Category: Thursday Technicalities

Thursday Technicalities: Choosing Viewpoint Characters

Ariel Paiement
Publishing Journey

Introduction

Choosing viewpoint characters can be a difficult task even for seasoned authors. For those who are just starting out or who have never delved far into viewpoints and point-of-view, it can be a landmine of problems to navigate: problems that can lead to deadly explosions within the piece they’re working on. Viewpoint makes or breaks the novel, so it’s extremely important to choose the right viewpoint. Let’s get right into it!

What is Viewpoint?

Think of viewpoint like a camera lens. That lens will follow around one character at a time, and only one character. It will shine a light onto their inner thoughts and onto their view of the world as well as what is happening in that world. But it can only do it for one person at a time, so it’s limited in its scope. 

Choosing what that lens shows the reader and who that lens shows them is one of the most important decisions for each scene. If your camera focuses in on someone who’s missing all the action or who doesn’t see the parts of it that move the story forward, the scene becomes lifeless and can’t carry its own weight across the page. So, now that we know what viewpoint is, let’s take a look at some factors that can help you choose which character should be the viewpoint character in the scene.

A Word About Omniscient

Before we get into all of the details, let’s take a look at viewpoint in omniscient POV. In omniscient, as we discussed in the article on point-of-views, you can’t delve into the internal thoughts of any of the characters. Instead, the reader will experience the emotions, thoughts, and behaviors of characters through the lens of an all-knowing, all-seeing narrator. This narrator, then, becomes the frame through which we will see the big picture. He or she will guide us through the world, showing us what we need to see and telling us about important things in clever or intriguing ways. 

Because of this, your viewpoint in omniscient will remain the narrator’s throughout the entirety of the novel. While you may show your reader what various characters think or do, they will not be the viewpoint characters because the narrator is telling us that’s what they thought or did.

Who is Central to the Scene?

This is the first in a series of questions to ask yourself about the scene you are writing. Who or what is central to the scene? The answer may be that several characters or animate objects/sentient lifeforms are central to the scene. If so, that’s fine. This question alone doesn’t necessarily contain the answer to your ultimate question, but it is the first layer in the onion that is your question.

So how does answering this question help? Well, your viewpoint character should always be important to the scene. The character should never be just a side character that’s observing for the heck of it. They should be integral parts of the scene in some way or another, though those ways may vary.

What Does the Character Reveal in the Scene?

The second question to ponder regarding the characters you listed above is this: what do these characters tell you that you don’t already know? If the scene were in their point-of-view, would it move the story forward? Would we gain as much from it as we would if it were told in someone else’s perspective? If so, then that character is likely not the best fit for your viewpoint. 

A scene should always tell us something new or move the plot forward in some way. Preferably, it should do both. If a character can’t help you toward that goal as the viewpoint character, they have no place in that role. They’ll only bog down your story, so strike them from your list.

How Does This Connect to the Bigger Picture?

The final question you ought to consider is how this will factor into the bigger picture. Will your viewpoint character’s revealed information or forward motion weave into the story seamlessly to provide the reader with hints and nudges toward the ending? Does that character work alongside the other viewpoint characters to draw us deeper into the story until we finally come up for air at the end? If not, then this character too would make a poor fit, even if he or she made it through all of the other stages. 

Results

At this point, you should have several very good candidates. Chances are you may only have one character who made it through all of the stages. If so, that’s the character you should use, assuming you were honest with yourself in previous sections. 

But if you still have a few characters left to pick from, go with the one you feel fits the scene best. Choose a character you find easy to write or one that, in your gut, you know fits in with the people and the mechanisms involved in the scene in question to move the plot and the characters forward. 

Conclusion

This may seem like a lot of work, but in reality, it often takes me only a minute or two to decide who should be my viewpoint character in a scene once I have the character established and know the story. Knowing the process and what questions to keep in mind when answering will speed up the process, even if at first it takes a little while to think through everything.

The main takeaway, besides the questions, is that this is entirely possible and can be achieved by even beginning writers. It takes some thought and some preparation ahead of time, prior to writing, but it isn’t impossible. You might never have thought about viewpoint before now, but that’s the good news for you. You can learn it and get to a point where you choose the viewpoint character correctly the majority of the time.

Have a question or another tip on how to choose your viewpoint character? Feel free to leave it in the comments.

Thursday Technicalities: Deep POV

Ariel Paiement

Introduction

This week on Thursday Technicalities, we’re going to discuss writing in deep point-of-view. This point-of-view, really, is more of a viewpoint to write from than it is a literal point-of-view, and as such, it can be used with both third, first, and second person. However, it works best with first and third person since those are the ones that readers have the easiest time acclimating to. So let’s take a look at it.

What is Deep POV?

Deep POV involves an entire shift in viewpoint and perspective as a writer. It requires you to go deep into your characters’ minds to understand how they talk and how they think. Why? Because deep POV is, at the heart of it, writing the scenes in the voice of the character. This is relatively easy to do in first person because it naturally lends itself to this, but it’s much harder to do in third person. However, it makes a huge difference in the writing.

Writing Deep POV

With deep POV defined, let’s go over how to write it. To begin with, let’s take a look at the difference deep POV makes. We should know what it looks like before we go into how to write in deep POV.

