Multiple Viewpoints

Multiple viewpoints in a story can be very, very confusing. Especially when they switch at seemingly random times or when there’s too many of them, it can be hard to find out who is telling the story at the moment, through whose eyes we see what is happening. Yet, they can also be necessary.

 

In most stories, there is only one viewpoint character, no matter which kind of viewpoint (first-, second-, third-person, close or distant) there is. The only real exception from that is the omniscient narrator who knows it all. Yet, omniscient narrators come with a host of problems of their own, so having a viewpoint character who also has a role in the story is usually the better choice. It brings the readers closer to what is happening.

Yet, if you have several viewpoint characters, the switch between them might be jarring for the reader. Suddenly, they are in another place and they might not realize that they’re looking through another character’s eyes, so they wonder what happened. This gets especially weird in first person because there’s no easy way to introduce the new viewpoint character by starting the first sentence with ‘X went into the room’ or something similar that tells us X is now our viewpoint character. In first person, you do not have the chance to do that because a first-person viewpoint character will usually not refer to themselves in third person. It can help to use some symbol in the scene breaks, but it will still be trying and can easily lead to misunderstandings and confusion.

 

Even if you are using third person for your story, there are still a few things you should keep in mind.

First of all, you should never switch viewpoints within a scene. If you start a scene with character X and switch somewhere on the way to character Y, people will definitely get confused. Never switch within a scene, begin and end it with the same character and don’t make any switches in-between.

Another thing you should avoid is retelling a scene several times with different viewpoint characters. That can get repetitive and confusing very quickly. Imagine finishing a scene and moving on to the next, only, in a “Groundhog Day” move, you are back where you started off before - the beginning of the scene you just finished reading. This time, you are looking at the same things which you’ve already seen happening, only from the point of view of character Y instead of character X.

For every scene that contains several potential viewpoint characters, choose the one who has the most stakes in it. Only retell a scene if it is absolutely necessary (which it rarely, if ever, is).

 

Another thing that helps to avoid confusion is to give every viewpoint character a distinct voice. Like this, readers will come to recognize the voice and know who is talking, even if they’ve somehow missed the switch.

A distinct voice contains different things, such as the choice of words, which has a lot to do with the age and social level of a person, but also what the person notes most clearly - smells, sights, sounds, specific objects or people. It’s hard to come up with specific voices for many different characters, though, so be aware that it will be hard to tell your epic story through the eyes of twenty different people who all have a distinct voice.

If you only have two or three viewpoint characters, giving each of them a distinct voice is definitely a possibility and it will work out well enough with first-person viewpoints as well. If your two first-person narrators both have a distinct voice and you introduce each of them when first using the viewpoint, the reader will quickly realize when you’ve made the switch and know who is talking at the moment.

 

When it comes to choosing who gets a voice in the first place, the very first question is ‘does this character’s viewpoint contribute to the story?’ Now, you’re probably immediately shouting ‘yes!’ at this, but take your time and think it through.

Every viewpoint character demands of your readers to remember details about somebody else. Every viewpoint character has to matter to the readers, too, or there’s a chance they might just ignore the chapters or scenes the character is narrating. To matter, a character must play an important role in the plot and their viewpoint must add to the story.

 

Say you have a story with three viewpoint characters. One is a brigand who took a book from a group of travellers, all of whom died trying to protect it. He can barely read and not understand more than the list of names in it - he has no idea what those symbols and diagrams mean, but it must be worth something. The second one is a magistrate tasked with finding the ones behind an intrigue to kill the king and replace him with his much-easier-to-influence son. She knows that the people behind the intrigue will have put everything down and learns that some men she suspects to be part of it have been killed by a brigand, so she’s hunting  for the brigand. The third character is the leader of that group, the mastermind spinning the intrigue. After learning that those men were killed, her main goal is to recover the book - by violence or money, whatever it takes.

All three of those characters have their own plot to follow and the plots, all revolving around the book the brigand now has, will converge eventually. Perhaps the brigand and the magistrate will team up and bring down the mastermind behind the intrigue (enter romantic sub-plot here, if you wish). Perhaps the brigand will side with the mastermind for money and make a try or two on the magistrate’s life (enter redemption for the brigand here, if you want). In a highly unlikely turn of events, the magistrate might be corrupted by the mastermind and join her in the search for book and brigand to make everything happen as planned.

All three characters have their agenda and all three characters will have separate stories to tell before the great finale happens. In this case, the three viewpoints are called-for - none of the characters can tell all of the story that is necessary to bring their arcs together.

