This is part of a series on how to study fiction, mainly directed at writers who have read all the beginning writing books and are like, “What now?!?”  The rest of the series is here.  You may also want to check out the series on pacing, here, which I’m eventually going to fold into this series when it turns into a book.

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What order should you tell your events in?

We’re back to talking about szuchet and fabula (see this post).  You have a choice between presenting the events of the story in different ways.  Here are just a few of your options:

• In strict chronological order, with no summaries or flashbacks, and with no foreshadowing.
• In reasonably chronological order, with some summaries, a few minor flashbacks, and possibly minor foreshadowing.
• With part of the novel split between the present and part between the past (parallel stories).
• With a small part of the novel in the present and a larger part in the past (or in another world, for that matter), a.k.a. a “frame story” or “story within a story.”
• With the prologue out of order, as in one scene that foreshadows most of the events of the book (a few scenes might follow the point where the book catches up to the prologue).  “It all started when…”
• Parallel (and possibly intertwined) stories that occur at very nearly the same time.
• Parallel (and possibly intertwined) stories that occur at different times.
• A story told in reverse order.
• A story told with most events in order, but in clusters that are not in order (Pulp Fiction).
• A story told through several completely separate episodes, with or without a frame story (variations on a theme).

There are more possibilities.  Most popular fiction books will follow the same structure, though:

• In reasonably chronological order, with some summaries, a few minor flashbacks, and possibly minor foreshadowing.

Most books present the setting, characters, and problems of the plot, move the plot forward a bit, stop to bring a few things into perspective via a flashback or a summary (and repeating the pattern of moving the plot forward, then explaining the important bits of What Has Gone Before), then increasingly shift to no more backstory while layering in some foreshadowing as we approach the climax of the book.

There is nothing wrong with that as a structure.  It’s like the structure of a modern pop song:  we all know it, even if we never really think about it, and intellectually we know that a lot of pop songs “sound the same,” but we will vehemently protest if anyone claims that Carly Rae Jepson’s “Call Me Maybe” is very nearly the same thing as anything by The Rolling Stones.  There’s an intro…some verses…a chorus…a musical interlude somewhere in the middle…more verses and the chorus…and some kind of ending.

Pop songs all follow kind of the same template. It’s all about how you use it.

Most fiction, most of the time, needs to have a real reason to deviate from the usual sort of structure.  Some deviations, like having multiple plots running at the same time across multiple characters, are so common in certain genres that they’re taken for normal.  For example:

• The structure of many modern romances is to have a his-and-her plot, two main plots running in parallel part of the time and together part of the time.
• The structure of many high fantasy novels is to have multiple plots running at the same time, with characters who start out together, split apart, check in with each other/get news of each other periodically, but all come together for the climax of the book, which is some huge battle.

Those structures aren’t requirements, but they can become expectations.  And most of the time, you want to meet the readers’ expectations…because then they’re ready for you to knock their socks off with something surprising.

Which is to say that what order you tell your events in:

• Depends on your story.
• But should be pretty normal most of the time, unless you have a major reason to do so.

Find out in what order events are usually played out in the books in your genre and subgenre.  Copy that.  If and when that doesn’t work for you, try something else.  Some experimentation may be called for.

You will know when you’re on the right track because, when you’re done with the draft, you can step back and go, “The content of the story fits the weird order I put the events in.   Huh.”

The biggest part of making this kind of structural decision is knowing what your options are–and that requires a lot of reading.  It can require some really challenging reading, too, if you want to wander off the beaten path.

I’ll probably repeat this again later:

The more original you are, the more studying you have to do.

You have to know what most readers expect most of the time, and you have to know it as well as any hack writer knows its ins and outs.

And, if you’re trying something the reader doesn’t expect, you have to have far more tricks up your sleeve than you will ever actually use in order to be able to select a good one.

If you want to build something new, you have to know even more:  you have to know every trick in the book.

And that means reading–and comprehending on a structural level–a huge number of books.

