Where do I start

greengirl31

Hi all ....

I'm like thousands of people out there who believe I have a story to tell and think i have at least one novel in me. The problem is I'm not sure where to start.

I haven't done any creative writing since i was in school and even that was only homework and study assignements so a little guidance is required. I've been looking for a creative writing course that I can take ... nothing too serious at first but just something to get my teeth into.

So I suppose my question is can anyone recommend such a course or give any tips or advice ?

All replies apreciated.

Thanks
A

bellapip

Hi there Greengirl.

Firstly you need to go out to your local pound shop, or euro store I believe they are now called, and purchase for yourself a hard back A4 copy book.
This should stay with you for every hour of the day, but most especially for the times you spend in the loo.
For two weeks, write down every idea, no matter how inane or insane in this book.
Write down that you thought you saw George Clooney empty your green bin, write down that you think the guy in the butchers is secretly chopping up his granny and selling her as prime rib, write down that you can not understand why women put false tan over false tan, over false tan, over false tan.
Write down that the dog smiled at you, the cat is trying to kill you and you believe there are a swarm of killer bees living in your neighbours garden,.
In other words, write it all down, traffic lights, 22c plastic bags the works.

After two weeks, read what you have written.
You may laugh, you may cry, you may have an idea, or you may just think, who the hell was that weirdo who told me to do that.

More than anything you have words, you have a sense of how you like to write, you have a feeling for capturing a moment,.

NOW you can look at where you want to go.
There are a million courses out there, the best one will be the one where you feel challenged but comfortable, the one where you are required to produce work, but never to be riddiculed for your efforts.

My personal recomendation would be that you sign up for a class with your local VEC, or school/tech, that cater to night classes.
Get a feel for what suits you and totally absorb what others are writing and progressing towards.
You may hate their choice of work, you may admire it, but in the mix you will find that you learn what you like, and that is the ultimate goal.

I wish you every sucess,. it is a long journey, often lonely, but if you have a passion for this then it will warm the lonely hours,.

Bella

The Mad Hatter

Start putting words on paper. Make sure you do that for some significant amount of time every day.

When it's finished, go back and read it. You'll hate it. Keep rewriting it until you like it.

(This isn't my advice, but something I've seen suggested by many authors asked this question, and it works for me. Many writers say more, but this seems to be the central advice from most.)

EileenG

There are lots of creative writing classes around. I personally recommend Patricia O'Reilly's class in UCD but there are lots of others.

The most important thing is not the class, it's simply to write, keep writing and then write some more. Put your bum on the seat, and promise yourself that you will write X number of words before you get up. It doesn't matter if they are rubbish, every time you write, you are learning more.

Where a class is useful is in teaching you how to recognise the good stuff in what you have written, and teach you to pare down all those words to the ones which really work. But it all starts with words on paper.

Antilles

EileenG wrote: »

Put your bum on the seat

I can't remember where, but I recently read a quote that a writer's two most valuable tools are his backside and a chair. Put the two of them together and eventually you'll get something down

cobsie

Antilles wrote: »

I can't remember where, but I recently read a quote that a writer's two most valuable tools are his backside and a chair. Put the two of them together and eventually you'll get something down

Kingsley Amis (father of Martin) said that - "The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of one's trousers to the seat of one's chair."

In other words, just do it

Memnoch

As everyone above has said, just write. Honestly, practise, read, practise is the best way.

Couple of basics that I found useful when I learned them.

People tend to think about stories in two ways, Characters and Ideas. Genre stories often seem to be more about ideas, especially in sci-fi, fantasy.

But the thing about stories is that they don't really matter unless they are happening to someone we care about. Just look at the news or the tabloids. Whenever they report on something, it's never just the name of a person or their age. It's "mother of two," "father of five." Because these things give characters context that allow people to empathise with them and therefore care about what happens to them.

In that sense all stories are about characters, even when they are based on an "idea." You should try and examine an idea through how it plays with the lives of your characters.

