No. 3: Viewpoint (How to Write a Novel)

Immediately, the reader will be curious who is screaming, at whom she is screaming, and why. If this same sentence appeared in the middle of a scene in progress, though, it would be wiser to move from cause to effect:. How did he do that? But precisely the opposite is true. Readers approach stories wanting to believe them. Readers have both the intention and desire to enter a story in which everything that happens, within the narrative world that governs that story, is believable.

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Readers want to immerse themselves in deep belief. We need to respect them enough to keep that belief alive throughout the story. The reader will begin to either lose interest and eventually stop reading, or will disengage from the story and begin to look for more inconsistencies—neither of which you want her to do.

And readers stop believing stories when characters act inexplicably. In a scene in my first novel, The Pawn , my protagonist is interviewing the governor of North Carolina, and the governor is responding oddly.

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Then the reader will agree, Ah, good! Rather than drive the reader away from identifying with the protagonist, this was a way of drawing the reader deeper into the story. Always give the reader what he wants, or something better. At the heart of story is tension, and at the heart of tension is unmet desire. At its core, a story is about a character who wants something but cannot get it.

Point of View in Writing: The Simple Guide for Authors

As soon as he gets it, the story is over. So, when you resolve a problem, it must always be within the context of an even greater plot escalation. This is usually a good idea; however, all too often the writer is then forced to spend the following pages dumping in background to explain the context of the hook.

Tension drives a story forward. When tension is resolved, the momentum of the story is lost. Somewhat similarly, plot is simply the casually related series of events that the character experiences as he moves through a crisis or calling into a changed or transformed life. The interplay of these two struggles is complementary until, at the climax, the resolution of one gives the protagonist the skills, insights or wherewithal to resolve the other. However, readers today are very astute and narratively aware.

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The story needs to progress toward more and more conflict, with more intimate struggles and deeper tension. The plot must always thicken; it must never thin. Because of that, repetition is the enemy of escalation. Every murder you include decreases the impact that each subsequent murder will have on the reader. Every explosion, prayer, conversion, sex scene means less and less to the reader, simply because repetition, by its very nature, serves to work against that escalation your story so desperately needs.

Strive, instead, to continually make things worse for the protagonist. All three of these storytelling secrets are interwoven.

When every event is naturally caused by the one that precedes it, the story makes sense. Not sure if your story structure is strong enough to woo an agent? Get a 1-year pass to WritersMarket.

Choosing and Using Viewpoint

Click here to join. Thank you for these really helpful tips! Especially, I agree with you in the part about cause and effect! Using the omniscient viewpoint , an author can relate the perceptions of any of his characters or detach himself from them to serve as narrator…. The multiple-character viewpoint is used to tell a story from the perspectives of different characters, one at a time.

1: What is point of view? Understand different types of POV

One View or Many? In most cases, the viewpoint character should be the one the reader is most likely to identify with. Please note the emphasis in that previous sentence. While it may not seem so at first, your viewpoint decision is a critical one.

Jumping back and forth between viewpoint characters, that is, employing multiple viewpoints , can be a tricky business, particularly for the beginning writer, and should not be undertaken lightly. Because this puts the writer in an almost godlike position, it is referred to as the omniscient viewpoint. First Person or Third? The one case where second person is commonly used is in instructional manuals like this one, for example and how-to articles: Third person can be used with single, multiple or omniscient viewpoints.

As she sat back down, she smoothed her skirt, not because it was mussed, but because she needed the rough nap of the wool to scour away the clamminess.