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.

If you want to confuse your reader, try using as many different ways as possible to refer to the characters in your novel.

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

When writing character names, which name is appropriate? First name, last name or combination?

I’m working on a thriller novel that I’ve mixed a secondary characters first and last name depending on my writing pattern on any given day. I want to standardize. Using his last name seems odd, but when in dialog, I use his first name, cuz, that’s how people talk.

In my mind and daily life, I rarely use peoples last names. I’m a first person guy, so in writing, I tend to reference their first names, a lot. Is there a standard? In Thriller/mystery’s is it different? I’ve read a lot of police procedure stuff that tends to focus on last name.

Randy sez: A lot depends on what category of fiction you’re writing and what your readers expect. In Russian novels (or novels with Russian characters), it’s common to refer to characters with their full names, including the middle name. This drives American readers crazy because those Russian names can get quite long. I can remember a few Tom Clancy novels in which the extra Russian names seemed to add another 100 pages to the book.

My rule of thumb is to use one name almost exclusively for each character. In most cases, that’s the first name of the character. In a few cases, it’s more natural to refer to certain characters by their last names.

It’s common in certain communities for everybody to go by their last names. Military units. Sports teams. Cop environments. Certain dorms I’ve lived in. If I were writing a novel set in one of these communities, then I’d be sure that the characters used each other’s last names in dialogue. However, in the action parts, I’d probably refer to most of them by their first names, unless there was a compelling reason to use the last name.

One mistake that you should avoid is trying to eliminate repetition by mixing up first names, last names, nicknames, and roles in a horrible hodge-podge. That just confuses the reader.

To illustrate how badly this can go wrong, let me write a really wretched bit of fanfic. Count how many characters you see in this snippet of a scene:

“Go away,” Harry said.

Lord Voldemort gave a high, cold laugh. “Says who?”

“Do it,” said the green-eyed boy wizard. “Now.”

The greatest dark wizard of all time pointed his wand at Potter’s chest.

“You think you’re really something, don’t you, Riddle?” sneered the son of James and Lily.

“Call me Tom.”

“One thing I’ll never call you is the Dark Lord,” said the Gryffindor seeker.

He Who Must Not Be Named hissed sharply as he twirled the wand between his long, pale fingers. “You will,” he said in a soft, dangerous voice.

“And I refuse to use euphemisms like You Know Who,” said the Boy Who Lived. “I’m not afraid of you and that’s why you hate me.”

Randy sez: Gack! How many characters did you see? If you haven’t read the Harry Potter series, then you counted these thirteen characters:

1. Harry
2. Lord Voldemort
3. The green-eyed boy wizard
4. The greatest dark wizard of all time
5. Potter
6. Riddle
7. The son of James and Lily
8. Tom
9. The Dark Lord
10. The Gryffindor seeker
11. He Who Must Not Be Named
12. You Know Who
13. The Boy Who Lived

If you’re familiar with the series, then you know that there are only two characters here: Harry Potter is the green-eyed Boy Who Lived, the only son of James and Lily Potter, and he’s also the seeker on the Gryffindor Quidditch team. Tom Riddle is the greatest dark wizard of all time, self-proclaimed Lord Voldemort, known to his followers as the Dark Lord and feared by his enemies as either He Who Must Not Be Named or as You Know Who.

In the series, Harry Potter is mostly referred to as “Harry,” although many characters refer to him in dialogue as “Potter.” The various other appellations for Harry are rarely used.

Lord Voldemort is generally called “You Know Who” by those who fear him. A few brave souls call him “Voldemort” when speaking about him. Professor Dumbledore calls him “Tom” and Harry calls him “Riddle” when speaking to him. Voldemort’s followers always call him “the Dark Lord”.

The key thing is consistency. Throughout the series, the context determines what Harry and Voldemort will be called, and things are never confusing.

Don’t be afraid of a bit of repetition. Clarity is good. If you have to use “Harry” and “Voldemort” fifteen times on the same page, then do so. Don’t confuse things by constantly switching appellations. If “Harry” appears in every paragraph, the name quickly becomes invisible and the story flows smoothly.

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.

When writing a synopsis for your novel, are you allowed to hold back information, or must you spoil the surprise for your editor by telling all? That’s the first of two questions we’ll look at today.