A story is divided into three parts. Beginning, middle and end. Sounds simple, but can seem hard when you actually start writing. Many writers encounter the "mid-book wall" on their first effort, usually around 15-20k words into a novel, or a third into a short story. This is because they started with an idea and were all excited but are unsure how to develop a story beyond that.

A good analogy for this is the "stuck in the tree," structure. Think of your story as that being about a character trying to save a cat stuck in the tree.

In the beginning of the story the character discovers the cat is stuck in the tree and climbs up to save it.

In the middle of the story the character faces obstacles in saving the cat. Eg. the cat jumps away or tries to scratch the character. Or some kids turn up (the writer) and start throwing rocks at the character.

In the end, the character either saves the cat and climbs safely down, or saves the cat but dies from the stones thrown at them, or they both die, or the character has to give up and leave the cat there and is unable to save it.

The key is the middle, and to find different and interesting "rocks" to throw at your MC (main character).

Another way to describe the structure is in terms of character goal.

Your MC has a GOAL they want to achieve and they set out to achieve this. Along the way they face obstacles that they must overcome in order to achieve the goal. In the end they either succeed or fail in reaching their goal and the journey/experience of trying to get there changes them. (character arc).

Best of luck with your writing.

pickarooney

^^Is all that really set in stone for all books? It seems very rigid and bears no relation to the structure of my novel (note my entirely reasonable position that the world is not corresponding to my view of it rather than vice versa )

desolate sun

pickarooney wrote: »

^^Is all that really set in stone for all books? It seems very rigid and bears no relation to the structure of my novel (note my entirely reasonable position that the world is not corresponding to my view of it rather than vice versa )

Pickarooney, are you writing literary fiction? Because that doesnt really follow a plot arc, as such.

But, yeah, the plot arc that the previous poster talked about is what mainstream books follow, or so I've been taught.

pickarooney

What do you mean by literary fiction exactly?

Memnoch

pickarooney wrote: »

^^Is all that really set in stone for all books? It seems very rigid and bears no relation to the structure of my novel (note my entirely reasonable position that the world is not corresponding to my view of it rather than vice versa )

Well, that's not rigid at all....

if you want rigid... then try Blake Snyder's Save the Cat Beat Sheet : http://www.blakesnyder.com/downloads/beatsheet.doc

It's the list of beats (approximately) and where they occur in a typical 90 minute movie. You can take these beats and apply them to pretty much 90% of movies. The basic 3 act structure you can apply to 100% of movies. I can't think of a movie that does not follow the 3 act structure. Even indie movies.

As to the stuff I mentioned above. It's pretty fundamental underlying dramatic structure that I think you find in most stories (though there will always be exceptions).

It's not that writers think, ah I have to follow this structure and be rigid. It's just a natural form for drama and story telling that has evolved over time and has been studied and dissected.

Here's a useful exercise. Pick your favourite books and think of them in the above terms.

Who are the protagonists? What are their goals? Do they face obstacles in trying to reach these goals?

This is the fundamental of character. We all want SOMETHING weather that be more money, more love, more freedom, more food, more shelter. It is that WANT that drives us, and drives our characters. The dramatic need.

When someone opposes the character's dramatic need we get struggle and conflict, and that's entertainment.

The only example that I can think of, OFF the top of my head where the MC's dramatic arc isn't obvious is Othello. Funnily enough everyone else in the play does follow the cat in tree analogy. Iago wants to destroy Othello. Cassio wants to win back Othello's favour. Roderigo wants Desdemona (or is that vice versa re Cassio and Rodergo). Even Othello wants something: to be accepted.

All of these dramatic needs are set up in the first act (or the beginning). And each character pursues their own dramatic need through the story, encountering obstacles and in the end succeeding or failing. It is the CLASH between the needs of the various characters, or in simpler stories between the NEEDs of the protagonist and the antagonist that creates conflict. Remember, the antagonist doesn't see himself as such, and indeed the best antagonists arise when to them their NEED is perfectly valid and justified.