Consider this example before it’s written in deep POV:

“Orian couldn’t believe they’d asked him to do this. If he’d known what was at stake, he thought, he wouldn’t have done this. He never would’ve gotten her involved either. Now, with the betrayal in her eyes fresh in his mind, he found it was all he could think of. He couldn’t think of the fact that he’d won or the fact that his masters were pleased. He could only think of those bright blue eyes full of pain and disappointment.” 

Now consider the same paragraph, but in deep POV.

“Why had they asked him to do this? He never should’ve done what they said. Never would’ve if they’d told him what was at stake before they’d sent him here. He clutched at his chest. Those bright blue eyes invaded his mind, his very being. He wouldn’t have gotten her involved either, really, he wouldn’t have. But it was too late. With the look of betrayal in her eyes filling his head, he had never hated himself more. That anguish cut to the quick. What sort of pleasure had duty brought? None. Pain and bitterness were his only companions now. That and the galling pleasure his masters took in his success. But what was that worth? Nothing. Not when he’d lost her. Not when the disappointment and despair in her eyes was all he could think of.” 

See the difference? In the first, the narrator tells us about what Orian is thinking and feeling. In the second one, we see everything through Orian’s eyes, and he tells us what is going on. Something worth noting about deep POV is that it often results in longer writing, not just richer writing. The nice thing is, though, that even though it leads to longer pieces, readers are still willing to read it because deep POV has an effect that pulls the reader right into the story as if they themselves could be the character.

Now, let’s go over some of the key things you need to keep in mind in order to write something that’s deep point-of-view. 

Key One

To begin with, the first key to writing in deep point-of-view is to let your author’s voice disappear in favor of the characters’. You aren’t writing about your viewpoint character. You’re writing as them. Therefore, don’t use words or phrases that remind the reader of the author’s presence. These are filter words like: heard, smelled, notice, feel, know, or noted, among others. If a character is telling us the story in the immediate moment, they won’t tell us he heard the birds chirping. He’d just say the birds are chirping. Here are a few examples of how this works:

Third-Person Limited before Deep POV

Horace noticed that the woman was unusually tall.

Deep POV:

The woman was freakishly tall.

Third Person Limited (Before Deep POV)

Angelina felt he couldn’t get much worse than he was, but somehow, she thought, he had managed.

After Deep POV:

He couldn’t get much worse, but somehow he had managed. Angelina shook her head.

Key Two

The second key ties into the first, and that’s the voice you use as you’re writing. Since you’re writing in deep POV, each scene must be written in the voice of your viewpoint character. This means that if you have a character who speaks British English, then you would use phrases and lingo within the narration itself that your viewpoint character would use. Let’s look at an example of how this works out with a character who is a bit more of the backwoods hillbilly character. 

Written outside of deep POV:

He couldn’t believe she’d just said that. She should know that sort of thing wasn’t acceptable here. If she’d said it to anyone else, he thought, she’d be sent out of town with a gun barrel to her head. But, here she was with a smile on her face, expecting him to just overlook her behavior.

Deep POV:

She ain’t kiddin’, is she? The girl had been sniffing around enough to know that kinda thing wasn’t going to fly around here. Anyone else woulda marched her on outta town with a gun to her pretty temple. But here she was,  with as pretty a smile as could be on that fresh face of hers, and just waiting for him to smile back. Crazy city girl.

In this version, you can see that not everything is formal or even “grammatically” correct, but you get an immediate idea of the voice of the character. 

Key Three

The final thing we’ll discuss on writing deep point-of-view has to do with explanations. Sometimes, it’s okay for a character to explain something. But many times explanations become extraneous and end with the character explaining to themselves something they already know. For example:

Rowen eyed the buck. If he didn’t hit it just right with the arrow, it would ruin the meat. Then his mother would be angry with him for failing to bring back food for the night.

Okay, so if Rowen is a hunter, even if he isn’t the best hunter, he already knows he needs to hit the deer just right or risk ruining the meat. He would also already know that his mother will be angry. So, here’s the deep POV version.

Rowen eyed the buck. Hit it just right and they’d have dinner. He leveled the bow and smiled. The best part was the way his mother’s eyes would light up when she saw him dragging this buck into camp.

Here, he isn’t explaining anything that he already knows. Only reflecting on the information in brief in a way that anyone might do. This is really important in writing in deep POV because no one explains things to themselves that they already know, so you have to find ways to write it that avoids that.

Conclusion

Alright, everyone! I know this is a long article, but hopefully it’s helpful to everyone. If you have questions or other things you want to add that you’ve learned about deep POV, please feel free to share those in the comments! I have also included some links below for additional reading on this subject because it’s a huge subject and not something this article is able to cover completely.

Well-Storied

The Editor’s Blog

Thursday Technicalities: Choosing Your POV

Ariel Paiement

Introduction

Last week, we discussed the different options for point-of-view, and this week, we’re going to go over how you choose one. This can be a bit of a struggle for many writers because the options offer widely varying strengths and weaknesses in some cases. This means that you need to assess your story to determine what point-of-view will really allow you to give the reader the fullest experience possible. By assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each point-of-view option, you will be better able to choose one to fit your needs. So let’s get started!

First Person POV

To start with, let’s look at first person. The obvious strength here is that you get to see intimately inside the character’s head and his/her heart. The character will be the one to tell the story and show us the world that his/her story takes place within. This is great when you want the reader to be close and personal with a small cast of characters. It’s usually suited well to one or two viewpoint characters who switch off, though some authors have used it for more than that.

