Once upon a time, I was a lot younger and a lot smarter than I am now. Rules of writing in viewpoint? Ha! I didn’t need lessons from all those tedious how-to-write books. My natural talent would carry the day, my written words would sing, and my genius would shine through.
Oh well. Live and learn. I did, the hard way.
At least I hope I did.
Years later, in 2009, I was thrilled to win a first-place Royal Palm Literary Award for my debut novel, Brigands Key. So Florida Writers Association asked me if I’d consider giving back to the community of writers by consenting to be a judge in the following year’s RPLA. I said okay, the FWA issued me a judge’s gavel and powdered wig, and the manuscripts began to arrive.
As one would expect, the manuscripts I reviewed were written by persons of differing levels of experience. A few were bad, most were good, a few were great. After evaluating them all, things that repeatedly jumped out at me, things that sometimes knee-capped the prose with a tire iron, were errors in viewpoint. These mistakes, big and small, kept kicking me out of that moment of absorption that we so love about reading. So when the leader of my local writers’ group asked if I’d make a presentation to the group, I knew exactly what I wanted to talk about.
I laid the foundation of my talk on the building blocks of viewpoint options—and there are more than you think–and then stacked the blocks from there, explaining why successful authors chose certain viewpoint characters for certain stories. Why are the adventures of Sherlock Holmes narrated by Dr. Watson? Why does Stephen King unleash a sprawling cast of viewpoint characters in ‘Salem’s Lot? Why does Dashiell Hammett go in the opposite direction in The Maltese Falcon, sticking with a single viewpoint character? What works—and is popular with writers and readers–in different fiction genres, and even in creative nonfiction.
Finally, how do you avoid, spot, and fix viewpoint errors? There may be nothing grammatically wrong with a passage of text, yet there might be glaring or subtle mistakes in telling the tale from a given point of view. With flaws in viewpoint, the whole structure collapses.
I’ve since given that presentation about a dozen times and have parleyed it into a short guidebook, which has been named a finalist in this year’s Royal Palms. Giving the talk now as a webinar will be a first for me, and I’m excited by the possibilities of the format. I feel so high-tech! I might even fly to the presentation with a jet-pack were it not for the fact that I’ll be doing it from a bedroom in my house.
KEN PELHAM will be presenting the FWA webinar on Mastering Viewpoint on September 12, 2015, at 11 am Eastern. Registration is now open!
Dean Murphy
Ken, thanks for “giving back,” being a writer helping writers. And thank you for ascending the bench as an RPLA judge. Your post indicates it was a learning experience. As a reviewer, I frequently see multiple viewpoints told through the author’s POV–the voice is the same, often the same phrases.
Ken Pelham
Thanks, Dean! Good point about characters all sounding the same. I find that in my first drafts, my characters tend to sound alike, so that’s one of the things I try to wring out in subsequent drafts.