Memnoch

desolate sun wrote: »

Pickarooney, are you writing literary fiction? Because that doesnt really follow a plot arc, as such.

But, yeah, the plot arc that the previous poster talked about is what mainstream books follow, or so I've been taught.

I think you will find that even the majority of literary fiction does have a similar arc though perhaps not as obviously defined.

All stories are ultimately driven by the dramatic needs of their characters and the struggles they endure to achieve these needs.

P.S. A simpler way to define the 3-act/beginning-middle-end structure can be Setup -- Conflict -- Resolution. Conflict is often where the meat of the story lies and if you find you are struggling to generate conflict then the weakness is probably in your set-up.

bigsmokewriting

Agreeing with what other posters have said about making notes and also just sitting down to write. Think about what interests you, and remember that it doesn't need to be perfect first time around.

Two of the books we use in our novel writing courses here are Stephen King's 'On Writing' and Louise Doughty's 'A Npvel in a Year' - might be worth looking at them.

Good luck!

greengirl31

Thank you all very much for your replies ... you've all been very helpful.

I think what i need to start doing is writing short stories or perhaps even chapters ... Like I said, I have the story in my head it's just how do i put it together so if I get the different stages down i can work from there.
I'm going to try to put aside a few hours a week to put pen to paper but im sure if it's anything like my endevors to keep a diary it might be a long time before I publish my debut best seller :-)
Anyway, I'm going to keep an eye on this board so I'm sure I'll be inspired
thanks again
A

pickarooney

Memnoch wrote: »

I think you will find that even the majority of literary fiction does have a similar arc though perhaps not as obviously defined.

All stories are ultimately driven by the dramatic needs of their characters and the struggles they endure to achieve these needs.

P.S. A simpler way to define the 3-act/beginning-middle-end structure can be Setup -- Conflict -- Resolution. Conflict is often where the meat of the story lies and if you find you are struggling to generate conflict then the weakness is probably in your set-up.

I should probably split this off to a new thread, but how and ever, with apologies to the OP (who might also be learning ):

I just took the last three books I read and, maybe I'm looking too hard but, I just don't see this three act structure at all, nor the conflict and resolution.

The End of Alice

Glue

100 Years of Solitude

Memnoch

Sorry I haven't read any of these so I can't help you there specifically, but I would say that there is ALWAYS a conflict.

There is always something a character wants or needs and always a struggle to achieve it.

The 3 act structure is more apt to movies, in terms of act breaks and big incidents at the end of those. (also to genre novels more loosely).

In terms of novels it's more beginning-middle-end. setup-conflict-resolution. This is true even in non-linear stories.

Again, I can't think of a story that didn't follow this pattern. I have a lot on my reading list already or I'd pop the above on though the first title seems pretty gruesome reading.

dawvee

pickarooney wrote: »

I should probably split this off to a new thread, but how and ever, with apologies to the OP (who might also be learning ):

I just took the last three books I read and, maybe I'm looking too hard but, I just don't see this three act structure at all, nor the conflict and resolution.

The End of Alice

Glue

100 Years of Solitude

In fairness, I believe two out of three (Irvine Welsh and G.G. Marquez) are the type of 'literary fiction' that Memnoch was talking about. I genuinely don't know if A.M. Homes counts as 'literary' or not.

If you're confused about the distinction between literary fiction and commercial fiction, think of it this way: is most of the book's audience made up of prize committees, other writers, English majors and poseurs? If yes, it's literary fiction.

Memnoch

dawvee wrote: »

In fairness, I believe two out of three (Irvine Welsh and G.G. Marquez) are the type of 'literary fiction' that Memnoch was talking about. I genuinely don't know if A.M. Homes counts as 'literary' or not.