Alice posted two questions on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I have a question about writing a synopsis for a mystery novel. Should you try to leave at least a bit of a mystery unsolved in synopsis (like, who’s the bad guy) or should you reveal all the secrets? What bothers me is that mystery novel is supposed to be a mystery and if the publisher knows everything right from the start, could it be that it won’t be interesting for him/her to read that novel?

That question concerns not just mystery novels but all other novels that may have a surprise in the end. Should you reveal it in your synopsis or can you hide it?

I have also another question that got me into an argument with my friend. If your POV character doesn’t notice (for different reasons) something that is important TO THE READER (not the characters) to know, can the author peek over his shoulder and show the reader what the POV character can’t see? I think the author can do that, but my friend argues that it will ruin the mood of the scene and that the reader would be more immersed in the story if they are not shown stuff POV character fails to notice. Problem is, her POV character fails to notice quite a lot of stuff that I, as a reader, would like to see and that quite the contrary irritates me and prevents me from getting the feel of the story.

Randy sez: Editors wear two hats at all times. All editors are readers. All editors are editors. (I’m sure this is not terribly surprising.)

When wearing the reader hat, the editor likes to be surprised as much as anyone else does.

When wearing the editor hat, the editor wants to know that you can deliver a good story. That means that she wants to know how the story ends. If you know who the bad guy is, you need to tell your editor. If you’ve planned a super-cool, extraordinary, knock-their-socks-off surprise ending, you need to tell your editor.

There is a loophole here. If you look closely, you’ll see that I used the words “If you know.”

What if you don’t know the ending? Well then, you can’t tell the editor, can you?

What if you think you know the ending but when you go to write it, an even better one weasels its way into your brain? As long as it’s a better ending, your editor will forgive.

What if you tell the editor an ending that makes sense, but you’re holding in reserve an even better ending? Well then, you’d better be able to fib Xtremely well to your editor and convince her that you never had an inkling the real killer was Throckmorton until you got to the last chapter and there he was with a bloody knife in his hands and only then did you realize that it wasn’t Fredholm after all, even though his fingerprints were all over Griselda’s iPod.

Now for Alice’s second question, is it ever legitimate to tell the reader something that the POV character doesn’t know?

This question is a little like asking, “Is it ever legitimate for an elephant to be a tiger?”

Go ahead and try to answer that question. Neither “yes” nor “no” seems to be appropriate. An elephant CAN’T be a tiger, so questioning the legitimacy of an elephant being a tiger misses that essential point. Let me unpack that a bit.

You have several different choices for the point of view of any given scene. One of those is called “omniscient POV” and it allows for you, the narrator, to tell the reader things that no character knows. In “omniscient POV” you don’t actually have a POV character. You can get inside the heads of your characters, but none of them is “the POV character.”

The reason is that in order to have a POV character, you implicitly make a decision that the scene is being filtered through the senses of one character. If you show part of the scene in some other way, then you are breaking POV.

Is it legitimate to write a scene in omniscient POV? Of course. Many fine novels have been written in omniscient, but there is no POV character when you make this choice. Instead, you have a “focal character.” (Tragically, the word POV is being asked to do double-duty here, as both a noun and an adjective, and that makes things seem more ambiguous than they actually are.)

It’s also legitimate to choose first person, third person, or even second person (this is rare). In any of these, you have an actual POV character. But when you make this choice, BY DEFINITION, you have chosen not to show the reader things the POV character doesn’t know.

It’s legitimate but fairly uncommon to use the “objective third person POV,” in which there is no POV character, there is only a “focal character”. (Again, the word POV is being used as both a noun and an adjective in the above sentence, which explains the apparent paradox.) When you write a scene this way, it’s perfectly fine to show the reader things the focal character doesn’t know. In fact, it’s common to do so, because the only way you can show emotion is by showing the physical responses of the character (like they do in the movies, where you also can’t get inside the character’s head). Most of those physical responses are not visible to the focal character.

One final question is whether the “head-hopping POV” is legitimate. In this choice, you get inside the heads of multiple characters in a scene. This is quite common and accepted in the romance category, where many readers want to experience the thoughts and emotions of more than one character in the same scene. I know good writers who claim this is legitimate. I know others who consider it the very work of Satan.

Personally, I don’t like head-hopping, but I think if it’s done well, it can get the job done. When the author skips back and forth between heads, never giving the reader the chance to identify with any character, that seems to me a clear case of bad head-hopping and there’s no POV character. When the author makes smooth transitions, it seems to me that the scene is simply being written with one POV character in one part and a different POV character in another part.