This is probably a good place to remind you that reading at least the top 100 books in your genre is probably a good idea–if you want to write books to fit reader expectations.  And that reading the top 100 books in another genre is a good idea if you want to write a book that surprises your reader.  If you want to be truly innovative…good luck!

Next time, I think I may work on a few case studies on structure.  I’ve been typing up a lot of Edgar Allen Poe lately because he has such interesting structures, and the stories are out of copyright–so it should be okay to quote them extensively here.

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Free book and other curiosities here.

This is part of a series on how to study fiction, mainly directed at writers who have read all the beginning writing books and are like, “What now?!?”  The rest of the series is here.  You may also want to check out the series on pacing, here, which I’m eventually going to fold into this series when it turns into a book.

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Structure: Headhopping & Tenses

Since these are two relatively minor elements, I’m going to cover them both here.

Note: Please keep in mind that my structure posts are going to be relatively tentative, because this is some fairly high-level stuff that I’ve only been getting into over the last few years. 

Headhopping

“Headhopping” is a pejorative term for shifting POVs while still in the same scene.  You’re an intermediate writer now; you’re allowed.  Master writers shift POVs a fair amount, I’ve discovered, and do it so smoothly that most readers (and yours truly) won’t notice it on a first read.

How is it done?  You have to understand POV as being from a specific character’s perspective in order to do so, and it’s for third-person POVs only (as far as I know):

• You’re writing from character A’s point of view.
• You need to get something from character B’s point of view, either information or an opinion.
• You make character A’s point of view as “objective” as possible.
• You swap over to character B’s point of view and make it as “objective” as possible.
• You get whatever you need out of character B, going deeper into the opinions and attitudes of the character as necessary.
• If you need to go back to character A, make character B’s point of view as “objective” as possible.
• Swap over to character A, with their point of view as “objective” as possible.

I have “objective” in quotes because the shift doesn’t have to be truly objective, just not anchored directly, obviously, and solely in one character’s point of view.

Here’s an example.  The POV of this scene is a character named Dodger who is walking through Victorian London with his dog, Onan (who smells bad).

The one thing you could say about this dirty old city, Dodger thought as he headed out of the attic, strutting along in his new suit with Onan at his heels, was that no matter how careful you were, somebody would see anything. The streets were so crowded that you were rubbing shoulders with people until you had no shoulders left; and the place to do a bit of rubbing now would be the Baron of Beef, or the Goat and Sixpence, or any of the less salubrious drinking establishments around the docks where you could get drunk for sixpence, dead drunk for a shilling, and possibly just dead for being so stupid as to step inside in the first place.

In those kinds of places you found the toshers and the mudlarks, hanging out with the girls, and that was really hanging out because half of them would have worn the arse of of their trousers by now. Those places were where you spent your time and your money so that you could forget about the rats and the mud that stuck to everything, and the smells.  Although eventually you got used to them, corpses that had been in the river for a while tended to have a fragrance of their very own, and you never forgot the smell of corruption, because it clung, heavy and solid, and you never wanted to smell it again, even though you knew it would.

Oddly enough, the smell of death was a smell with a strange life of its own, and it would find its way in anywhere and it was damn hard to get rid of—rather, in some respects, like the smell of Onan, who was faithfully walking just behind him, his passage indicated by people in the throng looking around to see wherever the dreadful smell was coming from and hoping it wasn’t from them.

(Terry Pratchett, Dodger.)

In the first paragraph, the character is thinking to himself; we’re inside his head.  But the POV slides over to a vague sort of “you,” a generic “you” that doesn’t sound like an objective third-person POV, but it really is–it’s not clearly coming from Dodger himself, but kind of vaguely from “you.”

You probably didn’t notice that by the end of the third paragraph, you’re in the POV of the people behind Dodger and Onan, looking around to see where the smell is coming from.  It’s not Dodger’s perspective; he can’t even see them.