The downfall of first person pov is that you can’t show us what is going on inside the minds of anyone except the viewpoint character, the “I”, in the chapter. Typically, to avoid confusing readers, you need to stick with one viewpoint per chapter in first person because changing becomes too hard to follow in most situations since both viewpoint characters would be referred to as “I”. To avoid throwing the character out of the novel, you want transitions to be seamless, which usually necessitates using chapters as the break for changing viewpoints instead of scenes as you do in third person. First person can also limit your cast because having too many characters to follow when chapters are the break off point for a new viewpoint. It isn’t that a larger cast is impossible, but it is difficult, so most writers avoid it with this point of view.

Second Person POV

As mentioned in my previous post, second person is really best suited to choose your own adventure novels or similar styles of writing. It doesn’t fit well at all with most other writing because readers will, at some point, find themselves unable to suspend their belief in order to enjoy the book. The weakness of this writing, then, is the fact that it addresses the reader and forces them to be the character, which may work fine if the reader relates to everything the character does. The minute they don’t, they’re going to struggle to keep reading and are, most likely, going to quit reading.

Third Person POV

This option has a few strengths. First of all, it allows the writer to have multiple viewpoints in a chapter. Because third person can easily differentiate between characters if the writer has done a good job with the work, it isn’t necessary to wait to change viewpoints until the beginning of a new chapter. A scene break will work fine. The other major strength is that it allows for a larger cast of characters. You can fit more of them within a chapter to show what’s going on in various places, so novels with a lot of characters and a large scope of events in varying locations are usually better suited to this POV option. It’s also strong because it gives room for not knowing why a viewpoint character did something. If you need to keep it secret, it’s much easier to simply write a scene in another viewpoint character’s perspective than it is to write the whole chapter in the other character’s perspective to hide an intent from the reader.

However, despite those strengths, third person does have the weakness of distance. It isn’t as close to the character as first person, and so readers may feel shut out of the character’s head at times, which could cause problems for relating with that character. Good writers can work around this issue with internal dialogue and other techniques, such as deep pov, which will be discussed in a later article, but it still falls under the weakness category.

Omniscient POV

Last, but not least, we have omniscient POV. This one’s biggest strength is the fact that it allows for a third party as the narrator, one who is seeing everything and knows everything but is not in the story. This allows a writer to give readers a much fuller picture of what’s going on than they might otherwise receive in another POV. Of course, the issue with is that you sacrifice the ability to delve into any one character’s thoughts. Instead, the narrator must tell us that Sally thought Jim was a nuisance or that Justin found Pete to be a tolerable roommate. This POV’s strength lies in the fact that it allows for some very interesting commentary and a humorous effect, in many cases, but it sacrifices the closeness with the characters in exchange. It also means the author must keep the entire narration in the voice of that narrator, not the voice of the author or the character. That can be exhausting, and it forces the author to constantly check to be sure they aren’t including anything unnecessary. Readers won’t have a high tolerance for extraneous information, so the author has to be sure that all commentary fits with the story without bogging it down. The author, then, is the filter for what is and is not important, not what the character would or would not know.

Conclusion

Hopefully this has been helpful to everyone!  If you have other strengths and weaknesses for these viewpoints that you can add, feel free to leave them in the comments! Have a question or a suggestion for a future Thursday Technicalities post? Leave that in the comments as well or send me an email at arielpaiement@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you!

Thursday Technicalities: Introducing the Points-of-View

Ariel Paiement

Introduction

This week, we’re starting a new mini-series on Thursday Technicalities. We’re going to go over point-of-view. This week, we’re just going to cover the basics. Once we’ve done that, I’ll get into how to choose a point-of-view and viewpoint as well as some other specific, more advanced topics on point-of-view. Hopefully this will be helpful for you all!

First Person POV

Let’s start with the point-of-view that many beginners choose. First person point-of-view is often easier for beginners because it feels more natural to speak in first person. It’s what we use all the time in regular speech. Out of all the points-of-view a writer can use, this is the one that generally feels closest to the reader because the character is the narrator and they tell you how things happened. However, this does present its own difficulties, as we’ll see in a later blog post on point-of-view.

Second Person POV

This is rarely used, but it bears mentioning because some books can use it to good effect. The entire book, in this point-of-view, is written as though the character (you) is the reader. Of course, this usually has the effect of distancing the reader from the book because they balk at more things and their suspension of belief is challenged too greatly. After all, they might not do the things your character (the you in the story) does, and so they find that it is irritating to be addressed and asked to be the character for the duration of the novel. The best place for this point-of-view tends to be books that are of the Choose-Your-Own Adventure variety because it then allows the reader to make some subset of decisions on their own rather than having everything dictated for them.

Third Person POV

This is the second most common point-of-view used in writing and with good reason. It allows for more scope than first person does, but it also still contains some of the up close and personal feeling that first person contains. Often, this is used for adult books because it allows authors to have more than one point-of-view per chapter, which is often necessary for more complicated plots.

Third Person Limited or Omniscient

The final common point-of-view in writing is third person omniscient or limited point-of-view. This is usually best suited to humor and satire, though it can work in other instances too. Of note is the fact that this used to be quite popular during the days of Tolkien and Dickens. Both authors, as well as many of their contemporaries, used the point-of-view with wonderful effect in their writing. However, the days when readers were willing to read that sort of prose in a non-humor or satire setting have passed, and most readers will only put up with it for the sake of reading a classic. As such, generally, it’s best to avoid this unless it suits your novel in a very specific way.

