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    #32
    pickarooney
    Moderators, Arts Moderators Posts: 35,197 Mod ✭✭✭✭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?


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    #33
    Memnoch
    Registered Users Posts: 4,276 ✭✭✭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.


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    #34
    EileenG
    Registered Users Posts: 5,775 ✭✭✭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.


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    #35
    pickarooney
    Moderators, Arts Moderators Posts: 35,197 Mod ✭✭✭✭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?


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    #36
    Memnoch
    Registered Users Posts: 4,276 ✭✭✭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.


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    #37
    dawvee
    Closed Accounts Posts: 122 ✭✭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.


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    #38
    pickarooney
    Moderators, Arts Moderators Posts: 35,197 Mod ✭✭✭✭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?


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    #39
    dawvee
    Closed Accounts Posts: 122 ✭✭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.


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    #40
    pickarooney
    Moderators, Arts Moderators Posts: 35,197 Mod ✭✭✭✭pickarooney


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


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    #41
    pickarooney
    Moderators, Arts Moderators Posts: 35,197 Mod ✭✭✭✭pickarooney


    Indulge me on this :D 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.


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    #42
    Memnoch
    Registered Users Posts: 4,276 ✭✭✭Memnoch


    pickarooney wrote: »
    Indulge me on this :D 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.


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    #43
    pickarooney
    Moderators, Arts Moderators Posts: 35,197 Mod ✭✭✭✭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 :D

    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.


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    #44
    Memnoch
    Registered Users Posts: 4,276 ✭✭✭Memnoch


    pickarooney wrote: »
    Oh, don't mind about the actual content, it's from version 4, before the revelation and the cull :D

    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.


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    #45
    dawvee
    Closed Accounts Posts: 122 ✭✭dawvee


    pickarooney wrote: »
    Indulge me on this :D 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.


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    #46
    Memnoch
    Registered Users Posts: 4,276 ✭✭✭Memnoch


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


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    #47
    dawvee
    Closed Accounts Posts: 122 ✭✭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.


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    #48
    pickarooney
    Moderators, Arts Moderators Posts: 35,197 Mod ✭✭✭✭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?


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    #49
    Memnoch
    Registered Users Posts: 4,276 ✭✭✭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.


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    #50
    pickarooney
    Moderators, Arts Moderators Posts: 35,197 Mod ✭✭✭✭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.


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    #51
    dawvee
    Closed Accounts Posts: 122 ✭✭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.


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    #52
    pickarooney
    Moderators, Arts Moderators Posts: 35,197 Mod ✭✭✭✭pickarooney


    dawvee wrote: »
    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.

    I put that in quite deliberately. It was a cheap gag originally, with an even longer, overindulgent description followed immediately by Olaf saying "This is so boring" thereby I suppose in a roundabout way informing the reader of what he was not experiencing.


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    #53
    EileenG
    Registered Users Posts: 5,775 ✭✭✭EileenG


    The trouble with that sort of thing is that if you are not very careful, you can really piss off the reader. If they don't get the joke, they are annoyed, and if they think you are talking down or lecturing them, they get annoyed. As long as you stick to your character's POV, it's the character being annoying, not the author.

    My feeling is that your own writing is much stronger when you stick to what your characters know or say or do, than when you are putting in all sorts of extra information.


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    #54
    pickarooney
    Moderators, Arts Moderators Posts: 35,197 Mod ✭✭✭✭pickarooney


    EileenG wrote: »
    My feeling is that your own writing is much stronger when you stick to what your characters know or say or do, than when you are putting in all sorts of extra information.

    That's the vicious circle I'm trying to understand and avoid. If the narrator intrudes, he's getting in the way of the story evolving naturally - I get that. However, if he doesn't, it's impossible to reveal important information about the various characters without 'head-hopping'.

    The extract above has been re-written about eight times since with some radical changes but I've not yet been able to find a way to show the reader the following.
    1. The jungle is, pretentious as it sounds, a character itself - it's grand, it's complex, it's nourishing and it's merciless
    2. Ulrike is only there as a kind of favour to Olaf, a minor concession to having him travel 10,000 km essentially just to massage her ego
    3. Olaf is there on the misassumption that he will see loads of cool animals
    4. Fausto is there because until he has made enough cash to move to the big city he has no other choice. He's bored of the jungle and though he's supposed to know everything about all the plants and birds, he's never been all that interested in the place.
    5. They all end up fighting one another with hilarious consequences.


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    #55
    EileenG
    Registered Users Posts: 5,775 ✭✭✭EileenG


    Dialogue! Let them have a difference of opinion and either say this stuff outright, or NOT say it in such a way that the reader gets it anyway. All you need is someone to roll his eyes when someone else rabbits on about the glory of nature, and you've told the story.