It seems that Alice likes omniscient or objective third person. Her friend likes first-person or third-person POV. Those preferences are a matter of taste, not a matter of legitimacy.

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.

If you’re a beginning fiction writer, you know good and well that your first novel is going to be awful. (If you don’t know this, then you have the added handicap of being delusional.) Given this fact, should you even bother to finish that first dreadful novel?

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

I’m in the works of my first story but I my craft needs a whole lot of work. What ways do I work on my craft without writing an entire novel that will no doubt come out as junk in the end? I don’t want to overwhelm my brain trying to make it do something I’m not ready for. Should I try and write shorter stories or scenes for my novel? Any advice?

Randy sez: Here is a theorem which you can easily prove. You will never write your second novel unless you write your first. Even if your first novel is so awful you wouldn’t even use it to wipe up the mess the puppy made, it’s still a necessary step along the road to publication.

You learn to write a novel by writing novels. You get good by first being willing to be bad — if necessary to be dreadful.

Having said that, there are varieties of dreadfulness.

If your paragraphs are dreadful, the solution is to write more paragraphs. Lots of them. Get them critiqued. Try to improve them. And keep doing that over and over and over. Eventually, they’ll get better.

If your scenes are dreadful, the solution is the same, but here it can be helpful to also study up a bit on the theory of writing scenes, because other people have solved the problems you’re struggling with. I’d recommend my free article on this web site, “Writing the Perfect Scene” as your first place to look. That article will recommend some books you can then buy if you need more help.

If the structure of your novel is dreadful, then I don’t recommend continuing to work on it, however. I recommend that you first learn what makes a well-structured novel.

There are plenty of sources for that. My buddy James Scott Bell has a terrific book, PLOT & STRUCTURE which I have been recommending for a long time. I have long sworn by Dwight Swain’s book TECHNIQUES OF THE SELLING WRITER. My own recent book WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES is my best shot at teaching the theory of story structure.

Once you understand why the story structure of your novel sucks, either fix it or move on to a different story. My first attempt at a novel had a serious defect that I didn’t recognize for two and a half years. It was a structural problem. As soon as a friend of mine (John DeSimone, my first writing buddy) pointed out the problem, I abandoned the book.

I don’t think it makes sense to keep working on a novel that you know is doomed. Work on one that you think has a chance of succeeding. If you later discover that one is also doomed by a faulty structure, then fix it or abandon it. Writing fiction is a tough business and it’s hard to maintain your enthusiasm even when you believe your story walks on water. If you know that the main story is broken, you’ll find it impossible to keep slogging on, writing ever-better scenes and paragraphs.

That’s my opinion, anyway, but I”m always willing to hear another point of view. What do my Loyal Blog Readers think? Have you ever realized that your whole novel was fatally flawed? What did you do?

A postscript: After abandoning my first novel, I worked on #2 for several months until I realized that it, too, was fatally flawed. I abandoned that immediately, grateful that I was learning how to fail faster. I worked on novel #3 for a couple of years and its structure was fundamentally sound and I finished it.

I then found an agent who worked for years to sell it while I worked on Books #4 and #5, each of which also had fatal flaws which caused me to abandon them.

Book #3 circulated for years, but we never sold it, although we had some near misses. However, the comments we got from publishers prompted me to write Book #6, which was the first book I sold. I hope to someday publish #3. It had some nice points, but it was too long for the market then, so I might need to slice it into two books.

I am sorry to say that the agent who worked so hard to sell Book #3, Ron Haynes, died suddenly of a heart attack before I completed Book #6, so I sold it without an agent. Ron thought I had talent, and he was an endless source of encouragement, but his hard work never came to fruition in his lifetime. Ron, wherever you are, I thank you.

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.

Do you have to use all the facts you know in your fiction? When the facts contradict the story you want to write, what do you do?

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

I’ve been working on this book in FanStory.com and I’ve gotten articles from the Mayor of Ketchikan I’m using for ‘kinda’ the place this young woman is going to to be a teacher. He had a few girls that did the same thing at 19. Now that rules were if the woman got married she could not teach anymore. This rule was in 1920’s and lasted until the 50’s. In my story I have the teacher getting married. Do I have to make her quit teaching or ignore a rule no one else is going to know? Isn’t there some kind of writing rule that allows you to write things the way you want? I am making this a Romance book, and she happens to be a teacher in the 1920’s Alaska!
What is your answer?

