D.B. Jackson's Blog, page 69

March 6, 2012

Writing Tips: Point of View and Voice, part II — Choosing Your POV Character(s)

Last week, I wrote the first installment in this series of Writing Tips posts on point of view and voice.  As I indicated in that post, writers trying to determine how to approach point of view for their particular projects face a number of choices, among them how many point of view characters to use, which characters are best suited to being POV characters, and whether to write in first and third person.


Today I continue our discussion by focusing on the questions of how many characters to use as POV narrators and which characters to choose for the role.  Let's take those two issues in order.  And let me reiterate here that while we'll be talking in part about using many different POV characters remember that you should only shift narrators with a new chapter or new section of a chapter.  You do NOT want to jump around from character to character within a scene.  The term for that is head-hopping, and it is not a good practice, particularly in today's market.


Theoretically at least, there is no limit to how many point of view characters you can use.  Writing as David B. Coe in my Winds of the Forelands series, I wound up using more than a dozen different POV characters.  Winds of the Forelands was a sprawling, complex series that totaled five books and over 900,000 words.  I needed all those perspective characters in order to tie together the various strands of my plot.  Thieftaker and its sequels has but one point of view character, Ethan Kaille.  In this case, each book stands alone, each storyline is fairly lean, and my subplots all revolve around Ethan's life.  Using additional point of view characters would merely confuse matters.  I have another book (not yet published) that has two point of view characters, and the narrative bounces back and forth between the two.  Their relationship defines the story and telling the story through the eyes of only one of them would have given that relationship short shrift.  In short, there is no right way to do this, no correct number that you should shoot for.


So then how do you decide which approach is best for you?  My advice would be to use the fewest number of point of view characters necessary to tell your story effectively.  Yes, before I said that there is no limit to the number of POV characters you can use, and technically that's true.  But the more POV characters you have, the greater the danger of confusing your reader.  I used a lot of POV characters in Winds of the Forelands — probably too many, thinking back on it — but I did so because I needed (almost) all of them to tell the story I was trying to tell.


Different approaches also have different advantages.  Because Thieftaker is, in part, a mystery, I wanted my readers to experience the investigation as Ethan did, to feel that they were solving the mystery with him.  Having just the one POV character served that aim quite nicely.  The Winds of the Forelands books had lots of castle intrigue and military strategy — betrayals, feints within feints.  By using many POV characters I could have my readers know more at any given moment than did any individual character.  That way, readers could anticipate traps and gambits as they unfolded.  They could see a character be duped; I like to imagine my readers trying to shout warnings to favorite characters as they read the books.


If your story is complex, if it takes place in several different settings, if there are lots of different subplots, you're probably going to need lots of POV characters.  If your story is more limited — an urban fantasy, say, with one lead character investigating a murder or hunting down demons, you might be better off with just a single narrator or maybe two (the hero and the villain, for instance).


There are variations on this approach, as you would expect.  Nicola Griffith's marvelous, award-winning novel, Slow River, uses three POV characters, or rather, one point of view character at three different times in her life.  To differentiate these three voices (and I'll discuss this more in future posts) Griffith uses first person past tense for one, third person past tense for another, and third person present tense for the third.  It sounds confusing; it's not.  It's brilliant.  The thing to remember is that in telling your story you want to make the narrative as accessible to your readers as possible.  Too many POV characters can create confusion.  Then again, so can too few.  Each story has different needs.


Okay, so maybe now you have a general idea of how many POV characters you need.  Which ones should you choose?  Well, again, this is up to you.  Sometimes it's pretty clear.  It comes as no surprise that the main POV character in the Harry Potter books is Harry himself.  On the other hand, a book like Jack Kerouac's On the Road is a bit odd in that the main character, Dean Moriarty, is NOT the POV character.  Rather, Kerouac uses his POV character, Sal Paradise, to describe Dean, so that we can experience him as Sal does.  Your POV characters can be the main protagonists of your story (this is certainly the most common approach) or they can be observers who take in the crucial action first hand by watching the protagonists (and antagonists) do their thing.


In my case, using Ethan Kaille as the POV character for Thieftaker was a no-brainer.  Choosing my POV character for various scenes in the Forelands books was, at times, far harder.  Occasionally I had to go back and rewrite the scene from a different character's perspective in order to make it work.  Again, as you work on your own book, these decisions will become clearer.