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    #56
    pickarooney
    Moderators, Arts Moderators Posts: 35,197 Mod ✭✭✭✭pickarooney


    No - then the characters themselves would know what all the others are keeping to themselves! And the fights would start about eight pages too early :D


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    #57
    The Sparrow
    Registered Users Posts: 3,614 ✭✭✭The Sparrow


    This thread seems to have derailed a good bit from the what the OP asked!

    I'm going to be a bit controversial and say that just sitting down to write a lot is not the wisest way to approach a novel. Having said that, I have not finished a novel or submitted one to a publisher.

    You can get caught up on rules about doing one thing or not doing another thing and all you end up doing is spending your time worrying about whether you are breaking any of these 'sacrosanct' rules.

    Also, everyone always says just write. Well actually it seems to me that if you want to write a novel, the worst idea is to open your laptop and start writing. If you think that you can write a novel, then by definition you must consider yourself a good writer.

    A novel has to be a good story that is engaging to the reader. That is the number one most important thing about a novel. Author's like Dan Brown have proven that a good story is even more important than writing skill.

    So it seems to me that the place to start is on your story and making sure that you have it all mapped out before you begin to write. I was listening to an interview with Jeffrey Deaver this morning and he doesn't write a word of his novel's for the first 8-10 months. Instead he works on an outline of the story and does the hard slog of researching everything.

    Only when he has a detailed outline of about 100 pages and has researched every element of the story, does he sit down and start writing. Then, he said he can have fun and lock himself away and use his writing skills to tell the best story that he can. It is only then that I would worry about any so-called rules.

    And the best thing about rules is that they are there to be broken. So don't listen to people who just talk about what rules or other nonsense about too many POV's and how stuff can or can't be broken.

    I say do your own thing and then worry about all that nonsense. if you think you can write a novel then you obviously think you are a good writer so have confidence in your own ability and come up with a great story, research the life out of it and then sit down and enjoy writing it.


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    #58
    Memnoch
    Registered Users Posts: 4,276 ✭✭✭Memnoch


    The Sparrow wrote: »
    This thread seems to have derailed a good bit from the what the OP asked!

    I'm going to be a bit controversial and say that just sitting down to write a lot is not the wisest way to approach a novel. Having said that, I have not finished a novel or submitted one to a publisher.

    You can get caught up on rules about doing one thing or not doing another thing and all you end up doing is spending your time worrying about whether you are breaking any of these 'sacrosanct' rules.

    Also, everyone always says just write. Well actually it seems to me that if you want to write a novel, the worst idea is to open your laptop and start writing. If you think that you can write a novel, then by definition you must consider yourself a good writer.

    A novel has to be a good story that is engaging to the reader. That is the number one most important thing about a novel. Author's like Dan Brown have proven that a good story is even more important than writing skill.

    So it seems to me that the place to start is on your story and making sure that you have it all mapped out before you begin to write. I was listening to an interview with Jeffrey Deaver this morning and he doesn't write a word of his novel's for the first 8-10 months. Instead he works on an outline of the story and does the hard slog of researching everything.

    Only when he has a detailed outline of about 100 pages and has researched every element of the story, does he sit down and start writing. Then, he said he can have fun and lock himself away and use his writing skills to tell the best story that he can. It is only then that I would worry about any so-called rules.

    And the best thing about rules is that they are there to be broken. So don't listen to people who just talk about what rules or other nonsense about too many POV's and how stuff can or can't be broken.

    I say do your own thing and then worry about all that nonsense. if you think you can write a novel then you obviously think you are a good writer so have confidence in your own ability and come up with a great story, research the life out of it and then sit down and enjoy writing it.

    That's ironic that you say that... especially since you use Dan Brown as an example considering...

    1) He writes like a million words for every 100k novel he puts out. i.e. he works INCREDIBLY hard at his craft.

    2) He used to teach a creative writing class espousing these "rules," while he worked on his own novels.

    3) He does seem to apply these rules even though he isn't considered to be a good writer by "critical" standards.

    And it's doubly ironic that you bash "rules" and yet preach a rule that you should outline everything in detail before writing.

    Here's the truth about outlining. Every writer is different and has to discover his or her own process.

    Some writers HAVE to outline before they write, it's the only way they can tell a story. Others write better organically.

    I'm one of the latter. I never outline. In fact, I find it IMPOSSIBLE to outline. Yet I've managed to complete two novels. Admittedly the first one was horrible. It's all about your creative process and how you think and this varies from person to person.

