done omniscient viewpoint).

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Blog of the Day: One of my Loyal Blog Readers is Camille Eide, a talented writer who’s done a guest post today on agent Rachelle Gardner’s blog. Check out Camille’s article on surviving the revision letter: “What Do You Mean My Hero Isn’t Sexy Enough?” I’ve been watching Camille for a couple of years now, and I’m pretty sure she’ll sell her first novel soon.

Can your characters walk and chew gum at the same time in your novel? That’s more of a trick than you might imagine, and we’ll explore that question today.

Jim posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

The problem I’m having with my writing is that I’m struggling to move my characters from one place to another.

I recently wrote a scene where two character’s were having a conversation whilst making their way through a town, but when I read over it it seemed as though they were teleporting through big lumps of their journey, when I felt a natural pause in the dialogue to describe their actions.

How’s best the keep them moving and talking without the two activities disrupting one another?

Randy sez: It’s a good idea to review the five main tools that you have at your disposal for writing scenes in your novel:

• Action: What your characters do.
• Dialogue: What they say.
• Interior Monologue: What they think.
• Interior Emotion: What they feel.
• Description: What they see, hear, smell, touch, and taste.

Your goal as a novelist is to use these five tools to build a solid scene. We can’t cover these in immense detail here today. If you want a few hundred pages of detail, I’m going to have to refer you to the usual books on how to write fiction. Being a selfish guy, I’ll mention my own book, Writing Fiction For Dummies, focusing on chapters 2, 6, 10, and 15.

The key question here that Jim is asking is how to use Tool #2, Dialogue, without losing track of the location of the characters.

The answer is quite simple. Jim, you want to mix in the other tools with your Dialogue. Specifically, use some Action and some Description. Actions allow your characters to do things within the environment. Descriptions are things which your characters see or hear within the environment.

Remember one thing: You will rarely be using only one tool in a scene. A scene might be mostly Dialogue, but if it’s all Dialogue, then you have talking heads, and the scenery goes away. I’ll give an example of this below, but let me make a quick digression.

You have another tool at your disposal, if Action and Description aren’t enough — you can use Narrative Summary to describe the scenery and help you manage transitions that take place over an extended period of time.

You may be asking what’s the difference between Description and Narrative Summary. That’s a good question. The answer is that Description is direct and immediate sensory input. Here’s an example with some Description mixed in with Action and Dialogue:

Joe and Sally rounded the corner. A clown with enormous shoes was riding a unicycle and juggling two bowling balls. A grizzly bear was chained to the wall, pawing at the thick iron band around its neck. Two Martians were playing poker with an eager-faced boy who looked about ten years old.

“Oh my gosh!” Sally said, gawking at the Martians.

One of them grinned at her wickedly and winked all three of his eyes, one after another. They reminded Sally of a slot machine.

“Behave yourself, Ronald!” Joe said in a sharp voice.

The Martian sullenly returned to his cards.

Narrative Summary is a summary of what happens over time. Like this:

Joe warned Sally not to stare at the Martians and steered her down the block and around the corner and into a street full of Farmers Market booths. When he had her safely out of earshot, he explained that the Martians were telepathic over short distances and used their abilities to cheat at cards. The boy was Joe’s younger brother Seth, a cardsharp who had figured out how to double-cross the Martians by manipulating his own thoughts.

So Jim, if you want to show the scenery while your characters talk, just mix up your Dialogue with Action and Description, and if necessary throw in a bit of Narrative Summary. You can probably go easy on the Interior Monologue and Interior Emotion during these sections (since you generally don’t want to perfectly balance all your tools in every scene).

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Blog of the Day: One of the blogs I read every day is Jane Friedman’s blog, “There Are No Rules,” at Writer’s Digest. Today, she had an interview with Kiera Cass, a young self-published novelist who recently landed a three-book deal with HarperTeen. You can read it here at “From Self-Published Author to 3-Book Deal: The Story of Kiera Cass.”

Can your novel have a main character without a goal? What if he has one, but it changes? What if he’s just floating along? And what if you want to make God the bad guy in your novel?

