Breaking in the new story

I've started writing a new story, recently. When you've spent a long time working on one story, the transition to a new one can be jarring. Even when it's set in the same universe as your previous work.

It's sort of like a stiff new pair of sneakers; a new story needs some breaking in.

Different characters
My character development process, for all my talking about it, tends to be on the slow side. And even though I've built characters from scratch many times, it always has its awkward stages when I'm waiting for the character to talk to me but he just isn't up to that level yet.

Working with "old," deeply developed characters -- like Kate, Kiefan and Anders in Disciple -- spoils you to a certain degree. I know I can just give them a topic and a direction, and they'll spool out a scene on their own.

By comparison, newer characters need more notes and more steering. It feels ham-handed, at times. I have to trust, though, that with repetition and listening for the character's voice he'll quicken on his own.

Character reference photo for
Hawks & Rams - Heath Ledger, from
A Knight's Tale

Different voice
Heathric's voice is different from Kate's. He's a different person with different priorities, different sensitivities. In some ways, he's more sensitive than she is. (I'm trying to break that T/F barrier, for those of you who read the MBTI series.)

A different character means a different narrative, since I let my characters narrate -- something I don't usually make explicit, but there it is -- and that means a different view on the story. And that is, itself, a part of the story. Hawks & Rams is a much "smaller" story than Disciple, it's very personal and Heathric's more intimate voice should be a good fit.

Even though, yes, Disciple is a very personal story also but the scope is larger and Kate's more objective voice fit that.

It's a useful exercise, as an aside, to write the same scene from different characters' POVs. One should be able to see the difference in the word choice, the focus, the whole mood or the scene.

Different expectations
Genre comes into play, also. Hawks & Rams is a M/M fantasy romance -- I don't think there will be enough sex to qualify as erotica -- and chances are that people who pick it up will not have read Disciple. I need to explain the world, from scratch, in the context of this place and time that the story is happening. Being an M/M romance, I can bet that the audience for Hawks & Rams will be mostly female. I could stand to slow the pace down and do more emotional and sensual description (which fits into Heathric's more intimate voice, too.)

Which are not my strong suit, admittedly. This will be good practice.

The "breaking-in" process is mutual, after all. I'm fitting the story to my style, and the story's fitting me to its style.

Remembrance of lessons past: POV

I spent a week, around Christmas, at my parents' and went through what parts of my early writings remain. I was glad to find one particular manuscript, disappointed that there's no sign of another. Much of my early writing was on 3.5" floppies, in ancient word processor formats. Some of it exists only on typewriter onionskin. There are stacks of notebooks, too.

I was hoping to find the how-to-write-genre-fic anthology that included Bradbury's "Run Fast, Stand Still," but I didn't. I did find, though, an anthology called Points of View (ISBN #0-451-62491-2, revised version available at Amazon) which I remember reading most of. It contains examples of stories told from various POVs: interior monologue, dramatic monologue, letter narration, subjective narration, various forms of anonymous narration, and more.

This book gave me much of the POV definitions I work from, though I've gotten muddied over the years by wading through confused online debates. You've seen them: attempts to classify stories as "close third person" or "distant third person," how "omniscient" or "limited" they are. Points of View organizes the POV continuum (that's what it is, really) from interior monologue to anonymous narration -- from very intimate first person to very distant third person, which is just one step away from a scholarly summary.

The stories presented offer quite readable examples along the continuum. And for me to say they're readable... bear in mind that I have no use for literary fiction, in general, and these are all lit fic. The closest it gets to genre is Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." (Bless her, RIP, etc.) Oh, and there's one Poe story.

POV is one of those structural elements that underpins a story, and like a skeleton it has an invisible yet unavoidable impact on the appearance of the final creature. Looking at this anthology has gotten me thinking about the POV choices I made in Disciple, both consciously and on a gut level.

Disciple is written largely as an interior monologue, by this book's classification (aka first person narration,) with lots of gritty and intimate detail. I did that very much on purpose. I wanted that level of detail, to let Kate speak to the reader as to a close friend, to heighten the realism and immediacy.

The limitations of first person, as anyone who's written in it knows, had a huge impact on what parts of the story I could show the reader, though. In a few places, I had to bend things to get Kate a good reason to see things that had to be known, but on the whole she was a character in a good position to see and present the best parts of the story I wanted to tell.

What if I had written it from the POV of an anonymous narrator? An omniscient one? As a memoir that Kate wrote many years after the fact? It would completely change the voice of the story, the structure -- I dare say with an anonymous narrator the story would mushroom into a sprawling epic, like GRRM's massively multi-POV Game of Thrones.

But I didn't want that. I only wanted to tell Kate's story. One visceral slice of what was going on.

How do you choose your POVs?

Positioning the camera: POV characters

Picking POV characters can be easy; if the story is mainly centered on one person, it they're sympathetic and/or interesting, then they're a shoo-in.

Whose story is it?

It can get trickier if your story isn't so focused. If there are several factions in play. If more than one character goes through major changes in the course of the story. Too many POV characters can dilute the story, though -- the story needs to be big enough to fit a large cast, and no that isn't an exact science.

I'm telling a smallish story, in the next Part of Disciple (Part V). In fact, it's so small and constrained that it's getting be a bit claustrophobic. And yet, I have four characters clamoring to be POVs. I don't think the story needs more than two, and I'm fairly sure that limiting it to one would mean missing out on too much. But four? Probably too much. So I've been weighing the pros and cons...

In the "for" column
Who's at the center of the action, if there's car chases and gunfights? (there aren't, in this story) Which character struggles to overcome the most important obstacles? Who has interesting things to say? Who would be good at explaining things the reader needs to know and/or would find interesting? And who do I find most interesting?

In the "against" column
How much overlap is there between this character and another potential POV character? How often will I need to decide who gets to narrate a scene because they're both there? Is this character's story important to the central, driving plot of the story? Would they just be a distraction? If it's not their story, are they sufficiently transparent to be a sideline narrator?

Control of information
POV characters are also a way to control the information the reader sees. This is one of the great advantages and disadvantages of first-person narrators. On one hand, you can spring stuff on the character because they weren't in a position to know about it. On the other hand, you're stuck with their eyeballs and sometimes you'll have to go through contortions to put them where they need to be.

POV characters are also a window into culture, since they bring their biases and opinions to the story. They work that information into their narration, and readers will pick up on it. That's another thing to assign a "for" or an "against" to.

I've mostly settled on which two characters I will use: one is kind of obvious, the other less so. A third one is still arguing her case. We'll see how it goes.

How do you pick your POV characters?

Beating a new horse

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