If you're confused about the distinction between literary fiction and commercial fiction, think of it this way: is most of the book's audience made up of prize committees, other writers, English majors and poseurs? If yes, it's literary fiction.

I don't agree that literary fiction HAS to be something that is inaccessable. I think if you look at a lot of the recent Booker winners, the thing they have in common is that apart from being really strong literary novels, they also appeal to a mass audience.

Ian McEwan is a great example of this. While his books have a lot of depth they still move apace and build tension throughout (though his latest effort, Solar, was incredibly self-indulgent imo).

pickarooney

100 Years is, as you might imagine, the story of a long succession of people over an extended period with births, deaths and marriages all over the place, so there's no main character as such. Can a book with no MC still fit the beginning-middle-end ideal? Essentially the book just goes on and on and on

dawvee

Memnoch wrote: »

I don't agree that literary fiction HAS to be something that is inaccessable. I think if you look at a lot of the recent Booker winners, the thing they have in common is that apart from being really strong literary novels, they also appeal to a mass audience.

Ian McEwan is a great example of this. While his books have a lot of depth they still move apace and build tension throughout (though his latest effort, Solar, was incredibly self-indulgent imo).

No, you're dead right. I was simply being glib, despite the fact that I vastly prefer literary fiction. There are countless examples of literary novels that have either been best sellers, or had all the right ingredients to be, in addition to being more literary.

Also, I would agree with your assessment of Solar.

Memnoch

pickarooney wrote: »

100 Years is, as you might imagine, the story of a long succession of people over an extended period with births, deaths and marriages all over the place, so there's no main character as such. Can a book with no MC still fit the beginning-middle-end ideal? Essentially the book just goes on and on and on

I can't comment specifically on a book I haven't read. But 'A Suitable Boy,' is 1300 pages long, with tons of characters each leading their own lives. And though there is a token MC, we spend a lot of time away from her, even though her story is probably the one we care about the most. But even in that, each character has a story.

And stories have beginning-middle-ends. Saying it's an ideal is like saying the human spine is an ideal. We all have vertebrae, we all have spine. But we are still individuals. This most fundamental structure is just the spine upon which stores are naturally built.

pickarooney

Finnegans Wake?

Memnoch

Good luck getting something like that OR Ulysses published in today's marketplace. But hey, you might just be the next Joyce and genius enough to understand anatomy so well that you can fashion your own spine that isn't a spine upon which to build a body.

cobsie

pickarooney wrote: »

100 Years is, as you might imagine, the story of a long succession of people over an extended period with births, deaths and marriages all over the place, so there's no main character as such. Can a book with no MC still fit the beginning-middle-end ideal? Essentially the book just goes on and on and on

Maybe then it serves as an instructive example of what happens when novels don't follow the traditional set-up, conflict, resolution arc: "Essentially the book just goes on and on and on" - and that goes double for Finnegans Wake!

The Mad Hatter

Memnoch wrote: »

Saying it's an ideal is like saying the human spine is an ideal.

Er, it really isn't. It's built for moving around on all fours.

Anyways, the important thing is that even if this idea is true, it's not something worth thinking consciously about while writing a novel, because striving to tick all those boxes winds up with something formulaic and dull.

pickarooney

The Mad Hatter wrote: »

Anyways, the important thing is that even if this idea is true, it's not something worth thinking consciously about while writing a novel, because striving to tick all those boxes winds up with something formulaic and dull.

I have to agree with that.

Memnoch

Okay, I'm an unpublished amateur myself. But I can look back at my writing from a couple of years ago and see the improvement. The following is the most useful advice I think I can give to any aspiring writer.

Writing cliches and rules exist for a reason. It's one thing to understand what these things mean and to then make a conscious decision to ignore them because they might not work for your story, it's another entirely to be simply ignorant of them out of some misguided fear that they will artificially constrain you.

The irony is that, this was also a fear I used to have (and still do sometimes) and I'd say is a fear for a lot of budding writers. It is also wholly unfounded.

