Writers Tricks of the Trade May-June 2015

PRESS “CONTROL” THEN CLICK “BUY” TO PURCHASE THE BOOK CURRENT NYT BALANCING POINT OF VIEW BEST SELLERS How can you tell? Sometimes, it’s a third set of eyes that will see it. When someone else reads it and raises the flag, don’t ignore it! 5/17/15 COMBINED PRINT & E-BOOK FICTION 1 GATHERING PREY, by John Sandford 2 THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN, by Paula Hawkins 3 MEMORY MAN, by David Baldacci 4 ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, by Anthony Doerr 5 THE LIAR, by Nora Roberts Complete List » COMBINED PRINT & E-BOOK NONFICTION 1 HOPE, by Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus with Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan 2 AND THE GOOD NEWS IS . . ., by Dana Perino. 3 THE ROAD TO CHARACTER, by David Brooks 4 THE BOYS IN THE BOAT, by Daniel James Brown Dunham 5 DEAD WAKE, by Erik Larson Complete List MAY-JUNE 2015 THE CASE OF THIRD-PERSON To simplify this discussion, since the inspiration for this article was a thirdperson novel, we’ll delve into the mechanics of that one. This story has multiple characters and each chapter, for the most part, switches between characters. The issues are that the POVs are mixed. This is a common forest-through-the-trees problem with any rough draft. You get into a writing frenzy, and even though the grammar may be relatively clean and the prose in pretty decent shape, the structure and what comes out may be a little mixed. You tend to head-hop and mix characters up and run thoughts together. One character starts driving a scene, but before you know it, one of the other characters creeps in and takes over, only to have the other character take over again. I’m, of course, describing head-hopping, but in this case, it’s unintentional. What this leads to is a weaker scene overall. With no focus, it leads to telling more than showing. I also found a lot of the narrative was just action and then dialogue, but no thoughts and feelings. It switched from one character to the next with no particular character driving the scene. All tell, like a screenplay where it’s up to the actors to show all the emotion. In this case, it was up to the reader to fill in all the emotion. It’s easy to fall into this trap, where you just want to get the story out and forget that there are people involved. I’ve done it plenty, especially on early drafts of my first Gold series novels. I’ve still wrote occasional stretches where I for

Writers Tricks of the Trade May-June 2015 | Page 14