As far as what omniscient point-of-view actually entails, the point-of-view is that of an all-knowing narrator. That narrator may be the older version of a character in the story or someone who is only observing the story (much as Death does in The Book Thief), but the narrator does not participate in the story. Instead, they tell the reader what has happened and provide interesting commentary to go along with it. The key to omniscient point-of-view lies in that interesting commentary and a narrator with an engaging voice, but this also makes it an extremely difficult point-of-view that I don’t recommend for beginners. Not for an entire novel at least. If you want to experiment with it, go for it! It’s a good exercise that will help to grow your writing ability, but start small because this point-of-view is tough, even for experienced writers.

Conclusion

These main points-of-view are the ones that have stood throughout writing history. Various authors use them to produce fiction that vastly differs in its style, content, and voice. You can use them too, but it requires some knowledge of how to choose and what is involved in each. I’ll be discussing that next time on Thursday Technicalities, so stay tuned for that! I hope this has been helpful.

As always, if there’s a topic you’d like me to cover in this blog category or another, feel free to email me or leave it in the comments. I’m always happy to get them!

Thursday Technicalities – Plotting Your Story

Ariel Paiement

Introduction

Last week, we talked about plotting scenes. This week we’re discussing plotting for an entire story. Does that strike a little fear into you? If it does, don’t worry! I’m going to break it down as much as I can to make the process understandable and much less of a headache. But at the end of the day, my process is just that. My process. You may find that working with other methods of plotting, whether more or less rigorous, may work better for you. If so, go with it. You want to do what works best for you and makes your story the best it can be. But don’t knock it until you try it, right? So let’s take a look.

Where to Start

Many times, the main issues people have with plotting center around uncertainty over where to start or a fear that plotting might take away from the joy of writing. Of course, this doesn’t have to be the case for you on either front. But let’s start with giving you a place to take off from with plotting.

For me, I use a blend of Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake Method, Jordan Rosenfeld’s method for plotting scenes, and Rachel Aaron’s method from her book 2K to 10K: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love. Mostly, these different methods achieve the same end goal of having your novel plotted out in a way that will allow you to continue working without getting stuck. 

The place I always start is with a summary of my story. I boil the story down to the heart of what it’s about and write a one-sentence summary. Then I take that sentence and expand it into a paragraph, then a half-page, and finally a full page. You can go further and write a full four-page synopsis/summary if you wish, but I usually don’t go that far. Just doing the full page will give you what you need to know where the novel is going and will take you from a high-level view to a detail-focused look at the story. Even if you choose not to go any further, I highly recommend doing at least this.

Character Charts

Besides plotting out your novel or story using a summary and, later on, a scene list that you can use for plotting scenes like we discussed last week, I also enjoy doing character charts. These are a tremendous help because I can use them to really get to know my character, and, as an added bonus, I can use them as references for little details I might otherwise forget or accidentally change, like eye-color or hair-color. This is one part of plotting a story that’s lots of fun while also being very important.

When you’re doing the character charts, try to write a short paragraph summarizing that character’s story arc and how they change in the novel too. This ensures that you won’t forget or get side-tracked on how they fit into the plot, especially if they’re secondary or supporting characters as opposed to a main character.

Scene Lists

Maybe after doing the other plotting stuff above, you decide you don’t want to plot out your scenes because it takes the spontaneity of deciding the little moments on the go. That’s fine, but I do recommend that you make a scene list. This is pretty basic and just involves jotting down the main highlights of each chapter that will comprise the one to two, maybe three or four, scenes in your chapter. If you decide to plot those scenes later, then you’ll already be all set to do so, but if not, they’ll just provide a general idea of where you’re starting on each chapter just so you don’t have to start with a blank slate.

Conclusion

Whatever approach you take, there’s a lot to be gained from plotting. Writers who haven’t tried it and are beginners often feel it may suck the fun out of it. Where’s the fun in planning, after all? Wouldn’t it be better to just jump in and find out what’ll happen as you go? And while there’s something to be said for too much plotting being a bad thing, blending the two approaches offers much more to those writers than choosing not to plot at all since plotting offers a road to avoid plot holes. If you’ve never tried it, I recommend that you do that. You can look up the authors I mentioned and see how they handle it or find others’ methods and blend everything to create what works for you. But give it a try before you decide it isn’t worth your time.

Thursday Technicalities: Plotting Scenes

Ariel Paiement
Publishing Advice

Introduction

Do you have trouble getting your chapters, let alone your scenes, to a word count or length that feels decent? Or maybe you feel that your scenes seem to be wasting space and fitting poorly in the structure of your book? These are only a few of the problems you may be having with scenes, and there is a simple solution to this.

Plotting.

Yes, plotting your scenes. I know, I know. To those of you who hate plotting or planning in any way, shape, or form, this probably sounds like a nightmare. A long time ago, I would’ve been with you. And I’d be having all the same problems you are too. So just hear me out on this. Give it a try and see how it can make a difference. If it doesn’t work, feel free to stop doing it. I don’t want you to waste your time. But you won’t know if it’ll help until you try, and my experience has been that most people I know (myself included) who have tried this, have found it useful.

So let’s take a look.