Now there are a lot of these so called rules. A few of the more important ones that I can think of, off the top of my head are:

Characters should be 3 dimensional.

Avoid overwriting. Each word should serve the story and be made to justify it's place in the prose. (adjectives tend to fall into this category)

Active voice is better than passive voice.

Head hopping is a bad idea.

There are a good few more. Even in the above there is a heirarchy. For instance, you should ALWAYS aim for 3d characters. Passive voice can be fine, but a whole paragraph of it is a bad idea, unless you are consciously trying to build a particular lyrical tone or style. Head hopping is a very bad idea because you are likely to leave your reader confused and break the immersion of the story.

All of these rules can and do get broken, it's just a question of knowing when to do it.

But this whole idea that BASIC story structure, i.e. setup - conflict - resolution, is some kind of artificial cage that will unduly constrain you and dampen your creativity is, and there is no kinder way to put this, baseless paranoia.

It's not about ticking boxes at all. It's about understanding. Think of it like vocabulary and grammar. The more words you know, and the more you understand the meaning of those words, and the more you know how to put those words together, the better sentences you can construct.

The going belief is that 90% (I've read as much as 98% in places) of all novels submitted to literary agents are unreadable. And I'd bet anything that most of the time this is because the writers never made an effort to understand the fundamentals of story telling.

Yes, story telling is an art, it is about creation. Some might even claim it is about talent. But it is also a skill. And requires understanding, practise and mastery of its tools to execute to a high standard. A lot of these tools we acquire subconsciously, by reading great writing. We learn without realising. But in order to succeed, I believe it is important to study, to find our weaknesses and improve upon them.

pickarooney

What's head hopping?

EileenG

Points of view jumping round all over the place. At its worst where you have a crowd of people in one scene, and you get the POV of all of them.

The general rule is to stick with one POV per scene, and many successful books only have one POV all through it.

pickarooney

I think I probably do that all the time. I never realised it was frowned upon.

EileenG

Depends how it's handled. I personally think you need to get a few POV just to round out your different characters. Especially the villain.

pickarooney

I'm a bit confused after reading an article on this. It was based on rmantic fiction, so my brain froze trying to read some of the examples, but it seems to apply to stories told in the omniscient narrator style so I couldn't make much sense of what the author was trying to say.

Why would the writer not know exactly what each person was feeling and thinking in this case?

Memnoch

I've no issues with multiple POVs. But as Eileen pointed out, the rule is to try and keep them separated out. I.E. it's generally a good idea to only change POV with a change in chapter or a scene.

It can and HAS been done successfully more than that but takes immense skill to pull off successfully.

The problem isn't as you said

Why would the writer not know exactly what each person was feeling and thinking in this case?

The writer usually knows, and because of this the writer sometimes doesn't realise that this isn't being conveyed adequately to the reader, especially when they are jumping around from one person's thoughts to the next in the middle of a scene.

The result is that the reader is following the thoughts of one character and the narrative shifts to another without any real clue and the reader still thinks they are reading the thought of Character A when really they are the thoguhts of character B.

This jars and the reader must stop and re-orient themselves which breaks the immersion of the story.

Personally, I tend to stick to chapters for POV shifts. And the novel I'm working on right now is all told from a single POV.

EileenG

The writer must know, of course, but you usually don't tell all, or there will be no suspense. Try to pick a good character, and stick to that character's POV all through the scene. So the reader gets to see, hear, smell and feel along with that character but still has to guess why the other characters are behaving in certain ways. Kind of like real life....

If you don't, your scene can end up sounding like a newspaper report of a party or whatever it was.

pickarooney

I suppose. I'm trying to fix up a chapter right this minute that has three characters, two of them new and one of those a temporary character. No matter how much I shift the paragraphs and the POVs round there seems to be no way of getting all the information across without what I think is called head hopping. I also have it written in such a way that there is a huge contrast between the way the three characters experience the environment which, again, doesn't seem possible to maintain by focussing only on one character.