Randy sez: Fiction is not required to follow the facts 100%. You are not only allowed to make stuff up, you’re expected to do so. Fiction is not a documentary.

Having said that, it’s important to be as true to your facts as your category requires. If you’re writing a police procedural, for example, your readers expect your cops to do cop stuff the way actual cops in your particular setting do cop stuff. However, your readers also don’t mind if you make up stuff in your cops’ personal lives that may not be typical of the personal lives of most cops. It’s fiction.

If you’re writing a historical novel set in a particular place and time, your readers expect you to not violate any known historical facts about that place and time. If you do, then you are disobeying one of the cardinal rules of historical fiction. Micky, it does no good to argue that this is a rule nobody will know about. If you know about it, then somebody else knows about it too — probably somebody close to your setting who could be a strong promoter for your book if it rings true. If it rings false, you can count on that “somebody” telling anybody who’ll listen that you don’t know your stuff.

There’s a way around this, of course. If you really insist on this woman continuing to teach after she gets married, then make that part of the conflict. The rules say she has to quit. She doesn’t want to — and she fights the system. Now whatever your story is, it just got better. Conflict always improves a story.

There are some classes of historical fiction where you don’t have to stick with the known facts. Some examples:

• Historical fantasy. Xena the Warrior Princess gets a lot of latitude from her fans, who really don’t care whether the history is anything remotely correct, so long as Xena does lots of fighting in an outlandishly skimpy costume.
• Alternative history. Harry Turtledove is one of the masters of this category. In this class of fiction, you’re expected to diverge from the known facts. It’s an exercise in “what if?” that lets you explore those pesky historical paths not taken.

The one thing you really must do is to make your category clear to your reader and then follow its conventions. In my view, one reason Dan Brown’s book THE DA VINCI CODE was so widely panned by critics was that it claimed to be giving the “correct history of early Christianity” when in reality it was giving an interpretation favored only by a few self-proclaimed “Holy Grail theorists.” Historians across a broad spectrum of philosophical persuasions saw no merit in this interpretation.

This would have been fine if the book were presented as a typical conspiracy book, like many of Robert Ludlum’s books. But Ludlum clearly never believed that his novels represented actual truth, whereas Dan Brown obviously does believe that his does.

Micky, I hope that answers your question. In your case, it seems like you need to account for the facts you know, and my idea to just use this to add to the conflict of your story makes sense to me.

What do my Loyal Blog Readers think? If you were Micky, would you take note of this rule in the story, or would you ignore it?

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: In scanning my favorite blogs today, I found three that sounded downright radical on the prospects of e-books and p-books in the immediate future:

• Seth Godin’s Blog. In a blog entry titled “But who will speak for the trees?” Seth argues that the demise of paper will “doom” newspapers, book publishers, and magazine publishers — probably within three years. (”Doom” means to change them beyond recognition.)
• Mark Coker’s SmashWords Blog. In a blog entry titled “How Indie Ebooks will Transform the Future of Book Publishing” Mark remarks that the future is bright for authors and for publishers willing to change. But he sees a dim future for those publishers who take a bunker mentality.
• Joe Konrath’s Blog. In a blog entry titled “Konrath on Wylie” Joe comments on the case of Andrew Wylie, an agent who has e-published some of the older books of his clients which were contracted before e-books were mentioned in contracts. Konrath warns publishers to embrace the e-future and start treating their authors better, with a better share of the e-book pie.

Things are changing even faster than I expected in my recent blog entry, “The Future of Publishing.” As writers, we need to be willing to adjust to the new realities. Bear in mind as the future comes rushing at you that we are essential to the future of publishing, no matter what form it takes. If you don’t have a writer, then you don’t have a story. Period.

Yesterday, we analyzed a one-sentence storyline posted by Seth. Today, we’ll be looking at four different variants of a storyline posted by a different reader, Daniel, and we’ll try to optimize his work.

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

I have a question about One-Sentence Summaries / Storylines regarding their scale and scope. Here are 4 that I developed for my WIP:

(A) A teenage detective tracks down his father’s killer. (9 words)
(B) A teenage detective with a sleeping disorder tracks down his father’s killer. (13 words)
(C) A teenage detective with a sleeping disorder turns his curse into a strength to track down his father’s killer. (20 words)
(D) A teenage detective with a sleeping disorder turns his curse into a strength to track down his father’s killer and discovers he is his family’s biggest secret. (28 words)

As you can see, they build from simplest to most complex. In working on developing the best storyline I could, I initially came up with the (C) and (D) versions and simply worked backward to get the (A) and (B) versions.

