Point of View: Getting Inside Your Character's Heads

Point of View Made Simple In This Link!

When I began to write, the first person (the "I" narrator) felt most comfortable.  When you are in a character's head, "I" helps you relate to that character.  I wrote 5 novels ( 3 published) using the "I" (first person voice) to help me understand the character of my narrators. 
I  wrote short stories from various points of view, including even some beavers, but I was still most comfortable in "I' mode.  Here is an example from "The Rich Are Different" in the anthology Coast to Coast: Murder From Sea to Shining Sea. Here us Molly introducing herself. 

I got off the plane in Fort Lauderdale in early June hoping to find a cooking gig. What turned up was a chance to sling hash for the hired crew sailing the Marie Galante, a sixty-three foot yawl, to New England for the summer. Except for a husband who wants to kill me, I’d still live in my old Chicago neighborhood. Said husband is just your normal Neanderthal who went bat shit crazy when served with divorce papers and a restraining order. 

Bud, the skipper, took me under his wing, and gave me a small advance. I bought some warm second-hand clothes that I hadn’t thought to bring along and a cheap cell with pre-paid minutes. I had much to be thankful for, and I didn’t want to screw up.  

Then I began a new book with a character, Maxine. It was weird. Maxine sat on my shoulder and practically dictated the first quarter of the book to me.  But Maxine was never "I."  She was always "she."  And then I needed to get into the head of Lotto, the drug lord who wanted Maxine to disappear. It was fun to be Lotto.  He had a weird sense of humor and he fainted at the sight of blood. He thought everyone he dealt with was stupid. Lotto was not the main character, but his point of view was necessary. Maxine had a sister she was searching for. If only she could find the sister. But the sister had gone off track many years back, and wasn't anyone Maxine wanted to find, but she didn't know that. When Maxine finally found her, I was in the sister's head. She was terrible, but it was fun. She had great survival instincts, and a yen for money.  I enjoyed writing in the sister's head as much as in Lotto's.  

I wrote a women's novel and also used she, not I. It's actually the story you are writing that dictates the point of view, which writers abbreviate POV.  In that novel, I only used one point of view. Now I have started a novel set in two time periods, 1953 and the present, and of course I have two narrators. One is "I" and the other is "she." We'll see how this works out. So far so good. 

I have never written in second person, the "you" voice, but a few writers have had success with it. Here is a passage by Annie Dillard in the second person "You." 
"You are a sculptor. You climb a great ladder; you pour grease all over a growing longleaf pine. Next, you build a hollow cylinder like a cofferdam around the entire pine, and grease its inside walls. You climb your ladder and spend the next week pouring wet plaster into the cofferdam, over and inside the pine. You wait; the plaster hardens. Now open the walls of the dam, split the plaster, saw down the tree, remove it, discard, and your intricate sculpture is ready: this is the shape of part of the air." (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper, 1974)
 There is also the omniscient POV,  in which the author is in everybody's head.  This was more common in prior periods, although some authors (especially in Britain) are very adept at it. It's called "head hopping." In the hands of an inexperienced writer, it can be deadly.  

When we learn to write, we learn that there is such a thing as a point of view violation, which comes from not understanding the rules. It can be blatant or so subtle no one is likely to notice.But it's best to learn and apply the rules.

Writing is a part art and part craft. The craft can be learned. My college English teacher told the class, "I can teach you to write not badly, but not well."

Ah, the subtle difference.     

These writers also have something to say on the subject.  You will be pleasantly surprised at the different takes on the same topic. Take a gander.

Dr. Bob Rich https://wp.me/p3Xihq-1ag
Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/
Helena Fairfax http://www.helenafairfax.com/blog
Fiona McGier http://www.fionamcgier.com/
Judith Copek http://lynx-sis.blogspot.com/
Marci Baun  http://www.marcibaun.com/blog/
Anne de Gruchy https://annedegruchy.co.uk/category/blog/
A.J. Maguire  http://ajmaguire.wordpress.com/
Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
Anne Stenhouse  http://annestenhousenovelist.wordpress.com/
Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspot.ca/
Rhobin L Courtright http://www.rhobinleecourtright.com
Diane Bator http://dbator.blogspot.ca/ 

Upmarket?

So now all (or some) of the literary agents are looking for "Upmarket" mysteries. Hard to know what this is. I think these are novels that used to be called "mainstream" mysteries. My take was that these books were a little longer, with a little more emphasis on character, and maybe even taught the reader something or took her to a place she had never been. Not exactly literary mysteries, but books with good writing that would interest someone who did not read the more "traditional" strictly who-done-it mysteries of 75,000 words.

One has to be careful because it is easy to step on toes and feelings in this business. God knows, I should understand that. And I think I have been writing upmarket books for years, but maybe I didn't know how to market them. The thing is, can the author call her own novel "upmarket?" I mean, what does that say? A whiff of snobbery? Some would say yes.

Oh yes, and these hoity-toity upmarket books may cross "genres," a no-no for the people the publisher hires to explain the book to the bookstore employees. You see, they have to know where to shelve it. But then why are agents looking for books that are hard to shelve? Hmmm. Inquiring minds want to know. Maybe they sell, even if the would-be reader has to look around the store. Word of mouth? Word of mouse?

Another weird thing is that the thrillers and suspense books are usually stuck with the "mainstream" books, and the mysteries get their own section. Why is that?

My current book is suspense. It's hard to keep the suspense going all the time, so I've resorted to cheap techniques like putting a kid and a cat in danger. Plotting is damn hard work, I say.

So far, my novel has grown to 55,000 words. If I were writing a "traditional" mystery, I could stop there. I personally think of these lite-on-words books as little chickenshit mysteries, but that's just my take, a book you can take up at 9:00 and put down at 11:00 and know who dunnit and it sure as hell wasn't the butler. Take Agatha Christie. But she understood how to tell the same story over and over and make it sound different. Well, lots of series authors do that. There is nothing the matter with chicken shit. As an adjective it means small or unimportant. The kind of thing Otto Penzler is always complaining about women writing, the cozies if you will, or traditional mysteries as the purists call them. Of course Penzler doesn't call them chicken shit. He's implied worse.

My take. One is always walking on bloody eggs. Ewww! Exactly. Or Eggsactly.

I think a lot about what I am writing because I suck as describing my own work. Bill Gates meets Moll Flanders. O.K. I hate these stupid-assed comparisons like that. They tell you nothing. All right, the co-mingling of such an incompatible-sounding duo tells you that there's loose morals and technology afoot. But I could just say that. Loose morals and technology. Maybe "Bill Gates meets Moll Flanders" just has that certain je-ne-sais-quoi. Actually, I've never had the nerve to say Bill Gates meets Moll Flanders in a query letter. Too stupid.

Next week we're off to Montreal, the Paris of Canada, and a week later I'm flying down to South Florida to finish the research on this book, In Flight, my suspense novel. Is this also upmarket? Don't think so. I do like my Colombian Drug Lord. It took forever to get into his head. Think I need another chapter from his POV. That's Point of View if you're not into literary acronyms. Fem jep is Woman in Jeopardy, which is what I'm writing now. Fem Jep, two POVs and I'm hoping it will come in around 90,000 + words, but let's keep this sucker under 100,000. Upmarket or not. Probably not. Who the hell knows?

What is upmarket, anyhow? If you know, please post a comment.

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