Doesn't a character need to have his experience conveyed from his POV in order to make him three dimensional?

Memnoch

pickarooney wrote: »

Doesn't a character need to have his experience conveyed from his POV in order to make him three dimensional?

We don't need to be constantly hearing every single character's thoughts in order to understand them. We understand characters through their actions, what they say and the way they say it. Yes we also foray into their thoughts, but there is much more than just that to understanding character.

dawvee

pickarooney wrote: »

Doesn't a character need to have his experience conveyed from his POV in order to make him three dimensional?

Not necessarily. A character being three dimensional just means that they're not two dimensional - the character more closely resembles an actual person than a plot device. You can convey a three dimensional character perfectly well without ever getting inside that character's head directly. Just have the character fleshed out and well rounded in your own head, but write those touches into dialogue, actions, etc. at the edges of the narrative for that character, rather than giving them primary focus.

pickarooney

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what POV means.

Say for example there's a sunrise and character A thinks it's beautiful but character B thinks it's boring. If I tell the story from B's POV, how can the opposite POV be got across?

dawvee

pickarooney wrote: »

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what POV means.

Say for example there's a sunrise and character A thinks it's beautiful but character B thinks it's boring. If I tell the story from B's POV, how can the opposite POV be got across?

I suspect you're overcomplicating it, but it really is as simple as it sounds.

For your example, you could have B bored and tetchy that A keeps bothering him/her to look at that damned sunrise, and keeps going on about how wonderful it is and why doesn't he/she just shut up about it. Everything about A's experience would be conveyed through what they say, how they act, and so on, as experienced by B.

pickarooney

Hmm, not really convinced It's probably pointless without an example.

pickarooney

Indulge me on this This is one of four versions of the same passage. Does this read as a character's POV (Olaf) or external narrative, or neither?

Olaf Hahn trudged leaden-footed after his guide through the jungle, crunching through shadow-speckled corridors of tagua and ajo-ajo trees. Great roots gushed forth from the rich, black soil, tall as two men, wide as barn doors. Huge, muscled arms of wood stretched up to the clouds. Lower, in the cool, dappled light of the forest floor, leafy dwarfs battled for supremacy. Every inch of the ground was home to something living, something fighting for light, food and survival in the rich density of the selva. Like some endless, green Manhattan, plants sprawled one atop the other, feeding, leaching, from the soil and sky. In the frosty silence of the woods, a tuned ear could hear the forest growing. Their tracks converged with the footprints of invisible beasts – here a cloven boar-hoof, there the five point mark of an ocelot's paw. Keel-billed toucans and emerald toucanets screeched in the gothic rafters of the canopy, their ugly voices contrasting with their brilliant bills glimpsed through cracks in the forest.

Olaf sighed. He was beginning to regret having travelled 10,000 kilometres to a jungle with no animals for a girl who appeared to have no intention of sleeping with him. Their guide stood with his hands on his hips while he waved his mobile phone in the air.
"Still no ****ing bars!" moaned Olaf.

"When we are ready..."
Fausto Beni knew he had to play his first trump card or lose them completely.
"Watch" he said, grabbing a dry-looking branch and swiping at it with his machete. He tilted the severed limb and allowed a clear stream of liquid to flow out. "Drink."
"No way!" said Ulrike, wrinkling up her nose at the suggestion. "That's disgusting!"
"It's water", said Fausto, exaggerating his sigh of refreshment as the cool fluid dribbled into his mouth.
"Have you one with rum and coke, perhaps?" asked Olaf, visibly bored.

Memnoch

pickarooney wrote: »

Indulge me on this This is one of four versions of the same passage. Does this read as a character's POV (Olaf) or external narrative, or neither?

All right, POV shifting isn't really that much of an issue here in terms of being confusing or jarring.