 

In the example above, the three viewpoints are necessary because there are a lot of important things which happen and can’t be told from the same person’s perspective. The brigand has no idea about the magistrate or the mastermind, he only knows he has this book and wants to turn it into coins. The magistrate doesn’t know who the mastermind is and only knows the location at which those men died, so she doesn’t know which brigand to hunt down to pick up what they had with them. The mastermind, too, doesn’t know who the brigand is and can’t easily approach him with an offer or a threat, neither might she know that the magistrate is already after her and her co-conspirators. If only one viewpoint were in the story, a lot of things would happen suddenly and without warning, because two-thirds of the story would happen behind the scenes and be told after the fact or never at all. That would be aggravating and confusing - two things a story should never be.

Major things which happen need to happen on the page of the book, not somewhere behind the scenes. If your plotting demands that the viewpoint character isn’t there when something important happens, you might have to introduce another who can witness or take part in those parts of the story. Either that or you have to re-plot the story to make sure the viewpoint character is included in those events.

 

Multiple viewpoints are not something you should introduce into your story lightly - many stories will do well with only one viewpoint character. Yet, there are stories which span a wide range of space or time and need several viewpoints to be told. It might even be just that one scene you need in your book which needs to be told from another perspective in order to include an important bit of information your viewpoint character just can’t get otherwise. Be careful about introducing various viewpoints, but be aware that it can be necessary, depending on your plot or plots.

Switch to Scrivener

After about a year, I’m switching my system for writing yet again. First, I went from One-Note to Campfire Pro, now I’m changing from Campfire Pro to Scrivener - but not only for my outlining. How did that happen and why did I decide to give up Word for my novels and other long projects, too?

 

It began with Campfire Pro. One evening, after having plotted a new story with the help of my Scapple whiteboard and Campfire Pro, I went into the file I have for “Theoretical Necromancy” to look at things and found an outline that was severely corrupted. It wasn’t the first time that happened to me and this time, it was hard to do damage control - let alone completely remove the damage. I was annoyed - there were two full outlines in there I hadn’t turned into written works yet. I needed a new program to do my outlines with and keep them in.

 

A few days earlier, after buying Scapple, I had looked at Scrivener, an all-in-one solution for writers, which is by the same company, “Literature and Latte”. Then, I’d installed the program, which comes with a ’30-Day Trial,’ and just thought I could dive into it and see what it was all about. I was wrong. Opening a blank project without any pre-made entries, I couldn’t even tell what that was all about, much less make heads or tails out of it. I uninstalled it right away afterwards, thinking I had what I needed.

After the corruption of yet another file, I installed the program again and this time was clever enough to dive into the tutorial first of all. The tutorial project led me through all important functions, explained to me how the program works, what I had to do or could do with it. With the tutorial, I could get into the program much more easily and see what I could set up on my own. I played around with my ‘Test’ project and loaded one of my fan-fiction files in it, so I could experiment with something which wouldn’t endanger any of my releases.

 

I rather quickly realized that the program was worth the price to me. As I bought it, the price for the Windows version (which, unfortunately, always gets new functions later than the Mac version) was 54 €. An up-to-date MS Word version (I’m, still working with the 2007 one) would certainly have cost me more and delivered less functions. Under the circumstances, I decided to invest that much in my future work.

The ’30-Day Trial’ of the program is extremely fair, to start with - it’s not ‘30 days after you’ve first opened the program,’ it counts down the actual days on which you use the program. You can also use the licence on several different computers, provided you need to work on different ones. Yes, not getting all functions at the same time as Mac users isn’t nice - that might not even be your problem, though, if you work on a Mac. Apart from that, I must say that I do really like the program.

 

Why, though, did I decide to abandon MS Word (except for blog posts, letters, and suchlike)?

Well, Scrivener is a word processor as well as a way to organize your stuff. It’s a word processor first and foremost, but it allows for easily accessing different files all the time. It’s also a word processor where every file and folder can have its own synopsis, which is where you can easily outline.

Unlike MS Word, Scrivener has a lot of options when it comes to bringing all the files and folders of a manuscript together (you can split the content of your manuscript right down to a scene or a similarly small unit) and actually creating a file to hand over to other people. Among the many different file formats aren’t only .doc and .docx, the Word formats, but also .pdf, .epub, and .mobi (the last two being regular e-book and Amazon e-book format) and many more. It will probably be able to format the finished file in any way that a publisher, reviewer, or professor might ever demand. Yes, professor. Scrivener is a good program for handling a large amount of text, that includes non-fiction works as well as fiction ones.