A good POV jump shouldn’t be obvious, and it should only drift as far from the main POV of the chapter as necessary to accomplish the point.  The technique isn’t supposed to be clear cut; if it were, it wouldn’t be effective.

Tenses

Your two basic tenses are present and past tense.  Because this is English, however, you can use all sorts of other tenses!  One of the strengths of English is in how freaking specific it can get about time:

The experiences he had had had been bad.

The time travel machine would have existed, except that it hadn’t.

We will have been there for an hour by then.

At this level, however, your main question is probably “Should I use present or past tense in my writing?”

Currently, fiction written in past tense is more common, and readers will tend to disappear into it more, because they have more familiarity with it.  Writing in present tense is less common, and you’ll have to work harder with sense and opinion details to keep readers buried in the character–but it also gives the tale a more modern/YA feel.

What tense you use should be more influenced by whether you like writing in it and whether your readers like reading in it than anything else–which is another reason to keep up with reading current work in your genre, so you know whether present- or past-tense books are more popular.

Anybody who says you must/must not write in a certain tense is talking to beginners!

Next time:  Scenes vs. Summaries:  When to show…when to tell!

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Free book and other curiosities here.

This is part of a series on how to study fiction, mainly directed at writers who have read all the beginning writing books and are like, “What now?!?”  The rest of the series is here.  You may also want to check out the series on pacing, here, which I’m eventually going to fold into this series when it turns into a book 🙂

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POV & Structure

Note: Please keep in mind that my structure posts are going to be relatively tentative, because this is some fairly high-level stuff that I’ve only been getting into over the last few years. 

At the beginner level, what we learn about POV is that it is a “point of view” and that there are three of them:

• First person (I)
• Second person (you)
• Third person (they)

You may also learn that there is an omniscient third point of view (written from outside the character’s perspective) and a tight third point of view (written from inside a character’s perspective, but from the third person, not the first).

You will also probably get the message that you should not head hop, which is that you should not jump from inside one person’s point of view to another (generally in third person).  And you’ll probably hear that you’re not supposed to use second person POV at all.*

Okay, great.  Those are things that tend to trip up beginning writers.  But you’re not a beginning writer now; you’re intermediate, so it’s time to pick apart POV on another level.

What is POV

A point of view is the filter through which all the events of the story are viewed.  The point of view should have such a strong filter on it that it changes how the events of the story are told to the reader.  If you swapped POVs or omniscient narrators, it would be a completely different book.

In cases where the narrator is hidden or there’s a little head-hopping going on, the POV should still be strong.  A POV isn’t just literally how someone sees things, but also their attitude toward life.  If your POV is an omniscient narrator, this filter can secretly come from one of the existing characters, no matter how minor, in the story, or it can be pulled out of thin air.  Or it can just be you 🙂

Let’s go back to the movie version of The Princess Bride.  (Although I think this is relevant for the book version, too.)  The entire story, even the parts that aren’t being directly intruded on by Grandpa, carries a filter that comes from him.  Even though he is cynical, he still carries an immense well of love in him: both attitudes come through in the telling.

Removing the Grandpa/Grandson sections of the story would obviously change the story as a whole.  But removing Grandpa’s attitudes from the story and replacing them with, say, Humperdink’s, would totally change the story.  Buttercup would be beautiful, but she would be an idiot.  Wesley would not be a dashing pirate, he would be a murderer.  And so on.

A point of view is about an individual character’s or narrator’s view of the world, more than it is about first or third person.

How to Use POV

When people ask me how I decide what “person” to use in POV (first, second, third, etc.), I always say, “It depends on how much I want to lie.”  First person narrators make excellent unreliable narrators.  Lolita, American Psycho, and Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd are all first-person narrators.  People accept that when someone is telling you a story, personally, there might be some lies, distortions, half-truths, braggadocio, etc., involved.  But if you hear a story about someone else, you expect that your narrator will tell you the truth about that person, as they know it.  It’s like gossip, so be careful about writing an unreliable third-person narration–the distrust can blow back on the author, not just the narrator.