Katy posted this set of questions on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I’m just having a few problems deciding which way to proceed with my plot development and hoping you can give me some tips.

I know you say that characters need to have a story goal, but are there exceptions? For instance, my protagonist is really just floating through life a bit at the very beginning, he doesn’t have a goal and that’s sort of the point, he needs to be called to action. So I could define a goal at this point, but then it changes further into the plot and then again closer to the end. This is because the character is changing as the story progresses and therefore what he wants is changing. Is it normal to have multiple goals? I really can’t think of a single goal he’s striving towards throughout the entire novel.

Also, one of my main conflicts is to do with the religion of my story world and the religious leaders, and although my main character is religious, ultimately God becomes sort of a “bad guy”. My novel is YA, and I’m a little bit worried I may be alienating some of my audience by taking this route. At the same time, I feel there won’t be enough conflict without it.

What do you think? I’d love to be able to just set all this uncertainty aside and write!

Randy sez: Don’t confuse the Storygoal of your story with the goal of your main character. Your character, being either a malleable male or a fickle female, will be changing throughout the story. Early on, he may not have a goal, or it may be a fairly prosaic goal such as to make it to the gas station before the tank is completely empty.

But your story doesn’t really get going until your character settles on a Storygoal. What’s a Storygoal? It’s the goal that will drive your character through the main part of the current story. The purpose of the Storygoal is to raise a Story Question in your reader’s mind.

The Story Question is very concrete: Will Scarlett O’Hara get Ashley Wilkes or won’t she? Will Indiana Jones find the lost Ark of the Covenant, or won’t he? Will Katniss Everdeen survive the Hunger Games or won’t she?

The Story Question almost always is a yes-or-no kind of thing. Can he or can’t he? Will she or won’t she?

So your Storygoal is important to you, the novelist. But it’s not necessarily what drives your main character at the beginning of the story, and it may not be what drives her at the ending. The Storygoal is what drives your character through MOST of the story.

Can you change it halfway through? Yes, of course you can — at your own risk. You can do anything you want. You have all power in your story. You are omniscient. You are, in fact, the God of your Storyworld. You pull all the strings. You decide everything that happens. If you want your character to have a different goal every five minutes, you can do that. But if you do that, you probably won’t have a lot of readers, because readers typically want your Storyworld to have meaning, and that means having a consistent, plausible, reasonable Storygoal that drives your main character through most of the story.

Now let’s tackle your second question, Katy. You’re worried about alienating some readers by making God the “bad guy.” It’s not a bad thing to alienate readers. In fact, it can be a good thing, because alienating some readers will generate word of mouth, and word of mouth sells copies. Part of being a novelist is deciding whom you’re willing to offend, and then getting on with the job of offending them effectively.

As an example, one of the hottest selling novels of this decade has been THE SHACK, by William Paul Young. In this novel, the lead character wrestles with the tough question of why God allowed his young daughter to be kidnapped and murdered by a serial killer. Young brings God into the novel to answer those questions himself. Or maybe I should say, Young brings God into the novel to answer those questions herself. In the novel, “God the Father” is a woman. An African-American woman. Jesus enters in too, and so does the Holy Spirit (also in a female form).

Plenty of people didn’t like that. There was plenty of muttering that Young’s theology was way off the mark. Plenty of ministers complained that Young was flirting with Universalism. Young got a huge amount of negative publicity. Guess what? All that negative publicity sold a lot of copies, because there were plenty of people who liked what Young said and who liked the way he said it.

So if you’re going to offend people, just make sure you’ve also identified a target audience whom you’re going to please.

I should say, however, that bringing God into a novel is a metaphysical impossibility. As I noted earlier, YOU are the God of your novel. You are the “ground of being” for your novel. You create the Storyworld. You speak it into existence. You control every single thing that happens in your novel. You are the God of your novel, but you exist on a different metaphysical plane than your novel, and you can’t actually enter your own Storyworld, even though you control it completely.

It’s true that you can introduce a character in your novel that you call “God.” You have at least two choices here:

1. This character may be an “incarnation” of you.
2. This character may be some other incarnation that is intentionally not you.