 

Now, it is revision month for me right now - I’m copy-editing “Ignition Rites” for publication -, so I have other things to do than to write in my new program. It has turned out, though, that being able to copy-edit every scene of my story separately does wonders for my work ethics. Instead of looking at a huge amount of words in one file, I’m only looking at a scene - that might be a full chapter, but usually it’s about half or less.

I found it very useful to use Scrivener for this. In addition, Scrivener can compile the full manuscript to .epub, as mentioned above. That means I can take more control of how my e-books are formatted, both for Amazon and for D2D (strangely enough, if you want to publish on Amazon, you can upload an .epub file, but not a .mobi file, despite this being Amazon’s own e-book format…). Over time, I now plan to go over my old books again, put them up on Amazon in new formatting, and bring it all together. My first few releases certainly can do with some more editing by now…

 

Scrivener is an all-in-one solution for writers, too. In addition to being a word processor, it also allows for direct outlining (as mentioned above) and for keeping all kinds of notes and even external files (like a PDF or a website) in the project folder to look them up when needed. The binder includes the manuscript folder, where everything is gathered for compiling (‘Front Matters’ and ‘Back Matters’ are the only exceptions), but can contain as many additional folders and files as you want (‘Research’ and ‘Trash’ are there from the beginning, but you can also make your own ‘Template’ folder for specific file setups and create as many other files and folders as you want, which enables me to keep my series together in one project for each). There’s a possibility to split up the screen into up to four windows to refer to your notes and suchlike while writing or editing.

What I really love about it are some other things, though: the autosave which saves my project after a certain number of seconds of no action (I’ve set it to 1 second, 2 is standard). The automatic backup in a .zip file every time I close a project (between 3 and 20, depending on the setting, are kept). The typewriter mode which keeps the line with the cursor in the middle of the Scrivener window while I’m typing, so I don’t have to look down that far - my head is comfortably lifted and facing forward. Being able to apply labels and statuses to my files and folder. Having a display of how much I’ve written that day in that project without having to highlight it all or do some maths. There’s also a lot of other comfort functions which I don’t remember right now or haven’t found yet.

 

It will take a long while to transfer, re-format, and re-edit my stories, but it will be worth it in the long run. Being able to reference my old stories in my series whenever I want without having to search around a lot and without having to open up an additional window will certainly be worth it. As it will be to work in scenes now and get things done in a different way. You can try Scrivener out for a long time, if you wish to, so check it out and see if it will be a better program for you long-term as well.

Scapple and Pre-Plotting

This blog post - and the last five, as it were - were pre-plotted with Scapple. It’s another piece of software I’m going to use in the future to get my books written and to write my blog posts, too, because it made writing the last five ones - and this one - a lot easier. I’m lazy, thus I’m all for ‘easy.’

 

I discovered Scapple by coincidence while reading K.J. Charles’ blog. She mentioned the program as having been helpful when she wasn’t sure why she couldn’t write the last part of a trilogy. Outlining the actions of the heroes and the villain showed her that there was a big chunk of content missing for the heroes and she was able to take care of that.

I checked the page (the same I liked to above) and downloaded the trial version. In essence, this trial version is the full program, only it’s going to lock up after 30 days unless you get a licence for it. I didn’t wait 30 days, as it were. After playing around with the program for a couple of hours, I decided it was worth the 19 € for me.

 

Scapple is a digital whiteboard of infinite size. You can easily add notes of whatever length you want, you can group them, draw connections between them, position them freely (or align them specifically, which I love to be able to do), delete or copy them. You can also make them different sizes, change the colours around, given them a border, whatever helps you sort things out.

For me, this has proven useful when I’m starting to work on a story (or blog post). I just throw down my ideas as notes and then I look at them, wonder how I can combine them, bring them into a logical order. Once I know what’s supposed to happen, I can switch to Campfire Pro, make my notes on characters etc. and do a real outline.

 

At first, I thought that could help me with some overall ideas - the way it does with the blog posts, too. It might also help me with some other projects I have, plot them and make sure I have everything covered. It’s a great place for brainstorming or gathering information you need for a non-fiction project, too.

While still playing around, I looked at “Changing Plans”, a story developed from an old stub on my hard drive (it’s been sitting there for many, many years - it’s still in German, I started it shortly after reading “Soon I will be Invincible” for the first time). It had been easy to plot out the story as far as I had already written it - with some curbing here and there -, but I was stumped about how to end the story. I’ve got a problem with endings in general, which is where outlining helps me a lot. I opened up Scapple, made a file for story ideas, and put down some general ideas I had. Then I moved them around, added something here and there which I extrapolated, and managed to put it all together. I switched to Campfire Pro and put down the last eight chapters of the story, finishing the outline.