So, my question: Which is best? (A) is simplest and meets all the right criteria but is also so bland as to be a non-starter. Or does “less is more” still apply? Is there a minimum word count? I can add some intriguing details to make it unique with both (B) and (C) and still be under the 25 word mark. Then there’s my whopper (D) which includes a hint at the outcome but is over the word limit.

I’ve tried to meet all the criteria for these things that you’ve mentioned, all from Rachelle Gardner’s blog, and more. Personally, I lean toward (C) to pack in the most punch while still meeting the word limit. But what do you and your readers think?

Randy sez: Agent Rachelle Gardner recently ran a contest on her Rants and Ramblings blog for one-sentence storylines and got quite a large number of entries. If you don’t follow Rachelle, you really should. She’s consistently one of the top bloggers in the Books category on Technorati, and she quite often has the #1 position on that list. I read Rachelle’s blog every day.

The problem with (D) is that it gives away too much of the ending. The one-sentence storyline should give away nothing that happens beyond the first-quarter of the book. The reason is simple: Your one-sentence storyline is a selling tool. It raises a “Story Question” which your novel is meant to answer. If you tell anything about the answer, then you have hobbled your Story Question. The Story Question is this: “Will this teenage detective find his father’s killer?”

In fact, if you look at all four options, (A) through (D), they all answer the Story Question, because they all say explicitly that he tracks down his father’s killer. That’s the main problem I’m seeing here.

An immediate way to improve (A) would therefore be to focus on the teen’s desire to track down the killer, not on his success in doing so: “A teenage detective vows to track down his father’s killer.”

Now the Story Question is clear: Will he or won’t he?

However, as Daniel noted, this is fairly bland. I’ll use a variant of the same question I asked yesterday, on both halves of the sentence:

• How is this teenage detective different from all other teenage detectives?
• How is this killer different from all other killers?

The answers to these questions add uniqueness to your hero or your villain and makes the story far more intriguing.

For example, in Mark Haddon’s brilliant novel, THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME, there is a teenage detective who has Asperger’s syndrome. So a one-sentence summary of this book might be, “An autistic teenage detective vows to find the murderer of his neighbor’s dog.”

Notice that this focuses on the uniqueness of the hero and it has a twist at the end: the victim of the murder is a dog. Most people wouldn’t care much about a dog nor label it a murder, but this detective is different — he is autistic, and it makes sense that he’ll see the death of a dog differently than most people. He, in fact, sees the entire world differently and that’s what makes this novel special.

You might focus instead on the killer. What’s special about him? What’s unique? We might try something like this:

“A teenage detective vows to track down the last surviving member of the Nazi High Command — the man who murdered his father.”

The last surviving member of the Nazi High Command is by definition unique. That heightens the appeal for the novel because the man is a villain on a global scale. But by making him the murderer of our hero’s father, that adds a personal hook that makes it plausible that this hero will not quit, ever.

Of course, this Nazi bad guy, if he exists, would be close to 100 years old. A book like this would have worked better in the 1970s or 1980s, so it would be more plausible to bring this villain forward a few years.

In (B), (C), and (D), Daniel brings in the teen’s sleeping disorder, but in my view, this needs more oomph. (”Oomph” is a technical term which means . . . um, “oomph.”)

The problem is that in (B) there’s no connection between a sleeping disorder and the main quest. It isn’t clear how it could help or hurt the teen’s pursuit of justice.

In (C) and (D), we’re told that the sleeping disorder somehow helps pursue the killer, but since we have no clear indication of how this could possibly happen, it makes the storylines less plausible without making them more interesting. To make these work, we need some sort of explanation.

Daniel has several options:

1. Make the hero unique or more clearly specified.
2. Make the villain unique or more clearly specified.
3. Explain how a sleep disorder can be an advantage.
4. Do something else that brings the story to life.

We’ve already covered Doors #1, #2, and #3. But what about that mysterious Door #4? That’s fertile ground, but we don’t have enough information about Daniel’s story to know what’s happening that could spice up the storyline. Daniel hints that he has some things that could do it, and I think those might be just the ticket.

To answer the final unanswered questions Daniel asked: Yes, less is more in a storyline. No, there is no minimum word count.

For example, I can give you an Xtremely short storyline for my friend Tosca Lee’s next book. Here it is, in just one word: “Judas.”