Door #1 is the approach that William Paul Young took in THE SHACK. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit of THE SHACK are not the real Father, Son, and Holy Spirit of our own world. They’re incarnations of the author of the book. They speak with his voice and they do what he makes them do.

Door #2 is the approach that you want to take, Katy. You intend to have a demigod who functions as the Supreme Being of the religion of your characters. This is perfectly OK and you’re free to do that. But bear in mind that this demigod is, in fact, NOT the God of your Storyworld. You are. Your demigod is created by you for whatever purpose you choose. He or she can do nothing without you. Bearing that in mind, you’re free to make that demigod as bad as you like. I think you’ll find it much more of a challenge to make the real God of the book (you) into a “bad guy.” I suppose it’s possible, but I’m not sure how.

What do my Loyal Blog Readers think? Is it possible for you, the author, to be the “bad guy” God of your own novel? What would you have to do in order to achieve that? Leave a comment and tell us how it’s done.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Blog of the Day: My friend Chip MacGregor is a high-powered literary agent with a blog that I think should be required reading for all authors. Today, he had a great blog about how he changed from being a wannabe writer to being a professional writer. He did it by changing his thinking in two essential ways. Want to know those two ways? Read Chip’s blog entry, “How I Got Started as a Writer.”

Can a man write an authentic female character in his fiction? Can a woman write an authentic male character in her fiction? Most novelists worry about these questions at some point in their careers.

Gabriel posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I’m at the early stages of what will become my first novel. I have a problem - my protagonist has turned out to be a woman!

As a first-time writer, I’m afraid having a female protagonist will result in one of three things - having a woman that thinks, feels and acts like a man; having a completely shallow character; or having a heavily stereotyped woman.

What’s your advice? Should I make my protagonist male until I have more experience? If I go ahead with a female, how should I go about writing in her voice?

Randy sez: Sooner or later, every novelist worries about this kind of question. Rightly so. We’ve all read novels where the characters didn’t ring true, where the male characters were “girlie men” or the female characters were Barbie-doll fantasies. It’s easy to find examples of gender-bending gaffes.

But those pesky gender lines aren’t the only lines to be wary of. There are plenty of other hazards for the novelist.

Can an American write an authentic Mexican? Maltese? Martian?

Can a housewife write an authentic cop? Engineer? Businessman?

Can an atheist write an authentic Christian? Buddhist? Jew?

You can tie yourself up in knots worrying about getting exact authenticity. Or you can do what most novelists do — get to know people different from yourself, and use them as models for your characters, or get them to vet your characters, or both.

You simply can’t write a novel containing only characters that you can write “authentically” because they’re just like you. That would be (don’t take this wrong) boring. It’s not that we writers are boring. It’s just that a meal with only dish is boring.

If you’re a guy trying to write female characters, try basing them (loosely) on women you know. It’s obviously a bad idea to base any character solely on a single real person. But if you draw a third of a character’s traits from one of your friends and another third from a different friend and you make up the rest, who’s going to know?

Gabriel, if you’re not sure that you got your woman right, it’s always a good idea to ask some women. They’ll be flattered that you asked and glad to help.

Likewise for you ladies — get a few guys’ opinion on whether your male characters are macho enough. Any guy with a male ego bigger than a termite will be thrilled that you think he’s manly enough to vet your characters.

Remember that your goal is not to create a stereotypical woman (or man or Mexican or Martian). Your goal is to create a unique character. That means that your female character will behave “like most women” in most ways, but she’ll be her own woman in at least a few ways. In some aspects, she may actually be more like a typical guy than a typical woman. That’s OK, so long as you find some way to acknowledge that fact somewhere.

For example, in the Harry Potter series, Ginny Weasley doesn’t get weepy, ever. That breaks a certain stereotype about weepy women, so JK Rowling mentions at one point in the story that Harry likes it that Ginny isn’t the weepy sort. Stereotype broken. Deviation from norm acknowledged. Problem solved.

Remember that a man is never going to understand a woman perfectly. That’s OK. A man won’t ever understand other guys perfectly either. Truth to tell, a man won’t ever understand himself perfectly. The goal is to get close. To be believable. You do that by doing your homework, then writing your character, then getting her graded.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.