As with so many issues in writing, there is only so much I can say before I run into the "a-lot-will-depend-on-your-particular-book-or-story" caveat.  This is particularly true in dealing with point of view.  But in describing my own process for making these choices, I hope that I have at least given you ideas of things to think about with respect to your own work.  Next time, we'll talk about first and third person POV, as well as issues of voice.


Until then, keep writing!

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Published on March 06, 2012 14:39

March 3, 2012

Yesterday's Storms

We'll get back to writing tips on Monday.  For today, my thoughts are with those who were hurt in yesterday's storms, those who lost homes or loved ones.  My family and I were deeply fortunate.  There were violent storms in our area, funnel clouds were spotted within miles of where we live.  But we came through the day unscathed.


To those who didn't, may you find relief and solace in the love of friends and the kindness of strangers.  I am about to go to the American Red Cross website and make a donation.  If you're reading this thinking of how fortunate you have been, perhaps you might consider doing the same.

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Published on March 03, 2012 15:33

March 1, 2012

Writing Tips: Point of View and Voice, part I — Overview

Today, I begin a series of posts on point of view and voice in storytelling.  This topic will take several posts, because it is arguably THE key element in storytelling.  We'll kick off the discussion today with an overview of the topic and will move to specific issues in subsequent posts.


So let me start with this:  Point of view is the nexus of character and narrative.  I've said that before on several occasions, but what does it even mean?


Let's define a few terms first:  Point of view is the perspective from which a story is told.  Generally speaking in today's market, that means it is the character whose emotions, thoughts, perceptions, and reactions inform the reader of what is happening in a story or book.  In the Harry Potter books, for instance, in large part Harry himself is the primary point of view character.  The vast majority of the action is seen through his eyes, described in terms of his emotional and physical responses.  The few chapters that are NOT written in Harry's POV are clearly defined as such.


Looking at the Potter books (or at the six volumes of George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series) you see that once a certain character is established as the POV character, that perspective does not vary and switch without some clear visual marker — a new chapter heading, or a clear break within a chapter.  Omniscient point of view, in which a story is told in such a way as to give readers access to the thoughts and emotions of several characters at once, used to be quite common.  It has fallen out of favor in recent years, however, and is now generally frowned upon in the current literary market.  It is often referred to — not kindly — as "head-hopping."


Books like Rowling's and Martin's are said to be written in close third-person point of view.  This means that while the action is described in third person — "he said such-and-such," "she did something," etc. — we are experiencing everything through a single set of eyes, a single human being.  We as the reader are close to a single character.  The term close third person point of view distinguishes it from omniscient (which, because of its changing perspectives, creates a good deal of distance between reader and character) and also from first person point of view, which is a narrative related using "I," "me," "my" instead of "he," "him," "his."


Finally, let me point out that close third person point of view does not rule out the use of  multiple point of view.  Multiple point of view, as it sounds, simply means that there are several point of view characters instead of one.  I will refer you again to the George R. R. Martin books.  In those books, Martin uses several point of view characters, but within any given chapter, the point of view remains constant.  He is not head-hopping.  He is switching point of view character with each new chapter.  That is perfectly acceptable and at times quite effective.  The alternative is to use single point of view, as I do in the Thieftaker books.  My books are written entirely from Ethan Kaille's point of view; my point of view character never changes.


Okay, so those are the basic terms you should know.  As you work on your books and stories you should think about what kind of point of view approach you wish to take.  Each has its advantages and disadvantages.  First person is quite popular these days, particularly with writers of urban fantasy, because it gets the reader as close to the action and emotion of the narrative as possible.  A story told in first person has an immediacy that can be incredibly powerful for the reader.  Think about it this way:  It's one thing to hear from a friend that someone she knows was in a car wreck; it's another thing entirely to hear from your friend that she herself was in the wreck.  First person POV closes the distance in that way.


Close third person, which I use in Thieftaker, also allows an author to delve into a character's emotions, but it leaves just a hair of distance between the reader and the story.  Why would an author want that?  Well, I wanted it for Thieftaker and the other Ethan Kaille books because, while I wanted my readers to feel close to Ethan, I also needed to explain some of the historical context surrounding the story, and there was no way to do that in first person without it feeling contrived.  In close third person there is just enough distance between the narrative and the reader to allow such explanations to feel natural, without, of course, resorting to data dumps.