What Plotting Scenes Isn’t

First of all, I want to start by explaining that plotting scenes is not creating an entire path for your whole novel. While I often use the list of events that need to happen for my novel’s entire plot to develop a scene list and scene plots, it isn’t necessary to have it. Scene plotting is its own entity, even if it does work well with plotting the storyline.

Plotting scenes is also not a waste of time. Initially, when someone suggested I plot my scenes, I looked at them like they were nuts. Why would I want to do that? It took me extra time to sit down and think about it ahead of time like that. But as I started thinking about it, I decided, hey, why not give it a try? The writers who suggested it had mentioned it increased their scene length and made the scenes much more cohesive, so I figured trying couldn’t hurt.

And they were right.

I went from scenes that might be about 1,000 words max to scenes that could get to the 1,500 to 2,000 word range. My chapter lengths went from 2,000 words max to anywhere from 3,500 to 6,000 on the high end. So, I promise that it can work if it’s approached well.

What Is Scene Plotting?

Okay, so now that we’ve clarified what plotting scenes isn’t, we probably should know what it actually is. Scene plotting means figuring out what the scene’s main focus is, what the intention of the viewpoint character will be, and the main points of that scene that will get you from the beginning to the end. Sound like a lot of work?

Well, it can be. But I usually only spend fifteen minutes to get all of the scenes for two or three chapters done. And it saves me a lot of editing time later. How? 

It does so in several ways. 

First, it saves time because I already know what the focal point of the scene should be and can write it in a way that best shows that focus. Second, I also already know the main points of what will happen, so I just have to fill in the details. No more time spent staring at a screen wondering where I’m going next. I already know. Finally, I know who my viewpoint character is and what they’re attempting to achieve or what they want out of the scene. This saves time in editing later because I will have already included their motivations for the reader, and it will be clear what the character is driving at in the entire scene. No ambiguity or confusion left there as long as I actually pay attention to what I wrote down.

Handling Scene Plotting

There are a few ways you can handle plotting for scenes. Really, none of them are right or wrong. What you prefer to do will differ from others, and that’s fine. We all need different levels of detail and work to achieve our goals. However, there are some key things I have found that work, so I’ll go over those to give you a place you can start.

The first thing I always do is write down what chapter the scenes go to above the plotting. That way, when I go back to it later, I don’t have to try to figure out what it went to. After that, I always label my scenes with numbers in order so I never have to wonder where one scene ends and another begins.

When it comes to the actual plotting, I write a name for the scene next to my number so I have an idea of what the scene’s main point is. I also write in parentheses the name of the character who will be the viewpoint character. Under that, I also jot down what the character’s motivation is. Finally, I use bullet points and fill in the main points of the scene as it goes from start to end. This can be done with sentences or sentence fragments. Whatever will be enough to jog your memory later.

You can do this chapter-by-chapter or all at once. I usually like to have a good number of chapters all plotted out so that I don’t have to take time to do it at the beginning of every writing session, but whatever you prefer is fine. There isn’t really a right way or a wrong way on this one.

The last thing that you should make sure of in your plotting of scenes is this: every scene must reveal to the reader something they didn’t already know. It may only be a new angle on an old fact that will be important later, but some new piece of information should be revealed. Characters should grow closer or further apart. Evidence should turn up that wasn’t there before. Clues should be discovered. New enemies or threats might appear. These are all just a few of the types of new information that might be revealed to a reader. So skim over your scene and ask whether or not it serves a purpose and whether or not it reveals anything new. If it doesn’t do either, you need to cut it. If it serves a purpose but doesn’t reveal anything new, you need to add more and keep writing until something new is there.

Conclusion

Initially, plotting scenes might seem a bit over-the-top. However, it really does save time and makes sure your scenes aren’t filler material that doesn’t and shouldn’t need to be there. If you’re a pantser instead of a plotter, I understand why you might not want to do this. But I really do recommend it. I know pantsers who have effectively worked this method in with their other methods of writing and discovered it helped tremendously. Give it a try and see if it works for you. You never know!

Thursday Technicalities: bringing Flat Characters to Life

Ariel Paiement

Introduction

One of the things writers of all levels can run into is the problem of flat characters. Characters can be flat because they haven’t been characterized in a way that makes them stand out, or they can end up flat because they’re cliche and boring. This is especially concerning if your main characters are the ones that end up flat. So, how do you bring a flat character to life? Let’s take a look at some of the common issues and ways to fix them so the character has a life of their own.

Voice

Last week, we talked about voice as a method of characterization. This is one place where a character can go flat. If they sound just like everyone else in the entire novel, they’re not going to stand out. Obviously, if the problem runs that deep, other characters will also be flat. But the problem might only extend to one or two characters that readers can’t distinguish between because of their similarity in voice. This is still a major problem if it’s occurring with main characters.

I won’t go into great length about voice since it’s already covered in my last article here. Review that to see how you can effectively use voice to provide characterization that is solid and unique to each character.

Direct Characterization

The next thing that could happen is having no direct characterization for a character. Direct characterization is when the author tells the reader something about the character.

This is one that I personally recommend avoiding for the most part, but sometimes there’s good reason to use it. If it’s something we would never learn otherwise but need to know, for example, the author might choose to tell us that fact about the character. Note that this particular type of characterization won’t work for deep-point-of-view because deep POV focuses on eliminating the author’s voice and diving into the character’s point-of-view exclusively.