 

For blog posts, Scapple provides me with a place to throw my ideas around.

I usually know which topics I want to have in a post, but I’ve had to add paragraphs in between in the past, which sometimes makes the stuff below them read a little weirdly. With Scapple, I can spend a little time beforehand, write down what I want to tackle, push and pull it around, and figure out how I want to lay it out. Like this, I can build up the post a lot better than I did before.

I can also see if there’s something else I should be adding or cut something out that doesn’t really fit with the rest. I certainly can write the blog posts much more easily afterwards - I did six posts in two days and it went very well.

 

For stories, Scapple comes in during the very early planning stages.

I have an idea - that happens constantly, if I’m honest - and I want to capture it. I write down a title that might or might not stay and I write down my initial idea. When I have the time for it, I deepen that idea. The interesting things about ideas in general is that they breed fast - once you have one, others are just around the corner. I write down additional ideas that work with the first one or come to my mind when I think about it.

Once I have an ample number of those ideas, I look them over and consider how they might fit together in a narrative. I can stack them, so they come one after the other, and I get a rough outline for where my story is going or for what my characters will be like.

Once my ideas are that far along, I can then switch over to Campfire Pro and begin the actual plotting, looking up the general ideas and turning them into short descriptions of scenes. Like that, I can plot stories pretty quickly. “The Crew” is the first story I’ve fully plotted that way and it took me about one day to do the pre-plotting in Scapple and one day to do the actual outlining in Campfire Pro.

 

Scapple also makes for a good sounding board. I can just generally write down what I want to think about or what I want to get information or thoughts written up about and then I can come back when I have something new and add it. That will be helpful for other projects I might be tackling in time as well.

Scapple can be open while I have other things going on - it’s a small program which doesn’t need much computing power, so it’s not going to trouble my computer. Like this, I can write or edit and at the same time, during my breaks, throw down a few ideas I have for new stories or blog posts. Collected in the file, they will be there for me when I can get around to using them.

Once I have no use for the notes any longer, I can simply erase everything and reuse the file - it’s not as if I still need the notes by the time the file in Campfire Pro or the blog post are done. It’s very much like a whiteboard in that aspect, too - one swipe with the sponge and everything is gone again, ready for new use.

 

Scapple’s big advantage in my eyes is the infinite size - the board grows and grows as you make more notes and push them in new areas. It’s also easy to give different kinds of notes a different look, so you can easily distinguish between them at a glance. There’s three types of connections you can created (simple line, one-directional arrow, two-directional arrow), you can stack notes that belong together, such as lists or story parts. There’s a lot of ways to align notes as well and make them look more uniform. If you like a well-ordered collection of notes like I do, that’s a very good thing to have, too.

 

The 30-day trial is also a good thing - I love it when I can fully test a program before buying it, not just a part of it. For 30 days, you can test all the functions, then you can decide whether it’s worth the price for you. For me, it definitely is worth the price.

I won’t deny, however, that there are similar programs around which are for free, so you can get the same use out of them - I just found it easier and more intuitive to work with Scapple, which is one of the things which make it worth the money for me.

 

I’ve added another step of planning to my work routine now, pre-planning stories and blog posts with Scapple before I use the programs I’ve already been working with. It’s part of my development as an author, I guess, and I will do it as long as it’s useful for me. Always keep in mind that changes are part of life - it’s okay to change parts of your routines to fit with something new.

Information Finding

Ever since I’ve started writing, I’ve found that it’s a big advantage to know something about a lot of different topics. That doesn’t mean I’m an expert on all these things, I’m more of a dabbler in them. Yet, knowing a bit about this and that has proven useful while I’m writing. It starts with such easy stuff as knowing that Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’ is too large a painting to move it as a single thief. It doesn’t end with knowing how people dressed in the regency period.

 

Information is a necessary part of your writing. You can’t write anything without having an inkling about what you’re doing there. First of all, it is hard to plot a story which includes nano technology or a duel or the daily habits of people in the year 1821 without knowing anything about those things. You can imagine what a duel looks like, but without at least a little knowledge about how a foil differs from a sabre, for instance, you can’t tell which tactics give which fighter an advantage (for a good example of a ‘foil vs. sabre’ fight, look at the second chapter of “Johannes Cabal - The Detective” by Jonathan L. Howard - you can also read the rest of the book afterwards). Without knowing what people were wearing in 1821, you might put in a tight-lacing scene for no reason whatsoever (neither did the dresses show the real waistline, nor could the stays used then withstand tight-lacing).