But the bigger question is, “How do I decide which point of view to use for this story?”  Which character is the right POV?  And how should that person best tell the story?  And how on earth do you decide whether to use multiple POVs?

As far as I can tell:

• The right character is the one who “speaks” to you.  If you can hear that voice in your head, then that is the right voice to use.
• The right character is the one who knows less, but can find out more.  Readers move from ignorant to informed during the course of a book; having a narrator who does the same is awfully convenient from a writing perspective.
• The right character is the one who tries to see the events objectively, but cannot truly do so.  A narrator who both tries to see the events with the distance of wisdom and who can yet be overwhelmed by emotion is a powerful thing.  (This especially applies to omniscient-type narrators, I think, as in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.)
• The right character is the one that the reader can understand and relate to.  Nobody can truly understand Sherlock Holmes; that’s why he tends not to narrate his own stories.

Multiple POVs are a special case.  Obviously, if you’re writing a romance where the POVs alternate between “he said” and “she said,” then you have your POVs selected for you.  And if you’re writing a thriller, then a dramatic prologue showing a murder almost has to be told from the POV of the victim, witness, or villain.  Some things are solidly established as reader expectations, and it’s rarely a virtue to try to completely flip them.

But what about other types of POV shift?

If you are typing things in, you will run into areas where professional writers are breaking POV “rules” right and left.  There is a lot of head-hopping among that crowd.  If you are outlining, you will see professional writers shift through more POVs than you might have noticed, too, with some POVs only showing up once or twice.

The rule of thumb is:

• Have a main character.  (ONE.)
• Spend most of your time with that main character.

Please note that this is only a rule of thumb; some writers will break that sort of basic rule.  George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire has some pretty sophisticated, unusual POV choices, and outlining his novels is pretty interesting in and of itself.

The arrangement of POV chapters should also reflect the plot of your story.  Let’s say that you have a story where there’s a good guy and a bad one, but it’s not initially clear which one is which.  Initially, each character might get an equal number of chapters, but as it becomes clear that evil has overtaken one of the characters, that character can have fewer chapters as the other character becomes the clear good guy.  Most authors will do this kind of thing subconsciously. However, if you’re interested in how it works, I’d definitely take a look at outlining the George R.R. Martin books.

First, Second, or Third?

Finally, let’s cycle back around to that old question: what POV should I use, first, second, or third?

• First-person POV is for when you want the person telling the story to be in the reader’s living room with them, as it were.
• Second-person POV is for when you want to address the reader directly, as in this blog article.  OR for when you want to sound hypnotic.  “You’re sinking deeper into sleep…” OR for when you want to completely alienate the reader from the narrator; I’ve done this on a couple of psychopath stories.  People naturally hold a second-person narrator at arm’s length.  See Caroline Kepnes’s You for a brilliant example.
• Third-person POV is for when you want someone else to tell the story to the reader.  This is the most believable of POVs.  It sounds like someone repeating gossip, for one thing, and it’s easier to forget that you’re “hearing” someone tell the story, especially if you leave out a narrator and only report things from the third-person’s point of view.

A constraint about first-person narration:  All first-person narrators must be able to tell their own tales at some point, logically speaking.  If you kill off a first-person narrator at the end of a book without them having written or recorded their thoughts as they go, you’re going to have a very annoyed audience.

Next time, I’ll probably post on how to headhop and what using different tenses means.  But only probably.

*Which was exactly what I was doing in that sentence.  Talking to you.  In second person POV.  Writer “rules” are weird sometimes.

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Free book and other curiosities here.

Someone was trying to explain to me how complex mysteries were to write; she claimed “she wasn’t smart enough.”

I, of course, knew that she was, and that she’s be good at it…but of course couldn’t find a way to say that succinctly in person at the time.

There’s a French phrase, l’esprit d’escalier, that means “the spirit of the stairs.”  It’s when you think of the perfect thing to say…too late.

So here’s my response:  How to Write Mysteries, The Extremely Short Version.