Indirect Characterization

This one is far more important than direct characterization for bringing a flat character to life. Indirect characterization focuses on all the things we learn about a character through little quirks, repeated actions, or recurring phrases and words. In this method, the character reveals himself or herself a piece at a time through concrete actions and behaviors, not through the author’s say-so.

If a character is feeling flat, there’s a good possibility this is what’s missing. The little habits, oddities, and nuances of a person is what makes them unique, and that’s equally true of a character.

This technique also has the added benefit of allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions and fill the character in with the broad strokes of their imagination, which often results in a more vivid picture for the reader than telling them directly does.

Another important note about indirect characterization is that it can include physical descriptions. Perhaps a character has a particular scar or marking on their body that bears significance to them and continually reminds them of how or why they got it. That can result in indirect characterization because that scar or marking acts as a vehicle to deliver information to the reader regarding that character.

Emotional Depth and Motivation

Another possible problem with your characterization is that they lack emotional depth and motivation. This problem can be the result of a cliche character. It happens a lot with books that focus on character types that have been overused. Think books with main characters like the bad boy, good girl, nerd, or any of the paranormal tropes such as vampires, werewolves, or witches.

Now, it isn’t that those character types can’t be given depth. They can. But often, writers slip into the cliche because it’s easier, and they forget to make the character unique. Emotional depth and motivation can help with this.

Revealing a character’s mindset and giving them just the right mix of emotional qualities can take a cliche character type and make it into an actual three-dimensional character that readers can relate to. Their emotional depth and how they respond to emotional stimuli provides the motivation for their actions in many cases. Even when people are at their most rational, emotion will factor in.

So if your character is feeling flat, check to make sure that your reader can connect to your character on an emotional level and can understand what motivates your character. Often, describing a character through their emotional state can be much more image-evoking than a physical one.

Change

This last one is the biggest problem that can lead to a flat character. If your character doesn’t change throughout the novel and is relatively uncomplicated, they are the definition of flat. The simplest way to fix the problem is to make sure they have a character arc. Make sure that by the end of the story, the character has changed, either for better or worse, and has learned something, ideally. There really isn’t much else you can do to fix this, but if you do that, then your character should be headed in a much more three-dimensional direction.

Conclusion

Though there are many reasons why a character may end up feeling flat, I’ve done my best to cover the main reasons why it happens. Do you have other reasons you’ve found for why a character ends up flat or ways to fix flat characters? If so, feel free to share them in the comments below! If you have something you’d like to see on Thursday Technicalities that I haven’t covered yet, feel free to send me an email or leave it in the comments.

Thursday Technicalities: Voice as a Method of Characterization

Ariel Paiement

Introduction

This week, we’re shifting gears to talk a little bit about voice as a method of characterization. We’re going to go over how you can use a character’s voice in the novel to characterize them and how you can do it well. Too often, we see those authors who choose strange spellings and awkwardly phrased sentences to get across the idea that a character is foreign or has a unique quality to them. While we appreciate the effort put into characterization, we’ve all seen it go wrong when it becomes unwieldy and difficult to understand. My hope is that this post will help you to better understand how you can go about using a character’s voice properly to characterize them.

What is Voice?

To begin with, we need to understand what voice is and is not. 

First, what it is not. Voice is not your writing style in this case. While you do have a writer’s voice that develops with time as you write, that isn’t what this article is about. It also isn’t about the dialogue of a character, specifically, though dialogue is a part of voice.

Voice, in this case, refers to the unique way that the character thinks and speaks. If you’re writing in deep point-of-view, something I will discuss briefly next week when I go over bringing flat characters to life (and more in depth about a month and a half from now when I discuss the different points-of-view), this is a little easier to utilize because the character’s thoughts and unique phrasings or sayings will shine through even in third person. Otherwise, unless you’re writing in first person, you’re going to be using voice mainly in internal and external dialogue. 

Using Voice

Now that you know what voice is, how can you use it properly? This is a little bit more tricky to explain, but I’ll go over a few do’s and don’ts for you to make things a little easier.

  • As a general rule of thumb, don’t make a lot of changes to spellings of words for dialect. Dropping the ‘g’ on the end of a word here in there (endin’ instead of ending) is fine, but don’t go crazy. Use specific phrases or occasional changes to spelling to hint at a character’s dialect or nationality, but avoid doing so in a way that makes it difficult to understand them.
  • Don’t overdo on the unique phrases or catchwords. You want the reader to be in on the unique culture of the character, and the best way to include them is not to throw a bunch of phrases or slang at them that they can’t possibly understand just yet. Sprinkle things throughout, and pick some specific words or phrases your character is going to use a lot. Then stick with it.
  • Do be consistent. If you’re going to change spellings, make sure you do it everywhere in the same way. Otherwise, you’ll just confuse people.
  • If you’re writing in deep point-of-view, do include these little phrases or character-unique words in the narrative itself. The whole point of deep point-of-view is to allow the narrator to entirely disappear so that the reader will be so immersed in the character that they feel as if they’re right there as the character, experiencing everything. Using the character’s catch phrases in the narration here and there or narrating things in a way that shows character-unique mannerisms all contribute to the voice of the character and to that sense of immersion for the reader.

The Importance of Voice

Having characters with strong or memorable voices is really important. It makes the difference between an okay book and a phenomenal one. Why? Because long after the plot has faded from our minds as readers, we will remember characters and the impressions they left us with, the words they said that made an impact, and the voice they had in our heads throughout the story. We’ll remember them because they were memorable.