As for choosing between multiple POV and single, that is more a function of the complexity of the storyline than anything else.  I used multiple point of view a lot when writing epic fantasy (under my other pen name, David B. Coe) because I was telling stories with many intertwining subplots.  The Thieftaker books are more directed; each book stands alone.  I could tell the stories solely from Ethan's point of view without losing any necessary details.  And, in fact, since the Thieftaker stories are all mysteries, using single POV allowed me to make my readers feel that they were discovering clues right along with Ethan.  These are the sorts of considerations you might want to consider as you choose your point of view character or characters for your own project.


So what did I mean at the start of this post, when I said that point of view is the nexus of character and narrative?  Basically this:  As writers we want to accomplish a couple of things.  We want to establish characters who will capture the hearts of our readers.  We also want to tell stories that will leave our audience breathless.  Point of view allows us to do both of those things at once.  It is the mechanism by which we bring the emotions, needs and desires of our characters to bear on the stories we are trying to tell.  And it is the mechanism by which the emotional impact of our storyline can be seen in the people about whom our readers have come to care.


In the next post, we'll talk more about how we accomplish those complementary aims.


In the meantime, keep writing!

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Published on March 01, 2012 15:20

February 28, 2012

Writing on a Whim: The Project That Won't Let Go

The other day, posting elsewhere, I commented on the fact that I was about to get back to writing after spending the first couple of months of this year working on short story revisions and a proposal for the next two Thieftaker books.  When I don't write for too long, my mood starts to sour, and I'm not very pleasant to be around.


And so I was looking forward to this week because I was finally — FINALLY — going to get back to writing original stuff.  I had in mind to work on a new short story or two set in the Thieftaker world.


Then Monday arrived, and I decided to do something totally different.


See, I have this book that I've been working on for the better part of seven years now.  I haven't been working on it continuously, obviously.  In that time I've also managed to write six other novels (all of them either published or in production), as well as two books that are still in the developmental phase, and at least half a dozen short stories.


But this book . . . this book haunts me.  I love it, and at one point we (my agent and I) had a publisher for it.  Unfortunately, the publisher went out of business, leaving the book homeless (at least we got the rights back).  We tried to sell it elsewhere, but no one bought it.  I reworked it a couple of times, tweaking this and that.  Still no interest.  I tore it apart and put it back together, improving it immensely, but by this time I could tell it still wasn't ready for one last round of submissions to publishers.  I put it away for months, managed to forget about it for a while as I immersed myself in other projects, most notably the Thieftaker books and stories.


But always the story has lurked in the back of my mind.  Because, as I say, I love it.  Truly.  In many ways I think it remains the best thing I've ever done, and with the major rewrite I did a couple of years ago it is closer than ever to being, potentially, a big project for me.  But it still needs one last set of revisions.


What can I tell you about it?  It's a contemporary urban fantasy with a strong mystery element, and a bit of romantic interest thrown in for good measure.  It contains some of my best character work, particularly the POV character.  I suppose it's a bit like a modern version of Thieftaker, though with enough differences to keep readers guessing.


And for some reason, when I sat down to work on Monday, fully intending to work on Thieftaker books, I found instead that this story was beckoning to me once more.  Suddenly, like a phone call from an old friend, or the reappearance of an old nemesis.  Without having planned it, I found myself opening up this book, whose continued obscurity remains the single greatest regret of my career.


I had long-since resolved that whenever I returned to the book, it would be the last time.  One more round of rewrites, and if I couldn't sell it after that, I would be done with it.  That was before epublishing took off the way it has, and so I now feel that other options may be open to me.  But still this is the last time I plan to revise it.  So maybe I was waiting for the right moment to dive in once more.  Apparently something in my subconscious has decided that this is that time.  We'll see if I was right.


Writers can be fickle creatures.  Many of us flit from one project to the next, sometimes without any rational plan or work schedule.  I'm usually not like that.  I have a work schedule for the year that I try to follow.  But this time I'm going to listen to my instincts.  The time has come to finish this book, for good or for ill.  Let's see what happens.


I'll keep you posted.

