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Cleaning the Lens

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I have a daughter. She’s seventeen. She’s a fantastic writer (truly), and a big-time reader (no surprise). She’s also totally blind. And this is where things get interesting.

A few weeks ago, we were driving down the road. She was reading aloud to me from her work in progress—a fantasy that featured a blind person as the main character. Here’s a snippet of that conversation:

Daughter reading: “As the minivan approached the curb, we all turned to look, and John’s face clouded with disgust.”

“Stop,” I said. “Stop right there. Isn’t the main character blind?”

“Yeah,” she said, as if it should be obvious. She’d already told me so.

“Okay, so how did she know it was a minivan approaching? How did she know everybody turned to look? How did she know what John’s face looked like?”

Long pause…Then, from the passenger seat. “Dammit.”

This exchange triggered a fascinating conversation about points of view and author intrusion. My daughter had infused her character with a point of view that was not specific to her character’s visual impairment, but rather to every sighted character in every book she’d ever read. This disconnect caused reader/listener confusion and a lack of trust.

“How can you rewrite it?” I asked.

A few minutes later she came back with: [Read more…]

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Perception and How to Identify POV Leaps

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Please welcome return guest Jordan Rosenfeld, author of seven books, most recently Writing the Intimate Character: Create Unique, Compelling Characters Through Mastery of Point of View (Writer’s Digest Books). Her freelance work has been widely published in The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Salon, Scientific American, The Washington Post, Writer’s Digest and many more. Connect with Jordan on Twitter. Perception and How to Identify POV Leaps For many writers, point of … [Read more...]

Juggling Act: Writing a Novel Within a Novel

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Please welcome back Yona Zeldis McDonough, the award-winning author of seven novels, twenty-seven books for children and numerous essays, articles, and short stories; her latest novel is The House on Primrose Pond. Yona is also the editor of two anthologies and the Fiction Editor of Lilith Magazine. She makes her home in Brooklyn, New York. I’ve always been intrigued by the novel-within-the-novel format but had never attempted it in one of my own books. The idea gnawed at me though and when I … [Read more...]

The Power Of Point Of View

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Please welcome back guest Molly Best Tinsley. Molly taught on the civilian faculty at the United States Naval Academy for twenty years and is the institution’s first professor emerita. Most recently Molly is the author of just-released middle grade fantasy thriller Behind the Waterfall. She is also the author of My Life With Darwin and a story collection, Throwing Knives, as well as two spy thrillers, Satan’s Chamber (with Karetta Hubbard) and Broken Angels, and a memoir, Entering the Blue … [Read more...]

For me, “voice” is character

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I am schizophrenic. That has to be the answer. Why do I say that? I recently came to understand that I write differently depending on the point-of-view character—and, scarily, I can’t write in that voice unless I channel the character. Here’s the inciting incident for this realization: I wanted to do an “About the author” page in my upcoming novel, The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles, and on the website. You need to understand that the narrative is told by my character, Patch, who is the world’s … [Read more...]

What point of view?

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POV, otherwise known as the narrating voice of your novel, is one of the very first decisions a writer makes when starting a new work. And it's probably the most important. Whether you are going to write in first person or third person (or very rarely, in second); and whether you are going to have a limited narrator (which can be either first or third person) or an omniscient one, which is always third person, will set the tone for your whole book. How to decide on the POV for your novel? … [Read more...]