One minor POVish issue is the sentence: 'The guide stood with his hands on his hips while HE waved,' this could cause confusion about who is standing and who is waving the mobile phone and I think is incorrect grammar.

But and I'm going to be quite brutal here so I apologise in advance, the much bigger problem is that the entire passage is very overwritten. There are actually a couple of nice sentences in there but they get lost within the deluge. I found it difficult to get through and there is no way I would read an entire book in this style of prose (and I ENJOY Henry James). You need to seriously edit this.

Also stuff like "visibly bored," "exagerated sigh of refreshment," is too much and unnecessary. You don't need to qualify every piece of dialogue. Sometimes "he said or said Olaf," is more than enough.

This reminds me of my writing from my first "novel." I had this idea in my head that every single thing had to have a "modifier," to describe it and that somehow that made the story more detailed and vivid, it didn't. I later learnt that this is apparently a common mistake writers make while starting out.

Here are a couple of pages from an early draft of my last novel as an example. Be warned it's painful reading.

The chain began here, at the end of the circle. Gopal Jaru dropped the long, stainless steel knife onto the ground behind him, spread his thin legs apart, and digging his tattered Kolapuri slippers into the mud, took aim at a narrow crack in the surface of the alley wall. His urethral sphincters relaxed, a stream of hot, yellow piss shot out from his penis and hit the decayed stonework a few centimetres below the targeted area.

'Behn chod,' sister ****er, Gopal cursed to himself at the missed shot. The piss splashed off the wall and fell into the thick, black stream of human waste that had, over time, carved itself a small rivulet along the foot of the wall. Gopal spat out a missile of bitter, chewed tobacco from his thin, reddened lips, onto a pile of garbage lying nearby, like a patient coughing up blood from the ravages of tuberculosis.

The stream of piss thinned and weakened, dying to a trickle, the last few drops falling between his feet. Gopal gave his dark penis a vigorous shake before stuffing it back inside his navy blue cotton trousers and buttoning them, their front zip long broken.

He tightened the frayed leather belt his father had given to him eight months ago on his seventeenth birthday and wiping the drops of piss on his hands against the side of his trousers, he bent down to pick up the knife given to him last week by Pundit Shri. It's elongated, polished blade, glinted under the pulsating, unmitigated sunlight, like a shard of crystal placed in a stylish glass cabinet with powerful, yellow lights, built into its frame to accentuate its contents.

Gopal slipped the knife into the side of his belt, concealing it under his matching dark blue shirt, two sizes too big for his slight frame. He rejoined his friends. The three of them had been standing guard at the mouth of the alley, similar weapons hidden about their persons.

pickarooney

Memnoch wrote: »

All right, POV shifting isn't really that much of an issue here in terms of being confusing or jarring.

One minor POVish issue is the sentence: 'The guide stood with his hands on his hips while HE waved,' this could cause confusion about who is standing and who is waving the mobile phone and I think is incorrect grammar.

But and I'm going to be quite brutal here so I apologise in advance, the much bigger problem is that the entire passage is very overwritten. There are actually a couple of nice sentences in there but they get lost within the deluge. I found it difficult to get through and there is no way I would read an entire book in this style of prose (and I ENJOY Henry James). You need to seriously edit this.

Also stuff like "visibly bored," "exagerated sigh of refreshment," is too much and unnecessary. You don't need to qualify every piece of dialogue. Sometimes "he said or said Olaf," is more than enough.

This reminds me of my writing from my first "novel." I had this idea in my head that every single thing had to have a "modifier," to describe it and that somehow that made the story more detailed and vivid, it didn't. I later learnt that this is apparently a common mistake writers make while starting out.

Here are a couple of pages from an early draft of my last novel as an example. Be warned it's painful reading.

Oh, don't mind about the actual content, it's from version 4, before the revelation and the cull

My question is more whether there is POV shifting and it's not too messed up or if there isn't POV shifting and I've misunderstood the term.