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Published on February 28, 2012 12:17

February 26, 2012

New Page on the Site

This is one of those things that makes an author slightly uncomfortable.  I've added a new page to the D.B. Jackson website.  It's a page that includes all the nice things reviewers and advanced readers have said (and will say) about Thieftaker and my upcoming novels.  Why does this make me uncomfortable?  Well, I don't like to brag.  I feel funny doing it.  But at the same time, I want people to know that other people have read and liked my books.  That's one of the best ways for an author to sell books.  Word of mouth is a crucial part of this business.


So, yeah, I should probably get over myself and just tell you about the page.  It's titled "Reviews and Such," and as you will see when you visit it, a few people have already said some very nice things about Thieftaker.  Not that I'm bragging….

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Published on February 26, 2012 11:52

February 24, 2012

Friday Fun: What Extravagances Do You Covet?

I love to write, which is why I'm an author.  As I said in my last post, this business can be really hard. If I was doing it for the money rather than for love of writing . . . well, I wouldn't be doing it.


But that doesn't mean that I am above crass materialism. Not at all.  Something that has been brought home to me in no uncertain terms this past week as I contemplate an upcoming birthday with greedy relish.  As usual, the problem I have in deciding what I'd like to get for my big day is not a lack of ideas.  On the contrary I want so much, all of it so extravagant, that I have no sense of where to begin.


Like what? you ask.


You sure you want to go down that road?  All right; you want this alphabetically or by expense?  If the latter, I might begin with the Hasselblad digital medium format camera currently listed in the B&H Photo catalog for a cool $35,000.00.  But that level of fantasy escapes even me, a professional fantasy author.


My actual want list is more reasonable than that.  Somewhat.


I've been playing guitar for 35 years now, and in that time have owned exactly two guitars.  The first is the starter guitar I learned on, which I had for all of five years.  The second is the Martin I bought in 1982, a beautiful rosewood guitar that has aged magnificently over the past 30 years.  It looks prettier and sounds more resonant and brilliant now than ever.  And yet, there is a part of me that wants a new guitar.


Why?  I'm sorry, are you looking for rationality?  Really?  All right.  Because as much as I love my Martin, I would like to play something sometimes that sounds and looks and feels different.  Now I have yet to decide if "different" means "electric" — a Paul Reed Smith Les Paul-style solid body electric might be just the thing — or if "different" means an acoustic with different body-type and wood, like maybe a Taylor Grand Auditorium made of Maple or Ovangkol.  Why yes, I have spent too much time thinking about this — why do you ask?


What else?  Well, as a dedicated amateur photographer and major camera gear-head, I am always looking for my next new lens.  And I mean always.  There is a 100mm macro lens that I have coveted for years, as well as an 85mm prime lens.  But why stop at lenses?  I've also been drooling over a Canon 5D mark II camera body for longer than I care to admit.  The price tags on these things?  I'd really rather not say.


But wait, there's more.  I want an iPhone.  I have no use for one — I work at home, travel just barely enough to justify the Colonial Era cell phone that I own, and live in a rural town where coverage is spotty at best.  But they're shiny and cool and fun, and I want one.


And I think I'll stop there, lest I embarrass myself.  But now that I've come clean, you need to do the same.  What material goodies do you covet?  Do you like gadgets and toys, or are you a clothing and shoes person?  C'mon, spill!


And happy Friday.

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Published on February 24, 2012 09:33

February 21, 2012

Writing Tips: Writing Is Hard

Sounds sort of weird, I know.  I mean, what kind of tip is "Writing is hard?"


In all honesty, it might be the most important tip I ever post to this site.


Let me start by saying that this is for my wonderful, talented friend, Misty Massey, who wrote a beautiful post this morning for the Magical Words blog site about what it's like as a professional writer to face the fear and self-doubt that strike at all of us now and then.  You can read her post here.  I'll wait.


Writing is a strange endeavor.  It seems easy.  We start writing stories when we're small children; it's one of the first things we are taught to do in school.  And like finger painting and coloring with crayons, it's often one of the most popular of classroom activities.  Perhaps that's why so many people grow up feeling that they want to write, and that they can write with relative ease.  I mean, we did it when we were seven years-old.  How hard can it be, right?


Well, if you're talking about writing as a hobby, writing for oneself, keeping a journal, or even writing stories — true or imagined — for friends and family, then it may not be all that difficult.