To describe things the way they are or were, to use them appropriately, you need to know about them. How will you describe the effect of a large-calibre bullet on that monster which is attacking your hero without knowing what the effect would most likely be? How will you make clear how tiring preparations for a party in 1821 could be without knowing about all the layers your heroine would be wearing? How would you know what was offered at that time without any idea of regular dishes or menus during that period? People haven’t always eaten as they do today, after all. For one thing, they didn’t have access to all the food we have today.

 

Another aspect you should keep in mind is that while you are not an expert on duelling techniques and the use of a foil, there’s bound to be some among your readers who are. There’s experts in every field and they’re not barred from reading novels, novellas, or short stories for fun. They will read what you are writing and realize you have no idea about the topic and they’ll be annoyed. They’ll cut you a lot more slack with small mistakes when it’s clear that you have a basic understanding, even if you’re not a fellow expert.

This plays into the principle of ‘suspension of disbelief.’ What that means is that you have to make sure the reader can suspend their disbelief when they dive into your story. That, for as long as they’re reading it, they can believe this is all true. Glaring mistakes, such as having a single thief make off with the Night Watch, will pull people out of that state of mind. They will realize something is wrong and will have a much harder time - if they still manage it - to keep that disbelief away.

Your story needs to be logical in itself and needs to make it plausible it’s true, even if it includes elves and dwarves and trolls. Of course, if you open a fantasy novel, you do not expect to see everything explained scientifically - magic may not exist in our world, but we can accept that it does in this world. Yet, if laws of nature don’t work in this world, if things fall upwards, for instance, it does need a very good explanation (if it’s everywhere, we can believe that there might be a cursed cave where the ceiling becomes the floor and vice versa).

 

These days, it’s also not that hard to get information. Research using the internet is a good deal easier than having to tour several libraries and order books from others through inter-library lending in order to get all the information you need.

Of course, there are reliable and less reliable sources online and it usually pays to check several different hits for your search. Do not only rely on Wikipedia or the first hit of your Google search. Check out various videos on YouTube and prefer scientific papers, if you can find them. Yet, there’s a lot of places where you can find all the information you need.

 

Research can also be fun. There’s a lot of books around these days which are both a great read and very informative. Challenge yourself a little. Read a book about a topic you’re not familiar with. Expand your areas of knowledge a little every now and then. It’s not only books on writing which can be very helpful (although they are, make no mistake there), but also books on fencing, needlepoint, Victorian daywear, or the potato through the ages.

Then there’s the wide expanse of YouTube which has oodles of interesting, well-made videos on a lot of topics. Not only will a video on fencing allow you to study the movements so you can describe them, it will also make it easier to understand certain things if you’re not a sporty person yourself. Videos on how people used to dress often show such clothing or modern remakes of it, so you get a better idea than from the fashion drawings or woodcuts which might accompany a chapter in a book. Not to mention that some YouTubers who do fashion history or other topics might be a lot of fun to watch and listen to.

 

Finally, let me give you an example of how reading non-fiction books for fun has helped me with writing. A while ago, I read “Monster, She Wrote” and “The Jane Austen Handbook” in quick succession during a few days. Somehow, the two books fused with each other in my head, especially the chapter on Ann Radcliffe from “Monster, She Wrote” and the entire “The Jane Austen Handbook”.

Jane Austen makes fun of Gothic romance - the genre in which Ann Radcliffe was one of the biggest names - in “Northanger Abbey”. Ann Radcliffe did the ‘it was Old Man Munson all along (and not a ghost or monster)’ twist long before Scooby Doo became a thing. In my head, this fused together into the idea of a story set in the Regency era (where all Jane Austen novels are set), but using the ‘it was not a ghost, but a human’ twist from Ann Radcliffe. The end result of this is named “The Haunting of Winterthorne Hall” and will be released in August next year.

Had I not read two books on topics I was not overly familiar with (female authors in horror and the life of landed gentry in the Regency era), I would never have come up with the idea and the plot of the book. I wouldn’t have known how to use the limitations of the Regency period to my advantage, either. The book would not exist.

 

Research is an important part of writing. It might not be as important as actually writing a book or outlining your story (if you outline, that is), but it will be important for the quality of the story you produce and it might even be a reason why that story you write does exist, see “The Haunting of Winterthorne Hall”.