But that’s only possible if they have something about them, about their voice, that we can hold onto and store away in our memory for some other day. You want to do that with your characters so your readers can remember your characters long after they’ve parted ways with your novel.

So while it is work to write in a voice not your own (not to mention developing it and keeping it consistent), it brings your story to life in a way many other things can’t. It may be a technical aspect of writing, but it’s as important as the less concrete aspects of the craft.

Conclusion

Voice can be tricky to nail down for some characters. Others may come easy. What are some of your favorite ways to get yourself into the mindset and voice of your character while you write? Is it something you find hard or easy? I’d love to hear what all of you think. Leave your comments in the comment section below! And as always, if you have a topic you’d like to see me cover on The Fantasy Nook, feel free to email me with the idea. If it fits well, you may just see your blog post idea covered on here.

Thursday Technicalities: Punctuation Lifesavers

Ariel Paiement

So, last week we talked about how to paragraph for effect. This week, we’re going to change gears just a bit and talk about punctuation. Now, I assume that most of us are fairly solid on grammar rules, and if we aren’t, we can look them up quickly enough on Google. So I won’t bore you with long-winded explanations of that.

Instead, this post is going to go through some of the ways you can use punctuation both inside and outside of dialogue to get across the mood. This plays into having strong prose and dialogue that can stand on its own. A big part of that is choosing punctuation that can give the tone you want.

If you haven’t already, you should go back and read through the posts on sentence structure, dialogue do’s and don’ts, and paragraphing for effect. All of those Thursday Technicalities posts need to be combined with this in order for the whole piece to function. Once you’ve covered those, come back here, and add this week’s tool to your tool box.

For those of you who have already read the previous posts, let’s get started!

Commas

In fiction writing, we have a little more leeway to do things that might not be precisely grammatically correct in other places. This isn’t to say there aren’t rules. There most certainly are. But the rules are a bit different, especially for dialogue.

Commas are a good way to show that there’s a pause in dialogue, a person’s train of thought, or narration. Periods can, at points, be a bit abrupt, so a comma might be a better choice so long as it doesn’t make the sentence too long or take the place of a period when a sentence should end.

Let’s take a look at some places where commas might be the better option for these areas.

Dialogue:

“I don’t like Freddy. He’s too loud. Too rude. Too stupid.”

Okay, so this person isn’t being very nice, but that’s beside the point. Notice that the last three lines sound choppy? Let’s use commas here instead and see how it improves the flow.

“I don’t like Freddy. He’s too loud, too rude, and too stupid.”

Maybe it’s a simplistic example, but this is much better with commas instead of periods.

Train of Thought:

Didn’t picture it ending like this. There had to have been a better way. Another way with more results. More finesse. And maybe more humanity.

Okay, so again, some of these sentences just feel choppy. That’s fine if you want a less flowing, more abrupt approach. But if you’re trying to give a more reflective tone to a character, this just isn’t going to work. With commas, it looks much better.

Didn’t picture it ending like this. There had to have been a better way. Another way with more results, more finesse, and maybe more humanity.

There’s a very obvious difference in feel and pacing here, so keep that in mind when you choose commas instead of periods or vice versa.

Narration:

Cora hadn’t planned for this. The flat tire threw all of her plans out the window. She was in the middle of nowhere. No help. Nothing. Not even a house in sight. So definitely a major setback. She didn’t even have a spare. Just lovely.

Okay, so this is fine. If you want the reader to speed through this paragraph, it isn’t a problem. If you want them to slow down and consider what they’re seeing more closely, it’s probably not so great. Looking at it with commas, you might end up with something like this:

Cora hadn’t planned for this. The flat tire threw all of her plans out the window. She was in the middle of nowhere–no help, nothing. Not even a house in sight, so definitely a major setback. She didn’t even have a spare. Just lovely.

Alright, I think I’ve belabored the point about commas for long enough. So let’s take a look at the next punctuation mark.

Exclamation Points

This one is overused all the time in amateur writing and even in some published work, depending on who you ask. Really, exclamation points are intended to give something a lot of weight and impact. So they should be used sparingly.

Let me show you why:

Read through this and think about what part of it stands out the most to you.

“I can’t believe you did that! You had no right to make that decision without me! Why would you even think you could give my kid away without asking first? I wanted her!”

Chances are that you have no idea what’s supposed to have the most emphasis here. And that’s because I used exclamation marks until they almost became like a period for all the good they’re doing. In fact, they’re not even as good as a period since they distract more from the writing than a period would.

So now look at what happens when I weed some of them out.

“I can’t believe you did that. You had no right to make that decision without me. Why would you even think you could give my kid away without asking first? I wanted her!”

Obviously, I could have placed that single exclamation point on a different sentence to place emphasis on a different point. But I chose to place it at the end for this particular example. The main takeaway here is to use exclamation points sparingly and only when someone is raising their voice (either out of excitement or anger, usually) to emphasize something.

One last side note is that you really shouldn’t have exclamation points outside of dialogue. It just isn’t necessary, and it makes your writing look sloppier and much less professional.

Periods

Next up, we have the period. This one is pretty straightforward. It forces the reader to completely stop before moving to the next sentence, so it has the power to either slow or speed up the pacing in a story. In the examples I gave earlier with the commas, you saw a little of that. But let’s look at one other example.