But if you want more, if you want to be a professional writer, with a career that encompasses multiple publications via a traditional publishing model, then it's incredibly hard.  I'm not even talking about the business end of things, at least not yet.  The simple act of sitting down to write every day — because that's what most professional writers do — takes will, determination, discipline.  Coming up with story ideas that are fresh and new and exciting, not only for your readers but for you as well, can be an incredible challenge.  Creating characters and relationships that are believable and compelling and compulsively readable?  Also wickedly difficult.  I could go on, but I think you get the point.


It may seem like everyone in the world is writing a book or story these days, but the fact is that only a tiny fraction of the population is even making the attempt.  And a minute percentage of that subgroup is actually succeeding at it.


You've heard of writer's block, right?  That moment in a writer's creative process when the words won't flow, when the narrative gets stuck, when none of the characters seem to be cooperating?  I don't believe in writer's block.  Because the very idea of it presupposes that writing should come easily, that the words should just pour out of us.  Writer's block is a myth born of the larger myth of the ease of writing.  What the world calls writer's block, a professional writer calls a typical day at work.


Writers work in a relative vacuum.  Yes, we attend conferences.  We have beta readers.  Maybe we belong to writers groups.  If we're lucky we have editors and agents who help us polish our manuscripts.  But most of our work — almost all of it — we do alone, a solitary figure in front of a computer or typewriter, or perhaps even curled up on a couch with pad and paper.  Most of us make very little money.  I'm established as an author and have been for fifteen years, and I make less in most years than my wife, a college professor (and we know how well they're paid…), makes in a semester.


With each new book or story we write, comes the familiar anxiety.  Can I sell it?  Will anyone like it?  Have I run out of good ideas?  We are only as secure in our jobs as our last book.  If the book did well, we'll be able to sell this new one.  If it tanked, we might be done.


So how is this a writing tip?  Well, let's start with the obvious:  J. K. Rowling, John Grisham, and Stephen King notwithstanding, if you're doing this to get rich, you're really in the wrong line of work.  So writing tip number one is, write because you love it.  Write because you have stories you want to tell, characters to whom you want to give voice.  Write because the very idea of NOT writing is enough to make you weep.  Because those are the only reasons that make any sense in this crazy business.


Second, understand that writing a book or story may well be the hardest thing you ever do.  Take pride in the process.  Give yourself credit along the way for making the attempt and allow yourself to celebrate when you finally complete the narrative.  It is a marvelous accomplishment in its own right.  Sales are great, rejections can hurt.  But there is value in the act itself, in the completion of that Herculean task.


And finally, remember that even professionals wrestle with fears and doubts.  We question our  abilities, we wonder if we've lost our chops, if this might be the manuscript that beats us.  Acknowledging those insecurities is not an act of weakness, it's an expression of strength.  The only weakness lies in giving in to the fear, in refusing to face it.  It's okay to fear; just don't let that stop you from writing.  And maybe that's the most important tip of all.

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Published on February 21, 2012 18:17

February 19, 2012

A Winter Day's Dilemma

It's cold out.  Not eye-watering-tears-freezing-on-your-face cold, but cold.  Raw, is probably the better word.  It's foggy and windy, and it was snowing earlier.  Nasty, nasty day.  And I'm sitting here on the couch, typing on my laptop, a fire in the fireplace, my wife sitting beside me doing a bit of work.  I'm pretty certain that their is a bottle of red wine in our immediate future.  So what's the problem? you might ask.


Well, the problem is — and I admit that this is going to sound pretty silly — but the problem is that all the bird feeders in our back yard are empty.  Yeah, I know:  It's just bird feeders.  But did I mention that it's cold?  There are birds coming to the feeders — Cardinals, Chickadees, Downy Woodpeckers — and they're giving me these pathetic "I'm-hungry-and-cold" bird looks.  It's like puppy-dog eyes without the drooling.


It wouldn't really take me that long to fill the feeders.


I'm comfortable, and it looks really ugly out there.


The birds need to eat.  Even more so when it's cold.


I get enough guilt from my kids; I don't need avian guilt, too.


They depend on you.  You can't feed them and then just stop when filling the feeders is inconvenient.


Yeah, I've got no answer for that.