Memnoch

pickarooney wrote: »

Oh, don't mind about the actual content, it's from version 4, before the revelation and the cull

fair enough so

Yes there is POV shifting.

In the sentence: 'Fausto Beni knew he had to...' We are now in Fausto's thoughts, whereas up to now we were in Olaf's, and this suggests an omniscient narrator.

dawvee

pickarooney wrote: »

Indulge me on this This is one of four versions of the same passage. Does this read as a character's POV (Olaf) or external narrative, or neither?

I read the first paragraph as coming from the guide's perspective, the second as Olaf's, and the third jumping back to the guide (who we now know as Fausto). Fausto's point of view is the most revealing through the whole passage, to be honest. My sense is that he's attuned to the environment (the other two are not), but he's also apt for making observations about the other two.

The only piece of information we get from the switch to Olaf's perspective is that he regrets coming, and Ulrike won't sleep with him. The first one is pretty much summed up by Olaf's subsequent dialogue ("Still no ****ing bars!"), while the second could be conveyed much better by an observation of Ulrike's body language.

IMHO, you only need one POV for that passage: Fausto's.

Memnoch

I don't get how you thought that the first para was the guide's perspective, seemed like Olaf's to me.

dawvee

Memnoch wrote: »

I don't get how you thought that the first para was the guide's perspective, seemed like Olaf's to me.

Well, if that's the case then it seems completely out of character to me.

The fact that the narrator is giving the names of many varieties of plants, plus this passage:

...a tuned ear could hear the forest growing. Their tracks converged with the footprints of invisible beasts – here a cloven boar-hoof, there the five point mark of an ocelot's paw.

particularly suggested someone very well acquainted with the jungle making those observations. Given that we have a guide mentioned as a character, that seemed a natural jump to make. None of those things exist in Olaf's 'world'. It's all just uninteresting backdrop to him.

pickarooney

Interesting divergence of opinions on whether the POV is decided on a syntactic or semantic level. For what it's worth, I simply switched the names around in the version I posted further up - I had alternatively Ulrike and Fausto in the first line at different stages.

And this is the thing - I'm still not getting why either one character or another has to know everything. Why can't the writer simply say, e.g. that the red car was a '78 Buick even though none of the characters in the scene know anything about cars?

Memnoch

pickarooney wrote: »

Interesting divergence of opinions on whether the POV is decided on a syntactic or semantic level. For what it's worth, I simply switched the names around in the version I posted further up - I had alternatively Ulrike and Fausto in the first line at different stages.

And this is the thing - I'm still not getting why either one character or another has to know everything. Why can't the writer simply say, e.g. that the red car was a '78 Buick even though none of the characters in the scene know anything about cars?

They can and do all the time. It's quite common in novels and I don't agree at all with Dawvee's opinion above that narrative that isn't directly attributed to the character has to be consistent with the character. Unless the character is themselves the narrator which is not the case here.

This kind of narration is commonly accepted 3rd pov and might even be the most common type of narrative and I don't think most readers would notice it.

pickarooney

I do quite often use a narrative style where the character stronly influences the tone of the narration itself, flowing back and forth between this and straight 'I know all and use the right names for things' wording. I've never done it consciously, but it occurs organically and I honestly think it works quite well.

It looks a bit like you do this yourself (or at least used to) in sentences like

His urethral sphincters relaxed, a stream of hot, yellow piss shot out from his penis

Urethra/piss/penis changes register from medical to vulgar and back for example.

dawvee

Oh, I'm not saying that every detail has to follow from the POV character's perspective, but the example of saying a car was a '78 Buick is a far cry from a full paragraph describing the minutiae of the jungle ecosystem when the character's direct speech refers to the jungle dismissively in the very next line. If it's meant to be from that character's POV, then it's out of character. That description has nothing to do with what the character as portrayed is experiencing. It's not necessarily indicative of my general opinion on narrative, but for this particular case I found it to be so.