I added a couple of twitter-based tools, including a plugin to allow people to follow me easily on Twitter, and should also republish my blog posts over there.
So consider this a test. Nothing to see here.
Author Archive
Okay, so my previous post on first person POV raised some hackles. I must explain.
As Andy LeBlanc theorized, that post came from a deep place of personal hurt. As Managing Editor of Every Day Fiction, I’m exposed to an unending stream of terrible, terrible fiction in the form of a deep slush pile. The “rules” that I mentioned in my previous article were, like any rule, meant to apply to beginning authors only. Masters* are free to break them (at their own peril).
For your convenience, here are a few rules about first person POV for you to break:
1) Your narrator cannot die in the end. Otherwise, who is he telling the story to?
2) There should be no scene breaks in first person POV. What do these mean exactly? Your narrator is taking a cigarette break?
3) No meta-narrative. Imagine you`re standing around a barbecue. Your friend is telling a story. How in heck does he relate the meta-narrative?
Anyone want to fire off a few more?
*Special note to Creative Writing Majors. This is not you. Masters have been published in one of the pros.
So my post on 1st person POV seems to have set the web on fire, and it seems I have to clarify my comments. And I’m going to. Just not now.
Instead, I’d like to treat you to this bit of writerly awesomeness.
So this is going to seem self-evident, but if you write a story in first person POV, you are, in theory, telling this story directly to your readers. It should work equally well on paper, or–and this is key–face to face.
So there’s shouldn’t be scene breaks because you don’t stop in the middle of a story you’d tell someone at a party (unless it was to go get a drink).
Equally, you don’t usually have “meta-narrative”. This means you don’t do an info-dump, then describe a scene, and go back to an info-dump. Remember, always picture yourself telling a story to a friend at a party. If they’d have to ask questions to follow your story, you fail.
That will be all for now.
Hey guys,
Andrew LeBlanc just passed along this link which contains a transcript of the story meeting held between George Lucas, Steven Speilberg, and Lawrence Kasdan (the writer). It’s a wonderful glimpse into how one of history’s most popular film characters was created, and what thought processes were employed in his creation by some of cinema’s most creative talent.
Mystery Man gets it right when he says that one of the most important insights here is that they started not by plotting out Raiders of the Lost Ark, but by developing Indiana’s character.