All right.  Putting on my coat….

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Published on February 19, 2012 14:54

February 16, 2012

DragonCon, Here I Come

Writing under a pseudonym is weird.  It's also fun, and I'll get to that in a minute.  But let's focus on the weird for a moment.  It's weird in big ways — I'm promoting myself, but it's not me.  I'm expecting that at some point I'll be as well-known (if not more so) as a different person as I am by my own name.  And it's weird in small ways:  Just the other day, as I was preparing to send out ARCs of Thieftaker to some readers, I realized that I wanted to send them with signatures and inscriptions.  So I had to practice my D.B. Jackson signature.  That's just weird.


The fun part?  Well, I'm writing new stuff, experimenting in ways that I never thought I would.  I think in part that's a function of the 'nym giving me a sense of liberation, of license to try new stuff.  And I've got this new blog, the D.B. Jackson web site, the DBJ Facebook and Twitter accounts — that's all shiny and new and exciting.


But yesterday I took the next step.  I am going to be attending Dragon*Con as D.B. Jackson.  And just D.B. Jackson.  This is a first for me.  I'll be listed in the program and on the D*Con website under the pseudonym, and that's all.  My badge will say D.B. Jackson.  The reason is, by the time Dragon*Con rolls around (it starts August 31 and runs through the first weekend in September) Thieftaker will be out and I will have had two more Thieftaker-universe stories published.  So it makes sense that I should be promoting my most recent and most visible work.  It's just weird.


My future begins today…

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Published on February 16, 2012 14:12

February 14, 2012

Writing Tips: Trusting Your Reader

Recently, while reading through a wonderful short story written by a Master's student with whom I'm working, I found myself writing a comment in the page margin that rang all too familiar.  The student had just had one of her characters do something during a heated conversation — I believe he was leaning forward, his hands braced on the table in front of him.  It was a small gesture, but very effective in conveying his stance and his emotions.  It reinforced his dialogue perfectly.  But my student not only described the gesture, she also explained it, saying something along the lines of "He leaned toward her, as if to give added weight to his words." [Her description of the gesture itself was more detailed and more elegant, but that was the gist of the gesture and her explanation.]


The comment I wrote on her story basically said this:  "You do such a great job of using his posture and his words to convey the tension.  You don't need the explanation.  Trust your reader."


Trust your reader.  It was something that my editor said to me again and again early in my career, as I struggled to find the balance between telling my readers too much and telling them too little.  And, if I'm honest with you and with myself, I have to add that it's something my editor still has to tell me at least once or twice with each new manuscript.


Trusting your reader means, in essence, not slowing your narrative to explain things that don't need explaining.  It means trusting that you have done a good enough job showing your readers elements of plot, character, and setting that you don't need to tell them as well.


Here's an example from an early draft of Thieftaker in which I use my own "as if" phrase to make a point that I've already made:  "Greenleaf watched Sephira, looking almost embarrassed, and she glared back at him, as if reprimanding one of her men." The final version reads simply, "Greenleaf watched Sephira, looking almost embarrassed, and she glared back at him." The phrase "as if reprimanding one of her men" is totally unnecessary to the success of the sentence.  The shorter version conveys all that it needs to, in fewer words.  I just need to trust that my readers will get it.


That, of course, is a very small example.  Trusting one's reader can mean cutting not just a few words, but an entire paragraph or more.  It can mean deleting a data dump that explains elements of background that are already clear enough.  It can mean skipping a long exploration of a character's emotional state because her emotions became pretty clear when she threw her glass against the wall.  As my editor put it to me many years ago, in reference to one book or another, "This is a good book.  It has lots of twists and turns.  It's complex.  But it's not rocket science.  Trust your readers.  They will get it without all the explanations."


And that, of course, is the key.  Saying "trust your readers" is actually just another way of saying "trust yourself, trust your book."  It's not that we should expect our readers to intuitively understand everything we do.  Sometimes we do need to work into our texts explanations of our worlds and magic systems or descriptions of our characters' emotions.  But when we explain too much, when we cross the line between showing and telling, we slow down our narratives and take away from the good work we've done on our story lines.


So trust your readers.  Trust yourselves.  Doing so will help keep your novels leaner, clearer, and more readable.


Keep writing!

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Published on February 14, 2012 14:44