    I'll say it again. It's one thing to not allow the rules to control your writing (which is good) it's another entirely to be ignorant of them.

    The reason these rules exist is because these are mistakes that writers typically make. eg over-rely on adverbs. That said, one of my favourite novels of all time uses adverbs a lot. (A suitable boy).


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    #59
    The Sparrow
    Registered Users Posts: 3,614 ✭✭✭The Sparrow


    Memnoch wrote: »
    That's ironic that you say that... especially since you use Dan Brown as an example considering...

    1) He writes like a million words for every 100k novel he puts out. i.e. he works INCREDIBLY hard at his craft.

    2) He used to teach a creative writing class espousing these "rules," while he worked on his own novels.

    3) He does seem to apply these rules even though he isn't considered to be a good writer by "critical" standards.

    And it's doubly ironic that you bash "rules" and yet preach a rule that you should outline everything in detail before writing.

    Here's the truth about outlining. Every writer is different and has to discover his or her own process.

    Some writers HAVE to outline before they write, it's the only way they can tell a story. Others write better organically.

    I'm one of the latter. I never outline. In fact, I find it IMPOSSIBLE to outline. Yet I've managed to complete two novels. Admittedly the first one was horrible. It's all about your creative process and how you think and this varies from person to person.

    I'll say it again. It's one thing to not allow the rules to control your writing (which is good) it's another entirely to be ignorant of them.

    The reason these rules exist is because these are mistakes that writers typically make. eg over-rely on adverbs. That said, one of my favourite novels of all time uses adverbs a lot. (A suitable boy).

    It's actually not ironic at all. Would you not agree that the thing that sells Dan Brown novels is not the writing skill but the plot line? The same plot that he must have spent so long coming up with and researching?

    Also I didn't bash rules per se. I bashed the idea that when someone asks how they should approach writing a novel, all they get is rather pointless discussion on what rules should or shouldn't be broken.

    And unless you are just writing for yourself (and fair play if you are) it doesn't matter how many novels you have completed. It only matters how many you have had published and how succesful they were.

    Finally, I didn't preach any rule about outlining. I just wrote how I would approach writing a novel. Which was what the OP asked.


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    #60
    dawvee
    Closed Accounts Posts: 122 ✭✭dawvee


    The reason nearly everyone gave the advice to sit down and start writing was because that's really the crucial step. All the planning in the world won't matter in the slightest until you've sat down and bashed a story out of it. If you've never gotten that far (and many never do), then you're not really a writer. Writers write.

    Though you're right that rules don't matter if you can't tell a good story, but the trick is figuring out how to tell a good story, isn't it? That's why all the various rules exist in the first place - to help you tell a good story without getting tripped up or held back on little things. They're not laws from some high and mighty authority, they're the voice of experience from other writers. They exist primarily as guidelines for the inexperienced. The less experience (and success) you've had as a writer, the more foolish it generally is to dismiss them out of hand.


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    #61
    The Sparrow
    Registered Users Posts: 3,614 ✭✭✭The Sparrow


    dawvee wrote: »
    The reason nearly everyone gave the advice to sit down and start writing was because that's really the crucial step. All the planning in the world won't matter in the slightest until you've sat down and bashed a story out of it. If you've never gotten that far (and many never do), then you're not really a writer. Writers write.

    Though you're right that rules don't matter if you can't tell a good story, but the trick is figuring out how to tell a good story, isn't it? That's why all the various rules exist in the first place - to help you tell a good story without getting tripped up or held back on little things. They're not laws from some high and mighty authority, they're the voice of experience from other writers. They exist primarily as guidelines for the inexperienced. The less experience (and success) you've had as a writer, the more foolish it generally is to dismiss them out of hand.

    I'm assuming that if somebody wants to write a novel, they consider themselves to be a good writer. Of course they may be wrong, but why would someone who doesn't consider themselves a good writer try and write a novel?

    So you believe yourself to be at a certain level as a writer. Therefore the next most important (and I would argue most important full stop) is to come up with a good story and then research the hell out of it so you have every single angle covered and you can tell the story in your sleep.

    Then sit down and spend time worrying about how to write it and what rules do or do not apply. It is then that you can perfect the craft of writing and you can concentrate on your writing 100% without having to worry about the plot. It is hard enough to fill a page with great writing without having to also worry about what your plot is, where it is going and if it is coherent and making sense. Not too mention having to research on the fly as well.

    I know plenty of writers do that but it seems like a crazy way to approach it to me.

    And obviously if you are not 100% confident in your writing ability you should practise on short stories etc before even attempting to write a novel.


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