Tosca’s book is titled ISCARIOT, and it’s the story of Judas Iscariot. If you’re a fan of Tosca’s writing, as I am, that’s really all you need to know. (Because I have a lot of expertise in the time and place that Tosca’s writing about, she and I have talked about her story a lot. Tosca is a research fiend like I am, so I’ve pointed her to my favorite research sources and have given her my best understanding of the political state of first-century Judea and Galilee.)

The reason a one-word storyline works for Tosca’s book is that she’s a character-oriented writer and her lead character is uniquely specified by his first name.

Bottom line: We don’t have enough information about Daniel’s story to perfect his storyline. But he does. I hope he’ll find inspiration to make it better and that he’ll post his improved version here as a comment.

Any thoughts from my Loyal Blog Readers? I’m sure you all know by now that I’m not always right in these judgment calls. But I’ve given my opinion. Anyone else got one? Post it here as a comment.

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.

Today we’ll analyze a one-sentence storyline for a novel involving a massive conspiracy. But don’t tell anyone!

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

Hey Randy, I’m new to this website, but I’ve already learned lots from your articles. I just recently started looking at the blog page, and was wondering if you were still doing one sentence critiques. I noticed that they were in March, so I may be behind the times, but hopefully you can still take a look at this.

“An adopted boy’s search for his real parents accidently uncovers a massive conspiracy that may threaten millions of lives, including his.”

Randy sez: I periodically run clinics on this blog to critique one-sentence storylines. It’s a great exercise for every novelist, and you can always improve. The last clinic was in March and we worked for a couple of weeks on submitted storylines. We certainly didn’t run out of them, but we just couldn’t do them all. Let’s analyze Seth’s storyline in detail, a few words at a time:

“An adopted boy’s search for his real parents…” is a good way to start out a storyline. It’s been done before, of course, but no story is ever completely original, so that’s not a bad thing. A search for parents strikes an emotional chord in just about everyone. This sounds like it’s going to be an intensely personal story.

“…accidently uncovers a massive conspiracy…” now switches gears and shows that the story is both personal and public. That’s good. Any story that threatens lots of people is going to be interesting to a large group of readers. But the wider the scale of the story, the more important it is to personalize it. It’s a lot easier to care about the burning of Atlanta during the Civil War when you are personally invested in the lives of Scarlett and Melanie.

A couple of issues that should be addressed:

• The correct spelling of the word should be “accidentally.”
• It’s not clear to me that it matters that the discovery is accidental. If not, then it’s best to trim this word, because every single word in a one-sentence storyline needs to be necessary. A 14-word sentence is better than a 15-word sentence, all other things being equal.
• Massive conspiracies are good stuff, and they form the foundation of many good novels. However, there’s the rub — many other good novels have had massive conspiracies. The editor is going to be asking, “How is this massive conspiracy different from all other massive conspiracies?” Seth, you MUST answer that question in this storyline. Unless you do, the editor thinks, “It’s been done. No thanks.” So what you really need to do is explain in a few words what the massively conspiring conspirators hope to achieve. Do they want to destroy the Federal Reserve? Emasculate all the fighting men in the US Army? Corner the market on rum-flavored teddy bears? Each of these is a different (and undoubtedly fascinating) story. Each of these is UNIQUE.

“…that may threaten millions of lives, including his.” It’s a fine thing to threaten millions of lives in a novel. It’s an even finer thing to threaten the life of the protagonist. However, this is not something you want to tell. It’s something you want to show.

Just as an example, suppose that I have a story about a terrorist plan to explode a nuclear weapon at the Super Bowl (the storyline of one of Tom Clancy’s novels, THE SUM OF ALL FEARS.) If Tom wrote a one-sentence storyline, it might go like this: “Arab terrorists create a nuclear bomb with plans to detonate it at the Super Bowl in Denver.”

With that level of detail, it’s really not necessary to add a phrase about the number who might be killed: “Arab terrorists create a nuclear bomb with plans to detonate it at the Super Bowl in Denver, which may threaten millions of lives.”

See the difference? When you tell specifically what the disaster is, you don’t also have to tell what the horrible consequences are. You also don’t need to add that the hero of the story also might get killed.

If the storyline were a bit more specific, I could make some tweaks to tighten it up. However, in this case, I don’t know enough about the story to know exactly how to do that. I don’t know what sort of conspiracy this is or what the possible consequences are. So all I can say is this: Make it more specific and you’ll have a good strong storyline.

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.