Phoebe wasn’t a particularly aggressive sort. At least, she didn’t think she was. But Arin MacLeod made her want to lash out, to punch his too perfect nose. Maybe to break a few bones in that finely-shaped face. He’d deserve it, and she constantly had to remind herself why she wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t let him goad her into taking that risk. He wasn’t worth it, and that was that.

Okay, that reads fine, but it’s a little slow. Tense, but not as tense as it could be if the periods were placed a little differently. So take a look at this version:

Phoebe wasn’t a particularly aggressive sort. At least, she didn’t think she was. But Arin MacLeod made her want to lash out. To punch his too-perfect nose. Maybe even break a few bones. He’d deserve it. But she constantly reminded herself why she wouldn’t do it. Why she wouldn’t let him goad her into that risk. He wasn’t worth it. That was that.

The feel to this one is entirely different. I had to reorder some things and add words here and there to make sure it still flowed, but with the shorter, choppier sentences, this feels much more tense and more like something she might be thinking about as she angrily tries to convince herself he isn’t worth her time.

Dashes and Elipses

I lumped these two in together because they’re both useful for endings or pauses, particularly in dialogue, but they work differently. A dash is a great tool to use if someone’s words or thoughts get cut off abruptly because of an interruption. An elipses, on the other hand, is best used for cases where the speaker (or thinker) has trailed off or is no longer holding the attention of a viewpoint character.

Let’s look at some examples.

“I can’t believe he did that…” Julia toyed with the pen on her desk. “I just— Well, why?”

In this instance, you have both an example of a speaker trailing off and an example of her cutting herself off abruptly.

This is, of course, just one example of how these two forms of punctuation can be used. They’re extremely useful in dialogue and, when used sparingly, can also be helpful in internal dialogue or even the narration.

Conclusion

And there are your punctuation lifesavers. They may, quite literally, make the difference between life and death for your sentence, paragraph, or page. How you use punctuation can entirely change the feel your writing has for the reader. So choose wisely!

Have questions? Leave them in the comments below, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

Thursday Technicalities: Paragraphing for Effect

Ariel Paiement

Introduction

Last Thursday Technicalities, I discussed the importance of sentence structure for your writing. This week, we’re going to take a look at paragraphing, which can be used in similar ways but also has a few unique aspects of its own that sentence structures don’t have.

Let’s take a look!

Paragraphing for Pacing

Much how sentence structure can either slow down or speed up your writing, paragraphing also affects pacing. Long paragraphs tend to slow things down just like long sentences do, while short ones speed things up.

In formal and academic writing, most of us were taught that paragraphs had to be at least three to four sentences long in order to be a paragraph. For fiction writing, throw that notion out the window.

Paragraphs can be one sentence.

But they can also be much more than the eight-sentence maximum advised for academic writing. It all depends on what you need for your writing. For pacing and for a few other reasons I’ll get to in a moment, you may wish to have a very short paragraph or a very long one. These are choices that depend solely upon what you wish to accomplish and how.

Paragraphing for Emphasis

This one’s relatively straightforward. If you have something that really needs to jump off the page at the reader, putting it into its own paragraph is often a great way to achieve this. It makes the information stand out and signals to the reader that the information is important, so they should pay attention to it. Especially if you do it after or between long paragraphs. The eye is just naturally drawn to it.

Another important aspect of paragraphing is knowing where to put information in a paragraph. If it’s important, stick it at the beginning or the end. Readers, even in fiction, tend to skip what’s in the middle of a paragraph or skim it quickly, especially if the paragraph is long. So book-end the not-so-important information with what you really want the reader to remember. (This goes for ending and beginning chapters too. Start and end with things that should be memorable and that grab the attention of the reader.)

Paragraphing with Dialogue

I’ll talk more about this in an upcoming post about dialogue do’s and don’ts, but I’d be remiss if I talked about paragraphing without at least mentioning dialogue.

The important takeaway with paragraphing and dialogue is pretty straightforward. You start a new paragraph whenever someone new starts talking, and you start a new paragraph if the actions you’ve written in don’t go with the previous speaker’s dialogue. For example…

Wrong

“Hey, Susan, d’you think you could pass me the ketchup?” Susan eyed her little brother. “You want ketchup on that?” Peter crossed his arms. “What if I do?”

Right

“Hey, Susan, d’you think you could pass me the ketchup?”

Susan eyed her little brother. “You want ketchup on that?”

Peter crossed his arms. “What if I do?”

Now, most people who have learned anything about writing know not to do the things I did in the first one. But many times, I’ll run across beginners who just struggle with paragraphing and formatting dialogue. Once you know the rules, it’s simple, I promise.

But most of the time, writers starting out on their own with no guidance or help, writers who just want to write and don’t know where to start, don’t know how to handle dialogue. That’s fine, and the goal here is to help everyone who struggles with it out.

Basically, stick with the two rules of paragraphing for dialogue, and you should be fine on that front. Start new paragraphs any time someone new starts talking and any time an action doesn’t belong to the owner of the dialogue.

Conclusion

That’s it for this Thursday Technicalities, everyone! I hope it’s provided some useful tips for those who hadn’t learned this information yet and a good refresher for those who had.

What are some of the ways you use paragraphing for emphasis in your writing? Share them in the comments below! If you have any questions, feel free to leave those in the comments too. Until next time, everyone.